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Last week, I
highlighted
a number of things to look for in the second Republican debate. The
only really important one was: will the real nominee please stand up?
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My premise is that the three people at the top of the polls right now
have never been elected to or served in public office, and that makes
them
highly unlikely
to be the eventual nominee. Outsiders are appealing, but they never get
the nomination, and probably for good reason. Not only do they have no
experience running campaigns and winning elections, they also have no
direct track record we can look to if we want to guess how they will
really vote and make decisions under the pressures of public office.
This early, a few months into the primary race, we don’t even know
whether they have the discipline and commitment to see a campaign out to
the end, or whether they will decide the actual lifestyle of a
politician isn’t worth living.
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(Donald Trump may already have given his answer to that last question by
dropping out
of a major South Carolina campaign event in order to close a
“significant business transaction.” Because the killer negotiator who’s
going to get Mexico to pay for the wall has so little clout that he
can’t reschedule the date of a business deal.)
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So I’ve been wondering which of the remaining experienced politicians
would come out of last week looking like a new front-runner. Well,
we’ve had a couple of days and a few poll results, and we’re beginning
to see the answer.
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Two candidates came out of last week with a definite gain in the polls.
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There are two candidates who came out of last week with a definite
gain in the polls. Not by coincidence, they are the ones who made the
biggest impression in last week’s debate. But here’s the twist. One of
the “real” candidates who is emerging is one of political outsiders I
had dismissed. And it’s getting a little harder to do that.
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The two people who broke out in a
new CNN poll are
Carly Fiorina and Marco Rubio.
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Fiorina rocketed to second place in the polls at 15%, with her
support mostly coming from the other political outsiders, Donald Trump
and Ben Carson. Trump is still leading at 24%, but that’s down from 32%
in CNN’s last poll from a few weeks ago, raising the hope that we may
already have seen Peak Donald.
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We may already have seen Peak Donald.
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It’s easy to see why Fiorina has done so well. She may have never
held office, but I’m now convinced we can’t dismiss her as a
personality-driven protest vote. (I’ll let you decide for yourself who
that description applies to.) What struck people about her most in the
debate was not just her poise and spunkiness, but the depth of her
knowledge and thinking about the big issues. There were only two
candidates on stage, for example, who could really tell you exactly what
was going wrong in the Middle East and exactly what they would do
about. And believe it or not, there are a lot of us who think that’s
kind of important for someone who wants to be commander-in-chief.
Three hours of debate can be summed up in about three minutes.
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The other person who gave those sorts of answers was Marco Rubio. In
retrospect, the whole three hours of the debate—five if you include the
undercard that almost nobody watched—can be summed up in about three
minutes, in a three-way exchange involving Trump, Rubio, and Fiorina.
CNN doesn’t seem to have posted video of this specific moment in the
debate, and besides, you can appreciate it better by
reading it.
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It begins with a question from the moderator about Russia.
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TAPPER: Let’s move to Russia if we
could. Russia is sending troops and tanks into Syria right now to prop
up a US enemy, Bashar al-Assad. President Obama’s incoming top general
says, quote, “Russia presents the greatest threat to our national
security.”
Mr. Trump, you say you can do business with President Vladimir Putin,
you say you will get along, quote, “very well.” What would you do right
now if you were president, to get the Russians out of Syria?
TRUMP: So, number one, they have to respect you. He has absolutely no respect for President Obama. Zero.
Syria’s a mess. You look at what’s going on with ISIS in there, now
think of this: we’re fighting ISIS. ISIS wants to fight Syria. Why are
we fighting ISIS in Syria? Let them fight each other and pick up the
remnants.
I would talk to him. I would get along with him. I believe—and I may be
wrong, in which case I’d probably have to take a different path, but I
would get along with a lot of the world leaders that this country is not
getting along with. We don’t get along with China. We don’t get along
with the heads of Mexico. We don’t get along with anybody, and yet, at
the same time, they rip us left and right. They take advantage of us
economically and every other way. We get along with nobody.
I will get along—I think—with Putin, and I will get along with others, and we will have a much more stable—stable world.
TAPPER: So, you—just to clarify, the only answer I
heard to the question I asked is that you would—you would reach out to
Vladimir Putin, and you would do what? You would…
TRUMP: I believe that I will get along—we will
do—between that, Ukraine, all of the other problems, we won’t have the
kind of problems that our country has right now with Russia and many
other nations.
TAPPER: Senator Rubio, you’ve taken a very different
approach to the question of Russia. You’ve called Vladimir Putin a,
quote, “gangster.” Why would President Rubio’s approach be more
effective than President Trump’s?
RUBIO: Well, first of all, I have an understanding of
exactly what it is Russia and Putin are doing, and it’s pretty
straightforward. He wants to reposition Russia, once again, as a
geopolitical force. He himself said that the destruction of the Soviet
Union—the fall of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical
catastrophe of the 20th century, and now he’s trying to reverse that.
He’s trying to destroy NATO. And this is what this is a part of. He is
exploiting a vacuum that this administration has left in the Middle
East. Here’s what you’re gonna see in the next few weeks: the Russians
will begin to fly—fly combat missions in that region, not just targeting
ISIS, but in order to prop up Assad. He will also, then, turn to other
countries in the region and say, “America is no longer a reliable ally,
Egypt. America is no longer a reliable ally, Saudi Arabia. Begin to rely
on us.”
What he is doing is he is trying to replace us as the single most
important power broker in the Middle East, and this president is
allowing it. That is what is happening in the Middle East. That’s what’s
happening with Russia, and…
TAPPER: Thank you, Senator Rubio. I want to bring in Carly Fiorina.
FIORINA: Having met Vladimir Putin, I wouldn’t talk to him at all. We’ve talked way too much to him.
What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I
would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would
conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d
probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin
would get the message.
By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of
us know General Suleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right
now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked
Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up
Bashar al-Assad.
Russia is a bad actor, but Vladimir Putin is someone we should not talk
to, because the only way he will stop is to sense strength and resolve
on the other side, and we have all of that within our control. We could
rebuild the Sixth Fleet. I will. We haven’t. We could rebuild the
missile defense program. We haven’t. I will. We could also, to Senator
Rubio’s point, give the Egyptians what they’ve asked for, which is
intelligence. We could give the Jordanians what they’ve asked for, bombs
and materiel. We have not supplied it. I will. We could arm the Kurds.
They’ve been asking us for three years. All of this is within our
control.
Note to Trump supporters. When we’ve been saying all along that we wanted a more serious candidate, this
is what we meant. You insisted that by “serious” we meant: in line with
the Beltway conventional wisdom. What we actually meant was: based on
detailed knowledge and thinking. What we meant was: not just declaring
that the US will be strong, but also being able to name the enemy’s
strategy and priorities, and to name specific measures that the US can
take to thwart that strategy.
When it comes to countering Putin, Trump is sure that Putin will be
impressed with him and that they’ll get along. After all, he’s Donald
Trump! And that’s it, that’s the whole of his strategy. Rubio and
Fiorina could name the specific reasons why Putin would take them, and the United States, seriously.
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Rubio and Fiorina were showing us who is really prepared to lead.
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In this context, Rubio and Fiorina did not need to send out zingers
about how we don’t need an “apprentice” in the White House. They were
showing us who is really prepared to take the reins of American foreign
policy. The same pattern applied on other issues, not just foreign
policy, and it explains why Fiorina and Rubio are the candidates who
broke out in the polls afterward. They were the ones who earned it.
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There’s not much point analyzing why other, lower-ranking candidates didn’t
break out. I can give some general impressions. Rand Paul is too
unfocused; he’s shooting from the hip and doesn’t really know what his
central sales pitch is. Scott Walker is running a great campaign—for
Secretary of Labor. Ted Cruz is eloquent, but while Fiorina and Rubio
give extemporaneous answers based on extensive knowledge, Cruz tends to
give set-piece speeches; there is a difference between sounding prepared
and sounding rehearsed. But in a field that is still so crowded, with
candidates given only a few opportunities to answer questions, there are
a lot of reasons why a candidate might not break out, and better luck
to them next time, if they’re able to stick around that long.
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Yet if last week’s performances continue—and given the people
involved, it’s likely that they will—the primaries are starting to look a
little more like a Fiorina-Rubio contest. The real contenders for the
nomination just stood up.
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