The Seventh GOP Undercard Debate: Cribbing from the Bernie Sanders Campaign
Left to right: Republican undercard debaters Rick Santorum. Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee and Jim Gilmore line up before moderators Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer in Des Moines, Iowa Thursday evening.
With just four days to go before the Iowa caucuses, the stakes haven’t been higher for Republican presidential candidates, and judging by the rhetoric flying fast and loose during the Fox News-backed undercard debate in Des Moines, the GOP aspirants to the White House are willing to say whatever it takes to hit their target.
This time. the seventh warm-up act (more on that note later) included former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, onetime Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore and Fox-picked moderators Martha MacCallum and Bill Hemmer.
For their part, former Arkansas Gov. Huckabee and Fiorina seemed to have come down with simultaneous bouts of sudden-onset populism, suggesting a move to co-opt some of the ideas that have gained traction among candidates from the other side of the aisle. On two occasions, Fiorina declared, “The game is rigged,” which evidently had more to do with the media’s role in framing and weighting presidential contests than it did with calling for a crackdown on Wall Street, judging by her follow-up commentary. “The establishment thinks it owns this country,” Fiorina intoned, clearly not counting her status as former chief executive of one of the biggest tech corporations in the world as grounds to be included among that elite group. “You have the power—take our country back,” she vaguely urged.
Meanwhile, Huckabee also attempted to distance himself from the fat-cat class by noting how his campaign is “not bankrolled by the corporatists,” name-checking big Wall Street players like Goldman Sachs and AIG while he was at it. “If you follow the money, the same folks who finance the Democrats finance the Republicans,” he noted, adding that changing the way campaigns are funded is the way to get a “different result.” Later, he pushed back on the persistent myth of the lazy underclass. “I resent it when people say people are poor because they want to be. No they’re not.” (As for Huckabee, here’s a bit of background on who’s been stuffing his campaign coffers.)
That all sounds like a promising, if disingenuous, notion—but how exactly is a more egalitarian outcome supposed to result from a GOP-friendly scheme in which big government and regulation represent the enemy, at least on the level of lip service? MacCallum and Hemmer gamely grabbed onto the anti-establishment thread as they repeatedly drew viewers’ attention to the crisis of economic inequality while advocating for a vastly smaller government. After MacCallum rightly observed that those living around the Beltway are getting richer and richer while communities around America are economically imploding, she volleyed the kind of leading question that gets a girl hired by Roger Ailes: “Is this presidency—any presidency—simply too small a David to slay the goliath of government?”
Next to big government, the other popular behemoth at which all four candidates took aim was the mainstream media, not excluding Fox News. Gilmore, Fiorina, Santorum and Huckabee took turns pointing out the injustice of some of the questions they were asked, of news outlets’ obsession with candidates like Donald Trump at the exclusion of other contenders, of being relegated to the undercard debate to begin with. While gripes about the mainstream media’s oppressive grip on the campaigning process were many, mentions of the campaign finance mayhem unleashed by Citizens United registered at zero.
In other key moments during the early debate, Fiorina hammered Hillary Clinton hard on Benghazi, once again brandishing snappy, Twitter-ready one-liners as she reminded voters who might have forgotten since the last GOP debate that she’s still in the running. “She’s escaped prosecution more often than El Chapo – perhaps Sean Penn should interview her,” Fiorina said, piling on one of the right’s most reviled Hollywood figures.
Meanwhile, Gilmore emphasized his veteran status at every opportunity and jumped at the chance to slam Santorum and Huckabee for, as the moderators helpfully noted early in the hour, agreeing to spend the latter part of their evening with absentee candidate Donald Trump across town at the GOP front-runner’s fundraiser for veterans. “I’m not going to any Donald Trump event across town on some sort of faux veteran issue.”
Although Huckabee couldn’t talk his way out of that one, he was able to avoid incurring the wrath of voters from a certain state in the nation’s northeast by picking up the “New York values” trope Ted Cruz started at the last debate. “I’m not going to get into an argument with New Yorkers, because there’s a lot of ‘em,” Huckabee said.
—Posted by Kasia Anderson
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Source: http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/the_seventh_gop_undercard_debate_20160128/
