Thursday Reads: How Bad Will the GOP Debate Be?

Good Morning!!

Today is the day the GOP clown car empties out onto a stage in Cleveland for the 2016 first debate of the 2016 presidential election season. Will it be a hoot to watch or will the pain of watching and listening to a bunch of loonies outweigh the pleasure of mocking their insane ideas? We’ll find out tonight.

Judging by the stories highlighted on Google news and Memeorandum, Donald Trump will eclipse every other candidate. It’s ridiculous, but the Republicans brought it on themselves.

Politico lists “Five things to watch” in the clown show tonight. Here are the highlights of their scouting report.

Trump

Advisers to several candidates said they’ve been closely examining Trump’s caustic statements and have concluded his bomb-throwing fits a pattern: He’s at his most inflammatory — for example, giving out Lindsey Graham’s cellphone number, making fun of Rick Perry’s glasses or criticizing John McCain’s past as a prisoner of war — when he’s responding to an attack against him. Graham, Perry and McCain had all gone after Trump aggressively before he had turned his fire on them.

If he’s not put on the defensive, Trump — who recently said that he hopes the debate stays “on a high level” — could be far less belligerent.

That’s assuming the rest of candidates, e.g. bomb throwers Ted Cruz and Chris Christie stay “on a high level.” Highly unlikely.

Jeb Bush

While Bush is typically more at ease with himself than many of his opponents, he can be awkward and uncomfortable when put on the spot. In recent days, advisers to one rival candidate examined a 2013 interview Bush gave to NBC’s “Meet the Press” and concluded that one way to get under the former governor’s skin is to compare him to his Florida protégé Marco Rubio.

Then there’s the rust factor. While many of Bush’s rivals — nearly all of whom are sitting governors or senators — have recent experience on debate stages, he doesn’t: Bush hasn’t faced an election since 2002. Bush aides say they recognize the problem and have taken steps to fix it. They recently brought on Beth Myers and Peter Flaherty, both of whom helped Mitt Romney prepare for the 2012 debates, to assist.

Watch for Jeb to commit another “unforced error” like his recent comment about women’s health not being an important issue.

Scott Walker

During a trip to New York City last week, the Wisconsin governor spent much of the day in debate prep with a group of advisers that included Mari Will, the wife of conservative columnist George Will, and campaign manager Rick Wiley. Walker has been criticized for being overly scripted and lacking policy expertise — he bobbled several times when discussing foreign policy and national security issues early in the campaign — and is under pressure to show that he can go toe-to-toe with his rivals.

There’s much more worth reading at the Politico link, including possible conflicts between Rand Paul and Chris Christie and what to expect from the Fox moderators.

Also from Politico, Jack Shafer writes: The GOP Pre-Season Begins. The candidates in Thursday’s debate would do well to remember it’s a long campaign.

Try thinking of Thursday’s presidential debates on Fox as tryouts for the next round of GOP presidential debates, which CNN will stage in September, and CNN’s presidential debates as tryouts for CNBC’s debates in October, and CNBC’s debates as tryouts for the Fox Business Channel’s debates in November, and so on and so on, until you reach the state of attentiveness that you apply to the MLB Cactus and Grapefruit league matches or NFL exhibition games.

It’s not that the early debates—and pre-season games—don’t matter. They do, but mostly to weed the real prospects from the position fillers and to help the veterans refresh their skills for the big season. But the crests and troughs produced in pre-season recede in importance as the days pass and the next contest is joined.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) speaks during the Family Leadership Summit in Ames, Iowa, on Aug. 10.

The Cleveland 10 candidates—who will appear on Fox at 9 p.m., after the undercard event featuring the seven junior varsity candidates going through the motions at 5 p.m.—will have little time to talk, says Fox co-moderator Bret Baier. Each of the 10 candidates will get 10 to 11 minutes of speaking time over the two-hour event, which is the baseball equivalent of playing less than an inning. Baier says he hopes to elicit something “interesting, but illuminating” from the candidates and to shove them off of their talking points. This will require interruption, as each candidate has filled his (and, in JV candidate Carly Fiorina’s case, her) brain with canned responses. The 2012 debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney set some sort of modern interruption record, as moderator Candy Crowley short-stopped on Romney 23 times and Obama 15 times to get the debate on track. (The candidates also interrupted one another repeatedly, making for a total average of 1.4 interruptions per minute.)

The candidates act like they own the debate, but the moderators possess the deed and title. In this go-round, Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace will be calling the shots. Fox-haters automatically believe that the network coddles conservatives by pitching them Wiffle Ball questions, but as Bill Scher wrote in POLITICO several weeks ago, Fox enjoys barking their shins. “Moderating a debate is like conducting an orchestra,” veteran moderator Anderson Cooper of CNN once wrote. “No one pays much attention to what you are doing unless things go badly, and then it’s your fault.”

Another interesting article, well worth reading.

Naturally, most pundits are writing about Donald Trump. Joshua Green has two good pieces at Bloomberg.

1. It’s Wrong to Call Donald Trump a ‘Fringe’ Candidate.

Donald Trump’s rise to a position of total dominance in the Republican presidential field has been accompanied by a dismissive snort from Beltway mandarins that Trump is merely a “fringe” candidate. The idea, in essence, is that Trump has a strong but narrow appeal to a group of mouth-breathing xenophobes and practically nobody else.

But a new Bloomberg Politics poll of Republican and Republican-leaning voters demolishes this claim. Trump not only laps the competition—he has twice the support of the second-place candidate, Jeb Bush (21 percent to 10 percent)—but he also leads among every demographic subgroup, but one (self-identified “moderates”).

Let’s break it down. Trump leads with male voters (Trump 24 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 10 percent) and female voters (Trump 18 percent, Bush 10 percent, Huckabee 10 percent). He leads with voters younger than 45 (Trump 15 percent, Bush 10 percent, Rubio and Paul at 9 percent) and voters older than 45 (Trump 25 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 9 percent) and seniors (Trump 23 percent, Bush 14 percent, Walker 9 percent).

Trump wins voters with no more than a high school degree (Trump 27 percent, Huckabee 13 percent, Bush 11 percent) and voters with a college degree (Trump 19 percent, Walker 12 percent, Bush 11 percent). He leads among affluent voters who earn $100,000 or more annually (Trump 18 percent, Bush 14 percent, Walker 13 percent) and those who make less than $50,000 a year (Trump 19 percent, Bush 11 percent, Walker 9 percent).

The thrice-married Trump, who recently told a Christian forum that he “never” asks God for forgiveness, wins “born-again” voters (Trump 16 percent, Huckabee 14 percent), as well as Catholics (Trump 27 percent, Rubio 9 percent) and Protestants (Trump 18 percent, Bush 12 percent). And he also wins “Tea Party” conservatives (Trump 24 percent, Walker 11 percent).

2. The GOP Is About to Become the Party of Trump.

When Donald Trump takes center stage at Thursday’s Fox News debate in Cleveland, it will be a critical moment for the Republican Party. Until recently, Americans mentally categorized Trump as a celebrity entertainer and interpreted his madcap antics and controversial pronouncements accordingly. But on Thursday, voters will experience Trump in a much different context: as the standard-bearer of the Republican Party, who not only leads the presidential field by a wide margin but, asa new Bloomberg Politics poll shows, has a powerful appeal to every segment of the Republican electorate.

That’s great news for Trump. But if voters start associating his demagogic rantingsabout Mexican “rapists” not with Trump alone but with the broader Republican Party, his presence in the field could doom the GOP’s efforts to extend its appeal to new voters. “If he got the nomination talking like that, it would be a big problem,” says Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-tax stalwart. Even Trump’s current standing could tarnish the Republican brand, says Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee: “It’s something very scary for the party establishment.”

Before Trump formally declared his candidacy in June, the American public held a firm opinion of him that has been remarkably consistent through the years. The deepest examination of Trump measured steadily over time is probably his Q Score—the entertainment industry’s popular measure of celebrity, television, and brand appeal. “Trump has consistently been in the category of celebrities that people love to hate, love to criticize,” says Henry Schafer, executive vice president of The Q Scores Company. “With the success of his TV show, he’s very controversial, intentionally marketing himself in a waRewas 7 and negative Q Score was 45 when last measured in January-February. The average celebrity, says Schafer, is about 15/26.)

There’s more good stuff at both of those links.

Paul Krugman points out that Donald Trump is not the only GOP candidate who is completely nuts:

Just about the entire political commentariat has been caught completely flatfooted by Donald Trump’s durable front-runner status; he was supposed to collapse after being nasty to St. John McCain, but nothing of the sort happened.

So now the conventional wisdom is that we’re witnessing a temporary triumph of style over substance; Republican voters like Trump’s bluster, and haven’t (yet) realized that he isn’t making sense.

But if you ask me, the people who are really mistaking style for substance are the pundits. It’s true that Trump isn’t making sense — but neither are the mainstream contenders for the GOP nomination.

Read the rest at the NYT.

More useful stories, links only:

Washington Post: Donald Trump talked politics with Bill Clinton weeks before launching 2016 bid.

Politico: How Jeb and the GOP Got Trumped.

Ezra Klein at Vox: The media’s 5 stages of grief over Donald Trump.

Time: How to Watch Tonight’s Republican Debate Online.

Business Insider: Republicans outside Washington are urging the party to take Trump’s campaign seriously.

Bill Schneider at Reuters: Why Donald Trump’s hostile takeover bid for the Republican Party is a loser.

American Prospect: Why Jeb Bush’s Pitch to the Koch Brothers Should Scare You.

Norm Ornstein at The Atlantic: The Republican Road Block Ahead.

Remember this is an open thread. Post your thoughts and links on any topic in the comment thread, and please come back later this evening for live blogs on the second tier and first tier GOP candidates debates. The first one starts at 5PM and the main event will be at 9PM. I hope you’ll join us!