Democrats have stopped defending Bill and Hillary Clinton. They just point to her poll numbers, and shrug. Mock federal law by establishing a secret email system? So what? Make Richard Nixon look like a piker by shredding 30,000 of those emails instead of erasing 18 minutes of tape? Who cares? Rake in $100 million in speaking fees from corporate interests and sketchy foreign donors? It’s for a good cause!
Sure, Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing crowds, but the old Vermont socialist doesn’t dare criticize the front-runner. Neither will former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, another declared Democratic presidential “candidate.” It evokes the GOP’s “11th commandment” popularized by Ronald Reagan: “Though shalt speak no ill of a fellow Republican.” Only this time, it’s Democrats.
The maxim was coined five decades ago by former California Republican Party chairman Gaylord Parkinson, mainly as a way of assisting Reagan’s nascent gubernatorial campaign. Over the years it was honored mostly in the breach by Republicans. Adhering to it in a crowd of 17 candidates is impossible.
Most of them did their best, however. Donald Trump refrained, by and large, from calling his colleagues “stupid” or “losers” Thursday night—although Fox News anchorwoman Megyn Kelly was more than happy to fill the void.
“You've called women fat pigs, dogs, slobs, disgusting animals,” Kelly said to Trump. “Your Twitter account has several…” Trump then interrupted her to ad-lib, “Only Rosie O'Donnell.” It was a quip that made some in the crowd laugh and others squirm nervously, which nicely sums up the main reaction to the loose-lipped billionaire.
He’s still leading the Republican field in the polls, but with 16 other candidates and Trump’s celebrity status, that’s not quite the achievement gleeful Democrats make it out to be. Whatever his ceiling of support might be, Trump is getting close to it. Speaking of which, it shouldn’t have been that easy to get The Donald to admit he’s not really a Republican, which Fox co-host Brett Baier did with the very first debate question.
Who there on the stage, Baier asked, would not agree to support the eventual Republican nominee? What he was getting at was the possibility of a third party campaign by Trump, a gambit that presumably would ensure a Hillary Clinton victory. Trump promptly raised his hand. Give him points for candor, but this is not what a Republican usually says in that situation. It so irritated Sen. Rand Paul—a man who actually would belong to a third party if the Libertarians were a viable national political entity—that he blurted out that Trump epitomized what’s wrong with American politics: “He buys and sells politicians of all stripes.”
When the question of such double dealing arose later, Trump’s answer was intellectually incoherent, if revealing. Health care is a mess because the politicians are bought and paid for by lobbyists, said the populist Donald Trump. A sentence or two later, Trump the oligarch was boasting about buying those same politicians.
But if Trump has peaked—and that’s a big “if”—who came out of Cleveland stronger than they entered? And what’s next for the other candidates? The most immediate worry for the men who participated in main debate is that Carly Fiorina, who starred in the “kids’ table” debate earlier in the day, seems poised to take somebody’s place in the Top 10. It might be Rand Paul’s; it could be Chris Christie’s or John Kasich’s.
Although she has little political experience outside her losing 2010 Senate campaign to Barbara Boxer, Fiorina was simultaneously the toughest on Trump while making the most articulate and direct appeal to his supporters. “Whatever the issue, whatever the cause, whatever festering problem you hoped would be resolved, the political class has failed you,” she said.
With nearly as many contestants as in “The Hunger Games,” certain pairings are inevitable, along with private feuds and side rivalries. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has already ruminated aloud about a Walker-Rubio ticket (or a Rubio-Walker ticket), but a discerning Thursday viewer also might imagine a Jeb Bush-John Kasich pairing, an alliance that would elevate within conservatism concern for the poor. The other possibility is an exacta ticket that you’d announce at the racetrack betting window this way: “All with Fiorina.”
The takeaway is that 17 is too large a number. There weren’t this many people deciding presidential nominations in the old smoke-filled rooms of lore, let alone that many contenders. Literally.
Heading into the 1920 Republican convention in Chicago, the GOP nomination was wide open. On the first ballot 12 Republicans attracted support, the top three being Gen. Leonard Wood, Illinois Gov. Frank O. Lowden and California Sen. Hiram Johnson.
Ohio party boss Harry Daugherty confided to reporters that it would be a deadlocked convention between the top two, and that he planned to break the impasse by offering home state favorite Warren G. Harding as the compromise candidate. “After the other candidates have gone their limit, some 12 or 15 men, worn out and bleary-eyed for lack of sleep, will sit down about two o'clock in the morning, around a table in a smoke-filled room in some hotel and decide the nomination,” he said. “When that time comes, Harding will be selected.”
It happened just as Daugherty predicted. For Republicans, this meant good news and bad. The good news was that they won in November. The bad news was that, in turning to someone they didn’t really know well, GOP bosses ended up choosing a guy who was a scandal machine once in the White House. It’s not a stretch to say, with the release of Warren Harding’s recent love letters to a mistress, that he’s still generating scandals a century later.
What I’m suggesting is that the voters will eventually sort this out, and that their track record is at least as good as that of the wise guys. Also that a political party, Republican or Democrat, which ignores the whiff of scandal may come eventually to regret it, even if they win the next election.
Donald J. Trump
