Debating the Debates: the Days of Our Political and Real Lives

Watching what’s going on in the world, in our country, in our own back yards over the last week or so—culminating in still another Republican presidential candidate debate—is to get an idea that some things, especially our political and electoral process, have changed dramatically while we weren’t looking, even as we were watching.

It also verified  that the old verities—that is the small glories of every day life are the best defense against the onset of surrealism in the daily news, coming from the paper thrown on your porch, the glow of the computer screen, the babble of nightly news and the ticker tape of posts, tweets and comments that make up the electronic and digital pulse of computer communication.

In the course of the past week or two, we saw Donald Trump, entrepreneur extraordinaire and celebrity, and Ben Carson, M.D., the African American neurosurgeon and inspirational author, surge to the top of the crowded heap of GOP presidential candidates—practically in a dead heat with a big lead over the remaining members of the pack. They, like shape shifters, drop out (Perry and Walker), move up and sideways, are fussed over (Jeb! Bush). Others surge—Cruz and Rubio, Rubio and Cruz, which sounds like 1) a Latino law firm, 2) a vaudeville bill, or 3) a presidential ticket—or get demoted to the lingering ranks of the second tier (Huckabee and Christie) or disappear altogether (Pataki, et alii).

Predictably, Carson, so soft-spoken in debates that you have to turn up the volume, came under closer scrutiny from an increasingly unpopular media, which unearthed little bits of misinformation, exaggeration and quasi-quarter-truths about his life story, including claims about a West Point offer and personal matters.  Predictably, Carson showed that he had the makings of a politician after all. “It’s a witch hunt,” he said like hundreds of politicians before him. He complained that he was scrutinized and vetted in ways that that never happened to other candidates like Barack Obama.

Less predictably, we saw the spectacle of Trump hosting NBC’s “Saturday Night Life,” which, if it did not complete the almost total immersion of the electoral process into show business that began about the time that Bill Clinton played a saxophone on the late and not so great “Arsenio Hall Show,” certainly went further in the deep muddy. Lorne Michaels, a Mark Twain awardee, apparently did not consider that such a move might erase any remaining satirical sting that the show might have—that it, like the current slate of late night talk show hosts, has become a part of the process and family of politicos.  In the end, SNL got the desired result—highest ratings in a long time—with the side effect that Trump and the show were not very funny. The whole thing was like watching an escort and her client eating dinner, pretending to be dating.

On a recent Friday night, Nov. 6, the Democrats held something like a candidate forum on MSNBC, hosted by Rachel Maddow, which appeared to be the second Democrat debate, minus three of its original candidates, who have promptly disappeared back into relative obscurity.  It also appeared nobody watched, or wrote about this particular debate, given that Hillary Clinton is now considered a shoo-in for the nomination, even though Bernie Sanders is still making a lot of credible noise with a major following.

Polls showed shifting changes among the Republican crew—Rubio on the move here, Trump maintaining there, someone leading in New Hampshire, but not in Iowa, Carson tied with Hillary. What was evident was that two rank amateurs—Trump and Carson—no matter what they said or did, no matter how uninformed,  or implausible their ideas, were a  combined favorite of the Republican party.  The issues could fit on a t-shirt and often do, or a cardboard placard, a bumper sticker or banner—small government, a wall, repeal Obamacare, defund Planned Parenthood, a flat tax, abolish, oh, just about everything.

a firestorm—these days everything that gets a one-day news shot is a firestorm—over the apparent rudeness and meanness of the moderators of the last GOP candidates at CNBC, in which the candidates fought with each other and the moderators and Florida Senator Marco Rubio claimed that the mainstream media was actually the Democrats’ Superpac, this week’s debate on the Fox Business News Channel was an exercise in portentous—and not a little pretentious—decorum. 

All the candidates and the head of the GOP National Committee sang the praises of the moderators to the point of embarrassment. When you hear that much praise hurled at members of the media, you know the fix is in.  They called it a debate for grown-ups—nobody said anything really nasty to anybody, nobody glowered at the moderates, and when Trump complained that Carly Fiorina was interrupting too much, the audience hissed. 

As it was, there was a lot of policy talk: the economy, job creation, budgets and budget cuts, taxes, immigration and how to make America great again. While that was stimulating and grown-up, the end result was still the same old same old: flat taxes, stand up to Putin and ISIS, build the wall—or not—tax cuts and abolish the IRS, the Department of Commerce, if Ted Cruz had his way, and Obamacare—and push natural gas and pipelines.  Most of the candidates did not favor raising the minimum wage.,

One Fox News commentator reckoned that Carson, who had been quieter than usual, was the clear winner, perhaps because he complimented the moderators not asking about something that happened in 10th grade. 

If you listened closely, you heard the beginnings of an appealing candidate in Rubio—he has the gift for turning his response to every issue into part of his campaign speech. Jeb Bush at last seemed to recover a little—he (and the voluble Governor John Kasich of Ohio) challenged the wall and mass deportation, a brave approach.  Rubio—along with Cruz, Trump and Fiorina—fairly bristling with combative spirit, wanted to spend more on the military and got into a minor scuffle with Rand over how too much spending on the military might cause bankruptcy.  Rubio called Rand Paul an isolationist.

In a debate that gave the appearance—if not the substance—of being substantative, nothing was said about what was actually going on in the country at the moment—the explosion that brought down a Russian airliner in Egypt, the campus demonstrations centering around racial issues that brought down the president of the University of Missouri, a police chase in Louisiana which ended in the shooting of the suspect and his six-year-old son and the arrest of two police officers.  

In times like these, you take needed solace in how the season works its wonders. Everywhere you looked in the city and in the suburbs, autumn was autumnal, in a symphonic way,  the last leafs doing their dance,  the city of trees doing its thing. I found a CD at Politics and Prose that was Dylan and Cash themed, and featured so many great song that it felt like bliss. I saw, “Unexplained Interior,” a new play by the actor Jay O. Sanders who passionately explored and tried to present the whole of the tragedy in Rwanda. The play was the first offering of Ari Roth’s new Mosaic Theatre Company in the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street.

Daily realities ground you, here and there for such appreciation.  The news is that there won’t be another GOP debate until sometime in December.  Nevertheless, there is a real Democratic candidates’ debate at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, Saturday, Nov. 14, to be broadcast on CBS News—they made it to the networks.

Yes, the beat—along with debates and polls—go on, as they must.