The GOP candidates for the White House held a CNBC-hosted debate presentation in
Sinking for a moment into the horse-race mentality that I deplore, I think the event’s clear winner was CNBC's Maria Bartiromo, who would be an ideal replacement for MSNBC’s
Chris Matthews, the sooner the better. Bartiromo asked pointed, organized and
substantive questions of various candidates equally – a welcome change of pace
in itself from the top-drawer, top-tier, top-crust-they-wish focus on
‘front-runners’ that seems to enslave most television personalities. Nobody
asked during the event, ‘What shape do you think American democracy is in?’ But
if anyone had, honesty/accuracy would have compelled including the tone of most
televised news presentations as problems in the public discourse. Surely,
honesty would have . . .
Instead, it being
No way to try to compute the billions Giuliani thinks is spent thus. It
is worthwhile to point out that 1) the overwhelming majority of lawsuits filed
are not ‘frivolous’ but involved deeply serious and even painful issues to the
parties; 2) there are mechanisms in place to weed out frivolous lawsuits –
which only wealthy Giuliani supporters would be likely to afford to begin with;
3) much of the total cost of lawsuits is generated by parties defending when
they should be settling. Take a look at Unum/Provident, for example, and the at
least 32 federal courts which reversed the company’s unfair denials of
disability benefits.
Giuliani’s answer was in response to a question about the
billions raked in by hedge funds. Bartiromo asked whether it is fair for hedge
fund billions to be taxed at the capital gains rate of 15 percent, when
other top income is taxed at about 30 percent. Predictably, Giuliani was in
favor of letting the largely unregulated hedge funds keep what they got, as
your dentist says about your teeth. Ron Paul responded to the same question by
talking about our immense transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, wiping
out the middle class in the process. Not your standard GOP fare, unlike John
McCain’s answer that “wealth creates wealth.”
Over-all, Giuliani, McCain and even Romney all sounded
rather tired, and wired – Giuliani often sounds that way at moments, fighting
fit wired, more or less the fighting form of the late Hunter S. Thompson. All
three sounded like supply-side cheerleaders, too. Huckabee as usual came off
sounding best after Ron Paul, with Paul mentioning the Iraq war in terms of
economic/fiscal costs as well as human costs, and Huckabee showing some
awareness, like Paul, of the “disconnect” between people for whom the current
economy has done much and the majority for whom it hasn’t. That touch has yet
to reach Romney and Giuliani, who lived up to CNBC commentators’ hope of
‘sparks’ by jib-jabbing at each other.
Fred Thompson, as always more laidback and more subtle,
sounded good in comparison to the jib-jabbing, also in comparison to Tancredo’s
harping on “illegal immigrants,” his signature issue, the signature here being
a large L on the forehead. At least Tancredo, like Ron Paul, refused to
swear support for the Republican nominee regardless of said nominee’s identity,
character and positions.
Romney got off a good joke, toward the end of the program,
saying that the debate series was “a lot like Law & Order: It has a huge
cast, the series seems to go on forever, and Fred Thompson shows up at the
end.”
Thompson did well, too, with a predictable question about
his ‘waiting’ to enter the presidential race only six months early, instead of
a full year to year and a half like the other candidates. He said he thought he
hadn’t waited too long, although “I gotta admit, it was getting a little boring
without me.”
I continue to think, as in August, that Romney is the
default nominee if the Repubs decide they can’t win; Huckabee wd be their
nominee if they were really smart about winning; and Giuliani is a joke. But
who knows at this stage. It’s really entirely conceivable that they’ll end up
nominating Thompson. He’s the one most used to television, after all.
Stumble It!