Brewing in the Milwaukee Debate- Fox Business News and the GOP Twelve Pack

….and then, there were twelve.

It had to happen, eventually. A somewhat-culled herd of Republican wannabes, assembling for an actual debate- a debate without the media bias that had become the rule, rather the exception- where real issues were bandied about, sans personal and ad hominem attacks on one another. Kudos go to Fox Business News and the moderators thus assigned, for producing a truly fair and balanced debate, where… get this… the candidates were at long last allowed to be the story, rather than the moderators, themselves. Voters, especially Republican voters, who did not have an opportunity to see this debate, were the only real losers, because all twelve of the GOP contenders received ample opportunity to explain their policies in a constructive and substantive format, one which was as informative as it was enlightening, and the candidates delivered.

Not really missing from this debate were candidates George Pataki, Jim Gilmore and Lindsay Graham- not really, because none of those three have any chance to register any real support, in any of the primaries or caucuses scheduled for early next year. The “junior varsity” edition of last night’s debate featured Chris Christie, Mike Huckabee, Bobby Jindal and Rick Santorum. While clearly, it was Christie who won this preliminary round, fending off broadsides from Jindal, and aiming his sites at Democrat front-runner Hillary Clinton instead, all four of these contestants made a good showing of it, thanks in part to the quality of questions posed to them- save for the “Which Democrat do you admire most?” question which seemed to be rather silly, as compared to the remainder of the questions posed to them. Wisely, each of the four chose to ignore that question and discuss their own political agendas, instead. How such a silly question was asked in the first place remains a mystery, because the rest of the questioning was on-point and quite relevant.

In the night’s main event, featuring Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Carly Fiorina, John Kasich, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Donald Trump, all of the candidates performed well enough not to lose any support although, clearly, it was Rubio, Cruz and Fiorina providing the very best performances, with front-runners Carson and Trump rounding out the top five. Jeb Bush showed much improvement but, given the fact that debates are clearly not his forte, he did not have any “moment” that will substantially improve his standing in the polls. Rand Paul had a good night, even tossing it around with Rubio over whether or not substantially increasing military expenditures was in, and of, itself “truly conservative”. However, Paul’s comparatively isolationist policies will inevitably prove to keep him from gaining the nomination of a Republican party, most of whose voters desire a much more robust presence confronting ISIS and radical Islam, not to mention a stronger and better-funded defense footprint. If there had to be someone bringing up the rear in the main event, it was clearly Kasich, whose position on bank bailouts was murky, at best, and whose position on illegal immigration was more in line with Democrats, than Republicans.

With the possible exception of how Maria Bartiromo’s question concerning Hillary Clinton was framed, touting Clinton’s “resume” and thus eliciting some degree of laughter from Marco Rubio to whom the question was posed, the panel at the varsity event also deserved much praise for both the quality of questions being asked as well as their allowing the candidates to dive deeply into their own policy platforms, and not pitting them against one another, as happened in the previous GOP debates.

All-in-all, it was a veritable GOP “twelve-pack”, offering substantial and thoughtful discourse that brewed in the Milwaukee Theatre last night, and any impartial observer would have to favorably compare this dozen against the three Democrats running for their party’s nomination. As Donald Trump indicated, any of the tax policies that were presented last night, diverse as they are, were substantially better than the ones being advocated by the opposition, and better than the status quo.

Now that Fox Business News has “set the standard” for how debates should be moderated, going forward, as even rival network CNN has noted, we look for and hope for similar moderation in the debates to come, with the American people being the real beneficiaries, in the end.

-Drew Nickell, 11 November 2015

©2015 by Drew Nickell, all rights reserved.