When Will GOP Stop Letting Liberals Pick Our Nominee?
Ask yourself this question: imagine what we’d know about our candidates if conservatives moderated these debates and focused on policy and the future of the Republican Party?
At present, the polling numbers of each candidate are distorted based on how much time they are given to speak, how often they are allowed to cut in (notice Carly Fiorina always has more time), how many attack questions they are able to turn into jujitsu broadsides on the moderators, and how they answer the tailor-made personal attacks questions about their opponents. All the while, we know very little about where the candidates stand on the most critical issues and the important philosophical debates that are taking place within the party today.
Perhaps the most substantive, respectful, and informative part of last night’s debate was when Christie and Huckabee disagreed over austerity vs. populism on Social Security and Cruz interjected by noting how the conservative approach is to marry the two by allowing younger workers to invest in private accounts while keeping the promises to older voters. But that represented just three minutes of the debate. Aside from a few isolated moments, especially when Rick Santelli brought some sanity to the debate and engaged in a serious discussion with Cruz about the Federal Reserve, this debate was a complete freak show.
The consensus from the talking heads is that Rubio did really well, but unlike Cruz, his “doing well” hinged on his defense against the personal attacks from the moderators. That is great, but is that how we are going to pick our candidate? Does that make a conservative? To be fair to Rubio, he didn’t have much of an opportunity to address the questions about policy and the divide within the party. And therein lies the problem.
Take a look at this list of questions I prepared several months ago and check off how many of them were addressed. As a result of this faux debate, we have no sense as to what the candidates will do about the massive social transformation, the disenfranchising of the people, the Islamic refugee issue, the war on religious liberty, judicial reform, their views on how our system of governance is broken and how to restore it to the original constitutional mandate. No fundamentals whatsoever. Even the few serious policy questions were the typical insipid issues designed to launch the candidates into their boilerplate stump speeches. In many ways, these primary debates are worse than the questions asked during the general election debates, which we automatically expect to be moderated by the liberal media.
What we are seeing on display in Washington is a Republican Party that no longer exists, yet we are no closer to understanding how these candidates would deal with any of the issues that have destroyed the party – other than Ted Cruz who is currently fighting these battles. There might be other candidates who have plans to address the broken party establishment, but that will never be properly vetted until we have a debate by conservatives, for conservatives.
If the candidates were smart, they’d form a non-aggression pact and all agree to a demand that the next debate be controlled by a panel of conservatives. And no, Fox News doesn’t cut it. Or at least, if we are going to have liberals moderate the debate can we tap Nancy Pelosi and make this entertaining? (For more from the author of “When Will GOP Stop Letting Liberals Pick Our Nominee?” please click HERE)
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