If any Democrat can't beat any of the Battling Bickersons in the Fox News debate last night, then the oldest political party in the world might as well fold its tent in permanently whipped humiliation. The televised exchange spotlighted the GOP's fractured ideological stance -- which is now wide indeed -- and overall the participants reflected the charm of a Bob Dole, the compassion of a Pat Robertson, and the brilliance of a George W. Bush.
Each tried his best on occasion to come across as light-hearted and personable -- except, of course, the humorless Ron Paul -- but the funniest moment came from Fox News' co-interrogator Brit Hume as he labored mightily to foment a third world war over the recent Strait of Hormuz incident. The poor dear was obviously crushed when he failed to enlist the panelists' disgust over the lack of the U.S. Navy's general bombardment of ... somebody, anybody ... but the South Carolina Republican Party compensated by opening the debate with a rousing choral rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.
Fox News didn't yet have a transcript up at the time of this early-morning writing, so I'm afraid I can't provide a link for your fullest edification. I did try settling for Fox News' online coverage of the debate, but when, early on, it noted John McCain's past as a "ship captain" rather than Naval aviator (a reference I now see they have just deleted), I thought it best to rely on Fox News no more. Can those folks, first try, ever get anything right?
So I skipped on over to the New York Times for quotable quotes instead, especially since the Times itself entered as a target in last night's debate. The ever-witty Fred Thompson, with cue-card jokes firmly at hand, at one point quipped that "you can tell that the news is good coming out of Iraq because you read so little about it in The New York Times." Oh my, good one, Fred, a real zinger. One wonders who reads the Times to Fred, or if they've read to him any of its expansively positive tales of late; but golly shucks, a great joke is a great joke and reality only tends to spoil it.
Nonetheless the Times seemed to award "best performance" to the ungrateful Mr. Thompson, crediting him for having "provided some of the liveliest moments of the debate." These came about from Fred's crosshairs being fixed on Mike Huckabee, whom the former charged would deliver unto us "liberal economic policies, liberal foreign policies." I'm unsure what a "liberal foreign policy" is, exactly, other than decades of Cold Warriorism, but let us quibble not: the demagogic essence of Fred's broad offensives throughout the evening was merely that of dropping the dreaded L-bomb on the Huck.
One also wonders if Huckabee helped himself last night, as he tended to confirm Fred's charges on his "liberal economic" contours by countering with outrageous decencies like this: "We need to make sure that we communicate that our party is just as interested in helping the people who are single moms, who are working two jobs and still just barely paying the rent as we are the people at the top of the economy."
Has Mike checked his party registration lately? Is he aware that few Republicans pols since Alf Landon have cared about policies with a humanitarian spin? Give it up, Mike. You can't reinvent the modern GOP in a few months, and you can't change its primaries' megalomaniacal obsession with trickle-down tax cuts. Those single moms can by God fend for themselves, the losers.
The best scorching, however, came not from Thompson, in my opinion, but McCain. And it was -- you guessed it -- Mitt Romney who got sautéed. The moment came during one of Mitt's tedious demagogic spiels directed at Michigan's unemployed: "I know that there are some people who think, as Senator McCain did -- he said, you know, some jobs have left Michigan that are never coming back. I disagree. I’m going to fight for every single job." To which McCain replied, cooly: "Sometimes you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear along with things that they do want to hear. There are some jobs that aren’t coming back to Michigan. There are some jobs that won’t come back here to South Carolina." And with that touch of globalization reality, Mitt was left looking like the desperate demagogue he is.
Unfortunately, desperate demagoguery sells -- especially to desperate people. How it sells to the desperate in Michigan, we'll soon see.
And of course there was Rudy Giuliani, who mostly focused on setting a new record for the number of times a man can say "Ronald Reagan" in 90 minutes. I really do regret that a transcript isn't up yet, for I very much wanted to count the bootlicking references. It was like Rudy was on some kind of pre-recorded loop. In lieu of that count, however, I bring you this choice selection from Rudy, who hammered his early support of the surge in Iraq with Keith Olbermann-like, comedic rapidity: "The night of the president’s speech, I was on television. I supported the surge. I’ve supported it throughout." How he omitted squeezing "9/11" into that I'll leave for others to ponder, although I imagine somewhere out there today is an unemployed debate-prepper.
In general, though, the debate pretty much confirmed that any Democratic candidate should have the easiest cakewalk in the history of U.S. presidential elections. The GOP's 30-year-old fusion has unraveled, and that's what principally was on display last night in South Carolina. It no longer has a threefold base -- social, economic and national-security radicals -- but three bases. And there's a huge difference.