Live Tweet or Die #2: The Most Important AND Bloodiest Debate Ever!
Saturday night promises to deliver the bloodiest Republican presidential debate of the campaign season. Polls show Donald Trump well ahead in the lead up to Tuesday’s primary, with a traffic jam of GOP aspirants behind him. Every candidate has an interest in attacking at least one opponent. Top tier candidates need a strong showing in the state, while lower-tier candidates have their very survival at stake. There is no longer cause for anybody to hold their fire.
From: New Hampshire GOP debate promises to be bloodiest yet – Washington Examiner
This debate and each candidate’s performance in it will decide which candidate will be the nominee. The winner of New Hampshire will win South Carolina and the Republican nomination, although a Trump-Rubio clash in the Palmetto state seems in the offing.
From: Roger Stone: What Donald Trump Must Do – Breitbart
Though many viewers took the Dem Debate last Thursday on MSNBC to be the best of this campaign on either side, and Chris Matthews, with typical understatement, called it one of the best ever, it is also said to have been the least-watched. Perhaps relatedly, our open thread received 0 as in nada and zilch comments – or it could be that after Iowa we’re plum debate- and campaign-tuckered out. You tell me – or don’t, if you’re too debate- and campaign-tuckered out even to have read this far…
The Washington Examiner article linked above traces out the expected or possible lines of attack available to each candidate in this debate.
Checking in for OT, showing no mercy and giving no quarter should be, according to last head count, @RolandDodds, @dscotto10, @RusselSaunder1, @CK_MacLeod, and maybe the ailingish @epiciutto and maybe @AmatuerPolSc. If @e’s not up to it, maybe she can figure out a way to share those slides on moral nihilism she’s been doing up, and we can work them in.
Here’s the embed – if it’s slow for you just go to https://twitter.com/OT_Tweep/lists/live-tweet-or-die in your browser or Tweetdeck!
I am in!Report
Excellent, and with that comment we’ve already beaten the last Ordinary Times Debate Open Thread (OT-OT, hereafter)!Report
People too often take these New Hampshire debates for granite.Report
Ha!Report
Warriors 73, Thunder 59 at the half.Report
Final score: Warriors 116, Thunder 108Report
Agreed. Kasich was the most rational but Trump won the debate.Report
I didn’t realize there was a Republican debate tonight until I checked my Facebook feed. Apparently, I missed the Christie-Rubio feud but got to hear various candidates lie about Hikkary’s position on abortion. No, she doesn’t support a woman’s right to abort her baby one day before its due date. I think it was Rubio who said that. He’s not as bad as Cruz but he’s really started to get under my skin the last couple of debates.Report
Doesn’t she?
The question wasn’t specifically about one day before the due date, but when asked if she supported a federal ban on abortions “at any stage of pregnancy,” she said no.Report
Explain how it could be medically necessary to perform an abortion one day before the due dateReport
Generally it’s not. They’ll just deliver a dead or dying fetus because it’s less physically dangerous than a C-section or partial birth abortion.
I suspect if you dig far enough, you’ll probably find some cases close wherein you had a dead or dying fetus, a mother going septic, something like that.
Bluntly speaking, pregnant women who keep the baby past the first trimester are generally women WANTING a baby. Which means abortions after that are almost exclusively tragedies.Report
Either that or people who didn’t realize they were pregnant.
(Not always in denial, but… you know.)Report
I don’t know. Ask Hillary Clinton. I think that’s just the framing she uses to avoid alienating moderates. She doesn’t say “I support a ban on abortions in the final N weeks of pregnancy, with an exemption for medical necessity.” She says “Medical necessity…anyway, this is about a woman’s right to choose.”
I’m not saying I disagree. I’m just wondering where Michelle gets the idea that she supports a ban on very-late-term abortion, with or without medical exemptions.Report
Maybe the reason Hilary doesn’t support a ban on abortions “past n week” is because it would be a case of government intruding into an area where the individual choices of women and physicians is already working just splendidly.
Just splendidly is the phrase here. Is there a problem with women having abortions of perfectly healthy fetuses in the 8th month for no good reason?
Is this happening, anywhere?
Or are we going to start passing federal laws to ban things that aren’t happening, but could somehow?
This pressure to ban late term abortion is like the Terri Schiavo case- it completely shreds the noble rhetoric of the conservative movement about individual choice and limited government.
There is no problem with late term abortions that needs outside intervention. The idea that women are strolling into abortion clinics in their 8th month and frivolously terminating their pregnancies is a complete and utter lie, a fantasy.
Yet it is the cause celebre of the conservative movement, one that has their almost laser like focus to the exclusion of everything else.
The only reasonable explanation is that conservatives are not angered so much by the fact that it is happening, but that women have the freedom to choose.Report
What Chip said. It’s odd to see BB dissatisfied with a politician who doesn’t follow “I don’t support X” with “We need a law against X.”Report
Also it’s the camel’s nose.Report
It’s also an attempt to conform her policy to the structure of Roe v. Wade, which slides state interest against individual interest by using trimesters. Arbitrary but objectively definable periods of time, which are (hoped to be) mostly right in most situations. Because that’s the best you can do anyway, legislatively.Report
Christie likened Rubio to Obama for being a first-term senator. Unfortunately for Rubio, as a Republican he couldn’t snap back about the track record of recent presidents who were in their second term as governor.Report
So, I spent the day watching the Star Wars prequels. Better or worse use of time?Report
It depends: watching for the first time, or rewatching? If for the first time, this is a defensible decision on the basis of knowing what it is that everyone is bitching about. If rewatching, then this is a perverse exercise in masochism. On the other hand, watching a Republican debate is, too, so it is a hard call. Didn’t you have any shoes that needed rearranging or something?Report
Rewatching. I suppose engaging in such behavior in a group only makes it more perverse.Report
I heard bernie and HRC got into it a bit last time around. Otherwise…yawn.Report
The Twitter Hot Take du moment is something to the effect of “Boy, isn’t Rubio lucky that he messed up that badly right before Superbowl Sunday?”
Which seems to me to indicate that Trump met expectations, Cruz didn’t exceed them, and Jeb is still in the race for some reason.Report
Yeah, Rubio took a beating and was exposed – so The Story goes – for reciting memorized lines and therefore!! being an empty suit. On the other hand, his advisers have decided he should very self-consciously campaign against Hillary and Obama’s legacy as a tactic to win the primary. Which strikes me as good if sometimes clumsily delivered politics. I see this hiccup hurting him right up until pregame festivities start.Report
The take that did not strike me as particularly hot was that if Rubio can’t handle the pressure of a single-digits guy right before New Hampshire, he will never EEEEEEEVER be able to handle Hillary in the general. (There was some other observation about the difference in pressure between a media that is interested in a horse race and a media that is interested in making sure that their preferred candidate gets elected but that’s conspiracy theory talk.)Report
People read all sorts of things into exchanges like that one, and it is pure speculation, and often projection, to presume we know how the People are going to react. Rubio himself is defending his tactic – including his repetition of the point he was trying to make, and including a promise to keep on making it. I could even see him inviting his supporters to repeat it with him at public events!
My relatively apolitical Republican friend who was watching the debate noted the exchange, agreed Christie had a point, but didn’t think it was an important point, and is now a Rubio supporter, I’d say. Previously, my friend knew only that Trump was running, but didn’t really know anything about any of the candidates other than to have heard of Bridgegate and to know that Bush is a Bush: I think that’s probably close to the median voter.
The polit-mavens, including some Rubio-likers, seemed mostly to take the position that Rubio repeating “Let’s dispel the fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing” three times, and even after being called on repetition of canned statements, does not rise to the level of embarrassment of Rick Perry’s “Oops!” moment. However, just the fact that a significant section of the opiniontariat thought Marco looked unsteady and less than commanding – whether or not his performance could be explained as staying on message and not sinking to low-polling bully Christie’s level – slows the consolidation of support around him as the best the Rs are going to manage this cycle.
So, if Rubio had had a universally acclaimed superduper performance, then maybe he’d have maintained or accelerated momentum on both tracks, establishment and electorate, and be closer to wrapping things up. Instead, “establishment” may have paused at least for the moment, at a time when every day is thought to count, and we’ll still have to see whether NH voters care, and if so, how they care.
So, the door is probably still open, but how open it is, no one knows. I think Rubio probably remains the best not-Trump, not-Cruz they’ve got, just as he was before the debate, unless one of the governors somehow parlays a strong result into momentum for the next states.Report
I just read a Vox article on Rubio’s performance which, in an attempt to provide analysis!!???, claimed that his debate performance was horrible; that he’s now “branded” as a Reciter (hey, that’s not bad! if anyone uses that term against him remember you heard it here first); and that the establishment media&donors will be reticent to back him now…. BUT! that voters don’t really care about that stuff, and donors prolly won’t either… SO! it’s only the establishment media folks who’ll make a big deal about it … UNTIL! they don’t anymore.
So, pretty much what you said with the only difference being that you didn’t get paid to write it up.Report
Hugh Hewitt praised Rubio for repeating the same inane talking point over and over, because that’s “staying on message”. And he’s right that it worked for W.Report
I think we’ll find out a whole lot on Tuesday. He could be knocked completely out of contention, or become the likely nominee. Until then, it’s hard to say. There’s going to be a lot of football noise between now and then.Report
That exchange was the only part of the debate we saw live. We were watching the Nets doing poorly against the 76ers(!) and we supposed we should check in on the Rs.
The thing that struck me more than Rubios repetition, was his non-follow up on the shot at Christie about NJ’s downgrades. Christie just denied it and Rubio didn’t follow up – easy to do since the facts were on his side had he known more than simply the bald assertion. So the repetitions were in the context of Christie leading with his chin and getting away with it.
It was easier to watch the Nets!Report
The take that did not strike me as particularly hot…
Agreed. If the Christie attack came from Trump, one might conclude that he can’t play ball with the heavy hitters. Coming from Christie it looks more like ankle-biting. To me anyway.Report
Rubio strikes me as a guy who will make one hell of a nominee in 2024 or 2028.Report
He already is, no? His answers to two pretty important questions – “what’s conservatism?” and “what would you do to fight OMightyISIS” – were far, FAR better than anyone else on stage last night, seemed to me. He actually knew the difference between Sunnis, Shia and Kurds (oh my). But the establishment-driven narrative that “being a good conservative” is essential to winning the primary appears to be upended. At this point, anyway.Report
Or 2040, since all serious candidates have to be at least in their late 60s these days.Report
Yes, but will he have the dangerous smoldering virility of Bernie, beckoning all the hot young chicks?Report