Across all news, Republican presidential debate (10/28/15) is put in the section "entertainment" - I thought so too when I viewed it.
You're kidding, right? Whatever comes out of it, it affects our life.
Only serious guy: Ohio Gov. John Kasich, offered some practical ideas.
"Gov. John Kasich of Ohio said he was the chief architect of the balanced budget in the 1990s. Hmmm. While it is true that Mr. Kasich was at that time the chairman of the House Budget Committee, most economists say the surpluses of the 1990s were because of a combination of three factors: The “read my lips” tax increases and spending cuts of President George Bush in 1991; President Bill Clinton’s budget of 1993, which most likely cost Democrats control of Congress; and the gold rush economy of the dot-com bubble.
Newt Gingrich, Mr. Kasich and Mr. Clinton reached their balanced budget agreement in 1997, but little of it had actually kicked in when the government’s red ink disappeared and surpluses swelled."
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee said: "social security is your money, government mishandle it - you need to get it back!" - Yes, what the hell does government do - can't even work out a budget plan, so ridiculous! No morale!
People paid their money, they expect to have it. And if this government doesn’t pay it, then tell me what’s different between the government and Bernie Madoff, who sits in prison today for doing less than what the government has done to the people on Social Security and Medicare in this country.
— Mike Huckabee http://www.nytimes.com/live/republican-debate-cnbc-boulder/
It caught me "Becky Quick had perhaps the worst moment as she asked Republican front-runner Donald Trump about his criticism of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for bringing in immigrant workers. When Trump falsely denied it, she did not have her source material -- the candidate’s own website -- at the ready to call him on spot."
You can't salvage - you got act on spot! Quick not quickly: Do your homework before you come up on stage.
***
The Republican presidential primary debate continued its run as the season's hottest TV ratings hit, delivering an average of 14 million viewers for CNBC on Wednesday.
The audience was the lowest of the three GOP candidate showdowns so far, but still delivered the highest number ever in the 26-year history of NBCUniversal’s niche cable channel covering business and finance news cable channel, which typically averages about 343,000 viewers in prime time.
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The number is also close to what advertisers who reportedly paid up to $250,000 for a 30-second spot were promised for the telecast.
The big ratings provide a bit of a salve in what has been a rough postmortem for CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, Becky Quick and John Harwood, the moderators of the two-hour event at the University of Colorado at Boulder. The trio were pummeled by critics, pundits and Republican Party officials for their handling of the debate. The candidates continued to pile on Thursday morning.
“The moderators just didn't do their job last night in a number of areas,” Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” "Not only were the questions snarky and divisive and nonsubstantive, they were just biased. The questions were biased. But on top of that, they didn't do their job in terms of controlling the debate, either. And it became somewhat of a free-for-all that everybody had to jump in when you could jump in.”
The moderating team’s occasional stumbles offered the candidates an opening to turn the partisan crowd against them and avoid delivering straight answers to what in most cases were tough queries.
Quick had perhaps the worst moment as she asked Republican front-runner Donald Trump about his criticism of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg for bringing in immigrant workers. When Trump falsely denied it, she did not have her source material -- the candidate’s own website -- at the ready to call him on it.
“This is the big leagues and if you show weakness they will kill you,” said one NBC News insider. “They turned it on them very quickly.”
Competing cable news channels, most notably Fox News, gave Republican talking heads and commentators free reign to dump on CNBC’s moderator panel during its post-debate programming.
But many of the second-day analysis by political writers showed that the claims the moderators raised in their questions that the candidates disputed were factually accurate.
CNBC stood by the moderators in a statement issued after the debate.
“People who want to be president of the United States should be able to answer tough questions,” a CNBC spokesman said.
NBC News executives said privately that the backlash against CNBC was not expected to effect their organization's relationship with the Republican Party. The network has two primary debates coming up early next year. CNBC operates separately from the news division and does not report to NBC and MSNBC Chairman Andrew Lack.
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The third Republican presidential debate was supposed to be one that winnowed the field. Instead, it is likely to revive several faltering candidates, while harming only one -- former front-runner Jeb Bush.
The event Wednesday night suggested that, even as the Democratic contest is narrowing, the race for the Republican nomination remains wide open, with months to go before the first states to vote -- Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- finally force some consolidation onto a field that still includes more than a dozen candidates.
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Prognosticators had predicted a fight between Donald Trump and the man who only recently leapfrogged him in national and Iowa polls -- retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. But those two were bit players for most of the evening. Oddly, perhaps, neither Trump’s business background -- nor the CEO experience of Carly Fiorina -- let them dominate a debate focused sharply on the economy and budgetary matters.
Instead, it was those in the middle of the pack who appeared to have benefited from the two hours of verbal sparring, specifically Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and even New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
At the other end of the spectrum, Bush, the former Florida governor, entered the debate beleaguered, and may have left it in even worse shape. In the last week, Bush sharply cut his campaign’s staff and salaries to save money as he tried to bolster the confidence of donors who have worried as he languishes in the lower reaches of polling, both nationally and in early states.
But hardly anything he did Wednesday night appeared to dramatically, or even minimally, improve his standing. He was repeatedly outpointed by Rubio, his fellow Floridian, including during a sharp back-and-forth between the two as they stood side by side onstage at the University of Colorado in Boulder.
Bush’s best moment -- temporarily -- was a light bit in answer to a question about online sports gambling. But Christie almost immediately obliterated Bush’s comment, to a roar from the assembled crowd.
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The Republican debate came at a fraught point in the 2016 campaign, particularly for Trump. A CBS/New York Times poll published earlier this week found Carson overtaking the New York developer in the national horse race, 26% to 22%. (Most of the other candidates trailed far behind.)
His loss of the national lead, at least in that survey, followed several recent polls showing him behind Carson in Iowa, the first voting state. Trump castigated the polls as inaccurate and expressed shock that he was trailing Carson. Since Trump has routinely dumped on candidates he perceives as a threat, Wednesday loomed with the promise of a Trump-Carson battle. But none developed.
Indeed, Kasich opened the debate with a broadside at several candidates, suggesting that some were not capable of doing the job. Soon after, he blistered Carson’s tax plan as a “fantasy.”
“Why don’t we just give a chicken in every pot, while we’re ... coming up with these fantasy tax schemes?” Kasich asked.
Trump responded by defending Carson, in effect, by criticizing Kasich’s former work at Lehman Brothers, one of the financial firms whose implosion contributed to the Great Recession in 2008.
Kasich moved aggressively throughout the debate, routinely citing Ohio’s economic resurgence as a rationale for his presidential candidacy. And if he halted his criticism of Carson at that moment, it was later taken up by CNBC correspondent Becky Quick, one of the moderators, who said Carson’s tax plan would leave a $1 trillion to $2 trillion hole in the budget. Throughout, Carson appeared tentative.
If the main bout was expected to be Trump-Carson, the secondary battle was expected to be Bush vs. Rubio. And that did develop, in perhaps the spiciest moment of the debate. After questioner Carl Quintanilla asked Rubio to respond to criticism that he has missed Senate votes while he pursues higher office, Bush interceded.
“Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year-term, and you should be showing up for work.... You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job,” Bush told Rubio.
Rubio noted that he had “tremendous admiration” for Bush and immediately used the moment to cast himself as the candidate best equipped to beat Hillary Rodham Clinton. Indeed, he was adept throughout the night at turning questions to his advantage by reminding viewers of his family’s immigrant history. He mentioned his bartender father, his maid mother -- both emigres from Cuba -- and the dry cleaner whose services he uses. He brushed aside questions about his handling of his own finances and whether their rocky nature disqualified him from running the government.
“I’m not worried about my finances; I’m worried about the finances of everyday Americans who today are struggling,” he said, one of several instances where, facing directly at the camera, he appealed to voters.
If Rubio presented an uplifting personal story, Cruz and to some extent Christie benefited from the aspersions they cast.
In an answer that drew raves from the crowd, Cruz stomped on a familiar GOP foe, the media, by maligning the moderators’ questions to his fellow candidates as mean-spirited.
Those questions were in “contrast with the Democratic debate, where every fawning question from the media was, ‘Which of you is more handsome, and why?’” Cruz said. (Christie later criticized questioner John Harwood as “rude” -- even, he said, by the standards of argumentative New Jersey.)
But the exchange that said more than anything about the possibilities that opened for the successful debaters -- and may have closed off for Bush -- came after Bush was asked whether online sports betting should be regulated. Bush replied with a lighthearted aside about his fantasy football team, and then allowed that “some regulation” was perhaps called for.
Christie cut in immediately: “We have $19 trillion in debt. We have people out of work. We have ISIS and Al Qaeda attacking us. And we’re talking about fantasy football? Can we stop?”
The crowd roared with an enthusiasm rarely heard by Christie during his long and star-crossed struggle for notice in the 2016 race. And, as the debate scrambled the field anew, the applause seemed to portend months of unpredictability ahead.
For more on politics, follow @cathleendecker
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