GOP Wars: Episode V Donald Trump (Darth Vader? Luke Skywalker? Both?) landed in his celebrity starship to challenge and terrorize . . . the Establishment. Dan Henninger
http://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-wars-episode-v-1450307332
Who needs “Star Wars VII”? We’ve got the Republican presidential competition. As alternative universes go, this one has been hard to beat.
Out of nowhere, Donald Trump (Is he Darth Vader? Luke Skywalker? Both?) landed in his celebrity starship to challenge and terrorize . . . the Establishment. The genius of the American political system is that it has built-in reality checks. The next one arrives in February with the start of 50 individual state primary elections or caucuses. Opinion-poll politics gives way to voting-booth politics.
Will Donald Trump, master of our alternative political universe, survive in the real-world primaries? This question forced itself upon us toward the end of the Las Vegas debate, when Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump about the “nuclear triad.”
That answer raises the recent Ben Carson question: How much does a candidate for the U.S. presidency actually need to know about anything in the real political world? The Las Vegas debate suggests we are moving closer to the realities of a voting-booth campaign, made clear in the fascinating, important exchanges between Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Notably, their discussion of dictators.
Wolf Blitzer asked Mr. Cruz about his past assertion that the U.S. should have left in place Saddam Hussein, Moammar Gadhafi and Hosni Mubarak. Let’s focus on Gadhafi.
Mr. Cruz replied that Hillary Clinton and President Obama “led NATO in toppling the government in Libya. They did it because they wanted to promote democracy. A number of Republicans supported them. The result,” he said, “is Libya is now a terrorist war zone run by jihadists.” He also opposed “toppling Assad.”
Mr. Cruz’s remarks are meant to attract the swath of GOP voters who get upset by the phrase, “nation building.” He hopes that when Sen. Rand Paul’s libertarian campaign inevitably folds, that isolationist base will move into the Cruz column. The Cruz campaign’s political math is: Evangelicals plus anti-immigration conservatives plus libertarians equals the nomination.
Sen. Rubio challenged Mr. Cruz’s elision of Gadhafi with Mubarak: “Moammar Gadhafi is the man that killed those Americans over Lockerbie, Scotland. Moammar Gadhafi is also the man that bombed that cafe in Berlin and killed those Marines.” He added that if “anti-American dictators like Assad, who help Hezbollah, who helped get those IEDs into Iraq, if they go, I will not shed a tear.”
Besides surfacing a substantive foreign-policy divide inside the GOP, the Cruz-Rubio exchanges yielded useful political insights about these two.
If one, bloodless qualification for the GOP nominee is, very simply, who’d best compete with Hillary Clinton in the debates, it looks to me like Marco Rubio would demolish her equivocations. We knew Mr. Rubio’s set-speech skills were impressive, but the mastery he routinely displayed in this debate of spontaneously compressing events and arguments into a coherent argument was impressive.
Mr. Cruz was a legendary debater at Princeton, a great political asset that may prove a problem. Mr. Cruz is running a debater’s campaign. In debate, rhetorical power depends on leaving out details. His frantic attempt later to get Mr. Blitzer to let him clarify his dictator comments suggested he knew Mr. Rubio had damaged him on an important point.
These two are formidable politicians, but Mr. Rubio’s ability to identify vulnerability and stick a shiv through the Cruz armor was unexpected.
Second best at this rapier is Carly Fiorina, who cut Donald Trump after he said Middle East military funds should have been spent on U.S. roads and airports. That, she said, is precisely Barack Obama’s position: “I’m amazed to hear that from a Republican presidential candidate.”
Ben Carson upped his policy game, but why didn’t he do that from day one? The delay is fatal. Jeb Bush also waited too long to learn the debate format, but the way he, of all people, made Donald Trump blow his top was great TV. For Mr. Bush, Chris Christie (whose ridicule of the Senate metadata debate was a gratuitous misfire) and John Kasich, the whole game now is New Hampshire. It’s win, place or go home.
We come out of Vegas with the same question we brought to Vegas: Is Donald Trump more than an opinion-poll phenom? Will they still love him inside the voting booths? Maybe. But this debate and the decline of Ben Carson suggests it’s time for Mr. Trump to up the substance of his game. The politicians are starting to catch up with the starship.
Comments are closed.
