RUTHFULLY YOURS

Swing and a miss.

It was the story of the night, the story of the debate, and it might soon be the story of Jeb Bush’s campaign.

After months of flicking passively at Marco Rubio — all the while dismissing talk of their collision course, and rolling his eyes at the narrative of “master vs. apprentice” — Bush finally launched a public broadside against his friend and former protégé during the third GOP presidential debate Wednesday night.

His timing was logical and yet inopportune; CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla had been quizzing Rubio about his mounting number of missed Senate votes, which prompted a Florida newspaper to call for his resignation. Rubio responded forcefully by decrying the newspaper’s “double standard” of endorsing Democratic candidates who had similarly missed votes. The audience rallied behind Rubio, roaring with approval — and just then, Bush decided to jump in.

“Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work,” Bush lectured. “You can campaign [for president] or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well. They are looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.”

Rubio had the most consistently impressive night. He showed his political skill with the first couple of questions, which were hostile and had him playing defense, but he parried effectively and by the end he had made each one a positive for him. At every opportunity, he brings his answers back to his message of helping Americans struggling in this economy and to Hillary Clinton (he went out of his way to hit her on Benghazi). He knows his brief extremely well and almost always sounds authoritative and well-informed. You have to think after tonight more Republicans are going to realize his potential.

Cruz had the best moment of the night in his Newt Gingrich-style slam of the moderators that he carried off very effectively–perfectly timed and delivered. It will be repeated over and over online and on the radio in the next 48 hours. He faded a bit after that, but he was as fluid as always on everything else and I imagine pleased former Ron Paul voters in Iowa with his answer on the Fed. Tonight will provide more support for the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom that it will end up as a Rubio-Cruz race (caution: the conventional wisdom used to be that only Rubio, Bush or Walker could win the nomination).

In one moment, Senator Ted Cruz managed to do what no other candidate for the Republican nomination for president has done to this point: unite Republicans. He did so by pushing back against the ridiculously biased questions presented by CNBC moderators. The Hollywood Reporter transcribes:

“The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” said the U.S. senator from Texas, instantly earning applause.

“This is not a cage match,” he continued. “Look at the questions. ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain;’ ‘Ben Carson, can you do math;’ ‘John Kasich, will you insult two people over here;’ ‘Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign?;’ ‘Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?”

Cruz contrasted moderators’ treatment of Republicans with their treatment of Democrats:

…every fawning question from the media was, “Which of you is more handsome and wise? …”

It’s not news to anyone that political journalists tend to be liberal. That alone doesn’t mean they’re bad at their jobs, but the presence of strong political views combined with the lack of ideological diversity can pose problems for those with differing political views.

We see this frequently with mediated political debates, where journalists moderate and control what topics are covered, how questions are framed, and what assumptions are built into topics.

Some journalists are better than others, of course, but too often the moderators — from smug local journalists to Candy Crowley — become part of the story. They frequently don’t have the policy chops to ask good policy questions or respond to dumb policy answers. When they generally agree with a politician, they won’t push back on even the most erroneous or outlandish claims. But if they disagree with a candidate, they’ll push back, no matter how uninformed about the matter at hand they may be. This is related to another point of confusion: they seem to believe it’s their job to argue with candidates rather than facilitate discussions among candidates. The debate is supposed to be with one other, after all, not with the moderator.
They seem to believe it’s their job to argue with candidates rather than facilitate discussions among candidates.

Journalists frequently ask questions full of incorrect assumptions, mistaking their job of reporting on a given topic for being significantly knowledgeable on the same. The ideological agendas advanced by various journalists show that the media are not neutral parties. To take just one example, reporters love to push pro-life candidates about every angle of their views on the sanctity of life, posing increasingly difficult questions. But when was the last time you heard a pro-choice politician asked much of anything about his views, much less if he thinks the right to abortion extends to killing a child because she’s a girl?

Many Republican observers were excited by the news that Reince Priebus, Republican National Committee chairman, had announced changes to the 2015 primary debates. Here he was on Hugh Hewitt’s show earlier this year explaining why liberal media will partner with conservative media figures, including Salem Media and Hugh Hewitt, this time around:

RP: Well, hey, congratulations to you and congratulations to Salem Media. This is exactly what I wanted to do a couple of years ago when we talked about taking control of the presidential primary debate process. And I was never interested in turning the debate process into some kind of patty-cake session, but that we would have serious journalists, serious people that wanted to get involved in asking questions and creating a debate environment that would bring honor to the Republican Party, not a debate environment spurred on by nefarious actors like Chris Matthews and others. And so, you know, we’re going to have a reasonable number of debates, and we’re going to have conservatives help in the moderating and the management of these debates, and today was a big announcement. I’m excited about it. I’m happy for you.

That was a big announcement.

So permit me to ask the obvious questions: Why in the world is liberal journalist John Harwood moderating Wednesday’s Republican debate? And where the heck is his conservative media partner?

As The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway predicted, CNBC’s management of Wednesday’s Republican presidential primary debate was a complete disaster. The night’s biggest loser, aside from everyone who suffered through watching the debate debacle, was CNBC moderator John Harwood, who blatantly and aggressively lied about the tax plan proposed by Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Harwood accused Rubio of offering a tax plan that was heavily tilted towards the rich. When Rubio corrected him and said that no, lower-income taxpayers receive a higher percentage of the plan’s benefits than rich taxpayers, Harwood repeatedly argued with him and declared that Rubio’s plan was just a big, fat giveaway to the wealthy 1 percent. Proving that his agenda was to push progressive talking points, not to offer debate questions that might lead to insightful answers, John Harwood swore up and down on live television that the conservative Tax Foundation backed up his assertion about Rubio’s tax plan.

It’s hard to see how Jeb Bush recovers from his self-inflected wound at Wednesday’s CNBC Republican debate in Boulder when he went after Marco Rubio just after the young senator had hit one out of the park. Rubio was defending himself from an editorial in the Sun Sentinel calling on Marco to stop “ripping off” the public and quit the Senate for non-attendance while campaigning. Rubio responded that John Kerry and Barack Obama had been even more truant while running for president and the paper had not only ignored that, but given these men their endorsement. It was an example of liberal media bias at its most obvious. The crowd erupted in its first ovation of the night. Advantage Rubio.

Clueless, Bush jumped in as if nothing had happened, taking the paper’s side and schoolmarmishly doubling down on Marco. He got his head handed to him by Rubio (politely) and the audience. It was so mishandled on Bush’s part, such an obvious case of self-sabotage, it left you wondering whether Jeb really wants to be president. You didn’t have to be a Freudian to think his unconscious had gotten the better of him — well, unconscious mixed with envy mixed with entitlement mixed with who knows. During the break you heard what Ross Perot famously called ”the giant sucking sound,” but this time it was of pledged Bush supporters calling their bundlers.

There was a disturbance in the force last night at CNBC’s Republican debate, and it left no doubt of who won and who lost. The loser was CNBC, and the winners were all ten Republican candidates – in varying degrees, of course. (More on that later). And there is no doubt when this shift in the axis happened.

Everything changed when Ted Cruz dressed down Carl Quintenilla and John Harwood – two of CNBC’s far-left commentators – and literally mocked their absurd line of questioning.

Cruz did not just criticize the questions; he made sport of them. He demonstrated just how infantile most of the CNBC crew was (Tea Party originator Rick Santelli not included). Cruz flat-out embarrassed them, and they knew it.

After the crowd stopped roaring in approval of Cruz’s protest, which took a while, the rest of the Republicans followed the Texas senator’s lead, and there was almost no Republican-on-Republican crime after this exchange. In fact, we then saw numerous examples where Republicans made it clear that any of the ten on the stage would be far preferable to what we have now, and to Hillary Clinton. These comments were met with loud approval from the audience every time. Meanwhile, Quintenilla was literally booed loudly three times.

Later in the night, Chris Christie embarrassed the mods again with his fantasy football reply, as did Mike Huckabee by turning a gotcha question related to Donald Trump into praise of Trump. I have my problems with Christie and Huck overall, but both are demonstrably nimble on their feet.

The Republican presidential campaign is still in its early innings, and a good thing too. This means that Wednesday’s unsatisfying debate is likely to be forgotten by most voters long before they cast a vote. With that said, some impressions.

• Wasn’t the Republican Party supposed to pick moderators who had some acquaintance with Republicans? We have many friends at CNBC, but the three debate moderators lost control of the proceedings from the start and never regained it. There is no surer applause line at a GOP debate than to attack the media, and the moderators walked into the trap with tendentious questions based on liberal talking points.

• Jeb Bush should fire whoever advised him to go after Marco Rubio on the trivia of his Senate absenteeism. The attack was clearly planned because Mr. Bush did it even after Mr. Rubio had received applause for rebutting a hostile question on the subject from a moderator. Mr. Rubio counterpunched and easily won the round. Mr. Bush’s proposals for economic growth are the most thorough and thoughtful in the field, but he is oddly inept at debating. He should have spent his precious time making the case against Hillary Clinton and for his agenda.

Imagine 4.9 million new jobs. Imagine, instead of President Obama’s income stagnation, average wages rising 12.2% over the next decade. Capital investment rising 43.9%. And Americans at every level of the economy enjoying double-digit increases in after-tax income.

Imagine exports and manufacturing jobs booming. The trade deficit falling as the tax bias against American-made goods is eliminated. Imagine a 10% income tax. Every American filing his or her taxes on a postcard or an iPhone app. And abolishing the IRS as we know it.

All of this is possible if we learn from the past and follow the example of what works.

In July 1981, Democrat Tip O’Neill, who was then House Speaker, drew a line in the sand: He was going to stop the Reagan tax cut, and he had enough Democrats to do it, with a 20-vote cushion. But President Reagan took his case to the people. Calls and letters flooded Congress, the speaker’s 20 Democrats jumped ship, and Reagan signed the tax cut into law.