This is, in my judgment, the best of the 4 debates to date. The moderators for once did not become part of the story; the questions were reasonably pertinent (there was one where Maria Bartiromo seemed dismissive of the qualifications of the 8 candidates on the floor relative to Hillary Clinton); there was some good back and forth as in a genuine debate; and we saw some substantive policy issues being discussed and some ideological divisions.
Let me just briefly address the Bartiromo issue. The fact is that there are multiple multi-term governors, although some of those weren't on stage: Jindal, Bush, Huckabee, Kasich, Christie, Pataki (not to mention Walker and Perry, who left the race weeks back). Jindal and Kasich also have significant DC experience. (Jindal served high in the HHS Dept. under Bush and was elected to 2 terms to the Congress. Kasich served 9 terms in Congress, including significant tenures on both the Armed Services and Budget Committees--including a major role in the first balanced budgets since the last surplus in the 1960's.) Trump and Fiorina also have executive experience. Clinton has no executive experience (if you argue her tenure as Secretary of State, she spent most of her time on diplomatic travel, and she has publicly distanced herself from the Keystone pipeline decision and TPP). Cruz has argued 9 cases before the Supreme Court (winning a number of these), serving as solicitor general for Texas and for the United States; he also served in the Bush Administration, providing experience across the 3 branches of government. Rand Paul has shown high-profile leadership in defending the Bill of Rights (including the highest profile filibusters in the last generation) and holding down spending (including DoD) and against Executive Branch overreach (including Obama's meddling in the Middle East and Africa), has continued his dad's legacy in pursuit of auditing the Fed, and has been involved in multiple bipartisan efforts, e.g., to protect privacy, to restore felon voting privileges, and federal sentencing reforms.
The big story here is that Rand Paul got his debate mojo back, with biting statements back to Trump, who was trying to portray TPP as a Chinese-led plot against American trade interests, pointing out that China wasn't a party to TPP, and to Rubio, that neocon Big Defense is not fiscally conservative. Trump was, once again, largely a non-factor, other than to questions directly to him, one of which allowed him to repeat his anti-immigrant bluster. Carson and Fiorina were impressive although I did not like their foreign policy positions; Carson's was convoluted, while Fiorina seemed to want to push Putin's buttons, which I considered unduly provocative. Carson reversed course on the minimum wage (formerly pro-); Fiorina is particularly impressive in pointing at the relation between size of government and corruption and her enumerated responses overall. Rubio, in my judgment, came across less authentic, more political soundbites as usual. Bush has been underestimated as a debater, but he is not making an impact good enough to reverse his slump in the polls; I also thought that he was emulating his brother's neocon policies. John Kasich got on my nerves for constantly stepping over other candidates and whining for more time; he also seemed to be finding fault for being principled. I finally have reason to bump Trump out of the bottom of my rankings below.
Somehow my debate notes got corrupted, and I have little interest in rewatching the debate a second time. I'll focus on a few prominent talking points:
- Donald Trump declined to endorse the minimum wage, making reference to global competition. While he's correct on policy, his rationale is dubious. There are roughly 142.5M nonfarm jobs (farms jobs amount to about 2% of total jobs); about 6.2M jobs are supported by manufactured goods. I suspect these are mostly skilled jobs paying above minimum wage. The correct rationale is that the minimum wage is a prohibition of gainful employment at a certain wage threshold. This discriminates against workers whose clearing wage is below that threshold; it amounts to a de facto tax on low-skilled/experienced wages, particularly teens and young adults looking for a starter job as a foothold in the economy.
- I was pleasantly surprised by Ben Carson's reversal on the minimum wage; he had previously supported increasing the wage and indexing it to inflation. Carson notes an exceptionally low hiring rate for young blacks.
- Cruz went on a rant on being outraged by discussion of his restrictionist views as anti-immigrant, pushing on a rule of law argument Cry me a river; if and when you regard the natural liberty of migration as fundamental, you are not impressed by a corrupt tyrannical majority restricting the rights of others. Cruz especially got on my bad side with his labor protectionist demagoguery, explicitly suggesting that it would be a different story if we were talking about journalist immigrants driving down journalist wages.
- Rand Paul started in on Rubio by questioning the high price tag associated with a high child tax credit. (I think there was some quibbling over whether the credit would be reimbursable for families with negligible tax payments; the Dems would never accept it otherwise.) It then progressed to the discussion of the high price tag associated with neocon Big Defense. This was important to Paul's demoralized followers, thinking that he was trying to accommodate neocon policies on ISIS, etc.
- Marco Rubio dismissed Bartiromo's question over whether Clinton's resume was superior to his. This was a good time to point out that his political background went beyond his one and only Senate term: he had also served at the local and state level, including a stint as the state House Speaker, where 2 dozen of his agenda goals were passed into law and where tax reformer Norquist called him the most taxpayer-friendly legislative leader in the country. On a more positive note, he started fleshing out how he would frame the general election as turning the page on failed Democrat policies, a new 21st century GOP agenda.
- Rand Paul and Ted Cruz took on the Federal Reserve. Cruz repeated from the third debate his core points for auditing the Fed, rule-based monetary policy, and convertibility of currency notes (e.g., gold backing). Rand Paul continued his talking points about an unholy alliance of Democrats and RINO's enabling massive deficits and things like the massive growth of the GSE's, i.e., Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I think as some point Kasich interrupted the criticisms of the Fed, saying effectively the alternative of Congress controlling monetary policy was laughable. (This of course ignores Cruz' discussion of rule-based policy.) I would have liked to hear them speaking of repealing the second (full employment) mandate, which has been used to justify things like quantitative easing.
- Ted Cruz had a Rick Perry moment where he repeated the Commerce Department among the entities he would shut down.
- Kasich seemed to have an issue with letting big banks fail, making a populist argument about the effect on depositers and bailouts. The others (e.g., Fiorina) correctly noted that consolidation was a natural response to excessive regulation. One of the debaters cited that for one well-behaved bank during the 2008 tsunami saw its compliance costs increased by a factor of 6 times after Dodd N. Frankenstein.
- Trump decided to play moderator by pointing out how rude of Fiorina to interrupt other candidates. He's continuing to repeat himself with tiresome claims of how American leaders are so inept in negotiating with other countries, bitching about currency manipulation. He ignores our privilege of having the world's reserve currency and all the deals China and Russia are cutting to avoid use of the dollar. The fact of the matter is Chinese purchases of debt and investments in American businesses have economic benefits; why should American consumers look a gift horse in the mouth if the Chinese want to subsidize their purchases vs. spend it developing their own economy? If the Chinese drive down the value of their currency, they make it more expensive to import materials and components for their own economy, which ultimately hurts their global competitiveness.
My ranking of who won the debate, in descending order:
- Rand Paul
- Ben Carson
- Carly Fiorina
- Jeb Bush
- Ted Cruz
- Marco Rubio
- Donald Trump
- John Kasich
