The moment Jeb’s dreams of the presidency definitively ended …
Here you go Twitter pic.twitter.com/9wfzAQGftg
— Brandon Wall (@Walldo) September 17, 2015
I found this debate a bit hard to get a read on. In large part that’s because it was, at three hours, just ridiculously too long. Maybe if there were fewer candidates, that might have been different. More focus would have been possible. But with so many voices over three hours, it was just too much. By my read, it held together with some coherence for the first hour or maybe hour and a half. After that it just lost focus and seemed to be a disorganized run of questions. I don’t think that was Jake Tapper’s fault. It was just too long; too many people.
I try to resist the snap winner/loser debate analysis, but Jeb … man, that was a rough night.
If you missed the entire five-hour slogfest last night, I’m … jealous. But more to the point, Ed Kilgore has the smart version of what you missed, which in truth wasn’t a whole helluva lot. And that’s partly the point.
NPR has the candidate-by-candidate breakdown from the debate:
Yeah, Chris Christie fudged a bit last night on when he became U.S. attorney, but Jeb dragged out one of the defining tropes of the Bush years: W’s presidency began on Sept. 12, 2001.
Commentators seem to agree that once the early Trump/World Wrestling phase of last night’s debate ebbed it moved on to a more substantive discussion from which Trump was largely absent. That may be so. Trump may have been silent because he just doesn’t now enough details or doesn’t care enough about them to engage. But there was a far more consequential reality that largely escaped attention. The debate turned not so much to foreign policy as to each candidate trying to outdo the other in embracing the sort of petulant unilateralism that made the aughts such a disaster for the United States.
It was, to put it simply, a race to embrace Bush foreign policy on steroids.
The whole crazy “shut down the government over Planned Parenthood” pyschodrama continued to unfold in the House last night even as the GOP presidential debate was droning on. GOP leaders now have a new plan to let anti-abortion hardliners “vent” but to avoid shutting down the government.
Great! But …
From BusinessWeek, a fascinating look at how the brutal Obama “machine” beat an over-nice AIPAC on the Iran Deal, as told by Senate Republicans and AIPAC staffers. As disinterested observer Sen. Lindsey Graham puts it, “Aipac went to the Democrats and said, ‘We need your help as a friend.’ Obama said, ‘If you cross me you are going to make an enemy of my machine forever.'”
Beth Van Duyne is Mayor of Irving, Texas, the city where the now famous Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school. When Beth isn’t mayoring she spends her time as a high-profile anti-Sharia law activist.