The New Republic (Opinion)
By Brian Beutler
August 6, 2015
Well
before Republicans officially lost the 2012 election, leaders of the
party, along with Mitt Romney’s campaign strategists and countless
conservative opinion-makers,
understood just how damaging the presidential nominating process had
been for them. The gravest damage came from an unconstrained series of
20 debates, which pit candidates against each other in a madcap dash to
win the hearts of audiences that booed gay soldiers
and cheered at the notion that society should allow uninsured citizens
to die.
Along
the way, the eventual nominee gained notoriety for an agenda that
included privatizing the Federal Emergency Management Agency, squeezing
unauthorized immigrants
into discomfort until they self-deported, and for offering an underdog a
$10,000 bet.
After
the election, the Republican National Committee set about sanding off
the party’s rough edges. It encouraged Republicans to pass immigration
reform and soften their
rhetorical tropes, and in so doing repair the party’s relationship with
a younger, more diverse segment of the electorate. It also set about
tightening the rules governing primary debates—to limit the total number
of them, exclude certain networks and moderators,
and penalize candidates for circumventing the process. By doing so, the
RNC hoped the party could escape its own primary without incurring the
self-inflicted wounds it suffered in 2012.
Thursday’s
Fox News debate represents the failure of that effort. The RNC, led by
Reince Priebus, succeeded only in holding the number of debates to
seven, which is still
enough exposure time to wash out the kinder, gentler image he wants the
party to project.
The
complete explanation for the failure is complex, but it stems from the
fact that the GOP (partially by design) has become dominated by
reactionaries and ideologues,
rather than by allied factions amenable to compromise. That explains
both Donald Trump’s emergence as a towering Republican figure, and the
influence Fox News has over the party. Both of those factors, in turn,
explain why Thursday’s debate, and perhaps debates
to come, will bear so much resemblance to the 2012 debates Priebus
hoped to vanquish.
Fox’s
influence has been particularly devastating. Trump isn’t the first
flash-in-the-pan candidate to illuminate a party’s dark underbelly. But
Fox amplified the incentives
he created for other candidates to jockey for attention.
The
network’s criteria, which limited the debate to the ten highest-polling
candidates, guaranteed that about one-third of them would be excluded.
This implicitly encouraged
lower-polling candidates—the also-rans of the also-rans—to call as much
attention to themselves as possible, in order to secure their place on
the debate stage, or in the hope that a last-minute surge would win them
one. That has meant trying to outcompete
Trump for the limelight—and in just the past several days, we’ve seen
candidates compare a multilateral agreement to curb Iran’s nuclear
ambitions to the Holocaust (Mike Huckabee), cook bacon on the tip of a
semi-automatic rifle (Senator Ted Cruz), and mount
a campaign that will result in a government shutdown unless Congress
completely defunds Planned Parenthood (Cruz, and Senator Rand Paul).
In
the end, Trump’s most vocal critics—Senator Lindsey Graham and former
Texas Governor Rick Perry—didn’t make the cut. The stage will thus be
overrepresented by people
unwilling to attack Trump directly or build a case that he doesn’t
reflect the party’s values.
Of
course, the whole point of circumscribing the debate process was to
keep unpopular values from garnering excessive attention. The Republican
Party wouldn’t have gone
to such great lengths to intervene if these debates were harmless
spectacles. In reality, they’re a proving ground for policy and
strategic thinking. They’re where candidates get locked, as they did
four years ago, into commitments like never raising taxes
on the affluent and voiding popular or high-stakes executive policies
on their first days in office.
Republicans
didn’t react to losing in 2012 by abandoning shared objectives. But
they did put a great deal of effort into changing processes and clamping
down on rhetorical
excesses, in the hopes of keeping the party from steering in a
reactionary direction. But the forces they were trying to control are
too great, and they created too much pressure for the GOP to keep the
lid on.
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