It was a more substantive debate—at least by the standard of the GOP donnybrooks we’ve seen so far this primary cycle. With only two candidates on stage, and neither of them being Vivek Ramaswamy, the actual issues—the economy, immigration, foreign policy, climate change—got some real airtime. Was the discussion of those issues mostly horrifying? Yes. Did Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis take big, clumsy uppercuts at each other? Absolutely. “You can’t trust what he says,” Haley said of DeSantis at one point. “That’s just cheap garbage,” DeSantis shot back after another barb. But if you squint a little—and ignore the fact that the dominant frontrunner was once again counterprogramming the affair—you might mistake what happened in Des Moines Wednesday night for a normal primary debate.
It wasn’t, obviously. The CNN debate at Drake University—the last before Monday’s Iowa caucus—was just another a reflection of the GOP’s dangerous, deranged rightward shift over the last decade-plus. And, with Donald Trump once again skipping out in favor of a Fox News town hall just two miles down the road, at the Iowa Events Center, it once again felt like a battle for whatever scraps of the electorate the demagogic former president won’t get.
And what a battle it was.
DeSantis cast Haley as a puppet for donors and corporate overlords—“warmed-over corporatism,” he labeled her campaign. Haley, meanwhile, cast the Florida governor as a phony—dishonest and merely “copying” Trump. “Don’t turn this into a drinking game,” she said of his lies in her opening statement, “because you will be overserved by the end of the night.” (Of course, if one were to do a shot every time Haley plugged “DeSantisLies.com” in response to one of his digs, they’d need their stomach pumped.) He promised to authoritatively “beat the left.” She pitched herself as the most electable, least chaotic Republican. But for all the jabs they landed on one another over the course of the evening, they mostly just sparred with Trump, lamenting his absence and insisting it was time for him to pass the baton to one of them.
The trouble is: Most Republican voters don’t seem to want him to—at least according to the polls. But the hope for Haley and DeSantis is to come out of Iowa, and other early contests, with a strong enough showing to establish themself as the One True Alternative to Trump.
The two distinguished themselves from one another on certain issues—particularly Ukraine, which contrasted DeSantis’s isolationism with Haley’s more traditional international approach. “You can take the ambassador out of the United Nations, but you can’t take the United Nations out of the ambassador,” DeSantis quipped. They also clashed on abortion—or at least the way their party discusses it. “These fellas don’t know how to talk about abortion,” Haley said.
But on a host of other issues, Haley and DeSantis—who appear unable to contain their distaste for one another—launched petty attacks while remaining in lockstep on various contemporary GOP preoccupations: condemning “wokeness,” fearmongering about immigrants, denying COVID and climate change, and nodding at deep state conspiracy theories. “There’s gonna be a new sheriff in town,” DeSantis said, using a question about taxes as a springboard to talk about the so-called “weaponization” of government. “There’s a reckoning coming,” later added, pivoting from a question about his versus Trump’s view of the constitution to a rant about COVID.
Haley, to her credit, was more firm in expressing disapproval of Trump’s actions following his 2020 election loss, saying he’d have to “answer” for his conduct. But she didn’t come close to the full-throated rebuke of Trump that Chris Christie offered up his campaign, which he suspended Wednesday, just hours before his now-former rivals took the stage. “I would rather lose by telling the truth than lie in order to win,” Christie said, warning about the dangers of Trump and lambasting his opponents for their timid approach to the former president. “This is a fight for the soul of our party and the soul of our country.”
He had even more candid words about his fellow challengers before he took the stage. In comments caught on a hot mic, the former New Jersey governor-turned-Trump critic described DeSantis as “petrified” and Haley as “not up to this.”
“She’s going to get smoked,” he said, “and you and I both know it.”
And while CNN’s Jake Tapper and Dana Bash steered the Wednesday debate toward more substance than their previous matchups, neither Haley nor DeSantis really seemed to prove Christie’s assessment wrong.
Eric Lutz
Source link
.JPG)
