Having left the smoldering wreckage of Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential campaign behind weeks ago, the remaining Republican presidential candidates swarmed into Milwaukee anyway for the debate originally intended as Walker’s home state showcase.
Actually, snuffing out the Walker presidential scare may be the only positive thing the Republican debates have accomplished so far.
Republican Party leaders pretend to be pleased the nationally televised Republican debates are being viewed by record numbers. But that’s always been true of trashy television.
There are obvious parallels between the Republican debates and, oh, let’s say, “Duck Dynasty.” Both owe much of their popularity to primitive backwoods attitudes about race mixed with some extreme religious fundamentalism.
Before the debates started, two candidates with absolutely no qualifications for the presidency who even Republican leaders knew would be a disaster if they won the nomination had a shocking amount of support.
Donald Trump and Ben Carson had strong support from two different fringe groups of extremists that Republicans shamelessly go out of their way to attract in order to win elections.
Trump went straight for the support of the racists. He opened his campaign attacking Mexican immigrants as rapists and violent criminals threatening the lives and jobs of Americans.
Carson is African American. That would make him one of only about 30 or so to attend the Republican national convention, according to a friend of mine who’s been one of those rare African American delegates.
But Carson’s strongest Republican appeal, beyond his celebrated career as an accomplished neurosurgeon, is that he’s a far-right evangelical Christian. It also leads him to some pretty bizarre ideas based upon his own eccentric interpretations of the Bible.
With those two attracting much of the Republican Party support that is rooted in either racism or ultraconservative Christianity, it’s easy to understand why the other candidates are having so much trouble scraping together double digits in the polls.
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Party leaders engaged in wishful thinking that eventually the glaring deficiencies of Trump and Carson would be exposed in the debates and experienced politicians would rise to the top. Instead, just the opposite has happened.
Support for Trump and Carson has increased after each of the four debates. And, at this point, the other candidates are getting exactly what they deserve.
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich have their own problems. Bush has turned out to be a surprisingly bad, inarticulate candidate and Kasich can come off as abrasive and overbearing.
But in Milwaukee they were the only candidates courageous enough to point out that Trump’s vicious idea of rounding up and deporting more than 11 million undocumented immigrants is not only literally impossible, but also morally repugnant and overwhelmingly destructive to families, communities and the nation’s economy.
Compare them to the two Cuban American Republican candidates who desperately sought to avoid alienating the party’s virulent anti-immigrant haters.
Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who once supported a rational pathway to citizenship for immigrants, hid under his podium, staying completely out of the conversation. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, much nastier, openly sided with Trump because “if Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose.”
Stoking the Flames of Racism
Given a pass from most of the field, Trump was free to stoke the flames of racism even higher.
Trump called for creation of a federal deportation force—exactly the sort of police-state thugs the right wing fears will be coming for their guns any day now—only these guys would be welcomed by Republicans because they’ll be removing millions of Latinos from their homes and forcing them across the border at gun point.
Trump even praised a shamefully inhumane 1954 U.S. program by Republican President Dwight Eisenhower that actually carried out such cruel relocations under the racist name Operation Wetback.
After a number of migrants died after being left in the Mexican desert with little food and water, that dark chapter in American history drew comparisons to the human misery aboard 18th-century slave ships.
Such reprehensible ideas are perfectly acceptable in Republican debates because the Republican candidates live in their own twisted version of reality that ignores any inconvenient facts.
It’s a world in which our current economy is a disaster instead of steadily recovering and expanding from the second worst Republican economic disaster in U.S. history.
It’s a world in which Obamacare is a dismal failure instead of covering more than 16 million people who previously had no health insurance and slowing the drastic rise in health care costs.
Viewers are used to seeing characters on television far removed from real life, but it would be hard to top Republicans telling working people they oppose raising the minimum wage because, in Trump’s words, “Wages are too high.”
The other wrestling shows on TV get big ratings too, but no one really expects them to produce a serious candidate for the presidency.
