* A little late to the party but something Ben Carson said last night is quite telling (the question being what is your greatest weakness)…
“Probably in terms of the applying for the job of president, a weakness would be not really seeing myself in that position until hundreds of thousands of people began to tell me that I needed to do it.”
Campaigning for president–the travel, speeches, TV/radio appearances, social media politicking, learning the intricacies of policy, etc.–certainly isn’t for everyone. Not to mention actually serving as chief executive. Carson intuitively knows this job isn’t for him, if for nothing else he doesn’t have the eloquence or gravitas voters crave. But when nice, smiling whites have devised your presidential campaign from thin air, helped you sell your autobiography, donated millions, and written op-eds singing your praises–you’re going to start believing them.
The cuckold wing of the Republican base (one can’t blame the establishment on this one) is solely responsible for this mess. The promotion of an Affirmative-Action by well-meaning nice whites will inevitably lead to a bewildered and bitter Carson once the heat (from Repub. opponents, media, leftist pols, etc.) is applied, causing the inarticulate Carson to inevitably backstab his nice white supporters and cite inherent racism as the reason for his political failures. See: Michael Steele, Colin Powell, Condi Rice, etc.
* Donald Trump will win the nomination, and Senator Jeff Sessions will be his immigration point-man, as he is now. Trump scored points again, even though there was little opportunity to go into money-and-trade-related issues in his wheelhouse — as there should have been in a “business network” debate.
* BTW in his closing remarks at the debate Trump bragged about how he and Ben Carson had worked together to force CNBC to abandon its plans to run a 3-3-1/2 hour debate and limit it to 2 hours, with opening and closing remarks by the candidates. To my great surprise, chief moderator John Harwood took issue with Trump’s claim and falsely contended that a 2-hour debate was the plan all along. That evoked the moment during the second Presidential debate in 2012 when Candy Crowley managed to throw Romney off his stride by interjecting herself into the debate by siding with Obama on a particular issue. Here is the segment of last night’s debate:
“HARWOOD: Just for the record, the debate was always going to be two hours. Senator Rubio?
TRUMP: That’s not right. That is absolutely not right. You know that. That is not right.”
It turns out that Trump was absolutely right on this issue. What galls me is that Harwood not only had the arrogance to engage in a mini-debate with Trump but had the audacity to lie about the matter.
Ted Cruz called it right when he said during the debate that he doubted that any of the moderators in the various debates was going to vote in a Republican primary. I don’t know what the answer to the problem is, but I think the situation with the Republican debates is scandalous. Now that the Republican debates have proven to be real ratings successes for the networks carrying them and have proven highly profitable, you would think that the guys who run the Republican Party would read Trump’s “Art of the Deal” and use their leverage to secure a more non-partisan moderation of the Party’s debates.
