Despite the noticeable absence of former President Donald Trump, last Wednesday's GOP presidential debate in Milwaukee was full of fireworks though the target of several of the candidates' ire was not Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, which had been predicted, but rather entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
It wasn't Ramaswamy's seeming media-driven status as a "rising" force to be reckoned with in the nomination race that prompted the heated reactions from the likes of former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley, and former Vice President Mike Pence, however. It was things he claimed without evidence during the debate, like how everyone around him on the stage except for him was supposedly "bought and paid for," his remarks about funding for Ukraine, and his allegation that some of his opponents were "Super PAC puppets."
During an interview Sunday on ABC's "This Week" program, co-anchor Martha Raddatz interviewed Christie, who usually appears on their weekly political panels. This time around, though, Christie was being asked for his perspective as a 2024 presidential candidate - specifically, why he chose not to go after DeSantis, whom he has frequently criticized on the campaign trail along with Trump.
Christie's answer to the question, which stood out to me as him having a rare but timely moment of clarity, though inartful was the right one for reasons I'll explain in just a minute.
Here's the relevant portion of the transcript:
RADDATZ: Fifty-five percent of debate watchers rated Vivek Ramaswamy's performance as excellent. What does that tell you? And -- and he seemed to be more attacked than Ron DeSantis, who is the frontrunner right below Donald Trump. Why didn't you and others go after DeSantis and instead go after Ramaswamy?
CHRISTIE: Look, I think the idea of, why didn't we go after this one or go after that one. My job is to communicate my vision for the future of the country. And if there's something that someone says that I drastically object to and I have the opportunity to do so, I’ll do it, as you saw me do with Vivek on a number of occasions.
Governor DeSantis' answers that night, while some of them I disagreed with, I didn't think it rose to the level of having to get in a back and forth with him in the first debate in August of 2023.
Watch:
Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie tells @MarthaRaddatz that the first GOP primary debate “will not be determinative of the Iowa caucus or the New Hampshire primary.” https://t.co/b741IDsXx4 pic.twitter.com/3j3sP4ExVW
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) August 27, 2023
In other words, why yell at each other when there's no reason to do so?
I get that on some level there are people who tune in to see the food fights that oftentimes erupt during debates, and yes they can be entertaining. But yelling at each other just for the sake of yelling just makes no sense and has the tendency to turn people off at some point.
That's not to say that the candidates shouldn't be passionate at the debates about where they stand, and where they disagree with other candidates on the issues. For instance, I know I'm not the only one out there who thoroughly enjoyed Tulsi Gabbard taking down Kamala Harris in July 2019 at the second Democratic presidential debate.
Gabbard kept it about the issues rather than making it personal and zeroed in point by point on Harris' record as chief prosecutor in California. She was so thorough that in response, a stunned Harris couldn't say much in the way of defending herself outside of declaring she was "proud" of the work she and her team had done during her time as California Attorney General.
After that, Harris' campaign went into a pretty epic freefall and just a few months later she dropped out well before the first primary vote was cast.
In other words, one doesn't need to be a bombastic flamethrower setting everyone's hair on fire in order to try to effectively get their point across to their audience and, more importantly, to get results in the aftermath.
Don't get me wrong here, though. If someone plays dirty and flings mud in a candidate's direction on the stage, it's on that candidate to respond accordingly, which Christie did to Ramaswamy. I have no issue with that. It's the obnoxiously tiresome "notice me, I'm here!" antics, which we saw a lot of from Ramaswamy that night, that need to be thrown out with the dirty dishwater.
After all, there's a helluva a lot going on in this country, and voters want to see where the candidates stand on resolving those issues, not petty grandstanding and personality squabbles between the candidates.
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