The Conventional Wisdom says that Carly Fiorina won the happy hour debate. And she did IF and ONLY IF you believe that she ran HP successfully and that she has been spending the ensuing years traveling the world making friends with heads of government.
As for the 9 pm main event? I’m pretty sure that debate was won by Bernie Sanders.
Details after the jump.
The first debate was incredibly boring, and the only fun part was that tape of both Carly and Rick was shown during the 9 pm hour, increasing their relevance to the millions of GOP primary voters who had never heard of any of the candidates. You can see my write up on that debate here.
The main event? The first thing that struck me was how the three moderators showed favouritism in the questions they asked the candidates. They fell over one another to “get” Donald Trump, asking him questions that they would never have asked anyone else. For example, they brought up his comments about women that could be construed as misogynistic, but under the heading of “sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me” they did not ask the governors about their direct damage to women in terms of their abortion legislation signed, their refusal to expand Medicaid, and in the case of Jeb, TERRI SCHIAVO.
They asked a few substantive questions, but for the most part, people ignored those questions to instead talk about their beliefs, and shout out predetermined gotcha lines.
I could go through win-lose moments for each of the candidates, but that doesn’t really matter in the long run. All that really matters is which clips Fox News chooses to play up to their audience over the next several days. Most people don’t know ANYTHING about what the candidates have done, and where they stand, and will rely on Fox to parse it for them. Thus, when you hear the surveys about who “won”, it will be based on what pablum is fed to those Republicans.
However, in my mind, Bernie Sanders really won the debate because he was only mentioned once, in the 5 pm hour, and he was not made the punching bag that Hillary Clinton was throughout both hours. She wasn’t damaged in any true way, but, because a lot of the answers, especially in the first hours, continued the lie that Planned Parenthood (and this is a quote) “sells organs”, and she was noted as supporting Planned Parenthood, it continues a lie that needs to be undone. Further, we all now know that she attended the wedding of one of The Donald’s daughters. Hope the food was good.
In the end, we can only hope that the next debate, on CNN, goes with a plan to run two prime time debates with the candidates selected by being picked from a hat. That would be much more interesting.
