Mark J. Terrill/AP Photo
From left to right, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy, and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina argue a point during the Republican presidential primary debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, September 27, 2023.
It was the eminent classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks who either invented (as he claimed) or in any event excelled at putting overlapping dialogue into the movies. In the fast-paced comedy His Girl Friday, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a disputatious couple careening dizzyingly from marriage to divorce to recoupling, consistently talked over each other, and as the plot grew more convoluted and the action more frenzied, so did everybody else.
His Girl Friday may take the prize as the film with the most characters talking at the same time—though Robert Altman might have something to say about that. But Hawks and Altman were entirely eclipsed last night by the second debate (sans Trump) of the Republican candidates for president. By my admittedly inexpert clocking of the action, I think a full quarter and perhaps even a third of the debate’s first hour was rendered unintelligible by having three, four, or sometimes five of the candidates speaking at once, to which one and sometimes two of the three moderators felt compelled to add their own voices in a fruitless attempt to tell the candidates to shut up.
I don’t mean to suggest that this incomprehensibility was always the result of candidates talking over one another. Some of the candidates demonstrated an impressive ability to be incomprehensible when they were speaking all by themselves. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum not only hollered himself into these overlapping colloquies for fear that the moderators would (quite reasonably) overlook him, but proved himself entirely capable of mystifying listeners with his shorthand references to obscure North Dakota policies even when the mic was his alone.
To be fair, a lot of the problem was the debate rules. Speakers to whom questions were posed were given one minute to answer, and if they attacked anyone else onstage, that person got 15 seconds to respond. These are not exactly Lincoln-Douglas rules structured to produce intelligent argumentation. They are designed specifically to produce sound bites, so that a veteran pol like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used his minute to recite scripted zingers, while a novice like Burgum used his to cram five-minute explanations into the one minute allotted, with bewildering results.
It followed that when the candidates understood they were effectively blocked from saying very much at all, they all became party to a tacit agreement (whose effects were all too audible) that they’d ignore the rules altogether. Accordingly, they exhibited all the bad things that Dostoevsky was convinced would follow from the notion that, as one of his characters put it, “everything is lawful—even cannibalism.”
To be sure, the candidates’ cannibalism was only verbal, but they devoured one another all the same. They interrupted their fellow candidates. They interrupted the interrupters. They squabbled and shouted; they fairly squealed. The only winner in this Hobbesian contest was Donald Trump.
Haley, Christie, Scott, and Pence are all addressing a Republican Party that’s gone to the elephant graveyard.
By not being there, Trump didn’t have to join in the melee when he was attacked, which Chris Christie did more directly than he had in the first debate. Vivek Ramaswamy, on the other hand, having generated torrents of ill will from his fellow candidates by dissing them all in that first debate, was on the receiving end of nearly constant attacks from his colleagues, which he sought to counter by shouting his responses even as his attackers were still in mid-attack. This was despite his repeated attempts last night to undo the spoiled-brat image he’d conveyed so masterly at that first debate.
This time around, he hailed his fellow candidates as good fellows all, even if Nikki Haley wasn’t a fellow as such, and readily admitted that his know-it-all manner didn’t mean he really does know it all (just a whole lot). These efforts were in vain, of course; Haley continued to pelt him with accusations of foreign-policy idiocy for his non-support of Ukraine, while Tim Scott, whose handlers had obviously told him to speak up this time around, made repeated references to Vivek’s various business dealings with Chinese companies that were controlled by that country’s Communist Party. Haley summed up her feelings on Ramaswamy by saying that she felt “a little bit dumber” every time she heard him talk. Later, Haley and Scott got into a prolonged tiff of their own over who’d betrayed their beloved Palmetto State more, by raising the gas tax (Haley) or authoring bills that went nowhere in Congress (Scott).
Haley, Scott, Christie, and Mike Pence are all still pre-populist, pre-Trumpian Republicans, talking fondly of balanced budgets and NATO allies. Ramaswamy and DeSantis, by contrast, made clear they’d transfer all the dollars we’ve sent to Ukraine and reroute them to our border with Mexico. Not willing to entirely concede the Trumpian base to them or, for that matter, to Trump, Haley also vowed to send special ops into Mexico to wipe out the cartels there. As Republicans repeatedly say, borders matter, except when they don’t.
The moderators—two from Fox and one from Univision—actually asked some very good questions. They asked about economic inequality; the value, if any, of unions; the ratio between CEO pay and median worker pay; who to blame for the coming government shutdown; the unaffordability of child care; and the high rate of uninsured Floridians, as well as the usual stuff on inflation and crime. The candidates generally succeeded in ignoring questions that were difficult for them to answer, instead talking about the usual stuff on inflation and crime. When they were interrupted, the other candidates weren’t interrupting to actually answer the question, either; they just wanted to loudly state their own off-topic remarks or to attack the candidate they were interrupting for some unrelated malfeasance.
And so: Haley, Christie, Scott, and Pence—I list them in the order of their effectiveness in these debates—are all addressing a Republican Party that’s gone to the elephant graveyard. For their part, Ramaswamy and DeSantis stick with tried-and-true Trumpian themes. The former group cannot prevail because their party has become fully Trumpified while they have not; the latter group cannot prevail because who better can embody Trumpism than Trump? Doug Burgum cannot prevail because he’s Doug Burgum.
The sole value of these debates, in short, is to test the limits of overlapping dialogue. Howard Hawks, thou shouldst be living at this hour.
