AP Photo/John Minchillo
Republican presidential candidates from left, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Scott Walker, Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and John Kasich take the stage for the first Republican presidential debate at the Quicken Loans Arena Thursday, August 6, 2015, in Cleveland.
Well, now at least we know where the Republican candidates stand on the minimum wage, paid sick days, student debt, climate change, CEO pay, and four decades of American wage stagnation.
Just kidding. Somehow, the Fox News questioners never quite got around to asking the candidates what they planned to do to help actual existing Americans cope with a profoundly rigged economy and a climate growing annoyingly inhospitable to living things. Then again, the candidates were asked what God would want them to do on their first day in office, other than repeal Obamacare and invade Iran, and they could have used the occasion to talk about minimum wages and heat waves, but it must have slipped their minds, too.
Come to think of it, the Fox Three never even asked the candidates for their plans to replace Obamacare. That was most obliging of them, since no Republican has yet come up with a remotely plausible answer.
The news of the debate, the climax, came, of course at the very start (violating every premise of drama going clear back to Aristotle), with Donald Trump's declaration that he wouldn't commit to supporting the eventual Republican nominee unless it was he. Trump came into the debate as the tribune of the Fuck-You Republicans, who share his belief, as he stated at one point in the evening, that, "We don't have time for tone," by which he meant any regard for anyone who might conceivably question his ego. But with his raised-hand answer to the first question, he also became, more problematically for his prospects, the tribune of the Fuck You, Republicans (this one has a comma). This must have been deeply frustrating to Ted Cruz, whose apparent strategy is that if he runs hard enough against Mitch McConnell, he just might win.
Two of the candidates who just might win the nomination-Jeb Bush or, if the Republicans are truly lucky, Marco Rubio-did allude in passing to American workers who wanted full-time jobs but couldn't find them, and the broken ladder of upward mobility. Of the Midwestern governors, John Kasich came off far better than Scott Walker, who tended to fade into the woodwork. Kasich had enough moments of apparent decency to look like a formidable candidate if he can find a way from the middle to the front of a crowded pack. If he does get near the front, however, that decency-in particular, his decision to accept Obamacare's extension of Medicaid-will become the target of his GOP rivals, and likely bring him down. In a year when Fuck-You Republicans may yet constitute a plurality of primary voters, decency is no asset.
The high point of Trump's Fuck-You-ism was his out-of-leftfield threat to Megyn Kelly for querying him about his over-the-top sexist eruptions. Trump dismissed the concerns Kelly alluded to as so much "political correctness."
To oppose Fuck-You Republicanism is to be a wuss submitting to political correctness, something no self-respecting Fox News viewer (Megyn Kelly notwithstanding) could ever do.
Chris Christie is a characterological Fuck-You Republican; Cruz, as we've noted, is a strategic one; Scott Walker, somewhat oxymoronically, is a quiet one but, in matters of governance, a Fuck-You Republican nonetheless. Hell, the entire Republican right now consists entirely of Fuck-You Republicans; that's why John Boehner can't get anything through the House. A Fuck-You Republican cannot win the presidency and probably can't win the party's nomination, either, but the FYRs will surely make life difficult for the Bushes, Rubios, and Kasichs in the months ahead.
