Don’t mention us

Hey, candidates, please don’t mention us

Not all publicity is good publicity. Here’s what wonks don’t want the debaters to talk about.

By Darren Samuelsohn

Plenty of Washington insiders will be watching Wednesday’s prime-time Republican presidential debate eager to hear the candidates talk about their favorite issues, whether immigration or taxes or defense.

And then there's another group: The policy experts, lobbyists and lawmakers desperately hoping their issues don’t get mentioned at all.

“Contrary to D.C. lore, not all attention is good attention,” said Jason Grumet, the head of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

The last thing these wonks want is for Donald Trump, Ben Carson or the rest of the Republican field to take a sudden interest in issues like corporate tax hikes, trans-Atlantic data security or climate change. The reason? Primary debates can push candidates to extreme positions, ultimately to a place where they'd have problems backing down if they ever had to govern. That could spell trouble in many policy arenas, especially wonky, technocratic ones like transportation, taxes, technology, energy and education, where some level of bipartisanship is necessary to have any chance of substantive change.

Robert Puentes, a transportation expert with the Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program, frets over the potential fallout if Republicans attack high-speed rail projects with the same fervor they did at the start of the Obama administration. "You hate to see those, excuse the pun, derailed, because of this pigeonholing of high-speed rail as an Obama thing," he said.

In the financial world there are several spots that some experts would prefer to see left alone, including Sen. Rand Paul's incessant calls to audit the Federal Reserve. "That gets a lot of folks uncomfortable," said Ed Mills, a financial policy analyst at FBR Capital Markets. He added that C-suite executives would rather not see a debate question posed to Trump about Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor who supports his campaign. Last week Icahn announced plans to launch a $150 million Super PAC to advocate for corporate tax reform; he wants to penalize U.S. companies that merge with foreign ones or relocate overseas because of high corporate taxes.

“A lot of multinational corporations would be concerned about being mentioned and don’t like the politicization of that topic,” Mills said. “There’ll be a lot of corporate CEOs watching these debates throwing up their hands, saying ‘I thought these were my friends.’”

While a few bipartisan bills tweaking the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law can still claim varying degrees of life in Congress, Mills also warned that those efforts could sink if both Republicans and Democrats continue to use the debates to demonize the financial services industry. “The continued politicization of all things banking makes any reasonable reform dead in the water,” he said.

Every debate has the potential to take experts by surprise. Consider some of the random directions the debate discussion traveled during the first two GOP face-offs. At the early-August kickoff, for example, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's charitable organization got dragged into a fight over abortion rights when Fox News' Megyn Kelly asked Jeb Bush to explain how he could serve on the board of the group when it "quite publicly gave tens of millions of dollars to Planned Parenthood." Bush's response: He'd actually gotten behind the Bloomberg Family Foundation because they had a “shared commitment for meaningful education reform.”

At the second Republican debate last month in Simi Valley, Calif., Bush and Trump detoured into a dispute over gambling when they offered competing versions of whether Trump had tried to build casinos in Florida. It was an unexpected turn, and quite unwelcome to some industry veterans. "From a Seminole standpoint, I don't want Trump anywhere near my world," said Bill Jarrell, a Republican lobbyist who has worked for other tribal gaming clients.

Data privacy expert Christopher Wolf said he'd be alarmed if the discussion on international trade—a likely topic—turned toward into the U.S.-EU dispute over cross-border data transfers. These have become a delicate international issue, after Europe's highest court earlier this month struck down an agreement between the trans-Atlantic trading partners, which now face a January settlement deadline. “The issue is complex and nuanced and not subject to the sound bites that typify the debates,” said Wolf, the director of Hogan Lovells' privacy and information management practice.

Several GOP debate observers said they were torn between seeing their issues getting some much-needed attention and watching the candidates get pushed into new and potentially dangerous terrain. Several environmentalists told POLITICO they are eager to see the Republicans get drawn into a debate on climate change, for instance, in part because it would give ammunition to Democrats later. But Phil Sharp, a former Indiana Democratic congressman and now the president of the Resources for the Future think tank, said he's also heard from some climate-friendly Republican colleagues who would rather not see too much discussion during primary season, when the pressure will be on the candidates to take an aggressive and contrarian stance. "They're likely to box themselves in, unfortunately," Sharp said. It could be even more challenging if a Republican were elected president, he added, and had to "figure out how to suddenly shift gears and then be accused of flip-flopping."

Some advocates are less worried about what comes up than who talks about it. An advocate for overhauling the military's criminal justice system said they'd welcome a discussion on the topic—just so long as Sen. Marco Rubio isn't the first one asked a question about it. "Then I'd be a little bit worried," the source said, noting that the Florida Republican voted against legislation on the issue and likely would back the Pentagon's internal reform efforts, which in turn could prompt the other presidential candidates to climb on the same bandwagon. The source said they'd rather the question went first to either Ted Cruz or Paul; both are long-time backers of the sexual assault proposal authored by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

Education advocates also said they'd welcome attention from the presidential candidates. But several explained that there's good attention, and there's bad attention. David Schnittger, a former Boehner deputy chief of staff, said he'd be pleased if the Republican field went deep on policy ideas for the nation's schools, but disappointed if they reverted to base-pleasing calls to eliminate the Education Department.

"You'd like to see education discussed during the primary in a way that it will be discussed during the general," he said, "and in a way that it will be discussed when we're in a governing situation. And that's sadly not what ends up happening."

For some debate observers, the question of whether they want to hear their issues mentioned in prime time has prompted some internal soul searching. Earlier this summer, on the morning of the first GOP debate, Daniel Caprio, a former chief privacy officer in President George W. Bush’s Commerce Department, said he was hoping that his primary focus -- the Internet of Things -- didn't earn even a passing mention from the Republican candidates. He was most concerned at the time about Trump. But in a recent interview, Caprio backtracked and said he no longer sees the billionaire as a “summer fling.” Now, he said he's open to seeing the Republicans get into the privacy and security issues swirling around technologies like the "smart cars" and Nest thermostats that are increasingly becoming part of Americans' every day lives. “That’s the way public policy gets made,” he said. “I’d welcome it.”