Whining

Stop Whining, GOP Debaters

Candidates should stop squealing about the rules: Republicans wrote them.

By Jack Shafer

Like a litter of ravenous piglets, the Republican presidential candidates began squealing about the format of the CNBC debates and the questions asked by the moderators the second the session concluded.

“What it has turned into is a gotcha,” said Ben Carson. Fellow candidate Chris Christie promised to lower the boom on future debate moderators. “I’m not going to allow them to ask stupid questions,” he said. Marco Rubio denounced CNBC’s moderators as showoffs determined to embarrass the Republicans, and the Ted Cruz campaign immediately converted his debate performance into a campaign ad, excerpting the segment in which he accused the CNBC questioners of pitting the candidates again one another. “This is not a cage match,” he said in his nasal Texas whine.

What’s all this bellyaching? The rules and formats they’re complaining about were largely designed by the Republican National Committee, and the point was to make Republicans look good.

This year’s debate schedule was a reaction to the unruly and feral Republican debates of campaign 2012, a spectacle that embarrassed the RNC and, some say, weakened the front-runner and eventual nominee, Mitt Romney. “It was like a dog-and-pony show,” RNC Chairman Reince Priebus said of the 2012 debates in a Washington Post last January. “I think debates are important, but just because you’re a good debater doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good president. It’s just too much of an importance on debating.”

So under the new rules hashed out in January, the RNC insisted that the number of forums be halved from their 2012 numbers (two dozen!), and they were. It wanted the first debate to start later in the year, and the wish was granted (August 2015 vs. May 2011). It wanted the first debate to be held concurrently with the RNC’s summer meeting in Cleveland, and it was. It demanded and received more geographical variety in the locations of the debates.

“I’m trying to limit the opportunity we have to kill each other,” Priebus said in January. “I’ve always tried to be a person that sells what I control. I don’t like to sell things I don’t control. I don’t control people’s mouths, that’s for sure, but what I do control is the length of time we have to kill each other.”

But Priebus’ plan for controlled killing didn’t quite work out the way he planned. For all the candidates’ carping about CNBC’s presentation, the network isn’t even the main object of their ire: It’s the RNC that’s catching a double dose of sweet shrieking hell from the campaigns. The campaigns blamed the RNC for letting CNBC produce such an unflattering showcase and are now moving to renegotiate “better” terms for the candidates in the upcoming televised GOP debates.

Eschewing this collective effort, the Donald Trump campaign has declared it will directly negotiate even “better” terms for its candidate with the networks. (Trump likes nothing better than to reopen negotiations when he needs a better deal.) Meanwhile, the RNC has gone into punishment mode by “suspending” the February debate CNBC’s parent network, NBC, has scheduled in Texas.

The problem with debate rules is that one size never fits all. Candidates with substantial leads in the polls want fewer debates, sensing rightly that they have more to lose than gain by exposing themselves to critiques by the other, less popular candidates in a nationally televised forum. (Not for nothing has the Clinton campaign worked to suppress the number of Democratic debates.)

Long-shot candidates, hoping to score a knockout, tend to want more debates. The smart ones also tend not to complain about the questions asked. Also-ran John Kasich took this path in his CNBC postmortem. “They asked me a lot of questions and I didn’t feel anything was below the belt,” Kasich said. Siding with Kasich’s view that the current debate formats needed no amendment were Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie.

Few candidates want genuine debates, in which they directly spar with other contestants. Most want soft forums in which they can broadcast their positions without any disputation. Some candidates, even such master debaters as Ted Cruz, want to swing at nothing but slow pitches. In the wake of the CNBC debate, Cruz said, “How about we say from now on if you have never voted in a Republican primary in your life, you don’t get to moderate a Republican primary debate.” As long as Cruz was sitting on Santa’s lap, he might as well have asked for the debates to be turned into free infomercials for the candidates.

The current demands by campaigns to “renegotiate” the terms of the future debates should be seen for what they are: Not a critique of CNBC’s poor performance with the debate, but exercises in opportunism by candidates who are forever flexing their biceps to reshape the forums to their liking. Last month, you recall, Trump and Carson threatened to exit the CNBC debate unless it limited the session to two hours. As front-runners, they possessed leverage that they were able to use successfully. (I think CNBC should have called their bluff; I’ll bet they would have shown up.)

By making a mess out of its debate, CNBC gave all the campaigns something new to bitch about — and what is a presidential campaign but a complaint machine? — and lent all of them new leverage to extract concessions from future debate hosts. Having now reached cruising speed, the three-way contest among the campaigns, the RNC and the networks for status and power will only accelerate as the next eight debates roll by. May the best negotiator win.