FIORINA PUTS THE PETAL TO THE METTLE
TRUMP WILL RIDE OUT INTO THE SUNSET
THE VIEW FROM THE U.S. VIRGIN ISLANDS
By
JOHN McCARTHY
Virgin
Islands Free Press
The
word going into the debate was: How is Donald Trump going to do?
And nobody said it better than John Weaver: “Imagine a
NASCAR driver preparing for a race knowing one of the drivers will be drunk.
That’s what prepping for this debate is like.”
Some newspapers in the Midwest had compared Trump’s Teflon
factor to Keith Richards’ longevity – the campaign and the person,
respectively, that no one could kill. Even Bret Baier of Fox News admitted what
some music reporters acknowledged while waiting to talk to Richards – they got
weak in the knees.
“I’d be lying to you if I didn’t say that I have woken up
in cold sweats wondering how I’m going to deal with a Donald Trump who’s not
listening,” Baier told TIME magazine prior to the debate.
All along the American fascination with Trump as he
elegantly bumped and harrumphed along the campaign stumps was: How low will he
go?
Now that the first debate is in the record books, the
question is: How low will he fall in the polls? And fall he will, mark my
words.
Clearly, by all accounts (meaning social media) Cara
Carleton “Carly” Fiorina of Texas won the debate. Like most Americans, I had to
Google her to make sure I got the spelling right on her first and last names.
Fiorina might have hit all of her home runs in the
B-League game; but, the fact that she has major league mettle was noticed by
the “owners” of the league and we can count on the Austin native to be called
up to the big leagues for the next debate once the new polling is announced.
You don’t think the former chief executive of
Hewlett-Packard isn’t tough to have risen as far as she did in the corporate
world? I thought Chris Christie might be best to negotiate with Putin, but
after last night’s showing, who can say Fiorina wouldn’t do it best?
In the main event, it would be difficult to say that Marco
Rubio didn’t “win” the debate, because he did. By pointing out that most of the
illegal immigrants now come from “Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras,” Rubio not
only made Trump seem out of touch, but misinformed when he lambastes Mexican
illegals.
“I
also believe we need a fence,” Rubio said. “The problem is if El Chapo builds a
tunnel under the fence, we have to be able to deal with that too. And that's
why you need an e-verify system and you need an entry-exit tracking system and
all sorts of other things to prevent illegal immigration.”
A close second would be home town hero John Kasich; but,
no matter how competent and caring Kasich appeared – it is hard to imagine how
he could qualify to be anything more than vice president. The intellectual
dishonesty in claiming the “economic growth” America had under President
Clinton in the 1990s as his own doing in balancing the budget didn’t just take
stones, it makes you wonder if he wasn’t stoned when he said it.
Third place is a tie between Chris Christie of New Jersey
and Ted Cruz of Texas. Some of the female commentators in the national media
felt that Christie was one of the losers in the debate because of the way he
went after Rand Paul in the controversy over the U.S. government spying on its
own citizens under the guise of rooting out terrorism. One went so far as to
say that it made Christie look “little,” which is very hard to imagine indeed.
Cruz seemed very comfortable in the debate, and as I was
unfamiliar with his voice, I was surprised at how commanding it sounded, but
after a while it did strike me as sermonizing, which was confirmed when he
mentioned that his Cuban father was a Christian minister. What I don’t
understand is, how can Cruz, born in Canada, run for President of the United
States? I guess the argument goes that his mother was an American citizen at
his birth. Where is Donald Trump when we need him?
The best (and most surprising) canned line went like this
when “Likeable” Mike Huckabee said this:
“It
seems like this election has been a whole lot about a person who's very high in
the polls, that doesn't have a clue about how to govern. A person who has been
filled with scandals, and who could not lead, and, of course, I'm talking about
Hillary Clinton.”
Huckabee
was measured and professional in his delivery of the two sentences, and Trump
could be heard in the background saying “thank you” or some other such thing.
Scott
Walker of Wisconsin mentioned coming into the debate that he is a normal person
who likes to shop at Kohl’s – my prediction: this nomination period will not
keep Walker from doing just that –without interruption – once he formally drops
out of the competition.
Brain
surgeon Ben Carson got a few chuckles at the end when he mentioned that he was
the only one on the stage to have done certain things.
“I'm the only one to separate siamese twins, the only one
to operate on babies while they were still in the mother's womb, the only one
to take out half of a brain, although you would think, if you go to Washington,
that someone had beat me to it,” Carson said.
But in the end Carson’s candidacy is a vanity candidacy
every bit as much as Trump’s is. On CNN after the debate, Carl Bernstein said
that he has known The Donald a long time and felt that Trump had already
achieved his goal in running for president – to become the most famous person
in the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment