Republican candidates whine about debate questions

Sally Bradshaw to NBC wrote:"We have become expert at how to provide ideological information to like-minded people but, devastatingly, we have lost the ability to be persuasive with or welcoming to those who don't agree with us on every issue."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/rnc-completes-autopsy-2012-loss-calls-inclusion-policy/story?id=18755809

CNN wrote:Los Angeles (CNN)Republican presidential candidates tore into CNBC's moderators at Wednesday night's GOP debate, issuing the sharpest attacks on the mainstream media of the 2016 election cycle.

Sen. Ted Cruz accused the moderators of trying to instigate a cage match, Sen. Marco Rubio called the media a super PAC for Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump slammed the "ridiculous questions."

The candidates took to the airwaves again early Thursday morning and continued to rip CNBC for the tone and substance of the debate. And in the days ahead, sources said, campaign representatives will air their grievances to the Republican National Committee.

Ben Carson even told reporters Thursday that he would be demanding a new debate format.

‎"We need a change of format," Carson said during a press conference in Lakewood, Colorado. "Debates are supposed to be to 'get to know the candidates,' what is behind them. What it has turned into is a gotcha." ‎

Carson declined to specify what changes he would ask for, but said his campaign was reaching out to the other GOP candidates to "lay out a plan" going forward. The next Republican debate is on November 10, hosted by Fox Business.

The campaigns will find a sympathetic ear in RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, who blasted CNBC late Wednesday night for asking "gotcha" questions and said the network "should be ashamed."

"I was very disappointed in the moderators. I'm disappointed in CNBC," he told reporters in the spin room in Boulder, Colorado. "I thought they would bring forward a pretty fair forum here tonight. But I think it was one gotcha question, one personal low blow after another."

He continued, "It's like they tried to design a Rubik's cube for every question to take the worst element, I think, of what the moderators and what the media should bring to the table. And all I can tell you is that while I'm pretty much proud of our candidates for pretty much sticking together, I'm very disappointed in the moderators and I'm very disappointed with CNBC."

Priebus went even further in an official statement: "One of the great things about our party is that we are able to have a dynamic exchange about which solutions will secure a prosperous future, and I will fight to ensure future debates allow for a more robust exchange," he wrote. "CNBC should be ashamed of how this debate was handled."

The candidates' attacks on the media were red meat for the conservative base, which already has a deep mistrust of the mainstream press. But even by conservative standards, the candidates' broadsides on Wednesday night were aggressive and unrelenting, and delighted the audience in Boulder.

The candidates' fierce criticism of CNBC -- the first sustained volley against the media of the current campaign -- immediately called to mind the frequent attacks against the press during debates in the 2012 elections.

Brian Steel, CNBC's senior vice president for public relations, stood by the moderators' performance.

"People who want to be President of the United States should be able to answer tough questions," he said in a statement late Wednesday night.

RELATED: Rubio, Bush brawl at the debate

Yet the morning after the debate on Thursday, GOP candidates continued to criticize CNBC and the mainstream media generally. In an interview with CNN's Chris Cuomo on "New Day," Rubio took issue with the tone and substance of the debate and said he hoped future debates would do a better job of focusing on important issues.

Carly Fiorina, appearing on "New Day" with Alisyn Camertoa, chided the "liberal media" and The Washington Post specifically for continuing to focus on her remarks about Planned Parenthood.

Later in the show, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie told Camerota that he was going to keep standing up to debate moderators. "I'm not going to allow them to ask stupid questions," he said.

The campaigns will further address their frustrations in a conference call with the RNC in the days ahead, campaign sources said. Their goal is to ensure that the Fox Business debate on November 10 focuses on more substantive issues, skips the "gotcha" questions, and provides all candidates with more equal speaking times.

On Wednesday night, CNBC's moderators struggled to maintain control of a debate that, according to many journalists on Twitter, they appeared ill-equipped to handle. The panelists, usually familiar with covering Wall Street and finance, were left scrambling to talk about a presidential race they seemed to know little about.

At one point during the debate, Jeb Bush campaign manager Danny Diaz began pounding on the control room door, shouting at the CNBC producers about how the network wasn't giving equal time to all the candidates, a source with a rival campaign told CNN.

The night left GOP hopefuls and reporters wishing for the previous Republican debate moderators from Fox News and CNN.

Politico's John Bresnahan joked that CNBC was frantically calling CNN and Fox "to ask how to run a debate," while Matthew Continetti, the editor of the conservative Washington Free Beacon, wrote: "Winners of GOP Debate so far: Jake Tapper and Anderson Cooper."

On stage, Cruz was the night's most vocal media critic, condemning CNBC for trying to instigate fights between the candidates while ignoring issues that mattered to voters.

"The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media," Cruz said, after being asked about the debt ceiling. "This is not a cage match."

"How about talking about the substantive issues people care about," Cruz added to thunderous applause from the audience.

The audience in Boulder was electrified by Cruz's attack. Social media mentions of Cruz blew up during his attack on the media -- it was the top moment on Facebook, the social network said -- while pollster Frank Luntz said his focus group "burst out in applause at Ted Cruz's media attack."

"Ted Cruz's focus group dials [hit] 98 with his attack on media bias," Luntz wrote on Twitter. "That's the highest score we've ever measured. EVER."

The Texas Senator wasn't the only one to slam the mainstream media at the debate: Rubio, asked to respond to a Florida Sun Sentinel editorial that had called on him to drop out of the race, charged that it "evidence of the bias that exists in the American media."

Later in the debate, Rubio declared that the mainstream media was so biased in favor of Clinton that it was effectively functioning as her Super PAC.

Trump, who had predicted before the start that the debate would be "unfair," criticized CNBC's moderators for asking "ridiculous questions," and later called a question posed to Mike Huckabee "nasty."

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie looked one moderator in the eye and said, "Even in New Jersey what you're doing is called rude."

At various points in the debate, both Rubio and Trump accused the moderators of having their facts wrong.

CNBC's problems were further compounded by the network's meandering commentary between the night's two debates, which was widely panned on Twitter.

"CNBC does underscore that the only people sometimes more vapid than candidates are journalists talking about candidates," New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof tweeted, echoing the sentiments of many journalists and political operatives.

"Is this a public access channel?" asked Jon Favreau, the former speechwriter for President Barack Obama.

eddie wrote:Now can any one, and I'm not taking sides, moan about what questions they're asked in a debate?

eddie wrote:Politicians are simply a weird breed.

Cass wrote:Awwww the poor sweetums are vewy vewy scared of mean qwestions from those big nasty moderators.


FFS you cant answer some hard questions on your feet and quicklyt? You mean acting like a leader? Then get outta the race. If you want the answers beforehand like its a test that, in school, is called cheating then clearly you aren't capable of being President.

STH

veya_victaous wrote:

Cass wrote:Awwww the poor sweetums are vewy vewy scared of mean qwestions from those big nasty moderators.


FFS you cant answer some hard questions on your feet and quicklyt? You mean acting like a leader? Then get outta the race. If you want the answers beforehand like its a test that, in school, is called cheating then clearly you aren't capable of being President.

STH

Good too see Americans also believe this

All this Trump stuff in the media makes some of us a little concerned for US sanity

veya_victaous wrote:

Cass wrote:Awwww the poor sweetums are vewy vewy scared of mean qwestions from those big nasty moderators.


FFS you cant answer some hard questions on your feet and quicklyt? You mean acting like a leader? Then get outta the race. If you want the answers beforehand like its a test that, in school, is called cheating then clearly you aren't capable of being President.

STH

Good too see Americans also believe this

All this Trump stuff in the media makes some of us a little concerned for US sanity

Cass wrote:

veya_victaous wrote:

Good too see Americans also believe this

All this Trump stuff in the media makes some of us a little concerned for US sanity

There is no way, no matter how much money someone offered, that I would EVER vote for that racist, bigoted, misogynist liar.

NPR wrote:Nativism And Economic Anxiety Fuel Trump's Populist Appeal

Ever since the Tea Party began in 2009, various Republicans have been auditioning to lead this populist revolt. Rand Paul took a chainsaw to the federal budget. Ted Cruz almost shut down the government. Chris Christie and Scott Walker have been bashing Washington elites.

But it wasn't until Donald Trump came along that the populist base of the Republican Party found the right mouthpiece for all its grievances.

So much of what Trump says on the stump seems improvised and inconsistent. And on the surface he can look like nothing more than a bombastic showman. But Trump fits right in to the classic tradition of American populism. From William Jennings Bryan to Huey Long to George Wallace to Ross Perot, American populism has always combined nativism with economic grievance.

As Michael Lind of the New America Foundation points out, the populist world view sees a division not between rich and poor but between producers and parasites. And that's why Trump's supporters hold in equal contempt Wall Street financiers who got a bailout and undocumented immigrants who broke the law.

In their eyes, both groups are cheaters and parasites. That's why it makes perfect sense for Trump to call for a big wall on the Mexican border and for higher taxes for hedge-fund managers. Some of his positions — like higher tariffs, an end to tax breaks for hedge funds, and protections for entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security — are challenging Republican orthodoxy. Some of them would even be right at home on Bernie Sanders' website. But populism is often a mashup of positions from the left and right.

The other thing Trump does is highlight the growing division between the Republican Party's establishment wing and its base.

Ever since another populist — the segregationist Democrat George Wallace — inspired a group of alienated white Southern Democrats to switch to the GOP, the Republican Party's base has consisted of white working-class (mostly male) voters whose views on trade, immigration and entitlements have been at odds with the GOP's donor class. For a long time, those divisions were papered over by social issues — opposition to abortion and gay marriage. But as the social issue debate recedes, the weak links in the conservative alliance are becoming more apparent. Trump and Trumpism makes the Republican coalition look like a rickety contraption.

Maybe one of the lessons here is that this is what happens when a party waits too long to update its ideology. Conservative intellectuals have been talking for years about the need to update Reaganomics for the 21st century, to develop a modern message for the middle class, especially for blue collar, non-college-educated voters who have been unsettled by globalization and whose incomes have been stagnating for a generation. There's a widespread feeling among voters that the old economic model isn't working anymore to provide broadly shared prosperity and economic opportunity. And neither political party is offering solutions. Now Trump — with his anger at immigrants, trade, Wall Street and Washington elites — is filling the void.

In the past, populist candidates haven't won. But they have left a lasting mark on one or both parties. That's what happened when the Republican Party absorbed Wallace's disgruntled white voters in the '70s and '80s. And when Bill Clinton co-opted Ross Perot's message about the deficit in an effort to prove that Democrats were fiscally responsible enough to balance the budget.

What will be Trump's legacy? That's not clear yet. One possible legacy could be to make the Republican Party more nativist, alienating Hispanic voters. That would likely doom the GOP to minority status for a long time.

Or one of the other candidates could emerge as the anti-Trump, and the party could have a big, healthy debate about what it means to be a modern Republican.

Jeb Bush seems the most likely Trump opponent. But even though Bush is pushing back against Trump's personal attacks, accusing Trump of being a closet liberal and — of all things — a germaphobe, Bush doesn't seem to want to engage with Trumpism directly.

Cass wrote:Trump and Carson cannot help putting their foot in their mouths...whining, targeting people who dare to criticize, creationism, no idea on US-Cuba policies/relations....and ad nauseaum (literally).

We know that Cruz, Jindal and Huckabee are lost causes - they should be the next along with Christie and Paul to drop out of the race.

I don't agree with Rubio but by golly he is looking good compared to the above.

veya_victaous wrote:@Cass
You need John Cena

 
Although it is a joke, it shouldn't be...  judge a man by his actions ...


And my god we are famous
First page of google search has a veya quote from here

Trump and Carson cannot help putting their foot in their mouths...whining, targeting people who dare to criticize, creationism wrote:

Hotwired wrote:

Are you saying they are liberals?

I think some of you should talk to your doctor about possibly having Narcissistic personality disorder
Symptoms

The more I read posts from you people the more you fit the pattern.

Hotwired wrote:

Trump and Carson cannot help putting their foot in their mouths...whining, targeting people who dare to criticize, creationism wrote:

Are you saying they are liberals?

I think some of you should talk to your doctor about possibly having Narcissistic personality disorder
Symptoms

The more I read posts from you people the more you fit the pattern.