The Republican Candidates Agree on Every Point of Policy

I blame it on Fox News and conservative talk radio.   Those media outlets knock all the edges off of candidate differences in policy.  Deviators--like Rand Paul on military issues--get sharply criticized so they move toward the acceptable orthodoxy.

I realize that voters get choice in candidate gender, age, experience/outsider, ethnicity, and mood (Carson calm; Bush and Kasich frustrated; Florina and Rubio angry;  Cruz very angry; Trump boisterous).

But their criticism of the current situation in America and their goals for the future are essentially identical.

Economy:   Really bad and gotten worse under Obama.   The candidates ignore that America was in financial crisis in 2008 and that unemployment was exploding, businesses failing, and homes going into default.   No one describes the past seven years as a recovery.    No one mentions that the stock market is up 250 percent in the past 7 years.   No one mentions that real estate values have recovered.  No one mentions that unemployment is back to a level economists consider a healthy equilibrium of 5%.   There is universal assumption that the economy is very weak and needs a complete turnaround from current policies.

All agree we need to:  reduce business regulation, end Dodd-Frank regulations of banking, leave the minimum wage unchanged, and generally "unleash" business.

Military and Foreign Affairs:  Get more hawkish and bellicose and assertive.   Every candidate thinks we need a much bigger army, navy, air force, marines, more ships, more planes.   And every candidate thinks we need to engage more aggressively in Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Ukraine, the South China Sea, and we need to tie our policy more closely to Israel as represented by Netanyahu.   Carly Fiorina said the first thing she would do on her first day in office is "call Bebe" and tell him it is a new President and they have a reliable friend here, and then to call Iran's leader and tell them it is a new era and the Iran Nuclear Deal is being changed and that they will allow Americans unfettered access to their country or we will freeze the world financial markets immediately, and this appears to be the policy of every candidate.

Immigration: Secure borders and enforce laws.   There is a little difference in tone but very little in policy.  Trump made the issue visible and the support he got caused the immigration "doves", i.e. Bush and Graham and Rubio, to re-emphasize enforcement.   No one mentions that deportations have increased significantly under Obama or that currently there is little or no net immigration.  The Republican orthodox immigration position is:  secure the border in some way, use much higher monitoring of foreign visitors on visas, allow some "good" people to immigrate, deport bad people promptly, stop employers from hiring undocumented people, and then after everything is settled with the borders then, maybe some  kind of legalization of residency but not citizenship.

Government in general--it is bad.  All candidates are running against "government."   Governance is tyranny, over expensive, wasteful, inefficient, corrupt.   A couple of candidates say they can fix this bad thing while others emphasize that they want to shrink the bad thing.   (But in every case the following areas are exempted from government: military, defense, intelligence work, Social Security, Medicare.  These programs are good and should be maintained or increased.)

Obama is completely wrong about everything.  I have never heard any candidate say anything nice about Obama, not a single thing, zero.  Not about policy and not about anything however anodyne.  Nothing about Osama Bin Laden, nothing about having cute kids, nothing about being married to his first wife, nothing.   Every single thing he has done is bad.  

Abortion is bad.   Defund Planned Parenthood.  They all say it.   Some candidates would allow abortions in the event of rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother while several would not allow those exemptions.   The full area of disagreement is within that narrow range.

America is in collapse and going in the wrong direction on everything.   America used to be great in some former golden age, especially under Reagan, or in the immediate postwar 1950s, and that America has fallen from grace.