Last Night's Debate: Who has the Biggest Penis

People who watched ten minutes of the debate last night came away with an impression.

I think the big thing that happened last night was the the experience of 3 children bickering in the back seat of a car, while a 4th sat on the side wearing earphones and reading a book.  It wasn't a hard hitting review of policy; it was nasty little personal jabs, with the Fox News moderators poking sticks at the kids, keeping the squabbling going.  Trump, Cruz and Rubio were the squabblers.   Kasich was on the side, behaving.

Auditioning for VP

Kasich looked like a good vice president.  

Kasich on the ticket would fill out the 'experience' part of the Nominee's resume and it might get them Ohio's electoral votes.  Kasich didn't burn any bridges last night.   Kasich might be able to bear standing two steps back and two steps to the left of the president with more patience than did poor Chris Christie standing miserably behind Trump.   Sad for Christie.

But there is little evidence so far that voters want decorum.  They appear to want an angry fighter.  They have rejected decorum in candidate after candidate, but now Kasich is the one remaining choice for people who want presidential decorum in the current version of standard Republican orthodox George W. Bush style of Republican.  Remember, the Republican coalition combines the trickle down economic policies of the rich (lower marginal tax rates, free trade, less worker protection, lower regulation, no-mass-deportation) with the traditional social values sentiments of the voting masses (anti-abortion, pro-Christian, anti gay,  fear and resentment of non-whites and immigrants). 

Mild mannered

Kasich is the remaining standard orthodox good Republican in the mold of George W. Bush.   Rubio is the young, attractive Tea Partyish version of the same thing--more aggressive, faster talking, more angry, more absolute in his language.  The young firebrand, but an orthodox firebrand.   Kasich is mild and conversational in tone and he communicates that he is a compassionate conservative, echoing George W. Bush.   Kasich is very conservative and he used state power to bury abortion providers with so much state regulation nearly all have closed in Ohio and he reduced access to voting by reducing absentee and early voting and reduced the number of polling places in urban areas .  This will increase already long wait-times to vote, which will suppress voting of targeted opponents.  This was done cleverly, amid talk of cost savings, not intentional voter suppression.  Kasich achieves hard partisan results but with a soft tone, making him acceptable to moderate voters turned off by naked partisanship voiced by the other three candidates.

So Kasich staked out his turf: the nice guy.

Meanwhile the other three were fighters.  It has stopped being sublimated or spoken in code.

Since Rubio is the young orthodox firebrand it leaves room for Cruz to be the very very conservative Christian firebrand.  Rubio is more interventionist, Cruz more careful about getting the US into regime change, but the real difference is that Cruz is unabashedly Christian in his search for a constituency, and Rubio is simply very Christian.   They don't differ very much on policy; they differ on tone.   Cruz is angry and mean; Rubio is more optimistic.   But these differences in policy were irrelevant last night.   We didn't see a debate, we saw a shoving match.

 have commented in the past that there was a "Testosterone Primary" going on, with Trump, Christie, Cruz, Rubio all attempting to seem most Putin-like, with Sarah Palin praising Putin and criticizing Obama's "mom jeans" and Christi referring to Obama as a "feckless weakling."   One dimension of this contest was each candidate attempting to appear most bellicose.   


 Trump is saying that he would torture people the Geneva Convention be darned,  Rubio saying he would joyfully wage a war of civilizations, and Cruz that he would carpet bomb whole areas and make sand glow in the dark, each uttered in the strongest most resolute voice possible.

It has gone beyond sublimation, disguise, or code, tough talk about killing people in the Middle East.   It has become about manliness.

Dog urinate on fire hydrants and telephone poles to mark their presence, each reaching as high up the pole as possible, seeing alpha status because the higher up the scent the bigger and more dominant the dog.   An anthropologist watching this struggle for head chief in some tribe or clan would immediately understand from the posturing and body language that the rivals were using manliness as a proxy for strength and dominance.  

It has become junior high.

Trump repeatedly referred to Rubio as "Little Marco" in the days prior to the debate and again in the debate, said with a sneering tone.  For several days Rubio had been returning fire, making sneering mention of the size of Trump's hands, overtly suggesting that hand size correlated to penis size and that Trump was lacking, or over-compensating, or something unmanly.  Trump, who has a very young ex-model wife,  and whose previous wife told the tabloids that Trump was the best sex she ever had, something Trump did not deny, rose to the bait this week, and asserted in town halls that he has very nice hands.  


In the debate last night, it got better--or worse-- with Trump assuring America that his penis is large enough to be president.

Trump:   "He referred to my hands, if they're small, something else must be small.  I guarantee you there's no problem. I guarantee it."

One cannot parody this by exaggerating it, because the simple truth is already parody.   

Cruz is mocking Trump, saying he is a fraud, his businesses are embroiled in lawsuits, that he certainly has bombshells hidden in his interview with the New York Times and in his tax returns.   I charge you with guilt.  Prove you are innocent, he says.  


 Cruz still has drawings of himself on his website, buffed up with upper body muscle mass.   His prepared closing remarks at the debate were addressed to America's warriors, foreign and domestic.   In the strongest most steadfast tone, he said to the fighting men in the armed services that he was a supporter and to our police forces, he had their back: Cruz, the Commander in Chief.

Steroidal Cruz

There were intermittent glimmers of policy debate that flickered through last night's debate, but the evening was not about policy.   It was a physcal-ed class squabble for dominance, with Cruz, and Rubio attacking Trump, and Trump attacking back.  My memory of junior high school fights is that they gathered a spirited and cheering crowd and that the kids admired the courage of the fighters.   The fighters "got in trouble" for fighting but they came out of it with higher status for having fought.   Maybe nothing has changed.  If Kasich rises in the polls then it is possible that people of voting age are different from boys at Hedrick Junior High School and they are grown up enough to prefer the boy doing his schoolwork.   We will see.

The bystanders at last night's debate each had their role: Fox egged them on, and the live audience clapped and cheered the insults.   But like back at Hedrick Junior High in my memory there were also the cautious "good kids" who hung back not wanting to get beat up if the fight spread into the spectators and not wanting to "get in trouble" when the grownups came running.  They may well be out there in the TV audience.

The voters are the grownups, who like the gym teachers might come running to say to grow up.   Or not.   The three fighters seem not to be punished in the polls for their behavior.   Voters may not want to stop this fight.