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.

Kaisch Town Meeting: Quiet. Serious. Gentle. Nice. Experienced. My Favorite Republican

Let me answer the question asked by Rachel Maddow of Hillary Clinton: Of all the Republican candidates if you absolutely had to choose a Republican candidate to be your Vice President, who would it be?

I will answer for myself:   John Kasich.

His Town Meeting presentation had maybe one hundred people at it, in the population center area of the state--Londonderry, right near Manchester.   Although for comparison 24 hours later Carly's Town Meeting had 500 or so people.

Kasich made the case that governing well is hard, but that some people are better at it than others, and he is good at it and can prove it.   He was a congressman for 18 years and during the Clinton years as Chair of the Budget Committee created balanced budgets.  He is a reasonably popular governor in a swing state.   He is good at this, he said.

His Town Meeting had all the elements of these Town Meetings:
    A setup with a microphone near one end of the room, with 90 percent of the chairs facing the microphone and a few "special guests" seated behind the speaker, where they will be seen by the camera.
    A stool with one or two water bottles sitting on it.
    Twenty minutes or so of remarks giving the "origin story", a description of the American situation, and then the solutions achieved by voting for the candidate.
    The Q&A session for about a half hour.
    The summation by the candidate.

I asked him a question.  He had spoken repeatedly about the important of jobs as the best social service program and criticized the current economy as being job killing (regulations, Obamacare).  I said that the greatest job killing event in my lifetime was the financial crisis.  Trump, I said, had noted that Kasich was high up at Lehman Brothers, one of the key malefactors in the creation and sale of bad mortgages.   He responded that Trump misunderstood his role, that he was far from leadership and he ran a two person office in Columbus, Ohio, and that he did not lead Lehman into its disastrous policy and eventual bankruptcy.

Kasich's summation started with his posing a question that had not been asked.   He said that sometimes people ask him why a man of faith like himself is not getting the "religious vote".   Kasich said he did not feel that faith should be traded on, but rather it should quietly inform lives.   And then he summarized by making the key point of his candidacy: that he had a real track record of success in governing.

There is none of the soaring rhetoric found in the talk by Rubio or Florina, or the emotional appeal of Christie's personal stories.

This is a summary of the Kasich value proposition: knowing how to get government results, now.

But he is likable and earnest.  He gets about 2% of the vote in polls.

The audience at the Kasich event

This is the typical setup.  Indeed, everyone uses a stool that looks just like this one.

Kasich at work.  His feet were arranged like this multiple times during the evening

Kasich cares about policy and the debt is a point of policy.   It is like Kasich not simply to complain about it, but to measure it.

Carly: Like Rubio, very eloquent generalities about leadership and citizenship. Big ideals

Carly Florina has very smooth and well practiced comments, wonderful inspiring words about leadership.  She looks strong, energized, angry but not enraged.   She packed the middle school auditorium.

Comments I overheard after the event reflected that New Hampshire people in the audience were shopping around, considering Carly among several other candidates.

Her thoughts are fully polished, long lovely sentences, with multiple phrases and examples spilling out rapidly and without hesitation.  

But I liken her to Rubio and not to Christie.    Christie speaks of governing work he has done.   He has been a US Attorney and now a governor.   Carly Florina speaks of her personal work history and of leadership and makes a virtue of being an outsider.

Carly's success depends on Republican voters being so disenchanted with government that they accept her argument that being an outsider is a good thing, and current polls seem to validate this as a winning strategy.  She puts "Outsider" right up there front and center.   And she makes an important distinction, one which puts a positive frame on her credentials.   There is a difference between managers and leaders.   Managers make the best of things, inside the system.   She noted that there can be bad managers and good managers but managers--people with experience in the failed institution of government--are people limited in vision.  Much better, though, are leaders.  Leadership, she says, is bringing out the potential in others.  Leaders question and improve the system.  Leaders can change the direction of something, and America is spiraling from bad to worse, so we need a leader.

Emblematic of her 70 minute Town Hall was her summation: a discussion of the two great women in America, Lady Liberty and Lady Justice.   She had soaring words about the triumph of liberty, then soaring words about justice holding a sword in one hand and a scale in the other, representing strength and the purity of justice.   It was all very smooth and inspiring.

It spoke repeatedly of unleashed potential making the point that she worked her way up from being a mere secretary.  (She never mentioned that she was a secretary having just graduated from Stanford, which would complicate the "mere secretary" narrative.)

The policy words on Lady Liberty, the "bring me your huddled masses, yearning to breath free" or the broken chains of slavery on Lady Liberty's ankles were left unsaid, which is good because they contradict her immigration policy.

In her talk she touched on all the current Republican required checklist, in very general terms:

  defund Planned Parenthood and oppose abortion

  end Affordable Care Act

  Support Israel first thing on her first day in office

  Cancel the Iran deal second thing on the first day in office

  Increase the military

  Support our Veterans

  Manage by firing some federal employees

  criticize federal regulations

  criticize government in general

In Christie's summation he warned voters about candidates who speak very generally, and he likened it to the canard about a Chinese meal:  after 2 hours you notice you are hungry again.  (He did not apologize or in any way distance himself from the Chinese meal canard.)   Their comments lack real life substance and clear policy prescriptions, he said.  He did not mention Carly or Rubio by name, but their presentations met this test.

A note here on my first-naming "Carly".   I do it because she does it.  Her signage is just "Carly".

Audience of about 500 people packed into the gymnasium

Simple mission statement of three words

  

Candidates are actors, doing well rehearsed lines, playing themselves. A report on a second Chris Christie Town Meeting

I saw a second Chris Christie Town meeting, this one in an old VFW meeting room attached to a thrift shop in the small New Hampshire town of North Conway.    I had seen an earlier Town Meeting six weeks ago.

He said this was his 25th or 26th Town Meeting in New Hampshire this year.

The experience was familiar because Christie's performance was essentially identical.  I say this not as a criticism but as a report on the simple fact that Christie has about 30 minutes of material that he presents to get across his main message about himself so it probably exists in every Town Meeting, as part of his opening pre-Q&A and then in his summary:
    He loves his parents and wife and kids.
    He learned his values from them, particularly his mother, who taught him to be blunt and confrontational.
   He was a prosecutor and has prosescuted terrorists and wants laws enforced.
   He experienced 9-11 directly since his wife was near the World Trade Center when it was hit.
   He wants a stronger, more engaged military.
   He is anti drug, having a close friend lost to addiction to drugs, plus his mother to alcohol.

Then he gets in the rest of the points he wants to make in questions that are predictable:
   tell us about immigration
   how do you feel about Israel and the Middle East
   can you say some critical things about Obama
   what about my Social Sevurity
 

He gets across his key points of personality and character and policy by storytelling and the words--even the intonations--are the same.

A recent comment he made about addiction went viral on Facebook.  Christie reported this morning that it had been seen some 7 million times.   I had heard the story when I saw him in mid September.   The viral recording, reported by Rachel Maddow, was essentially the story I had heard.

I have been telling people in my home town that Christie does an important piece of political theater and inoculation in a story he tells, a story about his mother being an in-your-face person very comfortable with confrontation who said there will be no deathbed confessions.  Just say things and be honest.  I would relate the story of his mother telling him at her deathbed to "go to work" and not stay there with her.   It is a powerful story and I warned my friends that the story works well to put into a favorable context the blunt and in-your-face behavior that has drawn some criticism.   The story helps inoculate him from the charge of being a mean bully.  Instead, he simply being a good son, having learned a lesson from his mother, just being the honest unguarded person he was brought up to be.

At this morning's meeting I heard him begin to introduce the story so I turned on my video recorder.  He gave the story exactly as he had before and exactly as I had related it to others.  It takes about six minutes and I hope to figure out a way to upload it onto my blog.   Or I will find someone else's recording of it on YouTube, and put a link here.

It is a great story. And this story, like everything he said today, has been said before.  At this point in the campaign we are seeing actors, reciting well practiced, well rehearsed lines, with the same pauses, the same gestures.   The fact that the Town Meetings are performances, reiterations of the same play, doesn't make them inauthentic.   After all, presumably they wrote the lines, and they are the subject of the lines, and they take political and repetitional responsibility for the lines even if someone else helped them craft them.  And the reviews and comments of the audience are not just of the candidate as performer but also as the person him or her self.

I am reminded of Steven Colbert, playing the character Steven Colbert.  In this case Chris Christie is a performer, only the character Chris Christie plays is his actual self, not an ironic caricature of himself.

The room wss starting to fill.   Over 100 people jammed into the room by start time.

Filing for office: a big event. Crowds, protests, supporters, then a retreat to a bar venue next door

I witnessed several iterations of the event of a candidate filing to get onto the ballot for the New Hampshire primary.

It needs to be done in person.   There is a $1,000 filing fee.  There is some signing of things that take place in the Secretary of State's office, so crowded with people at the moment of filing that I cannot get up close enough to see what happens.

But here is the publicly viewable thing.

1.  The candidate appears at a published time, surrounded with supporters.

2.  The candidate enters the Capitol Building, charges up the stairway to the second floor Secretary of State office in the corner of a hallway decorated with portraits of NH governors.

3.  The candidate pushes his or her way past a scrum of media people with notepads, tape recorders, and cameras, plus protesters with signs.   The protesters with signs are about equal in number to the supporters, also with signs.

4.  The candidate takes about five minutes inside the Secretary of State's office then stride out to the lobby of the building then across the street to one of several bars on the street immediately across from the building.

5.  In the case of Kasich and Christie they came across a school field trip of what I am guessing are second graders.  Both of them put on the special singsongy voice some people use with children.   Kasich urged them to listen to their teachers, love their mothers, and to say prayers every day.  Christie told them to listen to their teachers and to be fair and kind and inclusive to other people.

This is one of the things that is easier to show with photographs than to describe.   What the photos do not show is that it is noisy, hot, stuffy, and disputatious as the climate change environmentalists and the Planned Parenthood activists are pressed against the candidates' supporters.

Signs of Conflict.   Supporter of Planned Parenthood vs. Supporter of Kasich

Christie talks to the kids

Kasich emphasizes nightly prayer

Scene at the Secretary of State's doorway

Accentuating the negatives: Bernie and Bush

An astute friend, That Guyer, a trial attorney with good insight into the hidden communication of body language, observed that politicians who gesticulate broadly do not get elected.  They are interpreted as wild and extreme.

Bernie Sanders' positions on issues need not alarm people.  After all, Social Security and Medicare are treasured by he public.  Federal support for higher education is remembered fondly when in the context of the GI bill.  Taxing billionaires at a higher rate than nurses is popular.  But Bernie Sanders is "read" as extreme.  Why?  

No doubt some of it is his insistence on calling himself a Democratic Socialist rather than, say, a more neutral term like Democrat.  Or, if he wants to be considered something other than a normal Dmocrat, then bill hi,self as a "Citizen Democrat" and then ascribe his own fresh meaning to the term.  

But he also communicates wildness with his hair and hand gestures.    Look at the photos below, a couple of many I took.   His hands fly.  

And I contrast them with photos of Jeb Bush, who is fighting the reputation of being tepid.  And his body and hand language accentuate his negatives, confirming what Trump says and Bush's donors are starting to fear: that he is weak.

Very strong gestures, raising issues of trust.

Weak gestures, raising question of energy, passion, and desire for the job.

Jeb needs to eat some carbs. Body language and the paleo diet he is on

I sat next to Jeb! yesterday through either dumb luck or because I fit the event handler’s demographic.   They pulled me from the back of the room at the Senior Center in rural North Conway, NH and had me sit in the chair immediately next to Jeb!’s empty chair while he spoke, and the one immediately in the range of the bank of cameras behind Jeb!.   

Throughout the hour Town Meeting, during which Jeb! offered right wing views, but in a moderate and reasonable tone of voice, and in which he was upbeat and pleasant, his arms dangled at his hips, palms facing back, fingers extended.   His shoulders and torso were not slumped, but his arms hung, and it created a worn-out look.   The contrast with the upper body look of Rubio, Florina, and Kasich, and Bernie Sanders was profound.    Rubio, Florina, and Kasich have arms at the chest and they gesticulate constantly.   I took six photos of Bernie at random times during his speech and noted afterwards that in five of the six his hands were up above his shoulders, hands hammering out his emphasis on his points.  

And since I was sitting three feet behind Bush as he spoke it was also quite evident that his belt was cinched a couple of inches tighter than his suit pants, which were bunched in the back.   Jeb looks nice and trim, no stomach overhang.  

Part of Jeb!’s appeal is his not being angry.  But someone needs to tell him to change his default stance from hang-dog to alert, because his body language is affirming Trump’s accusation and the death-spiral meme.