SuperCarlyTrumpoliciousExtraBraggadocious
by Tom Sullivan
“I’m Donald Trump. I wrote the art of the deal. I say not in a braggadocious way. I’ve made billions and billions of dollars.”
Something Teagan Goddard said about last night's debate keys into something I observed:
Carly Fiorina was an obvious winner because she was clear, forceful and stood out among the 11 candidates on stage. Ben Carson was a winner, because he rose above the food fight. Donald Trump dominated the air time once again but likely won over few new supporters. It speaks volumes that all three have never been elected to anything.
Carson was a snooze, as Digby observed. But if anyone gained ground last night it was Fiorina. Her fabricated attack on Planned Parenthood aside, she drew wild applause for her smackdown of Trump over his comments about her face:
“I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr. Trump said.”
She was well rehearsed.
But the spectacle of the never-elected Fiorina and Trump bragging about their questionable skills in running businesses as qualifications for running a country was disturbing. Business, the logic of the marketplace, has become the raison d'être of American governance since Reagan. The ascendancy of the logic of the corporation (and its capture of the levers of government) parallels the decline in the American middle class over the last decades. Americans are feeling the pinch, the middle-class squeeze of which Sen. Elizabeth Warren speaks, and on which Bernie Sanders campaigns.
And if the after-action reports on the second GOP debate come in as expected, to whom are struggling Americans turning for salvation? To people who offer more of the very same corporate opiate, only in purer form.
GOP badges of honor: who wants to deport more people? Deprive more women of healthcare? Leave more Americans without health coverage?
— Michael Hiltzik (@hiltzikm) September 17, 2015