Debate This

We ended up going out to dinner with the girls last night. Cheesecake Factory. The girls were pleased. 

Mrs. Stroock got a promotion this week. You know, in 30 + years of professional life, we've never been promoted. That ends today. As proprietor of this blog, we're promoting ourself from Chief Writer in Residence to Director of Strategic Writing. The promotion comes with a significant increase in compensation. [Congratulations-Ed]. Thank you. 

We caught the first half or so of the GOP debate last night. Below are a few thoughts before we read commentary and analyses. This was a good debate about ideas and stuff. To be honest, we're disappointed. We were hoping for a train wreck. Hecklers, with someone storming the stage shouting 'Trump won!' or 'John 3:16' or something.  Maybe anti-fa. Where were the pro-Trump hecklers?  Oh well. We saw a Republicans for Ukraine ad during a commercial, and damn near hurled. 

Ron DeSantis: We can see why some find him off putting but thought he did well last night. Chris Christie: We remember why we used to like him so much in New Jersey. Don't trust him now. Vivek Ramaswamy: used car salesmen is often an insult hurled at politicians. Vivek came off like a game show host. Nikki Haley: said the right things, looked fine. We were pleasantly surprised. Mike Pence: a relic of the Tea Party era GOP. He said all the right things, for 2012. Asa Hutchinson: should go home. Doug Burgum: Seemed nice enough. What we saw of him we liked. He's running for Secretary of the Interior, which is fine. Tim Scott: Meh. Stay in the senate, become the first African American Senate Majority Leader.

You know, ten years ago, at least for us, debates were about investigating a candidate's ideological credentials. Had the candidate always said the right thing about a laundry list of issues, guns, defense, spending, Israel, etc etc. Was he consistent? This was Neoconservatism. To put it another way, after watching a candidate, what was the likelihood that he'd betray us like Bush the Elder (read my lips...). We weren't looking for that last night. We were watching out for the candidate who could stay on message, who could punch, who could take a loaded media question and use it to give the answer he wanted. DeSantis, Vivek, Haley all did fine in that regard. Haley actually surprised us a bit. 

So then we tuned into Tucker's debate with President Trump. Trump looked and sounded fine. Has Trump taken off 15 or 20 pounds? He mostly rambled.  This bored us. Trump and Tucker slammed Chris Wallace and then praised Mike Wallace, which was funny. Tucker was too accommodating. We think he was smitten. Exit observation: we are getting massively spammed by the Trump campaign.