Last night’s debate showcased the great wrench in the GOP gears: The three candidates with no political experience who are infuriating the politicians by playing a game of keep-away with the Republican nomination.
After last night, one thing is certain: Of the three political outsiders, Carly Fiorina is the only one who isn’t out of her depth.
{mosads}Donald Trump’s poll numbers will probably double for reasons invisible to those who aren’t impressed by the volume of his voice, but he looked like a kid talking politics at the grown-up table.
His rhetoric may work at big stadium rallies where no one talks back, but when his words are juxtaposed with the words of intelligent, articulate people, it’s like someone taking a giant yellow highlighter to his intellectual shortcomings.
He managed to sum up what a Trump foreign policy would look like in one bumbling sentence:
“We get along with nobody. I will get along — I think — with Putin, and I will get along with others, and we will have a much more stable — stable world.”
The Trump doctrine would have sounded weak even if Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Fiorina hadn’t delivered foreign policy analyses filled with specifics.
He was most exposed when he was arguing with one of the greatest living doctors on Earth, Ben Carson. Ben Carson explained that there was no link between vaccines and autism, but Trump insisted that Carson was wrong because he’s “seen it.”
That’s always the story with Trump. The facts are wrong because he’s “seen it” or he’s “talked to a lot of people who know.” These are always people who are “really, really smart,” but they are never people who have names.
Everyone will respect us. There will be more jobs. America will be great again. Donald Trump will take us all to El Dorado!
But not one word about how we’ll get there.
Carson is the anti-Trump: Smart, likeable, soft-spoken, but he comes off as an amateur. Like he always says, he has the capacity to learn how to be a politician, but it’s clear he’s not there yet. He spent more time explaining what he meant by things he said than explaining what he’d do as president.
Fiorina didn’t fit in with the rest of the candidates either, but it wasn’t because she seemed like an amateur; it was because they were out of her league.
Her knowledge base is shockingly deep. Her first big moment was when she showed off her foreign policy chops:
“What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic States. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message. By the way, the reason it is so critically important that every one of us know General Suleimani’s name is because Russia is in Syria right now, because the head of the Quds force traveled to Russia and talked Vladimir Putin into aligning themselves with Iran and Syria to prop up Bashar al-Assad.”
The rest of the night, there didn’t seem to be one issue that she couldn’t give a monologue on with ease. She sounded as in the know as a candidate running for reelection.
Fiorina will win every debate she’s a part of this election cycle because she knows the details of every issue, she knows precisely where she stands on every issue and she can wrap it all in the perfect word package every time.
Trump thought he was taking a shot at Fiorina when he made his instantly infamous comment to Rolling Stone: “Look at that face! … Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?” But I decided to take his advice, and I looked at her face every time the camera was on her during last night’s debates. In that face, I saw nothing but poise, seriousness and confidence in what was the most presidential face on the stage. So, yes, Donald, I can imagine that the face of our next president. I think a lot of the people who looked at her face last night could imagine that.
Zipperer is assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College.