Why the G.O.P. Candidates Don’t Do Substance
Mabe I missed it,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, said in a tweet on Friday morning, “but we just had an entire #GOPDebate on economics and #TPP was never mentioned.”
.. Rather than focussing on topics like these, the ten candidates spent much of their time attacking CNBC’s moderators (my colleague Amy Davidson has more on this) and competing with each other over who could offer Americans the lowest tax rates.
.. It was left to John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, who is seeking to position himself as the voice of sanity in the asylum, to state the obvious: “You know, these plans would put us trillions and trillions of dollars in debt…. Why don’t we just give a chicken in every pot, while we’re, you know, coming up—coming up with these fantasy tax schemes.”
.. The first problem the candidates face is that the field is still too crowded. Like Wall Street analysts (and media commentators), they therefore have an incentive to adopt extreme positions, because outliers get noticed.