Some Guy ...... ?! .... !!!! :
http://www.wsj.com/articles/see-you-in-cleveland-1447286081" GOP Voters: See You in Cleveland "
" None of the candidates is likely to win a majority of primary delegates. "
By
Daniel Henninger :
" Dive into the political Web and somewhere you’ll find this now-unavoidable headline: 10 Things We Learned From the GOP Debate. Let’s keep it simple. What we learned at the debate in Milwaukee was one thing: This campaign won’t end until it gets to Cleveland.
None of these candidates looks likely to pull away and capture the majority of primary delegates before the party’s nominating convention in Cleveland next July.
After Tuesday’s debate, the fourth evening we’ve all spent with these people, it’s hard for me to see why a round of brokering in Cleveland isn’t the most likely outcome.
This is the most volatile presidential nominating race in memory. Opinion polls, with all their statistical limitations, are playing a dominant role determining who stays on Debate Island and who gets thrown off.
Buried in this polling, however, is the reality that these preferences aren’t much more than sentiments. Most voters admit they haven’t picked a horse. Tuesday’s debate showed why.
In the third debate, on Oct. 28, after strong performances by Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, conventional tea-leaf reading said they would rise as Donald Trump and Ben Carson inevitably faded.
Ben Carson just spent a week passing through an intense crucible over his biographical credibility. After Tuesday evening’s good performance, I’d say Ben Carson isn’t going to fade.
As to Donald Trump, well, we’re close to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and every year you simply marvel at how those fabulous balloons stay afloat.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump, wending his way through the minimum wage issue, said: “Wages are too high.” He survived saying John McCain isn’t a war hero and George W. Bush didn’t keep us safe on 9/11. But this?
Mr. Trump’s blue-collar base is entering its eighth year of Barack Obama’s low-wage economy. If saying wages are too high doesn’t sink him, then he isn’t going to fade from the primaries.
Still, that crack just gave Hillary Clinton’s campaign its Mitt Romney Moment. They would plaster the billionaire’s “wages are too high” across every TV market in the Midwest’s battleground states.
These debates are largely presentation exercises, and Donald Trump survives because his presentation skills are astonishing. Last Friday evening on “The O’Reilly Factor,” Mr. Trump blew right through every direct question Bill O’Reilly asked him. It’s an amazing performance, when he isn’t bellowing.
Jeb Bush, meanwhile, is obviously prone to brain cramps. The people of Washington, Iowa, likely will forgive him for clutching on why they aren’t like Washington, D.C. John Kasich’s remark about what Jeb was “trying to say” about bank capital requirements was nasty if irresistible.
But Mr. Bush did what everyone knew he had to. He kept himself on the field with strong comments on the Obama regulatory blizzard, energy policy and especially his own mockery of Hillary’s “A” grade for the wheezing Obama economy.
Mr. Bush needs to finish no worse than fourth in Iowa’s February caucuses and notch a win or second in New Hampshire. If he survives those tests, the Bush money and campaign machinery will make him competitive through South Carolina and Super Tuesday.
But “competitive” is his minimum baseline now, not last June’s “front-runner.” Mr. Bush looks like a Kentucky Derby favorite running deep in the pack along the rail on the backstretch. His fade tightened the odds for everyone else in the race.
Maybe it’s unfair that the debates have such an outsize role in sorting candidates for the U.S. presidency, but the presentation exercises are useful and revelatory.
Take Ted Cruz. His strategy is to collect “outsider” support if the Carson or Trump campaigns falter. It’s a plausible gambit. But . . .
On one hand, Mr. Cruz Tuesday gave a handsome summary of how to achieve higher growth through Reaganomics: low taxes, deregulation and sound monetary policy. He’s impressive on these important but complex subjects.
But his top pander line—“If Republicans join Democrats as the party of amnesty, we will lose”—fell flat with the Milwaukee audience. Set aside the substance of this issue. The problem is that it was so patently opportunistic. It’s a Cruz quirk and liability. At the margin, it could suppress his vote in big-state primaries, such as Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—battleground states in the general election.
Marco Rubio swings from home-run rhetoric (the minimum wage will “make people more expensive than a machine”) to trite plug-and-play speeches. Did you know his father was a bartender?
Carly Fiorina often starts strong, then talks past any point of interest. Rand Paul demolished Marco Rubio’s family tax credit as a trillion-dollar outlay, then left his chin hanging on national security. Mr. Rubio ducked the tax credit and flattened him.
Undercard king Chris Christie is now the contest’s legitimate dark horse. If he talks personally to every GOP voter in New Hampshire, he may win there. But he’s sooo far back everywhere else.
Get used to hearing “no clear winner” and “no clear front-runner.” Until Cleveland. "
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