CONTENTIOUS CANDIDATES CRUSH CREED OF CIVILITY
Even on conservative icon’s birthday, contenders at debate attacked each other repeatedly as liars, following that with more insults and accusations
The biggest casualty of the bloody 2016 Republican presidential campaign may be what Ronald Reagan always called the 11th Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
“It’s gone, blasted into grains of dust,” says Thomas Mallon, whose 2015 novel, Finale, focused on the Reagan presidency. “It’s as if Moses came down from the mountain and smashed it with a sledgehammer.’’
Candidates who agree on little besides Reagan’s political divinity have broken his admonition routinely, enthusiastically and creatively. “They’re flat-out shredding it!” says Ford O’Connell, a GOP consultant and author of Hail Mary: The 10-Step Playbook for Republican Recovery.
At the last debate before the New Hampshire primary — on Reagan’s 105th birthday, a fact participants reverently noted — the candidates applied the words “lie,’’ “liar” or “lying ’’ to each other about two dozen times.
Things have gone downhill from there. The next GOP debate is Thursday in Detroit.
Perhaps the best illustration of the demise of Reagan’s edict came last week in the Houston debate, when front-runner Donald Trump stood between Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. First, Trump pointed to Rubio on his right and said, “This guy’s a choke artist.” Then, he pointed to Cruz on his left: “And this guy’s a liar.”
The next day, Rubio gleefully suggested that Trump, whom he’s taken to calling “a con artist,” may have nervously wet his pants on stage. He also has ridiculed Trump’s supposedly small hands. (Trump dismisses him as “Little Marco.”)
So it’s gone for months. Trump called Cruz “a nasty guy,’’ “unhinged’’ and “a basket case.” Chris Christie called Rubio “the boy in the bubble’’ and told him to “man up.’’ Rubio called Cruz a cheater. Jeb Bush called Trump a “bully” and a “loser,’’ adding, “The guy needs therapy.’’
When Trump threatened to sue Cruz for defamation, Cruz said go ahead, adding that he’d take the deposition himself. In South Carolina, he said Rubio was “behaving like Donald Trump with a smile,’’ and Rubio returned fire: “He’s been lying. If you say something that’s not true and you say it over and over and you know it’s not true, there’s no other word for it.’’
“I’m not going to engage in personal attacks,’’ Cruz said on CNN’s State of the Union recently when asked about Trump’s comments about him. “No matter what he says, I like Donald.’’
On another occasion, he took what passes for the high road these days: “I give (Trump) credit. When he insults someone, it’s always memorable and colorful.’’
The squabbling has percolated down to surrogates, non-candidates and neutrals. Pete King, a normally jovial GOP congressman from Long Island, was offended by Cruz’s deprecating reference to “New York values.” He urged the Texan to “go back under a rock.”
In politics, insults are “the wave of the future,” comedian Robert Smigel’s puppet, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, says on
Triumph’s Election Special 2016 on Hulu.
Why so much of what Rubio calls “Republican-on-Republican violence’’ in this campaign? Analysts cite three factors:
1. THE SIZE OF THE FIELD
In a contest that has so many candidates, the competitors have been hard-pressed to stand out or distinguish themselves from rivals who are ideologically much like themselves. That explains why Bush and his PAC attacked fellow centrists as much as Trump, who repeatedly excoriated Bush as a “low-energy’’ loser.
2. SOCIAL MEDIA AND 24/7 CABLE NEWS
Once, a campaign or candidate could wait hours or even days to reply to an attack. “Those were more gentle times,’’ says Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer. “Now the atmosphere has changed.” Candidates can and often do counterattack instantly, passionately and personally, and receive an enormous audience.
3. DONALD J. TRUMP
Trump has even attacked senior, non-candidate Republicans. He accused former president George W. Bush of failing to avert the 9/11 attacks, even though he knew something was coming, and of invading Iraq despite knowing beforehand there were no weapons of mass destruction there. He described Karl Rove, architect of Bush’s election victories, as “a total loser’’ and John McCain — a poor student back at the Naval Academy — as a “dummy.’’
During a debate Feb. 13, John Kasich seemed to have heard enough: “I think we’re fixing to lose the election to Hillary Clinton if we don’t stop this. … This is just crazy, huh? This is just nuts.’’
The rhetoric may be taking a toll. A Fox News poll of South Carolina Republicans before that primary found an increase since December in voters who said they’d “never support” certain candidates.
Trump went from 24% (“relatively high,’’ O’Connell says) to 39% (“incredible”). Cruz’s “never support” share rose from 8% to 19%, Rubio’s from 6% to 11%. Almost half of poll respondents said Trump had attacked other Republicans unfairly. More than a quarter said the same of Cruz, 19% of Rubio and 17% of Bush.
‘A RULE I FOLLOWED’
Reagan did not invent the 11th Commandment. In his autobiography, he said he first heard it enunciated by Gaylord Robinson, chairman of the California Republican Party, in response to personal attacks on Reagan during the primary campaign for governor in 1966.
Lyn Nofziger, a Reagan political operative, said his man needed the commandment because he was a political novice and because personal attacks in the 1964 GOP California presidential primary between Barry Goldwater and Nelson Rockefeller had weakened Goldwater in the general election.
“It’s a rule I followed during that campaign,’’ Reagan wrote of the 11th, “and have ever since.’’
Although it was not always honored — Reagan himself roughed up President Ford in 1976 over plans to give up the Panama Canal — it set the tone for the GOP’s relatively orderly way of doing business.
If it was broken, it was news, as when Bob Dole was asked after losing the 1988 New Hampshire primary if he had a message for the winner, Vice President George H.W. Bush. “Yeah,’’ he snapped, “stop lying about my record.”
“It was an incendiary moment in the campaign. That sort of thing just wasn’t done,” Mallon recalls. “But this year it wouldn’t even make the news.”
What would Reagan make of the tone of Campaign 2016? “It’s always folly to say, ‘If so-and-so were alive, this is what he’d think,’ ” Mallon says. “But I’d make an exception to that rule: I don’t have the slightest doubt that Ronald Reagan would be revolted.”
Reagan’s son Michael agrees: “Do you remember Ronald Reagan insulting his way to the presidency?’’
If Reagan wouldn’t approve of the insults being traded this year, could he have coped as a candidate?
The 40th president was a skilled actor who could seem angry when he wasn’t and attack without seeming to be angry. In a debate in 1980 with President Carter, he rebuffed Carter’s attacks by bemusedly chiding him, “There you go again.’’
Remembered for its charm, the comment was in fact “the ultimate put-down,’’ Shirley says, evidence of why Reagan’s adviser Martin Anderson called him “warmly ruthless.’’
O’Brien Murray, a GOP consultant, says Reagan would have adapted to this Don Rickles campaign: “He was the Great Communicator. Even if he came close to breaking the 11th Commandment, even if he crossed the line, you wouldn’t notice.’’
“Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.’’ Ronald Reagan