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SEPTEMBER 28, 2023

On the Prospect website

* Gabrielle Gurley looks at Virginia's upcoming legislative elections
,
which may turn on the abortion issue and clarify Gov. Glenn Youngkin's
future

* Bob Kuttner tells the story of the Association of Flight Attendants,
the gutsy, groundbreaking union that made the skies friendlier

for both workers and passengers

* Jarod Facundo reports on the efforts of Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep.
Pramila Jayapal to close the revolving door

between the IRS and the big accounting firms

Meyerson on TAP

Debate Number Two: Phonies and Cacophonies

Shouting over one another, the Republican presidential candidates were
unintelligible last night, and worse when actually audible.

It was the eminent classic Hollywood director Howard Hawks who either
invented (as he claimed) or in any event excelled at putting overlapping
dialogue into the movies. In the fast-paced comedy

**His Girl Friday**, Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell, a disputatious
couple careening dizzyingly from marriage to divorce to recoupling,
consistently talked over each other, and as the plot grew more
convoluted and the action more frenzied, so did everybody else.

His Girl Friday may take the prize as the film with the most characters
talking at the same time-though Robert Altman might have something to
say about that. But Hawks and Altman were entirely eclipsed last night
by the second debate (sans Trump) of the Republican candidates for
president. By my admittedly inexpert clocking of the action, I think a
full quarter and perhaps even a third of the debate's first hour was
rendered unintelligible by having three, four, or sometimes five of the
candidates speaking at once, to which one and sometimes two of the three
moderators felt compelled to add their own voices in a fruitless attempt
to tell the candidates to shut up.

I don't mean to suggest that this incomprehensibility was always the
result of candidates talking over one another. Some of the candidates
demonstrated an impressive ability to be incomprehensible when they were
speaking all by themselves. North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum not only
hollered himself into these overlapping colloquies for fear that the
moderators would (quite reasonably) overlook him, but proved himself
entirely capable of mystifying listeners with his shorthand references
to obscure North Dakota policies even when the mic was his alone.

To be fair, a lot of the problem was the debate rules. Speakers to whom
questions were posed were given one minute to answer, and if they
attacked anyone else onstage, that person got 15 seconds to respond.
These are not exactly Lincoln-Douglas rules structured to produce
intelligent argumentation. They are designed specifically to produce
sound bites, so that a veteran pol like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis used
his minute to recite scripted zingers, while a novice like Burgum used
his to cram five-minute explanations into the one minute allotted, with
bewildering results.

It followed that when the candidates understood they were effectively
blocked from saying very much at all, they all became party to a tacit
agreement (whose effects were all too audible) that they'd ignore the
rules altogether. Accordingly, they exhibited all the bad things that
Dostoevsky was convinced would follow from the notion that, as one of
his characters put it, "everything is lawful-even cannibalism."

To be sure, the candidates' cannibalism was only verbal, but they
devoured one another all the same. They interrupted their fellow
candidates. They interrupted the interrupters. They squabbled and
shouted; they fairly squealed. The only winner in this Hobbesian contest
was Donald Trump.

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By not being there, Trump didn't have to join in the melee when he was
attacked, which Chris Christie did more directly than he had in the
first debate. Vivek Ramaswamy, on the other hand, having generated
torrents of ill will from his fellow candidates by dissing them all in
that first debate, was on the receiving end of nearly constant attacks
from his colleagues, which he sought to counter by shouting his
responses even as his attackers were still in mid-attack. This was
despite his repeated attempts last night to undo the spoiled-brat image
he'd conveyed so masterly at that first debate.

This time around, he hailed his fellow candidates as good fellows all,
even if Nikki Haley wasn't a fellow as such, and readily admitted that
his know-it-all manner didn't mean he really does know it all (just a
whole lot). These efforts were in vain, of course; Haley continued to
pelt him with accusations of foreign-policy idiocy for his non-support
of Ukraine, while Tim Scott, whose handlers had obviously told him to
speak up this time around, made repeated references to Vivek's various
business dealings with Chinese companies that were controlled by that
country's Communist Party. Haley summed up her feelings on Ramaswamy
by saying that she felt "a little bit dumber" every time she heard him
talk. Later, Haley and Scott got into a prolonged tiff of their own over
who'd betrayed their beloved Palmetto State more, by raising the gas
tax (Haley) or authoring bills that went nowhere in Congress (Scott).

Haley, Scott, Christie, and Mike Pence are all still pre-populist,
pre-Trumpian Republicans, talking fondly of balanced budgets and NATO
allies. Ramaswamy and DeSantis, by contrast, made clear they'd
transfer all the dollars we've sent to Ukraine and reroute them to our
border with Mexico. Not willing to entirely concede the Trumpian base to
them or, for that matter, to Trump, Haley also vowed to send special ops
into Mexico to wipe out the cartels there. As Republicans repeatedly
say, borders matter, except when they don't.

The moderators-two from Fox and one from Univision-actually asked
some very good questions. They asked about economic inequality; the
value, if any, of unions; the ratio between CEO pay and median worker
pay; who to blame for the coming government shutdown; the
unaffordability of child care; and the high rate of uninsured
Floridians, as well as the usual stuff on inflation and crime. The
candidates generally succeeded in ignoring questions that were difficult
for them to answer, instead talking about the usual stuff on inflation
and crime. When they were interrupted, the other candidates weren't
interrupting to actually answer the question, either; they just wanted
to loudly state their own off-topic remarks or to attack the candidate
they were interrupting for some unrelated malfeasance.

And so: Haley, Christie, Scott, and Pence-I list them in the order of
their effectiveness in these debates-are all addressing a Republican
Party that's gone to the elephant graveyard. For their part, Ramaswamy
and DeSantis stick with tried-and-true Trumpian themes. The former group
cannot prevail because their party has become fully Trumpified while
they have not; the latter group cannot prevail because who better can
embody Trumpism than Trump? Doug Burgum cannot prevail because he's
Doug Burgum.

The sole value of these debates, in short, is to test the limits of
overlapping dialogue. Howard Hawks, thou shouldst be living at this
hour.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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A Union of Their Own

How a culture of gross sexism in the airlines created America's most
militantly feminist union BY ROBERT KUTTNER

The UAW Strike Could Redefine Biden and the Democrats. Good.

President Biden joined striking workers on the picket line. Former
'car czar' Steve Rattner is furious. BY MAX MORAN & CHRIS LEWIS

Battleground Virginia

The Old Dominion's neck-and-neck legislative elections have huge
implications for abortion rights, public education, gun safety, and
Glenn Youngkin's political future. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY

Warren and Jayapal Raise Revolving-Door Concerns at the IRS

The agency and its prospective nominees are adopting stricter ethics
standards following a 2021 investigation. BY JAROD FACUNDO

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