Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post is positively giddy about watching the upcoming GOP debate:
I feel like a kid the week before Christmas. There’s just one present under the tree, but it’s all a columnist could ever hope for: the first Republican debate! [...] When I look at the Trump phenomenon, I can’t help but recall something Gen. David Petraeus said to my Post colleague Rick Atkinson as they surveyed the battlefield during the early days of the Iraq invasion: “Tell me how this ends.” [...]
Maybe Trump will somehow self-destruct in the debate. But who among his rivals is more skilled at projecting a persona on television? Trump knows how to filibuster and won’t hesitate to turn an inconvenient question back on the questioner. Even if he brings nothing to the lectern but bombast, he might emerge unscathed.
Josh Voorhees at Slate examines the debate criteria at FOX News:
The most specific criterion the network has offered publicly to date is that its polling experts will select “the five most recent national polls, as recognized by Fox News”—a statement that effectively says that Fox News will pick the polls that Fox News picks. This isn’t a minor point: With the bottom half of the GOP field so tightly packed and with so much variability from one poll to the next, if Fox execs wait until the last moment, they won’t be picking polls—they’ll be selecting candidates. And as the head of a cable network that thrives on conservative chaos, Fox News chief Roger Ailes is hardly a disinterested observer. Worse still, Ailes is making those decisions in secret while hiding behind the polls in public.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Donald Trump promises to play nice:
Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine:
The candidates with the most on the line are Rick Perry and John Kasich. As things stand now, both are in contention to land the tenth and final prime-time spot, depending on which polls are averaged. According to sources, advisers for both Kasich and Perry have been calling Fox trying to find out which polls Fox is considering and how they will break a tie. “We don’t know what methodology they’re going to use. We’ve been asking the question and they haven’t shared,” says a Kasich adviser who, like all campaign sources I spoke with, agreed to speak on background for fear of angering Ailes. (Fox spokesperson Irena Briganti did not respond to requests for comment.)
[...] Inside Fox, the debate is generating controversy among Ailes’s senior ranks. “There’s total confusion about all of it. The Second Floor is making it up as they go along,” one Fox personality told me, referring to Ailes’s executive suite. According to sources, Fox executives are still undecided about which polls to use and who will be allowed on the stage. This week, for example, Fox amended an earlier rule that a candidate had to be polling above one percent to participate after it became clear that Lindsey Graham, Carly Fiorina, and George Pataki wouldn’t even make the 5 p.m. event. There’s also unease among some that Trump will likely get a starring role. “The problem is he’ll act like it’s his show,” another Fox personality told me.
Philip Elliott and Zeke Miller at TIME:
How can anyone debate with Donald Trump, the loud-mouthed billionaire who is atop polls of Republicans? Should he be treated as an inconsistent conservative who once backed abortion rights? Cast as an anti-immigrant firebrand who continues to alienate the fast-growing bloc of Hispanic voters? Or is the proper play to simply get out of the way as he panders to his base of frustrated, middle-class voters and hope one of the eight other people do the dirty work of deflating his sky-high poll numbers?
Interviews with campaign strategists, debate coaches and political consultants reveal that there is no single answer, and several different strategies that depend on whether the candidate is likely to be among Trump’s first targets on that televised stage. Begrudgingly, Trump’s rivals recognize they cannot continue to shrug him off. They’re going to have to treat him like a real candidate in Cleveland.
James Downie at The Washington Post examines why Marco Rubio is in real trouble:
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) came in fourth among Republican presidential candidates in a recent poll, trailing leader Donald Trump and second-place Jeb Bush by double-digits. That would be discouraging enough for Rubio’s campaign if it was a national survey. What makes it even worse is that the poll was of voters in Rubio’s home state of Florida. [...] To be fair to Rubio, the survey, conducted by St. Pete Polls, was an “email opt-in poll,” a method of unknown reliability. But in another Florida poll released by Mason-Dixon on Friday, Rubio trailed Bush by 12 points, with Scott Walker and Trump not far behind him. In Mason-Dixon’s previous Florida poll, Rubio was essentially tied with Bush. [...]
What happened? While it would be tempting to pick one big cause, Rubio’s stumble is probably due to a combination of factors: his stumbling answer on the Iraq war, his continued moderation on immigration (an anathema to many GOP voters) and, most recently, Trump’s entrance into the race. Perhaps the biggest problem is that while he is acceptable to many parts of the GOP base, he is none of those parts’ first choice.
Husna Haq at The Christian Science Monitor:
With his penchant for controversy and histrionics, Trump has stolen the thunder from other would-be GOP stars like Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, all of whom have sunk significantly in the polls since Trump took the stage – and the limelight.
One candidate, however, appears to have profited from Trump's flashy entrance: former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. [...] unlike many of their fellow contenders, Bush was already established when Trump entered the race. His name recognition, financial resources, establishment cred, and frontrunner status inoculates the former governor from the Trump Effect.
Maggie Haberman and Nick Corasaniti at The New York Times:
No candidate is more likely to wing it than the mercurial Mr. Trump. But the man who read Senator Lindsey Graham’s cellphone number aloud on a South Carolina stage has set the bar fairly high for himself to do something that would qualify as outrageous [...] “He can’t just complain about the media to a Republican audience when it’s Bret Baier asking the question,” he said, referring to a Fox News anchor.
There have already been glimpses of less-than-sure-footedness from Mr. Trump on the campaign trail. On a trip last week to Laredo, Tex., to visit the border with Mexico, he had difficulty summoning details when pressed on how he would fix the immigration system.
“We have to have legal immigration, legal immigration,” he said repeatedly. “We want to get legal immigration in. We want legal immigration.”
Carlos Lozada:
Sitting down with the collected works of Donald J. Trump is unlike any literary experience I’ve ever had or could ever imagine. I spent this past week reading eight of his books — three memoirs, three business-advice titles and his two political books, all published between 1987 and 2011 — hoping to develop a unified theory of the man, or at least find a method in the Trumpness.
Instead, I found . . . well, is there a single word that combines revulsion, amusement, respect and confusion? That is how it feels, sometimes by turns, often all at once, to binge on Trump’s writings. Over the course of 2,212 pages, I encountered a world where bragging is breathing and insulting is talking, where repetition and contradiction come standard, where vengefulness and insecurity erupt at random.