The traditional media has called it: Carly Fiorina won Wednesday night's Republican presidential debate. Mostly, we're told, she won because of her response to a question about Donald Trump's earlier "Look at that face" insult to her. As
Roll Call describes it:
CNN’s Jake Tapper grooved a pitch to Fiorina, asking her to respond to Trump’s remarks in a Rolling Stone interview about her appearance. Fiorina blasted it out of the park, saying, “I think women all over this country heard very clearly what Mr.Trump said.”
Wow! She had an effective pre-rehearsed answer for a question she was almost sure to get. So presidential. But this is hard media consensus at this point. According to the
Los Angeles Times'
Doyle McManus, Fiorina "scored the sound bite of the evening and staked out a role as a champion of women." Mark Halperin, in his
arbiter of beltway wisdom mode, gave her his highest grade of the night, with first mention going to the face response. And so on.
Halperin also notes that "Many TV viewers heard the strongest portions of her improved stump speech for the first time, to her benefit," a fact Heather Digby Parton interprets rather differently in assessing Fiorina's debate performance, writing that "she stood out by being able to think on her feet quickly enough to use standard lines from her well honed, road tested stump speech to good effect as if they were spontaneous answers to the question." Indeed, the answers registered rather differently if you knew how completely canned they were than if you thought this was material Fiorina was pulling together on the fly. Digby goes on:
In fact, much of what Fiorina says is either untrue or incoherent, which her polished style of rapid-fire answers containing long lists of memorized specifics obscures. She is a master at what we used to call “dazzling them with BS.”
Take, for example, how Fiorina claims she'd handle Vladimir Putin and Russia, beginning:
What I would do, immediately, is begin rebuilding the Sixth Fleet, I would begin rebuilding the missile defense program in Poland, I would conduct regular, aggressive military exercises in the Baltic states. I’d probably send a few thousand more troops into Germany. Vladimir Putin would get the message.
Uh huh. Ezra Klein
addresses this one:
The Sixth Fleet is already huge, and it's hard to say why adding to its capabilities would intimidate Putin — after all, America has enough nuclear weapons pointed at Russia to level the country thousands of times over. Her proposal for more military exercises in the Baltics seemed odd in light of the fact that President Obama is already conducting military exercises in the Baltics. And the US already has around 40,000 troops stationed in Germany, so it's hard to say what good "a few thousand" more would do. And pushing on a missile defense system in Poland is a very long-term solution to a very current problem. In total, Fiorina's laundry list of proposals sure sounded like a plan, but on inspection, it's hard to see why any of them would convince Putin to change course.
But what's important is that Fiorina had that one good (rehearsed) line against Trump, and the rest of the time, if you didn't know the facts she was misrepresenting, she sure sounded like she knew what she was talking about. That makes her a big winner, and the Republican establishment couldn't be more thrilled to have a woman in the race to attack Hillary Clinton without looking sexist.