Candidates as performers

Donald Trump: “All I can say is, you’re lucky in Ohio that you struck oil. That’s the one thing. Let me just tell you that Dwight Eisenhower — good president, great president, people liked him — ‘I like Ike, right?’ The expression, ‘I like Ike’ — moved a million and a half illegal immigrants out of this country. Moved them just beyond the border; they came back. Moved them again, beyond the border, they came back. Didn’t like it. Moved them way south — they never came back. Dwight Eisenhower — you don’t get nicer, you don’t get friendlier — they moved a million and a half people out. We have no choice. We have no choice.”

Governor John Kasich of Ohio: “I’ve got a couple of things here. In the state of Ohio we have grown 347,000 jobs. Our unemployment is half of what it was. Our fracking industry, energy industry, may have contributed 20,000. But if Mr. Trump understood that the real jobs come in the downstream, not in the upstream but in the downstream. And that’s where we’re going to get our jobs. But Ohio is diversified. And little false, little things, sir, they really don’t work when it comes to the truth. So the fact is all I’m suggesting, we can’t ship 11 million people out of this country. Children would be terrified, and it will not work…”

Trump: “I’ve made tens of thousands of jobs. I’ve built an unbelievable company worth billions and billions of dollars. I don’t have to hear from this man, believe me. I don’t have to hear from him.” (To watch the video, click here.)

Swatting mosquitoes

As I suggested almost three months ago, Shakespeare was only half-right when he said all the world’s a stage and the men and women merely players. All of us may indeed be putting on an act, but some of us have better scriptwriters than others. (On the set of Sex and the City, I once thanked the actress Cynthia Nixon for the opportunity the show had given to my writer daughter; she replied, “Without our writers, we’re nothing.”)

More to the point, some of us can think faster on our feet than others, which doesn’t necessarily mean we’re more qualified to run a business or a government. Great performers don’t necessarily make great administrators.

During the exchange above, seven men and one woman clamored for attention. Kasich, arguably the most qualified prospective president on the stage (he’s a second-term Ohio governor and former chairman of the House Budget Committee), attempted the ludicrous task of deflecting multiple Trump fallacies within the precious few seconds allotted to him, with all the success of a man swatting mosquitoes in a swamp. Trump, arguably the candidate least qualified for the White House, deflected Kasich’s inarticulate criticism with a glib (if absurd) soundbite.

Bloomberg and Martin Luther

Kasich never got a chance to respond. But if he had — what should he have said? I’ve had nearly three months to think about that question (I’m not very fast on my feet, either). Herewith a few suggested snappy comebacks:

1. I might say the same to you, sir. I’ve run a state government for five years; you’ve never held any sort of public office. While I grappled with real public issues, you were contriving fake issues on a TV show. You talk a good talk, but I’ve walked the walk.
2. You say you don’t have to listen? Good luck with that philosophy if, God forbid, you make it to the Oval Office. If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
3. Let me get this straight. You want to spend billions to remove 11 million illegal immigrants who currently contribute $40 billion a year in taxes while drawing very few benefits? And you say you graduated from Wharton?
4. You say you’ve made billions. But Bloomberg News Service recently concluded that you could have made even more if you’d invested your inheritance in a stock index. You remind me of the joke about how to make a small fortune: Start with a large one.
5. About your billions, Donald — I yield to Martin Luther: “Riches are the least worthy gifts which God can give men. Therefore, God commonly gives riches to foolish people, to whom he gives nothing else.”

Albert Brooks on reality TV

The seventh Republican Presidential debate will take place Thursday night in Des Moines (and televised on Fox). You and I and millions of our fellow Americans will tune in, if only because these rhetorical battles, like TV sports, are as close as we’re likely to come to genuinely unpredictable real-time drama in our otherwise carefully scripted lives. (For the definitive word on so-called “reality TV,” check out Albert Brooks’s 1979 comedy Real Life, in which a documentary film director, desperate to recoup his investment, attempts to inject some drama into the mundane lives of an ostensibly typical American family, first by seducing the lady of the house and ultimately by setting fire to the house.) Were Shakespeare writing As You Like It today, surely, the melancholy Jaques would begin his famous monologue: “All the world’s a stage, and most of us are spectators.”