On Sept. 16, eleven Republican presidential hopefuls gathered in the Ronald Reagan Library to face off in the second GOP debate of the season. The clash, hosted by CNN, aimed to provide Americans with a more contextualized understanding of policy through candidate interaction. Unlike the Fox debate earlier this season, which relied on moderators to structure discussion, CNN’s news team appeared stripped of its ability to direct the conversation. As topics meandered from Carly Fiorina’s appearance to Mike Huckabee’s disdain for judicial activism, the party seemed too extreme to claim Ronald Reagan as its gatekeeper.
The candidates portrayed themselves as unstinting disciples of Reagan. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush vaunted the “Reagan Ruling” of Title X, while Governor Scott Walker vented his ire at politicians that have strayed from Reagan’s vision of a “big and bold” America. According to Senator Marco Rubio, the expansion of “free enterprise” remains an implicit force in fostering an America of opportunity. The candidates offered little more than sound bites to back their claims.
In his opening statements, establishment candidate Bush touted his economic achievements as Florida’s governor. “I’m a committed, conservative reformer that cut taxes, that balanced the budget, that took on special interests in Florida, and we won” stated Bush.
While Bush may portray his tenure as one of high achievement, his mark on Florida is more questionable. During his tenure, household income growth far outpaced the national average, and unemployment hovered just shy of four percent. Such success, however, may have been due more to timing than to the merits of policy: By 2009, two months after Bush’s term ended, Florida’s unemployment rate rose to 9.1 percent. The housing bubble, which coincided with Bush’s time in office, cost the state more than half a million jobs. In the end, his policies failed to promote lasting growth.
GOP contenders diverge from Reagan on issues of taxation and immigration. Bush, positioning himself as a conservative in the Reagan tradition, fails to acknowledge that Reagan ushered in the largest peacetime tax increases. Through signing the Immigration Reform and Control Act, Reagan granted amnesty to 2.7 million undocumented workers. In a prescient speech at the 1984 presidential debate, Reagan affirmed his belief in “the idea of amnesty for those who have put down roots and lived here, even though sometime back they may have entered illegally.”
Reagan’s initiative provides a contrast to the immigration talk of candidate Ben Carson, who asserts that his proposal “is not amnesty for a number of reasons.” He advocates a guest worker program, in which migrants may serve in the agricultural sphere because that is “the place where Americans don’t seem to want to work.” Such a plan would cement the lower socioeconomic status of immigrants. Nearly a century ago, President Woodrow Wilson initiated his Bracero program, which established a temporary entry to workers from the Western hemisphere. This program, dismantled in 1922, drew criticism for circumventing labor rights.
Conspicuously absent from the debate was any talk of education policy or criminal justice reform. Although the Black Lives Matter movement has beset Democratic candidates, most notably Martin O’Malley and Bernie Sanders, Republicans focused more attention on attacking Trump than talking about the issues. My roommate and I were tempted to turn off the debates when a moderator asked Ms. Fiorina to respond to implications that she is ugly.
Bush’s hints at understanding the common man are especially striking given his record on school reform. In 2002, for-profit companies operated almost three-quarters of charter schools in Florida. To further ease their monopoly on the charter school system, Bush signed into law a bill allowing charter operators which had been denied approval by local school boards to appeal to the state.
On the few social issues the candidates chose to address, many spoke in bromides. When opining on the Supreme Court’s decision to legalize same-sex marriage, Governor Huckabee stated that the Justices’ had overstepped constitutional boundaries: “[i]f the court can just make a decision and we just all surrender to it, we have what Jefferson said was judicial tyranny.”
One wonders at the state of our nation today if Presidents could dismantle Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade on the grounds that the rulings upset consensus. Each candidate may emphasize that power should shift away from “career politicians” and toward the people, but Jefferson envisioned a far more restrained republic than our current system allows. The Supreme Court, with its lifetime appointees, was designed to insulate the country from the burdens of excessive democracy.
In his closing statement, Governor Chris Christie sang praises of America’s potential. He declared that “our presidency – our presidency – will be about enforcing the law, level the playing field for everybody…” If the debate is any indicator of how Americans perceive their institutions of government, opportunity for mobility will remain elusive. •
