Tangle - The RNC's debate decision.

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

On Thursday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), effectively ending more than three decades of bipartisan cooperation to organize debates among the leading candidates for the White House.You can read today's podcast here.You can subscribe to Tangle by clicking here or drop something in our tip jar by clicking here.Our podcast is written by Isaac Saul and produced by Trevor Eichhorn. Music for the podcast was produced by Diet 75.Our newsletter is edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle’s social media manager Magdalena Bokowa, who also created our logo.--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/tanglenews/message Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, and welcome back to the Tangle Podcast, the place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, without all that hysterical nonsense you find everywhere else. I am your host, Isaac Saul, and on today's episode, we are going to be talking about the RNC and presidential debates and their decision recently to basically boycott the commission that runs them. Before we jump in, though, I want to give a quick shout out and thank you to some readers and listeners who sent in some love. Last week, we celebrated our one year anniversary since I quit

my full time job to do this work full time. I'm still kind of sorting through some of the emails and messages we got, but there was a lot of really positive stuff and I can't always respond to all of it. And I just want to say thank you. It was much appreciated. As always, if you want to support our work, the best thing you can do is just, you know, spread the word. Tell some people you know about Tangle, share the link to the podcast or the newsletter or whatever works. And yeah, I really appreciate it. So without further ado, we'll jump in with our what you missed from the few days when we were off and then some quick hits. So first up, we're going to start with the what we missed quick hits. We've been off since

Thursday. Here are a few bits of news that happened while we were gone. Number one, Elon Musk made a takeover bid for Twitter, offering to acquire all the shares of the company to, quote, transform it. There is more on this story in our quick hits section in a moment. Number two, the CDC extended a mask mandate on public transportation for 15 days until May 3rd. There is also some more on this story in today's Quick Hits. Number three, New York police have arrested the gunmen who opened fire on a Brooklyn subway car shooting 10 people before fleeing the scene. Number four,

Moskva, the flagship Russian warship of the Black Sea Fleet, sank after being damaged by an explosion. Ukraine said it hit the ship with missiles, while Russia claims the explosion was from an ammunition fire on board. Number five, the FDA authorized the first ever COVID-19 breath test. Number six, President Biden announced he would resume leasing for oil and gas drilling on federal lands. All right, that is it for some of the stories you missed over the last few days, and here are today's quick hits. 1. Twitter's board detailed a poison pill strategy to ensure no single shareholder can take more than 15% stake in the company without the board's approval. 2. A federal judge in Florida struck down

the mask mandate on public transportation, and the TSA subsequently announced it would no longer enforce it. Several major airlines have made masking optional. Number three, Alex Jones' Infowars filed for bankruptcy after he was found guilty of defamation and liable for damages for his false claims that the Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax. Number four, U.S. Border Patrol said they stopped migrants over 220,000 times in March, a 33% increase from February and the highest number in two decades. Number five, in Ukraine, Russia initiated a large-scale offensive in Donbass, the hotly contested eastern region of the country. All right, that is it for our quick hits. That brings us to today's topic, presidential debates.

On Thursday, the Republican National Committee, the RNC, voted to withdraw from the Commission on Presidential Debates, the CPD, effectively ending more than three years of Republican and Democratic cooperation to organize debates among the leading candidates for the White House. The resolution, which the RNC passed unanimously, requires GOP presidential candidates to attest in writing that they will only appear in primary and general election debates sanctioned by the party. That's according to the Wall Street Journal. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel said debates are an important part of the democratic process and the RNC is committed to free and fair debates. The Commission on Presidential Debates is biased and has refused to enact simple and common sense reforms to help ensure fair debates,

including hosting debates before voting begins and selecting moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage. Any presidential primary candidate who does not agree in writing or who participates in any debate that is not a sanctioned debate shall not be eligible to participate in any further sanctioned debates, end quote. The vote is the culmination of years of a deteriorating relationship between the RNC and CPD and, for now, could have the practical impact of keeping Republican candidates out of general election debates unless certain terms are met. The RNC says it will create a working group to sanction debates that meet their standards for moderators, timing, and news networks, though individual candidates may ultimately hold the most sway on whether to

participate in certain debates or not. Ruptures between the CPD and RNC peaked in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump refused to participate in a virtual debate with candidate Biden after the commission cited concerns over the pandemic. Republicans had already been upset that the first debate was scheduled after over a million voters had already cast ballots, and the tension only intensified when Trump accused then-Fox News host Chris Wallace and C-SPAN political editor and anchor Steve Scully of being, quote, never Trumpers. After Trump criticized Scully, Scully accidentally sent a public message to former Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci to ask for advice. Should I respond to Trump, he said.

When the message was posted to his public Twitter profile and then quickly deleted, Scully claimed his account had been hacked. Then he admitted that that was a lie and the network suspended him. He left C-SPAN in June of 2021. In a moment, we're going to hear some commentary around the vote from the right and left and then my take. First up, we'll start with what the right is saying. Republicans argue that the CPD is biased against Republicans and refuse to make any necessary reforms. Some say it's a good thing the current debate formats might be gone. Others argue we should go back to moderator-list debates that existed before the CPD took over. In Breitbart, RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel wrote an op-ed explaining her position.

It didn't have to be this way, she said. Over the past year, we have attempted to work with the CPD to enact simple and common-sense reforms to help ensure fair debates going forward, hosting debates before voting begins, selecting balanced and unbiased moderators who have never worked for candidates on the debate stage, and prohibiting board members from publicly disparaging nominees. A guarantee that they would fix these issues would have solved the problem, but they refused to do that, McDaniel wrote. It's time for new, unbiased, modern debate platforms to emerge. The CPD has repeatedly chosen debate moderators who exhibit clear bias towards Republican candidates. Steve Scully,

who was chosen by the CPD to moderate a 2020 debate between President Trump and Joe Biden, was literally once an intern for Joe Biden, McDaniel said. It came as little surprise to Republicans when Mr. Scully accidentally revealed prior to the debate that he was seeking advice on how to attack President Trump. In 2012, CNN anchor Candy Crowley interjected herself in the debate and falsely accused our nominee of lying. CNN's Anderson Cooper even hosted a debate in 2016. These are just a few examples of individuals chosen by the CPD to moderate debates who we believed would be biased and later showed it in action on the debate stage. Additionally, we requested the CPD hold at least one debate before the start of early voting.

In fact, 26 states had begun absentee voting and uniform military and overseas voting in all 50 states prior to the first general election debate of 2020. In the week, Samuel Goldman said good riddance to the awkward group interview we call debate. The CPD was established by the major parties in 1987 to secure more control of the process and exclude minor candidates. The format has remained the same. Two candidates on a stage responding to questions posed by a famous television news presenter, Goldman said. We call that a debate, but it's really not. In classic form, political debate involves speakers taking opposing positions on a fixed proposition. Real debate is a showcase for speakers' knowledge, poise, and the rhetorical fluency. It does not prove they're suited to

govern, but it does indicate whether they have a clear position on some important issue and are capable of defending it. That awkward group interview we call debate does little of the kind, Goldman said. The question-and-answer format either gives the speakers free reign to select their own topics or degenerates into tit-for-tat exchanges between participants with the moderator. The tendency of moderators to challenge or correct candidates, rather than merely keeping time and maintaining the flow of questions, is one of Republicans' current grievances against the CPD. But it's not a recent or specifically partisan concern. When debates make a difference, finally, their influence may have less to do with their actual content than with the media narratives about them.

Because candidates' statements are usually vaucus, journalists tend to emphasize superficial qualities of vocal tone, body language, or diction. It's been said that if you want to know who won a debate, watch with the sound turned off. That's an indictment of the whole exercise. The Wall Street Journal editorial board said the GOP won't defer anymore to Beltway Brahmins. The usual suspects are hyping this as a GOP attack on democracy and the American way, the board wrote. Where's the fainting couch? The reality is that sidelining the debate commission will merely put presidential campaigns back in charge. Debate topics and formats will be up for negotiation between Republican and Democratic nominees. One of the GOP's complaints about 2020 is how late the commission's debate

started. The first smackdown between President Trump and President Biden was September 29th. Roughly a million people had already voted. North Carolina began mailing absentee ballots on September 4th without any process to let residents change their votes if they changed their minds before November. The second debate in 2020 was canceled after Mr. Trump caught COVID-19. The commission switched the format to virtual. Mr. Trump refused to appear. As it happens, that debate was meant to be moderated by C-SPAN's Steve Scully, who was suspended from his job the same week, the board wrote. Mr. Trump had criticized Mr. Scully. He used his Twitter to ask a Trump critic, should I respond to Trump? Then he lied

that his Twitter account had been hacked. The upside of cashiering the debate commission is that there's a chance to escape the stale Beltway formula. The next Republican nominee could insist on a debate with no moderators. One candidate gets two minutes, at which point the microphone goes dead. Then the other candidate goes. The nominees could choose their own best topics and pose tough questions directly to each other. Without a preening moderator, they'd get more time to actually debate. All right, that is it for what the right is saying, which brings us to what the left are saying. The left criticizes the move, saying Republicans are inventing grievances about the debates to avoid them altogether. Some say it's just the latest attack on Democratic institutions.

Others argue that Republicans are foolish to give up a chance to debate Joe Biden. Eric Wemple criticized the Republicans' grievances, saying the allegations actually reflect the Republican Party's own issues with facts. A central argument relates to the Debates Commission's decision to name Steve Scully, then of C-SPAN, to moderate a debate in the 2020 presidential campaign between then-President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Wemple wrote. The GOP's gripe is that Scully had, quote, worked for Biden when he was a senator. Technically, yes. Practically, not even close. As a 17-year-old freshman at American University, Scully took a course on Congress and the presidency that included an assignment to a congressional office. I literally opened up the mail, read it,

and sorted it and put it in different bins, recalls Scully. I never even got a picture with the guy. All of this went down in 1978, before Scully worked as an anchor and reporter in local TV news and before a 31-year career at C-SPAN. During that C-SPAN stretch, by the way, Scully became known for his patience and utter neutrality. The RNC has also agreed that several of the commissioner's board members, six of the ten according to McDaniel's op-ed, have said disparaging things about the Republican nominee. Board member Richard Parsons, who served in the Ford White House, said this to The Hollywood Reporter about Trump. He is, by nearly any measure that you want to identify, ill-equipped to be president of the United States. After Trump's horrific remarks after the white nationalist violence in Charlottesville

in 2017, John Danforth, another board member and former senator from Missouri, wrote in the Post that, quote, our party has been corrupted by this hateful man and it is now in peril. Both of those fellows are Republicans, which raises the question, must Republican CPD members take a vow of loyalty to Trump to meet the RNC's requirements, Wemple asked. In MSNBC, Steve Bannon said the Commission on Presidential Debates was nice while it lasted. In recent decades, political norms and Americans' expectations have changed, and many simply assume that presidential hopefuls will take part in debates, but it appears that the Republican National Committee has effectively ended the modern

era of debates for national candidates. According to RNC Chairwoman, this move is less about debates in general and more about the party targeting the Independent Commission on Presidential Debates, which Donald Trump and his party claim is biased. It's not, Bannon said, but reality isn't especially important for this discussion. As we've discussed, in October 2020, the Trump campaign claimed the commission was secretly supporting Joe Biden's candidacy, which wasn't true. A week later, when the CPD announced that the second Trump-Biden debate would be virtual due to the pandemic, Republicans responded with outrage, which wasn't justified, Bannon said. It's still possible, though improbable, that there will be some kind of resolution. Maybe the Commission on Presidential Debates will approve a series of RNC-demanded reforms, which would lead the party to back off. Perhaps some future Republican presidential

hopeful will ignore the RNC's policy, agree to the independent commission's format and schedule, and party officials will follow their nominee's lead. Maybe a Democratic ticket and Republican ticket will negotiate their own debate plan separate from the commission. But if we're being realistic, none of those scenarios is likely to come to fruition. On the contrary, as Republican hostility toward democracy grows, the party is targeting institutions that help serve as our democracy's foundation. In Brookings, John Hudak said Trump should be furious that the RNC nicks presidential debates. For most presidential candidates, debates are valuable, he wrote. They serve as a large-scale,

long-format means of detailing their plans and policies to the American public. Thus, it is surprising that the Republican Party would opt out of these debates during this cycle. First, it is always challenging for a presidential challenger to get as much airtime as a sitting president. Because of the nature of the office and the committed press coverage to a sitting president, the incumbent already has a leg up on the competition when it comes to delivering their message to the public. While there have been rumors that President Biden may not seek a second term, the Republican Party must operate under the assumption that he will seek re-election. As a result, the presidential debates offer a challenger an opportunity to be on the same playing field, in some sense literally, as the sitting president.

Second, presidential campaigns are always a clash and contrast of ideas, and there is no grander stage for that to be played out than a debate. If a candidate is confident that they are a better candidate with a more electable set of ideas and would bring to the office a style and approach far superior to that of their opponent, they should clamor for the opportunity. Third, Republicans have been quite confident in their debate performances in recent elections. On July 2, 2019, President Donald Trump tweeted his own opinion of the 2016 Commission on the Presidential Debate-sponsored events, stating, as most people are aware, according to the polls, I won every debate, including the three with

crooked Hillary Clinton. In the following election, the sitting president claimed to have won both debates once again. After the first debate, he told the press corps, by every measure, we won the debate easily last night. He even went on to suggest that despite his own desire for more debates, then-former Vice President Joe Biden wanted to opt out. All right, that is it for the left and the right's take, which brings us to my take. So I'm struggling to get excited about the whole thing. For starters, I definitely don't think this marks the end of presidential debates. It'd be foolhardy for Republicans not to participate in general election debates,

especially given the current very favorable political climate they're operating in. Even just the appearance of a party nominee backing out of the debate would be terrible, and I'm surprised so many pundits are confident this decision means 2024 presidential debates won't happen. I actually find that prediction rather unlikely. I also don't think the CPD represents democracy's foundation, as Steve Bannon warns, given that it has existed for little more than 40 years. The single most valid grievance the RNC has is the timing of the debates. It is, in my opinion, unacceptable for the first debate to happen after the first ballots have been cast. Voters should get at least one nationally televised general election showdown before any general election voting takes place. The RNC has claimed they could not get any assurances on this. The CPD has so far stayed

mum on the entire thing. If it's true that they wouldn't budge on moving the debates a little earlier in 2024, that's a fairly big issue, one worth hammering the commission for. But it's hard to swallow much else Republicans are saying in this debate. For starters, their primary grievance, as articulated by Ronna McDaniel, is still swirling around Steve Scully, the C-SPAN anchor who interned for Joe Biden part-time for six weeks in 1978 as a 17-year-old. The idea that this is disqualifying for a debate moderator is ludicrous. I feel for Scully. My first job was at the Huffington Post, not because I was a bleeding heart liberal who loved politics, my only prior experience at the time was as a sports reporter, but because I applied to 30 other places and they were the only one that hired me.

It's been nearly a decade and I'm still fighting to shed the assumptions about me from that first gig. Scully's modern crime, in the GOP's eyes, was messaging Scaramucci, who by then was a Trump enemy, and asking whether he should reply to Trump's attacks on him, then trying to deny the affair with the obvious lie that his account was hacked. But McDaniel characterized this exchange as Scully, quote, seeking advice on how to attack President Trump, when really he was seeking advice on how to defend himself from Trump's unprovoked attacks. The distinction here actually matters quite a bit. C-SPAN's consequential suspension of Scully was the right move, given his unethical contacts with a former Trump aide and the fact that he lied about it. But I don't think any of that was proof he was unqualified or too biased to moderate debates. Certainly it wasn't

evidence the CPD was working to kill Trump's candidacy. Scully had one of the finest reputations for neutrality in the business, and, as he has said when defending himself, he spent 31 years on TV conducting over 8,000 interviews without ever expressing a single political opinion. I can't think of another moderator with television experience who could have come close to Scully's on-air neutrality. The second most legitimate gripe is that the moderator for the third debate, MSNBC's Kirsten Welker, didn't ask Biden about his son Hunter's laptop and the story surrounding it. I criticized this in real time, but I also thought that it was a product

of luck more than anything else. If the story had broken before the first debate, Fox News' Chris Wallace or Scully almost certainly would have asked about it. Welker was always the more left-of-center moderator, and it's not like the topics she did cover—race, climate change, leadership, and national security—were of any less significance. Even so, there was near-unanimous agreement at the time that she did better than Wallace, who oversaw the chaotic and absurd first debate of 2020. And, by the way, Trump celebrated the debate at the time, repeatedly praising Welker and declaring unequivocally that he had won and the debate was going to benefit him. Another fair hit about the process was the fact that Donna Brazile, then a CNN contributor, leaked the debate question

to Hillary Clinton in 2016. This was a good reminder of the insidery nature of the candidate showdowns, but that scandal had nothing to do with the CPD's malfeasance, and Brazil lost her CNN contract for the move and was then hired by Fox News. All of which begs the question, why do this? If Trump swept the 2016 and 2020 debates, as he and the RNC claim, if Kirsten Welker did a good job, as they said at the time, is this really just about Scully's tweet or his brief internship at Seventeen with Joe Biden from nearly 45 years ago? Surely the debate format could use some changes, and I'd love it if there was at least one debate in 2024 that was unmoderated. Why not? Let's see what happens with two minutes each where candidates can ask each other questions, and then a hard mute button. If the RNC can score some reasonable reforms like those,

or usher in a fresh take on the format, I'll give them credit. But for now, I'm not sure that boycotting the CPD is the way to make any meaningful changes. I'm certainly not convinced that the RNC's stated grievances are justification for this boycott. And if this ends without any actual general election debates, however unlikely I think that is, it'll be a travesty for the process as a whole. All right, next up is our story that matters today. Texas Governor Greg Abbott ended enhanced inspections of commercial vehicles on the Texas-Mexico border days after the initiative caused major backlogs on the border crossing. Abbott had announced the initiative last week in response to the end of Title 42, but the inspections were widely panned by Mexican truck drivers who blockaded border crossings in protest and slowed the delivery of food to grocery stores

in the U.S. Abbott says he has struck a deal with all four governors of Mexican border states to enhance security and tracking of migration to help slow the flow of illegal border crossings. National Review has the story. There's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, next up is our numbers section. The percentage of voters who said they were undecided in the week before the first 2020 debate was 3%, according to Quinnipiac. The number of people who watched the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016 was 84 million. The percentage of voters who said the 2016 debates were very or somewhat helpful in deciding which candidates to vote for was 63%. The percentage of all registered voters who said they would vote for a Democratic congressional candidate if the midterm elections were held today was 43%, according to a new

Morning Consult poll. The percentage of all registered voters who said they would vote for a Republican congressional candidate if the midterm elections were held today was 42%, according to a new Morning Consult political poll. The same poll said 16% of voters said they didn't know or had no opinion about the midterm elections right now. know or had no opinion about the midterm elections right now. All right, and last but not least, our have a nice day section. This, I guess, could be a little scary depending on who you are. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the largest icy comet ever seen by astronomers. It's 80 miles across. That makes the comet wider than the state of Rhode Island and its mass is estimated to be 500 trillion tons.

But the good news, it'll never get closer than 1 billion miles away from the sun, which is a little bit further away than the planet Saturn. That'll be in the year 2031. For now, we can just marvel in amazement at a telescope that can even spot such a comet and a system that can accurately predict its trajectory nearly 10 years out. NASA has the story and there's a link to it in today's newsletter. All right, everybody, thanks so much for tuning into the podcast. As always, we appreciate all your support. There are links to pat us on the back and give us a big thank you in the episode description. So give that a look if you haven't yet and perhaps become a subscriber.

Don't it. Just share Tangle. Give us a five-star rating, whatever you like. We'll be back here at the same time tomorrow. Have a good one. Peace. Our newsletter is written by Isaac Saul, edited by Bailey Saul, Sean Brady, Ari Weitzman, and produced in conjunction with Tangle's social media manager, Magdalena Bokova, who also helped create our logo.

The podcast is edited by Trevor Eichhorn, and music for the podcast was produced by Diet75. For more from Tangle, subscribe to our newsletter or check out our content archives at www.readtangle.com.