The GOP debate, a few surprises.

0:00 Speaker 1 What is today is the honorable Carl Rove, one of the smartest guys I know in Washington, a Republican strategist, worked with the Bush team Deputy Chief of Staff Uh and Carl Rove. This week, there was an interesting week.

0:20 We had debates in Milwaukee and we had a President Trump do his own with Tucker Carlson. Uh, you start where you want to start? Should we start with the debates? Were there any clear winners, any clear losers?

0:41 Speaker 2 Well no, not really. I mean there are some people who did what they needed to do that night. Moron de Santis, I thought had a good opening, he had a good closing. He did a good job of focusing on his ability to get things done, represented by his record in Florida. So this was an important for him

1:00 to have a good night, and he had a good night. Mike Pince was a surprise of the evening. First of all, he was number one. He had twelve minutes out of the debate, more than anybody else on the stage, and he was rather defiantly the recan conservative and went out of his way to accept you know what he did.

1:21 He explained what he did on January sixth into it and accept arrows from the audience if they didn’t want to, if they didn’t like it. But he was defiant, and I thought that was good for him. Nikki Haley had a good night, strength strong, some good lines. She engaged with vivid Greb Sawani, who I think had on points,

1:41 had a good evening and on substance, had a bad evening. To representative of that was his comment that everybody else in the stage was bought and paid for, which I thought was so over the top that it was representative of his mindset. I’m the only perfect person on this stage.

1:56 And he got walked around, He got workeed around on you know, flip flopping on things, He got whacked around on comments that you know, we ought to Ukraine. We ought to get out of Ukraine because we’re forcing Russia to the line itself with China, and we need to stop aid to Israel because we need to have them

2:13 stand on their own. And you know, with Taiwan after twenty twenty eight, we don’t care really whether China invades Taiwan as long as we’ve got our chip factories up and operating by then. I mean, it was like Micki Haley particular said, you know, you have no foreign policy experience and it shows. And he was robotic, I thought,

2:32 very energetic, the high level of energy, big smile, talked very fast. But I think Chris Chiristy got off one of the better lines in the night that he sounded like you know, chat GP GPT and and you know it, Christy had you know mixt night. He was very good. Surprisingly, I’m talking about his record in New Jersey. I suspect

2:52 a lot of people learned something new about what he’d done as governor. He also prosecuted the case against a VIVT. But you know, he was really hoping that Trump would show up. That would be the fireworks of the night.

3:04 And obviously the former president didn’t show Asa Hudchison, Bergham both effective governors of smaller states. Nobody really knew that before they that night, and I think they, you know, did a good job of presenting themselves. We’ll see if they can meet the criteria for the second debate. But and Tim Scott, you know, aspirational, he wasn’t. He didn’t

3:31 speak as much as the others, but he had a nice aspirational, uplifting, positive message and some flashes of humor that were a welcome edition. But look, this was not a debate. It was not without Trump there, It was unlikely to be a debate that had a determinative effect on the outcome of the election. But each of the

3:50 several of the people took advantage of the night to build themselves into a better place, you know, than they were before the debate began. And that included probably the most of the crowd that it really has a shot again into the second slot and slug went out with Donald Trump and Iowa New Hampshire.

4:10 Speaker 1 How many people are going to survive that debate? You think half of them? Or when is the next scheduled debate and how many will survive.

4:20 Speaker 2 Well September twenty seventh at the Reagan Library, And of the eight people there last night, my sense is that there are a couple who are in danger of not making the cut for the next one, because what will happen is the R and C will raise the number of donors that they have to have, and it will

4:40 also raise the number level that they have to be at in national polls. So my sense is Asa Hutcheson and Doug Berghen are going to have trouble with the polling, and ASA may have difficulty with the number of donors, but my sense is that we’re likely to have rather an eight, we’re likely to have six candidates at the

5:02 at the forum and Cebee Belly about four and a half weeks.

5:06 Speaker 1 From now understood and now did you get a chance to see any any portion of the Trump with Tupper calls? There’s a lot of bs around. There was one hundred and fifty million people watching. But you know, Elon Musk, when you own the company and you you know, you don’t know what the real number is, what we don’t.

5:31 Speaker 2 Well, look, I think it had a much smaller viewership than the debates actually did because I mean you’re talking about having to go on X and then find it and you know, forty five minutes long, and so maybe you know, the kids wander in and say, Dad, come play with us, or you know, Mom, what’s what’s for dinner?

5:49 So you know, I just we don’t know. But clearly this rambling sort of thing that went lots of different directions. You know, it was it was Donald Trump’s favorite hits.

6:02 Speaker 1 You know, does Fox does? Does does Fox have a final number? How many people watched on Fox?

6:09 Speaker 2 Uh? I’m sure there is. I don’t know what it is.

6:11 Speaker 1 Yes, I understand, and uh uh the only uh, the the democratic end. You know, you you’re you, you know what you know, you know politics, What the heck is going on in democratic politics?

6:28 Speaker 2 Well, first, let’s let’s say a little bit of word about the Democrats and the debate. I thought there, Uh, they sent Jamie Harrison, the National Democratic Chairman to uh to Milwaukee to counter, uh, you know, the counter the Republican debate. I thought it was a food like performance.

6:46 I mean, everybody is an extremist. You know, everybody loves Joe Biden. The economy is great. That I mentioned that the Republicans are all extremists, and you know, it just was, you know, it was. I’m sure they’ve wasted a lot of money on it, but it wasn’t particularly effective. Look, I think there’s a disquietude inside the Democratic ranks, the

7:10 rank and file. I mean, you see it in these polls in which a majority and in some instances a significant majority of Democrats do not want Joe Biden to run again. And you know, if he runs, they’ll be for him, but they prefer that he not run. And they really do have a stable of people who could run.

7:31 You know, whether it’s the governors of California or Michigan, or New Jersey or North Carolina, all of whom would like to run, or Colorado governor Polos of Colorado would definitely like to run. Or Senators like Corey Booker, who’s still making phone calls to people to let him know that he’s still available, or maybe Clover Shower of Minnesota.

7:53 They’ve got a lot of people who would like to run. And you know, some of the Clinton people are booming for Mitch Lander, the former mayor of New Orleans, who’s the infrastructuriers, are for Biden, but you know they’re stuck.

8:07 As long as Joe Biden says I want to do it, they’re sort of stuck. There’s this interesting Democratic Congressman from Minnesota named Dean Phillips who’s openly saying what is right in my opinion, which is that Democrats would be better serve if they had a open contest for the presidency and a new face at the top of the ticket.

8:27 My view is the American people really want to turn the page on the eighty two. The guy who’s eighty two at the time of the election and the guy who will be seventy eight at the time of the election, and turn this over to a new generation of younger leaders.

8:40 And we’re sort of in nineteen fifty nine, nineteen sixty. We have an admirable president. His name is Dwight Eisenhower, but he was born in the nineteenth century. And the American people said it’s time to pick one of the two young veterans of World War Two, both of them in their early to mid forties, and we chose between

8:57 John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. In what happened is we started a thirty two year period during which America was governed by men from the greatest generation of young men who had been in their forties in nineteen sixty, in their early forties. And it was you know, Kennedy, and then Johnson, and then Nixon, and the Ford and the

9:17 Carter and then Reagan. And it ended with George H. W. Bush, who was the youngest Navy fighter pilot in nineteen forty one forty early in nineteen forty two, and then we turned to the baby boomers, and he’s defeated in nineteen ninety two by the young governor of Arkansas, and for thirty two years we’ve been governed by men from the

9:40 Baby Boomer generation, or, in the case of Joe Biden, the generation before the Baby Boomers, the so called silent generation. And I think there’s I don’t you know, I’m not a numerologist. There’s nothing magic about thirty two years except maybe it is sort of the point at which people say, well, you know what, it’s time to move to a younger

9:57 generation to lead our country. And so Ian Phillips is talking about it. And if somebody did entered the contest with respect and for Joe Biden and talked about what it is they wanted to achieve in a positive and optimistic way, I think he’d have a horse race on his hands, because I think the Democrats are ready for

10:15 that is Robert Kennedy.

10:17 Speaker 1 Is he credible? Does he have a chance?

10:20 Speaker 2 No? I mean, look, he’s got a good last name, the fact that he’s a kook, and getting you know, every conspiracy theory that comes along, whether it’s you know, you know, the the vaccines that we’ve used since the seventeen eighties to combat some of the worst diseases that mankind has ever faced, that somehow or another that those

10:40 those vaccines are somehow responsible for grave illness is ridiculous. And you know, he’s a sort of nine to eleven conspiracy mat I mean, if there’s any conspiracy that comes along, that guy’s sort of in favor. But he’s got a famous last name. There’s not a single member of his family that I think that’s going to vote for him.

10:58 I know some of his cousin they’re really not voting for him. But the fact that he’s getting twenty or twenty five percent is a sign of how Democrats are. Like, you know what, I’m open to an alternative, and he seems to have a famous Democratic name, but no, he’s not a credible candidate.

11:14 Speaker 1 We got one minute left. What would you like to tell the American people Sunday morning?

11:19 Speaker 2 And well, I’ve got it. This is self serving, but I have a long form peace in the weekend Wall Street Journal. I commend to you the politics of America is broken today, but it’s been worse before. And I sketch out in this piece how broken it’s been at many times in our history in which it’s been worse

11:42 than today. And we ought to you know, it’s one thing to acknowledge that we’re in a bad place today. It’s another thing to think that that’s an unusual situation and that we that we face doom as a result.

11:52 We have been in worse places before, and the good common sense of the American people eventually makes it self felt, and we write the country and put it in the right direction. This has happened in our lifetime since in the lifetimes of many people alive today. In the late nineteen sixties and early seventies, when the country looked like

12:09 it was broken. Our politics was uprooted by a very unpopular war and a national scandal and a fight over civil rights and a sexual revolution, and it looked like you had we elected a well meeting guy from Georgia, Peenian farmer, and it looked like the country was, you know, the out of the climb. And along came a sunny,

12:28 optimistic be actor from California named Ronald Reagan, and he put the country back in the right place. And this has happened several times, many times during the course of our country’s history, and we ought to have optimism that as bad as politics is today, we can come out of it.

12:44 Speaker 1 Carl Rove, thank you. A Republican strategist. Thank you for your analysis on a Sunday morning, and God bless you, and God bless America.

12:53 Speaker 2 God Bless America.