The second Republican debate, like the former president’s speech, showed how much has changed
I hear you, I feel a little dumber.” It might have been Jerry Seinfeld, after one of his mouth-agape pauses, responding to George Constanza’s latest theory of life. Better yet, accompanied by a lonesome guitar and rhymed, perhaps, with “plumber” or “warm beer”, the line might have made for a fine country-and-western lyric.
The debate was held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California, and so, inevitably, one of the moderators opened it by invoking Reagan’s cherished description of America as a “shining city on a hill”. Equally inevitably, given the state of the Republican field and possibly of the city itself, from there things went downhill. Time may have softened Reagan’s edges and blurred his flaws, bathing him in a rosy glow as it lengthened his shadow across the land.
Staring into the camera, Mr Christie taunted the former president as being afraid to defend his record. “You keep doing that—no one up here is going to call you Donald Trump,” he said, smugly pausing for what was obviously prepared as a devastating put-down. “We’re going to call you Donald Duck.
Although Mr Trump chose to ignore his rivals for the nomination and act like a general-election candidate, he offered his own backhanded homage to Reagan on the evening of the debate. He spoke at a non-union parts-maker in Macomb County, Michigan, made famous during the Reagan years as the prototypical home of the white working-class Democrats who became key to his national coalition. Such voters have been critical to Mr Trump as well.
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