Washington Wednesday: Withstand the fire

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the 23rd of August, 2023.

Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. Good morning, I’m Paul Butler.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

First up: Washington Wednesday.

Tonight, eight Republicans face off in Milwaukee for the first presidential debate of 2023.

Five of them are current or former governors. That would be Ron DeSantis, Doug Burgum, Asa Hutchinson, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie.

Also on the stage will be former Vice President Mike Pence, Sen. Tim Scott, and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy.

BUTLER: You may have noticed there’s a big name missing from the list. Former President Donald Trump is skipping this debate, and has indicated he’ll likely pass on future debates as well.

What will the debate be like without the current frontrunner on the stage, and what should voters be looking for tonight from those eight challengers?

EICHER: Joining us now to help answer those questions is Erick Erickson. He is an attorney, host of the Erick Erickson Show, and a WORLD Opinions contributor. Erick, good morning!

ERICKSON: Thanks for having me.

BUTLER: Well, Erick, you’re in a unique position to preview this debate, because you just hosted a number of these candidates at an event in your home state of Georgia.

Very quickly, did anything surprise you? And who do you think the audience at that event connected with the most?

ERICKSON: You know, on different topics, they connected differently, I was very surprised, and the entire audience, I think, was surprised by how much they wound up agreeing with Chris Christie on almost everything he said. A number of people in the audience who had left DeSantis went back to him saying that, if that guy was the contender, he would win. Vivek Ramaswamy did a very good job connecting to people. On the surface level, people still don't know a lot about him. And then Nikki Haley on veterans and military issues, just really resonated with the crowd. Of course, everyone loves Tim Scott and there continues to be this pervasive sentiment that He's so awesome, they don't want to see him run that he's just too nice to run, which is kind of a surprising thing.

EICHER: You know, we don't have time to talk about all of the eight candidates here, Eric, individually, but the top three candidates on the stage tonight, just going in terms of national polling, and that's not necessarily a good idea, but we're talking Ron DeSantis, Vivek Ramaswamy, Mike Pence. Let's begin though with DeSantis. He's still firmly in second place by the polling. But he's way behind Donald Trump. In fact, that gap seems to be widening considerably, has been since the first of the year. What do you think DeSantis needs to do in this debate to set himself apart from the others?

ERICKSON: He's got to show that he is a contender beyond culture war issues, the number one issue for Republican primary voters is pocket book cost of living issues, which he's only just started talking about in the last few weeks. He should have pivoted the moment he got into the race to those issues and didn't. If we are not talking about a strong performance for DeSantis tomorrow, it's going to be fatal to him I think because the donors are going to shift. He's, he's getting big dollar donors. He's not getting the strength of small dollar donors, and he needs to pivot to small dollar donors who want to be reassured that this guy really is the contender.

EICHER: So just for those keeping score at home, I guess we would put it this way, if you put it just down to a sentence or two. This will be a successful debate for Ron DeSantis if... How would you fill in the blank there?

ERICKSON: If he has the most memorable performance that can transcend tomorrow's surrender of Donald Trump to Fulton County Jail. People need to still be talking about Ron DeSantis. Even as the cameras are suddenly on Donald Trump's surrender.

BUTLER: Well, moving now to Vivek Ramaswamy. He's seemingly come out of nowhere. He's gone from a complete unknown to third place in the national polls. He's a newcomer, of course to politics, and this will be his first presidential debate. So the same question, what does he need to do in order to set himself apart from the other candidates?

ERICKSON: He needs to be able to withstand the fire. It's not just the DeSantis campaign gunning for him. All of a sudden all the candidates are beginning to field opposition research on him. He has a lot of ideas that are completely contradictory from ideas he held just a month or two ago. And he needs to be able to explain how he flipped so quickly. As well, he deviates from the almost the entirety of the Republican Party on foreign policy, particularly Israel, Ukraine and defense of Taiwan and even Nikki Haley's campaign is gunning for him on for example, defense of Israel, he's gonna have to withstand the fire.

EICHER: Well, why don't we quickly around the horn here? Let's turn to former Vice President Pence. He's in a bit of a difficult spot. Many Trump supporters don't like him anymore and to many who are not fond of Trump, Pence is associated with Trump. So what does he do tonight to both separate himself and generate momentum behind his own campaign?

ERICKSON: You know, he was on stage with me on Friday at my event and it struck me as he's he's a little more soft spoken, speaks a little slower, moves a little slower. I don't know if he's under the weather or its sign of age, it just, he doesn't feel like he's got a lot of energy. He needs to show that on stage. And I think if Fox wants to really hone in on Mike Pence and make him relevant, in a way I think they do, they've got a great question to ask everyone but Pence: what would you have done if you were in Vice President Pence's position on January 6? That not only makes Pence a part of the debate, but also really asked an intriguing question to the other candidates.

BUTLER: You know, one of the candidates that you mentioned at the top of our conversation was former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and the surprise at that recent event. He's established himself as an attack dog. He's the most vocal critic of Donald Trump. And he's vowed that if Trump was on stage, he would take the fight to him. But of course, the former president isn't going to be there.

So do you think Christie goes after Trump tonight? Or should he focus his fire on DeSantis and some of the other rivals for that non-Trump vote?

ERICKSON: I really think he wants to go after DeSantis. And he tried to with me, and I tried to design my event to avoid going after the other candidates. He went after Trump a little bit. I will tell you where he was willing to go, and I suspect we're going to hear tonight is, he went after both parties for fiscal mismanagement, went very hard after his own party for refusal to deal with entitlements and tied that to Donald Trump's refusal, and also went after both parties very hard on how the budget debt is now a national security issue on a bipartisan basis.

EICHER: So let's drill into the absence of Donald Trump a little bit. How do you think that that is going to change the dynamic of this debate? Is it still just as valuable an opportunity for these candidates with him not being there versus if he were there?

ERICKSON: If they can, one of them can capture some level of lightning in a bottle from this and gain momentum, whether it's DeSantis, or someone else, and Donald Trump is trying to take the oxygen out of the room by not being there, the press has this symbiotic relationship with him. But if someone can capitalize on his absence to stand strong, and stand up, that's going to really help that person. The key will be tomorrow, Thursday, do these candidates, does their message and what they did on stage really overshadow or contend with Trump surrendering? You're going to have to go through a 48 hour level of news cycle to see which candidate captured the imagination of people. And if none of them did, that just helps Donald Trump more.

EICHER: Erick, you’ve been involved in politics for a long time as player and pundit. What do you think it is for Trump: is it purely a numbers game? If the polls tighten, do you see Trump jumping back in or would that be a bad look?

ERICKSON: You know, if the numbers begin to tighten a lot, he will need to get into a debate to put them in their place, so to speak. But that's a problem because by saying, suggesting he's not going to do any debates, the moment he decides to do a debate, it pivots to a weakness on his part. It would have been smarter for his team to preclude the first debate, but leave open the possibility of future debates, and they didn't do that.

BUTLER: Eric, what do you think the purpose of debate is anyway? Why is this a valuable exercise for political candidates?

ERICKSON: In theory, it's to allow the candidates to show their differences of policy and their strengths of personality on a stage together. When you're in a room of rivals, who stands out, who stands apart based on not just their demeanor, but their positions? Who does the crowd resonate with? And they may be able to do that without Trump's dominant personality in the room.

BUTLER: And you feel like that's still a valuable exercise in a in an era of social media with so many other ways of getting that message out?

ERICKSON: Yes, because though they will only have minute, maybe minute-thirty second sound bites, there will be an accumulation of them over those hours on the debate stage. It was like my event this weekend, I had 45 minutes with each candidate to ask open ended questions and it resonated with the crowd. They learned a lot. They won't learn as much in the debate format. But seeing the nuances of the candidates elevated and highlighted by each other does still matter tremendously, particularly when, for example, Doug Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, no one even knows who he is. Will he have a moment where he's able to shine on stage? That could be meaningful for him?

BUTLER: We’ve been talking with syndicated talk show host and WORLD Opinions contributor Erick Erickson. Erick, thanks so much!

ERICKSON: Thanks so much for having me.

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