ELECTION 2016
TRUMP MAY GO ON WARPATH OVER KEY DEBATE ISSUE
Carson and Rubio in crosshairs: 'They're totally controlled'
Garth Kant
WASHINGTON – Two top Republican presidential candidates with the wind at their backs may be sailing into choppy waters at Tuesday’s debate, where the focus will be on the economy.
Following their performances at the last debate, Dr. Ben Carson took the lead in the race for the GOP presidential nomination and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio jumped into third place, according to Real Clear Politics, which averages the major national polls.
But the two may face a dangerous pitfall in the next debate if the topic of trade comes up.
The Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, has been endorsed by Dr. Ben Carson and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., but the massive trade deal is generally reviled by the anti-establishment conservative base of the party and has been blasted by businessman and former front-runner Donald Trump.
Carson was skeptical of the deal back in June but announced his support on Friday, the day after the Obama administration published the text of the mammoth trade deal.
Republican presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson
Carson spokesman Doug Watts told the Wall Street Journal the candidate “believes the agreement does help to level the playing field in key markets and is important to improve our ties to trading partners in Asia as a counterbalance to China’s influence in the region,” and that Carson is “now inclined to support TPP, with reservations.”
If the TPP comes up during the debate, Trump is likely to hammer Carson and Rubio over their support for it.
On Monday, Trump said, “The deal is insanity” and it “should not be supported and it should not be allowed to happen.”
At 5,544 pages, “Nobody understands it,” emphasized Trump.
Previewing a line of attack he could likely to use in the debate, Trump said, “The only people that are supporting it politically are people that are controlled by the lobbyists for certain companies that want this to happen because it’s to their advantage, not to the country’s advantage.”
“So the lobbyists and the special interests are supporting it, and certain politicians are supporting it because they’re totally controlled by the lobbyists and the special interests,” he added.
Other critics say the deal puts too much power in the hands of unelected foreign bureaucrats.
WND reported in June how Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., feared TPP would turn over important congressional powers to a new international body, create an economic union akin to a “nascent European Union” and prevent lawmakers from removing any objectionable provisions.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
“This nation has never seen an agreement that compares to the TPP, which forms a new Pacific Union. This is far more than a trade agreement, but creates a self-governing and self-perpetuating Commission with extraordinary implications for American workers and American sovereignty,” said Sessions.
He was also alarmed that the deal could be used to accelerate the immigration of foreign workers at a time when Americans are hurting for jobs, a concern shared by Trump.
That puts the two on the same side as unions such as the powerful AFL-CIO, who were also concerned it would hurt the American job market and depress wages, and environmentalists who feared the deal would lead to lax protections.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., said the deal would benefit large corporations and banks at the expense of the middle class.
Rubio has given TPP his full support but now appears to be trying to hedge his bet.
Julia Hahn, Breitbart reporter and former press secretary to Rep. Dave Brat, R-Va., has chronicled Rubio’s apparent flip-flop, noting how the senator declared on April 29, “We must rebuild our own military capabilities, conclude and pass TPP, and renew our support for freedom and the rule of law in Asia.”
He also wrote the TPP “will advance economic liberty and unleash free-market forces in the world’s most dynamic region.”
Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
On May 13th, Rubio said, “It is more important than ever that Congress give the president trade promotion authority so that he can finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership.”
So, the Wall Street Journal understandably listed Rubio as one of the candidates supporting the trade deal.
But Hahn noticed how, after the Journal story appeared, “a new paragraph suddenly appeared at the end of the piece stating that ‘Mr. Rubio’s spokesman said that although he backed the bill granting Mr. Obama fast-track trade authority this summer, he has not decided whether to support TPP legislation.’”
“Has not decided” seems a far cry from Rubio’s earlier adamant support for implementation of TPP.
Breitbart asked Rubio’s office what was the senator’s current position on the trade deal.
Hahn wrote: “Rubio’s spokesman directed Breitbart News to an interview with CNBC’s John Harwood, in which Rubio expressed his ‘very positive’ feelings about Obamatrade in the days after Obama reached the agreement.”
That seemed to do little to contradict the Journal’s original assessment, that, “Still backing the trade legislation are the party’s establishment wing candidates: Sen. Marco Rubio and former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida and Govs. John Kasich of Ohio and Chris Christie of New Jersey.”
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz supported “fast-track” legislation needed to secure TPP approval, but did not actually support the trade bill, saying he did not trust President Obama to strike a good deal.
That leaves Trump as the only major candidate to strongly oppose a bill that may be unpopular with a significant number of voters on both the left and the right.
A Pew poll in June found less than half of Americans, 49 percent, favored the TPP.
An even more damning Fast Track poll from last year had found a whopping 62 percent of Americans opposed giving Obama fast-track negotiating authority for the TPP deal.
- 72 percent said TPP would help large corporations while 64 percent said it would hurt small businesses.
- 66 percent said a convincing reason to oppose fast-track authority for TPP is that “workers in countries like Vietnam and Malaysia are exploited and paid as little as 28 cents an hour, which creates unfair competition that drives down wages for American workers.”
- 62 percent agreed TPP was a “NAFTA-style trade deal, and since NAFTA, the United States has run up an eight-trillion-dollar trade deficit, resulting in millions of lost manufacturing jobs.”
- 56 percent said he TPP deal “would make things worse rather than better, in terms of American wages and salaries.”
Republican presidential candidates at the CNBC debate
Smaller big stage
Regardless of whether Trump uses the trade issue to go after his opponents, Tuesday’s debate will offer something new: Someone finally figured out how to reduce the number of candidates on the overflowing GOP debate stage.
For the first time, there will be just eight contenders on the big stage, instead of 10 or 11, in the prime-time debate.
Only eight Republican candidates passed the threshold set by Host Fox Business Network, or FNB, of reaching “2.5 percent or higher in an average of four most recent national polls” (Fox News, Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP, Quinnipiac University and the Wall Street Journal/NBC News).
That means New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee will be kicked off the main stage and relegated to the smaller stage of the earlier “warm-up” debate of four low-polling candidates.
On the main stage for Tuesday’s 9 p.m. EST debate from Milwaukee will be businessman Donald Trump; retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio; Texas Sen. Ted Cruz; former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush; former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina; Ohio Gov. John Kasich; and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
Three candidates did not even meet the one percent polling threshold required to be in the debate at 7 p.m. EST: South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, New York Gov. George Pataki and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore.
The following is where the Republican candidates currently stand in an average of the major polls, as of Nov. 3.
Real Clear Politics GOP presidential poll
- Carson, 24.8 percent
- Trump, 24.6 percent
- Rubio, 11 percent
- Cruz, 8.8 percent
- Bush, 5.8 percent
- Fiorina, 3.9 percent
- Kasich, 3.0 percent
- Paul, 2.8 percent
- Huckabee, 2.6 percent
- Christie, 2.0 percent
- Santorum, 0.8 percent
- Jindal, 0.5 percent
- Graham, 0.5 percent
- Pataki, 0.0 percent
Honesty the best policy?
The debate is supposed to focus on jobs, taxes and the economy.
But one big question may be whether new front-runner Carson can recover after a damning accusation.
On Friday, Politico reported that Carson’s campaign “admitted he did not tell the truth” about having been accepted into the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.
A Carson spokesperson made the response to an inquiry by Politico into the veracity of a story in the surgeon’s autobiography, “Gifted Hands,” that the then-17-year-old was offered a full scholarship after a meeting in 1969 with Gen. William Westmoreland in 1969.
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson
Politico reported West Point had no record of either Carson’s application or admission.
However, a Carson spokesman told the Daily Caller on Friday, “The Politico story is an outright lie.”
Doug Watts said, “The campaign never admitted to anything,” and that Carson “[N]ever said he was admitted or even applied” to West Point.
“This is what we have come to expect from Politico,” added Watts.
“He considered it but in the end did not seek admission” to West Point, said a statement from the Carson camp.
Carson himself said the offer from West Point was informal and he never formally applied, which is how it was described in his book:
“I was offered a full scholarship to West Point. I didn’t refuse the scholarship outright, but I let them know a military career wasn’t where I saw myself going. … As overjoyed as I felt to be offered such a scholarship, I wasn’t really tempted. … I wanted to be a doctor. … Each college required a ten-dollar non-returnable entrance fee sent with the application. I had exactly ten, so I could apply to only one.”
The accusation of the West Point falsehood comes on the heels of a CNN investigation into the accuracy of another claim in “Gifted Hands,” that a teen-aged Carson had reformed himself after a violent youth that included trying to stab a friend and trying to attack his mother with a hammer.
“But nine friends, classmates, and neighbors who grew up with Carson told CNN they have no memory of the anger or violence the candidate has described,” reported CNN’s Scott Glover and Maeve Reston.
“This is a bunch of lies,” responded Carson on CNN. “It’s a bunch of lies. Attempting to say that I’m lying about my history. I think it’s pathetic.”
He said CNN spoke with his high-school acquaintances, but his last “violent episode” happened in the ninth grade, followed by a religious conversion that left him a changed person.
In a news conference, Carson accused the media of a double-standard.
“I do not remember this level of scrutiny for one President Barack Obama when he was running. In fact I remember just the opposite. I remember people saying, ‘Oh, we won’t really talk about that. We won’t talk about that relationship. Well, Frank Marshall Davis, well, we don’t want to talk about that. Bernardine Dohrn, Bill Ayers, well he don’t really know him. All the things that Jeremiah Wright was saying, oh, not a big problem.”
If questions about Carson’s veracity cause Carson to take a hit in the polls, it could be a shocking fall from grace for the renowned pediatric neurosurgeon, whose popularity has been based, at least in part, on a squeaky-clean image of honesty and trustworthiness.
A Fox News poll released on Wednesday found, of all “the presidential candidates registering more than one percent support, only Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, has a majority of voters thinking he is honest and trustworthy.”
Sixty percent of voters said Carson was honest.
He had a net honesty score of positive 34 (60 percent honest vs. 26 percent not).
No other candidate came close.
Fox reported, “The next closest are Bernie Sanders with a net honesty score of positive 12, John Kasich at positive 11 and Mike Huckabee at positive 10.”
The worst score was Hillary Clinton’s negative 26.
Trump scored negative 18.
Heading into the debate, Carson and Trump have been fighting each other for the lead in most polls.
In fact, Carson was the national front-runner as of a week ago in the Real Clear Politics poll, which averages the major polls.
Carson had a slim lead of .2 percent over Trump.
Rubio rumblings
Another candidate facing credibility questions has been Rubio, after getting a good bump and climbing to third place in the polls following his performance in the last debate.
More than a week ago, Trump hammered Rubio, calling him “a disaster with his credit cards.” Rubio finally responded, saying, “I find it curious that Donald Trump, the only person in this race that’s filed for bankruptcy not once but four times, is attacking anybody’s finances.” (Trump has said he never personally filed for bankruptcy, but four of his more than 100 companies did.)
Republican presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
But, on Friday, the Tampa Bay Times reported Rubio had charged Florida GOP committees for payments of $14,000 to relatives, $5,700 to his wife and for $51,000 in unidentified “travel expenses.”
The paper also reported, “He spent big on consultants and travel while giving little to candidates, the ostensible purpose of the committees. Rubio failed to disclose $34,000 in expenses – including $7,000 he paid himself – for one of the committees in 2003 and 2004, as required by state law.”
That comes on the heels of revelations he used a Republican Party of Florida American Express card in 2010 to pay for “groceries, repairs to the family minivan and at a music equipment store.”
“I was as diligent as possible to ensure the party did not pay for items that were unrelated to party business,” Rubio said.
But the Times reported party spokeswoman Katie Gordon confirmed the card was not supposed to be used for personal expenses, saying, “The RPOF American Express card is a corporate card and is meant to be used for business expenses.”
Rubio also made another flip-flop on immigration amnesty.
On Wednesday he said, as president, he would end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program that provides amnesty for immigrants who arrived illegally at a young age, the so-called DREAMers.
Previously, Rubio has said he would not overturn DACA.
However, he said his new-found desire to dismantle DACA was only because it should be replaced by more comprehensive immigration reform.
Rivals have slammed Rubio for defending DACA, with Christie saying, “I don’t know why anyone would want to have someone who is not going to enforce the law as the chief law enforcement officer of the United States.”
Trump tweeted that Rubio’s support for DACA was why he “cannot be president.”
Rubio was one of the primary architects and major proponents of a 2013 amnesty bill that passed in the Senate but went down in flames in the House, even though it was supported by the GOP establishment, Democrats, President Obama and big business.
Rubio’s “comprehensive immigration reform” bill would have provided immediate amnesty and expanded federal benefits to illegal immigrants while postponing border security indefinitely. Rubio has since claimed to have learned that border security must come first.
Hispanics for Trump?
Trump’s strong anti-illegal immigration stance is largely credited for rocketing him to the top of the polls after announcing his run for president.
Both Republican and Democratic critics have said Trump could not win the presidency because of his alienation of the Hispanic vote. But there are fresh indications that may not be true at all. In fact, it might help him with Hispanics.
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump
Last week, the Washington Times discovered pollsters and activists who think Trump “will appeal to the one segment of Hispanics that matters most in elections: those who work and tend to vote. That’s because those voters fear illegal immigrants will compete for their jobs under the new Obama amnesty.”
“This stuff you read about how Hispanics are going to run away from Trump in droves is a Northeastern myth,” longtime presidential Democratic campaign adviser Mark Sanders told the paper.
A top adviser in Democrat Tony Sanchez’s 2002 campaign against then-Gov. Rick Perry, Sanders added, “Most Hispanics here in East Texas are here legally, they vote, and they are hard-line opponents of illegal immigration.”
Most significantly, he observed, “The only one they want is Trump – not Hillary, not Bernie. That’s the conundrum for Democrats.”
Vets for Trump?
Trump has also been expanding his policy portfolio beyond opposition to illegal immigration and mammoth international trade deals.
An op-ed in the New York Post hailed his proposal to reform the Veterans Administration.
In an article titled, “Trump shows real policy chops with great fix for ailing VA,” Betsy McCaughey of the London Center for Policy Research wrote, “The man frequently tagged as lacking substance – Donald Trump – just came out with the best reform plan so far.”
She described how, “Under Trump’s plan, vets of all ages who are eligible for VA care could get treated at any civilian doctor’s office or hospital that takes Medicare. No bureaucratic hoops, pre-approvals or wait lists.”
McCaughey also observed it was a savvy political move by Trump, because, “A whopping 20 percent of Republican primary voters are military veterans.”
Bushed?
While Trump has been cruising in the polls and as Carson and Rubio suddenly have found themselves on the defensive, establishment favorite Jeb Bush may be making his last stand at Tuesday’s debate.
Republican presidential candiate former Gov. Jeb Bush, R-Fla.
Bush has dived to as low as four percent in some polls.
In a story on Friday titled, “Days of Desperation,” Politico outlined how Bush, Christie and Kasich were not gaining any traction.
But the author, Michael Lind, a contributing editor to Politico and author of “Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America,” was hardly bemoaning the demise of the establishment GOP.
Debating the moderators
The economy was supposed to be the focus of the last debate, but media bias against Republicans became the biggest issue of the last debate, to the surprise and the chagrin of the moderators.
Cruz finally had a memorable breakout moment in a debate when he lectured the CNBC moderators: “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media.”
He continued: “This is not a cage match. And you look at the questions: ‘Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, will you insult two people over here? Marco Rubio, why don’t you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?’ How about talking about the substantive issues?”
The crowd roared, his colleagues piled on, and CNBC was roundly pummeled in the aftermath and declared the big loser of the debate.
The Republican National Committee even suspended the debate scheduled to be hosted by NBC on Feb. 26 after complaining CNBC conducted the debate in “bad faith,” and “We simply cannot continue with NBC without full consultation with our campaigns.”
Most GOP candidates consulted on the drafting of letter stating demands for the next debates.
Trump said he will negotiate directly with the networks, and aides for Cruz and Bush said their campaigns saw no reason to sign the letter.
Is it still the economy, stupid?
Democratic campaign guru James Carville famously advised the Bill Clinton team the key to beating President George W. Bush was, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
The economy was supposed to be the focus of the CNBC debate before the debaters turned on the moderators.
If Tuesday’s event on Fox’s business network actually turns to discussing economic issues, one may loom the largest: jobs numbers.
The Obama administration may trumpet Friday’s report showing unemployment has dropped to 5.0 percent from 5.1 percent last month.
But critics howl that is only because there are so few job-seekers left to count.
They say the real unemployment situation is a disaster because record numbers of job-seekers have simply given up and are simply no longer counted as jobless.
Indeed, the number of Americans not in the labor force last month totaled a whopping 94,513,000.
That’s the lowest labor force participation rate in 38 years, with only 62.4 percent of the population either holding a job or actively seeking one.
Republicans largely contend that big government’s deadly one-two punch of excessive regulations and taxes is strangling economic growth and job creation, especially among small businesses.
GOP presidential candidates are starting to run out of time to make the case that they have the best solutions for the economy and the nation’s other woes.
After Tuesday night, there are just two more debates before the Iowa caucuses.
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/11/trump-may-go-on-warpath-over-key-debate-issue/#t6GqZoXc8kLI9UWD.99My comments: It should be clear to any reasonable person that whatever Obama supports is Not Good for America. Yet Carson, Rubio and Cruz all support TPP which gives Obama Tremendous Power; it gives away U.S. Sovereignty by giving more Power to the UN and Foreign Nations. UNCONSCIONABLE! Trump alone stands against this.
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