The 2016 presidential debate season officially begins tomorrow, with all 17 Republican candidates facing questions from Fox News Channel anchors and hosts — with seven debating at 5pm ET, and the top ten debating at 9pm ET, as everyone knows by now.
Then, over the next six months, these candidates are scheduled to debate on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, CNBC, the Fox Business Network and Telemundo (jointly with NBC).
A look back at the last several GOP presidential primary battles finds that, even though these debates are supposed to be for the benefit of GOP primary voters, journalists — especially those working for liberal news outlets — will hit them with left-leaning questions aimed at fulfilling an anti-conservative media narrative.
Back in 2000, NBC’s Tim Russert scolded frontrunner George W. Bush for daring to name Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher: “Fifteen million atheists in this country, five million Jews, five million Muslims, millions more Buddhists and Hindus. Should they feel excluded from George W. Bush because of his allegiance to Jesus?...Would you take an expression like ‘What would Jesus do?’ into the Oval Office?”
With Bush running as an incumbent, there was no GOP primary contest in 2004, but in 2008, the candidates showed up to a debate held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library moderated by MSNBC’s Chris Matthews (who let that happen?) , with many of the questions supplied by Politico’s evidently liberal readership.
Among the absurd questions posed at that debate: Politico’s Jim VandeHei selected a submitted question from a man who wanted Mitt Romney to disclose “What do you dislike most about America?” Another Politico question felt it was important to find out which candidates had watched Al Gore’s global warming propaganda film, An Inconvenient Truth.
And Chris Matthews felt it was rational to asked the GOP presidential candidates: “Seriously, would it be good for America to have Bill Clinton back living in the White House?” All of the candidates laughed, with Romney retorting, “You have got to be kidding.”
Later that year, the candidates showed up on ABC’s This Week only to be grilled by longtime Des Moines Register political writer David Yepsen: “Is this Republican dogma against taxes now precluding the ability of you and your party to come up with the revenues that the country needs to fix its bridges?”
In its November 28, 2007 so-called YouTube debate, CNN hit the GOP candidates with a question on gay military service from a retired U.S. Brigadier General, Keith Kerr: “I’m an openly gay man. I want to know why you think that American men and women in uniform are not professional enough to serve with gays and lesbians?” What sneaky CNN didn’t tell viewers is that Kerr was at that time a member of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s “LGBT Americans For Hillary Steering Committee.”
Four years later, GOP candidates faced a bevy of left-leaning questions from NBC’s Brian Williams and Politico’s John Harris at a September 7, 2011 debate. Williams peppered Texas Governor Rick Perry with a host of questions laced by liberal assumptions.
“You have touted your state’s low taxes, the lack of regulation, tough tort reform, as the recipe for job growth in the Lone Star state, but Texas ranks last among those who have completed high school, there are only eight other states with more living in poverty, no other state has more working at or below the minimum wage, so is that the kind of answer all Americans are looking for?”
“Governor Perry, you can’t have much of a workforce without a basis of education. As you know, your state ranks among the worst in the country in high school graduation rates, as we established. Yet, you recently signed a budget cut for billions in education funding, you pushed for greater cuts than were in the budget that the legislature passed. You’ve said that education is a top priority, but explain cutting it the way you did, please?”
“Question about Texas. Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times — [ audience cheers and applause ] — have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?...What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?”
Williams also hit Rick Santorum on whether his Catholic faith extended to caring for the poor, and asked then-Texas Congressman Ron Paul if he disagreed with LBJ’s notion of using federal power to supply hot meals for schoolchildren:
“Congressman Paul, a long time ago, a fellow Texan of yours, a young student teacher in Cotulla, Texas, was horrified to see young kids coming into the classroom hungry, some of them with distended bellies because of hunger. He made a vow that if he had anything to do about it the government would provide meals, hot meals at best, in schools. The young student teacher, of course, later went on to be President Lyndon Johnson. Do you think that is any more — providing nutrition in schools for children — a role of the federal government?”
A few weeks later, at a Bloomberg/Washington Post debate, reporter Karen Tumulty tried to get the GOP candidates to parrot the Occupy movement’s talking points about evil capitalists:
“Three years after the financial meltdown, Main Street continues to suffer. People have lost their jobs, they’ve lost their homes, they’ve lost their faith in the future. But Wall Street is thriving. The banks not only got bailed out by the government, they have made huge profits, they’ve paid themselves huge bonuses. Do you think it’s right that no Wall Street executives have gone to jail for the damage they did to the economy?”
And in January 2012, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos was evidently trying to kick-start the liberal talking point about a “war on women” by repeatedly asking Mitt Romney to speculate about whether state’s had the constitutional right to ban birth control.
Romney rejected Stephanopoulos’s biased premise: “No state wants to. I mean, the idea of you putting forward things that states might want to do, that no state wants to do, and asking me whether they could do it or not, is kind of a silly thing, I think.”
The Stephanopoulos-Romney exchange shows how GOP debaters shouldn’t just be thinking about winning over the audience at home. At some point along the way, liberal reporters are going to try to solicit answers from the candidates that could wind up as out-of-context fodder for attack ads or TV news hit pieces.
