I didn't watch the Republican Debate tonight — live, anyway. I've decided to take my own advice — dispensed often lately to friends who shudder at the concept of Trump in the White House. Or Carson in the White House. Or Cruz or…well, just about any of them. I wonder if a lot of folks aren't overthinking this riddle of why Trump has his commanding lead. Maybe it's as simple as the concept that most Republicans think the other candidates are less appealing and/or less likely to beat Hillary. No, Trump doesn't seem very presidential but neither do the rest of them.
So the advice I give is to stop paying so much attention to what's going on. It's a long way to the election and so much will change that we may well look back on the current standings the way we look back at when Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich were in the lead.
I did watch a lot of clips and my impression from them was that Ben Carson looked hopelessly clueless, Rand Paul looked irrelevant to the proceedings, Chris Christie looked like he was trying to convince people he could be the baddest ass on the stage and Jeb Bush looked like someone gave him a lot of one-liners and he was desperately trying to find places to slip them in. And does Ted Cruz really think we can do saturation bombing of whole villages, kill all the bad guys and leave the young, ill and innocent unharmed?
Someone will get a bump in the polls but that's meaningless. The second and third debates (I think it was), Carly Fiorina got large bumps in her numbers and now she's polling at the same percentage as the butterfat content of low-fat milk. Winning the Iowa Caucus is only slightly more significant.
I see pundits trying to predict which candidate will be the next to drop out but it seems to me that decision is usually based on facts that are not available to the public. Candidates don't quit this race because their poll numbers are low. Candidates quit because their wealthier donors are moving their money to other candidates. We don't know who's going to learn soon that staying in the race is no longer cost-effective.
And that's as much attention as I'm going to pay to this election for a while. I hope.