Gail Collins: Bret, this may sound a bit strange, but I’ve decided to be grateful for all the political debates going on around us. While the real world can get kinda depressing, the debate world is always ready to just chatter away.
I want to hear your predictions on the Republican set-to coming this week. But first, did you watch the governors go at it? Gavin Newsom versus Ron DeSantis? What did you think?
Bret Stephens: The idea for the governors’ debate was first mooted when it looked like DeSantis could be the Republican presidential nominee. Now he seems slightly less relevant than the moderator, Sean Hannity, as well as slightly more obnoxious. Which is … saying something.
But I still think DeSantis got the better of Newsom on the substance of their arguments. What did you think?
Gail: Thought DeSantis won in the sense that he sounded somewhat less dim than many of us expected.
Bret: I never thought of DeSantis as a dummy. Just a jerk.
Gail: Although having Sean Hannity continually tossing him softball questions helped.
Bret: True.
Gail: Newsom was quicker, and his answers were smarter. As to which state works better, Californians do have to spend a lot to live there, when it comes to housing, food, gas, etc., but Florida ranks 14th on those basics and that’s a whole lot closer to the top than DeSantis seemed to be claiming.
Florida’s taxes are lower but way more regressive — heavy on sales and property taxes that burden the middle and working classes with very little of the social services California dedicates to the poor.
Bret: Since Newsom became governor in 2019, roughly 2.3 million Californians have left the state, but fewer than 1.4 million have arrived, a net loss of close to a million people. This is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot, but in this case it’s literally true: People are voting with their feet. And they are going to red states like Florida and Texas, in part because California ranks last in the country in terms of affordability, violent crime rates are way above the national average and the state has the largest homeless population in the country.
I’m no fan of DeSantis when it comes to his views about abortion or his petty battles with Disney. But as blue states go, the Golden State ain’t exactly a role model for Democratic governance.
Gail: One thing I was thinking while watching the two of them have at it was that the whole scene was a good promotion for your version of conservatism. Whenever the conversation turned to social issues like abortion, DeSantis was toast. When the questions were about public spending, Newsom had to work a whole lot harder.
Bret: It would have been better to have a Democrat from a purple state, like Kentucky’s Andy Beshear or North Carolina’s Roy Cooper, provide the Democratic counter to DeSantis’s extremism.
Gail: Well, I’ll bet a whole bunch of other governors are out there waving their arms to volunteer if Fox News wants to go down this road again.
Bret: I hope someone smart and sane like Chris Wallace can moderate the next one. And speaking of smart and sane, we lost Sandra Day O’Connor last week. Ruth Bader Ginsburg was often treated like a feminist saint, but as a pioneer for women and a legal powerhouse, O’Connor deserves more of the accolades.
Gail: Super happy to applaud Sandra Day O’Connor, but Bret, I think she’d prefer if you celebrate her without dissing another female pioneer.
Bret: Sorry, that came out wrong. Point taken.
Gail: One of my favorite O’Connor stories was when William French Smith, Ronald Reagan’s attorney general at the time, called to interview her for the Supreme Court post. She cheerfully reminded him that she’d applied to his law firm when she graduated from Stanford Law, and the only job she was offered was secretary.
O’Connor then served Smith and her other visitors a salmon mousse she prepared and answered all their questions brilliantly without mentioning that she was recovering from a hysterectomy at the time they dropped by.
Bret: I’ll raise a toast to both O’Connor and Ginsburg for helping ensure that my daughters’ generation won’t have to put up with much of the sexism my mother’s generation had to suffer.
Gail: Amen!
Bret: And, more specifically to O’Connor, to salute her for helping save abortion rights for a generation with her vote in the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, as well as for her impassioned and correct dissent in Kelo v. New London, in which she denounced the use of eminent domain to suit the needs of private developers over poorer private homeowners. She was a conservative who could speak up for the vulnerable. Also, a good reminder that it was a conservative president, Reagan, who nominated her to the court. History will remember them both well.
Another historic figure we lost last week was Henry Kissinger. I’m guessing you weren’t a big fan?
Gail: Well, Bret, I was a student during the Vietnam War era, and I can’t say I was ever a fan. I realize Kissinger’s approach to the war was much more complicated than we gave him credit for at the time. But still not feeling any compulsion to mourn.
Bret: I knew Kissinger personally and once had a spectacularly, almost hilariously, unfriendly interview with him on the subject of China, in which he refused to answer most of my questions. I also disagreed with him about many things, though my criticisms were from the right, not the left. Arms control deals with the Kremlin, for instance, were always a mistake, since the Soviets could never be trusted to keep their word.
Yet I couldn’t help but admire him. His books, especially “Diplomacy,” are guideposts for my thinking about foreign policy. He came to this country as a refugee, served it as a soldier, rose to the pinnacle of influence and had a concept about husbanding American power through what he called our “disastrous oscillations between overcommitment and isolation.” I think it’s better to learn from him than just to castigate him.
Gail: Almost always a smart approach.
Bret: Let’s talk about someone less controversial. How about Elon Musk telling the companies that won’t advertise on Twitter — sorry, X — to, er, go do something or other with themselves?
Gail: Never claimed to be an expert on any twittery issues, but I do have a strong impression that Musk is one of those guys who had one great moment, capitalism-and-market-wise. But it turned out that was absolutely all he had, and once he took his billions down other paths, it was a disaster.
Sorta scary he’s one of the richest guys on the planet. Your thoughts?
Bret: I once called Musk “the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley,” because I thought he was basically a BS artist making a living off misdirected government subsidies for electric vehicles. That was unfair, especially considering the achievements of Tesla and SpaceX. He’s more like the Howard Hughes of Boca Chica — a technological and entrepreneurial visionary whose increasingly self-destructive behavior suggests he should probably lay off the drugs or whatever else he’s on.
And then there’s his efforts to meddle in foreign policy and his endorsement of antisemitic conspiracy theories — which may make him more comparable to Henry Ford. Maybe I’ve been too soft on opinionated billionaires.
Gail: Yeah, maybe what we need to do more of this holiday season is forget about Musk and Take a Lonely Billionaire Out to Lunch.
Bret: Unless you’d prefer to take lonely George Santos out to lunch.
Gail: Think anybody would give us a reservation? Can’t remember when a politician collected so many enemies for stuff that stupid. He’s going to spend the rest of his life known as the Campaign Contributions for Botox guy.
Bret: Or as the Politician Who Lied More Than Is Strictly Necessary.
Gail: Onward and upward. Bret, I promised we’d come back to this, so here goes: There’s another Republican debate coming up on Wednesday night. Might only be three people in it — your fave Nikki Haley, our friend DeSantis and Vivek Ramaswamy the, um, entrepreneur.
I’m hoping Chris Christie might somehow manage to qualify. If we have to watch a quarreling batch of Republicans who will not get the presidential nomination, I’d at least like it to be diverting.
Any predictions?
Bret: Gary Lineker once described soccer as a game in which “22 men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans win.” That feels a bit like this Republican debate: Three or four adults chase the political football across the stage and at the end, Trump wins.
I hope I’m wrong. But with Trump’s primary lead looking increasingly insurmountable, isn’t it time for you Democrats to, uh, panic?
Gail: Joe Biden is the inevitable nominee, if he wants to run for another four years. No way you can dump a guy who’s done a really good overall job as president, who has a fine character and no scandals more pressing than the thing with his son, which many American voters find totally boring.
Of course, we want someone younger than 81, but there’s no non-insulting way to rip the nomination away from him. And he’ll almost certainly be running against Trump, who we note every single week is almost as old and in way worse shape. And while Biden is certainly given to garbling his messages, he seldom comes up with total misstatements and lies.
Plus we’re going to have a campaign in which one of the candidates is facing more felony indictments than most of America’s Most Wanted. Call me sad, but not panicked.
Bret: Gail? I’m panicked.
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