Biggest loser in the GOP debate on Fox Business: CNBC

If the last Republican debate saw CNBC’s clownish moderators expose the media’s absurd approach to running these ill-begotten Vaudeville shows, the one last night may prove to be the moment when the much more serious folks at Fox Business Network effectively killed the CNBC-style debate forever. And they did that by showing how it’s done.

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I still don’t like the debate format that relies on journalists to prompt candidates with questions, but we’ve already talked about that. Given the format we have, the FBN moderators set the stage for a substantive policy discussion simply by asking the kinds of questions that led to such. Nothing about comic books. Nothing about people insulting each other. Nothing about what this or that person said about Rosie O’Donnell. What is your policy idea on this issue? Tell us in detail. That’s the type of question we need in debates if we must have questions, and Neil Cavuto and crew understood that last night in a way that the fools at CNBC did not:

The CNBC debate kicked off with moderator John Harwood asking Donald Trump, a real estate mogul and reality television star, whether he was running "a comic book version of a presidential campaign." By contrast, Fox Business host Cavuto opened by asking Trump whether he was "sympathetic" to people asking for a rise in the minimum wage. CNBC moderators expressed skepticism about the "math" in Ben Carson's tax code, the length of Carly Fiorina's proposed tax reforms, and the impact of Trump's tax cuts on the deficit.

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Fox Business moderators asked candidates to describe their tax cuts in detail, and asked them to elaborate. "You could end this debate now and it's already more substantive than the last one. Also more boring. That's the Catch-22," tweeted Bruce Haynes, president of Purple Strategies, a Republican media consultancy. The time limits on answers were 50 percent longer, allowing candidates to spend more time on their stump speeches - and a gentle bell rather than a moderator's interjection warned them when time was up. To those who will scoff that this was simply Republican-friendly Fox refusing to ask "tough questions," I say a debate is not a press conference. It's a clash between the candidates, and if tough questions need to be asked, the candidates can ask them of each other. That's one of the ways we can assess the strength, intelligence and seriousness of the people on stage. No one needs to remember the people who asked the questions, because as much as this may break some of their hearts, they really are not important. The FBN people probably realized they could earn themselves a lot of praise last night simply by playing it straight, but there's nothing wrong with that. They did it right, and we got a much more informative debate as a result. Disclosure: As most of you know, the boss is a regular contributor to FBN. I, however, am not. (I'm game, though! I don't live that far from Fox 2 studios in Detroit, you know.)

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