President Barack Obama on Monday evening weighed in on the controversy over the latest Republican debate by mocking the GOP presidential candidates for not being able to “handle a bunch CNBC moderators”. “When I talk to Putin, he’s going to straighten out, ‘” Obama said last night after having left Newark and on his way to see the Broadway show Hamilton. They meeting arose in the wake of last week’s CNBC Republican presidential debate, which was widely panned by the candidates and Republican officials.
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Despite a handful of high-profile defections, most Republican presidential candidates are still demanding changes to the GOP’s coming debates. Bennett suggested that campaigns could boycott debates to get their way.
This comes as the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus, insists that the party retains control of the process even as the campaigns try to negotiate directly with the host networks. During an interview with Brietbart’s News Daily on SiriusXM, Carson responded, “That wouldn’t happen to be the same President Obama who was afraid to go on Fox, would it…Must be a different guy…That’s just ridiculous”. Do you think Putin would be in the Ukraine today if Ronald Reagan were president? That said, I’ve read the CNBC debate questions (so can you – they’re compiled here) and while a few of them aren’t what I would have asked, only one or two of them remotely resemble “gotcha questions”.
One network official said the campaigns could not make demands about certain aspects of production outlined in the campaigns’ letter, such as whether the camera showed crowd or moderator reactions. (And I continue to be unnerved by the fact that Donald Trump is, at the moment, making more sense than all the rest of them combined, at least on this fauxtrage.) Given their performance to this point, I wouldn’t trust any of these people to park my vehicle, let alone decide when and where the country should make the next war.
The moderators of the recent CNBC debate received criticism for asking disrespectful and unimportant questions of candidates.
It also asks, following complaints that an earlier debate venue was too hot, that the temperature in the venue “be kept below 67 degrees”. Has the RNC lost control of the candidates it leads?
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Speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in New York City, Obama drew boisterous applause when he ripped into the Republicans running for the 2016 presidential nomination.
