During the first round of the fourth Republican presidential primary debate on Tuesday — consisting of the four candidates with poll numbers to low to qualify for the main stage — Fox Business Channel moderators asked each contender to name one Democrat in Congress whom they admire. Noting that if elected president, they would have to work with Democrats in some capacity to “get things done in Washington,” the moderators said: “I need one name from each of you.”
All four candidates refused.
Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called the question “silly,” then declared: “I want to fire everybody in D.C.”
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee was up next. “Since we’re not going to answer the question,” he began, before launching into a rambling response about the Department of Veterans Affairs. “The VA has been a disaster in large part because the people in Congress have never bothered to fix it,” he said. “What would happen if the Congress and the president had to get their health care from the VA? We would fix the problem and we would fix Congress.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum similarly refused to name a single Democrat with whom they could envision working. Christie used the question to declare that all Democrats are “not standing behind our police officers,” while Santorum threw out a non sequitur about highway funding.
These candidates, who still hope to claw their way back into the upper tier, seem to have learned a lesson from the last primetime GOP debate: If you don’t like the question, don’t answer it at all.