It’s under pressure that (and fiction writers know this well) character is most readily revealed. We now have a great vise that stands to be a useful character-revealer, in the form of the first Republican presidential debate of the new cycle, a little more than a week off. In the interest of holding a debate in which the various candidates have more than three or four minutes to speak, organizers have limited participation to the “top 10” candidates, as determined mainly by polling results. There’s a problem here. While three of the current candidates – Donald Trump, Jeb Bush and Scott Walker – hold a discernible lead over the others, the other 13 “major” candidates are all clumped together in the mid- or low single digits, and most within a margin of error. There’s no easy way to differentiate among them in polling terms, which means there’s no easy way to determine which six won’t make the cut – and thereby risk being characterized afterward as the minor candidates with minor support. What is this leading to? The New York Times describes some of it in its email report this morning: “Until Monday, most of the Republican-on-Republican violence in the 2016 presidential contest had been along familiar lines — Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey against Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky; Donald J. Trump against almost everybody. But the impending first Republican debate, which has a 10-candidate limit that has already prompted some attention-getting stunts, is quickly turning the race into a food fight.” Which may dominate news reports for some days to come. – rs (photo/Senator Ted Cruz, by Michael Vadon)
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