Bill Press: What the debates teach us

Political junkies were in heaven. Last week afforded a rare opportunity to see all 15 viable candidates for president — minus ultra-low-polling Lindsey Graham, George Pataki and Jim Gilmore — strut their stuff in two encounters: the GOP debate from Milwaukee on Nov. 10 and the Democratic line-up from Des Moines, Iowa, on Nov. 14. 

This wasn’t just good political theater, either — you could not ask for a greater contrast between the two major parties. 

{mosads}Indeed, while there were disagreements among candidates of both parties on the issues of the day — Marco Rubio versus Rand Paul on defense spending, for example, or Bernie Sanders versus Hillary Clinton on campaign contributions — they were nothing compared to the differences between how Democrats or Republicans would address the same issues.  

Take the minimum wage. 

Among Democrats, the big debate was over how high to raise it. Sanders and Martin O’Malley called for a $15 per hour minimum federal wage, achieved over the next two years. Hillary Clinton, rather bizarrely, argued for going no higher than $12. 

But, with the exception of John Kasich, all Republican candidates opposed raising the minimum wage at all, on the tired, old, long-disproven argument that it will cause a loss of jobs.

There are other such areas:

On climate change. All three candidates vying for the Democratic presidential nomination agreed on the serious threat posed by climate change and the need for government action. They only differed on who got there first and who would be the strongest leader. Republican candidates deny there’s even such a thing as climate change. So why take any action at all?

On ObamaCare. To varying degrees, the Democratic candidates all consider the Affordable Care Act a major step forward for the United States. Clinton and O’Malley would like to improve it. Sanders wants to expand it to cover everybody. Republican candidates, meanwhile, still insist on repealing ObamaCare altogether and replacing it with something new, or nothing.   

On immigration reform. Democrats are united in supporting comprehensive immigration reform, including a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million people who are in the U.S. illegally and living in the shadows. None of the Republican candidates have endorsed the bipartisan Senate legislation on immigration reform, and all but two of them, Kasich and Jeb Bush, seem to endorse party front-runner Donald Trump’s totally impractical and immoral plan to round up all 11 million illegal immigrants and ship them to Mexico.

Perhaps the starkest difference between the two parties is over income inequality. While candidates for both parties bemoan the plight of the middle class, they take exact opposite paths in how to resolve it. 

Democrats would raise the minimum wage by raising taxes on the wealthiest of Americans and investing those funds in job-creating infrastructure projects. Echoing Ronald Reagan, Republicans would lower taxes on the 1-percenters and corporations even further and wait for all that newfound wealth to “trickle down.”

Not to mention the differences between the parties on Planned Parenthood, abortion and same-sex marriage.

If nothing else, last week’s debates forecast the polar opposite arguments we can expect in the 2016 general election. Anybody with enough intestinal fortitude to sit through both debates had to wonder if they were watching candidates run for president of the same country.

Press is host of “The Bill Press Show” on Free Speech TV and author of “The Obama Hate Machine.”