Republican debate 2023 is an unmitigated disaster. Vivek Ramaswamy summed it up perfectly

It was a slip of the tongue, a mistake, a snide retort that wasn’t planned or executed with success — but it said everything about the second Republican debate Wednesday night.

“Thank you for speaking while I’m interrupting,” Vivek Ramaswamy said to Tim Scott and Ron DeSantis.

Exactly. That summed the whole thing up perfectly.

This was cacophony, the candidates ignoring the moderators and constantly talking all over each other, real Tower of Babel stuff.

“When all of you speak at the same time, no one can understand your message,” Ilia Calderón, one of the moderators, said.

To absolutely no avail.

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Ron DeSantis was a TV critic on Sean Hannity's show

Afterwards, on Sean Hannity’s post-game show, DeSantis turned TV critic. “There was a lot of bickering on the stage,” DeSantis said, later adding, “If I was at home watching that, I would turn the channel.”

Dude, you have no idea.

The moderators — Dana Perino from Fox News, Stuart Varney from Fox Business and Univision’s Calderón — asked some good questions and tried gamely to keep the train on the tracks.

But this debate didn’t need moderators. It needed preschool teachers, someone adept at handling immature outbursts. Honestly, when my children were young, if they behaved this way there would have been some serious time outs.

It was a futile effort on the moderators’ part, in other words, but Perino in particular kept at it. “The more you mess with each other, that means the fewer questions you’re going to get,” she said at one point.

Later, she was even more specific.

“Sir, we’ll have to cut your mike, and I don’t want to do that,” she warned Doug Burgum, lonely at the end of the stage and having been asked few questions, so he jumped in whenever he could.

And she didn’t. Maybe she should have. It got loud and it got ugly and it rarely stopped.

“Honestly, every time I hear you I feel a little bit dumber,” Nikki Haley said to Ramaswamy, who did not try as openly to be the most-hated candidate on stage, as he did during the first debate. But he still got the job done.

Honestly, the manufactured outrage about everything is exhausting. Ramaswamy referred to President Joe Biden as the “hollowed-out husk of a current president.” Scott, responding to a question about the Florida educational history standards, including language that there were some “personal benefits” to people who were enslaved, went in a weird direction.

“Black families survived slavery. We survived poll taxes and literacy tests,” Scott said. “What was hard to survive was (Lyndon) Johnson’s Great Society, where they decided to take Black fathers out of the household.”

Ugh.

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Who won the second Republican debate?

The moderators were far from perfect. Abortion, a clear hot-button issue for Republicans and an intriguing topic in the first debate, wasn’t even brought up until the last 15 minutes. And then Perino, asking the last question, bizarrely went the reality-and-game-show route. She noted that if no one drops out, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president — so which of the candidates on stage should be “voted off the island?” She asked them to write their answers on the card they’d been given, “Jeopardy!” style.

“I’ll decline to do that, with all due respect,” DeSantis said.

Now he brings up respect.

I don’t know who had DeSantis as the voice of reason in this cage match, but that’s where we are.

Who won the debate? That's the wrong question. The real question, which no one asked, for obvious reasons, is a simple one: What is the point of all this?

Donald Trump, who once again skipped out, enjoys a massive lead in polls, despite piling up indictments the way Patrick Mahomes piles up passing yards. Trump himself, on his Truth Social platform, called the debates “job applications” like they’re vying for a vice-presidential slot, maybe, or a cabinet position.

Might we suggest, after two debates of attacks on each other, professional wrestling? Both endeavors are entertaining, and equally useful when it comes to governing.

A third debate is scheduled for Nov. 8. It’s not known who will host.

You know what else isn’t known? Why they should even bother.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. X, formerly known as Twitter: @goodyk.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Who won the debate last night? Vivek Ramaswamy, without meaning to