Undercard debaters lambaste media coverage of no-show Trump
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Version 0 of 1. An “undercard” debate Thursday for low-polling Republican presidential candidates was focused for much of the time on the highest-polling hopeful who was not onstage: billionaire Donald Trump. In a Des Moines event that preceded the main GOP debate of the night, the participants lamented that Trump had taken so much of the media’s attention away from them. On Thursday, for example, Trump’s decision to boycott the main debate was once again dominating cable news headlines. “This debate was called the undercard debate. The undercard debate. It wasn’t advertised significantly,” said former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.) in his first chance to speak in the debate. He complained that Fox News had spent the previous hour talking about whether Trump would follow up on a threat to stay away. “An entertainer” had captured everyone’s attention, Santorum said. “The entire lead-up to this debate was about whether Donald Trump was going to show up for the next debate.” Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, expressed frustration that he had not had the same success this time around. He blamed the media, who he said had marginalized him by refusing to ask voters about him in opinion polls, and by relegating him to undercard debates such as this one. “Trying to segregate and take Iowans out of the process,” Santorum said, meaning that the media had not allowed Iowans a fair chance to evaluate him this time around. Later, Santorum said he had made 700 political appearances in Iowa over the last five years. Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, the lowest-polling candidate in the undercard, complained of a conspiracy to sideline him, to benefit other candidates on the undercard stage. “There are powerful forces that are really controlling our lives,” Gilmore said. “The biggest one is the organized establishment media. And I just noticed, just now, you gave Carly Fiorina two one-minute answers in a row.” Gilmore had been kept out of the past five undercards because his poll numbers were so low. But moderator Bill Hemmer pointed out that Gilmore had not even appeared in Iowa to campaign until a week ago. “This is not the place where I choose to begin my campaign. I am beginning my campaign in New Hampshire,” Gilmore said. He also took a shot at Santorum and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who were both scheduled to appear at the Trump rally later in the evening. Gilmore said that he came from a humble background: His father was a meat-cutter at Safeway; his mother, a secretary. “I’m not about to go across and carry the coat for some billionaire,” Gilmore said. Rather than addressing Trump’s absence, Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard executive, attacked Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, calling her dishonest and saying that Clinton deserved to be “in the big house” — a euphemism for prison — for her use of a personal e-mail server to handle government data. Fiorina, Gilmore, Huckabee and Santorum are all polling below 5 percent and have little chance to win the Iowa caucuses. Each has been overshadowed by Trump, the bombastic billionaire who rose to the top of the GOP field with promises to erect a giant wall on the border with Mexico and to bar Muslim foreigners from entering the country. |