Unruh Institute hosts GOP primary debate viewing
Students, faculty and other members of the community gathered Wednesday evening in the Wallis Annenberg Hall to watch the second Republican primary debate.
The event was hosted by the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, the Price Bedrosian Center on Governance and the Annenberg Center on Communication, Leadership and Policy.
Prior to the debate, the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Dean Emeritus Geoffrey Cowan moderated a panel featuring Cokie Roberts, a prominent journalist and author, James Barnes, U.S. Politics and Advocacy for Facebook; Matt Rodriguez, CEO of Rodriguez Strategies; and Robert Shrum, Louis Warschaw Chair in Practical Politics and Professor of the Practice of Political Science at USC.
The Republican debate, which was hosted by CNN, lasted several hours, and featured the following candidates: former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, U.S. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson, businessman Donald Trump, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.
CNN Washington correspondents Jake Tapper and Dana Bash moderated the debate, along with radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Razzan Nakhlawi, a sophomore majoring in print and digital journalism, said she attended the event to learn about current events.
“I like to keep up with politics in general,” she said. “I’m personally a Democrat, so I’m pretty left wing, but I like to keep up with what the other side is doing, what they’re saying.”
James Tyner, a freshman majoring in print and digital journalism, said he attended the debate because he does not have a set political stance.
“It’s important to see what all of the candidates are saying because the news cycle is all about Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, and there isn’t much focus on the other candidates,” he said. “It’s also important to see which candidate has a cohesive vision for what they want to accomplish.”
Many USC students attended the debate, completely filling the main lobby.
“It was a fabulous turnout of USC students,” Roberts said. “I think that it shows interest in politics, but I also think it shows a tremendous interest in the characters in this particular debate.”
Cowan said the turnout was so large because students are interested in current events.
“They know that the decision in this election will make a difference in terms of their lives,” he said. “They want to be more informed, and they weren’t just watching the debate, they were also here for the discussion about the issues that were substantive on campus. I think that partly speaks to the fact that they want to be part of an academic as well as a political conversation.”
Despite being known as the conservative party, verbal zings were flying across the Ronald Reagan Memorial Library where the debate was held as the candidates argued for their own policies, disputed their opponents’ and attacked each other’s records.
“If you go online, if you were following Twitter, they say that this debate is out of control,” Cowan said. “Debates have become more about personality and language because in a way you want to know who you like, who you want [as president] for that period of time.”
Cowan said that the person voters like as a candidate might not always be the one with the best policies.
“Carly Fiorina is the person whose comments have been most effective in this debate,” Cowan said. “To me, I don’t feel like Donald Trump has good answers to things.”
Dan Schnur, director of the Unruh Institute of Politics, moderated brief discussions during the commercial breaks as well as an extended panel discussion of the debate after it ended. The panelists were former California assemblymembers Tony Strickland and Dario Frommer, as well as Paul Samaha, a junior majoring in public relations, and Anshu Siripurapu, news editor of the Daily Trojan.
“I think that the biggest thing is that the debate was about capturing what the Republican party stood for,” Frommer said during one of the breaks. “There was a lot of talk about immigration, and immigration is really out of the mainstream right now.”
Samaha noted how the candidates who are not career politicians were more reluctant to speak on issues of foreign policy.
“I think it’s really interesting how Trump, Fiorina and Carson have been silent in this last quarter as the debate turned to international affairs,” Samaha said. “I actually think that Jeb and Rubio did a really good job of spinning the Iraq and Afghanistan wars to make it seem like it was Obama’s fault rather than Bush’s.”