In the runup to next Wednesday’s Republican debate in Milwaukee, candidates speaking in Atlanta focused their shots at President Joe Biden, not their opponent Donald Trump.
They talked about policy.
“Isn’t it amazing what you can learn when you ask the candidate about the candidate’s policies instead of asking about other people?” host Erick Erickson asked rhetorically after thanking Sen. Tim Scott, who had spent 45 minutes talking about what he'd do as president as contrasted with the Biden administration, and sharing his personal story.
The Gathering 2023, formerly called the RedState Gathering and then the Resurgent Gathering, is hosted by Mr. Erickson, an Atlanta-based radio talk show host with an estimated 5.5 million listeners. This event marked its resumption after a three-year hiatus during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At a hotel in the city’s Buckhead business district, it drew a sold-out crowd of 550 people from 40 states to hear a battery of big-name speakers.
They include the higher profile Republican candidates: South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC), former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, Ambassador and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
They also include a host of other big political names: Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, former Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler, former acting Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Ken Cuccinelli, founder of Mr. DeSantis’s Never Back Down PAC; North Carolina Rep. Mark Walker, Georgia Rep. Rich McCormick, Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst, and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Joining them are other speakers conservatives may want to hear: Josh Holmes of Ruthless Podcast, Michael Duncan of Comfortably Smug; John Ashbrook (ID); Dr. Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation; Virginia Republican Senate candidate Scott Parkinson; Cole Muzio, conservative political operative and president of Frontline Policy Council; Will Hild, executive director of Consumers Research; Grover Norquist, President of Americans for Tax Reform; pollster Brent Buchanan; and parental rights advocates Mehek Cooke, Alleigh Marre and Michele Exner.
They don’t include former President Donald Trump, whose grand jury indictment on charges that he conspired to change Georgia’s 2020 election results were handed up just a few miles away on Aug. 14 by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
“This year’s theme, ‘Forward: Which Way,’ reflects the decision conservatives must make as they consider their choice among the many contenders vying for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination,” event organizers said in a written statement.
“We already know who (Mr. Trump) is,” an event staffer who asked not to be quoted told The Epoch Times. “This is for us to learn more about the other candidates.”
“I'll be bringing together my radio listeners from across the nation with my readers here to hear from conservative voices both running for President and in leadership around the country,” Mr. Erickson said in a written statement.
Mr. Erickson said he’s friendly with four of the six candidates appearing - and several and their wives pray for his wife battling lung cancer, he said - but this would be his first meeting with Messrs. DeSantis and Ramaswamy.
Mr. DeSantis, the strongest of Mr. Trump’s challengers for the GOP nomination so far, led with the economy. Mortgage rates are climbing toward 8 percent, levels not seen in decades. Today’s interest rates make a monthly payment on the same house twice as high as five years ago, he said. “So how is that sustainable for having a strong middle class?”
“Our country is going to succeed or not based on whether we can have small businesses thrive and individual entrepreneurs do well,” he said. He'll look to rebuild military contracting in part by getting more small companies into the loop, not leaving all the business to a few prominent stakeholders.
And with another of the “Day One” commitments he likes to make, Mr. DeSantis pledged, “All of Biden’s executive orders and regulations are going in the trash can on January 20, 2025.”
He decried the Biden administration’s going after domestic energy production. “Who does that help? It helps Russia. It helps Iran and helps Venezuela, and it helps China. They want to force us into electric vehicles. The stuff that goes into that, most of that is produced in China. And so it gives them a competitive advantage.”
Under his administration, he said, “We’re energy independent. We‘ll be the number one energy power in the world. We will have a huge advantage not only economically but in terms of national security. And I think you’ll see that reflected in the standard of living of the average American.”
Mr. DeSantis sees economic and national security issues as intertwined. Once cut off economically from the Western world, China was brought into the global trade community.
“We were told that would make them more democratic. There would be more markets for our manufacturing, even though China took most of our manufacturing. And that China would play by the rules, yet they manipulate their currency. They steal our technology, all that.
“So they’re close to a peer competitor of ours. Their economy may pass us within the next ten years based on the current course and trajectory.
“I think that’s a problem for us economically because if they’re the dominant economic power, that is going to be something that’s going to be felt in the household of every American, and it will affect our freedoms.”
China would be a more formidable national security adversary than the Soviet Union was during the Cold War because “the Soviet Union’s economy was basically a Potemkin village. Reagan understood this. That’s why he spent them into bankruptcy. Even the Axis Powers in World War II, the Allied powers had more economic might.”
Mr. Scott, during his time with Mr. Erickson, discussed a wide range of topics. He alluded to the global military challenge. The nation needs to be ready to fight on three continents at the same time. It must have more than 11 percent of its force allocated to the Indo-Pacific region. The military needs to refocus on “lethality” and end the distractions of unnecessary issues like DEI policies.
Mr. Scott pointed to West Africa’s Sahel region as an area whose growing political instability, driven by factors ranging from Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism to Russia’s mercenary Wagner Group and the struggle for resources, is of increasing concern. Coups have taken place recently in both Mali and Niger.
He floated an innovative idea: reasserting America’s energy independence and begin exporting energy to poor areas like the Sahel, where 80 percent of the people are poor - and rely on burning wood for fuel, which is highly polluting and carcinogenic. It would help them and create jobs in America, Mr. Scott said.
Mr. Scott said that this spring’s banking crisis, in which some called the strength of regional banks into question, wasn’t one. Silicon Valley Bank, whose collapse sparked the problem, was an anomaly, Mr. Scott said: 94 percent of its deposits were federally uninsured, while the average regional bank has 70 percent of its deposits federally insured. Regional banks, he said, “are strong.”
Mr. Scott gave his optimistic message that if he, growing up poor and black in the South as the child of a single mother, can get ahead in this nation, anyone can. He paid tribute to his mother, who was in the crowd, who worked as a nurse’s aide “changing bedpans and rolling patients,” for teaching him a work ethic and raising him right.
That included using a switch on him when he was bad, he said. He and Mr. Erickson joked about their experiences with corporal punishment as children.
Mr. Scott discussed his plans to reform the federal justice system if elected. He'll fire FBI Director Christopher Wray and Attorney General Merrick Garland and clean out a lot of ideologically oriented staffers.
“Lady Justice needs a blindfold,” Mr. Scott said.
Mr. Pence, spending the same amount of time with Mr. Erickson, talked about his differences with the president he served as vice president. Mr. Pence said he’s more of a hawk on the national debt than Mr. Trump is, and is pointedly pro-life while Mr. Trump is “staying away” from the issue. The former president has distanced himself from the heartbeat-bill 6-week limits on abortion implemented in states like Georgia, Florida, and Iowa since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.
“Pro-life Americans will have a champion in the Oval Office,” Mr. Pence said.
At the same time, he defended the Trump-Pence administration’s records on the issues as far more successful than the Biden administration’s.
His time in the White House will serve him well, he said. “One of the reasons we’re running is there’s no time for on-the-job training.”
Biden, he said, “has been trying to cut military spending since he took office.” Republicans face the prospect that if they don’t pass all 13 appropriations bills in Congress, the military will have a mandatory 1 percent cut in defense. This would come while “China is literally floating a battleship in the Asian Pacific Theater about every month. They’re expanding a 350-ship Navy. We’re still falling way behind.”
“When we came in, I’m incredibly proud of the fact that we rebuilt our military. We finally began to give our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines, Coast Guard, and Space Force the resources that they needed to defend our nation.”
The next president, though, faces not just the need to rebuild but also “to build a military fitted to the widening challenges in an ever more dangerous world.” Mr. Pence noted he has a son who is a Marine Corps captain and a son-in-law who’s a Navy lieutenant.
He decried as “a disgrace” Mr. Biden’s “disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. ”I thought we should have left a small footprint of American forces there just to support our counterterrorism efforts.”
He talked about the Trump-Pence administration’s contrasting deal with the Taliban, which held up. An agreement for withdrawing troops, he said, included “three things. Number one, you don’t touch any Americans. Number two, you don’t harbor terrorists. And three, work with the Afghan government.
“We made it clear that if they broke the deal, all [bets] are off. In fact, we made clear, and I was in the room, when the former president actually said to the leader of the Taliban over the telephone, he said, if you broke the deal, we’re going to hit you harder than we ever have before.”
“And that’s why for the next 18 months, there was not one single American casualty in Afghanistan. Which is extraordinary. We'd lost more than 2000 Americans in that fight over the last 20 years, more than 20,000 wounded and injured. Not one American casualty.”
Mr. Pence said he supports an economic “Monroe Doctrine” to restore U.S. business influence in South America to counter the inroads China has made there. “With very few exceptions, in South America, those countries want to be aligned with the United States.”
Domestically, Mr. Pence pledged to eliminate the Department of Education and return 100 percent of its resources to the states. He’s a big fan of the Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which reserves to the states all powers not enumerated for the federal government.
Their strong defense record was why Russian premier Vladimir Putin, who tried to “redraw international lines by force” under both the Bush and Obama administrations, never tried it during the Trump administration.
Domestically, he said, he‘d seek to end the Federal Reserve’s “dual mandate,” in which it doesn’t just preserve the dollar’s integrity but also works to promote full employment. That’s appropriately the business of the president and Congress. He said he’ll appoint a new Federal Reserve chairman if he’s elected.
On the prospect of debating Mr. Trump, who has said he won’t participate in the Milwaukee debate, Mr. Pence said, “Sometimes people ask me that. ‘How do you envision debating Donald Trump?’ I say, ‘I’ve debated Donald Trump a thousand times. It’s just not what the camera saw.’ ”
