JANUARY 18, 2013
\nby Sara Morano \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019ll really never invite me back now.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Chris Cillizza repeated an ongoing joke during the question and answer session of his hour-long CLP event, titled \u201cWhat the Heck Just Happened? The 2012 Election and the Fiscal Cliff\u201d last night in the Watkins Room.<\/p>\n In a crowd of about 80, a member of the audience\u00a0had just asked the columnist behind the popular blog \u201cThe Fix\u201d\u00a0 if he thought there was a candidate on the 2016 frontier that will be able to unite Democrats and Republicans.<\/p>\n Without missing a beat, the seasoned politico shot back, \u201cJohn Huntsman,\u201d a sarcastic answer that sent the audience into peels of laughter.<\/p>\n The irreverent political commentator offered a kind of apology as a follow-up to his sarcasm by lamenting, \u201cI\u2019ll really never get invited back now,\u201d a phrase he repeated a few times throughout the hour.<\/p>\n The large audience of undergraduates seemed to appreciate Cillizza\u2019s humor, even as it perhaps began to go off the cliff.<\/p>\n Cillizza\u00a0 was welcomed to campus jointly by the College Republicans and College Democrats, who asked the\u00a0 frequent commentator on MSNBC, NBSC and CNN to discuss the fiscal cliff crisis, and the 2012 and 2016 election cycles.<\/p>\n Cillizza has a reputation for analyzing Washington like a sportscaster. As he spoke Tuesday night, his marked styled helped build an unusual rapport with the Furman audience. His very funny comments on John Hunstman joke even included the crowd in a working political hypothesis.<\/p>\n \u201cI have been asked more times about John Huntsman in the past six hours here than in the past six months in Washington,\u201d Cillizza observed, \u201cGreenville, South Carolina must just be the national hotbed of Huntsman support.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThree times is a story,\u201d the veteran journalist invoked a politico\u2019s maxim.<\/p>\n According to Cillizza, a \u201cwinners and losers\u201d scheme is an expedient, if ignoble, way of understanding of politics.<\/p>\n Some candidates, Cillizza said, like Republican Chris Christie or Democrat Bill Clinton, have\u00a0 that Lebron James, Huessin Bolt quality that\u00a0 leads them to\u00a0 political stardom, while others , like Hunstman, flounder for reasons\u00a0 perhaps\u00a0 independent of ideology.<\/p>\n \u201cYou would be horrified if you sat in on focus groups,\u201d he said, \u00a0alluding to studies of how votes are actually influenced. All jokes aside, no one was horrified, though, by Tuesday night\u2019s dose of political reality.<\/p>\n Cillizza picked Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal and Tim Scott as rising \u201cwinners\u201d in the Republican party, in desperate need of a strategy for appealing to Hispanic voters in the face of a rapidly shifting electorate.<\/p>\n Hillary Clinton, approaching her 70th birthday soon after the 2016 election, might easily win as the Democratic candidate for president, Cillizza reckoned, but was doubtful that the Secretary of State would be up to the demands of campaigning and presiding at this late point in her career.<\/p>\n The fiscal cliff, Cillizza predicted, would make losers on both sides of the aisle. Although the \u201ccliff\u201d itself is made up (\u201cIt\u2019s like setting an alarm for 6 a.m. to work on a paper due at noon,\u201d Cillizza explained), the consequences of the staggering federal debt are real. Government shutting\u00a0 down, federal workers being furloughed and another credit rating downgrade from Standard and Poor’s are all still possible.<\/p>\n By 9 p.m.,\u201cThe Fix\u201d columnist, \u00a0had suggested much of what needs to be \u201cfixed\u201d at the end of his lecture. \u201cGoing from crisis to crisis is not governance,\u201d Cillizza said in closing, leaving the audience with a thought to resonate well beyond his first visit to Furman.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" JANUARY 18, 2013 The Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s Chris Cillizza visited Furman Tuesday and shared his thoughts on presidential politics, the fiscal cliff and life in Washington, D.C. Cillizzi is a popular television commentator and contributes to a popular blog, “The Fix.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":1004,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-politics-and-international-affairs"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1004"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nby Sara Morano \u201913, Contributing Writer<\/p>\n