Trump dominates first debate
Five takeaways from the Republican debate
CLEVELAND, Ohio — “It’s over!” exclaimed Megyn Kelly at 11:03 p.m., just slightly more than two hours after the Fox News primetime debate in Cleveland, bringing to a close an event that John Weaver, the chief strategist for John Kasich, compared in terms of media anticipation to the chariot race in Ben Hur.
The debate was not quite that spectacular, but it was certainly a wild ride. Anyone who expected politesse or a gentle, soothing entry into the forensic stage of the Republican nomination fight was quickly disabused of such fantasies. There will be acres of analysis of the inaugural debate in the days to come, but herewith are the big takeaways from the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland:
1. Donald Trump can draw a crowd.
Sure there were nine other people on stage but do you really doubt that many tuned in just to see the Donald? An estimated 24 million people watched Fox News Channel’s prime- time debate with the top 10 Republican presidential candidates, the highest-rated broadcast in the network’s history. The Nielsen company said Thursday’s debate ratings more than doubled Fox News’ best ratings in the past, for election night 2012. Fox News Chairman Roger Ailes defended his moderators, calling it “the best political debate team ever put on television.”
2. Donald Trump was Donald Trump — and that was a problem.
From the very first question, regarding the candidates’ willingness to foreswear launching an independent bid for presi- dent, Trump was at the centre of the action. (The explanation he coughed for his refusal to take that pledge was a combination of word salad and verbal hash.) His answers from then on provided fuel for Trump skeptics on both right and left, from his suggestion that single-payer health care might at one point have worked in the U.S. to his sure-to-be-played-in-an-infinite-loop-on-cable reply to Megyn Kelly’s tough-asnails question about his verbal abuse of women (“Only Rosie O’Donnell”). Whether these and other answers — including his tacit endorsement of pay to play, coupled with the vivid suggestion that his campaign donations to Hillary Clinton in effect bought her attendance at his wedding — will dent Trump’s support with his core supporters remains to be seen. But it is hard to imagine his performance did much to expand his appeal to a wider swath of voters, and impossible to argue that it made him seem presidential.
3. Jeb Bush did nothing to reclaim the frontrunner’s mantle.
He made no errors, committed no gaffes and, contrary to some predictions, wasn’t turned into a pinata by his rivals. But aside from a strong and confident answer on Common Core, he was mostly flat, wooden, and halting, and rarely crisp, commanding, or inspiring. Former senior Obama White House adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted, “The frontrunner should be better, much better. If his name wasn’t Bush, he would be done.” And it was difficult to find many non-Bush-backing GOP
commentators who disagreed.
4. The night’s big winners were John Kasich, Marco Rubio — and Carly Fiorina
Sure, the Ohio governor was playing before a friendly, homestate crowd. But he made the most of every opportunity he had in the spotlight, coming across as authentic and charismatic-and speaking in what one savvy student of debates called the grammar of optimism. Though Rubio occasionally sounded a bit too much the senator, his answers were smooth, smart and convincing, presenting conservative policies compellingly and his biography affectingly. As for Fiorina, she was, of course, not on the primetime stage, but her performance in the undercard debate was so strong that Fox News chose to present a striking video clip of it to the top ten. The clip made clear how much her presence was missed, and led to rapidly forming consensus that, one way or the other, she should be in primetime next time.
5. The night’s big losers were Ben Carson and Rand Paul — for different reasons.
The Carson phenomenon has always been a difficult thing to parse. His biography is a big part of it, to be sure, and so his appeal as an outsider. But every time the good doctor opened his mouth, the energy level on stage palpably plummeted; his affect was less appealingly low-key than somnolent. Paul, by contrast, was full of life, but his irritability and thinskinnedness were on display in a testy exchange with Chris Christie over the NSA (which Christie clearly got the better of ); his eye-rolling became an instant GIF sensation on the interwebs. And even when Paul wasn’t visibly annoyed, he seemed screechy and off-key.