Debate stage less crowded, still chaotic
I guess everyone who watched Tuesday night’s Republican presidential debate had pretty much the same reaction when it started: Rand Paul is still in this? He is, and was at the big kids table, unlike New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose bellicose style was supposed to have him surging. Could this, finally, be the beginning of the winnowing of the overstuffed GOP field?
Certainly if we learned anything from this ongoing TV series, it is that eight is enough. Unlike the previous debates, Tuesday night’s roster was small enough to allow for some thrust and parry.
The national takeaway was that slick Marco Rubio continues to ascend. He’s got the sound bites — “A welder makes more than a philosopher” and a marginally hip reference to Candy Crush. He did make a Freudian slip when he said “the most important job any of us will ever do is being a president.” Or parent, which is what he meant.
Christine Hughes, chair of the San Francisco Republican Party, hosted a local watch party of some 50 Republicans.
“I did a straw poll of who won the debate and Rubio came in No. 1,” she said. “And then I asked if you were to vote today, and Rubio came in
first. I think he has a way of stating complex issues in a way that people understand.”
Rubio continues to nettle the Jeb Bush campaign. Some Bush supporters have reportedly put together a video claiming that Rubio’s abortion stance — militantly antiabortion and no exceptions even in cases of rape or incest — is too extreme for mainstream America. Expect the issue to follow Rubio.
Confused Bush
Meanwhile, Bush continues to rouse himself for spirited responses, only to lose the thread and tail off meekly. In one face-palm moment for his handlers, he started to make a point but found himself deep in the weeds and concluded, “it was, get the, kind of the ... anyway.”
“I thought he started out better, but then trailed off again,” Hughes said.
Paul probably doesn’t have a prayer of winning the presidency, but he proved to be a deft puncturer of debate bluster. When Donald Trump waxed on about China’s role in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Paul broke in with a shout-out to moderator Gerard Baker.
“Hey Gerard,” Paul said, “we might want to point out that China is not part of this deal.”
The demise of the Trump campaign has become a post-debate meme, but this was not his finest two hours. He bristled at criticism from Ohio Gov. John Kasich, airily announcing that “I don’t have to listen to this man.”
And when Carly Fiorina attempted to insert herself in the discussion, Trump earned boos when he asked, “Why does she keep interrupting everybody?”
Kasich continues to say, correctly, that Trump’s plan to simply deport some 11 million undocumented people is not only unworkable but ridiculous.
“Come on folks,” he said. “We all know you can’t pick them up and ship them back across the border. It’s a silly argument.”
Trump’s response was to refer to a Dwight Eisenhower program in the 1950s that deported nearly a million Mexican nationals to Mexico. It was called Operation Wetback, and is now considered a dark moment in U.S. history.
Meanwhile, with Mike Huckabee relegated to the junior debate, Sen. Ted Cruz inherited the evangelical, radio-talkshow-host persona. He’s got it down — searching, sincere eye contact with the camera, the thoughtful pause and then the red-meat punch line.
He told us, “There are more words in the tax code than in the Bible,” and claimed, “Washington is fundamentally corrupt.”
Impractically speaking
But his actual proposals have the sound of someone spit-balling at a Tea Party seminar. He promotes the oftendiscredited 10 percent flat tax and blithely says he’d eliminate the Internal Revenue Service and Department of Energy, among others.
As usual, it was hard to know what to make of Ben Carson. His answers were vague and off topic, but he’s always been like that, and his poll numbers remain high.
Fiorina was a puzzle, hammering the idea that programs like the Consumer Protection Act are “how socialism starts.”
However, Hughes said Fiorina was second in the poll of who won the debate, along with Christie from the undercard.
But when Fiorina and Bush did some saberrattling about creating no-fly zones in Syria, it was Paul, again, who took them on.
He reminded them — and Democratic hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has supported the idea — that Russian planes are already flying there, and “that means you are saying we are going to shoot down Russian planes. If you’re ready for that, be ready to send your sons and daughters to another war in Iraq.”
For a country just out of two destructive wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that was a message that will resonate.
Or not. If you haven’t formed an opinion yet, no worries.
“We still have eight more (debates) to go,” Hughes said.