More from WaPo:
1. No one attacked Ben Carson, who comes out as the frontrunner. Carson spoke for only 9 minutes and 22 seconds,
less than every other candidate during the two-hour debate. He did not attack anyone, and no one attacked him.
The other candidates on stage calculated that going after the soft-spoken neurosurgeon could backfire, especially if it looked they were doing the bidding of the mainstream media. Ted Cruz, who has the most to gain with Carson’s fall, is trying to make a show of abiding by Ronald Reagan’s 11th Commandment to not speak ill of other Republicans … at least for the time being. And the rest of the social conservatives who see themselves in Carson’s lane were relegated to the undercard debate: Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee.
Determined not to face the kind of criticism that CNBC got after the last debate, Fox Business moderator Neil Cavuto gently asked Carson not about the spate of stories that raise questions about his truthfulness. Instead, he asked him whether he thinks that coverage has hurt his campaign and to talk about his belief that there is a “double standard in the media … that seems obsessed with inconsistencies and potential exaggerations in your life story, but then looked the other way when it came to then Senator Barack Obama’s.” Cavuto never specified Carson’s alleged embellishments or asked him to engage with them substantively.
“I have no problem with being vetted,” Carson said. “What I do have a problem with is being lied about.”
Weekly Standard executive editor
Bill Kristol called it a “weirdly effective tactic”: “He doesn’t criticize anyone, so no one else gets to comment on him, and what he says seems unproblematic.”
Fox News digital politics editor
Chris Stirewalt put Carson at the top of his winners list: “He came to the stage with the press and his rivals hot on his heels over alleged fabrications in his biography. His succinct response to that (with an elbow thrown Hillary Clinton’s way over her Benghazi claims) was effective. But it was his new frontrunner status and cloak of favorability that did the trick.”
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight notes that Carson received more Google search traffic than any other candidate during the debate, “a factor which has sometimes been a better leading indicator of polling movement than pundits’ takes on who did well, and his performance was composed after a couple of weeks of intense media scrutiny.”
2. Jeb Bush “applied the tourniquet” and stopped the bleeding. It’s unclear if he’s bottomed out.
Al Cardenas, a longtime Bush friend, provided a blunt assessment to my colleague
Ed O’Keefe: “Two things happened: He applied the tourniquet and applied it successfully. And number two, he gave the reassurance to the donors, the activists and all the folks involved in the campaign, reassured them that they made the right choice to begin with and re-energized them. This was, in my opinion, the biggest night of the campaign so far.”
“If this was his biggest night, Bush still needs far bigger ones — and soon,”
O’Keefe writes in his analysis. “He’s mired in the single digits in national surveys and in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he will travel again this week. Donors have warned of potential fundraising struggles despite recent decisions to trim his campaign budget.”
“This is the confident Jeb Bush supporters have been waiting for, but how many good answers will it take to break the storm clouds?” wondered
CNN’s Jeff Zeleny.
Still, he got awkward at times.
Ross Douthat offered up a memorable metaphor:
@DouthatNYT)
But Bush manager
Danny Diaz noted in the spin room afterward that the performance was good enough to ensure that Bush stays on the main stage for next month’s debate. “We look forward to catching up with all our good friends in Las Vegas,” he said.
3. Marco Rubio got lobbed softballs so soft that he could not help but LAUGH at one of them. Literally! It helped that Jeb chickened out of picking a fight with him after blowing it so badly in Boulder. The critical reviews of the Florida senator’s performance are positive across the board, with some dissenters saying he sounded too canned.
The Fix’s Chris Cillizza: “Rubio knocked it out of the park when debating military spending and the right role for America in the world with Rand Paul. He got a meatball of a question when asked by the moderators about Hillary Clinton’s résumé as compared with his own; he, unsurprisingly, answered it well and easily. Time and time again, he oozed knowledge while appearing entirely relaxed.”
Conservative
Post columnist Jennifer Rubin: “Rubio once again had the strongest performance. He shot down Paul’s suggestion that spending on the military makes one ‘liberal’ and repeatedly spoke up in favor of strong U.S. leadership. … Asked about running against an experienced Clinton, he went into his effective riff about representing the future while she represents the past.”
The New York Times’ Jonathan Martin and Patrick Healy: “Rubio was not only able to avoid being drawn into the contentious immigration debate, but also repeatedly received questions that allowed him to answer with versions of his stump speech. Even he seemed unable to believe his good fortune when he was asked to make his case against Clinton. He chuckled for a moment before unspooling a well-rehearsed argument: why he can prosecute a ‘generational’ case against her.”
Watch a Vine of the moment here:
Rubio adviser Todd Harris tweeted at midnight that a major donor the campaign had been chasing for six weeks had just sent a two-word email:
“I’m in.”
4. Ted Cruz, who along with Rubio won the last debate, had another great night. He also foreshadowed the very bitter battle to come.
On crony capitalism, Cruz laid the predicate to go after Rubio more explicitly when the field winnows. The Texas senator decried sugar subsidies, but he did not mention that his opponent backs them. The Floridian’s unabashed support for special government handouts that directly boost the bottom line of his own donors at the expense of the free market could become a problematic data point when Cruz eventually sets out to make the case that his Senate rival is a moderate, as he called him last week, or, more credibly, a conservative of convenience.
Thought leaders noticed. For movement conservatives who see the sugar subsidy as the symbol of a backward agriculture policy, including the
top editor at National Review, Cruz’s attack was not subtle.
Lowry wrote
a column declaring Cruz the clear winner afterward: “Rubio was very good, as well. But I thought Rubio was slightly better than Cruz last time, and that Cruz was slightly better this time. Rubio just felt a little off.”
Kristol said
on his magazine’s podcast, “I though Ted Cruz was very strong. He consistently gave substantive answers that were well delivered. … I don’t think Bush saved his campaign.”
“Cruz is showing why so many insiders think he’ll eventually be in the final two or three when the field winnows,” wrote
NBC’s Chuck Todd.
It increasingly seems like this could come down to Rubio vs. Cruz.
Glenn Beck wrote on
Facebook that Rubio and Cruz were the two winners, but he was “leaning a bit” toward Rubio.
Mark Halperin gave all the candidates B’s on his post-debate
report card, but Rubio and Cruz got B-
plusses. The Bloomberg anchor says Cruz “continued his practice of addressing the TV camera, not the moderators or other candidates, to strong effect. A style and issue emphasis with the potential to broaden his appeal.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ways-from-the-republican-debate/?tid=pm_pop_b
