Going in, Chris Christie was the guy to watch at the undercard debate. He’s moving in New Hampshire, he handled his relegation with grit, and people are finally starting to see what a talent he is.
Clearly, he wanted to replicate what Carly Fiorina did in the first kids’ table debate by focusing exclusively on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and avoid getting dragged into scuffles with the other candidates. He wanted to talk directly to voters and show them how tough he’d be in a general election match-up.
It’s worth noting that Christie was the only one who talked about actually being in a general election match up. He kept saying “when I’m president” and that was a pretty effective, yet subtle, reminder that of the four guys on stage Christie was the only one with even an outside chance to be the nominee.
All of that, while Christie succeeded within the parameters of what this debate would allow, he wasn’t able to establish Fiorina-like dominance. And that’s because the dynamics of this stage made that impossible. In the first debate, people stayed in their own lanes and focused on introducing themselves. At this point we’ve entered demolition derby mode for the also-rans where people with nothing to lose were willing to do anything to try to stand out. With so much crossfire, Christie could only do so much. (But his close was awfully strong.)
Bobby Jindal went super-aggro, which was entirely predictable. Fresh off of challenging Ted Cruz to a one-on-one debate, Jindal went after Huckabee first and then Christie for a litany of sins—not being conservative enough, not cutting spending enough, fiscal mismanagement, etc. He was snide and condescending in the extreme, at one point telling Christie he should get “a juice box” for his accomplishments in New Jersey.
None of this is going to help Jindal. But on the other hand, how much could it hurt him? He’s sitting at 0.8 percent in the RCP average. I suspect he won’t lose sleep over the prospect of dropping to 0.6.
He is not, however, going to make himself any admirers. It’s one thing to be aggressively negative in the heat of a close campaign. Voters like toughness. It’s another to be aggressively negative in a thoroughly inconsequential lost cause. Voters tend to take a different view of that sort of thing. And alone among the men on stage, Jindal reeked of desperation.
Mike Huckabee wasn’t out of control, but he does seem to have hit the point of diminishing returns. Like Jindal, you wonder how much longer he’ll be willing to hang around.
As for Rick Santorum, at times you could see why he came within five points in Michigan of being the nominee. What you couldn’t see is why, if he was determined to make another run, he disappeared for four years instead of building an organization and a rationale for his candidacy.
Santorum was fond of reminding people that he has won more primaries than any Republican challenger since Reagan in 1976. The difference is that Reagan lost the nomination and then rolled up his sleeves and went to work getting ready to lead the party.
