The 10th Republican presidential debate is in the books. What did we learn in Houston Thursday night?
Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are going to attack Donald Trump. For months, Cruz hugged Trump because he hoped eventually win over the billionaire’s voters. Rubio has generally tried to rise above Trump’s dominance of the race to little effect. Rubio’s team even telegraphed that the candidate was going to ignore Trump, an obvious head fake.
Trump’s honeymoon is over. Both senators attacked him from the very beginning of the debate. Even better for anti-Trump conservatives, Rubio and Cruz demonstrated that they are capable of tag teaming against Trump even as they continue to jockey for support themselves.
Rubio in particular had a lot of success belittling Trump, shining a bright spotlight on his lack of policy knowledge and undermining his image as a self-made billionaire with compassion for the American working class. Cruz stuck mainly to assailing Trump’s conservative credentials, a tactic that doesn’t seem to have much impact on Trump supporters and has mixed results with the broader Republican primary electorate.
Interrupting works. Trump has been successful in previous debates because he is willing to talk over people and railroad the moderators while his opponents stand there politely or protest ineffectually. On Thursday night, Cruz and Rubio were willing to talk over Trump. It is much more effective and really the only to argue with someone like Trump.
If you allow him to bluster and filibuster, you’ll lose.
Trump misses Jeb Bush. The former Florida governor has served as a convenient punching bag for Trump, offering the Republican front-runner repeated opportunities to be the alpha male on the debate stage. While it might have been bad form to go after Jeb with his parents in the audience, Trump lacked that kind of foil in this debate.
Trump tried to make Rubio his whipping boy by repeatedly bringing up the Florida senator’s New Hampshire debate flub as well as his perspiration habits. But it just served to remind viewers that Trump wasn’t dominating Rubio as thoroughly as Chris Christie did. And the sweaty Marco lines work okay as throwaway jokes on the stump but don’t do much in a debate.
Trump’s grasp of policy details is weak. This isn’t exactly something new, but in especially in his exchanges with Rubio it came through that Trump really doesn’t know a lot of specifics when it comes to public policy. His attempt to explain his position in favor of allowing consumers to buy health insurance across state lines — a bona fide free-market reform position — was painful to listen to.
It might not matter much. Trump’s appeal has always been more about attitude and identity than philosophy or policy. He has always argued he will hire the right people to work these things out and that his managerial prowess is more important than ideology. A lot of voters don’t know much about policy either.
But if voters come to doubt Trump’s ability to run the government like a business, this could begin to become a problem.
Rubio and Cruz’s Trump criticisms might have made a bigger difference earlier in the race. Hindsight is always 20-20. But you have to wonder if going after Trump in such a sustained way would have been more useful before he became defined in the voters’ eyes and had bonded so strongly with his supporters. Trump’s large leads in the majority of Super Tuesday states will be hard for any debate performance to change, even if he was off his game most of the night.
Trump is winning, Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes, “because, like the most effective demagogues, he’s built an emotional bond with his audience.” But if he dominates in the primaries on Tuesday, we’ll have to wonder if Trump should have been scrutinized better before those attachments were fully formed.
Republicans really shouldn’t defend people dying in the streets. Despite an off night in the face of unusually blistering attacks from Cruz and Rubio, Trump still had his moments. His rejoinder that he was the only person on stage who had ever really hired anybody was good.
In the fight over whether Trump backed socialized medicine, he was able to get off another effective talking point. “We are going to have private health care,” he said, “but I will not allow people to die on the sidewalks and the streets of our country if I’m president.”
Are you really going to argue with that? Good luck in the general election.
John Kasich is going to have trouble staying the race until the Midwestern states vote. The Ohio governor and former House Budget Committee chairman has the most government experience of the surviving candidates and clearly believes he is the adult in the room. But this leads him to try too hard to be above the fray, leaving opportunities to connect with the conservative base on the table and often giving Trump relief when he was on the ropes.
Anytime Kasich was brought into the discussion after a particularly important exchange he derailed it with a motivational speech or by showcasing his ideological deviationism. Twitter users kept telling me Kasich wants to be Trump’s vice president. I doubt it would make more sense than as a strategy for winning the Republican presidential nomination.
Ben Carson likes fruit salad. And that’s how he would keep the Supreme Court from going bananas.
