Milwaukee
Ben Carson came to Wisconsin ready to rumble with Donald Trump. Since Carson surged to a tie for first place with Trump in national and Iowa polls, the real estate mogul has been attacking the neurosurgeon in media interviews and on Twitter. And the Carson campaign thought Tuesday night would be the time to respond.
“We were kind of hoping he would [attack]. We were all set to really go after him,” Carson campaign manager Barry Bennett told me in the spin room after the debate. According to Bennett, Carson planned on telling Trump: “I saved 15,000 lives in the operating room. And you don’t appreciate my service, but I wouldn’t trade a single one of them for all of your money. Money’s not important to me. It’s not what’s important to most Americans.”
But the opportunity to deliver those lines never came as Trump refrained from criticizing Carson to his face during the two-hour debate. “It’s kind of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde. When he’s alone at night with his Twitter account, he can say some pretty nasty things. But then when he’s around people it’s all nicey-nice,” Bennett said. “I don’t know. He’s an entertainer.”
Trump’s refusal to attack his co-frontrunner to his face was a good sign that Carson came out ahead. Carson continued the low-key, nice-guy approach that has served him so well in previous debates. As in previous debates, there were some very shaky answers from Carson. His comments on Syria were meandering and bewildering. But a shaky grasp of policy didn’t hurt him in previous debates, and he was able to deliver a solid argument in favor of a flat tax and against the notion that deductions for charitable giving and mortgage interest must be maintained.
“They say there will be no more charitable giving. We had churches before that and charitable organizations before that [deduction],” Carson said. “The fact of the matter is, I believe if you put more money in people’s pockets that they will actually be more generous rather than less generous.”
Carson’s closing statement was pithy and poignant. “In the two hours of this debate,” Carson said, “five people have died from drug-related deaths, $100 million has been added to our national debt, 200 babies have been killed by abortionists, and two veterans have taken their lives out of despair. This is a narrative that we can change, not we the Democrats, not we the Republicans, but we the people of America, because there is something special about this nation, and we must embrace it and be proud of it and never give it away for the sake of political correctness.”
For Trump, it was the second GOP debate in a row in which he almost entirely avoided fighting with other Republicans on stage. The only person he really took on was John Kasich after Kasich criticized him on immigration. “I just thought this was a very elegant debate. I thought the moderators were fantastic,” Trump said after the debate in the spin room. “It stayed on business, they didn’t ask about fantasy football and things like that.”
Trump’s nice-guy approach may have been a smart move Tuesday night. Attacking a likeable and popular candidate like Carson–particularly after Carson faced a barrage of overblown media attacks–may have very well backfired on Trump. But Carson’s ability to make it through a debate completely unscathed by his opponents was surely a win for him.
