Clown Car Crash...

5 takeaways from the third GOP debate

Bush is a bust, Rubio a winner, and Trump a bit player. 

By Glenn Thrush

What a mess. CNBC — a financial network accustomed to grilling CFOs on their price-to-earnings ratios — is not especially practiced at staging presidential debates in front of a national audience, and it really showed at a shaggy and acrimonious GOP debate that pit the moderators against the candidates.

Yet if the third Republican debate in Colorado was the sloppiest, it offered the greatest clarity to date about the direction of the race – marking the emergence of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as upper-tier candidates along with Donald Trump and Ben Carson.

It will also likely be remembered as the night the Jeb Bush 2016 deathwatch began.

Here are five takeaways:

1. Boulder crushed Bush. You can suffer the public doubts of your donors. You can brave the indignity of having to slash your staff’s salaries. You can even endure a face-plant after you muse about all the “really cool things” you could be doing if only you were relieved of the burden of having to rescue the free world from your party’s right wing. But you can’t do all those things, and then lay an egg in the most important debate of your political career.

Bush was meh for the third straight debate. But worse than that, he was tentative – and didn’t seem to exhibit the urgency of other candidates who had far less to lose. His only really memorable moment came when he declared that he was 7-0 in his fantasy football league. In the far more important contest – the mano-a-mano with his home-state rival Rubio, he was 0-1. If Bush donors were growing nervous about their man’s chances after the previous two debates, they are likely to be in full panic mode after Wednesday night.

2. Rubio won. The 44-year-old senator, inching up in the polls and skyrocketing in the political prediction markets, became a target for the first time – and turned the attacks to his advantage with impressive speed and steadiness. When Bush launched an entirely predictable attack on Rubio’s record of missed Senate votes (“What is it like a French work week? Do you have to show up for like three days? Just show up or resign,” the former Florida governor said to his onetime Sunshine State buddy), Rubio was ready – and accused Bush of desperation.

“Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you, but I’m not running against Jeb Bush or anyone else on this stage,” Rubio shot back, to the oohs and ahhs of the audience. “I’m running for president because there’s no way we can elect Hillary Clinton.”

And he delivered one of the biggest applause lines of the night. “The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC, it is called the mainstream media,” Rubio said – slamming what he said was preferential treatment of Hillary Clinton during last week’s Benghazi hearings.

“Rubio attacking media bias was the first and perhaps only 90+ dial score,” tweeted GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who conducted a focus group during the debate.

3. Donald Trump was a bit player. For the first time since the reality TV star emerged as the bombastic center of attention in American politics over the summer, Trump was a supporting player, if not an afterthought. Trump -- who hogged much of the airtime in the first two contests -- seemed a mellow shadow of the dominant Donald of the first debate. The most intriguing question, and one not easily answered, is whether he intentionally stepped outside the spotlight to counter perceptions that he’s only capable of circus-barker theatrics, or if it was a genuine shift in mood – a chastening precipitated by Carson’s surge to the top in Iowa and in at least one national poll.

According to initial estimates of microphone time, Trump logged just 5 minutes and 37 seconds of spiel, putting him in fifth place behind the pack-leading Rubio, who spoke for nearly 10 minutes in machine-gun bursts so fast the audience craned to catch each word. Whatever the reason for Trump’s relative reticence, it is not especially good news. Even if Trump intended to chill out (he concluded the debate by taking credit for cutting the CNBC stage time down from three to two hours) the nine other candidates on the stage felt less threatened by his presence, and thus less inclined to attack him directly – which cut down on the response time the moderators were obligated to give him. The one exception: an angry-uncle cranky John Kasich, who came out blasting both Trump and Carson for economic proposals he deemed absurd. “You just don’t make promises like this, why don’t you just give chicken in every pot while we’re coming up with these fantasy tax plans? We’ll clean it up, well where are you gonna clean it up?”

In one of the rare Trumpian moments of the night, he shot back by making fun of the Ohio governor’s low poll numbers – which put him at the end of the stage.

4. Cruz makes hay out of media-bashing. Republicans are getting really, really tired of all this wrenching soul-searching and public dissection of their deepening divisions into establishment and outsider wings, so why not single out a universally detested target to get the band back together? Rubio started off the press bashing, but the Texas Tea Party firebrand transformed it from a nifty riposte into a full-throated rebel yell likely to resound for the entirety of the campaign.

To the howling delight of the audience, Cruz roared at his CNBC questioners – including the not-so-liberal Rick Santelli, who coined the “Tea Party” moniker. “You look at the questions; Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here. Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?” Cruz asked, his voice drowned out by shouts of approval. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus joined in soon after, stalking into the spin room to deplore the network’s "gotcha questions" and the "hostile" environment the press created for the candidates.

5. Teflon Ben. The night got off to a good start for the soft-spoken neurosurgeon. Trump, the man he’s stalking for first place, offered him a Bernie-hearts-Hillary type reprieve by saying he wouldn’t attack him – as the media expected. Hitting Carson, who boasts the highest likeability ratings in the field, isn’t a good idea just now – as Trump said he “didn’t know about” Carson’s Seventh-Day Adventist Faith. Kasich’s attack on his plan to replace Medicaid and Medicare with savings accounts landed with a thud, and none of the other candidates piled on, despite predictions they would try to halt his rise in the polls.

The audience was similarly accommodating: When one of the moderators pressed Carson on his connections to a nutritional supplement company that made questionable claims about its effectiveness in treating a range of disorders, the crowd booed so loudly the questioner gave up.