GOP debate

Five takeaways from the GOP debate

Cruz mocks Trump, Rubio speeds through, and Bush lightens up a little.

By Glenn Thrush

A Republican debate without Donald Trump is like a fern bar without a bouncer.

Without enforcer Trump around to make everybody stutter and flinch, all those nice guys in carefully pressed dress shirts were free to mouth off and pick fights with one another. While the punches drew less blood, the debate had an air of freedom with the oft-bullied likes of Rand Paul and Jeb Bush liberated from the oppressive presence of the party’s frontrunner.

The ratings for these GOP Trump-fests have been steadily slipping, so it will interesting to see if Trump’s absence decreased or enhanced viewership – and whether or not the unobstructed view of the other candidates solidified or undermined his position. With that in mind, here are five takeaways.

Cruz: Why is everybody always picking on me? Trump claimed that FOX was rude and biased against him (absolutely nobody apart from the Donald faithful bought that), so, yeah, chuck the debate. But he had plenty of tactical reasons to ditch the madding crowd. First, if the debate ratings dip (as they would likely have done even if he was onstage) he gets to chalk it up to his absence. But the real reason he skipped out was to create a circular GOP firing squad – with Ted Cruz at the center. And it worked.

The other candidates, no dummies, knew what Trump was up to – but they had plenty of incentive to cut the Texas Tea Party hero down to size, and they whacked Cruz early and often, especially on immigration and his annoying habit (to them) of demeaning the conservative credentials of any Republican who opposed him. Rand Paul was particularly cutting, pointing out Cruz’s support for a comprehensive immigration reform “compromise” – before hardening his position to oppose anything that smacked of amnesty. “What is particularly insulting, though, is that he is the king of saying, ‘you're for amnesty,’” Paul said. “Everybody's for amnesty except for Ted Cruz. But it's a falseness, and that's an authenticity problem.”

Cruz responded to the attacks, at times, by whining. And unlike Trump, he let the FOX moderating team – including Chris Wallace -- best him in several testy exchanges. “Chris, I would note that the last four questions have been, Rand, please attack Ted. Marco, please attack Ted. Chris, please attack Ted. Jeb, please attack Ted,” he complained to Wallace – who shock back with, “It is a debate, sir.”

Then, Cruz, unconvincingly threatened to pull a Trump. “Gosh, if you guys ask one more mean question I may have to leave the stage,” he said. He may have meant it tongue-and-cheek, but it came off as petulant.

It was the worst possible time – on the eve of the deadlocked Iowa caucuses – for Cruz to stumble, and Trump dug the pothole.

Rand Paul, reanimated. The Kentucky libertarian, in days of yore regarded as the most interesting Republican in the race, has disappeared almost entirely from the presidential political consciousness – and his low polling earned him ejection from the main debate stage. Granted readmission in Iowa, he made the most of it: He spoke slowly – and seemed to benefit most from Trump’s absence – to launch a series of razor-sharp attacks on the character of Cruz and Rubio. And freed from the constraints of actually running to win, he reverted back to his heartfelt and idiosyncratic brand of Republicanism, speaking passionately about issues that almost never reach the GOP debate stage: Poverty, discrimination against blacks, urban economic development, the evils of civil forfeiture and mandatory federal drug sentences.

“I… think the war on drugs has disproportionately affected our African-American community, and what we need to do is make sure that the war on drugs is equal protection under the law and that we don't unfairly incarcerate another generation of young African-American males,” he said.

Chris Christie just won’t answer a question. It’s uncanny. The bellicose New Jersey governor, who is staking all on a decent showing in New Hampshire, simply wouldn’t address anything the moderators threw at him – turning every answer into a rousing am-I-right-guys attack on the easiest of targets, Hillary Clinton.

When Megyn Kelly asked Christie about entitlement reform – the single most important element of federal deficit reduction (“Can you name even one thing that the federal government does now that it should not do at all?” she asked) – he hit a bumper-sticker talking point that had zilch to do with entitlement reform. “How about one that I've done in New Jersey for the last six years -- that's get rid of Planned Parenthood funding from the United States of America,” he intoned to applause.

When asked about how he would stop terrorists without racial profiling, he dodged the policy question and punted: “Let law enforcement make those decisions,” he said. What guidelines they would use to make those decisions, he didn’t say.

Marco Rubio needed to be great -- not grating. For months and months, Rubio’s team opted for a low-key strategy of avoiding big debate-night fights to focus on his competence, eloquence and mastery of semi-hawkish foreign policy. All that has bought the Florida senator are middling poll numbers and a predicted fourth place finish in his home state. In recent days, however, Iowa Republicans say he’s hit a stride – and have been talking up a late-January surge that could upend the Trump-or-Cruz conventional wisdom.

But Rubio seemed overly tense, hyper-emphatic and prone to his unflattering habit of delivering his answers in an annoying Gatling Gun crescendo of ever-increasing volume. Style points like these matter -- Rubio is well liked by voters (even those who plan to vote for other candidates) and his less-than-calm performance undermines the boyish senator's contention that he's seasoned enough for the big job.

Jeb, unleashed. The knock on Jeb Bush in earlier debates was that he lacked the rhetorical zip and testosterone to go one-on-one with Trump. In the frontrunner's absence, he seemed more confident and more competently combative, training many of his blows at Rubio.

In one memorable exchange, Bush accused Rubio of choosing to "cut and run" from his commitment to pass comprehensive immigration reform in the Senate - in order to avoid the conservative backlash against supporting path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

"He led the charge to finally fix this immigration problem that has existed now for, as Marco says, for 30 years. And then he cut and run because it wasn't popular amongst conservatives, I guess," Bush said.

But he saved the most lacerating line for himself - acknowledging that his own support for a citizenship pathway is a no-sale in a GOP increasingly tilting toward the hard-line Trump position -- which includes building a massive border wall to keep out foreigners. "I wrote a book about this called Immigration Wars," he said. "You can get it at $2.99 on Amazon. It's not a bestseller. I can promise you."