Cruz, fresh off a strong victory in Iowa, found himself on the defensive immediately in Saturday night’s Republican debate in Manchester, N.H. First, he was asked to answer his comments that Donald Trump does not have the temperament to be president.
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But it may not matter.
Gov. Christie has built his closing argument around his criticism of Rubio, and he kept up that approach on the debate stage.
Paul Davis, a political science professor at Truckee Meadows Community College, said the exchange will nearly surely be the main talking point from the debate. He seemed to prove their point by repeating canned answers. So it’s possible that tonight at the debate that Trump-Cruz feud that sucked all the oxygen out of the room in Iowa gets redirected. “The Cruz campaign’s actions the night of the Iowa caucuses had nothing to do with CNN’s reporting”. His hellfire and brimstone manner doesn’t do much in New Hampshire. “This debate seems to have created a jump ball”. The audience started to boo Trump.
Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who won the Iowa caucuses last week, apologized to neurosurgeon Ben Carson for his campaign suggesting that Carson had dropped out of the race. John Kasich has staked his entire campaign on New Hampshire, so maybe his solid debate, alongside Rubio’s subpar performance by his own standards, crystallizes some support there for him.
Meanwhile, Trump and Bush clashed over the concept of “eminent domain” – the government practice to seize property for public use – that Trump has supported. He finished the debate in good form, but he sure gave reasons for Jeb Bush, Chris Christie and John Kasich to hang around to see if he stumbles again. He comes across as – dare I say it? – a genuinely compassionate conservative.
When the crowd booed, Mr Trump said: “That’s all his donors and special interests out there”.
“I think for a lot of people who are not into politics as strongly, what they will always remember is the gotcha moments”, he said. “Well, guess what, I’m still here, and I’m not going anyplace either”.
In his closing remarks, Ben Carson said he wasn’t going anywhere. “Every candidate got the same amount of tickets”. His problem long term, however, is that if he does well in New Hampshire, he may still come off as too common sense-y (at least for Republican base voters who have tilted away from that virtue). Cruz said it was possible to deport people living here illegally. “Donald Trump is good at saying what he thinks, and it probably played well on TV, but it did not go over well with these hard working rank-and-file Republicans”. He really shone against Donald Trump on the question of eminent domain.
Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, whose dreams of following his father and brother into t …
Bush, whose mother has fondly chastised him for being too polite in the race for the White House, laid into Trump for allegedly trying to take the property of an elderly woman in Atlantic City. “That is downright wrong”, said Bush.
When Mr. Rubio responded with a line he had used earlier, Mr. Christie looked at the camera with seeming exasperation: “There it is”.
Rubio defaulted to a line he has been delivering in his stump speech that President Barack Obama is not necessarily unprepared or unknowing about what he is doing.
“We are rising here in New Hampshire, you all know even though they have tried to throw the kitchen sink at us, millions and millions of dollars being spent against us”, he said of the television ads being aired by opponents Super Pacs. He fulfilled stereotypes; he was the caricature of the inauthentic pol. Mr. Christie, who is fighting for his political life in New Hampshire, clearly got the best of him.
He added, tangentially, a request to “dispel once and for all with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing”.
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Visibly rattled, Rubio reached for his water. “There it it is everybody”.
