And if it’s possible for a moment from a debate to have a lasting impact on a presidential campaign – which recent history suggests is no small question – I’m guessing that the gleeful whooping Christie proceeded to administer to Rubio will be remembered as one such moment.
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Quote by a Smart Person: “I am turned into a sort of machine for observing facts and grinding out observations”.
Trump’s rivals barely laid a glove on the frequent New Hampshire poll leader.
Mr Rubio struggled to respond, plucking stock statements from his stump speech and for the first time seemed unnerved on a debate stage after assured displays at the seven previous debates.
Rubio’s stronger-than-expected third-place result in Iowa – – he received 23.1 percent of the vote, several points above levels indicated before the February 1 caucus – made him a marked man at Saturday’s event in Manchester, the final Republican debate before the state’s first-in-the-nation primary on February 9.
Kasich, who has staked his White House hopes on New Hampshire, offered a more moderate view on immigration, though one that’s unpopular with many GOP primary voters.
Advisers to Bush, Christie and Kasich were ebullient after Saturday’s debate.
Rubio hit back by saying that Christie presides over a state whose credit rating has been downgraded nine times.
“We’re going to look at judges – they’ve got to be great judges, they’ve got to be conservative judges”, he said of any Supreme Court picks he might make. Senator Ted Cruz was translucent most of the evening-visible on stage, but barely so. “Fool me once, shame on you”. At that event, he blew past the debate performance with barely a nod, saying that, despite being criticized for being repetitious in his attacks against President Barack Obama, he will continue to repeat them at every stop.
“Let’s dispel with his fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing”, Rubio said. The president is not a fool; he’s a menace.
Rubio also said he believes the United States could leverage its relationship with China to keep North Korea in check. This got a noticeable round of applause from the audience. Rubio then said the same line once again later in the debate. The problem for Rubio was not that the line is something Republican voters would disagree with.
Well, it’s hard to imagine anything Rubio could have possibly done that would more immediately, and humorously, affirm the caricature.
Bush also, on “Fox News Sunday”, pinged Rubio as “totally scripted and kind of robotic” because Rubio repeated the same phrase three times within the space of a few minutes during the debate as Christie pressed the attack against him.
Rubio has always said that he supports an exception for abortion when the life of the mother is endangered and that he would be willing to sign legislation that includes exceptions for cases of rape and incest, even though he believes all unborn children have the right to life no matter the circumstances of their conception. Rubio’s emasculation was all but complete. Barack Obama wants America to be more like the rest of the world. “We raised more money last night in the first hour of that debate than any other debate”, he said. Sometimes it’s a negative influence, granted. I’m going to do the right thing for the American public.
Rubio put on a disastrous performance in last night’s debate. That’s thanks, in part, to its already fitting a pre-established narrative. Again, Christie noted that this is a difference between a governor and a legislator, touting his record in taking on the teachers unions-and winning the fight over tenure. Both stepped back in the debate to allow Christie to take the lead in targeting Rubio, though they were happy to relish in the afterglow. It does not rank among the United States’ most inspirational moments of civic engagement, admittedly.
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Elias Isquith is a daily columnist at Salon who focuses on politics and inequality.
