So who won last Thursday’s 2016 GOP presidential debate?
Answer: The Republican Party.
I wasn’t sure what to expect from the 10 candidates who crowded the stage at the first 2016 GOP debate in Cleveland, given the abundance of entrants and the mixed qualities of their resumes and temperaments. I had anticipated three or four would exceed expectations, several would perform on par, and a few would prove ready to exit the field.
I hadn’t expected virtually every candidate to perform better than expected.
Start with Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who turned in low-key but reliable performances. Walker politely finished most responses before the buzzer rang instead of talking over it like the other candidates, but that didn’t stop him from getting in zingers like “[E]verywhere in the world that Hillary Clinton touched is more messed up today than before…” He crisply eviscerated the Iran deal: “To me, you terminate the deal on day one, you reinstate the sanctions authorized by Congress, you go to Congress and put in place even more crippling sanctions… and then you convince our allies to do the same.”
Cruz let his bête noire reputation in the Senate speak for itself and merely reiterated his role in standing up to party leaders who squander electoral victories: “There is a reason that we have $18 trillion in debt. Because as conservatives, as Republicans, we keep winning elections. We got a Republican House, we’ve got a Republican Senate, and we don’t have leaders who honor their commitments.”
In contrast, the fieriest presences of the evening were New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, who sparred over the bulk collection of meta-data. Christie noted, “I’m the only person on this stage who’s actually filed applications under the Patriot Act, who has gone before… the Foreign Intelligence Service court, who has prosecuted and investigated and jailed terrorists… I will make no apologies, ever, for protecting the lives and the safety of the American people. We have to give more tools to our folks to be able to do that, not fewer…” Paul mounted a vigorous defense that cited the Bill of Rights and the Fourth Amendment, but Christie seemed to prevail.
When asked how he would improve conditions for small or new businesses, Florida Senator Marco Rubio wisely observed, “[I]t begins by having leaders that recognize that the economy we live in today is dramatically different from the one we had five years ago… [T]he big companies that have connections with Washington, they can affect policies to help them, but the small companies… they’re the ones that are struggling.”
Ohio Governor John Kasich was a bit unfocused in addressing the moderators’ questions but highlighted his roles as both Chairman of the Budget Committee and member of the Armed Services Committee—a combination of fiscal and defense experience that may render him uniquely qualified among the candidates.
Businessman Donald Trump was predictably cantankerous and belligerent, and coughed up some eye-rolling lines about how his buying politicians was proof that the system was broken and how it wasn’t he but his companies that had gone bankrupt. But given some of the more incendiary rhetoric he’s unleashed in recent weeks, Trump was overall tamer and less embarrassing than expected.
No one gets excited about former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, but he did a solid job reminding viewers of his fiscal record: “I cut taxes every year, totaling $19 billion… We balanced every budget. We went from $1 billion of reserves to $9 billion of reserves. We were one of two states that went to AAA bond rating. They called me Veto Corleone. Because I vetoed 2,500 separate line-items in the budget…”
Even the candidates with no chance of winning—Mike Huckabee and Ben Carson—turned in surprisingly good performances. Though Huckabee got bogged down with a few mini-speeches involving religious platitudes and theocratic sentiments—e.g., recommending that the next president “invoke the Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments to the constitution” to protect the rights of fetuses—he more than made up for those with several rousing responses about the economy and national security that ranked among the best responses of the evening. On the Iran deal, Huckabee thundered, “Iran gets everything they want. We said we would have anywhere, anytime negotiations and inspections, we gave that up. We said that we would make sure that they didn’t have any nuclear capacity, we gave that up… What the Iranians have said is, ‘We will wipe Israel off the face of the map, and we will bring death to America.’ When someone points a gun at your head and loads it, by God, you ought to take them seriously…”
Neurosurgeon Ben Carson cheerfully answered his questions in the way that someone who knows he has no chance of winning but would be better than many of the alternatives might respond. My favorite Carson line came during his first answer, when moderator Megyn Kelly pointed out several of his early foreign and national policy blunders and asked whether voters should trust him to run the country. Carson credibly responded, “The thing that is probably most important is having a brain, and to be able to figure things out and learn things very rapidly.”
Marco Rubio summed up the quality of the candidates: “God has blessed us. He has blessed the Republican Party with some very good candidates. The Democrats can’t even find one.”
When even the candidates with no chance of winning look better than Hillary, it can only push our viable candidates to greater heights.
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