http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/article/2569776Some observations on the Fox Prime Time Debate: The best debate ever
By Michael Barone • 8/7/15 2:55 AM
The Fox News Prime Time debate was the best presidential debate I've ever seen. Bret Baier, Megyn Kelly and Chris Wallace asked excellent tough questions, gave the candidates appropriate time to weigh in and the candidates, mostly, responded in kind. It's a very difficult task to moderate a ten-candidate debate and it's hard to imagine that anyone could ever do a better job of it than the three Fox News anchors tonight.
Big moments included (1) Donald Trump's hands-up declaration that he isn't ruling out running as a third-party candidate. (2) The fierce argument over surveillance between Rand Paul and Chris Christie. (3) Trump's set to with Megyn Kelly over his comments to women. (4) Ben Carson's end-of-debate responses on race and what makes him unique.
But every candidate had his good moments and gave their spin doctors something to brag on in the spin room and post-debate interviews.
Donald Trump was combative, sometimes funny, capable of pivoting to talking points on occasion, but also sometimes flummoxed, as when Chris Wallace asked him for evidence that the Mexican government is purposely sending criminals across the border (Trump cited comments from Border Patrol officers he heard some weeks after first making the charge).
Marco Rubio was outstanding. He was fluent, seemed always knowledgeable, was adept at weaving different strands together, as when near the end he was asked to weave together his thoughts about God with his policies toward military veterans. He cast himself attractively as a candidate of the future and had one of the few good lines twitting Hillary Clinton — if it's a question of who knows what it's like living paycheck to paycheck or saddled with student loan debt —that we heard all night.
Jeb Bush and Scott Walker, who have been leading in many pre-July polls and coming in ahead of others but behind Trump in some July/August polls, mostly delivered workmanlike responses and had some occasional high points. Bush was defensive on some questions, but also convincingly described his strong record as a conservative governor. But on the basis of this one debate you wouldn't have picked them as the candidates running ahead of the seven others on this stage and the seven in the Happy Hour debate earlier.
Ted Cruz came out blazing, when he had the chance, and with impressive command of facts and argumentation. The debate gave him a good opportunity to showcase his hardline views and his impressive intellectual capacity. Mike Huckabee made some statements clearly aimed at the religious conservatives who produced his victory in the 2008 Iowa caucuses, but also provided a succinct and utterly convincing critique of the Obama administration's weak bargaining against Iran and strong statements on how political correctness is hampering the military.
Huckabee was hugely less convincing on entitlements, in response to Chris Christie's strong arguments for entitlement reform, a subject the other candidates mostly steered clear of. John Kasich resisted the temptation to accuse anti-Medicaid-expansion Republicans of heartlessness, while highlighting his own credentials on budget-balancing and reaching out to those who are not doing well.
How will this affect the candidates' standings with Republican caucusgoers and primary voters? I'll leave that to the polls. And just say that the three questioners did a brilliant job and all of the candidates performed pretty well. Marco Rubio's typically graceful line that there were a lot of good Republican candidates while the other party had none was at one level a nice partisan dig but on another was a pretty accurate view of the state of the race. Is there any evidence that Hillary Clinton could pivot as adroitly and (in some cases) movingly as all or almost all of these candidates did at least at some point in Cleveland?
