Up until the last 15 minutes, Thursday night’s debate couldn’t have gone better for Ted Cruz.
The first two hours went a long way to hardening the impression that this is a two-man Republican race right now, which is exactly what a confident and cool-headed Cruz wanted.
Then a clearly frustrated Marco Rubio finally saw his opening and took the fight to Cruz in a dazzling last-minute display of theatrical fireworks.
Was it too late in the evening? And did it matter, considering that Donald Trump remained the pivot point of the debate — and likely came out of the proceedings stronger than ever?
Until the Rubio onslaught, the debate was almost all Cruz v. Trump. Ted scored points against Donald on the question of his eligibility in the first half-hour.
Donald scored big points against Ted when it came to Cruz’s attack on New York in the second half-hour.
The Trump-Cruz dynamic sucked all the oxygen out of the room. The two men half-joked with each other about which would be the top of the ticket and which would be the veep — and in that moment, it was easy to believe one was fast-forwarding into the future.
Rubio got off some good lines against Chris Christie, who seemed to have learned something from Trump’s debating style.
The New Jersey governor just out-and-out lied about having given a donation to Planned Parenthood in 1994 and having supported the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor in 2009. But in the end, Christie — who arguably won the last debate — wasn’t a factor.
But in the second hour, Trump took hold with the hypnotic word salads that are his specialty — both rising from tough questions asked by the Fox Business Channel moderators.
One from Maria Bartiromo concerned Trump’s assertion that we should halt all Muslim immigration and visitation. Jeb Bush tried hard, yet again, to make the point that the idea makes no sense — will we prevent Muslims from India from coming to the United States, for example? But Bush’s bizarrely tentative approach, asking Trump to “reconsider,” only made Trump seem forceful by contrast.
Even more striking, Trump grabbed onto a difficult question from Fox Business Channel’s Neil Cavuto on China and simply went to town. Cavuto zeroed in on Trump’s demented suggestion to the New York Times about imposing a 45 percent tariff on China.
Trump said the Times was lying about that, which is doubtful. Then Trump said he was a free trader, then said he was against tariffs, then said he would impose tariffs, then said five other things.
But he sounded tough. Tough, tough, tough.
And by the time he was done with this astounding display of demagogic mishegoss, even Rubio’s strong attempt to explain that tariffs only make products more expensive for Americans couldn’t break through the fog.
When the debate passed its second hour and kept going, Rubio seized center stage. With his amazing fluidity, he delivered a series of jabs at what he called Cruz’s inconsistent conservatism — 11 in all, by Cruz’s startled count at the end of it.
That was crucial, but not because Rubio scored blows that would slow Cruz’s rise in Iowa. Rubio’s only shot going forward is to consolidate the primary vote that won’t go for Cruz or Trump.
He may have gone some way to concentrating the attention of those voters Thursday night.
All that said, strictly as a matter of performance, Trump ate everybody’s lunch — and believe me, I take no pleasure in saying it.