Rubio Endures Harsh Criticism In a Chaotic Rollicking GOP Debate

The Republican candidates for president took the stage for their latest debate Saturday night in Manchester, N.H., just three days before the second contest of the 2016 nominating contest — the New Hampshire primary.

Donald Trump leads the state by a wide margin, while a cluster of GOP candidates are fighting for second place. And much of the action Saturday was among the latter. 

Riding momentum after a surprisingly strong third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses, the senator from Florida became the top target in a New Hampshire debate that veered — sometimes chaotically — from Islamic State terrorists and North Korea to health care and immigration. Donald Trump had a decent night, despite being booed, but Marco Rubio and Ben Carson both faltered.

The final Republican presidential debate before the primary on Tuesday in New Hampshire was marked by heated exchanges between Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey. Voters also saw a more muted Senator Ted Cruz, and a Jeb Bush who seemed finally to have found his footing on the debate stage. For Donald J. Trump, Saturday night’s affair was one in which he largely stayed above the fray, while delivering some crisp attacks without getting rattled. Commentators and critics agreed that it was his best debate to date. 

Senator Marco Rubio faced the fiercest attacks yet of the Republican race after his strong third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. He faltered under heavy criticism, while Christie, Kasich and Bush played offense. 

Mr. Christie went straight at Mr. Rubio with an attack he has been using all week: that the Florida senator lacks accomplishments in Congress. But when it was his turn to respond, Mr. Rubio seemed unnerved, off-kilter and robotic.

Three times, he defaulted to a line he has been delivering in his stump speech all week, that President Obama is, in fact, not unprepared or unknowing about what he is doing. “We are not facing a president who does not know what he’s doing,” Mr. Rubio said, arguing that Mr. Obama understands perfectly well that he is trying to transform the country to fit his liberal worldview.

Mr. Christie flashed his characteristic sharp, cutting ability to diminish a rival. And he accused Mr. Rubio of reverting to “the memorized 25-second speech.”“You have not been involved in a consequential decision where you have had to be held accountable,” Mr. Christie scolded him. “You simply haven’t.”

Like the high school bully picking on the bookish over-achiever, Donald J. Trump sliced into Jeb Bush — cutting him down with a dismissive “quiet!” as Mr. Bush, a former Florida governor, tried to attack Mr. Trump, a billionaire real estate developer, for using eminent domain to build up his empire.

It may have been a somewhat obscure topic — a provision of the law that allows the government to commandeer private land for public use. But eminent domain is a major source of consternation for conservatives, and Mr. Trump’s reliance on it to build has been one of the aspects of his record that his rivals have tried to highlight.

“Jeb wants to be a tough guy, and it doesn’t work very well,” Mr. Trump said as Mr. Bush accused Mr. Trump of once evicting an older woman from her land in Atlantic City so he could build, in Mr. Bush’s telling, “a limousine parking lot.” When Mr. Bush tried to interject, Mr. Trump was having none of it. “Quiet,” he snapped.

The crowd booed, and that sent Mr. Trump into another rant. But this time his target was the audience — New Hampshire voters, many of them — whose members he dismissed as donors and special interests. That allowed Mr. Trump to pivot to one of his strongest arguments as a candidate: his insistence that because of his wealth, he is incapable of being bought.

“You know who has the tickets?” Mr. Trump said. “Donors, special interests, the people who put up the money.”

“The reason they’re not loving me,” he said as the boos continued, “is I don’t want their money.”

Since he skipped the last Republican debate, some people may have forgotten what it was like to have Donald J. Trump on the stage. He reminded us in the debate’s first exchange — with his clipped verbiage, vagaries, simple syntax and repetition. Immigration, immigration, immigration.

“I hit immigration — I hit it very hard,” Mr. Trump said, rejecting the premise of the moderator’s question: Did he have the right temperament to be president. “Everybody said, ‘Oh the temperament.’”

“I hit other things,” he continued. “I talked about Muslims. We have a problem.”

And the solution? As usual, Mr. Trump was vague. “Something” needed to be done.

“We have to have a temporary something, because there’s something going on that’s not good.”

Rubio differs from many of his Republican rivals on the issue of exceptions to abortion, arguing against any exceptions to a potential abortion ban in the case of rape or incest.

He has taken criticism from his Republican rivals for this stance, including during tonight’s debate. But rather than drawing a contrast with the other candidates on the stage, Mr. Rubio lashed out at Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, calling her an “extremist” and accusing her of supporting terminating pregnancy up until the due date of a child (an obvious exaggeration).

Many criticized Mr. Rubio’s position against any exceptions on abortion legislation as a general election liability, but he argued that it was a strength. Of the Democrats’ views on abortion, he said: “I can’t wait to expose them in a general election.”

But Democrats may be able to seize on Mr. Rubio’s comments as well. Mr. Rubio has pitched himself as a next-generation Republican with youthful appeal, but his statements may make seem outdated on women’s issues.

Ted Cruz: Speaking of front-runners, Cruz just won Iowa and has a very strong path to the GOP nomination starting in South Carolina on Feb. 20. But given he's not expected to do well in New Hampshire, basically everyone gave him a pass Saturday. He was even more untouched than Trump; not even his regular immigration bouts with Rubio were rehashed. That will change ahead of South Carolina, of course. Cruz, like Trump, did have at least one not-great moment, when he lost his train of thought on one answer on waterboarding, but he recovered rather quickly.

And toward the end of the debate, Cruz — voice quavering — talked about his half-sister's drug and alcohol addiction and resulting death. It was touching. It was memorable. It was what people will remember Cruz for in this debate.

If there is one area where Senator Ted Cruz of Texas differs from many of his Republican rivals, it is his approach to the military. And his response to a question about waterboarding revealed the careful line he is negotiating as he tries to persuade voters he would be a strong commander in chief while not betraying his vow not to overextend American troops in faraway conflicts.

Mr. Cruz, who has already drawn criticism for sounding overly militaristic when he promised to “carpet-bomb” the Islamic State into oblivion, hedged when asked if he would allow waterboarding. He would, he said, but not in any kind of widespread way.

Ben Carson, the retired neurosurgeon who has largely faded as a candidate in recent weeks, deftly cut down Mr. Cruz for incorrectly spreading a message that Mr. Carson had dropped out right before the Iowa caucuses.
Mr. Cruz, who was concerned about Mr. Carson making inroads with evangelicals in Iowa, apologized and recalled that he had done so the day after the caucuses. But he did not take full responsibility, faulting CNN for reporting that Mr. Carson was “taking a break” from the campaign. (It turned out that Mr. Carson was only returning home to Florida for a change of clothes.)

The scornful tone throughout the debate even crept into the candidates’ closing statements, which are usually optimistic. Mr. Trump, who made the final closing statement, could not resist besmirching Mr. Cruz’s victory.“That’s because he got Ben Carson’s votes, by the way,” Mr. Trump said, “but we won’t say that.”