Republican Debate Review: Scalia's Death and a Vicious Brawl
The announcement of the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Saturday led to a subdued beginning for the CBS-sponsored Republican debate held in South Carolina. Moderator John Dickerson led the hall and the six candidates in a moment of silence out of respect for Scalia.
What followed, however, was the opposite of silence: The candidates occasionally yelled at each other, accused each other of lies, dishonesty, and misogyny, and felt the lusty boos of an audience that sometimes sounded as though they were at a pro wrestling match.
The first 15 minutes found all six men saying vehemently that President Obama should not put forth a replacement for the Supreme Court. Not surprisingly, the Republicans hope that America will elect a Republican president who will appoint a judge whose legal philosophy will be to their liking. Donald Trump took this sentiment a step further, encouraging the Republican-led Senate to halt Obama with this strategy: “It’s called delay, delay, delay.”
The rest of the night was occupied with addressing topics such as immigration, foreign policy, and the economy. But the topics were very quickly turned into opportunities for some of the candidates to attack each other, sometimes in ways that were startlingly gratuitous. After Ted Cruz leveled a criticism of Marco Rubio based on an interview the latter gave to Univision, Rubio snapped, “I don’t know how he knows what I said on Univision, because he doesn’t speak Spanish!” Cruz responded by speaking a few phrases in Spanish to Rubio.
(Any viewer who still recalls the criticism Rubio faced for his repetitive answers in the previous debate — doesn’t it seem like months ago already? — would have to say his performance here was an objective improvement, in the sense that he rarely repeated himself, and held forth with brisk efficiency in answering questions.)
Both Marco Rubio and Donald Trump accused Cruz of being a “liar” regarding a host of issues, from immigration to his campaign’s actions against Ben Carson. Trump gestured to Cruz, saying, “This guy… he’s a nasty guy.”
John Kasich acted appalled. “This is nuts; this is crazy,” he said as Mr. Trump and Mr. Bush shouted at each other, adding his own unique expression of wonderment: “Jeez-o-man!” A bit later, Kasich added, “I think we’re fixing to lose this election to Hillary Clinton if we keep this up.”
Bush said he was “sick and tired” of Trump’s insults, of Trump “going after my family.” But Bush did himself no favors by saying he was channeling “my inner Chris Christie” in criticizing his opponents’ answers: What possessed Bush to go out of his way to invoke a guy whose campaign lost steam and who dropped out of the race?
The audience was an equal-opportunity hostility machine. Various segments of the crowd booed everyone — but especially Trump, repeatedly and especially when he invoked the fall of the World Trade Center to criticize Presidents Obama and George W. Bush for their foreign policy. The crowd booed moderator Dickerson for — well, some folks actually seemed to be angered when he tried to get one candidate or another to clarify a point.
“We are in danger of driving this [debate] into the dirt,” said John Dickerson well into the debate’s second hour. John, John, Johnny — by the time you made that observation, it was way too late to stop the dirt-driving.
