Christie plainly never disliked Trump, whom he’s known for a decade. His attacks on him were those that an experienced governor would make naturally—“I tell everybody who goes to a Donald Trump event, if you get to ask a question, just ask him ‘how?’” Christie said. “I don’t care which of the things he talks about just ask him, ‘How? How?’”
.. I would guess that Christie felt his chosen profession was somehow diminished by the likes of Rubio. A man who could banter off the cuff endlessly with reporters and citizens was clearly irritated by being surpassed by someone possessing none of those abilities. Well apart from what he stood for, there was something fake about Rubio—the scripted answers, the avoidance of press gaggles. Christie had begun to talk about it in public a week before the final New Hampshire debate, making repeated references to “the boy in the bubble. ”
Who gains the most when the GOP field shrinks?
When we ask registered Republican and Republican-leaning voters about their second choices, the results show that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio are in the best position to gain supporters if and when voters decide to make a switch. Cruz is the second choice of 18 percent of registered Republicans, while Rubio is the second choice of 17 percent.
Why Marco Rubio is insisting that his massive tax cuts will pay for themselves, explained
Conservatives hate taxes, they dislike deficits, and they’re scared of spending cuts. Dynamic scoring is the answer.
The basic idea here is that massive tax cuts boost growth so much that they pay for themselves, and so there’s no actual trade-off between lower taxes and balanced budgets. In this telling, eating your cake leads your body to burn calories so fast that it’s like you end up thinner than you started!
.. As Jonathan Chait wrote, the skeptical reception Rubio’s plan got among many on the right spoke to a problem almost without precedent in the modern GOP: Rubio had designed a tax cut “so gargantuan that nobody in the party actually believes it.”
.. While Rubio gives some lip service to deficit reduction — he later tells Harwood that balancing the budget will require entitlement reform, not just tax reform — he clearly cares a lot more about the tax cuts than about the deficit reduction, just as Bush did.
Five Big Questions After the Harshest G.O.P. Debate Yet
Voters haven’t flocked to him because they’re deeply familiar with, or woefully ignorant about, his political history. They’re responding to him in a larger and more visceral way: as the megaphone for their disgust with the status quo and frustration with America’s trajectory. They thrill to his braggadocio, and he gave them more of it on Saturday night. They look to him precisely for bad behavior. On this front, too, he didn’t disappoint.
.. Rubio lined up with him: “I thank God all the time it was George W. Bush in the White House on 9/11 and not Al Gore.”