Mr. Bush injected his stump speech with a new shot of urgency after Mr. Trump’s victory, warning South Carolinians that the Republican Party’s identity was at stake. “Our party is being hijacked by people who do not believe in the goodness of the conservative cause,” Mr. Bush said. “I do. I believe it.”
.. “I don’t think you can keep saying, ‘Trust me, I got a plan for it,’ ” Mr. Rubio said. “I think as we get closer, especially now that he’s been successful in New Hampshire, I would expect people will be pressing for more details.”
.. The Florida senator is trying to position himself as something of a hybrid candidate, acceptable to the establishment and to the hard right
.. South Carolina does not register voters by political party, so any voter can cast a ballot in either the Democratic or the Republican primary, though not in both.
GOP debate: Rubio chokes
It was a defining moment as Rubio’s opponents successfully turned two of his greatest strengths — his eloquence and message discipline — against him in the final debate before the New Hampshire primary, casting the Florida senator as a lightweight leader who has been lifted by little more than lofty and canned rhetoric.
.. [Cruz] advocated for “carpet-bombing” but promised incongruously that it would be “targeted,” as well.
“Kill the enemy and then get the heck out,” Cruz summarized his international doctrine.
Did Marco Rubio Squander His Big Moment?
Rubio responded by attacking Christie’s record in New Jersey. “But I would add this,” he said. “Let’s dispel with this fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing. He knows exactly what he’s doing. He is trying to change this country.”
It was a familiar, and effective, maneuver for Rubio: slashing at his opponent, then ending above the fray with a larger point. But Christie, calling the audience’s attention to the move, described it differently: “the drive-by shot at the beginning with incorrect and incomplete information and then the memorized 25-second speech that is exactly what his advisers gave him.”
.. The debate had barely begun, and Rubio had walked into a trap. Accused of being a mindless reciter of talking points, he mindlessly recited talking points, over and over and over again. It was a theme the press had repeatedly noted, as it grew bored watching him give the same speech, the same answers to questions, time and again; Rubio’s besotted advisers termed it “message discipline.” On the debate stage, his inability to do anything but repeat the same line threatened to confirm the very criticism leveled against him: that behind his pretty rhetoric, there was little else.
.. If the debate does pop Rubio’s bubble, it will be a blow to the professional Republicans of Washington, D.C., for whom he seemed to represent the party’s last hope... “Tonight is closer to what I expected when I got behind Jeb, and exactly what I was worried about when others rallied around Rubio.”
Ahead of N.H. primary, questions for Rubio, Trump and Cruz
A few weeks ago, it appeared as though there was something between acceptance and resignation within the GOP establishment about the possibility of a Trump nomination. Today there is considerable resistance to his candidacy among those elites and many rank-and-file Republicans.
.. Given the choice between Trump and Cruz, in a hypothetical two-person final for the nomination, Cruz trounced Trump by 53 percent to 35 percent.
.. Cruz offered a lawyerly defense of his campaign’s actions, blaming media reporting for the mistake. He also apologized to Carson. But the low-key retired neurosurgeon sliced apart Cruz’s defense with a quiet but deadly response that completely undermined the senator’s argument.
Cruz’s goal has been to consolidate the entire conservative coalition — evangelicals, tea party activists and the smaller pool of libertarians. Getting into a fight with Carson won’t help him do that.