Top takeaways from the South Carolina GOP debate
Corrections and clarifications: An earlier version of this story misidentified one of two candidates who was of Cuban descent. It was Marco Rubio.
It began with remembrances of Justice Antonin Scalia, but the South Carolina Republican debate quickly turned into the most contentious yet of the 2016 campaign.
Top takeaways from Saturday night's GOP debate in Greenville, S.C.:
The Carolina Quarrel
Saturday night's debate was dominated by shouting matches. We lost track of how often the words "lie" and "liar" were used. Donald Trump and Jeb Bush got into heated arguments over and over again, as did Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. Trump also got into a fight with the audience, saying people booing him were Bush donors. At one point the shouting on stage got so out of control that moderator John Dickerson joked "Hold on gentlemen, I am going to turn this car around." Ohio Gov. John Kasich said "I've got to tell you, this is just crazy."
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'Bush lied, people died'
Normally it is Democrats who attack George W. Bush for launching the war in Iraq in 2003, but Saturday night Trump was hammering a familiar line from anti-war protests. "They lied," Trump said. "They said there were weapons of mass destruction, there were none. And they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction." Jeb Bush fired back that Trump should leave his family out of it. "While Donald Trump was building a reality TV show, my brother was building a security apparatus to keep us safe. And I'm proud of what he did," Bush said.
But Trump said President Bush did not keep the nation safe. "The World Trade Center came down during your brother's reign, remember that." Not exactly Republican orthodoxy.
¿Hablas Español?
In one of the night's odder exchanges, Rubio and Cruz, both of Cuban descent, got into a fight over speaking Spanish. Cruz accused Rubio of saying "he would not rescind President Obama's illegal executive amnesty on his first day in office" during an appearance on Univision, the Spanish language network. Rubio fired back. "Well, first of all, I don't know how he knows what I said on Univision because he doesn't speak Spanish." Cruz then switched to Spanish to suggest they should continue the conversation in that language.
John Kasich, Happy Warrior
Kasich campaigned relentlessly in New Hampshire, casting himself as the positive pragmatic alternative to the more strident voices in the GOP. And it worked. “Tonight, the light overcame the darkness," he told supporters Tuesday night after his second-place finish to Trump.
Saturday night's debate made clear that Kasich isn't about to recalibrate his approach as the nomination battle moves to the state known for its rough-and-tumble primaries. As Trump and Bush and Cruz and Rubio sparred in what looked like a no-holds-barred cage match at times, "This is just nuts, OK?" he lamented. "Jeez, oh man." At one point Kasich and Bush, both vying to become the establishment alternative to Trump and Cruz, sparred over Kasich's expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, but the tone of that exchange was mild by comparison to others, to say the least.
Rubio unplugged
It was clear after last Saturday's debate who the loser was: Marco Rubio, who was battered repeatedly by New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (now out of the race) that he was too scripted. The knock apparently stuck, as Rubio stumbled to a fifth-place finish three days later in New Hampshire.
But Rubio seemed to recover his footing in South Carolina. He fired back at Cruz during the immigration exchange and otherwise wasn't nearly the target of other candidates that he was a week earlier. Whether Palmetto State voters will reinvigorate the Florida senator's once-surging White House bid next week remains an open question, but at the very least, Rubio likely stopped the bleeding on the narrative that he's a robotic debater.
Carson struggles for attention
Yes, there's still a sixth person in the GOP field, but it was hard to know that during Saturday's debate. As he has in recent face-offs, Ben Carson seemed to fade from notice for much of the night. He was neither a target of or instigator of any of the debate's most heated exchanges. His most notable line tended to be him referring viewers to his campaign website.
The retired neurosurgeon has never shown an interest in engaging in the more combative moments of GOP debates, and in the most combative GOP debate of all, he maintained that stance. At one point he noted how people have told him he needs to "scream and jump and down — jump up and down like everybody else. Is that really what you want? What we just saw? I don't think so."
Unfortunately for Carson, that meant a lot less airtime for him as the rest of the field battled. But he keeps hope alive. "If all the people who say, 'I love Ben Carson and his policies, but he can't win,' vote for me, not only can we win, but we can turn this thing around," he said in closing.