GOP candidates attack each other on policy positions
With no Trump onstage, GOP debate focuses on Cruz, policy, other issues
(about 1 hour later)
DES MOINES — Sen. Marco Rubio said that rival Sen. Ted Cruz, was running a campaign “built on a lie,” because Cruz had shifted his position about whether undocumented immigrants should be allowed to remain in the country legally.
DES MOINES — The first Republican debate without Donald Trump unfolded differently than the others. It was quieter, more cordial – and far more predictable, as the politicians onstage often retreated into talking points and rehashed bits of stump speeches — without a bombastic billionaire onstage to throw them off their game.
“This is the lie that Ted Cruz’s campaign is built upon,” Rubio (Fla.) said. ‘Throughout this campaign, you’ve been willing to say or do anything to get votes.”
The night’s most interesting moments largely revolved around Sen. Ted Cruz, who played the front-runner’s role as Trump boycotted the debate because of a running feud with Fox News Channel, which hosted the event. Rival Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) said that Cruz’s campaign was built on a “lie,” because Cruz (Tex.) was not honest about his position changes on the subject of immigration. Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) said Cruz had an “authenticity problem.”
Rubio’s attack on Cruz (Tex.) was part of a difficult section for the second-place candidate, who was playing the front-runner in this debate because billionaire Donald Trump was boycotting it.
[Live reports from the debate and the Trump event]
A few moments earlier, moderator Megyn Kelly had played video clips that showed Cruz appearing to support a comprehensive immigration bill, as long as it included an amendment that he’d proposed. Cruz’s amendment would have eliminated the possibility that undocumented immigrants could become U.S. citizens, though it left open a chance for them to obtain a permanent status as a legal resident.
Now, however, Cruz has lambasted Rubio for helping to author that bill, saying that Rubio had supported “amnesty.”
“Was that all an act? It’s pretty convincing,” Kelly said.
Cruz responded, in effect, that he had never supported the bill itself – although, in the clips, he had appeared to.
“The bill was 1,000 pages,” Cruz said. “The fact that each amendment didn’t fix every problem didn’t mean that I supported the rest of the bill.”
That brought attacks not just from Rubio, but also from Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.).
“That’s an authenticity problem,” Paul said. He said that Cruz was always casting other Republicans as fatally open to “amnesty.” “Everybody he knows is not as perfect as him.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie — who has a debate habit of waiting for other candidates to duke it out, then jumping in to condemn them both – did it again.
This is why you need to send somebody from outside of Washington, to Washington. I feel like I need a Washington-to-English dictionary convertor,” Christie said. It should be somebody like . . . him. “It’s perfectly legal in this country to change your mind. But when you’re a governor, you have to admit it.”
***
Sen. Rand Paul called for a reexamination of the “war on drugs” in Thursday night’s main Republican debate, saying that it was being enforced unequally and had led to higher rates of incarceration of black men.
“What we need to do is make sure that the war on drugs is equal protection under the law,” Paul (Ky.) said, hitting a theme that had defined the early stages of his candidacy.
He also said that in communities like Ferguson, Mo., city governments were using traffic fines to raise money from poor people: “A third of the budget for the city of Ferguson was being reaped by civil fines. People were being just fined to death.”
Paul is now a long-shot for the candidacy, but just two years ago he seemed like a Republican who might build an unusual coalition that included black voters, and a platform that included reform of sentencing laws. In theory, this was a way to expand on the libertarian base of his father, former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul – building a “Leave Me Alone Coalition” that might draw from both parties’ bases. It didn’t come together. Paul espoused more mainstream GOP views, lost his defining qualities, and wound up in the middle of the GOP pack.
Paul’s statement was one of several moments at Thursday’s debate that showed what this GOP race might look like without its unorthodox front-runner, billionaire Donald Trump.
With Trump boycotting the debate, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz got to play front-runner: At one point, Cruz complained that moderators were directing all the other candidates to attack him. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) was the leading foreign-policy hawk, turning many questions back to the subject of the Islamic State, and his plans for stepped-up government surveillance and more detentions of terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush – a frequent target of Trump’s taunts – got time to defend his family and his status as member of the hated “establishment.” “Fine, I’ll take it. I guess I’m part of the establishment because Barbara Bush is my mom,” Bush said.
For Rubio, though, the Trump-less debate brought new scrutiny of his record, which included his failed effort at immigration reform. Rubio pursued an “earned path to citizenship” for undocumented immigrants, then backed away from his own bill. That brought a new attack from Bush, Rubio’s former mentor and now rival.
“He led the charge to finally fix this immigration problem,” Bush said. “And then he cut and run, because I guess it wasn’t popular among conservatives.”
“You used to support an earned path to citizenship,” Rubio retorted.
“So did you,” Bush said. “So did you, Marco.”
***
Fox News Channel accused Donald Trump of asking the network for a $5 million donation as a “quid pro quo” in return for Trump’s promise to appear in Thursday night’s Republican debate, as an extraordinary feud between the right’s best-known media platform and the Republican party’s presidential front-runner overshadowed the last debate before the Iowa caucuses.
“Roger Ailes had three brief conversations with Donald Trump today about possibly appearing at the debate — there were not multiple calls placed by Ailes to Trump,” Fox News said in a statement released to the media. “In the course of those conversations, we acknowledged his concerns about a satirical observation we made in order to quell the attacks on Megyn Kelly, and prevent her from being smeared any further. Furthermore, Trump offered to appear at the debate upon the condition that FOX News contribute $5 million to his charities. We explained that was not possible and we could not engage in a quid pro quo, nor could any money change hands for any reason. In the last 48 hours, we’ve kept two issues at the forefront - we would never compromise our journalistic standards and we would always stand by our journalist, Megyn Kelly. We have accomplished those two goals and we are pleased with the outcome. We’re very proud to have her on stage as a debate moderator alongside Bret Baier & Chris Wallace.”
In earlier interview on board his private plane, Trump had not mentioned any request for a donation from Fox. Trump said he would make good on his promise to boycott the debate. “No, I’m not doing it,” Trump said, after calling reporters to his private plane for a special media availability – in which Trump essentially said that nothing had changed.
He appeared eager to needle Fox News, saying the network’s top executives had been calling him every 15 minutes, and that he had spoken to Rupert Murdoch, the chairman of Fox’s parent company, News Corp., just minutes before.
“The time to change my mind would have been two days ago,” Trump said. He said it was too late now.
[Trump debate withdrawal is backfiring big-time on Fox News]
In the debate itself, the seven other top GOP candidates sparred with each other about questions of national security, in a sometimes contentious debate about who had been toughest on the Islamic State, and the proper limits on government surveillance.
Moderators pressed Sen. Ted Cruz (Tex.) – the front-runner in Trump’s absence – on his call for “carpet-bombing” of ISIS in Syria, a strategy that has been criticized as both impractical and likely to lead to civilian casualties.
Cruz responded by saying that he’d been singled out for criticism: He said that the past questions to other candidates had boiled down to “Rand, please attack Ted…Chris, please attack Ted,” and so on, naming Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie.
“It is a debate, Sir,” moderator Chris Wallace said.
It turned out that Cruz had been setting up a Trump joke: “If you guys ask on more mean question, I may have to leave the stage.”
Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) picked up the same theme. “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving the stage, no matter what you asked me,” he said.
Despite his lack of physical presence, Trump very much was part of the scene.
“Let’s address the elephant not in the room tonight,” said Fox News Channel moderator Megyn Kelly, whose removal from the stage Trump had tried – and failed – to secure. In a question to Cruz, Kelly noted that Trump had not shown up: “What message do you think that sends” to Iowans?, Kelly said.
Cruz responded with a joke: “I’m a maniac. And everyone on this stage is stupid, fat and ugly. And Ben, you’re a terrible surgeon,” Cruz said, meaning retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. “Now that we’ve gotten the Donald Trump portion out of the way…” Cruz thanked the others on the stage for having “the respect to show up” and make their case to Iowans in person.
Besides Cruz, Carson, Christie, Rubio and Paul, the other candidates in the main-event debate were former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.
[Debate transcript, annotated: Who said what and what it meant]
[Debate transcript, annotated: Who said what and what it meant]
For the seven, this first Trump-less debate could provide a new chance to stand out, or to attack the bombastic billionaire who has so far managed to overshadow a stable of better-credentialed politicians. This is the last televised debate before Monday’s Iowa caucuses, and it is especially crucial for Cruz, Trump’s closest rival in this early-voting state.
And Cruz was pressed about an issue where he has been criticized by the popular and long-serving Republican governor of corn-growing Iowa: Cruz’s call to phase out the federal mandate to use ethanol in fuels.
However, many of them, having little chance in Iowa, may be aiming already at the (theoretically) more-moderate, establishment-friendly voters in New Hampshire, although Trump is way ahead of them there, too. The New Hampshire primary is Feb. 9.
“I don’t believe that Washington should be picking winners and losers. And I believe that there should be no mandates and no subsidies whatsoever” for any kind of fuel, Cruz said. His call for the elimination of the ethanol mandate, which boosts purchase of corn, brought an attack by Iowa’s long-serving governor, Terry Branstad.
Instead of attending the debate, Trump appeared at his own rally in another part of Des Moines, which he said would honor veterans – but would also give Trump a platform to counterprogram the very debate he is skipping. Trump said he had already donated $1 million of his own money to veterans causes and raised a total of $5 million for them.
Cruz sought to reframe his opposition to the ethanol standard as part of a broader roll-back of government regulations, which would eventually boost the corn-ethanol industry along with everyone else. He mentioned an even more obscure issue – at least, obscure outside of Iowa – which was the “ethanol blend wall.” That is a limit on the percentage of ethanol that can be blended into fuel, set by the government and supported by oil companies. The logic of the “wall” is that a greater amount of ethanol may harm auto parts. “I will tear down the EPA’s blend wall, which will enable ethanol to expand its market share.”
At the center of the dispute was Trump’s long-standing disdain for Kelly, who Trump has frequently accused of being biased against him after a tough line of questioning during the first GOP debate in August. Those tensions escalated Saturday amid a push by the campaign to have Kelly removed from the debate during a telephone call Saturday between Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and a Fox network executive.
[Trump wasn’t onstage, but he was still front-and-center]
[A viewer’s guide to a crazy night of political television]
Trump himself sought to overshadow the entire event, holding a rival event across town meant to honor veterans. He also dominated the news during the debate, after Fox News charged that Trump had asked for a $5 million donation to his charities in return for his appearance at the debate.
Trump first indicated that he might skip the debate Monday during several television interviews, stirring questions about whether the front-runner would seriously skip a nationally televised debate so close to Monday’s caucuses, the first nominating contests in the country. Trump repeatedly accused the network of treating him unfairly in the days before the debate, adding that the network has used him to boost their ratings and advertising revenue.
Late Thursday evening, Trump responded with a statement that didn’t specifically deny he’d asked Fox News for what the network called a “quid pro quo.”
Fox News responded with a series of press releases that angered the billionaire: “We’re very surprised he’s willing to show that much fear about being questioned by Megyn Kelly,” the statement from Fox said.
“The event tonight, which raised more than $6 million dollars, and in many respects turned out to be bigger than the debate, was for the Veterans. If FOX wanted to join in that effort and make a contribution Mr. Trump would have welcomed that,” the statement said, in part. It concluded by saying that “Mr. Trump won tonight as well,” even without showing up.
Elsewhere in Des Moines, the night’s first “undercard” debate began at 7 p.m. as planned, and its early minutes focused on Trump. The low-polling candidates onstage lamented that Trump had taken so much of the media’s attention away from them.
[Undercard debaters lambaste media coverage of no-show Trump]
“This debate was called the undercard debate. The undercard debate. It wasn’t advertised significantly,” said former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.), in his first chance to speak in the debate. He lamented that Fox News had spent the previous hour talking about whether Trump would follow up on a threat to stay away. “An entertainer” had captured everyone’s attention, Santorum said. “The entire lead-up to this debate was about whether Donald Trump was going to show up for the next debate.”
It was unclear whether Trump’s boycott will actually pay off: That may have to wait until Monday, when Iowans finally go to the caucuses.
Santorum, who won the Iowa caucuses in 2012, expressed frustration that he had not had the same success this time around. He blamed the media, who he said had marginalized him by refusing to ask voters about him in opinion polls, and by relegating him to undercard debates like this one. “Trying to segregate and take Iowans out of the process,” Santorum said, meaning that the media had not allowed Iowans a fair chance to evaluate him this time around.
But his absence showed the rest of the GOP field what their race might have been like, without this bombastic and unexpected outsider. For one thing, there was a lot more of what politicians call “pivoting” – taking a dangerous, difficult question, and responding with a safe, poll-tested answer. Asked about their own issues, candidates turned quickly to subjects they all agreed on: the Islamic State must be defeated. Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton cannot be trusted.
Later, Santorum said he had made 700 political appearances in Iowa over the last five years.
“One of her very first acts as president may be to pardon herself,” Rubio said.
Former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore, the lowest-polling candidate in the undercard, complained of a conspiracy to sideline him, to benefit other candidates on the undercard stage.
“The days of the Clintons in public housing are over,” said New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Those got good laughs, but they did little to differentiate those candidates in a crowded field of candidates, all chasing Trump.
“There are powerful forces that are really controlling our lives,” Gilmore said. “The biggest one is the organized establishment media. And I just noticed, just now, you gave Carly Fiorina two one-minute answers in a row.”
One of the most memorable statements of the night came from retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who had been a largely quiet presence onstage. Carson was asked for a closing statement. He responded by reciting the preamble to the Constitution, one of the most beautiful and succinct explanations of what America is about.
Gilmore had been kept out of the past five undercards because his poll numbers were so low. But moderator Bill Hemmer pointed out that Gilmore had not even appeared in Iowa to campaign until a week ago.
“Folks, it’s not too late,” Carson said after that. “Enough said.”
“This is not the place where I choose to begin my campaign. I am beginning my campaign in New Hampshire,” Gilmore said.
He also took a shot at Santorum and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who were both scheduled to appear at the Trump rally later in the evening. Gilmore said that he came from a humble background: his father was a meat-cutter at Safeway, his mother a secretary. “I’m not about to go across and carry the coat for some billionaire,” Gilmore said.
Rather than addressing Trump’s absence, Fiorina, the former tech executive, attacked Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, calling her dishonest and saying that Clinton deserved to be “in the Big House” for her use of a personal e-mail server to handle government data. The Big House is a euphemism for prison.
Jose A. DelReal and Ed O’Keefe contributed to this report.
