Republican Debate Review: Trump Booed, Carson Muted, But Still Lots Of Yelling

Tuesday night’s primetime Republican debate, brought to you by the Fox Business Network and The Wall Street Journal, was a spirited — sometimes acrimonious, sometimes frivolous — exchange between eight candidates on a Milwaukee stage. Unlike last month’s CNBC wild spree of moderator self-absorption, Tuesday’s inquisitors (Maria Bartiromo, Neil Cavuto, and Gerard Baker) rolled out their questions fairly crisply.

Marco Rubio had one of the most Internet-jeered soundbites of the night: “Well, that’s a great question, and let me begin by answering it.” This was a throat-clearing worthy of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s veep Selina Meyer — and @OfficialJLD knew it, tweeting that quote and adding, “Awesome stuff.”

But with each succeeding debate, the strenuous effort of anyone not named Trump or Carson to break through — in the debate, in the polls, in pop culture — has become more aggressive. On this night, John Kasich was fearless about winning the Most Rude award, repeatedly inserting himself into questions directed at others. “I hate to crash the party,” he said, preventing moderator Baker from asking Donald Trump a question. What Kasich’s grin as he said this really meant was, “How ’bout that — I crashed the party!”

Kasich’s elbow-throwing was met with equally sharp ones belonging to Carly Fiorina. She wasn’t merely playing to win; she was imagining winning, at one point painting a self-projecting word-picture: “Citizens must help a President Fiorina get it done.”

“Why does she keep interrupting everybody?” asked Trump, only to be met with scattered boos from the audience.

As for Trump — well, here he was, fresh from his triumph of turning Saturday Night Live into a 90-minute free ad for his campaign, but his assertions this night were more scattershot and non sequitur-y than ever: “The wall will be built, the wall will be effective… If you don’t think walls work, just ask Israel” (yikes!); “Putin, we were stable-mates on 60 Minutes, we did very well, you know it” (huh?); “You should let Jeb speak” (awww…). Of Kasich, Trump said, “I don’t have to hear from this man, believe it.” (This was the second time some booing could be heard directed at Trump.)

This was a debate about the economy, and so Twitter was exploding with jokes about how boring it was to have to hear about tax reform, banking regulation, the Dodd-Frank Act, income inequality, and (when the weeds got thickest) sugar subsidies. It was telling that the question that got nearly everyone on the dais most stirred up was one about Hillary Clinton’s own debate comment that she would not bail out big, failing banks. Oh, the squawking and talking over and trying to disagree with Hillary while most of them ultimately did agree with Hillary that one provoked! The noise must have rattled Cavuto a bit, since he mistakenly referred to a “crook” named “Bernie Sanders” when he almost certainly meant “Bernie Madoff.”

The most silent candidates of the night were Jeb Bush (who knows why, other than this is, increasingly, his standard method of operations) and Ben Carson (who came ready with a prepared opening joke — “First, thank you for not asking me what I said in the 10th grade” — and then pretty much clammed up unless directly spoken to, and answering with comparative brevity).

As usual, I leave the political content and fact-checking to the pros. As a TV event, the FBN/WSJ debate must be considered a success in terms of questions asked and a sustained adherence to, as Cavuto put it, “It’s not about us.”