However, last night's debate was about finding the right tone to finally take down Trump and prevent his incredible momentum from actually resulting in victory. For candidates like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, detailing policies or engaging in rounds of marginal differentiation between the various non-Trump candidates has led to the Donald's rise.
Now it was time to join Trump in the mud and take him down. It was really time long ago, but there's no time like the present.
Numbers such as Trump's favorability numbers in a state like Texas, where 45% of Republican voters see him favorably and 50% see him unfavorably, suggest that successful consolidation of the non-Trump voting bloc would finally see the real-estate tycoon go down in defeat.
However, it was still essential that Rubio finally take on Trump for the following reasons:
1) It's impossible to appear as a strong leader who can unite the party if you don't confront the frontrunner.
This holds especially true if the frontrunner's specialty is mocking and demeaning his top opponents with precise strikes that often cut to the heart of their failings.
2) Rubio needed to maintain the notion of a Trump "ceiling."
Trump has struggled in most states to get over the 30-35% hump, and there's good reason to believe that he's the last choice of most of the voters outside of that group, but it was essential that Rubio hit Trump hard enough that he was certain to be the last choice of all of those voters.
It's been proven to be very difficult to dislodge Trump's core of support but if Rubio can consolidate everyone who hasn't been a Trump supporter that should be enough.
3) Rubio needed to do what he could to diminish Trump's key strengths.
As I just noted, it wasn't likely that Rubio would steal many voters from Trump, but his attacks on Trump's record of hiring illegal immigrants and Cruz's follow up attacks on how Trump funded the "gang of eight" amnesty bill's legislators (except Rubio apparently) cut at the heart of Trump's appeal with his hardcore fans.
Trump's serious strength comes from being seen as the defender of old, white America from the forces of immigration, political correctness (i.e. cultural marxism that blames all of life's problems on the pernicious evils of white males), and from his perceived strength as a frontrunner.
Rubio (and his sidekick Cruz) needed to do what they could to hammer away at each of these legs and see if they could get Trump to fall out of his chair as a result.
I'd say that the Latin duo's attacks were successful on all three fronts.
Rubio's plan was to demean Trump and marginalize him as a candidate that serious voters don't take seriously. That should be relatively easy but it was completely beyond the skill of Jeb because Jeb lacked the social confidence to pull it off.
Marco seemed to be totally comfortable with the fine art of trolling and mocking an opponent, here was his best exchange:
You notice that Trump immediately goes for what he thinks is the jugular, that Marco Rubio is a "choke artist" who can't handle the pressure of the moment. If he's successful, that would devastate Marco's chances of winning the trust of Americans to become their Commander-in-Chief. No one wants the guy in charge of doing diplomacy with Putin or taking down ISIS to be someone who craters under pressure.
Rubio's "water" incident and debate meltdown against Chris Christie all fed into this line of attack, but this time things went very differently.
First Rubio picks the fight and he picks it over the very issue that Trump desperately wants to use against him, that he repeated himself in robotic fashion when Christie went after him. But...
Trump goes for it and Rubio keeps needling him over the fact that A) Trump doesn't really have much of a plan to address Obamacare and offer new healthcare legislation and B) Trump is basically just bluffing and hoping that this goes by unnoticed.
Trump says, "I watched you repeat yourself five times 30 days ago," and Rubio snarks back, "I saw you repeat yourself five times five seconds ago."
He finally closes hard when he sums up Trump's ENTIRE campaign message in the most condescending fashion imaginable as:
"He says the same five things every night. Everyone is dumb, we're going to make America great again, we're going to win, win, win, he's winning in the polls, and the lines around the state."
The message, "this guy isn't a serious candidate with real solutions, he's just a blowhard." If there was another Donald Trump in the race, that's exactly what he'd be saying about Trump, if that makes any sense. It's the insult that cuts right to the core of Donald's failings the kind of insult that Trump himself is so great at finding and utilizing.
On the second front, limiting Trump's ceiling, Rubio and Cruz successfully painted Trump as being a totally untrustworthy person who has been a hypocrite on the major issues and would get pulverized in a race against Hillary when team Clinton and the media would suddenly shine lights on all of his shady business dealings like "Trump University."
This also helped on the third front in weakening Trump's image as the inevitable nominee and ultimate winner. Cruz repeatedly emphasized that Trump is weak in polls against Clinton and would likely get smashed in a general election.
Trump's response, "well if I would get beat imagine how badly you would do!" That's a solid line of rhetoric against Cruz, but it's not likely to hold sway against Marco or blunt the damage done by the comparison against Clinton. There's no better way to unite a frayed group of people than by providing a common enemy and suggesting that the common enemy Hillary would win if Trump is the leader is a powerful argument.
It's hard to imagine how that debate could have gone much better for the Rubio/Cruz alliance other than Trump losing his head and finally saying something so ridiculous that it destroyed his own candidacy. Frankly, that might have happened and it will just take some time for it to sink in.
Next up you're going to see Rubio and Cruz both release their taxes, per Romney's request, and then put increasing pressure on Trump to do likewise, all the while insinuating that he has something he wants to hide. Every Trump bluster and refusal to do so will make it seem all the more likely that he does in fact have something to hide.
If you don't think Cruz, Rubio, and Romney orchestrated this whole maneuver together...well we'll just have to disagree.
This leads us to our last point for today, the apparent alliance between Rubio and Cruz. Now this could be a marriage of convenience since Cruz knows he can't possibly win without all of the conservative, anti-immigration voters currently rolling with Donald.
The fact of the matter though is that even if Trump can be taken down or diminished, Cruz doesn't really have a path to the nomination any more, the delegate math just doesn't add up. You wonder if last night was an audition for the role of "base rouser and VP attack dog" for Rubio.
Cruz would be a strong VP for the purpose of going hard after opponents (his campaign ads are often the most biting and his debate cross examinations are brilliant), rallying the GOP base (including potentially some of the Trump fans who don't trust Rubio over immigration), and bringing his ground game operations to the fold.
For the purpose of stopping Trump, there's no reason for Cruz to drop out of the race before he's utilized his strength in Texas to beat Donald there on Super Tuesday and then perhaps to drop out and endorse Rubio before the crucial "winner takes all" vote in Florida. It's hard to imagine him doing so without assurance from Rubio of a VP slot on the ticket or some other concession but it's also not hard to imagine that happening.
Beyond that, Rubio's path to stopping Trump is to consolidate middle class voters who are being easily convinced that Trump is not a trustworthy man or a serious candidate, whatever his poll numbers say, and then to either win the nomination himself or keep Trump from getting the 1236 delegates needed to secure the nomination.
If we get to Cleveland for the Republican national convention and no candidate has 1236 votes, then they'll have to work some deals to choose a nominee and there's no chance they choose Trump.
Donald and his fans like to say, "if you screw me like that then I'll run third party!" but "sore-loser" and "double registration" laws will actually make it impossible for him to do so. They'll have to find another anti-immigration demagogue to rally behind and they'll have to find them very quickly.
The Republican party, initially hellbent on nominating another Bush, allowed Trump to get very far before finally training their guns on him and looking to bring him down. It may very well be too late, but last night was the first step in what could be a successful operation to stop him.
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