New York Times
By Jeremy Peters and Michael Barbaro
August 3, 2015
Jeb
Bush stumbled through a familiar question about his brother and father,
struggling for the right words as he cracked a joke about duking it out
with anyone who questioned
the legacy of his aging dad.
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey awkwardly said aloud what many have been wondering about his candidacy: “Am I washed up?”
And
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina reached back to the 1990s to
attack Hillary Rodham Clinton’s credibility by dredging up her husband’s
dishonesty about a sexual
affair.
Mischievously
promising to translate “Clinton-speak” for the audience, Mr. Graham
explained, “When Bill says, ‘I didn’t have sex with that woman,’ he
did.”
After
weeks of preparing for a smash-mouth debate with Donald J. Trump, 14
Republican candidates found themselves instead Trump-less but sandwiched
into a constricting
format on Monday night, delivering strikingly uneven performances just
days before the first big test of the presidential primary contest.
Rather
than making the other contenders look more presidential, however, the
event, at St. Anselm College in Manchester, N.H., seemed to shrink the
candidates. Assembled
in the front row, the Republicans gawked as each rival took his or her
turn on stage, looking at times as if they were being forced to sit
through a tedious school assembly.
In
Mr. Trump’s absence — he skipped the event, saying it was not worth his
time — the candidates filled two hours with credentials and boasts that
he could not match.
They touted their experience balancing big state budgets (Gov. Scott
Walker of Wisconsin and Gov. John Kasich of Ohio), their military
service (Mr. Graham) and their middle-class roots (Carly Fiorina.)
“I
started out as a secretary in a little nine-person real estate firm,”
said Ms. Fiorina, who ended her career in business as chief executive of
Hewlett-Packard, a billion-dollar
computer company.
Still,
Mr. Trump’s influence could be discerned. The moderator, Jack Heath, a
New Hampshire radio host, repeatedly pressed the candidates on
immigration, the issue that
Mr. Trump has ridden to the top of the polls. And it seemed clear they
felt compelled to take as hard a line as they could to leave as little
room as possible between their positions and his.
Rick
Perry, the former governor of Texas, said he had looked President Obama
in the eye and warned, “Mr. President, if you don’t secure the border,
Texas will.” He listed
the security measures he favored for stemming the flow of illegal
immigrants, from air patrols of the border 24 hours a day, seven days a
week, to a stronger fence in certain places.
The
forum, sponsored by The Union Leader newspaper, seemed to lack the
drama and anticipation surrounding Thursday night’s Republican debate in
Cleveland. Candidates were
not permitted to interact with each other directly; instead, they each
took two turns at the microphone, fielding rapid-fire questions from the
moderator, before being given 30 seconds for closing statements.
Some
were not even in New Hampshire. Three of the senators who participated —
Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Marco Rubio of Florida —
did so from a studio
in Washington, where they stayed so they could vote for stripping
Planned Parenthood of its federal funding. (The vote failed in a
Democratic-led filibuster.)
The unusual format and repeated interruptions by timekeepers led to several painfully awkward moments.
Former
Gov. George Pataki of New York was mid-sentence — “By the way, Jack” —
when the moderator cut him off. He reacted with surprise, stood up and
walked off. At another
point, a woman suddenly emerged from stage right with a folder in hand,
beckoning Mr. Perry to leave. He sheepishly did so.
C-Span
cameras caught candidates waiting their turn, forlornly watching their
rivals onstage, sometimes in unflattering ways. Mr. Christie at one
point sat with his head
down, looking positively bored, as he listened to Mr. Walker. As Rick
Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania, gave his closing
statement, Ms. Fiorina was caught gabbing with Mr. Graham.
There
were moments of levity. The moderator asked Mr. Perry to name agencies
he would cut from the federal government, the same question that tripped
him up, disastrously,
during a Republican presidential debate in 2012.
“I’ve heard this question before,” Mr. Perry deadpanned, to laughs.
There
were revealing moments, too. Mr. Heath asked Mr. Christie if his best
shot at the White House had been in 2012. Mr. Christie gamely replied,
“Jack, you saying I’m
washed up?” He added that, back then, "I was not ready."
The
Republicans largely spared each other attack, favoring Mrs. Clinton as
their primary target. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana deployed backhanded
praise for a Clinton
rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, to mock her liberal values.
“Give Bernie credit,” Mr. Jindal said, “At least he is honest enough to
call himself a socialist.”
But
the fiercest critique was from Ms. Fiorina, the sole woman in the
Republican field, who repeatedly accused Mrs. Clinton of lying and
declared herself uniquely capable
of taking her on: “In order to beat Hillary Clinton, we have to have a
nominee on our side who is going to throw every punch.”
The
format seemed ill suited to a number of candidates. Mr. Bush, the
former Florida governor, whose eight years out of office has left many
wondering about his adroitness
as a debater, delivered a low-key and sometimes halting performance —
particularly on the subject of the Islamic State. He said America “needs
to pick a strategy and stick with it,” but when asked about putting
American forces on the ground to fight it, his
answer seemed wobbly: “I’m not sure that’s necessary.”
He
also stammered through his attempt at a joke about his famous family.
"My dad is the probably the most perfect man alive, so it’s very hard
for me to be critical of
him,” he said. “In fact, I’ve got a T-shirt that says, uh, at the Jeb
swag store, that says I’m the, um, I’m the, my dad’s the greatest man
alive. If you don’t like it, I’ll take you outside.”
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