Tonight’s Republican CNN debate should be, to use the Donald Trump word, yuuge. I don’t mean to sound like a boxing promoter; I know that TV debates, especially Republican ones, are overhyped. They often turn out to be little more than soundbites and fury, signifying nothing. But anybody who thinks a bad debate can’t harm a political candidate should see what happened in New Hampshire, when Marco’s Rubio hilariously robotic performance in the Saturday night TV showdown helped push him down to fifth place.
Since Donald Trump looks increasingly certain to be the Republican nominee, his rivals, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, desperately need to do something special to hurt him. The CNN debate tonight is surely their last chance. If they can’t dramatically embarrass him, or somehow puncture his amazing success, he will have a barnstorming Super Tuesday on March 1, when about a quarter of the party’s delegates will be awarded. By Wednesday, Trump’s nomination will seem all but certain.
Curiously, however, Team Rubio are putting out noises that their man will go after not Trump, but Cruz. According to Politico’s Mike Allen, the Rubio Campaign ‘think the Texas senator’s voters are less committed and could swing Rubio’s way should Cruz fade. The only way to dislodge Trump … is to turn it into a two-man race – meaning that they first need to get Cruz out of the way.’
If that’s true — and it’s possible Rubio’s spinners are playing a clever game by not giving away the real plan — it seems foolish. As Trump himself has pointed out, Rubio’s backers assumed that, after Jeb Bush dropped out, Marco would pick up the lion’s share of his vote. But that didn’t happen. Why does anybody assume Cruz supporters would be more likely to turn to Rubio than Trump? It’s true that, given his piety, he might mop up a fair number of Cruz’s evangelical voters, as he appears to have done in South Carolina. But Cruz’s Tea Partyesque crowd also has a strong anti-establishment element, which suggests they would prefer Trump, the outsider, to an obvious machine politician such as Rubio. Rubio may have rubbed the elite the wrong way, but he doesn’t have maverick appeal. Trump does and that’s why he is winning.
Moreover, exit polls suggest that Rubio’s recent surge seems to have come as much from people who can’t quite bring themselves to back Trump as from Cruz’s dwindling support. Why should he not attack Trump directly? Does he think it would be look unpresidential to get into a slanging match with the Donald? Or is he scared?
When your candidacy is being strangled to death by a vicious cage fighter like Trump, there’s no time to be civilised. Surely it’s time for him to Marco to man up. If he doesn’t, we can forget the pugilistic talk, and accept that Donald J. Trump has won.
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