Republican primaries
Marco Rubio shines in the first Republican debate of the 2016 election cycle
Debate — Quicken Loans Arena hosted the first Republican debate of the primaries as an audience of more than 24 million viewers tuned in around America. Google Images
The 2016 presidential race has officially begun. On Aug. 6, Fox News hosted two Republican debates in Cleveland, Ohio, the sight of the 2016 Republican National Convention. This was an opportunity for the candidates to make a first impression on a national stage, and few took advantage of it.
There were two clear winners of the first Republican debate of the 2016 cycle. In the 5 p.m. debate, Carly Fiorina blew viewers away with her confidence and intelligent policy answers. Fiorina, the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, had a number of encouraging media appearances leading up to the first debate but was viewed by many as too good to be true.
This outlook was shattered as she handled question after question with grace and poise, showing she was more than a dark horse candidate for the vice-presidency. Charles Krauthammer, from the Washington Post, stated that Fiorina “took the stage and made it her own” and that she was “articulate, knowledgeable, and relentlessly combative.”
The other winner coming out of Quicken Loans Arena was Senator Marco Rubio. Calm, cool, and collected, Rubio handled every question thrown his way with ease, including an awkwardly worded one from Megyn Kelly on “God.” One of his stronger moments of the debate was his correction of Donald Trump’s faulty assertion that all illegal immigrants are coming from Mexico.
“Let me set the record straight. … The evidence is now clear that the majority of the people coming across the border are not from Mexico,” Rubio said. “They are coming from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras.”
Rubio left the debate as the favorite to win the nomination in the eyes of many.
While Rubio and Fiorina helped their campaigns for the presidency, one candidate hurt himself by having a mediocre performance and being somewhat boring. Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush came into the debate with all the name recognition and money a presidential candidate could want. Yet throughout the debate, Bush came across as dull and unenergetic.
He had a few strong answers including his expert redirection of a Common Core question meant to trip him up. However, his stumbling over a question on how his older brother, former President George W. Bush, handled the war in Iraq seems to be a reoccurring problem for his campaign. Earlier this summer, Bush was asked a similar question in an interview with Fox News and bumbled his way through a poor response. One would think in light of this, Bush and his campaign would have come up with a strong, go-to answer that would end these questions. Instead, he continues to struggle with a difficult question that will surely not go away if he makes it to the general election.
Finally, senator Ted Cruz has become a darling of many grassroots conservatives over the last few years for his attacks of both the Obama Administration and the Republican congressional leadership. Over the summer, Cruz went so far as to accuse Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of telling “a flat-out lie” to the GOP conference on the Export-Import Bank.
With this reputation in hand, the senator from Texas was aggressive from the very start of the debate. However, he made one large gaffe in his attack of the Obama Administration’s handling of ISIS. Cruz began by stating that President Obama is “essentially, an apologist” for radical Islam and then preceded to express his support for Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s work against the Islamic State.
“We need a president that shows the courage that Egypt’s President al-Sisi, a Muslim, [showed] when he called out the radical Islamic terrorists who are threatening the world,” stated Cruz. This is an extremely high compliment to be paying a leader who, Foreign Policy pointed out, killed over 1,000 Egyptian protestors who opposed his administration and overthrew the previous, democratically elected president in July 2013. These types of brash, poorly thought through statements are ones that will hurt the senator’s chances in this tight and competitive campaign.
This Republican field is much different from previous cycles. In 2012, there were, at most, three reasonable candidates for the nomination. For the 2016 elections, the group is full of influential governors, senators, and businesspersons that could all take on the presumed Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton.
Sutherland is the opinion editor.