"This will go down as the debate that unified the Republican field… in their common contempt for the CNBC moderators."

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CNBC's Republican Debate Was One Big Squawk Box
By Ken Tucker, October 28, 2015

It’s never a good idea for the party host to hog all the hors d’oeuvres and monopolize the conversation, but that’s what CNBC did in its lip-smacking, crumb-spillingly self-satisfied Republican debate on Wednesday night. The network’s debate started late — the better to have its anchor team jabber over each other — and then proceeded to ask so many questions phrased to provoke squabbling that the first big hand of the night went to Ted Cruz for castigating the moderators for “trying to get people to tear into each other.” Talk about a squawk box.

A business network, CNBC had branded its debate “Your Money, Your Vote,” but the moderators’ very first question was small-change, softball stuff: “What is your biggest weakness?” The debate went out of control at regular intervals, with a question directed at one candidate was met with shouted answers from three, four, or five candidates at once. At one point, Rand Paul asked beseechingly, “What are the rules about follow-ups?” About seven people started murmuring answers until CNBC’s Becky Quick said tersely, “It was at the moderator’s discretion,” which prompted laughs and boos from the Boulder, Colorado audience.

Going into this debate, the media was trumpeting Ben Carson’s new lead over Donald Trump in some polls, and suggesting a few of the low-polling candidates would have to make a bold move this night. Bellowing from one far end of the stage, John Kasich had read those reports; right out of the gate, you could not get him to stop as he yelled that the country is “on the verge of putting someone [in the Presidency] who cannot do this job.” His barely-concealed attacks on Trump and Carson were some of the rare personal insults this night, joined primarily by Trump, who said of Kasich, “His poll numbers tanked, so he got nasty… You can have him.”

Fiorina, also slipping in the polls, tried to re-position herself not as running against her Republican challengers, but against Hillary Clinton. She seemed awfully pleased with her closing-statement one-liner as she said plaintively to America: “I may not be your dream candidate yet, but I am Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare.”

But the real stories this night were the Republicans’ persistent attacks on the media (Marco Rubio said, “The Democrats have the ultimate super-PAC: the American mainstream media”) and the chaos of this cable broadcast.  Candidates answered questions that weren’t asked of them (Chris Christie: “Here’s the difference between me and Hillary Clinton…”), galloped off unpredictably onto personal hobbyhorses (Carson: “The P.C. culture is destroying this country”), and launched into freshman-college lectures (Fiorina: “You see, folks, this is how socialism starts…“).

This will go down as the debate that unified the Republican field… in their common contempt for the CNBC moderators. The night started with cheers from the audience when Cruz tried to shame moderator John Harwood for asking Trump if he was conducting “a comic-book version of a Presidential campaign” (I say, sir, that’s a slur against comic books!); it ended with Christie asking if CNBC was serious in asking questions about fantasy football “instead of ISIS,” chiding Harwood not to interrupt his answer to Harwood’s own question and saying, “Even in New Jersey, what you’re doing is called rude.”

The winners of the debate? That could be calculated only in the mathematics of who provoked more applause for criticizing CNBC’s debate tactics. (I will say that Rubio’s “I’m against anything that’s bad for my mother” sounds like a campaign-trail crowd-pleaser to me going forward.) Yessiree, when you add in the likelihood that Game 2 of the World Series probably cut into the debate’s ratings, they must be popping champagne corks and beer cans over at previous debate hosts CNN and Fox News.  
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