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Republican Debate: Without Donald Trump, Issues Stand Out While the presidential front-runner held his own event, serious policy differences emerged By Gerald F. Seib

Posted By Ruth King on January 29th, 2016

http://www.wsj.com/articles/republican-debate-without-donald-trump-issues-stand-out-1454041233?mod=trending_now_5

Donald Trump missed Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, and a funny thing happened: A serious conversation broke out.

The conversation was, among other things, about what it would take to ensure American security in a time of Islamic State terrorism, what it means to be a conservative in the mixed-up environment of 2016 and, most heatedly, about what to do with illegal immigrants.

The seven candidates who did show up argued with one another, pointedly and occasionally angrily but rarely on personal terms. Significant differences emerged, which is what is supposed to happen in debates.

The consensus second-ranking contender, Sen. Ted Cruz, had to explain why there was no inconsistency between his votes against defense budgets and his fiery rhetoric about sending waves of American bombers to attack Islamic State forces in Syria and Iraq.

Sen. Marco Rubio tried to sound the toughest notes on fighting extremists. At one point he said Islamic State forces “want to trigger an apocalyptic Armageddon showdown” and “need to be defeated militarily, and that will take overwhelming U.S. force.”

Sen. Rand Paul struck his usual notes warning that it is a mistake to trim Americans’ civil liberties in pursuit of more security. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie chose to argue less with his Republican competitors than to bash President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, saying they have undermined law enforcement in the fight against domestic terror, and continuing his campaign strategy of trying to show that he is the one who is ready to go after the other side rather than the home team.

Missing from the conversation, of course, was the now-undisputed front-runner, Mr. Trump, who stayed away in a dispute with the debate sponsor, Fox News. He wasn’t forgotten, to be sure. At the outset, Mr. Cruz, pretending to lay out the lines Mr. Trump would have used had he been there, called himself a “maniac,” and said the others were “stupid, fat, and ugly”—and then declared that the Trump portion of the evening had been dispensed with, and the conversation could commence.

At another point, upon asserting that the debate moderators seemed to be egging on other candidates to attack him, Mr. Cruz declared, in jest: “If you guys ask one more mean question I may have to leave the stage.” Mr. Rubio followed up: “Don’t worry, I’m not leaving the stage no matter what you ask me.” So, yes, Mr. Trump was never far from the minds of all involved.

But he didn’t dominate the night from afar, as he may have expected he would.

Indeed, such is the madness of Campaign 2016 that Mr. Trump may have suspected that by skipping the debate he could still ensure the event would be entirely about him. And beforehand, media coverage played along nicely.

But it also may be that by skipping the event, Mr. Trump avoided what might have been the harshest criticism he has faced so far in his unconventional run for office. Mr. Cruz, in particular, has shown in the past week that he was preparing for a more frontal and sustained assault. Indeed, Mr. Cruz’s stump speech in Iowa in recent days has become almost entirely an indictment of Mr. Trump’s conservative credentials, largely implicitly but sometimes explicitly.

Mr. Cruz has been urging conservatives in Iowa: Ask the other candidates where they have been in the fight against abortion, against gay marriage, against the Affordable Care Act and for gun rights. In each case, the message has been that Mr. Trump has been absent or, in some cases, on the other side.

But none of that was hashed out on Thursday night. Instead, the absence of Mr. Trump seemed to open the way for a detailed debate on, among other things, immigration. The Trump position on that subject is simple: Build a wall to stop immigrants from crossing the Mexican border.

Messrs. Rubio and Cruz and Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, all had to wrestle with a subject that has vexed each of them: their evolving positions on what to do about the 11 million or so illegal immigrants. The fact is that each of them has shifted ground on the subject and is trying to strike a more hard-line position amid the anti-immigrant environment of their party in 2016.

And on that subject, the ghost of Mr. Trump did hover overhead, when Mr. Rubio turned to Mr. Cruz and charged: “Now you want to out-Trump Trump on immigration.”

Write to Gerald F. Seib at jerry.seib@wsj.com

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