Third GOP presidential debate: And then there were four

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The third debate for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination Wednesday seems to have been the best showcase so far for the differences between the self-proclaimed conservative candidates who want the White House.

Sure, every single one of the A candidates (we’re not even counting the Happy Hour debaters) is the “only one up here” to do something or other and every single one of them wants to save Social Security and every single one if them has a tax reform proposal that was better than the next one’s.

It felt like a different type of competition: Whose got the biggest, er, tax plan.

And maybe it’s because of the cumulative effect as we get closer and closer to the first primary in Iowa Feb. 1, but Wednesday’s debate has all the makings of a turning point. People will look back in a year and call this debate the one that thinned the herd.

Read related story: 5 things we learned from the CNN GOP debate

Right off the bat, there are a couple of people who need to pack up and go home tomorrow: Pennsylvania Sen. Rand Paul and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.  Both needed to have break-out moments and neither did. Paul’s less-is-more on government regulation is just expected now. He needs to expand on it. And Huckabee scores some points for his push to fund research for major diseases — like diabetes, cancer and Alzheimer’s — to save money on Medicare. But he likes Donald Trump too much and he closed by saying that he wasn’t in it for himself. So save us the time, Mike, and get out now.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was no more exciting than usual and, as we learned, is doing better with his Fantasy Football League (7-0) than he is on his campaign, so maybe he should stick to that. He is only prolonging the campaign’s death by diluting the palliative meds.

Ohio Gov. John Kasich stumbled too much and has too much pride for his home state — “In Ohio I did this, in Ohio I did that” — that it would be a crime to pull him away to Pennsylvania Avenue. He also lost a lot of votes with all that talk about requiring “public service” hours from university graduates. You mean like the communist Cuban government does?

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was more fun to watch. His performance and dumbfounded responses — “Really? We’re going to talk about regulating Fantasy Football?” — will bring him up from the back of the bus for a couple of weeks, but not much longer. He was like the Bernie Sanders of the GOP field Wednesday, just saying the first thing that popped into his head. But he still won’t be taken seriously because of his Jersey shore “deadly serious” style.

Read related story: Donald Trump trumps Jeb Bush in social media contest

Carly Fiorina looks angry even when she smiles and could hardly get a word in. She scores a few points for taking accountability for the HP firing, but she cannot be “the female alternative” candidate because, well, that position’s already taken by Hillary Clinton.

In fact, if we had to cull the Final Four out of this debate it would be Trump, who packs heat but can’t answer a question straight on if his life depended on it, and Ben Carson — if only because they got the most attention from the moderators, since they are leading the national polls — and Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who did the best with their limited time and should be leading the national polls.

Carson might slip a bit in the polls after this, though. He seemed to sleep through most of it (did he drink Jeb’s “tea” by mistake?) and his somewhat stammering answers about that drug company he took money from did not ring genuine. Nobody is going to believe that he didn’t know his face was on their website. That’s, as he said on live TV, “a buncha crap.”

Cruz and Rubio both connected with the typical American Republican voter when they blasted the mainstream media, which is as evil and complicit as the Washington establishment (to their audience) and which was more obviously than ever trying to pit the candidates against each other with loaded questions that seemed really over the top. Even for NBC.

Cruz is also increasingly polite to the other candidates, and that gives him more gravitas.

But Rubio probably scored the most points. He was able to deftly thwart lame attacks on his voting record and personal finances — because that’s the best they can do against him, ladies and gents — telling his one-time friend and mentor Bush that he was getting bad advice.

“What is it? Like a French work week? You get like three days when you have to show up,” asked Bush, because he is under the false impression that a Senator has to punch a time card to represent the constituency when, by the way, those of us who voted for him are all too happy to have Marquito run around the country trying to become the first Hispanic president in the U.S.

“Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you,” Rubio shot back without hesitation and to some applause. He refused to fight back. He said he wasn’t running against Bush or anybody on that stage. He had already set the record straight, adding that John McCain, Barack Obama, and John Kerry — who was endorsed by the same newspaper that called for Rubio’s resignation — missed more votes in the year of their presidential campaigns.

Rubio, who probably has more in common with voters than any other candidate, connected yet again with paycheck-to-paycheck voters and was also the only one who, in closing arguments, chose not to talk about how great he was and what he had done in his home state or fighting Obama or how he was a “proven leader.”

No, instead, Rubio talked about America and restoring the American dream.

“We can’t just save the American dream we can expand it, to reach more people than ever before,” he said.

That just might be the kind of thing that will set him apart from the other three candidates who are left.

  Donald Trump, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Presidential race 2016