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For the Record: Marco and the No Good, Very Bad Debate

Brett McGinness ,  Jessica Estepa ,  Joanna Allhands   | Paste BN

How about that GOP debate, huh? Saturday night was the final pre-New Hampshire showdown between Chris Christie, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush ... Ben Carson ... and Donald Trump. Oh, and John Kasich, who we totally remembered and definitely wasn't an afterthought.

Before we begin, let's dispel once and for all with this fiction that you don't want to sign up for the daily For the Record e-newsletter. That's exactly what you want to do.

Marco and the and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Debate

It was a rough night Saturday for the new establishment favorite Marco Rubio as well as for ABC and the behind-the-scenes folks at St. Anselm College. During the introduction, Ben Carson missed his cue altogether, Trump stayed behind with Carson (out of solidarity?), and they seem to have forgotten that John Kasich was there. ABC may have kept Carly Fiorina and Jim Gilmore out of this debate simply because they knew that introducing multiple candidates isn't in their skill set.

For Rubio, the third-place finisher in Iowa but first place among the "establishment" candidates, it was his opportunity to separate himself from the pack. Thanks to a back-and-forth with Chris Christie, he did not. Christie hammered Rubio for rote recitation of 25-second sound bites — and if anyone should be able to recognize a memorized sound bite, it's Chris Christie, who you may have heard was appointed U.S. attorney on Sept. 10, 2001, and the guy who's pro-life, but he continues to be pro-life after babies leave the womb. But he had a point about Rubio, who in two hours managed to repeat the same sound bite about Obama on five separate occasions.

So if Marco lost, who won? Everyone else, according to everyone else.

And before we move on, we'd like to add this: Let's dispel with the fiction that you aren't interested in signing up for our e-newsletter.

We never realized how much of a buffer O'Malley was until now

It's still early in the nomination process, but the gloves have already come off for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. In addition to the continued fight over the Iowa caucus results (see below), the two are sparring over what Clinton calls an "artistic smear" by Sanders, insinuating that Hillary changed a vote on a bankruptcy bill in 2001 based on contributions from the banking industry. The line came up during Thursday night's Democratic debate and was rehashed again on CNN's State of the Union on Sunday.

Clinton appears to be looking forward to post-New Hampshire primaries and caucuses, sending Bill ahead to Nevada and sending surrogates to Texas and New York. She's also looking to shore up her support among minorities, influential unions and lower-income voters. But seriously, this notion that you don't want to sign up for our newsletter is just not true.

Law and Order: Special Caucus Unit

Iowa Democrats spent the last week trying to sort out errors in the caucus results, and have come to a conclusion: We were right the first time, more or less. In the final, we're-not-doing-this-again tally, Sanders picked up 0.1 delegates, roughly, while Clinton lost about the same.

Still, the Iowa Democratic Party has spent so much time tracking down caucus witnesses in contested precincts, it's only a matter of time before Ice-T shows up. The crowning achievement was in Woodbury County No. 43 (dun dun) where the only guy who showed up voted Bernie, and the initial results for the county showed Clinton 1, Sanders 0. So this is pretty confidence-inspiring — we've only made it through one state in our quest to pick the Leader of the Free World, and we're having a difficult time counting to one. Also, we think anyone who believes that they don't want to sign up for the e-newsletter doesn't understand what they're dealing with here.

More from the campaign trail

  • Former U.S. senator and secretary of state not part of the "establishment," says her husband, a former president. So there's another word that has lost all meaning (Paste BN OnPolitics)
  • Gloria Steinem: Democratic socialism brings all the boys to the yard (Paste BN OnPolitics)
  • Detroit to host GOP debate in March, so maybe moderators will remember to ask a question about Flint (Detroit Free Press)
  • Republican donors splitting pairs, hoping to win either the Jeb hand or the Rubio hand (The News-Press, Fort Myers)

"Eh, I'll take the 2%"

Bernie Sanders became the third presidential candidate to make an appearance on this season of Saturday Night Live, showing up halfway through a classic SNL "we don't know how to end this skit" skit. For us, the highlight was Larry David as a neurotic, germophobic Bernie in "Bern Your Enthusiasm," which was pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.

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