As abhorrent as I think they are, I think Rand Paul and Ted Cruz did the best at distinguishing themselves and taking advantage of the longer (90 second) time to respond format.  Trump and Carson, both weak on substance and clearly out of their league on wonky stuff, did their best to tread water with the low information voters.  This was very substantive, and I think a lot of low information voters — the bread and butter of the right — lost interest pretty early.

While there was no whining about the questions, and little to whine about.  The moderators did fine, but didn’t challenge very much.  The candidates answered with stump speeches and prepared lines, drifted off onto weird tangents, and then moderator would say, “Just to make it clear, you would be in favor of…..” just to bring the candidate back to the question.  Here is a case in point:

BAKER: In seven years under President Obama, the U.S. has added an average of 107,000 jobs a month. Under President Clinton, the economy added about 240,000 jobs a month. Under George W. Bush, it was only 13,000 a month. If you win the nomination, you’ll probably be facing a Democrat named Clinton. How are you going to respond to the claim that Democratic presidents are better at creating jobs than Republicans?

FIORINA: [Looks like a deer in headlights.] Well, first of all, I must say as I think about that question, I think about a woman I met the other day. [blah blah blah, playing for time, hoping everyone will forget the question.]Yes, problems have gotten much worse under Democrats.

Look at the question.  Look where Fiorina ended up.  Acting as if a different question was asked.  Or rather, the opposite question.  It’s almost like the moderators’ questions didn’t matter.

And by the way, that’s not a throwaway question. That’s an important question for the general election.  Republicans have to come up with a better answer than simply saying the opposite of the question.

There are other examples.  Ben Carson tarted up his opposition with a correlation between minimum wage increases and high unemployment that does not exist. Rand Paul responded to a question about the Obama-era energy boom by promising to repeal Obama-era regulations that clearly didn’t destroy the U.S. energy market.

Josh Marshall has an excellent quote about what happens when candidates’ statements are not challenged:

So now we have a debate structured around letting candidates say absolutely anything – because scrutinizing candidates is liberal. This leads to having half the debate framed around how strong financial regulation leads the biggest banks to get bigger and bigger and how we need to put in place new policies to prevent banks from getting this big. And the best place to start is to repeal Dodd-Frank. ….[I]t’s impossible to find any way into this conversation because it’s all theology and self-referencing assertions.

Jeb Bush, an exception to this overall dynamic, seemed to be the exception to this, and even scolded his unrealistic adversaries by saying “They’re doing high-fives in the Clinton campaign right now when they hear this.”  Republicans should have listened to him.  They didn’t.  It’s hard to hear what people are saying when you’re swimming in a pool of KoolAid.