A bit differently from my colleague, Andrea Widburg, I enjoyed the presidential debate.

I found it intelligent, lively, not too destructively argumentive, and well-controlled in content. Bret Baier and Martha McCallum at Fox News did a terrific job of moderating, urging candidates to get their points across within the time so that they could cover all the topics. Right on.

And they called out candidates who were not answering the questions, which was another point in their favor.

All the candidates had their moments, all displayed certain strengths. 

The pair who had the weakest performances -- Asa Hutchinson and Chris Christie -- were the Trump-haters. All they did was offend, and Christie just kept talking and talking as the audience overwhelmed him with boos. He kept digging, glibly calling booing a part of 'democracy.'

That underlined what this debate was really about Who was going be President Trump's understudy. Who would be there to replace Trump if the prosecutors and their leftist juries snapped him away? That was what this was about.

Because as Laura Ingraham remarked in the after-show commentary, the candidates were strong and most did well, but none were strong enough to make anyone want to switch their vote from President Trump.

I can't see anyone rising to frontrunner status after this. Nobody had the energy, the fire and the electricity of President Trump, who drew a hundred million views on his Tucker Carlson debate alternative interview on Twitter. This was essentially a vice presidential audition for the benefit of President Trump.

And while not the main meal, it was a useful side dish.

I found things to like in many candidates, each had ways to shine.

I thought the brightest star was Nikki Haley, whose intelligent discussion on foreign policy and the family and role of women were right with the mainstream.

Her practical thoughts on abortion -- to move slowly and condition voters to embrace a culture of life instead of move suddenly and nationally all at once (which will only enrage blue-state women who have had abortions), were spot on. Her personal story was lovely. Her foreign policy experience was generally good, albeit with a neocon tinge, but not as bad as I had thought. She didn't have nasty words for President Trump. 

But her speech had the annoying specter of tired buzzwords and cliche thoughts.

She started out with a cliche that annoyed me -- the line from Margaret Thatcher saying that if you wanted something said, ask a man and if you wanted something done, ask a woman, which in the age of Kamala Harris, Lori Lightfoot, Kim Foxx, Jennifer Granholm, Susan Rice, Jill Biden, and others of that incompetent ilk, is queasymaking. We've seen enough of that. Give me Donald Trump over any of those dumpster fires any day of the week. Those kinds of generalizations are odious. 

She also spoke of a "new generation" which made me play "It's the Pepsi Generation" commercial jingles, circa 1971 in my head. That's old. It's the 2020s. We can elect whoever we want, Nikks.

She complained about Vivek Ramaswamy's lack of experience in foreign policy, calling him 'unqualified.' Oh, really? He actually had a lot of thoughts about not getting into useless permawars and working with Russia that sounded a lot better than hers. There's a lot more to expertise than being being able to pronounce countries' names, Nikki. And it was President Trump who actually gave her her foreign policy experience that she is so proud of. She launched into him from a practical perspective, saying he was the most unpopular president in America which while practical and not personal, was not the ace in the hole she thinks it was, given that 2016 changed everything. 

I also very much liked that she attacked the national debt, said both parties were responsible, which is perfectly true, and fully understood that government overspending is why we have inflation.

 I'm sounding too critical, remembering just things I didn't like. I liked her performance and thought she came off as classy and presidential. She'd do great as President Trump's vice president if it came to that.

Vivek Ramaswamy put in a strong performance, too. He was spot on on the matter of education and the damaging impact of wokester education, and the specter of people not knowing much about civics, which Ron DeSantis also did well on. His finest moment was in calling bee ess on global warming. We all know it is fake. Haley tried to tiptoe around it by emphasizing that Republicans are in favor of clean air and water and check out the non-cooperation of China and India on cutting their emissions, which were both good arguments. But just calling out the whole idea as garbage was what a lot of us wanted to really see. Spot on, Vivek.

I was amused at how ferociously Haley attacked him on one forgotten issue -- given that both are Indian-Americans, I wondered what the papers in Delhi would say.

Ramaswamy had one weak spot, on crime, reciting a litany of 1980s style diagnoses and solutions -- mental health crisis, emptying of mental institutions, all of which happened a long time ago. He should have brought up drugs, which is driving both homelessness and the open border, as well as the complete disintegration of blue cities.

Ron DeSantis turned out an acceptable performance, but came off as timid at first and shallow in many spots. When he really got into the specifics of his record, things got different -- speaking of firing bad prosecutors who refuse to do their jobs, taking on critical race theory and other shibboleths of wokedom, making Florida prosperous with clean elections -- these were things of beauty. He laughed off President Trump's attacks on him  which was excellent. How I wish he could be President Trump's vice president.

Another strong performance was from Tim Scott, who spoke of his roots, his disdain for wokedom and calls for repairing families by ending government incentivizations against that. Classy and strong. He was good on everything and made no mistakes. At one point he told the Fox moderators he was "a Southern boy" who spoke slow, as his means of getting a few seconds more of time -- and the point he made hit it out of the park. Touche!

Mike Pence was good on a few points but largely weak. There was no obvious fire in him, which yes, is his style,. Asked about his decision not to halt the certification of the election of 2020 on January 6, he started out by lecturing us on the Constitution which was garbage since the whole argument there was that there were two different readings of a vague clause. To heck with that. At the tail end of his response to that, he gave the correct reasoning that he could not halt the electoral certification in his role as Senate president because it would set a precedent -- that Kamala Harris could do the same thing to a Republican winner. He also did some annoying things like speaking of being saved by Jesus at the beginning of his responses and did it a couple of times, which was a raw pander to the Christian right, a thumb in the eye to those who are not Christians yet could vote Republican, and a classless wearing of religion on one's sleeve. That gave me the creeps. We gonna have to listen to this for four years if he's elected? Good thing we won't because he won't be chosen for President Trump's veep nor get elected on his own. Just no way.

North Dakota's Gov. Doug Berkum came off as generally good, explaining to us his North Dakota values, and the nature of his state, which few have been to, and the significance of small town values. While I liked it, I know that small towns do have their problems with crime, fentanyl, social disintegration and other stuff, which makes his characterization an idealization. Generally speaking, yes, it would do some good to import in more small town values and more niceness to society, but that's no solution, and it's also no way to rope in city and suburban voters. Nice try, but not gonna make it.

Asa Hutchinson spoke of his work as a former DEA administration and on that he was fairly good. But he attacked President Trump, which pretty well made us ignore anything else he had to say. Bzzt, no.

Chris Christie was the worst, pontificating about President Trump as running a revenge campaign and getting promptly smacked down by Ramaswamy, who pointed out that Christie was doing the exact same thing against Trump. When Christie waxed about the law and how valid the prosecutions were against President Trump, he fell through the floor, everyone booing and he wouldn't stop. One thing Ramaswamy could have done is pointed out that Christie is famous for his bridge closure to get back at a political rival. That was crummy politics as well as thumbing his nose at the law, so he has absolutely no leg to stand on.

All the candidates were good on the open border and the role of China. One thing that didn't get brought up, though, was election fraud, except indirectly by Ron DeSantis to his credit. Most Republicans know it was there in 2020 and we'd like to know which candidates thought 2020 was all free and fair and which think as we do that they weren't. That's pretty pertinent because elections hang on this, and whether Republicans can ever get elected. We'd also like to know who would go after corrupt secretaries of state with a proverbial political baseball bat to hose out dirty voter rolls, end junk mail balloting, end ballot harvesting, and putting a stop to Zuckerbucks. That is a big issue to Republicans and the criticism goes to Fox, which was one of the loudest voices claiming 2020 was all free and fair as they called Arizona for Biden before he had the votes. I think that was intentional, and that deprived Republican voters of the information they needed.

But all and all it was a pretty good debate. The big thing it told us is that Trump won.

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