Rubio and Christie battle for establishment lane

For much of the night Thursday, the sixth Republican presidential primary debate was a split-screen competition, with two pairs of candidates fighting separate battles.

As Donald Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz slugged it out for the top spot in the Republican presidential primary polls, the two men competing to represent the establishment wing engaged with each other.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie hope to emerge as the champion of Republican voters who do not like Cruz and Trump.

In New Hampshire, for example, support in the polls for Rubio, Christie, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Ohio Gov. John Kasich amounts to 42 percent. Trump leads the pack, but with only 30 percent.

Each of the four hopes to be the one to break out of the pack and emerge as the alternative to Trump and Cruz. So each has been taking shots at the others, but Rubio and Christie’s broadsides at each other have been particularly harsh.

Late in the debate, Cruz and Rubio clashed — as they did onstage last month — on immigration. But the fight that matters most to Rubio now is with Christie, and it will likely get more intense as the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses and the Feb. 9 New Hampshire primary approach.

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Debate moderator Neil Cavuto of Fox News asked the two Republicans about their recent back-and-forth, in which Christie charged that Rubio was trying to “slime his way to the White House,” and a super-PAC supporting Rubio portrayed Christie as a liberal in step with President Obama.

Rubio noted — after saying that he liked Christie — that the governor supported the Common Core education standards and gun control, and that he had once, years ago, made a personal donation to Planned Parenthood.

“All I’m saying is: Our next president has to be someone that undoes the damage Barack Obama has done to this country. It cannot be someone that agrees with his agenda,” Rubio said.

Cavuto asked Rubio if he considered Christie a liberal. Rubio stopped short of saying he did, but repeated many of his charges and added one more, that Christie supported Obama’s nomination of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“Unfortunately, Governor Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports, whether it is Common Core or gun control or the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor or the donation he made to Planned Parenthood,” Rubio said. “Our next president, and our Republican nominee, cannot be someone who supports those positions.”

Christie flung back at Rubio the Florida senator’s own response to Bush when the former governor attacked him in an earlier debate. At the time, Rubio said that Bush was simply doing what political consultants told him to do, because he was slipping in polls.

“I stood on the stage and watched Marco, rather indignantly, look at Governor Bush and say, ‘Someone told you that because we’re running for the same office, that criticizing me will get you to that office,’” Christie said, leaning on his rostrum and looking at Rubio. “It appears that the same someone has been whispering in old Marco’s ear too.”

Christie disputed Rubio’s charges. “I didn’t support Sonia Sotomayor,” he said. “Secondly, I never wrote a check to Planned Parenthood.” And he listed steps he said he had taken to veto gun control measures: vetoes of a 50-caliber rifle ban, a clip-size reduction plan and a statewide ID system proposal.

Common Core, he said, has been “eliminated” in New Jersey.

Christie went on to dismiss Rubio’s accomplishments as a senator — “What you get to do is just talk and talk and talk” — and then mocked him for changing his tone after they became rivals. Christie came back to his charge that Rubio was changing his stripes and abandoning his high-minded tone of a few months ago.

“I like Marco too, and two years ago, he called me a conservative reformer that New Jersey needed,” Christie said. “That was before he was running against me. Now that he is, he’s changed his tune.”

But Rubio failed to press his attack on several points where Christie would seem to be vulnerable.

In 1994, Christie did say he had donated money to Planned Parenthood, but now says he was misquoted. He was pro-choice in the early 1990s, but says he changed his views after hearing his daughter’s heartbeat in utero.

In the early 1990s, Christie supported an assault-weapons ban, but now admits he’s changed his mind. He defended Common Core as recently as 2013, but last year abandoned this position.

On Sotomayor, Christie said he wouldn’t have nominated Sotomayor, but did say, “I support her confirmation.”

Late in the debate, as Cruz and Rubio debated tax policy, Christie interrupted to tout his own experience as a governor and once again reinforce his experience as a state executive — in contrast to Rubio’s job as a lawmaker in a body of 100 senators. And he punctuated it with a dismissive put-down.

“I’d like to interrupt this debate on the floor of the Senate,” Christie said. He reminded the audience that the question had been about entitlements, and said he wanted to talk about that subject, projecting an air of exasperation with Cruz and Rubio for not addressing the topic at hand.

When Rubio started to say that he would be happy to talk about entitlements, Christie brought him up short.

“You already had your chance, Marco. You blew it,” Christie thundered.