RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Republican presidential candidates auditioned to be Commander in Chief on Tuesday in the first debate since the terror attacks in Paris and San Bernardino. The differences with President Obama were less instructive than the GOP fault lines that emerged on antiterror surveillance, the war on Islamic State and the Middle East.

Perhaps the most revealing exchange came on the powers of the National Security Agency, where Senator Marco Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich in particular squared off against Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Messrs. Paul and Cruz were among the few Senate Republicans to vote for the USA Freedom Act this summer that barred the bulk collection of telephone records.

Mr. Rubio has been hitting Mr. Cruz’s vote on the campaign trail, and he rightly pointed out that “now the intelligence agency is not able to quickly gather records and look at them to see who these terrorists are calling. And the terrorist that attacked us in San Bernardino was an American citizen, born and raised in this country. And I bet you we wish we would have had access to five years of his records so we could see who he was working with.”

Who needs “Star Wars VII”? We’ve got the Republican presidential competition. As alternative universes go, this one has been hard to beat.

Out of nowhere, Donald Trump (Is he Darth Vader? Luke Skywalker? Both?) landed in his celebrity starship to challenge and terrorize . . . the Establishment. The genius of the American political system is that it has built-in reality checks. The next one arrives in February with the start of 50 individual state primary elections or caucuses. Opinion-poll politics gives way to voting-booth politics.

Will Donald Trump, master of our alternative political universe, survive in the real-world primaries? This question forced itself upon us toward the end of the Las Vegas debate, when Hugh Hewitt asked Mr. Trump about the “nuclear triad.”
This excerpt conveys the gist of his answer: “But we have to be extremely vigilant and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear. Nuclear changes the whole ballgame. Frankly, I would have said get out of Syria; get out—if we didn’t have the power of weaponry today. The power is so massive that we can’t just leave areas that 50 years ago or 75 years ago we wouldn’t care. It was hand-to-hand combat.”

That answer raises the recent Ben Carson question: How much does a candidate for the U.S. presidency actually need to know about anything in the real political world? The Las Vegas debate suggests we are moving closer to the realities of a voting-booth campaign, made clear in the fascinating, important exchanges between Sens. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz. Notably, their discussion of dictators.

I’m for Ted Cruz but there is a lot to like about Marco Rubio, so I’m of two minds about the clashes between the two that highlighted Tuesday night’s debate.

On the one hand, I’m buoyed by how good they are. We haven’t had candidates of this quality for a very long time. (On that score, while I am not a Chris Christie guy for substantive reasons, his talent cannot be denied.) On the other hand, I’m dismayed to see the exchanges between the two senators get so bitter. I think some combination of the two of them is ultimately the best chance of beating Hillary Clinton. Thus, I like it better when they disagree with vigor but without rancor. I know this ain’t beanbag, but what’s going on now may make it hard to put it back together at the end.

On surveillance, I think they are arguing over an empty bag.

It is no secret that I am an enthusiastic advocate of the NSA program. In theory, it is a valuable national security tool and it is constitutionally unobjectionable. As a practical matter, though, there are three major problems that my fellow advocates of the program (Rubio and Christie, along with Jeb Bush and some others) really have not answered.

— Nine candidates took the stage here Tuesday night for the final primetime Republican debate of 2015, but in critical moments it seemed there were only two: Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.

The pair of freshmen senators went toe-to-toe several times, most notably on the issues of the National Security Agency’s data collection and immigration, participating in lengthy back-and-forth exchanges that left the other candidates sidelined while CNN featured the budding rivals in a split-screen presentation.

Tuesday may have foreshadowed a Rubio-Cruz battle for the nomination that more and more Republicans are now predicting, as Cruz continues to consolidate the support of conservative voters and Rubio emerges as the favorite of center-right, establishment-oriented voters. The headlines coming out of the Nevada debate could further cement the narrative of a collision course for the two senators, who presently occupy very different places in the Republican field. Rubio, despite strong debate performances, remains stuck in the mid-teens in early-state polling; Cruz this week surged to the top of several Iowa surveys and is gaining momentum nationally.

The looming threat to such a binary battle continues to be Donald Trump, who continues to place at or near the top of virtually every poll in the early nominating states. But the bombastic real-estate mogul was largely absent from the defining moments of Tuesday night’s debate inside the towering Venetian hotel and casino here on the famed Las Vegas strip.

The first direct conflict in the suddenly fierce rivalry between Senate colleagues, heretofore conducted via dueling press releases, came when co-moderator Dana Bash asked Rubio about Cruz’s support for a bill that limited the NSA’s ability to collect metadata from US citizens.

“Is Senator Cruz wrong?” Bash asked Rubio, who voted against the bill. “He is,” replied Rubio. “And so are those who voted for it.” His campaign fleshed out the jab hidden in those words with a press release showing Cruz surrounded by other senators who voted for the bill: Democrats Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Al Franken, and Barbara Boxer.