CNN Republican debate 2015: Donald Trump vs. everyone

The Republican candidates in tonight’s presidential debate have a problem. They’re used to avoiding attacks on each other. But now, the clock is ticking — the Iowa caucuses are just over a month away. And Donald Trump has the biggest lead he’s ever had.

To get any traction whatsoever, they’re going to take him — and each other — down.

At Wednesday’s debate, Carly Fiorina received thunderous applause for challenging Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to watch a specific scene from the Planned Parenthood sting tapes. The scene, she said, showed “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.”

But when asked for a citation, her campaign replied with a video that isn’t from the Planned Parenthood sting tapes at all — and that still doesn’t show what Fiorina said it did.

Hillary Clinton’s campaign is out with a light-hearted new ad that makes a serious point about Wednesday night’s CNN Republican presidential primary debate: There wasn’t much talk about kitchen-table issues that animate Democrats.

The 89-second Web ad flashes a series of issues on the screen — paid family leave, making college and child care more affordable, equal pay for women and protecting voting rights — and shows breaks in the action Wednesday when candidates weren’t speaking. At one point the audio flips to the sound of crickets chirping.

During last night’s GOP presidential debate, CNN moderator Jake Tapper lobbed what should have been a softball question at the candidates: “Earlier this year the Treasury Department announced that a woman will appear on the $10 bill. What woman would you like to see on the $10 bill?”

This should have been an easy one. All the candidates had to do was choose a prominent American woman. How hard could that be?

Fiorina is wrong: Nobody watching the Planned Parenthood tapes would see those things. I know, because I recently watched the 12 hours of video that included all footage shot inside clinics.

The videos were produced by the Center for Medical Progress, an anti-abortion group that argues Planned Parenthood has profited from procuring fetal tissue for researchers. The videos do show Planned Parenthood officials discussing fetal tissue, sometimes in ways that are callous and jarring. But there is no moment where Planned Parenthood discusses procuring fetal tissue for profit, nor is there the scene that Fiorina describes.

This is a party that spent five years casting vote after vote after vote to repeal Obama’s signature domestic policy accomplishment. Just two years ago, Republicans shut down the government in an attempt to defund the law. The Tea Party itself was born out of calls to end Obamacare.

But last night, candidates mentioned Obamacare exactly six times during the first debate. Only two candidate, Scott Walker and Ted Cruz, have even uttered the Republican rallying cry: “Repeal Obamacare.” The near-complete absence of Obama’s health overhaul is remarkable.

None of them could take down the bully of the presidential primary schoolyard alone, but they ganged up on Trump and got their licks in Wednesday night. It was the moment the Republican field turned on Trump.

And it happened on a night when Trump, for the first time, faced an onslaught of serious policy questions that revealed his lack of preparation. At the Fox debate in Cleveland last month, it was all about Trump and his persona. And that’s his comfort zone. But as CNN pushed him more on policy, Trump tripped.

Republican presidential hopefuls Donald Trump and Ben Carson dived into the question of whether vaccines cause autism in the Republican debate Republican debate Wednesday night.

Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon, pointed out (correctly) that researchers have throughly discredited the notion.

Trump, meanwhile, persisted with his own version of the science. “You take this little beautiful baby,” he said, “and you pump — I mean, it looks just like it is meant for a horse, not for a child, and we had so many instances, people that work for me, just the other day, 2 years old, beautiful child went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very, very sick, now is autistic.”

At Wednesday’s CNN debate, Carly Fiorina did what no other Republican has been able to do: she stopped Donald Trump cold.

CNN’s Jake Tapper provided the opening. “In an interview last week in Rolling Stone magazine, Donald Trump said the following about you. Quote, ‘Look at that face. Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?’ Mr. Trump later said he was talking about your persona, not your appearance. Please feel free to respond what you think about his persona.”

“Vaccines are very important. Certain ones,” Carson said. “The ones that would prevent death or crippling. There are others, a multitude of vaccines which probably don’t fit in that category and there should be some discretion in those cases.”

Trump agreed. “I want smaller doses over a longer period of time,” Trump said.

What these Republican candidates were tapping into tonight is the push by parents to delay and space out kids’ vaccines— even though scientific evidence suggests this is a bad idea.

As he runs for president, he is leaning on his family name and connections. He’s raised over $100 million thanks to the Bush donor network. Many of his policy advisors have ties to his brother’s and his father’s administrations.

And, right now, his name is one of his biggest liabilities, as America struggles to stomach the idea that the 2016 campaign, just like the 1992 campaign, could be Clinton vs. Bush.

When Sen. Rand Paul launched his presidential campaign, he promised to be a Republican who wouldn’t just support criminal-justice reform as a policy platform (as some other presidential candidates, including New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and Sen. Ted Cruz, have) but talk openly about mass incarceration and the war on drugs as racial issues. He was supposed to be running to reach out to non-traditional Republican constituencies: young voters and African Americans.

During most of the campaign, that Paul hasn’t been much in evidence. Over the summer, when he has talked about race, he’s sounded more like a typical Republican: calling on the Black Lives Matter movement to change its name, for example. But during Wednesday’s CNN debate, the old Paul came back with a vengeance. Asked a question about whether the federal government should be cracking down on states with legalized marijuana, he brought up race as part of the answer to the question:

Since the US enacted a federal income tax over a century ago, people making higher incomes have had to pay higher marginal income tax rates than those with lower incomes.

But at the Republican presidential debate Wednesday, Dr. Ben Carson— the current runner-up in national and early state polls — referred to progressive taxation as “socialism,” adding that it “doesn’t work so well.”

The US Treasury is planning to put a woman on the $10 bill alongside Alexander Hamilton. When the Republican presidential contenders were asked which woman they’d choose, three named their own relatives.

Here’s who they’d nominate:

Gov. Jeb Bush joined social network Vine at an unusual time on Wednesday: while he was debating Republican candidates during CNN’s live debate.

This screenshot, provided by Huffington Post’s Ryan J. Reilly, is as hilarious as it is slightly misleading. A social media campaign manager likely joined Vine on his behalf, which Reilly saw when Bush’s Twitter account was connected to Vine under the same name. It seems that Gov. John Kasich joined Vine at the same time, too:

I am pretty well inoculated against issue ads, especially issue ads on immigration. But during one commercial break in CNN’s Republican presidential primary debate — held at the Reagan Library — the National Immigration Forum Action Fund aired an ad contrasting Reagan’s immigration rhetoric with his 2016 Republican heirs. And it is a very, very good ad:

Ronald Reagan, of course, signed the only broad immigration bill in American history that actually called itself amnesty. But the ad is effective because it showcases how compassionate Reagan’s rhetoric was toward immigrants. Compared to Donald Trump’s insistence that the United States can and should deport 11 million people (and their US-born children), of course Reagan sounds like an immigration dove. But he’s even to the left of many Democratic supporters of comprehensive immigration reform, who talk about unauthorized immigrants having to take responsibility and get to the back of the line.

Defending his brother’s record as president at CNN’s Republican presidential debate, Jeb Bush had a simple answer: “He kept us safe.”

And the next morning, his campaign reiterated the point.

CNN’s GOP debate on Wednesday night became quite heated. It was also literally too hot — at least for the candidates, whose sweaty faces reflected the bright stage lights.

When CNN debate moderator Jake Tapper asked Carly Fiorina to respond to Donald Trump’s comments last week, she didn’t take the full 45 seconds she was given. She didn’t need them.

Fiorina was responding to a remark Trump made about her looks recently: “Look at that face!” Trump said. “Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president.”