Compared to the lengthy contributions from Clinton or Obama, most of the Republican candidates’ remarks on the events this week seemed canned and lightweight. Photograph by Alex Wong / Getty

Imagine that you were running for President as a Republican when Freddie Gray sustained fatal injuries in the back of a police van, and parts of Baltimore erupted into riots. How would you have reacted? Basically, you would have had two options.

With black youths on the streets, throwing rocks and overturning police cars, the obvious temptation would be to exploit the situation as a wedge issue, by defending the police, calling for the rioters to be dealt with harshly, and bemoaning the failure of Great Society programs. Broadly speaking, that’s what Richard Nixon’s G.O.P. did after the riots of the nineteen-sixties, and it helped the party to dominate Presidential politics for a generation.

A second option, a more daring one, would have been to use the occasion to highlight how Republican attitudes toward the criminal-justice system are changing. In Texas, Florida, and other G.O.P.-run states, Republican governors have launched initiatives aimed at reducing the prison population and ending custodial sentences for non-violent offenders, such as low-level drug dealers. And on Capitol Hill, Republicans are taking part in a bipartisan initiative to reform federal sentencing guidelines.

For a candidate primarily interested in gaining the support of traditional Republican voters, the safe bet, clearly, was to play the law-and-order card: if you did that, there was very little chance that you would end up offending Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. But if you were positioning yourself as a new type of Republican, one interested in updating the party’s brand and reaching beyond its electoral base of elderly white voters, then adopting the riskier option may have been worth considering. At the very least, it would have garnered a lot of attention.

So how did the G.O.P. primary contestants actually react?

Perhaps deciding that there wasn’t much to be gained from engaging on such an incendiary topic, some of them didn’t say much. On Tuesday, Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin, tweeted, “Our prayers for restoration of peace in Baltimore.” That was it. Senator Marco Rubio, who was busy pledging not to raise taxes and trying to undermine the Iranian nuclear deal, didn’t make any public comment about what was happening in Maryland—or at least none that I saw.

Of all of the G.O.P. candidates, Senator Rand Paul was perhaps the most likely to say something interesting. Over the past couple of years, he has made a sustained effort to reach out to the black community, offering a message of hope and enterprise. If Jack Kemp has any heir in today G.O.P., it’s probably Paul. In the wake of the unrest in Ferguson, he authored an article in Time which criticized the police’s military tactics, writing, “Given the racial disparities in our criminal justice system, it is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.”

After Baltimore erupted, however, Paul goofed, and goofed badly. Appearing on Fox News, he quipped, “I came through the train on Baltimore last night. I’m glad the train didn’t stop.” In his other remarks, he expressed sympathy for the police and blamed the violence on ”the breakdown of the family structure, the lack of fathers, the lack of sort of a moral code in our society,” but nothing he said was particularly insightful, and, in any case, it was overshadowed by his tasteless attempt at a joke. He didn’t speak at all to the circumstances surrounding Gray’s death, his own support for sentencing reform, or the long history of poverty and deprivation in parts of Baltimore.

Jeb Bush, to his credit, was more sensitive in his comments. ”A young man died and that’s a tragedy for his family,” Bush said on Thursday, at an event organized by the National Review. “This is not just a statistic; this is a person who died.” Having shown some humanity, however, he was also content to fall back on a number of all-too-familiar Republican nostrums. He defended the “broken windows” model of policing pioneered by Rudy Giuliani. He bemoaned the “pathologies being built around people who are poor, that they’re going to stay poor,” and asked, “How do you create a system of support that doesn’t create dependency?” He also praised Toya Graham, the Baltimore mother who was videotaped smacking her sixteen-year-old son for joining the rioters: “It was a nice visual symbol of what needs to be restored.”

Ted Cruz, in an appearance on Fox News Latino on Wednesday, also spoke to the circumstances surrounding Freddie Gray’s death. “There needs to be a fair and impartial investigation into what happened,” he said. ”But the answer is not violence and mayhem.... The people who have been paying the biggest price have been the minority communities.” Having offered these measured comments, however, Cruz couldn’t resist taking some potshots at President Obama, whom he accused of fomenting racial tensions. The President “had the opportunity to be a unifying President, to try to bring people together,” Cruz said. “Rather, his Administration, it seems, constantly seeks to divide, to turn us against each other ... based on race, based on sex, based on wealth, based on geography.”

Given the G.O.P.’s animus toward Obama, remarks such as these were to be expected, I suppose. But still. Parties that are seeking to improve their image need to play against type occasionally; only by doing so can they persuade voters that they have really changed. On this occasion, though, the G.O.P. candidates didn’t say much of note. Compared to the lengthy contributions from Hillary Clinton, and also from Obama, most of their remarks seemed canned and lightweight.

Perhaps that’s because the G.O.P. doesn’t wish to focus on the problems of inner cities, where the party picks up hardly any votes. Or perhaps it’s because the 2016 hopefuls feared offending traditional Republican voters. Whatever the reason, at least one of the candidates, Paul, has conceded that he might have gone another route. “We’re listening and learning every day,” Elroy Sailor, a senior adviser to Paul, told Politico after the candidate’s remarks on Fox News. “And we learned from this.”

We shall see if that’s true.