Jeb Bush and wife Columba Bush greet people on stage after the Republican Presidential Debate. Off Message 5 takeaways from the GOP debate Bush doesn't bomb, Rubio and Cruz take flight while Paul looks the odd man out.

Tuesday night’s Republican debate in Milwaukee wasn’t as much a neat romp as the previous three — but it represented a vital team-building exercise for a party that seemed to be pulling itself apart at the raucous Oct. 28 CNBC scrum.

There were sharp, sometimes contentious exchanges on immigration and military intervention, but for the most part the eight GOP contenders presented themselves — for the first time — as a diverse but essentially coherent field united against Hillary Clinton, who seems increasingly likely to win the Democratic nomination.


To do so, they united against all the current common enemies — big government and big media — but also coalesced around a common hero, Ronald Reagan.

Here are five takeaways:

1. GOP rediscovers Reagan’s 11th Commandment. This was the (relatively) harmonious and (modestly) party-building debate Republicans wanted after three trips to the flea circus. The Trump and Carson campaigns groused about the Democrats’ getting a free pass at their first debate in mid-October, and the Fox Business moderators responded by handing them the easiest 120 minutes of debate time the field has ever had. The questioning wasn’t precisely powder-puff, but the moderators mostly steered clear of the controversies that howled outside the venue all week. Ben Carson — accused of exaggerating and distorting significant parts of his biography — was asked a solitary question about new reports he’d made up a scholarship offer to West Point and fudged details about his adolescent outburst, with no real follow-up.

Let off the hook, Carson pivoted from a question about his own integrity into a GOP consensus talking point on Clinton’s Benghazi testimony, which went unchallenged by his peers. “I have no problem with being vetted. What I do have a problem with is being lied about, and then putting that out there as truth,” he said. “I don't even mind that so much if they do it with everybody, like people on the other side. But when I look at somebody like Hillary Clinton, who sits there and tells her daughter and a government official that this was a terrorist attack, and then tells everybody else that it was a video, where I come from I call that a lie.”

The candidates — with the notable exceptions of John Kasich and Rand Paul, the two most on-the-bubble contenders — themselves obliged, for the most part emphasizing their considerable overlap on policy. “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican,” was honored for the first time in practice instead of in its breach.

2. GOP rediscovers Reagan’s foreign policy. The most memorable — and substantive — clash in Milwaukee came at the halfway point when Paul, a libertarian non-interventionist, challenged Rubio, a GOP traditionalist who has backed a more muscular, Reagan-esque foreign policy. “How is it conservative to add a trillion dollars in military expenditures?” the poll-poor Kentucky senator said. “You cannot be a conservative if you’re going to keep promoting new programs that you can’t pay for.”

Rubio fired back with the charge that Paul was an “isolationist” — and quickly earned a hallelujah chorus from everyone else on the stage. The unity was noteworthy: Over the past decade the dovish wing of the GOP, galvanized by the Iraq War, has joined with anti-war Democrats in pressing the case against interventions in Libya, Syria and elsewhere. The party seems to have reunified, with Paul as the odd man out: “We can’t even have an economy if we’re not safe,” Rubio said. “There are radical jihadists in the Middle East beheading people and crucifying Christians. A radical Shia cleric in Iran trying to get a nuclear weapon. The Chinese taking over the South China Sea.”

3. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz cruise. The two candidates rising fastest prior to the debate continued their steady upward trajectory on Tuesday night. Despite a pre-debate report in The New York Times that Jeb Bush’s super PAC planned a multimillion-dollar blitz against Rubio, few of the candidates (with the exception of Paul) tried to lay a glove on the Florida senator, who had a steady if not exceptional night. Cruz, if anything, was more on point, hammering relentlessly away with base-tickling attacks on the D.C. media and big-government cartels. “I understand when the mainstream media covers immigration, it often doesn’t see it as an economic issue,” said Cruz — defending Donald Trump’s positions on the issue. “I would say the politics of it would be very, very, different if a bunch of lawyers or bankers were crossing the Rio Grande — or if a bunch of people with journalism degrees were coming over and driving down the wages in the press.”

But the silver-tongued former debate champion had a rare lip-slip, reminiscent of the mistake fellow Texan Rick Perry suffered four years ago. Prior to the debate, Cruz announced his plan to eliminate five Cabinet departments — but he listed only four, including “Department of Commerce” twice.

4. Jeb Bush was halfway decent — finally. The politically and financially embattled former Florida governor wasn’t great, but he finally showed a little life. And, at long last, he had a wingman: Ohio Gov. Kasich, who launched a spirited attack against Trump over immigration. In his slickest move at any debate (maybe his only slick move at any debate), Bush waited for Kasich and Trump to trade blows — then slipped in his own passionate defense of comprehensive immigration reform. “It’s not embracing American values and it would tear communities apart,” Bush intoned — in response to Trump’s call for the deportation of undocumented immigrants by the millions.

Unfortunately for Bush, he is at his most passionate on issues where he is most politically vulnerable — immigration, where Trump’s position remains widely popular, and in defending his brother, who still remains hugely unpopular with the party base. And time will tell, if one adequate performance can stabilize a campaign badly in need of a breakout performance.

5. The Taming of the Trump. Sure, he got into a couple of nasty food fights — including one where he repeated his dubious claim that Kasich’s success in Ohio was wholly attributable to a tax windfall from fracking. But Trump, fresh off a somewhat tranquilized performance on "Saturday Night Live," wasn’t dissing anyone’s hair, face, sweat glands or congenital idiocy. At times, he sounded — gasp — like your standard, amply-briefed front-runner, especially as he discoursed on trade policy (he’s opposed to the Trans-Pacific Partnership) and Syria (he parts with Rubio and other hawks, in saying he welcomes Russia’s decision to leap into the ISIS-infested quagmire).