Ted Cruz, the oleaginous Texan, is an erudite slyboots, but his history is off kilter. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW HARRER / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES

The reverberations from last Wednesday’s CNBC Republican debate continue to rattle the political china. According to the conventional wisdom—and, let’s face it, the conventional wisdom is more often right than wrong—the big winners were Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, the big losers were Jeb Bush and … well, Jeb Bush, and the big nothings were everybody else, although Donald Trump and Ben Carson got through the night without doing much to either help or harm themselves. That’s the text. Now, two footnotes.

1. Rubio’s apotheosis.

It came when Bush fumblingly tried a maneuver that he and his advisers had obviously planned—and that Rubio and his had obviously anticipated. The plan was for Bush to slam his former Florida protégé as a shirker and a grifter, the proof being that he has been running around the country campaigning for President instead of dutifully staying in Washington to vote on bills and “do constituent service, which means that he shows up to work.” Here’s Bush, delivering what was no doubt supposed to be the coup de grâce:

Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work. I mean, literally, the Senate—what is it, like a French workweek? You get like three days where you have to show up? You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job. There are a lot of people living paycheck to paycheck in Florida as well. They’re looking for a senator that will fight for them each and every day.

Ah, France. What a hellhole. Quel trou de l’enfer.

Rubio had a pretty good answer, and I’ll get to that in a moment. Really, though—isn’t it time to retire this stupid talking point, which gets trotted out every time a member of the United States Senate has the temerity to run for President? It was used against Senator Barack Obama, whose floor-vote-missing tally was slightly worse than Rubio’s. It was used against—speaking of France!—Senator John Kerry, whose absenteeism in 2004 was worse still. More to the point, it was used against Senator John McCain, who missed three-fifths of the votes the Senate took while he was a candidate in the 2008 campaign. Rubio, for his part, has skipped about a third of this year’s roll-call votes, and almost half of those taken since April, when he announced his candidacy. Which raises two questions. So what? And who cares?

Anyway, here’s what happened next:

RUBIO: Well, it’s interesting. Over the last few weeks, I’ve listened to Jeb as he walked around the country and said that you’re modelling your campaign after John McCain, that you’re going to launch a furious comeback the way he did, by fighting hard in New Hampshire and places like that, carrying your own bag at the airport. You know how many votes John McCain missed when he was carrying out that furious comeback that you’re now modelling after?

BUSH: He wasn’t my senator.

RUBIO: No, Jeb, I don’t remember—well, let me tell you, I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.

“Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you”—that was the saber thrust that won Rubio both ears, the tail, and the debate. Bush tried feebly to respond, but a halting “Well, I’ve been—” was as far as he got before Rubio interrupted him to talk confidently and a little patronizingly about how his own campaign is “about the future,” how much he admires his hapless former patron, and how important it is to defeat Hillary Clinton.

All that was all very well, but Rubio could have gone further. He could—and should—have tried to finish off the whole absenteeism canard. Something like:

Look, the people of Florida didn’t elect me to punch a time clock on Capitol Hill. They didn’t elect me just to cast votes on routine bills or doomed bills or meaningless bills where my vote wouldn’t change the outcome. They elected me to fight for their values, and right now I can do that most effectively by putting my heart and soul into this campaign to take back our government and our nation from those who don’t share their values, our values.

That would have been a public service, not just a debater’s point.

By the way, to the (trivial) extent that any candidate deserves censure for supposedly neglecting the routine duties of his day job, governors are a more logical target than senators. Any given senator is only one per cent of the Senate, and the institution can function, or dysfunction, quite normally in his or her absence. Any given governor is a hundred per cent of his state’s supreme executive authority. Senators, like Presidents, deal mainly with national matters. The responsibilities of governors, if not their ambitions, end at the borders of their states.

2. Ted Cruz, dialectical diagnostician.

There’s been a spate of stories lately about how Cruz’s rhetoric is more hifalutin than everybody else’s. He uses lots of big words and dependent clauses. The Times’s Upshot feature has analyzed the speeches of the Republican field by comparing the complexity of their language to that of a range of literary classics. The Upshot concludes that “Mr. Cruz’s debate style is much more complicated than that of his fellow Republican candidates, close to works like Beowulf and Don Quixote.” Beelzebub and Don Knotts is closer to the mark, but the oleaginous Texan is inarguably erudite.