The big loser of the South Carolina GOP debate Saturday night had to have been the audience.<\/p>\n
It was painfully obvious to all with eyes to see that the audience was cooked, packed with donors backing Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio.<\/p>\n
In fact, such was the transparency and desperation of the neoconservative Establishment that its attempts to salvage its candidates\u2019 diminishing prospects while weakening the frontrunner and first runner-up were at once pitiable and laughable.<\/p>\n
In the real world, Jeb Bush supporters are rarer than Elvis Presley sightings. This is consistent with Jeb\u2019s abysmal national polling, to say nothing of the results of Iowa and New Hampshire. Yet to judge from the constant cheering with which debate audiences respond to his remarks, one could be forgiven for thinking that this guy is <\/em>Elvis Presley come alive again.<\/p>\n Rubio is more popular than Jeb, it\u2019s true, but Rubio is also the candidate that finished in third place in Iowa and fifth place <\/em>just last week in New Hampshire. An alien from another planet would never have guessed this given the audience\u2019s orgasmic eruptions over Marco.<\/p>\n That the audience was hand-picked in favor of the Establishment candidates, Jeb and Marco, is a fact so blatant that even leftist observers like The Huffington Post<\/em><\/a> and Vox<\/em><\/a> couldn\u2019t fail to notice it.<\/p>\n \u201cSomething very peculiar happened at the Republican debate on Saturday night,\u201d writes Vox. \u201cWhen Donald Trump talked, the audience booed. Yet when Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and even John Kasich <\/em>talked, they got loud cheers and applause\u201d (emphasis original).<\/p>\n The article explains that this happened so frequently that it even resulted in a \u201cspike in Google searches for \u2018Why are people booing?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n HuffPo states that the audience \u201cwas more boisterous than usual\u201d and that it often \u201cseemed to favor former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and to be very much against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and real estate mogul Donald Trump\u2014the two candidates currently leading the race.\u201d<\/p>\n The audience\u2014the Big Donor audience\u2014was the biggest loser because its over-the-top behavior succeeded in a way that few other things could in accentuating the chasm between the members of the Establishment, on the one hand, and, on the other, the party\u2019s rank-and-file voters: The former vindicated their opponents\u2019 narrative that, one, there is <\/em>an Establishment and, two, this Establishment is responsible for every evil for which the GOP is blamed.<\/p>\n The Establishment audience also harmed its one candidate who may have had some chance of going somewhere in this race.<\/p>\n The last thing that Marco Rubio wants is to be branded as the Establishment\u2019s candidate, another Jeb Bush. But after hearing the lobbyists scream wildly over every syllable that Marco uttered in South Carolina, we can now safely \u201cdispel with the fiction<\/a>\u201d that he is anything but an Establishment candidate.<\/p>\n Rubio is one of Saturday night\u2019s losers for another reason: His 1,043 attempt to explain away his support for amnesty reinforced the impression of his untrustworthiness.<\/p>\n While Rubio was busy trying to strong-arm Republican voters into accepting the Gang of Eight\u2019s bill of goods, he insisted that the Gang\u2019s \u201cpath to citizenship\u201d was actually the conservative <\/em>alternative to the status quo. Rubio suggested that Tea Partiers and traditional Republican voters who supported him at one time but who unequivocally rejected his, Lindsey Graham\u2019s, John McCain\u2019s, and Chuck Schumer\u2019s immigration proposal were actually the fake conservatives, for it was they <\/em>who wanted a \u201cde facto amnesty<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, though, Rubio says that he learned his lesson. However, here\u2019s what some of us are still trying to discern: What is<\/em> the lesson that he alleges to have learned?<\/p>\n Does he no longer think that the current situation is \u201cde facto amnesty?\u201d<\/p>\n The voters were right, Rubio says, in rejecting his proposal, for they rightfully want the border secured before anything further could be done with immigration. Yet didn\u2019t Rubio swear (and swear and swear) three years ago that the Gang of Eight plan did <\/em>secure the border<\/a>?<\/p>\n As recently as Saturday night, Rubio defiantly declared that he never even supported amnesty. The latter, he contended, is forgiveness, but the Gang of Eight\u2019s plan affixed stringent penalties. But if Rubio\u2019s Gang of Eight immigration plan was the only \u201cconservative\u201d alternative available to the \u201cde facto amnesty\u201d that is our present circumstances; if it was not amnesty; and if, as he says, it did secure the border, then on what grounds does he claim to have learned his lesson from having labored so tirelessly on its behalf?<\/p>\n Phyllis Schlafly is a legendary veteran of the conservative movement who endorsed Rubio in his senate race against Charlie Crist. Her thoughts about him have since\u2026changed.<\/p>\n