The Sixth GOP Debate: Guns, Grids and the Clinton Machine

4:38 p.m.: Another year, another Republican debate. This time, Sen. Rand Paul was notably absent from the lineup during the undercard round Thursday at the Fox Business-sponsored huddle of GOP presidential hopefuls in South Carolina.

Even though being bumped from the main stage at the North Charleston Coliseum & Performing Arts Center apparently didn’t work for Paul, the three other candidates—Carly Fiorina, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum—turned up for the occasion to woo voters with talk of reforming tax codes, immigration, income inequality, gun control, foreign policy, and that perennial conservative favorite, family values.

Oh, and also how to train taxpayers using methods borrowed from child-rearing and dog-training. That last bit came courtesy of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who gave tax talk a down-home feel with an innovative approach involving “rewarding behavior you want more of and punishing behavior you want less of” when drawing up taxation schemes on the federal level.

Santorum was sanguine about reversing President Obama’s recent nuclear agreement with Iran, regaling viewers with fearful notions of attacks from Tehran on our “electric grid.” His delivery style became even more forceful when he denounced the scourge of political correctness, another popular right-wing theme to play upon this election season. Santorum also made a pitch for restoring the ideal of the nuclear family as a way of solving societal problems and reminded Americans about that time he took Hillary Clinton on, and won, in a contest over partial-birth abortion.

Fiorina, for her part, clearly had given her writing team explicit orders to tailor her comments for Twitter, and she delivered several one-liners with obvious gusto. Right out of the gates, she had it in for Democratic heavyweight Hillary Clinton, zinging her left-leaning counterpart by remarking how, unlike a certain other woman in the running “I actually enjoy spending time with my husband.”

Of Clinton’s sticky email scandal, Fiorina had this to say: “Mrs. Clinton, you actually cannot wipe a server with a towel.” The former Hewlett Packard CEO also took a swipe at Republican front-runner Donald Trump, characterizing his vocal enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin as the stuff of “bromance. In her closing remarks, she entreated the audience to help keep her in the race in order to allow her to finally face off with Clinton. “You would pay to see that fight—and that’s ‘cause you know that I would win.” 

Huckabee also wanted people to know he fought the Clinton Machine. (If any of the undercard group got the memo about Bernie Sanders gaining on Hillary Clinton in the polls, they didn’t quite show it.) He blasted President Obama’s recent moves, which Huckabee has called “unconstitutional and completely insane,” on the gun control issue. “I promise you I’ve been to more gun shows than president Obama,” Huckabee began, encountering absolutely no argument there. “I’ve purchased guns, and I can assure you that it is much more difficult to purchase a firearm than it is to purchase the ingredients of a salad at the supermarket.” He also denounced the entire European Union while he was at it, calling the coalition an outright “failure.”

When it came to income inequality, the candidates reached for oblique connections to make the GOP look like the party of the common people. Fiorina deflected the conversation to focus on how Republicans are against big government, while Santorum also pulled another thread, in his case about immigration, into the conversation. “We need to be the party that stands for the American worker,” he said, calling up the economic argument that focuses on foreigners taking over American jobs.

The trio then made way for the main act, featuring seven debaters in this go-round: Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, John Kasich, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie.

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