Missing from the Republican debate: better hats

 

 John Kasich, left, and Donald Trump, second from right, argue across fellow candidates during the CNBC Republican presidential debate at the University of Colorado on Wednesday.

Watching last night’s Republican debate while the World Series played on another channel brought to mind the late Yogi Berra, who once described the blinding sun in Yankee Stadium’s left field this way: “It gets late early out there.”

Going into last night’s debate, there was still plenty of time left on the calendar for any of the party’s governing candidates to incite some passion among voters and break away from the second-tier blob. But after months of town halls and diner stops and two previous debates that seemed to last for about 18 hours each, the odds that any one of these candidates might suddenly take flight — especially in New Hampshire, where the establishment will likely need to make its stand — seemed to be growing more remote.

It’s getting late early out there. And there’s a palpable sense of anxiety among candidates who wonder why they’re running in place, and how long they have until their window of opportunity starts to close.

I agree with those who thought Marco Rubio had command of the stage last night, dealing a pretty sharp blow to his friend and fading mentor, Jeb Bush. Back in April, after interviewing Rubio on the eve of his announcement, I wrote that he would get a moment like this, and he seems to be seizing it.

But to this point, he and the rest of the party’s governing candidates — Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, Chris Christie, Rand Paul — have remained, for the most part, bunched together in polls, and probably in the public mind too. And there are reasons for that.

For one thing, the field is so crowded that it’s hard to get the kind of exposure a governor or senator might normally take for granted in the autumn of a primary campaign. When the governors of Ohio and New Jersey have to shout from the edge of the stage just to force their way into a debate (and when other governors and senators can’t even gain admission), it’s no wonder that voters haven’t been able to differentiate much between them.

And then of course there’s the Trump carnival, which dominated coverage for an entire summer, forcing all the other candidates to react. Trump has never held more than a third of the Republican electorate in Iowa or New Hampshire, according to most polls, but he’s commanded about 90 percent of the campaign news from both states.

But none of that really explains the lack of enthusiasm out there for anyone who isn’t a builder or a brain surgeon. None of that gets to the heart of the problem these guys are having — which is what’s missing at the heart of their campaigns.

If I went out on the street in Manchester today and asked 20 random people what Trump’s campaign was about, probably 15 of them would tell me: “Make America great again.” They’ve seen the hat. They’ve heard the 60-second spiel about how America never wins anymore, which always strikes me as the most powerful line of the campaign.

We know what Ben Carson’s big idea is — that only a complete outsider and novice can fix what the experts in Washington have wrought. (“It’s not brain surgery” would be his hat.) We know that Carly Fiorina is going to bring a CEO’s acumen to the White House.