It didn’t take long for Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate to devolve into an angry back-and-forth between rival candidates. And for once, it was actually kind of substantive.
Ohio Gov. John Kasich spent his first moments on camera attacking what he considered to be his party’s drift toward the fringe. Although he didn’t mention candidates by name, he hammered Donald Trump’s proposal for mass deportation of undocumented residents; Ben Carson’s decision to base his tax rate on biblical tithing; and many of the other candidates’ support for throwing millions of people off the insurance rolls.
Trump didn’t take that sitting down. He sniped back, noting that Kasich worked at the investment banking firm Lehmann Brothers prior to the company’s collapse in the 2008 financial crisis. Then they fought over what, exactly, Kasich’s role at the company was. (He was a managing director of the investment banking division.)
