Able to Destroy, But Not to Create?

I didn’t watch the most recent Republican debate, but I’ve heard almost everywhere that Governor Chris Christie managed to do some rather serious damage to Senator Marco Rubio during one of their exchanges.

I won’t pretend to be happy about that.

Governor Christie, most are saying, didn’t do much good for himself.  We’ll see tomorrow, of course, but it seems probable that his campaign is on the ropes and that he’ll be “suspending” it within a few weeks, at most — if indeed he doesn’t drop out already on Wednesday.

Perhaps we’ll be surprised.

We’ll also learn tomorrow, though, whether Governor Christie’s talent for damaging Republican presidential candidates, so well demonstrated in the 2012 campaign, has endured into 2016.

Senator Rubio seemed to be enjoying palpably good momentum, but that may have been stopped in its tracks.  (Some sketchy preliminary polling data, though, suggests that the damage to his candidacy may not be as grievous as the Washington chattering class imagines it to be.  We’ll know tomorrow night.)  It may be that Governor Christie, without improving his own chances, has substantially aided Mr. Donald Trump’s quest for the nomination by joining the intense attacks focused on Senator Rubio over past weeks by Jeb Bush’s surrogates.