Photo by Rick Wilking/Reuters 
 
 Wednesday’s Republican presidential debate was critical for Jeb Bush. He had to show donors and voters that he was a fighter, with life in his campaign—that he could stand up to Donald Trump, take on Sen. Marco Rubio, and emerge as a front-runner for the GOP nomination. 
 
 Jamelle Bouie Jamelle Bouie is Slate’s chief political correspondent. 
 
 In other words, it was do or die. And Bush died. The debate clock tells the whole story; next to Sen. Rand Paul, who fell to the bottom, Bush had the least speaking time of any candidate on stage. Worse, he was on the losing end of a tough exchange. Early in the night, the former Florida governor came out swinging against his erstwhile protégé, Rubio. “Marco, when you signed up for this, this was a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work,” said Bush, hitting Rubio on his absence from the U.S. Senate. “You can campaign, or just resign and let someone else take the job.” 
 
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 Bush had a hit. Rubio was supposed to stumble. But he didn’t. Instead, he accused Bush of playing politics in the most brutal way possible. 
 
 Well, it’s interesting. Over the last few weeks, I’ve listened to Jeb as he walked around the country and said that you’re modeling your campaign after John McCain, that you’re going to launch a furious comeback the way he did, by fighting hard in New Hampshire and places like that, carrying your own bag at the airport. You know how many votes John McCain missed when he was carrying out that furious comeback that you’re now modeling after? 
 
 [L]et me tell you. I don’t remember you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record. The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you. 
 
 And that was it. Bush was finished. He spoke again throughout the night, but never with energy. Any wind he had—any fire or spirit—was gone. In a few seconds, Rubio had knocked Bush out of the game completely. 
 
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 Put differently, if this was an “establishment” debate—hosted by CNBC, focused on the economy, and meant to give voice to the most viable candidates in the race—then it served its purpose. Bush might have cash reserves and support from family backers, but after tonight, he’s slipped to the second tier. He may not leave the race, but he’ll struggle to get traction. Now, Rubio—who gave another great performance—takes his place as the most viable candidate in the race, and as the closest thing to a front-runner. 
 
 But he’ll have rivals. Like Rubio, Sen. Ted Cruz excelled on this stage. But where Rubio turned to biography to win applause and plaudits—reminding the audience that he has struggled with student loans and personal debt—Cruz turned to an old saw. He attacked the media. Constantly. “The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don’t trust the media,” he declared in response to a question on compromise and the recent budget deal in Washington. “How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?” 
 
 Any wind Bush had—any fire or spirit—was gone. 
 
 The crowd went wild, Cruz returned to this theme, dodging questions with hits on the moderators. And as they lost control over the debate—struggling to keep candidates on time and to ask follow-up questions—other candidates did the same, slamming the “liberal media” at the pro-business, pro–Wall Street CNBC. Cruz doesn’t just leave Wednesday in good shape; if he gets a boost in the polls, he has a campaign that can capitalize on his gains. 
 
 With that said, it’s important not to get lost in the theater criticism of presidential debates. This was supposed to be on the economy, and while it jumped into issues such as same-sex marriage and marijuana legalization, that was largely true. And after the modest but steady gains of the Obama administration where is the Republican Party on growth, wages, and economic security? 
 
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 The same place it’s always been. As with Mitt Romney’s campaign in 2012, the signature policy plan for every Republican candidate is a tax cut. “We need somebody who can lead. We need somebody who can balance budgets, cut taxes,” said Ohio Gov. John Kasich, touting his record. “We’re reducing taxes to 15 percent. We’re bringing corporate taxes down, bringing money back in, corporate inversions,” said Donald Trump. “Growth is the answer,” declared Cruz. “And as Reagan demonstrated, if we cut taxes, we can bring back growth.” And the cuts are meant for high earners. Under Rubio’s plan, for example, the government wouldn’t tax income from dividends and capital gains, largely benefiting the wealthiest Americans. And while Rubio includes measures that benefit the bottom 10 percent of income earners, the overall effect of his supply-side cuts is to tilt the tax code toward the top at an even greater angle than exists now. 
 
 There’s more: Gov. Chris Christie called for Social Security benefit cuts and demogogued the program as broke (despite all evidence to the contrary) while Sen. Rand Paul and Ben Carson pitched the audience on their plans to slash Medicare benefits. Carson called for a flat tax, Cruz praised “sound money” and the gold standard, and Carly Fiorina attacked the federal minimum wage as unconstitutional. Candidates talked about their modest upbringings but couldn’t articulate plans for reducing student loans and debt. At most, Kasich pointed to online education, Bush pointed to “accountability,” and Rubio promised more vocational training. 
 
 In short, despite years of decrying Romney’s “47 percent” remarks, Republicans have stuck with the underlying idea: that the government does too much to redistribute wealth to low- and middle-income Americans, and too little to assist the richest citizens. ||||| What a mess. CNBC — a financial network accustomed to grilling CFOs on their price-to-earnings ratios — is not especially practiced at staging presidential debates in front of a national audience, and it really showed at a shaggy and acrimonious GOP debate that pitted the moderators against the candidates. 
 
 Yet if the third Republican debate in Colorado was the sloppiest, it offered the greatest clarity to date about the direction of the race — marking the emergence of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz as upper-tier candidates along with Donald Trump and Ben Carson. 
 
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 It will also likely be remembered as the night the Jeb Bush 2016 deathwatch began. 
 
 Here are five takeaways: 
 
 1. Boulder crushed Bush. You can suffer the public doubts of your donors. You can brave the indignity of having to slash your staff’s salaries. You can even endure a face-plant after you muse about all the “really cool things” you could be doing if only you were relieved of the burden of having to rescue the free world from your party’s right wing. But you can’t do all those things and then lay an egg in the most important debate of your political career. 
 
 Bush was meh for the third straight debate. But worse than that, he was tentative — and didn’t seem to exhibit the urgency of other candidates who had far less to lose. His only really memorable moment came when he declared that he was 7-0 in his fantasy football league. In the far more important contest — the mano-a-mano with his home-state rival Rubio — he was 0-1. If Bush donors were growing nervous about their man’s chances after the previous two debates, they are likely to be in full panic mode after Wednesday night. 
 
 2. Rubio won. The 44-year-old senator, inching up in the polls and skyrocketing in the political prediction markets, became a target for the first time — and turned the attacks to his advantage with impressive speed and steadiness. When Bush launched an entirely predictable attack on Rubio’s record of missed Senate votes (“What is it, like a French work week? Do you have to show up for like three days? Just show up or resign,” the former Florida governor said to his onetime Sunshine State buddy), Rubio was ready — and accused Bush of desperation. 
 
 “Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you, but I’m not running against Jeb Bush or anyone else on this stage,” Rubio shot back, to the oohs and ahhs of the audience. “I’m running for president because there’s no way we can elect Hillary Clinton.” 
 
 And he delivered one of the biggest applause lines of the night. “The Democrats have the ultimate super PAC, it is called the mainstream media,” Rubio said — slamming what he said was preferential treatment of Hillary Clinton during last week’s Benghazi hearings. 
 
 “Rubio attacking media bias was the first and perhaps only 90+ dial score,” tweeted GOP pollster Frank Luntz, who conducted a focus group during the debate. 
 
 3. Donald Trump was a bit player. For the first time since the reality TV star emerged as the bombastic center of attention in American politics over the summer, Trump was a supporting player, if not an afterthought. Trump — who hogged much of the airtime in the first two contests — seemed a mellow shadow of the dominant Donald of the first debate. The most intriguing question, and one not easily answered, is whether he intentionally stepped outside the spotlight to counter perceptions that he’s only capable of circus-barker theatrics or whether it was a genuine shift in mood — a chastening precipitated by Carson’s surge to the top in Iowa and in at least one national poll. 
 
 According to initial estimates of microphone time, Trump logged just 5 minutes and 37 seconds of spiel, putting him in fifth place behind the pack-leading Rubio, who spoke for nearly 10 minutes in machine-gun bursts so fast the audience craned to catch each word. Whatever the reason for Trump’s relative reticence, it is not especially good news. Even if Trump intended to chill out (he concluded the debate by taking credit for cutting the CNBC stage time down from three to two hours), the nine other candidates on the stage felt less threatened by his presence, and thus less inclined to attack him directly — which cut down on the response time the moderators were obligated to give him. The one exception: an angry-uncle-cranky John Kasich, who came out blasting both Trump and Carson for economic proposals he deemed absurd. “You just don’t make promises like this, why don’t you just give a chicken in every pot while we’re coming up with these fantasy tax plans? We’ll clean it up; well, where are you gonna clean it up?” 
 
 In one of the rare Trumpian moments of the night, he shot back by making fun of the Ohio governor’s low poll numbers — which put him at the end of the stage. 
 
 4. Cruz makes hay out of media-bashing. Republicans are getting really, really tired of all this wrenching soul-searching and public dissection of their deepening divisions into establishment and outsider wings, so why not single out a universally detested target to get the band back together? Rubio started off the press bashing, but the Texas tea party firebrand transformed it from a nifty riposte into a full-throated rebel yell likely to resound for the entirety of the campaign. 
 
 To the howling delight of the audience, Cruz roared at his CNBC questioners — including the not-so-liberal Rick Santelli, who coined the “tea party” moniker. “You look at the questions; Donald Trump, are you a comic book villain? Ben Carson, can you do math? John Kasich, can you insult those two people over here? Marco Rubio, will you resign? Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen? How about talking about the substantive issues people care about?” Cruz asked, his voice drowned out by shouts of approval. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus joined in soon after, stalking into the spin room to deplore the network’s "gotcha questions" and the "hostile" environment the press created for the candidates. 
 
 And it could pay big dividends for Cruz: His attack on the media registered a 98/100 on Luntz’s scale with moderate and conservative voters – the highest score registered in a Luntz focus group in 15 years. 
 
 5. Teflon Ben. The night got off to a good start for the soft-spoken retired neurosurgeon. Trump, the man he’s stalking for first place, offered him a Bernie-hearts-Hillary type reprieve by saying he wouldn’t attack him — as the media expected. Hitting Carson, who boasts the highest likability ratings in the field, isn’t a good idea just now — as Trump said he “didn’t know about” Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist faith. Kasich’s attack on Carson's plan to replace Medicaid and Medicare with savings accounts landed with a thud, and none of the other candidates piled on, despite predictions they would try to halt his rise in the polls. 
 
 The audience was similarly accommodating: When one of the moderators pressed Carson on his connections to a nutritional supplement company that made questionable claims about its effectiveness in treating a range of disorders, the crowd booed so loudly the questioner gave up.
– With each Republican presidential candidate sharing the stage with nine others—and sharing the GOP field with 13 rivals—Wednesday night's debate participants needed to get tough, be bold, and say something that would help them stay at the top, or claw their way there. Here's how they did that, via the Washington Post and AP: Donald Trump set his sights on a new target, John Kasich: "John got lucky [in Ohio] with a thing called 'fracking.' He hit oil. Believe me, that is why Ohio is doing well. ... He was so nice. He was such a nice guy, and then his poll numbers tanked. That’s why he’s (standing) on the end.” Jeb Bush on Marco Rubio's record of missed votes: "Marco, when you signed up for this, this is a six-year term, and you should be showing up to work. I mean, literally, the Senate—what is it, like a French work week? You get, like, three days where you have to show up? Or just resign, and let somebody else take the job." Rubio's retort: “Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.” Bush's kiss: "You find a Democrat that's for cutting spending $10? I'll give him a warm kiss." Kasich on his rivals' tax plans: "Why don't we just give a chicken in every pot, while we're, you know, coming up—coming up with these fantasy tax schemes. ... Folks, we gotta wake up. We cannot elect somebody that doesn’t know how to do the job. " Ted Cruz on how the CNBC moderators are doing: "This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions: 'Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?' 'Ben Carson, can you do math?' ' John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?' ' Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?' 'Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?' How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?" Rubio on the media: "The Democrats have the ultimate SuperPac. It's called the mainstream media." Chris Christie on a question posed about fantasy football: "We have a government involved in fantasy football? We have ISIS and al-Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football? Enough on fantasy football. Let people play! Who cares?" Mike Huckabee: "You know, everybody has an 'only guy'—'I'm the only guy this; I'm the only guy that.' Well, let me tell you one thing that I am the only guy: The only guy that has consistently fought the Clinton machine every election I was ever in over the past 26 years. And not only did I fight them, but I beat them." Carly Fiorina: "I’m Hillary Clinton’s worst nightmare. In your heart of hearts, you want to see a debate between Carly Fiorina and Hillary Clinton." Ben Carson stayed true to form: "I do, however, believe in Reagan's 11th commandment, and will not be engaging in awful things about my compatriots here." Rand Paul on the budget deal: "I will spend every ounce of energy to stop it. I will begin tomorrow to filibuster it."