Rand Paul and Chris Christie sparred. The Happy Hour Debate candidates scrapped for attention. The moderators challenged Donald Trump's credibility.
But two words wove through virtually every answer in the hours of Republican presidential debates Thursday night: Hillary Clinton. The field hasn't settled on a consensus best way to take on the Democratic front-runner — but each of them zeroed in on a different part of her long public record throughout Thursday's events in Cleveland.
They railed on her tenure as the face of the Obama administration's foreign policy; they called her out for supporting Planned Parenthood; they bemoaned her refusal to take a position on the Keystone XL pipeline. Some tied her to Washington dysfunction; others dismissed her as a product of the far Left; one lambasted her inability to improve the economy.
Every candidate had something to say about Clinton, however brief — but unlike the national Republican Party, which has focused heavily on Clinton's trustworthiness and on headlines about the Clinton Foundation and her private email server, the GOP candidates came at Clinton from all different directions.
In fact, there was only one reference to the various Clinton "scandals" during the prime-time debate: a quip from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker after a question about cybersecurity. "The Russian and Chinese governments know more about Hillary Clinton's email server than do the members of the United States Congress," he said.