After debate success, Rubio and Fiorina given warm welcome in Atlanta

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/aug/07/marco-rubio-carly-fiorina-redstate-atlanta

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Republican presidential candidates Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina took the momentum each earned in Thursday’s night’s debates and carried it on to an Atlanta stage at RedState Gathering, a conference of conservative activists, on Friday.

Related: Marco Rubio passes critical debate test, but abortion answer hands Democrats gift

Fiorina and Rubio came to the event directly from Cleveland, where they had debated the previous night. Fiorina, a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard, appeared in the early-evening debate for second tier candidates while Rubio was on stage for the main event held in primetime.

Although both candidates were enthusiastically received by the crowd in a darkened hotel ballroom in Atlanta, Fiorina did show some indications about why she had been relegated to the second tier so far.

With a gaggle of reporters afterwards, the former Hewlett Packard CEO became testy when she was asked how she could criticize Donald Trump for talking a phone call from Bill Clinton before running when she had appeared as recently as last year at the Clinton Global Initiative.

Fiorina was visibly annoyed at the question, firing back: “So you really don’t understand the difference between getting a personal phone call from Bill Clinton and showing up at a conference where the Clintons have for years invited a bipartisan group of guests?”

It was a show of irritation that the normally composed and on-message Fiorina had rarely displayed on the campaign trail so far. She also had to backtrack, both to reporters and via an announcement after her appearance, for misunderstanding a question. Fiorina said that she had thought that a question about the US Chamber of Commerce, the powerful pro-business lobby, was actually about the US Department of Commerce.

Yet these were relatively minor hiccups for Fiorina, who came on to the stage at RedState with all the swagger one would expect from someone introduced as the winner of her debate. “I think we kind of rumbled last night, what do you think?” she asked the crowd.

She then went on to hammer home her message attacking “progressivism” and Hillary Clinton – and got big applause for calling the Democratic frontrunner a liar. “She did lie about Benghazi. She did lie about her emails. She did lie about her servers,” said the Republican candidate, referring to two well-publicized controversies over Clinton.

Rubio was more understated, spending more energy trying to emphasize his credentials as a social conservative. He compared the zeal of Democrats to use federal money to fund the reproductive health organization Planned Parenthood to the idea of Republicans trying to divert government funds to the NRA. The Florida senator also emphasized the importance of family. While he rehashed his familiar story of being the son of an immigrant bartender, he noted that he did “come from privilege”. After all, he said, he was raised in a two-parent, stable household.

The Florida senator also tried to woo the crowd with some corny jokes. After reading a question in Spanish, he translated it as: “It means I know how to save you a bunch of money on your car insurance by switching to Geico” to the mostly older and white crowd.

The only time he visibly struggled was when he got a softball question about hip-hop, a genre of music of which Rubio is one of the most prominent fans in American politics. Rubio said he was excited to see the upcoming NWA biopic Straight Outta Compton and had heard the new Eminem album was supposed to be “pretty good” but seemed ill at ease and eventually asked for the “next question”.

The crowd was enthused about both candidates. Debbie Georgatos, a talk show host from Dallas, said: “I thought Marco Rubio was fabulous,” and Fiorina “informed, impassioned and couldn’t be better prepared”.

Andrew Carlton of Atlanta was far more impressed by Rubio’s performance at the conference than that on the debate stage. The Florida senator “seemed very down to Earth and spoke intelligently”, he said. But Fiorina had made an even bigger impact in his opinion during her debate. “If she’s at the next top tier debate, there’s a big problem.”