Keller @ Large: Answer The Question
BOSTON (CBS) - You can tell a lot about a candidate from how direct or evasive they are in their answers, and Wednesday night, undecided voters got an eyeful of the contrasting styles of three of the front-runners, Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz.
Trump's lead in the race reflects his keen eye for cutting-edge issues. "We're gonna bring back our jobs, we're bringing them back from China," he said at an MSNBC forum, a line that's helped fuel his rise.
And his blunt answers can be crowd-pleasers: asked if he'd commit to appointing a Supreme Court justice who was opposed to restrictions on gun owners' rights, Trump didn't equivocate: "I give that commitment right now, absolutely."
But other responses, like this one to a question about Apple's refusal to help the feds hack a terrorist's iPhone, are as vague as can be:
Q: What do you do as far as changing laws to make tech companies comply with the needs of the government?
A: "We should force them to do it, we should do whatever we have to do."
By contrast with Trump, Rubio often prefers to smother questions with specific solutions.
"How do you deal with cutting costs for students while still maintaining a quality education?" he was asked during a CNN town hall. "I have a bipartisan agenda on this and it's comprised of four main things. The first is alternative accrediting," said Rubio, the start of a detail-rich four-minute monologue.
But like Trump, Rubio sometimes prefers to change the subject, especially when the subject is a sore one. CNN's Anderson Cooper asked him about President Obama's remark that in Rubio the GOP has "a candidate who sponsored a bill that I supported to finally solve the immigration problem, and he's running away from it as fast as he can."
His response: "Yeah, but President Obama has no standing to talk about immigration."
And what about Ted Cruz?
Cooper again: "Donald Trump and Marco Rubio have both said that you're a liar, are they lying?"
Cruz: "Ha ha ha, I gotta say Anderson, this is a strange election season."
The aggressiveness of Trump and the verbal agility of Rubio without much of the charm of either one.
How many voters really care about a candidate's command of details and the directness of their answers? We're about to find out.
