Every exchange of the night reflected civility and mutual respect among the candidates — except that every exchange involving Ramaswamy was vitriolic and personal, going in both directions. Pence, Christie, and Haley were all openly contemptuous of him. Pence called him a “rookie” and “too young.” Christie said he was shallow like Barack Obama — perhaps Pete Buttigieg’s smarm may have been a more apt comparison. Haley said he had no foreign-policy experience, “and it shows.” Ramaswamy dished it out, too: he basically repeated Obama’s “the ’80s called” line in trying to lecture Pence about how the USSR doesn’t exist anymore, and accused Christie of running to be an MSNBC commentator and Haley of running to get board seats on defense contractors — a deeply ironic pair of attacks for a man running a vanity campaign aimed at raising his own profile for future gigs. He also dabbled in old-school anti-Catholicism by saying his opponents were treating Volodymyr Zelensky like their “pope.”

Ultimately, Ramaswamy’s entire affect was that of a college sophomore who just learned about politics for the first time and came home to lecture his dad and uncles at Thanksgiving and called them all sellouts to The Man. Republican voters used to viscerally hate people like that. But I suppose it will still win him some fans who just ate up his act.

[That’s the same analogy I used, too. I should get bonus points for the Proust reference, though. Dan and I disagree on others, especially Pence, but he’s even harder on Asa Hutchinson than I am. — Ed]