The two-hour extravaganza starring five of the six front-runners in the Republican presidential primary certainly had a high production value, but by the technical definition of the term, NBC News’s revue was not actually a debate. One would assume that if the Republican National Committee, which has aggressively threatened candidates from participating in conclaves ranging from Fox News to Bob Vander Plaats’s famous Thanksgiving Family Forum, decided to grant rare debate hosting honors to a network as hostile to conservatives as NBC, that NBC would be expected to force the field to actually spar against each other. Yet NBC’s Lester Holt and Kristen Welker seemed less interested in the candidates differentiating themselves and more in asserting their own authority.