Just one short comment about tonight's GOP debate:
Mitt Romney has become a really good debater (substantive arguments aside), giving ever more crisp, clear, and to the point answers. Perry avoided major gaffes but didn't help himself any tonight on his fourth try, so I'm guessing Romney will surge ahead in the polls and will be the eventual nominee.
Given the opportunity to ask any question of any other debater, Romney didn't try to hit anyone in a vulnerable spot, as the others did, but instead asked a really softball question of Michele Bachmann -- something like what would you do to get people back to work?
I'm sure that was a carefully thought out tactic: Score points for being a gentleman? He's ahead so don't attack anybody? Try to bolster her to help knock out Perry? Hoping to get her support with her religious right base?
Or is he possibly thinking of her as a VP running mate?
Ralph
PS: I'll put any other morsels about the debate in the "comments."
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Howard Fineman on the debates:
ReplyDeleteHANOVER, N.H. -- My conservative friends in the press room here at Dartmouth were shaking their heads when this chaotic Bloomberg-Washington Post debate ended.
Mitt Romney, smooth as silk and just as slippery, had expertly handled the format and the questions -- his evasions were earnest, his voice confident . . . and no one else here could lay a glove on him.
Rick Perry, whose expectations were as low as the belly of an armadillo, failed to meet them. He made no major gaffes. He just didn't say anything, and what he said was so painfully simplistic that even the crowd had a hard time listening.
The consensus seems unanimous: Mitt Romney won the debate hands down. Nobody scored a hit on him that he didn't effectively counter. Getting Chris Christie's endorsement just hours before the debate didn't hurt him a bit.
ReplyDeleteOf his closest competitors in the polls, Perry again looked out of his league, mostly kept quiet, and was not effective when he did open his mouth. Cain entertained with his bold, but simplistic, answers to complex problems.
Bachmann looks more and more like a mechanical doll, where you pull the string and a prerecorded voice spouts a canned answer. Again and again she played the line: "I'm a tax lawyer; that's what I do for a living; I understand these things and Obama doesn't." Second in frequency was the recording about "my husband and I started a small business; we understand the problems of small business owners; we have to get rid of these Obama regulations that cost jobs."
Boring, boring -- because it's so canned. Gingrich tried to grab headlines by wanting to put Chris Dodd and Barney Frank in jail for their finance regulatory bill. Paul did his usual quirky mumbling about anti-government. Santorum had to be obnoxious and interrupt just to get to speak -- and then he wouldn't stop. Huntsman? I think he was there. He may be the most qualified of all -- but he just doesn't connect.