Tonight's Republican debate in New Hampshire has had quite a number of highlights as well as a similar number of lows. One overarching truth, however, comes out of the debate: Mitt Romney had his best debate performance ever. He was the clear winner, even though other candidates like Gingrich, Santorum and Perry also performed well. When Romney put forth his vision for America in contrast to Obama's, there must have been tens or hundreds of thousands of voters around the country nodding their heads in agreement. It was the kind of positive, insightful and rational statement that is too often missing from these debates (mainly due to the format.) It is also interesting to me that the ABC commentators who rushed onto the screen to tell us what had happened were focused instead on the "failure" of the non-Romney candidates to take Mitt on directly. In other words, the supposed experts either did not see Romney shine or they chose to ignore that fact since anyting positive about Romney might not help their own candidate Obama.
Beyond Romney's home run, there were many other high points. Here are the main highs:
1) Newt Gingrich should get credit for turning a lengthy segment on gay marriage around by pointing to the media bias which asks repeatedly about how gay marriage affects gay couples but never mentions the opposite effect, namely, the discrimination that results against religious organizations that cannot accept gay marriage. Gingrich also had a number of other good responses and performed quite well overall. Of course, Gingrich always does well in the debates.
2) Mitt Romney did quite well explaining his history with Bain Capital and the net jobs created there. Indeed, in another wrinkle brought on by the questions from ABC correspondents, very little was asked about the Obama jobs record. The focus was on Romney's 'job creation" when he was in the private sector. Romney also was outstanding in dealing with the questions about the right of privacy and the ability of a state to ban birth control. Romney made clear without saying that the question was a setup from the ABC folks dealing with an non-issue in an attempt to try to create another issue for Obama. Romney made ABC look foolish.
3) Rick Perry was better than he has been at any of the debates. He spoke well about each subject he addressed.
4) Santorum also did well. He dealt well with the crazy attacks from Paul who claimed that Santorum was not a conservative. (My guess is that Paul thinks Reagan was not conservative either.) Santorum was impressive in his discussion of foreign policy, but he usually shines there.
The lows were also clear:
1) The low of the night had to be the performance of Ron Paul. I am sure that there are folks out there who loved what Paul had to say. Nevertheless, it was very interesting to watch Paul get asked to explain the newsletters that went out under his name in the 1990's that contained racist and anti-semitic content, only to see Paul say that he had already explained this and then change the subject. Paul says that the Ron Paul Newsletter was written by someone else and he never saw it. Of course, he owned the newsletter and received the profits from it, but he never saw it. Oh, and many of the columns were stated to have been written by Paul himself, but he says he never saw them. I would have liked to hear how that was possible, but Paul changed the subject.
Paul's attacks on some of the other candidates were also exposed as bogus. In particular, Paul's calling Santorum was, we now know, based upon the charges of a George Soros funded group that labels all conservatives corrupt. Paul looked silly on this to say the least.
2) Huntsman was also his usual self. If smarmy was in the job description for the presidency, Huntsman would have the job locked up. This man is the proverbial bad used car salesman. Amazingly, Huntsman also looked bad in the exchange he had with Romney over China policy. Romney made clear that he would lead the US in a new direction that held China to account for all of its actions while Huntsman told us how important China is and about how we need to talk to them more. It sounded particularly silly coming from the man who just spent over two years as ambassador to China during which time he talked to the Chinese but solved nothing.
We still have tomorrow morning's debate to come. My prediction, however, is that tonight may be seen as the time when Romney took a giant step towards locking up the Republican nomination, not because the others did not attack, but rather because he gave the Republican base a bettter reason to support him.
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