Iowa / ABC / Yahoo GOP debate
Just a few quick observations on this: The debate was clearly choreographed by Stephanopoulos and Diane Sawyer to turn Newt Gingrich into the latest Republican piñata. It’s difficult to look good when you’re being attacked from all sides, and in particular it threw Newt off of his game of being positive and focusing his criticism on the Obama administration. The prearranged set-piece where they questioned each candidate on the importance of “marital fidelity” and then deliberately ended with Gingrich was especially nauseating—perhaps the most nauseating interlude in any political debate I’ve ever seen, and that would truly be saying something.
All that said, Newt did much better than any previous GOP piñata. He needed to answer the criticisms hurled his way rather than leave them hanging out there, and this he largely did very well. On the issue of Israel and the supposedly controversial fact that the Palestinians are in fact an “invented people” in historical terms he simply hit it way, way out of the ballpark. He gets credit here not only for his point of view but for his willingness to stick to it in the face of a firestorm and for his ability to articulate it so concisely and effectively on the national stage.
Some (on Twitter at least) seem to be praising Rick Perry in strong terms for his performance tonight. I’m not so sure. He could have made a big distinction by becoming the “positive” candidate himself, but chose to weigh in with some quite blunt knocks against others on the stage. I don’t think that helps him.
Mitt Romney did not look good tonight, continuing a pattern where when really taken on he becomes flustered. In this case he was being taken on merely in response to his own attacks on Newt as being a lifetime politician. Gingrich made the obvious point (if not articulated in a debate until now) that Romney the “outsider” has truly been in politics for almost twenty years, beginning with his failure to defeat Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts in 1994. Mitt’s response to the effect that this defeat was a good thing, because it forced him back into the private sector, was laughable.
…
|
|
There is no one the Barack Obama campaign is better prepared to take on than Mitt Romney. They are no different to anyone else; they have accepted the long-standing conventional wisdom that Romney will be the nominee, and they’ve been planning accordingly. By the same token, there is no one they are less prepared to take on than Newt Gingrich. They have accepted the conventional wisdom that his was a hopeless case. And even now, they are just learning like most everyone else what he’s really about in the context of presidential politics. He doesn’t represent something we’ve seen before, really; he’s a different kind of animal. He cannot easily be compared to candidates of recent memory. They will go massively negative on him, of-course, as they would with any GOP nominee, because Obama has precisely no positive record to run on. But they will have to compose the playbook on the fly, and Gingrich is not necessarily going to be the kind of target they would like him to be.
The GOP nomination process is far from over. In a real sense, it hasn’t yet begun, no votes being cast. But Gingrich is showing real strength and staying-power as a front-runner. Coming through this particular debate without a major wound, while all guns were focused on him and the moderators were happily holding the coats, was a not inconsiderable achievement.
