The Bloomberg / Dartmouth GOP presidential debate
You could argue it was all about Herman Cain tonight. Since his surge in the polls—to the very top of some polls—he was the target of the lower-tier candidates (always excepting Newt Gingrich who doesn’t target fellow Republicans) who were seeking to displace him as the sole alternative to Romney/Perry. As far as those lower-tier candidates go, I think it’s become glaringly obvious now that both Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum should do the gentlemanly thing and get off the stage. (They should have already.) Barring a crash involving an airplane carrying all of the other candidates, those two guys do not have a chance, and their desperate efforts to attract attention by sniping at others are only profoundly unseemly.
Cain may not have expected all of the attacks he received in this debate. As a candidate, he is inseparable from his “9-9-9″ tax reform program, and it was somewhat disappointing to this viewer that he wasn’t better prepared to defend it. Bachmann and others made the powerful point that once you give the federal government a new tool (a 9 percent national sales tax) with which to collect revenue then you open it up to unlimited expansion. Cain didn’t convincingly argue that his flat tax system might be steady by its very nature, and he didn’t sufficiently contrast it with the current system which is entirely unsteady by its very nature.
Cain’s political inexperience also showed up when he was posed some specific questions and responded with answers which he considered sufficient but which were short. In a format like this you run out the clock. Answer the question, and then pivot to saying what you want to say. Romney, of-course, is the master at these kinds of perfectly timed-responses.
And Mitt Romney made not only Herman Cain but everyone else look like rank amateurs when it came to the “candidates question each other” segment. Given 30 seconds to pose a question to another candidate (with that candidate having a minute or so to respond) all of the other candidates posed a question to someone they actually wanted to challenge. In the majority of cases, that was Romney. Of-course, that was also giving him the floor to talk, and to pivot from answering the question to making the broader case for himself. Romney himself, when it was his turn, posed a totally softball question to Michele Bachmann (no threat in his book) about job creation, and happily smiled while she yammered on in a way that did no damage to his own interests.
Rick Perry pushed American energy independence based on domestic resources—which is an excellent thing to push—but may have come across too one-note. He probably maintained his standing in this debate but didn’t dramatically improve it.
Romney played to form by being smooth and articulate, if still failing to truly answer the concerns that conservatives have over him (perhaps because he can’t answer them).
Cain displayed his inexperience as a political candidate, but that’s double-edged, since being a politician in this election cycle is a weak starting point.
It should go without saying that the debate moderators and questioners (Charlie Rose of PBS, the Washington Post’s Karen Tumulty and Bloomberg’s Julianna Goldman) were furiously liberal in the angles which they pursued, but … as said, that should go without saying.
I think many Republican voters will take from this debate that (1) Yes, Herman Cain is raw, but still has a lot going for him and (2) Yes, Mitt Romney is super-smooth, and that quality cannot be discounted and (3) Yes, Rick Perry is still the governor of a huge job-creating state and knows up from down pretty well and (4) Newt Gingrich still gives the darndest-best debate answers every time, without ever seeming nasty.
|
|
What this all means for the polls, the odds and the overall race: I will freely admit that I do not know, other than that Mitt Romney did not hurt himself (which is kind of like saying that the sun came up this morning).
It may be that this debate has functioned mainly as a place-holder. The next debate is scheduled for November 9th, 2011, in Michigan, via CNBC. Debates are not the only factor in this contest, and I kind of have a feeling that quite a bit of other stuff will have happened between now and then.
