After the latest GOP Goat Rodeo all this blogger can say is that he feels like his eyes are going to bleed if he has to watch much more.
Last night saw the final Rodeo events before the fine folks of Iowa get to show us all why it is so important for them to be the first to weigh in on the topic of who a presidential candidate should be. For 120 minutes all I could think is there is not a lot of there, there.
The big story, such as it is, was Newt Gingrich trying to catch darts from all the ankle biting second (or is that fifty-second?) tier candidates. The Republican establishment has been signaling for the last 10 days or so that Reagan’s 11th Commandment was no longer in effect and the chum was in the water for the minnow-sized sharks.
Michele Bachmann (remember Michele Bachmann?) was actually effective in slamming Gingrich, mainly because the disgraced ex-Speaker of the House showed so much disdain for her that it gave an opening that she could and did exploit.
Here is a little tip for the GOP field that the self-immolation of Herman Cain should have taught you; its 2011, not 1961, you can’t just push women around and survive. Even in a party that approves of the old June Cleaver and Donna Reed model of women’s roles, the women in this nation are not going to take you treating them badly.
They are votes you have to have to win the nomination and sure as hell need to win the general. You dismiss them at your peril. Somehow I don’t think they are going to hear me on this, but what the hell, ya gotta try to at least worn people baiting a rattlesnake.
Gingrich also drew some good fire from the Mad Elf of the Republican Party, Rep. Ron Paul. This was over Gingrich’s comment about abolishing some Federal Courts, like the 9th Circuit or hauling judges before Congress if you don’t like the way they rule.
Rep. Paul was the only one on the stage that seemed to get that the Judiciary is co-equal branch of government and setting the precedent of an administration abolishing a Court they don’t like was a very dangerous thing in a nation that is supposed to be about the rule of law, and not the rule of the party in power.
Bachmann, who can’t go 15 minutes at a time sounding informed and sane, asserted (falsely) that the Judiciary was supposed to be a less equal and powerful branch than the Executive or Legislative branches. Someone needs to send her a freaking copy of the Constitution for Dummies.
For the most part this was a perfunctory and boring Goat Rodeo. I think that this was because of the organization hosting it. Fox “News” had to have conflicting motives in this particular endeavor.
On the one hand there is the desire for ratings, to make some news by having a candidate or candidates stumble or get angry or do anything other than the usual Goat Rodeo events. That tends to require tough questions.
On the other hand they are a partisan arm of the Republican party, charged with keeping the alternate reality of Right intact and healthy, and to help elect whom ever wins the giant belt buckle as GOP Goat Rodeo Grand Champion and Presidential Nominee.
So while the moderators did ask a few tough-ish questions they did not really follow up very much in terms of pressing the candidates to really answer. This led to a lot of answers which started out with “The real question is” and then a bit of their pre-canned stump speech. It was the Goat Rodeo equivalent of the parade of flags.
Even in this hardly charged environment the pre-ordained losers, Rick Perry, Rick Santorum and Jon Huntsman couldn’t seem to break through.
The Texas Opps!, Gov. Rick Perry, could not even get his planned applause line about being the Tim Tebow of the Caucuses out without stumbling. He did manage, mostly, to clear the very low bar of being coherent in his answers, but at this point no one cares.
Santorum is looking like he has been dragged through a knot-hole. He was pale and rumpled and tired. The look in his eyes said he knew already that sometime in the week after January 4th he could hang up his spurs and go back to being rather gross joke on Google.
And poor Jon Huntsman! It was like he was locked in a cone of silence last night. He was talking, he even made a moderate amount of sense, but the Republican/Tea Party base was just not interested in hearing him, so they stuck their fingers in their ears.
I have come to the conclusion that he is in the race to be the Not-Jeb candidate in 2016. The thinking in the campaign has to be that he can hang on through probably South Carolina and then next cycle the low information voters will see him and say “You know he was not crazy, a flip-flopper (much) and he didn’t have a lot of personal life baggage, maybe he deserves a real look”.
It might work, but it is predicated on the idea that Republican primary voters will learn that nominating the “true conservative” or the last man standing is a way to electoral defeat. I think they give the Teahadist base way, way, waaaayyyy too much credit, but it is not my campaign to run.
One thing that I saw last night that I had not seen before was an actual refining process at work in the field. The tons of debates that President Obama and the field went through in the Democratic nomination process last cycle actually made both him and then Senator Clinton better debaters and better candidates.
Last night the first 60 minutes so Gingrich back on his heels, as the darts came in from all sides. But in the bottom half of the debate he rallied and was more effective in turning away the attacks. That is the kind of improvement that any party would hope a string of debates would engender in their candidates.
Which leads us to Mitt Romney. He has not changed nor improved one whit this whole process. Part of it has been a conscious effort to stay out of the fray, to let the front runner emerge and self-destruct. He continued that path last night.
He struggled with the flip-flopper attack, just like he always has. The problem is that it is actually the plain and unvarnished truth and that is always hard to spin. But add to that the fact that he has not gotten into many tussles and thus has not had to learn and grow.
This, to me, seems to be the reason that he can’t break out of the 20% to 30% range in the national polls. He is not changed at all in most of a year of actively running for president. He is exactly the same opportunistic and pandering Ken Doll of a candidate.
As long as there is nothing new, there is no reason for voters supporting other candidates to look at him again or even consider him for their second choice other than by default. It might be a way for him to win the nomination but it will be a flat disaster in the general election, having a candidate with all the appeal of a bowl of cold oatmeal without brown sugar.
So, there you have it Kossacks, the last Goat Rodeo Round up for the year. I’m off to see if I can stop my eyes from bleeding before the next round in 2012.
The floor is yours.