(Cartoon courtesy of DonkeyHotey, via Flickr)
So last night saw the (depending on how you count these things) the 21st Goat Rodeo of the season. It was a fairly spirited affair, with all of the GOP candidates out there to put their rivals in the dirt.
It started with Newt Gingrich being asked about his second wife and the claim that he wanted an open marriage. The disgraced former Speaker was quick to make an attack on the media and the CNN moderator while denying the claim.
This is Newts modus operandi when he is in a tight spot. He attacks the moderators and the press for an applause line. It was the source of his new campaign ad when he did it to Juan Williams on Tuesday and he was quick to deploy it here.
It got the expected results but I think it shows off a flaw. There is this meme going around that Newt is some kind of great debater and that would make him the man that could defeat president Obama. Certainly that is the line that Newt is selling.
There are a couple of problems with that. First, he is currently debating against some of the weakest and looniest debaters in modern times. It doesn’t take a whole lot of skill to come off as the powerhouse when you are surrounded by folks with mental polio.
The other factor that makes him look strong but would not help him in a head to head debate with the president is the Republican crowd. They are not only raucous and fractious they will cheer for anything that sounds tough. They cheered a brag about executions, they cheered someone not having health care and dying, they have cheered for bellicose jingoism about Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan.
Basically if you sound like a character from any action epic, then you can get a rise out of them. Those cat calls and applause all are a distraction. They feed the idea that Newt said something accurate or strong, instead of dodging the question. This combined with the fact that none of the others (especially Mitt) are every willing to follow up and challenge him on his bald faced assertions (lest theirs be challenged too) means that he gets away with this.
That won’t happen in a head to head with Barack Obama. There is no cheering allowed in presidential debates. The audience is admonished to be completely silent, and that means that the words of the candidate and the thoughts of the viewer interact more strongly.
Newt is prickly and brittle and when there is no where to hide he bursts out with crazy bullshit. If he had to have faced real prepared candidates more, he might have grown out of this, but he has not had to do any real heavy lifting and that will doom him.
Mitt Romney displayed a lot of the same brittleness when pressed last night. He is just not able to roll with the punches. When he can use his carefully scripted responses he sounds good (after all when you pull the sting on Vulture Capitalist Ken he is going to say what he is programmed to say) but when Rick Santorum really pushed him, he stuttered and lost his train of thought. Last night the former Governor of Massachusetts was in his head, he was not in the debate and there was a sheen of desperation in his eyes that no presidential frontrunner should ever have.
When the topic came up of his tax returns you could almost see his stomach clenching. This is an issue that is not only not going away but makes the case about Romney being weak willed explicit.
Originally he was not going to release his tax returns. Then he said he’d release a year; last night he was pushed to the point where he capitulated to releasing a few years.
His excuse that he wanted to wait until this April because the Democrats would use more than one release against him did not cut any ice. He is already dying the death of a thousand cuts on this and being slowly forced to commit to more and more information just makes him look weak willed and will do nothing to prevent the information from eventually coming out.
There were a couple of questions last night where the answers might excite the Republicans in South Carolina, certainly are going to cost the Republicans support in the fall.
The first was on immigration. Every one of the candidates tried to be tougher than the last, all the while alienating the Latino vote. The big memes were boarder fence and the requirement for informal immigrants to have to leave the country before they could apply for visas and green cards.
Gone was any talk of compassion, gone was any recognition that some of these immigrants are the parents of children who are American citizens, there was just a tough law and order pose. Newt came the closest to any kind of compassion but he put it on the Congress saying that they would never pass a bill the required all of the informal immigrants to leave.
One shocking bit here was from the Mad Elf of the Republican Party, Ron Paul. He made an odd connection that we have a lot of troops trying to hold the Afghan/Pakistan boarder and that instead of using those troops there, he’d rather see them trying to shut our boarders.
This is a point that many people seem to miss about Rep. Paul. Yes, he does want to end our foreign wars, and bring the troops home, but he wants to bring all of our troops home from everywhere. He wants us out of Europe and South Korea, as well as Afghanistan.
He would like to see our massive army deployed at home, something that we have not done very often in the history of our nation. Trying to close the boarders like the old Soviet Union by using our military might will not end well for a nation that is, as Paul repeats ad nauseum, based on the idea of liberty.
Newt really stepped on his dick in this regard, when he made point of saying that if he were president he’d instruct the DoJ to stop the law suits against the draconian and unconstitutional immigration laws in Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina.
So even though the Latino community is not very happy with our President, for the lack of movement on their issues and for the very large increase in deportations under his administration, they are going to see (accurately) the Republicans as being actively hostile to them.
On the abortion issue, there was a lot of talk about who is the true “pro-lifer” with Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum trying to take the lead. He thought he had a real winner of a trick when he made the point about his full support for forced pregnancy by holding his hands up around the mike and saying “I am pro-life” in a whisper.
It probably seemed like a good idea, and it might work in a stump speech but it really flopped last night.
All of the candidates went to the full 11 on this issue. They all want to completely remove a woman’s right to choose and are even talking about banning contraception. Again that might play to the Teahadists in South Carolina, but given that 50% of the nation thinks a woman should be able to choose it is going to bite the eventual nominee in the ass hard in the General Election.
All in all it was just another night at the Goat Rodeo. They were fractious and crazy, the crowd was the same and I don’t think much changed. I am still predicting the Mitt will be the nominee, even with the Newt surge, but that is not my call it is the call of the money behind these candidates and the votes they will buy.
The floor is yours.