This Sunday ABC’s This Week featured the first debate in Iowa among all of the Republican candidates. As with every other similar event so far in the presidential campaign, this was less a debate than parallel press conferences; very few moments of interaction occurred between the candidates, and everyone seemed frustrated with their amount of face time. George Stephanopoulos, the moderator, opened the event by confronting Mitt Romney with a robo-call paid for by the Sam Brownback campaign. The message highlighted Romney’s pro-choice history, but the former Massachusetts governor dismissed the calls as “desperate ” and “negative,”–the back and forth between Brownback and Romney got a little testy. As Romney explains–in a somewhat peevish tone of voice–“I was pro, pro-choice; I am now pro-life.… I changed my position.” He gets some support from the crowd when he admits to being tired of the “holier than thou ” attitude of his opponents on the issue. When a statement Romney made about Rudy Giuliani’s stance on social issues is brought up, Romney backtracks a little, saying that the former New York City mayor should be allowed to voice his own thoughts, and Rudy gladly does so:
In one of the odder moments of the debate, McCain tried to connect abortion to his main strength, national security, by saying that America’s approach to abortion “says very much what kind of a country we are in our respect for human life; whether it be here in the United States, or whether it be in China or Bangladesh or the Congo, or anywhere else in the world.” Ron Paul spoke about the war in Iraq much as he has in the past, announcing he would “Just come home. … We went in there illegally, we did not declare war, it’s lasting way too long. … We shouldn’t be there, we oughta just come home.” The libertarian has a disproportionate amount of supporters in the audience; though he’s polling at just two percent, according to the ABC/Washington Post poll cited at the beginning of the debate, he definitely has more than two percent of the audience cheering for him. Rep. Duncan Hunter is given a chance to respond, and makes a strong case for the American presence in Iraq.
The response from the crowd was impressive and made Paul’s support seem minimal by comparison. The rest of the candidates touched on the topic: McCain warned that if we don’t get the job done right the first time, we’ll just have to go back; Giuliani mentioned that in the Democratic debate, not one of the candidates used the phrase “Islamic terrorism”; Romney broke out one of the best lines in the debate (and elicited some chuckles from the crowd) when he mocked Barack Obama’s foreign policy plan–“I had to laugh at what I saw Barak Obama do. In one week he went from saying he’s going to sit down for tea with our enemies, but he’s going to bomb our allies. He’s gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week.”
At this point, Rep. Tom Tancredo broke in, petulantly noting “there are other people here in the room, George. I mean, after all, I did miss votes to get here.” Well, no offense Mr. Tancredo, but your time probably would have been better spent making sure the House passed the Protect America Act than making an appearance at this dog and pony show. From here, the talk shifted to health care. Here is Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee’s take on insurance: “Either give every American the same kind of health care that Congress has, or make Congress have the same kind of health care that every American has.” It’s a good soundbite because it’s anti-Congress (and as a Washington outsider he can get away with it), but on its face it’s a nonsensical statement, as every American doesn’t have the same kind of health care already; some people have Medicare and Medicaid; most people have insurance through their employers, and some people willingly have no health insurance. Tancredo makes a good point: “The government, it’s not the responsibility of the federal government to provide womb to tomb health care for Americans.” (Maybe it was a good thing he missed those votes after all.) Brownback says we need more market forces in health care. Overall, everyone is opposed to the expansion of federal control over health care. Stephanopoulos comes back to Obama’s statement earlier this month that he would unilaterally invade Pakistan if he thought doing so would lead to the death of Osama bin Laden. Obama’s Senate colleague, Sam Brownback, laid out a more sensible approach to dealing with foreign nations:
The candidates are then asked by a Des Moines Register writer whether or not they would support a tax hike to pay for improvements to the country’s infrastructure. They are united in their desire not to raise taxes; Mike Huckabee pointed out the basic flaw in the question’s premise, noting “It’s not necessarily that we raise a tax to fix what we ought to fix in this country. We’re spending billions of dollars all over our country and around the world, but it may be time that we spend some of those billions of dollars to deal with our own infrastructure.” McCain echoed that point by promising to veto all pork-barrel funding, and Giuliani went back to the Laffer Curve to note that you can raise more money by cutting the percentage of tax charged. Stephanopoulos wrapped things up by asking what each candidates biggest mistake is, and the usually tedious answers are proffered: it took someone too long to find religion, someone doesn’t tell their family they love them enough, etc. But Rudy Giuliani gets big laughs out of the crowd by being self-deprecating and noting that there are too many to list in 30 seconds. Overall, Romney came out of this debate the best. None of the major candidates took big shots at each other, while some of the lesser-known candidates got into it with each other. McCain seemed more or less resigned to a third place finish in Iowa, and Giuliani scored some points by winning the “guy you’d most want to have a beer with” race. But all in all, there was no real shift. It’ll be nice when the debates eliminate some of the also-rans and focuses solely on the frontrunners.
