In the first hour or so of the Republican presidential candidates debate conducted by ABC News at Drake University in Des Moines, we saw the most contentious, negative debate of the campaign. It is just 24 days from the Iowa precinct caucuses, and at least a few of those days—Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day—are off limits to politics. Candidates who had been willing to hang back and speak positively in earlier encounters suddenly seem to be feeling the pressure to knock down one or more of those rivals who appear to be standing in their way.
Michele Bachmann, whose campaign cannot survive a disappointing showing in Iowa—she doesn’t even have a headquarters in New Hampshire, and her website’s list of New Hampshire news items are all datelined Iowa—went after Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney for their support, in different ways and different times, of individual mandates to buy health insurance. Rick Santorum, the only candidate to have held events in all 99 counties in Iowa, went after Bachmann hard, contrasting his record on having prevailed on conservative initiatives, even while in the minority in Congress, with hers as not having prevailed. Mitt Romney, running second or tied for second in polls in three of the four January contests, took on both Gingrich (on his space programs, his attack on child labor laws) and Rick Perry (on the Texas mandate for HPV vaccination of teenage girls). Ron Paul proved quite ready to redouble the criticisms of Gingrich he has been making in Iowa ads. Rick Perry made the point, obviously aimed at Gingrich, that you can’t trust people who violate their marriage vows — vows made, as he pointed out, not only with one’s spouse but also with one’s God (that’s even stronger, he said, than a handshake in Texas). Gingrich for the most part refrained from harsh criticism. But he wasn’t shy about saying that Mitt Romney would have also been a career politician these last 17 years if he had beaten Ted Kennedy in his 1994 Senate race.
Did Mitt Romney make a misstep by offering to bet Perry $10,000 on Perry’s charge that his revisions for the paperback edition of his book omitted his claim that his Massachusetts health care plan should be a model for other states? The ABC commentators thought this was dreadful. I’m not quite so sure, though it has been my observation that even the richest men I know take a bet for the lesser sum of $1,000 very seriously, and certainly most ordinary Iowa and New Hampshire voters would never consider betting $10,000 on anything. (Or would they? Iowa has one of the nation’s largest riverboat gambling operations and New Hampshire back in the 1960s, eager for revenue but unwilling to impose taxes, instituted the first late twentieth century state lotteries.)
To all the attacks launched in his direction, including those directed not so bashfully at his acknowledged marital infedilities, Gingrich responded with seeming aplomb and unconcern. He defended his mining-in-space program as an inspiration for science, technology and math students, his proposal to use local World War II-type Selective Service boards (which seemed to have little legitimacy in the late 1960s) to judge whether illegal immigrants should be given legal residency status and his declaration that the Palestinians are “an invented people.”
Perry gave his best performance yet, attacking the nexus between Washington and Wall Street, arguing that Gingrich’s statement on the Palestinian people was a minor issue next to America’s need to stand with Israel, and giving Ron Paul credit for his attacks on the Federal Reserve.
ABC moderators Diane Sawyer and George Stephanopoulos were perhaps overdosed with saccharine, but they asked a couple of questions that elicited nice replies at the end, on whether the candidates had ever experienced real economic deprivation and what they had learned from one or more of their opponents. The first of these questions allowed Perry and Romney, who live in opulent style these days, to give genuinely moving accounts of their younger years, and others delivered touching replies as well. And almost all the candidates, after the fractiousness of the first 80 minutes, managed to say something that sounded both nice and sincere about one or more of their opponents.
The ABC commentators seemed pretty sure that Gingrich, the frontrunner in Iowa, South Carolina and Florida polls, and pressing for the lead in New Hampshire, came across ahead. Certainly Romney seemed somewhat more flustered and defensive than he has in most previous debates. Yet I think Gingrich may have sustained more damage than they suggest. Bachmann’s hard-hitting attacks may not have been ignored by Iowans who gave her the lead in polls in that state last summer. And Santorum may finally be making some headway. Any gains for either are likely, it seems, to come more out of Gingrich’s hide than Romney’s. And while Romney did not have a superb night, the spate of negative attacks from and to almost all directions insulates him from the risk which I argue in my Sunday Examiner column he has taken by launching negative attacks on Gingrich. If he were alone in going negative, we might see the dynamic of candidate A attacking candidate B which hurts both A and B and therefore helps candidate C (like John Kerry in Iowa in 2004 after Dick Gephardt attacked Howard Dean). When there’s lots of flak, incoming from all directions and headed in most directions too, the risks for the attacker are likely to be lesser. My conclusion: the plot thickens.
