In ten Republican presidential debates, Mitt Romney has been challenged, criticized, sometimes ridiculed — but never smacked down. That streak came to an end Tuesday night at the 11th GOP debate, a session devoted exclusively to national security issues, when Romney tangled with libertarian candidate Ron Paul over the frenzy of budget-cutting proposals in Washington.
It happened after Paul was asked a question about foreign aid, which, to no one’s surprise, he opposes. “I think the aid is all worthless,” Paul said. “This whole idea of talking about the endless wars and the endless foreign aid, it seems like nobody cares about the budget. I mean, we’re in big trouble, and nobody wants to cut anything.”
Paul’s words came just one day after the so-called “supercommittee” failed to reach a deficit-reduction agreement, a failure that might — or might not — result in budget cuts that disproportionately hit Pentagon spending. Romney saw an opportunity to jump in. “Congressman Paul, what they’re doing is cutting a trillion dollars out of the defense budget,” he said. “They’re cutting a trillion dollars out of the defense budget, which just happens to equal the trillion dollars we’re putting into Obamacare.” Proposed defense cuts have to be stopped, Romney argued, “to protect America and protect our troops and our military.”
Paul appeared to be a man who couldn’t believe what he had just heard. “Well, they’re not cutting anything out of anything,” the ten-term congressman said scornfully. “All this talk is just talk.”
“Believe me,” Paul continued, “they’re nibbling away at baseline budgeting, and its automatic increases. There’s nothing cut against the military. And the people on the Hill are nearly hysterical because they’re not going — the budget isn’t going up as rapidly as they want it to. It’s a road to disaster. We had better wake up.”
The crowd at Washington’s DAR Constitution Hall — a crowd far more inclined to support Romney than Paul — began to applaud. For one moment, the always-prepared Romney had been taken to school by a veteran of Washington’s spending wars. The audience of political insiders — the debate was co-sponsored by the conservative think tanks Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute — cheered someone who would come out and say that all the talk of federal spending cuts might be just talk.
In previous debates, Romney, protecting his frontrunner status and avoiding conflict when possible, hasn’t engaged Paul much. In the future, Romney might return to that strategy.
Not that it was Paul’s night. On another occasion, Paul was righteously slapped down by new frontrunner Newt Gingrich after Paul cited the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing as part of a critique of the Patriot Act and its role in preventing terrorism. Better to treat terrorism as a crime, Paul argued. “I think the Patriot Act is unpatriotic because it undermines our liberty,” he said. “I’m concerned, as everybody is, about the terrorist attack. Timothy McVeigh was a vicious terrorist. He was arrested. Terrorism is still on the books, internationally and nationally, it’s a crime and we should deal with it. We dealt with it rather well with Timothy McVeigh.”
At that point, it was Gingrich’s turn to look like a man who couldn’t believe what he had heard. “Timothy McVeigh succeeded,” Gingrich said incredulously. “That’s the whole point. Timothy McVeigh killed a lot of Americans. I don’t want a law that says after we lose a major American city, we’re sure going to come and find you. I want a law that says, you try to take out an American city, we’re going to stop you.”
It was one of several strong moments for Gingrich, who seemed particularly willing to challenge conventional wisdom as the night wore on. At one point, he was asked about proposed Pentagon cuts — “Would you be willing to say that our national security is so paramount that cuts to the defense budget are unacceptable?” — and offered a simple answer: “No.”
The standard debate response would have been to denounce the very idea of cuts. Gingrich did not take that road. “I helped found the Military Reform Caucus in 1981 at the beginning of the Reagan buildup,” he explained, “because it’s clear that there are some things you can do in defense that are less expensive. It’s clear, if it takes 15 to 20 years to build a weapons system at a time when Apple changes technology every nine months, there’s something profoundly wrong with this system. So I’m not going to tell you automatically I’m going to say yes.”
At other times Gingrich, eschewing his tactic of attacking the debate moderator — in this case, it was CNN’s Wolf Blitzer — proved again that he can pack more information into less time than perhaps any other candidate on stage. In response to a question about Pakistan, he said it’s entirely appropriate that U.S.-Pakistani relations should be strained by the discovery that Osama bin Laden had been living in that country for years. Then he offered a thumbnail statement of Pakistan policy that the other candidates probably wish they had said: “You want to keep American troops in Afghanistan, you accept hot pursuit, you say no sanctuaries, you change the rules of engagement, you put the military in charge of the military side, you overhaul the State Department and AID so they get the job done, and you do it for real and you do it intensely, and you tell the Pakistanis, help us or get out of the way, but don’t complain if we kill people you’re not willing to go after on your territory where you have been protecting them.”
Despite his strength on a variety of topics, it’s likely that Gingrich’s performance at the debate will be remembered for his position on immigration. Some illegal immigrants in the United States should be kicked out, he said, but others should be allowed stay. “If you’ve come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home, period,” Gingrich said. “If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.”
Challenged by Michele Bachmann — “I don’t agree that you would make 11 million workers legal, because that, in effect, is amnesty” — Gingrich stuck to his guns. “I do not believe that the people of the United States are going to take people who have been here a quarter century, who have children and grandchildren, who are members of the community, who may have done something 25 years ago, separate them from their families, and expel them.”
In coming days, Gingrich will likely be called on to explain his position further. Is he setting a 25-year standard for illegal immigrants? What about those who have been in the United States 20 years, or 15, or 10? At what point would Gingrich say that illegal immigrants are “members of the community”? And if he is not offering those immigrants amnesty, then what is he offering?
It’s possible Gingrich will come under continued attack for his position, but it’s also possible he will not suffer anything like the damage suffered by Rick Perry, who fell in the polls after he famously said that those who disagree with his position on in-state tuition for illegal immigrants “have no heart.” Perry didn’t make a very effective case for himself; there was a reasonable argument to make for his position, but he did not or could not make it, at least at first. Gingrich won’t have that problem.
Although Gingrich turned in the strongest performance of the night, other candidates — Bachmann, Rick Santorum, and even Jon Huntsman, who hasn’t made much of a mark in debates — did well, too. Romney didn’t do badly, but he was at times wobbly and underwhelming, at least by the high standard he has set in previous debates. The most that could be said for Perry and former frontrunner Herman Cain is that they did not shine.
About midway through the debate, the veteran Republican strategist Alex Castellanos, who is not affiliated with any candidate this year, sent out a tweet: “Except for Cain and Perry, credit the GOP tonight for having serious people discussing serious issues in a mature way.” What more could Republicans ask of a debate?
