Tonight’s was an ugly debate. It wasn’t especially negative compared to the others, but it showcased some of the worst issues for the GOP candidates competing for the nomination.
It was also a debate in which Rick Santorum stumbled in his challenge to Mitt Romney, blunting his post-Colorado momentum — although the extent of the damage remains to be seen.
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The first lowlight was a colloquy about earmarks, the legislative line-items that politicians use to bring home the bacon. They are often wasteful, and quite commonly used to buy votes in Congress and thus grease the skids for terrible legislation. Three candidates came out in favor of earmarks, and one against. (And yes, I am describing a Republican debate in the post-Tea Party era, in case you’re confusedly looking up at the timestamp.)
The one person on the stage opposed to earmarks — Mitt Romney — demonstrated that he knows nothing about the topic. He described the way spending ought to be done instead of through earmarking and — suprise! — what he described was exactly the way earmarks are actually made.
The others — Santorum, Gingrich, and Paul — had plenty of earmarks to defend, and they did. (One of the ones Santorum backed had been requested for the Salt Lake Olympics by…citizen Romney.) It was a dismal spectacle, especially after the lonely but successful crusade by Rep. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., to abolish earmarks in the new GOP House. (Gingrich’s defense of earmarks was the most successful — a Republican Congress might have to impose funding requirements on a second-term Obama administration.)
Then there was contraception. After browbeating moderator John King for what was really a silly question (the wording was roughly, “Do you believe in contraception?” — as in, “Yes, it exists”) the candidates proceeded to dignify the question for what seemed an eternity. Only Romney was wise enough to divert his answer into the broader question of religious freedom, including a recent court case not related to contraception.
Santorum at least made the point that he didn’t want a government program to deal with it just because he thought it was a bad thing. “Just because I’m talking about it, doesn’t mean I want a government program to fix it.” But Romney then called him out on stage for trying to have it both ways on Title X birth control subsidies. Santorum said in the debate that he only voted for them because they were in a larger package, but he had used that same vote for another audience as evidence that he was perfectly comfortable making taxpayers fund contraception. Santorum had no convincing defense to this.
Santorum also made this unforced error with respect to his yes vote on the No Child Left Behind law:
This was the gaffe of the night, and you can bet it will show up in numerous negative super PAC ads on the topic of leadership. When Santorum said “folks,” he was responding to the crowd’s light booing. Note that he said this shortly after choosing the word “courage” as his one-word self-description.
Mitt Romney did not dominate this debate, but he did much better than Santorum. He battered the former senator with a mention of his old colleage, liberal Sen. Arlen Specter, whom Santorum backed in 2004 over conservative primary challenger Pat Toomey. To attacks on Romneycare, Romney responded by pointing out that Specter (who switched parties in 2009) provided the decisive vote on Obamacare.
This is typical of Romney’s method for dismantling opponents. He is like the fabled man who talked Saint Peter into letting him into heaven, simply by proving that the Apostle’s own sins were as great as his own. If he is bad on an issue himself, Romney simply aims to demonstrate that his principal opponent of the moment is equally or nearly as bad.
With his adequate debate performance, Romney showed once again how he can win the nomination — by turning off voters to everyone else. And tonight, Republican voters were certainly turned off.
