Nine Takeaways from the Arizona Debate
MESA, Ariz. -- They needled each other for the better part of two hours, ran roughshod over the moderator, and occasionally bent the facts to suit their narrative, but when the 20th Republican presidential debate of 2012 ended Wednesday night neither Mitt Romney nor Rick Santorum had done much to alter the arc of this unpredictable campaign.
Then again, in this mercurial race it has never been easy to gauge the reaction of Republican primary voters. The last time CNN’s John King moderated one of these tilts, Gingrich turned a question about his checkered marital past into a boomerang that nearly decapitated King and led to a runaway Gingrich victory in South Carolina -- the former House speaker’s only win so far.
But now, with pivotal primaries next Tuesday here in Arizona and in Romney’s home state of Michigan, polls show Santorum and Romney locked in a head-to-head battle in both places, with Gingrich and Texas Congressman Ron Paul stuck in the second tier.
If the much-hyped debate didn’t live up to its billing, and didn’t do anything to change the pecking order, it did leave impressions of each candidate that were not always flattering, and not always “on-message,” as political handlers might say. Here are nine examples:
1. Mitt Romney may look like a choir boy, but he’s not. Taking direct aim at Santorum’s claim to be the one true conservative in the race, Romney went after Santorum’s bona fides on a host of fiscal issues, ranging from his frequent requests for Pennsylvania-centric earmarks when Santorum represented the Keystone State in the Senate to his votes to raise the debt ceiling.
“While I was fighting to save the Olympics,” Romney said pointedly to Santorum while the two sat beside each other, “you were fighting to save the ‘Bridge to Nowhere.’ ”
And in something of a bank shot, Romney also sought to pin the passage of “Obamacare” on Santorum -- on the dubious grounds that Santorum supported former fellow Pennsylvania Sen. Arlen Specter in 2004 over the much more conservative Pat Toomey in the Republican primary. Specter, in Romney’s telling, was the all-important 60th vote in the Senate for President Obama’s 2010 health care bill.
“So don’t look at me,” Romney told Santorum. “Take a look in the mirror.”
2. Ron Paul may look like a kindly old man, but he’s not. When King asked Paul why he was running a new television advertisement calling Santorum “a fake,” Paul replied quickly, “ Because he’s a fake.”
Sitting beside Paul, Santorum tried to lighten the moment by touching his own skin, looking at Paul, and saying, “I’m real, I’m real.” Paul responded by saying sarcastically, if incongruously. “Congratulations.”
3. Santorum sounded defensive. Lyndon Baines Johnson used to say, “If you’re covering your ass, you’re losing your ass,” and Santorum seemed to be covering his most of the night. If Romney played the role of relentless prosecutor, Santorum came across as a defendant -- who seemed shrill while sticking up for himself.
To be sure, Santorum got off some good lines. When Romney took credit for balancing the budget when he was governor of Massachusetts, Santorum pointed out that the Bay State’s constitution requires the budget be balanced. “Don’t go around bragging about something you have to do,” Santorum scoffed. “Michael Dukakis balanced the budget for 10 years. Does that make him qualified to be president of the United States? I don’t think so.”
Yet, Santorum tried too hard, laughing derisively while his opponents made their points, rolling his eyes, shaking his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped at Romney at one point. These histrionics came across as desperate, an impression Santorum only reinforced after the debate when he complained that Romney and Paul seemed to be working in tandem.
“If ever there was an iconoclastic guy, it’s Ron Paul,” said top Romney adviser Stuart Stevens. “I mean, the notion that Ron Paul would do anything other than speak his own mind is whiny silliness.”
4. Santorum also sounded like a man who’s spent too much time in Washington. At several points in the debate, the national front-runner employed Capitol Hill jargon that must have caused Arizonans’ eyes to glaze over. He gave a lengthy dissertation about supporting “Title XX,” whatever that is, and practically filibustered while parrying Romney’s criticism over earmarks and big spending programs.
One of those appropriating bills contained money to support Planned Parenthood, Romney pointed out. In response, Santorum said that although he had “a personal moral objection to it, I voted for bills that included it.”
Santorum also apologized for voting for the No Child Left Behind law, on the grounds he was taking one for the team. The team in question, of course, was led by George W. Bush, a two-term Republican president. Santorum could have pointed out that Bush’s signature initiative was supported by 91 of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate, making it one of the most bipartisan pieces of major domestic policy legislation in years.
Instead, his “politics is a team sport” defense opened the door for Ron Paul, who rejoined caustically that Santorum had illustrated precisely what was wrong with politics. It was an awkward moment for a candidate who, in response to John King’s request that the candidates provide a one-word description of themselves, had replied, “Courage.”
5. Bullying the media is still good Republican politics, if done skillfully. In this area, Gingrich, at age 68, still has his fastball. When King asked the candidates for a one-word description of themselves, the other three played along, offering flattering self-assessments. Not Gingrich. He smiled at King and slowly let out the word “cheerful” -- as if to say, “Screw you and your clever question, too.”
In a more serious vein, Gingrich responded sharply to a question CNN producers plucked from their online audience about whether the GOP candidates “believe in birth control.”
“I want to make two quick points, John,” said Gingrich. “The first is: There is a legitimate question about the power of the government to impose on religion activities which any religion opposes. That’s legitimate. But I just want to point out . . . not once in the 2008 campaign, not once did anybody in the elite media ask why Barack Obama voted in favor of legalizing infanticide.”
Romney, by contrast, came across as clumsy at the end of the debate, when King asked the candidates about the biggest “misconception” voters might have of him. Almost as though one could see Romney’s mind racing through this minefield (“They think I don’t have any core values, but they’re wrong!”), the former Massachusetts governor launched into his familiar litany of grievances against the president.
When King interjected by reminding Romney the question that had been asked, the candidate replied, “You know, you get to ask the questions you want; I get to give the answers I want.” Here, he was borrowing directly from the Gingrich playbook, but Romney came across as someone who was blurting out his handlers’ stage directions. It was artless, and it generated a spoof by one wag on Twitter: “Moderator: ‘What’s your favorite color?’ Romney: ‘Hot dogs.’ ”
6. The candidates were confident in inverse proportion to their poll numbers and delegate counts. To the question of what might be voters’ biggest misconception about him, Paul went straight to the point. “I think the biggest misconception about me is that I can’t win,” he said, citing a recent poll in Iowa that shows him running more strongly in a head-to-head matchup with Obama than anyone else.
Likewise, Gingrich, who vacillated between being subdued and “cheerful,” seemed sanguine to the point of near-disengagement with his Republican rivals. Gingrich’s best lines were directed at Obama instead of his opponents, and he never laid a glove on Romney.
Afterwards, Gingrich advisers R.C. Hammond and Kellyanne Conway were rhapsodizing about their man’s performance, with Hammond going so far as to discuss the supposed inevitability of Romney dropping out of the race. “Our job is to weather the immediate storm,” Hammond told skeptical reporters. “The shrinking Romney campaign will run out of time, it will run out of money, it will run out of steam.”
7. The candidates continued to be factually challenged. Gingrich’s claim that Obama supported infanticide is an exaggeration, as is his assertion, “When I was speaker . . . we balanced the budget for four consecutive years.” (Gingrich was House speaker for only two years in which the federal budget was in balance.)
Other fudges included: Santorum’s claim that Romney’s tax plan would raise taxes even on the 1 percent. (Romney’s plan would actually cut taxes across the board.); Romney’s counter-claim that “we cut taxes 19 times” when he was in the statehouse in Boston (taxes, particularly on businesses, were raised in his tenure as governor, although they were generally disguised as fees); Santorum’s assertion that Obama had not spoken out for the Syrian people (he did just that last August, and forcefully).
8. Rick Perry looked presidential again -- or, at least, gubernatorial. Gingrich’s most prominent surrogate in Arizona on Wednesday was the Texas governor, whose own debate-night performances earlier in this process relegated him to the sidelines. But Perry looked relaxed, not to mention ruggedly handsome, while seated by Callista Gingrich in the audience, and he sounded like his old confident self while being mobbed by reporters in the spin room after the debate, and in interviews beforehand.
“Newt’s the real deal,” Perry told John King just before the debate. “He’s the real fiscal conservative, he’s the real social conservative, he’s the real 10th Amendment-believing and -breathing individual on the stage.”
Hardly earth-shattering, but Perry’s presence served as a reminder how the current process, with its endless debates, super PAC attack ads, and topsy-turvy nature has served to diminish all the candidates, and possibly the Republican brand along with it.
9. The GOP has a diversity problem. The four candidates and their questioner were white men, as were all of the questioners in the audience save the last one. It was almost a parody of the Democratic Party’s criticisms. The candidates’ tough stance on birth control puts them at odds with the views of independent women, while the party’s hard line on illegal immigration sends a problematic signal to Latinos.
But while that pale-fest was taking place on the stage at the Mesa Arts Center, the crowds gathered on the streets and walkways outside created a veritable cacophony of color and noise attesting to the true diversity of modern America.
One dignified demonstrator, Dolores Huerta, holds a venerated place in the history of the American labor movement, and the western United States. Huerta, who is 81 years old and still lives in California, helped César Chávez form the United Farm Workers union in the 1960s. She was here in solidarity with Barack Obama, she said -- and in protest of Mitt Romney’s previous assertion that the answer to the nation’s illegal immigration problem is “self-deportation.”
Romney did not repeat that fatuous phrase Wednesday night, but the presence in Arizona of a grand dame of Mexican-American political activism underscored the fact that in the absence of a dramatic gesture, the GOP’s problems with Hispanics aren’t going away.
“Romney comes across as someone who doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Huerta told a reporter minutes before the debate. “My grandfather fought in the Civil War, on the side of the Union. His father was born in Mexico -- so he should know better.”
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Carl M. Cannon is the Washington Editor for RealClearPolitics.
Page Printed from: realclearpolitics.com at February 23, 2012 - 05:47:26 AM PST |
