I watched the Republican debate last night. I’m sure I’m only one of about a trillion people who has an opinion on it, but here goes.
I wouldn’t ‘tier’ the candidates as the media does, but I would definitely classify them:
1: Rudy and Mitt – mud-slingers who can’t give a straight answer to a tough question and happen to get most of the attention. These two deserve to be ignored, basically.
2: Tancredo and Hunter – moreso Hunter, but really both are the candidates the media *really* wishes weren’t there. They mostly ignored them. Too bad.
3: Huckabee and Thompson – Relatively friendly (aside from Thompson’s ad, which was great but caustic), easy to listen to, semi-straight forward, but not terribly precise.
4: Paul and McCain – Appeared to me the most Presidential, precise, opinionated, calculated, experienced, … and opposite.
I have to say, despite the fact I’m an avid Paul supporter, that I didn’t think this was necessarily his very best performance, and it was most certainly engineered not to give him any room to shine. They did also offer some challenging questions up to some of the other ‘contestants’ but picked particularly hard on Paul and didn’t given him any room to truly shine (i.e. on economics, for example).
My biggest disappointment in Paul was in his not mentioning the IRS in his list of agencies he’d cut or eliminate. Of course, the options are limitless and his choices (Education, Energy, and Homeland Security) were good ones, but Huckabee’s IRS reply drew lots of applause, essentially stealing Paul’s thunder. As an aside, Huckabee’s support of the Fair Tax is far less appealing than Paul’s desire to simply eliminate the IRS and replace it with nothing.
I’ll give Huckabee props for the best line of the night in response to the ‘WWJD’ question: “Jesus was too smart to run for public office.” Funny, and true on so many levels… 🙂
Jeers to CNN for cutting the best part of Paul’s response to McCain’s ‘message from the troops’ in the post-debate analysis, namely that Paul gets more donations from active duty military personnel than anyone else on the stage. On the bright side, they did replay his comment about not knowing the difference between isolationism and non-interventionism. That very important point has needed to be made for quite some time now. I hope the media was listening, too.
I also wish Paul had been given a chance to respond to Tancredo’s comments about the terrorists wanting to ‘follow us home’. Paul should have had the chance to explain the difference between non-interventionism and naive ‘head-in-the-sand’ liberalism, too.
Despite all that, I think Paul fared reasonably well. I thought his response to the question about running as an independent was great: He’s won 10 times as a Republican, has thousands of people showing up at events (more than any other candidate), raised $4.2 Million in one day (more than any other Republican in history), and wins many online polls and live straw polls. His support is real and big.
Now the real work begins of taking his message directly to the voters in New Hampshire….
V-