Live-blogging the CNN/Tea Party Republican debate

You can watch the whole debate here:



You can also check in at Althouse and TalkingPointsMemo for more live-blogging.

You can read my live-blogging of the last debate here, and if you want even more you can see all the live-blogging I've ever done with the "live-blog" tag.

8:07 - Do they only sing the national anthem at the beginning of Republican debates, not Democratic or general-election debates?

8:09 - The debate still hasn't started yet. They're just explaining how the debate is going to happen. Twitter, Facebook, blah blah blah. Boring.

8:10 - Wolf Blitzer: "It is important to know where the candidates agree on these important subjects, and where they disagree." Got that, Newt Gingrich? This is a debate. Please don't scold the moderator for encouraging you to argue over your differences.

8:13 - We're almost a quarter of an hour in, and we're just getting to the first question.

8:15 - Michele Bachmann says Obama "stole" money from Medicare to pay for his health-care reform. Interesting that she's so forceful about the government's property rights.

8:15 - Blitzer asks Rick Perry why his USA Today editorial struck such a different tone on Social Security than he did in the last debate (where he called it a "Ponzi scheme" and a "monstrous lie"). He repeats the words "Ponzi scheme" and "lie" but still softens his tone.

8:17 - Mitt Romney on Perry: The problem isn't that they disagree over whether there's a financing problem. Everyone agrees that there is. The problem is that Perry has said Social Security is "unconstitutional" and "should not be a federal program." Also, the term "Ponzi scheme" is frightening to many people.

8:20 - Perry quotes Romney as calling Social Security "criminal." Romney corrects him: Romney said it would be criminal to raid the Social Security trust fund. The two had been rapidly going back and forth, but Perry suddenly has no response.

[Added later: Here's the video.]



8:22 - Jon Huntsman quotes Romney's book, No Apology, on Social Security, and says, "I don't know if this was written by Kurt Cobain or not." If this is supposed to appeal to younger voters, it's not going to work. Josh Marshall at TalkingPointsMemo says:

Earth to Huntsman: These folks don't know who Kurt Cobain is.

Is that because they're too old or too young?

8:23 - Newt Gingrich brushes off the wild applause in response to one of his comments: "You're eating into my time."

(As always, I'm writing down these quotations as I go. I believe they're generally accurate, but they might not be exactly word-for-word.)

8:25 - Blitzer asks Rick Santorum about Social Security: "Are you with Perry or Romney?" "The question is who's with me!"

8:27 - Gingrich dismisses a woman's question about her family's financial future by saying, "That's just a Washington mythology."

8:28 - Santorum vocally complained in a past debate about not getting enough questions. CNN seems to be overcompensating.

8:32 - Josh Marshall says:

Now we're back to the antics by the also rans. But the whole thing was that Romney/Perry exchange. That book is just a massive obstacle to Perry's run. It's filled with stuff like that. It's written by someone who clearly wasn't planning on running for president anytime soon. Probably ever. Now he's stuck with it.

8:33 - Bachmann has an incisive point: we've gotten used to the idea that the government can keep "buying us more and more stuff." Who is the "everybody else" who's going to pay for all of it?

8:34 - My mom (Ann Althouse) notices that the audience seems to be responding much more positively to Perry than to Romney. Her theory:

I think CNN's scheme is to have packed the audience with the Tea Party faithful, making it a cheering section for Rick Perry. It's a bit irritating. I think Mitt knows what's happening, and he has a great opportunity to show that he can keep his bearings.

8:40 - Perry uses the phrase "risk their capital" three times in one answer. He must have a very tightly controlled set of talking points.

8:41 - Bachmann says: "Don't give the United States a $2.4 trillion blank check." That doesn't sound like a blank check to me! (Democrats were similarly oxymoronic in the 2004 race when they attacked the "$87 billion blank check" for the Iraq war. By the way, that figure sounds quaintly miniscule by today's warped standards.)

8:43 - Romney: "We've moved from a pay-phone world to a smartphone world. President Obama keeps jamming quarters into a smartphone thinking that's going to make it work. They're not connected, Mr. President!"

8:44 - Romney: "I think Gov. Perry would agree with me that if you're dealt 4 aces, that doesn't necessarily make you a great poker player." The audience reacts very negatively, supporting my mom's theory (see above). Perry responds: "Mitt, you were doin' pretty well till ya got to poker."

8:45 - Romney has a clever point about Perry's record: Perry has achieved good results in an environment where it worked well to go in expecting things to be fine. This mindset might not work so well for the position they're running for.

8:46 - Ron Paul is asked whether Perry deserves all the credit for Texas's growth. Paul, chuckling, says: "Eh, not quite!" He says taxes have doubled in the time Perry has been governor. "But I don't want to offend the governor because he might raise my taxes."

8:49 - Gingrich points out the paradox in Perry running as a conservative who created lots of jobs: "The American people create jobs, not government."

8:50 - A commenter on my mom's blog named Jim Howard says:

I'm not sure who will be the next President, but I'm pretty sure that Herman Cain will be the next VP.

I'm not so certain, but I see the point. Cain isn't running for president; he's running for vice president.

8:51 - Huntsman: "This country needs more workers. Can we say that? This country needs more workers." When he asks if "we" can say that, he intends to present himself as someone who has the courage to speak the truth, but he ends up sounding like he's weak, tentative, in need of others' approval.

8:53 - Another commenter on my mom's blog says:

Newt totally seems like a professor who's going to give me a B.

8:59 - Perry is asked about his "treason" statement about Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke. He says he only made a statement starting with "If..." I guess you can get out of any statement if you preface everything with "If..."

[Added later, video:]



9:03 - Gingrich: President Obama says he's going to get rid of tax loopholes. "Doesn't he realize that every green tax credit is a loophole?" That's why General Electric is able to pay zero taxes.

9:04 - Blitzer comes back at Gingrich: Wouldn't getting rid of those tax loopholes be a tax increase? Gingrich admits this, but incoherently says he's against tax increases.

9:10 - Perry keeps defending his HPV vaccination law by saying, "My goal was to fight cancer," and "I will always err on the side of life." Isn't that exactly the same principle used by supporters of government-sponsored health care, which Perry presumably thinks is tyrannical?

9:25 - My mom says:

Bachmann accuses Perry of being bought for $5,000 and Perry says he's insulted that she'd think he could be bought so cheaply.

Josh Marshall's take:

That was a great expression on Perry's face when he realized that the logic of his response to Bachmann was that $5,000 was way too little to buy him.

Even CNN itself is using this as a "BREAKING NEWS" headline at the top of its homepage:

Perry says he's offended if someone says he can be bought for $5,000 campaign contribution

9:30 - Santorum: "Gov. Perry gave in-state tuition to illegal immigrants. Maybe that was his attempt to get the illegal — uh, the Latino vote."

9:31 - Perry defends his tuition policy in response to Santorum, taking a resoundingly pro-immigration tone: "It doesn't matter how you got here. It doesn't matter what the sound of your last name is. That is the American way." The audience loudly boos Perry here.

9:33 - Huntsman, grinning, says: "For Rick [Perry] to say we can't secure the borders is a treasonous comment." Perry cracks up.

9:35 - Romney says that Huntsman's decision to give drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants "creates a patina of legality." Lose the law-prof-speak, Mitt!

9:36 - Huntsman comes back: "We could talk about where Mitt's been on all the issues, and that would take forever." It's been surprisingly rare to see the candidates attacking Romney for his famous flip-flopping. They don't want to draw too much blood from Romney; they might need him later.

9:40 - Paul: There's a big difference between "military spending" and "defense spending." We should cut military spending, not defense spending.

9:41 - Paul: "What would we do if another country, say China, did to us what we do to the countries over there [in the Middle East]?" We can't think we can occupy them with no retaliation.

9:42 - Santorum attacks Paul for a post on his website yesterday, saying that U.S. policy led to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

9:43 - Paul: "This whole idea that al Qaeda is attacking us for being free and prosperous is just not true." He paraphrases Osama bin Laden's purported reasons for attacking America. He seems to have difficulty continuing because the audience is so vocally negative. I don't know why Paul takes bin Laden at his word.

9:52 - Bachmann answers the question what she'd bring to the White House: copies of "the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights." The Bill of Rights is part of the Constitution, so that's redundant unless you want to emphasize the first 10 Amendments — most of which are about protecting the rights of criminal defendants.

9:54 - The debate is over. TalkingPointsMemo notes one ghoulish moment, which I also noticed but didn't have time to write down:

Wolf asks Ron Paul about a hypothetical 30 year-old who has no insurance and needs intensive care.

“So society should just allow him to die?” Wolf asks.

“Yeah!” someone in the audience shouts out.

There's your Tea Party debate in a nutshell.

Fact-checking the Washington Post's Fact Checker

Ben Smith at Politico says (a) Biden did call Tea Party activists "terrorists," and (b) the Washington Post's Fact Checker isn't checking facts.

"[W]e face the absurd phenomenon of colleges encouraging students to go into six-figure debt ... but forbidding them to drink on campus ...

... because they're deemed insufficiently mature to appreciate the risks."

Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit) argues that the federal drinking age in the United States should be lowered from 21 to 18 — and that Republicans are particularly well-positioned to bring about this change:

Republicans are supposed to stand for limited government, freedom and federalism, but it was under a Republican administration—and a Republican transportation secretary, Elizabeth Dole—that states were forced to raise their age limits or face financial penalties. That was before the tea party, though. Perhaps today, when Republican leaders across the board are singing the praises of limited government, it is time for them to put their money where their mouths are and support an end to the federal drinking-age mandate.

And if arguments based on fairness and principle aren't enough, perhaps one based on politics will do the trick: This will get votes.

Democrats traditionally do well with the youth vote, and one reason is that they have been successful in portraying Republicans as fuddy-duddies who want to hold young people down. This may be unfair—college speech codes and the like don't tend to come from Republicans—but the evidence suggests that it works. What's more, the first few elections people vote in tend to set a long-term pattern. A move to repeal the federal drinking-age mandate might help Republicans turn this around.

There's also the fact that almost no other country in the world has such a high drinking age. And I think ours is the highest of any developed country. But I guess Republicans don't like the "America is the only country in the industrialized world..." style of framing.

The case for big government that Obama hasn't made

Peter Beinart lists 3 ways the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert rallies captured "what the American left did wrong in the early Obama years." His last point is

the focus on “sanity.” Talk about condescending. The Tea Party types who believe that expanding government undermines their freedom are not insane. They’re tapping into a deeply-rooted American fear of government power, one that would be immediately recognizable to Calvin Coolidge or Strom Thurmond. And in the process, they’re conjuring, once again, the myth that America was born free, and surrenders a smidgen of liberty every time Washington imposes another tax or establishes another government agency. (The Tea Partiers may not be racists, but it’s hardly surprising that this idealized image of 19th Century America doesn’t impress African-Americans). The Tea Partiers, in other words, are making a serious argument, which the left too often tries to dismiss by calling them nuts. In fact, the haughtiness reflected by such insults conceals the left’s confusion over how to respond ideologically.

Beinart then goes on a tangent about how President Obama has undersold his own policies:

The Obama administration has barely tried to argue that activist government can make people more free—by, for instance, guaranteeing their health care coverage and thus freeing them to leave a dead end job. In America today, as at past moments in our history, there’s a profound debate underway not just about how to right our economy but about the relationship between capitalism and freedom. Pretending it’s not a real debate is a great way for the left to lose.

Matthew Yglesias and Ezra Klein have made the health-care point well. I'm at least convinced by their criticism of the status quo ante, though this isn't necessarily a good affirmative argument for the new law. As Klein says:

Unable to risk losing their employer-sponsored health insurance, would-be entrepreneurs don’t start small businesses, they stay in jobs that don’t maximize their productivity, they remain in positions that another worker would be better suited to.

OK, so that's a cumbersome run-on sentence. But if you edit it down to something snappier and more eloquent, why wasn't that Obama's #1 argument for health-care reform?

Short URL for this post: goo.gl/T5reP

Fake outrage over the deficit from the Pledge to America (and everyone else)

Dan Drezner and Megan McArdle notice that the Republican Party's Pledge to America repeats the same incoherent set of positions we've been getting from the Democratic and Republican sides for decades:

1. We can't raise taxes.

2. We can't cut military or entitlement spending.

3. We have to reduce the deficit.

As Drezner says: "Good luck with that."



McArdle has a good rebuke to Tea Partiers who claim to be passionately opposed to the high deficit:

That's sort of like saying, "I want to be a size 6 and run marathons. I just don't want to do the part where I stop eating and go running."

ADDED: This is the Paul Krugman column that Drezner mentions (and agrees with. Krugman says:

In essence, what [the House Republicans] say [in the Pledge to America] is, “Deficits are a terrible thing. Let’s make them much bigger.” The document repeatedly condemns federal debt — 16 times, by my count. But the main substantive policy proposal is to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which independent estimates say would add about $3.7 trillion to the debt over the next decade — about $700 billion more than the Obama administration’s tax proposals.

True, the document talks about the need to cut spending. But as far as I can see, there’s only one specific cut proposed — canceling the rest of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Republicans claim (implausibly) would save $16 billion. That’s less than half of 1 percent of the budget cost of those tax cuts. As for the rest, everything must be cut, in ways not specified — “except for common-sense exceptions for seniors, veterans, and our troops.” In other words, Social Security, Medicare and the defense budget are off-limits.

So what’s left? Howard Gleckman of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has done the math. As he points out, the only way to balance the budget by 2020, while simultaneously (a) making the Bush tax cuts permanent and (b) protecting all the programs Republicans say they won’t cut, is to completely abolish the rest of the federal government: “No more national parks, no more Small Business Administration loans, no more export subsidies, no more N.I.H. No more Medicaid . . . No more highway construction. No more homeland security. Oh, and no more Congress.”