Why Cruz's attack on "New York values" was both wrong and against the Republican party's interests

National Review's Kevin Williamson writes:

What to make of Senator Ted Cruz? He is a very, very smart man who apparently believes that the median Republican presidential primary voter is very, very dumb. There’s some evidence for that proposition — Donald Trump still leads in the national polls. . . .

But sneering at New York values isn’t very smart for conservatives. Not in the long run.

It has been said that you cannot understand America without understanding New York City, and the first thing to understand about New York is that it isn’t very much like the rest of America. That is true, unquestionably. But New York’s traditional virtues — its brashness, its hustle and enterprise, its anything-is-possible attitude — are the traditional American virtues, just as the city’s vices — its materialism, its self-importance, its fascination with the transitory and the impermanent — are the American vices, too. Conservatives, of all people, should be more attuned to the virtues of the nation’s commercial center; let the nation’s art-school dropouts sneer at that great collision of money and culture. . . .

To the extent that “New York values” is another way of saying “urban values” — and it is, to a great extent — conservatives would do well to develop a keener appreciation of them. (Never mind, for the moment, the notion that Donald Trump’s values are identical to the values of New York, in which he is a figure of fun rather than a figure of respect.) From a matter of pure self-interest, Republicans would be in much better shape if their presidential candidates did not start in an electoral hole, with California, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois wrapped up in a bow for the Democrats. It isn’t California ranchers and Illinois farmers who have handed those states to the Left, but city-dwelling people who believe with some reason — Ted Cruz has just given them another — that Republicans hate them. . . .

When Ronald Reagan was elected, 74 percent of the U.S. population lived in cities; today it is 82 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the nation’s population grew by 9.7 percent — but the city population grew by 12.1 percent. And those urbanites are not entirely pleased with the Democratic monopolies that govern most of them: In Flint, the Democrats are literally poisoning the children; in Atlanta, the schools are so corrupt that teachers and administrators had to be sent to prison; elsewhere, urban Americans are literally up in arms (Molotov cocktails, at least) over their treatment at the hands of the city powers they interact with most often: the police. New York City is sliding back into pre-Giuliani chaos. And what are Republicans doing? Sneering at “New York values,” when they should be seeking to satisfy the best of those values, such as the entrepreneurial spirit and the hunger for advancement — which are, after all, the best of American values, too.

Have moderate Republicans been losing the presidency because conservative voters stayed home in protest?

Ramesh Ponnuru says no:

Conservatives sometimes argue that Republicans lost the last two presidential elections because they nominated moderates who did not inspire conservatives to vote. On NRO today, Bernard Goldberg places blame on those conservatives who stayed home. He writes that “millions of the ideologically pure — who normally would vote Republican — did in fact sit home, if not handing the elections to Barack Obama, at least making it a lot easier for him to win.”

The premise of both arguments–Republicans shouldn’t have nominated moderates because they can’t turn out conservatives, and conservatives shouldn’t have sat out the elections–does not appear to be correct, based on the exit polls. There was no drop-off in conservative turnout in either 2008 or 2012. Conservatives were 34 percent of the electorate in 2004, 34 percent in 2008, and 35 percent in 2012. They voted Republican at a normal rate in 2012 too: Romney got 82 percent of them, a bit lower than George W. Bush’s 84 percent in 2004 but higher than his 81 percent in 2000. (McCain did a bit worse in 2008, with 78 percent.) Goldberg’s argument could end up being true about 2016, but it has not been true in the last two elections.

A conversation about politics

This is me and Alex Knepper talking about politics a few weeks ago on IM. It should go without saying that I would never post something like this without the other person's permission! I've added links and rearranged the text into a coherent dialogue.

A: You voted for Kerry in 2004, right?

J: Yes

A: Did you think that was a particularly dirty campaign?

J: Well, I ignored the swift boat stuff.

A: Interesting. The right-wing base was obsessed with it.

J: That just didn't interest me. I voted for him because I was inclined to vote Democratic, he seemed solid and reasonable, and Bush wasn't very good. I wasn't going to be influenced by personal attacks.

A: Do you think, though, I mean, that the election was a particularly poor display of democratic campaigns at work?

J: Well, my view of a presidential race is mainly based on the debates, plus random TV interviews and speeches and stuff like that, not the ads. I thought the 2004 debates were incredibly serious and substantive, almost to a fault.

A: Who was the last Republican candidate you voted for before Romney?

J: I didn't vote for Romney.

A: Oh yeah. You voted for Gary Johnson. But you preferred Romney to Obama, no?

J: I couldn't decide. For a while, I considered voting for Romney. I wrote up a whole blog post about why I would vote for him, but I didn’t publish it. I can't bring myself to vote for someone who's against legal abortion, against gay rights, etc.

A: I really was stunned that he continued to advocate for the FMA. If he runs in 2016 will he still support the FMA? Geez

J: I voted for Joe Lhota for Mayor. That's the most significant Republican I've voted for. Lhota is pro gay rights, and abortion rights don't matter for NYC mayor. Note: when social issues are off the table, I suddenly start voting Republican — an example of how Republicans lose young voters through their unreasonable social views.

A: I’m at the point now where as long as the Democrat is basically reasonable on economics and foreign policy, even if I disagree a bit (to the right), I'd prefer to vote for the Democrat over a socially conservative Republican. These social issues are clearly being resolved in favor of the liberal position, as is usually the case in American history, and it's time to let these issues go. The longer the GOP holds onto them the more of a drag it is on their ability to do anything substantive.

J: Another reason I wouldn't say I thought Romney was definitely better: I found him appealing because he seemed really smart on economics, more so than Obama. But then I had to step back and say: OK, he can talk about economics smartly, but what is he going to do? And I thought: well, he wants to take money away from Medicaid and spend it on the military. And I just think that's wrong.

A: I was deeply disappointed when he sort of shelved Ryan's Medicare plan, and shamelessly started criticizing the Medicare cuts in Obamacare. The GOP freakin' ran ads in 2010 that juxtaposed the words 'government takeover of healthcare' with 'Obama getting in your Medicare.’

J: Romney was obviously in a bind on health care. What a weird choice for a nominee! I can't believe the Republicans nominated the governor responsible for the precursor to Obamacare.

A: Yeah, well, what was the alternative? Newt Gingrich? Rick Santorum? Herman Cain? All the serious candidates declined to run.

J: Yeah, there was no good candidate. But why was there no good candidate?

A: Because Romney blocked them from entering.

J: Oh, Romney didn't stop anyone from doing anything!

A: Ever since 2008, when I first started writing, I've been mystified by Romney's appeal.

J: I find him appealing! I think he's gotten a bad rap. There's plenty of stuff I disagree with him about. But considering that the Republican party exists, I like him about as much as any Republican. I hope he runs again. And I think he probably will. When I watched Romney, I thought: that's probably what I'd be like if I ran for president. I'd be stilted and awkward and overly calculating. Probably most people I know would be. Most normal people would be uncomfortable as national politicians. Very few people would be as cool and effortless as Obama.

A: Given how lukewarm my opinion about Romney is, it is sad to say that I'd still prefer him to just about anyone else the Republican Party is putting up. I just don't trust him.

J: We should never trust any politician.

Rubio and Ryan try to kill Romney's "47%" line

Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan gave speeches last night "delivering an implicit, but sharp, rebuke to Mitt Romney's '47 percent' line." I like this point:

“Every country has rich people, but only a few places have achieved a vibrant and stable middle class,” Rubio added, calling it a “fundamental promise of America” to have the opportunity to make it to the middle class.

Epistemic closure

Public Policy Polling says that "Republicans are taking the results [of the election] pretty hard":

49% of GOP voters nationally say they think that ACORN stole the election for President Obama. We found that 52% of Republicans thought that ACORN stole the 2008 election for Obama, so this is a modest decline, but perhaps smaller than might have been expected given that ACORN doesn't exist anymore.

Can Jon Huntsman save the Republican Party?

Jon Huntsman, the former Governor of Utah and U.S. Ambassador to China, never seemed to have a chance at the 2012 Republican nomination. But I hope that Republican pols are considering whether this was unfortunate in retrospect. Huntsman is only 52 years old, and if he ran again, he could benefit from the Republican Party's preference for nominating someone who has already run. (The lone recent exception was Bush in 2000; the rule has held up with every other non-incumbent Republican nominee going back to Nixon in 1968.)

Maybe the 2012 election will force Republicans to realize what Democrats have understood for a while: primaries are less about choosing the ideal candidate for the party's base, than about choosing a candidate who's going to appeal to swing voters in swing states. Huntsman, like President Obama, seems like the kind of person you'd expect to be the president of the United States in the year 2012 and beyond. Mitt Romney seems less like a modern-day president — or anyone the average American would expect to meet in their day-to-day lives — and more like someone who could have played the dad on the Donna Reed Show. (See the update at 8:58 in this live-blog from 2008.)

How can Republicans win after 2012?

Self-proclaimed "liberal Democrat" Bill Scher has some advice for Republicans on how to win in the future. (And yes, it's genuinely good advice, not sarcastic or insincere!)

Condoleezza Rice says:

When you look at the composition of the electorate, clearly we are losing important segments of that electorate. And what we have to do is to appeal to those people not as identity groups, but understanding that if you get the identity issues out of the way, then you can appeal to Americans on the broader issues that all Americans share concerns for.

Alex Knepper (a libertarian Republican) agrees and elaborates:

That’s exactly right. The social issues serve as a barrier to persuasion. New voters — young people, immigrants — tend to identify with one of the parties on a ‘big picture’ basis — not by going down a checklist of issues and comparing the party platforms. The social issues are not only the easiest for the uninitiated to understand, but they have the most emotional impact. It’s one thing to argue over the merits of adjusting the capital gains tax rate — most people will submit that it’s an issue about which reasonable people can civilly disagree. But when Hispanics hear that the Republican presidential nominee has openly advocated making life so miserable for illegal immigrants that they won’t even want to live here anymore (that’s what “self-deportation” means, people), then an enormous wall has been created. When you’ve lost the trust of a minority group, they won’t listen to a word you have to say about Medicare, tax reform, or deficit-reduction. There’s nothing inherent about brown skin that makes a person hostile toward capitalism. But if people with brown skin think that the party of the free market hates them, then they’ll run into the arms of the party of statism. And why not? People need to feel assured that you view them with dignity and respect, not with contempt and loathing. There’s nothing that should be surprising about that.

We don’t need to win the Hispanic vote — we just need to increase our share back to levels more like George W. Bush’s. Changing our policies and tone toward immigration issues is only a first step to achieving that — not only because it is practical, but because it is the right thing to do. Once that issue is out of the way, then we can go about the vital task of reaching out to Hispanic voters on the basis of the timeless American values of upward mobility, economic freedom, and individual liberty.

I think a lot of people go along with Democratic economic policies largely because they've already decided to be Democrats based on social issues. As Knepper points out, social issues are relatively easy to have clear, unwavering views about. Given the choice between memorizing and repeating a few slogans to sum up the mainstream Democratic positions on economic issues, or reaching your own conclusions on those issues by soberly weighing the smartest arguments on all sides, many people just don't have time for the latter, no matter how much more intellectually honest it would be.

Yet people would rather feel a sense of clarity than uncertainty on the major issues of the day. So, when they don't have time to master those issues, they develop shortcuts, like saying their side cares, and the other side doesn't care — or, only cares about the wrong people. That approach is simplistic but powerful enough to be able to explain almost any political divide. Given that Republicans are the party of social and economic conservatism, and that their social conservatism is blatantly uncaring, socially liberal voters have a readily available shortcut for taking a stand on Republican economic policies: just as Republicans' social policies show that they don't care about women, blacks, gays, immigrants, etc., their economic policies show that they don't care about the middle class (or the poor), and that they only care about the rich (or corporations).

It's not just that many voters are socially liberal and prioritize social issues, causing Republicans to lose a portion of the electorate every Election Day based on those issues. Of course, that's true, but Republicans have a broader problem: their positions on social issues are turning off many voters from the very idea of agreeing with them on any issue. Conservatives like to bring up "the law of unintended consequences." Well, how many professional Republicans are willing to face the fact that their party's retrograde positions on social issues have been inadvertently holding economic conservatism hostage?

Is there more entitlement spending under Democratic or Republican presidents?

Republicans, according to this editorial in the Wall Street Journal:

In current political discourse, it is common to think of the Democrats as the party of entitlements, but long-term trends seem to tell a somewhat different tale. From a purely statistical standpoint, the growth of entitlement spending over the past half-century has been distinctly greater under Republican administrations than Democratic ones. Between 1960 and 2010, the growth of entitlement spending was exponential, but in any given year, it was on the whole roughly 8% higher if the president happened to be a Republican rather than a Democrat.

This is in keeping with the basic facts of the time: Notwithstanding the criticisms of "big government" that emanated from their Oval Offices from time to time, the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and George W. Bush presided over especially lavish expansions of the American entitlement state. Irrespective of the reputations and the rhetoric of the Democratic and Republican parties today, the empirical correspondence between Republican presidencies and turbocharged entitlement expenditures should underscore the unsettling truth that both political parties have, on the whole, been working together in an often unspoken consensus to fuel the explosion of entitlement spending.

The Republican Convention in a nutshell

"Convention speakers: 'OK, guys, my turn to get an applause line with 'You didn't build that!"'"

(From Alex Knepper on Facebook.)

Live-blogging tonight's Republican presidential debate on foreign policy

[Here's the transcript.]

Keep reloading this page for updates!

8:11 - Wolf Blitzer gives an example of an introduction, saying: "I'm Wolf Blitzer, and yes, that is my real name." Mitt Romney says that "Mitt" is also his real first name. Not according to Wikipedia! [UPDATE: TalkingPointsMemo, which makes a lot of money by posting attack ads against Romney, is running this headline:]

Mitt Romney Flip Flops On His Own Name

8:15 - For the first time, Newt Gingrich goes first. He says he wouldn't "change" the Patriot Act, but would "look at strengthening it."

8:17 - Ron Paul mentions Timothy McVeigh as an example of a terrorist who was dealt with in the criminal justice system. Gingrich says, as if this were a knock-down argument against Ron Paul, "But Timothy McVeigh succeeded!" Is Gingrich suggesting that McVeigh shouldn't have been criminally prosecuted?

8:20 - Jon Huntsman says that Tom Ridge was a "great Secretary of Homeland Security." I don't remember many people saying this at the time.

8:22 - Rick Perry says he would criminalize TSA pat-downs and privatize the TSA.

8:23 - Rick Santorum agrees with Perry. "We should be trying to find bombers, not bombs."

(As always, I'm writing down these quotes on the fly, not using a transcript, so they might not be verbatim.)

8:24 - The moderator asks Santorum what kind of profiling he'd support. Santorum says you should look for "Muslims," as well as "younger males." Ron Paul says: "What about Timothy McVeigh?" That sounds like an example of the kinds of people Santorum wanted to focus on! He was a young man.

8:27 - Herman Cain calls Wolf Blitzer "Blitz." A little later he makes fun of himself for the slip, saying he meant "Wolf." Wolf Blitzer says: "Thank you, Cain!"

8:31 - Michele Bachmann hones her answer from the last foreign-policy debate about why she supports continuing to give aid to Pakistan. She points out that we need to maintain our relationship with Pakistan because they give us intelligence information about terrorism. Perry disagrees, without explaining what he thinks is wrong with Bachmann's reasoning. After Perry says he wouldn't give any financial aid to Pakistan, Bachmann's says that's "highly naive."

8:36 - Romney supports spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Afghanistan for years to come. "We need to bring them into the 21st century — or the 20th century, for that matter." Huntsman "strongly disagree[s]." There's a very long back-and-forth between Romney and Huntsman, which might be a first in all the debates. Romney emphasizes listening to the generals, whereas Huntsman says you still need to make your own decision as commander-in-chief.

8:41 - Gingrich: "We were told that killing bin Laden in Pakistan brought our relations with Pakistan to a new low. Well, it should have!"

8:48 - There's a bizarrely long lull while they wait for someone in the audience to ask a question.

8:50 - Paul: "Why does Israel need our help? They need us to get out of the way."

8:51 - Paul reveals Israel's open secret, saying they have "200, 300 nuclear missiles."

8:53 - Perry says he would "sanction the Iranian central bank." Doesn't "sanction" as a verb have the opposite meaning from "sanction" as a noun?

8:56 - In response to a question by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Santorum strongly supports humanitarian assistance to Africa in fighting AIDS. He rebukes the candidates who oppose foreign aid (Perry, Gingrich, and Paul).

9:05 - Blitzer asks Gingrich if he would bomb Iran. He says only as a last resort, and only to change the regime.

9:06 - Huntsman is asked if he would support cuts to the defense budget. He says we can't have any "sacred cows" in reducing the debt. "Everything's gotta be on the table. The Defense Department has gotta be on the table." If we can't find any cuts there, "we're not looking hard enough."

9:21 - Adam Sorensen of Time Magazine points out that Cain is "still giving the 'I'll wing it' answer on every question."

9:27 - Paul: "The federal war on drugs has been a failure." Blitzer asks if this means we should legalize all drugs. Paul says he would at least legalize medical marijuana. He adds that prescription drugs are more dangerous than illegal drugs. "And believe me, the kids can still get the drugs."

9:31 - Is there some rule that every debate needs to bring up immigration, but only near the end? There seems to be some consensus that immigration is so important that it always needs to be debated, but it's unimportant enough to wait till the audience has stopped paying attention.

9:34 - Gingrich seems to be doing about half of the talking in this debate. Paul seems to be speaking more than Romney or Perry.

9:41 - Blitzer says we'll have "much more" after a commercial. The debate has been going on for over an hour and a half — I don't know if I can take "much more."

9:54 - Wolf Blitzer asks all the candidates to quickly answer a question about what national-security issue no one is talking about that they wish would be talked about. Santorum says South America. Paul says Afghanistan. Perry says China. Romney agrees with Santorum: South America. Cain: cyber-attacks. Gingrich agrees with Cain and adds: electromagnetic pulse attacks. Bachmann: Iraq. Huntsman: the United States economy.

Now that the debate is mercifully over after 2 whole hours, a couple non-live points:

Perry said that Hezbollah and Hamas have infiltrated Mexico to try to enter the United States:



Josh Marshall at TPM thinks the most important event of the night was Gingrich's comments on immigration. Marshall says:

Newt’s edging into the GOP danger zone here on immigration. He really did say he’d provide a path to legality, though not citizenship, to a substantial number of the current undocumented population. Bachmann called him on it. And he denied he said it. But Bachmann, I think, was right. He did say it.

Now, [that's] an immensely logical thing for Newt to say — that you’re not going to be uprooting and separating families who’ve been here for a quarter century.

But this is toxic in GOP primary politics. It helped sink Rick Perry.

The New York Times seems to agree that that's the big story. The NYT is currently reporting on its homepage:

Newt Gingrich suggests some illegal aliens should be allowed to stay in the United States.

Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review says on Twitter:

Someone should tell Gingrich that some of those immigrants will build mosques.

My mom, Ann Althouse, gives the transcript of the interchange between Gingrich and Bachmann on immigration, and concludes:

That one-on-one really highlighted Gingrich's superior intelligence and sophistication. Clearly, Gingrich has the ability to reach out to many Americans who feel empathy toward the people who are in the county illegally and to take a middle position that balances a large set of interests. I like that, but obviously the red-meat fans have something to complain about. He put some vegetables on their dish.

Could Republicans win in the long run by losing the presidency in 2012?

Alex Knepper makes the Republican case for "supporting" President Obama's reelection. Excerpt:

Instead of flailing through a doomed McCain presidency, the Republican Party went through a few years of soul-searching. It has miraculously shaken off the Bush brand and is newly focused on economic liberty and the debt crisis — and that’s just in a few years’ time. If, say, Herman Cain is nominated and loses to Obama, it could possibly serve as the wake-up call that the party base needs to discipline itself, setting up a candidate like Chris Christie to easily walk to victory in 2016. (Worse, if Herman Cain wins, we will fail in our goals of addressing the debt crisis and rolling back left-wing policies. He is awful at public relations management and has not proven himself as a political leader.)

Moreover, it’s not as if — despite his oft-stated wishes — Obama can single-handedly enact harmful policies. The worst of the Obama era — four years or eight — is over. The Republican House already acts as a buffer on his left-wing dreams, and if we focus on re-taking the Senate, he will be rendered virtually impotent. He is no Bill Clinton: he’s not going to co-opt conservative ideas and spin them into left-wing victories. He’s not smart, savvy, or pragmatic enough to do it — he’d have already done so if he were. He’d simply have a failed second term, setting up a Republican to cruise to victory in 2016 — and the field next time is bound to be better, with people like Christie, Jindal, and possibly Ryan raring to run.

Sometimes, when you lose, you win. We have a competent slate of candidates waiting for us in 2016, should we lose to Obama. Since none of the Republican candidates this year are acceptable, I feel that I have no choice but to support Obama’s re-election and wait for 2016.

Live-blogging CNN's Las Vegas Republican presidential debate

I'll be live-blogging the debate starting soon. There will also be live-blogging on TalkingPointsMemo, National Review, and the New York Times.

Feel free to post any comments about the debate (or the election) in the comments.

[ADDED: Here's the transcript, and here's the video:]



7:58 - This seems to be online only: we see someone warming up the audience, encouraging them to applaud as wildly as possible. He introduces Anderson Cooper (who I walked by on the street the other day). Cooper tells the audience we're going to start with the National Anthem, which he'll sing very quietly because he has a terrible voice. Good, this will give me time to make a salad before the actual debate starts.

8:02 - The opening sequence has majestic music (to conjure up the West), and an announcer gives us a basic run-down of who has what at stake. After summing up Mitt Romney (holding steady in the top tier), Rick Perry ("trying to get back on track after a meteoric rise"), and Herman Cain (surging), the announcer says that Newt Gingrich, Michele Bachmann and Ron Paul are still trying to break through, while Rick Santorum is described as trying to "beat the odds." Santorum fans (if they exist) had to cringe that he was placed in a lower tier than everyone else including Ron Paul.

8:07 - An aggressively masculine rendition of the Star Spangled Banner.

8:08 - Fortunately, this is the second debate in a row with no bells to signal when a candidate's time is up.

8:09 - Everyone is giving an opening statement. Santorum includes a sweet message to his daughter, who had surgery today and is doing fine.

8:10 - In Cain's opening statement, he says he's "a businessman, which means I solve problems for a living." Romney goes next and awkwardly echoes Cain's intro.

8:10 - In his opening statement, Perry forcefully says he's "an authentic conservative, not a conservative of convenience." A heavy-handed swipe at Romney.

As always, I'm writing down quotes on the fly, so they may not be verbatim.

8:14 - Santorum: "Herman's well-meaning." But 84% of Americans will pay more in taxes under Cain's 9/9/9 plan.

8:16 - Cain denies that he's proposing a value added tax. Bachmann insists that he is proposing a VAT. (I recently blogged about this.) The VAT just tricks people into thinking businesses, instead of government, are making them pay more.

8:17 - Perry calls Cain "brother" twice in his answer on why the 9/9/9 plan won't work. [Here's the video, which also shows that he uses a different word for Romney:]



8:19 - Paul makes a crucial, surprisingly overlooked, point: any time you increase spending, you're effectively raising taxes (I would add: especially as long as we're in debt). The taxes will have to go up sooner or later. The fact that we don't experience the tax increases right away doesn't change this fact.

8:21 - So far it's almost all been about 9/9/9. There's a lively exchange between Cain and Romney. Cain says Romney and Perry are "mixing apples and oranges" by equating his proposed federal sales tax with the current state sales taxes. Romney retorts: "I'll have a bushel of apples and oranges, because I'll be paying both taxes."

8:24 - Bachmann says "every American should pay something" in taxes. Well that's good, because that's already true.

8:25 - Perry says he's finally released his economic plan. His plan is to extract our own energy, which would "create 1.2 million jobs." How long a period of time do you think he's referring to? A quarter? A year? Nope. 7 years.

8:29 - Santorum uses his favorite strategy of interrupting another candidate, and Romney responds very sharply, repeatedly saying: "Rick, you've had your chance — let me speak." That might be the most heated moment Romney has had in any of these debates. Santorum eventually announces that Romney's time is up before he's gotten a chance to say one sentence! The audience boos.

8:33 - Romney gets Gingrich to admit that Romney got the idea for his health-care plan's individual mandate from Gingrich and the Heritage Foundation.

8:42 - Perry says "Mitt loses all standing" on illegal immigration because Romney hired an illegal immigrant and knew about it for a year. Once Romney starts answering, Perry uses an uncannily similar strategy to Santorum's, jabbering over Romney for the whole time he's talking. Romney (who's right next to Perry) puts his hand on Perry's shoulder and leaves it there for a long time. Romney: "You have a problem with allowing someone to finish speaking. And I'd suggest that if you want to be President of the United States, you ought to let both people speak." Have Perry and Santorum privately agreed to the same line of attack against Romney — talking over him throughout his whole time — or did Perry spontaneously decide to emulate Santorum? Either way, Perry and Santorum are using a cowardly tactic and creating the impression that they're afraid of letting Americans hear the whole debate.

8:46 - Anderson Cooper asks Cain why he said he supported an electrified fence along the southern border, then said it was a joke, then said he stood by the statement and just didn't want to offend anyone! Cain starts out saying he's finally going to be serious, but he doesn't clarify whether he still supports an electrified fence.

8:52 - I just noticed this is the first debate without Jon Huntsman. [ADDED: He's boycotting Nevada. That'll do him a lot of good.]

8:52 - Perry brings back his attack against Romney for supposedly hiring illegal immigrants. The audience boos very loudly for a long time. Romney says: "We've been down that road sufficiently, and it sounds like the audience agrees with me." Once Romney says that, the audience immediately switches to cheering. That was Perry's big attempt to offset the charges that he himself is soft on illegal immigration, and the attempt failed miserably.

9:01 - I'm adding the "free speech" tag to this post, since the candidates seem to disagree on whether they should all get a chance to speak.

9:11 - Cain stands by his past statement about Occupy Wall Street: that if you're not rich, blame yourself. Ron Paul: "Cain is blaming the victims."

9:21 - Santorum makes a smart statement on the relevance of religion in a presidential race. The candidate's faith has to do with their values, and that's relevant for voters to consider. In contrast, whether the candidate is right or wrong about "the road to salvation" shouldn't be part of the political arena.

9:22 - Gingrich tries to outdo Santorum by saying that the idea that we were "created by a loving God" defines the boundaries of . . . what? (I'm having trouble paraphrasing him because I found this so incoherent.)

9:23 - Perry has been pausing a lot throughout the debate.

9:33 - Paul: "We have enough weapons to blow up the world 20, 25 times."

9:37 - Paul would "cut all foreign aid," which is "taking money from poor people in this country and giving it to rich people in poor countries." He emphasizes that this includes Israel.

9:41 - Gingrich, answering a question by Paul, says that the Iranian "arms for hostages" deal in the '80s was "a terrible mistake."

9:46 - Santorum says Romney in Massachusetts "ran as a liberal, to the left of Ted Kennedy." Romney laughs on cue.

9:48 - Romney: 40% of the jobs created in the last several years in Texas have gone to illegal immigrants. Perry says this is wrong, and adds: "You failed as the governor of Massachusetts." Romney responds that his unemployment rate in Massachusetts was lower than Perry's in Texas during the same time period.

9:49 - Romney: We need "someone who's created jobs, not just watched them being created by others."

9:50 - Cooper asks Cain a dumb question: Should either Romney or Perry be President? "No, I should be President!"

That's all. Now, here's the moment this debate will be remembered for:



Jonah Goldberg says:

I don’t think anyone left the debate more likable than they were when they went in, with the possible exception of Newt.

Maybe he was reading Jason (the Commenter)'s Twitter feed:

My scoring of the debates: Cain -1, Romney -2, Perry -5, Bachmann -1, Santorum -2, Newt (my new favorite)

Goldberg elaborates:

I thought Perry had his best performance so far, but it was awfully shaky at times and he struck me as unlikable at times. If this had been his first debate, he might still be the frontrunner, albeit with a lot of chatter about how he needs to get better.

Romney still won the debate but I think he finally got bloodied on RomneyCare in a way he hadn’t in the past. He also looked angry and flustered for the first time ever. It might humanize him for some people. Or it might make him look weak.

Cain wilted under the pressure, but didn’t fold. He needs to learn how to talk about 9-9-9 in a granular way without asserting ignorance, laziness or dishonesty on the part of its critics. He remains a mess on foreign policy.

Santorum was the winner on points in almost all of his exchanges but he simply cannot stop sounding whiney, angry or aggrieved. . . . [H]is tone is so unpresidential you want him to stop talking even when he’s winning.

Bachmann’s simply a diminished candidate who thinks saying Obama is a one-term president is an argument for her.

All in all, an exhausting debate.

The word of the evening: "repeal"

Live-blogging the first Republican debate since the rise of Herman Cain

[Here's the complete transcript.]

I'll be live-blogging here, and there's also live-blogging at TalkingPointsMemo and National Review (in the second column of the homepage).

As always, I'll be typing any quotes on the fly without the benefit of a transcript. So they might not be verbatim accurate, but I'll try to keep them as close as possible.

8:00 - The candidates are sitting around a table, for the first time in this race.

8:01 - Also unlike any of the previous debates, this one will be only about the economy. Good.

8:04 - Rick Perry says he'll finally get around to releasing some specific plans.

8:05 - Mitt Romney emphasizes the importance of working with both parties, which he knows how to do based on his experience in a state dominated by the other party.

8:07 - Charlie Rose presses Perry for some specific proposals. He makes some general statements about energy independence, and says he isn't going to lay out his plan tonight. He says it's unfair for Romney to criticize him for not having a specific plan yet: Romney has had 6 years to run for president, while Perry's only been doing it for 8 weeks. [ADDED: How conservative is it of Perry to be complaining that Romney has an unfair advantage because he's worked longer and harder at this?]

8:09 - I like this format. It feels more serious and composed than the podium/standing debates. It's also more dramatic when a candidate looks at another candidate from across the table. So far, I'd say the format is good for Cain, Romney, and Michele Bachmann, and not so great for Perry.

8:12 - Newt Gingrich is very strident on what he considers the corruption of the Federal Reserve. The moderator prompts hearty laughter around the table by saying, "So, Congressman [Ron] Paul, where do you stand on this issue?"

8:15 - Rick Santorum says that in contrast with Cain's "9/9/9" plan, his plan will actually pass in time to respond to the ongoing economic crisis.

8:17 - Thankfully, this debate is free of those annoying bells to signal when the candidates' time is up.

8:19 - Gingrich says Sarah Palin was unfairly attacked for coining the phrase "death panels." He claims that federal government standards on prostate cancer are effectively going to kill men.

8:20 - Bachmann: "President Obama plans for Medicare to collapse, and everyone will be pushed into Obamacare."

8:22 - Huntsman on Cain's "9/9/9" plan: "It's a catchy phrase. I thought it was the price of a pizza when I first heard of it." Huntsman finally pulls off a zinger that works.

8:23 - Cain is on fire as he responds to Huntsman and Santorum: "9/9/9 will pass, and it is not the price of a pizza. And unlike your plans, it starts by throwing out the current tax code. . . . It will pass, because the American people want it to pass." Oh, so the American people want to make the rich richer and the poor poorer?

8:25 - The moderator and Romney spar over whether the moderator's question about a future economic collapse of Europe is a "hypothetical." The moderator says "it's not a hypothetical" because it's about "a very real threat." When did people stop understanding what the word "hypothetical" means?

8:28 - Romney quotes Milton Friedman: "If you took all the economists in America and laid them end to end, it would be a good thing." But Romney has more respect for economists than that.

8:31 - TalkingPointsMemo has a huge headline:

Gingrich Calls For Jailing Sen. Dodd And Rep. Frank

Actually, he only called for "looking at" jailing Senators Chris Dodd and Barney Frank. [Clarification: Gingrich did at first make a pretty clear statement that we should jail Dodd and Frank, though he said this after the word "if," so he has plausible deniability. Later, he softened his statement to say we should investigate Dodd and Frank.]

8:47 - Bachmann criticizes Cain's "9/9/9" plan for "creating a new revenue stream for Congress." If you turn it upside-down, "the Devil is in the details."

8:49 - Huntsman criticizes Romney for wanting to start a "trade war" with China.

8:51 - Perry seems to come out against the very idea of enacting any policies! He just wants to "get America working again." But how would he do that? The most concrete thing he says is that he'd pull back a lot of regulations and put us on a path to "energy independence." (Of course, every president and presidential candidate says we need "energy independence," and it never happens.)

8:54 - Santorum asks how many people in the audience want a national sales tax. Almost no one raises their hand, and Santorum tells Cain that shows how many votes he'll get. Santorum asks how many people think Congress will keep the sales tax at 9%, and no one appears to raise their hand. But Cain promised us in an earlier debate that there's no chance the taxes would ever go up!

8:58 - Up next: the candidates will ask each other questions.

9:06 - Bachmann uses her question to Perry to point out that he worked for Al Gore's first presidential campaign during the end of the Reagan administration.

9:09 - Cain asks Romney a question: Cain's 9/9/9 plan is "simple" and "neutral" (whatever that means). Is Romney's "59-point plan" simple and neutral, and can he list all 59 points? This is actually a softball question, since it gives Romney an opportunity to list the highlights of his plan. No one would expect him to list all 59 points in a debate, so the question about whether he can list them all is a red herring.

9:11 - Romney: "I'm not worried about rich people. They're doing just fine. The poor have a safety net." He's worried about the people in the middle, and that's why his tax plan is directed toward them. Good.

9:12 - Huntsman asks Romney a question. Is that the third question in a row that's gone to Romney?

9:15 - Paul asks Cain whether he stands by his past statements against auditing the Federal Reserve. Paul says Cain said people who want to audit the Federal Reserve are "ignorant." Cain adamantly says this is a misquote, that he didn't call anyone ignorant, and that Paul shouldn't believe everything he sees on the internet. Cain adds that his priority isn't auditing the Federal Reserve — it's "9/9/9"!

9:17 - Perry asks Romney a question about his health-care reform in Massachusetts. That seems like a waste of his question. Oh, the health-care issue may be bad for Romney, but Perry has to know that Romney is going to smoothly give his standard answer on health care. Perry cuts into Romney's answer, and Romney sharply says: "I'm still speaking!" Romney criticizes the high percentage of people without health insurance in Texas.

9:18 - The candidates are supposed to ask questions in alphabetical order, so Santorum declines when moderator Charlie Rose prompts him to ask a question. Santorum points out that Romney is before him in the alphabet. Romney: "You'd think someone from PBS would know that."

9:21 - Santorum points out that 4 of the candidates — Cain, Romney, Perry, and Huntsman — "naively" supported TARP. He asks Cain why voters should trust him to protect liberty given his inexperience. I believe this is the first time anyone in any of the debates has called out Cain's total lack of political experience.

9:32 - Cain is asked who his favorite Chairman of the Federal Reserve is, and he says Alan Greenspan. Ron Paul: "Spoken like a true insider! Alan Greenspan was a disaster!" Yet Paul says Greenspan agrees with him about the need to bring back the gold standard.

9:40 - Charlie Rose asks Gingrich if owning a home is no longer "the American dream." Gingrich predictably attacks this idea: some people would like America to "decay so that government could share in the misery."

9:45 - Santorum says the way to reduce poverty is to "encourage marriage," because the poverty rate among families led by a working "husband and wife" is only 5%, in contrast with the 30% poverty rate of families with just one working parent. If that's Santorum's approach, shouldn't he be interested in the poverty rate among families with two husbands, or two wives?

9:47 - Each of the candidates is asked how their personal experience would influence them as president. Cain: "I was po' before I was poor."

9:50 - Santorum says there's more upward economic mobility in Europe than in America. That seems like an odd tack for a conservative to take.

9:52 - The debate is over. Charlie Rose thanks the candidates for sitting with him at the table, and adds: "I believe in tables."

This debate reinforced Cain's newfound frontrunner status, in that the moderators and other candidates spent so much time attacking him. Whether his defenses were convincing on the merits is a matter of opinion, but as far as his presentation, he seemed unflappable, resolute, and passionate. Beyond that, I have a hard time seeing this debate changing much. Frankly, unless someone makes a huge gaffe or gives as bad a performance as Perry did last time, I doubt any of the upcoming primary debates from now until January will change much either. This cast of characters has gotten pretty familiar.

UPDATE (the next day): My mom, Ann Althouse, had a very different reaction to Cain than I did. In this post, she describes "[t]he point in the debate when my doubts about Herman Cain suddenly spiked." After a rigorous analysis of Cain's statements from last night's debate, she concludes:

Come on, people. This infatuation with Herman Cain is embarrassing. Wake up!

If conservative voters are angry with the Republican establishment, why is Mitt Romney winning?

Ramesh Ponnuru says: "Make a mental list of the last four Republican nominees -- George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain -- and the notion of a Romney victory in the primaries becomes less surprising."

Live-blogging the Republican presidential primary debate on FoxNews, September 22

Feel free to post any comments on the debate, whether or not they're relevant to what I said.

You can see more live-blogging at Althouse (my mom's blog), TalkingPointsMemo, Politico, and National Review.

Any quotations in this post will be whatever I write down on the fly. I'll try to keep these reasonably accurate, but they might not be exactly word-for-word.

9:03 - Rick Perry seems weary, disoriented, and halting, just one minute into the debate.

9:04 - Perry, where's your specific jobs plan? Perry says he'll show it to us . . . eventually. In other words, he doesn't have a specific jobs plan.

9:05 - The moderator tells Romney his 59-point jobs plan is very specific, but perhaps too timid. Romney gets off to an awkward start, asking if the microphone is on. "In order to create jobs, it helps if you've had a job. And I have."

9:07 - Romney refuses to answer the question how he defines "rich." He wants everyone to be rich. Sounds like a great plan.

9:08 - Bachmann is re-asked a question from the last debate (which was originally asked by an audience member): How much of his money does he deserve to keep? Of course, Bachmann says you deserve to keep all of your money. It's the wrong question. It implies that there's some bureaucrat somewhere who just loves taking people's money because they think people don't deserve all their money; so we have to debate with that person about what the right percentage is.

9:12 - The debates this year have had more discussion of welfare than we've heard in presidential debates since before 2000. Everyone seemed to decide it was no longer a salient issue at some point. Notably, the welfare reform law of 1996 needs to be reauthorized on September 30.

9:15 - Herman Cain is asked if his "9/9/9 plan" of eliminating many taxes and creating three new flat taxes will just lead to tax increases in the future. Don't worry, says Cain: there's no chance of that! Well, that's a relief!

9:18 - Ron Paul is asked what he'll do to protect the 10th Amendment. He concisely says he'll veto any bill that violates the 10th Amendment. In an unprecedented move, the moderator complains that Paul hasn't used enough of his time.

9:21 - During a commercial break, a FoxNews anchor tells us they asked viewers to answer the question of what counts as rich. The most common answer (to rephrase it in negative terms) is that anyone who makes $999,999 or less is not rich. Wow.

9:27 - Romney to Perry: "You better find that Rick Perry and get him to stop saying" that Social Security is unconstitutional and so on. In other words, Perry has watered down his talking points about Social Security, and Romney isn't going to let him get away with it.

9:29 - Perry unilaterally shifts the debate to health care, retorting that Romney said in his book that his health care reform would be a good model for the country. I'm not clear on what Romney's point was in rebutting this.

9:30 - Does Romney believe that President Barack Obama is a socialist? Romney says: (1) The better title for him would be "Former President Barack Obama." (2) He's a big-spending liberal who's going down the path of Europe.

9:31 - Romney, apropos of nothing: "I didn't inhale." [Added: I didn't catch his setup, which made this make a bit more sense. My mom transcribes the full comment: "I spent 4 years as governor. I didn't inhale." She notes that Romney says this while glancing at Perry.]

9:34 - The candidates are asked which federal department they'd eliminate if they were forced to do so. Cain says the Environmental Protection Agency, but he emphasizes that this presupposes he'd be forced to eliminate one. Republicans seem to have softened from the old days, when they would boast of their willingness to "abolish" federal agencies.

9:36 - My mom points out that 3 of the 9 candidates are wearing yellow ties (of course, that's 3 of the 8 candidates who are wearing ties at all): Jon Huntsman, Cain, and Paul.

9:38 - Libertarian Gary Johnson (in his first debate of the race) says he'll abolish the Department of Education — and this was not in response to the question about which department he'd abolish if forced to.

9:40 - Paul repeats his "care" theme from past debates: "If you care about children, you'll want to get the federal government out of the business of educating them."

9:42 - Perry goes even more negative than he's gone before, sternly calling Romney "not conservative" on education. Perry is apparently saying this only because Romney has praised elements of Obama's education policy. Romney laughs this off: "Nice try!" He agrees with Obama's policy goal of making it easier to fire teachers. This was an odd move by Perry. I thought it was conventional wisdom that Obama has challenged the standard Democratic teacher's union orthodoxy.

9:46 - Josh Marshall said (half an hour into the debate):

I'm curious how it will play. But Romney's just running circles around Perry. He's a very different candidate than he was four years ago, let alone back in '94 when he ran against Ted Kennedy. Tight, on message.

9:50 - Romney attacks Perry for giving more money to illegal immigrants than citizens to go to the University of Texas. "It makes no sense." In fact, it makes so little sense that it's hard to believe that's even the real policy. [Added: I understand now: as this TNR article explains, Romney was referring to the fact that in-state UT students who happened to be illegal immigrants got the same discount on their tuition as other in-state students, so they paid $22,000 a year less than out-of-state students.]

9:52 - Question to Perry: How do you feel, being criticized by many of the candidates for being soft on illegal immigration? "I feel pretty normal." Perry adds that if you make arguments like the one Romney made about education for illegal immigrants, "I don't think you have a heart."

9:53 - Moderator Chris Wallace: "Senator Santorum, you don't need to butt in, because I'm about to ask you a question." Santorum sheepishly responds: "OK."

10:03 - Romney says Obama has gone wrong by publicly criticizing Israel. It's OK to disagree with an ally, but make the criticism privately.

10:04 - Romney: "It is unacceptable — and I use that word carefully — it is unacceptable for Iran to become a nuclear power."

10:10 - Gingrich says (reasonably, in my opinion) that he'd get rid of almost all direct government-to-government foreign aid since it leads to corruption.

10:11 - Johnson: It's "crazy" for us to be giving money to any countries when we have to borrow money to do it.

10:12 - Like Romney, Huntsman can't tell if his microphone is working even though we can hear him. FoxNews seems to have some problems with its debate infrastructure.

10:13 - Huntsman: "People are ready to bring our troops home from Afghanistan."

10:14 - Bachmann is asked about a comment she made saying "separation between church and state" is a "myth." In response, she says all "separation of church and state" means is that there isn't a United States-sponsored church. "We should have freedom for all people to express their belief in God."

10:16 - A self-proclaimed "gay soldier," serving in Iraq, asks if the candidates would allow him to serve. The audience loudly boos the soldier. Santorum responds that he doesn't want gays to have "special privileges." The moderator re-asks the question since Santorum didn't answer it. Santorum incoherently says he would reinstitute the old policy so that "sex would not be an issue." But it was precisely under the old policy ("Don't Ask, Don't Tell") that sex was an issue. It's the repeal of DADT that takes sexuality off the table as an issue. I thought conservatives were supposed to be attuned to the fact that government policies lead to unintended consequences.



[Added: GOProud is asking Santorum to apologize to the soldier, saying:]

It is telling that Rick Santorum is so blinded by his anti-gay bigotry that he couldn’t even bring himself to thank that gay soldier for his service.

10:19 - Paul doesn't support a law against the "day-after pill." He makes the important point that you don't always need law to make people behave well.

10:21 - Cain says he would be dead today if Obamacare had been the law back in 2006 when he was diagnosed with cancer. His reason is vague: Obamacare would have provided a "bureaucrat's timetable" for when he could get treatment.

10:27 - Bachmann attacks Perry for being influenced by a campaign contribution to support a law requiring that girls in Texas receive a vaccination for the sexually transmitted disease HPV, which can lead to cervical cancer. Perry dramatically responds: "I was lobbied on this issue. I was lobbied by a 31-year-old woman with cervical cancer."

10:31 - Romney says his health care reform was "different than Obamacare" because it was "market-based." It didn't create some new government health insurance. Does Romney not realize that the public option failed?

10:33 - The sniping between Romney and Perry has started to feel worn-out. Perry is incapable of getting through his litany of issues on which Romney has flip-flopped; he stumbles over his words so much he's incomprehensible ("You were for it before you were before it . . ."). [Added later: TalkingPointsMemo seizes on this as the moment when conservative pundits turned against Perry. TPM aptly says that Perry "attempted to deliver a knockout blow against Mitt Romney’s various changes of position — only to trip over all his words as he tried to keep track of them." Here's the video, with Perry's bumbling starting after 1:25:]



10:39 - Cain: "Ronald Reagan said we were a shining city on a hill. We've slid down the bottom of that hill." Overall tonight, the candidates have been mercifully restrained in mentioning Reagan.

10:41 - Paul: "Government destroys jobs; the market creates jobs."

10:44 - Johnson: "My next-door neighbor's 2 dogs have created more shovel-ready jobs than this administration."

10:47 - Who on the stage would you choose as a running mate? Johnson, of course, says Paul, the only other libertarian on the stage. Santorum would pick Gingrich. Gingrich: "I couldn't imagine hurting the rest of their feelings by picking one of them."

10:49 - Paul points out that he's the #3 candidate in the polls. He'll wait until he's one of the top 2 before picking his running mate.

10:49 - Perry: "If you could take Herman Cain and mate him up with Newt Gingrich, I think you'd have a really interesting candidate." Romney: "There are a couple images I'm going to have a really hard time getting out of my mind."

10:50 - Romney says he'd be happy with anyone on the stage as a running mate. He's asked how can he say that about Perry, whom he's attacked as unelectable. Romney doesn't take the bait to lob yet another attack on Perry. He simply says everyone on the stage has problems that would be obstacles for them in getting elected.

10:52 - Huntsman makes my mom's point about his and Cain's yellow ties, while saying he'd pick Cain as a running mate.

10:54 - Almost everyone picked Gingrich as a running mate. Reminds me of the 2008 Democratic primary debates, when Joe Biden was able to get a whole ad out of running together all the times the other candidates said during debates that they agreed with him. If you're getting lots of praise from everyone in the debates, it means you have no chance.

Post-debate

Dana Loesch says on Twitter (via Jonah Goldberg):

That Gary Johnson's line is most discussed tells you how badly some of the other candidates performed.

She's also, like Romney, thinking about the image of Perry wanting to have Cain "mate up" with Gingrich:

Brangelina ... Caingrich?

My mom gives Romney the "quote of the night" award, for saying this:

I'm going to stand by my positions. I'm proud of them. There are a lot of reasons not to elect me. There are a lot of reasons not to elect other people on this stage. But one reason to elect me is that I know what I stand for, I've written it down, words have meaning, and I have the experience to get this country going again.

(You can see Romney saying this at the end of the video I embedded between 10:33 and 10:39.)

Huntsman says the audience's booing of the gay soldier was "unfortunate." "We all salute the same flag."

Frank Luntz's focus group on FoxNews is saying Romney won the debate. TPM says the focus group is calling Romney

“Presidential,” “decisive,” and “elegant.” Perry, meanwhile, is being called “too much of a waffler” by one woman in the group. The crowd also seem angry about the moment when he turned on his immigration critics and accused them (and Bachmann in particular) of not having a heart.

A new Gallup poll shows that Romney has a distinct lead over Perry and Obama in a hypothetical general election.

So, can we stop calling Perry "the frontrunner" yet?

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.

Live-blogging Rick Perry's first 2012 Republican presidential debate

My mom, Ann Althouse, is live-blogging too. So is TalkingPointsMemo, in 4 parts: 1, 2, 3, 4.

[Added later: Here's the complete transcript of the debate, on the New York Times' website. But I don't know how accurate that transcript is; it refers to Brian Williams as being with Politico, when he's the anchor of NBC Nightly News. Here's the full video:]



Feel free to post any reactions to the debate in the comments.

8:03 - Rick Perry says Brian Williams is wrong to say most jobs that have been created in Texas are "low-wage jobs," because 95% of them were above the minimum wage. Spot the fallacy!

8:06 - Mitt Romney touts his "experience succeeding [and] failing." I'm sure some people would like to use his positive spin on "failing" against him, but it makes sense.

8:07 - Perry reveals his strategy against Romney: concede that he did well in the private sector, and contrast this with his work as governor.

8:08 - Perry has a zinger against Romney: Michael Dukakis created jobs three times as fast as Romney did in Massachusetts. Without missing a beat, Romney retorts that Perry created jobs more slowly than George Bush did (presumably this refers to Bush as Governor of Texas, not President). Brian Williams: "Nice to see that everyone came prepared."

[Added later: here's a video of the most attention-getting squabble between Romney and Perry.]



8:11 - Herman Cain has a "9/9/9" plan for the economy. Maybe he was listening to the Beatles' "Revolution 9."

8:15 - In response to a jobs question, Michele Bachmann puts the emphasis on kids and racial minorities.

8:16 - Ron Paul "doesn't believe in" any federal safety regulations. He believes only in the "regulations" of the free market.

[Added: I was writing down these quotes on the fly based on trying to pay attention to the debate while making soup for dinner. I believe my quotes are reasonably accurate, but they might not be verbatim.]

8:21 - When asked about his health-care reform in Massachusetts (as he always is in these debates), Romney not only gives his usual vow to give waivers from Obamacare to all states on day 1 and eventually repeal it. He also defends his decision in Massachusetts based on the fact that the status quo ante was unacceptable because people were incentivized to rely on emergency rooms for all health care, the costs of which were passed on to the people.

8:27 - Newt Gingrich continues his tactic from the last debate of attacking the moderators: "I'm not interested in your attempt to get Republicans fighting each other. . . . Let's not puff this up into some giant thing."

8:31 - I agree with Rick Santorum about welfare reform.

8:33 - Perry paraphrases John F. Kennedy, who "said that the most powerful welfare program is a job." I believe this is the first time in the last three debates that a candidate has referenced a Democrat in a positive way.

8:35 - Romney on President Obama: "He keeps talking about green jobs. Where are they?" Good question.

8:37 - Ron Paul calls out the moderators for only asking Romney about his health-care plan and not asking Perry about supporting Hillary Clinton's health-care plan. (Perry denies this.)

8:39 - Perry takes a gratuitous swipe at Ron Paul for quibbling with then-President Reagan. This is a transparent gambit on Perry's part to give more time to Paul and take time away from the stronger candidates.

8:49 - Perry says anyone who promotes Social Security as we know it is perpetrating "a monstrous lie" to young people. He does not exclude Karl Rove or Dick Cheney from this.

8:51 - Romney clearly places himself as the moderate candidate — who wants to save Social Security — against Perry, the extreme candidate — who wants to abolish Social Security. He seems to have read this article in The New Republic:

You must persuade the decisive portion of your party that Rick Perry is too extreme to be elected president.

Here’s your theme: Rick Perry wants to repeal the 20th century. I don’t. And neither do the American people.

[I've added this video, and commentary from TalkingPointsMemo:]

The exchange marks a crucial moment in the campaign: this is the first time Romney has deliberately staked out a centrist position in order to attack Perry explicitly from the left. This is a dynamic that’s going to have a huge impact on the character of the race from this point on, assuming Romney holds his ground.

8:58 - Romney is notably gracious in not going along with Paul and Bachmann in attacking Perry over his widely reviled HPV vaccination law.

9:01 - Paul says the attacks of September 11, 2001 happened because Americans didn't have enough guns.

9:04 - Jon Huntsman says the Department of Homeland Security has "a fortress security mentality that is not American."

9:08 - Gingrich praises Obama for showing "some courage" on education policy. I believe that's the first time any candidate has praised anything about Obama.

9:13 - Santorum makes a good argument on immigration, which I've never heard before: "It's a very good thing for the first thing you do when you come to this country to be a legal act, not an illegal act."

9:20 - A commenter on my mom's blog says:

Perry is a disappointment - not ready for prime time. His simplistic sloganeering makes Sarah Palin sound like Thomas Jefferson.

9:23 - Romney dodges the question whether he's a member of the Tea Party: "I don't think you carry cards in the Tea Party." (This sounded a little odd, since the moderator didn't use the phrase "card-carrying member.") He qualifies his answer that "I'm for the Tea Party" by saying this is true "if the Tea Party is for" smaller government and so on. In other words, he agrees with them as long as they agree with his opinions. That's a weak answer. Why not say unequivocally that he supports the Tea Party because they are for those things?

9:25 - A Facebook friend, Alex Knepper (who gave me permission to identify him and link to his Facebook), says:

REAGAN is not a synonym for GOOD, people!

9:29 - Perry blatantly dodges the question whether Bush was too quick to go to war without thinking through the risks. He blithely says he's against "adventurism" but doesn't clarify how he would apply this to any of Bush's foreign-policy decisions.

9:29 - Perry, of his own accord (not in response to any question), gives emphatic praise to Obama for prosecuting the war on terrorism.

9:33 - Bachmann firmly states that it was "wrong" for the United States to go to war with Libya.

9:36 - Huntsman: "We can't run from science." He says other (unspecified) candidates have made "comments that don't reflect the reality of the situation" including denying what 98% of scientists say on climate change and denying evolution.

9:45 - Perry slowly, dramatically lists capital crimes and says if you come to Texas and do them, "you will be executed."

9:49 - Paul has the last word, saying he rejects the idea that if he's against federal government benefits, he lacks compassion. It's compassionate to understand that the most effective way to care for children is through the free market.

ADDED: That was a solid, substantive, lively debate. The moderators did a good job of keeping the candidates reined in without cutting them off so soon that they struggled to make their points. There was a good mix of gotcha questions and broader "What do you think about this issue?" questions. The MSNBC debate led by Brian Williams far outdid the debate back in June hosted by CNN and led by John King. Between tonight's debate and the previous FoxNews debate, CNN has a high standard to meet when it hosts the next debate, on Monday, September 12.

As for the candidates, I'm not going to claim to be impartial — I'm rooting for Romney. I was hoping that finally appearing on stage next to everyone else would remove some of Perry's luster. I don't know if that happened or not. The conventional wisdom seems to be that Romney "won" the debate, but Jon Chait says Romney lost to Perry by being too reasonable:

The media seems to consider Romney the winner. Pardon the condescension, but they’re not thinking like Republican base voters. Romney approaches every question as if he is in an actual debate, trying to provide the most intellectually compelling answer available, within the bounds of political expediency. Perry treats questions as interruptions. What scientists do you trust on climate change? I don’t want to risk the economy. Are you taking a radical position on social security? We can have reasons or we can have results. His total liberation from the constraints of reason give Perry a chance to represent the Republican id in a way Romney simply cannot match.

In this way Perry eerily apes the style of George W. Bush, who was also mocked for his intellectually vapid debating style, but who succeeded in rallying Republicans behind him. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I suspect the Bush-Perry debating style broadcasts a subliminal message of strong leadership. Romney feels compelled to bind himself to the parameters of the question before him. Perry ignores them. It is, in a sense, an alpha male move. I am not going to lower myself to your premise about scientists. I am going to declare my principles.

In my view, Perry established his alpha male style, and that impression will matter more than any position or statement he’s made.

Does Mitt Romney have a good chance at being the Republican presidential nominee?

An ongoing discussion between two New Republic writers. One of them, Jonathan Cohn, thinks Romney has a good chance, while the other, Jonathan Chait, thinks he's doomed by the health-care issue.

One factor I don't see either of them bring up: the conventional wisdom is that Republicans prefer a candidate who's run for president in the past. (I suppose Republicans would say they like to see someone diligent and battle-tested, who's paid their dues — and Democrats would say Republicans are uncomfortable with newness and youth.)

Of course, this isn't an ironclad rule. George W. Bush's nomination in 2000 might seem to be a counterexample since he hadn't run before. But the main other strong candidate, John McCain, hadn't run before either, so this wasn't a factor as between those two. OK, Pat Buchanan had run in the past, but he never had a chance. The general rule isn't a silver bullet that renders all other factors irrelevant.

John McCain's nomination in 2008, on the other hand, is a clear example of the general rule. None of the other plausible candidates (Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson) had run for president before.

You might think 2012 doesn't even offer an opportunity to test the theory, if you think Romney's record on health care makes him an implausible candidate off the bat (along with his flipflop on abortion, his general reputation as a flipflopper, and the fact that he was governor of a state that Republicans view as ultra-liberal). If health care is truly a deal-killer for most Republicans, then it doesn't matter if Romney's record as a candidate in 2008 is an advantage; he has no chance anyway.

Well, I'm not convinced. Everyone knows health care is a major obstacle for Romney. But every presidential candidate faces obstacles. You generally can't completely rule out someone who would otherwise be a formidable candidate based on a single issue. McCain got the nomination despite a very long list of issues on which he had flipflopped and/or taken liberal positions. He was on record attacking the Bush tax cuts on first principles, saying they were unfairly tilted toward the rich. Sure, he later tried to characterize his past position as narrowly as possible (by saying he objected to the tax cuts only if there continued to be excessive spending), but this was as disingenuous as Romney's attempt to distinguish health care as a national issue from the decision he made at the state level: it's hard to imagine any voters actually basing their vote on such transparently post hoc line-drawing. McCain simply took the hit on taxes and other issues, but he ended up getting enough votes to be the nominee. And aren't tax cuts at least as defining an issue for Republicans as health care?

"[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.