Maggie's Farm

To MSNBC's discredit, the first question out of the gate was one of those "you can bend statistics to say anything" routines.  Perry was asked about the "number of unemployed" in his state being so high, as well as the "number of people earning minimum wage."  The numbers were some of the highest in the nation.

Well, duh!  If you've got the second-most populated state in the goddam union — then you've got a lot of people!

Perry deflected it nicely and won the first point of the evening with the more-astute members of the audience who recognized the inherent slant in the question.


In my preview post, I mentioned how important it is to 'reach across the aisle', and Rick Santorum was the first person in two debates to bring it up.  He said, in essence, "I'll get the Democrats on board!"  The audience, not tuned into the importance of such a statement, gave it a smattering of polite applause.

It was really his only shining moment of the night.  Like Jon Huntsman, half the time it seems like he's giving a speech, rather than actually talking to us.  Put another way, his words come across as rehearsed.  And both of them take any opportunity to stray from the question, jump back on their favorite soap box and end up speechifying instead of talking.


First big laughter-to-applause of the evening: Herman Cain has some kind of plan he calls the '9-9-9' plan, where '9%' comes into the equation.  He explains it to the audience, then goes on to say, "If 10% is good enough for God, 9% should be good enough for the federal government."


When asked about ObamaCare and Texas, Perry struck a chord when he basically said, "The one thing we've got to do is get the Federal government out of our lives!"  His 'fiery Texan spirit' came through at that moment and the audience loved it.

I thought Newt Gingrich's best moment was when he was asked what he thought of Romney's health care plan at one end of the spectrum versus Perry's at the other, and he barked at the moderator that a question like that was a thinly-veiled attempt to create distance and animosity between the candidates.  He then reminded everyone that regardless of their minor differences, every person on that stage was dedicated to one thing, and one thing alone: defeating Barack Obama.

It might have been the loudest applause of the night.


Putting on my English Teacher's hat for a moment, there were only a few blunders, and relatively minor ones at that.  At one point, Cain listed out three things, then said "Neither of them would work."  Romney seemed a tad off his game and stuttered a few times, and once said, "...running for governo-...president," quickly correcting himself.

Rick Santorum made one debate boo-boo, but probably got caught up in sentence tense and had to keep going.  He suddenly referred to himself in the second person, like a sports star, when he said, "Nobody did more than Rick Santorum."

When Paul was asked of Perry, "Is he less conservative than meets the eye?", he replied "Even more so."  Even more so than less?  Huh?  (It was a great line and I LOL'd and everything — but it still didn't make sense.)


Perry was the first to address the camera — you and me — in that he broke away from the moderator and sought out the red-light camera shooting from the side.  I'm not sure if anyone else did this during the evening, but it was quite effective.  Everyone spoke into the camera at some point, of course, but only when the camera was right in front of them.  This was different.


Okay, let's take a break and bring in some comic relief Ron Paul:

Paul said, "Lowering the minimum wage would benefit the poor."

Bwah-hah!  Ah, that Ron.  What a laff riot.

Because if there's one thing smart, compassionate people want, it's for poor people to have less money.

It's like the right-wingers who think food stamps should be shut down.

Because if there's one thing smart, compassionate people want, it's for poor people to not have food.

Sometimes you just have to wonder if these people are even listening to themselves.


Probably the classiest moment of the evening was when the moderator lobbed a lit bomb Perry's way on what he thought of Ron Paul leaving the Republican Party.  To Perry's utter and complete credit, he turned to Paul and gave him his time to explain it himself.  It was done with smiles and in a gentlemanly way, Texan to Texan.


There weren't any commentators during the commercial breaks, alas.  I thought they made a couple of very good points last time when it was streamed from CNN.  This was coming from MSNBC's site.

To their credit, though, they only had two commercial breaks in two hours, whereas I'm sure the advertising department was screaming to stick one in every ten minutes.

As far as Social Security goes, I think Perry's way off base with his 'fraud', 'ponzi scheme', bit.  As Romney made clear, it isn't the concept that's wrong, it's just the implementation, up to and including a greedy Congress constantly dipping into its funds.  If it was run as it was intended, it would work just fine.  Why wouldn't it?


If you were wondering why yesterday I listed the HPV vaccine brouhaha Perry got himself into, I mentioned it for good reason.  It was the one, singular thing all of the other candidates could rally around and hurl at him, their criticism taking the form of "families should decide these things, not government."  Or course, what was left out was that it wasn't mandatory, it was FDA approved, and, ultimately, it was just another vaccine amongst a variety of vaccinations that children get.  But putting it on a 'family versus government' level didn't make Perry look very good.

To his credit, Perry admitted that he could have handled it better, and then said, "In the end, I will always err on the side of saving lives."

Then, in another classy move of the evening, Romney jumps in and exonerates him with something along the lines of, "As governors of these fine states, there are always a few things we'd like to do over," and then proceeded to bring up Obama, jobs, the economy, and ended it with a rousing, "Obama doesn't have a clue how to get this country running again!"

Big applause.  Not only for the classy rescue move, but for his not-so-subtle reminder to the moderators what this event was ultimately about.


Okay, time for some more comic relief Ron Paul:

Paul said the government is ultimately responsible for 9/11.

Bwah-hah!  Ah, that Ron.  Never a dull moment.

Why?  Because they didn't allow pilots to carry guns and had instructed them to just play along should terrorists take over the plane.

Oh, excuse me, I meant hijackers. The only reason 9/11 worked was because every other airline takeover in the previous 500 years had involved hijackers, not "terrorists."  Who would have guessed that they'd fly their ass straight into some goddam building??  (I mean, besides Tom Clancy and the 3.4 million people who had read 1994's Debt of Honor.)  The crew and passengers on the planes probably initially thought they were going to be spending the night in Cuba.

As a small side note, if there had at least been a rule in place that the cockpit door had to remain locked, and if the pilots had noticed that the plane had been taken over by bad guys, either from a hidden panic button or a small video camera, all they had to do was put on their oxygen masks and lower the air pressure in the cabin.  Everyone would have been asleep within seconds.  Didn't anyone at the FAA read Steven King's The Langoliers?


Finally!  At 9:01, after an hour of patient waiting, anti-war peacenik hippie radical Ron Paul finally got his obligatory "Bring the troops home NOW!" in.

Mild applause.

Analysis: Not many Paulbots in CA, it would appear.


The only sordid moment of the evening was when first Paul, then Huntsman, fell back on the tired old 'TSA is sexually molesting people' trope.  They think the (cough!) airlines could do a better job?

Did you hear about the TSA agent who (apparently) raped some female passenger, right there in public?  Four times, no less, according to the poor victim.  And what evil man forced this horrific act upon her?

Oh, wait, my mistake.  The TSA agent was a middle-aged woman.  Right there in public, no less.

What might be remembered here is that, by the numbers alone, there are some X percent of certifiable paranoid delusionals out there, and a few of them are bound to want to fly somewhere at some point.  Touch one of them two inches from the groin and suddenly it's "I was raped four times!"


Michelle Bachmann came off much better than last time.  She was smiling more, and, without Pesky Pawlenty around, she seemed more her 'own person'.  I've been pretty hard on her in these posts, but she was impressive last night, and raised a few good points on her own, whereas the general routine was just to answer the question.


On the subject of national security, Perry won another point for style when he complimented President Obama for pursuing the bad guys (bin Laden) and keeping Gitmo open.  Like his handing his air time to Paul to answer the leaving-the-party question, giving Obama a few kudos seemed like the gentlemanly thing to do.

A fine round of applause.

When it comes to global warming, Huntsman attacked Perry on it, but Perry's response was the correct one; that you simply can't hurt the economy as much as the new EPA rules would without some kind of solid proof that man's the cause of any current rise in planetary temperature — and that's assuming the temperature is currently rising.  As you probably know, according to NASA and NOAA, the last 'warmest' year on record was 1998.

On the subject of the EPA's latest attempt to cripple America, Bachmann was correct when she noted that the impending regulation has only been "suspended" by Obama, not stopped.  Suffer ye no false illusions, folks.  It's waiting in the wings.


The most dramatic moment of the night was completely unexpected by everyone.  Williams started to ask Perry about the 234 people who have been executed in Texas over the past-

And the audience erupted in applause.

Actually cutting off the question has to be extremely rare.  Perry ran with it and laid it down that when bad people do bad things to good people in Texas, they pay the ultimate price.

More rousing applause.

Then Brian Williams picks up on the rarity of having been interrupted and asks Perry about it, to which Perry responds, "Americans understand justice."

More rousing applause.


Since I know there are some Ron Paul fans out there, he closed the show on a high note.  He actually made an impassioned, sensible speech (I was as shocked as anyone), giving his fans in the audience their first real chance of the evening to erupt, and they did.  End of show, fade to black.


In summation, I'd say that Perry won it by a nose, with Romney coming in a close second, but it's honestly hard to make a judgment call with eight people on the stage.  It didn't seem like Bachmann got equal time, and Gingrich seemed to spend half his time dismantling the bias from the question.  When a few more are pared away, it'll be more interesting and revealing.

As to who gets the axe and when, I have no idea how these things work.  If anyone does, please expound in the comments.  Does a candidate have to officially withdraw, as Pawlenty did, to be left off the guest list?

A spitball guess says Santorum and Gingrich are the next to go.  Huntsman should be on the axe list, but he still has some strong advocates in the media and I imagine he'll hang around as long as he does.

I've noticed this morning that, typically, everyone's playing up the 'feud' between Romney and Perry on job creation, but my intuition says these two actually like and respect each other and the back-and-forth was all done with smiles and good graces, the very opposite of how Bachmann and Pawlenty went at each other a month ago.  Typical media/blogger hype, in other words.

All in all, a great show, and more to come.

Perry/Walker 2012.