October 10, 2007
The Republicans Yuk It Up In Michigan
This is how low the bar is set for the 2008 Republican front-runners' debate performances: Don't screw up, and make us laugh at least once.
That's according to most of the news coverage, anyway. Of Fred Thompson's long-awaited debut in yesterday's GOP primary debate in Michigan, the general assessment is no, he didn't screw up, and yes, that one thing he said at the end was kind of funny.
"I've enjoyed watching these fellas," the former Tennessee senator said as things were winding down. "I've got to admit, it was getting a little boring without me."
Good line, were it not for the fact that the debate wasn't terribly exciting with him either. He didn't scuffle with any of his eight rivals there, so there were no fireworks. Nor, as Rich Lowry also observed, were any of the "Law & Order" star's lines very funny. Does it matter? Thompson's catching a lot of flak for a rocky campaign launch -- before CNBC aired the debate, Radar magazine went up with a YouTube-laden "blooper reel" feature -- but his ready-made support in the polls guarantees him top-contender status. That support, remember, was there even before he officially entered the race. Unless he goofs up horribly on the national stage, it isn't going away because of one disappointing debate performance.
Thompson's viability is rooted less in who he is than who he is not. So voters might be better served by also paying attention to how Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney fared, even though this was their umpteenth televised debate.
Mayor, you've got to check your facts. So sayeth Romney to the former New York City mayor. They were squabbling over the line-item veto in an exchange you can read plenty about elsewhere, but those words should come back to haunt Giuliani. This was a debate about the economy, a topic that confounds politicians, journalists and the public alike, so there were plenty of questionable or just plain fudged facts all around. Giuliani erred here by misquoting the politician he assumes will be his lone rival next year, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"The free market is one of our greatest assets," he said when asked about the billions of dollars private equity firms are raking in. "The leading Democratic candidate once said that the unfettered free market is the most radically destructive force in modern America. I mean, just get an idea of where that philosophy comes from."
Giuliani's accused Clinton of saying this before, and we probably won't see him corrected on national TV unless he and the senator from New York win their respective nominations. First of all, the quote is not Clinton's but Alan Ehrenhalt's, who wrote that the free market was the most radically disruptive force in modern America, meaning since the 1950s. In the '90s, the Clintons flirted with communitarianism, a sort of philosophical lament of the community-based civil society of yore. (For more, see Fareed Zakaria's 1996 explanation in Slate.) Then-first lady Clinton quoted Ehrenhalt in her book, "It Takes A Village," in a chapter on how downsizing was adversely affecting middle-class families.
If she wins the Democratic nod, Clinton will be cast as the crazy radical her conservative critics make her out to be, when in truth she has long been a moderate on social issues. Giuliani wasn't referencing Clinton's book, but a C-SPAN interview she did to promote the book. Asked about the quote, she said she agreed with Ehrenhalt, and then continued:
I think if you look at the argument we've had in our political life in the last several years, it's been a false debate. We've pitted the government against everything else. Well, I don't believe the government has had as big an impact as commercial television, as a lot of the decisions made in the marketplace about how we're going to pay and compensate people, about downsizing corporations and making workers more insecure. And I just believe that there's got to be a healthy tension among all of our institutions in society, and that the market is the driving force behind our prosperity, our freedom in so many respects to make our lives our own but that it cannot be permitted just to run roughshod over people's lives as well.
You'd be hard-pressed to find a social conservative who disagrees with much of that. Not a great fight to pick for Giuliani, whose family life and social positions are the mains reasons he doesn't have a lock on the GOP nod right now.
Lawyering up in the war on terror. Do Republicans hate lawyers, or do they love lawyers? They sure dig bashing the legal profession during these debates, so it seems Romney picked a very weird time to give lawyers their due.
"You sit down with your attorneys and [they] tell you what you have to do, but obviously, the president of the United States has to do what's in the best interest of the United States to protect us against a potential threat," Romney said, in response to a Constitution 101 question from moderator Chris Matthews.
To be fair, the "Hardball" host's question about whether President Romney would seek Congress' approval to strike Iran's nuclear facilities was a classic gotcha that would have allowed headline writers to scream the former Massachusetts governor would launch another war immediately after his inauguration. Even the Democratic front-runners agree that Iran must not be allowed to develop nukes and that every option should be explored to prevent the country from doing so.
But sitting down with your lawyers? Not very commander in chief-y, and the comment allowed the National Review, which seems to have it out for Romney, to run wild. Maybe the Review's coverage of Romney should be taken with a grain of salt, but as it is the unofficial publication of the active Republican base, it still counts big time. And that's unfortunate for Romney.
The other side of this is, in much of the post-debate coverage, Romney's name ends up in close proximity with the word "scripted" more than any of his rivals. But whose jokes aren't penned by a staffer and then rehearsed to death by the candidate? Romney's somewhat laborious line comparing the debates to "Law & Order" -- "has a huge cast, the series seems to go on forever... and Fred Thompson shows up at the end" -- will get a lot of play today, both for being pretty funny and also for being obviously rehearsed. Romney's inability to ad-lib as well as the more naturally funny Giuliani and Mike Huckabee do is, in the scheme of things, insignificant, but it does reinforce the possibly unfair impression that he's phony.
Thompson's real role. The conventional wisdom on Thompson's insta-success in this race so far is that early displeasure with Giuliani's and Romney's social conservative credentials left the field wide open for the politician-actor. But the real void Thompson seems to be filling is the one left by John McCain's implosion.
As a poll cited early in the debate shows, the public is overwhelmingly pessimistic about the economy, despite indicators that they should be bullish. The American people's overall depression about the Bush administration and the war in Iraq is a likely drag on their feelings about other topics, like the economy. No amount of optimistic rhetoric on America's can-do spirit will change this at the moment. McCain's Straight Talk Express is sputtering out for a variety of well-reported reasons, but Republican voters may still hanker for critical discussion of the nation's woes, including those blamed on the party. Thompson seemed to deliver here:
I don't think anybody believes anything coming out of Washington anymore. I think we need to tell them the truth, that our security is on the line, that our economy is on the line, that our prosperity is on the line. We're going to have to do some things differently. We're probably going to have to spend more than 4 percent of our budget, as we're spending right now, on our military. We are bankrupting the next generation and those yet to be born. Those are truthful things that the American people, I think, have an intuition about. We need to own up to it.
Spoken like one of the Democrats -- without the pesky business of being a Democrat.
Huckabee for VP. No one should be predicting winners this early in the game, but who can dispute that the former Arkansas governor would make a fine running mate for any one of the top three? Base voters like him, and the main reason he isn't catching fire in the polls seems to be low name recognition (which translates to the perception he can't win, which in turn means a mere trickle of donations, which in turn etc., etc.). Plus, the former Baptist preacher has the social conservative bona fides that Giuliani, Romney and even Thompson lack.
Too bad most Americans still aren't tuning into the debates. Huckabee killed on an issue that partisans of all stripes feel passionately about: airlines. Asked how he would fix the delay-plagued industry, Huckabee quipped, "First of all, we've got to have the kind of technology on the ground that we have in the cockpit. We've got 'Jetsons'-level technology that's running the cockpit; we have the 'Flintstones' technology on the ground that's controlling the airplanes."
Talk about a uniter.
Why they fight. Asked if he would pledge to support the eventual Republican nominee, Rep. Tom Tancredo said, No way, Jose. He's angry as Hades about the party's failure to unite on illegal immigration, and he won't be alone in checking the box for no one rather than for someone who might support "amnesty" -- the bugbear of border-security conservatives of his ilk.
There is so much anger and strife within the Republican Party that it's no wonder some prognosticators are already calling 2008 for the Democrats. In previous forums, the candidates came down on the wrong side of the public on Iraq. Yesterday, when the topic moved to the economy, they were able to show why observers shouldn't count the party out.
Aside from a blossoming protectionist streak among certain Republicans (Tancredo again), the GOP's free-market, free-trade, low-tax mantra still holds water in the electorate. Giuliani does the entire field a favor by chuckling at those silly big-government, big-regulation, big-tax Democrats, which he did quite often yesterday. As displeased as GOP voters are with their choices, there's nothing like the specter of Clinton Redux to get their motors running.
All the 9/11 references aside, that may be Giuliani's big gun should he win the nod: the very New York way he's able to portray the Democratic Party as a bunch of aliens from outer space. This works less well for Romney, since to many in his own party, he's the alien from outer space.
The Caucus did something very smart and wonderful by inviting actual economists to contribute to the liveblog. For more economy-centered coverage, see the Wall Street Journal, The Street and Financial Times. The New York Times has a transcript of the debate, and CNBC has video.
Posted at 9:15 AM
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Campaigns, Democrats, Economy, Fred Thompson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Iran, John McCain, Middle East, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani, Taxes, WH 2008
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