What an odd debate last night. It was surely not Lincoln-Douglas 1858. And yet I think it revealed more about the candidates and the shape of the field than any information we had to date. I thought the format was tiresome. The use of live voters asking questions from remote locations seems like a complete waste of time and money; in essence, it’s either a gimmick to make the debate look like a 18th century New England town hall meeting, or a pure ratings play because viewers must love themselves some minor connection to the event (look, those questions are being asked by someone in Virginia! I live near there!). In either case, it doesn’t produce better (or even more populist) questions. It just creates a forced and obvious fake replication of some sort of community. Allowing questions via Twitter is an interesting concept, but suffers from much the same problem: there are some great follow-up questions running on the ticker via twitter, but those don’t get asked. Wolf Blitzer struck me as a weak moderator, but one thing he did well was to let the candidates have some back and forth; there were a few moments where two candidates (notably Romney and Perry) seemed to be almost having a conversation. I don’t know what that’s worth, but it certainly made for some lively television.
Anyway, on to the debate. There’s a certain conventional wisdom going on right now in the blogsphere/DC chattering class about the meta-implications of these debates. It goes something like this:
Romney is winning among people who are thinking strategically about the 2012 general election and is consistently showing himself to be the most appealing candidate to the median American voter. He’s sensible, intelligent, and presidential. However, these debates are not about winning the general election, they are about positioning yourself to win the Republican primary. In that sense, Perry is destroying Romney. Conservative voters looking to make an emotional attachment to a candidate are almost certainly choosing Perry, and whenever Romney attacks Perry’s right wing orthodoxy, it backfires regardless of how effective the attack is.
I think this CW needs to be tweaked a little bit. For one, not many people are watching these debates. In one way, that’s good for Perry: even if he has a bad night, his poll numbers will remain relatively stable. On the other hand, if few people are watching the debate, then the people who are watching are going to be skewed drastically toward the chattering class. In that case, things might just be coming full-circle and favoring Romney. If you believe in the invisible primary — the idea that the money-and-influence elites still have a huge say in the nominating process despite the early 70’s reforms that brought in all the direct primaries — then Romney’s strategy seems not only clear, but also working: convince all the elites that Perry is a loose-cannon who may blunder a slam-dunk election, and that everyone with money or influence must immediately back Romney and arm him in order to sink Perry before the primary voters make a huge mistake.
That seems to be what Romney is doing. And I think it’s working.
Now, take the latter sentence with a grain of salt. Who really knows, right? Almost by definition, if you are reading this, you aren’t in position to judge either (a) how the average Republican primary voter thinks; or (b) the degree to which the money and influence establishment can push voters away from Perry. But I don’t think there’s any question that this is Romney’s strategy at this point. He’s passing up most opportunities in these debates to prove how conservative he is, and that was once his main goal. Instead, he’s now positioning himself as a sturdy, classic conservative stuck in a lifeboat with half a dozen people who, while maybe more conservative than him, are definitely missing a few nuts and bolts of common sense.
Five points:
1) My predictions from yesterday were pretty far off. It was actually Romney who came out swinging in the attack on Perry and Bachmann who went more subtle. I don’t remember the jobs bill getting a “show of hands” moment, so my prediction there can’t really be judged. And Ron and Herman were off the chain, but not really more than usual. Herman Cain’s references to the Chilean model of social insurance might be brilliant policy, but someone has to tell him that’s it’s a political dead-end to tell voters were going to copy how some other country they’ve never really heard of does something. Double dead-end if you’re trying to win GOP primary voters.
2) This is undoubtedly a two-man race between Romney and Perry. Barring the entry of someone not yet in, that is. And probably even then. Which raises the secondary question: what are the other people running for? It’s become clear to me that Bachmann is running to be Perry’s Vice President. (Not that I think she will get it). Same with Santorum. Huntsman is running for a serious cabinent post in the Romney administration. Ron Paul is running to swing the debate, particularly over troop withdrawal and issues of empire. Gingrich appears to be running either to try to hold the party together philosophically — he’s incredibly focused on unifying the people on stage, even to the detriment of his own differentiation — or to pump his private-sector businesses. I have no idea what Cain is angling for, but unlike some people, I don’t think he’s a bad voice to have on stage.
3) Perry got battered bad a few times last night. He still hasn’t found the pitch-perfect response on Social Security. You’d think they’d have more staffers working on that right now. And he can’t seem to get the vaccine mandate off his back. He needs a more forceful response to that question, or he is going to continue to get hammered by Bachmann/Santorum. Right now his line is “I always err on the side of life” and “there was an opt-out.” But the former is obviously a joke — his death penalty policies prove that — and the latter is not explained well. Here, I’ll write him a 30-second response that I think works better:
I 100% agree that parents should have total authority over their children’s health care — and that’s why our policy in Texas allowed anyone who did not want the vaccine to opt-out. But I will not let fear-mongering and half-truths cloud reality here: the health of our kids is my top priority, this vaccine saves lives, and I think it is 100% appropriate for a state government to promote the health of its citizens in the manner my administration did. This is no different than wearing a seat belt: we can debate whether people should be required to wear their seat belts, but it’s ridiculous to debate whether wearing one is a good idea.
4) I thought Perry made one potentially huge sound-bite style error. At one point, he said that he was “offended” if someone thinks “he can be bought” for five thousands dollars, because that’s chump change compared to his “$30 million dollars” he raised in the campaign. I totally understand what he was trying to say — that he’s not going to bend his policies for some drop in the bucket financial addition to his campaign — but it came out sounding like he was saying “it takes a lot more than a measly $5k to buy off this politician!” He also had this weird hesitation as he was saying it, as if he was thinking to himself “oh, shit” as it was coming out of his mouth. And while I would not be surprised if someone down the road makes an ad or otherwise uses the sound-byte against him, the bigger takeaway is that, once again, Perry has shown he can stick his foot in his mouth in unscripted moments. In the current campaign environment, that’s another plus for Romney in the invisible primary.
5) There are some new populist bogeymen. Or, I should say, some old populist bogeyman. The federal reserve is now under direct attack. Free silver ain’t seen nothing yet. There’s really no better populist conspiracy than a central bank, and American history is rife with this line of thinking. Almost no one — I mean, almost no one in the chattering class let alone the median voter — has a firm understanding of central bank politics. Which means not only does it appear to be an utterly non-transparent, non-democratic, shady institution, but also that no one can defend it, even among people who know it’s vital. Romney had the best response to all this pap last night — he asked the rhetorical question, “What’s the alternative? Do you want Congress setting the interest rates and controlling the money supply?” — but I’m 99.44% sure that went right over the heads of any plausible audience. Except for the invisible primary targets. Which, again, is why I think he’s slowly winning.
