It was barrel riding night at the Goat Rodeo in Florida. All the contestants had something had issues they felt they needed to slalom around in the limited amount of time they had. It should make for an exciting evening, but best laid plans and all that.
Brian Williams was at the helm of this particular Rodeo and he did an incredibly crappy job of it if I do says so myself. As someone with ADHD all I could think is that Williams must have forgotten to take his Ritalin.
Time and time again he would say that he wanted all of the GOP candidates to answer a question, ask Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney the question and then bounce to a new topic for Santorum or Paul, assuming that he even called on them. Here is a little hint for NBC, if you are going to have the also-rans on the stage, you should at least let them talk.
It was so bad that during a commercial break Rick “Frothy Mix” Santorum got out form behind his podium before they faded out and made a bee-line to Williams to lobby for a chance to answer the question, more on that later.
The night started out with Williams going straight at Newt for an issue that I think is the one that will ultimately kill him either in the primary or the general election (assuming the Republicans are suicidal enough to nominate him) his lack of discipline and the fact that it lead to his resignation as Speaker and ultimately resigning from the House of Representatives.
Newt swerved around this first barrel by trying to obscure the issue with dubious factoids. He insisted that he told all the Republicans to vote to censor him for his ethics problems, as a way to get it behind the party since it was all trumped up by the Democrats.
This is really a weak effort, since who in their right mind would accept censor if they were innocent? Then he dug up the corpse of Ronald Reagan and draped it on his shoulders, making the fascicle comparison between the way that Democrats would love to run against him and they way they wanted to run against Reagan.
Newt, here’s a little hint- Reagan was likeable, you are not. Reagan might have been divorced but he was not an asshole who tried to pay as little child support as possible, and Reagan was not someone so ethically challenged that he had to resign from the House in disgrace. In short, you ain’t the Gipper.
I’ve seen commentary that Newt looked “presidential” last night. Frankly I did not see it. This was the first Republican Goat Rodeo where the crowd was admonished to not applaud or shout things out, and as I mentioned yesterday, that really takes a lot of wind out of Newts sails.
Romney must have had two bowls of Wheaties yesterday morning because he was much feistier than he has been in the last two Rodeos. He did not have that look of fear in his eyes that he had in South Carolina and he really took after Newt and did not back down.
Romney pushed his meme of influence peddling and even came back with a decent definition to back his assertion. The barrage was so sustained that it seemed to knock Gingrich back on his heels. He tried to recover by stopping the bickering, taking a deep breath and then bending his response away, but he never really came back for the rest of the night.
All four of the GOP hopefuls (well two hopefuls and two also-rans) did everything they could to bolster their support with the Cuban community while basically ending it with the wider Latino community.
They were asked what we should do about Castro and Santorum, Romney and Gingrich all came out for continuing sanctions. The disgraced Speaker showed why he is the very definition of a loose cannon when he upped the ante and said he’d order covert and perhaps overt action against the Castro regime to replace it.
The Mad Elf of the GOP, Ron Paul, was the only one with a sane idea, which is basically end the embargo and conquer the Castro’s by economic might through trade. That probably pissed off the Cuban community, but he is not really running to win the nomination so he doesn’t care.
We got a new phrase on immigration from Mitt Romney last night when he weirdly talked about “self-deportation”. By trying to thread the needle and avoid calling for trying to deport the 12 million or so informal immigrants but insisting the they go home before even starting a processes for residency Romney managed to coin one of the most mockable and awkward phrases of the campaign thus far.
The bellicose nature of the GOP foreign policy was really on show last night. After talking about Cuba talk turned to Iran. There was truly stupid question as to whether Iran actually acting to close the Strait of Hormuz would be an act of war.
Newt and Mitt said of course and talked their tough talk about how we have to be as aggressive as possible with them. This is where they went to commercial and Lil’ Ricky ran to the ref for a chance to talk, and boy-howdy how he talked!
Santorum is nuts when it comes to Iran. He actually advocated any and all military means for stopping them from getting a nuclear weapon. He as even went as far as to say that Iran with a nuke would be the same as Al Qaeda with one!
He insisted that it would be a existential threat to the US for a country like Iran to have this capability. Which got me wondering, where was this kind of absolutism when North Korea achieved nuclear state status? Lil’ Ricky was in the Senate then, his party was in control of everything, yet no one was talking about invading or military strikes.
It seems that a secular regime with a nuke is not as scary as a religious one. But then I guess that Santorum knows first hand how scary it is to have religiously motivated leaders in control. After all it is a main arguing point for his candidacy.
Santorum only had one really good point at the Rodeo last night, and that was all the way at the end (where most of America had probably tuned out by then). He Romney and Newt to the wood shed for not being “conservative enough”. He had a good attack on them about compromise. It was a good attack and might play with the Republican base but I personally think that America actually wants politicians who compromise, after all that is how our system of government is supposed to work.
Where he stepped on his dick was his insistence that it would have been better to let all the big banks fail in late 2008 instead of shoring up our banking system. Now, I am all for taking these banks apart, they are just too big a threat to our economy to allow them to stand, but letting them collapse willy-nilly as Bear-Sterns did would have been a disaster.
Hell it was a disaster that we are still trying to dig ourselves out of, thanks to Republican intransigence on all economic and jobs issues. But it would have been far, far worse if we had allowed the whole thing to come tumbling down. Santorum saying that as president he would not have compromised his free market principles to prevent that just goes to show why he is unfit to be president.
Ron Paul was barely there last night. He looked like Grandpa on an day trip out of the nursing home, and just happy to be doing something. He really only cares about his coin operated liberty and did not really do a whole lot to add to the debate.
All in all not a lot changed last night; Romney showed that he can fight more, Gingrich was looked petulant for most of the debate and without the support of the crowd he never seemed to get his mojo going. Santorum tried to muscle in, but everyone but him realizes that short of two plane crashes that take out both Mitt and Newt he is done.
So Newt will probably continue to surge in Florida, he might even win it. But he is going to have a real money problem and his rep as a “great debater” is going to suffer if the moderators keep a tight leash on the crowd.
If this was not an exciting Goat Rodeo, don’t worry, we’ll have another in just two days.
The floor is yours.