The Two Republican Debates

[Peter Chattaway]

http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/14/the-two-republican-debates/

by Ross Douthat
June 14, 2011, 7:33 am

If you were being kind to the Republican contenders on the debate stage last night, you would say that a debate featuring 60 second answers and 30 second responses, with no room to elaborate and little or no interaction between the candidates, is hardly a format in which any politician is likely to particularly shine. Throw in CNN’s “this or that” gimmick, which asked the candidates to choose between Conan and Leno, American Idol and Dancing With the Stars, and other oh-so-creative binaries, and the night was a good reminder why most sane Americans ignore the early primary debates entirely.

If you were being unkind … well, let’s just say that nobody on the stage last night had Barack Obama quaking in his boots. (Right now, the only 2012 challenge that our president really fears comes from the unemployment rate.) Essentially, there were two debates going on: One between Michelle Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul for the chance to emerge as the dark horse/spoiler of this cycle, and the other between Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney for the actual nomination itself. (Poor Newt Gingrich currently seems to be running in a primary all his own, in which the winner gets tenure at an online conservative university.) The candidates in the first debate had nothing to lose by getting specific on controversial issues, so their answers were generally more detailed, substantive and provocative — whether it was Rick Santorum defending Paul Ryan’s Medicare plan, Michelle Bachmann attacking the Libyan intervention, or Ron Paul castigating the other candidates for saying they’d defer to the generals on Afghanistan. But then again they also tended to be more extreme, implausible and/or crankish. (I liked Paul’s promise of 10 or 15 percent growth — why not? — if we just unwound the Federal Reserve.) Meanwhile, Romney and Pawlenty were more likely to stick to platitudes (private sector good, big government bad, etc.), which meant that both avoided saying anything that might come back to hurt them later, while leaving no lasting impression on any specific issue.

They also avoided attacking one another — and given that Romney leads in the polls and Pawlenty is still an unknown quantity to most voters, the absence of any real friction between them probably made the debate a win for the former governor of Massachusetts. Pawlenty seemed to duck a chance to go after Romney’s health care plan directly (earning him the instant disdain of a desperate-for-controversy press corps), preferring to draw contrasts implicitly by talking up his blue-collar background at every opportunity. It isn’t a crazy idea: It was arguably Mike Huckabee’s populist charm, more than any of his substantive attacks, that upended the stuffed-shirted Romney in the early going in 2008. But Huckabee was a natural at playing the populist card, whereas with Pawlenty it already feels belabored. He’ll need to absolutely tear Romney down on health care, I suspect, to have any chance of beating him, and on this night that didn’t happen.

So Romney was the winner in the important debate, and Michelle Bachmann, by general acclamation, was the winner of the interesting one. The other winners? War-weary conservatives, who heard a field of candidates taking a much more restrained tone on foreign policy than the Bush-era Republican Party did. The losers? Pawlenty, Herman Cain, and anyone who would like America’s opposition party to advance an domestic policy agenda that consists of more than just capital gains tax cuts and corporate tax cuts, rinse and repeat. But that, alas, was to be expected.