After skipping a couple of Republican presidential candidate debates lately, I thought it was time to get back in the game. After all, the field is down to just four candidates, which led me to believe that last night’s event, at the Reagan Library in California, might be a little more substantive than most. Indeed, it also seemed likely to be more lively, given that, for the first time in a year, there’s an obvious frontrunner, who seemed like an obvious target.
Alas, I was quickly reminded as to why I gave up on watching these things in the first place.
There was one exchange that was particularly heated, and which will probably draw the most media attention today. The LAT’s Janet Hook asked, “Obviously Iraq is still a major issue in this campaign, and over the last few days there’s been a real back and forth going on here. Senator McCain has said over and over again that you supported a timetable for phased withdrawal from Iraq. Is that true?” Romney responded:
“Absolutely unequivocably [sic] — (chuckles) — if I can get that word out — unequivocably [sic], absolutely no. I have never ever supported a specific timetable for exit from Iraq, and it’s offensive to me that someone would suggest that I have. And I have noted that everyone from Time Magazine to Bill Bennett over there, to — to actually, CNN’s own analyst. He said it was a lie, and it’s absolutely wrong. I do not support that, never have. […]
“Raising it a few days before the — the Florida primary, when there was very little time for me to correct the record, when the question I was most frequently asked is, ‘Oh, you’re for a specific date of withdrawal,’ sort of falls in the kind of dirty tricks that I think Ronald Reagan would have found to be reprehensible.”
McCain responded:
“Well, of course, he said he wanted a timetable before that. We have to understand that we lost the 2006 election and the Democrats thought that they had a mandate. They thought they had a mandate to get us out of Iraq. And I was prepared to sacrifice whatever was necessary in order to stand up for what I believe in….
“April was a very interesting year [sic] in 2007. That’s when Harry Reid said the war is lost and we got to get out. And the buzzword was ‘timetables.’ Timetables. Governor, the right answer to that question was ‘no,’ not what you said, and that was, we don’t want to have to lay — have them lay in the weeds until we leave, and Maliki and the president should enter into some kind of agreement for, quote, ‘timetables.'”
And from there, we were treated to a back-and-forth squabble that seemed to last for hours. How bad was it? It took Ron Paul to help make sense of the bickering.
“[W]hen I listen to this argument, I mean, I find it rather silly because they’re arguing technicalities of a policy they both agree with. They agreed going in, they agreed for staying, agreed for staying how many years, and these are technicalities. We should be debating foreign policy, whether we should have interventionism or non-interventionism, whether we should be defending this country or whether we should be the policeman of the world, whether we should be, you know, running our empire or not and how are we going to have guns and butter.”
Paul received more applause than he’s heard at a GOP debate in quite a while.
The truth is, the endless squabble over whether Romney backed “timetables” for withdrawal in April 2007 — objectively, he did not — didn’t do either candidate any favors. For his part, McCain was lying, and it was pretty obvious. As for Romney, the underlying point — that Romney was not enthusiastic in support for the Bush policy in Iraq — is fair, and he was trying to weasel out of it. Worse, by spending what seemed like forever bickering over a one-sentence comment from April about Iraq, Romney wasn’t able to talk about the economy, which is safer ground for him.
As for the bigger picture, since there were only four candidates on the stage, let’s go one at a time:
McCain: The frontrunner appeared tired and a little confused at times. Worse, he was intentionally deceptive more than once — on the “timetables” thing and when he told the audience that he voted twice to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent. If McCain had a strategy last night, it was hiding well. Slate’s Chadwick Matlin wrote, “As my Trailhead colleague Mr. Beam pointed out, he’s the senile grandfather you let prattle on because it’s too sad to tell him to shut up.” Will any of this change the dynamics of the race overall? I doubt it.
Romney: He’s actually become a pretty good debater, but his goal for the night was to score some points at McCain’s expense. I didn’t see that happening last night. Indeed, I saw more of Romney trying to be too slick for his own good, such as refusal to answer a question about whether the U.S. is better off now than it was eight years ago.
Huckabee: Huck clearly has the best rhetorical skills of the GOP field, but he got screwed last night with very few questions, and at times, one forgot that he was even on the stage. I did notice, though, that at one point in the debate, Huckabee said, “You can’t have a president who sees a whole bunch of America as invisible.” Isn’t that almost the exact same line that Hillary Clinton used in her Iowa ads?
Paul: At one point, early on, after some discussion between the other candidates, Paul said, “I would like to take one minute, since I didn’t get a chance to answer this discussion on conservative versus liberal…” at which point Anderson Cooper cut him off. “I promise you we’re going to have a — you’re going to have another opportunity to do that, I promise you, coming up in like two minutes, or two questions,” Cooper said. He broke his promise, and Paul wasn’t heard from again for quite a while. Paul, for his many faults, at least kept some of the other debates interesting with an untraditional perspective. Last night, CNN ignored him altogether.
So, what did you think?