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My personal musings about anything that gets on my radar screen--heavily dominated by politics.

2007-05-15

Thoughts On The Debate

Winners:

Rudy Giuliani: for no other reason than the smackdown of Ron Paul--this is the sort of clarity that distinguishes Republicans from Democrats and Europeans. It's just too bad that not enough Republicans spoke like this prior to the last election.

Mitt Romney: projects to the audience that he is the intellectual class of the field. He's articulate, informed, and clear about what he thinks and why. Of course, one of the most effective lines of the night was the straight jab he aimed at John McCain over immigration. Whether or not his past views limit his appeal has yet to be seen.

Chris Wallace: pretty good questions, and "I'll give you another 30 seconds to actually answer my question" was one of the better lines of the night. The problem is that he never seems to press points like that with Democrats.

Losers:

FOXNews: when they cut off what was about to be a lively debate after the Ron Paul quackery, only to return to canned questions. Too bad.

John McCain: two reasons--when Mitt Romney hit him on the nose over immigration, he dodged the real issue to launch a personal attack; secondly, when asked about "torture" he absolutely ruled out using any and all means to stop an imminent attack in lieu of courting world opinion. I'm not sure that the victims of that attack would really be in a mindset to give a !#*&^ about world opinion.

Ron Paul: for a while, he was a curiosity; now, he's been revealed as a nut.

The rest of it was pretty meaningless.

Hopefully, some of these guys are going to start to recognize that they're nowhere near ready for prime time, and get off the stage. Leave it to the big boys.
Posted by: Michael / 5/15/2007 11:18:00 PM

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