TAMPA, Fla. — Rick Perry came into last night’s debate
here with a target on his back, leading in the polls only a month
after his late entry into the Republican presidential campaign. His
fellow GOP candidates fired at the Texas governor all night, but it
wasn’t until Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann said the phrase
“innocent little 12-year-old girls” that he suffered
any serious wound.
Bachmann’s poignant phrase was used in reference to
Perry’s controversial 2007 executive order mandating that every
sixth-grade girl in Texas get vaccinated with Gardasil, a new drug
to prevent the sexually transmitted disease human papilloma virus
(HPV). Perry’s decision was subsequently voided by the Texas
legislature, and he has said he regrets trying to implement it by
executive order, but continues to defend it as “making a difference
in young people’s lives,” as he said during Monday’s
debate.
Bachmann drew cheers from the Tea Party audience when she
said Perry’s decision “to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be
forced to have a government injection through an executive order is
just flat out wrong.” And she also implied that Perry’s decision
was corrupt, mentioning his former chief of staff’s position as a
lobbyist for Merck, the company that makes Gardasil and a
contributor to Perry’s gubernatorial campaign. Perry responded by
pointing out that Merck donated a mere $5,000 to his campaign, out
of $30 million he raised. “If you’re saying that I can be bought
for $5,000, I’m offended,” Perry said, to which Bachmann replied:
“I’m offended for all the little girls and the parents who didn’t
have a choice.”
Perry said he saw the issue as one of “trying to save
young people’s lives,” since HPV infection can cause cervical
cancer. It fell to former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, a
favorite of many social conservatives, to point out the difference
between Gardasil and other vaccinations. “Ladies and gentlemen, why
do we inoculate people with vaccines in public schools? Because
we’re afraid of those diseases being communicable between people at
school. And therefore to protect the rest of the people at school,
we have vaccinations to protect those children. Unless Texas has a
very progressive way of communicating diseases in their schools…
then there is no government purpose served for having little girls
inoculated at the coercion of the government. It is big government
run amok. It is bad policy and it should not be done.” Santorum
also drew applause.
The exchange about Gardasil came an hour into the debate
on CNN sponsored by the Tea Party Express, but probably hurt Perry
worse than the attempt by his rivals to capitalize on his comments
about Social Security in last week’s Reagan Library debate. Unlike
the Social Security issue, where Perry’s characterization of the
program as a “Ponzi scheme” reflects a common conservative
perspective, his Gardasil mandate enabled other Republicans to
attack Perry from the right. The issue undermines his support among
both social conservatives worried about “innocent little girls” and
libertarians worried about government intrusion, and Perry’s
defense — that he went about it the wrong way and should have
first consulted the legislature — doesn’t do much to allay those
concerns.
Perry was also hit for having supported in-state tuition
for illegal immigrants at Texas colleges and provoked boos from the
audience when he defended that policy by saying, “That’s the
American way.” Again, Bachmann was the one to strike the blow again
Perry. “I think that the American way is not to give
taxpayer-subsidized benefits to people who have broken our laws or
who are here in the United States illegally,” said Bachmann, as the
audience applauded and cheered. “That is not the American
way.”
Perry’s emergence as the GOP front-runner has come largely
at the expense of Bachmann, who won the Iowa Straw Poll the same
day the Texan officially announced his candidacy at a conference in
South Carolina. While Perry has eclipsed former Massachusetts Gov.
Mitt Romney as national front-runner, it is Bachmann’s support that
has plummeted most in the past month. She may have begun recovering
some of that lost ground in last night’s debate. Despite the focus
on Perry, CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer was praised by staff for
several campaigns — including Herman Cain’s — for distributing
the speaking time more evenly than had NBC’s Brian Williams and
Politico’s John Harris in last week’s Reagan Library
debate.
Who won? It’s hard to say. But Perry “took
obvious hits that might do him some harm,”
Commentary editor John Podhoretz
observed. “The main problem… is that he seems to
think he can wing these debates by referring to what he did in
Texas here and what he did in Texas there.”
Perry and his supporters can take comfort in knowing that
last night’s debate reached a relatively small audience, since it
ran opposite a Monday NFL double-header. And the candidates will
meet again in just 10 days in an Orlando debate on Fox News. By
then, Perry had better find a better way to explain
himself.
