Rick Perry versus Mitt Romney: Thursday night, it was no
contest.
People from Texas often say that, while they don’t dislike
Perry, he’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer. With every
debate, that criticism has been validated, with Thursday night the
most egregious example of Perry’s intellect simply not being at the
level of others on the stage. It’s no coincidence that Perry’s poll
numbers have fallen after each prior debate, and it wouldn’t be
surprising to see Mitt Romney recover the lead in various GOP polls
over the next several days following Perry’s disastrous
performance.
To be sure, Perry was being attacked from across the stage,
though it seemed less than in the prior debate. His problem was
two-fold: His answers were mediocre and stumbling, and his attacks
on Mitt Romney were deftly thwarted by just two words from Romney:
“Nice try.”
Perry has a huge problem on the issue of illegal immigration. He
is credible when it comes to the issue of border security, but his
opponents’ talking points on “bi-national health insurance” and
subsidizing Texas’ public universities for illegal alien residents
of Texas are devastating. Now, bi-national health insurance may be
a reasonable idea — basically allowing private insurance policies
to cover treatments in either country, which could be very useful
for people who live on one side of the border and work on the
other, of whom there are many in southern Texas. Nevertheless, just
the term “bi-national health insurance” will sound terrible to many
GOP primary voters who won’t dig any further into what it
means.
And that’s the defensible one. Subsidizing
education for illegal aliens, even if they were brought here by
their parents, is bad policy. It is a magnet for illegals with
children to move to Texas. Furthermore — and it’s amazing that in
two debates in a row no other candidate has mentioned this — an
illegal with a college degree is still an illegal, and not
permitted to work here. So until our immigration or work visa
system changes to allow such a person to work here, the argument
for providing a subsidized education for him or her is extremely
weak. Perry also made a huge mistake by saying that people
who do not support his efforts to help these illegals are
heartless.
Conservatives are rightly sick and tired of being called things
like heartless, much less by a Republican presidential hopeful.
After all, it’s the left’s oh-so-heartfelt policies which have
sentenced large segments of America to poverty through the chain of
the welfare state. That single statement may eventually be looked
back on as the death knell of Rick Perry’s campaign.
It’s also worth noting that Perry had the dumbest line of the
night: When debating border control with Rick Santorum, in
particular the question of a fence versus patrols, Perry said he
would “put…the aviation assets on the ground.” It doesn’t need to
be explained why that’s such a poorly worded statement.
Perry and Romney went back and forth about what each of them has
said or written in the past about Social Security and health care.
While it’s hard to put a finger on it, it felt like Romney got the
better of those two exchanges. The substance of the charges against
each other was fairly similar, but one couldn’t help believing that
Romney was probably right in what he said about Perry’s book, with
Perry less certain to be right on the facts in his claims about
Romney. Romney’s answers were quick, crisp, and confident, and he
seemed usually to be looking at Perry when he spoke to him, a move
which viewers would take (even if subconsciously) as the behavior
of a confident person. Perry on the other hand seemed to have
rambling, nearly incoherent answers, and rarely looked at Romney
whether criticizing or responding to him. It was the pose of
someone unsure of his own words, unsure whether he was in the same
league as his competition.
Romney did a fairly good job, for the second time, convincing
the audience that Romneycare is different from Obamacare, and that
Romney firmly believes that his measure was a state solution only
and is not appropriate to be implemented in any similar form at a
federal level, in short that health care is not the province of the
federal government. He also did something new (at least new to me)
when he said that “Our plan in Massachusetts has some good parts,
some bad parts, some things I’d change, some things I like about
it.” Taking responsibility for a mistake is so different from
anything our current president does that it probably struck a
strong positive note with GOP voters even while he was admitting a
mistake.
Overall, it was Romney’s style that helped him as much as the
substance of his answers. He was distinctly presidential, and it
was a sharp contrast to the dark and often downward-looking Rick
Perry, who looked and sounded overwhelmed. And on the substance,
Romney dealt with criticism very well, not just from Perry, but
parrying a question from Fox’s Bret Baier about the Wall Street
Journal’s criticism of Romney’s tax plan as timid. And indeed
it is timid, and Romney stuck with it, arguing for tax cuts for
interest, dividends, and capital gains, for people earning under
$200,000 a year. This is, at least at where he places the dividing
line, something too close to what we might hear from President
Obama and plays too much into the left’s class warfare rhetoric,
offering comfort to the enemy.
It is part of Romney’s obvious strategy to avoid moving too far
to the right to win the primary and then have to swing hard to the
middle for the general election. He’s going to play this as close
to the middle as possible from the beginning, hoping that he’s
conservative enough and perceived as electable enough to win the
nomination, leaving him in a position where it’s slightly harder
for Barack Obama to call him a right-wing nut or accuse him of
flip-flopping (as Romney is already vulnerable on that charge.)
Also, Romney probably knows that if his policy actually gets to a
Republican-controlled House (and likely Republican-controlled
Senate), that they would strip out that threshold and allow him to
sign a bill that offers tax relief to everyone, which is to say to
include the people who pay the majority of income taxes in
America.
Among the people who can’t win the nomination, Herman Cain was
probably the debate winner. But there is no doubt that the real
winner of Thursday’s debate was Mitt Romney and the real loser was
Rick Perry.
In political betting at Intrade.com for who will be the
Republican nominee, Rick Perry has dropped more than 5 percent in
the last 24 hours, from nearly 36 percent to just over 30 percent,
his lowest betting odds since officially entering the race. During
that same 24 hour period, Mitt Romney has gone from trading just
over 38 percent to about 41 percent. This represents a new betting
high for Romney, and obviously the biggest gap between the two
candidates of the whole campaign. Yes, it is very early, but as we
say in the trading business “the trend is your friend” and as of
today you’d certainly rather be Mitt Romney than Rick Perry when it
comes to achieving your political aspirations.
