In the third Republican debate, held at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, CA, last night, a star was born and one crashed to earth.

 

Gov. Rick Perry (TX) made a strong showing in his first debate, and completely overshadowed Rep. Michele Bachmann (MN). Bachmann knows how former Gov. Tim Pawlenty (MN) must’ve felt in Ames, IA, last month.

 

To be fair, moderators Brian Williams and John Harris, both from Politico, clearly wanted to see former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) and Perry lock horns, and continually tried to goad them into taking the other on. The result was that the other candidates were largely marginalized.

 

Till now, Bachmann was the center of attention but last night, she was treated as a second-tier candidate – she even didn’t get a chance to speak until after (in this order) former Sen. Rick Santorum (PA), businessman Herman Cain (GA) and former Gov. Jon Huntsman (UT) each had a chance to answer a question. Oddly, unlike Mike Huckabee – who was very skilled at pulling the spotlight in his direction during the 2007/2008 Republican debates – Bachmann seemed content to “wait her turn” rather than to fight for face time.

 

It looks like the testosterone-fueled Perry took the feistiness out of her. I dunno, maybe there is something to those questions about her being submissive to a strong man (Pawlenty definitely not falling into that category), which The Stiletto had initially dismissed as being irrelevant, if not motivated by sexism or secularism. Can’t imagine Sarah Palin wilting the way Bachmann did – they breed ‘em tough in AK and she would have relished going head-to-head with a he-man.

 

When a question was directed to her, Bachmann gave weirdly off-kilter answers. For instance, asked how she would handle the estimated 11 million illegals already in the U.S., she spoke about narco terrorists and Cuban-Americans in Miami opposing taxpayer- subsidized benefits being given to illegals and their children. And when asked why she opposed U.S. intervention in aiding Libyan rebels to oust Gadhafi, she spoke of the debt ceiling debate, cutting the military budget, Iran’s nuclear program and Obama telling Israel to retreat to its 1967 borders.

 

In previous debates, Bachmann was crisp and focused. Last night, she was rambling and off-point. While Perry’s performance was solid, he wasn’t as polished as Bachmann was coming out of the gate in her previous debate showings. It’s not so much that he shoved her into the second-tier, but that she assumed her place there.

 

After last night, the race is between Romney vs. Perry – andeveryoneelse.

 

 

The Two Texans Lock Horns

 

The candidates ignored Ronald Reagan’s "11th Commandment" – Republicans shalt not speak ill of fellow Republicans during the third Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library in Simi Valley, CA, last night. But for the most part, they used a humorous touch when challenging each other that The Gipper would have appreciated and approved. Some of the headlines about the debate were a tad overwrought (Perry And Romney Trade Strong Blows At Debate and Perry, Romney At Each Other's Throats, to cite a couple), in The Stiletto’s opinion.

 

In fact, the two Texan candidates went after each other with greater ferocity than the two putative front-runners did. When Politico’s John Harris asked Rep. Ron Paul a question about abolishing the minimum wage (he would), he took the occasion to stick it to Gov. Rick Perry on healthcare “reform”: “[T]he governor of TX criticized the governor of MA for RomneyCare, but he wrote a really fancy letter supporting HillaryCare. So we probably ought to ask him about that.”

 

Perry countered with his own suggestion about questionable correspondence to ask questions about: “Speaking of letters, I was more interested in the one that you wrote to Ronald Reagan back and said I'm going to quit the party because of the things you believe in.” (Paul explained that he was criticizing the 1980s deficits, not Reagan’s message.)

 

The two mixed it up again over a controversial decision by Perry to vaccinate all girls against a sexually transmitted disease that is linked to cervical cancer. Paul took specific issue with how Perry foisted the forced innoculations on Texans (“He did it with an executive order, passed it. … I don't like the idea of executive orders. I, as president, will not use the executive order to write laws.”)

 

Perry didn’t get a chance to rebut Paul until after Rep. Michelle Bachmann (MN) stated that she was opposed to forcing young girls to get vaccinated with Gardasil against their parents’ wishes, and he admitted that he felt “like the piñata here at the party” before deftly recasting the issue from an example of executive overreach to being a life-saver:

 

I hate cancer. … Cervical cancer is caused by HPV.  …. We allowed for an opt-out. I don't know what's more strong for parental rights than having that opt-out. … Should we have talked to the legislature first before we did it? Probably so. But at the end of the day, I will always err on the side of saving lives.

 

Perry’s mandate is as noxious to conservatives as RomneyCare’s mandate to purchase health insurance, which Romney himself pointed out subtly (“I believe in parental rights and parental responsibility for our kids. My guess is that Governor Perry would like to do it a different way second time through. We've each get – we've each taken a mulligan or two.”).

 

Still and all, no one bludgeoned his or her rival into a bloody pulp – Nancy Reagan was in the audience, and the candidates may have pulled their punches out of respect – but there were a several flurries of sharp jabs in the answers and rebuttals between Romney and Perry:

 

Brian Williams (Politico): Is [being a career politician] a disqualification to be in government all your career?

 

Fmr. Gov. Mitt Romney (MA): It's a fine profession, and if someone were looking to say how can we restructure government, and which agency should report to which other agency, well, maybe that's the best background.

 

Perry:  [W]hile he had a good private sector record, his public sector record did not match that. As a matter of fact, we created more jobs in the last three months in Texas than he created in four years in Massachusetts.

 

Romney: Texas is a great state. Texas has zero income tax. Texas has a right to work state, a Republican legislature, a Republican Supreme Court. Texas has a lot of oil and gas in the ground. Those are wonderful things, but Governor Perry doesn't believe that he created those things. If he tried to say that, well, it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet.

 

Perry: Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt.  

 

Also, the occasional joke (except for Romney’s Al Gore crack – which was also meant to subtly remind the audience of Perry’s erstwhile support of the unhinged former veep – none of them were at the expense of another candidate):

 

Cain (asked about job creation): [M]y 9-9-9 economic growth plan. Throw out the current tax code, a 9 percent tax on corporate income, our 9 percent tax on personal income and a 9 percent national sales tax. If 10 percent is good enough for God, 9 percent ought to be good enough for the federal government.

***

 

Williams to Fmr. House Speaker Newt Gingrich (GA): [Y]ou wrote the foreword to Rick Perry's most recent book called "Fed Up," and you called him "uniquely qualified to explain what's taking place with the economy." Does that mean, in terms of job creation credentials, he has your proxy at a gathering like this?

 

Gingrich: No, but it means that, if he wants to write another book, I'll write another foreword.

 

At several points in the evening, the candidates remembered Reagan’s admonishment, and avoided being baited by Williams and Harris – and Gingrich reprised his role as media critic from the previous debate in Ames, IA:

 

Harris to Perry: Governor Romney said Vice President Cheney is right and you're wrong about Ponzi schemes.

 

Perry: [W]e're not trying to pick fights here.  …  We're about fixing things. … You cannot keep the status quo in place and not call it anything other than a Ponzi scheme. … that's provocative language – maybe it's time to have some provocative language in this country.

 

***

 

Newt Gingrich to Harris (when asked about the number of people with health insurance coverage in MA vs. TX and which governor’s approach was better): "I for one and I hope that all of my friends up here are going to repudiate every effort of the news media to get Republicans to fight each other, to protect Barack Obama who deserves to be defeated. And all of us are committed as a team. Whoever the nominee is, we are all for defeating Barack Obama.

 

That may be true, but the nominee first has to defeat his closest rival. Romney never got the chance to beat McCain to win the Republican nomination in 2008 because he could never get past Mike Huckabee. He will never get the chance to beat President Obama in 2012 if he can’t get past Perry. At some point, Romney has to stop acting as though he is above the fray and fight like a man – if not willingly, then because Perry will force him to by pummeling him in the debates.

 

 

Republican Debaters Face Enemy Fire

 

As Mark Levin astutely noted on Facebook, “nearly every damn question” asked by Politico’s Brian Williams and John Harris at the Republican debate last night “was based on liberal assumptions … about government, including health care, the climate, taxes, spending, illegal immigration, job creation, faith, the death penalty, etc.” There was more hostility towards the conservative worldview in each question, than the eight candidates had for each other during the debate.

 

Given that, Gov. Rick Perry (TX) and former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) both deflecting hostile questions effectively (meaning, they spun like crazy), though Romney was the more practiced of the two and ended the debate without a hair out of place, as it were:

 

Williams to Perry: Texas ranks last among those who have completed high school … there are only eight other states with more living in poverty … no other state has more working at or below the minimum wage … unemployment is better in over half the states of the union than it is right now in Texas.

 

Perry: [W]e created 1 million jobs in the state of Texas. At the same time, America lost 2.5 million … 95 percent of all the jobs that we've created have been above minimum wage … for the White House or anyone else to be criticizing creation of jobs now in America, I think is a little bit hypocritical.

 

Williams to Romney:  Your private-sector experience, as Governor Perry's strategist recently put it, consisted of being "a buyout specialist" … Bain Capital, a company you helped to form, among other things, often buys up companies, strips them down, gets them ready, resells them at a net job loss to American workers. 

 

Romney: [W]e started business at Bain Capital, and when we acquired businesses, in each case we tried to make them bigger, make them more successful and grow … they didn't all work … but when it was all said and done … we added tens of thousands of jobs to the businesses we helped support.

 

***

 

Williams to Perry: [Y]ou can't have much of a workforce without a basis of education. … your state ranks among the worst in the country in high school graduation rates … yet you recently signed a budget cut for millions in education funding.

 

Perry: [T]he reductions that we made were thoughtful reductions, and the fact of the matter is, Texas has made great progress in the 10 years that I've been governor, from the standpoint of our graduation rates now are up to 84 percent, higher than they've been during any period of time before that. … When Caterpillar and Toyota and eBay and Facebook move to your state, it's not because you've got a workforce that's not capable.

 

***

 

Harris to Romney: You said some things about the Massachusetts law worked; other things didn't work as well. … Was [the individual mandate] one of the things that worked in Massachusetts?

 

Romney: [O]n day one if I'm elected president is direct my secretary of health and human services to put out an executive order granting a waiver from Obamacare to all 50 states. … What we had is a lot of people who found that they could simply stop getting insurance, go to the hospital, and get free care paid for by the people, paid for by taxpayers. We were spending hundreds of millions of dollars in our state giving care to people who in some cases could afford to take care of themselves. … It's a model that lets other states take a look at it. Some parts of it have been copied by other states; some haven't. One thing I know, and that is that what President Obama put in place is not going to work. It's massively expensive. In our state, our plan covered 8 percent of the people, the uninsured. His plan is taking over 100 percent of the people.

 

Romney is getting better and better at explaining the dichotomy of being for an individual mandate in one state but against it in all of them collectively – good enough, perhaps, to mollify independents, but not hard-core conservatives. For his part, Perry bobbed and weaved when Harris questioned him on healthcare coverage, and this exchange was his weakest:

 

Harris to Perry: MA has nearly universal health insurance. … In TX, about a quarter of the people don't have health insurance. That's 50 out of 50, dead last. Sir, it's pretty hard to defend dead last.

 

Perry: Well, I'll tell you what the people in the state of Texas don't want: They don't want a health care plan like what Governor Romney put in place in Massachusetts. What they would like to see is the federal government get out of their business. For Medicaid, for instance – as a matter of fact, I bet Mitt and Jon would both agree, and I know Newt would, as well – Medicaid needs to be block-granted back to the states so that we can use the innovation in the states, come up with the best ways to deliver health care.

 

But Perry stood his ground – and then some – on the long-term viability of Social Security – and probably made his rift with the Bushies permanent, while he was at it.

 

Harris to Perry: [In your book "Fed Up"] you call Social Security the best example of a program that "violently tossed aside any respect for states' rights." … [E]xplain your view that Social Security was wrong right from the beginning.

 

Perry: [R]ather than spending a lot of time talking about what those folks were doing back in the '30s and the '40s … we have got to be focused on how we're going to change this program. … It is a Ponzi scheme to tell our kids that are 25 or 30 years old today, you're paying into a program that's going to be there. Anybody that's for the status quo with Social Security today is involved with a monstrous lie to our kids, and it's not right.

Harris: [Y]our former political adviser, Karl Rove, said that type of language could be "toxic," as he put it, in a general election. … My understanding is you're standing by every word you've written in that book. Is that right?

 

Perry: Yes, sir. You know, Karl has been over the top for a long time in some of his remarks. So I'm not responsible for Karl anymore.

 

Perry also gave a serviceable response to his position on climate change, but his reference to Galileo was odd, considering that the 17^th century scientist was persecuted by the church and ultimately vindicated for his observation that the sun, and not the Earth, is the center of the universe:

 

Harris to Perry: [I]n New Hampshire, you said that weekly and even daily scientists are coming forward to question the idea that human activity is behind climate change. Which scientists have you found most credible on this subject?

 

Perry: [T]he science is … not settled on this. The idea that we would put Americans' economy at … jeopardy based on scientific theory that's not settled yet, to me, is just … is nonsense. … [J]ust because you have a group of scientists that have stood up and said here is the fact, Galileo got outvoted for a spell. … [T]o put America's economic future in jeopardy, asking us to cut back in areas that would have monstrous economic impact on this country is not good economics and I will suggest to you is not necessarily good science. Find out what the science truly is before you start putting the American economy in jeopardy.

 

Next time, he needs to connect the dots to explain that scientists who are being persecuted today by politically motivated peers – not being invited to symposia, having their papers rejected by the journals in their field, etc. – may also be ultimately vindicated. But while all that is being sorted out, the economy shouldn’t be held hostage.

 

Perry was at his best when he discussed the death penalty:

 

Williams to Perry: Your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. ... Have you struggled to sleep at night with the idea that any one of those might have been innocent?

 

Perry: No, sir. I've never struggled with that at all. The state of Texas has a very thoughtful, a very clear process in place … when someone commits the most heinous of crimes against our citizens, they get a fair hearing, they go through an appellate process, they go up to the Supreme Court of the United States, if that's required.

 

Williams: What do you make of that dynamic that just happened here, the mention of the execution of 234 people drew applause?

 

Perry: I think Americans understand justice. … [I]n the state of Texas, our citizens have made that decision, and they made it clear, and they don't want you to commit those crimes against our citizens. And if you do, you will face the ultimate justice.

 

No wonder Perry noted at one point that he “felt like a piñata.” But neither Williams nor Harris were able to bust him up.