THE DAILY BLADE: Remember Rudy McRomney? In the last presidential election, former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani, AZ Sen. John McCain and former MA Gov. Mitt Romney dominated debate after debate. This election’s version of Rudy McRomney appears to be Mitt Caingrich. In every debate, Romney is poised and polished; former Godfather’s Pizza CEO Herman Cain is authentic and passionate; and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is an intellectual powerhouse.

Because CNBC’s “Your Money, Your Vote” Republican Presidential Debate at Oakland University in MI focused on the economy it did not reveal huge differences on substance, so the only way to judge “winners” and “losers” was on style – keeping in mind that the eventual Republican nominee will have to go toe-to-toe with Obama in three debates before the general election. This debate, more than any other, solidified in The Stiletto’s mind, which of the candidates would be up to the challenge – regardless of his or her platform: Romney, Santorum and Gingrich. (The Stiletto had written Perry off a long time ago, so his now-famous 53-second brain freeze about which government agencies he wants to dismantle does not figure into her calculus.)
 

† Romney vs. Obama: Both candidates are equally matched in the art of pivoting. Look at how Romney smoothly extricated himself from this question by moderator John Harwood: “Your opponents have said you switched positions on many issues. It is an issue of character, not personal, but political … What can you say to Republicans to persuade them that the things you say in the campaign are rooted in something deeper than the fact that you are running for office?”: 

I think people understand that I'm a man of steadiness and constancy. I don't think you are going to find somebody who has more of those attributes than I do. … I have been in the same church my entire life. I worked at one company, Bain, for 25 years. And I left that to go off and help save the Olympic Games. I think it is outrageous the Obama campaign continues to push this idea, when you have in the Obama administration the most political presidency we have seen in modern history. They are actually deciding when to pull out of Afghanistan based on politics. Let me tell you this, if I'm president of the United States, I will be true to my family, to my faith, and to our country, and I will never apologize for the United States of America. That's my belief.

After invoking G-d and country, Romney pivots to an attack on Obama and gets the crowd cheering and applauding with the red-meat line of never apologizing for the U.S. By that point, the audience had forgotten what the original question was.

So Romney and Obama will shadowbox, and each of their debates will likely as not end in a draw. Which means that Obama won’t lose and for an incumbent that’s as good as a win – no matter how unhappy voters are with the economy and overall direction of the country Romney has to overcome the hurdle of inducing independents to change horses in the middle of the stream.

† Santorum vs. Obama: As evidenced by this exchange with with "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer over why the federal government shouldn’t subsidize energy production to create jobs and make the U.S. energy independent, Santorum is as nimble as Gingrich in providing facts and figures to buttress his points:

Pennsylvania has Marcellus Shale. It took a while for us to ramp up, but we're drilling 3,000 to 4,000 wells. The price of natural gas, because of Marcellus Shale, which is the second largest natural gas find in the world, has gone from $12 to $3.65. And we let the marketplace work. So, no, we didn't have the federal government come in and bail us out.

But knowledgeable as he is, Santorum does not come off as likeable – he is wound tight, whereas Obama is relaxed. It would be the Nixon-Kennedy debate all over again.

† Gingrich vs. Obama: Gingrich seemingly has the entire Library of Congress stuffed into his brain. In answering a question, he will quote a world leader or an obscure (to most of the audience) event in American history; tick off dates, facts and figures; put the issues of the day into a larger context; and offer a well-thought out solution – often more than one – to every problem. Without a TelePrompter. His forensic talents are showcased in this answer about the impending student loan bubble:

You know, this is a good place to talk about the scale of change we're about to live through. We're at the end of the welfare state era of dependency, debt, distortion, and dishonesty. The student loan program began when Lyndon Johnson announced it, I think, with a $15 million program. It's an absurdity. What does it do? It expands the ability of students to stay in college longer because they don't see the cost. It actually means they take fewer hours per semester on average. It takes longer for them to get through school. It allows them to tolerate tuitions going up absurdly. By 2014, there will be one administrator for every teacher on college campuses in the United States.

Now, let me give you a contrast that's very startling. The College of the Ozarks is a work-study college. You cannot apply to it unless you need student aid, and they have no student aid.

You have to work 20 hours a week during the year to pay tuition and books. You work 40 hours a week during the summer to pay for room and board. Ninety-two percent of the students graduate owing no debt, the eight percent who owe debt owe $5,000 because they bought a car.

Now, that is a model so different, it will be culture shock for the students of America to learn we actually expect them to go to class, study, get out quickly, charge as little as possible, and emerge debt free by doing the right things for four years.

Liberal pundits flatter Obama by calling him “professorial” because he was a lecturer (not actually a  professor, by the way) teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School, but Gingrich truly deserves that description. Obama’s handlers will not be able to prepare him to debate Gingrich because they won’t be able to predict where his nimble mind will take him. But the flip side of nimbleness is lack of focus and discipline and Gingrich’s worst enemy will be his tendency to put his foot in his mouth. Assuming he continues to handle himself the way he has been in these Republican debates, Obama will have no choice but to play the politics of personal destruction. But then, he will lose his likeability and the contrast between Obama’s negative campaign and Gingrich’s solutions-oriented campaign will give independents little reason to vote for the incumbent. 

The Wall Street Journal’s Dorothy Rabinowitz makes the case for Gingrich. A Gingrich-Obama contest doesn’t capture the imagination like Cain-Obama, but watching Gingrich demolish Obama in the debates would be satisfying on too many levels to count.  

Candidates played nice at CNBC debate

CNBC’s “Your Money, Your Vote” Republican Presidential Debate at Oakland University in MI had its plusses and minuses.

One big minus was that the cable channel did not turn off its stock ticker or its news crawl, which was both distracting and disrespectful to the candidates. Another was including "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer on the panel, because he lacks an “indoor voice” and though his questions were interesting and original, he literally screamed them at the candidates.  

The plus was that the moderators, Maria Bartiromo and John Harwood are very knowledgeable in a specialized beat – financial journalism – which meant that the questions were intelligent and informed. Unfortunately, a scant 20 minutes into the debate The Money Honey turned waspish and asked Herman Cain about allegations of sexual misconduct made by several former National Restaurant Association employees  in the guise of a corporate governance question (“[S]hareholders are reluctant to hire a CEO where there are character issues. Why should the American people hire a president if they feel there are character issues?”). The audience immediately grasped the bait-and-switch, and booed loudly.

Cain stood his ground (“for every … person that comes forward with a false accusation, there are probably … thousands who would say none of that sort of activity ever came from Herman Cain”) with the audience interrupting his response with applause three times. Harwood then tried the gambit on the other businessman in the field by asking whether he would have kept Cain on as CEO had he purchased his company when he was at Bain Capital. Former Gov. Mitt Romney (MA) wisely declined to fall into the trap and indicated it’s up to the voters to decide whether Cain’s answer to Bartiromo would suffice.

MSM pundits were salivating over the prospect of the candidates capitalizing on Cain’s woes, but it did not happen. Either they are listening to the entreaties of conservative commentators to stop doing President Barack Hussein Obama’s oppo research for him, or they have notices the bump in the polls that former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (GA) has enjoyed by playing the role of elder statesman and remaining above the fray, but the candidates refrained from direct attacks on each other this time around.

In fact, the candidates rarely or significantly disagreed with one another, because – unlike foreign policy and social issues – Republicans, conservatives and libertarians all share certain core beliefs about spending, taxation and the role of government in the marketplace.  

For instance: Cramer asked Cain what he would do to prevent Italy’s financial woes from taking us down, too. Cain responded that the best thing to do to prevent the spread of the contagion would be to have a robust economy here at home and to shore up the value of the dollar. When Bartiromo pressed Cain about allowing Italy to fail, and then put the question to Romney, Cain said, “There's not a lot that the United States can directly do for Italy right now” and Romney agreed, “They have the capacity to deal with that themselves. They're a very large economy.” And when Cramer asked Rep. Ron Paul (TX) and former UT Gov. Jon Huntsman a variation on the question of what to do about Italy, Paul pointed out that bailing people out just prolongs the agony “as we're doing in the housing bubble” and Huntsman agreed: “[I]f you want a window into what this country is going to look like in the future if we don't get on top of our debt, you are seeing it playing out in Europe right now.” There really wasn’t a whole lot of daylight amongst the candidates on this issue.

Cramer also asked Romney, TX Gov. Rick Perry and Gingrich “[D]o you believe public companies have any social responsibility to create jobs, or do you believe, as Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman, the most important, most influential conservative economist of the 20th century held, that corporations should exist solely to create maximum profit for their shareholders?” All three agreed that it was not an either/or proposition, but Romney hit it out of the park (“This is a wonderful philosophical debate. But you know what? We don't have to decide between the two, because they go together. … What happens with profit is that you can grow the business. You can expand it. You have working capital and you hire people.”). Perry touched on his flat tax plan and ended his remarks with the crowd-pleasing slogan, “We need to go out there and stick a big old flag in the middle of America that says ‘Open for business again.’”; and Gingrich demolished the faulty premise of the question and – as has become his signature flourish – took a swipe at the media:

Henry Ford started as an Edison Electric supervisor who went home at night and built his first car in the garage. Now, was he in the 99 percent or the one percent?  Bill Gates drops out of college to found Microsoft. Is he in the one percent or the 99 percent? Historically, this is the richest country in the history of the world because corporations succeed in creating both profits and jobs, and it's sad that the news media doesn't report accurately how the economy works.

When Bartiromo challenged him to give an example, and Gingrich pointed out, “I have yet to hear a single reporter ask a single Occupy Wall Street person … for example, ‘Who is going to pay for the park you are occupying if there are no businesses making a profit?’”