Lets take a look at this Debate

We are a year away from the next Presidential election. You know what that means, time for people to start choosing sides again. Tonight, the second Republican Debate took place, this one at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. This was a debate that I think could actually be taken for face value because of the addition of Rick Perry into the mix. So I want to take a look at the candidates and their performance in tonight's festivities. There were 8 candidates on stage tonight: Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, Ron Paul, Herman Cain, and John Huntsman. It was billed as a debate between front runners Perry and Romney, with the others there to field questions as well...really I think it was the beginning of the end for Hunstman, Santorum, Cain, and Gingrich. In the end, there just aren't enough votes to go around, and if Republicans want to retake the White House next year, they are going to have to pull their votes together.

I'll get the superlatives out of the way first. Winner of the least questions fielded/least responses goes to Herman Cain. I think he has some good ideas, but he just doesn't have enough of a following to warrant the time for the questions. Best quote of the night is a tie.

Newt Gingrich: "I for one, and I hope 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." (Newt is trying to form "Team Evict Obama") It didn't work very well because Herman Cain jumped out in the very next response and called out anyone who came to mind.

Mitt Romney: "We have some differences between us, but we all agree this President's gotta go.The President is a nice guy, but he doesn't have a clue how to get this country working again."

Worst quote of the night has to also go to Romney: "First, we need to put up a fence..." Think we've seen that Mexican immigrants might know how to climb over a fence Mitt...

The winner of "Mr. Popularity" has to go to Rick Perry, who lead the way fielding 11 total questions and 5 rebuttals for a total response time of 15 minutes, 10 seconds. And surprisingly enough, he also had the lowest average response time, meaning that he was the only one who really followed the rules of the debate. He was also the only candidate to be featured in every multiple shot of the debate with 4 2-shots (Romney/Perry), 1 split screen(Perry/Santorum), 1 split screen(Perry/Gingrich), and 1 3-shot(Perry/Romney/Bachmann).

On the opposite side of the spectrum, the Most Likely to have his face on the Side of a Milk Carton Award goes to, and this one was actually pretty close, Herman Cain, who spoke for just 5 minutes, 40 seconds while fielding only 5 questions and forcing himself into 1 30-second rebuttal.

The rest of the response count/time goes like this:
Mitt Romney- 9 questions fielded, 2 rebuttals totaling 11 minutes, 58 seconds
Michelle Bachmann- 8 questions fielded(although I am counting the Libya question twice) and 1 rebuttal totaling 9 minutes, 11 seconds
Ron Paul- 7 questions fielded, 1 rebuttal totaling 9 minutes, 27 seconds
John Hunstman- 7 questions fielded, 1 rebuttal totaling 9 minutes, 1 second
Newt Gingrich- 5 questions fielded, 1 rebuttal totaling 6 minutes, 54 seconds
Rick Santorum- 5 questions fielded, 0 rebuttals totaling 6 minutes, 12 seconds

The Late to the Party Award goes to Newt Gingrich, who we didn't hear from until 17 minutes, 44 seconds into the debate.

The actual meat of the debate does not really coincide with how much each person got to talk. While Governor Perry was defending his executive order to mandate HPV vaccinations for 12 year old girls, and Mitt Romney tip toed around his actual job numbers while he was Governor of Massachusetts, Newt Gingrich had his usual strong debate performance, at one point calling out the national media for protecting President Obama by trying to turn Republicans on each other.

Michelle Bachmann successfully shot herself in the foot by regurgitating the same old rhetoric about strong leaders and repealing Obama care. I would guess that she might know something about putting people to work with a total of 28 children having grown up in her house...I wonder how many of her congressional aides are Bachmanns...

Herman Cain stuck to his guns and would not be drawn into helping the other candidates promote their agendas. He would only answer questions by talking about his own plans, which would be a great strategy if his plans didn't rely on the retirement plan adopted by Chile 20 years ago...Not sure Chile is the economic model that is going to get us out of our problem. I guess it couldn't hurt us anymore though.

John Huntsman used his short time to prove that a President needs to have private, public, and international experience. Then made sure we knew that he in fact had successful experience in all three areas. If Huntsman had a little more money, he might actually be a threat in this race. I would not exclude him for the possibility of a VP candidacy though. He seems to be poising himself for a run.

Rick Santorum was just there to add a pink tie to the proceedings. He had a few comments, but mostly piggy backed on Newt's policies, at one point out right giving Newt the credit. I don't see him lasting past Thanksgiving.

Ron Paul is a very crazy man. But he doesn't care and he will tell you exactly what he thinks. Just because he's crazy, doesn't mean he doesn't have some good ideas. I just don't think you win a national election by telling people that you want to take away ALL government mandates immediately, and offering gas for 10 cents a gallon. He's got the money to take this thing to the end, I just don't know if he has the gumption to take it all the way.

Getting down to the two candidates that this debate was really highlighting, Rick Perry had a good start talking about his 4.9% job increase in Texas, but took a few blows when asked about the poverty rate/graduation rate in his state.

There was one part of Mitt Romney's responses that caught my ear...I think Mitt read my blog the other night because he quoted my "Localizing Energy Production" Plan almost verbatim. So, thanks for reading Mitt! But he did fail a bit when arguing his job growth rate while Governor of Mass. and really didn't add anything new to the table.

Perry says social security is a ponzi scheme. Romney says it isn't. That's a push.

The one thing that we can really agree on about last night's debate, is that everyone on the stage is committed to the fact that, though they may not agree on who SHOULD be the President, they ALL agree that Obama should NOT be the President. All in all, it was 98 minutes of a debate that had 70 minutes of 8 candidates trying to sell us on their policies, and 28 minutes of Brian Williams doing his best to push his own agenda. I guess the thought of an unbiased debate is just too much to ask for. I'd like to see a debate where Bob Johnson, American Citizen, is the moderator. And the participants actually get equal time to offer their responses to the same questions. Until this field gets reduced, the debates will continue to not show us a whole lot of poll movement.

 Well, I had more to say about this last night, but I simply did not have the energy or the time to do so. I just finished watching the President kick off his re-election campaign in front of a joint session of congress...so now I will redeem myself by watching the open of the 2011 NFL season.

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