NATCHITOCHES, La., January 26, 2012—Mitt Romney finally has a pulse.
There were signs of it on Monday in Tampa, where Romney managed a decent performance against his current biggest threat, Newt Gingrich, but if Tampa was an improvement over his South Carolina debates, Thursday's debate in Jacksonville showed that the improvement was for real.
Romney spent most of the last year as the presumptive GOP front-runner. The Romney campaign assumed that their man would remain the front-runner and could stay above the fray. The other candidates would battle it out, take each other down, and in the end only Romney would be left standing.
His campaign decided that Romney should avoid spontaneous contacts with the press. The candidate and his family stood remote from the media conversation, unapproachable and thoroughly scripted. The strategy was a good match for Romney's personality. By all accounts a numbers man, he's not good at expressing passion or showing empathy. He's not a people person.
South Carolina showed that Romney's above-it-all strategy is flawed. A Romney loss there was always likely, but it shouldn't have been as bad as it was. Gingrich was forceful and pugnacious in the debates, Romney foolishly dithered about releasing his tax returns, and voters decided that the Tin Man was a bad choice to face Obama. Romney came across as wooden and lacking the common touch, artificial and cold.
His performance in Jacksonville didn't see the emergence of a vigorous, passionate Mitt Romney, but he was assertive, forceful, and clearly had a pulse. He finally stopped being defensive of his wealth, saying, "I'm proud of being successful; I'm proud of being in the free-enterprise system that creates jobs for other people. I'm not going to run from that. I'm proud of the taxes I pay. My taxes plus my charitable contributions this year, 2011, will be about 40%. So look, let's put behind this idea of attacking me because of my investments or my money, and let's get Republicans to say, you know what, what you've accomplished in your life shouldn't be seen as a detriment; it should be seen as an asset to help America."
This was the performance Romney's supporters had been desperate to see. It wasn't great, he'll have to up his game before next fall, but it had Gingrich off balance and made Romney seem the stronger candidate.
Gingrich did poorly. He was put on the defensive over immigration. He'd called Romney anti-immigrant in ads that were later pulled, but reiterated at the debate that Romney was the most anti-immigrant candidate on the stage. An outraged Romney went on the attack, indignantly pointing out that his father was born in Mexico, his father-in-law in Wales, and calling Gingrich's language "inexcusable." In response to Gingrich's repeated comment that grandmothers might be deported, Romney retorted, "the problem isn't 11-million grandmothers. Our problem is 11-million people getting jobs that many Americans, legal immigrants would like to have."
When Gingrich brought up Romney's foreign bank accounts and investments in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Romney lectured him on the nature of blind trusts and mutual funds, pointed out that Gingrich himself had made a profit off of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and then asked whether Gingrich knew what was in his own investments. Gingrich was obviously unprepared for the question.
In the contest between Romney and Gingrich, Romney was the clear victor. But two other candidates participated, and neither had a bad night.
Rick Santorum made some strong shots against Romney on Massachusetts health care, but a couple of times he came to Romney's defense. "Can we set aside that Newt was a member of Congress and Newt used the skills that he developed as a member of Congress to go out and advise companies, and that's not the worst thing in the world, and that Mitt Romney is a wealthy guy because he worked hard and he's going out and working hard." It isn't unlikely that Santorum wants to position himself for the second spot on the ticket, no matter who takes the top spot.
Ron Paul continued to hit his major themes, arguing for instance that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should have been sold off years ago and that Federal Reserve lines of credit should have been severed. In response to questions about illegal immigration, he observed that American resources should be moved from protecting the Afghan-Pakistani border to protecting our own.
One of Paul's best arguments, though not forcefully made, was that reform in Cuba would be more quickly achieved by engagement rather than confrontation. The other candidates demurred, but the movement of people and resources from Miami to Havana would probably kick the last supports out from under Castro's decrepit regime.
Paul and Santorum were often sidelined during the more heated exchanges between Romney and Gingrich. In this case, it probably made them seem a little more statesmanlike. The debate did them no harm and may have done them some good. But the clear winner was Romney, the clear loser, Gingrich.
Read more:
How Romney can win over the conservatives
CNN Florida Debate--Not great, but not bad
Mitt Romney, real conservative
Newt Gingrich, a one-man CREEP
The race of the RINOs - Republicans In Name Only
Florida GOP NBC Debate: Beth Reinhard of the National Journal is a national disgrace
Mitt Romney and the real state of our union
Newt Gingrich affair: Time to review the rules
James Picht is the Senior Editor for Communities Politics and teaches economics at the Louisiana Scholars' College in Natchitoches, La., where he went to take a break from working in Moscow and Washington. But he fell in love with the town and with the professor of Romance languages, so there he stayed. Now he teaches, annoys his children, and makes jalapeno lemonade. He's glad the debates are over for a month. He tweets, hangs out on Facebook, and has a blog he totally neglects at pichtblog.blogspot.com.
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