Winners:
Huckabee:
No real mistakes. Lots of good lines. Showed some substance, but not much.
He is the winner if Bull Moose Republicanism is a good idea. If not, then he is the winner rhetorically, but his ideas are unsound.
Would the rest attack after Iowa? Not likely.
For reasons of their own, they all need Huck in the race and they are afraid of his wit.
For the first time, Huckabee put his total values package on display.
If you think libertarian=conservative, then you cannot see how he can square all his beliefs. If, like a good Burke conservative, you recognize that we are not going to repeal the New Deal immediately, then Huckabee makes sense.
He wants a small government, as small as he can reasonably and decently actually get. He wants one which acts, since the people want it to act, for the middle class, poor, and for traditional values.
Huckabee changed my mind tonight about “who he is.” Because he is religious (and anti-evolution) many think he is like the Boy Orator from the Platte, William Jennings Bryan.
Bryan, however, was never the successful executive that Huckabee has been.
In policies and rhetoric, Huckabee is most like the Bull Moose version of Theodore Roosevelt in his domestic policy ideas.
Roosevelt wanted a government big enough to counter-balance big business. He was a “trust buster” and conservationist. While not hating the rich, he did not trust them. He sounded a lot like the modern Huckabee.
Perhaps Huckabee should stop trying to channel Reagan (who was much more pro-business and radically free market) and start talking up T.R.
Huckabee’s foreign policy is still too inchoate for me to support him . . . there he is not Bryan (pretty much a pacifist) or Roosevelt (Mr. Big Stick), just a mess. Tonight he looks like he is heading toward Roosevelt. He just isn’t there yet, but give him a month. If he thought Bush’s policy arrogant, then Huckabee is right to be humble about his foreign policy since he has so much to be humble about with his foreign policy ignorance.
It is a sorrow sight to see a front runner for President forming his foreign policy on the run while we are War.
NRO types underestimate the appeal of TR Republicans at their peril. He is the first social conservative (I can recall) to try to revive it in my lifetime. It is a bad idea since we are no longer in the early twentieth century, but it might win the nomination.
Rudy:
He escaped this debate without making mistakes. He was crisp with some good lines. He saw the only other plausible national candidate (Romney) attacked and reminded us of his good foreign policy chops.
If his job is to bide his time and stay plausible, he did that . . . if he is still plausible.
Bluntly, he would lose a two way race with any pro-life candidate.
He needs McCain and Huckabee to stay in the race and for Romney to fail . . . but if he cannot crack high teens in New England now, why will he later?
Losers:
Thompson: Wake him up when he finally notices he is finished. He looked so bad and sounded so slow that my family began to feel sorry for him.
Commentators who think Thompson “won” this debate are living in a world where radio and newspapers dominate public attention. Welcome to the twenty-first century.
Thompson seems to confuse pronouncements with debating points.
Some might think he looked Presidential, but only if you are waiting for a guy who looks ready now to be a head on Mount Rushmore without bothering to have been an actual President.
McCain: He is a one state candidate, the Pat Buchanan of 2008.
He looks to win the next primary, but he reminded the rest of us that he is temperamentally unfit to be President. His attacks-with-a-smile are as disturbing as Microsoft putting a Smiley-Face on the Blue Screen of Death.
Running Oscar the Grouch McCain against Elmo Obama is a very bad idea.
Hard to Call:
Ron Paul: He says odd things. He has no coherent foreign policy or views on the economy, but that will not matter to his folk. He did well by them and they will keep supporting him.
If he needs third place to stay viable after the primary, this debate did not help.
Romney: He held his own, but everyone, just everyone, was shooting at him. If he had to change the story-line in this primary and win, then he failed. If conventional wisdom is right (and when is it?) and he must win next week, then this debate was at best useless.
If he can run a fifty state campaign (perhaps the only candidate who can), then he did very well. He looked presidential, knows his facts, and was (at times) inspirational. He took no cheap shots and made no gaffes.
Romney defended business against Huckabee’s TR style populism. He really is (at least now) a Reagan Republican.
As a Reagan Republican, that is one good reason I back Romney.
Random Utterly Superficial Observations:
Fred Thompson is very tall and very bald.
Mitt Romney is pretty tall and very hirsute. Every other candidate loves hating Mitt Romney. Why? It is in every other candidates self-interest to knock him out the race.
Ron Paul is very short and should receive every John Birch Society vote.
Fred Thompson seems able to sustain interest for one pithy comment before going back to sleep.
Rudy is, oddly, a pretty bad debater. He has no ability to make his message hang together.
Mike Huckabee did something mysterious to make the NRO people mad. He can adopt their positions and they still take shots at him.
An Obama/Huckabee ticket would irritate every blogger in America (including me) and carry every state in America.