Why Gingrich Won the Debate

David Weigel has a good analysis in Slate of why Gingrich won the debate last night. Bottom line: he's the best debater.

Gingrich never allowed himself to get stuck [...]. His rivals, cursed in their own ways with weaker debating skills, kept letting him out. Ron Paul, never a comfortable attacker, chided Gingrich for consulting for Freddie Mac in the run-up to the financial crisis. "As you say, normally, in your own speeches, the housing bubble came from the Fed inflating the housing supply," said Gingrich. A one-two punch: He called Paul a phony and called himself innocent. "I was in the private sector," he explained, "and I was doing things in the private sector." He charged for his insights. "You're allowed to charge money for them. That's called free enterprise."

This was pure distraction. "Free enterprise," as conservatives like to think about it, has nothing to do with the health of the government. Gingrich was referring to a period when he used his clout and connections to charge a government agency as a consultant. But he slipped so quickly in and out of the explanation that no one nabbed him for it.

 Sounds about right to me - Gingrich is a smart guy, no question about it. As Weigel puts it:

When he talks to Republicans, especially to Republican voters who may not be inclined to back him, Newt Gingrich wins them over with a promise. He will outsmart Barack Obama. He will challenge him to "seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates," as he said last week at the Republican Jewish Coalition's confab. The president can even "use a teleprompter," jokes Gingrich. It's one of the tightest punchlines in conservative politics.

Tonight's debate in Iowa was the first since Republicans agreed that Gingrich was their presidential front-runner. They've started to imagine him facing off against Barack Obama, the president they consider a pure media creation who can't put two words together unless they're in blue type on a screen in front of him.

While in any case "seven Lincoln-Douglas-style debates" will never happen (every election cycle someone yearns after a return to those, and they never happen, because the risks are too high for everyone involved), there's no question that Gingrich would probably be the most fun to watch Obama debate against. The Republican idea that Obama can't hold his own is obviously fantasy, but this is a party that hasn't been overly concerned with reality for some time, so no problem there.

I think Gingrich's biggest problem, fundamentally, is that no one likes him. He had famously bad relationships with just about everyone he worked with in Congress, and I think he'd have a hard time building a solid working relationship with the party mandarins if he won the nomination - especially because the establishment has lined up solidly behind Romney and might view a last-minute Gingrich upset as illegitimate.

In any case, Democrats should not be concerned. Gingrich is a crank, and he's a scary crank - Gary Trudeau in Doonesbury famously drew him as a bomb with the fuse lit. As we've seen since he's become the "front-runner", he might be good at wiggling out of other people's traps but he's so good at sabotaging himself with his scary, crazy ideas (legalize child labor!) that it hardly matters. I've seen several columnists ask, independently, a question along the lines of "is this really the guy we want with his finger on the button?", and I think that will resonante with voters.

I still think Romney will be the nominee because Republicans always nominate whoever's next in line. But if Gingrich were to get the nomination, I think we'd see a general with low turnout as voters unhappy with both choices stayed home, but I think Obama would win comfortably as swing voters would see him as the safer pair of hands.

Founding Father-worship watch

Janet Daley, writing in the Telegraph, accuses Obama of abandoning the Founding Fathers'... unequivocal support of foreign adventurism in the name of spreading democracy? Or something? It's such a Neocon whitewash of American history that it's hard to know what to say.

[W]hat does [Obama's hesitation about Libya] say about the role that America is choosing to adopt on the global stage? That in future we can expect it to follow rather than lead? That it has abdicated its role as defender and standard bearer for the principle of freedom – the idea that all men are born with inalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, which the great founding documents of the United States declare to be universal and not simply the birthright of residents of one nation?

The point is further driven home by the headline, "If the Founding Fathers could see Obama now". Never mind the tradition of American isolationism (inspired by George Washington, no less!) which Daley dismisses with a flip comment about "pragmatic isolationism with which America has experimented before (only to repent later)". "Later", of course, being 200 years later.

All about jobs, jobs, jobs

Paul Krugman, as so often, speaks my mind. In his column this week he points out that in all the clamor to reduce the deficit, the important discussion about job creation that was going on before the election has been completely left to one side, while unemployment is still sky-high. And once again, President Obama didn't even let the fight start before he caved:

I still don’t know why the Obama administration was so quick to accept defeat in the war of ideas, but the fact is that it surrendered very early in the game. In early 2009, John Boehner, now the speaker of the House, was widely and rightly mocked for declaring that since families were suffering, the government should tighten its own belt. That’s Herbert Hoover economics, and it’s as wrong now as it was in the 1930s. But, in the 2010 State of the Union address, President Obama adopted exactly the same metaphor and began using it incessantly. [...]

So who pays the price for this unfortunate bipartisanship? The increasingly hopeless unemployed, of course. And the worst hit will be young workers — a point made in 2009 by Peter Orszag, then the White House budget director. As he noted, young Americans who graduated during the severe recession of the early 1980s suffered permanent damage to their earnings. And if the average duration of unemployment is any indication, it’s even harder for new graduates to find decent jobs now than it was in 1982 or 1983.

Obama's not a fighter, and I'm sure he thinks he's got this all figured out. I almost trust him, because over and over again he's surprised me by how well he plays the long game. But emphasis on the almost.

This week's No Duh Moment from the GOP, and why they haven't got a prayer

Politico is not exactly the most high-brow publication out there. But today's article, "GOP reality check: Obama looking tougher to beat in 2012", if it's accurate, shows that the Republicans still really don't get it. The premise of the article is that the Republican optimism of the last two years that Obama would go the way of Jimmy Carter in 2012 was perhaps misplaced. Why? Well let's let the Republican frontbench explain it:

Mike Huckabee: “You just don’t go against a billion-dollar mountain of money, a guy who’s already won the presidency once – but he gets to fly in on Air Force One and make all his campaign stops with the trappings of the office.”

Haley Barbour: “Incumbent presidents don’t lose very often, particularly if it’s a president who has taken over from the other party.”

Chris Christie: “He proved he could win once, so that’s one more time than anybody else who has run.”

That last is a staggeringly stupid thing for a pretty smart guy to say. So never mind Obama's policy successes, never mind his statesmanship, never mind any of the man's actual talents. And also never mind the GOP's lack of coherent policies, lack of desire to govern rather than score points, lack of party coherence and above all lack of a candidate. Obama will win because he's already president. I mean, like, duh.

There are more sensible people who offer their opinions in the article. But, significantly, none of them are running for president. It seems like the smart folks in the Republican Party are sitting this one out. So who does that leave us with? Seems to me like a whole slate of not-yet-candidates who each have at least one big reason that they're unelectable. Here's my breakdown, for what it's worth: