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.

The annals of backlash

The Republicans start to come to their senses on Medicare:

After House Republican leaders pushed through a budget that contained a politically charged plan to overhaul Medicare, the chairman of the House tax-writing committee suggested Thursday that he did not intend to draft legislation turning the proposal into law any time soon.
The comments by Representative Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, coupled with remarks by other top Republicans, suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal was firmly on hold even though lawmakers had taken a risky vote to support it in the House.
At a health policy forum at the National Press Club, Mr. Camp noted that Democrats had resisted the Republican approach and said he was “not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in.”
“I’m not interested in laying down more markers,” Mr. Camp said.
His statement followed similar comments by other Republicans, including Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the budget chairman who developed the Medicare plan. They both said Republicans recognized that they were unlikely to win approval of their sweeping Medicare proposal in the debt-reduction talks that began at Blair House on Thursday.

If you fight them they will back down.

Douthat on social mobility

You know your country's got a problem with social mobility when even Ross Douthat thinks so:

As Republicans refine their proposals [...] they need to focus more on economic mobility than the Ryan budget does. Public policy is going to be made from inside a fiscal straitjacket for the foreseeable future. But within that straitjacket, Washington can favor policies that enhance working-class opportunity, while ruthlessly paring back those that subsidize the affluent. The goal shouldn’t just be small government, but what the economist Edward Glaeser calls “small-government egalitarianism.”
There are elements of this vision woven into the Ryan budget — cuts to farm subsidies, means-testing for Medicare, and promises to go after tax expenditures that primarily benefit the rich. But at least in its initial draft, too much of the budget’s austerity is borne by downscale Americans. The Ryan proposal would repeal the Obama health care plan without replacing it, throwing the uninsured back into a broken insurance marketplace. It would trim Medicaid more enthusiastically than corporate welfare. And its central economic premise — that lowering marginal tax rates guarantees widely shared prosperity — was tested and found wanting during the Bush era.

I think Douthat is an ideological hack, but I'm glad that this discussion is happening on the Right. I honestly never thought I would hear a Republican suggest that trickle-down doesn't work. He still thinks the Ryan budget is a serious proposal, but this is the first glimmer of hope I've seen in a while that there are mainstream, relatively high-profile Republicans who care about governing (as opposed to just winning elections). Now if only he were in Congress...

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: