_____ Wins
I’ll compile some post-debate reaction from various quarters, as a matter of interest.
Andrew Sullivan declares McCain the winner, though not very enthusiastically. His word for Romney was “smarmy”, and for Giuliani “unimpressed”. Also a couple of soft spot mentions for Ron Paul.
Ed Morrisey of Captain’s Quarters declares Romney the clear winner. Agrees with us that Tommy Thompson tanked. COLDLY dismissive or Ron Paul, which surprises me. Also notes that Fred Thompson helped himself by staying out, something I agree with.
What do the Democrats think? Dailykos is polling its members, and Ron Paul is running an easy second, behind Zombie Reagan but almost twice the third place finisher, Romney.
The Corner is kind of all over the place. Most seem to think that Rudy lost, Romney won, and “McCain was the Zell Miller of the night”. I’m not sure how they mean that, but I agree just the same. I think the breakdown is: K-lo/Romney, Lowry/Rudy, everybody else sniping.
Powerline gives McCain the edge, also with Rudy as the bottom of the top three.
Mickey Kaus indecipherably thinks Duncan Hunter won. Because everybody cares what Mickey Kaus thinks (though also a soft spot for Paul).
Red State declares the two winners to be McCain and Fred Thompson.
Blue Sate declares it to be Ron Paul. With maybe Romney winning in terms of mainstream appeal.
Americablog has no opinion, save on Tommy Thompson’s gay firing comment, which by the way Thompson has ALREADY retracted.
Drudge’s poll has Romney winning in a walk.
Lew Rockwell’s site is abuzz all over, and not very divided, and close to declaring Jihad on Chris Matthews.
MSNBC, the host of the event, has a poll up, and in it, Ron Paul wins, Romney second.
For the record, if any of the trackbackers are wondering, of the three commentators on this site, I say Romney won, Rojas says Rudy. Both of us agree that Brownback and Paul had big nights.
Comment by Brad — 5/3/2007 @ 11:15 pm
Crooks and Liars points to this video clip of Ron Paul, saying “Paul talked about true conservative values, all of which run counter to the current reincarnation of the Republican Party.”
Of the same clip, The Right’s Field says “In a field of phony conservatives, Congressman Ron Paul (R-Surfside, Tex.) schools his fellow Republicans on traditional conservative political theory in less than a minute.”
SurveyUSA was polling the debate, and concurs with Rojas, Rudy wins, huge. Paul, incidentally, polls at 2%, tied (with Thompson) for worst (sample size: 317, MOE +- 5.6%).
Hotline seems to go more blow-by-blow than analysis. I think they say Rudy wins?
Co-host of the debate Politico declares Romney the winner, McCain the big loser.
They do add (they’re vehement about using a “playmaker” analogy; don’t ask):
Comment by Brad — 5/3/2007 @ 11:39 pm
The most interesting of those polls by far is MSNBC’s.
Conducted in an atmosphere too early for spin to take hold, the people weigh in on each candidate, positive, neutral, or negative. And BY FAR the most appealing candidate is…Ron Paul, at 45% favorable.
One can’t accuse Paul’s supporters of stacking the vote, because Paul doesn’t HAVE the 4500 supporters it would take to produce that number. That is, he didn’t until tonight.
Whether or not they deem him the “winner,” it’s clear that Middle America wants to hear more from Ron Paul.
Comment by Rojas — 5/3/2007 @ 11:45 pm
Paul is also running a strong third at Drudge. One might see the kos vote as a referendum on the war alone. Hard to make that case about Drudge’s usual readers. It’s looking more and more like Ron Paul is the big winner among the second tier. We’ll see if he starts registering in the national polls.
I’m a bit suprised that Brownback didn’t come across better to the broader audience. He may have spent too much time talking about actual policy substance.
Comment by Rojas — 5/3/2007 @ 11:51 pm
I don’t know if Paul will start registering in the polls, but he’s getting invited to the next debate (confirmed yesterday), and people are going to be giving him a look.
Comment by Brad — 5/3/2007 @ 11:57 pm
A showing in the 2-4% range would not shock me. There’s a substantial segment of the Republican electorate that nobody but him is speaking to.
Of course, to register in the polls the pollsters have to INCLUDE him in them. Surely after tonight we won’t be seeing any more purportedly “comprehensive” surveys that include Tancredo or Jeb Bush but not Paul.
SURELY not.
Comment by Rojas — 5/4/2007 @ 12:01 am
Surely.
You’re right though, 2-4% wouldn’t surprise me either; nor would it surprise me if Paul’s performance tonight proves to be pretty consistent. I think he can do these things from now until eternity.
Comment by Brad — 5/4/2007 @ 12:04 am
By the way…I’m going to weigh in with Rockwell on the “fixed” thing. If the media wants to see three candidates debate, then let them invite three candidates. If we’re going to have ten candidates on the same stage, OTOH, let’s have a set of equitable rules amongst them. I’d almost prefer overt exclusion to the pretense of inclusion we saw in Matthews’ conduct tonight.
Comment by Rojas — 5/4/2007 @ 12:04 am
I unfortunately missed this one too (for work, which has gotten somewhat hectic of late). Bah.
Comment by Adam — 5/4/2007 @ 6:15 am
MSNBC, the host of the event, has a poll up, and in it, Ron Paul wins, Romney second.
This poll used Range Voting with a 3-point spread. -1,0,1. Same as using 0-2. The only thing is, they didn’t give you an “abstain” option. The default vote was just a middle score.
Comment by weltschmerz — 5/4/2007 @ 10:25 am
Here’s Rolling Stone’s take. They call Ron Paul “too Mr. Rogers”.
There’s really not much to talk about. The debate felt like watching live versions of the ten candidates’ websites. No fireworks. Not even interesting flash animation.
But, Hey, did you hear about that Reagan guy? He sure was an optimist. City on a hill and all that.
If you just parachuted onto this planet I don’t think you could have picked out the frontrunners from this crowd.
A couple also-rans were self evident:
Tancredo seemed lost. For a single issue candidate he never seemed to get around to really talking about his signature issue. Which is immigration, by the way.
Tommy Thompson leapt at the chance to call for civil rights violations — firing people for being gay? A-OK — and otherwise failed to impress … other than with his expansive vocabulary.
Ron Paul, I suppose, gets points for standing up for true limited government, but he really could take some fighting lessons from Mike Gravel. These are crazy making times for libertarians as well as progressives. He was just too Mr. Rogers to get anyone’s juices flowing even when he talked about defending habeus corpus and killing the IRS.
McCain: He hit wasteful Washington spending pretty hard, but pulled his punches against Giuliani, making up some wierd story about how his dig about how police and firemen should be on the same radio frequency wasn’t a critique of Giuliani’s failure to implement such a system in New York before 9/11. Reflecting his inherited political team, he debated just like Bush used to, as though he were reciting lines from a neocon Hemingway novel. Tiny sentences. About fear. And Iran. And the line item veto. His applause lines about surrender and the Democrats had less sting because his hard-linerism was out of step even with GOP guys like Brownback and Huckabee. And did you see him want to shit a brick when he was asked if he believed in evolution?
Giuliani: Seems to have abandoned the straight talk on his pro-choice stance, waffling on abortion rights, while also muddying his strict-constructionist view, allowing that such justices might uphold Roe. He’s supposed to be the superstar candidate, the celebrity counterterrorist. But he came off as particularly average tonight, and his answers to the question about if he regretted his relations black New Yorkers — all about poverty and welfare and crime — veered uncomfortably close to Imus territory.
Duncan Hunter: Came off as a credible candidate. He stole all of Tancredo’s thunder on immigration and his unabashed support of the military industrial complex reminded me more of the Reagan I remember than anyone else’s policy positions. He had the presidentiality that Romney’s supposed to project, and a conversationality about his platform that both McCain and Giuliani lacked. Could get some movement.
Mike Huckabee: He was funny and charismatic. His anti-CEO schitck — sticking up for 50 year old guys losing their pensions should win him points with the Lou Dobbs crowd. He out classed Romney for sure. Though I don’t know if America’s ready for a creationist. (That goes for you, too, Brownback. Even more reason to forget Tancredo.)
Brownback: I think he might actually have won the debate. He articulated his worldview in a gracious way. He’s such an extremist … but he didn’t come off as a hater. He was conversational and articulate. Strayed comfortably away from his talking points and had a great line about killing something — the AMT, maybe? — behind a barn with a ‘dull axe’. Again, without looking at the polls, you might think he and Hunter and Gilmore were big top-three.
Gilmore: Weird looking and a bit too intent on introducing himself — he was a Governor, a chief executive, or so he told us about 34 times — and he needed some powder on that forehead, but he — like Brownback — actually articulated a coherent conservative message, and projected confidence and gravitas and everything the jumpy Romney was missing.
Romney: What can you say? He sure looked pissed at the beginning when Chris Matthews took a little too much pleasure in pointing out the fact he’d drawn the far left position on the stage. And the questions about just about everything early on put him on the defensive, such that he couldn’t even slam a slow pitch softball: His mindless gushing about the great heart of the American people was saccharin to the point of distasteful. If he didn’t have so much cash, you’d have to put him in the third tier at this point.
I know, I know. You can’t read too much into a debate like this. It’s like handicapping an NBA playoff series after the first pregame shoot-around. Or trying to predict who’s going to be the team to beat in baseball after watching spring training batting practice.
But A-Rod impresses in batting practice. You can tell the difference between him and, say, Xavier Nady. Tonight the supposed GOP superstars blended in with the guys who are just struggling to make the team. And that’s great news for the big names on the sidelines.
Comment by weltschmerz — 5/4/2007 @ 10:29 am
We now have another MSNBC poll, a day later, with 100,000 respondents, in which Paul is AGAIN prominent among the debate “winners”. Anyone care to argue that Paul’s got 100,000 secret volunteers stuffing the ballot boxes on his behalf? And if he does, isn’t that IN ITSELF enough to make him a force to reckon with in the primaries?
Today I was approached by multiple students–Catholic kids from one of the most Republican counties in America–asking me what I knew about Ron Paul.
At this point the ONLY people who aren’t buzzing about Ron Paul are the media spin-meisters. I am force to conclude that the self-anointed experts have called this one wrong.
America wants to hear more from Ron Paul.
Comment by Rojas — 5/4/2007 @ 1:30 pm
RCP has an MSM roundup here.
Comment by Brad — 5/4/2007 @ 1:43 pm
Amazingly, Ron Paul wins the WorldNetDaily poll as well.
Comment by Brad — 5/4/2007 @ 1:58 pm
Alright, my last reaction update (unless I come across something really good). Taking the Temperature of the Right-Wing Blogosphere on the debates.
On the whole, the big loser is Rudy, say they.
I think the best comments come from Jonah Goldberg.
On Romney: “I’m sorry but Romney still comes across like a well-cast actor in a movie of the week about a guy running for president.”
On McCain: “To hammer his points home McCain should hold his hand over an open flame – like G. Gordon Liddy – for the duration of each of his answers just to prove his steely resolve and his willingness to go to eleven in defense of America.”
plus the Ron Paul answer Laura mentioned.
Comment by Brad — 5/4/2007 @ 3:01 pm
Just as another anecdotal account, Ron Paul’s website has a section called “Join Us” where you put in your name to be notified of meetups in your area (or to just network generally; or so the Paul campaign can have tabs on people they might be able to tap later). As of Wednesday, I was still the only person within 50 miles of Pittsburgh registered on the site.
In the last couple days, a lot more people are trickling in (I get an email in my inbox for each new person that joins). You can put a comment along with your name and location when you register, and what’s been interesting is most of them don’t seem to be libertarians (i.e. those of us who already knew and were enthusiastic about Paul). Comments like these are pretty indicative:
Anecdotal and may not amount to much, but it does seem that at least some people are giving Paul, at worst, a serious look.
Mine, by the way, simply says “Time to take the ‘con’ back out of ‘conservative’.”
Comment by Brad — 5/5/2007 @ 12:53 am