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Mike Huckabee just channelled Jed Bartlet during an answer about his suggestion in a sermon that wives should submit themselves to their husbands. Huckabee clarified the Biblical quote he was referring to: "As wives submit themselves to the husbands, the husbands also submit themselves."
There's a West Wing episode where President Bartlet hears a pastor quote the first half of the same passage. Later, speaking with the First Lady, he points out the second half. So either Huckabee knows the Bible really well, or he's a closet Aaron Sorkin fan.
(In the meantime, anyone got a YouTube link? Lemme know.)
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In response to a question on foreign policy, Rudy Giuliani goes waaay out of his way to squeeze in this canned line: “The kind of change Democrats are talking about is taking the change out of your pocket.”
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Chris Wallace asks Romney whether the primary results in New Hampshire suggest the people value experience over his message of “change.”
His response could have come out of a certain Democratic senator’s mouth. Paraphrased: If you stick with the same people, I’m convinced you’re going to see same results. If you send the same people back to Washington to sit in different chairs, nothing happens.”
McCain then rebuts charges that he’s a Washington insider: “Ask Jack Abramoff if I’m an insider in Washington. You’d probably have to go during visiting hours because he’s in prison.”
Correction, Jan. 14, 2008: This item originally misspelled Jack Abramoff’s name.
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McCain conflates trading with Arab nations with trading with al-Qaida. "I don’t want to trade with al-Qaida, all they want to trade is burqas," he says, smiling smugly. "I don’t want to travel with them, all they want is one-way tickets."
That's almost as good as Thompson's remark about the Iranian boats: "One more step and they would have been introduced to the virgins they were looking forward to seeing."
That's great, first we had the Hillary debate. Now we get the racism debate! Welcome to South Carolina.
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Carl Cameron tries to play Ron Paul off against his crazy 9/11 conspiracy theorist supporters. Will Paul tell them to renounce their beliefs?, Cameron asks.
He might as well have asked a cat to bark. Paul, good libertarian that he is, refuses to denounce them. He says he doesn’t agree, but that they’re entitled to their own opinions. “So please can I participate in the current debate?” Big applause.
Paul must know he's being kept around as something of a side show. It's the least he can do to request legitimate policy questions.
UPDATE 9:41 p.m.: Moments later, Paul gets laughed out of the room for railing against a "rush to judgment" surrounding the faceoff with Iranian boats, which he compares to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Mitt Romney gets in a pretty devastating slam: "I think Congressman Paul should not be reading as many of Ahmadinejad’s press releases." Paul looks like he might cry.
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We’re not in New Hampshire anymore.
Thompson butts in on a question about the Reagan coalition so he can rattle off a litany of attacks on Huckabee. He thinks we have an “arrogant foreign policy,” says Thompson. “He thinks Guantanamo should be closed” and the prisoners brought into the American court system. “He has the endorsement of the NEA.” “He said he’d sign a bill to ban smoking nationwide.” And so on. He makes Huckabee sound so reasonable!
South Carolina is make-or-break for Thompson. And with Huckabee's popularity among southern Baptists posing a major threat, Thompson has to pull out all the stops.
When he’s done, he gets the first burst of applause of the night. Could that be the sound of Thompson bouncing?
Update 11:33 a.m.: Yes, we changed the headline. Sorry!
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Finally, Rudy Giuliani gives a less-than-absolutist answer on the question of whether tax cuts raise revenues. “The reality is some tax cuts lead to revenues, some tax cuts don’t lead to revenues,” he says. That’s a big change from his previous stark statements.
“Let me give you an example,” he says. "If you cut the corporate tax from 35 percent to 30 percent," that will stimulate the economy and raise revenue. “Our corporate tax is second highest in the world.” He doesn't give examples of tax cuts that wouldn't raise revenue, but at least he acknowledges their existence.
The most important thing, he says, is to “guard against overtaxing, overspending, overregulating, and oversuing.”
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After blocking Ron Paul from Sunday's debate, FOX News adjusted the cutoff standards to be either a fifth-place finish in New Hampshire primary or to have at least five percent in national polls. The first criterion allows Paul in. The second admits Thompson. Sounds like the result of some backroom negotiations, especially after the Internet practically exploded at Paul's exclusion.
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Check back here starting at 9 p.m. for live updates on tonight's Republican debate in Myrtle Beach, S.C.
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Remember a few months ago when the Republicans spent an entire debate slamming Hillary Clinton? ABC sets this up as the Obama debate with a great question: Why not Barack Obama?
The candidates cite his health care plan, his lack of experience, etc. Only Mike Huckabee decides to praise him—probably to remind people of his own co-victory in Iowa. Paraphrased: Sen. Obama has changed the way Americans look at politics. It’s not a horizontal line anymore: not just left-right, conservative-liberal. He transcends labels. He’s exciting people about voting who have never voted before.
And that's coming from a Republican. Obama couldn’t have asked for a better endorsement if he'd written it himself. It's also something Huckabee could regret saying if, however unlikely, he ends up facing Obama in the general.
UPDATE 10:32 p.m.: What does Obama think of all this attention? He weighs in during the Dem debate: "I was flipping back and forth between the Republicans and football."
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Romney was asking for it. Look at the set-up he gave his opponents: “And when we sit down and talk about change, I’ll say not only can I talk about change, I’ve lived it.”
John McCain can’t resist: “Gov. Romney, we disagree on a lot of issues, but I agree you are the candidate of change.”
But Fred Thompson has been saying that!
Mocking Romney's shifting stances on the issue, Thompson called him the candidate of change. "He changes his position from time to time on it."
How about some attribution, McCain? Thompson is a gentleman not to take credit.
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Romney is bearing the brunt of just about every attack tonight. His only breather was when he and Giuliani got to tag-team Ron Paul on foreign policy.
The reason this keeps happening, a friend points out, is that Romney is the most unsympathetic person onstage. He can’t play the victim because he doesn’t appear to have feelings. His two emotions appear to be plastic joy and sour frustration. That’s why Huckabee can toss off a withering aside—and Romney can look visibly irked—without paying any political penalty.
The format also seems to hurt him more than others. The other candidates are eager to pounce on him—he is jockeying for first in New Hampshire polls, after all—and Gibson isn’t really intervening. A long spat with McCain over whether McCain's immigration plan constitutes amnesty ends up reflecting worse on Romney, if only because he's getting slammed from both sides. That's when McCain deals the second zinger of the night: "You can
spend your fortune on your attack ads, but it won’t be true."
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Rudy Giuliani: We have the best health care in the world. People come from around the world to get treated in America.
Ron Paul: Americans are actually going to India to get heart surgery for half price.
Maybe they just run in different circles.
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What is Thompson thinking?
In his first soliloquy, he gives a disquisition on how Cold War foreign policy led to the theory of preemption. Now he’s going on about how the Bill of Rights informs his world view.
I’m trying to picture the strategy session that led to this performance. Fred, you’ve been too … too engaging. Just pull back a little. Relax. Channel your inner high school history teacher.
If Thompson got up and left the room while the camera was looking away, I'm not sure I'd notice.
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The candidates are sitting around a semicircular table. Looks more like an academic panel than a presidential debate. On the upside, it means no silly WCW-style entrances.
The first question – "Would you run on George W. Bush’s foreign policy or run away from it?" – brings the conversation back to Iraq after weeks of focusing on domestic issues. You can tell ABC wants this to be a high stakes debate – no attempt to avoid the most heated issues, a la PBS.
Huckabee is ready for the question. He cites Rumsfeld’s “we go to war with the army we have” quote as an example of the Bush administration’s “bunker mentality”: “I felt that the proper way to approach the war was we go to war with the army that we need, and we make sure we have that army when we do go to war.”
As Thompson gives his blah answer, you can see Ron Paul rocking back and forth, itching to jump in. (And the cameraman knows it; he keeps cutting back to Paul.)
John McCain acts all magnanimous, praising President Bush for his foreign policy and praising Giuliani – a decidedly unrisky move, given McCain’s status in New Hampshire right now.
Finally, Paul has his say – his usual arguments about preemptive war and the Golden Rule – and Rudy and Mitt both pounce. Their gists: It’s not us; it’s them. (The terrorists.) After Romney mentions Islamist theorist and activist Sayyid Qutb, Huckabee gratuitously mentions the date on which Qutb died. See, he knows stuff about other countries!
Soon after, Huckabee lands the first major blow. Romney is talking about his "views," when Huckabee interrupts: “Which one?” The whole press room goes “Ohhhhh!” Romney’s looks like he just involuntarily regurgitated some bile.
Finally, the whole thing devolves into a free-for-all. Gibson holds up a “time out” sign. Anarchy.