You\u2019ve got to hand it to this year\u2019s GOP candidates.\u00a0 Saturday night for nearly two hours starting at 9:00, they debated.\u00a0 Sunday morning at 9:00, there they were, different town, different channel, doing it all over again.<\/p>\n
Some have observed that certain candidates \u2013 Romney is most often cited \u2013 are becoming better as a result of so many face-to-face events.\u00a0 Broadly, that\u2019s true.\u00a0 But to me it is more than this or that candidate has sharpened his game.<\/p>\n
In well functioning markets, there is something like a continual process of improvement that reaches all the players and works very fast.\u00a0 For example, first there was the cell phone, a very expensive brick.\u00a0 Soon someone made it smaller, someone else, smaller still, until it became tiny and free.\u00a0 Blackberry gave us a different kind of communications device, which Steve Jobs merged with cell phones into the iPhone, the first of the smart phones.\u00a0 Then someone added a camera.\u00a0 Someone else added an MP3 player.\u00a0 Anyway, we\u2019ve all seen this process in every market from PCs to automobiles to air travel.<\/p>\n
And now we are seeing it in presidential politics.<\/p>\n
Yes, at the start of the season, Mitt Romney was an eager but not particularly graceful or able candidate.\u00a0 Now he handles himself with aplomb in the give and take of the debate stage and in the turning around of left wing gotcha questions from the (with the exception of the more intelligent and probing Fox questioners) sanctimonious panels.<\/p>\n
But the same can be said of Gingrich and Santorum, both of whom have played off one another and Romney and he off them to hone increasingly stronger messages.<\/p>\n
At the beginning of the process, Romney had a story about himself but not about the country, where it is and where it needs to go, something other than boilerplate.<\/p>\n
In contrast, Gingrich was all about the American character and an agenda in keeping with it, not opposed to it, as is the administration\u2019s.\u00a0 That sense of vision was Gingrich\u2019s great differentiator.<\/p>\n
Then at Saturday night\u2019s debate, Romney tied the nature of the American people to the drivers of economic growth in a far more coherent and compelling way than he had before, as if he had learned from Gingrich, which you can be sure he had.\u00a0 Romney talked about the long familiar theme of entrepreneurship, but he put it in a broader context of national vision and national purpose.\u00a0 And he was right.<\/p>\n
Then at Sunday morning\u2019s debate, Santorum gave his best statement to date about the impact of family on economic wellbeing and growth \u2013 and the best statement of its kind from any national presidential stage in any election cycle. \u00a0He noted that if you finish high school and put off having children until you marry, your chances of living in poverty are two percent.\u00a0 Your chances of earning more the national median income are seventy percent.\u00a0 He then challenged the notion of an American middle \u201cclass.\u201d\u00a0 We have middle incomes in the United States, he said, but not a middle class or any classes, as such.\u00a0 He cautioned that the GOP should not buy into the left\u2019s class warfare lexicon.<\/p>\n
In effect Santorum upped the ante on Gingrich and Romney, tying social and economic issues together and making a profound and hitherto ignored point about the character of the nation.\u00a0 I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if some of this sensibility creeps into both his opponents\u2019 presentations in the weeks ahead.<\/p>\n
If Romney, Gingrich and Santorum appear to be learning from one another, the others don\u2019t.\u00a0 Perry has become a much better debater, but he is still the traditional set-piece-battle candidate.\u00a0 He\u2019s got his message, and he\u2019s sticking to it, which would be effective if he hadn\u2019t stumbled so badly in his initial hike with the troop.<\/p>\n
Perry and Huntsman are going there own ways.\u00a0 Huntsman had one particularly off-putting moment in the Sunday morning faceoff.\u00a0 He referred to the mean statements that others had made from the stage about gay rights and unions.\u00a0 But none had made mean statements about either.\u00a0 As so many times before, Huntsman seemed to be confusing the media with the electorate, the exact opposite of Gingrich, who over the months has proven particularly effective in calling out the leftwing biases of debate moderators.<\/p>\n
In this year of continuous improvement, Gingrich has absorbed Ronald Reagan\u2019s rule \u2013- which Reagan learned in Hollywood and applied to politics.\u00a0 Huntsman should learn it, too.\u00a0 Never confuse reviews with box office.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You\u2019ve got to hand it to this year\u2019s GOP candidates.\u00a0 Saturday night for nearly two hours starting at 9:00, they debated.\u00a0 Sunday morning at 9:00, there they were, different town, different channel, doing it all over again. Some have observed that certain candidates \u2013 Romney is most often cited \u2013 are becoming better as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1086,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions\/1086"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}