It’s all eyes on Texas Governor Rick Perry in tonights GOP debate. Perry: the Texas Governor who conservative admirers consider a kind of George Bush who could get conservatism “right” — and who some liberals now define by using the punch line “he’ George Bush without brains.” But no matter what people think of Perry this is agreed: he is a smart politician, an underestimated politician who has never lost a race, and he fits the qualities that many 21st century conservatives want to see in a nominee. A lot of Republicans now see a way to flee former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a former moderate Republican governor who is in the Presidential race and also a bigger race to distance himself from his former political incarnation.
Plus there’s this: if Rick Perry gets the nomination, he’ll be running against a Barack Obama whose reputation decreases each day as a)a skillful politician, b)an effective President, c)someone to be feared. And then there’s this: when Ed Rollins said he was leaving as Rep. Michele Bachmann’s campaign manager due to health reasons, a good chunk of the punditry felt the real reason was the fact that Perry is quickly overshadowing Bachmann and the old media conventional wisdom about her being fascinating or having a chance to catch on and get the nomination has deflated almost as quickly as Barack Obama’s former perceived status as a skillful politician and President who might solve problems effectively.
*** Do Perry and Romney mix it up? The obvious focus of tonight’s debate — which begins at 8:00 pm ET and which airs on MSNBC — will be on Perry. Will the newly minted front-runner hold up to the scrutiny? Will he mix it up with the other GOP candidates (especially Romney) as easily as he’s done on the campaign trail? Or will he try to try to be more statesmanlike in his national debut? As for Romney, he has been much more aggressive since losing his front-runner status. Do we see a different Romney than we saw at his previous two debates (in New Hampshire and Iowa), when he went unscathed?
The main focus of the debate at the Ronald Reagan Library in the Simi Valley, near Los Angeles, will be on whether Texas governor Rick Perry, who only entered the race last month, can consolidate his frontrunner status.
Tom Mann, a political analyst at the Brookings Institution, said: “It is interesting because of Rick Perry, and the fact that he has sky-rocketed to the lead in the Republican field without many people having a firm hold on him, just some impressions.”
In spite of eight on the platform in the debate, the nomination is already shaping up as a two-horse race between Perry and Mitt Romney, according to the polls, with Michele Bachmann trailing in third place along with outsider Ron Paul.
Mann said Perry’s record of speeches and writing leaves him vulnerable. He said: “The question is whether Romney can show some signs of life and put himself back into the thick of the race. Everything else is beside the point. There are no other plausible candidates for the nomination. The others are just window-dressing on the side.”
Job creation will be one of the dominant issues in the debate, which comes the day before Obama’s speech to a joint session of Congress in which he will propose a job stimulus package that that will cost $300 billion to cut taxes, help state governments and pay for the building or rebuilding of roads, bridges and other infrastructure projects.
To appease Republicans, Obama will propose the $300 billion in spending will be matched by $300 billion in cuts elsewhere.
Perry received a pre-debate boost this morning when the Wall Street Journal, whose opinion pages remain a bastion of conservatism, offered a damning verdict on a jobs plan put forward on Tuesday by Romney, a relative moderate compared to almost all the rest of the field.
Even before the Texas governor entered the race, Romney had started downplaying his own single term as governor of Massachusetts while highlighting his business career. That presents an obvious contrast with Perry, who has been governor since 2000 and was first elected to public office in 1984. “I am a conservative businessman,” Romney recently told a convention of veterans in Perry’s backyard of San Antonio. “I have spent most of my life outside of politics, dealing with real problems in the real economy. Career politicians got us into this mess, and they simply don’t know how to get us out.”
Expect to hear a lot more from Romney during the debates about the “real economy” and “career politicians,” although this strategy is far from foolproof. “Real” is an adjective not often applied to Romney, a buttoned-down multimillionaire from Massachusetts who recently has faced awkward questions about his plans to expand his beachfront house in La Jolla, Calif. Perry may be a “career politician,” but he is much better than Romney at connecting with an audience.
Still, the less-seasoned debater from Texas is new to the extraordinary pressures of a nationally televised debate with eight candidates on stage. His rocket-fueled trajectory in the polls demands that he back it up with a strong debate performance. He’s already come up with a snappy retort to Romney’s “real economy” line, insisting: “Texas is the real economy.”
Perry is also expected to draw elbows from some of the lesser-known candidates as they bid for more attention. Rick Santorum has questioned the sincerity of Perry’s opposition to same-sex marriage, while Jon Huntsman has mocked his skepticism of climate change and evolution. Polls suggest that Huntsman’s criticism is unlikely to carry much weight with the conservative majority in Republican primaries, but it might complicate Perry’s path with better-educated GOP voters, for whom he has displayed a strong appeal in recent surveys.
Perhaps the candidate with the most to lose from Perry’s entrance is Bachmann, because the Texan directly threatens her tea party and evangelical base. Their dynamic will be one of the most important takeaways from the debates. While Huntsman has come at Perry from the left, Bachmann’s potential swipes would come from the right, possibly questioning his moderate stance on immigration or his efforts in 2007 to require girls to receive vaccinations for a sexually transmitted disease that causes cervical cancer.
While Perry, who has only limited experience debating, is mostly expected to attempt to hold serve during the event, his fellow candidates will likely go on the offensive in an attempt to steal some of the media spotlight that has focused on the Texan of late.
In a likely preview of Wednesday’s action, Paul unveiled a new ad on Tuesday that took direct aim at Perry, labeling him “Al Gore’s Texas Cheerleader” for his 1988 endorsement of the Democrat’s (ultimately failed) presidential bid.
Bachmann is also likely to go on the attack. The Minnesota congresswoman’s campaign appears to be sputtering somewhat in recent weeks, despite winning the Iowa straw poll last month, and could benefit from a high-profile sound bite or two, all the more so if it were to come at the expense of Perry.
The most anticipated clash, however, is the one that may occur between Perry and Romney, who had previously been the clear-cut GOP front-runner before the Texas governor shook up the race.
In previous debates, Romney has been mostly content to lay low and avoid directly engaging with his fellow GOP candidates. But that may change Wednesday now that it appears clear that he won’t be able to keep his head down and simply coast to his party’s nomination.
“Both Romney and Perry have to strike a balance,” Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics, told Politico. “Romney has to take on Perry without seeming desperate. Perry has to be in control without seeming anesthetized. Of the two, Perry’s got the easier job.”
The Politico’s Ben Smith notes that GOP political maven Karl Rove sees Perry facing a major problem due to a book he wrote:
It’s hard to overstate what a liability “Fed Up!” — published just last year — is for a guy who is otherwise an extremely strong candidate. You have to take him at his word that he would never have written it if he’d planned to run; and he doesn’t seem to have settled on a strategy for dealing with it.
His first approach, which featured him and his aides demanding that reporters “read the book” — with the suggestion that it was being misinterpreted — backfired, because reporters read the book and wrote more stories about his unpopular views.
Karl Rove today on ABC called it “his biggest challenge”:
ROVE: What they’ve done thus far is, I think, inadequate. Which is to basically say, “look, we didn’t write the book with the presidential campaign in mind.” Well, okay, fine. But they are going to have to find a way to deal with these things. Because, as you say, they are toxic in a general election environment and they are also toxic in a Republican primary. If you say Social Security is a failure and ought to be replaced by a state-level program, then people are going to say: “What do you mean by that?” And make a judgment based on your answer to it. Each candidate has strengths. Each candidate also has challenges. This, for Governor Perry is his challenge. Now he’s got formidable strengths. But this is his biggest challenge.
But President Barack Obama faces big challenges, too. And not just the economy and polls that are going down so far south that any day he’ll see a sign “WELCOME TO THE SOUTH POLE.” Rumblings from Dennis Kucinich — hardly the voice of election winning strategy for his own party, let alone his party’s liberal wing — about a primary challenge are sure to get Republicans salivating. But Obama is facing a slew of bad news as he heads into his jobs speech — the one where he moved the date up a day when Speaker of the House John Boehner nixed his original date request.
Some news stories right now:
All of it boils down to this:
The Republicans have an opening.
Rick Perry has an opening.
Will Perry and the GOP seize it? Watch the debate tonight to see if it looks like there is any attempt by debates to talk to more than Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity fans.
And Obama: does he think one more well delivered speech can turn the tide? Or has he decided to finally go to the matt for his policies, sink or swim, and let the voters decide.
Because right now it looks as if voters are deciding — which is why Democrats may be starting to dread 2012.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0911/62806.html#ixzz1XHaUYseX
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.