WASHINGTON POST: Mitt Romney won big in last night’s Post/Bloomberg debate. Rick Perry disappeared for long periods. Jon Huntsman didn’t make much of a dent except for a couple of jokes. Herman Cain is now big time. While he enjoyed himself immensely and looked pretty fluent, my hunch is that this debate will be remembered as the moment when people started taking apart his 9-9-9 plan. It won’t survive the scrutiny.
In what I saw as the Rick Santorum-Newt Gingrich primary to challenge Cain and the non-RomneyPerry candidate, I thought Santorum won soundly. I conclude that because Newt was at his most outrageous and undisciplined, notably when he said: “If you want to put people in jail, I want to second what Michele [Bachmann] said, you ought to start with Barney Frank and Chris Dodd.” Ah, yes, let’s focus on jailing those we disagree with. This is America?
Santorum, in the meantime, scored by reminding New Hampshire residents who pay neither sales nor income taxes that Cain’s plan would impose a whopping nine percent sales tax. He also got at Cain and the frontrunners for supporting the Troubled Asset Relief Program. (I think Santorum is wrong about the issue, but most Republican primary voters agree with him.) And it did not hurt him among social conservatives that he managed to get in an argument that family breakdown is a major cause of poverty… (more)
