Gloves Come Off at Second GOP Debate

Tuesday night's Republican debate in South Carolina turned out to be the Zinger Debate, featuring the sharp exchanges and one-liners that TV producers dream about and crowds applaud.

Debates are about theater, and the Fox News debate in Columbia, S.C. was certainly theatrical, even including one show-stopping moment when Rudy Giuliani, who sits atop all national polls for the Republican nomination, sharply upbraided Ron Paul, who sits so far at the bottom his support is not really measurable.

Paul, a 10-term congressman from Texas, is a political exotic, a Libertarian who believes in a form of 18th century isolationism for America. In terms of the presidency, nobody cares what Ron Paul says, perhaps not even Ron Paul.

But when Paul said Middle Eastern terrorists "attack us because we've been over there; we've been bombing Iraq for 10 years," Giuliani saw an opening and took it.

"That's really an extraordinary statement," Giuliani said. "That's an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of September 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don't think I've ever heard that before, and I've heard some pretty absurd explanations for September 11th."

The audience erupted into its loudest and longest applause of the evening.

"And I would ask the congressman to withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn't really mean that," Giuliani said.

Paul withdrew nothing, but nobody cared. The Republican pack doesn't really have a second tier. It has a top tier — Giuliani, John McCain and Mitt Romney — and then you fall off a cliff.

The Cliff Dwellers are comprised of: Paul, Tom Tancredo, Sam Brownback, Duncan Hunter, Tommy Thompson, Mike Huckabee and Jim Gilmore.

Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, did have one zinger moment. (Though it is oddly missing from the official Fox News Channel debate transcript.)

"We've had a Congress that spent money like John Edwards at a beauty shop," Huckabee said.

The audience loved it, but note that Huckabee said "beauty shop" even though Edwards did not get his $400 haircuts at a beauty shop. (The barber came to him.) The use of "beauty shop" therefore seemed to be a sexual dig, a somewhat more sly form of Ann Coulter's calling Edwards a "faggot" recently.

Another Cliff Dweller moment came when Gilmore, a former governor of Virginia, was asked to defend his sneering characterization of the top tier as "Rudy McRomney."

He gladly did so, which only gave those attacked the opportunity to defend themselves.

McCain, who was much improved over his Simi Valley, Calif., performance, hit his talking points: He would reach across the aisle to Democrats; he has consistently been a conservative; and "my life, my experience, my knowledge of the military and national security qualifies me most to lead."

Romney once again gave a smooth, controlled performance except for one bizarre moment when he held up the bottom of his suit jacket and said: "Have you ever bought a suit and look at it and you can't tell if it is blue or black? That is how blue Massachusetts is."

Huh? Massachusetts is so blue it is almost black? Is that supposed to be some kind of racial statement? I doubt it, but it shows you the perils of live television.

Like when Giuliani, a former prosecutor, threw out the American concept of innocent until proven guilty when he said: "Fort Dix happened a week ago.

That was a situation in which six Islamic terrorists, who were not directed by al-Qaida but claimed to have been inspired by them, were going to kill our military in cold blood at Fort Dix."

Giuliani did repair some damage from the last debate, however. At that debate, he gave a confusing account of his pro-choice beliefs. Tuesday night, he defended his pro-choice position in a way that plays well even with some conservatives:

He said that while he opposed abortion personally, he respected a woman's right to choose because "you want to keep government out of people's lives, or government out of people's lives from the point of view of coercion, you have to respect that."

The toughest exchange of the evening came between Romney and McCain, when Romney said, as he has before on the stump, "My fear is that McCain-Kennedy would do to immigration what McCain-Feingold has done to campaign finance and money in politics, and that's bad."

McCain whacked back: "Well, I take and kept a consistent position on campaign finance reform. ... I have kept a consistent position on right to life. And I haven't changed my position on even-numbered years or have changed because of the different offices that I may be running for."

It was a good rejoinder not because it answered Romney's point — it didn't — but because it was dramatic and tough.

Which is, after all, what debates are about.

To find out more about Roger Simon, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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