Hewitt Blog

Sunday morning's debate had a much smaller audience than last night's and a much sparkier beginning, but the same distortions brought about by having an Obama partisan moderate a debate among conservatives.  My thoughts on David Gregory's abysmal job of moderating will be over at NRO's The Corner later this morning, but on the key question of impact on actual voters, the debate could not have moved the needle for anyone much but almost certainly played into everyone's tentative decisions in New Hampshire. 

Gregrory got both Newt and Rick Santorum to take hard shots at Romney and Romney responded well.  On policy questions --the EPA especially-- Santorum, Gingrich and Romney all excelled, and I have to think New Hampshire voters in particular would have liked Romney's performance over the others especially given his answer on achieving real results despite having an overwhelmingly Democratic legislature opposite him. 

But I strongly suspect the former Speaker went a bridge too far in the last half hour --again egged on by Gregory-- and gave Romney the perfect opening to review the true statements in the SuperPac ads objected to by Newt.  Some on my Twitter feed believe Newt is no longer trying to win, and is instead on "a mission" to destroy Romney, but that doesn't seem right either.  He's trying to be both the happy warrior and to dethrone Santorum as the alternative to Romney by creating "Newt v. Mitt" headlines.  Quoting the New York Times doesn't seem to me to be the way to do that. Pushing back hard at Gregory's bias was.  The former overshadowed the latter, and probably killed any chance of even a small swing back to the Speaker. 

Mitt Romney's looks like he is going to win New Hampshire handily.  The field is going to remain splintered among alternatives headed into South Carolina.  The only thing Romney has to worry about is one of the other three dropping out and endorsing one of the other two, and that just doesn't seem likely. 

Two debates in 15 hours leaves the GOP race right where it was when they began, but they certainly have reminded everyone that the MSM is going to be working overtime for their guy Obama from now until November.

FYI: Since state mottos came up, here's the quick guide to all 50.  Ohio's is officially "With God all things are possible."  But it really is "Beat Michigan."

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That's the headline at Politico and it sums up the debate.  My quick reaction is also over at NRO's The Corner.  Bottom one: It was the worst performance by moderators at the most important debate of the season, but Romney and to a lesser extent Santorum used it to their advantage.

The George Stephanopoulos line of questions of contraception will should go into J School courses on how not to moderate debates.  After the exchange with Romney and being booed by the crowd for doubling and tripling down on an inane and irrelevant gotcha question, Steph looked like a concussion victim, and Diane Sawyer too wandered from subject to subject, including a "What about China?" head-shaker to Governor Huntsman.  Never has the MSM so obviously allowed its anti-GOP bias to show, but where will the candidates be tomorrow morning?  On NBC.  It is the GOP's own fault.

There are 450,000 absentees out in Florida.  Romney has got to hope lots of those ballots being filled out tonight.

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Even the New York Times has now figured out there is a reason to support defense spending: It powers technological innovation across the entire economy. That's not the primary or even secondary reason we spend on billions on defense, but it certainly adds another couple of  paragraphs to the already long indictment of Barack Obama's stewardship of the nation's national security.  Not only does his radical plan for downsizing the American military endanger the country, it also cripples technological innovation as a bonus benefit for those in the world hoping to see American power shrink.

The radical president's radical plans for the Pentagon should be at the center of the GOP presidential debates tonight and tomorrow, but with MSM at the controls, they will probably spend far too little time on the most important questions of all: How to protect the United States and the qualifications of the men on the stage to be Commander-in-Chief.

I asked callers yesterday two questions:  Who would you like to be the GOP's nominee if Iran starts a hot war in the Middle East before the election?  I also asked who they would want to be the Commander-in-Chief if such a war erupts in 2013 and not between now and November 2012?

It is possible to answer the questions with different names.  The first focuses on a candidate's ability to adopt to a rapidly changing political environment driven by a crisis in which President Obama will be at the center of events. 

The second question wonders aloud who is best equipped actually to lead a major war effort to victory.

On the second question at least, each of the four plausible GOP nominees has a claim.  Perry fans will cite his toughness, and Newt's legions his ability to inspire and cajole.  Romney supporters will note that a war is the greatest executive challenge of the presidency, from picking senior leadership from among the general officers available to the marshaling of international allies and economic capacities.  The growing ranks of Santorum backers will note that the senator has spent years and years studying Iran and knows the issue and the mullah's fanaticism and governing structures better than the other three.

It is an important discussion to have, by far the most important because while a president doesn't make major changes to domestic policy without the Congress in support, he most certainly acts alone on the questions of response to war and aggression.  If Iran starts a war, by design or accident, whether by direct aggression aimed at the United States or via an attack on Israel, it will be on the president to almost instantly decide how to respond.  Which of the GOP would-be nominees would you select to be in the chair when that crisis erupts?

Callers and guests debated the issue for hours yesterday and there is no way to judge if any listeners changed their minds as the various arguments were made, but framing the question that way significantly changed the debate that has been raging about the race for the past month.

The Commander-in-Chief question is the key question, and the president's assault on the Pentagon's budget this week provides the starting point for the debates tonight and tomorrow, because whoever is the president, he will have to go into a new war with the military the country has, and Barack Obama announced this week that on his watch, that military will significantly shrink in size and capacity over the next many years, and indeed has already begun to do so.

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President Obama's plan to slash the size of the American military by at least 10% is dangerous and covered in a deceitful "strategic reassessment," which is a crude attempt to deflect attention from the bottom line of a much shrunken American military.

There is a fiscal crisis, but it isn't because of defense spending but because of entitlements which the president will not discuss in detail much less reform.  Dramatic cuts in the number of soldiers, sailors and Marines are a substitute for the hard work of shrinking the payout state and cutting off the president's favored constituents. 

Search the reporting on the radical downsizing announced yesterday for hard numbers.  You won't find them.  The president is trying --thus far successfully with the assistance of the MSM-- to downsize the American military under the cover of the GOP primaries.  The failure of the Supercommittee and the train wreck of the debt ceiling showdown this past summer has left the House GOP divided and its freshman caucus demoralized and apparently defeated.  But the House GOP simply has to rally to save the Pentagon from the president's wildly irresponsible plans.

I interviewed House Armed Services Chairman Buck McKeon yesterday (transcript here) and a member of his committee, Virginia's Rob Wittman who also serves as chair of the Investigations and Oversight Subcommittee of Armed Services (transcript here.)  Please read their assessments and call your representatives and senators to demand these cuts be stopped and the military preserved at its present strength.  A Harry Reid-led Senate so dysfunctional that cannot even pass a budget in three years ought not to be in charge of the nation's defenses and ought not to be allowed to cooperate in the gutting of the American military.

"Fund the Marine Corps not NPR" should be the theme of a growing pro-defense movement.  The Ron Paul-led isolationist slice of the country has seen it voice amplified by the GOP debates, but the Iowa caucus showed again that it is a tiny, tiny part of the GOP and should be pushed aside by the traditional demand of Republicans for a strong and vibrant military defined by a 300 plus-ship Navy and the modern era doctrine of the ability to successfully fight two wars at the same time.

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum have got to avoid being drawn into the sorts of fights the MSM loves --like Rick Santorum's dust-up on same sex marriage with college students yesterdayy-- and instead must insist that the campaign focus on the president's radical fiscal irresponsibility at home and appeasement abroad, now backed by a plan to hollow out the American military.

Mark Steyn and I talked about the president's plans for the Pentagon yesterday.  Here's that exchange:

HH: Today, the President announced that the condition, the first condition that allows for that upward mobility in American prosperity, the American military, which defends sea lanes and allows prosperity, they are tandem. I know you’ve argued you lose your military when you lose your economy. But he’s not waiting to lose the economy, Mark Steyn. He’s going to cut tens of thousands of active duty uniformed personnel, billions more from an already skinnied-down Defense budget. It’s, I have talked today with Congressman Buck McKeon of California, who’s chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Congressman Rob Wittman, sub-committee chairman of the Armed Services Committee. It’s an outrageous assault on the American Defense posture.

MS: That’s true, but as you indicated at the beginning, in a certain sense, it’s inevitable. You can have big government at home, or you can have an assertive national defense that can project force to any corner of the planet abroad. But you can’t have both. I mean, if you look at the United Kingdom between the 1950s and the 1990s, in a sense, social spending and Defense spending sort of more or less inverted. This is, by the way,  where I disagree with Ron Paul. When Ron Paul romanticizes the 19^th Century isolationist republic of the founders’ vision, he forgets that there was a global order at make on the planet then. It was called the Royal Navy. And America benefited from the fact that the Royal Navy patrolled the oceans.

HH: Yup.

MS: It was, there is no one to succeed to America’s role as America succeeded to Britain’s role. And it simply, and what I think is dangerous about this is that both on the left and the right, there are people who think that the books can be balanced on the backs of the military. And in fact, if you abolish the entire Pentagon, it doesn’t actually, it’s barely the size of the most recent debt ceiling increase requested by Obama. So it’s not going to do it. You can actually get rid of the whole Pentagon, sell off every aircraft carrier, sell the nukes to North Korea and Iran, and Sudan, and anyone else who wants them, and it still won’t solve the fiscal crisis, the fiscal abyss into which America has lower itself into.

HH: Because that is a Medicare and Social Security and Medicaid-driven abyss. That’s all…

MS: That’s right. And in fact, I mean, where I agree with, I mean, for example, by about mid-decade, U.S. taxpayers, just in the interest on the debt, are going to be covering the entire cost of the Chinese military. No nation can afford to pay both for its own military and its principal rivals. And that’s why although I think that there are certainly savings to be made in the military budget, and I certainly think an awful lot of money is wasted in the military budget, the idea of using the military as an excuse not to go after the big social spending, I think, is wicked, and delusional, both from the left and the right.

"Wicked" and "delusional" are exactly the sort of terms that the GOP's would-be nominees need to use about a plan that slashes the military even as Iran threatens to attack our aircraft carriers the next time one enters the Gulf and which is thrusting ahead with its plans for nukes and just as the PRC surges out its new naval forces.

This is so wildly irresponsible that the president chose to announce it while Congress was out-of-town and the steady hands that have long defended defending America like Buck McKeon and Jon Kyl were out of town. 

But the MSM simply laid down and most refused to go and find them to comment, which was perfectly possible as shown by my interviews with McKeon and Wittman.  The reporters at the Pentagon didn't even go out and ask what it would mean to, say, the Marines to lose 10 to 15% of their troops, taking the Army from 570,000 to 520,000 and possibly as low as 490,000 and the Marines from 200,000 to at or below 180,000.  To say, as the Washington Post did, that "new military strategy, contained in an eight-page document, will guide wrenching decisions on defense cutbacks," isn't reporting. "Details will be made public in the next few weeks as the White House finalizes its proposed federal budget for the next fiscal year," is cooperation with the Administration in cloaking the huge national security cut-backs. (The Post to its credit at least managed to find McKeon for a quick quote and the Wall Street Journal managed to allot one quick aside to John McCain before quoting a retired general who supported the president's plans and a left wing think-tanker who wants even more radical cuts.)

Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are both strong supporters of a robust American military and of increased defense spending.  Romney's speech on foreign and defense policy delivered at The Citadel in October laid out his vision and he needs to return to it in the debates on Saturday and Sunday, and throughout the campaign.  If Santorum's momentum continues, he too will have to lay out the specifics of his defense plans, but he has a very reassuring record as a national security realist.

Both men have to show the way on the issue to a confused and disorganized D.C. GOP, and face down the isolationists as well as the deficit hawks who don't care or who don't understand what is coming at America and its allies from Iran in the near term and the PRC in the medium term.

Whatever the questions are from the ABC and NBC hosts this weekend, the candidates have to make sure that debate over America's military and thus its "common defense" gets the attention it must have.

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My new Townhall.com column compares Romney v. Santorum to Ford v. Reagan in 1976.

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In one of the many interviews Rick Santorum did on my show in 2011 --this one on December 14 of last year-- I asked him to make an appeal to the supporters of his GOP opponents.  This is what he said to supporters of the two opponents he now faces in New Hampshire:

HH: All right, now let’s talk a little bit about your opponents, because votes to Rick Santorum have to come from each place. So I want to go down the line and ask you to talk to the people who are supporting that candidate, and why they ought to be supporting you instead. And let’s start with the frontrunner, Newt Gingrich.

RS: Well, you’re looking at someone who, I’ll just give you one example. When Newt was in leadership three years into leadership as Speaker of the House, conservatives launched a coup against him, because he was not standing up for the conservative principles that he at least articulated when he ran for Speaker. When I was in the leadership of the United States Senate, any conservative leader in the country, any conservative group, if they wanted something done in the United States Senate, and they were having trouble in leadership, there’s one person they went to. They went to me, because I was always the squeaky wheel. I was always the guy pushing the conservative agenda whether it was life issues, whether it was guns, whether it was national security, or whether it was economics. I was the key go-to guy for conservatives in the United States Senate. And that’s just a very clear contrast, when you’re in a position of leadership, when the pressure is on, who stands and fights for the conservative principles, and who bails out, and wimps under pressure. And you’ve got a very clear contrast between me and Newt on that front.

HH: What do you say to Romney supporters about coming over to Rick Santorum?

RS: Look, I was a Romney supporter four years ago. I endorsed him a few days before the Super Tuesday primaries. It’s a different election. The key in this election is to making sure you have a clear contrast with Barack Obama on the issues that are vitally important to our country. And that’s fundamentally economic freedom issues. And Romneycare, the TARP, the cap and trade, his positions on so many issues are so, just not the right position to have a clear contrast that we need to beat Barack Obama. And he will just be decimated by Obama by throwing, saying well, he was with me in the past. We just can’t have that. We just have to have someone who has a clear contrasting record as someone who has been a consistent conservative. And this is the key for both Newt and Romney, someone who makes Obama the issue in this campaign and his policies, not your record and not, whether political or personal record, that can’t be the issue. If it is, then Obama, with the media and the money, is going to destroy the Republican nominee. We need to have someone who makes him the issue.

 

Take away the American troops prematurely, and the someone blows on the almost-out embers of the civil war.

Iraq hasn't been lost, yet.  But President Obama shows no interest in saving it.

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Rick Santorum raised $1 million today via the web.

His website is www.ricksantorum.com. 

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Mitt Romney's very narrow win in Iowa that was not settled until late in the evening combined with the daylong run up to the caucuses to overshadow two stories that ought to matter very much to New Hampshire voters and should be a focus for Saturday's and Sunday's debates.

First, the Guardian reported that a deal with the Taliban has been reached to open "peace talks" and also on the release of some prisoners from Gitmo.  The Wall Street Journal confirms that the Taliban is gearing up for negotiations with the U.S. in Qatar.

"The US has agreed in principle to release high-ranking Taliban officials from Guantanamo Bay in return for the Afghan insurgents' agreement to open a political office for peace negotiations in Qatar," the Guardian reported, which would be an enormous departure from past American policy not to negotiate with terrorists. 

While the U.S. appears to be preparing to sit down with the Taliban, Iran threatened the United States.  From Reuters:

Army chief Ataollah Salehi said the United States had moved an aircraft carrier out of the Gulf because of Iran's naval exercises, and Iran would take action if the ship returned.

"Iran will not repeat its warning ... the enemy's carrier has been moved to the Sea of Oman because of our drill. I recommend and emphasize to the American carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf....we are not in the habit of warning more than once," he said.

John McCain is endorsing Mitt Romney today, (credit BuzzFeed's Ben Smith with a big scoop for his new organization) and while the 2008 nominee doesn't rally many conservatives to Team Romney, his endorsement comes as these two stories underscore the seriousness of the choice in front of voters and the stark contrast which the GOP's nominee must present to the president's policies of appeasement.

Most of the takes on the Iowa results --a symposium on that subject to which I contributed is here at NationalReview.com-- are focused on the horserace, and the coverage of the New Hampshire primary will be pulled towards process questions when it very much needs to focus on the substance of the collective GOP argument against Obama.  Romney, Santorum and Gingrich agree on 90% of issues but present very different personalities and skills sets, and the key issue is electability.

"Who can win" is the first and most important question of all for GOP voters because the U.S. desperately needs a new Commander-in-Chief. 

"How ought the U.S. to respond to General Salehi's threat?" ought to be the first question in the weekend's debates, followed by a question on whether the U.S. ought to be negotiating with the Taliban when their return to power will mean an instant loss of freedom for everyone given over to them, most especially women.

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