California Republican Debate - 1/30/08

As such, we are down to four Republican contenders for the nomination though CNN's Anderson and the panel make it sound like there are actually two candidates for the job, both McCain and Romney.

Much of the debate question and answer was on these two. The sharpest and ridiculous moment in the debate came when Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was asked about the McCain campaign's charge that he once said he favored a strict timetable for removing troops from Iraq.

Romney has consistently denied ever having backed a timetable and said McCain was taking a small portion of a quote out of context.

"It's simply wrong," Romney said. "By the way, raising it a few days before the Florida primary, when there was very little time for me to correct the record, falls in the kind of dirty tricks that Ronald Reagan would have found reprehensible."

Kudos to Ron Paul for calling them out on arguing about timetable "technicalities."

"...They agreed with going in; they agreed for staying, agreed for staying how many years? And these are technicalities. We should be debating foreign policy, whether we should have interventionism or non-interventionism, whether we should be defending this country or whether we should be the policemen of the world, whether we should be running our empire or not, and how are going to have guns and butter?

...

And we have these silly arguments going on about who said what when. I think it's time to debate foreign policy and why we don't follow the Constitution and only go to war with a declaration of war."

This is true. This is more than dealing with Iraq. We would want to know the ultimate foreign policy agenda with each candidate. How would they treat Iran? Or a future aggressor, or another mess like Iraq?

McCain loves to keep on stating that he is putting his career and political fortunes on the line. Don't we know that already? If a politican is staking his whole entire career, does that give us a guaranteed reason to trust that person? Of course, he expands upon that by including his military career and his time as a POW.

Anderson Cooper really kept a tight leash on Paul as compared with the other candidates.

Paul, who has not won any of the early primary contests but still has raised millions of dollars from supporters, was not able to detail his credentials. “I would like to take one minute, since I didn’t get a chance to answer this discussion on conservative versus liberal,” he said.

Moderator Anderson Cooper promised him he would have an opportunity later. But it never came.

He also did not give Ron Paul a chance to expand about cutting government spending, only Huckabee mentioned about the same thing.

Of course, it's was amusing when Ron Paul was speaking, the camera would turn to McCain and Romney, and both of them would be smirking, almost like there were two girls giggling. It seems to me they think Paul is just a clown and his words have no meaning.

Paul should have mentioned about government spending and being endorsed by the Taxpayers Union.

McCain touted his military credentials, Romney showcased his business credentials. Perhaps we should merge their DNA together and get both.

Anyways, I think Huckabee and Paul did well enough despite their limited airtime. Clearly, McCain needs to do better in debate. I think some of his answers were clearly rehearsed, and he was acting like a robot during the whole argument about timetables with Romney. Honestly, I don't think he really cared. He knows he got Giuliani's endorsement and Arnold's. Pretty much, he thinks it's all a slam dunk and he will represent the GOP against Hillary or Obama.

What's going to hurt is that McCain may not get a huge turnout by fellow Republicans in the general election.

Transcript