The first Republican primary debate in the South was staged at the University of South Carolina’s Koger Center for the Arts. Here are a few highlights of the 90-minute match-up, which was sponsored by the South Carolina Republican Party and moderated by Fox News anchor Brit Hume:
† Sen. John McCain got off the first gag of the evening when he said that he has spoken with sailors who are offended by accusations of ever being drunk enough to spend money the way Congress does – but former AR Gov. Mike Huckabee got the biggest laugh of the night by noting that Congress has spent money “like John Edwards at a beauty shop.” (Note that he did not say “barber shop,” or even “unisex salon.”)
† Former VA Gov. Jim Gilmore got a small chuckle from the crowd with his reference to “Rudy McRomney,” to underscore the point that not all the candidates on the stage could be considered true conservatives when it comes to abortion (Rudy), tax cuts (Huckabee), universal health care (former MA governor Mitt Romney) and – though he did not mention him by name, illegal immigration (McCain).
† But the evening wasn’t all fun and games. The audience groaned when Fox News White House correspondent Wendell Goler asked McCain a question about the confederate flag that was e-mailed from a viewer. And TX Rep. Ron Paul - whose vote against giving President Bush the authority to go to war against Iraq in 2002 prompted Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace to ask if he was running in the wrong party - made the only serious gaffe of the evening when he stated that the U.S. was attacked on 9/11 because, “We’ve been bombing Iraq for 10 years. We’ve been in the Middle East.”
† Rudy’s eyes flashed in anger as he retorted: “That’s really an extraordinary statement, as someone who lived through the attack of Sept. 11, that we invited the attack because we were attacking Iraq. I don’t think I have ever heard that before and I have heard some pretty absurd explanations for Sept. 11″ – here, the audience erupted in cheers - and then Rudy asked Paul to “withdraw that comment and tell us that he didn’t really mean that.” Hume gave Paul a chance to back down, but he did not take it.
In The Stiletto’s opinion, Paul is finished. Rudy McRomney is still the leading candidate, and none of those in the second tier really left an impression – with the possible exception of Huckabee and CO Rep. Tom Tancredo, who drew sustained applause by noting that the candidates were debating whether water boarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” amounted to torture (in a hypothetical scenario that involved questioning captured terrorists after several suicide bombings at shopping malls) when he’d be “looking for Jack Bauer.”
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