1. It won’t change anything. Gingrich had the crowd with him and some memorable answers, and Santorum, although tough and quirkily authentic, didn’t shine enough. Romney was rated very low on the authenticity-meter by the tweeters and Pete, but he just wasn’t bad enough. Paul won with the tweeters, but his tweeters are particularly devoted to tweeting. From Santorum’s view, not enough of the debate was on “social conservatism,” and so he didn’t get to make his pitch to the SC evangelicals. Meanwhile, we were reassured that Newt is pro-life. My guess: Newt picks up a little more of the shrinking not-Romney vote from Santorum. That’s not my hope.
2. Most astounding moment of the debate: Gingrich shows that Romney’s super-PAC commercial slamming his abortion record is completely wrong. Romney doesn’t even attempt to defend the false allegations; he responds instead that Gingrich’s Bain Capital film is full of malicious errors. Both candidates agree that it’s too bad that they aren’t able to take responsibility for these lies or even contact those who lie on their behalf. Romney blames McCain-Feingold and gets applause. Santorum should have said you should be expected to do more to take responsibility and at least apologize to the man you’ve wronged.
3. Romney’s lead in the national poll grows. He’s at 40%, and there’s a three-way tie for second at considerably less than 20%.
