High Stakes

 It is a Saturday, but big debate tonight. Gingrich has to decisively win his clashes in order to maintain his debater invincibility cred. If he loses that he is just another guy who used to be for cap-and-trade and a federal health insurance purchase mandate. It isn’t impossible that he’ll pull that off, but he has a lot of spots to defend. Huntsman needs to take Romney down and turn himself into the not-Gingrich (or the not-whoever-becomes-the-next conservative-authenticity-candidate. Romney needs to get off of his “I’m not a professional politician” thing. He looks and acts like a stereotype of a professional politician and if he could fix that he already would have. He should instead just say he was in the “real” private sector rather than cashing checks from the crony capitalist private sector and that he created jobs rather than contributing to the mortgage meltdown and costing the taxpayers tens of billions of dollars. Santorum needs to not be whiny and angry while reminding everyone up that he has been the most consistent domestic policy conservative out of any of the people out there in the stage (well, there is Bachmann but she has a short record at the federal level.) Bachmann needs to knife Gingrich but good to get back in the game. I don’t know what Perry does. He is fighting for voter share with Gingrich, but if I were him, I’d want to go at Romney just out of spite. Just one reason I shouldn’t be running for President.

I won’t be seeing the debate tonight (family commitments) so I’ll have some thoughts tomorrow after reading the transcript.