MinnPost teammate Jay Weiner already filed a perspicacious analysis of last night’s kickoff debate of the Republican presidential field. A few more thoughts and details:
The debate was strange, mostly since the media-designated serious contenders skipped it (with the notable exception of Minnesota’s own Tim Pawlenty), and relatively uneventful. More strangeness: AP and Reuters refused to cover the event (or distribute any coverage of it) because of unprecedented restrictions that the sponsors — Fox News and the South Carolina Repub Party — imposed on photography.
The surprise winner, at least according to a Fox focus group, was Herman Cain, although U.S. Rep Ron Paul got, by far, the most applause. (That latter development seemed to have less to do with Paul’s answers than a decision by his backers to ignore the request by the organizers to hold down the applause.)
Fox’s panel of questioners did fine. They went with a seriously-enforced one-minute limit on answers, which worked fine (although, in the long run, there is something pitiful about what this says about the current understanding of our attention spans).
Personally, I couldn’t see what Cain, the former Godfather’s Pizza CEO, did that the focus group found so impressive. But when Fox cut to righty focus-group-guru Frank Luntz for the group’s reaction, it turned out that about half of the group had been converted over the-90 minute debate into Cain supporters. The groupies said it was the direct nature of his answers. (I didn’t detect any directness advantage for Cain.) The group members were all South Carolinians and professed great annoyance with the many top tier contenders who skipped the event. They were sneeringly dismissive of the excuse that Donald Trump couldn’t be there because he has to finish up his Apprentice TV show first.
I was particularly struck by the focus group’s wowed reaction to Cain, since he was the only black candidate and the focus group was almost all white and South Carolinian. But unless Cain ends up emerging as a serious candidate, the debate will be a non-remembered non-event.
On substance, the most interesting pattern was the difference between the two real libertarians — Ron Paul and former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson — and the three more conventional Repubs, who emphasize “liberty” and small government on money issues but endorse big government on social issues like banning gay marriage, prostitution and marijuana use. Paul, whose stated position is that the federal government should have nothing to do with defining marriage, actually supported for the Defense of Marriage Act, and his attempt to explain that away made no sense.
One site, called Mr. Media Training, rated the candidates on pure presentation points and gave Pawlenty its highest grade (a “B” compared to a “B-“ for Cain.) I didn’t agree. TPaw seemed slightly awkward. His answers were all familiar, and not much that he did seemed to move the crowd. But, as a first-time prez candidate, perhaps he was wise to participate while the other, more experienced, major candidates were away.
Michael Shear, blogging the event for the NYTimes, focused on one of TPaw’s answers, namely when he was asked to defend his shocking, horrifying (in certain circles) former flirtation with cap and trade. TPaw went with the mea culpa approach, then asked for credit for at least a straightforward apology:
“It was a mistake, and I’m sorry. You’re going to have a few clunkers in your record, and we all do, and that’s one of mine. I just admit it. I don’t try to duck it, bob it, weave it, try to explain it away. I’m just telling you, I made a mistake.”
National Journal’s Beth Reinhard also focused on TPaw, in a piece that called his performance “lackluster.” The basic analysis seemed to be that, as the only serious contender present, he should have dominated, but he didn’t. That rap seems silly to me. When I catch his act, TPaw seems mostly to be going for an “I ain’t crazy” appeal. He has repudiated all former moderate positions, so as not to be eliminated by the righty purists. But he hopes there will come a time when the Repub electorate will decide it can’t go with a flame-throwing novelty candidate. If that moment arrives, he seems to hope (this is wild speculation on my part) that it will be small group, maybe Mitt Romney and himself.
A small personal note: If anyone noted my absence from the blog this week, I was taking care of my not-so-healthy mom out of town.
Rob, I’m not an expert on this but I’ll take a stab at it. The south is majority Republican (at least on a national level) so we’d expect most of the districts to go that way. In the same way, New England votes overwhelmingly for Dems. The south is a bit different in that it’s more heavily gerrymandered. Some of that is malicious party driven stuff, but a fair amount of it has to do racial balancing done to create majority African American districts. The idea behind that is laudable on some level but the upshot has been to create heavily Republican and Democratic districts.
“I was particularly struck by the focus group’s wowed reaction to Cain, since he was the only black candidate and the focus group was almost all white and South Carolinian.”
Eric what does Mr. Cain’s race or the race of the focus group; which by the way included multiple ethnicities, have to do with the debate or his qualifications to be President of the United States? This comment by you has the old “Uncle Tom” underpinnings that have no place in our Nation. You would be fired if you were a Conservative for writing something like this.
Eric:
Here’s hoping for the best outcomes for your Mom. It seems that the honor of looking after aging Moms (and Dads) is being shared by many of us “of a certain age” nowadays. Mine is 98 and I look forward to several more years of quiet convertible rides in the summer listening to Twins games.
“TPaw seems mostly to be going for an “I ain’t crazy” appeal. He has repudiated all former moderate positions, so as not to be eliminated by the righty purists. But he hopes there will come a time when the Repub electorate will decide it can’t go with a flame-throwing novelty candidate.”
Couple that with his straightforward statement that he was ‘wrong’ about cap-and-trade & I’d say he wants to be in the ‘not crazy’ group with Romney, but not in the ‘flip-flopper’ group with Romney, leaving himself alone, by process of elimination. But he might not be properly accounting for Daniels & Huntsman.
I think you should expound this statement:
“I was particularly struck by the focus group’s wowed reaction to Cain, since he was the only black candidate and the focus group was almost all white and South Carolinian”
Why does this strike you?
“I was particularly struck by the focus group’s wowed reaction to Cain, since he was the only black candidate and the focus group was almost all white and South Carolinian”
The problem with Eric and darn near every single White Minnesota Liberal is this. The only film they have ever saw about the south included Bull Connor. They saw a film clip by CBS in 1962 and think nothing has changed.
They don’t know that Gov Wallace eventually made common cause with a diffused group of people that included Jesse Jackson.
They don’t know that Southerners both black & white have been electing black and white candidates to council, schoolboard, county board, judge, dog catcher, govenor and you name it.
Guilty white liberal Minnesotans don’t want their prejudicial and cast in stone notions of 40-50 years thrown out. It doesn’t fit their model of how things are. Why should Eric be any different?
One day they might even convince you that the Nathan Bedford Forrest Klan was run by the GOP. Hell, a time may come when they will actually tell you that it was the GOP that led the walk out of states in 1861. Tip of the day to Democrats. The largest city of the south then and now is Atlanta. That city has had a black mayor for what….38 years.
Hey Northern Liberals. The south aint your punchin’ bag no-more. They got our jobs, they’re getting our young, our workers, their population is growing, their economies are booming. Quit your race to the bottom talk, they are racing past you.
“Paul, whose stated position is that the federal government should have nothing to do with defining marriage, actually supported for the Defense of Marriage Act, and his attempt to explain that away made no sense.”
This statement is utterly incomprehensible to me. It makes perfect sense that one who supports getting the federal government out of the marriage issue would support that bill, because that’s what it does. It doesn’t ban gay marriage at all. It also doesn’t matter that the bill says “one man, one woman” because it strips the federal government of the authority it would need to act on that statement, making it a moot point.
“Paul, whose stated position is that the federal government should have nothing to do with defining marriage, actually supported for the Defense of Marriage Act, and his attempt to explain that away made no sense.”
Really? Why should I care what you think of the GOP debate … If you can’t even take the time to find out what the DOMA is?
Let me help you … The DOMA says that no state (or other political subdivision within the United States) may be required to recognize as a marriage a same-sex relationship considered a marriage in another state.
Now, you do not understand why someone who thinks the states should decide this issue would favor a law that allows SC to decide who is married in SC and not MA?
Really?
I am not a Ron Paul supporter, but am still capable of understanding what federalism is.
Eric, Everything a republican or conservative for that matter does is strange to your little elitist liberal heart! That being said, I think the history books will record that Tim Pawlenty had the same success that your buddy Tom Horner had after attending a zillion debates, “he was an also ran candidate.”
Hope your Mom’s feeling better, Eric.
Pawlenty doesn’t strike me as the dominating type. When he shakes his fist and plays angry, it doesn’t seem genuine or honest, though I’m sure he has genuinely angry moments. I’m inclined to agree that Beth Reinhard’s critique of Pawlenty is itself pretty shallow. I don’t think Pawlenty is a genuine fire-breather, but he’s caught in an era when that’s what gets the media’s (and the public’s) attention.
Interesting comment from Eric Larson. Not entirely false – Atlanta HAS had a black mayor for quite a while – and yet not entirely true. Indeed, there are now plenty of local and state officials in the deep South of both races, and a smattering of those of immigrant descent, as well (Louisiana’s Governor among them). That said, not only are black national political figures from the South extremely few and far between, it’s even more rare for one of them to be a Republican, since it’s the Republican Party that, in recent years, has worked the hardest to restrict civil rights, end affirmative action, and in other ways reset the clock to those halcyon days before that pesky Brown v. Board of Education decision.
The South’s population IS growing, but a sizable portion of that growth is due to a climatic quirk – it’s warm(er) there in the winter – more than any real affection for Southern culture. I’d agree that the South is, in some ways, racing past states farther to the north, but keep in mind that Mr. Larson was talking about a “race to the bottom.” I think the South will win that race, but it’s one Minnesotans shouldn’t mind losing.
The right still seems to prefer nastiness to actually addressing the facts.
Interesting to see you guys citing South Carolina as a paragon of racial equality. Hell, those guys down there won’t even admit that the Civil War was about slavery. I’m not sure who was in the focus group, but I’d sure be interested in seeing any poll that showed a majority of white South Carolinians voting for a black candidate.
“… it turned out that about half of the group had been converted over the-90 minute debate into Cain supporters. The groupies said it was the direct nature of his answers.”
They meant that when Cain was asked a question he had an immediate, direct and logical answer that made sense to the listeners.
Pawlenty began each answer with a sentence or two of personal history, I suppose to give us some context, but nevertheless the result was an answer that sounded like he had memorized it from a 3×5 card, but one that took him a few sentences of stalling before he was able to recall it.
Compared to Herman Cain’s answers, they sounded rehearsed and bland in comparison.
Frank Luntz is the creator of phrases designed to evoke an emotional rather than rational response. He gave the right wing, for instance, phrases like “death panels” and “government takeover” that did much to rouse opposition among the electorate to the new health care act.
Since most black people in the South are Democrats (for good reason), I’d guess Luntz focused on that focus group with his truly large talent for convincing people to think his way about something while letting them believe they were coming to his conclusions on their own.
Mr. Cain would be used as a right-wing trophy and a draw for voters.
Bernice, Herman Cain is nobody’s “trophy.”
I’ve been a Herman Cain fan since he came out with this book in 2005.
http://tinyurl.com/3n274e5
Its title is aimed directy at black people and refers to the democrat party.
Way back in November of 2010, the good people of South Carolina voted Nikki Haley for governor. She is non-white (Sikh) and (obviously) a woman. That didn’t seem to bother all of the voters that so many of the leftist commenters here want to paint as racist.
Peder–
You used the phrase “all of the voters….” followed by the usual (inaccurate) editorializing.
What percentage of the adult population of South Carolina voted for Ms. Haley?
How many of them were not white (about one third of the population of SC is non white).
Thanks to all for an interesting thread.
It’s true that southerners have been electing black candidates. The majority of those were Democrats, elected by Democrats and especially in areas with a lot of black votes. But there have been exceptions, including black Republicans, like J.C. Watts and more recently Allen West, both of whom went to Congress with the support of a lot of white Republicans.
Nonetheless, I’ll stand by my statement that the immediately positive reaction of a group made up mostly if white Republican South Carolinians to a black presidential candidate is notable — or “striking”, as I phrased it — if only because it strikes against easy assumptions that we make about race politics in the south.
Paul, remember a couple of weeks ago when Eric posted about a study that showed that liberals were less likely than conservatives to see things as good vs evil? Well look at this thread here. How many on the left here are desperate to paint everyone on the right as racist?
To answer your question, Haley won 51% of the vote, a clear majority. I can’t find exit poll details but I’m guessing that the third of the state that is minority probably voted mostly Dem. That would mean that the white southerners voted overwhelmingly for Haley. Would that happen if they were consumed by race?
As to the racism of the South: Today there is only one white-majority district in the deep south that has a Democratic Representative. Why do you think that is?
Peder–
As usual, you’re rewriting my comments to fit your answers.
Mr. Cain is campaigning, in part, on his support for the so-called “Fair Tax,” which would finish the job of moving all America’s wealth from the poor and middle classes to the top few percent of American earners.
The retail industry would replace the IRS as the collector of US taxes, since taxes would be based only on consumption. All new things would be taxed at 23% (or more) of their retail price. So if you were a billionaire purchasing Bill Gates’ $15 million dollar Washington home, the sales tax would be zero because the home is used. Meanwhile, a low-income person purchasing a new small condo or mobile home would pay the tax.
All other taxes would be gone. Those at the top, who spend a small fraction of their annual millions on consumption (think banking and insurance execs), would pay a very low effective tax rate. Those making $20,000 to $50,000, however, who spend almost 100% of their incomes just paying the rent and buying food, transportation and health care, would see 23% or more of their entire incomes lost to the tax.
For this alone, voters should RUN from Mr. Cain.
Paul, I’m not sure what you’re after. Are you suggesting that Haley was primarily elected by people of color that crossed the traditional party lines? I haven’t seen anything that would support that but I’m open to any kind of cite that you have.
I don’t know what percentage of the adult population voted for Haley. After some internet noodling I can tell you that the 2010 SC Gov race was busier than the previous (2006) race by about 200k votes. So she won a clear majority during what looks like a busy election.
My main point is that in SC, Republicans seem willing to vote for non-white people that fit their political values. (The same holds true for LA.) This seems to defy the easy stereotype of the racist southerner. If you can present some kind of argument for why I’m wrong about this, I’m certainly open to hearing it.