Live-blogging is a form of political journalism that didn’t exist until a few years ago – if it is journalism at all. It’s just reporting on what is happening, as it happens, with brief comments on how odd, or expected, what just happened seems. It’s all on-the-the fly and kind of like doing play-by-play courtside at a basketball game, or the Hindenburg crashing and burning. The one effort here – covering the final primary debate, Barack Obama versus Hillary Clinton, Thursday, January 31, 2008, at the Kodak Theater here in Hollywood – was the only effort here. It’s nerve-wracking. Things happen so fast – there’s no time to step back and try to gain perspective. All you do is react, and type. But when you have a friend who is a senior producer at CNN, and CNN is sponsoring the debate, which gets you a seat in the media-room with what seem to be real reporters, you go for it. And you forget about careful nuanced analysis and historical and cultural perspective, and forget about the statement-logic-evidence-perspective-exceptions-proof-conclusion essay format. An investigative journalist works in that sort of format, but there’s no time for any of that. There’s no time for being thoughtful. Ah well, the little knick-knacks from CNN and the Los Angeles Times were amusing – and the pictures came out fine – and the press credentials you get to hang around your neck make a fine souvenir.
But live-blogging is real journalism, reporting in its most primitive form. And now everyone does it, particularly for these primary debates, and thus every political junky and policy wonk gets the word on what just happened, immediately, without the bother of having to sit through the whole damned debate or having to wait for AP or Reuters or whomever to compress it all in about eight hundred carefully chosen words. And this isn’t like a Lakers game or anything, where you actually want to watch. Someone will watch for you, and let you know if anything good happens.
And here it is, the final days before the South Carolina primary, and the Republicans have scheduled two more debates. Who really wants to watch these things? Ask your Republican friends. They’re not watching. And the night of the first of these two debates, the one on Fox News, the Lakers were playing Dallas – Kobe and the rest of the old guys versus last year’s champions. That’s not a night you want to watch Newt and Mitt face off, with that Santorum fellow sniping at both of them, and Rick Perry jumping up and down and asking for someone to call on him, please, please, please – and Ron Paul being all loveable and eccentric.
But they did have a debate. And the real journalists at the New York Times – Jeff Zeleny and Jim Rutenberg in this case – provided a fine wrap-up:
Mitt Romney withstood forceful attacks during a debate here on Monday evening, with his Republican rivals lining up to question his job-creation record, wealth and character, as they implored voters to scrutinize his candidacy more deeply before allowing him to sail to the party’s presidential nomination.
With five days remaining before the South Carolina primary, the four other remaining Republican candidates sought once again to raise questions about Mr. Romney’s credentials as an economic manager and his consistency as a conservative.
Yet they failed to goad him into losing his composure or making any major mistakes, and he devoted nearly as much attention to President Obama as he did to the candidates on stage with him.
The rest of this, at 1,444 words a bit long for such things, describes the whole thing as “one of the most rollicking presidential debates of the season” – having to do with Twitter cosponsoring the event and the tweets coming in fast and furious. But it was mostly Pick-on-Mitt night.
Romney was besieged by his opponents, all of whom are trying to survive the winnowing process of the early primaries and emerge as a singular challenger to him. They pointedly called on him to disclose his tax returns, explain whether his corporate buyout firm Bain Capital had created or killed jobs and account for his evolving views on social issues like abortion.
He got hammered, and the Times guys quote a lot of that, along with covering all these guys saying they hated the Super Pac stuff and all the negative ads – from the other guys. They had no control over any Super Pac supporting them, really, as that would be against the law:
Mr. Gingrich sarcastically dismissed Mr. Romney’s protestations that he had nothing to do with a super PAC ad attacking Mr. Gingrich. He said Mr. Romney’s defense “makes you wonder how much influence he would have if he were president.”
In reply, Mr. Romney said the outside group supporting Mr. Gingrich was showing an anti-Romney documentary that has been widely criticized for its misleading claims about Mr. Romney’s work at Bain Capital. He called it “probably the biggest hoax since Bigfoot.”
This was all somewhere between ingenuous and silly. And there were oddities:
In a debate that fell on Martin Luther King’s Birthday, the Republicans also found themselves arguing about whether convicted felons should be able to regain the right to vote when they have completed their prison sentences and parole. The issue has long been of concern to black leaders, given the disproportionate number of African-American men who serve prison terms.
Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, said he thought they should regain voting rights under those conditions, defending a position he had taken in the Senate. Mr. Romney, after considerable pushing by Mr. Santorum, said he thought that violent felons should never regain the right to vote.
At that moment, Mr. Santorum – who appeared to have anticipated what Mr. Romney was going to say – responded by asking why as governor of Massachusetts he never did anything to deal with a state law that permitted felons to vote even while they were on parole.
All that never came up before, and there was this:
Mr. Romney, who often struggles to convey a regular-guy appeal, stumbled only when asked whether he had hunted in recent years. First he said he had hunted moose, but quickly corrected himself to say elk. After saying he would not “describe all of my great exploits,” he sought to make clear that he was not a devoted gamesman. “I’m not the great hunter,” he said with a smile.
It was an odd debate, apparently, but no summary can do it justice. The real flavor of it was in the play-by-play, and Andrew Sullivan was live-blogging the thing and offering nuggets like this:
9.22 pm. Santorum trips up Romney’s smooth operator shtick. And Romney won’t answer. This is where Santorum’s assholery can come into its own. Santorum is now defending former felons’ right to vote. And then he pounces on Romney for governing under different laws when he was running Massachusetts. Romney then whines about Super Pacs. Maybe someone should ask these candidates about Citizens United. This is great – and Romney is a little rattled. So far: advantage Perry and Santorum.
9.25 pm. When will Romney tell us why he alone will not release his tax returns? So far, I think Santorum has dominated and will likely benefit. Romney’s plasticness is somehow particularly exposed by Santorum’s relentless, terrier-like impertinence.
And then Rick Perry finally gets his chance:
9.35 pm. South Carolina is “at war” with the federal government. I doubt Perry doesn’t understand the resonance of that phrasing. Then he lies again about the Obama administration’s alleged and non-existent “war on organized religion”. The sound we just heard – from Perry and the crowd – was the rebel yell.
And there’s the tax issue:
9.46 pm. They are all seeking even further drastic cuts in federal income taxation. Ron Paul even goes to zero. How on earth are they going to cut the debt if they slash the top rates even further? The radicalism here is breath-taking.
And this:
9.48 pm. Jeers and boos for someone who has Mexican ancestry. Wow. The rank xenophobia in the GOP base sometimes surprises. And Romney of course aims to please: he’ll veto the DREAM Act.
9.55 pm. Juan Williams tries to find out if Gingrich can even understand why some of his rhetoric may offend some. Newt responds by backing child labor in schools. Juan Williams hangs in. The crowd boos the black moderator. Then Gingrich says that president Obama has put more people on food stamps than any president in history – because that’s what “elites” like to do. Notice the way in which Gingrich cannot make a point without personalizing it against the president. But with this crowd, against a black media man, he wins the crowd overwhelmingly.
That’s nasty and then it got bloodthirsty:
10.06 pm. Ron Paul gives his worst answer yet on war. I’m afraid he’s doing very poorly in this debate. A little rattled, a little meandering, somewhat off his game. Sad. Then Gingrich does off on Pakistan. He’s having a good debate. He knows in his bones how to rouse a Southern audience. And the Andrew Jackson “Kill Them” line really is the mantra of the Southern right. Killing is what they truly believe in. And Paul is able to stand up to the mob.
10.11 pm. Now Romney tries to co-opt the bloodlust. “We are under attack.” If you believe that the US is under attack, and that this gives the US the right to go anywhere and kill anyone, then this is your party. Romney disowns his own foreign policy adviser. No negotiations with the Taliban. Romney apparently favors the Afghan army finishing the job. Heh. Since that won’t work, I assume Romney will intensify the war in Afghanistan and reverse the planned withdrawal.
10.20 pm. A chilling defense by Romney of the right to put people in prison for “treason” without any due process. Santorum says that the NDAA does not change previously existing law. That was Obama’s interpretation. The notion that we should simply trust the president not to abuse a power that is inherently authoritarian is outrageous. Ron Paul alone sees the real issue. But this party that allegedly believes in individual freedom is completely comfortable with the abolition of habeas corpus whenever an administration cries out: “terror suspect!”
10.35 pm. Just to recap: Turkey is run by Islamic terrorists; and the right response to the Golden rule is to boo it. Also: habeas corpus is no big deal because presidents don’t abuse power. Unlike monarchs, I suppose. This is the party of restoring the Constitution?
So here is Sullivan’s conclusion:
I’m not sure what to say about this evening, except I want to take a shower. I’ve rarely been repulsed by the atmosphere of a debate as I was tonight. But this is the Republican core of South Carolina. One of the biggest applause lines was about waging war on the federal government. I suspect that if any Latinos or African-Americans were watching this, Obama’s support just jumped.
From my perspective, Romney was cringe-inducing, shudder-worthy, and plastic beyond measure. I suspect he’s going to try and rig this year’s tax returns to hide his far lower rate of taxation and far, far, far higher income than 99.999 percent of the population. It was a weak answer.
We also had a strong endorsement of child labor, largely for African-Americans. I suspect that Santorum helped himself tonight, as did Perry a mite. Gingrich also showed his ability to reach the Southern vote, and Romney tried to fake it. Gingrich’s diatribe about blacks getting paychecks rather than food stamps earned him a standing ovation.
I still have some strange feeling that Romney is in trouble in this state. I’d be a fool to analyze this debate or its impact in South Carolina. But Newt’s solid racial dog whistles and constant support for violence and hatred of “elites” may well help him a lot.
And you wanted to watch that?
And for what other people thought, at the American Conservative, Rod Dreher offered this:
There goes Gingrich with the food stamp thing again, blaming Obama for “putting more people on food stamps than any president in American history.” It wasn’t Obama that did it, Gingrich, it was the depression recession. This is FOOD we’re talking about. This is people struggling to feed their families in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. And Gingrich is playing racial and cultural politics with it. To listen to Gingrich, you’d think that Obama signed up all those layabouts for food stamps just so he could throw government money at them.
And Josh Marshall says here that the base is now in love with Gingrich:
Newt’s really on fire tonight. Really not sure that it’s going to matter much. But he’s back into that mode of serving up perfect red meat for the Republican primary electorate.
Will Wilkinson says here that Romney had an awful night:
This was Romney’s worst debate. He was often flummoxed and seemed incredibly greasy, even for him, in his wriggling answer about disclosing his income taxes. His attempt to pin Bain’s creative destruction on insidious Chinese trade practices was pathetic.
And see Peter Spiliakos:
The low point was when Santorum asked Romney if Romney believed that felons who had completed their sentence should be allowed to vote. Romney froze and tried to change the subject since apparently Romney didn’t know what he was supposed to pretend to believe.
But the polls show we have a frontrunner, Romney, and P.M. Carpenter is simply amazed:
Unlike some of his earlier appearances in previous grillings and third-degrees, his demeanor is utterly imperturbable; there stands a man who knows he’s getting away with a magnificent fraud – himself.
And most of these folks are conservatives. This was amazing.
But you really didn’t have to watch. The play-by-play online was fine. And while all this was happening the Lakers did beat Dallas. And in the morning ESPN has that show, Highlight Express – with the essential clips from the previous night’s games. That too will do just fine. Sometimes it’s best to avoid the full experience, when the full experience is just too painful.
