A key primary debate revolved to a large degree around the Texas governor, write ADAM NAGOURNEYand JEFF ZELENY
THE FIGHT for the US Republican presidential nomination narrowed into an intense and ideological battle during a staged TV debate involving all candidates on Wednesday night.
Front runners Governor Rick Perry of Texas and Mitt Romney of Massachusetts clashed sharply over social security, health care and each other’s long-term prospect against Obama.
A series of spirited exchanges between the two men, which revealed differences in substance and style, offered the first extensive look into the months-long contest ahead that will offer Republican voters a starkly different choice. They traded attacks on each other’s job creation records and qualifications to be president, overshadowing their opponents in the crowded Republican field.
Perry doubled down on his view of social security, assailing its future as a “monstrous lie,” and he questioned scientists’ assertions that climate change has been caused by human activity. Romney said that Social Security should be protected and suggested that Perry’s positions would make it difficult for the Republican Party to appeal to a broad base of voters needed to win the White House.
“Maybe it’s time to have some provocative language in this country,” said Perry, who spent much of his time in his first presidential debate defending his Texas record and a litany of positions in his book, Fed Up.
On the eve of the president’s economic speech to a joint session of Congress, the debate at the Ronald Reagan Museum and Library focused far more on the distinctions among the Republican candidates than on Obama’s handling of the economy. The entire Republican field united around the notion of limiting Obama to a single term, but differed in proposing solutions to the country’s ailing economy.
Perry attacked Romney’s record of creating jobs in Massachusetts and his championing of health care legislation when he was governor. Romney, in turn, cast Perry as a career politician.
“Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt,” Perry said, referring to the former Democratic governor of Massachusetts who ran for president in 1988. “Well, as a matter of fact,” Romney replied, “George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did, Governor.”
The crowd of Republicans burst into laughter.
But as the exchanges intensified, one of the other candidates, Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, chastised the moderators of the debate, from NBC and Politico, and said that they were trying to stoke divisions among Republicans in a way he said would help Obama.
That said, neither Romney nor Perry seemed to need much prompting.
Romney argued that Perry, who has spent much of his life in government, lacked the experience in private industry needed to turn the economy around. And seeking to undercut what has been Perry’s main claim in advancing his candidacy – his record as governor – Romney argued that Perry had benefited from institutional advantages, ranging from having a Republican state legislature and state supreme court to the economic benefits of having vast deposits of gas and oil.
“Those are wonderful things, but Governor Perry doesn’t believe that he created those things,” Romney said. “If he tried to say that, well, it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the internet.”
The exchanges quickly moved from the economy to health care. The candidates were asked to register their opinions on the health care plan that Romney signed into law when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Perry chimed in first, declaring, “It was a great opportunity for us as a people to see what will not work, which is an individual mandate in this country.”
Romney sought to defend the healthcare law, which was a precursor to the federal plan signed into law by Obama, but said it was intended for his state only. If elected, he said, he will move to repeal the Obama administration’s law as soon as he takes office.
Jon Huntsman, a former governor of Utah who stepped down as the ambassador to China in the Obama administration, sought to insert himself into the exchange and pointed out that Utah under his stewardship led all states across the country in creating new jobs. Huntsman assailed the hard-line posture Romney has taken toward China.
“Mitt,” he said, “now is not the time, in a recession, to enter a trade war.”
The debate here revolved to a large degree around Perry, whose candidacy has dramatically changed the contour of the race.
Perry defended his record of overseeing the execution of 234 inmates in Texas. When asked by one of the moderators, Brian Williams of NBC News, if he had lost sleep over the decision, Perry replied, “No sir, I’ve never struggled with that at all.”
The invited audience, made up of supporters of the candidates and patrons of the Reagan Library, broke out into applause when Williams noted again that 234 people had been executed. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who had hoped that her victory in the Iowa straw poll last month would place her among the top tier of candidates, struggled to break through during the exchanges. She, along with former senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Herman Cain, a businessman, were asked far fewer questions than Romney and Perry.
Huntsman, apparently alone on the stage, argued that Republicans were endangering their prospects in the general election by attacking the theory of global warming. “In order for the Republican Party to win,” Huntsman said, “we can’t run from science.”
Perry, one of the strongest sceptics of global warming on the stage, strongly stood by his views and said it was a mistake to adopt policies to deal with a problem that he said was not proven. He invoked the scepticism that he said was directed at Galileo.
“The science is not settled on this,” Perry said. “The idea that we would put Americans’ economy at jeopardy based on scientific theory that’s not settled yet, to me, is just nonsense”
Ron Paul of Texas challenged Perry aggressively on several fronts, including for pushing through an executive order requiring young girls to have an inoculation against HPV, human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease, before reversing course.
"This is not good medicine, I do not believe," he said. "It's not good social policy. And therefore, I think this is very bad to do this. But one of the worst parts about that was the way it was done." – (New York Times service)