Predator drones to keep out 'illegals' was one of many unusual proposals mooted in a TV debate, writes LARA MARLOWE
IT WAS fight night in the Venetian casino in Las Vegas when Republican presidential candidates convened for the eighth time late Tuesday.
Rick Perry and Mitt Romney shouted at each other over Mr Romney’s alleged hiring of illegal immigrants and over who was the better “job creator”. At one point, they appeared close to coming to blows.
Mr Romney also lost patience with the former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who attacked Mr Romney for his healthcare policy when he was governor of Massachusetts.
Throughout the two-hour debate, candidates preferred slamming each other to answering questions posed by the CNN moderator Anderson Cooper.
Mr Cooper asked Mr Perry to explain why Texas had one of the highest rates of children without medical insurance.
Mr Perry blamed the federal government for not securing Texas’s border with Mexico, then diverged into a rant against Mr Romney.
“Mitt, you lose all of your standing from my perspective because you hired illegals in your home and you knew for . . . a year,” Mr Perry accused Mr Romney.
“And the idea that you stand here before us and talk about that you’re strong on immigration is, on its face, the height of hypocrisy.”
Mr Romney chuckled, saying: “Rick, I don’t think that I’ve ever hired an illegal in my life.”
Mr Perry, who was visibly angry, stammered something about a newspaper, a reference to the December 2006 report in the Boston Globe that Mr Romney used a landscaping firm that employed illegal aliens.
In the ensuing shouting match, Mr Romney eventually said he’d warned the company to stop using illegals on his property and fired them when they offended a second time.
At one point, Mr Romney put his hand on Mr Perry’s shoulder. The difference in their height and social class was glaring.
Mr Romney is a tall, Harvard- educated multi-millionaire. The shorter Mr Perry is the son of a tenant farmer, who studied at Texas AM.
“This has been a tough couple of debates for Rick,” Mr Romney said condescendingly. “And so you’re going to get testy.” The shouting resumed.
Mr Romney again lectured Mr Perry: “You have a problem with allowing someone to finish speaking. And I suggest that if you want to become president of the United States, you got to let both people speak.”
There was a contest over who could build the biggest fence on the border with Mexico, won by Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, with her proposal for two parallel walls. “I will enforce English as the official language of the US government,” Ms Bachmann said to cheers.
She would make sure no immigrants received taxpayer-subsidised benefits, and would stop immigrants using “anchor babies” born in the US to gain a foothold in the country.
Herman Cain, the African-American former chief executive of Godfather’s Pizza, who is now in second place in the Republican sweepstakes, had created something of a scandal by proposing an electrified fence that would kill would-be immigrants. That was in Tennessee on October 15th. The following day, he told NBC he was joking.
In the Las Vegas debate, Mr Cain appeared to backtrack, saying he refused to “apologise at all for wanting to protect American citizens”.
Mr Perry warned his rival candidates that “you can build a fence, but it takes anywhere between 10 and 15 years and $30 billion”. He had a better solution: “a lot of boots on the ground” backed up by Predator drones.
Emboldened by the findings of the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington that Mr Cain’s “9-9-9” tax plan would represent a tax cut for Americans earning more than $1 million a year, and a tax increase for those earning less than $50,000 annually, the other six candidates ganged up on him.
Mr Santorum said he loved Mr Cain’s “boldness”. Mr Romney used the Yiddish word “chutzpah” to describe the plan, while Texas congressman Ron Paul denounced it as “dangerous”.
Considering the recent scandal over the fact that he’d maintained a hunting ranch called “Niggerhead”, Mr Perry’s repeated use of the word “brother” in his folksy put-down of Mr Cain seemed tasteless.
“Herman I love you, brother, but let me tell you something . . . I’ll bump plans with you, brother, and we’ll see who has the best idea about how you get this country working again,” said Mr Perry
There has been no serious discussion of foreign policy in Republican debates.
Mr Cain earlier expressed the Republicans’ disdain for the rest of the world when he said he didn’t need to know who ran places like “Ubeki-beki-beki-beki- stan-stan.”
It was time for the US “to have a very serious discussion about defunding the United Nations”, Mr Perry said during the debate.
“When you think about the Palestinian Authority circumventing those Oslo accords and going to New York to try to create the conflict and to have themselves approved as a state without going through the proper channels, it is a travesty,” the governor of Texas said.