I was only able to watch the republican debates last night, but I was glad I did. I thought Rudy, McCain, Huckabee and Dr. Paul all did a good job, and that Thompson and Mitt performed less well. In my humble opinion, I respect Mitt Romney, but his campaigning skills need help, and his opponents weren’t letting him slip up at all.
Everyone (the candidates and the media) seemed to smirk at Ron Paul, except the audience and the voters. Dr. Paul was smart to align himself with Barack Obama I thought, as it sets himself apart from the new Republican establishment which can’t seem to figure out a cohesive front.
The bickering about who supported the troop surge and who didn’t was hilariously reminiscent of the Family Guy episode where Peter is set to the task of convincing Washington to go to war. Again, it was Dr. Paul who was clearly the outsider - the only one who voted against going into Iraq in the first place, and is for pulling out troops out as soon as possible.
I also thought it was funny when the moderator was mentioning the candidates shifting positions on the issues and acknowledged that Dr. Paul hasn’t changed much in his convictions and voting record. He’s probably the most consistent politician I’ve ever encountered.
As you can probably guess, I’m leaning towards endorsing Ron Paul. I definitely like McCain, Rudy, and Mitt, but I’m not sure what good it will do to give any of them my support. On the democrat side (which I have historically leaned towards), I like Barack the best by far. Edwards is OK, and I don’t know much about Richardson, but I’m not a fan of Hilary. I have nothing against the idea of a woman as president, but I don’t think a former first lady is right for the task. There are term limits for a reason, and electing the spouse of a former president is too close for comfort.
I guess what I don’t understand about a lot of what’s going on is why the candidates smirk when Dr. Paul talks about the issue of inflation, national debt, and running a war we can’t afford when our own country has lots of serious infrastructure issues (border control, New Orleans, health care, etc.). In fact, it really disappointed me when Fred Thompson made what I considered a really dumb joke about Dr. Paul’s statements about inflation - something along the lines of “so if we stop printing money… we can pull out of Iraq?”
Although I’m not a fan of Facebook, I was glad to see their polls about issues, and how more people wanted to hear about the economy. I agree, I think a lot of our nation’s issues can be traced back to economic policies, from health care to even foreign policy.
My favorite comments from Mitt and Thompson were regarding oil and pharmaceuticals and free market trade. I agree with them that profit is not a bad thing, and in a free market economy, when profits are too high, the market naturally corrects itself through competition. That is a well understood principal of economics. On the flip side, if we were going to spend a trillion dollars, I would prefer we spent it on developing new energy resources instead of invading other nations.
Speaking of foreign policy, this is an area I am a full supporter of Ron Paul. I don’t think that our country should go around policing the world and invading countries. As my father-in-law put it, we should focus on ending wars, not starting them. We’ve done that successfully in the past with WWI and WWII, and unsuccessfully invaded countries without declaring wars in Korea, Vietnam, and others.
When attacked, we should retaliate. And we should remember that the 9/11 attackers didn’t fly war planes or arrive on war ships, then entered our country at the border undetected. I was glad that several candidates said they see border control as an issue of national security. Frankly, I found it really silly how McCain and Mitt Romney bickered for so long about amnesty. In my humble opinion, McCain definitely came out on top. McCain is a smart fighter, obviously, and Mitt picked a fight with him in his attack ads, and lost. Rudy has a realistic approach, I think, but frankly I don’t know too much about the issue, other than I don’t want to have to pay for the care and education of people who are here illegally, and I don’t want people who want to hurt us to be able to waltz right in and roam around as they please.
Dr. Paul made a significant slip-up by saying that terrorists weren’t attacking other countries - the attack in Bali was terrible, along with the ones in Spain, England, and all over the world. But Rudy corrected him on that without making too big of a deal about it.
Huckabee took a quick, stinging jab at Mitt Romney too. If you watched the debate, you know which one I’m talking about - that must have hurt. I just read that Huckabee is supporting the Fair Tax, which I think is a decent idea. The tax code is overly complex in my opinion, and a burden upon itself. The fact that there are 35,000 lobbyists in Washington trying to tinker with the tax code is a little bit nauseating.
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