Debates are doing in the Republican candidates one by one, and yet they can’t seem to stop talking. And we can’t seem to stop watching.
Tuesday night’s debate was the 11th political face-off among the Republican candidates in a year that has seen more televised blab-fests than any presidential election cycle in memory.
Much to the surprise of the political establishment, the debates are determining front-runner status on a weekly basis.
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They elevated the underfunded Michele Bachmann and sidelined her within a month. They turned Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan into a national buzz word. They shined a spotlight on golden boy Rick Perry before crippling him when he repeatedly fumbled responses to basic policy questions.
And now they are giving Newt Gingrich a second chance.
Tuesday night was focused on national security. With Cain, Perry and Bachmann on hand, it was lively entertainment, even if a few candidates did come off like deer in the headlights.
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“They’ve turned the Republican race into a national primary rather than a state-by-state battle, at least up to this point,” Dan Balz, national political correspondent at the Washington Post, told TheWrap. “Once we get to January, we’ll go state by state, but the debates have really shaped the Republican race in ways no one quite anticipated.”
The contest for the Republican nomination isn’t being waged in the cornfields of Iowa or the VFW halls of New Hampshire; it’s been fought almost exclusively over a candidate’s debate performance.
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Impressively, Bachmann, Cain and Gingrich have done it all without having much of a ground presence in early primary states or the war chests to compete with the man who rode into the election as the presumed front runner, Mitt Romney.
“All you need is a few hundred dollars to get you to the next debate to keep your candidacy alive,” Lawrence O’Donnell, host of “The Last Word” on MSNBC, told TheWrap. “It’s a new economic structure that’s keeping their campaigns viable.”
It doesn’t hurt that the ratings have been bullish, with debates on each of the three major cable news networks bringing in between 5 million to 6 million viewers apiece.
But what debates giveth, they can also taketh away. When Perry threw his hat in the ring last summer, the Texas governor was instantly perceived as the frontrunner, until he stumbled badly by backing away from earlier attacks on Social Security and endorsed giving children of illegal immigrants lower tuition at public universities.
Oh, and there was Perry’s brain freeze about the three cabinet departments he’d like dismantled -- the “oops” moment instantly became a YouTube sensation and seemed to banish Perry to also-run status.
