Poor Ron Paul, he has some really great ideas, but he sounds like the Republican version of Mike Gravel, only not spastic. He looks and sounds like a kindly old man who is way out of his depth. I like him, I think he has good ideas, but he isn't presenting them in a way that looks or sounds presidential. If you saw the faces of the people in the audience, it was a collective "wtf?" look.
Tommy Thompson sounded like a frigging genius when it comes to health insurance and health care. I don't like almost anything else he said, but I think my heart skipped a beat when he spoke about healthcare. If I were president, I would make him the head of my Healthcare Taskforce, Republican or not.
Giuliani, believes that global warming is manmade, is pro-choice, and in the words of I think Duncan Hunter, will never ever be the nominiee because of it. Pro-choice is a litmus test for Republicans, many of them are single issue voters, and this is a non-starter. Other than that, I don't agree with him on a lot of foreign policy, but I can get on board with much of his social views.
For the most part, other than Rudy, Romney, McCain, and Paul, the other six are all interchangable to me. Sam Brownback, Tancredo, Hunter, Kilgore, Thompson, the other guy I can't remember, they all seem to basically be on the same page, they're all interchangeable middle aged white guys who look like dime a dozen Republicans to me. I wasn't impressed by any of them except for Thomspon's speech on Healthcare.
The whole debate was muted. None of them went after each other, which I think was GOOD for the Democratic debate. They defined themselves, they showed their differences, they really made a statement about what they believed in and stood for, especially Biden I thought. I still can't tell you the names of all the Republican candidates just by looking at them, they haven't brought any value to the table yet.
I thought, taken out of context, McCain saying 'I like Indians' or whatever it was that he said, and a couple other comments were pretty funny. And it was absolutely hysterical when Giuliani was talking about Jesus and the crack of lightning shut his mic off.
I'm in favor of culling the field now. I'd like to see both parties narrowed down to five candidates each at these debates, that way we can start getting more specifics on answers, better longer answers, and more questions on more issues rather than the continual drumbeat of 60 minutes on Iraq and then 60 minutes of dodging domestic issues.
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twinky: While the transcript is great so that later when the voting-promises are broken I have some sort of fond memory of what I once hoped for, I prefer to hear my lies straight-faced so I can at least be temporarily assuaged by the charisma. Posts: 3060 | Registered: Nov 2003
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