Last night, to its credit, CNN showed what can happen if a news organization sets aside its political bias and lets the candidates actually debate. If journalism schools exist in the future, they should build a course around comparing the MSNBC/Politico partisan hackery with last night’s CNN debate.
Below is a recap of reactions from your BIG editors:
Andrew Breitbart: Whatever Wolf Blitzer took to make it tolerable for him to be around so many flyover-country Tea Party rubes, he should distribute it to his peers in the mainstream media for the coming election year. CNN put on the show that MSNBC was government-subsidized not to. What was conspicuously missing–and thus making it journalistically fair–was the usual framing of Tea Party concerns as inherently racist. So CNN, especially with its exciting intro package that felt like an ESPN playoff game intro, gets high grades. Maybe I was so appalled by MSNBC’s lower-than-low performance that CNN comes out the winner this evening, simply by behaving professionally.
What Democrats and leftists want is that artificial injection of race. But those who will bring it up in desperation after this Tampa tea party debate will have exposed one of the Democratic Party’s greatest weaknesses: concern over the plight of real minority oppression. None of the Tea Party’s critics will recognize that one of tonight’s questioners was a Tea Party member who happened to be a Muslim woman from Afghanistan. To the modern leftist, this woman is invisible. Her question mark spurring cognitive dissonance across the Daily Kos-Huffington Post-MSNBC bizarro world spectrum.
As for the candidates, there was one moment where Chuck Barris should have gonged Jon Huntsman: his humorously prepared, yet clunkily delivered “no apology” reference to Kurt Cobain. He’s providing no value to the debates, and has no constituency. Tonight should be his last debate. If MSNBC tried to bury Bachmann in the previous debate at the Reagan library, she resurrected herself on CNN tonight. The predictable governor-à-governor sparring of Romney and Perry is already becoming tedious.
Mike Flynn: Now we know why CNN has the brand it does. Hopefully, John Harris, Brian Williams, Politico and MSNBC were taking notes. Wolf certainly got his liberal biases in, from time to time, but not at the expense of a free-wheeling and interesting GOP debate. Newt had the best lines in the debate, but he’s Newt and isn’t going anywhere. Everyone else had some good lines. Rick Perry, yet again, was the subject of attacks from all sides. He was much steadier than in the first debate. He stood his ground, so I score him with the win.
Joel Pollak, EIC Breitbart: The big winner tonight was the Tea Party.
If the Tea Party is racist, then so is CNN. The big loser was Ron Paul, who got booed by the Tea Party when he tried to blame 9/11 on American foreign policy and U.S. support for Israel in particular. One question that remains is why the Tea Party allowed CNN to control the debate being held in its name–especially since CNN seemed to target frontrunner Rick Perry, who is popular among Tea Party supporters.
Larry O’Connor, EIC BreitbartTV: It took the Tea Party to finally put Ron Paul in his place. For years we’ve suffered with this man running for President with an accidental “R” at the end of his name only because he is smart enough to know that he only has a modicum of relevance by staying within the Republican Party. He learned in 1988, when he ditched our party, that he would suffer in obscurity screaming about “militarism” on a street corner like a mad man. Unlike his ideological brother Pat Buchanan, Paul figured out that he could only keep himself from being fully ridiculed by staying within the party and pestering us every four years with his erratic debate appearances.
But not tonight. Tonight, finally, someone said enough. Enough of his blaming America for the 9/11 attacks. Enough of his undermining our troops by constantly labeling ourdefense efforts as “militarism” as if he was channeling Dennis Kucinich or Michael Moore. Enough of his enabling the anti-Semitic fringe followers who see in him the last great hope of finally abandoning Israel like they’ve always wanted. Enough.
The Tea Party audience let Ron Paul hear it and hear it loud. Unlike the establishment Republican audience at the last couple of GOP debates, my pals in the Tea Party booed on Paul. They booed him loud and they booed him long. Unfortunately, I suspect neither he nor his sycophantic followers heard a peep. After all, they are the TRUE Republicans, just ask them. The rest of us are all RINOs.
John Nolte, EIC Big Hollywood:
***UPDATE: What I wrote below was my gut reaction from last night and after reading Dana Loesch’s piece this morning I regret not giving CNN credit for avoiding the kind of divisive social issues no one cares about except for the MSM. That was a big leap froward from previous debates and credit is due.
My list of candidates based on how they did from best to worst:
1. PRESIDENT OBAMA: I’m not saying this to be glib or clever. The plan worked. Wolf Blitzer framed every so-called “tea party” question into a “how awful is Rick Perry” question to hurt our front-runner. The media’s job is to take out each of our front-runners one-by-one, and that’s exactly what’s happening. When you combine this with Mitt Romney’s shameless demagoguery on the issue of Social Security, Obama now has all kinds of fresh talking points and campaign ad material.
Watching the GOP agree to these MSM debates is like watching Christians sign up to meet the lions.
Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
2. MICHELE BACHMAN: Her hit on Romney and RomneyCare was a thing of beauty. I love everything she said and how, unlike Romney, she’s able to score points against her fellow Republicans without undermining their chances in the general election. This is a woman with grit and courage and she was a tea partier before being a tea partier was cool.
3. NEWT GINGRICH: Unlike the other candidates, he sees The Matrix, he sees that the corrupt media is trying to keep everyone’s eye off the ball and he just keeps bringing it all back to where it should be: at the feet of a failed president we call Barack.
4. HERMAN CAIN: This is a great American with an amazing resume and great ideas. Personally, I’m so sick of the MSM dismissing him as second-tier in these debates I could spit. A large number of primary voters remain undecided and these debates should be about helping us learn more about all eight of these candidates, not the horserace or the corrupt media toxifying our front-runner to help re-elect Obama.
I want to hear more from Herman Cain and had the GOP figured out a way to set up these primary debates so that they serve our interests as opposed to those of the corrupt media, who knows what the field would look like today.
Cain is a casualty of this failure more than any other candidate.
5. RICK PERRY: He took some hits today, especially on the issue of immigration. He has poise though, and I think that will serve him well as the campaign grinds on. He just needs more answers to the charges thrown at him and he especially needs to find a way to back off Romney’s Social Security demagoguery.
6. JON HUNTSMAN: He wins for most-improved but that was a pretty low bar.
7. RICK SANTORUM: The former Pennsylvania Senator’s “What the hell’s your problem” face makes me laugh, but he keeps returning to the same message that didn’t register in the first debate: I won as a Republican in a Democratic State. He needs to adapt or get voted off the island.
8. RON PAUL: His foreign policy ideas scares me.
9. MITT ROMNEY: Shame on Romney. One sign of statesmanship is the ability to win the Republican nomination without undermining your opponents’ chances in the general election in the event they win the nomination. This is about beating Obama and what’s good for America, and Romney’s mercenary impulses are a major turn off.
I’ll support Romney 100% should he win the nomination but he just became the first Republican I’d like to see lose the nomination.
Dana Loesch, EIC BigJournalism: We’ve grown accustomed to the MSNBC treatment: a far left network hosts a debate where the moderators are at odds with the candidates instead of forcing the candidates to go at their own records and the records of others; afterwards the entirely far-left panel of the far left network’s on air talent mock the debate participants and skew the issues. Last night’s debate made MSNBC’s previous effort a tacky, JV affair in comparison.
CNN made an effort to include voices to the “right” including mine, Erick Erickson, Ari Fleischer, and many more. Tea partiers asked questions. No one focused on social issues, which isn’t what the tea party is about, the night was about the economy and foreign policy. CNN fielded questions from the web. It was an impressive effort of which conservatives should take note. Don’t demand a balanced media and throw around terms like “MSM” if you aren’t willing to support conservatives when they go on MSM — or willing to acknowledge a successful effort at a debate which included grassroots more so than any other network to date.
A bar was set last night in terms of how media will perceive the tea party going forward and another bar was set concerning diversity of thought on air. Note this and expect it going forward. Kudos to all who helped put on a great debate.
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