The Sunday morning GOP debate in Iowa made plain the magnitude of the problems Republicans face as they try to hold on to the White House after a truly terrible eight years of George W. Bush. It was frighteningly clear that Rudy Giuliani is the best candidate they have, even as he demonstrated why he is a disaster waiting to happen.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, seeking the title of Mr. Inevitable, was exposed on abortion. And Sen. John McCain, who likes to say that he is older than dirt with more scars than Frankenstein's monster, had the weary look of a man fighting his last fight, one he knows is already lost.
The winner, if there was one, seemed to be a candidate who wasn't even present: Barack Obama, who drew heavy fire from the Republicans for his declaration that he would bomb al-Qaeda in Pakistan without approval from the Musharraf government. (Hillary Clinton was not mentioned once during the entire debate.) In an especially poignant development, the Republicans, when they were not agreeing with Obama, were attacking him from the left, urging international cooperation and decrying unilateralism. "When you have a country that is cooperating, you don't tell them you are going to unilaterally move against them, or you are somehow going to undertake this by yourself," said California Congressman Duncan Hunter.
Romney got off a good line on Obama, accusing him of going from "Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week," but later backpedaled and ended up agreeing that bombing al Qaeda in Pakistan is an option he would retain. The main distinction he drew with Obama was that he would keep quiet about it. "We don't -- we don't say those things. We keep our options quiet," he said.
On the more blaring topic of abortion, Romney had a tough road to travel after having changed his mind on the issue. His frustration boiled over at one point, forcing him to blurt out: "Look, I was pro-choice, I am pro-life." It had all the persuasive power of John Kerry's, "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."
Romney is ahead of Rudy Giuliani in both Iowa and New Hampshire, but if he is to overtake the former New York governor in the national polls and grab the mantle of inevitability before Fred Thompson gets it, his abortion answers will have to improve.
Guiliani, on the other hand, seemed at the top of his game, except for his very dated reference to the Democrats' plans for "socialized medicine." Giuliani has an old debating trick he has used for years; he challenges the premise of the question in order to make whatever point he wants to make. He used this strategy to full effect Sunday. Asked whether GOP tax cuts would make it more difficult to address the nation's infrastructure needs, Rudy pounced: "There's an assumption in your question that is not necessarily correct. It's sort of the Democratic liberal assumption -- I need money, I raise taxes." It was the most commanding moment any candidate could muster all day.
Still, the emerging subtext of Giuliani's campaign is that the worst is yet to come.
Asked to describe an important mistake that had changed their lives, the candidates offered everything from not saying "I love you" enough (Brownback) to not taking good enough care of their health (Huckabee) to volunteering for a mission that led to five and a half years of being a prisoner of war in Vietnam (McCain). "I have no doubt of what the greatest mistake in my life has been, and that is that it took me probably 30 years before I realized that Jesus Christ is my personal savior," confessed Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo. Mitt Romney said he wished he had been more honest about his views on abortion earlier in his career.
The question was a gimme, a slow, underhand, high-arc softball pitch for a candidate to do with as he pleased. Only Giuliani, whose tangled personal and professional relationships have in the past raised questions about his character and temperament, dodged the question: "To have a description of my mistakes in 30 seconds?" he responded, drawing some nervous laughter. Moderator George Stephanopoulos, whose father is a Greek Orthodox priest, persisted, asking Giuliani to narrow his answer to a "defining mistake." Rudy could come up with nothing funny, light-hearted, or innocuous enough. "George, your father is a priest. I'm going to explain it to your father, not to you, okay?"
Sooner or later, he's going to have to explain it, whatever it is, to GOP primary voters and then, maybe, to Americans in general.
