Mitt Romney pounced on Newt Gingrich at every turn Monday in the GOP presidential debate in Florida.
Sponsored by NBC News, the National Journal and the Tampa Bay Times, in conjunction with the Florida Council of 100, the debate featured Romney throwing repeated haymakers at Gingrich on such issues as economic policy, lobbying and taxes. The former Speaker of the House didn't duck and dodge in his answers, but bounced around the ring in a way, deflecting Romney's blows just enough to stay on his feet.
“I learned something from that contest in South Carolina,” Romney reasoned, “and that was I had incoming (pressure) from all directions, was overwhelmed with a lot of the attacks and I’m not going to sit back and get attacked day in and day out without returning fire,” he said.
So he lit into Gingrich, whose popularity has soared since the South Carolina primary. “This is the worst kind of trivial politics,” Gingrich said at one point, posturing himself as above-the-fray to Romney’s accusations.
“Let me be very clear, because I understand your technique, which you used on McCain, you used on Huckabee, you’ve used consistently. It’s unfortunate, and it’s not going to work very well because the American people see through it,” he said.
Bryan Williams, one of the moderators, instructed the crowd at the outset to subdue its applause after the candidates spoke, dousing the exclamatory fervor evident in previous debates.
Political analysts scored the debate as a close win by Romney, although there were clearly no knockout blows.
“I think that Romney won,” The Daily columnist Reihan Salam told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “Keep in mind that in ’96, Romney was putting his own money into newspaper ads attacking a flat tax that would have been great for him, saying that it was a tax cut for fat cats,” he said.
Jamal Simons, principal at the Raben Group said, “I thought he came out and he punched Newt pretty hard in the beginning. Newt was clearly trying to contain himself, he looked like he was kind of going to bust out of his suit a little bit, but he was trying to contain himself and not get into a real big fisticuffs with Romney,” he said.
Ron Paul and Rick Santorum (yes there were two other candidates in Monday’s debate) tried to steal attention away from the front-runners but came up with nothing provocative.
Paul actually came to Gingrich’s defense when Romney asserted that the former Speaker of the House was run out of Congress in disgrace.
“This idea that he voluntarily reneged and he was going to punish himself because we didn’t do well in the election, that’s just not the way it was,” Paul said.
The Texas Congressman rejected a question about going third party, saying that he was doing “pretty darned well” with younger voters.
The topics ranged from Iran to Cuba to immigration to Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman who was kept in a vegetative state for several years, sparking a legal battle that became a national issue. A relatively new phrase was coined during the immigration segment -– “self-deportation,” the act of relocating back to one’s country of origin because of the lack of U.S. jobs. Romney and Santorum both trumpeted the term as evidence that pro-business immigration policies could work without government regulation.
Santorum’s finest moment, perhaps, was when he honed in on both Romney and Gingrich, saying “there is no difference between President Obama and these two gentlemen.”
“Here’s one where you have folks who preach conservatism, private sector. And when push came to shove, they got pushed. They didn’t stand tall for the conservative principles that they argued that they were for and as a result we ended up with this bailout that injected government into business like never before,” he said.
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