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Townhall...
Still
Looking for a Candidate to
Replace Obama
By Michael Barone
9/26/2011
The
spotlight was hottest on Rick
Perry, the frontrunner in national polls since he announced his
candidacy in
Charleston, S.C., on Aug. 13, the same day that Michele Bachmann won
the straw
poll in Ames, Iowa.
Perry’s
problem was not just that he
punted on the tough question of how to respond to a terrorist takeover
of
nuclear-armed Pakistan. Even the smooth-talking Mitt Romney might have
had
trouble with that nightmare scenario. And Perry was right to cite our
informal
alliance with India as a source of leverage.
The
problem was that Perry was
couldn’t respond cogently to utterly predictable questions and was
unable to
articulate his pre-scripted criticisms of Romney. A case can certainly
be made
that Romney has flip-flopped on issues. But Perry failed to make it.
Perry
defended his order requiring HPV
vaccinations by citing his talks with a woman with cervical cancer --
but they
took place only after his order. He failed to fend off attacks on his
criticisms of Social Security in his book “Fed Up!,” saying he was only
endorsing the longtime exemption from the program for state and local
public
employees.
He
failed to explain why Texas, with
its large legal and illegal immigrant and young populations, has a high
percentage of people without health insurance.
He
was eloquent in defending Texas’s
in-state college tuition for children of illegal aliens, but his stand
is
hugely unpopular with Republicans outside Texas. And he failed to point
out
that it helped him win a respectable 38 percent from Latino voters in
the 2010
election.
Mitt
Romney clearly benefited from his
greater experience over the years and his superior preparation in
recent weeks.
But he also benefited from the fact that no one challenged him
convincingly on
claims that he is unlikely to be able to sustain.
He
sloughed off Perry’s accurate
charge that he supported the Obama administration’s Race to the Top
education
program -- a defensible position, but not a popular one for Republicans.
He
repeated now what has been his
standard defense of his Massachusetts health care program. But someday
someone
is going to nail him on his insistence that its individual mandate to
buy
insurance covers only 8 percent of the population. It actually applies
to
everyone...
Read
the rest of the column at
Townhall
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