Republican Presidential Debate

I watched most of the Republican Presidential debate tonight. I think there's very little useful information to gain from these debates, but there's a strange mix of frustration and entertainment that mysteriously keeps drawing me in. And sometimes it's just uncomfortable... like hearing the crowd cheer at the mention of the death penalty in the last debate and shouting enthusiastically that we should just let people without health insurance die in this one.

The basic problem with these debates is this... you have 1 minute to answer extremely complicated questions that most viewers know very little about. If the best answer is complicated and beyond the understanding of someone with no knowledge of the topic, trying to explain it in 1 minute isn't going to be very popular. If you want to get elected, your only real choice most of the time is to throw out catch phrases, play it safe, and try to start a controversy around one of your opponents. So you hear really stupid things in these debates, but you never know for sure if that was the candidate's belief for real, or if that's just what they thought is best for their campaign.

Best examples from tonight:

1. Perry defending HPV vaccination mandates because he's "always on the side of life". It should be obvious how much this contradicts his opposition to universal health care.

2. Question: What should happen if someone without health insurance gets into an accident and needs a treatment they can't afford in order to survive? Bachmann: I don't like Obamacare.

3. The crowd booing when Romney suggested there would be benefits to moving to a federal sales tax. Of course, they were just booing because "tax=bad". But really, shifting our taxation away from income and more into consumption is exactly in line with conservative politics. Earlier in the debate when they were praising Texas for not having an income tax, that's exactly what it meant: we have a sales tax instead. A suggestion for Romney: if you want to get elected, stop assuming people know anything. Don't try to explain something complicated; you should have just answered "no new taxes", and you would have gotten tons of applause.

4. Every candidate keeps saying we should lower taxes. Then Perry was asked if he agrees with Obama's tax cuts. He answered no because we can't afford to, so we'll have to raise taxes in the future to pay for it. I guess that only happens when Obama is the one proposing the tax cut?

5. When Bush became President, we had a budget surplus. By the time he left, we had a really bad deficit. The biggest policy contribution to that deficit was huge tax cuts (this is math, not opinion). So tonight the simple question was asked: were those tax cuts bad since they weren't paid for with matching spending cuts? Bachmann just said no because "we have a spending problem not a taxing problem". Ugh.

6. Ron Paul getting booed for suggesting terrorists hate us because of ways we've screwed them over in our foreign policy. There's such a strange contradiction in the Republican base in their views of the government and the military. "The government screws everything up, we need to shrink government" is guaranteed to get cheers on almost every topic, but you can't hint at that idea with regards to our military interventions around the world. "We need to cut government spending" is a reason to cut every program that helps our poor, but you must hate America if you make that suggestion for our military.