A lot less excitement came out of this debate than many of the recent ones. It’s a bit hard for me to say what of great consequence came out of it. With one exception: Rick Perry avoided any major stumble or embarrassment (yep, a pretty low bar but that’s where we are) and even managed, oddly enough, to get the rest of the candidate’s following him on the foreign aid/start at zero idea.
If this Rick Perry had shown up for the other debates it’s interesting to speculate where this race would be now. Less hypothetically, can this kind of performance along with the massive amounts of money Perry’s now readying to spend on TV ads change the equation and get him back into the race? It’s really hard to figure how he gets back into it. But who knows? Herman Cain was briefly the national frontrunner. So really anything’s possible; the weirder, the more possible.
One other point: the debate moderators, Scott Pelley (CBS) and Major Garrett (NJ) did a very good job.
