I wasn't all that impressed with last night's debate. I was working online with the debate in the background for part of it. Rick Perry seemed better prepared for things than in the past, but not prepared enough. I was especially uneased by the "have you been to the border" meme between he and Santorum (Santorum deserved better treatment, but he was seemingly a bit off-kilter in his approach to Perry) and also troubled that Perry didn't have a good answer to the illegal immigrant student issue.
As I understand it, the plan Texas has is to give good Texas high school students extra tuition help; since children of illegal immigrants are welcome at schools without having to show legal status, a lot of youth will have graduated while being here without getting normalized.
Such youngsters, once they turn 18, should normalize themselves, but I don't think it is wrong to treat them as part of the community, especially when they didn't have the option of not being brought into the country. I think they should get a student visa to go to college, but since they've been here a while, they should be treated much like the children of legal immigrants who will often get resident status at state-run colleges.
Perry also needs to talk about Social Security in a better manner. If you just focus on the problems and start talking "failure" and "Ponzi scheme", it scares people. You need to follow that up with ways to make it more actuarially sound rather than use Tea Party bumper sticker rhetoric.
I don't trust Romney's policy sense. It's not that he's dishonest per se; I would trust him with my teenage niece and he's too rich to be going at this for the cash. He doesn't seem to have a firm of a ideological core for me to be comfortable and I fear that he'll be prone to flowing wherever his aides or circumstances dictate.
Perry isn't all that slick, but he at least brings that Texas stripped-down government meme into play. It's not a great place to be if you need government help, but that lack of taxes and regulation also makes it easier to get ahead once you get into the job market. That Texas economic meme predates Perry by quite a while; it was that way in the mid-80s when I lived briefly in San Antonio, back when Perry and I were both Democrats.
None of the candidates is perfect; even Palin, who usually has a good nose for policy, was on the wrong side of the vaccination issue, falling prey to the vaccination-causes-autism meme that has been refutiated in the last few years. However, one of these folks will likely be up against Obama.
_________
P.S. we'd be better off doing a smaller number of candidates; it's hard to do that this early in the race, but a 8-way split of time doesn't work all that well. I'd prefer something that would put two or three of them alone with a moderator for an hour and have at a handful of issues in depth.
Comments