Romney vs. Perry, reductio ad absurdum

By Michael J.W. Stickings

I was too busy writing our (long) NFL preview post (up this afternoon!) to pay much attention to the Republican debate last night, but it would seem that these are the two key takeaways:

1) It's Romney vs. Perry now. All else is pretty much irrelevant, even Bachmann.

2) Perry can handle himself awfully well, while Romney remains awkward.

Here's The Hill reporting on last night's "fireworks":

Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) began sparring over their respective jobs records less than 10 minutes into Wednesday's Republican presidential debate.

The highly-anticipated fight between Romney and Perry, the two front-runners for the GOP nomination, largely lived up to expectations, with extended spats between the pair throughout the debate.

And how about this nasty little exchange:

Perry responded: "Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did, Mitt."

Romney retorted: "Well, as a matter of fact, George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did, governor."

I think Perry wins. Isn't it worse, if you're a Republican, to be compared to Dukakis than to Bush?

Whatever the case, it's rather amusing, in a depressing sort of way, watching two pro-business stooges talk about jobs. Romney made his wealth as a job-slashing management consultant, after all, while Perry is very much a corrupt crony capitalist (even Palin thinks so). But whatever. Let them duke it out.

While they do so, at least Obama has an opening -- even if his jobs speech was unfortunately re-scheduled to coincide with tonight's NFL opener -- to offer concrete solutions, to prove that he's serious about getting things done, about helping the American people at a time of significant economic uncertainty, instead of just trying to score cheap political points. The Republicans do enough of that.