Republican debate: Who gains the advantage in Florida?

The Associated Press

This crowd is about to get much smaller.

Featured Topic | Posted 43 weeks 1 day ago

Republican debate: Who gains the advantage in Florida?

There were no major blowups at Thursday's Republican presidential debate in Florida. Mitt Romney repudiated Washington's management of the economy. John McCain repudiated war critics. Rudy Giuliani repudiated the New York Times. Mike Huckabee repudiated those who attack his faith. And Ron Paul repudiated ... everybody else.

What did we learn from the Republican debate.

Ben likes: A quiet night, not worth missing 40 minutes of a new "Chuck" episode

Jim Geraghty/The Campaign Spot

I don’t think there was an enormous margin between the candidates this evening. One of the challenges of covering this race is getting a sense of how these candidates and their messages are perceived to folks who don’t follow politics day-to-day, who just begin to tune in to the race in the closing days before they head to the polls.

If you were an apolitical Floridian, and you just tuned in tonight, I think you were probably impressed by Romney. It was his most unflappable performance in a while. Everybody else – McCain, Giuliani, Huckabee, even Paul – they were all more or less their regular selves.

Joel likes: Debate takeaway

Chuck Todd/NBC

Perhaps all of them saw how both Clinton and Obama killed each other in that CNN debate earlier this week and were afraid of turning off voters. Either way, tonight's debate was the tamest GOP affair in weeks. This, despite the fact that half of this field could be out of contention after next Tuesday.
Overall, the tame affair was good news for both Romney and McCain, the two frontrunners in Florida; both got to sound and look presidential. Romney, in fact, may have had his best debate performance in a long time because he wasn't attacked.