THERE WAS something strange about watching six middle-aged men in charcoal grey suits and white shirts devote so much discussion to contraception and gay marriage on Saturday night and yesterday morning, in the last two Republican debates before tomorrow’s New Hampshire primary.
But the former senator Rick Santorum’s near victory in the Iowa caucus last week set the tone for the New Hampshire campaign.
Santorum, a devout Catholic, opposes contraception, though he would not ban it, and clashed repeatedly with New Hampshire voters on the issue of gay marriage, which he also opposes.
The ABC News presenter George Stephanopoulos, who once served as president Bill Clinton’s press secretary, got a bee in his bonnet about contraception and wouldn’t let go.
As the frontrunner Mitt Romney noted, no state in the US proposes banning contraception, so it wasn’t really an issue. The interlude gave Romney his best laugh line: “Contraception, it’s working just fine, just leave it alone.”
The less favoured candidates spent more time attacking each other than Romney, but the former governor of Massachusetts took some blows.
In one of the nastiest exchanges, in the NBC Meet the Press debate yesterday, Santorum, who lost by eight votes to Romney in Iowa, asked why, if the latter’s record was so great in Massachusetts, did he not stand for re-election?
(Santorum lost his own re-election bid in 2006 by a staggering 18 percentage points, a sore point with him.)
“Why did you bail out?” Santorum taunted Romney. “I’d go and fight the fight. At least you can stand up and make the fight. I did that . . .”
When Romney stood against the late Teddy Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, Santorum noted, “He was to the left of Teddy Kennedy on gay rights and abortion. We want someone who is going to stand up and fight for conservative principles and not run to the left of Teddy Kennedy.”
“People who spend their life in politics assume that’s all you want to do your whole life,” Romney replied haughtily. “Run again? That would be about me.”
Did that mean that if he defeated President Obama, Romney would not run for a second term, Santorum asked. “Politics is not a career,” Romney replied, still haughty. “I long for a day when instead of having people who go to Washington for 20 or 30 years, stay in office, then become lobbyists . . . I think it stinks.”
The statement was a direct attack on former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and on Santorum, both of whom became lobbyists after leaving Congress.
Gingrich jumped into the fray: “I realise the red light doesn’t mean anything to you because you’re the frontrunner,” he said snidely, suggesting Romney had exceeded his time limit.
“Can we drop the pious baloney. You lost . You were running for president as you were governor. You were out of the state constantly. You lost to McCain and you lost to Kennedy. This idea that suddenly citizenship showed up in your mind . . . Level with people: you’ve been running since the 1990s.”
Animosity was most intense between Romney and Gingrich, whose campaign manager has called Romney a “predator” for business practices at Bain Capital, the investment firm he co-founded.
Gingrich yesterday said he stood by having called Romney a liar. He cited an article in the New York Timesas evidence that Bain "looted a company, leaving behind 1,700 unemployed people".
An advertisement released by a pro-Gingrich “Super PAC” (political action committee) calls Romney’s tenure at Bain “a story of greed” and accuses him of stripping US businesses of assets, selling them off to the highest bidders and destroying jobs for profit.
He was not surprised to have the New York Timesand the Obama administration "put free enterprise on trial", Romney said, but it surprised him coming from a "colleague".
“We understand that in the free economy, in the private sector, that . . . that sometimes investments don’t work and you’re not successful,” Romney said.
“Net-net, taking out the ones where we lost jobs and those that we added, those businesses have now added over 100,000 jobs. I have a record of learning how to create jobs.”
Gingrich then attacked Romney for the advertisements that knocked him down from frontrunner in late November and early December to fourth place at present.
“Governor, I wish you would calmly and directly state that your former empire are running your PAC, and you know some of the ads are untrue.”
Of course they were his former employees, Romney said. “Under the law I can’t direct the ads. If there is anything wrong, I hope it is taken out. The ad I saw said you were forced out of the Speaker’s job, that you sat down with Pelosi and discussed climate change. That’s true.
“It said you called Paul Ryan’s plan ‘right-wing social engineering’. That’s true. You had to reimburse $300,000 after the ethics committee investigation. That’s true . . . But I think the rhetoric, Mr Speaker, was a little over the top . . . I wouldn’t call you some of the things you’ve called me.”
Aside from the titillation of such heated exchanges, much of the 3½ hours of debates sounded like a broken record.
If you’ve attended one campaign rally for each candidate, you’ve heard it all. New ideas do not emerge; nothing moves forward. Romney repeated that this was a fight “for the soul of America”, that the US was in danger of “becoming like Europe”.
He and Santorum criticised Obama for allegedly allowing Iran to develop nuclear weapons, for failing to support pro-democracy supporters there in 2009.
Gingrich displayed his wicked wit to effect. After a rival’s tirade against Obama, the former speaker said he agreed, but the message had been “a little bit harsh on President Obama, who, I’m sure in his desperate efforts to create a radical European socialist model, is sincere.”