May 4, 2007

NRO Debate Forum

Last night, I had the pleasure of analyzing the debate with my excellent co-bloggers at Heading Right as it happened, and then recapping it at Debate Central in a half-hour roundtable which has now been podcasted by BlogTalkRadio. Afterwords, National Review offered me the opportunity to participate in their Symposium on the Reagan Library Debate, along with Yuval Levin, Kathleen Parker, John F Pitney Jr, Peter Robinson, Lisa Schiffren, and of course, Kathryn Jean Lopez.

The consensus appears to be that the debate format was so awful as to make it almost inconsequential. Everyone agreed that Rudy did not help himself, although apparently Survey USA's snap poll showed Rudy winning the debate among California watchers. Perhaps that was because he didn't get to talk as much as the other candidates, as Chris Matthews at times seemed to play keep-away from Rudy. After that, the responses vary, and all are intriguing.

Well, all but one: I'd say my piece is unfortunately the weakest, so read the rest. It's well worth it, as always at NRO.

NOTE: A long night and a cranky computer have me off to a slow start; more to come.

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Comments (1)

Posted by flenser [TypeKey Profile Page] | May 4, 2007 3:45 PM

If you look at the internals of that Survey USA poll, you find that it was only of California voters, that it included a large number of Democrats, and that 86% of the people surveyed said they had not even watched the debate.

In other words, it gives us some idea of how popular Rudy is in California, but says practically nothing about the debate.