Herman Cain wins very close debate

I’m going to score this on a 10 pt must system

WIN­NER Her­man Cain 10.0: Answered ques­tions directly and drew com­ple­ments from other can­di­dates, pushed his plan that is sim­ple enough to under­stand. Needed to be noticed and was.

Rick San­to­rum 9.9: Strong answers and strong punches landed on Paul and Perry, had one so so answer that kept him behind Cain, spent a lot of time in a mutual admi­ra­tion soci­ety with Gingrich.

Michelle Bachmann/​Newt Gin­grich 9,8: Both did what they had to do, Bach­mann started slow but was strong and not shy about throw­ing punches, The con­tri­bu­tion angle is going to smart because of the Palin follow-​up. Great Oba­macare answer too. Gin­grich excelled again and sim­ply needed to stay rel­e­vant, If I had to give an edge to one it would be Bach­mann because she had more to lose.

Mitt Rom­ney 9.7 : Fairly solid per­for­mance, the expe­ri­ence of run­ning before really helps. He had one or two weak answers but out­pointed Perry which is all that mat­ters. Because he is com­fort­ably ahead of the peo­ple who did bet­ter than he did it’s not a prob­lem, at least not yet.

Rick Perry 9.6: Hes­i­tated a bit at first but set­tled down but was a con­stant tar­get and was hit solidly and it showed. It was not enough that it will cost him the lead but he was clearly off-​balance. How he comes back in the next debate will really deter­mine how he can take a punch.

Ron Paul 9.2 I can’t under­stand how he didn’t go back to that Fed ques­tion that he wasn’t asked that was a mis­take, other than that he was him­self. He han­dled the med­ical ques­tion very well, but the Bin Laden ques­tion really hurt him for the gen­eral pub­lic but Paul is not about to be some­thing he is not. He likely cost him­self con­sid­er­a­tion among the gen­eral pub­lic, but Paul will not pan­der and answered hon­estly. I can’t see what else he could have done.

Jon Hunts­man 9.1: It takes a lot of effort to do a worse job than some­one who is unwill­ing to absolve Amer­i­can from blame on ⁹⁄₁₁ but Hunts­man man­aged to do it. His “Trea­son” com­ment on Perry sounded con­trived, although he ref­er­enced his plan he did a poor job of mak­ing it clear. His dri­ver license answer while hit­ting Perry didn’t work and his Afghanistan answer was hor­rid. But the media loves him so he’ll be back.

Tea party 9.8 Most ques­tions were solid and I liked start­ing with the national anthem, no horns on anyone’s head and peo­ple who watched the debate and the tea party mem­bers didn’t see a bunch of racists unless they were already in Andre Car­son land.

CNN 9.6 Started slow and I thought he could steer the ques­tions slightly bet­ter but Wolf wasn’t bad. Best debate to date.

Bot­tom line: The dif­fer­ence between the top 6 was close enough that it won’t move much, Bach­mann did enough to keep her in it, and we need to see if Perry can keep tak­ing hits, Rom­ney is helped by the minor can­di­dates all doing well.

Update: Stacy Points to a key moment:

It fell to for­mer Penn­syl­va­nia Sen. Rick San­to­rum, a favorite of many social con­ser­v­a­tives, to point out the dif­fer­ence between Gar­dasil and other vac­ci­na­tions. “Ladies and gen­tle­men, why do we inoc­u­late peo­ple with vac­cines in pub­lic schools? Because we’re afraid of those dis­eases being com­mu­ni­ca­ble between peo­ple at school. And there­fore to pro­tect the rest of the peo­ple at school, we have vac­ci­na­tions to pro­tect those chil­dren. Unless Texas has a very pro­gres­sive way of com­mu­ni­cat­ing dis­eases in their schools… then there is no gov­ern­ment pur­pose served for hav­ing lit­tle girls inoc­u­lated at the coer­cion of the gov­ern­ment. It is big gov­ern­ment run amok. It is bad pol­icy and it should not be done.”

This is a real prob­lem for Perry, in the pri­maries and every debate he is going to be hit again and again on this.