The Left is always "smarter" but how has that worked out in their choices?
This is an interesting take.
Professor vs. Professor ……”This is where Gingrich comes in. Just as Kerry’s candidacy represented an attempt to effectively out-patriot George W. Bush (“You have a war president? We have a war hero!”), the former speaker has skillfully played to the Republican desire for a candidate who can finally outsmart and out-orate Obama.
His promise to challenge the president to a series of Lincoln-Douglas debates, in particular, has been deliberately framed as a kind of professor versus professor showdown, in which the president’s weaknesses will finally be exposed.
“How does a Columbia-Harvard graduate, who was the editor of the law review ... supposedly the best orator in the Democratic Party,” Gingrich asked recently, “how does he look himself in the mirror and say he’s afraid to debate a West Georgia College professor?” It’s a line that evokes a kind of conservative revenge fantasy, in which the liberal elitists who sneered at George W. Bush’s malapropisms and Sarah Palin’s “you betchas” receive their richly deserved comeuppance at the hands of Newton Gingrich, Ph.D.
But a fantasy is all it is. The American Spectator’s Quin Hillyer calls it “the fallacy of the master debater” — the belief that elections turn on dramatic rhetorical confrontations, in which the smarter and better-spoken candidate exposes his rival as a tongue-tied boob.
In reality, Kerry outdebated Bush but did not outpoll him, Al Gore won the 2000 debates on points only to lose them on personality, and Abraham Lincoln lost the Illinois Senate race to Stephen Douglas. When a presidential debate does matter to a campaign’s outcome, it’s usually a passing one-liner (Ronald Reagan’s “there you go again” Walter Mondale’s “where’s the beef?”) rather than a Ciceronian performance that makes the difference.
More important for the Republican Party’s purposes, it isn’t 2008 anymore, and conservatives don’t actually need to explode the fantasy of Obama’s eloquence and omnicompetence. The harsh reality of governing has already done that for them. Nobody awaits the president’s speeches with panting anticipation these days, or expects him to slay his opponents with the power of his intellect. Obamamania peaked with the inauguration, and it’s been ebbing ever since.”…..
The entire GOP has been unable to get in front of the dialogue. It’s time to stop blaming the mainstream media and time to bring out the big guns of truth. The left will easily invoke the tx governor legacy with Perry, they already have. He did fantastic in this debate, I simply question, not perry as much as the message only being preached to the choir. The frank discussion on the ss dust fund was refreshing, but not gaining traction. Same with Medicare. I think I will copyright social security “ dust fund”. Great job by Perrys prep team... Improved by leaps and bounds.