This is a piece about Thursday night’s Republican presidential debates, but first I would like to note that the media’s fixation with which Republican is the most like Reagan, and who is the next Reagan, and who parts his hair like Reagan, is absurd, and subtly undermining of Republicans, which is why they do it. ~Peggy Noonan

The media’s fixation?  I enjoy the old “the media is out to get us” line as much as anyone, and it can be true, but I am struggling to see this one.  Presumably the party agreed to hold the debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and obviously it was the candidates who have been going out of their way for the past few months (especially the tiresome Mitt Romney) to declare that they are Reagan’s children.  It has been conservative activists who have been actively fretting about the quality of the candidates and the alleged lack of true-blue Reaganites in the field.  Yes, the media has reported these internal divisions and anxieties, perhaps even gleefully, but they are not fabricating the “who’s like Reagan?” narrative out of thin air.  When you can imagine Giuliani responding to what he would like on his hot dog by saying, “Well, as the great and optimistic hero Ronald Reagan might say…mustard and relish,” you know that all of the obsession about Reagan is an expression of the candidates’ understanding that they aren’t very much like Reagan, at least in terms of their effectiveness as candidates, and are doing all that they can to cover up their weaknesses by constantly tying themselves to the great man.  As a result, ironically, the more often they mention Reagan, the more they diminish themselves by calling to mind just how capable and effective Reagan was at articulating his message and how generally bad many of them are at doing the same.  If Reagan was the Great Communicator, Giuliani showed himself to be the Great Stumbler (his answer on Sunnis and Shi’ites was amusing to watch as he painfully called to mind the difference–which he managed to get more or less right, by the way). 

That brings me to Mitt Romney.  Yes, Romney is smooth and, to the untrained eye, almost human.  In the superficial world of television debates, he will always “do well” in some sense, because he is a master of appearance over substance.  I will be willing to grant that Romney gained the most from last night’s debate, even though he did not necessarily perform as well as some of the others, because he made no obvious mistakes (except for being a treacly and obnoxious politician who reinvents his views when it is convenient) while his two major rivals came away looking unimpressive (Giuliani) or like a crotchety old man who hasn’t had his dinner yet (McCain). 

If Nixon’s infamous five o’clock shadow and sweat were allegedly his undoing on television, McCain’s glowering face will have to be his.  Not for him M. Royal’s coleres tres saines et tres utile–he was just grumpy.  That isn’t necessarily a negative in my view, since we could stand to have more grumpy and passionate candidates and fewer prefabricated candidate dolls who utter trite phrases (guess which one I mean), but the public typically responds poorly to these displays.   

Did Romney really help his chances at the nomination that much?  He may have, but his chances of getting the nomination have always been so poor (there’s the Mormonism and then there’s his record) that improving on those chances doesn’t necessarily mean that much.