More About Last Night
There has been a lot of good commentary on last night's Republican Presidential debate, but I want to highlight Jennifer Rubin's column in Human Events. Jennifer notes the gulf that separated the pre-debate mainstream news coverage from what actually happened last night:
If you did not know better you would have thought the GOP hopefuls were gathering just to debate abortion. In the days preceding the debate coverage in the print, TV and website news of most traditional press focused on Rudy Giuliani’s recent difficulties in fending off an abortion question and then responding to revelations about Planned Parenthood donations and a NARAL questionnaire.Headline after headline and story after story warned of Giuliani’s predicament and the sorry state of the GOP portrayed in the midst of a family squabble. *** The major networks all ran stories postulating that an intra-party fight over abortion would be bad news for Republicans already operating under the burden of the unpopular war and sagging Bush Presidency.
There was only a hint that perhaps the MSM was barking up the wrong tree. A May 4 Gallup poll revealed that abortion tied with global warming as the 13th place winner in the “most important issue” question.
The debate was much better, and much less focused on social issues, than mainstream news coverage would have caused one to expect. This is partly due to the excellent job done by the Fox News team, and partly due to fact that the media stereotype of the GOP as a party obsessed by the social issues is far off the mark.
PAUL adds: In a survey of more than 3,500 readers of Human Events, abortion ranked tenth in importance among all issues in this campaign. The top two issues were illegal immigration and the war on terrorism. I thought McCain did very poorly on the first issue and not as well as the other contenders on the second (due to his answer on interrogating known terrorists). Judicial nominations came in fourth, and McCain may have some vulnerability here too because of his partication in the Gang of 14. Campaign finance reform didn't make the list, but we know from our mail that the McCain-Feingolf legislation is a sore spot with many conservatives.
