desperation with him. you see that with his campaign. there is a feel of a do-or-die moment with the straw poll. then you had michelle brockman, who early on seemed really prepared for getting hit. she was ready for these attacks by tim. she seemed to get tired. frankly, at the end, i think she came up with a position on the debt ceiling. when she came up on the debt ceiling and said, we never should have raised it under any circumstances, that is a minority view even inside the house republican conference. that is not going to go over well with the business community. that makes it hard for her to take this leak from being a tea party favorite and making the leap to a possibility of becoming a mainstream republican candidate that the business community can get behind because they are acting like that
deficit reduction you can get. we don t care how close you get to balancing the budget. if you raise taxes by one dime, we are against it. that is not a very good position to take. eugene robinson, did you see anyone tonight when you consider the road that candidate will take to get all the way to the republican nomination, who can take the presidency away from barack obama? i am not sure that i did. if you are going to judge by that metric, i think romney is the strongest of those eight candidates in the general election. we will see the extent of which he corners himself in this radical, right position. i thought the tim/michelle, minnesota nice, it minnesota not so nice smack down were great
this is a very important point because i think for the men on that panel taking on the only woman on the panel is difficult. it seems that romney will want him to stay on as long as he can. i want to point out what michelle said about tim s record is accurate. the raising of the taxes and the budget issues that he s had, and i thought polenty seriously misrepresented himself tonight. he kicked a lot of cans down the road and penciled a lot of stuff out that was not true budgeting. mark baiten will tell you that he s been left with a real mess. so i thought bachman didn t expect polenty to be as aggressive as he was but i thought she handled herself very well and what she said from my knowledge base was factually correct. i don t disagree on that part.
i have had republican mitch strategist tell me that would tear the party down. who had the best night, who did what he or she had to do up there most effectively? the cheap, cliche answer is rick perry, because he did not have to be up there or do this. everybody tonight had some odd moments. the ones that had to do well was tim. you got the sense that, to use a baseball metaphor, any ball that was thrown remotely in front of him, he took a swing at it. he went after michelle. sometimes he did it in a serious policy way. sometimes he was cheap about it. same when he went after minute. you could feel the air of desperation with him. you see that with his campaign. there is a feel of a do-or-die moment with the straw poll. then you had michelle brockman, who early on seemed really prepared for getting hit.
it seems this will corner them more and more into tight, republican corners that do not appeal to the general elections. it almost seems like they are trying to outdo each other on taxes. always. the could have followed it up with out 100 to 1. all the hands would have stayed up. they are out trying to outdo one another. that was my interpretation. we have a thing in minnesota called minnesota nuts. we found out tonight that they left the republican arena. i thought that michelle and tim going back and forth with one another is very telling. we will see more of this with the candidates as we get going. they will have to separate themselves on issues on how far they will go when it comes to taxes, house for they will go when it comes to entitlement programs, and how far when it comes to rolling back health