I love the contrast…
The Nov. 12 “foreign policy” debate Paul gets 89 seconds out of the televised portion…and even Sean Hannity calls it "deplorable." This next time around on he actually gets the third-most speaking time, and analysts are saying he “surprisingly did well”…and he gets a Drudge Report above-title headline.
Gee. Imagine that.
I will also say I found this to be one of, if not the best moderation job of the debates thus far. Wasn’t perfect, but it was certainly much better than the rest. It was Blitz who was surprising…actually being pretty fair with the questions, the distribution, and the allowance of back and forth. He didn’t try to pit them against each other (and let them keep going back and forth) like that closet teabagger colleague of his.
Another thing I think was pretty obvious was Paul was a lot more vocal (if even just in a metaphorical way). The way he made it well known that he was looking to get a response seemed to be effective. It’s possible someone on that campaign took a little of Tom Woods’ advice. Paul stood up and out quite a bit more than usual, and it obviously worked for him. He needs to do more of that.
Here’s the tally:
Again, count 1 tally as a full minute and a half tally as a 30 second, it went like this. It’s not exact to the second, and that means even more in this debate where Blitzer just kind of let them go on as long as they wanted up to two full minutes, but it’s pretty accurate. If they went on for a 1:30 they got 1.5 tallies, etc.
Romney - 11.75
Gingrich - 10.5
Paul - 9.5
Huntsman - 8
Bachmann - 7.75
Perry - 7.5
Santorum - 7
Cain - 6
I actually may have missed a full tally for Romney, but I don’t think so. (past times here and the included links there.)