I didn’t watch the debate, but the clip above shows Newt Gingrich swatting away Mitt Romney’s attack the Newt is a career politician, whereas Mitt is a businessman.

Romney also got in trouble for challenging Rick Perry to a $10,000 bet.

Romney has generally done well in the debates, and yet he still couldn’t break through. Now that he’s slipping and Newt is surging, he picked the wrong time to finally have a bad debate performance.

Things aren’t looking good for him.

Yesterday, I saw a clip of Mitt Romney ripping Newt Gingrich for being a flip-flopper. Of course it was only a matter of time before one of his opponents used Romney’s own words against him. The Jon Huntsman campaign produced this ad.

It’s hard to think of a major candidate in modern history who comes across as more opportunistic than Mitt Romney. Newt Gingrich has plenty of problems and he’ll be a disaster for the GOP, but his flips and flops come more from his flaky mind and his constant desire to come up with creative proposals to puff up his ego. With Mitt, it’s all calculated, and then he makes things worse by lying about it.

The scathing attacks on Mitt Romney from prominent conservatives are intensifying. While the GOP establishment rallies around Mitt as they survey the confederacy of dunces that make up the Republican field of candidates, conservative writers are stating the obvious – that Mitt Romney is basically a fraud who will say anything to get elected.

George Will unloaded on Romney last week, expressing disdain for Romney’s multiple positions on practically every issue dear to conservatives.

Yesterday, Erick Erickson from RedState.com lamented that Romney will be the death of conservatism.

Mitt Romney is not the George W. Bush of 2012 — he is the Harriet Miers of 2012, only conservative because a few conservative grand pooh-bahs tell us Mitt Romney is conservative and for no other reason.
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Mitt Romney is going to be the Republican nominee. And his general election campaign will be an utter disaster for conservatives as he takes the GOP down with him and burns up what it means to be a conservative in the process.
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Mitt Romney will be the nominee because the other candidates, right now, are a pretty pathetic lot.
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You’d think that given the economy, jobs, and the present angst about the direction of the country that the GOP would have an easy path to victory. You would be wrong.

You forget the electoral college. The vote is coming down to a handful of states and Barack Obama still maintains the advantage of incumbency and not terribly terrible polling in those swing states.

Mitt Romney, on the other hand, is a man devoid of any principles other than getting himself elected. As much as the American public does not like Barack Obama, they loath a man so fueled with ambition that he will say or do anything to get himself elected. Mitt Romney is that man.

I’ve been reading the 200 pages of single spaced opposition research from the John McCain campaign on Mitt Romney. There is no issue I can find on which Mitt Romney has not taken both sides. He is neither liberal nor conservative. He is simply unprincipled. The man has no core beliefs other than in himself. You want him to be tough? He’ll be tough. You want him to be sensitive? He’ll be sensitive. You want him to be for killing the unborn? He’ll go all in on abortion rights until he wants to run for an office where it is not in his advantage.

I don’t blame conservatives for rejecting Romney. I think the conservative movement has lost its mind with the unbending, extreme positions we’re seeing all around the country, and I do believe that some level of pragmatism has to be considered, but Romney is a joke.

Many establishment Republicans are rallying around Mitt Romney, mostly because the rest of the GOP field is an utter embarrassment. But Romney keeps making it tough for them with his parade of flips and flops.

Romney’s establishment support took a hit over the weekend when prominent essayist George Will slammed Romney in a column over his inability to be consistent. After a devastating summary of Romney’s various positions on the issues, Will concludes with this:

Romney, supposedly the Republican most electable next November, is a recidivist reviser of his principles who is not only becoming less electable; he might damage GOP chances of capturing the Senate. Republican successes down the ticket will depend on the energies of the Tea Party and other conservatives, who will be deflated by a nominee whose blurry profile in caution communicates only calculated trimming.

Republicans may have found their Michael Dukakis, a technocratic Massachusetts governor who takes his bearings from “data” (although there is precious little to support Romney’s idea that in-state college tuition for children of illegal immigrants is a powerful magnet for such immigrants) and who believes elections should be about (in Dukakis’s words) “competence,” not “ideology.” But what would President Romney competently do when not pondering ethanol subsidies that he forthrightly says should stop sometime before “forever”? Has conservatism come so far, surmounting so many obstacles, to settle, at a moment of economic crisis, for this?

This is a devastating critique. While Will represents the conservative wing of the GOP, he’s not part of the crazies and he has significant influence with the establishment. He’s now provided an argument against Romney’s principle claim – that of electability.

Mitt Romney is turning into a joke. If you don’t like his position on something just wait a bit. He might change it if the wind blows in a different direction.

His latest feat of mental gymnastics occurred in Ohio, where he once supported Governor Kasich’s union-busting bill. Romney came to the state to support the efforts to support Issue 2, but he must have seen the polls which showed how unpopular the bill had become. So he wavered. Conservatives were justifiably outraged, so a day later Mitt flipped again and said he was 110 % behind the bill.

Rick Perry and the others GOP candidates will savage him for this. Meanwhile, the Democrats are happy to chime in as well. See the video above.

We’re seeing a battle of videos out there and the Rick Perry-Mitt Romney feud gets personal and nasty.

Mitt Romney’s campaign put out a scathing video yesterday implying that Perry wasn’t capable of speaking coherently. The video was taken down after complaints by CNN of clips from their pundits, and now it’s been re-posted by an organization that downloaded the original video.

Perry’s video above hit Romney where it hurts. Not only is Romney a compulsive flip-flopper who will take different positions depending on the political environment he’s facing, Romney will also lie about his past positions. This video is devastating, and provides fodder for Romney attacks during the GOP primaries and in a potential general election match-up.

Perry is also vulnerable, and we can expect to see more videos from Romney showing Perry’s difficulties with the English language. He makes George W. Bush sound like a Shakespearean actor.

It’s game on folks, and this political cage match should be fun to watch, and it’s precisely what the Obama campaign has been waiting for.

This is going to be a fun political season.

CNN did a terrible job with this debate. With so many candidates, it would have worked much better with one or two moderators. Instead we had to listen to simplistic questions from the audience, and we rarely got most of the candidates to answer the same question.

I didn’t agree with hardly anything that was said by the candidates, but most of them did fine for the first debate. Tim Pawlenty, however, looked weak as usual when he passed on the opportunity to slam Romney on health care. I just don’t think he has what it takes to survive the primaries.

Mitt Romney did fine, but nobody really challenged him tonight, so we’ll see how he does if Rudy Giuliani enters the race. Giuliani will hammer him. Romney also talked in circles about the auto bailout.

I was surprised by Michele Bachmann. Again, I don’t agree with anything she says, but she was very comfortable onstage and she handled herself well. This is terrible news for Pawlenty who is trying to get some of the evangelical vote, and so it’s also good news for Romney, who would love to have Bachmann draw the evangelical vote from more viable candidates.

Herman Cain was very erratic, so we’ll see if the Tea Party crowd remains impressed with him.

Chrysler announced today that it is repaying $7.5 billion to the U.S. government years ahead of schedule. Meanwhile, GM has announced it will hire thousands of new workers in the U.S. after a successful IPO.

The bailout of the U.S. auto industry in 2009 by the Obama administration was very unpopular, but it will go down as one of the shrewdest decisions of President Obama. Letting GM and Chrysler go through a bankruptcy liquidation would have killed thousands of jobs and possibly turned the recession into a depression. Thousands of auto suppliers would have been insolvent immediately, thus creating even more job losses.

Most on the right, including presidential candidates Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney, opposed bailing out the auto companies. Mitt Romney even penned an op-ed arguing that we should let Detroit go bankrupt. They look like fools now, and the Democrats just released a preview of how this issue will be highlighted in the 2012 campaign, particularly in the Midwest.

He got off to a slow start, but Mitt Romney got the crowd going with some clever lines and some cheap shots. For a party that is going crazy over the thought of family members being in the news, Mitt Romney took another shot at Michelle Obama.

I’m surprised he didn’t take any real shots at Obama. I suspect this is coming, particularly from Giuliani, but we’ll see how tough they get with him.

All the red meat attacks seem to be against “liberals” and the East Coast elite. I don’t know if this is going to work. Sure, the base will get excited, but will independents and young voters react to this? Is this starting to look a little like 1992?

Anyways, I wish McCain had picked this guy. He’s such a putz.