GOP Debate:

NOTE: I have told you this before, but it is necessary that I repeat it here: The Lad is a senior staffer on the McCain campaign. As I have said in speeches (and maybe on the air) I will be for whomever the Republican nominee turns out to be. My interest in the McCain campaign limited to my desire that it stay in business as long as possible so The Lad continues to get a paycheck.

Here's the problem I have watching these debate. I cannot watch the Democrats and put myself in the mindset of being a likely Democratic primary voter. Nor can I watch the Republican debate and pretend I am not a likely Republican primary voter.

As I did on Sunday night, I watched the first hour (or in this case the first hour and 13 minutes) but did not watch the folks-in-the-crowd part so if something happened after the first hour, I missed it.

Who won, who lost:

I thought everyone was on his game and there were probably no major vote changes based upon what happened in the first hour.

I originally thought that Giuliani didn't have as much time as the other major candidates, but I counted eight answers in the first hour for Giuliani, seven for McCain, and nine for Romney so it was pretty even.

I thought everyone did pretty well. In the Democratic debate John Edwards decided to make a hard run at Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

In this debate, the third place candidate, Mitt Romney, stayed in his rhetorical lane and answered the questions clearly and to the point, and didn't try to show how much he knows except for the first question which was whether "if you knew then what you know now about Iraq �"

Romney said the question didn't make sense and twice used the phrase "It is a null set," which, according to our friends at Wikipedia is defined thus:

In measure theory, a null set is a set that it is negligible for the purposes of the measure in question.

Looking back, I think Romney's penchant for trying to sound like the smartest kid in the school is a sign of insecurity and nervousness. After that first answer he sounded like a normal person and did a pretty good job.

McCain has, it seems to me, hit his stride after a very shaky first debate and a modestly improved second. The fact that much of the first hour centered on his two best subjects: Immigration and Iraq, no doubt helped.

McCain has a verbal tic when he uses the phrase "my friends." It is jarring and makes an otherwise good answer sound like it has been lifted from a press release.

Giuliani's answer on the abortion question is getting better and better and the more it gets asked the less Republican voters are going to talk about it, because they will have made up their minds. He did a better job in bringing national security into more of the answers - Iraq, Immigration and big oil - and was especially good on the need for an Apollo-like effort to wean the US from foreign oil.

However, on immigration, when Giuliani went into the specifics of what he thought was needed to fix the bill in the Senate, he gave McCain the opening to say, "You've just described out bill, Rudy, I'd like to discuss it with you."

We'll have to see what happens if and when Fred Thompson gets into the race, but I suspect his first debate will not go well because as we have seen, it is not like anything else politicians (or, for that matter normal people) do and it takes some practice. The other candidates will have had a number of full-contact debates under their belts and are not likely to cut Thompson any slack the first time he shows up.

What about the others? Huckabee is a minister so when he was asked about creation v. evolution he is very comfortable with his position.

By the way, scientists - even the most ardent opponents of creation - have no explanation for how or why the Big Bang happened or how to explain the nothingness which preceded it. They have a name for it: singularity, but that's just so they can nod and move on to something they can understand like quantum mechanics and dark matter.

As for Tancredo, Gilmore, Tommy Thompson (who did much better this time than the first), Hunter, Paul and Brownback; I suspect they will all stay in until the Iowa straw poll in August, but they must know by now they have no chance to vault themselves into the top tier.

Having said that, though, none of them is playing the role of comic relief like Mike Gravel (on purpose) and Dennis Kucinich (inadvertently) on the Democratic side. They are all serious guys but they're not going to make it to the finals.

END NOTE: I did not see McCain's answer to the woman whose brother was killed in Iraq. I watched the youtube replay which you can also do but, as it fell outside my self-imposed one-hour window I won't add it, to these notes.