My reaction: I didn’t watch any of it.
However, over at The Corner, it’s looking like Rudy seems to have done quite well. Rudy’s biggest problem is still with abortion, but I’m not yet entirely sure it’s fatal to him. At this point, it seems like that issue has been discussed to death, and Rudy’s forthrightness on the position does seem to be helping the matter. Rudy’s numbers have gone down as of late, but that seems to be as much attributable to the Fred Thompson factor than Rudy’s abortion position. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that Giuliani apparently bitch-slapped Ron Paul into next week. Then again, that’s not a particularly difficult task.
As always, Glenn Reynolds has his usual roundup of links. It looks like the general zeitgeist is that Rudy won, but McCain didn’t do badly either. Romney didn’t do as well as the last week.
It’s just too early in the race to get too worked about about these debates. It’s all inside baseball at this point, and people aren’t going to start paying attention for a while yet. Any debate that features a crank like Ron Paul or Mike Gravel isn’t a debate in which you’re going to get much depth. When the field winnows down to the top few candidates, we’ll get more action, but it doesn’t look like there are going to be any surprises as to who’s going to be in the top of this lineup.
