Why do a deal with liberals for a GOP debate?

Michael Barone:

The biggest mystery about the Reagan Library/MSNBC debate last night is why the Reagan Library allowed MSNBC to be the co-sponsor. Brian Williams, whom I haven’t watched much in recent years, seems to have been drinking liberally of the MSNBC kool-aid; many of his questions were so steeped in liberal distaste for Republican positions that it was embarrassing. There was no questioning about the nation’s fiscal position, aside from asking whether Rick Perry would abjure $1 of tax increases in return for $10 of spending cuts, very little on the macroeconomy and very little on foreign and defense policy.

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Rick Perry (29% in the average of recent polls). Perry came prepared to exchange barbs with Mitt Romney but not to defend Texas against the stereotypical complaints against Texas relayed by Brian Williams. He accepted Williams’s invitation to pummel Romney on Massachusetts’s low rate of job creation during Romney’s single term as governor and managed to note that it created fewer jobs then than during Michael Dukakis’s governorship in the 1980s (Romney didn’t think to note that Perry was a Democrat during most of that time and backed Al Gore for the 1988 Democratic nomination which Dukakis won). He was less adroit in explaining why Texas has relatively high levels of people without health insurance (one obvious reason: it has higher percentages of young people and immigrants, legal and illegal, than the national average).

He did manage to make the point that, although Texas spends less money on education than many other states and—horror of horrors to Brian Williams, cut education spending from projected levels this year—that its black and Latino students tend to have higher test scores than in many high-spending teacher-union-dominated states. He was, I think, suitably presidential in going out of his way to give Barack Obama and the Navy SEALs credit for killing Osama bin Laden, and he was steadfast in defending Texas’s record on capital punishment. (Note to Brian Williams: You may be against capital punishment, as I am, but most Americans favor it in appropriate circumstances, and every American president including Barack Obama has supported it; it’s not un-American to execute the most heinous criminals.)

Perry was also interestingly passionate in defending his decision to require hpv inoculations and he accepted the invitation to attack Ron Paul for his 1987 renunciation of Ronald Reagan; he was strong in maintaining that Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” for Americans now in their twenties. His call for predator drones to police the border with Mexico precluded any attacks on him for opposing the border fence in Texas (where, as he has pointed out before, it’s impractical since the border runs along a river). His statements that Keynesian economics was now dead.

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He also critiques the other candidates. I think his question about permitting MSNBC to sponsor the debate is valid. They are left wing crazy. They hate Republicans and despise conservatives. Their "talent" is just not credible when it comes to analyzing conservative Republicans. They tend to support the squishiest candidate but would never vote for them.

The media did not like Newt Gingrich's response to a question trying to get him to go after Perry or Romney, but I though he was spot on and so did most other conservatives watching the event.