I was very proud to be a Republican tonight. Hard to say who won. They were all very impressive. Even Bachman, who I have really come to despise in the past couple of months or so, was more disciplined than usual and she came off with some very good comments. I particularly like when she pointed out that Reagan himself had agreed to a tax hike/spending cut deal very similar to the hypothetical one that the GOP candidates said they would not agree to in the last debate. He got burned, and the reason no GOP candidate will ever take that kind of deal is because they know that they will get burned by either the current Congress or future Congresses. Not because of some stupid tax pledge that Nordquist wants them to sign.
Huntsman was very impressive. If he didnt shoot himself in the foot by basically telling Republicans that theyre stupid for not believing in Global Warming (even though the same people who are pushing that nonsense were wrong about every single other scare in the past 50 years) , and if he had not worked for Obama, he might have an outside shot at the nomination.
I was very impressed with the way Perry carried himself. He obviously has been coached to act more presidential, and it showed. Im not sure if he has persuaded me to put my support to him from Romney, but he definatley showed that he is for real and that he deserves to be one of the front runners. He was a bit shaky in terms of substance when answering some of the attacks on the Texas record, but as the debate went on he started to catch fire, and I thought he did a good job later on in answering the attack on Texas education.
Romney did well on the immigration issue by pointing out how a lot of liberal policies on illegal immigration such as DREAM act help encourage MORE illegal immigration.