ORLANDO, Fla. - Rick Santorum didn't get much rest before the Fox News-Google Republican presidential debate Thursday night. The former Pennsylvania senator arrived here in Orlando in the early morning of debate day after driving nearly eight hours from South Carolina. Why spend all that time in the car, while other candidates fly in private planes? "I don't know if you saw my last finance report," an exhausted Santorum says with a laugh a couple of hours after the debate's end. "We're running a grassroots campaign."
On Thursday night, Santorum's persistence paid off. Here's the bottom line from the debate: Just because Rick Perry and Mitt Romney are the frontrunners in the race, and just because most political observers expected them to attack each other in the debate, and just because they did, in fact, attack each other in the debate -- none of that necessarily means Perry or Romney actually won the debate. And indeed, neither did.
Instead, Santorum had the night's best performance. Romney came in a close second, while Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain also did well. As for Perry -- it would be hard to place him any higher than fifth.
"Perry was off his game, big time," Santorum says. "Or maybe that is his game."
Santorum, along with Romney, hit Perry hard on immigration, one of the Texas governor's weak points in the Republican primary race. Romney went first, pointing out that Perry's support of giving in-state tuition breaks to the children of illegal immigrants constitutes an enormous financial subsidy to illegals. "You know how much that is?" Romney asked. "That's $22,000 a year. Four years of college, almost $100,000 discount if you are an illegal alien and go to the University of Texas. If you are a United States citizen from any one of the other 49 states, you have to pay $100,000 more. That doesn’t make sense to me."
Judging by the applause in the Orange County Convention Center, it didn't make sense to the audience, either. And Perry, who must have known such questions would come up, didn't have much of an answer. "If you say that we should not educate children who have come into our state for no other reason than they’ve been brought there by no fault of their own," he said, "I don’t think you have a heart."
That was too much for Santorum. "Governor Perry, no one is suggesting up here that the students that are illegally in this country shouldn't be able to go to a college and university. I think you are sort of making this leap that, unless we subsidize this, the taxpayers subsidize it, they won't be able to go. Well, most folks who want go to the state of Texas or any other state out of state have to pay the full boat. The point is, why are we subsidizing it?"
Pushing harder, Santorum brought up -- for the first time in any of the debates -- the fact that Perry once considered a bi-national health care plan with Mexico. "I mean, I don't even think Barack Obama would be for bi-national health insurance," Santorum said.
The Fox moderators gave Perry an opportunity to respond. "I've got one question for him," Perry said of Santorum. "Have you ever been to the border with Mexico?"
"Yes," Santorum said. (It turns out he toured U.S. border control facilities at a California checkpoint a few years ago.) Hearing Santorum's answer, Perry said, "You weren't paying attention." But it was Perry who seemed to have been caught off guard.
Santorum also seized on Perry's weak answer to a question about Pakistan. Perry was asked what he would do if, as president, he got word that "Pakistan had lost control of its nuclear weapons at the hands of the Taliban."
Perry didn't have much to say. "Obviously, before you ever get to that point you have to build a relationship in that region," he answered, stressing that as president he would have a firm relationship with India. But as far as what he would do if that terrifying moment came, Perry had no answer.
A moment later, Santorum was asked a different question, but chose to return to Pakistan. The only way to deal with such a crisis is by having good connections inside the country, he said, not somewhere in the region. "The bottom line is that we should be establishing relationships in Pakistan with allies of ours," Santorum said. "Working with allies [outside Pakistan] at that point is the last thing we want to do. We want to work in that country to make sure the problem is defused."
Santorum gave solid answers to several other questions ranging from right-to-work laws to Iraq and Afghanistan. As for Perry -- well, his troubles extended beyond exchanges with Santorum. He stumbled when he tried to turn a pretty easy question from a Google viewer -- what would he do to stop "a massive overreach of big government into the classroom" -- into an attack on Romney.
"There is one person on this stage that is for Obama’s Race to the Top [education initiative] and that is Governor Romney," Perry said. "Being in favor of the Obama Race to the Top -- that is not conservative."
Perry was apparently referring to a report that Romney had told a group in Miami that Education Secretary Arne Duncan has "done some good things" with Race to the Top. But Perry's denunciation of the entirety of Race to the Top left his defenders in a somewhat awkward position. One of Perry's most prominent Florida supporters, state House Speaker Dean Cannon, struggled to align Perry's statement with the views of state Republicans, some of whom have supported Race to the Top. "In Florida, there are attributes of Race to the Top that are admirable," Cannon said. "Some of the components are desirable." A moment later, a reporter asked, "Can you support Race to the Top and be conservative?" and Cannon quickly answered, "Yes."
After the debate, Romney's advisers were out in force in the Spin Room. They seemed clearly satisfied with their man's performance, but more than that, they seemed delighted with Rick Perry's performance. In each debate, the Texas governor has had "a moment or two where he's good," said top Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, but fails to deliver over the course of the whole debate. "It doesn't seem like his heart's in it," said Stevens. "He kind of gives it a go and then seems to be mailing it in the back half of these debates. His answer on Pakistan was incoherent. He doesn't have a job plan. He thinks that Texas is a great place and you should vote for him for president. Well, you can think that Texas is a great place and not vote for him for president."
Perry -- and Romney, and Santorum and the rest of the field -- will get another chance October 11, when Republicans gather for the next debate, presented by Bloomberg and the Washington Post, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
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