Debate Reverberates Going Into Final Stretch

Mitt Romney has 23 days to confront any political damage from what may become the most memorable moment of Saturday night’s debate — the image of him offering to wager $10,000 to settle a bet with Rick Perry over the contents of Mr. Romney’s latest book.

Mr. Romney heads to New Hampshire Sunday evening and will campaign there, in Iowa and in South Carolina in the coming week as he battles Newt Gingrich and his other rivals before voting begins on Jan. 3. The seven remaining candidates will face each other one more time before then during a debate in western Iowa on Thursday night.

The rapidly closing window for campaigning puts new pressure on the candidates and their campaigns to respond quickly and aggressively to offer defenses against bad debate moments — or to take maximum advantage of good ones.

Mr. Gingrich faces the challenge of building on his lead in the polls and capitalizing on what early reviews suggested was another strong debate performance on Saturday night. His campaign quickly posted video of Mr. Gingrich vowing to tell the truth like Ronald Reagan did.

For the other Republican candidates, like Michele Bachmann, the trick will be to use the memorable debate moments to try and generate a new buzz around their candidacies. That may be increasingly difficult to do as the media increasingly focuses on the new rivalry between Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney.

On Monday, the one candidate who didn’t participate in Saturday’s debate,Jon M. Huntsman Jr., will face off againt Mr. Gingrich in a two-person, Lincoln-Douglass style debate in New Hampshire, where Mr. Huntsman is hoping to make a last stand in his bid for the nomination.

But until the next debate, much of the political conversation in the country — and among the candidates fighting for the Republican nomination — will revolve around what was said at Drake University in Des Moines last night.

Here are five of the key moments that will fuel that conversation.

1. $10,000?

It looked like a scripted moment; one of those overly practiced lines that politicians love to have in their back pocket, ready to whip out at just the right time. As soon as Rick Perry started his attack on a passage about health care in Mr. Romney’s book, Mr. Romney lunged out his hand, offering a bet on whether he had changed his position.

“10,000 bucks? $10,000 bet?” Mr. Romney said.

Mr. Perry demurred, saying that “I’m not in the bettin’ business.”

The danger for Mr. Romney is that the size of the bet was so large and so out of reach for many Americans, for whom $10,000 amounts to a huge chunk of their annual salary. The Democratic National Committee pounced, tweeting repeatedly on Saturday night with the hashtag #What10kBuys.

Republicans seized on it too. Mr. Huntsman’s campaign promised to launch the website www.10kbet.com soon. And Representative Michele Bachmann’s spokeswoman told reporters that $10,000 was “three or four months salary” for many voters in Iowa.

The moment was similar to one earlier this year, when Mr. Romney answered a heckler at the Iowa state fair by saying that “corporations are people, my friend.” Democrats seized on the clip as evidence that Mr. Romney was no friend of average Americans.

Like the corporations incident, the $10,000 bet may be most dangerous for Mr. Romney if he becomes the nominee and has to explain it to a broader electorate.

Aides to Mr. Romney conceded it wasn’t his best moment, but insisted that it does not fundamentally change the dynamic in the race. People know that Mr. Romney is rich, they said, and his opponents were always going to try and use that against him.

But the economic unease in the country could make the moment particularly dangerous for Mr. Romney if his rivals are able to successfully paint him as out of touch with middle America. It’s particularly problematic given Mr. Romney’s recent attempts at populism by tailoring some of his economic proposals directly at the middle class instead of the wealthy.

In the debate, Mr. Romney confronted the issue head-on: ” I didn’t grow up poor,” he said. “And if somebody is looking for someone who’s grown up with that background, I’m –  I’m not the person. But I –  but I grew up with a dad who’d been poor, and my dad wanted to make sure I understood the lessons of hard work.”

Now, the question is whether that argument will win out over the political noise from his $10,000 bet.

2. Newt’s Humility?

If there’s anything that’s whispered about in Washington, it’s how vulnerable Mr. Gingrich might be because of his personal life — three marriages, one of them broken up because of his own infidelity with his current wife.

But Mr. Gingrich — now in the lead in most polls — created one of the more memorable moments in the debate Saturday night by handling the issue deftly when it was raised by the moderators.

He didn’t object to the question or call it stupid, as he has so many times about other subjects in previous debates. He waited patiently as the other candidates took their turns talking about their successful marriages. And then he humbly accepted responsibility for the mistakes he has made.

“In my case, I said up-front openly I’ve made mistakes at times,” Mr. Gingrich said. “I’ve had to go to God for forgiveness. I’ve had to seek reconciliation. But I’m also a 68-year-old grandfather. And I think people have to measure who I am now and whether I’m a person they can trust.”

It was an un-Gingrich-like answer to what began as a pretty direct assault on his character from Mr. Perry, the governor of Texas. Asked about the importance of marital vows and faith, Mr. Perry took a barely veiled swipe at Mr. Gingrich’s marriages.

“I think the voters are wise enough to figure that one out,” he said. “I’ve always kind of been of the opinion that –  if you cheat on your wife, you’ll cheat on your business partner.”

3. Mr. Newt Romney.

If Mrs. Bachmann was looking for a moment that could help her regain the spotlight in the days that are left, she may have found it.

By creating a new opponent — Newt Romney — Mrs. Bachmann offered a catchy new slogan for conservatives who think that both men are not true believers in their causes.

“If you look at Newt Romney, they were for ObamaCare principles,” she said. “If you look at Newt Romney, they were for cap and trade. If you look at Newt Romney, they– for the illegal immigration problem. And if you look at New Romney, they were for the $700 billion bailout. And you just heard Newt/Romney is also with Obama on the issue of the payroll extension.”

The phrase recalls the success that Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, briefly had by combining Mr. Romney’s name with “Obamacare” and coming up with “Obamneycare.” His refusal to use the phrase during a debate made him look afraid to attack and contributed to his early departure from the race.

The question may be whether Mrs. Bachmann can sustain the criticism of both Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Romney during the days ahead in ways that capture the imagination of voters and the attention of the media.

4. Ted Kennedy?

If Mr. Romney flubbed his prepared line, Mr. Gingrich did not. As soon as Mr. Romney contrasted his experience in the business sector with Mr. Gingrich’s years of Washington work, he was ready.

“Let’s be candid,” Mr. Gingrich said to Mr. Romney. “The only reason you didn’t become a career politician is you lost to Teddy Kennedy in 1994.”

The audience booed — but not at either man on the stage; Republicans just boo at the mention of the late Mr. Kennedy, a liberal icon. Mr. Romney ran against Mr. Kennedy in 1994, but lost the race and did not make another attempt to get back into politics until 2002.

“I’m a citizen, I’ve served the country in many ways, you’re a citizen, you served the country in many ways,” Mr. Gingrich added. “But it’s a bit much. You would have been a 17-year career politician by now, if you’d won. That’s, that’s all I’m saying on that one.”

Mr. Romney had a good comeback when it was his turn, noting that “if I would’ve been able to get in the NFL liked I hope when I was a kid, why, I would have been a football star all my life too.”

Taken together, the back-and-forth is likely to remain one of the most memorable moments, in part because it gets at the central question between the two leading candidates for the Republican nomination: what kind of experience is better?

Mr. Romney and groups working on his behalf are already pressing that question with voters in appearances and television ads. And Mr. Gingrich is not shy about saying whenever he can that his experience as the Speaker for four years is part of what he is selling to voters.

Mr. Gingrich is trying to undermine Mr. Romney’s claim to have spent most of his adult life as a businessman. There’s very little time left for Mr. Gingrich to get that message across to voters.

A debate moment like that can’t hurt his cause.

5. Palestine and Israel

Perhaps the only foreign policy moment to emerge from Saturday’s debate was the exchange over Palestine, and especially Mr. Gingrich’s heated refusal to back down on his characterization that Palestinians are an “invented” group of people.

Mr. Gingrich sought to portray himself as a truth-teller who was willing to stand up on behalf of Israel.

“Somebody oughta have the courage to tell the truth: These people are terrorists. They teach terrorism in their schools,” he said. “It’s fundamentally time for somebody to have the guts to stand up and say, ‘Enough lying about the Middle East.’”

A few minutes later, Mr. Gingrich summoned the memory of Ronald Reagan, saying that “sometimes it is helpful to have a president of the United States with the courage to tell the truth, just as was Ronald Reagan who went around his entire national security apparatus to call the Soviet Union an evil empire and who overruled his entire State Department in order to say, ‘Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’”

But his rivals are just as certain to characterize his statements as the rantings of a hothead who does not have the temperament to be the commander-in-chief. Mr. Romney began to make that argument during the debate, and it’s likely he will continue on the trail.

“I will exercise sobriety, care, stability,” Mr. Romney said, seeming to suggest that Mr. Gingrich has none of those attributes. “And make sure that in a setting like this, anything I say that can affect a place with– with rockets going in, with people dying, I don’t do anything that would harm that– that process.”

Rick Santorum echoed Mr. Romney, saying that “I think you have to speak the truth, but you have to do so with prudence. I mean, it’s, it’s a combination.”

The question going forward, however, is whether Mr. Romney and Mr. Santorum and others can effectively raise serious doubts about how Mr. Gingrich might handle foreign policy — especially during a time when most voters are more concerned about their economic situation.