The Republican presidential candidates opened their national security debate Tuesday night by clashing over the balance between protecting the country from terrorist attacks and preserving individual liberties.
Former House speaker Newt Gingrich argued passionately that every tool available should be used to prevent terrorist attacks. “We need to be prepared to protect ourselves,” he said.
Rep. Ron Paul (Tex.) argued just as passionately that the threat of terrorism should not be used as an excuse to impinge on individual liberties. “You can still provide security without sacrificing our Bill of Rights,” he said.
Most of the others agreed with Gingrich, but former Utah governor Jon Huntsman Jr. said he too worried about going too far. “I think we have to be very careful in protecting our individual liberties,” he said.
The candidates used brief opening statements to criticize President Obama’s handling of foreign policy. “I’m afraid he’s taking us on a perilous course,” said former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney.
Tuesday’s debate was held at Constitution Hall in the District and was sponsored by CNN, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute. CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer served as the moderator.
Four other candidates participated: business executive Herman Cain, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), and former senator Rick Santorum (Pa.).
While the focus on Tuesday’s debate was primarily foreign policy, it came on a day that Romney launched his first television commercial of the campaign, a 60-second spot airing in New Hampshire that attacked President Obama’s handling of the economy.
The ad underscored Romney’s strategy of keeping his focus on the president rather than his Republican rivals, just as the Obama team has been focused on Romney in its early maneuverings.
The commercial also caused a flurry of controversy and brought an immediate denunciation from Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee. It included an audio clip of the president from 2008 and quoting an aide to the Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, as saying, “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.”
Democrats called the ad deceptive, because Obama was speaking derisively about his opponent when he quoted the words of the McCain aide. Romney’s campaign defended the use of the clip by saying that Obama is now in the same position as McCain because dissatisfaction with his handling of the economy threatens his reelection.
Not to be overshadowed by the Republicans Tuesday, Obama flew to Manchester, N.H., hours before the debate was to begin. It was his first trip to the Granite State in nearly two years. Early polls show Romney leading the president in a hypothetical general election matchup in the state, which Obama won easily in 2008.
Obama used his appearance there to defend his record on the economy and to chastise Republicans for failing to extend a 2-percentage-point cut in the payroll tax.
Even before the candidates took the stage, Democrats were moving preemptively to challenge the Republicans and promote the president’s foreign policy record. Polls show that the public gives Obama good marks on foreign policy and terrorism, in contrast to low numbers on the economy and the deficit.
On Tuesday, national security adviser Thomas E. Donilon delivered a speech at the Brookings Institution contrasting U.S. policy toward Iran before and after the president took office.
Three years ago, he said, “Tehran believed, and many in the region believed, that Iran was ascendant.” Today, he argued, Iran’s standing in the region has declined. “Rather than looking to Iran, people in these Arab countries are looking in the opposite direction — towards universal rights, towards democracy,” he said.
Donilon’s speech came a day after the Democratic National Committee held a news conference featuring three foreign policy and military experts who spent much of their time criticizing Romney on national security.
For the first time this year, Gingrich assumed one of the center positions onstage at Tuesday’s debate — along with Cain and Romney — positions dictated by their standings in public polls. For Gingrich, that privilege represented a remarkable evolution in his fortunes since June, when much of his campaign staff quit and he was trailing badly in polls.
Two new polls show him narrowly leading Romney in the race for the Republican nomination. A CNN/Opinion Research survey found Gingrich favored by 24 percent of Republicans and Romney by 20 percent. A Quinnipiac University poll put Gingrich at 26 percent and Romney at 22 percent. Cain ran third in both polls.
Just in time for Tuesday’s debate, Gingrich assembled a new team of national security advisers, some of whom were on hand at the Constitution Hall debate. The announcement offered still more evidence that Gingrich’s campaign is expanding quickly and trying to harness his recent surge.
According to the Gingrich campaign, the team will be led by Herman Pirchner Jr., the founder and president of the American Foreign Policy Council, and it will include Robert C. McFarlane, Bill Schneider, R. James Woolsey, David Wursmer and several others.
After his campaign imploded in June, Gingrich’s campaign shrank to a dozen staffers. Now, his staff is back up to 40, and money is flowing in at a fast enough clip to allow him to build operations in all the early states, he said during a swing through New Hampshire on Monday.
The former speaker’s dramatic turnaround has again shaken up the Republican race and comes after a series of ups and downs for others in the field, namely Bachmann, Perry and Cain. Gingrich’s surge is all the more surprising because of the collapse of his campaign operation in the spring, when his principal advisers quit in a dispute over strategy and tactics.
Gingrich is faced with the challenge of sustaining his support amid growing scrutiny of his record as a rebellious backbencher in Congress, the architect of the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, his stormy tenure as House speaker and his decision to step down from that post under fire. Even less well known is Gingrich’s record since he left office and set up a series of businesses that have made him a wealthy man.
Beyond the details of his record, Gingrich will be challenged to demonstrate that he has the demeanor and temperament to lead the country. Gingrich has declined to attack his Republican rivals in their debates and has said repeatedly that he has matured and grown since his younger days.
But he is still given to provocative rhetoric, strident language and sharply polarizing attacks on the Democrats and their allies. Those attacks have gone down well with Republican audiences, but GOP voters will be weighing whether they see him as their strongest candidate to run against the president and compete for independent voters.
Romney has tried to make the argument that he would be the party’s strongest nominee against Obama, and many polls show that, as of now, he does better than his rivals in general election tests. But Romney has yet to demonstrate that he can energize and consolidate a Republican Party that is heavily influenced by tea party activists and that has moved to the right since the past presidential election.
