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Republican primary debate tonight features eight candidates

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From Humans Events.

Excerpt:

Eight Republican presidential candidates will debate on September 7 at the famed Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who is currently at the front in many national polls, will join Mitt Romney​, Newt Gingrich​, Rick Santorum, Jon Huntsman, Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Ron Paul​ on stage.

NBC News and POLITICO will moderate the debate, and it will be co-hosted by NBC Nighlty News anchor Brian Williams​ and POLITICO’s editor-in-chief John Harris.

The debate will be significant because it is Perry’s debut on the national debating stage. Even more so, it is first debate in which someone other than Romney will most likely be the leader in the polls.

This dynamic can impact debate strategy in a number of ways.

Will Perry be above the fray and take a page out of Romney’s playbook or will the combative Texan go straight after Romney?

Will Romney act like an underdog and make it seem as if he is punching up in a weight class to Perry?

For Ron Paul, who has been at a stable 10-15 percent in the polls, how will he break out? Can he put together a crisp debating performance that highlights the areas where Republicans have moved toward his views and not come across as too professorial and absent-minded?

Michele Bachmann and Herman Cain will come into the debate sharing a similar set of debate experiences. Both splashed onto the national scene during a debate. For Cain, it was in South Carolina. For Bachmann, it was in New Hampshire. But both candidates have not been able to maintain the initial burts of momentum they received from their respective debates due to a mixture of gaffes and staffing questions though Bachmann did win the Ames Straw Poll, which, in the end, seems to not have given her a bounce in the polls.

Newt Gingrich, fresh off his last stellar debate performance, must kick his campaign into gear. He said his campaign would be like Walmart in terms of being innovative. September seems like the time when he should be rolling out his campaign innovations.

The debate is going from 8 PM to 10 PM Eastern. I am concerned about the moderators being mainstream media. I hope they don’t ask stupid questions like John King did last time.

UPDATE: Newsbusters warns about the liberal bias of the debate moderators.

Excerpt:

Tonight Brian Williams will moderate, along with Politico’s John F. Harris, the GOP presidential candidate debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. If recent performances by the NBC Nightly News anchor are an indication, candidates (particularly those favored by the Tea Party) should recognize his hostility to their agenda and be prepared for a number of topics and questions from the left.

Ever since its emergence, Williams has undercut the Tea Party, its champions within the GOP, and its cause of fiscal conservatism. At the same time, Williams has heralded its chief opponent Barack Obama.

In the summer of 2010 Williams began mocking the Tea Partiers as unsavvy paranoids. On the August 23 Late Show With David Letterman, Williams made fun of the signs he had seen at Tea Party rallies, as he told the late night talk show host: “It makes people feel better to say ‘Take our country back.’ If you ask them, they would say from, ‘from the Trilateral Commission, from the big bankers, from the Council on Foreign Relations.’…You see a lot of signs, ‘Federal Government Out of My Social Security,’ ‘Federal Government Out of My Medicare and Medicaid,’ but for the federal government, of course, those programs would not exist.”

[…]Williams has also attacked those in the GOP who have championed the Tea Party cause, namely – Texas governor and presidential candidate Rick Perry, former Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and current Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Williams introduced Perry to his viewers, on the August 16 Nightly News, as a name-caller who came out “swinging and talking” and alerted his audience that the White House had already warned him “to watch what he says.”

“On the broadcast tonight, fighting words. Rick Perry comes out swinging and talking, and the White House tells him to watch what he says….The rest of the country is learning what Texans already know about their Governor, what he says, what he does, how he does business….Today’s debate had to do with money, name-calling, and whether or not the President of the United States loves his country.”

Uh oh. I don’t think the Republicans should let radical leftists moderate their debates. It’s just stupid. Let Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio be the moderators.