Florida

My first opinion, before I started reading everyone else's opinion, was that there was no clear winner of Florida's debate, and because of that, Gingrich was the loser.

Well, everyone else was much, much less kind to the former Speaker, which amuses me because I'm not even in his camp to begin with.

Before I get into everything, I suppose I should point out the last debate I watched was the one in Iowa, where Romney made his $10,000-bet gaffe, there were six candidates on the stage, and Rick Santorum looked like he was there just because he badly wanted to be Gingrich's VP. My, how times have changed.

Blitzer/CNN: I'll point this out every single time it comes up: I do not care about loaded questions, or perceived bias on the part of the moderator. We are going to have that in the general, and more than anything else, these debates really should be about the candidates proving that they're the best shot against Obama.

Blitzer was mostly effective and fair, neither letting Romney get away with not knowing about a radio ad he was running nor letting Gingrich get away without comment on Romney's taxes. The softball questions about first ladies and health records were appropriately timed and didn't distract too much from the main event.

While Blitzer mostly let candidates respond to each other's attacks, he also let a lot of bickering through when he could, as Santorum suggested, have moved on to other topics. Overall, if he could enforce time limits, I'd like to see him back in the general. Good show.

For the actual contestants, let's do this in the reverse order of how well I expect the candidates to do on Tuesday.

Ron Paul is going to come dead last in Florida because his supporters are mostly young people and Floridians are mostly old people. Despite that, he had a fantastic night. He only went into "Crazy Ron Paul Caricature Mode" once, when he got a bit muddled up in discussing the housing crisis. From joking about sending politicians to the moon, to pointing out that big government caused more problems than it solved, to challenging everyone else to a 25-mile bike ride through Texas, he was great.

I know people are concerned about a third-party run, especially since he's got so much more support this time around, but I love the fact that he's here, reminding us at every turn that the federal government is simply too big. He needs to find a suit jacket that fits him, though.

Rick Santorum has sanctimoniousness down to a T. He pummelled Romney on RomneyCare, demonstrating that the Mittster still doesn't have a good defense for it. He managed to out-Gingrich Gingrich when he lectured Blitzer and asked for a more relevant question.

Back in Iowa, he was one of four candidates competing for the Not-Romney slot and seemed more like a hanger-on than anything else. Now that the Not-Romney field is down to two (no, Ron Paul doesn't count), some people (including the version of me in a parallel world that never watched the Jacksonville debate) are expecting this relative lightweight to bow out sooner rather than later. Tonight he proved that wasn't going to happen. Biggest surprise of the evening: Captain Sweatervest was on fire when it came to foreign policy, demonstrating that he does in fact have the detailed know-how necessary to be President.

I don't actually have anything negative to say about his performance. I guess he won the debate, in that sense.

Newt Gingrich got punched early and hard and never really recovered. He tried to pull a repeat of his South Carolina stunt, and he utterly failed to stick the landing. He needed a win here to propel him to victory in Florida and keep his momentum up for the next three debate-less weeks, and he just didn't get it. On a "macro" level, he was the clear loser simply because he failed to win. His worst two moments, aside from when he tried to tell Blitzer that a question about Romney's taxes was stupid (and the crowd did not go wild), were when he doubled down on an ad he'd already pulled, and when he tried to talk money with Romney. (Never, ever, get into a debate about money with a businessman. You will lose, and Romney slapped him silly.)

Neither of those mistakes were particularly damnable, though, and he sparkled on foreign policy; one of my favorite parts of the evening came when both he and Romney looked the Palestinian in the eye and told him that the Palestinian leadership is the problem, not Israel.

But...

After the debate, he whined that the audience was stacked with Romney fans and that Romney misrepresented his (Romney's) stance on illegal immigration and why he voted Democrat in 1992. In reading his argument, I can only conclude that 1) Newt misrepresented Romney's stance on illegal immigration, and that 2) the former speaker is a crybaby.

Mitt Romney needs a Venn Diagram to explain the differences between RomneyCare and ObamaCare. The sooner he makes it, the better for him. (Though I guess that would require somebody to read ObamaCare, which would probably take them all of the primary season.) He also really needs to know which ads his campaign is airing.

On the plus side, Romney laid into Gingrich (a tad too overzealously, in my opinion), stole Gingrich's righteous-indignation mojo, wasn't ashamed of his wealth, refused to apologize for making money, and, though it was far from a perfect defense, he couched his defense of RomneyCare in economic terms. He also delivered my Favorite Line From Someone Other Than Ron Paul of the evening when he punctured Newt's immigration policy: "Our (illegal immigration) problem isn't fourteen million grandmothers."

Conclusion: Mister Inevitable is back; Florida is Romney's. And the Not-Romney crowd? You guys crowned Gingrich your champion way too early. Santorum has less baggage, is in a better position to attack Romney's weaknesses, and is clearly up to the task. (Would he do better than Newt against Obama? That's a different question.)

So now we have the ultimate paradox. The sooner Santorum leaves, the sooner Newt gets a sorely-needed boost. But at the same time, the sooner Santorum leaves, the sooner Romney's biggest weaknesses evaporate, at least for the primary.