I am starting this blog Thu afternoon, the day after the first of the Republican Presidential debates. I watched some of CNN this morning and I have taken a quick look at the NYT. Other than that I have not studied the responses of others, so what you get here is pretty much me with perhaps a little outside influence. What I intend to tell you is, mainly, my immediate reactions. Maybe I’ll do more on the details fairly soon

My impressions begin with a ranking of how they did–I would say Haley was No 1 followed by Christie, Pence, DiSantis, Hutchinson, Burgman, Scott, and Ramaswamy in that order. This is not, I note, exactly the order others have chosen and I am ambiguous about a few of them myself. But please remember, this is about first impressions. I do remember a sign in a high school room that said “The first impression is the lasting one,” and that may be true occasionally–maybe here. But things, particularly political things tend to change quickly.

Nikki Haley seemed to be the leader of the evening. She was smart and organized, tough minded but polite, and knew her stuff coming and going. Of course I did not agree with everything she said, but she did say some things that needed to be heard. The most important of these was to point out the nearly 8 trillion dollar addition the Trump Administration made to the national debt. The second was her impassioned plea for a strong US stance to defend Ukraine, Europe and freedom. On this issue she deserved credit for giving Ramaswamy a well-deserved hard time. No, Nikki, I don’t plan to vote for you but if you win at least there will be someone competent in charge.

Chris Christie deserved more credit than he seems, at glance, to be getting. He’s a tough but rational and mostly polite debater. Like Nikki one of the best things about him is that he clearly knows what he’s talking about in an era when that is not necessarily the case. He was not mostly asked questions that played to his strength, but he still managed to be extremely critical of the Trump Administration without going outside the bounds of apparent facts, common sense, and common civility. Good job, Chris–maybe next time they’ll give to chance to show a bit more oomph. If they don’t, just take it.

Mike Pence surprised me some, though I had noticed in recent weeks that he was sounding more confident in rejecting some parts of the Trump Administration and also just in presenting himself. He sounded very much like someone who knows his ground–and hey, he should be, he’s a recent Vice-President. He even showed a slight tendency toward wandering into irony and sarcasm in his assault on Ramaswamy who had the misfortune to be located next to Haley and only one Ron DiSantis from him.

DiSantis didn’t seem all that great to me but he was a whole lot better (or a lot less awful)than I was expecting. He began with a good deal of at least the appearance of self confidence. The things he had to say were largely as expected and I was not impressed, but I did think the presentation was better than my anticipation–guess you could call it a victory of low expectations. I thought he got weaker as the evening went along, though some of that may be that I think he slipped more and more into his routine rhetoric which we’ve all heard and some of us have heard quite enough.

Hutchinson, Burgum and Scott came in that order as my 5th, 6th and 7th choices, but there wasn’t a whole lot to choose among them. None of them said anything I found really inspiring or compelling or showed any extraordinary insight into our national(or international) difficulties. None of them showed any signs of being an outstanding orator. You could re-arrange them in those three positions and I wouldn’t complain. Burgam did have one pretty good moment when(speaking, I guess, as the only clearly rural, non-city person in the group)suggested that the wisdom that comes from running a state full of farms and small towns might sometimes come in handy too.

The most disappointing by far was Ramaswamy. Of course you know who did a blog slightly praising him the other day. At the time I did make it clear I was talking about his speaking ability and the overall impression he gave, not his ideas. I went so far as to compare him to JFK based on peraonality, looks and attitude, and using those criteria I was likely right, but …

Last night Ramaswamy spent most of his on camera time praising Trump and talking about Trump’s foreign policy in glowing terms. While he made a bow or two toward some more traditional American diplomatic instincts, he was very up front about the fact that he thought money spent on Ukraine was largely wasted and that he thought they were not enough of our national defense commitment to be concerned about.

Well, two things about that Vivek–although I am not an advocate of getting into as many wars as possible and think we should be very circumspect about committing our combat forces, there is such a thing as honor and protecting smaller nations from larger, bullying ones. Your colleagues Haley, Pence and Christie I think made this clear to you last night. If not, see my blog from this past Saturday.

I will concede that Ramaswamy’s take on China as potentially dangerous to us is correct. But he insists on emphasizing that it is “Communist” China which is true in a technical sense and they’re still pretty totalitarian. But they’re well on their way to a “mixed economy” and to call it a communist nation is an exaggeration, presumably used to bring back the hysterical right-wing anti-Communism of years ago, even though there are only three even allegedly communist nations left–China, North Korea and Cuba. Also, while I am certainly no fan of Xi or his methods, Russia appears at least as potentially aggressive now and with the added issue of Russian, particularly Putin’s possible instability, it is more than arguable that we should worry about them at lest as much as we do about China.

So Ramaswamy pretty much lost it last night in my opinion(of course I wasn’t going to back him anyway), but he is still a talented and charismatic man. He needs to be a bit calmer and to show more judgement than he did last night if he wants to continue as a serious candidate.

This is, of course, a quick and not very deep analysis. It’s more like a sports writer’s spring-training time guess as to who’ll win the division and the World Series. But they’re both a long time off from his column as the actual election is from this one.