Unless you were glued to your Twitter feed this week, you probably missed something. If you did, North By Northwestern has you covered. Here’s what you didn’t catch from this week in the GOP ’12 field.
The Iowa CaucusIn a surprisingly strong performance, long-suffering candidate Rick Santorum lost narrowly to Mitt Romney, by a margin of only eight votes. The results caused Michele Bachmann to finally bid adieu to the race and also shafted a recently-popular Newt Gingrich, who placed fourth, with only a little more than 13 percent of the vote.
Two Debates in Less Than 24 Hours
In what would seem to be another examination of the remaining candidates’ rhetorical endurance, the GOP contenders debated twice in quick succession – once being at the New Hampshire debate Saturday and the next on Meet the Press with David Gregory the next morning, January 8.
So, God forbid you had something else to do with your Saturday night – maybe a trip to the shooting range, as Rick Perry would’ve done in lieu of a debate – you missed a few gems. After Mitt Romney attacked Jon Huntsman on his position working for the Obama Administration as the ambassador to China, Huntsman trumped this rhetoric with a Mandarin phrase, in perhaps one of the most surprising moments of all the debates, excepting, uh, that other one.
Additionally, everyone and his brother was after Romney for a myriad of political aspects, including the effort to espouse an outsider position in the political process, which Gingrich called “pious baloney.”