IBD Editorials

Politics: Despite the “gotcha” sniping at Thursday’s debate, Republicans need to keep their eyes on the prize. The target for 2012 is not Santorum, Cain, Bachmann, Romney or Perry. It’s the current White House occupant.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry must have felt a bit like Gen. Custer at Little Big Horn at the Orlando debate, a made-for-TV contrivance in which those who have a real chance to be president must take pokes and jabs from those who don’t.

We appreciate this may be a necessary evil in which front-runners without stamina — the Ed Muskies and Rudy Giulianis, for example — are weeded out.

Still, we must understand that while the goal is the nomination, the prize is the White House. Lost in the brouhaha over tuition for illegal aliens and mandated vaccines is the fact we simply can’t afford four more years of President Obama.

Perry has given awkward responses. How can he debate the president, the whispers ask. Sound-bite debates in which you thrust and parry (no pun intended) with eight other candidates, as well as the pundits, are one thing. Comparing your job-creating pro-growth record in a booming state to the record of the arguably worst president in American history is something else.

Those former and nongovernors without a 1,200-mile border with Mexico may criticize, and perhaps justifiably, Perry’s embrace of a college tuition break for illegal aliens. We’ve opposed it too in the past.

Perry makes the point that this is a matter for a border state and that we wouldn’t be having this conversation if Obama had secured the border and put the thousands of boots on the ground that governor has requested.

Perry opposes the federal Dream Act as an unconstitutional mandate on all the states, like ObamaCare.

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Romney, ironically has defended his version of ObamaCare as an example of federalism, essentially one state freely deciding what is best for itself. He says as president he would grant all states a waiver from ObamaCare.

Michele Bachmann wants a border fence from San Diego to Brownsville, a shovel-ready project if ever there was one, and work Americans staggering under 9.1% unemployment are willing to do.

Perry has doubts about fences without troops and enforcement of immigration laws. It is Obama who sees crumbling bridges in Hooterville as more important than a border fence. It’s his Justice Department that fights states for enforcing federal immigration law.

And rather than worry about whether Perry was wise to mandate via executive order the use of a vaccine 100% effective against cervical cancer, let’s focus on the damage ObamaCare has done and will do to the creation of vaccines, to medical innovation and to what still remains the best health care system in the world.

It’s Obama who’s destroying the country, not the candidates in Orlando. It is he who taxes too much, regulates too much, spends too much and imposes job-killing mandates through his EPA — something Perry knows all too well.

So enough with the circular firing squad. For the next debate, the GOP contenders need to understand that their real foe isn’t each other. It is a name too infrequently mentioned in these debates — Barack Obama.