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Cain and '9-9-9' plan seize spotlight at debate

Former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain and his "9-9-9" economic plan were the main point of discussion at Tuesday night's Republican presidential debate, where theatrics between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry took a backseat.
/ Source: msnbc.com staff and news service reports

Former Godfather's Pizza CEO Herman Cain and his "9-9-9" plan stole the spotlight at a Tuesday night debate among Republican presidential candidates in New Hampshire.

The GOP candidates took their turns weighing in on Cain and their own plans to boost the economy and job creation at the debate, while frontrunner Mitt Romney, the former Massachustts governor, emerged relatively unscathed.

Cain, who's surged to second place in recent national polling, talked up the plan — which calls for a nine percent tax on personal income, business income and sales — and responded to criticism from other GOP presidential hopefuls.

Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann said it's "not a jobs plan; it's a tax plan."

"When you take the '9-9-9' plan and turn it upside-down, the devil's in the details," she said, referencing the Satanic sequence of numbers, "6-6-6."

"I don't need '9-9-9,' We don't need any plan to pass Congress. We need to get a president of the United States that is committed to passing the types of regulations, pulling the regulations back, freeing this country to go develop the energy industry that we have in this country," said Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whom Cain has overtaken in recent primary polls.

The intensive focus on Cain left Romney relatively free to focus on President Obama and his own economic record — points which his campaign believes are an asset to his candidacy. He managed to fend off most criticism in yet another strong debate performance, while Perry at times struggled to assert himself in the roundtable discussion.

Cain has climbed in the polls despite spending minimal amounts of time on the campaign trail; recently, he's been engaged in a national book tour.

"'9-9-9' will pass ... because it has been well-studied and well-developed. It starts with, unlike your proposals, throwing out the current tax code," he said, later rejecting an economic analysis of the plan as resting on faulty premises.

The focus on Cain was a bit of a surprise, given the fireworks throughout the afternoon between the campaigns of Perry and Romney.

Cain even went on offense against Romney, using an opportunity for candidates to ask questions of other candidates, to needle Romney over whether he could name all 59 points of his economic plan.

"I must admit that simple answers are always very helpful, but oftentimes inadequate," Romney said. "In my view, to get this economy going again, we're going to have to deal with more than just tax policy and just energy policy."

Even Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a staunch critic of U.S. monetary policy, piled on. Paul said Cain, a former board member for the Kansas City branch of the Federal Reserve, was speaking like a "Washington insider" when he identified former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan as a model for future appointees to that position.

A Democratic ally, Priorities USA Action, foreshadowed the focus on Cain with a pre-debate memo assailing him, and not Romney or Perry, the two leading candidates for the nomination.

"Cain’s rise from obscure pizza executive to the latest second-place contender for the Republican nomination is impressive," wrote Bill Burton, an alumnus of the Obama administration who cofounded the group. "Unfortunately for Cain, his newfound popularity says a lot less about his appeal than it does about the appeal for who he isn’t."

The focus on Cain provided Romney with an opportunity to talk up his leadership skills and claim an ability to work with Democrats on improving the economy. Romney presented a possible opening in his defense of the 2008 Wall Street bailout program, first engineered by President George W. Bush's administration, but other candidates failed to seize on the sentiment — anathema to a number of conservative activists.

"My experience tells me that we were on the precipice, and we could have had a complete meltdown of our entire financial system, wiping out all the savings of the American people. So action had to be taken," he said.

Romney got backup in that comment from Cain, who said he also agreed with that plan in principle, if not in practice. Perry's campaign hit Romney for his support of the program, though the the Texas governor himself passed on a chance to take a shot at Romney.

Perry, who's set this week to detail part of his economic plan as it relates to energy, said that he would also work across the aisle to roll back regulations and encourage domestic energy exploration — policies he asserted could create 1.2 million jobs.

"Certainly as the governor of the second-largest state, I've had to deal with folks on both sides of the aisle," Perry said.

There weren't any fireworks between Romney and Perry — expected because of a heated afternoon war of words between their campaigns — beyond a relatively minor zinger sent Romney's way by Perry early in the debate.

"Mitt's had six years to be working on a plan, I've been in this for about eight weeks," he said.

All eyes had been on Romney and Perry following a politically-active afternoon in which Romney secured a key endorsement from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and challenged Perry to repudiate recent comments from a controversial texas pastor who, speaking in support of the Texas governor, called his rival's Mormon religion a "cult."

There was no mention of that issue, though. The Romney-Perry spat largely took a backseat to other issues, and Romney deflected a question about his signature health care reform law's resemblance to President Obama's health reforms.

"I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish," Romney said in response to a question from Perry. "We have the lowest number of kids, as a percentage, in uninsured of any state in America; you have the highest ... We have less than one percent of our kids that are uninsured; you have a million kids uninsured in Texas."

Three months before Republican voting begins, the pressure had been on Perry to reverse a streak of wobbly debate showings that put his once high-flying campaign into a nosedive.

Perry roared past Romney to take the lead in polls after getting in the race in August. But he foundered after several stumbling debate performances where he was hammered over his immigration policies and for ordering young girls be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted virus.

His poll numbers have declined in recent weeks, and Cain — who had sought to prove tonight that he’s a serious, top-tier candidate — has passed by Perry to emerge in second place behind Romney in two national polls, as well as two NBC News-Marist polls of primary voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whose 2008 White House bid failed, has retaken the lead in polls but has still not won over conservatives who remember his past support in Massachusetts for abortion rights and a healthcare mandate.

The debate put pressure on Romney to solidify his lead in the polls. He set the stage for the debate by announcing Christie’s endorsement Tuesday afternoon at a press conference hours before the debate.

"I'm here in New Hampshire today for one simple reason: America cannot survive another four years of Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney's the man we need to lead America, and we need him now," said Christie, whom many prominently Republicans had urged to run.

It was during that press conference that Romney called on Perry to specifically repudiate comments made by Texas pastor Robert Jeffress, who introduced Perry at the Values Voters Summit last week in Washington. Jeffress told reporters afterward that he did not believe Romney was a Christian, and said that Mormonism was a "cult."

There was no mention of that issue during the debate, despite intense media focus on the issue throughout the afternoon.

The debate aired at 8 p.m. EDT on the campus of Dartmouth College and was carried by Bloomberg Television. Its focus was economic issues.

Candidates sat side-by-side with the moderators in a round-table format, surrounded by the audience, in a bid to generate more interaction, sponsors said.

It was the second debate this year in New Hampshire, which is expected to hold its influential nominating contest in early January. The exact date remains uncertain as other states jockey to gain influence by jumping ahead in the calendar.