It’s another Luntz clip. Takeaways include the fact that any of the candidates can score well with the right rhetoric. You see Thompson and Huckabee both score highly for their answers. You also see just how poorly most Republicans think of Ron Paul’s nonsensical, nearly insane answer on Iran. He scored off the charts in the negative, Mr. Derbyshire, because he obviously hadn’t been listening to the other candidates and because he leaped to blaming the US rather than understand the threat that even small craft can pose to our large warships after the attack on the USS Cole. Real terrorism and real attacks on the US just don’t enter into Paul’s calculus. It’s always the US plotting something nefarious as far as he’s concerned, which incidentally is one more piece of evidence that he had more of a hand in those newsletters than he’s letting on. They’re consistent with the paranoid thinking he exhibits now.

At the end, I find it heartening that several of the focus group folks see right through the Democrats’ “change” crapola. It is empty nonsense. These South Carolinians aren’t buying any of it.