Republican candidates for President held their 19th debate in Florida last night. With the formal withdrawals of Duncan Hunter and Fred Thompson, the field was down to the five remaining active contenders: McCain, Romney, Huckabee, Giuliani, and Paul.

My own impressions of their respective performances:

Romney ~ I believe he was the clear winner. He started strong on economics, which opened the debate, and delivered several of the more memorable lines. Among them: "General Hillary Clinton," "Bill Clinton back in the White House - with nothing to do," and that government keeps "doing the same things, expecting a different result." He was articulate and on message throughout, and never came under direct fire from the others, which sometimes seems to make him uncomfortable. The only challenges came from the questioners. He deflected the "flip-flop" question deftly, but did show uneasiness when grilled about how much of his own money he was spending. He recovered adequately even from that momentary flinch, though.

Giuliani ~ finished second, although he wasn't either close to first nor far ahead of third. His performance was mistake-free and strong on the issues, but if the trend of the Florida polls is accurate he needed to turn in a sizzling win. That, he didn't do.

Huckabee ~ was a bit shaky early on, but came back with another of his strong performances, and was close to taking second. Once warmed up, he delivered, even giving one of the better defenses of the Fair Tax proposal I've heard (although I believe his numbers are merely repeating the fanciful projections of the authors).

Paul ~ his best overall debate performance yet, and not far behind Giuliani and Huckabee by any measure. Although he mentioned "monetary policy" a couple of times, he avoided going into the type of detail which invites questions, and he only overtly mentioned withdrawing from Iraq once, by my count, preferring euphemisms like "wasting billions overseas" for the most part. Other than those instances, he voiced conservative principles well, with both passion and argument.

McCain ~ It wasn't a disaster, but was probably his weakest debate performance in memory. The prominence of economic issues hurt him from the start, when Russert quoted him saying that he was "uneducated" on economics. McCain denied it, which was not wise since the quote is on the record, and proceeded to offer a defense of his economic knowledge and credentials which was weak at best. When the issues of Iraq and national security came up, he did very well, but never quite recovered from the poor start. Not a terrible last place, but how respectable can last place be? I had the impression he knew he didn't need to win to go on, and the result was not his best effort.

It was a generally well presented debate. I was disappointed none of the candidates pointed out, when confronted with "Bush's economic record," that a few negative points had been cherry-picked - the question was "Can you run on this record?" Well, no, Tim, but you left out a few things, moron. Naturally, none of the candidates will be running to defend the Bush record, though, since none have any role in the Administration: they will seek office on their own merits.