Newt Gingrich was among those who jumped on Paul Monday night. Paul takes drubbing at debate

MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — The rivals who largely ignored Ron Paul for much of the campaign gave him a drubbing Monday night.

The Fox News/Wall Street Journal debate pile-on began after Paul answered a question about whether the U.S. government had the authority to kill Osama bin Laden. Booed by the boisterous audience, Paul compared bin Laden’s capture in Pakistan to a Chinese dissident hiding in the U.S. and said the U.S. government wouldn’t want China to “bomb us and do whatever.” He also advocated attempting to capture and question top terrorist leaders instead of kill them.


“I mean, if you think about Saddam Hussein, you know, we did that,” Paul said. “We captured him, and we tried him — I mean, the government tried him — and he hung — got hung. What’s, what’s so terrible about this? This whole idea that you can’t capture … what’s this whole idea that you can’t capture people?”

Paul added: “Just think, [Nazi leader] Adolf Eichmann was captured. He was given a trial. What’s wrong with capturing people? Why didn’t we try to get some information from them? You know, we’re, we’re accustomed to asking people questions, but all of a sudden — gone. You know, that’s it.”

Newt Gingrich quickly jumped on the Texas lawmaker, calling the comparison of bin Laden to a Chinese dissident “utterly irrational.” Romney moved to second the former speaker, adding the right solution for bin Laden was the “bullet in the head that he received.”

Paul’s own words — and the strong counterpunch from his GOP rivals — had the net effect of isolating him from the rest of the pack on foreign policy. Combined with the fact that Paul has actually spent very little time campaigning in the state, there are questions about whether the dovish lawmaker — who wants all U.S. troops returned from foreign entanglements and won’t confront Iran over nuclear weapons — can actually compete in a serious way in hawkish South Carolina.

“Congressman Paul has got his way of communicating and everything, and he’s kind of been the one who has been here the least,” South Carolina GOP Chairman Chad Connelly after the debate. “I don’t know if he decided to play here less or anything. I’ve kind of been the one saying, ‘Please, come on in, get in the state.’ So it’s going to be interesting to see what he gets on Saturday.”

South Carolina GOP Gov. Nikki Haley, who has endorsed Romney, said Paul’s isolationist message won’t play here.

“South Carolina is a very strong military state,” she said. “Very strong military state, patriotic state, and so I don’t think that that part of his message resonates in South Carolina.”

Paul’s chief in-state surrogate, state Sen. Tom Davis — who was former GOP Gov. Mark Sanford’s chief of staff — defended the congressman’s debate performance.

Davis called the crowd’s boos to Paul’s bin Laden response “misconstrued” and said that any time Paul hasn’t spent in South Carolina is devoted to campaigning elsewhere.

“He’s running a nationwide race,” Davis said. “He’s not somebody that’s focusing on just certain areas … He’s not a niche candidate.”

But Paul’s views on international relations have long been outside the Republican mainstream , and he is pitching his message way beyond the bounds of the 3,000-person debate crowd to a national audience and core supporters already sympathetic to his libertarian stands. His foreign policy views are more about slashing money from the federal budget — “waste,” as he called it to applause on the debate stage — and shoring up the military domestically. He is one of only two candidates who have served in the military and can claim more campaign donations from active military personnel than any other candidate.

Speaking in a part of the state heaviest on retired military, Paul defended his pledge to cut military spending by arguing that he wouldn’t reduce domestic defense expenditures.

“I want to cut military money. I don’t want to cut defense money,” he said. “I want to bring the troops home. I’d probably have more bases here at home. We were closing them down in the 1990s and building them overseas. That’s how we got into trouble. So we would save a lot more money and have a stronger national defense, and that’s what we should do,” he contended.

He added, in a line that drew big applause — some of his only of the night: “You don’t understand there’s a difference between military spending and defense spending. Just because you spend — spend a billion dollars on an embassy in Baghdad bigger than the Vatican — you consider that defense spending. I consider that waste.”