Perry helped himself, Mitt's a goner IMHO, and it will be Newt in Iowa at least, if not more. Bachmann is done and Paul will keep his bots. Santorum may get a slight bump as he did OK.
For me the big moment was when the moderators asked about marriage commitment. They all went before Newt and said they believed character was an important trait for president and of course all were married to one spouse except Newt. Perry even said if you would break your vows to your wife, you would break your word with a business partner. Finally they got down to Newt. He said there were things he was not proud of and he had repented to his God and he is a changed man. I think they were expecting a comeback or some hand grenade, but he actually agreed that character was important and he has changed.
The talking heads started to think that it would have been easy to mention FDR had a mistress in the WH and of course he is a liberal god to them, Kennedy had Marilyn, and of course, Clinton had,.......well do we count the rapes or just the volunteers? It was a gotcha question to entrap Newt, but alas, it backfired.
They never laid a hand on Newt, IMHO. They even jousted over the Palestinian question and of course Newt taught history in college, so of course he was right. The talking heads tried to imply that Newt had made it harder on Israel by being inflammatory, but he just came back and said they are shooting rockets into Israel daily and have vowed to destroy Israel so how does the truth make it worse?
Newt wins!
BTW, if Perry keeps debating, he may get better. I give him a B+ tonight. He has money enough to stay in after Santorum and Bachmann go home.