Last night, to its credit, CNN showed what can happen if a news organization sets aside its political bias and lets the candidates actually debate. If journalism schools exist in the future, they should build a course around comparing the MSNBC/Politico partisan hackery with last night’s CNN debate.

Below is a recap of reactions from your BIG editors:

Andrew Breitbart: Whatever Wolf Blitzer took to make it tolerable for him to be around so many flyover-country Tea Party rubes, he should distribute it to his peers in the mainstream media for the coming election year. CNN put on the show that MSNBC was government-subsidized not to. What was conspicuously missing–and thus making it journalistically fair–was the usual framing of Tea Party concerns as inherently racist. So CNN, especially with its exciting intro package that felt like an ESPN playoff game intro, gets high grades. Maybe I was so appalled by MSNBC’s lower-than-low performance that CNN comes out the winner this evening, simply by behaving professionally.

What Democrats and leftists want is that artificial injection of race. But those who will bring it up in desperation after this Tampa tea party debate will have exposed one of the Democratic Party’s greatest weaknesses: concern over the plight of real minority oppression. None of the Tea Party’s critics will recognize that one of tonight’s questioners was a Tea Party member who happened to be a Muslim woman from Afghanistan. To the modern leftist, this woman is invisible. Her question mark spurring cognitive dissonance across the Daily Kos-Huffington Post-MSNBC bizarro world spectrum.

As for the candidates, there was one moment where Chuck Barris should have gonged Jon Huntsman: his humorously prepared, yet clunkily delivered “no apology” reference to Kurt Cobain. He’s providing no value to the debates, and has no constituency. Tonight should be his last debate. If MSNBC tried to bury Bachmann in the previous debate at the Reagan library, she resurrected herself on CNN tonight. The predictable governor-à-governor sparring of Romney and Perry is already becoming tedious.

Mike Flynn: Now we know why CNN has the brand it does. Hopefully, John Harris, Brian Williams, Politico and MSNBC were taking notes. Wolf certainly got his liberal biases in, from time to time, but not at the expense of a free-wheeling and interesting GOP debate. Newt had the best lines in the debate, but he’s Newt and isn’t going anywhere. Everyone else had some good lines. Rick Perry, yet again, was the subject of attacks from all sides. He was much steadier than in the first debate. He stood his ground, so I score him with the win.

Joel Pollak, EIC Breitbart: The big winner tonight was the Tea Party.

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Tonight, CNN and Tea Party Express co-host a debate of GOP candidates in Tampa, FL, site of the upcoming GOP convention. I’m not really sure how the ‘tea party’ is going to be represented in this debate, since the moderators are pulled from CNN, but there is no way it can be any worse than the MSNBC/Politico forum last week. In that fiasco, John Harris and Brian Williams drew deeply from lefty activists like ThinkProgress to launch attacks on the GOP candidates. It was as if the DNC had done a mind-meld with Harris and Williams (redundant, I know!), and got 90+ minutes to prospect for material for negative campaign ads.

Color me naive, but CNN is not MSNBC. Liberal, sure. But, it at least tries not to seem totally in the tank for the left, unlike Politico and MSNBC. So, I don’t think the DNC will own the same real estate in Wolf Blitzer’s brain as it had in Harris/Williams. Then again, according to news reports today, it won’t have to. Amazingly, two leading candidates for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, look set to take a page from the DNC and ThinkProgress playbook and attack Gov. Rick Perry for daring to speak the truth about Social Security. Below is a flier the Romney campaign is distributing in Florida.

And, yesterday, Bachmann’s campaign had this to say to Byron York:

“Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America,” says a Bachmann adviser. “Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it’s an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives.” … “She strongly disagrees with his position on that…”

So let me get this straight; we now have TWO GOP candidates against any kind of entitlement reform? Really? We can’t begin to get out from under our overwhelming debt burden unless we tackle these auto-pilot programs. You could close every government agency and slash defense spending in half and we’re still screwed if we don’t reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. How can Romney or Bachmann seek to be President if they don’t understand this basic fact? I mean, its not just a theory…its math.

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From the Associated Press:

Take a breather, Iowa and New Hampshire.

Florida is about to get into the Republican presidential race big time, starting with a televised debate Monday in Tampa and ending with an early primary in 2012 that conceivably could wrap up the nomination.

It’s quite plausible that front-runners Rick Perry and Mitt Romney could roughly divide the first four contests, in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina. If that happens, Florida could prove the virtual tie-breaker, a prize so big in a state so central to presidential elections that the loser might struggle to stay afloat.

“My guess is that Florida is going to be the big kahuna,” said Brad Coker, a Florida-based pollster for Mason-Dixon who conducts surveys nationwide. Florida is much larger, diverse and expensive than the other four early-voting states, he said, and so it rewards the type of campaigning a Republican must do around the country to oust President Barack Obama in November 2012.

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On January 28th, President Obama traveled to Tampa, FL. This is how he greeted the mayor of Tampa, an American city the last time we checked. These gratuitous displays of public humility suggest a deeper narcissism than we feared.