The freak show begins. Last night the Manchester, New Hampshire chapter of Americans for Prosperity hosted the first (sort of) debate between Republican aspirants for the White House. It didn’t go well.

Beginning with Tim Pawlenty, each candidate spoke for eight minutes and then took one or two questions from an AFP official on stage. There was no debate and the question were softballs; no was going to be challenged. So the evening became a competition to see who could spin the most outlandish conservative fantasy. Pawlenty had the misfortune of going first and might not have realized what a gimme the event was going to be. He called only for “getting the government off our backs,” made the customary paeans to American greatness, and used the question-and-answer segment to apologize profusely for having once supported cap and trade (“I changed my position…it was a mistake, I’m stupid and I’m sorry…it was ham-fisted…I no longer have that position…it was really ham-fisted”).

Herman Cain upstaged him by specifically calling to lower the corporate income tax, the personal income tax, temporarily abolish the payroll tax (individual and employer), abolish the capital gains tax, repatriate profits from overseas (abolishing any taxes on those profits), and, the coup de grace, declaring that all this would pay for itself by spurring economic growth.

Michelle Bachmann called for an immediate 25 percent cut in federal discretionary spending, the cancellation of outstanding stimulus projects, and the privatization of vaccine development (she cited polio as an example). The debt ceiling? Keep it right where it is. She joined Cain in calling for the abolition of the capital gains tax, the “death tax,” proposed limiting income-tax rates to 20 percent, and then decided to scrap the federal tax code outright. “Let’s get rid of what we’ve got and start over,” she said.

Romney either chose to wing it or is simply rusty from not having been on the campaign trail. Though practically alone among the GOP candidates in not pandering to the fringes by questioning Obama’s citizenship, he made the strange choice to open with a birther joke about how, when Obama released his birth certificate last week, “there was no one more disappointed than that amiable, know-it-all windbag–Joe Biden.” Romney didn’t have a bullet-point fantasy list of tax cuts to abolish, so instead he parceled out bits of his old stump speech with charges that Obama had no private-sector experience and is trying to “Europeanize” America.

Romney remains an exceptionally unnatural public speaker. To convey passion and excitement, he raises the pitch of his voice and imbues it with urgency. But it never quite clicks. His tone and affect are like that of an adult doing a dramatic reading of a pirate story to a wide-eyed three year old. It doesn’t help that he speaks too quickly and often trips over his lines. At points during his speech, Romney seemed to slip into a frenzy and start madly free associating economic buzzwords.

This hurt him during the question-and-answer period when, in response to a question about high gas prices, he blurted out a Jimmy Carter-Barack Obama comparison about how just as Reagan had hung the “misery index” around Carter’s neck, so, too, would Republicans have to “hang” Obama with the country’s current economic hardship. Romney repeated the “we’re going to hang him” locution once more and then, all of a sudden, in mid-sentence, seemed to realize that metaphors about hanging a black man probably wouldn’t redound to his political benefit. He stammered that he meant it metaphorically, that “you have to be careful what you say.”

Now, let’s remember that Mitt Romney is really supposed to be a serious candidate who can avoid dabbling in birtherism and outright insanity and retain some kind of viability as a general-election candidate. If he were to stop pandering to the Republican base and just run on his record as the governor of Massachusetts, he’d be positioned as a moderate Republican alternative to Obama who has some more business experience and, maybe, a plausible claim to improving the economic condition of the country. So, what does he do in his first competitive campaign appearance? He opens with a birther joke and then moves on to alluding to the lynching of the president.

That’s an even worse Crazy Index than I would have predicted.