Hello and welcome to the Slate Political Gab Fest for Friday, September 23, 2011.

I am David Plotz, the editor of Slate. I am here in Slate's Washington, D.C. studio.

Emily Bazelon joins us by phone from New Haven, Slate's senior editor, D.C. studio. Emily Bazelon joins us by phone from New Haven. Emily's Slate

senior editor, Emily. Welcome, Emily. Emily. I am here, yes. Okay. I'm on the phone, though.

You're not on the phone. And then joining us by phone from some place, and I want to guess what place he is, is John Dickerson, who is at a Republican presidential debate, which we are taping before so we don't have the results of. And John, I'm going to guess that it's in South Carolina, and I'm going to guess it's in Charleston, South Carolina. Am I right? No, you're wrong. And that's interesting, Charleston, because Charleston's not the most Republican part.

My guess, if you were to guess a Republican debate would be Greenville or Columbia.

Or Columbia.

But Charleston would be the – if I were to host one, I'd host in Charles.

No, I'm in Orlando, Florida, which is probably the last place you'd guess because I was just down in Florida seven, eight days ago or so for the last Republican debate.

Why do they keep having them in Florida?

Two Republican back-to-back debate.

Well, I think, I guess a number of different reasons.

One, swing state, two, swing state that they might be able to actually win.

Three, this is where the convention is uh... in public conventions in tampa um next year and um and

it's a state you know with a new republican governor it's got marco rubio the

kind of young darling of the senate um it just kind of a happen in Republican state. And I don't know why

there are two back-to-back ones, though. I mean, other than there's also, in addition to the

Google Fox debate this evening, there's a conservative political action committee meeting on

Friday and something called P5, Presidency 5, which is a meeting of Florida activists on Saturday,

which is a big deal in the party.

It used to be a slightly bigger deal because of a straw poll.

They're still holding a straw poll this time, but candidates are pretending that they're not going to pay attention to it.

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