Every evening, CNN gives an hour to Lou Dobbs, who explains that international trade and illegal immigrants are endangering national security, destroying the middle class and bringing back leprosy.

Last Wednesday on CNN, Dobbs’ hour was followed by two hours of Republicans running for president.

And for a while, you couldn’t tell where Dobbs stopped and the debate started.

Things began with a rousing alley fight between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani over who was weaker on illegal immigrants. Romney took the first question on the subject and wheeled on Giuliani, charging him with running New York as a “sanctuary city.”

Giuliani responded by saying Romney had a “sanctuary mansion,” because the gardening company working at his house employed two illegal immigrants. (The Associated Press reported Tuesday that Romney had fired the company.) The New Yorker told Romney, “You have a special immigration problem that nobody else has, because you were employing illegal immigrants.”

Getting nasty with Giuliani, Romney gives away too much weight. Romney’s willing to do it – he is, it seems, willing to do just about anything – but he takes no particular joy in the attack; he’d rather beam and talk about the wonderfulness of family.

Giuliani, on the other hand, delights in the idea, with a New York politician’s fondness for calling opponents either dangerous or deranged. As a result, the GOP presidential debate began with an argument over what you should do if someone mowing your lawn seems to have an accent.

Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., running for president on a single-issue anti-immigrant platform – he wants to stop legal as well as illegal immigration – stood quivering with excitement, exulting, “All I’ve heard is people trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo.”

Romney then attacked former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, breathing down Romney’s neck in Iowa, for proposing to let illegal immigrants graduating from Arkansas high schools qualify for state college merit scholarships. Huckabee responded firmly, “In all due respect, we’re a better country than to punish children for what their parents did.”

The former Massachusetts governor declared incredulously, “It reminds me of what it’s like talking to liberals in Massachusetts” – which also reminded people that five years ago, he was one.

As noted, Romney’s willing to get nasty; he’s just not very good at it. When he can’t figure out what the audience wants to hear, he gets fuddled. Confronted by an earlier quote from him looking forward to a time that gays could serve in the armed forces, all he could think to say was, “This isn’t that time.” Asked what he’d do to preserve Social Security, he went off on “tough new competition from Asia,” “overuse of oil” and “Hillary Clinton.”

Huckabee probably gained most from the debate, with calmness and a supply of prepared zingers. He was also better at avoiding unwanted questions; asked whether Jesus would support capital punishment, Huckabee explained that Jesus was too smart ever to run for public office.

He was also better positioned for a black questioner who asked why minorities didn’t vote Republican. The question started with Giuliani, who pronounced, “We probably haven’t done a good enough job as a party in pointing out that our solutions, our philosophy, is really the philosophy that would be the most attractive to the overwhelming majority of people in the African-American and Hispanic community.”

One thing that would help, of course, would be if Hispanics hadn’t seen the beginning of the debate.

Still, it was a ringing statement from someone who, at one point during his time as mayor of New York, enjoyed the approval of 8 percent of African-Americans in New York.

The single number is not a misprint.

Huckabee was able to note that running for re-election as governor of Arkansas, he’d won 48 percent of the African-American vote.

If just about any other Republican had said that, it would be a misprint.

Huckabee has his own problems. He goes off into Great Pumpkin-like calls for abolishing the income tax. Awkwardly for a president overseeing billions in federal medical and scientific research, he doesn’t believe in evolution.

Then again, if you’d participated in multiple Republican presidential debates, you might not, either.