that the last surviving liberal from pennsylvania in the republican party is going to be. so i thought it was very shrewd tactics on the part of mitt romney, there s no doubt about it. john heilemann, it did seem to throw santorum off. he could never have been expecting he would never sit in that chair and think, at some point tonight, i am going to be blamed for obama care. by mitt romney. and you know, romney s thread there wasn t that easy to follow, but it was much easier to follow than what santorum s answer became. yeah. yes, sorry, i thought you were about to play tape there, lawrence. don t do that. i thought that throughout the night that rick santorum, on that question, on a lot of questions, i thought rick santorum really seemed to kind of, tonight, bring his b game. and he was he did not this is, i think, could have been the most important debate of the entire cycle, the 20th debate.
the last word on the debate tonight. i m sorry, we ve run out of time. thank you all very, very much for joining me tonight. thank you, lawrence. coming up in the rewrite, the return of the ugliest campaign ad of the year. not financially. so we switched to the bargain detergent and i found myself using three times more than they say to and the clothes still weren t as clean as with tide. so we re back to tide. they re cuter in clean clothes. that s my tide. what s yours? your finances can t manage themselves. but that doesn t mean they won t try. bring all your finances together with the help of the one person who can. a certified financial planner professional. cfp. let s make a plan.
and a lot of people will be catching up on this debate tomorrow morning on morning joe and on the morning television cable shows and over the air, they ll be reading about it in the newspaper. i was just in arizona over the weekend on other business. there wasn t a lot of buzz down there about the debate coming. obviously, they were paying a lot of attention to their politics. but they ve got severe economic problems in arizona. on the other hand, they ve got a lot of other good things going on, starting to turn the corner. there was a lot more talk about that than about the debate that was coming up. so i m not surprised that at this stage in the game that it got to this point. i think to talk about what john was describing rick santorum and the position that he was in, he learned, as all of them have, newt, governor romney, now rick santorum, that you can be on the offensive when you re not leading the pack. but once you get out front a little bit, then you re playing the defensive
we would not have obama care. so don t look at me, take a look in the mirror. okay, gang, that is best reshuffling of the deck i have ever seen in a presidential debate. howard fineman, there is mitt romney blaming rick santorum for obama care. well, and what made it worse, if you re keeping score in the debates is rick santorum took the bait. and then went into a long explanation of why he voted for arlen specter, why he supported arlen specter, why he backed arlen specter, because specter was going to be a reliable vote for supreme court justice nominees, et cetera. and i can tell you that it s not really a way to win the hearts of undecided conservative republican voters, to associate yourself with arlen specter. it s just not. because not only is is he pro-choice, he s pro-gun control, he s all the things
more and more unwed people having children. but he also made the point when they were talking about contraception, he has his own personal belief on that. he personally does not believe, his faith does not have him support contraception. but he has also not stood in the way of women who make that option. and he also feels with the way that president obama is acting, we have the federal government stepping in on personal decisions and this has become an infringement on religious freedoms. and we can t have that. that s not the government s role to do that. but one thing that rick made abundantly clear is while he has personal opinions on many issues, it s not the federal government s position to step in and do anything about it. jackie gingrich cushman, i want to congratulate your candidate. please pass on this congratulations to him. i thought he said the single smartest thing in the debate, in the toughest area of the debate for republicans, which is earmarks. newt gingrich was the