lies in realtime. but marie had out of the box pick. she wants to see the romney tax returns on that stage. and our facebook community is still talking about paul ryan s speech from last night. brenda says quote, mitt romney has a pre-existing ill nns, foot in mouth disease. who would have thought it was contagious? we want to hear what you think too. head over to facebook and search politicsnation and like us to join the conversation that keeps going long after the show ends. on car insurance? no problem. you want to save money on rv insurance? no problem. you want to save money on motorcycle insurance? no problem. you want to find a place to park all these things? fuggedaboud it. this is new york. hey little guy, wake up! aw, come off it mate! geico.
diverse speakers taking the stage this week in tampa. governor nicki hailey, condoleezza rice, governor susana martinez and several others were featured. the republican party should be commended for welcoming more minorities to their party. give credit where credit is due. but the party s policies don t match the picture. and that s the problem. take a look at their official platform approved this week. they oppose any form of amnesty for immigrants and encourage illegal immigrants to return home voluntarily. it is now party policy to require photo identification for voting. and have you and you would have to look at governor romney s have you looked at his attack on president obama s welfare policies? well, it s a false attack.
correspondent for the guardian. thank you both for joining me. thank you. thanks. david, is it too late for romney to try to fill in the blanks on his biography? i don t think it s too late to fill in the blanks. he needs to talk to a lot of people who don t know a lot of the details because as you mentioned, he doesn t talk about a lot of the details on the campaign trail. there are a lot of people just tuning in now. what i think is it s a tough call for him to try to make himself likable out of those details. that s been a problem for him going back years and years. it s something he and his pollsters and focus groups and advisers all know. it sounds like they re going to try to do that tonight rather than just strictly try to make him mr. confident, mr. power point which is usually what he s more successful at portraying himself as. so this likability question, this problem he has of connecting with people has been a life long problem of his throughout his political caree
way. which is the position he ll probably take and try to kick those down the road even farther. you wrote a piece saying ann romney connected pretty well, but it s not going to help him. how does he connect if he doesn t have that kind of personality, or do you think he does have it and he just hasn t revealed it yet? oh, i don t think he has it. i think he suffers from the al gore problem a bit which is no matter how charming he may be in private, in public he is very awkward and doesn t connect well. and what ann did was she came across very well. she told lovely stories about her. even when she was trying to tell us how great he was, she didn t have any specific anecdotes. she didn t come across with those kind of political stock and trade. one time he was there with this sick person, or one time he was you know, kind of things that are really basic showing you how somebody really is at heart. and so i don t even know that he ll be able to go much farther than that.
of the gop, some of them would do like charlie crist does and say i m ashamed where the party has taken me. jonathan, you re down in tampa and have seen the display, i call it an optical illusion on the stage. but the people in the audience and governor rendell is saying it s not diversity. how do they deal with the policies when they say we should be proud of the diversity on the stage but the policies don t in any way seem to appeal to people that are in those communities. well, keep in mind while the overall shots of people here in the hall are overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly older, there are african-americans and latinos here. there are people of color delegates here at the republican party. and not just the folks we saw on stage. i think the problem that s going to come in for the republican party isn t so much what s happening now in terms of the disconnect between the candidates and the position of