and compliment of these two candidates. big fight for votes in michigan and the primary for tuesday. rick santorum hasec intoen and left this venue and lit a fire under this crowd, a mostly conservative crowd. this is a crowd that mitt romney has had a hard time attracting, the sharpest language we ve seen from rick santorum about mitt romney saying why would this party put up a candidate that the party is not excited about amp camping for. one day he ll tell you one thing and the very next day something else and the crowd seemed to response to that. mitt romney will come here and he has to wiggle through the fact that he did not support the auto bailouts while supporting, as rick santorum pointed out, the bailout of wall street. that s a message that is not sitting well with this largely conservative crowd and both of these gentlemen are trying to get that vote. as you mentioned, alex, the latest msnbc poll with governor romney showing a slight lead for all practical purposes. this is
ends and michael holmes joins us from the region with a live report. and did gas prices go up overnight? we ll look at pump prices around the nation and see who is paying the most and why it s going up, up, up. from cnn s world headquarters, bringing you news and analysis from around the globe. live from studio 7, this is cnn saturday morning. former president nelson mandela is in the hospital right now. officials are calling it an abdominal complaint. the 93-year-old s health has declined in recent years and he was largely kept out of sight, shunning public appearances. first of all, what are you hearing? what is going on? well, deborah, the presidency and the international public congress has been very, very adamant that mr. mandela is okay, that there is no need to panic. they re trying to reassure a very panicked public because the last they heard is that mr. mandela is suffering from abdominal ailments that really needed a specialist s attention. but the anc is say
tax. what steve said is revealing, i think. this began under a republican president. it was carried out by a democratic president. and, you know, as president bush said, it is really fascinating. if you re it issing there and you have all the experts in the world telling you the world is going to end, you re going to abandon your ideology. there is that. there is that. and by the way, we talk about edmond burke. yep. not enough. i didn t support the bailout, the bank bailouts. it was a burkian thing of george w. bush to do to say i m going to put my world view to the side and do what i have to do right now to make sure people can get money out of the atms. although, on the auto bailouts, dig chenai dick clany
investors of which there are how many? exactly zero. yeah. and this is the problem that not only romney but a number of the opponents of what president obama tried to do on the auto bailouts don t understand. there are really only two choices in the spring of 2009 and for that matter during president bush s administration fall of 2008. one is for the government to provide money under some set of circumstances and we debate those. the others is for those companies to close their doors, liquidate, lay off all the workers and go out of business. those are the only two choices. do they get any sense from bush administration officials how they felt on the auto bailout? yeah, i spent an enormous amount of time reporting for my book. i began my book with the bush period. and we saw it almost the same way. paulsen had a conversation with the white house. paulsen was in favor of the secretary of the treasury of helping the auto companies across the across this bridge. and somebody i
michigan. you talk to people in michigan, they believe not republicans but the general electorate believe that this bailout saved the car companies, saved their cities, saved their state. and for that matter, joe, the on a national basis, support for the bailout has got enmuch, much higher as people have seen the progress of it. when it first happened, as a country people were opposed to the bailout. but when you look at the latest national polls, there is a lot more support for what the president did on all of those. steve, really quickly and then i want to go to great charts you have here. so the bank bailout, the federal government actually made money. made more money on that bank bailout than any other thing they ve done in a long time. they made money. what about the auto bailouts? how much was invested? how much have they gotten back? how much do you expect them to recover moving forward? $82 billion went in. i don t know exactly how much went back. but they ll lose $10 b