drill down on and say, so you re now saying that you re with this new romney and you denounce your own position on this, that or the other? that could be fatal. you re right. that s the stretch. away from the old romney to new romney is a stretch away from paul ryan s own record. i m intrigued tonight by the moderator. she s a reporter. yeah. follow-up questions, will be interest to see if her instincts take over when something comes across she might know might not be exactly correct. this is msnbc s coverage of the 2012 vice presidential debate sent to get under way from centre college in danville, kentucky, in a couple minutes. i m rachel maddow at our msnbc home base in new york city. and chris matthews is at the debate site. chris, before we head into the main event tonight, do you have any last thoughts in terms of the stakes here? yeah, i think that biden should do what obama didn t do last week. just do it that way. everything different. everything different. it will
long, hard slog ahead and we need math that works. that means probably raising taxes or at least cutting some loopholes and making the tax code simpler, raising revenue, making some investments but maybe curbing entitlements. i want to bring in ralph nader, three-time presidential candidate and author of the new book called the 17 solutions. always good to have you on the program. thanks for being here. mitt romney is painting himself as a defender of the middle class. he says he won t raise taxes on the middle class, won t cut education. has a plan to cover people with pre-existing conditions. is this the real mitt romney? give us your take on this economic debate. it s clearly the new fake romney on the debate and president obama couldn t adjust in time. he said what s this? and i think it s the old romney that counts. i think the 47% really reflected his plutocratic personality, and
night, president obama could have ended the campaign, had romney failed. now he has two weeks where between paid advertising, interviews, campaign trail appearances, this romney is the romney that he has to be going forward because if he goes back to being the old romney, the romney that was like self-emulating over the course of the last three months, this will all be wasted. but if he brings that romney for the next two weeks, it will be a different campaign. i think he will, mike. if you watch mitt romney over 20 years, what you saw last night was mitt romney. you cannot run for president, as he has done for the last 18 months, pretending to be something you re not. yeah. you just can t do it. it catches up to you. it caught up to him multiple times with self-inflicted wounds. last night, that s mitt romney. yeah. a planner, an executer, a business guy, semiboring but human. and a moderate. joe klein and a moderate. and a moderate. speaking of which, joe klei
to figure out how to attack barack obama without alienating people who did vote for him. and i think that s right. if you bring this to debate, he ll have a hard time going after the president for that reason. well, alicia, there s something to that, because you notice he s been trying to come off a little more moderate in tone. watch this. now and then, the president says i m the grandfather of obamacare. i don t think he meant that as a compliment, but i ll take it. translator: if one of our children or grandchildren or relative, any of them were gay and wanted to get married, what is your advice for them? i love my children and i love my grandchildren and i would, of course, want them to be happy. my view is this. that individuals should be able to pursue a relationship of love and respect and raise a family as they would choose. now, that s a lot for a moderate. but he s the same guy that said this. let me show you old romney. i m talking only a few weeks ago, alicia.
a particularly not great moment to have just hours, 48, 72, before the republican national convention. i kind of like this. romney had intended to talk about the economy all summer, barely talked about it at all, distraction after distraction. this at least was kind of straight talk, this was mitt romney, he does in fact know a lot about tax loopholes, he knows a lot yes, he does. he knows a lot about big business and how it works. it is a real thing that small businesses have a lot of trouble and a lot of people realize that, navigating these regulations that big businesses are fine at. and again, the massachusetts health care plan is in fact a selling point, is in fact something he s proud of. he s supposedly going to the convention, will talk about things he has not talked about before about his religion. i think this is more of a relaunch than people realize, kind of back to the old romney. really, the phrase, when the president said the private sector is doing fine, it w