there s been shelling in some parts of libya. reporter: richard engel, nbc news, in green square, libya. texas governor rick perry s quickly rising to the top of the republican presidential field despite his team of so-called eggheads or maybe because of them. plus, a mother is charged with pouring hot sauce down her kid s throat. but is she guilty of child abuse? the verdict is in. first a look at wall street today. the price of gold slumped 4% as investors got a little more confident. and the dow is off 38 points. s&p is down by almost five and the nasdaq has dropped 22.r5 at midday. , (what) can i do for you today? [ female announcer ] need help keeping your digestive balance? align can help.
the thing i really focus on which is an unprecedented effort on the part of perry and his top political advisor dave carney to try to figure out what works in campaigns. and they invited in these four political scientists they call the eggheads and invited them to run randomized field experiments like drug trials on every aspect of the campaign s budget that they could successfully design and experiment around. and the results, the findings from these experiments really changed how perry ran his re-election in 2010 and sort of shaped their thinking as they geared up for this presidential run. if the focus really is on what works, what wins elections, it would stand to reason that it s less about what your platform is than about how you conduct the campaign and retail politics was a really important part of his gubernatorial campaign. is that something that can
translate on a national scale? sure. i think broadly there are a lot of questions that they are asking and the eggheads are asking about how much lessons from the 2006 campaign with the very well known governor can be transferred to a race where he s running in states where people don t know him that well. it s about both things working. the messaging needs to be good and the issues need to be in sync with the electorate, the mechanics of campaigns do matter. dave carney said i m going to be spending $40 billion in a campaign in texas. i want to make sure i spend that money well. perry s a very aggressive fundraiser. very successful fundraiser. i think we ll be seeing results of that soon in the presidential race. here s the weird thing. i just showed this clip where he s telling people to buy his book. the campaign is saying that doesn t reflect his current thinking. there s kind of a disconnect? i think in that particular instance he wrote that book when he wasn t thinking of r
all the stuff that we re used to seeing actually had the effect that campaigns hoped that it did. and dave carney decided to invite these eggheads into rick perry s campaign. ok, so and that was there s carney right there. his campaign manager. that was in 2006 where they came in and watched. in 2010, they were actually part of the operation. how did they change things? then this whole body of work in 2010 that had come out of dozens of experiments they had run in 2006. one of the big findings that they took away from 2006 came from the experiment where they randomized perry s travel around the state and so they were able to randomly assign him to different cities and then track the effects on his approval rating, on volunteer signups, on campaign contributions in an individual city. what they realized is that perry s physical presence in a place mattered. that everything went his way, if he was somewhere and so they realized that the value of having him in abilene on a given day
i think it could be profound. if you read the new york times piece this morning on david carney s use of academic eggheads, as they called them in the perry campaign, to test what campaign tools actually work and the ones that don t, they were extraordinarily effective in 2010 in their texas re-election race using these things. and i think we will see in this primary in 2012 that they ll apply the same things. you think they ll apply and work on a national scale? on a national level. absolutely. some of them. not all of them. but i m sure some of them will. as they did for obama in 2008. all right. mark tapscott, dave weigel, gentlemen, good to see you. the three dougherty siblings who were the focus of a nationwide manhunt are going to be formally charged with attempted murder and assault this afternoon in southern colorado. police say the trio also robbed a georgia bank, they shot at police officers, and they re charged with stealing two cars in utah.