welcome to south carolina mitt romney. tea partiers here despise you. that was the message an organizer was sending to the count when he took a day off to swing by the palmetto state. martin said in a telephone interview that except for the people who have signed on for romney, almost no one she knows in the state is supporting him. we don t really think too much of mitt romney here in south carolina. i don t know any tea party people in the states. one i talked to this morning who is supporting him in his presidential bid. like many tea partiers who say they don t like romney, martin cited the public health plan in massachusetts, which is similar to obama s plan. the republican party didn t like him in 2008. not much has changed about him between then and now, but the electorate has changed a lot.
leaving that podium after some very controversial comments on gay marriage. independents can vote in new hampshire. thanks very much. ron paul and rick perry are taking a break from the campaign trail today. congressman paul will return tomorrow. perry will be there for weekend debates, then he ll head off to south carolina to campaign. perry s in texas today and tomorrow. just moments ago, mitt romney wrapped up his event in charleston, south carolina with governor nikki hailey and his new supporter, john mccain. his target, president obama. i had the fun of reviewing some of the campaign tapes. from barack obama s speeches when he was a campaigner. and back then, he made a lot of promises. he was going to repair the nation, remember, and repair the world. there s a big gap between what he promised and what he delivered and what we ve seen over the past three years is a failed presidency. i don t think he s a bad guy. i just think he s way over his
going to ask him, it looks like new hampshire first strategy might not have been such a great idea. we ll also get insights from the former state republican party chairman here. he s a big romney guy here. he s a long time conservative. we ll ask him what he thinks of the criticism and e get his assessment op the state of the play here. sounds like a good show. thanks very much. as his conservative rivals pound away, mitt romney just arrived in south carolina, but critics on the right haven t exactly rolled out the red carpet for him. let s go to joe johns. what s the latest? well, mitt romney has the endorsement of the state s tea party backed governor, nikki hailey. he s certainly got money. he s got a very good organization, but hey, this is south carolina, where the people like their politics raw and we ve already gotten some examples of that.
head. what a difference a month has made for romney. time had romney on the cover asking why don t they like me. a different side of the photo, a new caption, so you like me now? let s bring in rick stengle. explain why then has changed to now as far as your cover stories are concerned. back then, which wasn t so long ago, just a few weeks ago, romney was in the second tier, third tier of candidates in iowa. people thought he might not get one of those coveted three tickets out of iowa, but he took a chance. he saw he was doing better with evangelicals than he thought and he decided to put his money on iowa. not so much as he had done the last time, then he triumphed. the fact he won in iowa actually makes him better suited to win everywhere else.
the substance, some of what you plan on doing. let me read a statement mitt romney put out. he says president obama s bureau is perhaps the most powerful and unaccountable in the history of o our nation headed by an unaccountable bureaucrat with unprecedented authority over the economy. i want you to respond and explain why he s wrong if you believe in fact as i assume you do. well, i think there s a lot of accountability in the law for this bureau, but the other thing is there wasn t a lot of accountability in the financial marketplace before we had the meltdown in 2008. that was a real tragedy for this country and it hurt millions of people and part of it was because we had banks and nonbanks competing in financial markets. they led a race to the bottom. they destroyed standards and they hurt a lot of people. who s going to be overseeing