growing in this pivotal state. a series of weak debate performances have sent rick perry plummeting in the polls. but last night s las vegas debate showed a more assertive side of the one-time gop front-runner as he went head-to-head with mitt romney. the governor s duel saw the two men sparring over heated accusations of lying with illegal immigration taking center stage. you can t have access to health care we hired a lawn company to mow our lawn. and they had illegal immigrants that were working there. and when that was pointed out to us, we let them go you have a problem with allowing someone to finish speaking, and i suggest that if you want to become president of the united states, you ve got to let both people speak. so let me speak. i m joined by wayne slater for the dallas morning news. thanks for being with us today. great to be with you. you know, you gave us three take aways in last night s performance. the first thing you say, is he
j.p. frayer. mitt romney taking hits from all sides, but the animosity between romney and rick perry, it was palpable. you could almost see steam coming out of their ears when romney put his hand on governor perry s shoulder. he touched him for one thing. i mean, who came out looking most presidential? did anyone come out winning here? you re almost waiting for perry to kind of, you know, get your hand off my shoulder. look i don t know what took rick perry this long, frankly, to rhetorically and almost kind of physically get in mitt romney s face. because the fact is, on hard-core conservative issues, abortion when romney ran against ted kennedy in 1994, he said he was going to be to the left of ted kennedy on abortion and women s rights. on gun control, on t.a.r.p. you could own health care, when it was fashionable, he said that health care he pushed in massachusetts would be a model for the nation. and all of a sudden it became unpopular and now he s tryi inio
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go back on it. if rick perry could string coherent sentences together better than he does, frankly, he d be in much better shape today than he is. thankfully last night, at least, he stepped up a little. and he said and i ll say one final thing on this whole immigration thing. the fact is when romney said we looked into this when i was running for office. as if somehow having illegals working on your lawn is okay unless you re running for office. that s a very damaging thing for him to say. it s reminiscent of when hillary clinton got tripped up exactly four years ago in a debate when the whole issue was getting driver s licenses to illegal immigrants in new york state. let s keep an eye on that issue. you know, richard, i want to bring you in. one thing in last night s debate might clear is romney s massachusetts health care law is going to continue to dog him throughout his campaign. let s listen to what rick santorum had to say.
you just don t have credibility, mitt when it comes to repealing obama care. your plan was the basis of obama care. your consultants helped craft obama care. and to say you re going to repeal it, we have no track record on that. will all of this give democrats even more ammunition against romney? is this what they need? i think there s going to be a ton of ammunition. if the campaign stops today, i think all the flip-flops that mitt romney has had over the years, including just this week on occupy wall street. he was talking about them kind of being essentially like mobs until he saw they were picking up steam and he said, look, i m with the 99%, not the one. which nobody believes. that s a joke. i think, frankly, there s a ton of ammunition at the campaign stop today by virtue of mitt romney s flip-flops. we just saw president obama who comes across as genuine. and when you see mitt romney go