produce. the book comes out tomorrow. and if you re on an msnbc marathon, i will be on with rachel mad doe at 9:00 p.m. that will do it for this show today. i m dylan ratigan. hardball is up right now. good evening. i m chris matthews up in manchester new hampshire. one day before the primary. leading off tonight, you can t handle the truth. it s finally happened. mitt romney, the number one threat to president obama s reelection is under attack by his own party. the other republican candidates are inflicting wounds that could destroy romney for the general election. at yesterday s msnbc facebook debate. jon huntsman had the line of the
he is the game. he s the president. romney was trying to have a bit of both ways. here s mitt romney. listen to what he said yesterday to differentiate himself from president obama. i don t think he feels it. he experiences it the way so many of you do and i do by virtue of having lived in the real world. i know what it s like to worry whether you re going to get fired. there was a couple times whether i wondered if i was going to get a pink slip. we ll think about that. today rick perry, jumped on romney s comment. let s watch. i have no doubt that mitt romney was worried about pink slips whether he was going to have enough of them to hand out. because his company and all the jobs they kill, i m sure he was worried he would run out of pink sli slips. you re in trouble when rick perry is smarter on his feet than you are. he was pointing out he was the one doing chop shop work like
primaries and can win them now, who are you looking at? well, to be honest with you, the problem that we re having with newt gingrich and rick santorum is a lot of the votes that they made that look a lot like mitt romney s record. that s the problem that a lot of these politicians who are pretea party, they got in and started talking our talk. the most consistent performer has been ron paul who stayed around 20%. at 76 years old, can he be our next president? no, i don t think so. i think he s running to drive an agenda. he s running to hold the other politicians accountable. i don t know what they are talking about. they don t have a candidate who they are ready to nominate. what happened to the tea party? i almost feel sympathy for the tea party. listening to matt, i can hear the pain in thiz voice. there s no one in the non-mitt field who can appeal to these
this is the essence of who he is. is it a strategy of attack the strength? go after the main bragging point and smash his face on it. yeah. if you think about the scale of these ads, we re talking about $3.7 million being dumped in south carolina. that s about what mitt romney dropped on newt gingrich in iowa. and it had a devastating effect on him. then you throw in rick perry competing down there. and they are thinking that south carolina could put this away for them, but it could be a tough state. let s get to the point of what the ad says. here s another excerpt of the video going after romney from a pro-gingrich super pack. let s watch it. they fire people. they cut benefits. they sell assets. what did he do when he was the ceo of this holding company? a group of corporate raiders led by mitt romney, more
the great leader s new attire which really consisted of nothing at all. he was naked except to those who clung to him seeking the benefits which often flow from an emperor. well, think of mitt romney. he presents himself in the new clothes of a conservative, a figure who has no faith in government, a hard-nosed man of the right who has great fondness for the tea party. great distaste for other countries, who assumes all the trappings of the american angry enemies of the establishment. oh, yes, that other adornment, he s a man who never and he wears this code well, wanted to serve a life in politics. he ran for the senate but never really wanted to serve a career there. it helped he lost that race. he ran for governor and was elect bud never intended to run for governor because that would have made it about him. he isn t one of those politicians who runs for office with the idea of serving there. he s just a private citizen. a conservative businessman who on some occasions offers himsel