in a gem election, jeb bush, governor chris christie of new jersey, they mate maybe this isn t the best year for me for a lot of reasons. if one of them was the nominee and two bring the two wings of the party together you might have a real race but they had such a weak field. that would be a choice election where reasonable people would try to decide between the two candidates. this one is not a hard choice. last month when missouri senate candidate todd akin made his comments about legitimate rape, time wrote that the comments and the no-nothing idiocy of the plurality of the base. todd akin is not an outlier, he s a symptom of the disease. governor romney, he knows about as much about science as anybody i know. he s educated. he s got a degree in harvard in law, in business. he could do a little studying about climate change and understand it s a real challenge. and yet he just plays this know-nothing view of i don t know anything about that stuff. he does. he kind of remind
so, you know, it s really backwards. it s really retrograde, and we ve talked about it for a long time, but if they really want to pull paul ryan forward they have to go back to that war on contraception, war on abortion, war on women language because it s really true, they would take away major rights for women, and if they think that s a winning formula in 2012, let them try it. here is the recent political director in iowa, here is what he had to say, or she had to say about the republican party and how it s criticizing this guy, romney. i hate to say this but if ryan wants to run for national office again, he ll probably have to wash the stench of romney off of him. the word stench, gene, it s very unpleasant word, and i wouldn t be that rough, even me. but the stench of romney? that is unpleasant. this is a republican statewide coordinator out in wisconsin. well, you know, we sat here through the primary season, and we saw, you know, the republican
the tea party loved him. they were so happy when mitt picked hip but they re now very disappointed. it looked like a rare moment of courage for mitt romney, but instead he desaied to run away from paul ryan s positions as fast as he could, skak the etch-a-sketch again and now you have conservatives who are grumbling and saying this but it would, of course, be disaster for romney. the same question for you, gene. i was at a family event and my 90-year-old stepmother is having her birthday. one of the people in the family is a doctor. the word is out this could kill this ticket of romney and ryan, this whole thing of messing with medicare. nobody wants it messed with apparently. nobody wants it messed with. you saw the reaction that paul ryan got at aarp the other day. a chorus of boos. people don t want to screw around with the program and voucherize it the way paul ryan wants to do. and so i think this sort of let ryan be ryan thing just isn t going to happen. i mean, what s in it
and what he thought about it, what he wanted to do about it, what he had accomplished in massachusetts, how can mitt romney talk for five minutes on health care, even like 90 seconds without saying something that contradicts something he said the week before, the month before, that gets the base upset, that is confusing, that reporters can t quite understand? i don t know how he does it. he s tied himself into knots on this particular question. on the other side, i do know some obama aides who are a little worried that the president, who sometimes can be overly profess soral, may use the time not to his advantage either. they d like to see more succinct answers. they each have the opposite issue to deal with. how romney can speak coherently about health care in a way that s convincing and obama doesn t go too far down the debate. i think he s going to get through this on sheer unadulterated memory. what we saw on 60 minutes seemed like opening arguments.
facility in china where its iphones are assembled. google hit a closing high. different story at facebook which dropped 9% after a weekend report that said the stock remains too pricey. that s it from cnbc. we are first in business worldwide, and now back to hardball. welcome back to hardball. conservatives swoon for congressman paul ryan when he was chosen for the republican ticket, but he s since played the classic role of second fiddle. moderating his positions on both fiscal and cultural issues to conform to romney s views. well, now that romney/ryan campaign is coming off a bit of a couple rough weeks there. some conservatives have just got the answer. simply let ryan be ryan. that was the advice they dished to the new york times today. but is that really the smart move, really? joan walsh is editor-at-large of salon and author of what s the