now. the immigration answer we showed the first or the second question, that set the tone immediately for the night. romney was prepared with his answer and had gingrich back on his heels and it was clear this was not going to be like the previous debates in south carolina where gingrich was going to get off his one-liners and have the crowd come to its feet. and the one time he tried the john king move where he challenged wolf blitzer and said that s an absurd question, wolf blitzer shut him down and said no, wait a minute, you just said this on the trail two days ago, talked about swiss bank accounts in the cayman islands and gave romney the opening who said wouldn t it be nice if we were we had a candidate out here willing to repeat to my face what he said on the trail? can i say one thing? clearly there s a conventional wisdom now, which is gingrich needed a strong debate, didn t have it. romney was awesome, santorum was awesome, and therefore he s going to grow and that ll tak
over. that s the conventional wisdom. and we ve seen it s been wrong a lot. gingrich and his super pac have millions of dollars in florida, gingrich is a fighter, and romney still has a ceiling in florida. while the conventional wisdom is this is over, i d still want to see what happens over the next few days. florida s not iowa, florida s not new hampshire. as i ve said before and anybody that lives in florida knows, i mean, you know, if you have a great debate performance in concord, they know about it all the way from dartmouth down to manchester. if you have a great performance in coral gables, chances are really good they don t know about it on the other side of coral gables. that s the difficulty of florida. or not. because florida is a mighty river. it flows and people are people are doing a million different things. you for instance, you could have a baseball team that wins the world series and nobody would go out and see them play. that s right.
i have a little storm cloud for morning joe. what? this is the last debate till february 22nd. oh, no. we have to go weeks without a gop debate. that s not bad news. it s the longest this was debate 19, the longest stretch till debate 20 since the debates have started. last night, newt s no-show debate is what we re calling it. before the debate, romney folks told us if romney wins tonight we probably win florida, if newt has another south carolina moment, we could well lose. newt had no south carolina moment. in fact, it s the we re calling it the trading places debate that mitt romney was the one who was the aggressor, looked strong, went after newt. newt was oddly passive throughout the debate. afterwards, his folks blamed it partly on the audience. they told the huffington post john ward that mitt romney had packed the debate hall. that s advance 101.
will overturn as an unconstitutional violation of my civil rights as an american, that s nothing to get concerned about. right. that s a big big mistake. if you were judging this debate strictly on a kind of college score, santorum s critique was substantively the most powerful moment of the night. but it was so overwhelmed mitt romney, they ought to test him for performance-enhancing drugs because he s never had a more enhanced performance than last night. at every moment, everything people have been panicked about mitt romney. he s a stiff, he doesn t know how to debate, can t take a punch was turned on its head. even to the point where gingrich s demand for an audience response worked for romney and against gingrich. everything seemed to work for romney. and it was as if, i kept remembering the scene in patton
any time of the day in the heat of texas. you know, there are laws against age discrimination, so if you push this too much, you better be careful. imagine you re in the oval office, you speak to raul castro, what would you say to him? well, i d ask him what he called about, you know. yeah, okay. he was good last night. very nice. joining us from washington, moderator of meet the press, david gregory, and chief white house correspondent chuck todd. gentlemen, thanks for being with us. david, a fascinating debate last night on so many levels. break it down for us. well, i think it was a big night for mitt romney. i think if you took newt gingrich s biggest strength and you saw how he performed this week, you have to give the advantage to romney. he went after gingrich very hard. i think romney neutralized some of his own liabilities, attacked