leadership, what s wrong with this bill? basically at the end of the day, they didn t want to have a victory for the president right before the election. that s not how i made decisions in the u.s. senate. fund-raising, i know it s been a little tougher. connie mack has a long family history in the state. now with mitt romney s help, are you going to be able to financially compete? we are financially competing. we have raised about the same amount of money as connie mack iv. we have about the same amount of money cash on hand. we re getting a lot of support in recent weeks as people know that this connie mack is not the father, it s the son and with all the challenges he has about his character. a bloody primary, are you at all concerned that a bloody primary, no matter which one of you comes out that you ll both be weakened with a very short general election? i believe if i m the nominee, i can beat bill nelson. if connie mack is the nominee, i don t think he can beat bill nel
and i worked for and around the state of florida campaigning for him. did you think some of the negative stuff on marco rubio had gone too far during that primary? primaries are always a contest of ideas. i have to think back about what those things were. there were some hits about marco rubio s personal finances, things like that. did you think governor crist went too far during the primary? i haven t thought about that, to be honest with you. i ve been focusing on this race and making sure the people of florida know who i am and who my opponent is. a lot of your attacks on mack haven t been on issues, they have been personal character issues. it s character and it s competency. this is a guy who doesn t show up for work. he has the worst voting attendance of any person in the u.s. congress. it s hard to be last out of 535. he s missed 40% of his votes. there s a big question as to whether he actually lives in florida. his wife lists him as a resident of california. we hav
here half the time. mack has rejected the suggestion that he s not a florida resident and his campaign has tried to put it to bed, insisting the issue is long settled. they called the ad mostly false. for his part, mack has tried to stick to political criticism, putting an ad on youtube slamming george lemieux for working across the aisle. we re seeing this in other states too, like texas whereby partisanship has become a dirty word. two republican senators, senators george voinovich and senator george lemieux george lemieux, once a liberal, always a liberal. could it be that last shot that may bow the most damning for lemieux, where he appears to be whispering into charlie crist s ear. that s toxic to a lot of republicans and the situation could be damaging for lemieux. it was then governor charlie
show how many days i was in florida. do you think this would be a big issue in florida? there s a lot of republican primary voters who are residents for six months and one day. well, let s not be that critical of them. there s a lot of folks in florida who are there the whole time. mack likes to say i was only in california for 11 days. if you can count how many days he was in california, tell us how many days you were in florida. i talked to the people in his congressional district and they say they never see him. so let s get this, put it to rest and release the records. when it comes to some of the support that you have given, you gave to president obama, you saw that one ad where you voted, frankly, against most of your party on a couple of those job bills. do you regret these votes? no. it was one jobs bill. it was a small business jobs act. it was a bill the republicans and democrats worked together. it cut taxes on small business, didn t increase the debt or deficit and
president obama, they will say it s gone up by $5 trillion. they neglect to say that a lot of the reason the debt has gone up is bush policies before. they say they have changed now. this is something they want to hit the president with continuously. will it work? we don t necessarily know, but for john boehner to start talking about it in may and some folks say threatening a default, although he denies it, it s certainly getting the issue at the forefront early on trying to make it a political issue as opposed to everyone being quiet and dumping it into november. let s talk about senate budget shenanigans yesterday. everybody s budget in some form went down yesterday. explain the 99-0 deal on the president s budget, because they didn t really vote on the president s budget. it s the same sort of legislative shenanigans we saw before. walk me through them all, republican budgets alike. sure. first, the president s budget went down 99-0 and people are saying, oh, my god, how could t