battling it out with ryan over that. it s funny how ben carson actually said that. he said, you know what, i don t really know about this debate plus i don t think anybody is watching it because they re watching the world series. the world series was great. it was hard to find cnbc. it was harder once you found it to watch it. it was a rumble in the rockies as the republican candidates hit the stage for the third round of the presidential debate. john roberts is waking up in boulder, colorado, where it all went down. he has some of the highlights. john, there were plenty of low lights. reporter: there were what do you mean, waking up, steve? still awake from yesterday. good morning, steve. elisabeth, welcome back. brian. the candidates did manage to get into some substantive discussion of policy. the over arching theme was media bias and the way the moderators conducted the debate. marco rubio who appears to be the clear consensus winner scored big points with the
broad, over arching narrative story of what happened you try to pin leon panetta down we don t have answers from secretary of state clinton or frankly from the president of the united states. i went to the president of the united states and i asked him. i do. if panetta told him on the day of the attacks, september 11th did he tell you it was a terrorist attack? he would not answer the question. panetta won t answer it however, i understand in florida i did say that he did tell the president that. but if that comes to light, if panetta tells president obama-o
broad, over arching narrative story of what happened you try to pin leon panetta down we don t have answers from secretary of state clinton or frankly from the president of the united states. i went to the president of the united states and i asked him. i do. if panetta told him on the day of the attacks, september 11th did he it was a terrorist attack? he would not answer the question. panetta won t answer it however, i understand in florida i did say that he did tell the president that. but if that comes to light, if panetta tells president obama-o
that s why one of the super committee members, a democrat, told us today he s optimistic of a grand bargain, but very skeptical. i ve always been in the camp that hoped we could go big, get sort of a large over arching agreement that tackles a lot of these issues. i don t know am whether we ll be able to get there or not. only time will tell. but i think that there is a seriousness of purpose among the members of the committee to work very hard between now and our very short deadline to get the job done. now, if they don t get $4 trillion in deficit cuts, they have to at least get 1.2 trillion. that s what they promised in the debt ceiling negotiations, otherwise something known as southwest race kicks in. that s a complicated washington way of saying painful defense cuts would automatically kick in, painful entitlement cuts would automatically kick in to reset $1.2 trillion target. it s an incentive to make both sides try to come together and dependent a deal.
reception in the room? well, you know, i thought ahead of time this mixed seating might mute the applause and i think it did. i think we saw fewer applause lines in this state of the union than any in recent memory. the sharpest and most partisan line came when he said we simply cannot afford a permanent extension of the tax cut for the wealthiest 2% of the americans so when he immediately went to relitigate the issue of the last congress his party lept to its feet with strong support. it was also the single most specific sentence about governing proposals in this speech. it is very soft language all the way through. gene said his language transcended our previous political vocabulary. to me it transcended it so far that i don t know what it meant through most of it. what does out innovate mean? there is no government program that s being discussed there. so we his intent i think part of the point though was to get through the