who are supporting obama and biden tonight. we want to bring congresswoman blackburn in. she s a republican from tennessee. she supports the romney/ryan tick. she joins us from the spin room tonight. congresswoman, thank you for your time tonight. nice to have you here. thank you. chris matthews, my colleague, is just outside the building where you are right now. chris, i know you wanted to get in the first question here. i m trying to figure out, congresswoman, you know, i really like you. you re a great guest on our show. maybe you don t know the answer, but i m going to try it. what s the position of the romney/ryan ticket on abortion rights? it seems to me that congressman ryan was very passionate tonight saying if he has the chance he ll get rid of abortion in this country. he made it pretty clear he s a pro lifer, and that means something to him. it s not just a term of art. he wants to get rid of abortion. joe biden said although he s against it in his church, he accepts h
medicare. he tried to sell that hard. everything joe biden said was factual. everything that ryan came back with was, well, that s not right, this is what we want to do. but he really had no detail on anything. and i also thought joe biden s experience tonight on foreign policy, i mean, it was a man against a boy. yep. he got so mixed up, ryan did, about, he would not accept the fact he talked about how great our troops are doing, but he would not accept the fact the afghan forces are also making strides and they re the ones that are being detailed in the very regions he s talking about. and so, look he was saying he agrees with the drawdown and the drawdown is dangerous. he agrees with the timeline and the timeline is dangerous. paul ryan, there was one bit of damage done to the republican side tonight which is the romney/ryan ticket is not credible on the issue of the war that we are fighting. no, they re not. we have 68,000 people right now, paul ryan embarrassed himse
left. ryan had a whole do-no-harm strategy. i m told that was their goal. they knew biden was coming at him hard. they didn t want him taking the bait on too many things. at a minimum, he didn t do anything to hurt romney going into next tuesday. chuck, in terms of that do-no-harm strategy, are we seeing anything from the romney/ryan side in terms of trying to either correct or walk back any of the things that he said either on the confused or the confused muddled response where he lost track of what he was saying on afghanistan or on the blunt comments he made on abortion rights? any attempts to finesse those or walk those back? well, i think you saw the difficulty. this was something i know that the romney folks were worried about. how was ryan going to handle basically differences that he has with romney on two big issues. you saw ryan struggle. social security is another one i throw out there and the whole
go to a much more aggressive form of privatization. he continued to promote different forms of privatization through the next decade until 2010. it was when he really got charged with creating a budget that all republicans could sign on to that boehner and other members said you have to take this out of your budget because we can t go into battle like this. ryan was, in terms of what you had in the house, he was the leader of the privatization movement and was much more committed to it than just your run of the mill average conservative. this seems like a really important moment in the campaign. this, to me, seems like something that s very, very important. in 2004, george w. bush won re-election and said i earn political capital, now i m going to spend it. he tried to spend it on privatizing social security. paul ryan was on board. the democrats have now signaled as of this debate tonight they re going to try to it hold him to that, make him run on privatizing social security.
paul ryan talking about that in terms of a deprivation of religious liberty. paul ryan didn t say this, of course, but he and mitt romney have said on day one if they were elected they would get rid of insurance coverage for birth control from employers. all across the board. so actually, this is an issue that, you know, mitt romney repeatedly has said. he s going to get rid of planned parenthood. now they re saying they re going to get rid of birth control coverage in insurance plans. i think you heard mitt romney and paul ryan aren t going to take women back four years, they re going to take women back 40 years. this is such a clear distinction. i m glad the men and women of america are hearing it. you listened to the whole debate. taking in the whole debate, what are you hoping that undecided voters heard tonight? well, i think what i heard was a vice president who clearly has the experience, who is fact based, was able to talk clearly about policies, and i thought mr. ryan di