primary and tacted back to the center and started quoting reagan and lincoln. is he pulling fast one to say you supported the auto industry when you didn t? these guys find themselves in different cross hairs at different times. i think you have mitt romney making that play to seal the case going into ohio. joy, thanks for joining us. this is what i ve been hearing all night. i understand what you have to do when you re on the wrong side of the argument but the new argument anything he says is fine. anything he covers up is fine because this is an election two weeks from now. they say it s two weeks from now. it s the two-minute drill. you can say anything you want to say. that seems to be the argument tonight. i thought what steve was saying was extraordinary admission of how the political consultant world looks at election s that the content doesn t matter is long as he used this vacuum cleaner s approach.
behind is he a moderate governor? let me finish. no. let me finish. he s 20 to 25 points behind in his home state. he s probably the first governor to run for president will not carry his home state because people who know him the best trust him the least. he couldn t run for re-election. he was at 37% because he was doing things differently from the way he was going to run. why? because he wants to be president. i m going to play you something from one of these, you know, every news organization has their own version of undecided this, undecided that. let me play you what one of these undecided voters we were talking to in tampa said last night about mitt romney and this new messaging. i felt like romney agreed with the president a lot and i was surprised there wasn t more distinction between them. so, it i m glad he did. i felt some of the things he was saying before, he was kind of speaking in a language that
heaven and earth to get him. president obama trying to disqualify mitt romney as commander in chief by explaining how the united states military term works and boats that go under the water that are called submarines. this must have been planned out in advance. you ll be seeing this over and over and over again over the next few days. our navy is smaller now than any time since 1917. the navy said they needed 313 ships. we re now down to 285. we re down to the low 200s. that s unacceptable. i want to make sure that we have the ships required by our navy. i think governor romney hasn t looked at how the military works. you mentioned the navy and that we have fewer ships than in 1916. we also have fewer horses and bayonets because the nature of
sometime you get real, live actual news out of these presidential debates. i think tonight was one of those nights. a cbs flash poll of uncommitted voters found that 53% said that president obama won tonight s debate. 23% said mitt romney won tonight s debate and 24% scored it as a tie. lawrence o donnell is in the spin room with john kerry whose twitter feed has become way more interesting. lawrence? thank, rachel. you played mitt romney in the debate prep. when you were playing mitt romney, did you say we are going to be out of afghanistan by 2014? no. why didn t you say that? because mitt romney hasn t said it and he s never said it. i mean, my head is dizzy tonight trying to follow mitt romney. you were shocked when you heard him say it again. i was. because weeks ago mitt romney
held onto him tight and kept him in his grip. he got him to back this 800 ship navy. take a look at this. you can have the first grab at this. this is when the president used some real humor. it has to do with the back and forth on the military budget and the navy. obama had one of his strongest lines of the night. it was prepared but god help him. our navy is smaller now than 1917. they said they needed 317 ships. we re now under 285. we re headed down to the low 200s. that s unacceptable to me. i want to make sure we have the ships required. i think governor romney hasn t spent enough time at looking how our military works. you mentioned the navy and we have fewer ships. we also have fewer horses and bayon nets because the nature of our military has changed. we have aircraft carriers where planes land on them.