conservatives blamed john mccain being too moderate for their loss and then we had the tea party and a dramatic move to the right as a result of that. now there s already talk of who will get the blame or what will get the blame if romney does end up losing and what senator lindsay graham of south carolina said is if i hear anybody say it was because romney wasn t conservative enough i m going to go nuts. we re not losing 95% of african-americans and 2/3 of hispanics and voters under 30 because we re not being hard-ass enough. what do you think the explanation will be after election day if romney does lose tomorrow? i agree with mr. graham. i m a bad person to ask because i m a self confessed liberal. but i think mitt romney s a very moderate guy. by any common sense definition of the word. he s one o of the most decent people i know.
debate, said he wasn t all he portrayed to be. that he actually did have a plan and he laid it out, he was pretty aggressive laying out his five-point plan of the president obama has gone on to say, you know, romney wasn t telling the truth about his plan, nevertheless message got through at least to some voters he is pushing that he has a plan to get the economy moving again and it s resonating. jon: on that point, especially in the battleground states, the obama campaign decided in the spring, well before the mitt romney was the nominee they decided he was the guy who would get the republican nod. they started negative advertising you were referring about. so when voters were asked in the wall street journal what are your feelings toward each candidate, mitt romney gets 43% positive rating, 44% negative ratings. president obama has better numb berks 49%, 43% negative. but the interesting things those are the highest positive numbers that governor governor romney enjoyed to this poi
bus full of women, those who have worked with the man. but his claim during the debate that women have lost 580,000 jobs in the last four years is, i believe, not strictly accurate, is that right? no, it s not. it s a number that s really outdated. it s a number that had he said it back in march, which he had been saying, it would have been true. but now if you calculate the number, it s only 283,000 if you calculate from january. now, there s some debate whether or not you should calculate from january or from february. february is the month the first full month that any president serves. if you calculate from february, well, that number drops to just 82,000 jobs that have been lost. so either way you look at it, romney wasn t accurate at the debate. so that figure that romney suggested places full responsibility for job losses on the president even before he was inaugurated, correct? well, that s always the question that economists always have an analyst to say
but there s something so condescending. i thought that of the first debate. that lack of deference to the office. was there again tonight. hold on son, you ll get your turn. it s like come on. but romney wasn t challenged in the first debate. so therefore he didn t have to sort of figure out how to respond. he could focus on making his power point presentation to the voters. and not be interrupted. and obama just sort of let him go through. this time around, he seemed to get rattled again and again and again. he didn t know whether to deal with the voter asking a question. whether to deal with the president. or to deal with the moderator. and he got very testy. that exchange reminds you of the one during the debates where he turned to anderson. anderson, anderson. it s the same thing. candy, candy. came in defending the content of his blind trust. the president worked in a good line. let s listen here. any investments i have over
my gosh, barack obama has shown us the way to the promised land over the next four years. no, but to your point, though, joe, and to marry up one of your points to mark s point about, you know, people showed up, i think, wanting to know whether the president would have another bad performance. but i think more than that, the biggest question for a lot of voters is when they looked at that denver debate was, does this guy actually want to be president? right. is he actually willing to fight for his job? and i think that he answered yesterday pretty compellingly. he showed up and fought for his job. and mark actually raised this on the show yesterday. he fought for it yesterday. he wanted it. he corrected from the first one and said when romney wasn t telling the truth and went at him. but kept it dignified. and i think that sends a really important signal that matters to people because i do think voters feel like if you re not willing to fight for your own job, you re not will