your son was aware of violence. yes. reporter: he wrote, with all of the shootings and police violence on minorities, you have to have a sense of light inside of you. that s who he was. that s who he is. everywhere he went, he wanted to leave a little bit of his light. reporter: one semester shy of graduation and now another family in our country in a fight they did not want. i had just gotten off the phone with him. i had just gotten off the phone with him. reporter: a tremendous amount of courage to sit there and talk about this with us. and today, both happy and her son, the perrys, said they would stand in front of as many cameras they could. to tell people not only is there a need to recognize what s
how much of this is a function of not the split delegates or the money or all this but the fact that the actual debate is a terrible debate? that we re complaining not of course you want to short an lousy debate, but you could have a long fantastic debate as well. no. absolutely. look, the if you re an independent voter, and let s say rugt now the independent voter is the key to the outcome in november, first of all, the entire field, the bachmanns, the perrys, the her man caines, you re convinced this is nothing more than a clown circus, number one. then, number two, as you narrow the field, the candidates, particularly senator santorum, keep talking about issues that are just way out of the mainstream. you know, making contraception illegal, attacking jfk for his reasonable statement on church and state. it s not focused. if you look at clinton versus
momentum heading into the next early states. jon: well, most of those players that you just mentioned, the bachmanns, the perrys, on the chart, the graph, you know, it goes like this. the real clear politics graph, it goes up, and then it goes down. but all of those people as newt gingrich is falling, all of those other candidates seem to be coming up again. yeah. i mean, that is one of the consequences. we ve seen this time and time again, and it s totally unlike the race in 2008. we actually have on real clear politics, you can go back and look at the polling, exactly where this race stood four years ago, and you ll see a completely different picture. it was much more stable and steady until the very end when huckabee sort of caught fire. this time, to your point, it s all rise and fall as republican voters have given each one of these candidates a hard look. and that s why i think the race is so fluid. i mean, in the latest poll in iowa 60% of caucus goers say they are open to cha
so sort through. we ve got a lot of numbers to talk about. david, talk about how these polls matter. we ve seen the ups and downs, the bachmanns, the cains, the perrys. newt s up now, some polls showing him going down. does it matter that he has such a commanding lead right now? i think it does because i think it represents consolidating an anti-romney vote against him. we re just a couple of weeks away from iowa, and he s got that put together. and in a commanding way, he s got that put together. but i think there s a volatility. i think right now republican primary goers have a couple of things going on. they re not excited about one candidate, but they re real concerned about the other. yeah. how would you like that if you were a father, your daughter was going out on a date, i don t like that guy and i m concerned about and this goes to what we have in our poll about the view that this is either an average or a