massive crowd singing aloud and getting the crowd to join him. that s about as unplugged and untethered as you ve seen mitt romney in any of his two, now, presidential campaigns, and clearly an exhibition of his sense of relaxed good nature and belief that he s going to pull off a victory here. of course, up until today he d been pretty far ahead in the polls, so singing is about as risky as you can get. jon: we heard the president singing al green a couple weeks back, i guess mitt romney was inspired to follow suit. what about newt gingrich today? reporter: again, sort of trying to look past the current race and position himself for upcoming battles and vowing that he will not get out of the race should he not win the florida 50 winner-take-all delegates and saying he s going to go on for some time, and he s also pressuring rick santorum to get out of the race and allow republican conservatives to coalesce behind newt gingrich which doesn t go over particularly well with rick santor
touch and that he is and that he s part of the right wing extremism which doesn t go over well with the middle. they want to see problems solved without much of a fight. that may not be realistic, but the longer romney goes on sort of flirt with this and this atmosphere, it s going to hurt his chances in the fall. richard, i ve got to go back to this whole reince priebus, chair of the republican party, comparing the president of the united states to this captain that caused this very tragic ocean liner to go down in italy. where people died. and people are still missing. i mean, not only does it disrespect the presidency and the president. what about the people who died, family and about the families that are still waiting to see if their loved ones will some way be miraculously be recovered and you are taking their pain to use
a 26% stake as taxpayers in it and a lot of its decisions are motivated by politics. when the government is one of your biggest shareholders you dance to the government s tune. we have a report from the mack kin gnaw center in michigan, that the chevy volt cost taxpayers $3 billion. each job created by the chevy volt cost taxpayers $250,000. that is not a good return on taxpayer investment. gregg: you know, in an election year, john, when jobs and the economy is paramount, how much of a political liability, if at all, is this? i don t think it s a major liability because solyndra is not a household word when people go to the polls. however, it s another example of how wrong the obama administration got the entire jobs picture wrong. remember, this is the administration that said when they took office if you pass our stimulus package, we will guarantee that unemployment doesn t go over 8%. how is that working out for us? not too well. here we are three years into
the obama administration, unemployment rate, 8.6%, may even go up if the european problems we see start to affect the u.s. economy. gregg: john, if it goes down, look went all the way up to 10%, the president can brag, if you will, that it went up to 10 on his watch. it is now gone to nine. it has gone to 8.6% f it goes lower, can t he claim credit for reducing joblessness? well he can try but no president with an unemployment rate over 7.2% has ever won re-election. and remember, what large part of the reason for that drop in unemployment, people have given up for working. therefore if they re not looking for jobs they re not counted and therefore the unemployment rate can go down with fewer people looking for jobs. a lot of people are working part time. they may have have a job but only working 20, 30 hours a week. if the unemployment rate remains high i think the president still has political liabilities.
the capitol building on many occasions. we try to get involved down there as much as possible. i ve been down there several times myself. i plan on being down there again. i think it s our responsibility to be engaged in that process. reporter: exit polls in 08 and 2010 suggest that born again christians, selfidentified make about 60% then of the vote, martha. martha: that s a huge dynamic obviously in iowa. the candidates who are viewed as more socially conservative, you would think would have an advantage there. it s also interesting that newt gingrich is bringing up all of this. don t shoot within the tent stuff when you head into iowa as well. reporter: well, yeah, traditionally negative campaigning doesn t go over well in iowa. social conservatives might get squeezed a little bit if turn out is high. a sharp operative by the name of tim albrecht thinks the turn out