Al Gore Problem News Today

Lies in realtime. but marie had out of the box pick. she wants to see the romney tax returns on that stage. and our facebook community is still talking about paul ryans speech from last night. brenda says quote, mitt romney has a pre-existing ill nns, foot in mouth disease. who would have thought it was contagious? we want to hear what you think too. head over to facebook and search "politicsnation" and like us to join the conversation that keeps going long after the show ends. on car insurance?...

Correspondent for the guardian. thank you both for joining me. >> thank you. >> thanks. >> david, is it too late for romney to try to fill in the blanks on his biography? >> i dont think its too late to fill in the blanks. he needs to talk to a lot of people who dont know a lot of the details because as you mentioned, he doesnt talk about a lot of the details on the campaign trail. there are a lot of people just tuning in now. what i think is its a tough call for him to try to make himself likab...

Way. which is the position hell probably take and try to kick those down the road even farther. >> you wrote a piece saying ann romney connected pretty well, but its not going to help him. how does he connect if he doesnt have that kind of personality, or do you think he does have it and he just hasnt revealed it yet? >> oh, i dont think he has it. i think he suffers from the al gore problem a bit which is no matter how charming he may be in private, in public he is very awkward and doesnt conne...

Of the gop, some of them would do like charlie crist does and say im ashamed where the party has taken me. >> jonathan, youre down in tampa and have seen the display, i call it an optical illusion on the stage. but the people in the audience and governor rendell is saying its not diversity. how do they deal with the policies when they say we should be proud of the diversity on the stage but the policies dont in any way seem to appeal to people that are in those communities. >> well, keep in mind...

Republican governor. >> so if this is a video released today, if the obama campaign is going to use his flip-flopping in the fall, wouldnt that be a problem, erin? >> i suspect that they will use it more -- i think the point is that the obama campaign is trying to run a choice race between the different visions that were seeing from president obama and from mitt romney. tonights speech, ive seen the excerpts. he doesnt get into some of the nuances of policy. hes going to talk about his personal ...

Way to get their support. >> no, you dont. and theres certain things in the romney platform and what romneys been talking about that appeal to those voters on a substantive level. you dont have to do stuff like this. but the problem for romney is not white working class democrats. hes going to get his share of them. john mccain in pennsylvania, rev, four years ago carried 11 of the 12 southwestern democratic counties. lost the state by 11 points because he got clobbered in the philadelphia subur...

>> we know rick santorum has talked about man-on-dog in the past. so he takes this issue very seriously. >> but you saw this coming. you wrote a column -- what was it, january, entitled "mitt romneys al gore problem." did you think it would take the form of a dog? >> you know, it does in so many different ways. i liken it to, he looks like a person and he sometimes acts like a person, but every once in a while, you realize theres a glitch in the matrix and hes not like everybody else and hes a b...

Would say the issues of character are important in this election. we need to look at all those issues and make a determination as to whether thats the kind of person you want to be president of the united states. >> joining me now, dana milbank. dana, issues of character, rick santorum answers with a straight face that the dog is a serious issue of character. >> we know rick santorum has talked about man-on-dog in the past. so he takes this issue very seriously. >> but you saw this coming. you w...

Badly. the problem is theres no good answer. if we were to release the returns and people would see how extraordinarily wealthy he is and how little hes paid in taxes, thats not necessarily a better answer than him equivocating and hemming and hawing here. hes in in al gore trap. hes so worried about saying the wrong things. hes calculating before he says any word that comes out of his mouth and it leads to this mush coming out. it makes the problem worse the its like this vicious cycle. >> that...

President of a country of people who doesnt make near that. >> seven times the average income for family. but he is speaking the way he thinks. >> he has got to stop doing that. >> every time we do what youre doing right now, we say learn how to talk regular american people. he gets more and more withdrawn. >> this goes back to his al gore problem. hes so afraid of what might come out of his mouth, hes thinking it through, which makes him make more mistakes, which is why you got that absurd clin...