garner good feelings in politics like this. you know, mitt romney is the nominee, rick santorum has said some tough things about him. that s fine. but you know, republicans are pretty united that they want to get president obama out of office, and the only way that s going to happen is if rick santorum speaks to his followers and convinces them that, you know, yes, what i said, i said a lot of things that weren t very nice about mitt romney but now this stage is over, we need to line up behind mitt romney, and it s been pointed out in the last 24 hours that hillary clinton, in 2008, didn t immediatey endorse barack obama, and that s true, but when she came back and she did endorse him, it was quite a full-throated endorsement and was i think probably went a long way to helping him win a pretty amazing victory in 2008. jon onand did you hear a big sigh of relief from republicans there in washington when this thing effectively ended with
because as you know, dick cheney ran the process for george bush, then became the vp nominee. jon: i remember that well. you know, it s, again, 20 weeks, carl, as you point out. doesn t sound like a whole lot of time to put this kind of a thing together. vetting can take days, weeks. there are some who argue that vetting should take months. the person who ran john mccain s vice presidential search committee was a guy, arthur caldehaus and he met sarah palin quite secretly, managed to do a lot of it behind closed doors, all of this sort of stuff has to happen and the campaigns take great pains to keep it secret. they want as maximum maximum bump as possible by the mentioning of the running mate which before the convention gives the opponent a big enough bounce to take a lead in the polls. that s what romney is trying for with the pick, they ve just got to get there. jon onand the running mate could well be someone not seen on the screens there,
the ground work to in in the words of political operatives, soften the battle ground for the nominee, likely to be mitt romney. so to be able to provide him a little bit of time, a little bit of time, a little bit of cover, to get his organization and his money up to speed for the general election, even ahead of the conventions. jon: bret, stick with us. we want to talk more about where we are in the election cycle now and the growing speculation about mitt romney s possible choices for a vice president. chief political correspondent carl cameron joins us on that. who s in, who s out when it comes to the possible selection of a vp carl? reporter: at this point, it s more about building the long list. we are today 20 weeks exactly to the beginning of the republican national convention in tampa, so the clock is ticking for mitt romney to pick a running mate, even though he has rivals newt gingrich and santorum and ron paul in the race. first thing romney has to do is who is going to
magnified. a few dea baits ago, there were 20 now? look back at 13, when he was on the fringe, people didn t pay attention to everything he said, this time every word mattered. when he said that quote about politics was a team sport and he had to take one for the teal and when he voted for president bush s education bill, bad move for him, didn t look good, didn t score any points with conservatives at all. jon: right. conservatives seem to be looking for somebody who is sort of an outsider, somebody who s ready to change the way washington does business and in many of his responses he basically seemed to affirm that he was part of the washington establishment. right. i mean, he was talking a language about committee meetings and appropriations and this sort of washingtonspeak, which i as somebody who covers washington, i understood. i m probably in a very, very tiny minority of people who did understand it. it made sense factually but in terms of messaging it reinforced his notion h
all these states. in nevada, it s a disappointing finish for congressman paul because he spent a lot of money, a relative lot of money, and spent a lot of time on the ground in nevada, and so it s a little bit disappointing in third place. i talked to him saturday night, he said he s going to continue to fight all in these states and will be a factor in a delegate battle if it gets down to that, a delegate hunt all the way to the convention. i do want to say one thing, jon. in the evolution of the news cycle, with all of the situation in syria, the u.s. closing the embassy in damascus, the back and forth about iran and the possibility that israel attacks iran sometime in the spring or summer, foreign policy could likely raise its head as a key issue in the gop race, as well as a playlude to the general election pretty soon. jon onand some interesting statistics on a new poll out on how mitt romney stacks up