say that about romney. they like him but they just don t feel it. they don t even know how to put their finger on it sometimes. you know, what it is about him that doesn t win them over. whereas i think santorum has had more success with that, though what happened yesterday wasn t a good example of that. for sure. all right. lois? please read my piece today on santorum s electability in the daily beast. please read. any reply? there you go. phil? i m going to make a plug for a little local grass roots group called we the people. di a forum last night and it is run by jennifer horn and fred barnes and congressman steve king and i did a panel on it. it s a great group. we the people.com. support them. a great group. he came to new hampshire? trying to keep the process in cement. there it is. beth? i m going to plug our national journal forum saturday. rick santorum is coming. it s at 9:30. you don t need a ticket. just come. i m plugging the final debate, 9:00 a
this is a time when republican primary voters are wanting to say look at their leaders and say that s the president, that s the guy i want to follow. santorum came into a liberal audience with no music, with no trappings of any kind of growth and proceeded to have a wandering message that did not talk about mitt romney, and at the end of the day he argued about gay marriage with a bunch of college kids can, that s not what you want to be doing four days before the primary. very quickly, that seemed to be the rick santorum that some of us in washington, he could get thrown off message. he s really long-wind, and he s wandering, just like phil says. asks a question, i ll take questions for an hour but then he takes three because he spends 25 minutes on each question. very detailed, i ll give him that. and he did not want to get into a fight with a kid on gay marriage. that was not good. you ll be coming back, but we have this weird, the white house says the white house can t
gdp growth to be moderate in the coming year. forecasts are imperfect. the world has a lot of uncertainty. and given this environment, i think it makes sense to have some insurance and try to strengthen economic growth and job growth by extending the payroll tax cut. all right. we ll leave it there. council of economic advisers, thank you for coming by this morning. thanks, chuck. nice to be with you. all right. let s bring back the panel. phil, let me just talk to you quickly on these jobs numbers. you re a romney supporter. romney s favorite line these days to say the president took all the stimulus and promised it would be under 8% and it s not. at the rate we re going, it could be under 8% before the republican convention. it does change the talking point. you know, is that not a concern? there was a lot of hedging in that commentary from mr. kruger at the cea as you heard. you would expect nothing else than the spin. no doubt. but look. i m not going to sit here and
than i was, as you put, it when we were riding the wave. there was an underdog character, super underdog? phil musser is a former senior adviser to the pawlenty campaign and is now a romney supporter and a senior writer for newsweek and the daily beast join us. welcome all. i think the question now is what are the debates going to look like, a full-fledged pile on mitt romney? if it is, we may hear things like this from newt gingrich. i think we ll do better in new hampshire than people expect because when you start to describe a massachusetts moderate and you remind people of his record, suddenly they go, oh, yeah. he s not a conservative. it s a joke for him to call himself a conservative. it s a saturday night live live skit. so beth, do you think it s going to be a pile on mitt romney type of doubleheader debate weekend. certainly gingrich is going that direction.
i mean, he s trying to frame it as a two-man race between them even though that s a little bit of a stretch considering the fact that he came in fourth in iowa. i think that gingrich also needs to worry about some of the other guys in the race. he needs to worry about santorum in particular. he needs to get the social conservative republicans who voted for santorum in iowa, that brand of republican, to get behind him, or he s or he s in trouble. phil, if you re if you were advising the romney campaign and you re not, you re a supporter but not an adviser right now, would you be preparing for an onslaught or thinking that it may be like every other debate where they would just ignore mitt romney. i think you re preparing for an onslaught. this is the final quarter, so i think you re preparing for attacks from all areas. i think you know where they are coming from. one of the things that s uniquely interesting here is that kind of the health care attack on mitt i sympathy baked i