a nation with a 2 3erz unemployment rate. it is singapore and its prime minister, you'll want to hear what he has to say. also, i'll explain why we should stop worrying so much about the stumbling revolutions in tunisia, and around the arab world. here's my take, first. now that mitt romney is once again the frontrunner, his campaign focus is returning to president obama. he will probably repeat a line that he has used often in the past. >> this is a president who fundamentally believes that this next century is a post-american century. >> now, i leave it to the president to describe what he believes, but as the author of the book "the post american world, i would like to clarify the phrase. at the very beginning of the book, i note, this is a book not about the decline of america, but rather about the rise of everyone else. throughout the book i'm optimistic, and i think we can prosper in this new world and remain the most powerful country on the planet. i argue that the age of america's singular dominance, its uni-poll airport has ended. for a quarter century after the collapse of communism and the soviet union, the united states dominated the world with no real political or economic competitors. mitt, we're in a different world now. in 1990 china represented 2% of global gross domestic product. it has quadrupled to 8%, and it's rising. by most estimates china's economy will become the world's largest between 2016 and 2018. this is not simply an economic story. china's military capacity and reach are also expanding. beijing's defense spending is likely to surpass america's by 2025. it's not just china that's rising. emerging powers on every continent have achieved political stability and economic growth and are becoming active on the global stage. let's do a then and now. 20 years ago turkey was a fragile democracy dominated by its army, constantly in need of western economic bail-outs. today turkey has a trillion dollar economy that grew 6.6% last year. since april 2009 turkey has created 3.4 million jobs. that's more than the entire european union, russia, and south africa put together. in this hemisphere brazil was emerging from decades of dictatorship and was racked by inflation rates that reached 3,000%. today brazil is a stable democracy steadily growing with foreign exchange reserves of $350 billion. i could go on. barack obama has succeeded in preserving and even enhancing u.s. influence in this world precisely because he has recognized these new forces at work. he has traveled to the emerging nations and spoken admiringly of their rise. he replaced the old western club and made the group of 20, the central decision making forum for global economic affairs. by emphasizing multi-lateral organizations, alliance structures and international legitimacy, he got results. it was chinese and russian corporation that produced tougher sanctions against iran. it was the arab league's formal request last year that made western intervention in libya uncontroversial. mitt, by and large you have ridiculed this approach to foreign policy, arguing that you would, instead, expand the military, act unilaterally, and talk unapologetically, but just pumping triumalism won't help you promote mesh's ideals in a world set by powerful new players. you can call this new century whatever you like, but it won't change reality. just because we call it the world series, doesn't actually make it one. let's get started. let's get to it with today's terrific panel. to start two davids. david brooks is the columnist for the "new york times". david recommend remnick is -- peggy noonan and christy freeman. welcome all. so if mitt romney gets the nomination, what happens to the conservative base? will it reluctantly accepted -- will it feel like a john stewart said, that's the chocolate in the chocolate box nobody ever wanted to eat but eventually they'll eat it and like it? >> they'll like it. you know, when obama ran against clinton, you could get polls saying 40% of democrats wouldn't support the other. that all vanishes. that's always going to vanish. i think what the tea party people should be asking ourselves, we had this -- >> you say ourselves. you mean -- >> they should be asking themselves. thank you. >> on the show you're not to out yourself as a tea partier. >> i have always been partial. it's been obvious. and they should say, lisp, we have all this energy, all these ideas, we have mowed by so many people, and we produce mitt romney. why couldn't they produce a leader? why couldn't they really change the party? if romney wins, the head of the republican party, the most -- three most important people in washington will be mitch mcconnell, john boehner, and mitt romney. that's the republican main street establishment. the tea party will have pretty limited effect. >> doesn't the tea party -- isn't the tea party's answer the vial elites still control the political process and are not letting us in? >> my definition of the republican elite is that anybody who knows what newt gingrich is really like. the people who worked with him, those are the so-called republican establishment, and they want anybody but him. >> isn't this debate period wearing away at the image of romney? is it all disappearing? this debate period is pretty hideous. the incidents are so bad, the gaps are so frequent, the cruelty so cruel, in fact? doesn't that wear away? >> everybody's negatives are going up. it's true. it will take some time, i think, to be able to look back at these debates and figure out if they were a net plus or a net minus. i think at the moment they look a little bit net minus-y because of the clown car indy 500 aspect, you know, but there's also the sense, i think, that, first of all, they're really learning how to debate. one of these guys is going to go up against obama, and he is not going to have been to the rodeo for the first time. second of all, they're all -- all of these candidates are asked really serious questions just about half the time in these debates, and that's a good thing, and i think people will be able to contrast that somewhat with the inevitable approach of a press corps towards a president who is always more protected and less available to them and gets a lot less tough questions. i also think it's interesting that while the republicans are killing each other, the president's numbers -- i hate to fall back on words like numbers, but the president's numbers are not going up as you might expect as the republicans look more and more like a clown car. >> i notice when we are talking about the gaffs in the debate and the campaigns. romney has this new gaff of the comment about the poor. i feel as though in some ways the guy can't get a break because if you look at the previous gaff where he talked about i like to fire people, he wasn't talking about firing people. he was talking about firing insurance companies, and it's absolutely clear, and here he says i'm not so concerned about the poor. they have a safety net if it has holes, i'll repair it. i feel as though the media here is sort of saying, yes, yes, but if we take this entirely out of context, it really sounds like he is being very mean to the poor. am i -- it just feels like, yeah. >> you just took it entirely out of context. >> i think you are giving mitt romney a safety net here. it's true that the comment was more extensive than the cartoon of the comment. there's no question. if mitt romney has spent five minutes on the campaign trail discussing poverty, it will be a lot. i think it's emblematic of his attitude towards it. >> i think it's to the person he is. it will be interesting to see how it plays in the general election if he is the candidate is that old hucka becomment, right? is he more like the guy who is going to fire you than the guy that you would be working with. i think that that's going to be the big question for him. can he persuade people that his ceo and managerial strengths outweigh that, you know, lack of common touch and common experience. >> i would say -- first of all, i haven't heard too many democrats talk about poverty either. >> including obama. >> you are absolutely right, which is shameful. >> that probably won't be an issue. i notice all his faux pas have to do with money. sort of the -- as a victorian sort of -- he has trouble just talking about it. >> guilt. >> i don't know. >> it's not guilt. >> he i think he is guilt-free where money is. >> it's not about guilt, is it, peggy? it's just that he lives in a really different universe from most americans, and that's where he finds it hard. that's why the $10,000 wager was such an issue. i didn't make that much money on speeches. >> i have a different analysis, psychology of him. he looks like a wasp, so we project 1920s the ville anl from "the great gatsby." in fact, he is a jew. the mormons have an exodus story. his family has a story in which they have perpetual poverty from which they are perpetually climbing out of it, and it breeds a sense of we just have to work hard and make it. i think he has that sort of drive and immigrant experience. he just out of the mormon experience, which he cannot talk about because it involves mormonism and polygamy. >> i want to know what he really believes. i think this is important in voters and their relationship to candidates. this is always the problem with romney. yes, it's made into more of a cartoon because he is so handsome. he is just comically handsome in a certain kind of way. >> rugged good looks. >> yeah, but what does he really believe? when you hear it come out of his mouth, is there an instant where you think, ah, this is the core of his conviction? when you hear him talking about obama and foreign policy as in retreat and somehow like neville chamberlain, you know you doesn't believe a word of it. not a word of it. when you hear him talk about a safety net and the poor, he doesn't care a bit about it. when you look at his real word in his one political success in his term as governor of massachusetts, his signal achievement, he is running away from it, and everybody sees that. yes, it's true that everybody to the right of a certain point is going to vote against obama, but will they come out in droves to do so is another question. >> we got to take a break. we will could be right back and talk about american politics and a little bit about what's going on around the world when we come back. wow. wow. but you can help fight muscle loss with exercise and ensure muscle health. i've got revigor. what's revigor? it's the amino acid metabolite, hmb to help rebuild muscle and strength naturally lost over time. 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[ major nutrition ] ensure. nutrition in charge! today is gonna be an important day for us. you ready? we wanna be our brother's keeper. what's number two we wanna do? bring it up to 90 decatherms. how bout ya, joe? let's go ahead and bring it online. attention on site, attention on site. now starting unit nine. some of the world's cleanest gas turbines are now powering some of america's biggest cities. siemens. answers. but when she got asthma, all i could do was worry ! specialists, lots of doctors, lots of advice... and my hands were full. i couldn't sort through it all. with unitedhealthcare, it's different. we have access to great specialists, and our pediatrician gets all the information. everyone works as a team. and i only need to talk to one person about her care. we're more than 78,000 people looking out for 70 million americans. that's health in numbers. unitedhealthcare. have more fiber than other leading brands. they're the better way to enjoy your fiber. we are back about with our all-star panel. let's talk about the -- what oba obama. you think this is going to be a big problem for the president. >> yeah. i think it's a complicated story, and it's also abstract, and it hasn't captured people's attention in a big we. certainly in the political class, but i feel like it is a bomb that went off in the past week, that the political class in america has not noted. the catholic church has been told by the obama administration that it must understand the regulations of obama's health care initiative to mean that the churches affiliated, institutions, catholic charities, the hospitals, the schools must in their new health care insurance provide and pay for services that the church itself feels are morally abhorrent from contraceptives to abortion inducing drugs to -- to some -- to stelilization procedures. the church finds it unacceptable. the church says it will not do this. the church is left either with the choice of closing down its great institutions or if the church defies the directive, being fined ruinous fees in the millions of dollars, which catholic charities can hardly afford and catholic hospitals. the administration, i think, thinks only conservative catholics will be offended by this and conservative catholics we don't have any way. they are misreading the catholic church. leftist catholics are offended by this. catholics in the middle. there are 77.7 million catholics in america. they all heard last sunday or, rather, about 75% of them heard last sunday speaking from their priest during the mass against this obama directive. i think it is huge, period. >> is this -- is it worth noting, though, just to move slightly beyond what you are talking about, the nature of conservatism and catholic simple in america today have become so intertwined. i mean, the fact that you have the five supreme court justices who are conservatives on the court are all catholics. what does that tell us? is it an appropriate question to ask? >> oh, sure. >> i think it's a great good news story. i'm coming to the south carolina primary, and there are no protestants among the top three. we have two catholics, a mormon, and i guess ron paul is protestant, among the top three. >> the catholics attract evangelical -- they're seen as -- santorum is seen as the candidate in some ways -- >> there used to be a lot of anti-catholic prejudice and in part because people like jerry falwell, to be honest. a lot of that was driven away. >> do you agree with something peggy said earlier was that obama's numbers are not moving up. i thought that in the head-to-head match-ups, he is now in places like ohio beating all the republicans. >> there has definitely been a move in the last six months. there's definitely been a move up to about parody. that's depending on a couple of things. first, the oppositions are making fools out of themselves. secondly, the economy has been churning up. if you look at the project ebbings for next year from cbo which takes an aing gat, that's not expected to continue. there's expected -- who knows if they know what they're talking about. unemployment will shoot back up in the higher 8s or 9 maybe. i think obama would be foolish given what's happening in iran or in greece and europe to assume that he can just coast on a rising economy, and i don't think the campaign really expects that either. >> before we go, since we have you david, i want to ask you about russia. it seemed as though there was in no question that putin was assured victory, that things were going to go smoothly, that there was a few interesting disents here and there. you are hearing more and more of them. is there anything going on in russia that makes you think that you could actually see the beginnings of social -- >> i think that putin will rough it out and win, and to me the question is to what degree does he come back into office, if he ever left it, as president in a spirit of vengeance or recognition of the need for reform? because there are a lot of liberals around who are on the streets who are fearing that, in fact, they might go to a more chinese root where it comes to freedom of expression, for example. right now the internet is more or less free, as opposed china. there aren't tens of thousands of people shutting down monitoring, filtering out the internet, which is the field of play. the really important national field of play in terms of the press and communications. will putin come back in and take vengeance on it, or will he recognize that in order to survive he needs to be a bit less putin-ish in years to come? i don't know. >> i agree with david. the only extra thing i would say is they have an election coming up, right, and so the protest movement and the awakening of the affluent middle class has happened at exactly the wrong time for them, right? it didn't happen during the election. it happened a few months beforehand. people are organizing. people are thinking. the big question for me is how much cheating is there going to be during the election, and how much are people going to catch them cheating? that, you know -- there is a transformation that -- the transformation within the elite is very important. i totally agree with david. civil society really is waking up in russia. that personally i think is fantastic, but the condefenses are very hard to predict. >> one of the things that i have been wondering about is the -- syria, the russian role in it comes into play, but i ask this question openly because i don't think anyone has any special expertise here, but here you have this regime that seems to be, you know, facing all these challenges, and it has responded unlike many of the regimes with no concessions, no bribery, just brutal repression. so far it's managed to hang on. my sense is, you know tianeman square works, and maybe we'll -- >> pair docks is the worst the dictator the stronger they've tended to be. they've kafshed owl all society and opposition, and they can just kill people. we've all covered this when they lose self-confidence, that's when they fall, and there's been no sign of that in syria. >> the question is will they run out of money? can they keep doing this? they're not oil-rich. the russians are the one supporter. >> they're the stallwetter -- >> they're worried. they're worried about what you have been saying. i think putin is really scared, and they're scared about what happens if they have to try to shoot and for them there's a lot of money that they're worried about. >> putin was first scared when he witnessed what happened in ukraine, and, again and again and again the pattern of rhetoric is out of fear for this kind of thing happening on red square. they see what's happening in the middle east, and they're scared as well yet again. >> imagine facebook once it has $100 billion. we have to leave it there. thank you. up next, one year on from the fall of hosni mubarak, egypt gets its bloodiest outbreak of violence. is democracy doomed fail there? what in the world is right back after this break. imagine if you could always see life [music] in the best light. every time of day. outdoors, or in. transitions® lenses automatically filter just the right amount of light. so you see everything the way it is meant to be seen. maybe even a little better. experience life well lit, ask for transitions adaptive lenses. dozens of egyptians were killed in a soccer stadium brawl this past week. this was the deadliest outbreak of violence since hosni mubarak was ousted exactly one year ago. the violence didn't stop at the stadium, and it begs the question, what has egypt gained since its revolution? take a step back and ask, what has the arab spring achieved in the last year? has people power failed the people? what in the world is going on? in egypt the military might be more entrenched before, and parliament's seats has gone to an ultra conservative group of islam it'ses. only 2% has gone to women. consider libya is veering towards anarchy. the local militias that helped topple muammar gadhafi have given up on a pledge to give up their arms. look