earth. i'm wolf blitzer. you're in "the situation room." mitt romney is using ads, web videos, speeches to hammer away at president obama on welfare. romney is taking a lot of heat though over his claims about the administration's policies, but with support from an unlikely ally he's raising the stakes today. here's our national political correspondent jim acosta. >> reporter: wolf, mitt romney is not backing away from his accusation that president obama is trying to make it easier for the poor to receive welfare checks and to help make his case he's getting some help from an old rival. >> they just send you your welfare check. >> reporter: even though his ad accusing the president of weakening work requirements for welfare recipients got a pants on fire from politifact and four pinocchios from "the washington post," mitt romney is doubling down on the claim. >> this is to help people go to work so they can stop drawing a welfare check and start drawing a paycheck. >> reporter: the new video not only touts president clinton who signed welfare reform back in the '90s, but also features a young state senator barack obama speaking out against it. >> i was not a huge supporter of the federal plan that was signed in 1996. >> reporter: in iowa romney said that only bolsters his claim that this memo guts the work requirements in clinton's law by offering waivers to states implementing the program. >> now he's president. and just a few days ago he put that original intent in place with a very careful executive action, he removed the requirement of work from welfare. >> reporter: but that accusation drew a harsh rebuke from clinton himself who said in a statement, romney's original ad is not true. when asked about clinton's comments, romney declined to respond. but ron has kins, a former republican congressional staffer who helped draft welfare reform says romney's wrong about the waivers. >> the purpose of the waiver is to help more people get off welfare by getting employment or to help people get better jobs. >> reporter: romney is getting support from one of his old rivals, newt gingrich, who sounded a similar theme during the primaries when he called mr. obama a food stamp president. >> it's not just obama's radical but the people are even more radical. i don't think they thought it would be a big deal. >> reporter: the welfare offensive comes as a new poll shows most americans still don't have a favorable view of romney. ron haskins says the president's advisors should have seen the attack a mile away. >> if i were a political advisor to the president, i would say you better not do this now because republicans are going to claim you're trying to undermine the welfare reform legislation. and that's exactly what republicans are doing. >> reporter: and it's not just romney and gingrich making these claims. other republicans in congress and even the party itself have picked up this banner, a sign that this issue could be here to stay. wolf. >> jim acosta, thanks very much. in the next hour i'll be speaking live with newt gingrich. he's here in "the situation room." with the republican convention only a few weeks away, the clock is certainly ticking on mitt romney's search for a running mate. campaigning for romney today, one of the presumed favorites, former minnesota governor tim pawlenty said romney has a crop of unbelievably talented wonderful people. as to who romney will choose, pawlenty says, and i'm quoting once again, we'll know soon enough. joining us now cnn contributor ryan lizzie, what are the pros and cons of pawlenty, for example, getting this pick? >> i think pawlenty of the three that everyone's talking about right now, and we should say sometimes the people we talk about are not the ones that are being talked about in boston, he represents outside washington. he has this outside washington quality. two governors on the ticket. he's competent. he had relatively successful tenure as governor and he doesn't make a lot of mistakes. he's a pretty on-message guy. >> i've heard from some of romney's folks that one of the problems with pawlenty is when he accused him of having obamneycare. that's a sound bite that could come back to hount a potential vice presidential running mate. >> i think the criticism the guys make before they're chosen melts away. you have the old sound bite versus the guy standing now next to romney supporting him. just like the bill clinton thing with obama we just saw. you have the old comments but you also have his current comments supporting obama. i think that tends to fade away. the big picture on the vp is it's not so much about the candidate or running mate, it tells us about what's on the top. they voted in 2008 for barack obama. they thought about what did it tell us about obama with his vp bik e pick. >> you believe pawlenty is one of the final three. but paul ryan, the impressive republican you have a new piece about him and you think he's one of the final three as do i. you quote him as saying this, romney's already endorsed these things -- referring to what he is proposing, i want a full-throated defense for an alternative agenda that fixes the country's problems. i want to show the country that we have a solution to get us out of the ditch we're in and to be proud about it. it sort of sounds a little like paul ryan could be challenging mitt romney a little bit. could he upstage him, if you will, if he were the running mate given the clout he has on the hill? >> that was the context of it. he wants romney to basically run on what the ryan budget, which is a pretty controversial budget but passed the house of representatives with almost every republican voting for it. i think pawlenty and ryan are the two polls here. depending on what romney's theory of this election is, he would go with someone like pawlenty or someone as ryan. if his theory is the economy is terrible, there's going to be a referendum on obama and he has to be the sort of default republican standing there once the country sours on obama, i think it goes with someone safe like pawlenty. if he thinks things are getting better, he needs something big and bold, maybe high riskbut high reward, go with someone like ryan, make it an ied logical debate. >> i still think and thought this for a while that ohio senator rob portman, i think he's one of the final three as well, i still think he has the best shot. that's just me. i have no inside information. it's just the gut. >> he's the one a lot of republican establishment types really seem to like. very smart. long resume. been around a while. doesn't make mistakes. the downside is his association with the bush administration. barack obama wants to tie romney to the bush years. and portman would let him do that to a certain extent. >> and the other names that have been out there, whether marco rubio, bobby jindal, john thune, you can they're all pushed to the sidelines? >> i don't think so. i think it's been such a black box, they've been so difficult to penetrate that i think there's just as good a chance someone that we're not actually talking about someone today, wolf. >> i know there was a lot of pressure for romney to make the selection before he begins his bus trip next week. although i'm hearing maybe that's going to be delayed until mid-next week. >> yeah. we just don't know at this point. >> well, we'll wait and see. >> we didn't -- sarah palin was not on our lips at this moment in 2008. i don't think joe biden was the leading contender as well. so i think we should be ready for surprise. >> a surprise would be good, you know? i like surprises in our business. that's always exciting. thanks very much, ryan. thanks for coming in. good article in the new yorker magazine. while mitt romney's busy slamming obama's record, the president today is going after the record of his republican predecessor and touting his own accomplishments. listen to this from a campaign speech earlier in the day in denver. >> when it comes to the economy, it's bad enough that our opponents want to take us back to the same policies of the last decade, the same policies that got us into this mess in the first place, the same policies that saw jobs going overseas and ended up seeing people's wages and incomes going downeven as the cost of everything from health care to college were going up, policies that culminated the worst financial crisis since the great depression and we've spent now three and a half years trying to recover from. that's bad enough. but when it comes to a woman's right to make her own health care choices, they want to take us back to the policies mo suited to the 1950s than the 21st century. [ cheers and applause ] and, colorado, you've got to make sure it does not happen. four years ago i delivered on my promise to pass health reform before the end of my first term. that's what we did. the affordable care act also known as obama care -- [ cheers and applause ] -- i actually like the name because i do care. >> we're going to have much more on the political scene coming up later. but we're also getting new information on just how the sikh temple gunman died. brian todd is standing by, he'll have details from wisconsin. that's coming up at the half hour. and nasa's rover raises its mast to take a stunng revelation of the surface. and a way to get you out of the airport a lot faster without even worrying about your checked bags, all of course for a price. ♪ ( whirring and crackling sounds ) man: assembly lines that fix themselves. the most innovative companies are doing things they never could before, by building on the cisco intelligent network. energy is being produced to power our lives. while energy development comes with some risk, north america's natural gas producers are committed to safely and responsibly providing generations of cleaner-burning energy for our country, drilling thousands of feet below fresh water sources within self-contained well systems. and, using state-of-the-art monitoring technologies, rigorous practices help ensure our operations are safe and clean for our communities and the environment. we're america's natural gas. 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[ tires squeal ] and if you get into an accident and use one of our certified repair shops, your repairs are guaranteed for life. call... to switch, and you could save hundreds. liberty mutual insurance -- responsibility. what's your policy? let's check in with jack cafferty for the cafferty file, jack. >> wolf, less than three months to go now before the election and americans are becoming less confident in the economy. that's not good news for the president. according to gallup's economic confident index, july was the second monthly decline in a row. this after economic confidence actually improved during the first five months of the year. the index measures the current economic conditions and the country's economic outlook. americans were more pessimistic about both of those things during july. 59% say the economy's getting worse. that's the lowest rating of 2012 so far. americans declining economy confidence due to several factors including weaker jobs reports, last month's report notwithstanding. and europe's ongoing economic trouble. meanwhile, a new report suggests the shaky economy is hitting babyboomers especially hard. a survey by aarp, the association of retired persons shows high economic anxiety extending far beyond the issue of jobs for pre-retirement boomers between the ages of 50 and 64. no surprise a lot worry about retirement. only one-third of these baby boomers are hopeful or confident that they'll reach their financial goals. a third, almost three-fourths think they'll have to put off retirement and over half think they'll never be able to retire. sad. many baby boomers are left with smaller pensions than they expected, more stress and health care and the costs of caring for other family members. the aarp also recently reported that more than 3 million older americans over the age of 50 are at risk of losing their homes to foreclosure due to the housing crisis. here's the question, as the election gets closer, are you more or less confident in the u.s. economy? go to cnn.com/caffertyfile, post a comment there. or go to our post on the "the situation room" facebook page. wolf. >> you remember, jack, that question ronald reagan asked in 1980 when jimmy carter was the incumbent, are you better off now than four years ago? a lot of people said no. that's why reagan was presumably elected as you well remember. >> if you ask that question today looking back at the financial crisis of 2008, a lot of people might answer that question differently this time around because we were at the edge of an abyss four years ago. >> right. dow jones was below and people at least invest in the stocks are better off than they were four years ago. what goes up can still go down. >> absolutely. >> jack, thank you. other news we're following, nasa's engineers just switched on better cameras aboard the new mars rover "curiosity" giving us the clearest views yet of the martian surface. cnn's john zarrella is at the jet propulsion laboratory in pasadena, california, where the lander is being controlled. these are amazing pictures. it's amazing to think how they can control that rover from where you are. >> reporter: yeah, absolutely, wolf. and some of those images that came down today you have the mosaic -- the full frame mosaic that shows literally the gale crater wall in the distance. in the forefront you can see part of the rover itself sitting there. and also the first little thumbnails of a panorama that they're going to be putting together. and a lot of those came from a mass cam. where i'm standing now, a lot of people call this, wolf, the sand box. what you see behind me is an absolute duplicate of the rover "curiosity." it's the engineering model. and it shadows "curiosity." everything that "curiosity" doe on mars, this vehicle will do. and vandy thompkins is joining me. you helped develop rover and now you are a rover driver and everybody always says a rover driver, well, that's cool. but nobody really understands what it means to drive the rover on mars. tell us how you do it. >> so, actually we don't command the rover with a joy stick or a steering wheel in realtime. what we do because of the time delay from mars, if we were to do that, by the time we would see we were at the edge of a cliff, the rover would have driven off of it. so instead we create an entire sequence of commands that tell the rover -- say we want to go in a certain direction, we'll say drive one meter this way, turn, take a picture to see if you've gone as far as we wanted you to go, maybe go extra if you haven't, and then once it's done it might take a picture of its surroundings and e-mail it back to us. essentially it's sending it back. and then the rover goes to sleep. and while -- when we get those images like the ones that you're talking about that you saw, we analyze them, look at them and decide where in that image we have something interesting and create a line. >> reporter: based on that you come up with a plan that say, okay, vandy, we want you to drive it over there. >> not just me. >> reporter: well, an entire team. >> that's right. >> reporter: we're talking about the camera. show us. this is the camera up in here, right? >> that's right. so the images you saw today were taken by the cameras up there on the mast. this is the mast that until yesterday was deployed. so this mast was laying back there. if you look at that casing there, it was flat across. and that's how it landed. and then one time only we deploy the mast. >> reporter: it will stay up now for the duration of the mission. >> it will stay up there for the duration of the mission and we took pictures from it. the very first pictures you saw were from the rear. and the second set were from the front haz cam. they allow you to see the terrain right in front and give you a sense of the winds. >> reporter: this here is actually the drill and everything else. this is the arm here. >> this is the robotic arm. and it's stowed. it's stowed like this. this is joint one attached all the way. so when we unstow the arm, it rotates it off. there's a bunch of hnges in which it's locked. it will rotate and come up to this position. we haven't done that yet. >> reporter: that will be a while before you do that. >> yes. >> reporter: it's incredibly complex. for anybody out there who thinks this is a simple machine, wolf, look at this. i mean, all of this is exactly -- the wiring and everything that's on "curiosity." one of the things we were talking about is this is exactly how it landed, right? the wheels are in this position? >> that's correct. this vehicle is exactly the configuration the wheels are as the real. >> reporter: vandy, thank you so much for taking time to be with us. wolf, again, you can see everything "curiosity" does is mimicked by this rover. if in fact they were to get in some trouble on mars, they can come here, use this rover to try and figure out what they need to do to get out of that problem. so they'll be using this for the entire two years plus that "curiosity" will be working on mars, wolf. >> they've got a lot to do over the next two years. we're anxious obviously for the results. thanks so much, john zarrella, all over this story. when it comes to the nation's weather, 2012 is going down in the history books. in a minute we're going to tell you which records have just been broken. and if you think the obama/romney tax fight is a rough one, wait until you hear what may happen to millionaires in france. mid grade dark roast forest fresh full tank brain freeze cake donettes rolling hot dogs g of ice anti-freeze wash and dry diesel self-serve fix a flat jumper cables 5% cashback signup for 5% cashback at gas stations through september. it pays to discover. to drive a car filled with as much advanced technology as the world around it. with the available lexus enform app suite, you can use opentable to make restaurant reservations... search with bing... and listen to pandora. presenting the 2013 lexus gs, rx and the all-new es, the leading edge of the leading edge. during the golden opportunity sales event, get great values on some of our newest models. this is the pursuit of perfection. ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 let's talk about the cookie-cutter retirement advice ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 you get at some places. ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 they say you have to do this, have that, invest here ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 ttd#: 1-800-345-2550 you know what? 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