Live Breaking News & Updates on Mitt romney grapple
Stay updated with breaking news from Mitt romney grapple. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
we tracked very carefully which candidate shares your values. right now obama has an advantage. another one of the things that we ask is, who is the candidate who can best get things done? romney has an edge there, and he opened it up after denver. we look at those metrics, and i think polls there do give you some good insight into the mood of voters. >> all right, james has a fever, and the answer? more polls. thank you. up next, trending this election cycle is twitter. we have a top guy to tell us how to spot the big story lines out of the debate before your friends do. wonder if he'll be my twitter buddy? [ snoring ]
security professionals. they're the ones who weigh all of the threats and the risks and the needs and make a considered decision. >> those very candid comments is where we start off in the spin cycle. s.e., you've been following these developments very closely. >> a quick note on hillary. it was nice to take the wrap for libya, but i wonder if the supporters will appreciate that. as for tonight, i don't let romney let the president off the hook. i bet romney will find a way to question the president on his level of responsibility for libya. it could be a fireworks moment as poboth try to accuse the oth of politicizing the events. will romney look strang or will the president make romney look
one again next week. we saw that last week. people who were kind of drifting toward obama then woke up and said, wait a minute. romney is a lot better than i thought he was. the president couldn't have been less impressive. >> if we could go back to your role as a moderator, you moderated the last town hall debate in 2008. what's your own sort of personal yardstick for your performance after the fact, and while you're there in the moment, john mccain was taken to task by "snl" for his wandering around the stage, and it was one of the enduring moments from the debate. do you recognize that when you're there in the chair, that that's going to be a take-away. >> yeah. this is not just because i did it. i talked to others that participated in the town hall format as well. you have a lot more to worry about than jim lehrer did last week or bob schieffer will next week. we both talked before and after the debates four years ago, and again this time. you have to worry about the
the obama team was quick to pounce on the last stats calling the "usa today" poll flawed and inaccurate. in this guest spot today politi politico's reporter james hol n holman. they have mitt romney ahead in ten battleground states. when romney was down, all we heard from some republicans is the polls were flawed. now that gallup has romney ahead, the obama campaign is complaining about polls. how are voters supposed to make heads or tails of these numbers? >> well, the races remain shockingly static. the numbers are so stubborn. we've been polling every single week, and even before the debate it was basically what it is now. the top line number nationally not looking at the swing states, obama is still ahead 49/48.
i grew up on an army base and my moraisther raced three boys thee of this table. >> sounds like my apartment. >> i think the country is eager to do that. to kind of have a reset of values. what counts. one of my friends says we have to get up every morning and say, what do i need to do and not what do i want today? that's a good guide. >> tom, you mentioned when we tha about how we cover the presidential election, what are the issues that matter to voters and covering a broad range of topics. how do you think the debates have done thus far in covering the gamut of issues? >> i thought the first debate was pretty good. i don't think that president obama pinned down mitt romney on what he was going to do to get to that $5 trillion deficit he'll make up with the tax reformation plan. it was a wonky debate. it has oxford and cambridge
it's one thing we look at, and we cut and slice and dice the sample a lot of different the ways to try and find meaning in the numbers to help people make heads or tails of them. >> james, back to the gallup poll that the president's campaign is unhappy about, and i'm not a poll truther, but it's an odd result to show romney and the president running evenly with women. it sort of defies it. in fact, most other polls including the politico poll shows the president leading by double digits among women. when you see a result like that, that sort of defies logic and is out of step with almost every other poll result. what do you do with it? what do you make of it? >> the only way to solve bad polling is more polling. there's no doubt. there's no doubt romney is not tied among women. our poll has him trailing 53 to
42. that's probably about right both nationally and in the swing states. there's a serious gender gap problem. what we noted in the poll was a shift in women's attitudes underneath the surface. they may vote for obama but the support has softened somewhat and they view mitt romney more narrowly. for the first time women don't overwhelmingly view romney negatively. he's not underwater the way he has been. a majority of women up until that debate in denver said they didn't like romney personally. they see tens of millions of dollars in negative attack ads. romney on the stage with the president, he wasn't the bad guy, the corporate raider who puts profits above people that you saw in ads all summer. he still needs to close the deal. he needs to convince people that re-evaluate him personally he's a good president. >> you sound like the kind of guy that said what this song needs is more cowbell.
that's a statistical tie the same as it was the week before. we're stunned at how polarized the electorate is. most have made up their minds. for example, 75% of americans think romney won the first debate, only 16% think obama did. a vast majority say it no impact on their vote whatsoever. people watch these debates as sporting events rooting for their side and not necessarily using them to make up their minds. >> technical question here, but it's something i'm struggling to figure out. maybe you can help me. we have seen the proliferation of a new type of poll in this election. we flashed it on the screen before the segment. the aggregate battleground poll. we take what we designate as 12 states and say, cumulatively these 12 states, here's what's happening. i look at that and say i do not get what the meaning or the value of the aggregate battleground poll is. i get taking the individual states. we can look back, you know, 4, 8, 12, 16 years and see how each
here's a question i would like to see asked. i love a moderator to step in and make mitt romney grapple with something he hasn't been forced to grapple with publicly. to prove he was pro-choice in massachusetts, he didn't just say it. he told a wrenching personal story about it, which quickly play that clip right here. this is what he said 18 years ago. >> many, many years ago i had a dear, close family relative that was very close to me who passed away from an illegal abortion. it is since that time that my mother and my family have been committed to the belief that we can believe as we want, but we will not force our beliefs on others on that matter. you will not see me wavering on that. >> he just did the opposite there of what we're talking about dukakis doing, which is to completely separate the personal from the political. romney leaned on the personal there. he changed his position when he wanted to run for president in the republican party. he has never really been forced to grapple publicly how you get
last election cycle a group of scientists in 38,000 or so people who signed their petition argued for a presidential debate about science. as we know, that never happened. instead though, they succeeded in something slightly less ambitious. they got the candidates to submit written responses about more than a dozen top science issues ranging from space exploration to climate change to whether vaccines cause autism. then the editors graded the answers. this year it was barack obama and mitt romney's turn. they found scientific american that is, found mitt romney's science policies were more specific and more feasible than the president's but obama scored higher when it came to scientific accuracy. what has been most surprising is how anti-science politics has become and how scientific facts seem up for debate. this is happening during an election where the economy is an especially large factor. half of our economic growth since world world 2 is traced back to innovations in science.