Stay updated with breaking news from Thetiguas. Get real-time updates on events, politics, business, and more. Visit us for reliable news and exclusive interviews.
Joining me now is msnbc analyst steve schmidt. he is the former senior adviser to the mccain/palin campaign, and a senior strategist in the bush/cheney 04 campaign. and msnbc political analyst and future msnbc host, alex wagner. thank you both for joining me tonight. steve, you ve seen a lot of these debates. i there s never been a moment in my lifetime, in the history of televised presidential debates, as what we just saw happen with rick perry. he s got these three agencies of government he absolutely wants to close down when he becomes president. just can t remember that third one. yeah. i think it s over for him. i think his campaign effectively ended tonight. just an extraordinary moment, the likes of which we have never seen before in a presidential debate. he had fallen off the radar screen. he s fallen to michele bachmann levels in the race, but i think it s over tonight with that. ....
Frankly, stupid, e-mails. that s one i regret. i ve apologized for it. i apologize tonight for it. it was just a stupid move. one of your rackets was indian tribes, representing indian tribes and playing the casino game on one side or the other, trying to help some of them get permission to run casinos, trying to prevent other tribes getting permission to run casinos, because that would compete with your tribe, casino. and in one of those non-compete games, you ended up in a situation with ralph reed, and they asked you under oath in the senate committee, kent conrad asked you, he said, i would like to ask, did you, mr. abramoff, you and your partner, your colleague, mr. scanlon, give $4 million to ralph reed? and you pled the fifth amendment on that and didn t answer that. did you give $4 million to ralph reed? yeah, we provided ralph reed was a very important vendor in terms of our effort to slow down competition for our tribes. ....
Absolutely. i don t know the exact number. and you and that $4 million was delivered to ralph reed to get him to mobilize christian conservative opposition to a casino that some indian tribe you weren t representing was trying to well, either indian or non-indian casinos. any casino we hired our clients, as often others are, to prevent them from losing their market. and we were very creative and used every method we could to do that. and one of them was to mobilize people who hated casino gambling for the short-term strange bedfellows partnership of working together to stop a new casino. one of the tribes, thetiguas that you represented, eventually they ran out of money in their ability to pay you. how much did they pay you over time? i think it was a couple million dollars. and eventually they ran out. right. so you came up with another idea. in 2003, abramoff approached the tigua tribal council with a novel proposition. ....
it was one of those white-knuckled moments where you could almost hear him saying, line, line. it was painful to watch. but once you have the pity of the american public, you ve also lost their vote. and steve, this is one of those debates everybody was watching just to see, how is herman cain going to handle it? and also, not just how is he going to handle it, but how is it going to come up? it wasn t clear to me in a cnbc economics debate, how you could bring this up. but let s see exactly how it did come up in the debate. here we re focusing on character and on judgment. you ve been a ceo. yes. you know that shareholders are reluctant to hire a ceo where there are character issues. why should the american people hire a president if they feel there are character issues? the american people deserve better than someone being tried in the court of public opinion based on unfounded accusations. that s what that s about. and i value my character and my ....
What we have in washington today is a president and an administration that doesn t like business. the senate somehow thinks they like jobs, but they don t like businesses. michael, the republican candidates went into your home state, michigan, tonight, to debate. not one of them, not one of them supported the out bailout that president obama did that effectively saved the american automobile industry. not only that, there was no discussion of jobs, real jobs, in a state where there are hundreds of thousands of people who have lost their jobs. we ve at a high rate of unemployment for the last five years. and also, no apology on their part as a party for giving this disastrous economy to the new president, having destroyed it in the previous president s term. nobody seems to want to take any credit for that. but i was just wondering, the people in the audience there, what they were feeling and thinking, when there was actually no discussion about real jobs or how to put people ....