>> what do you think of when you see a tree? a treatment for cancer? alternative fuel for cars? do you think of hope for the environment, or food, clothing, shelter? we do. weyerhauser, growing ideas. >> i find it kind of strange on a stage like this with republicans having to describe how private equity and venture- capital work. >> this week, south carolina's rock 'em, sock 'em republican primary. >> i am appalled you would

begin a presidential debate with a topic like that. >> his second wife weighs in. >> he wanted an open manage. that i accept the fact he has somebody else. >> a rough week for mitt romney. the issue, taxes. >> i have been paying probably closer to the 15% rate. >> to rub salt in the wound, iowa slips away. >> we defeated mitt romney in iowa. rick perry throws in the towel. >> president obama rejects the keystone pipeline project. >> no other way to put it. the president is selling out american jobs for politics. captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- >> ok, first, housekeeping. full disclosure for our pbs

audiences. we are putting this together friday, we have to get it out to our pbs stations that day but the primary is saturday. so if you are watching this program on sunday and it appears dated, it is. but we soldier on. the field of candidates for the republican presidential nomination is narrowed to four. jon huntsman, rick perry got the message this week. voters just were not interested in what they had to offer. huntsman endorses and romney, perry endorses gingrich. thursday night the remaining candidates took the stage in charleston. here is a sample. >> i am steady, i am solid, i am not going to go out and do things you are going to worry about. >> i am tired of the elite media at protecting barack obama. >> and on the question whether mitt romney would release several years of tax returns. >> maybe. i will take a look at what our documents are. >> despite the fact it now

looks like mitt romney did not win the iowa caucus after all, that gingrich was coming out strong in south carolina this week, his angry ex-wife's comments notwithstanding, the self-inflicted wounds mitt romney's campaign. -- appeared to suffer because of taxes, do you think romney is still the likely nominee? >> i must say i can't believe you are starting this show with such a malicious, destructive, despicable question. i refuse to wallow in the elite media -- what was your question again? [laughter] yes, but his chances are vastly diminished. >> ok. can anything stop mitt romney? >> yes, newt gingrich, i guess. if he doesn't win on saturday or he only ekes out the narrowest victory, we will have a very fun next few months. >> colby? >> romney hit the wall, so to

speak, and i think even if he gets by in south carolina, he has a fight on his hands in florida and the states to come. >> what is your take? >> i remember in 1984 when walter mondale, the democratic front runner, was considered the inevitable choice and ran into the sand storm, the hurricane of gary hart. mondale gave a speech at that time in florida and said this is why i am in the race. it was just a statement of his political beliefs and principles. that is what mitt romney has to do. the question about him is core to the man and beyond that, inevitability is not a campaign argument. i am not going to vote for somebody because of the inevitable. what is it that makes mitt romney want to be president in a public sense, not private vindication sense? >> what we heard in new hampshire and iowa was i am

going to vote for this guy -- i am not crazy about him -- but he is the one who could beat obama. >> what south carolina is showing is that mitt romney has issues, serious issues, that will cause his campaign to stumble. not only against obama, but also in trying to get the republican nomination. >> let's not overestimate this. south carolina is as much home country for newt gingrich as a new hampshire was for romney. so, what is remarkable is how romney has sunk in one week and how quickly gingrich is coming up. and i think it is not because of a deep problem in the conviction -- candidacy of romney, but he had some unforced errors which are simply inexplicable. the idea he had not prepared on a monday debate for the tax question is amazing. and then that he repeats it thursday when he must've been drilled on it 50 times is simply unbelievable.

>> we will get to taxes later, but i want to talk about south carolina. newt gingrich has been talking a lot about food stamps. he says president obama has put more people on food stamps than any president in history. factcheck.org said george w. bush did. is this a code phrase? >> of course, in these -- it is. >> of course, not unlike welfare queen and designer jeans. we have the worst recession since before world war ii, put more people out of work. food stamps are designed to prevent people from going hungry. that is the reason. and to preserve some sense of civility and sanctity in our society. i would just quote, if i could, this man who style themselves as a reagan conservative. this is a president. today we are feeding more people, taking care of more people, funding more college

students than any time in our history, giving more food stamps to more people than we have ever given in our nation's history. march 20, 1984, president ronald reagan. so, ronald reagan was a food stamp president but newt gingrich is distancing himself from him? >> he argues the case worse than that. he says i want to teach african americans to want to have jobs over food stamps. better to get a paid job. that has never been an issue. there are people who are working, low incomes, who are getting food stamps. he knows better. he also knows how to play this thing. he knows how to use the code. and in south carolina especially, race matters. >> whatever he is doing, he is surging. >> he is surging. newt knows how to play this game. as charles said, he is in his own backyard, next to georgia, and he is incredibly good.

it does not matter there are more people on food stamps under george w. bush, does not matter that his suggestion is minorities are the ones who get food stamps -- far more white people get food stamps. it does not matter that working people get food stamps in order to feed their family. facts don't matter to him, and it makes for great talk. >> in a republican primary, republican race, it works with that crowd. he knows exactly the audience he is playing to. >> charles? >> the main republican critique of the obama administration is that like in europe, it increases entitlements and dependency, it increases the scope and reach of government -- into education, health care, energy, and that the counter

argument, the one that the republicans and conservatives have been making for 60 years is that you want to teach a person to fish, you do not want to give them a fish. this is not a new argument. this is the oldest argument between left and right. i think what gingrich is stating is the general argument. in his own way. but to imply that it is inherently racist or something like that, i think is completely wrong. >> defending newt gingrich? >> i am defending the conservative argument that the expansion of the state, the intrusion into individual lives and enterprise builds the tendency of the kind you see in europe -- >> minorities -- >> i am giving you the conservative argument. my point is in the end it is not sustainable and creates a dependency.

>> they are the ones who are benefiting, they are the ones on the dole. >> let's take a second and talk about rick santorum. he had a good debate but also apparently has won the iowa caucuses. how important is that? >> first of all, i think he had the best debate he had it and look in comparison better than anyone else. but the iowa thing is a real blow to them who have the position of no. 1. a not able to count the people who showed up. >> missing eight precincts? >> missing them an undecided and and precise. -- imprecise. at that to the fact that the republican national committee absolutely caved into florida's one-sided demand to move there is to the 31st. that compress the whole thing so iowa and of a voting less than a week after christmas and new hampshire followed that. it has been a lousy system. after florida was given the damn convention, somebody did

not have the nerve to say, no, you are going in order. republicans, the business-like party, forget it. >> about rick santorum, i thought he did pretty well. >> he did come under the circumstances. but anybody would be better because you did not have eight people. you have four individuals. he had a chance to hone his arguments. he came up with a little bit of a boost -- endorsing his candidacy. the problem he is still facing is the mass of evangelical voters who will be split with newt gingrich. >> he does not talk southern. he talks northeastern. wait a minute -- >> he is from pennsylvania. >> i did not mean accent. newt gingrich really has the top -- the talk of that appeals

in south carolina. >> blue-collar. working-class background. he is the non-mitt romney, not the rich guy. >> i agree with all of that. >> that was sent on's line in -- in was santorum's line iowa, and it worked. >> but for some reason it does not really seem to take in south carolina. i have to assume it is cultural. that newt gingrich really has a sense of it. iowa has become the most important this year, and then it turned out they could not even get it right. >> charles? >> santorum is the unluckiest guy in the world. he wins iowa out of nowhere, but it does not count because it is announced three weeks later when he is already headed downward. then when he wins it, it turns out because of the eight precincts, it turns out we don't really know -- it is like quantum mechanics, uncertainty principle descending upon iowa that we may never know who won.

i thought he did well. he is extremely earnest. but i think he will lose traction. the rule has been the person who comes last drops out. bachmann after iowa, huntsman after new hampshire, perry, he knew he was going to come in last and south carolina, so he dropped out. i think if santorum and of last behind ron paul, he will be out as well. >> santorum, to correct the record, jon huntsman finished third in new hampshire -- did not finish last. but the reality of santorum is he made the case against newt gingrich better thursday night in south carolina that has been made by anybody else in these debates. if you want to get up in the morning and worry what will be the headline. that is what happens with newt gingrich. he had a conservative revolt in his hands three years after he became speaker of the house. he just put it bluntly. if the nominee is rick santorum, barack obama would be the issue of the 2012 campaign.

implicitly, if newt gingrich is the nominee, we know that newt gingrich will be the issue in 2012, much to the republican's chagrin. >> mitt romney's political tax problems. >> if that is the tradition, i am not opposed to doing that. time will tell. i anticipate most likely i will be asked to do it around april. my last 10 years, my income comes overwhelmingly from investments made in the past. >> ok. just about every time he opened his mouth on the subject of taxes this week, mitt romney put his foot in it. the 15% tax rate, income mostly from investors, speakers' fees, not very much -- but amounted to $374,000. how does his campaign let this get ahead of him? >> i do not understand it because he certainly knew from last week he would get asked abouttaxes.

overall -- if you have been running for president for as long as he has been running for president, the mayor of new york, a lot of money, too, mr. bloomberg, he does not take the 15% rate, he says, because he runs for office. he knows that that is going to come up. you know this, he does not say he is, to release his previous years. he says up to -- it might be around 15%, it might be less than 15%. it is really going to be a huge problem. >> he is not going to follow the model is father gave us, george. >> it is not that he has something to hide probably. unlawful or illegal. but the release of the tax returns, it will cause people to focus like a laser beam on the way he has earned his living, his investments, the tax treatment of his investments, and he will become the focal point and he has been

trying to keep the focus on obama during the whole campaign. >> political question. abc reports this week that he has money in the cayman island somewhere and his campaign says he is taxed on it like anything else. if you are vetting this guy, isn't it a red flag, cayman islands offshore? >> and as a general rule, people do not put money in the cayman islands as an effort toward paying the maximum tax. that is the general assumption and a valid one. if something is going on in the cayman islands, people deliberately do it. why not give the jobs to americans who work in banks, the tellers who would handle it, rather than outsource them? i think the thing about romney you have to say -- this is not a campaign fault. this is a fault with the candidate. there is no question that the

people in the campaign went to him -- because you do, you would check every candidate to see if there is anything else. this will be a credential. what about your taxes? he has avoided this. he sounds marble mouthed, unsure, absolutely unconvincing, and the question about the man's genuineness is absolutely compounded by his mishandling of this issue. >> such an easy one, charles. this seems to me. >> it seems that, one, he should have had an answer six years ago. and equally so, on the bain capital issue. he was attacked by ted kennedy on bain capital 16, 18 years ago, and he still can't put in three sentences a concise explanation of how private equity in the end helps the american economy and the worker. all he has to do is draw an analogy with what the

president's and the democrats have done with the auto companies and say in order to save them, they had to shed a lot of jobs, shutdown of lot of plants, close a lot of dealerships, cause a huge amount of pain, however, it saved the companies and in the end it grew. he did that essentially with private risk capital and obama used taxpayer treasury money. but why he can't articulate that after all of these years is a mystery. >> the problem he has with bain capital is not the performance of rock. bain -- overall. when you go into florida and south carolina, you can find companies that had investments from bain capital that did not do well over the long haul. and he has to help answer the question. >> a word from newt gingrich's ex-wife. >> i said to him, we have been married for a long time. and he said, yes, but you want

me all to yourself. callista does not care what i do. >> what was he saying? >> he was asking for an open marriage and i refused. >> i think the destructive, vicious, negative nature of much of the news media makes it harder to govern this country, harder to attract decent people to run for public office, and i am appalled that you would begin a presidential debate on a topic like this. >> newt gingrich's response to the first question on thursday night's debate. the question famed by cnn's john king. newt gingrich's response received a standing ovation from the audience. the question, was a gift, mark? >> this is a man, understand -- you have to talk about chutzpa. he led in the impeachment, the witch hunts against bill clinton for his episodic infidelities with a much younger woman while he was sustaining a six-year sexual affair,

extramarital, with an unmarried woman while he was married. this is a man -- shameless is the word that comes quickly to mind. and i have to say one thing. the networks look at that tape and say, having a pep rally atmosphere at these things does not help. it changed the entire dynamic and chemistry of that event because it absolutely intimidated the other candidates from discussing everything. i just really think it is a lousy idea to have an audience be participants. >> newt gingrich always gets great mileage out of attacking the media. he has done a before with great success. >> that kind of question is the reason you cannot get a decent people to actually end up on talk shows. they just refuse to do it. i am with mark on this. if you run the same debate, a

transcript, without an audience, it would have been completely different. and the winner of that debate would have been santorum, who had this colloquy with newt gingrich in which he talked about essentially how erratic -- grandiosity. and he quietly said, look, i am not a guy who will light up the screen but you can rely on me. i am not going to wake up in the morning with a crazy idea. that, i think, was the most substantive attack on gingrichism. but because of the audience, it changes everything. i think it is happened in of the debates as well. turn to the republican race -- it has turned the republican race, 18 of these -- into a reality show. twice a week you get a live episode of these people in a mosh pit and people are surprised republicans are sliding. >> on the mary ann newt gingrich, why -- marianne gingrich, will there be any

thing against gingrich because of the interview? >> i have been married 50 years, and i have learned no one can tell about anybody else's marriage. i am not in a position to evaluate newt gingrich's marriages -- the current one -- >> but you are not a south carolina voter. >> i do not like newt gingrich for other reasons, the reasons charles and i debated a few minutes ago. but what happened in that relationship is beyond my ability to evaluate. >> i find it a bit ambivalent about this because i really do not like discussing people's personal lives. on the other hand, this is a guy who has been preaching about the sanctity of marriage constantly. and the hypocrisy of it is a little galling, number one, another two, what makes you think that people who believe actually in the sanctity of marriage would not be offended,

men and women? >> what about people who believe in redemption? he converted to catholicism. he appears to be -- >> he has claimed -- he did not claim redemption. >> he says i have made mistakes, i know i have made mistakes -- >> he did not acknowledge mistakes, quite frankly, thursday night. he said we have all known people who felt pain. not mentioning the fact that his wife, in sort of a sad interview with brian ross, acknowledged she just told him she had multiple sclerosis. this is not a man you want to tell you have a health problem, based upon his first divorce when his wife had cancer, and let's pray that callista gets a very positive report from mayo clinic. >> for a quarter of the century

since of the gary hart incidents i have argued obviously with no success whatsoever that this stuff should not be part of our politics, that i am with colby on this -- reading into people's hearts and marriages is extremely hard. as an ex-psychiatrist i can tell youeven if you spend an hour a day every day, you still have no idea. i would rather have an election on jobs, the economy, iran, and we are not having -- there was not a single question last night -- i think it is true -- on foreign policy. not one. that is disgraceful. >> the oil pipeline moves. >> president obama is destroying tens of thousands of american jobs and shipping american energy security to the chinese. there is no other way to put it. the president is selling out american jobs for politics. >> all right. the president rejected the keystone pipeline deal. there is political capital for

everybody. >> he did not want to offend the environmentalists. my guess is he will eventually approve it. >> but he offended labor. >> he will approve something. the republicans played in their political card. they squeezed the president, a smart thing to do and the president said, i am not approving it for now. >> well, look, labor will still go for barack obama, not mitt romney or the republican nominee. the railroads, put in an interstate highway system -- we need to do something about our dependence on foreign sources of energy. >> charles? >> it is a travesty. this is a time where we have high unemployment, creating jobs in a private industry that would not have cost the american treasury a sense. 1 cent. it is a time we have dependence on oil for people who -- from people who are not friends,

from the middle east, russia, venezuela, and elsewhere. it is a source of secure oil. it is a slap at canada. the idea it would have any affect on the environment is ridiculous and the oil would have ended up in china. it is a disgraceful decision. >> republicans have won the debate. that simple. it is jobs. that is what it has been. and this is the jobs president and this is not a plus if you look at it politically. >> it is the most studied pipeline in american history. the state department reported it would be ok. he did it entirely as a political calculation. >> you got the last word. thanks. see you next week. >> for a transcript of this broadcast, log onto insidewashington.tv.