." >>> i'm joined by bob franken. good morning. lots to talk about here.'s start off by the comments made by governor christie. is this different than we've seen from other republicans? is he reaching out to a different base of conservative voters? >> perhaps so. consider how absurd some will think it is of all people governor christie who has told people to sit down and shut up at town meeting gings is talking about being welcoming. some consider that absurd. >> we expect the official announcement from jeb bush at some point. seems like he's definitely running with paperwork that's been announced. seems like a broken record here. the republican field continues to have more and more candidates. is that going to be hard to diversify themselves among each other? >> at this particular stage, you always have quite a few people who are in the want to be category. the big debate has been, what are you going to do about the debates? how many people should be there? we have the this in republican party saying no we should include all of those announced candidates

i'm joined now by bob franken.lay a little game of softball. >> a little bit. it looks like jeb bush will jump in the raise. why not continue raising a whole lot of money? >> well the fact that he has announced that he's going to actually announce means that he's decided that he's squeezed out every bit of money that he could kout being a candidate. he's going to make official what everybody knew and he's going to make his announcement in the middle of june. >> is he the one to beat among this ever expanding list of presidential hopefuls? >> well, the -- many of the republicans have problems with him because he's presenting himself at the relative moderate even though he has quite the conservative record which he likes to talk about. i suppose with his name recognition, he is the one to beat but it's kind of hard to spot the one to beat in that field which is growing every single day. >> speaking of former texas governor rick perry is set to announce that he is running today today. it's his second time. can he reco