. >> michael gerson, it's very, very hard to defend this, isn't it?re in the romney camp, it comes off the back of another couple major gaffes by common consensus major gaffes, including the libyan, way he behaved over that attack. when you are in that camp now, what do you do? how do you get him out of this hole? >> well, there are only a couple of responses in a case like this, because it's hard to disagree with that analysis of this quote. you say what i really meant to say was and that's what he's done. i really meant to say government's too large and will bankrupt the country and try to get it back to a more sustainable ideological argument until the press moves on to the next thing, or you can say i was wrong, at least in part, which maybe is what he should say here. the government is too large but the reality here is that most people want to improve their own lives and i'm going to appeal to everyone and i made a mistake. i don't think politicians do that enough. >> there's a new "wall street journal" poll tonight and nbc news combined with the

"vanity fair's" dee dee myers, "washington post's" michael gerson, and cbs news political director, john dirk son. it's all ahead because this is "face the nation." captioning sponsored by cbs from cbs news in washington, "face the nation" with bob schieffer. >> good morning, and welcome to "face the nation"." bob salve today but we're joined by scott pelley who is back in new york after a trip to st. petersburg, florida, to sit down with president obama. scott, what did the president have to say? >> pelley: noragreat to be with you this morning. the the president and mr. romney have so many campaign stops in florida and ohio, it almost looks like they're running for governor. but we caught up with the president in st. petersburg, as you said, and one of the things we wanted to ask him about is how things would change in a second obama term. we pointed out to the president, of course, if he is re-elected, it is very likely that john boehner will still be speaker of the house, and paul ryan will still be the chairman of the budget committee. so i wanted to know from the president how they

i want to read this from michael gerson in "the washington post" with less than two months until theon romney is left with dwindling opportunities to reshape the dynamic of the race. this places extraordinary pressure on him in the presidential debates. early voting has started in some states. >> it has. look in the debates the president has put forward his jobs plan, put forward ideas. when you're at the table and the president is able to speak in some degree of specifics and mitt romney kind of blusers with his rhetoric, that's not going to, you know, stand up, stand the test. one of the things i find so surprising, you know, mitt romney came into this race, what was one of his fundamental character flaws, people don't trust him. his own base didn't trust him. you reinforce that every single time when you say we can't release our tax records because if we you'll just attack us. okay. clearly there's something you're hiding. the fact that he fundamentally didn't understand that flaw was going to be dog him throughout the whole campaign and that all -- everything he's doing is only r

had run for president in 2000 with one person playing the roles of karl rove, mark mckinnon and michael gerson. is stewart stevens the problem. is this all on mitt romney since his campaign says he's making all the decisions? >> well, i remember very clearly september of 2000, we called it black september in the bush campaign. we were down by three points. all the guns started shooting at us. everybody wanted me fired because the ads were terrible and the campaign was going down the drain. they wanted all our heads. it was a lot of talk of internal dissension. and then a couple of weeks later due to the debates and a number of other external factors within the campaign because the campaign didn't panic, we were able to right the ship. i think it's way too early to be writing off the romney campaign. it's a lot of seasoned veterans there. i think they're going to lock down and they understand the dynamics and the physics of this thing. sure, the fundamentals look good for obama right now coming out of the convention. but they had the second convention. they get to step on the republicans' bounc