Romney on Meet the Press

Romney was on Meet the Press with Tim Russert yesterday. You can watch the interview or read the transcript here. I thought Governor Romney was very successful in handling the tough questions from Russert on Mormonism, abortion, etc. He came out strong against Huckabee's comment that the Bush administration has an “arrogant bunker mentality,” saying “that’s an insult to the president, and Mike Huckabee should apologize to the president." (Huckabee refuses to apologize). The most talked about moment occured when Romney was asked about the Mormon church's decision to finally allow African Americans into the priesthood in 1978. His eyes filled with tears for a moment as he described his reaction to the news.

“And so it’s very deep and fundamental in my life and my most core beliefs that all people are children of God. My faith has always told me that. My faith has also always told me that in the eyes of God, every individual was merited the fullest degree of happiness in the hereafter and I had no question that African Americans and blacks generally would have every right and every benefit in the hereafter that anyone else had and that God is no respecter of persons.”

President Clinton - This Time With Pants

Nurse Ratched made a strong case for why she shouldn't be president last night in the Democratic debate. She got caught in a bind on questions about New York Governor Spitzer’s plan to give illegal immigrants driver’s licenses. She said the plan “makes a lot of sense,” but then weaseled out of saying whether or not she supported it. Instead, she got angry and blamed President Bush for the failure of immigration legislation and said “what’s (Spitzer) supposed to do?” Here’s why she doesn’t know what to do: giving illegals driver’s licenses will lead to massive voter fraud that will favor Democrats (there’s no way to stop someone with a driver’s license from voting), so she supports it, as she said earlier. However, recent polling suggests 72% of New Yorkers are against it for the obvious reasons. Democrat messaging that those against amnesty are racists is not working out nationwide either. Should she win the nomination, add illegal immigration to the long list of huge problems for her campaign.

In response to challenges that she was too cozy with big business, Hillary said she had specific plans "to take $10 billion away from a lot of these industries." Is this in addition to her promises to take away the oil companies' profits?

The Shrillary camp is furious with Tim Russert for asking Hillary, since she's running on her experience, why Bill Clinton is preventing all of the records of the advice she gave to him as first lady from being shared with the public. Hillary weaseled out of this, claiming it's just that the National Archives are slow to release them. This is a lie. Bill Clinton can release them anytime he wants. For reasons we can only speculate about, none of the other candidates opted to ask what they are hiding.