Yet another debate tonight. Fox News, a mere five days after they hosted one on Sunday. What’s new to ask? Besides Ron Paul about the New Republic story on his newsletter?
Hume says 3,000 in the audience. Bet there’s a lot of red meat tonight.
Carl Cameron has been liberated from having to repeat questions from some flinty, quaint diner, and is in the building.
UPDATE: Ladies and gentlemen, the first debate to begin with a musical number. About a dozen twangy singers, the women in what look to my untrained eye like wedding dresses.
Wallace – are we heading to recession? And why trust you, when your state lost jobs?
Romney: Our hearts go out to those affected by job slowdowns and growth slowdowns. I’m proud that after many months of declining jobs, and when I was governor, we kept adding jobs, every single month. Every month since we’ve left, jobs have kept being added there.
(Way to go, Deval Patrick, apparently.)
Romney says need help for gas prices, and need to invest in R & D.
Hits McCain for saying the jobs are not coming back.
McCain: I won New Hampshire because I told the truth. Sometimes you have to tell people things they don’t want to hear. We’ll create new jobs, but some of the old jobs aren’t coming back.
Education and training. It’s a lot of stuff you’ve heard before if you’ve been watching these debates (and I’ve been watching and live-blogging just about all of them.) So I’ll only let you know when we get something new this evening.
(I know, I know, that makes it sound like I’m trying to take the night off…)
It’s a good question from Wallace, trying to get the candidates to give a policy to deal with recession in the short term; most of them are recycling their answers for long-term economic growth.
Really good answer from Huckabee, saying he hopes we’re not going into recession, but if we do, it’s because of four factors: increasing fuel costs –says people know that “everything they reach for on the shelfof a store costs more money because it costs more to get that to the store.”Says America is “enslaved” to foreign oil.Mentions subprime mortgage mess. Says President is right, to not use taxpayer money to try to bail out but to bring .
Other two major factors health care costs, education costs.
Rudy: We’re overtaxing, over-regulating, and over-suing.