DH: First, lets take the last one first. I’m a sponsor of the Fair Tax. Now we spend about $250 billion a year plus preparing, defending and shaping our lives around the tax code of the United States. That’s money that doesn’t go to feed anybody. It doesn’t go to send any kids to college. It doesn’t go to create new jobs. It’s just paperwork money that is a cost to the American citizen. And if we have the Fair Tax, we eliminate that massive overhead, that massive bureaucracy. I like that. Another thing I like about the Fair Tax is it gives a more level playing field on trade. Because our dumb bunnies, the people that negotiated our trade deals with the rest of the world, said this: “Every other trading partner in the world gets to refund its taxes to its manufacturers, they have value added taxes. So, they all work tax free. Every country can do that under the deal we signed except one country. Guess who? The United States of America.

With the emergence of Iran as a country pursuing a nuclear weapon and with North Korea already having some and racing now to develop systems for the delivery of those nuclear devices, and China now emerging as a new superpower and stepping into the shoes of the old Soviet Union, I think national security is going to be an important issue.

The burning of oil and other fossil fuels is contributing to the dangerous accumulation of greenhouse gases in the earth’s atmosphere, altering our climate with the potential for major social, economic and political upheaval. The world is already feeling the powerful effects of global warming, and far more dire consequences are predicted if we let the growing deluge of greenhouse gas emissions continue, and wreak havoc with God’s creation. A group of senior retired military officers recently warned about the potential upheaval caused by conflicts over water, arable land and other natural resources under strain from a warming planet. The problem isn’t a Hollywood invention nor is doing something about it a vanity of Cassandra like hysterics. It is a serious and urgent economic, environmental and national security challenge.

In the rest of the speech, instead of frame global warming as a environmental problem or a problem threatening America directly (such as in an Inconvenient Truth, when Al Gore shows where Manhattan would flood), McCain instead frames as a national security problem. Starting from oil money going to terrorists that we’re fighting, to money that is going to Venezuela and Iran. The speech itself won’t win McCain many awards, but it seems to be the standard against which other Republicans’ energy plans will be set. The wording that McCain uses to to describe incentivizing alternative energy (but not subsidizing) seems taken directly from Newt Gingrich’s debate against John Kerry. Ideologically, I’m sure there are some differences on the subject between the two, but I was more reminded of the commonalities while reading McCain’s speech, not the differences. His attack on the politics of oil especially seems like something that might resonate with independents especially, and possibly the right.

“Sometimes the best position would be for the appointee to make the decision and not force the President to do so. You best serve the person you work for when you can decide that if you are a distraction that you no longer will create that level of problem for your boss. … The Attorney General is clearly creating a major distraction for the President and for the Administration and for the Republican Party.”

Well, I like the idea of letting states have some flexibility to develop their own programs to get more and more people insured. We found a way to get everybody in our state, Massachusetts, insured. I like the plan. I think it’s one of the best things we did in my administration.

It’s not perfect. We will learn from it. But the idea is for people who can afford insurance make sure they get their premiums down by taking mandates off insurance companies. Let the insurance companies offer true market-based products. And then for people who can’t afford insurance, help them buy their own private policy. Don’t put them on Medicaid. Get them private insurance. Get everybody in the system.

It’s a bit like bringing work to welfare. Bring personal responsibility to health care. Get the government out of the health care business for those 45 million uninsured, and let individuals own their own policies.

When asked about whether he would have gone into Iraq, Romney talked about his feelings about the war then and now, even sort of giving a timetable for starting to pull troops out:

Well, it’s kind of an impossible setting to imagine, because there is so many imponderables and so much we would like to know before you’d ever consider committing our troops.

But one thing I can tell you is that when the president made his decision, based upon the intelligence that existed then — from our own intelligence sources and around the world — I supported the president’s action.

And the question is, what do you do now? And how do you make sure that we get our troops out as soon as possible, without precipitating a regional conflict that would cause us to have to go back and potentially a far more dangerous setting?

And so I support the president’s troop surge. I believe that al-Maliki has a plan that we can support, to try to stabilize the civilization — or the population in Iraq. I don’t give it 100 percent chance of success, but I think we will know in a matter of months if it’s working or not.

If it’s working, we can start bringing troops home.

And his feelings on the war’s execution really seem to echo that of John McCain:

I think the place where we really fell down in our planning was in preparation for what would happen after we knocked down Saddam Hussein. I think we underestimated the kind of mayhem that might ensue once insurgency started from surrounding nations, once people within Iraq itself began the sectarian violence between the Shia, the Sunni. The Kurds also were affected — not to the same degree, of course.

But those kind of developments would have suggested that we needed more troops. That if we were going to go in, we would go in heavy, we’d lock down the country, we would secure its major assets. We would not be in a situation where we had the kind of unraveling of civil order that occurred.

And so, I think we were underprepared, underplanned, understaffed, certainly undermanaged with regards to the prison situation.

We find ourselves in a very difficult situation, in part because of the failures of our own preparation.

The interview concludes with the Romneys talking about their personal lives, their family, and his father; for a time, they also talk about her diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about the broader context? After Columbine, you gave a speech where you blamed 35 — blamed the shootings on 35 years of liberalism. … You went — you said, “I want to say to the elite of this country, the elite news media, the liberal academic elite, the liberal political elite — I accuse you in Littleton of being afraid to talk about the mess you’ve made and being afraid to take responsibility for the things you have done, and instead foisting on the rest of us pathetic banalities because you don’t have the courage to look at the world you have created.” Do you stand by that prescription today?

GINGRICH: Yes, I think the fact is, if you look at the amount of violence we have in games that young people play at 7, 8, 10, 12, 15 years of age, if you look at the dehumanization, if you look at the fact that we refuse to say that we are, in fact, endowed by our creator, that our rights come from God, that if you kill somebody, you’re committing an act of evil.

STEPHANOPOULOS: But what does that have to do with liberalism?

GINGRICH: Well, who has created a situation ethics, essentially, zone of not being willing to talk about any of these things. Let me carry another example. I strongly supported Imus being dismissed, but I also think the very thing he was dismissed for, which is the use of language which is stunningly degrading of women — the fact, for example, that one of the Halloween costumes this last year was being able to be either a prostitute or a pimp at 10, 11, 12 years of age, buying a costume, and we don’t have any discussion about what’s happened to our culture because while we’re restricting political free speech under McCain-Feingold, we say it’s impossible to restrict vulgar and vicious and anti-human speech. And I would argue that that’s a major component of what’s happened to our culture in the last 40 years.

Now, this is going to get his base and the right riled up, but I’m not sure it’s the type of thing that would help him in the long run. At the end of the day it seems like something to encourage the partisan bickering back and forth that Gingrich has also stated that he wants to move past.

I am arguing that (Republicans) have lost their way. Right now, on the surface, a lot of Republicans in Washington will be critical of my positions, saying “I don’t support the president or the party,” but if you look at our platform, our state platforms, our policy positions, I would say we have lost our way. And quite frankly, I have not seen anybody running for the presidency on the Republican ticket that’s actually offering to stand up and stand for the principals the Republican Party has been built on.

In the past six years, when the foreign policy really changed, when we accepted the notion of pre-emptive war, a strong violation of our personal civil liberties, (we) at the same time (became) the party of entitlements, doubling the size of the Department of Education, McCain-Feingold. These are all things that Republicans used to criticize and not support, and all of a sudden we accept them. In essence, we have accepted what has traditionally been the Democratic platform — increase entitlements and foreign intervention, getting involved in quagmires abroad.

It’s important to understand, my friends, that people coming across our country into this country, some of them are coming for the same purpose as they people who went to Beslan,” . … It’s not all people who are just looking for the job that no other American wants … but there are other people, very dangerous people, who come across that border unimpeded, and there is absolutely nothing to say that the same thing that happened in Beslan could not happen here.

Using that as a starting point, Tancredo also wants to build a fence on the northern border with Canada. However, only 25 people came to see him at that campaign stop; he’s not finding much of a groundswell of support. He spent four days campaigning in New Hampshire though, this past weekend. We’ll see if subsequent polls have him doing any better, or if he gets better crowds on his next visit.

Tommy Thompson