The grass roots are energized because the absolutely highest priority in the country in November is to defeat Barack Obama. I have spoken with literally thousands and thousands of tea-party activists - I have yet to meet a single tea-party leader that is not going to vote for Mitt Romney.

If the federal government is going to cost $100 million or more of your jobs going away, at a minimum the people who are elected by the people ought to have to vote and say, yes, I support taking away your job; or no, I don't support taking away your job.

I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else, i'm not going to do it.

I'll tell you whose view on [Bashar] Assad is the same as mine. It's Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu. Prime Minister Netanyahu has said Israel doesn't have a dog in that fight because Assad is a puppet of Iran, a Shia radical Islamic terrorist, but at the same time, Prime Minister Netanyahu doesn't want to see Syria governed by ISIS.

I'm a fighter. I am passionate about what I believe. I've been passionate my whole life about the American Constitution.

The judgment that every voter is making of every one of us [running for presidency] who has the experience, who has the vision, who has the judgment to be commander in chief. That is the most important decision for the voters to make. That's a standard I'm held to. And it's a standard everyone else is held to.

Let me say something at the outset. The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media. This is not a cage match. And, you look at the questions - "Donald Trump, are you a comic-book villain?" "Ben Carson, can you do math?" "John Kasich, will you insult two people over here?" "Marco Rubio, why don't you resign?" "Jeb Bush, why have your numbers fallen?" How about talking about the substantive issues the people care about?