At the Republican debate Wednesday night, the fireworks came quickly between Gov. Rick Perry and the man he replaced as the frontrunner for the Republican party's presidential nominee: Mitt Romney.
The topic of contention was, as it has been for several days now, job creation. Romney argued that a career politician wasn't the right resume to have to turn the country around, and Perry responded by noting that Romney, while in the private equity world, did a good job creating jobs... overseas.
Then it turned a more personal.
"States are different," Romney said, of the notion that Perry's management of Texas showed his prowess as a job creator. "Texas is a great state. Texas has zero income tax, [it's] a right to work state, [with] a republican legislature ... a lot of oil and gas in the ground ... Those are wonderful things. Governor Perry didn't create those things. If he tried to say that it would be like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet."
Perry, famously, worked on Al Gore's 1988 presidential campaign.
"Michael Dukakis created jobs three times faster than you did Mitt," Perry responded.
"George Bush and his predecessor created jobs at a faster rate than you did," Romney replied.
"That's not correct," Perry said.