Why did he answer the question that way?
Seriously! There should be a video montage shown to every conservative candidate of the damage that poorly-worded responses to gotcha questions cause.
So many candidates that would be competitive get blown away by these unforced errors. Not only do the media deliberately try to inject gotcha questions, they also will sit on edited footage waiting for a candidate to win a nomination before releasing the moment publicly.
You’d think by now that candidates could learn to deflect or turn the question around at the interviewer. Some of the best ways for a politician to gain support is to challenge the premise of a question and put the interviewer on the spot.
Just look what Newt Gingrich did to Juan Williams, John King, or Chris Wallace. They were humiliated publicly when they tried to pull this stuff.