0 no matter who wins and who loses in the election in november, the people cannot lose the sacred right to vote in this country. thanks for watching. i'm al sharpton. msnbc special coverage of the democratic national convention starts now. the republicans kept their party's last president far away from their convention. but the democrats tonight put their last president in the primest of primetime. tonight night two of the democratic convention puts the famous clinton/obama drama to work for the democratic campaign. and the auto bailout. elizabeth warren, the nuns on the bus, planned parenthood, mitt romney's bain capital legacy, and not in a good way. an undocumented immigrant speaking for the first time in convention history. if last night was for the first lady and tomorrow is for the president, tonight is all about hardball politics. msnbc's primetime coverage of the democratic national convention night two begins right now. thank you for joining us. i'm rachel maddow here at msnbc headquarters in new york. i'm with ed shultz and reverend al sharpton and chris hayes as well as steve schmidt. our fence lawrence o'donnell will be joining us shortly as well. and leading our coverage from charlotte, north carolina, from the site of the democratic convention this year is our friend and colleague chris matthews and a lot of his friends who he is there with. chris, you're a very popular man in charlotte tonight. i've got to you if tonight is essentially afterglow from michelle obama's speech or is there a separate second night agenda for the democrats here leading up to the bill clinton speech? >> rachel, it looked for awhile there there were two versions of the democratic party. there was the clinton version and the barack obama version. that was a wrong perception a lot of us had. there are, in fact, two complimentary parts to the democratic party. the clinton part and the obama part. when they are together, it is a robust political party. when they are separated by division or bad feeling, they are not a strong political party. the clinton case has to come back for obama to win. it looks like it's coming back starting tonight. >> chris, are there any substantive differences between those two parts of the party you're talking about? any differences between clinton and obama that either need to be resolved or glossed over in order to make this sort of remarriage tonight work for the president? >> i don't know if it comes down to policy, but it certainly comes down to politics. bill clinton the day he was elected president in 1992 called a business conference down in little rock and brought in all the business people and said we're going to work together. barack obama has not been that friendly to business. he has basically said we have an unfair tax structure, unfair national policy and i'm going to fix it. that is burdensome to people in new york and people with wealth in this country. so in terms of the politics, clinton had him on the team obama has to win them back. >> what obama is proposing is going back to the clinton era deal. >> yes. ironically, he's giving them no worser deal than bill clinton gave them back to the mid-30s, high-30s for the top bracket. reasonable taxation. just taxation many of us believe. and nothing worse than bill clinton. it's interesting how bill sold it better than obama has. >> that's exactly right. chris, i want to bring in chuck todd from inside the convention hall. he's been reporting earlier this evening when there was a changed sort of unexpected and sudden change to the party platform after some criticism of changes the democrats made this year. what do you know? >> look, it was a little bit of a back track. and the way the story is unfolding now is apparently president obama wanted to personally intercede in this. here's what happened. the new party platform had no mention of the word god and had taken out a phrase that had been in the democratic party platform for the last couple of cycles. stating that jerusalem was to be -- that the support of jerusalem as the capital of israel. overnight republicans had been making hay about this. and apparently the president was very upset about the fact that there was no mention of the word god in the platform. he doesn't understand why that was done in the first place. then of course there was a lot of people upset a lot of people in the jewish democratic community upset about the removal of jerusalem. already this has been a touchy subject. we know republicans are trying to exploit this idea that somehow president obama is less than supportive of israel, less than an ally of israel. so any little thing can get blown up. the campaign basically forced this change. and rachel, there was a bit of drama. and he can say whatever he wants. when he said i need -- you know, put these amendments up about god and about jerusalem and do i hear a yea? then on god do i hear any noes? the noes were so loud he had to ask it again. then he banged the gavel and said i hear a 2/3 vote. it's by rule of the chair. if you actually heard the yeas and the noes on this change when it came to god, it's hard to say that it was a 2/3 vote but that's the power of the gavel and the chair. and rachel, this all came from the obama campaign and in some cases president obama personally. they wanted to sweep this under the rug. >> now it's a sort of bookend to what happened with the republican convention when they had their -- not their platform change but rules change. that would effect the way the delegates are allocated and how much power a front runner will have in the primary. and john boehner was the antonio in a the case hearing this no and saying i hear it pass. >> 2/3, it passes, time to move on. nothing to see here. wave the magic hand. it just shows you how nervous -- when you think about the swing states let's just randomly pull out florida -- how nervous they are. any little vote. you know, they want to get 75% of the jewish vote. anything under 75% that could move a state like florida. >> thanks for the insight on that. i want to bring andrea mitchell on this as well. i believe we have her on the floor as well. what can you tell us? >> right now interestly the head of the aflcio is the head speaker. and the fact the labor groups are here is awkward. they were not happy when charlotte was picked. this is a non-union town and non-union state. they made their peace with it. but labor is no longer as big a part of the coalition. one of the big organizing and get out the vote or registration efforts they were attempting to do here was going to take place tomorrow. they were planning to go person to person among the 65,000 people who had lined up to get into that stadium. and now the bank of america stadium can no longer be the venue. they waited to the last minute. they had to pull the plug. they saw the weather forecast for thunderstorms. and they knew they could not risk endangering thousands and thousands of people who could get trapped in that bad weather. they had to move it back here in the arena. they haven't figured out how to stage the president's speech here tomorrow night because they no longer have the excitement of an open air statement to recreate the magic of denver four years ago. they also worry there isn't enough enthusiasm. and they thought with that stadium they could register and get people ready to register to vote and also create the imagery for the general public. and one quick thing, they won't be able to have a balloon drop tomorrow night. they can't get the balloon drop organized in time. so we don't know quite yet how they're going to make this look like a grand finale. >> andrea, let me ask you about the rejoinder that the republicans had to this announcement today. they responded essentially instantaneously implicitly questioning whether weather was actually the reason they were doing this. essentially saying maybe the democrats couldn't actually fill up that big stadium and that's why they were moving it. from talking to the democrats about this today from reporting this out, did you get any sense, any indication it was anything other than weather that caused the democrats to move this inside? is it possible the republicans' claims are right? >> in fact, we've talked to a lot of people including people who were lined up and disappointed. and the fact is they say they had 65,000 people plus 19,000 people wait listed. and if the measure of enthusiasm is the measure of excitement on the floor last night, you saw the difference. just the real involvement of the delegates. they were here early, listened to all the early speeches. they weren't out partying in the early hours. this is a different vibe here. there's no lack of enthusiasm in charlotte for this convention. >> thank you. we know it's going to be a very late night tonight too. take advantage of the enthusiasm. hopefully some of that will translate into stamina. now let's go to lawrence o'donnell who is in charlotte as well. he's been on the floor talking to people involved in the elements of this. we're hearing about the platform change today for the democrats, the schedule change tomorrow for the democrats in terms of the president's big speech. is any of that effecting the overall enthusiasm level or what seems important inside the hall tonight? >> it's not effecting any enthusiasm here. i'm with the virginia delegation now. i found the two best bumper stickers in the state of thirz. these are real virginia license plates. that belong on their cars. they use them and will be driving around virginia with those. that's an indicator of the level of enthusiasm and the commitment in this room. rachel, on the platform, this kind of thing happens all the time. i remember there was an incident many years ago, senator moynahan was reading through an enhanced draft of the platform and saw the word poverty did not appear. that was caught in time so there wasn't any public controversy about it. these kind of omissions and misplaced notions that slip in and out of platforms happen all the time. this one was absolutely standard. and the fix by the chair was absolutely standard too. that whole voice vote game has always been just a game when it comes to the convention. and as for tomorrow night, there is real disappointment among all the people who were going to have access to the appearance in the stadium tomorrow night. that was the big challenge for the obama campaign. will they hurt themselves in their ground game in north carolina by disappointing all of those people who won't be in that stadium tomorrow night? if you were here, rachel, to witness the violence of last night's rains, i don't know how they could have made any other call. if rain like that fell before or during the event tomorrow night, it would have been disastrous. >> thank you for that perspective. thinking about 65,000 people in that stadium, you think well how do we extrapolate the importance of that number of the people who would really be there to the election. would filling the stadium make a difference? what was the margin of victory for barack obama in north carolina in 2008? it was 14,000. >> i remember talking to an organizer outside the stadium in denver before the event. and realizing talking to her and when i told her i was press 15 minutes in, she freaked out because they're not allowed to talk to reporters. they got the capture of the data of the names ae e-mail addresses of everyone that walked in that door. that's 80,000 fresh names to go to for donations, for volunteer shifts, to get people to drive to the polls. right? it was a huge, brilliant organizing undertaking. the interesting thing is here they probably captured all that data already even if it's canceled. so the mission is accomplished from an organizing perspective. >> they got the data because they'd already begun issuing the tickets. i think they have to now take back some of the tickets because of the smaller venue. i think on the platform a couple things came up. one, unlike -- if you remember, romney distanced himself from his platform. rather than change the platform and stand up to whatever he agrees with they said that's the party, not the candidate. so i think what you saw in contrast is president obama saying no if this is going to be the platform of my party, i want god in it and correct jerusalem. whether one agrees or not, he's not running away from his platform. i think because since they were making it known that it is the president and campaign that wants the changed. here's a president that openly goes to church, that is very much devout. i've been in meetings with him. so he's not just doing this during election time. he has a spiritual life. and i think the jerusalem question there was an op-ed piece in the "new york times" saying he's a friend to israel. they've tried to create this facade. rather than doing the romney saying that's the platform, not mine. if he made the changes it's a real contrast. >> just one second. on the -- is there a bipartisan sort of strategic answer to whether it's better to challenge the platform and get it in line with the candidate or whether it's better to not hold the candidate accountable for what's in the platform? >> i think it's better not to hold the candidate accountable for what's in the platform. many times candidates for president say i'm running on my platform not the party's platform. it's a statement of the candidate's beliefs entirely. this was an unforced error. i wouldn't want to be the campaign aide on the receiving end of the phone call from the president. it's a potent issue. among the voters that the president has to make gains with, that he has to improve in, you look at states like ohio, pennsylvania, you look at florida. i'm sure the president was very angry about that tonight. and the images of the booing and shouting down over the questions it got are something they'll make hay with. i don't think it's going to determine the outcome of the election, but i think it is a bump in the road after a flawless first night. >> platform it is are important, but they're not etched in stone and they're not in concrete dried. the universal health care was in the platform of the democratic party in denver of 2008. it never made it to the table. that was a big thing they campaigned on around the country. it was in the platform. it never made it to the table. i think that this whole issue with israel and the support of the president goes back -- and i'll be the one to say it -- goes back to the battle that hillary clinton and barack obama had way early on. there was a whisper campaign here in new york where she was the senator that barack obama was not going to be a good ally of israel. that was a whisper campaign that dogged the obama campaign early on for some time. he knew he was going to have to deal with it down the road. and he has done that. now not to have proper language puts him in a position. i think the president showed leadership today, stepped forward, got it right. we're going to put that behind us. he just didn't -- that's not the case. benjamin netanyahu has said he's a good ally. >> he had the choice of doing what romney did saying that's not my platform i'm on my own or changing the platform. that was the choice he had. >> it's a substantively terrible decision. it's a capitulation that empowers the worst elements in the people that are working on this issue. i mean, if you read this platform, there is not a single condition put on israel and palestine section. there is a restriction that they must accept the rights et cetera, nothing about the settlements. if the thern government wants to move the embassy to jerusalem, there have been plenty of opportunities for democrats and republicans to do that. they have not done that because it's a terrible idea of getting a lasting peace between these two. >> but you're talking about something else, chris. we're not talking about our views. >> i know. i just want to get on the record it's a bad issue. >> the president doing what romney wouldn't do. these are his views. whether we agree or not. in some areas we may disagree with the president, but he made sure they reflected his views. i accept steve saying maybe the candidate shouldn't be responsible, but steve's candidate did start attacking him on this platform after they did not stand up and do the same. so last week it wasn't my platform. this week obama's responsible for it. switch and bait has got to be the theme of the republican party. >> it's a stark difference in the way both candidates handle differences with their platform. i will make one note on it. on the god side of it. the platform before being changed today may not have had the word g-o-d in it but it had things like a full commitment is for the essential continuing flourishing of faith and country. faith has been an essential part of the american story and driving through history. our lives are made vastly stronger and richer by faith. so they use faith instead of god. which of course was a scandal. for a reason -- because this is an even number year. >> don't feed the trolls. >> fair enough. there are some changes ahead tonight in terms of the business of the actual convention. the actual nomination process for the president. in tampa you might remember the republicans got the nomination of mitt romney out of the way on the first day of the convention in the afternoon before anybody was really paying attention. in conventions past, they have it be a dramatic thing with the roll calls from all the states leading up to the speech by the nominee himself. but tonight the democrats are going to do their actual nominating process after bill clinton. so in the 10:00 hour tonight with the network coverage and everything, 10:00 p.m. eastern that's elizabeth warren, she'll give her speech. then bill clinton will give his speech and formally put in president obama's name for nomination. then after president clinton's speech, the democrat wills do the state by state roll call rolling out of 11:00 p.m. hour up through the midnight. they will be up all night shouting out the votes. it's kind of weird scheduling, but if you are a night owl it will be fun to watch. i hope you'll stay with us here all night on the live coverage of the democratic national convention. it's always unexpected. we'll be right back. >> for 25 years it has been my privilege to represent the city of san francisco and the great state of california. welcome aboard! 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