0 deadline. this is the four corners offense. cliff, fiesta, follies and slope. if you want your own corner name tweet us for four corners or post on our facebook wall. in today's news the president a little more than an hour ago went to northern virginia to push the middle class tax cut message by spending time with an actual middle class family. >> the message that i got from tiffany and the message that i think we all want to send to members of congress is, this is a solvable problem. i'm not going to sign any package that somehow prevents the top rate from going up for folks at the top 2%, but i do remain optimistic that we can get something done that is good for families like this one's. >> and this actually appears to be working. a new poll shows the president is running ahead of the boehner-led republican team. what about basketball you say? we go to charlotte last night, and the knicks treasury secretary, carmelo anthony, top paid and big star got hurt in this dive and had to leave the game. then the at the end it came down to this. >> looking for felton and finds smith. two seconds, one second. smith for the win. >> game over. no overtime. deal, end game, done. is this meaningless nba game in charlotte lead us to how the fiscal fiesta ends? we have a man who we think knows the answer, the king of the last word here on msnbc and all seeing of things in washington, the great one and only lawrence o'donnell. lawrence, thank you for joining us. this is very early in the day for you. >> this is earlier than i normally wake up in the day. see, i do very late night tv show. >> i'm familiar with it. >> you've been there once in a while. don't expect much from me at this hour. >> all right. way to set the barlow. very smart strategy there. proposal. is he going to wield actually more power at the heritage foundation than he does right now as a senator? >> it's always a joke when anybody talks about wielding more power out of elective office as a civilian than in elective office. it's a real help to the republicans in the senate because he has cost them the senate. he has done more damage to the senate and most especially to republicans in the senate than anyone else. he has backed these crazy, nutty tea parties who have gutted the republican nomination for senate in various states around the country, and then he went on to lose to democrats thereby preserving the democratic control of the senate, preserving harry he reed therei. he had become an absolute disaster within his own party. the big cheer today is in the republican caucus saying, finally, we're getting rid of our absolute craziest nut. >> very good. we congratulate them for that. another thing, lawrence, that happened today is governor bobby jindal wrote an op-ed in politico and he said, at present any reading the headlines over the past week indicates that republicans are fighting to protect the rich and cut benefits for senior. it may be possible to have worse political positioning than that, but i'm not sure how. certainly it's true the democrats have the stronger hand and the republicans do. republicans threaten to use the debt ceiling down the road to try to still get their way in some way. how would you advise the president it to sort of approach these negotiations right now? >> first of all, it's worth noticing for the president and everyone else that there has become after this election a competition among possible future national republican candidates to sound the most reasonable. jindal is leading in that race so far. what he's just said is the most reasonable thing you could possibly say under the circumstances, and this is why the president is sitting back in if he can waiting for boehner to come to him. he's allowing the pressure to build on boehner, to build on house republicans and senate republicans from the outside and from the jindals and from tom cole in the house. these people are saying let's do the reasonable thing and vote on all the tax rates we agree on. let's get that done and then let's reserve time in january and going forward to work on everything else. >> lawrence, as you know, you're an extraordinary man and you've had an extraordinary career. >> this is scary. >> working around extraordinary people. of course, senator moynahan and on the west wing. i think you have insight into extraordinary people, being one yourself. i saw an extraordinary sentence in the "new york times" this morning. many house republicans appear to view mr. boehner with the same sort of respect that adult children award their parents for the sage counsel they ignored in their younger days, which is amazing and i've long thought of some of the republicans as children. so it's interesting that now we call them adult children. how has speaker boehner corralled his caucus to respect him and work with him and be on board with him when we know it's -- they like discipline over there, but it's a raucous group as well. >> he had to do it the hard way. we haven't seen a modern speaker have to do it this way. the way he had to do it was allow the nuts to run things for a couple of years and see where that got them. so he couldn't get any control over these kinds of people, you know, a year ago, two years ago, and he has got to show them, look. we did it your way. anti-politics in a certain kind of way from the tea party, anti-government, anti-compromise, when they come in to your group, it is impossible to lead. by the way, imt not someone who at any point criticized john boehner's leadership skills. i believe all those criticisms were misplaced. he had a problem with who got elected under his party banner. it's not that previous speakers were better leaders than he was. previous speakers didn't have as many crazy people in the room with him. >> that's a good point. >> let's see how much the republicans appreciate his sage counsel if he says guys, we have to hike rates. i'm waiting for that. speaking of that, lawrence, i know you were there in washington when the clinton rates that we're all talking about now went into effect back in 1993. you probably remember the republicans saying there would be a second recession and millions of jobs lost and none of of that happened in the 1990s. now we're back at the point where democrats for a decade have fought the lower rates and there are two top rates. the 33 and the 35. under the obama plan, the 33 would go to 36, the 35 would go to 39.6. you know, if you're trying to negotiate a compromise, you can start to play with each one of those numbers and try to find something. the huge problem for the republicans on doing that is they're opposed to any kind of tax increase on principle. so it's very hard for them to go into the negotiations that way and say, well, we could live with 37. well, if you do that, you have violated everything you've said about what you stand for prior to that. min i mean, the easier way for boehner to handle this is to allow if not secretly encourage a vote to occur in the house on the senate bill. if boehner were to allow a couple of dozen of his people it to go sign the discharge approximately was medicare cuts, also medicaid cuts that were in that bill. they were all done on the so-called provider side. that's the way they tend to do that. those are very difficult cuts to make because we've made so many of them in the past. so that side of the of the system is kind of cut to the bone at this point. >> all right. lawrence o'donnell, thanks for hanging with us. will you hang out again sometime? >> this is a lot of fun. no-homework tv is a lot of fun. >> up next, forbes's list of the most powerful people in the world is out. 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