ryan. bottom line, it be electric a fight about entitlements. if you think the fairness issue now is large, it will be far worse. the upstate congressional race last year, the. bi-election was a referendum on ryanful he lost. there is nothing in his plan to suggest the same thing won t happened. portman s a real player. ryan, i think is doa. to stop ryan, put him in the vice presidency. liz: how much do you think it matters at the end of the day? i like to think it matters. but at the end of the day, how much does a vice-presidential candidate really matter? for a lot of real conservatives with questions about romney, i am not sure that those questions would be erased by his picking someone, you know, that was really, really conservative because if you look at joe biden, he is not had that
not learned a thing in 80 years. sooner or later, the president s going to have to fish or cut bait with this crowd. they re not going to help him out. they re not going to work together. he can have them over to lunch all he wants. as a matter of fact, they re against him, against anything he puts up there, unless they do it their way, the republican way. in your opinion, what should the president do at this juncture? well, i think the president has to, and it s very important that he appears, but also genuinely holds out an olive branch, attempts to cooperate, attempts to talk with them, says, look, what do you want to do, here s what i m proposing, what s your idea. but that doesn t get him anywhere. no, but here s where it gets him now. it didn t get him anywhere before the past election. before the bi-election, ed. but it will get him places now, because his approval rating keeps on going up, and the republican approval rating keeps on going down. americans want politician
republicans who apparently have not learned a thing in 80 years. sooner or later, the president s going to have to fish or cut bait with this crowd. they re not going to help him out. they re not going to work together. he can have them over to lunch all he wants. as a matter of fact, they re against him, against anything he puts up there, unless they do it their way, the republican way. in your opinion, what should the president do at this juncture? well, i think the president has to, and it s very important that he appears, but also genuinely holds out an olive branch, attempts to cooperate, attempts to talk with them, says, look, what do you want to do, here s what i m proposing, what s your idea. but that doesn t get him anywhere. no, but here s where it gets him now. it didn t get him anywhere before the past election. before the bi-election, ed. but it will get him places now, because his approval rating keeps on going up, and the republican approval rating keeps on going
separate violations. barbara, let s go back to that idea about what the potential offenses could be here. if this wasn t about donald trump running for election, if it wasn t about keeping a story out of the press at a particular time when it would have been influn ential to voters in the united states, it sort of gets a little bit more less serious. the issue here, the thing that investigators mostly want to know and the thing that i think the country wants to know is did michael cohen as is alleged with stormy daniels, did he do something meant to keep the public from discovering there was a scandal afoot? yeah. some of the things are legally significant and some of them are politically significant. if there is campaign finance violations or wire or mail fraud or money laundering that, is criminal violation. what are the political ramifications? we have donald trump denying any knowledge of this and then perhaps recordings that contradict that.
well, we know that the story from the trump team has changed a little bit since we first broke the story this morning when we spoke with rudy giuliani. he said that the discussion on the tape was about whether michael cohen himself should make a payment to miss mcduggou. what we should talk about is whether cohen should buy the rights to mcdougal s story. this is important not just because of the legal ramifications but let s remember that the wall street journal wroek t broke the existence of this secret deal this deal to keep the story quiet a few days before the election and the trump campaign said we know nothing about it. and now we find this tape exists and suddenly they re talking all about it. a real substantive conversation actually occurred. you re right. we re going get to the legal