CSPAN2 U April 8, 2013 archive.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from archive.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
you can also join the conversation on the social media. come your question this morning is, how effective our political ads? meet the woman who might decide whether president obama or mitt romney will be the next president of the united states. she is the mother of three and a resident of ohio. she is more than a voter in the biggest battleground state. she is undecided about whom to support. although most of her friends have made up their minds, i just do not know yet. she and her fellow undecideds are the most precious commodity in american politics. the obama and romney campaigns are courting them on an historic scale. let s take a look at one of the ad on the airwaves right now. this one is obama for america. you made $20 million last year and you paid 30% and capital taxes. is that fair to the guy who makes $50,000 end had a higher rate? host: we are asking you have affected you think political ads are. before th you could join that conversation on facebook by looking fo
that the president relies on his core team of white house advisers more than he does on the cabinet secretaries in terms of being privy counselors. they may have influence in their departments, but it s a fiction that he calls in the cabinet to discuss the most important issues. or that he d ask the secretary of hud what he d do about afghanistan. let s compare the other administrations, bush, he was close to one or two cabinet secretaries and that was about it. bush 43 was that. but as recently as jfk, he would call in bob mcnamara, secretary of defense, to talk about issues in the economy more broadly. and of course his brother, the attorney general, he talked to everything about. fdr had people who outside their lane of responsibility, heir hopkins was briefly the commerce secretary, but one of fdr s most important aides, his key liaison with churchill, so on and so forth. so it s been a really long time since that kind of cabinet existed, but in some ways, obama promised he wou
walker s victory in wisconsin, which the one thing it showed, undeniably, is that the republicans have a ground game that s going to match the democratic ground game. and while important surveys in wisconsin and virginia still had romney trailing, yesterday we had an important surprise for the campaign. in michigan, where a fairly reliable poll over the years, shows the race a dead heat. this morning, romney is out with a new ad, responding to the obama campaign s attack on his jobs record as governor of massachusetts. here s a bit of it. the difference is strong leadership. as governor of massachusetts, mitt romney had the best jobs record in a decade. romney reduced unemployment to just 4.7%. he balanced every budget without raising taxes. quick fact check there, the unemployment rate in massachusetts was 4.7% in december 2006, which was romney s last full month as governor. but that was higher than the nation s overall rate at the time, 4.4%. and while the ad says that
so what comes to mind is an extraordinary individual capable of great good and and who created helped create the vietnam tragedy. it s a very interesting pairing of success and failure in this man. c-span: why did you want to do this? guest: oh, i don t know. i had done a lot of defense writing as a reporter for science magazine and as a free-lance writer. and i had done a lot of reporting on arms control. and i came at it, in a sense, through the mathematics analytic side. i also came very much to realize that my whole generation, the baby boomer generation, really were affected and scarred by vietnam. there are 8.2 million people who served in the armed forces between 1961 and 1975, and all of those people have had some contact and some impact from the vietnam tragedy in our experience. so actually, although i may have started out of professional interest and rather intellectual interest, as i went on, i got very pulled in by the need to try to understand this terribl