politics. okay, jonathan prince, susan del percio, both crisis experts impervious to all crises. thank you, both. a little knew, bill clinton has called michelle obama s speech from earlier today the best speech given in this campaign by anybody. we ll take a break and come back. we re going to talk to the libertarian vice presidential candidate, bill weld, right after this. and if you re watching us in washington, d.c., you can now listen to us on the radio, bloomberg 99.1 f.m. right back with bill weld after this. healthy, free, the world before me, the long brown path before me leading wherever i choose. the east and the west are mine. the north and the south are mine. all seems beautiful to me.
the right way to go. jonathan, are you surprised these new polls show north carolina and ohio rather competitive still after the rough week that trump has said? i m never surprised in american presidential politics when competitive states are competitive. because there are so many issues that go to core voting decisions that don t have to do with the candidates. i wish, to some extent, the character issues were taken more into consideration, but they re not. let me ask you both real quickly, trump has attacked the media, he s been attacking the republican party, and obviously attacks the clintons all the time. there s now a theory by steve bannon and some others in the campaign that they should make these last three weeks, in order to get through this crisis, drag the clintons all the way down deep into the mud as they can. go after bill clinton, more than nay already have on his personal life, hillary clinton s complicity as they see it. is that a winning strategy? given where t
campaign. mark halperin, i many friend, how do you think on the basis of this past 24 hours, the trump campaign is handling this crazy moment? we ll come back to the polls in greater detail. but i ve got to tell you, those who said, like joe scarborough, that maybe trump you would to the collapse in the wake of the access hollywood tape in the debate, maybe they re right. he s way down in pennsylvania. but if those ohio and north carolina polls right, it s too easy as the new york times and other are says, and politico and others, this race is over, trump s electoral path isn t there. he s still got a really narrow path. he s still behind. but the polls suggest there s more going on than just a downward trajectory for trump. now, donald trump s playbook right now is a lot like the clinton playbook from the 90s, when they were trying to discredit women who were making accusations against bill clinton. race, questions about their stories, race, questions about the timing saying th
it s at mar-a-lago. it s got glass walls. can you believe this? why wasn t it in the story? biggest story of the year. when the trump campaign sent out a transcript of that speech, they suspiciously left out that part where trump seemed to ridicule the people magazine reporter for her looks. trump has previously threatened to counter allegations like these by bringing up dirt on bill clinton s sexual past and hillary clinton s complicity in it, as he sees it, a strategy that is being championed by steve bannon. that line of attack was noticeably absent from trump s speech in florida today. meanwhile, on the non-scandal side, a brand new bloomberg politics poll shows hillary clinton leading donald trump by a wide margin in pennsylvania and new wall street journal /marist polls in ohio and north carolina suggest that the race is still pretty tight in those states. but those polls have obviously been overshadowed by the crisis raining down on donald trump s
are pretty fundamental. one is donald trump is doing a lot of this himself and that s a danger. and two, he s doing it in an angry way. you won t find many cases where bill clinton personally attacked his accusers. those are big problems for donald trump. and it s never been the case, although bill clinton has been accused by various people, and i ll stress that bill clinton is not running in this campaign. but though he was attacked he was accused by various women, he never faced anything like what we saw last night. just the number of accusations all coming in a giant wave. all of them, as i said earlier, remarkably consistent in the stories they tell, and remarkably consistent in terms of what trump boasted of in the access hollywood tape. given those realities, it seems to me the burden of proof is not on these women. the burden of proof is on donald trump. and right now all he s saying is, the stories are ridiculous, they re lies.