shows a little bit of guts, i think. michael, you haven t changed over the years. let s talk about the bush inaugurals and what you learned. how did it feel sitting up there? i was sitting near when you you talked at the time, and hearing the words that you had helped craft with president bush s message. what does that mean to a speechwriter and to a colleague working on such a big speech? well, i remember talking to you on the west front of the capitol in 2004, and i can just remember total blind fear that day because, you know, you look back, as i did, when i worked on inaugurals with the president, and read all of the past inaugural speeches, and it is just extraordinarily intimidating to even imagine yourself a very small part of that long story. and to try to contribute some way. it s just very intimidating. that s mainly what i remember. now, we had hope and change. we had calls for bipartisanship.
geithner says, hey, we re going over the debt ceiling, we re popping up against the debt ceiling on december 31st. what will happen then. nobody believes that is a hard deadline. they do believe that could be pushed a month or two, perhaps even more into the future and republicans are definitely going to try to push, to use that debt ceiling fight as leverage to get some spending cuts. the bottom line for republicans is, they want substantial spending cuts, specially in entitlement spending going forward. gregg: byron york, thank you very much. thank you, gregg. gregg: all right. heather: well, right now, former president george h.w. bush is in the intensive care unit at a houston hospital. doctors say they re treating him for a fever and that the 88-year-old former president is in what they re calling guarded condition. trace gallagher has the latest on this from our west coast newsroom. trace? reporter: and, heather, the former president has been in the hospital for better part o
and decade the american people have watched the ball drop in times square. it is the countdown to midnight, the start of a new year. but this year, mr. president, the american people are waiting for the ball to drop but it will not be a good drop. heather: those words from senate majority leader harry reid as anxiety rises in washington over a fiscal crisis that could raise taxes for nearly every american. while the president cut his holiday short to, maybe, help come up with a plan, house speaker boehner says the people who can prevent us from going over it are not in the white house. simon rosenberg, former clinton campaign advisor and president and founder of the new democrat network. mark these send, former bush speechwriter and fellow at american enterprise institute joins us with more insight. thank you both for joining us. thank you, heather. heather: more and more people are saying this fiscal cliff deal isn t
february and we ll be back at the table, negotiating this with the republicans right away. so it is just, should be seen as a little fiscal break or a fiscal, we ll come up with a better analogy but temporary stopgap measure what will then be, we re going to be starting this debate all over again in february. heather: mark, in terms of, you know, who the blame is placed upon and in terms of the public, poll after poll does show that they will blame republicans. is that a matter of messaging from republicans and what can they do, if anything, to change that? what have they done wrong? number one of the rasmussen poll today showed 44% would blame republicans, 36% would blame obama. that is eight point gap. that is not bad. he is on air endorsing 98% of the bush tax cuts and opposing returning to the clinton rates, the man he worked for. very hard to say we have lost the economic debate. we re just discussing the how best to, i mean democrats are ones who said bush tax cuts should be
thanksgiving to talk about this. so they re talking but there is no indication anybody is actually doing anything right now. gregg: what about harry reid? what s his, does he have anything at all maybe towards the end of the week he will put on the table? i ve been hearing he will put to a vote an extension of the bush tax cuts for anybody making under $250,000 a year, extend unemployment benefits for some 2 million people that are about to lose them. what are you hearing? right. he sounded pretty pessimistic this morning but that could change and there s, kind of a fight, procedurally between the house and the senate in a sense that if reid originates a bill in the senate that would do what you said, people in the house say, well that would be unacceptable because the constitution requires revenue bills to originate in the house. but there is this bill that the house did pass a while back extending tax cuts for everybody. the senate could actually amend that bill. it originated in t