the calculation changes. he ll have to fight for it. yeah. and he s being called the front-runner by his own team acting the front-runner, he won t talk? because he is the front-runner and probably almost the only electable candidate but don t leaders have to lead? yes, eventually they do, if not being challenged directly. irregardless, respond to this, mitt romney asked how he d solve the country s deficit problems. here he was, and his answer. let s listen. the answer for the country is for the president to cut federal spending, cap federal spending and put in place a balanced budget amendment. it s within, in my view, the president s power to say, to his leadership and to the house and the senate, i will cut spending. i will cap the amount of spending. i ll pursue a balanced budget amendment, and if the president would do those things, this whole deficit issue disappears. that was nitwit talk.
yeah. and he s being called the front-runner by his own team acting the front-runner, he won t talk? because he is the front-runner and probably almost the only electable candidate but don t leaders have to lead? yes, eventually they do, if not being challenged directly. irregardless, respond to this, mitt romney asked how he d solve the country s deficit problems. here he was, and his answer. let s listen. the answer for the country is for the president to cut federal spending, cap federal spending and put in place a balanced budget amendment. it s within, in my view, the president s power to say, to his leadership and to the house and the senate, i will cut spending. i will cap the amount of spending. i ll pursue a balanced budget amendment, and if the president would do those things, this whole deficit issue disappears. that was nitwit talk. all he was doing was parroting
for those of you too young to remember that is a a 1970s movie. i want you to go to the window, stick your head out and yell, i m as mad as hell and i m not going to take this anymore! now that sounds like how a lot of people feel these days. this time, instead of the late actor peter finch, it was president barack obama who will people to take action. i m asking you all to make your voice heard. if you want a balanced approach to reducing the deficit, let your member of congress know. if you believe we can solve this problem through compromise, send that message. and so they did. today more than 100 congressional websites crashed or threatened to. phones rang off the hook and letters and e-mails poured in. once again, the same old posturing went on and on. we ve all seen this movie before. in fact, we ve been watching it for weeks now. i ll have a lot more on this story in just a moment. but first, here s a look at the top stories i ll be telling but tonight. let s
believes the senate majority leader s plan is a much better approach. as we mention that approach does not include any tax increases or revenue coming into the government. we ve talked about this balanced approach that the president has said over and over again, when i think of a balanced approach it s easy to think about scales where it s equal on both sides. you have equal tax increases with equal spending cuts. how do you see the break down, when you talk about a balanced approach? is it equal like that? let s be clear, the president was going back over the discussions that have been now taking place over many weeks and he was describing where we should go to solve our deficit problems. and in that kind of approach we have to be talking about revenues as well as spending, because when you look at how we got into the deficit problem that we are in, the cause of it was tax cuts we couldn t afford, a prescription drug benefit we couldn t afford and two wars that we didn t pay for. so
different question that you re asking me today, which is that in order to get over this deadlock that the congress is now in over the extension of our authority to pay our bills by raising the national debt, what the different approach for that would be. i think senator reid in that case has put together something that frankly appears designed to be acceptable to the house, because it doesn t raise that issue. jenna: so, he would support senator reid s plan as a temporary fix, but as a longtime debt reduction plan the president would want to see something different? just to be clear. senator reid s bill would do serious deficit reduction but not solve our long term deficit problems. the president was speaking to a real structural solution. the tragedy is that the president and speaker were engaged in detailed negotiations where offers were going back and forth for weeks where we were tackling the big questions, questions about entitlement reform, questions about tax reform, and the p