american secretary of state is the in-box for the world. i didn t even understands it as national security advisor. it s almost as if there is no issue that people don t bring to the secretary of state. and so you find yourself sometimes saying, well why is that my problem? and then you realize, you sort of get over your grumpiness about that and you say it s because people really look to the united states to be a problem solver. they understand that we are prepared to do hard things. but i was surprised, even having been national security advisor at the scope and scale of the job of the secretary of state. in terms of mistakes, look, we made our share. whenever you are in con convention times you are particularly going to make them. i think in probably, in iraq, if i had to do it over again, i would try to build iraq from the outside-in. concentrating a lot less on reconstruction and politics in baghdad and working more with
on focusing on the issues that are popular in their districts. i want gloria and grove tore weigh in on what they think the dynamic is. congress is about to head home for summer recess. first i want you to listen we went to a john mccain town hall in arizona. they re most likely republicans or republican-leaning independents in the room to be fair. listen to what i ll call the grumpiness of the crowd. the biggest threat to this country is not our border security. it s not obama-care, not the war on terror. it is our huge federal government and its out-of-control federal spending. obama is supposed to be the post racial president. since he s been in office, this has been the most racial times i ve seen since i ve been around. in my lifetime, i have never seen the business bashing that goes on from this administration. again, to be fair, a
caught on camera, on a microphone, insulting a british voter. let s play it for everybody so we can remind them and then ask about it. listen. she s a bigot or words to that effect. we want to know your response to that. you re joking. all right. so, matt, what effect in the end do you think that had on gordon brown s campaign? you just can t get enough of that tape, can you, savannah? we really can t. i think it did have a significant effect in terms of the perception of the prime minister, who s never been captain charisma, to be honest, trying to go out there and schmooze the voters. and that chasm, that gulf between the kind of public smile and the private grumpiness really didn t help him. now, whether it had a crucial impact in those marginal constituencies that might lose him the election, we really don t know.
how much has he raised from poor old taxpayers to do his antitax stature. neil: alan stinson not holding back on the president s debt reduction commission with criticism, grover norquist her to respond. grover, mean words from him. what happened between you two? well, you re getting a little of the grumpiness there. look, obama, president obama, wants a commission that will come out and say we should raise taxes to pay for all of the massive spending he and reigned pelosi have done in the last year and he picked alan stinson to be the lead republican on a commission whose job is to say the problem isn t all the spending, the problem is we re not paying enough in tax to say coveralls the spending. neil: you don t know that for sure, cynically, a lot of people share that view but he said
dan rather s career was made when he had a back-and-forth in a primetime conference with richard nixon. i think it was the east room. rather than ask a tough question, nixon said, are you running for office? he said, no, sir, are you? and it was suddenly rather became the face of opposition to nixon, which he then paid for for years in the right-wing media, but this has been going on for at least 40 years. any comments this morning out of the white house about robert zbeats gates stunning statement, that really applies to the bush administration as well with the secret memo being leaked out that the ad medication has no strategy on iran to nuclear weapons. reporter: they are not commenting at all on it publicly, but this certainly ratchets up the issue. look, they still don t have any sort of resolution out of the united nations. it will be pretty watered down