reality that leadership in our country is first and foremost about character. second i think about competence, not just personal competence but the ability to shape and lead an honest good team. and lastly about specific policies or politics. and so i m endorsing sethmou moulton, i ve known him for years. i think he d be the best president for our nation for where we are now and where i think we need to go. congressman, how impeded are you in this campaign by your inability to get a national forum in these debates? i don t think the summer debates are going to decide the election. voters don t go to the polls until february of next year. our response on the ground has been fantastic. those are the voters who are ultimately going to make this decision. and we re doing well. we re inching up in the polls. we polled ahead of a couple of senators just in the poll a couple days ago. we out theraised five of the
of the house today. she is trying to put the focus back on politics. in my conversations with democrats and republicans and people close to the president, this will likely continue and will likely get worse. as democrats have not settled on a nominee, the president who always feels that he s at his best when he s on the attack has focused on these four women. he s focused on issues of race and ethnicity. we should point out that there was another republican, mark walker, republican congressman from north carolina, who was apparently disturbed by it. he said it was brief, the chants. i struggled with the send her back chant tonight, referencing representative omar. her history words and actions reveal her great disdain for america and israel, not phrasing that s painful to our friends in the minority communities. when you were in congress we had a lot of divisions. i don t think you saw anything like this. never. i left congress 8 1/2 years ago
and here s the thing, andrea. in these four women the president is finding the physical representation of everything that his anti-immigrant, you could say anti-multiethnic america that his make america great again pitch has been since. what we re seeing now is his allies trying to refine and rationalize what it is, those tweets he sent over the weekend. those racists tweets say it s about ihlan omar and what they view as her being a socialist and anti-zaisrael. that was never the case if you go back to what the president tweeted. now you have democrats on the hill who say this is an emergency for ihlan omar, that her physical safety is now at risk. it was just in the last ten years we ve seen members of congress of both parties targeted and shot and gravely injured. ihlan omar was seen on the floor
to head the wilson center, which you pointed out is a place where scholarship and policy are discussed free from the political spin. at least that s what we try to do. i don t recognize there. there were divisions. there was increasing partisanship. that s a reason i left in my ninth term to do this job. but i never saw this. let me say a couple other things. it s fine for people to oppose other people. it is fine for heated rhetoric to occur. it s not fine for hate speech to occur on either side. it worries me, too, that this group of four new members of congress have said things, at least reported things like the blue dogs are segregationests. i was a blue dog, i m no segregationist. ihlan omar is leaving the capital. there were hearings today. a cameraman fell down, she was
omar has a history of launching vicious anti-semitic screeds. joining me now msnbc political analyst peter baker, chief white house correspondent from the new york times. and jane harmmon. nbc white house correspondent jeff bennett in washington. welcome all. thanks so much. peter baker, you and i have seen a lot over the years. but i have never seen a president of the united states arousing a crowd with rants of send her back. yeah, no, that s a different level than we ve seen before. obviously in the 2016 campaign, we saw a lot of lock her up chants about hillary clinton. that was a new type of