10-point toll on his gallup. brian: and bill clinton warned democrats, watch about marginalizing people who grew up with a gun culture because you don t grow up with guns. alisyn: meanwhile, the washington post listed what the president promised four years ago on his inaugural day and what was delivered during the course of four years and they gave him a passing or a failing and the first thing they looked at was hope and change, obviously, that catch phrase that he ran on, and whether or not he was able to stop partisanship in washington and surprisingly, he was not. in fact, you know, i think they could go further, it s obviously hard to stop republicans from being, you know, intransigent if that s what you think they are, how about your own sort of attitude and your own tone and the president wasn t the post-partisan president he promised to be. the first couple of days he tried to say rush limbaugh was
recommending the gop be less intransigent, do you think inside those meetings going on this weekend there will be some message, some form of that message? look, i think there s an amazing amount of soul searching going on within the republican party right now. and it s a troubled time for the party because there is no single standard bearer. it s not as if there s one leader who is charting a course and saying, yes, we re going to compromise or no, we re not. and and so, you know, the fact remains in the last two national elections presidential elections, the republicans lost. so they ve got to figure out a way to listen to those voters who, you know, decide close elections. it s the middle of america. and the middle of america has said repeatedly, get something done. we ll see if the republicans listen. and alex, you know, they ve brought in a pollster this weekend, they want to talk about, for example, how to appeal to women. one thing reportedly that she told them is to stop t
both intransigent, both irrational to change over time. the president in 2006, the sign that the leadership failure, a sign that the u.s. can t pay its own bill and financial assistance to reckless policies. leadership means that the buck stops here and he goes on tosayt it. now, that s, that was his position back then. right. megyn: he was saying no, period. no, to an increase in the debt limit. the republicans in the house now are saying, not know, yes if we put in place some spending cuts. so, it s not an absolute no on their part, it s we ll give you what you want if you put in place spending cuts, but he seems to think that that position is more extreme than flat out no back in 06. it becomes habitual with this president, megyn, that he described his opponents political or otherwise, in terms from which they have no,
centrist districts where the president won or lost but not by that much or they re retiring so they re not worried about election, not worried about challenges from their right flanks so it seems like it s not so much that both sides are to blame but republicans much more concerned with playing to their base and also if you look at polling from the last debt ceiling crisis that we unfortunately lived through in 2011, when you ask people whether they favored compromise to avoid default or people to stick to their principles no matter what, democrats 81% wants compromise, independents 69%, republicans 53% so just in general, democrats are more amenable and interested in compromise. i think that you re absolutely right that if you had to pick the party that was more intransigent and inflexible it would be the republicans at least for a few years but go back democrats. i think you mean the democrats, right? no, he doesn t. no.
democrats in it, and so in terms of this divided government, i mean, he is going to have to work even harder to bring along the far right parts of his caucus to get deals done, and, again, i think nancy pelosi comes out of this as somebody he is going to have to work with, and i think he certainly is weakened going into this session of congress after this kind of a vote today. absolutely. this is actually the backlash of jerry mandering. they put millions of dollars all around the country into carving out these super, super safe districts for all these guys who were then elected by constituents who hate the government, hate government spending, rather, who want to cut it, who are uncompromising, and that s who they have to listen to, and that, ironically, is what is making it so hard for him now to cut these deals. they don t pay a price. they don t pay a price for being intransigent. they are rewarded in these deeply red districts for not going netting done. they feel like the