well, i m very supportive of it. you know, chuck, back in 2014 and 2015, for instance, i felt frustrated at times that it was harder to get information declassified. an example, russia was providing lots of military equipment into eastern ukraine where russia was claiming that separatists were fighting in some kind of natural uprising against ukrainian oppression, where. in, what was happening is russia was pouring in military equipment and advisers across the border and just to declassify some overhead imagery of that would take us a period of days. i think it s very important that you don t allow vladimir putin to set the narrative as he wants it around an incident here because what he ll want to do to his own public and the global public opinion is make it look like ukraine was the aggressor and he had to respond. we may not believe that as americans, but that s the message he needs to try to bring the russian public along with a war that this time would be much more costly than c
have to say. yeah. is it going to be enough? well, you know, chuck, you and i have talked about this before. if i were joe biden for state of the union, i d be real candid and say, look, this has been the toughest two years in my lifetime for this country. if you just look at the number of people who have died, who have gotten sick, economic, job losses, people who couldn t see a new grandchild that was born in another state, people who couldn t go to a funeral of a friend because there wasn t a funeral. this has been absolutely brutal, unlike any time during my lifetime. i think he should say that. but he should say, look, there s an american comeback coming on. we have record job growth and gdp growth, we have wage and salary growth that s dramatic. we do have an inflation challenge, yes. we have to keep the other three trends going because they re great and manage in the fourth trend and let me tell you how we re going to do it. so he should acknowledge that the last two years
campaign, chuck, don t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. we have to make the comparison every day and remind americans that the things that have made it possible to open the economy again, republicans voted against every single one of those measures. that s critical. you sort of responded to what i was going to ask you to respond to, which is the david alexrod op-ed in the times that frames this debate. the state of the union is stressed. to claim otherwise and highlight the progress we have made without fully acknowledging the hard road we have traveled and the distance we need to go would seem off key and out of touch. you cannot jawbone americans into believing things are better than they feel. i read that last sentence and heard what you said, and in my head i said donald trump wouldn t take that advice. he would not at all. thank you, chuck. i ve made a career out of agreeing with david axelrod and he s right more often than i am,
state. you know, chuck, it s interesting. the you look at these contests, look at missouri, republicans are challenged with the kinds of candidates that are likely to emerge from their primaries, the fact they re still yolked to donald trump. that will be a challenge to them. they struggle with january 6th and a national party that the republicans have that call it legitimate public discourse, a moment where americans are repulsed by what happened then and continuing to polarize with violence. there s an opportunity to push back on the economy, on the state of our democracy, what it takes to hold this nation together to make progress. republicans don t have a coherent message and there s a huge opening from the senate field and the gubernatorial playing field and congress as well. important point. democrats may be debating what the message should be. republicans, i mean, even mitch mcconnell said we re just running against them. patrick gaspard from the center of american progress, g
reporter: the main event that has heightened the concerns for the americans in the past couple days is the fact the russians put out this information suggesting they were de-escalating and u.s. intelligence coming to the conclusion that was basically a head fake. the biden administration is trying to be very narrow in their messaging in response to russia s moves right now because they re trying to avoid falling into one of several different misinformation narratives that vladimir putin has in place right now. so if russia does something that looks dees kala torry, responding positively to a diplomatic engagement, the u.s. dismisses it out of hand. the russians will use that to say it s the jingoistic americans. but they don t want to look like fools by letting the pressure off putin in response to de-escalation moves which turn