convince people of on the other side, people who want there to be a credible military threat before they ll vote for something in congress have to be convinced it is credible and it would be significant and he s going to have to thread that needle tonight. that s going to be difficult and it s been one of his problems here all along. jon: the president has to tell the american people that the response is in america s national interest. right. exactly. i think that s where the debate hasn t been engaged very well by the white house. what s the american national interest? i understand the humanitarian interest and the moral argument but what s the american national interest? and the american national interest has to be an explanation that says essentially if bad guys in rogue states can sort of move across the international landscape, amassing weapons of mass destructions with nothing being done about it, that could be a threat to the u.s. that s why we have to draw a line here. that s
force? jon: larry told jenna last hour a presidential speech can sway a few percentage points of americans but when you look at the polling numbers, well, he s described it as a big lift, a heavy lift and that s an understatement perhaps. 60% of americans disapprove of the job he s doing regarding his handling of the syrian crisis. that s up by 20% since may. right now only 29% of americans approve of the job he s doing. so jamie, i don t know. how does he try to convince them? he s getting in late on this. he s had his secretary of state and a lot of other officials come out and try to make the case for syrian intervention and he went off to, you know, russia, went to play golf the day after he made the announcement. he hasn t made the case in the forceful terms of a presidential address. so he s already coming in late where a lot of this has already been decided by the american people. i think he probably can sway a lot of some of those people
have been able to stop from going at each other. jenna: you tell some interesting anecdotes in your writing. one of them just recently you were talking about a restaurant around aleppo where there were some opposition forces, a different groups, all sort of sharing the same restaurant. rifles on the table. that the waiters were moving away so they could place food down for them to eat. i m wondering in that type of situation what the chatter is like about a u.s. military strike and what is the effect of this talk here in the united states on the ground in syria? well, that was a really interesting light lunch we had at that restaurant because as you could imagine the chattering of the u.s. strike was everywhere. the mainstream opposition were all for it. they were very enthusiastic about it, saying we haven t had help from an ally in good faith at any point in the last couple of years. let s bring it on. you, wish we could give americans targets to attack, including headquarters and
cycle repeating itself? you know, every few years this isolation tendency comes up or are you viewing this as different considering this time and place? i think it s different. here is why. jenna, americans are naturally isolationists. we control a big part of a continent. we have a lot of problems and we like to focus here. but we are willing to get involved abroad when we understand that something is in our national interest, when it s in our interest to do it, we ll make the sacrifices in blood and treasure to do it. as i said, that s totally absent here, at least at this point. the president has not made the case convincingly not just to republicans and independen undi everyone opposes this. jenna: it s one of the reasons we ll be watching tonight at 9:00 p.m. eastern time. larry, always appreciate you, your time. thank you very much. thank you. jon: even the president
let me jump to this. the chief judge this is the fiac. which has the authority over some nsa operations says that his court doesn t have the proper too mals to monitor all nsa surveillance programs and must rely on the government. then you also have the president. listen to this. now, part of the reason they re not abused is because these checks are in place. and those abuses would be against the law. and would be against the orders of the fisc. erol, where does that leave americans? it s not good enough i think is where it leaves us. the president reverting to his original job as a constitutional scholar seems to think that, well, it s all perfectly balanced. we ll have a court do the oversight and everything will be fine. as you said the head of the foreign intelligence surveillance court says they don t have the independent means to verify whether what they are told is true or not. and he compared it to other