janice dean. jon: as you might know president obama has spending a lot of time on the campaign trail reminding everyone about his record but democrats in races coast to coast with trying to keep their distance from the president s policy, chief washington correspondent jim angle is in d.c. reporting for us. i guess president obama is out campaigning, trying to stir up enthusiasm, right? is it helping jim? reporter: that s a key question, jon. because while it may light a fire under voters it puts the focus on the president and his polices which some democrats worry will hurt them because so many voters don t like those polices. listen: democrats are trying to localize races across the country, they say this is not about health care reform or barack obama and nancy pelosi. this is the two candidates run, incumbent versus the republican challenger. reporter: so many
south is gone. do you think that we re comfortable with such a declarative statement saying the south is gone, it s going to go republican this far away from voting day? democrats right now are having, as they say, good days and bad days, and some days they say hey, we re going to be okay, we re closing the enthusiasm gap but then they spread out the math and look at places like the midwest and south and say oh my goodness we ve got a real structural problem and are not going to pull this off, we re not going to narrow the gap the way that jim was talking about in the previous seeing men. so i think the strategists i talk to are people from the heartland, people from the south, who believe that democrats need to get back to the clinton model and court a lot of independents and from their way of looking at things on the ground, not here in washington, they say they have a big, big problem. jenna: how do you keep track of these districts, chris, do you have flash cards on your desk, yo
jenna. jenna: just n. jon, you have to see this, brand new video, the results of a bear attack, but harris, we should warn our audience, it s pretty graphic stuff, right? reporter: yeah, and this is a man s face, okay? he has to look at this image every day after a bear attacked him in the driveway of his home outside of seattle. this is john chiminiac, a councilman for the bellevue city council in washington statement he s now facing the media for the very first time. he was attacked on september 17th. and as you might imagine, he has gone through a lot. he just detailed, this is live or rather was live a few moments ago, he detailed what it was like to hear the breath of a giant black bear at the end of the driveway and what happened next. listen: i felt that if i went down on the ground and i got turned over on over on my back and she had a chance to go for either a neck or abdomen that i was probably dead. at one point
in the book, but when it comes down to it and this is another point i show in the book, obamanomics has helped wall street. wall street got the guarantees, low rates, you name it, goldman sachs made $12 billion the year after the bailout. what did main street get? the still lous package, the wonderful stimulus package, $800 billion, loads up taxpayers with debt and 9 1/2% unemployment and that s what this book is really about. now, will they support him in 2012? i think awe the writing is on the wall that they will. they re hedging their bets now. they will, because they make a lot of mope out of big government and obama is if anything a big, but also, they re just like him, they re progressives. go down the list on who runs the firms. jenna: i bet that surprises viewers. some viewers sent in great questions, we ll get to it after the break. one question that is a tough one, is there anything you can point to that would mean things would be different
both jenna: the republicans out there, over the last decade, would they have set us up differently so we wouldn t have been in this mess? who knows. by the way the mess we re in right now may not be the last decade, it of the last two decades. there were things in the clinton administration that led to the expansion of fanny and freddie, that in the clinton administration, the hud secretary and andrew cuomo, who gay be who may be the governor of new york, i think you go by the polices by the individual policy of the candidate, not the party. jen one one of the stories that s related to the last decade is the bush tax cuts, we re getting a lot of questions on that. jack olson in oak creek, wisconsin had this to say, there s an argument to extend the bush tax cuts to all americans not just the middle class, he wants to know is it worth it to