i am a huge joe biden admirer. i know this was excruciating decision in a time of such pain and grief for him and his family. he is liberated. i don t think history is done with him. there is a lot for him and the president to keep doing in the next year and a half. i want to build on the progress that they are leaving behind. i feel very strongly about that. i want to go further, but i think the real point of this election is whether or not the republicans are going to be able to turn the clock back and rip away the progress that has been made. you can see much, much more in rachel s full interview tonight 9:00 p.m. eastern right here on msnbc. joining me now is margie o mara and jamalsimmons and susan dell percio. i want to pull something from
these questions get you a little bit closer to figuring it out. in the absence of any other discussion about hillary clinton, yes, this is going to be have an impact on her numbers. she has to move beyond it by talking about what she is, what she represents, the kind of narrative and the purpose of her candidacy. but she also has to speak in a candid way about who she is as well. i think the character questions are more important than the e-mail questions. so she has to establish what kind of leader she would be. and i think for many democrats, and this may just be anecdotal, you may be seeing it in the numbers. the problem ant e-mails is that it won t go away. she has to it put it to rest as an assertion of of her own strength and that strength is what people are going to want to see tomorrow night. listen to what president obama said about the e-mail controversy last night on 60 minutes. i don t think it posed a national security problem. i think it was a mistake that she s
would you expect her to try to emphasize that tomorrow night? yes, i would. i mean, the risk the risk of it being you can start to sound a little in the weeds and a little boring. right. and a little establishment. yeah. it would be a major mistake for her to do that. i think her strength is her strength. yeah. she s got to project the core essence of who she is which is an extremely strong leader and a strong woman. and someone who can speak authentically at a time when voters, democrats and republicans, are looking for that authenticity. polysubstance does not equal authenticity at this time. emotion, character, forcefulness, direct communication and an honest answer to questions, those are the kinds of factors that i think are shining through. and that s true for bernie sanders especially. and, yeah, margie, that is that s what bernie sanders is running on basically, is i ll tell it to you straight, i ll give you the absolutely unvarnished truth. yeah. i think
things joe biden would raise about her position on foreign policy, about the president s record on foreign policy, but those are not going to decide the core support of the democratic voters in these primaries and caucuses. so i don t think that his absence is going to twist the field. it might pose some tricky questions. if hillary clinton can t deal with those, then she s in serious trouble. margie, this is bernie sanders big opportunity. he s never been seen. he s been pulling the biggest crowds for democrat, no question about it. but in terms of television audiences, he s never had the exposure that hillary clinton has had. is there a special strategy that he should be working on for this debate because it is going to be in many ways for him, an introduction to many new voters? i think you re going to see him introducing himself to people. people who seeing him speak for the first time, they may know a little bit about him but they don t know that much about him. so i think he
you know, wrestling with these issues, i m sure that for him he s saying to himself, i could do a really good job. a new national cbs poll released on the eve of the debate shows hillary clinton holding her solid lead at 46% with bernie sanders holding steadily in second place at 127% and joe biden running third to bernie sanders at 16%. that same poll shows that if joe biden is not a candidate hillary clinton would get two-thirds of biden s supporters pushing her up to 56% and bernie sanders would pick up the rest and move up to 32%. joining us now richard wolffe, executive editor of msnbc.com and margie, democratic pollster for purple strategies. margie, these polls with biden in, biden out, clearly show that he does more damage to hillary clinton than to bernie sanders, but what they don t show is any upward movement for him over the last, say, 60 days.