romney or perry, pick your poison, and let s play hardball. good evening. the fall political season is on, and the race for the republican nomination is going down to rick perry or mitt romney. i love that question, does he think either of them will be easy? that s our top story tonight. then we could have seen this coming. republicans rumbling about president obama s job plan, saying they don t want to give him a political victory. that s why the president needs to take this flight straight to republicans and highlight projects, work that needs doing in their own district. all politics is local. tomorrow president obama goes to ohio, home of house speaker john boehner, and boehner s district is home to 99 bridges that need repair, structurally deficient. should this help the president s argument? we think so. we begin with which candidate president obama wants to run again. thank god we have the right people here. howard fine man, his titles get longer and more impre
focus on other things and mcchrystal wants to do whatever it takes to win the war. larry: michael, you want to comment? no, i think peter has it exactly right. if you look at the speech president obama made last march of 2009, he specifically says, my goal is to narrow the aims of the u.s. effort in afghanistan. a year later, those aims under the command of general mcchrystal had expanded ex po nesh shully. larry: what do you think of petraeus coming on the scene? i think there s a couple reasons he was chosen. there s not going to be a change in strategy immediately. think the president did what he had to do today. every person i know who i ve talked to says i d be gone too.
about our strategy. nor do i make this decision out of any sense of personal insult. stan mcchrystal has always shown great courtesy and carried out my orders faithfully. i ve got great admiration for him and for his long record of service in uniform. larry: joining us, ari fleisher, former white house spokesman. pete hesef is president of vets for freedom. he s an iraqi war veteran. peter barnhart is the author of theic russ syndrome, a history of american hubris. and john saltz returns, co-founder and chair of vets.org. he served as a captain during operation iraqi freedom. staying with us from kabul is rolling stone s michael hastings who wrote that bombshell article about general mcchrystal what will be
other the other public comments he makes, they re all cautiously optimistic. even calling them cautiously optimistic might be an optimistic way to characterize them. afghanistan being a long hard fight. so i think it s you know, i think there s definitely a question of how much how confident they believe they were in an eventual win. larry: peter is this a demotion for petraeus? peter beinart? well, on paper, but it also just adds to the myth of petraeus as, you know, the one guy who can really save us in this circumstance. and certainly if petraeus can turn the war in afghanistan around, his legend will become even greater. but i think the fundamental question that we really need to be focusing on is, is this a coherent policy? i agree with what everyone else has said here. it s not at all realistic to think we re going to have made a lot of progress by the time we ve reached this deadline.
serious problems with it. one of the main ones being the relationship between the military and civilian side. but i think if you read the article, it s not so much about general mcchrystal, it s about using general mcchrystal to look at some of the wider policy problems. and as the gentleman mentioned, the sort of inflammatory comments that were said, get at these very real and very serious tensions between the civilian side and military side. larry: we ll get the thoughts of peter barnhart and john saltz when we come back. don t go away one word turns innovative design