those are your headlines at this hour. chris and kate, back to you. let s move to our political gut check, all of the stories you need to know, coming straight out of washington. president obama addressing the nation last night and pressing pause on his hard sell for a military strike in syria while diplomacy plays out. so where do things go from here? cnn s chief national correspondent john king is here to break it all down for us. a late night and an early morning for you, john, for many as they watch the speech and try to digest everything that came from it. a lot riding on the president s words last night. you and i have talked about how much impact one speech can have to sway public opinion. how do you think the president did? what do you make of it. i know from talking to people inside the white house, they were optimistic. they had begun to make the case. the president s challenge was very difficult. as you noted, he was trying to make the case that plan a was diplomacy an
strikes. we ve gone through the polling. the american people don t want this. the president had a steep hill to begin with and now when he says there s a potential diplomatic breakthrough out there, it makes it harder to make the case for war. a huge challenge for the president. it makes the speech and how he ll present his case more complicated this evening, it seems, that s for sure. some of our new polling out this morning lays out the challenge that the president is facing today. new cnn poll she s only one in five people say they completely understand the president s policy on syria. so it makes me wonder if it s realistic to think the president will be able to change that dramatically in one speech this evening. no, he s not. the president can use this unique opportunity to talk directly to the american people. to build a foundation for changing those numbers. again, the president s challenge is pro-found, both from a personal and policy standpoint. from a policy standpoint,
transparent, in fixing the system and putting new controls in place. do you think more people need to be fired over there at the irs? well, i think the ig made it clear that there were additional people beyond obviously the obvious one, somebody who made false statements. we re going to the ways and means committee is going to be getting interviews and public testimony, to get further on that. but as you said, many of them are civil service. they can be hard to fire. although you can relieve them from doing things with this level of trust. again, the ig report made it clear that the system did not have the safeguards the american people expect, and that will be part of what the administration and congress as a legislative body will have to do, is create that comfort level, that this will never happen again. so you re accepting the president s challenge to work in a bipartisan way, to make sure that this never happens again. so he says he s going to do whatever is necessary. are
don t have the resources sort of available. the marathon we had the benefit of having the doctors and the police officers and everyone surging to the event. you just don t have what we call the surge capacity in a more sort of isolated area like what we re seeing in texas. that is going to be a challenge on the response side as we see what unfolds. we re getting ready to hear from the president. we re getting ready to hear from religious leaders in boston, this interfaith service will begin at 11:00 a.m. eastern or so. we re also watching the after-effects of the explosion that occurred at that fertilizer plant in west, texas. much more of our special coverage coming up. we went out and asked people a simple question: how old is the oldest person you ve known? we gave people a sticker and had them show us. we learned a lot of us have known someone who s lived well into their 90s. and that s a great thing. but even though we re living longer, one thing that hasn t changed: the officia
the turning point in that first term and helped him get re-elected. this a moment for that kind of soaring oratory and president obama no doubt has been working with his speech writers on what exactly is the right message to convey. we heard from jessica yellin, your senior white house correspondent earlier today, he ll be talking not only about the three victims killed in these attacks but also the heroics as we ve been covering all week, wolf. there were some incredible stories of bravery. people running from this medical tent into the attack. into the smoke. to help people. and juliette and i were just talking about this. if it weren t for the quick actions of all these first responders the casualty count would have been much, much worse. we re seeing similar heroic actions in texas right now. people just rushing to the scene wanting to help. i wish i could say it s the same. the challenge in texas, although you do see that that sense of wanting to help in texas right now, i