to see if significant minds have changed or policy has changed. i will say with the caveat he has a soapbox. he is using it. when you take a look at what mayor bloomberg has done when it comes to smoking ban, tax regulation. soda ban, the headphone ban. you re going down the list. but i think it s a little too early to tell, but i do think he s an influential figure. robert is right, but he s put his money where his mouth is. you look at that race in california. he lost the primary because of the gun issue. in the suburbs of chicago he put some serious money behind it. you think there s a tectonics shift under way. he has the ability to spend and is spending. he makes is his issue. let s talk wayne lapierre, head of the nra. he s addressing them this week. what kind of reception will
around halloween, republicans were neck and neck in the polls. if you take a look at the polling data, everything suggest thad mitt romney was going to win and quite frankly was going to win fairly big, and so what the republican party needs do is reinvent itself and see how relevant it can be. robert trainham, thank you so much. former congress patrick murphy. thanks to both of you. good to see you in the flush. we ll return to the gun debate as well as we take a close look, a close look at gun violence in the president s hometown. we re going to talk about what s been happening in chicago. first, though, a look back to the day the man who killed mlk jr. went to jail and the discussion that people were really having about his case.
why does there seem to be such a disconnection between nra and its membership? because it s the lobbyist group in washington and the spokespeople. they re stopping commonsense gun safety laws going in effect. they re my parents and your parents who are saying we re for this, we don t want these kids we don t want 20 first graders to be mored in their seats in connecticut. robert, switch gears with me really quickly here. perhaps you ve heard about it. the rnc s launched a listening tour. reince priebus has announced this. this is an effort to learn what happened. they know what happened. how long does the autopsy take? a couple of months, and here s why. the republicans were flying blindly. you know this, craig. if you take a look at the tape
robert, i ll begin with you because i want to go first to that digging in one. the hill reports speaker john boehner has told fellow republicans he is absolutely done negotiating one-on-one with the president. at the same time, the president says no compromise. what kind of bargaining chips do republicans have at this point? oh, my goodness, alex, they have a huge bargaining chip coming up, and that s called the debt ceiling. congress racks up the bills, and congress has to pay those bills. we had this fight last year. we saw a huge, huge who was going to blink first, and obviously president obama blinked. this time around the republicans, i would assume, will most likely try to use that chit again and say, look, mr. president, look american people, let s have a philosophical conversation here about our debt and how much we really can afford. doug, same question to you relative to the democrats. what kind of bargaining chips do they have right now? i don t see the president backi
seems not all red jars are created equal. olay regenerist. president obama has settled on former nebraska senator chuck hagel has secretary of defense. an official announcement is expected for tomorrow. today s topics, digging in, mean spirited, and the must reads for this week. democratic strategist and former senior adviser to president hillary clinton campaign, doug hathaway. editor of nbc news hour. and former bush/cheney senior adviser robert trainham. welcome to the three of you.