steve rattner, harold ford jr., julie pace still with us from washington and joining us at the table in new york political columnist for time magazine, joe klein. hi, joe. hey, mika. great to have you here. hillary starting her book tour. hillary starting her book tour. big interviews. you write in time magazine the myth of inevitable presidential campaigns can t be managed like book tours. they tend to be overwhelmed by events and trivialities. a recent politico article about clinton in the press one of her advisors is quoted saying look, she hates you that is not going to change. her top communication advisors argued that clinton really didn t hate the press. she brought bagels to the back of the bus. bringing bagels to the back of the bus is an embarrassingly transparent ploy. i ve seen her candor more than once but always off the record. if hillary clinton hopes to succeed she will have to drop
calibrate the separation from her predecessor. remember the roger mudd moment in 1980. i think that s what we re looking at. roger mudd asks teddy kennedy why do you want to be president of the united states and he has no answer. what answer does hillary have when part of that answer has to be being critical of barack obama. and the fact that hillary clinton believes, like bill clinton believes, that barack obama doesn t know how to run the white house, doesn t know how to run washington, doesn t know how to run america and doesn t know how to run foreign policy. she believes it. bill clinton believes it. she cannot say it. i know. therein lies a problem. they believe it to their core but they can t say it. how do you run a campaign on that? julie pace, why was she chosen as secretary of state? well, she was chosen for a couple reasons. a big one why? what was the bottom line? a big one, the optics of bringing in obama s chief democratic rival, bringing her into the cir
from the thirsts of marco rubio to the influence of ted cruz. here are 2013 s top lines. are you kidding me? the person who had the worst year in washington is obama. you know that sheldon aid ellison spent 100 million dollars of his own last year on negative ads. you ve got to really dislike me to spend that money. did you know going in you were going to win? i for sure did. i think we were convinced we would win. are you kidding me? i know i ve let a lot of people down but i ve learned tough lessons. where do you get the morality to judge me. i do not use crack cocaine, nor am i an addict of crack cocaine. have you purchased illegal drugs in the last two years? yes, i have. are you kidding me? false choices like the one
it seems john boehner may have found some spine, there is some hope for him. is it going to matter? it strikes me that the cuckoo caucus isn t listening to him anyway. they re listen to go ted cruz. i was completely bearish. when i look back on everyone s predictions, i was predicting immigration would never go anywhere. this is a function of both sides. 2013 was the year in which both parties proved to us they don t really want to run washington. you had the republicans actively trying to lose everything by shutting down the government. and then you had democrats turning back around and squandering that political goodwill by screwing up the rollup of healthcare.gov. so here we had a year in which nobody wanted to win. they just wanted the other guys to win the election. now let s see in 2014 if anybody actually really does want to win the mid terms. actually, jonathan, it struck me everybody is trying to get out of the way of the other guy imploding. what they perceived as an impl
that s why the stakes for these games are important. he s popular in some parts of the world. arguing that western democracy is failing. right. our oh problems in washington. so this is a really interesting moment to see, can he provide security, and does the putin style of authoritarian rule gain credibility or not in the next six weeks. and you know, ann, final question to you. the white house has actually offered support in security preparations. i guess the sense they have made it clear they re willing to be helpful in terms of counterterrorism around the sochi olympics, not necessarily wanting to get involved in counter frichl in other part of the country. but it s unclear at this point whether or not the russians have accepted the assistance from the americans. no. it s not clear whether they have accepted this new offer, which was sort of made in slightly an odd back hand way today. there is a long history of u.s./russian counterterrorism cooperation in the caucuses an