approval rating amongst registered voters is at just 40% there. can he move the needle? i think that finding reflects the kind of tone deafness that he s had on the terrorism issue in the last few months. and he tried to address this in an oval office speech. not very successful. it was his second kind of unsuccessful effort to get in tune with where the american public is on this issue. you will see him make a third effort in the state of the union to convince people that he is responding appropriately to paris and sanbernardino. that will entail a good chunk of that foreign policy part of his speech. why is it a week earlier? why a week earlier? you know, i m going to say something we don t say very often on television. i don t know why they are doing it earlier. jonathan alter does not know.
going, are you kidding me? it s very interesting. first of all, republicans tend to prioritize terrorism much more as an issue. one of the things you saw in the wake of san bernardino immediately is republicans focused on it as terrorism issue. democrats focused on it as a gun control issue. the big shift is not in the republican party. it s remained squarely against any gun control legislation for a long time now. the shift is the democrats who used to be afraid of this issue because they were afraid of losing working class white voters who might be sympathetic to them on economic issues have gone all in. hillary clinton has gone all in as the democrat party has moved to the left. 2016 will be a fascinating test of whether the old rules about gun politics, which is that they help the republicans and hurt the democrats, whether those have changed or not. so, ron, interesting, do you think this is now a winning issue in terms of the democrats? they see they can get some
calm the nation by not overreacting. the problem with that is that, one, he actually made the nation more nervous by underreacting. if you see david ignatius by not going early and not overreacting he did wanted to make sure everyone did not have irrational fears. ignatius is a the washington post apologist for president obama. now, how does this tie into your top story of the week? well, i still think that the terrorism issue is the most important one, especially because we had and you have the second one, the democrats debate on saturday night where the number one issue for the first time in this election cycle is national security and terrorism. how do you think the republicans did on the terrorism question? i think they showed a lot of seriousness. who was the most serious of all of them? well, i don t think that any of them are not serious about terror. who is the most serious? about fighting terrorism? yes. i would say the least serious is rand paul. wel
information in a way to not alarm people. their goal here is to inform without alarming and to get people to be smarter about the whole terrorism issue. a work in progress, indeed. pete williams, thank you very much. you bet. that does it for us for this edition of andrea mitchell reports. follow the show on facebook and twitter @mitchellroberts. msnbc live with thomas roberts is here next.
was asked go to san bernadino there is no plans for that yet. why would he do that? the press secretary said the president often goes to places where there has been gun violence. this is gun dumbing down terrorism. he continues to try toy deflect the terrorism issue into the gun control issue he is going to it lose. and i pointed this out before. the irony is more americans are buying guns now because of him. he wants fewer guns they are north going it protect us so i m going to get as many bazookas as i can from the basement. the president want to put forward on more background checks for their point of view what they want to do. it s peaceful people buying a gun. and they will buy more of them. can i make a prediction on this show in the president is leaving next friday. he will go to hawaii for two and a half, three weeks something like that. yeah. i bet you money he stops in san bernadino on the way. all right. republican debate tuesday night and you say. i m ex