and he is a detail guy. in this case, he was in all those meetings. you can say that sometimes he, you know, he is too much lost in the details or he sees too many complexities in. this case, we have trashed him a lot for being overly complex in his thinking sometimes. this is a case where his ability to deal with complex things really helped him evaluate it seems all the pieces of this thing. do you think we have ever picked a president we think is not as smart as we are? do you think that the right will even go that far? they are looking at people like palin they don t think is as smart as they are. do you think we ll ever pick somebody that people say, they are not as smart as me. i want them to be president. do you think so? my parents spent a lot of money on college and tuition that i hope we won t. i think that the shopping will be different for now on. they ll look for somebody as smart as obama. you think? i m not sure. thank you, howard fineman. todd. i think of them
successful in putting out those speeches from 2007 and 2008 in which at the time you ll recall people sort of mocked him. oh, yeah, if you saw bin laden you d take him out. you shouldn t say that out loud because it will hurt our relationship with pakistan. by the way, he s put a lot more troops in afghanistan, ok? he didn t put as many as some of the conservatives wanted. stepped up the present attacks with the drones. and here are the differences between president bush and dick cheney almost literally pushing the 500 daisy cutter bombs down onto iraq and not getting what they were targeting. and the approximate the getting the purpose that he was targeting. there s a difference between being cold blooded and being a sadist. i think presidents had to be cold blooded. i think most people would agree with that. but all the debate about whether osama bin laden was defending himself, whether he had a weapon or didn t have a weapon, let s face it. based on what we are thinking, the
wow. welcome back to hardball. that was of course was president obama talking to a bipartisan dinner meeting of congressional leaders at the white house last night. early poll numbers show some big changes in attitudes. a washington post pugh research center poll conducted monday finds a spike in the country s attitude about how things are going. roughly 1-3 now say they are satisfied. it was 1-4 in march. that s an uptick. the president s personal approval, however, has gone way up in this poll. he is up at plus 18 points now, and was at minus three last month. while the country is positive on the handling of terrorism, his handling of afghanistan still just 40% approve his handling of the economy. duh. it has something to do with reality. can finding osama bin laden prove to be a defining moment for president obama? howard fineman is the director for the huffington post. and todd perdham is the national editor. do i have to ask what republicans secular
cannonization. the guy would be on mt. rushmore if w. had done this. carving the stone tonight, right? no question. the spiking of the ball. just like what george w. did, you know, on the aircraft carrier. without even doing it. it wasn t really mission accomplished. this really was mission accomplished. if it was the republicans, there would be fireworks everywhere. todd, do you want to venture a partisan assessment here? i think most republicans were quite effusive of the praise of the president. dick cheney couldn t have been more gracious. but 80% of the republican party give credit to president w. and only 60% of republicans give it to president obama. and that is really screwy. there will always be some guy that didn t get the word. well said. here is more from the washington post /pugh poll. 31% give president bush no credit.
and i think it s a big tipping point in my view, a big tipping point between the parties that didn t exist before. todd? ike was restrained. he didn t use military force hardly at all. carter didn t use it. but there s a difference between restraint most of our lifetime it s been the reverse. but i think one of the things that president obama may have put to rest with this, there will be some people that never like him, but you really can t say he is not a man who has a certain amount of daring, because he did pick the hardest option. and, you know it also resonates what he did with the pirate that time on a smaller case. i think it resonates with the notion that we are not going to mess around. and the white house was quite