policy at that point, 2008. there was. what there wasn t was a big difference between mccain and candidate obama. after the first couple bush and mccain and obama 2008. after the first couple days their policies really aligned a lot more closely on georgia. as susan pointed out, at that time bush was on the sidelines, the more tempting weapon was to go after his handling of the iraq war. that s why bush skated through 08 without that much criticism and why barack obama today is a magnet for criticism. he still has a lot of time in the oval office. republicans looking to get a good position in midterms or in 2016 he makes a nice target. one of the lessons, susan, it doesn t matter what the approach is of the president. putin s going to do what he s going to do. i m glad you made that point because in the end it s about putin. secretary clinton, people may pe debate her points but this is an action that wasn t putin looking at obama in the eye. this was putin op technical
the presidential campaign and really about, you know, bush having invaded iraq and afghanistan, really having limited tools in his tool kit, would he change our approach after november of that year. i think it s important, too, senator mccain is out there being critical of president obama now. he s been a vocal supporter of the ukrainian democracy movement. he flew there to be on the stage during the protests. but there s a big thing on foreign policy. the muscular interventionist wing of the republican party is increasingly outnumbered even within the gop these days. george f. will now with fox, then with abc, was critical of outbound during that same rather. he s one of the few i could find who was consistent saying he didn t think the bush approach to putin was the right one because he peered into putin s soul and trusted the man. there was a real difference between mccain and bush foreign
world war ii era so it s not a particularly politic thing to someday. comparisons to hitler are pretty tox nick the political atmosphere, which is why we saw her immediately trying to clarify them. right. of course millions of russians died fighting hitler s army, but she was not really criticized. in fact, a lot of republicans sald they agree with her. a lot of this going on. a lot of this putin is acting like hitler going around. so probably a lot of republicans actually agree with her. it s part of their narrative, which is that president obama s weakness has enticed putin to take these steps. so, yeah, they re comfortable with this. she might not be if she has to deal with this in january of 2017. she had this to say about vladimir putin s tough-guy persona. as for president putin, i know we are dealing with a tough guy with thin skin. i ve had a lot of experience not only with him but people like him but in particular president putin, aened i know that his
russia would hurt byes in the u.s., businesses in europe? well, the truth is that these u.s. businesses are not the ones that are human rights violators. what we would be doing in the united states is hurting the human rights violators and those who do business with them. i think that kind of aggressive act by putin against u.s. businesses that are not related to this crisis in ukraine, that is purely a punitive action not related to the situation at hand. so i think that putin is putting us to the test. are we going to back up our words with actions or is this going to be a situation like syria where the president said this is a red line, the use of chemical weapons will not be tolerated, we will do limited air strikes and then he pulled back on that. what are we doing with russia? are we threatening with a lot of action that then we won t fulfill, and we have now putin taking us up on our words and
to meet with nato in brussels. everybody is hoping there will be a negotiation but a negotiation that respects ukraine and doesn t ratify a reoccupation by russia of crimea. so it s a real nail-biter right now. but nobody wants to up the rhetoric. everybody wants to cool it in order to try to find a diplomatic solution. and that s what we should be trying to do. let s bring in cnn senior political correspondent brianna keilar. brianna, we ve been getting some reaction from high-profile republicans to clinton s remarks. not exactly what you might expect. arizona senator john mccain a vocal critic of clinton s handling of the benghazi terrorist attack as well as other things she did as secretary of state. he tweeted today, she s right on this comparison. marco rubio agreed with clint clinton s take saying there are similarities between putin and hitler s approach. no surprise i suppose she s more