i took my white gloves, willie, to get cleaned and they are going to tax that. you know, i always wear my white gloves when i come in. to touch the silver. exactly. you know what de blasio said about snow. god bring it, god can take it away. no, that was marion berry a decade ago. we ll stay with this theme as unfair as it is, as our welcome gift to the new mayor. i hear he s a great guy. he s a good guy. why can t he fix the snow? he is. you have to go to working class neighborhoods. it is true. it is true. my streets there were much clearer than they are in manhattan. not even a close call. i came about 50 blocks through manhattan and every street was plowed. i ll stay with the joke and theme because it s fun but every street was plowed beautifully. other than that he s not
that tree. if i can just right. let s move now to our political gut check of the morning. president obama is recommitting himself to closing the growing gap between the rich and the poor. in a speech he delivered from one of washington s working class neighborhoods, he said making the economy work for all americans is in his words the defining challenge of our time. here to talk more about this, john avlon, cnn political analyst and executive editor of the daily beast. good morning, john. good morning. the president has talked about this and pushed to are this issue before. why now? the president and white house is pushing this idea. he wants to make this a signature issue of his second term. first of all going back to his roots as a community organizer, this is a president who cares about these issues. thiscy fundamental fault line in the current debate inside the democratic party. you have the centrist democrats of the bill clinton era that were always closest to business
i think he was he saw civil rights even after he had thrown the president s power in back of it as a political problem. not just in the south, in the white working class neighborhoods of the north. i think we would have gone the there because the moral force was strong but it would have been less successful. your gut feeling, would he have become a truly great president, do you think? it s very hard to cut through what the death meant and how that put him in a different category. i think he would have been seen by historians as a reasonably successful president. . and avoiding world war iii gets a lot of of points from me. jeff greenfield, thank you very much indeed. called if kennedy lived fascinating thesis. we ll be right back. i got this.
the president s power in back of it as a political problem. not just in the south, in the white working class neighborhoods of the north. i think we would have gone the there because the moral force was strong but it would have been less successful. your gut feeling, would he have become a truly great president, do you think? it s very hard to cut through what the death meant and how that put him in a different category. i think he would have been seen by historians as a reasonably successful president. and avoiding world war iii gets a lot of of points from me. jeff greenfield, thank you very much indeed. called if kennedy lived fascinating thesis. we ll be right back.
nuisance abatement activities. we have homes that have rats in them. we have homes that have broken windows and kids are having parties in them. imagine if you lived next door, what that is doing to your property value. it s pulling it down. is the insurance company going to continue to insure you when you live next-door to a risk? and again, these are middle class, working class, african-american, latino neighborhoods that we re comparing to white middle class and working class neighborhoods. so, joan, let me ask you this. you see the sort of empirical evidence. there hasn t been a ruling yet in the courts. when you see that, do you think this is purposeful, racial discrimination or do you think there s probably something going on here that leads to this kind of racial inequality, but it s probably not purposeful on the part of boa. it s purposeful neglect. there s though doubt of that. there are some neighborhoods that simply don t get the attention. there s a great group well,