Joining me today, correspondent for the Guardian Anna marie cox and former director of speech writing for the president i cant get the words out, im so excited, columnist for the daily beast and cofounder of fenway strategies, jon favreau and Washington Post columnist and msnbc Political Columnist eugene robinson. Joining us now is chuck todd who is also, of course, host of msnbcs the daily rundown. Before we get into the actual policy here, i want to talk about the sort of birdseye view as far as what the president is doing on this great middle class tour if you will. To me it seems like hes trying to build up as much Political Capital as possible before he gets back to washington. What do you think hes trying to do . I think hes trying to talk about what people around kitchen tables are talking about, right . This has been the great disconnect of washington, sometimes its a trap that the Obama White House falls into. Im sure favreau will maybe even cop to that once in a while. When youre in washington, the Washington News and story of the day as much as you want to talk about the economy and talk about tuition prices and talk about the things that are actually impacting every day people that are living in omaha or buffalo or miami, youre dragged down because you have not one but two crises in the middle east. You have the issue with the nsa which i think hurt his own personal credibility. Its become the example of gone washington, if you will, the defending the system as it is versus trying to change some things as he wanted it to be. I think, you know, the aim of this and its been part of this whole, i think over the last six weeks theyve tried to do this every couple weeks, some form of this, this is a bus trip, theyve done Different Things when theyve gone around the country, is to try to send the message to the middle of the country. By middle, middle class voters, middle of the electorate, et cetera, that, hey, he is still focused on the economy, education is part of the economy. We know the high cost of tuition is something that is bothersome to a lot of people. We know you think we havent didnt enough in washington. The question is, the hard part for him, hes in year five. Does he have the credibility with this group of americans who think, okay, yes, he did have his eye on the ball or at a minimum, okay, hes got his eye on the ball more than the other guys so maybe at least ill take his side during this budgetpalooza well go through in a couple of months. This would seem to be pro prompt. One is the congressional fallout in the fall and the legacy piece. If you look at syracuse, scranton, buffalo, 41 of people over the age of 18 in scranton have withdrawn altogether from the work force. In syracuse, the poverty rate is 32 . In buffalo the population dropped 49 since 1960. You are seeing a gutting the no not just rust belt cities but American Cities where poor and working and middleclass families used to thrive. Can the president reverse that . The congressional fight is one thing. The other thing is a very longterm structural issue that the president is now seeking to address. Right. I think thats why he gave that speech at knox college a couple months ago, talking about the unequal nature of our economy right now and how thats been true for quite some time. This is why he ran for president. Right. Thats why hes talking about this today, College Costs are, you know, have everything to do with getting a good job in this economy. People with a College Degree make a lot more than people with its not possible to get a good job without a College Degree right now. Absent cooperation of congress, which doesnt seem like hes going to get, some of them think federal aid is socialism, hes going to try to do everything he can to bring costs down. Eugene, the interesting thing about the proposal that he laid out today, is that it actually is about accountability and would potentially trim the amount of money that the federal government spends on aid or at least make it more efficient, right . Thats the idea. You dont actually need to do it with you can establish these standards as ezra klein writes, without congresss approval. Whats interesting is half of it meets congressional approval. Its the half that comes later and can be done quicker. Thats something the department of education can do on its own. They can build the measure, im not sure they can apply them to federal aid, prorating federal aid to colleges that score higher. It is more complicated than going down the u. S. News list and seeing best party school, check or uncheck. Thats where most federal dollars are going. There are a lot of questions. If youre looking at graduation rates, for example, you dont want to discourage colleges that take a chance on students who are the first in their families to go to college, might have gone to high schools that didnt prepare them as well as some other schools. You want to hold colleges accountable. It is complicated and its good that theyre getting a start on it. Anna, as jonathan chafe pointsous, the government is likening Higher Education policy to Health Care Policy where his administration has devoted Political Capital. The question remains whether the education proposals will be as repellent to the gop as the health care proposals. This is something that maybe everybody could have agreed upon once upon a time. Right. Given the current climate in washington there are so many parallels between whats happened with health care and education policy. This seems to be backwards engineered from what can we accomplish without congresss help. Which you already pointed out. It sort of wants to hijack from the gop and cover sieves as treating this like a marketplace. As much as im in favor of doing everything we can to make colleges more affordable and have more people to have access, this encourages people to think of Higher Education as a consumer good. Were the only country in the world that thinks of it that way. Other countries have much more highly financed Public Education where many colleges are free. We dont think of college that way here. We think of it as shopping around in the marketplace. We think of it as a right, not something people can do to participate in the community as a citizen. Its thought of as an extra. I think if we could change that way of thinking, again, heres a parallel to what hes done with health care, the real solution here is nationalize colleges. Well. Aint gonna happen, okay. We couldnt nationalize health care. The simple solution would be to adopt the same standard and same approach as every other country in the world does, like education. Theres one big difference from health care and education. The perverse incentives are clear. Doctors and hospitals, the more procedures they do, the more they get paid. They want to be efficient. In education, that particular insentative isnt there. It doesnt quite work that way. Its going to take some doing to find where the inefficiencies are before you can root them out. Chuck, i think the fact that as honest, this is sort of the idea of treating the education sphere as a marketplace, would seem to be almost like i dont know, something conservatives could embrace and that sort of middle ground reasonableness seems to sort of be the entire point of this exercise, right . I mean, i want to talk to you about the place that the president finds himself in right now, which is, you know, youve said this, youve pointed this out before. It is august. I think the president did not imagine he was going to be fending off Foreign Policy arrows, questions about surveillance and proposing sort of education reform. This was when he was supposed to be basking in the glow of immigration reform. Theres that. But i wanted to get something that anna said. There is a middle ground. I remember 25 years ago in the education Reform Community there was talk of doing this, which is youve got to figure out a way, how do we move high school from 12th grade to 14th grade, theres a middle ground motto, keep colleges private and public and the way weve done it but how do you basically raise the ceiling of what a minimum education should be in this country. Right . You raise the ceiling in a votech way. 13th, 14th grade could be fellfledged college prep. You move on to college for two or three years in a smaller way in whatever field you want to pursue. But that, you know, somehow that got lost. And we have we no longer thought about, is there a way to raise the ceiling . Part of it is nobody knows how to pay for it. No state wanted to experiment with it, even though there was maybe mandatory of 13th and 14th grade of some form would happen. You bring up the marketplace issue. Thats another troubling part of the student loan crisis that theres been over the last 20 years. Credit was too easy. Universities took advantage of the fact that credit was too easy, too easy to get a second mortgage, too easy for a parent to raise the cost in crazy ways an yet there wasnt a sense of, at the time, for the tune to the think it was that hard to get. Well, borrow the money. Its low interest rates. Its easy to get and then of course universities responded by doing what . Well, they can get away with raising the price. There was a freakonomics aspect to it. The universities, the more expensive they were, the more valuable they seemed, the more exclusive they seemed. Applications would go up for the more expensive institutions, not down. Theres never been the problem is, i think the consumer in this case, which is the high school graduate, thinking about going to college, doesnt values the expensive is the value here, not the cheap. Right . We think of a cheap university as a bad school. I dont know how you change that paradigm. John, we should mention that the president student loan reforms that a lot of folks said didnt really reform Student Loans insofar as the rates can go up to 8. 5 in the next ten years. But, again, this is about this is about a president whos trying to take a pragmatic stance. I think there are issues that shouldnt be that controversial but where washington is right now, these become somehow, they have the haze of, i dont know, socialism over them. I would say these are moderate conservative proposals, less than they are democrat. The president has been saying since the first year we were in the white house, like taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize outofcontrol, rising costs for colleges, a conservative thing to say. I think back to like changing the incentive structure, look, u. S. News world report one of the factors they have in the ranking is how much does the college spend in the more you spend, the higher up in the rankings. The more people you graduate and put into real jobs, then the better value you have. Its not a cheap consumer good but a good value. That way college would be less like buying handbags and more like buying a car. No, thats an even worse metaphor. There is a metaphor in there somewhere. Nbcs chuck todd, thank you. Catch chuck on the daily rundown at 9 00 a. M. Eastern. A new poll shows morelandlamorelan Louisiana Residents for a strong bag that grips the can. Get glad forceflex. Small change, big difference. He is the most awesome 5yearold on the face of the planet. 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With accident forgiveness, they guarantee your rates wont go up just because of an accident. Smart kid. [ voice of dennis ] indeed. Are you in good hands . I thought long and hard about katrina, could i have done something differently. Like land air force one either new orleans or baton rouge. That was george w. Bush discussing the biggest mistakes of his presidency in his final press conference. President obama did not mention that it took two days two days for National Guard troops to arrive after the hurricane struck or three days for fema to acknowledge that there was a situation at the superdome. Instead, our 43rd president wished he had done a different photoop. That clip is from january 12th, 2009, more than three years after the storm laid waste to new orleans and the gulf coast. Heres why were talking about it right now. A new ppp poll finds that 29 of louisiana republicans believe president obama was responsible for the poor response to hurricane katrina. That is more than the 28 who blame george w. Bush, the man actually president at the time and for the three years following it. The results are even more stunning among republicans over the age of 65. 42 of them blame the botched response on barack obama who was at the time a freshman senator in the United States congress. Coming up, the white house expresses concern about a reported chemical weapons attack in syria. While the u. N. Voices strong concern about the allegations. We will discuss chemical reactions and the international waiting game when the New York Times peter baker joins us, coming up next. Time nor the your business entrepreneur of the week. His first job was working at the boardwalk in ocean city, maryland. Today hes the fifth generation of trimpers to run the company. Learn how this iconic Amusement Park is keeping up with the times. Im a hard, hard worker and im working every day. Im a hard, hard worker and im saving all my pay. Small businesses get up earlier and stay later. And to help all that hard work pay off, membership brings out millions of us on Small Business saturday and every day to make shopping small huge. This is what membership is. This is what membership does. Now you can give yourself a kick in the rear v8 vfusion plus energy. Natural energy from green tea plus fruits and veggies. Need a little kick . Ooh couldve had a v8. In the juice aisle. After an alleged chemical attack in syria yesterday killed hundreds of civilians in the damascus suburbs and devastating video footage of the aftermath spread around the world, the International Community is searching for our response. Yesterday, the u. N. Security council held an emergency meeting calling for an investigation into the attacks. But according to the bbc, the Security Council failed to reach an agreement on a toughly worded statement condemning the alleged atrocity. According to diplomatic sources it was russia and china that blunted a more forceful response. As of this afternoon, a total 35 u. N. Security Council Members have called for a Chemical Weapons Team to be dispatched immediately and ban kimoon says the attacks should be investigated without delay. If confirmed, the allegations would represent the largest use of chemical weapons since Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s. In the meantime, the blood letting continues. The ap reported this morning that Bashar Al Assads forces pressed on with a military offensive in eastern damascus, bombing the same suburbs attacked yesterday. Joining us now is the New York TimesWhite House Correspondent peter baker. Peter, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. I want to talk about the inaction. We look at whats happened, the video footage from what is presumed to be a chemical attack in syria is devastating. And yet, we seem to be sitting on our hands. To some degree that seems to be due to intransigence on the part of the russians and chinese. I wonder how much you think the current stalemate between the u. S. And russians and russia and the International Community is affecting u. N. Security council action. Well, it is, obviously. This has been a sore point between the United States and russia for quite a while. The syria situation is looked at differently in moscow than it is in washington. Bashar al assads government has every right to defend itself against the rebels who are attacking. So you see a different attitude there on Vladimir Putins government when they hear reports of attacks by chemical weapons, theyre just as likely to blame them on the rebels than they are on the government. Theyre not eager to have a morrow bust u. N. Investigation. In washington, problems white house is approaching this swhau cautiously. Just today on air force one, the spokesman said, the president is appalled by the president s reports. They dont have information about them and call again on syria to provide more access to investigators. Its a more cost response than say, france, whose foreign minister today said that the International Community should react with force, his words, though not with ground troops. John, you are a word smith. I want to talk about the sman tick semantics about this. The term red line is a thing that was much discussed. David fromme tweeted yesterday, is he threatened to do a if they do b, we dont want to do b, take action, so we must squirm to avoid ac