poor kids. it's unbelievable. block the vote, republicans launch a full-scale attack on voting rights across the country. but the countering attack is gaining momentum. no surrender, president obama steps up the fight for the middle class. hey, republicans, does it seem you're starting to sweat? >> how can you fight tooth and nail to protect high-end tax breaks for the wealthiest americans and yet barely lift a finger to prevent taxes going up for 160 million americans who really need the help? >> welcome to "politics nation." i'm al sharpton. people across america are demanding that newt gingrich apologize for the insulting way he spoke about poor children in this nation by saying they and their parents don't know what it's like to work. but instead of reaching out to the poor, newt met with a billionaire. this afternoon, newt and donald trump met at the trump tower here in manhattan. newt asked trump of all people for help in addressing poverty. >> i've asked him to take one of the poorer schools in new york and basically offer at least ten apprenti apprenticeships to kids from the school to get them into the world of work. >> i thought it was a great idea. we call it an apprenticeship. we're going to be picking ten young wonderful children and we're going to make them apprenti and have a little fun with it. >> that's your solution to 15 million kids living in poverty? today newt also said there are a few people in housing projects, very few, that he claims work at all. >> talking about the importance of work, particularly as it relates to people who are in areas where there are public housing, et cetera, where there are relatively few people who go to work. if you look at the largest urban housing projects, you'll find areas who have remarkably little work experience. >> late last week, newt suggested poor kids had two career paths -- become a janitor or become a pimp or prostitute. >> what if they cleaned out the bathrooms and what if they mopped the floors? what if they were learning to work, learning to earn money? they didn't have to become a pimp or a prostitute or a drug dealer. >> it's become his path to the nomination. >> it is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods in trapping children -- first of all in child laws which are truly stupid. most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors. have one master janitors and have local students take care of the schools. >> gop voters could have punished newt for saying something so outrageous. instead, they've come to like him more, not less. his average poll rating has shot up 5% since he said poor kids could be janitors. let me say friday night when i address this had issue, i got a lot of you on tweet that were saying i got emotional. i got emotional because many of us have struggled to talk about what is going on with working poor people in this country and to try to give hope to those kids who like me came out of that poverty to know we can make it and be something. for someone seeking the presidency to try to dash those hopes and to try and stereotype a whole section of this country whose jobs have been outsourced, who's been laid off, who get up and work every day and sometimes go to two or three jobs is unpardonable. you're not running for an emmy, newt, you're running for the president. this is not a reality show. it's about reality. joining me is dana milbank and "new york times" columnist charles blow. he wrote on article called "newt's war on poor children." thank you both for being with me. charles is one of my favorite columnists. i read his articles every saturday morning. but you were off the chain, as they say, this saturday. what is newt saying -- is this what the base of the gop want to hear? >> i don't know if it's what they want. but they do respond so this sort of demonization of the poor. you can only take him at what he says. you can't say, what he meant was -- i can only analyze what the man says. and he's saying that these very poor kids don't have anyone around them who works. that is not true. >> hold one minute. you wrote accurately, 3 out of 4 people living below the poverty line have a job. this is in your column. >> absolutely. >> i quoted some data on friday night. but i was glad that you put it in "the new york times" on saturday because most -- not most, but a lot of people don't understand that people that are poor are not necessarily people that don't work. >> absolutely. and what newt was saying was they don't have a habit of getting up and going to work on monday and staying all day. that's probably true because they have a habit of getting up at night and working all night and working on the weekends because a 9:00 to 5:00 monday to friday is actually a luxury for mihm who are actually working job that is don't pay enough to get you out of poverty. so everything about that comment was degrading because a lot of it was absolutely false. and even if you say -- if you look at the absolute poorest kids in the absolute poorest areas -- we looked at areas where 30% of the households are poor or more, even among that group, a third work and in the poorest areas, 66% of kids in that area live with a parent who works. so even if the parent that you're living with is not working, you see people constantly coming and going back and forth to work. this idea that nobody in these neighborhoods is working is just outrageous. >> what i said on friday night, if newt came to any urban center, come to new york, chicago, wherever, go to a housing project early in the morning, you see floods of people rushing to the subways or to the public transportation to go to work. what is he talking about, young kids in those areas don't understand a work ethic? but, dana, the politics of this is that newt is going up in the polls, which is even more alarming to me. >> yeah, reverend, i suspect one may not be related to the other. >> i hope not. >> take a step back here. it's not just newt going back to 1995, 1996 and the welfare debate. he's going back to the guilded age. donald trump and newt gingrich are members of the same country club here. and now they're getting together and talking about, we're going to repeal the child labor laws here and have child january tors. as the father of a 7-year-old trying to get her to clean her room, i suggest to you the idea of a child janitor program is not going to go anywhere. but newt gingrich has a way of spouting out whatever is in his pr professorial mind at the moment. when you get this kind of spotlight over and over again, the public is gradually going to see that the guy is a little bit erratic once you see him all the time. >> let me say this, though. he's not alone. it seems like the whole cast of republican candidates -- and i say cast since they're going into the reality show business now -- have declared a war on the poor. look at this. >> continuing to pay people unemployment compensation is a disincentive for them to seek new work. >> accountability in welfare and accountability in unemployment benefits is going to be a prime thing that we focus on in this election. i so want drug testing. i so want it. >> we have been putting so much entitlement into our government that we really have spoiled our citizenry and said, you don't want the jobs that are available. >> if you don't have a job and you're not rich, blame yourself. >> and those are not all candidates other than -- well, even the last one is no longer a candidate. but this is like what we're hearing, charles. and the thing that bothers me. as you know, president obama had newt gingrich and i go out with education secretary duncan in '09 visiting schools. newt knows better because we went to inner city schools. he saw kids that absolutely were striving for educational excellence and came from families, some with single parents who worked every day. he knows better. they're feeding into this kind of welfare -- as dana said, 1994-1995 politics and that is what is so disturbing. >> this is why i don't mind taking him to the woodshed, is because newt knows better. newt know that is child labor laws are meant to protect children from being exploited, not to prevent them from working. in new york state, if you're 14 years old, you can get a job. but they want to make sure you're healthy, that you don't work so many hours that that you can't do your homework. he knows better. he's basically playing to a stereotype. that is wrong and he knows it. sometimes he spouts off. but he's had this before him -- three or four days, come back at it several times. has yet to apologize, has yet to make it right. so he should be taken to the woodshed on this. >> and he showed his repentance that he wanted to show himself to be accounble by going to donald trump, that's how you really straighten out your position on poverty. but, dana, he's managed to do one thing. if you think president obama did something getting newt and i together for a minute, he got whoopi and elisabeth hasselbeck together today. look at this. >> i've been as offended as i've been for a long time. to paint all children who are not lucky enough to be wealthy as potential pimps and prostitutes, you're talking about dignity -- you didn't give them any dignity when you made this statement. >> that won't work. it's distant. there's no heart in it. i don't understand how he could even defend those statements again. >> i couldn't believe it, dana. elisabeth and whoopi and rev al on the same page. >> it's not as good as seeing you and newt together there in the white house driveway. but i'll give you that -- it's a close second. the politics here can be dangerous, not in the republican primary. but when you go for the independent centrist voters, they're okay with you picking on people living on welfare. but it's different when you're talking about kids and going after unemployment insurance available to 15 million americans. it's different when you go after medicare which tens of millions of americans are relying on. these aren't classic welfare programs. these are broadly accepted programs and talking about our children. >> dana milbank, charles blow, thanks for coming in. thank you both for your time. ahead, the fight to keep money in the pockets of 160 million americans continues. but republicans are fighting against it. plus, nancy pelosi says she might spill the secrets of newt. we're talking about thousands of pages of secrets. and we're exposing the gop effort to suppress minority votes in our special series "block the vote" starting tonight. you're watching "politics nation" on msnbc. usa prime credit... this peggy... hi, i'm cashing in my points... peggy? 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[ male announcer ] yes, it is. that's the cold truth! the republican effort to suppress the vote, it may be a big factor next year. we investigate it tonight. that's next. that's relied on tg children holiday joy, and while it doesn't travel by sleigh or reindeer, it does get around... in fact, every year duracell sends loads of batteries to the mattel children's hospital, u.c.l.a. of course, children here and everywhere don't really think about which battery makes their toy run... but, still... you'd never want to disappoint. duracell. trusted everywhere. as we've been reporting, the republican campaign is reaching a fever pitch. but behind the scenes, there's a quieter campaign. republicans don't talk much about it. it is there, it is widespread and it is a real threat to the democrats' chances in the election. i'm talking about the full-on gop effort to change voting laws that could have a dramatic effect next year. 25 voter suppression laws have passed in 14 states this year alone. they're aimed at everything havestringing early voting periods and passing photo id requirements to restricting voter registration. it's a full-court press to restrict voting, which is a fundamental civil right. republicans justify these laws by hopping on about voter fraud. but a five-year study by the bush justice department found only 86 cases of fraud out of more than 3 million votes cast. that's 0.00003%. an imaginary problem with a very threatening solution. joining me now, two champions for voters everywhere, ben jealous, president of the naacp. they're out with a new report today, "blocking the vote, why the struggle to secure voting rights for people of color continues in the eve of the 2012 let me ask you th elections." and george gresham, president of united states health care workers east. he marched for me with jobs for justice in october. we talked about that issue there, he did in his speech. and we're all coming together this saturday. friday we were talking about the the 25 cities. saturday, we're all in one city, new york, marching from the brothers helping to finance this to the united nations. thanks to both of you for joining me tonight. >> thank you. >> george, this is a civil right. whether you're a democrat, republican. the reason that the labor and civil rights groups along with you and sciu and all of us are all coming together is because this really undermines the voting rights movement in this country. >> absolutely. what's happening right now in this country, it seems that the powers that they want to take away what we've worked years and years for. i grew up in the south and in segregation and watched the civil rights movement achieve what working people need together. and just when we came together in 2008, working people all around the country, to vote for hope, to stand up for something for working people, they're changing the rules now and they're bringing it back to the bad old days, talking about voter fraud. the only fraud is the idea that there is voter fraud as a way to suppress the vote in the country. >> ben, one of the things they're using is photo id. in the report, the naacp and the legal defense fund has come out with, you outline many of those areas. i was in florida over the weekend. they are stopping sunday voting in states like florida where you had soul to the poles and you've come out in the report in photo id, african-americans, 25%, latino americans, 16%, white americans, 8%. this is skewed in a way that directly affects minorities at a higher impact, which really will flip a lot of those districts. >> that are's. and as you said, it's really a series of attacks going on across the country. the state of wisconsin, we know fully one-half of blacks and fully one-half latinos in wisconsin do not have a valid driver's license or id, one where the address matches up with where they vote. that's quite simply because -- two things, one, if you're too poor to have a car, you tend not to have a driver's license in the first place. secondly, if you rent and you move frequently and there's a whole group of renters in this country who move like every six months, when you show up to vote, you may live one place but your id still has some other place on it. then you go down to the state of texas, in texas, they say, look, you can vote with your gun license but you can't vote with your student id. when you look into -- ground zero for student voting rights in texas has often been out at prairie view. this is a black college where there have been wars fought in that town trying to make it possible for black students to get to the polling place. there's all sorts of battles over the years, very much targeted at disenfranchising students and especially black students. then you shift over to georgia that has this law that says if you don't have a zawahixeroxed attached -- >> a xeroxed copy -- this is crazy. the stuff they're saying doesn't make sense. >> you and i have been involved in voter registration our entire lives. we've been throw countless voter registration drives. never once have we been able to push one of those off while pushing a xerox machine down the street. they have said, look, we're not going to register voters in florida so long as these rules stay in place. >> let me say this, you and i -- ben and i all of our lives have been in voter registration. but you and i have been in the trenches for these legal battles. karl rove has made no bones about that there's a political strategy to this. and i think people need to understand that. let me show you -- karl rove openly wrote about targeting black voter turnout in "the wall street journal," an op ed he wrote -- why obama is likely to lose in 2012. he writes, even a small drop in the share of black voters would wipe out his winning margin in north carolina. if you look at the states that ben is talking about and that we all are raising and you bring down a percentage just based on voter id or any of the other things, you wipe out the margin of victory in some critical states for the democrats. >> absolutely. what they can't deal with is they can't win with the issues. they know that working people in this country are starting to get fed up when you see the 99% movement, when you see working people of all stripes standing up together in 2008. there was something that many of us thought that we would never see, that people stood up for hope, that people in this country said, despite the fact of color, we're going to go for people that work for us, that we can afford no longer to be stuck on the issue of race. we need to be stuck on the issue of class, of working class. so they can't beat us with the issues. so now they change the games. they changed the game. they changed the rules. but i can tell you right now, all they're doing in this country is waking up working people. they're not going to get away with it. we're going to arm our people to make sure that they have what it takes to get votes. but we need the public to stand up. we need the public to stand up and say, we're not going back to those old days again. we're not going back to the days when people were stopped from voting in the south, whether there was poll tax or whether there were education tests that people had to do. similar things are happening now. they're just trying to do it in a different, more intelligent way. and under the disguise that they're trying to protect working people. that's as phony as when you have a right to work state that makes it hard for people to organize and saying you're doing it for working people. it's a sham. >> ben, we have to go, but we're doing house call or office call, we're going to deliver room service to the cope brothers on saturday. >> they can text stand to 62227, or go to stand4freedom.org. >> friday, we're in 25 cities. we've been talking about it. and then saturday, we're all coming together with the naacp, sciu, all of us, from the coke brothers to the u.n. ben, george, thanks to both of you for your time. >> thank you for having us. >> this week, we'll continue to focus on the issue of the effort to suppress the vote. ahead, president obama won't stop fighting for the middle class. he challenged republicans big-time today. stay with us. all energy development comes with some risk, but proven technologies allow natural gas producers to supply affordable, cleaner energy, while protecting our environment. across america, these technologies protect air - by monitoring air quality and reducing