cold. i take your sign hospitality as a sign of things to come. tony perkins and gary bauer and the politics of top secret with homeland security xharn jor joe lieberman and congressman peter king. i m candy crowley. and this is state of the union. the president s congressional to-do list is as broad as it is unlikely to pass. job outsourcing, mortgages, small business tax credits, clean energy, and jobs for vets. the beauty of the president s to-do list, what doesn t get done becomes campaign fodder. the question is whether congress will be anything more this year than a campaign prop. joining me now from springfield, illinois, the number two democrat in the senate, dick durbin, and here in washington the man charged with electing more republicans to the senate, senator john cornyn. thank you both for being here. let me start out, i want to play something that senator durbin said in mid-april to kind of kick off our conversation. senator, let he remind you of what yo
joe klein said this week the example where mitt romney stands up to anything, the sort of direction it s moving. he never says, stop, i disagree with that. he never says, i disagree with what s going on. he just sort of goes along with the foreign policy, the tax policy. he never says, wait a minute, i m mitt romney, i m different than you, let me explain. and i m going to take my lumps and stand up for something unpopular but this is what i believe. part of what michael was saying, it was as though he wanted to have it both ways. he wanted to be a figure of tolerance where he said we have this guy, he s a hawk, he s very credible, we don t care if he s gay. he wanted credit to do it, and he it did it briefly, but then he didn t have the courage of his convictions and he wasn t able to dig in his heels and say, look, you guys, i hired him and i want him to stay. governor romney could still
Obama administration, something that he agrees the obama administration. but he didn t do that. instead he tried to duck and weave, bob his way out of it and was unsuccessful. why didn t he get in trouble for this at his fancy private school that has things about all these things? maybe because his old man was governor. maybe because it was favoritism shown to him everyday of his life as he was proceeding through high school. oh, an ugly won. jonathan k. park, thank you very much. thanks, lawrence. coming up, president obama uses a new politically powerful phrase, etch-a-sketch in response to mitt romney s unbelievable claim of credit for saving the auto industry. and, conservatives are lying about the history of marriage, that it has always been for thousands of years a union between one man and one woman. the only way they can say that is they have never read their bibles. that is in tonight s rewrite. i m michael bazinet,
Want to judge mitt romney by our standards of today. we don t want to go back 50 years and impose those standards. how is our standard different from then? i think we are more cognizant of the damage that bullying does, and particularly anti-gay bullying. so i m not going to give him a pass for it, but i kind of agree with michael. you want to give a younger person compassion. but what you can judge by the standards of today is his response, and since we live in a culture where we have the it gets better videos where prominent people are telling young, gay teenagers, it gets better, and hang in there, to have him respond this way is really a missed opportunity for empathy. we re looking for who this guy is. most people have never met mitt romney personally, and i think we connected the dots. one dot is this story, which i think is probably true, but he said he forgot it. another one was this week where he had a staff member run off
The kid is muted, quiet, tamed. joan walsh, this is the novel. this is the stuff you read about in a separate piece by john knowles. this is the stuff we all remember in school, the cruelty of school, how cruel it can be. your thoughts? well, i really appreciate michael s candor about the way the campaign handled it, but i think it goes slightly deeper than that, chris, because when you listen to mitt chuckle, he dhubl chuckles after he hears four times. exactly, he chuckles after he hears the description of what happened. a, i find it impossible to believe he doesn t remember. but b, if i gave him the benefit of the doubt and said maybe it slipped his mind, to hear it and to chuckle? i mean, there is really a kind of empathy deficit there where if someone said to me, you did this and i heard it, i wouldn t laugh. i would be horrified and i would say, i don t remember that, but if i did, that was a terrible thing to do. and it s not that we don t