john: i am john heilemann. mark: and i am mark halperin. you might want to consider a certain tv show. with all due respect. on the show, baltimore, but first, hillary clinton. she announced her campaign in a video, where she did not say much about anything. she then did some small-scale events in new hampshire that many thought were equally uneventful, but today for the first time, she took to a very big stage, an actual stage, and gave a very big speech at

columbia university. this was a major speech, and for one thing, she was darn good. candidate hillary clinton: indeed, it is a time for wisdom, for, yet again, the family of a young, black man is grieving a life cut short. yet again, the streets of an american city are marred by violence, by shattered glass and shouts of anger and shows of force. yet again, a community is reeling, its fault lines laid bare, and its bonds of trust and respect breeds. mark: john, we are going to talk more in detail about it, but your first cut on how hillary clinton did in her first policy speech. john: let's start by the fact that i and you and many others have been critical of her for

being substance free, for not putting out more of a policy agenda, but here she is stepping forward this situation still playing out, the worst of it hopefully over, and seizing the agenda on a big issue. i thought the performance was strong. i thought the substance was a little thinner, but the timing was impeccable, and you have to give her credit for being out there in the lead. mark: we want to pay our due, as we have been all week, but i have to say a purely political point of view, a performance point of view, this was the best-ever campaign to date, a very strong speech, very well written, and she made it clear to people that she was showing them her heart. i think this was the most authentic emotive she has been in a well-crafted speech off teleprompter. i think it is the best speech of hers to date. john: and turned around quickly and well.

if you read it on the page, the speech was a well written speech. it is clear that she has been working on this even before the baltimore flareup happened, and i am impressed by it. it not only showed off her and her heart but also showed off her team as being on the ball. mark: we will look at more of what she said and how she said it in our next segment, but for now, we want to move on to the other potential presidential candidates, also speaking out today. almost everyone has weighed in in one way or another, and martin o'malley flew back to deal with the crisis and talk to our reporter in a neighborhood about his reaction to the latest events. >> you have to a better job of policing your police and doing a better job of intervening and doing a better job with drug treatment. mr. o'malley: the anger has a

lot to do with the underlying hopelessness of huge swaths of our country. it is that the unemployment rates, the lack of summer job opportunities. it is about wages that have been declining over the last years rather than rising. mark: and from john kasich on he signed an executive order for a task force he proposed last year after the protests in ferguson missouri, and in cleveland, at a signing in columbus, governor kasich talked about it. governor kasich: we will look at other parts of the country.

it is not acceptable because our friends in the african-american community, it is not accessible to have a gap. we will bridge this gap, and it will take everyone to participate in this. we do not want to have people in the streets earning buildings, hating one another. we have to do this. it has to work, and it will work. mark: senator ted cruz spoke out a little while ago and laid some of the blame on president obama. he said president obama has divided us and enflamed race relations. john, reactions from the potential 2016ers, and if you look at the range of the people we just talked about, who is handling it well, and who is not handling it well? john: well, john kasich, that is a very good speech on his part. we have known he has done a lot to increase the support in ohio.

clearly emotional and very strong comments. he is going to have to look hard at the cleveland police department if he wants to be serious about this, and i think the worst of this is rand paul who i know has said a few things lately, but he said he was glad he did not have to stop and get out of a train when things were at his worst, and that has been the worst reaction so far. mark: and jeb bush has responded but not really done what hillary clinton done today, and this is a national moment, and i think hillary clinton today set the bar. certainly people are scrutinizing martin o'malley and his record, but he will have to look at how to turn this into a positive situation. this is a situation he would normally thrive on. staying with baltimore, the city is still not back to normal, and the first side of that was today at camden yards, today's game with a nearly empty stadium, no

fans allowed in, and here is one of the weirdest things we saw, with during the pregame, the announcer and the hall of fame pitcher. announcer: there will be people looking in. why even play the game? well, i think the answer to that is as buck showalter and others said, we do want to bring some kind of normalcy back to the city. mark: so no sooner were the commentators done, they have a big first-inning, including this home run you will see rattling around in the right field seats. announcer: he got a hold that one. will it stay there, and goodbye, home run! mark: so the fans were kept outside, some of them at the gates to watch the game, peering through, and the players inside the stadium kind of made light of the situation they found themselves in.

waving to the imaginary band and signing some imaginary, pretend autographs. the sad thing is all of those foul balls, they would normally give that fan a contract, as they say in camden yards, but they just rattled around, and nobody got them. white sox were beaten, 8-2, and an unprecedented move by major league baseball. john, did they do the right thing, continuing the game but letting the fans inside? john: i think you and i will disagree on this. there was no easy or simple or obvious solution to this. when they had to make the decision. as a baseball purist, my view is there are 162 games in the season. you have to get them in at some point, and with the rain and everything, i do not want to have the world series in november. we have to get them done. mark: they have to get back to a regular position. playing this like this was absurd.

they should have found a way to deal with it. pick up a double-header down the road, and i think this was a horrible decision, which they did to play for money. bad idea for the city of baltimore, which was getting back to normal. john: there is not a good solution here. this was an odd situation. there is no doubt about it, but i think you are overstating the case. i think no one is going to remember this in baltimore or anywhere else three or four days from this. mark: no, but it is freakish and giving them a baseball game with nobody in the stadium and the players signing imaginary autographs, ridiculous. john: things will be back to normal tomorrow. mark: ok, coming up, hillary speech, a greater look, and then brian grazer and why he likes meeting famous people. that is brian grazer and not john. we will be right back. ♪

mark: candidate hillary clinton was at columbia university for a statement about justice, a lot like bill clinton, and we will play a fair amount of the speech for you and talk about what she said and how she's said it, starting out with her best, a well-written speech the more in poetry than in prose. candidate hillary clinton: we will have to try to begin to replenish our depleted reservoirs of trust, but i am convinced as the congenital optimist i must be to live my life that we can rise to this challenge. we can heal our wounds. we can restore balance to our justice system and respect in our communities, and we can make sure that we take actions that are going to make a difference in the lives of those who for

too long have been marginalized and forgotten. let's protect the rights of all our people. let's take on the broader inequities in our society. we can't separate the unrest we see on our streets from the cycles of poverty and despair that hollow out those neighborhoods. marco: it showed she has already got a speech writing operation up and running that is very professional. maybe i am just reacting to help relatively uninteresting and back performance she had at her initial campaign event, but i was interested in what she had to say, and i found her delivery compelling. that was quite good. john: that is funny. you just stole a exactly what i was thinking. i was looking back to the 2008 campaign and trying to think besides some fiery speeches she

gave towards the end, including her concession speech, there were not very many where she was that good, and in some ways, these are tricky to pull off because it is not just where you can be fiery and use raw emotion, here you have to convey compassion, and as you said poetry, not prose. that is not something she is particularly good at, but she was good at it today. mark: like bobby kennedy in 1968 and her husband, rising to the occasion and matching the emotion of the event with her own emotion. listening to the speech for any specific policy proposals that she might bring up. here is some of what she put forward. candidate hillary clinton: we should make sure every police department in the country has body cameras to record interaction between officers on patrol and suspects. that will improve transparency and accountability.

it will help protect good people on both sides of the lens. if the united states brought our correctional expenditures back in line with where they were several decades ago, we would save an estimated $20 billion a year, and i believe we would not be less safe. you can pay a lot of police officers and nurses and others with $28 billion to help us deal with the pipeline issues. it is time to change our approach. it is time to end the era of mass incarcerations. we need a true national debate about how to reduce our prison population while keeping our communities safe, and please please let us put mental health back on the top of our national agenda. [applause] mark: john, not hugely

programmatic, except for the camera thing, which is not news for the country, but framing the issues in a passionate way and in a way that made her priorities as president clear. john: look, again, i think being out in front on this, there is a case that there is a bipartisan consensus for big reform in this area, everyone from rand paul and chris christie, and everyone was to do something. i would like to see her be bolder and more programmatic i'm mandatory minimum sentences, sentence disparities, and going more towards the core, which is racial disparities, but i do think this is a good first start, and she is in front of this, as you said, as we go forward in the campaign. mark: she has to deal with her husband's legacy of the crime bill, and finally, she spoke several times today about racial inequality in the u.s. justice system. candidate hillary clinton: there is something profoundly wrong

when african-american men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts. there is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes. and an estimated 1.5 million black men are, quote, "missing" from their families and communities because of incarceration and premature death. there is something wrong when more than one out of every three young, black men in baltimore cannot find a job. mark: her husband was a master of talking about race, and she was very strong on that. john: yes, and she has got a lot more to say.

mark: ok, we will have more with hillary clinton, that after the break, john's conversation with brian grazer, up next. ♪

john: yesterday, i had a chance to sit down with brian glazer, who had several movies including my favorite, kindergarten cop. he also has a new book out called “a curious mind: the secret to a bigger life,” and i asked him what inspired him to write the book. brian glazer: i have created a discipline that i have adhered to and i have met someone who is expert in something other, so science, technology, politics, athletics, of all types, every

art form, and i meet these people, and i have no agenda and there is no asked. they cannot ask me to make a movie about their life, and i cannot say to them i want a job. it is just one of those things where it is pure, and you are just trying to learn, and you're entering someone else's sort of life process and their expertise, and it is a conversation that can last from one hour to three hours. john: if i read your book correctly, and i think it is true, on the same day, if i was following this, there was a screening at the white house 2005, where you screened something for george w. bush and you met john mccain and barack obama, so that is kind of an amazing day. i went to hear about that day. brian: because i had this about meeting a person every two weeks, they had opportunity to

go to the white house to show “cinderella man” to george w. bush for a white house screening, and i thought, well i have got enough time, and i kind of got some credibility because i am at the white house to meet two senators, and i thought i want to meet john mccain, which was in a lavish office that you would imagine was a big state senator's office, and then i thought to myself, i am going to meet barack obama, and he agreed to do that, when i went to -- they said to get on a tram, so i got on a tram, and i went to office number 99, and his office kind of looked like the department of motor vehicles. you had people coming in and out, wearing mariachis and big hats, but he was such an awesome guy. he made himself available to everybody in a very democratized way.

the way you would experience him. mccain was serious. not a lot of humor. i was able to relate to him because i had spent time in vietnam. i had commonality with him. he was not a big smalltalk guy. reporter: he might have been suspicious of you because you are a hollywood liberal. barack obama had only been in the building for some number of months, healing got elected in the fall of 2004. mccain had been around or a wild.

-- for a while. it was weird you pick the guys who would run against each other as president. either you are really prescient or lucky. brian grazer: i was very lucky. you are very smart. i had not realized the time parameters. ultimately they did correct. reporter: did you have the idea, that guy is going to be president. when you first met obama in 2005, did you walk out thinking, this guy's going to be president? brian: yes, i thought so, but it was not again like david geffen. david geffen knows things, and he is right about 99% of the time. john: often. brian: i did not have a vision like that. i just thought he was amazing

and had like a savant at indication. john: so you spend some time with the clintons. brian: yes. john: like he is complicated and -- brian: i am pro-clinton. i have had many opportunities with president clinton to talk for quite a long time about many different subjects, and he usually takes over and has these amazing anecdotes that are 20 or 30-minute-long stories that are awesome, really. he is brilliant. john: so you spend some time with him and her. compare and contrast them. brian: president bill clinton is a very relaxed communicator, was an intellect that is beyond believe, and he does not put

that in your face. so he has a lot of available subjects, and he is willing to roll with you like that. hillary clinton, in my limited relationship with her, she is surprisingly a good listener and she is able to listen and integrate what you are saying or what you said hours ago into the crescendo of her conversation, so she is brilliant in a slightly different way. john: thanks to brian grazer for providing the show with a little bit of star power, but we have more stars on the way. tomorrow, a brief on british politics with our correspondent, the one and only john cleese and then on friday, my interview with the self-described pornographer, pundit, the man behind the hustler empire, larry flynt. ♪

>> last time he was here, we got texas senator ted cruz an ice cream cake. he'll be back on the show tomorrow for a talk. but for now, president obama with

pimm: hello. i'm pimm fox. this is what i'm taking stock of this wednesday, april 29, 2015. signs of a slowing u.s. economy. the gdp report shows growth sputtered to a halt, gaining only .2%. janet yellen and the federal reserve expect the economy to pick up. the central bank suggesting also today they are still open to an interest-rate increase later in the year. bill gross of janus capital expects the federal reserve to raise interest rates this year just to prove it can. gross: they want to prove that they are -- not healthy, but they can stand on their own two legs, and that means a 25-basis-point increase