john: with all due respect to jeb bush, if you knew then what we knew now about why we know it, he never would have gone with megan kelly in the first place. ♪ john: happy national crouton day, sports fans. questions, more questions, and not a lot of answers. jeb bush is having another bad day on the question of iraq. he cannot seem to answer a question that a lot of republicans can answer with great clarity. would he have supported the invasion knowing what he does now? let's review the brief history of the past 72 hours.

>> on the subject of iraq knowing what we know now, would you authorize the invasion? jeb bush: i would have and so would hillary clinton. >> i interpreted the question wrong. given what we know then, rather than what we know now. >> in 2020 hindsight, you would have made a different decision. jeb bush: the simple fact is mistakes are made as they always are in life. i respect the question but if we are getting back into hypotheticals it does a disservice to people who have sacrificed a lot. john: chris christie, ted cruz rand paul, john kasich and a little bit marco rubio all basically said i think if we knew now, no iraq war.

would not have been for it or proposed it or done it. why is jeb bush having such a hard time coming down on the side of his rivals? mark: he does not want to be in the psychodrama of seeming to repudiate his brother. i think it is practical. he does not want to get into this topic because there are lots of questions about whether you agree with your brother or not on specific things. john: on one reading of the question which is literally if you knew back then that there was no weapons of mass destruction in iraq, would you have invaded, the answer should have been obviously, no. maybe dick cheney would say yes but not many people would say yes because that was the pretext for the war. this should not be hard for him. mark: there is a fuzziness to the question. he needs to get a decisive

answer. the fact he gave and the answer he gave today, anyone outside his campaign would tell you these are bad answers. john: he said i am my own man. there will be daylight between me and my brother. second, this is the single most anticipated question of the whole jeb bush campaign. he has to have a clear answer. he does not have a yet. mark: we will see if he can get an answer who works -- that works. marco rubio's first major policy speech since he became a presidential candidate. he talked about his own foreign-policy doctrine. listen to a little bit of senator rubio from a little while ago. senator rubio: the first duty of the president is not taxer in chief, it is commander-in-chief. every candidate must be prepared to execute this duty. mark: he did a q&a with charlie

rose and with the audience. i did not hear a lot there that was specific or new. i did not hear a lot that could not have been said by many other people. what is your take away? john: the rubio doctrine consists of three pillars. ensuring american strength around the world. protecting the american economy. apple pie and now comes cherry pie, preserving the end -- moral clarity. that is vaporware. he wanted to increase the defense budget. there is some specificity there, but the rest is conservative vaporware. mark: a lot of generalities. the most energized part of the speech was criticism of barack obama. beside the criticism almost anyone would say. it was not particularly well delivered, either, and the room

was not electrified. for a guy who is getting high marks in foreign policy, very solid. he answered charlie rose's questions quite well but this is not a big speech that would instill in people a sense of this is our commander-in-chief. john: i thought he was better in the q&a than the prepared speech. he has moved to the right. he used to be thought of as a moderate. this was more conservative, at least in tone. mark: it was not a game changer. john: in congress that trade deal that everyone is het up about, it looks like the fed is striking a deal and there will be a vote tomorrow. where is the standardbearer of the democratic party on this issue? i am not talking about barack obama. i am talking about hillary clinton. an editorial accuses her of making an "dash for the tall grass" and missing an opportunity to find the values of the party she would lead. bloomberg view saying hillary

cannot waffle on trade forever. she apparently thinks not saying anything on this trade deal is good politics. is she right? mark: i have to say that maybe this is the best thing for her. she is alienating both sides by not taking a position but if she took a position, there would be a firestorm and by laying low and hoping the thing goes away the press does not like it, we do not like it, we think it is a lack of leadership. i know we both agree. taking the position would be politically dangerous. john: an anonymous strategist thinks bernie sanders would go up 20 points if she came out in favor of this agreement. i do not know that worse true. there is a looming fear of elizabeth warren getting in this race. no one wants to give elizabeth warren any oxygen.

it is bad on substance but probably smart on politics. mark: no doubt that she is for the deal. the question is, if she took that position, how bad would it be? what if she came out against? how bad would it be? that is my confusion. she did not want to look like a flip flopper or tied her hands as president, i do not know. she is so tied in knots about it, her staff will not even answer. john: the closest analogy is the iraq war vote and they are reliving that again. even with no barack obama in sight, she does not want an issue that opens the door on her left. mark: do you know how many calls there have been on this matter? many. to recap today's episode. hillary clinton is in big trouble for not talking to the press and jeb bush is in bigger trouble for talking to the press and scott walker is in trouble for avoiding the media during

his recent trip to israel. jeb bush's poll numbers are not looking great. clinton and walker are holding strong in national polls. while the media is up in arms about all three of them today to some extent, what would you say of the three are doing the best job in dealing with the press right now? john: you have to grade this on consequence and right now the person who is getting away with it is scott walker. there are people in his world who are trying to drum up more interest in the fact that he is not taking questions. people -- the world of his rivals, bush primarily, but others. she is getting hammered for it. he is getting hammered by making mistakes, by taking questions. scott walker so far getting off relatively scot-free. mark: in the next two days clinton will not be paying much of a price. walker will not be paying much of a price. the best person dealing with it is walker.

he is not doing very much. a trip to israel, there were some tweets and photos. walker is considered the favorite in iowa. many people look at his fundraising and think he will be just fine. walker has the best strategy. long-term, how does he do? and there is -- you may be setting himself up for some danger in not taking questions and controlled situations right now. john: he said he will talk about the trips when he gets back. we will have to see how he does. i do think there is with the hillary clinton and jeb bush thing, there is a calculation you got to make which is, this matters a lot in the echo chamber but it does not matter a lot outside the echo chamber. you have long-term consequences, but in the short-term, no americans are walking around in the malls of america saying i wish hillary clinton would answer more questions. that is not happening. mark: jeb bush has done nothing in the last three days, arguably his worst three days of the

campaign. so far. because people are unsettled by the fact that he does not know how to answer this question. john: if hillary clinton would not answer questions, people would be unsettled by that. mark: do think that is the right answer or do you not execute? john: coming up, the spy who came in from the cold in our studio. that is next. ♪

mark: thank you for coming. mike morell is our guest. you're right about the cia fight against radical extremism. why did you write the book?

michael morell: i think this fight against islamic extremism will be a generational fight. i wanted americans to understand what the threat is and i wanted americans to understand we have to keep the pressure on. the second reason is there are a lot of myths out there about the cia. one myth is we do everything right. the james bond myth. that is not true. and everything we touch we fail at. sort of the get smart maxwell smart myth. that is not true. the third is jason bourne that we are a rogue agency and we do things the president does not know about and the congress does not know about.

that is not true. the reality is is the cia is a bunch of incredibly hard-working, dedicated people trying to protect the country and we get many things wrong but we get many things right. i wanted americans to understand that. the third reason is if i happen to believe and this sounds weird coming from a former spy, that former senior officials have a responsibility to tell the american people what they did when they were in government. this is a democracy and the american people need to know everybody's perspective on the decisions they made and the decisions they saw. that is important. that is what you guys do every day. mark: countries kind of kicking the tires on foreign policy three it if you're looking at a candidate, what are the two or three questions you want to ask about, say, putin? michael: i would want them to ask me questions about putin.

there is an organization called the cia where you can go and find out anything you want about somebody. what i would want to know on national security, and i am a george schultz foreign policy guy, and that is foreign policy, national security is easy. if you say what you're thinking, if you are very clear about what you think and what you know and you do what you say, you draw a red line and you follow through. and you carry a big stick. that is what i want to know from the three candidates. are you going to do those three things on national security? john: to go to another hot spot in the world, what about iran? michael: do you understand the big picture here? because the nuclear issue and this is what i would be doing if i was advising this president. the nuclear issue really important that we get our arms around it and do something around it but iran poses a greater threat to the u.s. than

just nuclear program. iran conducts terrorism itself against other countries, namely israel, but also its neighbors the rest of its neighbors. it supports international terrorist groups, namely has -- hezbollah. it supports insurgencies throughout the middle east. it is happening in yemen right now. do you understand the bigger picture here and do you have a strategy not only to deal with the nuclear problem, but do you have a strategy to deal with the bigger challenge that iran faces? john: one of the more memorable speeches i ever heard in washington was pat lenehan attacking for having missed on the soviet union. what explains that, how could the cia miss something in both cases, something that big

and should americans wonder if the cia is not a little bit more maxwell smart-ish. michael: we did not miss isis. we missed a small part of it. as you know, isis started out as al qaeda in iraq. al qaeda was its neighbor in -- at its nadir when we left. when we left, we watched al qaeda gain strength. the military pressure was reduced and two, prime minister maliki started acting up and disenfranchising sunnis and then al qaeda goes across the border into syria and becomes isis. they changed their name. same group. just changed their name. we report their growing strength there. why? they are getting recruits and

arsenals and money and we are reporting all of that. the part we missed was the collapse of the iraqi army in the face of the terrorist group. the iraqi army fell apart. we did not see that coming. that was the bees we got wrong. mark: pretty big piece. the man george w. bush called "mikey." the book again, the great war of our time. thanks for joining us. we will be right back. ♪

mark: we learned the obama presidential library will be in

the president's old stomping grounds, chicago. we had an expert on the obama family in the studio recently whose new book, "michelle obama, a life" that is about michelle obama and her life. peter slevin. you said i wanted to know what michelle obama set out to accomplish and why. what did she set out to accomplish and why? >> it tracks back to where she grew up. she grew up on the south side of chicago, she saw inequality all the time and she sees it now. what she is trying to do in the white house is i write about in the book is to un-stack the deck. when you think about her programs, there is an element of disadvantage, dealing with this advantage kids, disadvantaged adults. very much like what barack obama is doing now. mark: how did you decide to write a book about someone who is so covered and over-covered. and say new things?

>> we think we know them, but we know the glossy version of them. we have not gone so deep, we think we know it all and we move on. this was a great opportunity especially in chicago where i am based to go back into her history, her parents history and to see before she got in the white house, she had a 20 year professional career with a separate identity from barack obama. john: one of the things you decided to do is not focus so much on her time in the white house although there was a ring -- reporting on that -- this focus on the stuff before she gets to the white house. you talk a lot over the course of writing about her life, torn between two worlds. between the black world she was from and the white world she came to inhabit and also working classes. the black working-class and the elite that she joined. tell me about how that plays out in her life and make her who she is today?

peter: she was a working-class kid from the south side of chicago. chicago when she was growing up was pretty darn segregated. it was before harold washington. when she went through princeton and harvard and got back to chicago, she ended up walking in these different worlds. she spent 12 years at the university of chicago where she was trying to bridge this elite, largely white institution that had very tough, very negative relationships with the surrounding black communities and her mission was to try and use the power that she had inside the institution to make things around in the surrounding neighborhoods a little bit better which is very much what she is trying to do now in the white house. john: meeting barack obama was a big turning point. pre-meeting barack obama, what is the turning point in her life that was significant? peter: it was when she got out of south shore, when she got out of chicago, when she got into

the ivy league. she talks about feeling like an outsider, not only as an african-american woman, but also as a daughter of the working class. she gets to princeton and she sees kids with bmws and she said i did not know adults with bmws. i think that stretched her in both places, harvard and princeton. john: there has been a persistent refrain that he is not black and afford does not do enough for lack voters. they confronted that when they ran in 2004 and she spoke up on his behalf and came out and said, i am as black as they come, he is married to me. he is black enough for you. did she understand, that is a pretty hardball political thing. she is not a very political person but that was playing racial politics in and out front, aggressive way. did she understand what she was doing as nakedly political as i interpreted it? peter: she knew what she was doing and some of her strategists consider her to have possibly better political

instincts than barack obama himself does. they had gone through the bobby rush campaign through the -- where he lost to bobby rush by 30 points. fast forward a few years and people who are on the southside of chicago who are political competing against barack obama saying, the kid from harvard what does he know? he worked as a community organizer and he thinks he lived the civil rights era. michelle obama says listen, i know what this man is about, i know what he is prepared to do i know what he has done, let's not play that card. mark: lots of talk the obama's may not go back to chicago. not asking you to predict or speculate whether they will but if they moved here, what do you think that would say about where she is in relationship to the city in which she grew up and where they made their political name? peter: the are telling their friends that they will move

to new york after sasha finishes, sasha wants to stay there until she graduates. part of it is chicago is not big enough for them. she thinks she can be more anonymous here. there is plenty of work to do on both fronts. in new york. that said, they will put the presidential library in chicago. the fact that her large family is still there, many of their closest friends are still there, suggesting they will still take -- they will still stay tied. the blow is if they had not put the library there. that would have been seen as a betrayal. mark: the book again is "michelle obama, a life." our thanks to peter slevin. when we come back what mike morel did before the cia. ♪

john: before our talk with mike morrell, he told us about the best job he had never had. he was the snack guy. can't imagine what that was like?

>> popcorn here, get your popcorn here. mark: we are on twice a day. see you tomorrow.

emily: facebook steps into the ring with news websites, but do the social network's publishing ambitions give it too much power? i'm emily chang and this is "bloomberg west." today, a possible new rival to amazon prime. we will look at the report that says it got a peek at walmart's combo. alibaba takes a play from 10 send playbook. we will talk about the partnership with the ncaa. and i robot is out with a microchip that connects its devices to you. i will be joined by the ceo. first, to a new force in the publishing world -- facebook's instant articles.