tonight on "nightline" -- tough questions. as the 2012 campaign revs up, george stephanopoulos puts president obama on the spot. how he's going to fix the economy, keep gas prices low, and how he really feels now about donald trump. ice ka paids. what would possess a man to strap on razor blades and climb these pillars of peril? there's only one way to find out. i meet up with one of the world's best ice climber to take on a terrifying popsicle. and motown legend. ♪ cruising together he's given us 50 years of makeup

music. sound for love built in. so we go cruising with smokey robinson in tonight's "play list." good evening, all. i'm bill weir. believe it or not, like it or not, the 2012 presidential campaign is under way. for proof, some republicans are pointing to the president's big deficit speech yesterday. but here's more definitive evidence tonight. president obama back in the friendly confines of chicago for his first major fund-raiser of this re-election cycle. who exactly he'll run against is anyone's guess. but a new cnn poll of republicans has mike huckabee tied with donald trump, atop the list of favorite nominees. before leaving for chicago, the president talked with george

stephanopoulos exclusively to talk about, among other thing, the birther bombs that have, among other things, raised donald trump's profile. >> nobody ever come s forward. nobody knows who he is until later in his life. it's very strange. the whole thing is very strange. >> what do you make of that? >> i think that over the last 2 1/2 years, there's been a effort to go at me in a way that is politically ex-pe pee-petant short term for republicans but creates i think a problem for them when they want to actually run in the general election where most people feel pretty confident the president was born where he says he was, in hawaii. were not really worrying about conspiracy theories or birth certificates. >> now with unemployment even higher than when he took office,

he's got to convince the nation that he's the man to continue fighting for jobs and a blooming deficit. you had a pretty soft launch to your re-election campaign last week. why should americans re-elect you? >> i think we have gone through 2 1/2 of the most challenging years that we've seen since the great depression. and during that time, not only have we been able to yank this economy out of a very, very deep recession, not only have we been able to stabilize the financial system and get the economy to grow again, not only have we now produced over 1.8 million jobs just in the last year, we've been able to, you know, make changes like don't ask, don't tell. we still have to put more people back to work. we've got to bring the deficit down. internationally, obviously, we still have enormous challenges, particularly given what's happened in the middle east. i think i'm equipped to help us finish the job. >> challenging that notion, the

young congressman who has become the darling of conservative, paul ryan of wisconsin. his plan would dramatically change major government programs like medicare. >> the congressman has really come out with a tough response to your speech. i want to quote it exactly. he said the president was excessively partisan, dramatically inaccurate and hopelessly inadequate. instead of building bridges, the president is poisoning wells. are you poisoning wells? >> absolutely not. look, if you look at my speech yesterday, it was not so much a critique of what the house of representatives proposed as it was a description of what they proposed. and, you know, i think -- >> -- said it would lead to a fundamentally different america. >> i think that's true. if you set revenues at around 16% of our gross domestic product, then what flows from it is exactly what mr. ryan's proposed. 70% cuts in clean energy. 25% cuts in education.

we cut transportation spending by a third. and we end medicare as we know it fundamentally. i mean, that's just a -- but that's a fact. >> i asked our viewers for questions for you. thousands came in. >> gas prices. >> you got it. you guessed it. why not release at least some of the oil in our reserves before gas reaches $5 a gallon? give us a break. that's what it's there for. >> i understand how big of a strain this is on family budgets. and, you know, already we've got about $3.85 -- >> close to $4. >> close to $4. that's tough. if you've got to drive to work every day and you don't have an option in terms of the car that you're driving, and it's taken more and more out of your budget, that's a problem -- >> but you're not ready to release the reserves yet? >> the reserves i think are something we've got to be very careful about. typically were used during disruptions, for example, during hurricane katrina when refineries shut down. what we don't want to do is

catch uourselves in a situation where we're using it now and it turns out we need it later. >> they want to give people like me a $200,000 tax cut that's paid for by asking 33 seniors each to pay $6,000 more in health costs. that's not right. it's not going to happen as long as i'm president. >> you called out your potential opponents. >> a couple seem to share that vision. if we believe it's unacceptable for our seniors not to go in a nursing home when they need care. or children who are poor not to be able to get a good education. i think the vast majority of americans do. then we've got to make sure we're paying for it. >> the battle will next be joined when the country hits its debt limit next month. if next month is anything like

our recent partisan past, that may be easier said than done. for "nightline," i'm george stephanopoulos in washington. >> and our thanks to george for that. just ahead, how innocent journalistic curiosity put me on a frozen waterfall with a world class ice climber. in the past, when we thought about computing, we thought about boxes. on a smarter planet, computing has left the box. generating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. today everything computes. which means we need to think differently about computing. how we manage it. how we deliver it. how we design it to run a railroad spot a trend. spot a market change and act on it. a smarter planet is built with smarter computing. i'm an ibmer. let's build a smarter planet.

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since i am neither a figure skater nor a polar bear, the only ice i really enjoy fits into a high ball glass. after the winter, we just survi survived, the idea of breaking ice as recreation never occurred to me. which led me to a certain pair of men who changed my entire

perception of what cold and slippery can really be and they gave me one of my most breath-taking adventures. check out this photograph in a recent "sports illustrated." that is a frozen waterfall the size of your average sports arena. and that dot is a man climbing it. i know. i had the same questions. how? why? so to find out, i went to the canadian rockies, drove to an ominous sounding place called weeping wall and waited for the guy in the picture. >> let's get it on. >> soon there appeared a canadian as nice as he is nuts. >> you just quogot to think wha could possibly go wrong. >> his name is will gad. he is 42. and he loves ice the way labradors love tennis balls. he used to race the best climbers in the world up walls

like this and won a bunch of medals. now it's about being the first or the only. so you can find him on bobbing icebergs or in freezing black mine shafts or behind frozen sta staligates from nepal. he needs photographic proof of his exploits to show the world. so he usually brings along christian, the tonighto tonto t ice ranger. >> photograph guys in cold snowy places. >> pasty guys. >> exactly. i think i would shoot super models in the tropics. >> let me know if you make that career switch. i'll come do that story too. what's the closest you've come to slipping your mortal coil? >> driving in new york city. in this taxicab.

several times i asked about the inher inherent danger. he says his only real -- came when fallen ice broke his nose. describing a moment that almost broke up this die many thattic duo in the worst way possible. christian and i were in sweden. and i made kind of a judgment in error, big huge block of ice, we're talking like the size of a bus, broke loose. picture 500 foot deep elevator shaft with a block of ice slamming down, explode. christian's at the bottom of it. i'm watching from across the way ways going on. to me, if i kill myself ice climbing, that's one thing. one of my friends, that would be actually worst for me. just that silence after it all sort of stopped and we're waiting, like, okay. >> okay? >> all good.

>> whoo. >> it was like yeah! you know? it was really -- i'm like, yeah, like, the hallelujah moment. >> snap it over your head. yeah. right towards the ice. >> to get a sense of the physical demands, will provides a five minute lesson and offered to try his craft. i feel like wolverine. this is cool. the biggest danger is ice falling from above. >> your face is an asset, right? so how do you protect it? me, it doesn't matter. drop it up, slam it in. drop your head forward. that way anything will go off your helmet. if i catch one of them in the snoz, there's always radio. then there are the razor sharp cap-ons that can slice an ankle during a fall. >> what you're climbing right now is about grade 2.

what we'll climb up later today is grade 6. just for perspective. >> meaning steeper? >> much steeper. much longer. >> i only get as high as an eight-story building but enough to feel the shin and forearm burn. enough to have new awe for the . i have to say, it looks hard and it's tougher than it looks. then there's the time he climbed continuously for 24 hours to raise money for charity. >> yeah, buddy, nice work. >> unthinkable after just 24 minutes up here. >> put your arms out to the side. keep your feet high. >> soon they lower the amateur. man, that's work. and because the day is still young and the ice still inviting, they go play. >> we're going to make some

pictures. >> yeah. beautiful pictures. >> and while you would never know it, their helmet cameras provide a glimpse of their joy and a bit more understanding of how and why. >> pretty cool up here. >> yeah, way cool. >> your whole world, you're not going to think about your mortgage payment. you're going to be like right there, man. >> challenges the mind. >> gets rid of all the junk. other people meditate. i go ice climbing. >> awesome. >> nice one. >> and for a slide show of totally wild photos of will climbing ice, you can visit abcnews.com/"nightline." really had a lot of fun. a beautiful part of the world thanks to him. coming up next, look close and it's easy to trace the tracks of his tears and how smoky robinson changed music. tonight, the king of motown tells us what music he likes to fall in love to.

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it is shorthand for soulful, sexy and swinging. motown changed the music world in the early 1960s and millions of lovers are forever grateful. tonight, we're going to go inside the mind of the artist who was at the center of that motor city revolution to find out what he listens to. smoky robinson is tonight's "play list." ♪ baby let's cruise away from here ♪ >> i wrote two or three songs to cruising and none of them fit and then one day i came up with the idea. you're going to fly away. i'm glad you're going my way. because i love it. you love what? i tried many i love its. none of them worked. i was driving down sunset one

day and i heard "grooving on a sunday afternoon." i said, that's it. grooving. so i turned my car around, i went back home, i put the tape on, and i love it when we're dwro grooving together. but that didn't fit. it wasn't sexy like that music. so i wanted a word that sounded like grooving. so i searched for words and i came up with cruising. ♪ ♪ baby i love you love you so when i was 11 years old, the thing was singles. the first single i ever bought was by a group called the spaniels. they had a song called "baby it's you." that's the first song i remember buying for myself. ♪ what's going on ♪ what's going on ♪ yeah what's going on >> "what's going on" is my favorite album of all times. marvin gaye was a really close friend. i was with him most days when he

was composing "what's going on." and he said, smoke, this album is being written by god. i'm just sitting here at the pea yawn any and i'm an instrument for god. and i'm writing this album. and when i listen to it today, it's more poignant than when he wrote it. it's like prophesy. the things he sings about in the album are more prevalent today than they were when the album first came out. beethoven's fifth is one of my favorite compositions in life. beethoven was such an innovative composure. in the early years of beethoven composing music, many people were trying to get his music banned because they said it was too sexy and it was too provoke tifl. and they didn't think it was appropriate for the young ladies to listen to beethoven's music

because it made the young ladies hot and bothered, you know. so maybe 100 or 200 years from now, they'll be saying the same thing about some of the same music that they say is too provocative today. ♪ shake your tailfeather nelly did a song with puff and it's called "shake your tailfeather." and it's one of my favorite songs by nelly because the beat is so profound and outstanding. i think nelly is, like, the modern day james brown. because james brown always had captivating beats to his songs. i mean, you listen to a james brown record, you could not sit still. if you had any rhythm in your body whatsoever, you can't sit still. nelly's the same way. his tracks are always so -- ♪ take a good look at my face ♪ my smile looks out