>> big speech at the reagan library. >> calling that speech real american exceptionalism. >> his chance is not going to come again. >> is chris christie smarter than his party? >> christie continues to say a 2012 run, though, is not in his heart. >> i simply do not have the desire to do it, nor do i think i'm ready. >> i don't see him running. >> what do i have to do short of suicide to convince people i'm not running? >> i don't think he's going to run. republican field? >> every week we add some other idiot. >> the heartlessness of america. >> rick perry is in trouble. >> no question rick perry had a rough week. >> number ten, lost support from both the whack jobs and nut jobs. >> it's a ponzi scheme. >> the number one sign rick perry campaign is in trouble, even michele bachmann thinks he's nuts. >> with all due respect, it's not up to primetime. >> it's like the republican primary is a season of "american idol" in reverse. >> i believe in science, revolution and climate change. >> the world is changing.

>> republican base, meet me at camera three. have you ever considered the possibility that maybe your candidates aren't the problem, maybe it's you? while president obama continued his jobs bill campaign in denver today, republicans were still looking for a 2012 presidential candidate. their hope for an alternative to front-runners rick perry and mitt romney and apparently now possible front-runner herman cain will be dashed tonight when new jersey governor christie fails to announce a bid for president in a speech at the reagan library in california. christie's brother, a republican fund-raiser, told a new jersey paper today, "i'm sure that he's not going to run. if he's lying to me, i'll be as stunned as i've ever been in my life." but "the new york times" reports tonight, "people close to the

governor say mr. christie was not totally immune to the flattery and that his brother's statement was more definitive than it should have been. a republican close to mr. christie said tuesday that the governor had not changed his mind but had begun to reconsider his absolute refusal." christie's address tonight is entitled "real american exceptionalism." deliberately leaked prepared remarks indicate christie will criticize domestic political conduct of late and encourage leaders to confront economic challenges. today, the biggest challenge we must meet is the one we present to ourselves, to not become a nation that places entitlement ahead of accomplishment, to not become a country that places comfortable lies ahead of difficult truths. to not become a people that thinks so little of ourselves that we demand no sacrifice from each other.

we are a better people than that, and we must demand a better nation than that. the speech comes one day after former new jersey governor and christie confidant, tom kaine, reignited christie campaign chatter by telling "the national review" that christie is very seriously considering a bid for president. it's real, kean says. he's giving it a lot of thought. i think the odds are a lot better now than they were a couple weeks ago. christie knows running for president provokes a very different level of media scrutiny than he has experienced as a mere governor. including moments like this on "the view" today. >> can you see him as president? >> you say no? okay. why not? >> too fat. >> oh, wow, did they say fat? >> i heard that and you're right.

>> what you said, it's because he's hefty. >> hefty, hefty, hefty. >> christie offers something rick perry and bachmann don't. >> krispy kremes. i have to say, it might be fun to have a fat president. >> who said he's fat? >> his motto can be, no more vetoes, only cheetos, yay. >> he's not healthy. >> i don't want to have to worry about my president dying from a heart attack because he's overwyatt. >> joining me now, salon columnist steve karna, who follows new jersey politics closely. that's a preview of the christie presidential campaign when he becomes a daily feature of "the view," if he were to become a republican nominee. he has to be thinking about things like that and be thinking about, hey, wait a minute, i've only been doing this politics thing for, what, two years now? >> he's been doing politics a lot longer. it's kind of interesting. there's a lesson buried early in his career that i think most people don't know about which i think is really relevant to what's going on right now. he's one of those guys in middle school and high school, he was

rehearsing the inaugural address in the bathroom mirror. he always wanted to run for office. he was the student president at the university of delaware. he's a new jersey guy and always dreamed of the new jersey governorship. early in his career he was elected to a county board out in new jersey. it was supposed to be the first rise of chris christie. he's doing the whole rise of a bull in a china shop. there wasn't youtube or tv cameras but county officials that resented this guy and they basically drove him out of county politics, defeated for a race for state legislature and defeated in a republican primary in his re-election county free holder board in new jersey, and at 34 years old it looks like chris christie's career was absolutely over. the lesson he draws from that, there's a risk in doing too much too soon, reaching too far too soon. he got elected governor two years ago. now everybody's talking about going national, and i think he looks back to that moment early in his career and says if i run for president now, that's an all-or-nothing prop pigs. if i lose, i can't go back to new jersey.

i'm going to lose in 2013. i'm going to be a lame duck. do i want to give it all up for something as iffy as this? in i end, he probably won't. >> i love tom kean's rumor thing when he says he thinks the odds are now better that christie will run for president. the odds being better than zero. i mean, here's a guy who's threatening to kill himself if necessary to prove to you he's not going to run for president. so it's pretty easy for the odds to get better than zero, isn't it? >> now he'll just seriously wound himself. i think that's what we've upgraded it with. having followed new jersey, tom kean is such a shameless flirt. the guy left the governorship in 1990, and he himself flirted with running for office six times since then launching trial balloons like this. now he's 76 years old so he's doing it for other people. >> what do national republicans not realize about christie? i mean, we've seen these candidates remerge who are supposed to be the savior and then you discover, oh, wait, those jobs in texas, there's this other thing that you don't know about. what would they suddenly discover they wouldn't be crazy

about? >> perry, on the republican side, what killed him is immigration. that's right there with christie, too. christie brings -- >> what has the man done on immigration or said? >> he committed the crime of being in law enforcement, realizing if you're in law enforcement as a federal prosecutor in new jersey, you have to have a realistic pragmatic view of illegal immigration. >> like maybe you can't round up every one of them. >> or maybe none of them. >> maybe none. >> that's what he went out there and said two years ago at a town hall event in new jersey and was confronted by somebody who told him, why aren't you doing more about this as u.s. attorney? he said, that's not my job, i'm in law enforcement. i have to be realistic about this, and we can't be demagoguing this as leaders and as politicians. now, that played well in new jersey. it helped him get elected governor in 2009, but look at what happened to rick perry. imagine what happens to chris christie. there's a lot of examples like that. >> you have a third of republican voters in places like south carolina who believe that the president of the united states a muslim. no matter what he says about it.

chris christie appointed a muslim judge which i praised him for on this show, jon stewart actually used some of my tape of that on his show last night talking about christie. that's one of things republicans nationwide don't know about. >> one thing christie said in defending the judge is basically i'm tired of all the nuts. these are the people he would now have to be appealing to. the only thing i say about christie, i look at rick perry, mitt romney and chris christie and do think chris christie is a better salesman. if all these guys are flawed at a certain level and christie gets in, the republicans are going to have to compromise in some way. i do wonder if the salesmanship that christie has might give him an advantage there. >> steve kanake, senior new jersey correspondent for "the last word" and from salon.com. thanks for joining me tonight, steve. last night, jon stewart gave his take on why republicans can't find a presidential candidate to fall in love with. >> have you ever considered the possibility maybe your candidates aren't the problem?

maybe it's you. you seem hard to please and figure out. i mean, you're pro life, yet -- >> your state has executed 234 death row inmates, more than any other governor in modern times. have you -- [ applause ] >> what was that? you're afraid of death panels, yet for uninsured coma patients -- >> are you saying that society should just let him die? >> no. >> yeah! >> that's the crowd. yeah! you've got to support the troops, well, except for this captain over here. it's like the republican base is at war with its own talking points. i want someone who's going to cut taxes and balance the budget. someone's who's a skoildilled or and doesn't talk all fancy.

the child of poor immigrants who will build a fence to keep them out of this country. someone who's strong enough for a man but ph balanced for a woman. now you want chris christie. sure you do. >> the folks who criticized my policy are ignorant, absolutely ignorant of that and criticize him because he's a muslim-american. this sharia law business is crap. it's just crazy. and i'm tired of dealing with the crazies. >> he's talking about you. >> joining me now, editorial director for aol, "huffington post" and msnbc analyst howard fineman. howard, thanks for joining me tonight. >> hey, lawrence. >> howard, you at "the huffington post" have done this fascinaing poll of what you call the 160 republican power outsiders. you've gotten their attitudes about these potential nominees. tell us about that. >> well, in iowa, new hampshire and south carolina, the big three, first three primary caucus states, we are having our patch.com local editors and reporters go out and talk to

dozens and dozens and dozens of local influential republicans in those states. elected officials. party leaders. businesspeople and so on. so we have close to 200 of them we talk to every week. and to try to get a real ground-level feel, nobody else is trying to do something this extensive because we have 26 of these local patch sites in these three states. and this week we asked them about rick perry and mitt romney. what we found was rick perry plummeting like a stone among the grassroots people, the sort of local influentials in those three states. they ended up having a much less favorable view of rick perry than they did. look at this. we did the poll from last friday to today. 57% of our local influentials, the people we call the power outsiders, in those three states said they had a less favorable view of rick perry after that debate. now, this isn't the pundits talking.

this isn't the, you know, the national press talking. these are local main street influential republicans in these three states. that's terrible news for rick perry. you know, they had a more favorable view of mitt romney, but, again, it's just compared with rick perry. what these numbers show to me, lawrence, is that the republicans are still out there yearning for somebody who's really going to satisfy them on all fronts. mitt romney now does well by comparison to rick perry, but only because rick perry screwed up so royally over the last couple weeks. >> and you asked them the electability question, howard. 63% saying romney has the best chance to defeat obama. 24% says perry has the best chance to defeat the president. >> right. >> that could turn out to be the decisive issue as the campaign ripens. >> keep in mind, that's given the choice between perry and romney.

so what romney has done as sort of unpopular as he is natively, if you will, is he keeps beating people back who try to challenge him on that front. it looks like to me for the time being, according to the grassroots leaders in the republican party we talked to, romney's successfully done that with rick perry. steve was talking about chris christie's a heck of a salesman. if he gets in the race, that's going to be an entirely different equation for mitt romney. now, my reporting tells me that people around chris christie, people close to him, who are his political and personal advisers are out around the new york area and, indeed, around the country asking people if chris christie were to decide to run, would you be with him? these are both professional people and financial people. i talked to somebody who worked in chris christie's gubernatorial campaign. that person tells me that while

nobody thinks that chris christ yae's made up his mind, some of his closest people are asking around, if the governor were to decide to do this, might you possibly be available to help? >> howard, quickly before you go. i need you to place your bet. will he or won't he, will christie run? >> no, in the end he won't for the reason steve said. i think he's a master of timing and i think he realizes this probably isn't quite his time. >> howard fineman of "the huffington post" and msnbc. thanks for joining me tonight, howard. >> thanks, lawrence. coming up, how the constitutionality of the health care reform bill will dominate the presidential campaign next year. and later, what "the huffington post" reports as the super lie behind the super committee. ryan grim joins me with the details. i habe a cohd. yeah, i toog nyguil bud i'm stild stubbed up. [ male announcer ] truth is, nyquil doesn't un-stuff your nose. really?

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coming up, the constitutionality of the president's health care reform bill will be decided by the supreme court right in the middle of the presidential campaign next year. and we tried to tell you last night that the president is not, repeat, not the anti-christ. we also tried to tell you the whole idea of the anti-christ is kind of crazy but not everybody is listening including the guy who called the president the anti-christ in los angeles last night. he's in the "rewrite." [ oswald ] there's a lot of discussion going on about the development of natural gas, whether it can be done safely and responsibly. at exxonmobil we know the answer is yes. when we design any well, the groundwater's protected by multiple layers of steel and cement. most wells are over a mile and a half deep so there's a tremendous amount of protective rock between the fracking operation and the groundwater. natural gas is critical to our future. at exxonmobil we recognize the challenges and how important it is

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there's going to be a supreme court showdown over the president's health care bill in the middle of the presidential campaign next year. that is the likely result of today's decision by the justice department to skip a step in the federal fight over the president's affordable care act. the obama justice department has asked the supreme court to bypass a possible delaying stage of the appeals process and hear the cases challenging the health care reform law as soon as possible. in august, a federal court of appeals in georgia ruled that

the individual mandate in the law is unconstitutional. there are several other cases working their way through the federal courts, but this is the one, the obama justice department has decided to push to a supreme court argument likely with a decision to be written in the spring of 2012, probably around june. just when the republican attacks on what they call obama care post" columnist and msnbc contributor e.j. dionne. thanks for joining me tonight, e.j. >> good to be with you, lawrence. >> e.d., do we have a campaign precedent like this where basically in the middle of a presidential campaign here comes the united states supreme court to decide what may be the constitutionality of the central issue of that campaign. >> i can't think of one. there may be somebody out there who can.

the closest thing i can think of was the dred scott decision which laid the predicate for the 1860 election, but that was three years before. but i really liked the fact that they did it this way. they could have gone through the 11th circuit. there was no guarantee, by the way, that they would have done the full review. they would have subjected themselves to criticism that they were playing games, trying to delay it. i think this shows real confidence that they can win and while i am always skeptical that this supreme court is going to engage in judicial activism, there may be reason to think they won't this time. two reasons. one is, this would be a way to start a huge fight over the nature of the court. and i'm not sure the conservatives on the court want to do that. secondly, we talk about the 11th circuit decision. there was a sixth circuit decision in favor of the health care bill written by a very conservative judge called jeffrey sutton who is very respected by people like justice scalia. he had an interesting line in that decision. he said, not every intrusive law is an unconstitutionally

intrusive law. it was basically telling conservatives, don't have the courts do your political work for you. that's what conservatives are supposed to say. >> how do you suppose the mitt romney camp feels about this right now? here is the individual mandate going to the supreme court during the presidential campaign. the individual mandate that is virtually identical to the one romney supported in massachusetts. and made law in massachusetts. >> i think anything that puts health care at the center of the discussion in the republican primary is bad for mitt romney. i think it's notable, for example, that when he went after rick perry for being out of the mainstream, he didn't say anything about medicare because he didn't want to talk about health care at all. he went after him on social security. i think it was smart. it's clearly been effective. but i think he would like health care to go away as an issue until the general election. >> e.j., the supreme court, understandably, has a way of

settling things. they reach a decision then that's it. at least that's it legislatively. no one tries to make any real moves after that. but this decision is going to be made right in the middle of a presidential campaign where one campaign, the republican campaign, is going to say, if the court doesn't rule it unconstitutional, the republican candidate is going to say, repeal it. i mean, even romney's position is repeal it, get rid of it, throw it out. and so the decision which is likely to be 5-4 one way or the other, you can see where it's going to be in a certain way the beginning of the campaign argument in what is the final stretch of the campaign. >> yeah. and this decision could be as much sausage making as the making of this bill, itself, because they wouldn't necessarily have to throw out the entire law if they were against it. they might just throw out the individual mandate, keep the rest of the law in place. there are ways potentially to make it work without the mandate.

paul star, health care expert at princeton, has an interesting idea about how you could make it work without a mandate. so they could go in a lot of directions. they could throw it all out or just throw out the mandate. in which case you then have a very complicated discussion going all the way through the election. >> and the mandate i've pointed out before is something of a mirage since it doesn't really have a penalty attached to it. there's this very low dollar penalty written into the tax code which the irs is specifically forbidden from trying to collect either through civil or criminal process. if you refuse to pay it. so there's this really funny mirage quality to the mandate to begin with. the thing they're fighting over so intently. the obama team knows if they lose the mandate they still have the essence of their bill and they will be ready to go forward with it without the mandate. >> right. it's hard to make it work without something to replace the mandate, but i think it's going to be -- it ought to be really

hard to throw this out on constitutional grounds. this is done on the basis of the commerce clause regulating interstate commerce. are there any mom and pop insurance companies out there? i mean, we're talking about a truly national industry. what's this about -- it's actually a conservative idea to mandate. we are all going to go into hospitals in an emergency to be cared for. the hospitals have to take care of us by law. somebody is going to pay. this is an effort to rationalize it and to prevent free rioting which is, again, something republicans ought to be for. >> and e.j., you and i have been around this argument long enough to know the individual mandate began as a republican idea. >> exactly right. >> e.j. dionne -- >> you should get into the republican race for president. why not? anybody can enter. >> that's right e.j.dionne, thanks for joining me tonight. >> good to be with you. the congressional committee has a super secret. its automatic trigger may not be

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still to come in this hour, the most mementos budgetary decisions of our time will be made by a congressional super committee that actually represents about 15% of the american population. but the super committee has a secret and "the huffington post" has uncovered it. that's coming up. and i got a tweet last night from a viewer who was baffled, just baffled about why we were discussing the importance of the antichrist in our politics. and then as if to prove our point, a heckler at a presidential fund-raiser last night called the president the antichrist. accept it.

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in the spotlight tonight, the trigger. remember the trigger? it's attached to the gun that congress has aimed at its own head. but congress being congress,

they may have forgotten to actually load that gun. in the torture debt ceiling deal passed in august, congress created a super committee that is empowered to write legislation that has a guaranteed route to a vote. in other words, it just cannot be filibustered. can't be stopped. and the super committee's legislation must cut the deficit by $1.2 trillion using any mix of tax revenue increases or spending cuts that the majority of the super committee can agree to. if the super committee fails to produce such a bill or if congress fails to pass it, that will automatically trigger $1.2 trillion in budget cuts that neither party will like. including massive cuts in defense spending that republicans will hate. and massive across the board discretionary spending cuts the democrats will hate. those dreaded triggered cuts, the ones that each party will hate, are supposed to provide the incentive for the super

committee to come up with something smarter, something more acceptable to both parties. but what if the automatically triggered cuts are not so automatic after all? joining me now is ryan grim, washington bureau chief for "huffington post" who wrote about this today. ryan, thanks for joining me. >> thanks for having me. >> ryan, the title of your piece today, "super committees, cuts, anything but automatic." what did we miss here? how did they sneak by us? how are they going to get around the automatic trigger they're so afraid of? >> if you listen to the coverage of this and especially if you listen to the members of the super committee, themselves, you'd think the moment they deadlocked almost that, you know, the federal government would cease to operate as we know it and these painful across the board cuts would happen immediately. or they might even happen in the

next month or so. no. what congress did when they wrote the law is they said these cuts will begin to take effect january 1st, 2013, then they will go out through the next ten years. so they could even all be backloaded toward, like, 2020, 2021 and they would still be in compliance with the law. 2013 is what's key. because, you know, as your show talks about every night, there's something pretty important that's going to happen between now and january 1st, 2013. a few important things. >> yeah, let me think. let's see, oh, yeah, there's going to be a presidential election. >> a presidential election. yeah. and then what you have after a presidential election and a congressional election is you have a lame duck congress. and this is something i didn't mention in my piece, but the debt ceiling is going to be touched right around that time as well. january 1st, 2013, bush's tax cuts expire. so you're going to have this need to do all sorts of structural policy work in these

very short amount of time and so everything's just going to come together. and i talked to a bunch of senators and laid this scenario out to them and overwhelmingly they said, yes, that's right. that's when it's going to come together. so what we're going to have, we're going to have deadlock now and that's probably a good thing for all sides, the republicans don't want taxes so they won't get tax increases. democrats don't want cuts. they won't get cuts. god knows the pentagon doesn't want to get cut so they won't get touched. you'll have the next year-plus to start talking about how you're going to do -- how you're going to do all of this together. the debt ceiling, the bush tax cuts that obama extended and also these supposed automatic cuts. so all of that's going to get put together and will get worked out probably sometime in the lame duck. >> well, ryan, isn't it even specifically designed to be done in the lame duck session? the super committee isn't even expected to report until after the election, aren't they? >> well, the super committee is supposed to report, i believe,

this november. so it should, you know, it should have collapsed pretty quickly. but they did give themselves through 2012 to work on the super committee's recommendations. so you're right. so they can be working on these recommendations. the other thing is that if the super committee cuts, say, $200 billion, you know, they find $200 billion over 10 years, which is not that difficult to do, you know, you can monkey around with all kinds of baselines, different rates to come up with $200 billion easily. so that would mean that then these automatic cuts, supposedly, would only be there to make up the difference. a lot -- all of that difference could be made by simply allowing the bush tax cuts to expire because, you know, that in itself would raise the amount of revenue that the super -- supreme committee was going to call them. super committee, congress,

whatever you want to call them. what they were supposed to cut. so, you know, basically we have a lot of theater right now. >> yeah, on january 1st, at that point, the bush rates expire and you would raise $4 trillion over 10 years without anybody legislating anything. we're going to do a lot more on this. ryan grim of "the huffington post." thank you very much for joining me tonight. >> thank you. coming up, you heard it here last night and the president heard it less than an hour later. the people who believe the president actually is the antichrist get the "rewrite" again tonight. and later, the director of the new documentary about sarah palin joins me to talk about why people in wasilla couldn't wait, couldn't wait to dish about their ex-mayor. [ male announcer ] you are a business pro. executor of efficiency. you can spot an amateur from a mile away... while going shoeless and metal-free in seconds. and you...rent from national.

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nick broomfield, director of "you betcha" joins me for an exclusive interview. last night we tried to explain why some evangelical christians believe president obama is the antichrist. now after what happened to president obama last night, we have a little bit more to explain about them. an accident doesn't have to slow you down. with better car replacement available only with liberty mutual auto insurance, if your car's totaled, we give you the money for a car one model year newer. to learn more, visit us today. responsibility. what's your policy? yeah, i toog nyguil bud i'm stild stubbed up. [ male announcer ] truth is, nyquil doesn't un-stuff your nose. really? [ male announcer ] alka-seltzer plus liquid gels fights your worst cold symptoms,

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and then the president heard it last night in los angeles. >> i want to thank -- >> the one and only true living god, the creator of heaven and the universe. jesus christ is god! jesus christ is god! jesus christ is god! jesus christ is the son of god. you are the antichrist. >> that is president obama smiling at a deranged heckler in los angeles last night. the heckler calling the president the antichrist. that happened less than an hour after we had a discussion on this program about people who believe that president obama is the antichrist. i was guided through the subject by matt sutton, a history professor at washington state university who has studied the history of christianity in the united states. professor sutton's op-ped piece in yesterday's "new york times"

entitled "why the antichrist matters in politics" tells you everything you need to know about this. everything that will make you understand what that crazy heckler yelled at the president last night. first, what or who is the antichrist? >> and for conservative christians they've developed this notion of the antichrist out of the reading of the bible and a couple different places. mostly the old testament but also the book of revelation. essentially what they believe is the world is getting worse and worse and worse and it's going to end in this great cataclysm and what's going to happen, first all true christians are going to be raptured. they're going to disappear. and a new world leader is going to come forward promising peace and security and it's going to turn out he's the antichrist and ultimately seven years later jesus is going to return, the second coming and going to battle the antichrist in a literal place in the middle east, the battle of armageddon then jesus will then restore a new heaven and a new earth and things will be much better at that point. >> okay. that was not a pitch for a

movie. you got that? did you follow that? so the guy who heckled the president last night believes, believes that barack obama is not only going to continue to be the leader of the united states of america, but he's going to become the leader of the entire world. now, i know what you rationalists there are thinking. you're thinking, the president is going to need much better poll numbers in florida before all of south america is willing to make him their leader, too, but that kind of thinking does not get in the way of believers in the antichrist. now, of course, most christians do not believe in any of this antichrist nonsense, but the ones who do certainly can't be talked out of it with poll numbers. according to believers in the antichrist, before president obama becomes the leader of the entire world, all true christians on earth are going to disappear. they are simply going to be lifted into heaven in what they

call the rapture. so the heckler in l.a. last night is actually kind of happy to know that he will soon enough be going to heaven because he can see that the antichrist has now taken his place among us as president of the united states and is obviously on his way to taking over the entire world. the guy wasn't really angry at the president. he was just yelling to make sure that the president heard him. he had to yell over all that crowd noise. he really just wanted the personal satisfaction of the president knowing that he knows that the president really is the antichrist. and, yes, his tone does kind of indicate that he doesn't exactly like the antichrist. and even though he knows that the emergence of the antichrist is a necessary step in the fulfillment of his loony version of biblical prophecy, he sure as hell is in no mood to vote for the antichrist to be re-elected

president of the united states. i think we can count on the heckler to vote for rick perry or michele bachmann in the california primary and then for whoever the republican nominee is for president. after our segment last night on the antichrist, i got this tweet from tonny rae. completely baffled as to why you just had your last guest. well, you know, as i had hoped was obvious last night, the point of talking about the antichrist on this program is to point out just how crazy the crazy section of our electorate is. no matter how many times the president says things like this -- >> i agree jesus christ is the lord. i believe in that. i -- >> 12% of americans still think he is a muslim. and despite the worldwide

release of this document proving barack obama was born in hawaii, 25% of americans still believe he was born in another country. the resistance to fact is not evenly distributed in this country or among political persuasions. the more southern and the more republican you are, the more likely you are to be wrong about the president's birthplace and his religious beliefs. 30% of south carolina republicans think the president is a muslim. and more than a third think the president was born in another country. we don't know what percent of south carolina republicans believe the president is the antichrist, but you can be sure it is not zero. those south carolina republicans vote for republicans in congress who stand in the president's way every day in every way. it is as if they've taken an

oath to oppose the president no matter who he says or does even when the president proposes something some south carolina members supported in the past, they oppose him as soon as they hear the president is in favor. such is the mindlessness of the relentless opposition to the policies of president obama because after all, too much of the republican opposition is not really opposition to president obama's policies. but opposition to the man, himself. [ male announcer ] this... is the montrose pet hospital -- montrose, california. ♪ in here, anarchy meets order. working with at&t, doctors set up a broadband solution to handle data and a mobility app to stay connected with their business.

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sarah palin is threatening to sue author joe mcginnis and his publisher for the new controversial book "the rogue." in a letter obtained by abc news, palin's lawyer says "the book contains a series of lies and rumors presented as fact and combined with anonymous sources." this friday, a new film, "sarah palin you betcha" opens in new york, los angeles and san francisco. the 90 minute film is director nick broomfield's quest to find the real sarah palin, with a hopeful first encounter with the former governor. >> hi there, what's your name? >> nick. >> nick, nice so meet you. heck yeah. heck yeah. were you up there? >> i was. i might go back and do a documentary. i was wondering if you could -- >> i'll betcha ifantastic. >> do you have a card? >> i'll leave one here.

i'll contact you when i'm in wasilla. thank you. >> palin watchers will not be surprised that she never did grant that interview, but others >> on sbept 13th the church where sarah palin has gone for six years is having a pray away the gay -- >> did people in the church make -- when the mayor of your town is saying that they don't like you, then, you know, it's not a good thing. because obviously people had to vote her in. so she's probably got a good backing of people that feel the same way. >> joining me now for an exclusive interview, award winning director nick broomfield. thanks for joining us tonight. us broomfield fans know in your documentaries you tend to become a character in the story about how do we find this person? is that what we see in this

movie? >> well, i think it's one of the -- a way, really, of telling the story and sarah palin, as you pointed out, was very reluctant really to be interviewed. so it was really the quest mainly talking to other fellow republicans and people who had worked with her to find the real sarah palin. and i'm the sort of mcguffen who strings it along. >> you did find people who wanted to talk. one was the ex-brother-in-law. the semi-famous, briefly famous ex-brother-in-law who she had kind of a vendetta with. let's look at that clip about the ex-brother-in-law. >> behind closed doors, she's not raising her kids. somebody else is raising her kids. i raised her kids for four years. you know, 4 1/2 years. >> really? >> when molly and i were together. when todd was on the slope, those kids were always at somebody else's house. and if they weren't, and we were

over at their house, she's yelling at them all the time. you know, go outside and play. get away from me. you know, having arguments with them, calling them names. i mean, it was just completely different from what she portrays herself to be in the public eye. >> how do you judge the credibility of those kinds of interviews? >> because many other people, some of whom did not want to appear on camera, said exactly the same thing. people who had looked after sarah's kids when she was mad, she used to drop them off at a friend's house. time and time again you'd hear the same stories and it was because of that that i included it and i gave it the weight i felt it deserved. >> did you find anybody who -- what's the positive story of sarah palin in this film? is there a positive picture of sarah palin? >> i think the positive sarah palin story is she's someone with incredible will and discipline and charisma and she has the ability to lead people and for them to believe in her. they don't necessarily believe in her for very long.

there are an awful lot of people who gave their hearts and souls to sarah, who talked in the film who i think would have done anything for her. but then she turned. and i think that's why a lot of people came forward. they were frightened about her having some real power. >> and the -- she clamped down on friends of hers, told them, don't cooperate with this guy. you encountered that, right? >> i think also there was a genuine fear. it's a small evangelical community and the church is incredibly powerful. >> did they think you are the antichrist? did they ever -- anyone ever accuse you of that? >> no, they didn't. i was on best behavior, on non-antichrist behavior there. no, i got along very well with the people, very hospitable. there was a fear in wasilla, you do not want to cross the palins. you lose your job and you have a hard time. >> now, if you had gotten the friends and the family and those people, it must have been her belief that you just wouldn't have presented them fairly. >> well, we did actually talk to

the family and talked to various friends. i think sarah has fallen out with almost everybody in wasilla. >> did you talk to my pal, levi johnston? he's done this show a couple times. >> he was too expensive. >> he had his hand out, asking for cash? >> he certainly did. >> he comes here for free. the magic of television. >> i should have talked to you first. we talked to his sister, though. >> great. >> she was pretty good. >> you have to watch the clip of him last week on this show reading from his own book. there are many people who suspect he was reading those words for the very first time. nick broomfield, director of "sarah palin you betcha." thank you for joining us. coming up on tomorrow night's show, another documentary filmmaker you heard of, mr. michael moore. have the last word on line on our blog, thelastword.msnbc.com. > good evening, lawrence. thank you for staying with us for the next hour.