ls, found delight again. that's the power of all of us. that's the power of all of us. that's the membership effect of american express. hello from new york. i'm chris hayes. new polls suggest the democratic national convention gave president obama is still growing bump. yesterday's gallup tracking poll put him at 49% to 45% against mitt romney. romney's problems gaining altitude are not just metaphorical. after campaigning yesterday in virginia, romney and his campaign had to find a flight home when the campaign plane was grounded due to technical problems. right now my story of the week, what the president didn't say in charlotte. this was, i think, my favorite moment in the president's speech on thursday night.

>> my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet because climate change is not a hoax. more droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke. they are a threat to our children's future, and in this election you can do something about it. >> a-fricking-men i say. it was hardly mentioned at all save for three references. so it meant a lot to hear it from the president's own lips. but there's also something distressing in that line, something that haunted me and the entire democratic convention. it was this part. >> and in this election, you can do something about it. >> and in this election, you can do something about it. after the spectacle of dysfunction and obstruction over the last two years, it's hard to take that proposition at face value. in 2009 barack obama had a house majority and a senate majority

by 60 votes. they worked tirelessly through a long, hard legislative slog to produce a bill that would cap carbon emissions. it passed congress and the house by seven votes. in the senate, lindsey graham had once been the co-sponsored of a similar cap bill. >> our country doesn't have a vision on carbon. we need one, and we need to lead the world rather than follow the world on carbon pollution. >> ultimately, lindsay graham did what nearly every republican and his cohort has done, to conveniently forget his previously beliefs and commit himself to opposing any and all major initiative that is bore the president's mark. so cap in trade died. all of this was before the republicans took over the house in 2010. since then things have only gotten worse. the record of republican opposition and obstruction is legion at this point. the record number of filibusters, the unprecedented

foot dragging on judicial and executive nominees, and, of course, the explicit threat to provoke a possible new financial crisis by holding the nation's full faith and credit hostage in. you are suit of a savage austerity agenda. since the emergence of the tea party in the 2010 elections, the central political story of our time is of republican obstruction. the ways in which with remarkable discipline and fervor the republican party has overturned the previous norms of congressional behavior in order to create a country that is nearly ungovernable. this is a reality that looms over this election. and yet the gop opposition was almost entirely absent from the president's speech. unless the democratic party manages to retake the house, a possible though not probable outcome, the president's second term will face precisely the same obstacles it now does, a republican congress bent on his destruction and humiliation. the president, however, told "time" magazine if he wins in november, the stark choice voters will have made would,

quote, pop the blister of polarization. if you're skeptical of that line, i don't blame you. whether the president believes that or not, he kind of has to say next time will be different. otherwise, all of his articulation of his vision for the country in his speech on thursday is more or less for naught. the cruel irony of the mitch mccandle plan to sandbag barack obama is that it creates a dev illishly cynical implied reason for voters to elect a republican president, because it's the only way to restore the country to normal governance. the republican party is so maximalist it cannot be trusted in opposition. you can only get compromise when the republicans have the power. republicans won't lot it work the other way around. it would be a true low point for american democracy if this argument were persuasive. but the president and democrats need to acknowledge it head on in the remaining two months of this campaign. you can't simply ignore the tanned, weepy elephant in the room. if the president and democrats

are going to lay out their agenda for the next four years, they have to make an explicit case either that it is vital the president be given a democratic congress, my strong preference, or some new set of policies, tactics, approaches, inknow vagus to overcome or run an end around past republican opposition. whatever the case is, whatever the solutions are, we need to hear them because the republican party and its agenda of political destruction cannot be ignored or willed away. nor can the politics of self-immow lation be perpetuated by awarding them with electoral success. the president has subjected he will use executive pours as he did with the dream act to circumvent an obstructionist congress. that's only the second best way to deal with republican obstruction. what president obama did not say in charlotte was that the best way to stop republicans from holding them hostage is to strip them of the power to do so in november. i'm joined now by peter binart

founder of the blog open zion, michelle goldberg, also at "newsweek" and the daily beast where she's a senior contributing writer, telsey gab effort, he spoke at the democratic national convention, and jacob hacker a professor of political science at yale. great to have you all here this morning. i want to start -- i want to play a clip because we wrote this, we were working on this this week and then "meet the press" is airing an interview with mitt romney today and this is a section of it i want to show you because to me it just perfectly hits home this point. this is mitt romney speaking to david gregory. check it out. >> well, i want to maintain defense spending at the current level of the gdp. i don't want to keep bringing it down as the president is doing. this sequestration idea of the white house, which is cutting our defense, i think is an extraordinary miscalculation. >> republican leaders agreed to that deal -- >> it was a big mistakes. i thought it was a mistake on the part of the white house to propose it. i think it was a mistake for the republicans to go along with it.

>> let's keep in mind the context. the republicans held the debt ceiling hostage, completely routine thing over the last 40 years. it's been the -- the debt ceiling has been raised 90 times, average of twice a year. that's routine posturing around it. the only way to get them to vote to maintain the full faith and credit of the united states was to agree to this deal in which both parties bound themselves to these cuts which is called sequestration. this was the deal. this is what everyone agreed to after this climactic battle. this was the democrats basically appeasing the republicans who had exempted themselves from the normal procedures of governance on the deal of sequestration. now mitt romney is saying this deal is terrible. the president, what a terrible person the president is for signing on to this deal, and my running mate who approved the deal, awful person. and john mccain is running around saying terrible deal. they want to cut defense spending. to me it's like, wait a second, they won't even live up to the deal they themselves made months

ago, how can we govern? what is the second term going to look like? >> isn't this part of the problem that obama was facing in this speech? i think a lot of people were disappointed in this speech because one of the things we all loved -- those of us who loved obama in 2008 loved the fact he seemed to lefl with people, he seemed to speak to people like adults. he seemed to forthrightly face our problems. i'm not sure our political culture has gotten to the point where a presidential candidate can forthrightly speak -- >> the truth about the nature of the republican opposition. >> exactly. >> the person that did that was bill clinton. i think the reason that clinton speech was -- people liked it so much was he was just talking about the obvious elephant in the room. here he is just talking about this preposterous asymmetry in the two parties in the way they're approaching cooperation in government. >> one of the main reasons we ought to re-elect president obama is that he is still

committed to constructive cooperation. we all know that he also tried to work with congressional republicans on health care, debt reduction, and new jobs, and that didn't work out so well. but it could have been because, as the senate republican leaders said in a remarkable moment of candor, two full years before the election, their number one priority was not to put america back to work. it was to put the president out of work. well, wait a minute. senator, i hate to break it to you, but we're going to keep president obama on the job. >> i think the feeling of exaltation people felt was thank you for stating the obvious thing about the nature of our politics in the last two years. >> for me the failure of obama's

speech was he still didn't really explain to americans why we're in this mess. i never felt that president obama has spent enough time trying to explain the financial crisis to people. like what actually happened and how did it affect your life? i think this is what clinton was always really good at connecting what was happening in people's lives to what was happening in the world, and then the second part, first to explain the financial crisis but why the bottom fell out of so many people's lives and second to explain why obama wasn't able to do more about it. i feel like he didn't do those things. >> and he didn't really get into the fact of public sector job loss or nobody gets into that which is amazing to me. >> it's important to say the stimulus was part of what kept things from going even -- >> i disagree actually. i think if you look at the speech as he gave the speech at georgetown early on that was a pretty long evocation -- >> but not on the convention speech. >> the problem with his republican opposition issue and i think the reason bill clinton was able to talk is they have laid this trap for him.

they have created this -- what i was talking about at the top of the show. if he talks about republican obstruction it just reminds everyone what a dysfunctional mess washington is and that cynically aids the opposition. >> also, bill clinton can say it's all their fault. i'm not sure that obama can say it's all their fault. >> i don't think that talking about how -- what a political mess it is is necessarily against obama's long-term interests. i mean, he was pretty articulate in the 2008 campaign about how our politics was broken. if he was saying we have major economic challenges but our politics isn't living up to it, he reprised some of those themes, i think that would resonate with a lot of people. >> i think it would. that's what i have been hearing from people post-convention, people who don't live within this political world we live and breath, that they really appreciated president clinton's speech because it spoke the facts, laid it out in a way that everyone can understand. people who are working every day and don't have time to pay attention to the day-to-day slog

of the presidential campaigns. >> tulsi, you're about to, barring some big upset, i don't want to count your chickens before they hatch, but likely to be entering congress next year. the least trusted institution in american life, approval ratings below paris hilton and the u.s. going communist. i'm curious when you think about what life is going to be like come january, what it looks like. let's talk about that after we take this break. [ male announcer ] from our nation's networks... ♪ ...to our city streets... ♪ ...to skies around the world... ♪ ...northrop grumman's security solutions are invisibly at work, protecting people's lives... [ soldier ] move out! [ male announcer ] ...without their even knowing it. that's the value of performance. northrop grumman. that's the value of performance. mid grade dark roast

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projecting into the knew tour and talking about what the campaign argument looks like as we enter the stretch and particularly what it says about what the future of governance will look like in washington. tulsi, you are a candidate in

the district. how do you think about what you're going to be going into in january should you be elected? >> there's a couple things that i saw in my race in hawaii but i think are very reflective also across the country that i saw at the convention when i had the opportunity to meet some of the other democratic candidates from other states is people are really looking for that fresh leadership. people are looking for real people who will speak as we're talking today, just having real conversations and actually listening. i think that's been the key thing there. and that's where i have hope and i'm optimistic because of this very real energy that i think will be coming in with the crop of new legislators who are looking towards bringing back the statesmanship that i think a lot of our longtime elected officials say have been lost, for us in hawaii we have senator akaka who is retiring. they have talked to us about how the statesmanship they saw when they have been in office about working with both sides and maintaining your principles and your values and actually getting things done is what is causing

such an exodus, and i think that many of us who are looking to come back if we have the privilege of serving is looking to bring back that ability to work together for the people. >> you're part of a class of democrats running for congress. one of the things we've noted here and it's something we've done ourselves and is trying to correct is the presidential race takes up so much oxygen that the down ballot races aren't getting much attention. i thought the todd aiken moment was revealatory. it's like why weren't they paying attention to him before he said this because his views were awful. do you feel there's the money and grassroots support and the infrastructure focused on getting a democratic house? it seems within reach though very difficult and also just crucially important when we're think being that next term. >> that's a great point. it's critical. we're talking about if president obama is re-elected about having that cooperative relationship and actually being able to work together to get things done. i know that the democratic

leadership in the house is very excited, but optimistic but realistic as well about the challenge of being able to hit that 218 magic number and are really focused on putting the resources into those races that are on those targeted lists. so i think that the opportunity is there. >> yeah. i think that what we know as political scientists is the down ballot races in a presidential election are determined by presidential coattails, whether there's significant turnout for the president. so it's important the presidential race is important, but i think the money matters a lot more on the down ballot than at the presidential level. presidents and presidential candidates get a lot of news, and obama is a formidable fund-raiser even if he's outspent, he's going to spend a lot. on the down ballot race that is where the real concern should be about this huge amount of outside spending. we have seen a decline in competitive races over time and this is one of the reasons. >> i think turnout, you mentsed turnout, that is a critical

factor in some of these races like in hawaii we have a challenger to the governor. >> lind da lingle is the republican. >> to fill this seat that senator akaka is leaving. turnout is going to be the key. there's going to be a substantial amount of money nationally that will be dumped into this race. it's going to come down to turnout. >> i think one of the interesting things i think is how much obama is going to run against this money. you know, it seems to me how populist will he go? he if wanted to say, look, wall street turned against me. they're the guys who got us into this. i made some efforts to change things and now they're basically trying to unseat me. i think it would be a powerful message. i wonder if he decides to go there. >> that's one thing i saw that i had hoped he would talk about in his speech is about the lack of true wall street reform and what you mentioned earlier about how that has really been one of the major causes of our high unemployment rates and really the downed economy and how there really hasn't been action taken or people being held accountable

for that. >> let me say, i thought that people panned the president's speech or some people panned the president yaes speech because it wasn't this high-flying bit of oratory. one of the things we're going to talk about later in the show is the cutting edge of science of campaigns. it seemed to me what people wanted from the speech and what they were trying to do is as a stort sort of strategic block in the wall they're building for the campaign are just very different things. i thought one of the things that was striking to me about the democratic convention was it felt very deftly as if it was hitting certain strategic marks, on choice, certain marks on marriage equality and veterans and wip and women's choice. and it sort of went through those. sometimes it could feel like there's no real uplift uniting theme here, but that may just be the most effective way of going about and marketing because the amount of voters that were -- when you're talking about designing a democratic convention, the amount of voters

that's really for in terms of persuadable universe is a very tiny subsect of the electorate at this point, right? >> i think it was skillfully set up so as the day went on, you would get the base mobilization speeches and then as you moved to the prime time speeches, they focus much more on that small segment of voters that really are persuadable. i think it was very well-run convention and certainly contrasted sharply with the republican convention in terms of the discipline on display and the organization of the themes. my own view on the president's speech is that it was a good speech, wasn't a great speech. the reason it fell short of great m my view is it is really i think important for him to what's going to happen after the election, how am i going to address that concern about both the immediate jobs problem and the long-term economic challenges of the middle class, and he got close to that, but ultimately it felt to me like he was falling back on sort of the familiar idea of invoking hope rather than setting out an agenda. >> we have this fiscal cliff

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so we've had this situation now, we've had tremendous i think unprecedented republican obstruction. i think it's important to keep in mind that the debt ceiling deal was a real break with the norms that had ruled washington for a very long time. obviously, the opposition party is going to oppose. that's what they're there to do. it's not surprising. but we have this totally unprecedented form of obstruction. now the debt ceiling deal -- the debt ceiling microcosm, you know, with much higher stakes in the fiscal cliff that's going to happen, all the bush tax cuts expi expire, a huge, huge horrible shock to the economy if everything just -- all the taxes went up, the spending went down,

we'd have this big effect. there's an argument to be made that's going to give the president leverage to deal with republican obstruction. i'm curious what you guys make of that argument. i want to be persuaded by it. >> well, i think it will give the president leverage. how that will be used is another question. i mean, we learned during the last fight over expiration of the tax cuts that the republicans were actually willing to do a lot to get the upper income tax cuts. they agreed to extensions of unemployment insurance, they agreed to continuation of payroll tax cut. so strategically the president has an opportunity he wouldn't have otherwise. the problem right now is everything he wants to do, like the jobs act, requires congressional action with the senate filibuster. nothing will happen. but this has to happen, right? and most of the observers i think now believe that the president would be in the best position if he just stuck to his guns and waited until december 31st, the expiration, and said, you know, republican can give up

on their desire to have $800 billion in tax cuts for the rich and when they're ready to talk i'm ready to deal. now, it's still the case that, you know, that this could be politically damaging to democrats as well as republicans in the fight that's going to take place and the fight will take place on terrain that's favorable to republicans. >> if the president is re-elected -- you know, he's at the peak of not -- first of all, he's in the second term. a lame duck session after he's just been re-elected. in terms of his own political capital, i don't think he has to worry in the same way about its erosion. >> it's hard to know what the psychological impact of the election will be the day after. you know, the republicans were remarkably disciplined after obama's victory. but i think that the mood -- you know, the republicans i know -- they really believe obama's victory was a fluke because mccain had been a bad candidate. i think after losing an election that they should have won given

how bad the economy is, i think you're going to start to see the process of some people saying -- >> this is the big question -- >> i wish -- >> -- of the country. maybe it will take a third loss -- >> i think it will take a third loss. >> nine losses in we're sitting here at the table in 2060. >> sooner or later we're going to have a republican version of the democratic leadership council and a struggle inside the republican party the kind the democratic party had. >> i think you will not have that until you have a candidate that respects the republican party losing. i was already hearing at the convention they have made the same mistakes they made in 2008. they nominated a squishy moderate. >> but they put paul ryan with him. that make it is harder -- >> they put sarah palin with mccain. >> yes, but they doubled down on the medicare stuff. >> they already made these arguments to themselves. >> all these arguments are basically in the cue and they're ready to fire them out. >> i would not -- i don't think you can underestimate the degree

to which the republicans are going to -- or overestimate the degree to which the republicans are going to find confirmatory evidence that their agenda should be pursued. this is a lot more conservative party than we had after the 2008 election. and for another thing, you know, there is going to be this sense, well, obama is the incumbent president. things were bad but they weren't bad enough. i think the best opportunity for action is the action forcing mechanism of the fiscal cliff. >> and -- please. >> it seems like there are the hard core republicans who have their minds made up, hard core democrats, minds made up, and really the results of this presidential election are going to be with that group of independents who i think are really looking for leadership, true leadership, and, you know, we've got the partisanship on both sides -- >> but it's not on both sides. come on, we have -- certainly partisan democrats, but you don't have these kind of like,

you know, kind of bitter end democrats who would rather destroy the country than see the republicans have any political victory. you certainly didn't see that with bush. and the idea, you know, genuine independence like persuadables as opposed to people who say they are independents but have strong ideological leaning, but it's a small and disengaged part of the population. it's not as if they're the kind of reasonable ones and everybody else is -- >> i just don't think -- i think the other thing to remember is the electoral fight is only part of it. after the election the same kind of organizational barriers to action are going to be there. there's going to be an enormoen amount of lobbying money to push back. the challenge of trying to implement the aexisting achievements of the administration will be formidable. the other problem with this idea that the independents are going to be pressuring the republicans is that to -- we political

scientists have been looking at this and we're very surprised, right? because the parties are moving asymmetrically apart. the republicans are moving way to the right and the democrats are moving modestly to the left. how can this be if the independent voters are roughly in the center? we have been struggling through that. what i would say is political science has reached a couple conclusions. one, this is clearly activist-driven. and the activists on the right are -- the tea party are really power pfl. >> hold that thought. you compare the first thing the democrats did when george w. bush was elected was work with him on no child left behind versus how republicans responded. there was a honeymoon period back in 2000. i want to pursue this question more because it's going to affect what that congress looks like that you're going to be possibly going into in january right after we take this break. with the spark cash card from capital one,

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there's something i have noticed lately, you probably have, too, and it's this.

maybe it's just because i grew up in a different time, but though i often disagree with republicans, i actually never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate our president and a lot of other democrats. >> i love that phrase from president clinton. never learned to hate them. that phrase learn to hate is a really powerful phrase about our politics in general. jacob, you have -- you've written a report about -- a document that's interesting about what a second term agenda might look like. and i'm curious what the kind of contours of it and is it any good if we have the same -- it's easy to write a document saying, this is what things should be like, but when you're facing the kind of political challenges of this republican opposition, how do you get from here to there? >> well, i should say first i wrote it with this yale law student nate lowenthal who is great, and that made it relatively easy, but it was

still a big challenge. we wanted to lay out what it would take to get the economy moving in the right direction. there really isn't a kind of vigorous agenda on the other side from this kind of austerity agenda of ryan and now romney, and so that was our goal. and we had a second goal, which was to get some of the major grassroots, progress tiff groiv. these groups all told have millions of members at the grassroo grassroots. after the election you have the leverage from this and the leverage from having outside groups pushing for something else. that's what gives me hope over the longer term. the president obviously has his own challenges. he's articulated some of these ideas but he hasn't offered a bold set of prescriptions. somebody has to be out there

opening up some space. if other groups are saying we have to have a set of solutions that are up to the scale of the challenges we face, i'm hopeful that will at least open up some broader discussion in the next few years. >> i want to turn this to you. this is a close race. it looks like the president is pulling ahead in the wake of the convention and nate silver has been tweeting about this. there's some promising signs. this convention did what it needed to do. quickly, if the shoe is on the other foot, you go and serve in congress in january with president mitt romney, how are you going to see yourself interacting with the republican administration? >> the work is going to be tough, to say the least. there's a lot of things that would concern me in that scenario, one of which that's very personal to me, i have some friends who are on their way to afghanistan now from the hawaii army national guard. mitt romney's positions on foreign policy, his position on afghanistan really that would be open-ended, who knows how long we would end up staying there

worries me tremendously. >> that's one of his many positions. >> exactly. which is the point, right? it's hard to know exactly how things will be if his positions keep changing, and i think the burden on the democrats will really be to communicate, we have to really work hard, i think better than we have been, communicating to people, middle class families across the country, about what it is we're trying to do to be able it get that kind of broad-based grassroots support. >> i should end on this note, which is for whatever obstruction there is in the future, the things that have been done and particularly the affordable care act, right, it will die. it will be killed by president mitt romney very early on. he'll kill it using budget reconciliation. if mitt romney is elected and there's a republican senate, it doesn't survive. the most remarkable in some ways achievement of domestic policy for the center left of this country since medicare i would say is on the table. forget any forward looking obstruction. i just want to leave on that

note. thank you to jacob hacker political science at yale for joining us. great to have you here. democrats take it to republicans on foreign policy when we get back. for fastidious librarian emily skinner, each day was fueled by thorough preparation for events to come. well somewhere along the way, emily went right on living. but you see, with the help of her raymond james financial advisor, she had planned for every eventuality. ...which meant she continued to have the means to live on... ...even at the ripe old age of 187.

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much of president obama's domestic agenda has been stymied by obstructionist republican party in congress. the last two years he's been much more unfettered on foreign policy. democrats at the convention were eager to point out the president's victories in that area. notably the success of the operation ordered by president obama that killed osama bin laden. >> osama bin laden is dead, and general motor is alive. >> take out bin laden. >> bin laden. >> bin laden. >> bin laden. >> osama bin laden. >> osama bin laden. >> bin laden. >> ask osama bin laden if he is better off now than he was four years ago. >> in a video played to introduce president obama on thursday night, former president bill clinton further emphasized president obama's singular role

in ordering the operation. >> that's one thing george bush said that was right, the president is the decider in chief. >> president obama's foreign policy and national security credentials were served up as a stark contrast to the relative lack of foreign policy experience on the republican ticket, something the president himself pointed out. >> my opponent and his running mate are new to foreign policy. but from all that we've seen and heard, they want to take us back to an era of blustering and blundering that cost america so dearly. after all, you don't call russia our number one enemy, not al qaeda, russia, unless you're still stuck in a cold war mind warp. >> joining us now is jeremy scahill my colleague at the nation where he is national

security correspondent. great to have you here. it was really striking. yesterday we talked about the classic cultural war issues and how aggressive democrats seemed on things they had previously been on their heels about, things like marriage equality and choice for women and the immigration dream act. they seemed to be leading with that. and the same dynamic i think seemed to be true on foreign policy and national security, the invocation of osama bin laden, the ridicule -- there was almost this amazing reversal if you look at the 2004 republican convention to the 2012 democratic convention, here is -- i want to show, here is dick cheney in 2004 employing this ridicule against john kerry. >> even in this post 9/11 period, senator kerry doesn't appear to understand how the world has changed. he talks about leading a more sensitive war on terror. as though al qaeda will be impressed with our softer side.

>> and now here is john kerry who, of course, was the butt of all those jokes eight years ago being the one who is doing the mocking in what was by far the biggest dis track of the convention. >> folks, sarah palin said she could see russia from alaska. mitt romney talks like he's only seen russia by watching "rocky 4." >> tulsi, you're of a generation of democratic politicians that came of age during this era of long war. if people are not familiar, you were elected to the state house at 21. you then signed up for the national guard and not just signed up for the national guard, volunteered to deploy to iraq. went to iraq, came back, did another deployment, that one was in kuwait and have continued your political career. you're still a member of the national guard if i'm not mistaken. >> yes. >> my understanding is that experience changed your politics quite a bit. you were a conservative i believe, conservative on social

issues certainly, when you were 21, and your deployment changed your politics. i want you to talk about that and then talk a bit more broadly about what you saw from democrats in this convention. >> absolutely. you know, my deployments both to iraq and kuwait absolutely were life-changing in so many ways. specifically with regards to social issues and kind of my politics in general, seeing firsthand the extreme, really the extreme negative effects of what can happen in societies where the government tries to be a so-called moral arbiter for its people and drawing that link from extremeness in the middle east to some of the conversations that we're having here at home, places where our government should have no presence. you know, whether it's in a doctor's office where a woman is making difficult decisions about her future and her reproductive rights, or about who to love and who we want to spend our lives with. and i think that's an important perspective even when we talk about separation of church and state. we hear a lot of conversations here about so-called morality within government, but there are

these positions that really need to stay within the realm of your religious beliefs, your church, your cultural, your personal lives, your family, and that's really what my experience in the middle east taught me and caused me to really reflect on the values and beliefs that i had grown up with and my own views now about government's role within your personal lives here in a place where we celebrate freedom. >> to fill in the context, your father is a state politician, and extremely prominent in advocating against marriage equality for gay and lesbian couples. >> needless to say we have some very colorful dinner conversations at home. >> in hawaii this is a big deal, he's known for that. he was probably the singular spokesperson the issue came up in the late 1990s. you were one of a number of veterans that took the stage. we have a little "b" roll of that. i'm curious what you thought -- what was the foreign policy message, the national security message, of this democratic convention to you? >> i think clearly the message was delivered by many different

speakers throughout the convention. the appreciation and paying tribute and honor to veterans and those who serve and understanding their contributions to our communities and our country and also understanding how what our presence is overseas, basically the shrinking global community that we have and how important it is, and i was glad they brought this up. this is an issue that does rise above the partisan politics and it's an issue that affects families all across the country, and i think that we need to actually do more to express this sense of urgency where every single day that we are at war people are losing lives and families here at home are being affected. >> i think there's sort of three lanes this was happening on. there's the appreciation of veterans, celebration of veterans and talking about veterans' issues which is very prominent. there was the operation on osama bin laden which was obviously very prominent, and then there was kind of everything else, right? foreign policy, how long are we going to stay in afghanistan? the drone issue. and i want to talk about that everything else and maybe what

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jeremy, what was your impression of watching this kind of -- the posture from the democratic party at this convention on national security issues, which is what you cover? >> you know, regarding the way that osama bin laden's name was used by the democrats at the convention, it really felt like we were watching a parade of jingoism that belonged in a sports bar. i think the fact is there has been no serious analysis of the president's foreign policy in all of the coverage i have seen of the democratic national coverage, including msnbc, there has been no serious hard-hitting critique of the president's foreign policy from the issues that actually are real or that distinguish him from the republicans. because the fact is that the democratic foreign policy is distinguishable from the republicans only in so far as

the president took some of the worst aspects of the bush era foreign policy and pushed them forward. >> wait a second. that's not entirely fair. there's some truth to that, but if you look at what's happened on iran other than the past few weeks where i think the administering has skillfully pushed back on pressure that was mounting on them to set a deadline by which they would take mill tear action. >> we have a president who in a two week period authorized the assassination of three -- they have never been able to produce -- >> we do not know he was the target. >> well, the president authorized operations over a two-week period that resulted in the deaths of three american citizens, including a 16-year-old boy. and if you're going to use osama bin laden's killing as a football to spike on the national stage, i want the president of the united states to explain to the -- >> at his convention? >> if you're going to use it in

such a cynical way. >> i agree with you about the policy but it would be political mall pra to, a, not kind of milk the bin laden thing on the national stage -- >> i have trouble where these drone strikes happen. i'm not talking about political -- >> we're talking about the convention tp there's two different things. the discussion about the president's foreign policy -- >> many of the media discussions including here on msnbc about foreign policy felt like we were watching a vote for obserama me up. there's all of this going after romney and i think it's legitimate, but some of the core issues of this president's national security policy are not being debated and i'm sorry, but watching john kerry and joseph biden criticizing the war in iraq, they voted for the war in iraq. joe biden was the chair of the senate foreign relations committee and shut down debate about iraq when it was being

debated in this country. there's revisionism, jingoism. i'm not thinking about this from a political perspective. i'm talking about life and death issues that cut to the heart of will we follow the constitution when it comes -- >> we should aggregate some of the issues. there's the ending the war in iraq. the status of forces agreement was negotiated by the bush administration that we adhered to. there was some evidence we were trying to get out of it but the end result was the president did end the war. we're going to keep quite a large force of essentially paid mercenaries behind, there's a huge embassy, but combat troops have been brought home. that is in one column. there's extension, the surge in afghanistan. we have 87,000 troops there, and the deadline for that. there's the decision to order the strike against osama bin laden and then there is the massive drone policy and all of the engagements that we've engaged in in terms of bombing and drones across other theaters that you've been covering. i want to put those out there as

distinct things and then there's iran. let's sort of look at some of those individually rather than as a sort of full portfolio and tulsi, i would like to get your thoughts on it when we come back. [ woman ] ring. ring. progresso. your soups are so awesomely delicious my husband and i can't stop eating 'em! what's...that... on your head? can curlers! tomato basil, potato with bacon... we've got a lot of empty cans. [ male announcer ] progresso. you gotta taste this soup. we've got a lot of empty cans. alright, yand... flip!in? whoa! did you get that? yep, look at this.

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hello from new york. i'm chris hayes. i have peter bienart, democratic congressional candidate tuls gabbard. we are talking about national security policy and foreign policy both articulated and performed at the democrat ink c convention. what were the atmospherics about what the democrats posture on these positions are. jeremy, you levered a scathing critique of what you thought was jingoism, the sort of constant invocation of osama bin laden which we showed. michelle, you were saying that

you -- it would be political malpractice not to essentially celebrate the fact that osama bin laden is dead. as a politician, tulsi, i would like to get your response to this, how the death of osama bin laden was treated at the convention, what you thought of how that was -- >> there's no question it was highlighted tremendously. i think really as an example of president obama's leadership in being able to be decisive at a time, you know, where we spent a lot of time looking for osama bin laden post-9/11 and as a sold mother was deployed to iraq obviously that was pretty significant for many of us, but i think also the issue of afghanistan was not really talked about enough, and in my view congress and the president really needs to take a stronger role in that and not just gloss over where we're saying, hey, we're going to end combat operations in 2014, but what does that really mean? what happens after so-called end of combat operations? how many troops are going to be on the ground there doing noncombat operations? when i was deployed to iraq, something i will never forget, i

was serving in a medical unit, and on one of the gates there we had a huge sign that was mounted that said, is today the day? and it caused all of us to reflect if anyone was being complacent about the reality of the situation we were in, but i think it's also very relevant about the sense of urgency that we need to have here in this country about every single day our troops are down range, it's affecting them, it's affecting families in our community and for what? >> yeah. and that question i think the -- you know, the president said i ended the war in iraq and in 2014 we'll end the war in afghanistan. and the question i think that naturally rises when you hear that is why 2014? >> exactly. >> and what's going to be different? this is the question i have is what's going to be different in 2014 than it is today? we're still going to be dealing with a corrupt government. we're still going to be dealing with the tribal form of leadership there, and we're still going to be dealing with al qaeda that is moving around different places and looking to

go back at any time. >> the amazing thing is joe biden had that powerful moment where he gave the number of people who have died and been injured in this war, and i was thinking, part of some of those are because you decided -- this administration whose white house -- >> against joe biden's council. >> -- basically decided to send more troops. they felt political pressure, but the reality is there's no political pressure. the republican convention cheered clint eastwood when clint eastwood said we never should have gone into afghanistan. this thing is so mindless at this point. >> yeah. what's remarkable about afghanistan is there is -- there's essentially -- we don't really know what mitt romney thinks about afghanistan, but -- >> or if he thinks about afghanistan. >> there's a huge -- >> we know he's criticizing obama for even saying he's going to put out in 2014. >> which is what is frightening, if mitt romney gets elected, what is the plan going to be? 10 years, 20 years, 30 years to

work for a so-called stable afghan government which can only be accomplished if the afghan people start making tough decisions about what direction they want their country to go in. >> you know what's interesting is one of mitt romney's main foreign policy advisers is this sort of notorious gangsterish thug named kofir black who said bin laden's head would be brought back in a box with dry ice. he was a guy that really ran the whole torture program at the cia. it was his brainchild. he's one of the main foreign policy advisers of mitt romney. i think they're salivating at how effectively obama liberals that the kill list is a good idea or the drobs are a good idea. you see the poll numbers on drone strikes among liberals are pretty disturbing, how many liberals support these drone strikes, and when you talk about the case of an american citizen, my views are apparently in the minority, the radical minority in this country because people -- two-thirds or more of

democrats support this. but are we comfortable with mitt romney controlling that hit lst ar -- list around the world? >> this is the question. i think the flip side of the projections of deciderness, decisiveness we saw is that the conceptual core of that, right, and obviously there's a political power to that. i'm the president, i have to make these decisions, and that's true at a certain level, i think the thing that is a dangerous, seductive element of that is investing more and more power in the executive, right? because that is going to endure past president obama and what we have seen the trend be in the united states since basically the passage of the war powers act back in the wake of vietnam and watergate is more and more power being invested in the executive, particularly in the war on terror. >> it's cheney's life's work. >> and much of it is continued

with this president. in terms of handing that power off, there is this video, john cook, going around asking democrats the question that you just posed. would you feel comfortable trusting mitt romney with this power? take a look. >> americans trust mitt romney to make the call about which u.s. citizens to assassinate with drones? is he ready to handle a kill list? mr. mayor, can americans trust mitt romney to decide which citizens get killed in drone strikes? >> again, my point is right now i'm focused on president barack obama and his stance. >> can americans trust mitt romney to decide which american citizens get extra. >> you dishally assassinated and which ones don't? >> let's see. i don't think he'll do that, but i think there are a lot of other issues they shouldn't trust him on. >> so you're going to be in congress, so i have to ask you this question. do you feel comfortable with from what you know, these are

public reports, the program is classified but there's been leaks and stuff we have read from "the new york times," the power the president has right now in the white house to create this kill list. do you feel comfortable with that as a mainstay of executive authority going forward if, say, mitt romney is the person who wields it? >> the short answer is no. what you touched on a few minutes ago was really about how congress has given up or not really stood up for the job that it has of actually being the decider on where we go into battle, where we send our troops, and this is something we've seen now for many, many years and something that i think is important for congress to really take a shard lihard line. just in general it's critical for us to stand up. should i have the privilege of searching in congress, to do our jobs in congress and decide these difficult issues. >> i was asking about this

issue. they have a right to have access to this information. they're supposed to be briefed about many of these sensitive operations. i was asking about this process about how an american citizen ends up on a kill list. what widen was saying is that he believes that the intelligence committee hasn't actually had that fully explained to these people with these special security clearances. moreover, he said that the american people would be shocked if they were allowed to access the administration's interpretation of the same laws that the american people can read publicly. in other words, widen said there are two sets of laws in this country. one that the american people are allowed to read and then one which exists in secret which is the administration's interpretation of those laws. that's a pretty sobering thing to hear from someone who has been on the intelligence committee since 2001. >> there's two distinct issues we should be clear about. one is the substantive policy, right? the existence of the kill list. the ways in which we're using special forces and drones as a tool of counterterrorism that means engaging in hostile

activities, sometimes in a few cases against haern. american citizens as a means of going after al qaeda and whether that's a justifiable policy from a strategic standpoint in terms of whether it's in the best interest of u.s. national security from a legal and koticonstitutional po. then there's the secrecy issue. it's what do we know about what our government is doing? will they even admit to and address the fact that, say, anwar al awlaki was put on a kill list. it seems to me it might be possible that under conditions of more transparency i could be persuaded about the substance of the policy, but under the current conditions, you can't really even get to that argument because of the amount of secrecy that surrounds it. >> i think we need to have that argument though about

strategically what kind of tactics we as a country will employ against this modern-day threat. i think if you look at what the options are on both sides, this unconventional warfare where you have small special force strike teams, quick insert, quick exit versus the conventional where we have close to 100,000 troops plus over 100,000 dod civilians really staying and plunking down in a country for over now ten years. i think that's something we need to talk about because we're dealing with such an unconventional threat, an enemy in al qaeda that knows no allegiance and loyalty to a specific nation, highly mobile, and we need to be able to respond in kind. >> do you foresee a time when we can -- i think the thing that i think about is 9/11, authorization of use of military force, declaration of a war on terror, the invasion of iraq, the continuing war in afghanistan, now this new counter terrorist front for special forces and drone strikes. do you envision as someone who served in theater a time when we

can declare it over? i mean, do you imagine some day when we just say, this period of war won't be permanent. this is over? >> i would like to say yes, but i think it's going as leaders and a nation to really look at this in a modern warfare concept and really look at the modern threats and where we say well, now we are at war or we're not at war. i think we've got to really just change the whole dynamic of how we look at this and we can't look at it in the traditional sense that we have, you know, for the last 50 or 100 years. >> see, i think you were talking before about the -- what a second term of obama would look like. i mean, i think that there's going to be a return to the kind of military policy that we saw under president clinton where it was sort of cruise missile liberalism in a sense where you had these air wars, you had the kosovo air wars, the strikes against sudan following the embassy bombings in 1998 combined with the use of other special operations forces. i would look for a bleeding of

the conflict in a low intensity way into mali, somalia, pakistan i think will continue to be there, yemen as well. and trying to move away from large-scale deployments. >> because they don't have the money for those large-scale deployments. there's another factor, too. to me almost the most remarkable thing, no discussion in this convention about china. it seems to me this very middle east-heavy american foreign policy cannot continue that many more years. foreign policy -- china is going to be the dominant issue -- >> there is a question about china but it's only in terms of outsourcing. >> there is an emerging geopolitical game going on in china which is now rivaling the u.s. control in the pacific which is going to dwarf all of this stuff and it's still not on the political radar. >> jeremy scahill, my friend, thanks for coming in. >> i look forward to the ad hominem attacks on twitter. >> they'll be there. hey. hey eddie.

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we are now just two months away from the presidential election, and in those two months you are likely to be unnun date with campaign ads. spending will reach historic levels and if the trend so far continues, almost all of them will be negative. the day after president obama's acceptance speech the romney campaign announced a massive new ad buy of 15 different ads in eight different swing states like this one airing in ohio. >> this president can ask us to be patient. this president can tell us it was someone else's fault. but this president cannot tell us that you're better off today than when he took office. >> here in ohio, we're not better off under president obama. his defense cuts will weaken national security and threaten over 20,000 ohio jobs. the romney plan reverse obama

defense cuts, strengthen our military, and create over 450,000 new jobs for ohio. >> i'm mitt romney and i approve this message. >> we should mention that the ad, like many of romney's ads, is disingenuous nonsense. the defense cuts he criticizes are not president obama's, they're the ones in the sequestration we were speaking of earlier agreed to by democrats and republicans. also, i have to note that the implicit idea here is that, you know, government can create jobs as long as every dollar spent is spent on defense. spend it on anything else, doesn't create jobs. if you spend it on defense it does create jobs. i can think of no coherent economic theory that would suggest why that's the case but i digress. the bigger question that will be central to the campaign over the next two months is this. will the ad make any difference whatsoever? the answer according to a growing body of research is no. if tomorrow morning you were to wake up and find yourself a candidate for political office, one of the first things you

would do is hire a consultant and they would tell you to do basically two things, raise money and run ads. now that the conventions are over, the campaigns are shifting fully into the second phase, the ad phase. the campaign and media narrative will be dictated in large part about what those ads say. new research into what motivates people to vote and what doesn't has the potential to revolutionize campaigns. if the people who run the campaigns realize it in time, it could shape the outcome of the election. join us are sasha issenberg. he has a much awaited new book that comes out tuesday. chris hughes, co-founder of facebook and publisher and editor in chief of the new republic. and walter shapiro, a former white house speechwriter for president jimmy carter. great to have you all here. we also have bob sha rurump whos

worked for several campaigns, a senior fellow. great to have you here. >> i assume i'm over here in the corner because i was representing the tie-wearing -- then i saw waldner, and he has a tie on, too. >> i let him go this time but you are at the tie-wearing camera. let's start with the basic question of, sasha, this is something you're doing research on and from what i've read of the parts of your book that have been published, there's more and more scientific approach of testable hypotheses, rand yamization, experimental looks at the way campaign methods work. what does that research say about ads and their effectiveness. >> one of the few times people have measured the impact of ads was in rick perry's 2006 campaigns where he brought on four academic political scientists and invited them to run randomized control trials on basically every aspect of his

campaign -- >> he said you guys tell us where to run the ad it's a ads. >> i'm skeptical that the things i'm spending money on are doing anything. for three weeks they randomized his ads. what they found was ads have been impact but it's small and it decays pretty quickly. so you can move some numbers, you can move his positive number in that case, you can move his number in the horse race, but after a few days it goes away and after a couple weeks any influence is gone entirely. >> one of the other things that we've seen, and there's a new paper i was reading last night by a political scientist, co-authored by a political scientist named mike jones that i know and he looked at congressional races. basically what happens is the ads tend to cancel each other out. the thing that makes an ad effective is a lot more ad bys than your opponent. it's hard to have a lot more ad buys because competitive races

by definition are ones where people are running roughly the same amount of ads and buying the same amount. it seems to me there's an interesting deeper cultural tension here between a cons consultant class that has been navigating by gut and instinct and this kind of emerging empirical analysis. bob, i want to get your thoughts on this. you go in, what are you basing your decisions on here or have been over the last, you know, several decades you have been doing this work when you tell someone that we should be putting money in running ads and this ad is going to work? >> well, first of all, i'm retired so i guess i could just join here in the beating up because i don't have any self-interest in this. secondly, even the piece of evidence you cited that the ads cancel each other out in congressional races, that means no one's side is ever going to unilaterally disarm. third, that study focused on congressional races where there is a lot of gerrymandering so most races are decided in

advantages. fourth, it suggested to it could make a 3% difference in the races. a 3% difference in many cases will determine the outcome, could control the outcome in terms of the house. finally, i can go back to campaigns i was in. i mean, you take the kennedy campaign against romney in 1994, the bain ads and they didn't look like ads, they just looked like people coming on television and talking to you, had a profound impact on that race. and there was a huge amount of empirical evidence. what sasha is writing about, and i'm in the process of reading the book to review it, what sasha is writing about is very interesting. it's a development that i think gives campaigns a powerful new tool, but it's not -- it's not a secret sauce, but it's certainly not a replacement sauce. you know, i think of these guys who -- political scientists who say campaigns don't matter. >> right. >> the outcome for the presidency is predetermined from the beginning. we are never going to have the experiment where one -- >> well, that's true.

that's true. but walter, you have covered the industry of the kind of what i call the campaign industrial complex, and one of the things you have kind of said is, you know, basically people that have the job that bob shrum used to have basically have to say that. i want you to talk about why that is after we take this break. nd it together. nd it together. on a walk, walk, walk. love to walk. yeah, we found that wonderful thing. and you smiled. and threw it. and i decided i would never, ever leave it anywhere. because that wonderful, bouncy, roll-around thing... had made you play. and that... had made you smile. [ announcer ] beneful. play. it's good for you.

oh, hey alex. just picking up some, brochures, posters copies of my acceptance speech. great! it's always good to have a backup plan, in case i get hit by a meteor. wow, your hair looks great. didn't realize they did photoshop here.

hey, good call on those mugs. can't let 'em see what you're drinking. you know, i'm glad we're both running a nice, clean race. no need to get nasty. here's your "honk if you had an affair with taylor" yard sign. looks good. [ male announcer ] fedex office. now save 50% on banners. i know campaigns can seem small, even silly sometimes. trivial things become big distractions. serious issues become sound bites. the truth gets buried under an avalanche of money and advertising. if you're sick of hearing me approve this message, believe me, so am i. >> very funny line from the president at his speech talking about the onslaught of ads. walter shapiro we just heard from bob shrum about his view that a good ad really does and can make a difference.

and i'm curious to put this in the contention of the broader industry of people that make these ads. >> first of all, a good ad may make the difference, but most of the ads in this campaign have not been good ads. they are the cookie cutter things that are boring if you watch them on youtube. you can imagine how boring they are like those romney ads you showed early on. if you're doing it, they come at you unawares while you're watching television and going up to go to the kitchen. it's not going to say, this is a compelling moment, i have to come back. number two, going back to that study, voters have so much other information in a presidential race as opposed to a congressional race that the impact v ads i think is a lot lower in a presidential race than even in a 1994 senate campaign in massachusetts. but the largest thing is that the way the compensation structure of a political

campaign is set up is that in addition to the salaries listed in the filing to the federal election commission, the admakers and the ad team take a certain percentage of the ad buy which is just lumped together in the fec reports with the actual tv costs. >> explain what that means. >> well, bob shrum can probably do numbers better than i can, but basically it's a leftover from the early days of commercial television advertising, and as much as 15% of the ad buys, mostly negotiated down from that, can be called -- can basically go to the ad team as a fee. >> right. so people who are listening to, the incentive structure is such that you're the person who oversooes what kind of ads to run and how much money to put on ads, and your compensation is such that the more money you put into ads, the more money you get paid. >> what's really unique though about this sickle is we're seeing the emergence of a lot

more digital consulting firms. there's still a belief that ads work but as television habits shift, the question is how do you get ads online. we're seeing the emergence of persuasion advertising online in the circle. before it was just getting people into the funnel to become field organizers -- >> or donors. >> this sort of transitions us to this kind of what the next frontier is. the thing about broadcast ads in general is it's essentially a 1960s technology, which doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, hi, advertisers, keep doing your thing, but that there are other more specific ways to -- >> yeah. the possible of targeting particularly online right now is really incredible. not only to get potential supporters so that they become more excited and potentially become donors but to actually find those people who the campaigns know need to be persuaded in a swing state while they're watching a youtube video and converting them at that

moment. >> general hly had two differen categories. voter contact has been mail, phones, canvassing, and there you know who you're talking to and you get information back from them. you know you had a contact. tv you get none of that. radio you get none of that. this cycle in a way that wasn't true in '08 has done online we're starting to fuse those two. you get all the advantages of broadcast content, video, the sort of full dynamism of a 30-second spot but you know who you're delivering it to and if they saw it. >> is the fee structure the same for online digital ads as it is for over the air tv ads? one of the reasons why get out the vote was always a stepchild of campaigns is no one ever bought a vacation house with their fee structure from get out the vote. >> it depends on the firm. there are some firms that are more mature about these things and charge on conversions, in

other words the number of people that sign up. other that is do it differently. the thing that's really tricky about looking at the numbers if you're talking about the economics of e-mail addresses, once you get on the obama list, obama can then convert an e-mail address into donor. they announced 35 million bucks raised just last week online that was the result of that online advertising program. so it's where voter contact and media merge. >> and you don't have to -- you can know who you're talking to, which is this big's next frontier. bob, i want you to weigh in on this incentive question. it seems key, and tulsi, i want you to talk about what your experience has been in the market for campaigns consultants and how you pulled off the primary victory did you right after we take this break. whoa. right? get. out. exactly! really?! [ mom ] what? shut the front door. right? woop-woop! franklin delano! [ male announcer ] there's oreo creme under that fudge! oreo fudge cremes. now in two new flavors.

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zzzquil, have led to an increase intands clinical depression. drug and alcohol abuse is up. and those dealing with grief don't have access to the professional help they need. when you see these issues, do you want to walk away or step up? with a degree in the field of counseling or psychology from capella university, you'll have the knowledge to make a difference in the lives of others. let's get started at capella.edu we're talking about the cutting edge of campaign science and what we know and what we don't know about what actually works in campaigning. i mean, the thing that's amazing

and i have worked a little bit in campaigns in the past, it always seemed so superstitious to me or like alchemy. there's this kind of hocus-pocus feel to it. the question of what do we actually know about what persuades people. bob shrum as someone who has worked on a number of campaigns, i want you to just respond to the point that walter shapiro was making about the incentive structure and how that does or does not affect the choices that consultants make and push for campaigns. >> hear from the pinata corner let me say four things. there's nobody unless the candidate is insane who is getting paid 15% in very large major races like the presidential campaign. that certainly was not true in kerry. certainly was not true in gore. was certainly not true in clinton, and, in fact, in the kerry campaign in the last three weeks, we gave up the entire commission which was considerably lower than 15% in fairly low single digits to try to win that election.

secondly, i want to say something for the people who are still in this business and i'll pick the people who are doing the media in the obama campaign. david axelrod, jim margoli s, jim done llan, they care about this. if they didn't think the ads worked, they would use the money elsewhere. chris hayes is right, we are going it see more and more advertising moving to the internet because more people spend time on the internet and less time on television but there's going to be a compensatixe compensation structure there. i think we're tilting at windmills and i think it's the wrong windmill. bain and taxes would not be an issue in the way it is in this campaign without advertising. >> right. we should make this point about ads. there's the primary effect of an ad which is you see it and what impression it makes and second

airily if it gets picked up by the press, and there's research that suggests that does have an effect. >> even at the beginning the mainstream media tended to dismiss the bain ads. most of the comment on it was negative. after two or three weeks after people saul results in the polling, they said those ads were working, then they picked it up -- >> that's a serious issue. the polling tells it. you have just gone through what i would imagine is a daunting process of declaring yourself a candidate and then you go shopping and people come knocking on your door and they say these are my services and how do you distinguish the snake oil salesman from -- because there is this -- >> it's a good question, and especially challenging for first-time congressional candidates like myself because we want to make sure that whoever we hire is someone who is not only going to know and respect the individual, unique dynamics of our communities which in hawaii is incredibly important but also who i will be able to work with because ultimately, you know, i think someone mentioned earlier the choices that the consultants

will make. if you're the candidate, you better be making the choices. >> you have to own all those choices. >> and my media consultant was joe tripy. we had many heated debates but i give him so much credit. he saved me from myself many times. you were talking about the difference between good ads and not so good ads. people have come up and told me i was brushing my teeth and i stopped brushing my teeth because your ad caught my interest. i really wanted to listen and hear what you had to say. >> that's your famous hey you, stop brushing your teeth ad. it got a fair amount of play in the media. chris, what do you think of the big differences between 2008 in campaigning and this year and thin project out ten years from now. what are we going to be seeing then? what's the trajectory of where campaigns are heading? >> i think the big story perhaps isn't as sexy as the one in 2006. >> which was sexy and got a lot

of attention. >> it did. this story is more about data. the opportunity to create integrated databases amongst supporters and potential persuadable voters is immense. it means that you can have a field operative in the obama campaign and its offices in all these states, spent four times what the romney campaign has, and know very clearly who exactly on a block you need to talk to, exactly what you should say to them, and then once someone else has talked to them, get them off the list. even goes so far into the iphone app that they have created and deployed. it's not about buzz, it's not about just messaging. it's about what you can talk to. >> what's fascinate something it's marrying the oldest voter persuasion technology which is talking from a human being to a human being with all this information that's coming from database and one of the things that's interesting is donald green, who is famous in this field,s who book quk get out the book" i read when i was a field organizer because it was the first time political scientists had done these samples. this is a bar graph of votes

secured per 1,000 people for each thmethod. 71 votes per 1,000 in door to door. 29 in commercial phone bank. door to door is more labor intensive but we're seeing the technology is making that persuasion universe look a lot different. i want to find from you, sasha, what you're finding, and you, walt walter, after we take this break. what makes a sleep number store different? you walk into a conventional mattress store, it's really not about you. they say, "well, if you wanted a firm bed you can lie on one of those.

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about persuasion. we actually learned very ultimately about what persuades people. what we have learned in the last 10, 15 years is what mobilizes people to vote. the science around turn out and registration has gotten much smarter. and so that's a place where i think that, you know, individual level data has been useful, campaigns are able to, you know, identify and predict who they should be talking to, and it's coincided with this narrowing of the persuadable universe in presidential elections. so campaigns are getting much more intelligent. obama has all those field offices not just because volunteers are coming out, but the campaign has recognized the value of doing jegeo tv. >> there are nuggets about this research that would strike us as surprised about getting people out to vote? >> the most effective tool documented is to send people a

copy of their own vote history, the elections in which they voted, and all of their neighbor's vote history. and say after the election we'll send you all an updated set. >> that's a great -- >> everybody knows how incredibly effective it is. it's called social pressure, behavioral psychologists have talked about it. no campaign wanted to put their name as a return address. it looked like block mail. people have softened this and said i want to thank you for being a voter in the last election. i hope i can thank you again. everything we're learning about motivating people to vote is there's a social dynamic. the smartest people in the campaigns are talking less right now about these as being contests of ideas and how you change people's behaviors. >> walter? >> one final thing i want to get in here is last friday was a very important date in this campaign. it was not only the end of the democratic party -- the convention, but it was also the

day at which the romney and obama campaign qualifies for something the fcc calls the lowest unit rate for ads and super pacs, party committees, everybody else doesn't qualify. which basically means for the next two months a dollar given to the presidential campaigns buys you a lot more ad time than a dollar that shelden aidleson gives to a super pac. >> and preferential buying time and preferential treatment in the mail. which means a lot. parties and k35i7campaigns stile a privileged place. >> i want to touch on something sasha said about all the what have we learned, how do we persuade people. i think it comes down a basic thing of people are going to vote for who they like. they're going to like people who they trust, and it goes back to the basic thing of relationships. when you make those personal relationships, and that's why i think you saw the door to door

success rate is so much higher. >> bob shrum, final thought on this sort of move from persuasion to mobilization that we've seen. >> well, i entirely agree with sasha about the mobilization, and i think this is going to be very much in some ways a base election, but i think we have a false either/or here. the fact of the matter is that you've got to try to do both. we've learned so much more in the last ten years about how to turn out voters. but you also have to go out and persuade people. you have to create an overall message, and, look, the reason obama could do this and did he it brilliantly in '08 was because h funding. john kerry would say the biggest mistakes he made in 2004 was to take the federal funding -- >> and be locked into it. >> run a 13-week campaign when bush only had to run five weeks same amount of money. we couldn't do all the stuff we had at our disposal in terms of turnout and we had to get out of states like colorado in terms of media which we could have won. >> in this new world you can use

different tools and target different communication. i want to thank bob shrum, walter shapiro, and facebook co-founder chris hughes, veteran of the 2008 obama campaign for joining us this morning. what you should know for the news week ahead coming up next. [ male announcer ] this is sheldon, whose long dy setting up the news starts with arthritis pain and a choice. take tylenol or take aleve, the #1 recommended pain reliever by orthopedic doctors. just two aleve can keep pain away all day. back to the news.

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so what should you know for the week coming up? you should know who played the role of a disillusioned obama supporter in a strange, somewhat creeping and patronizing new ad from the rnc. >> listen this just isn't working. it's been four years. you've changed. you're just not the person i thought you were. it's not me. it's you. >> the woman is actually a staffer at the republican national committee, director of hispanic outreach and we know -- should know if she was tasked for finding a latino obama voter who was disillusioned, and the

best she could do is herself, she's not very good at outreach. >> the romney campaign continues to flounder when it comes to discussing issues when it comes to women when it comes to an interview ann romney gave on friday. >> do you believe employer provided health insurance should be required to cover birth control. >> again, you're asking me questions that are not about what this election is going to be about. this election is going to be about the economy and jobs. >> well, a pew research poll shows those issues are very important to women. ranked either important or very important. >> listen, i've been across this country for a year and a half on the campaign trail, i've spoke nguyen thousands of women. they are telling me -- one, they are saying they are praying for me, which is really wonderful and they are saying please help. please help, we are so worried

about our jobs. really, if you want to pull me off the other messages, it's not going to work. >> the latest gallup poll shows president obama moving into a four-point lead over mitt romney. we are seeing his best numbers since the killing of osama bin laden. the republican's 2.5-point convention bounce deflated before it even inflated. and clint eastwood's talk to an empty chair is hithe highlight, rather than mitt romney's acceptance speech. tar balls of the spilled oil washed up on beaches of louisiana and alabama. and auburn university researcher joel hayworth said we're in year three and this is the new normal for the gulf coast.

for the unforeseeable time, this is the new normal for the beach. the famed enemy of big government was helping himself to the worst excesses of big brother. seth rosenfeld obtained previously indisclosed fbi records that reagan secretly reported people in the fbi that he suspected to communist activity. and he also asked them to spy on their 19-year-old daughter maureen living with an older, married policeman. one possessed as an insurance salesman and other interviewed a maid to get information back to her parents. the records released rosenfeld after a long and costly legal fight under the freedom of information act and we know so much about our government thanks to that law. i want to find out what my nest guests think we should know for the week coming up. and you, chelsea, do the honors here. brought this. thank you very much, aloha. >> the most consequential thing

in the world is happening in the south china sea, that gets no political discussion whatsoever. a massive, potential dangerous conflict going on between some very important countries like china, japan, south korea. hillary clinton trying to maintain the u.s. as a player in this. this is what american foreign policy is about in large measure no whaert who wins in november, yet it's rarely discussed. >> we've been talking a lot about the presidential races with regard to women's issues, some of the things you just talked about. critical races between women candidates across the country. running for u.s. senate. which are going to be very critical to how the congress and u.s. senate are made up and what kind of strategy we take going forward. we need to pay attention to some of the other races critical, turning points for our country. >> i would say to our people watching, down ballot, down ballot, down ballot. keep paying attention to the senate race in a swing district.

congress a race if you're not in a swing district. >> every vote will make a difference. >> not only is technology fusing what used to be separate worlds of medium, but fusing field organizing and fund-raising and campaigns in the past couple weeks, figure out how to do fund-raising, over text message, with a square credit card reader and people knocking on your doors, canvassers asking for money. >> that's an interesting ask. i guess you have to get through the first few questions. you want to find out -- you probably don't want to ask a persuadable voter. find out if they are in their camp. >> how do you feel the economy is going? well -- >> michelle goldberg. >> campaigning yesterday with pat roberts and mitt romney promised he would fight efforts to take in god we trust off our money. there are no such efforts to take in god we trust off our money. it's fascinating to see romney

doubling down on the religious culture war rhetoric. >> he embraced the most far-right congressman, virulently bigotedly anti immigrant. right after the rnc. >> when everyone thought he would turn to the center. >> i want to thank my guests today. chelsea, i had sound like an ignore ant boy from new york. made of fresh flowers. smells wonderful. thank you, all, for joining us. back next week with sam seder of the majority report, and on friday, i'll be on "real time with bill maher" ohbo. coming up, pennsylvania's discriminatory voter i.d. law headed to the state supreme court. where did it come from? who is behind it? that's melissa harris-perry up next. we'll see you next week, here on

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