synchronizes your business expenses. just shoot your business card receipts and they're automatically matched up with the charges on your online statement. i'm john kaplan, and i'm a member of a synchronized world. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. back to the beginning of the shutdown or are democrats suddenly more emboldened? a new day, a beautiful day here on the east coast. and what may be a brand-new day for democrats in washington. the height of autumn, a certain spring in their step we haven't seen in a long time. we'll explain that in a minute. also we have known for a while that george w. bush and dick cheney weren't exactly best buddies, we did know their relationship was a close one. a new book excerpted in today's "new york times" magazine shows it may have been a lot more

complicated than any of us realized. the details of that in a discussion is ahead. and last week, we inducted lloyd benson into the debate hall of fame. this week, on another big anniversary, another presidential debate question i want to bring before the hall of fame committee, maybe the hall of shame committee for this one. either way, a moment that had a ripple effect we're still feeling and we'll talk about it. first, once again, it is a sunday morning in october. it is a holiday weekend in fact. happy early columbus day to all of you. also an nfl sunday. still eight hours before the marquis game of the day, the saints and the patriots before that kicks off. so we will pass some of the hours between now and then with politics. and some pastries too on the table over there. also not too early to talk about playbooks and you don't have to follow the nfl to get the concept of a playbook. it is the notebook, where a team keeps all the diagrams of its plays, how it hopes to fake out and beat the other team. and for a few years now in washington, the fiscal negotiation playbook for john boehner and congressional

republicans has gone something like this, threaten to do something extreme or to allow something extreme to happen, something that makes the political world say they wouldn't seriously do that, would they? and the prospect of a debt default is a perfect example of this. this isn't the first time we have been down this road, since republicans took back the house in 2011. and it isn't the first time because when they did try it for the first time, two summers ago, pretty much worked. president obama negotiated with republicans over the debt ceiling back then. and sent a message to them that they could dangle the prospect of a catastrophic default and extract real meaningful concessions by doing that. that same basic republican playbook has now led us into a government shutdown and once again to the brink of default. there are five days we are told now until the u.s. will no longer be able to pay its bills. that day is maybe not an exact date, there are some tricks that the treasury could do, juggling of accounts, can move some t-bills around or something like that. i don't know the details. this isn't cnbc.

but the damage that a dead default would do is very real, that much i am clear on. can send the dollar crashing, could cause interest rates to soar, could freeze credit markets around the world, stock markets would almost definitely crash. in short, it could send the u.s. economy into a recession even worse than the one we are still struggling to crawl out from. that is the republican bet that precipitated this standoff, that in the face of another default threat, democrats would agree to give away the store. a lot has happened in the two-plus years since that last debt ceiling showdown. obama was willing to negotiate and make concessions in the name of averting a threat to drive the u.s. economy off a cliff. a lot has happened. in fact, just since yesterday. the weekend began with let's mack a deal worthy promise, behind door number one we had paul ryan trying to broker a deal, the budget guru of republicans in the house, a conservative with deep ties to the republican establishment, but also just as much clout with the tea party wing of his party. behind door number two, in the

senate, we had republican susan collins, a moderate from maine. she's been trying to broach a deal in her chamber that everyone could find acceptable. where t the fact the senate is engaged in trying to reach a deal is significant. the deal that susan collins proposed would raise the debt ceiling until the end of january. also, ask for so-called minor adjustments to obama care, the president's signature achievement. the democrats own playbook calls for changing the republican playbook, putting an end to the constant parade of cataclysmic deadlines. they said yesterday what collins was calling for simply isn't enough. >> susan collins is one of my favorite senators, democrat or republican. i appreciate her efforts as always to find a consensus. but the plan she suggested and i've seen in writing is not going to go anyplace at this

stage. two good things in it. number one, it opens the government. number two, it extends the debt ceiling. but other than that, there's little agreement with us. as i explained to senator mcconnell and senator alexander this morning, they're not doing us a favor by opening the -- reopening the government. they're not doing us a favor by extending the debt ceiling. those are -- that's part of our jobs. that's why we have said open the government, let us pay our bills, and we need to do that before we have any agreement on what goes after that. >> so what is now day 13 of the shutdown, we're in the just right back where we started. we're at a point where democrats are feeling more emboldened. they want to raise the debt ceiling for more than 14 weeks because they don't want to turn

around and do this all over again in january. there is also this. democrats' main concern according to reporting in the washington post is scaling back sequester cuts, making sure once the government is open and running again, it is not at the drastically reduced funding levels we have been operating at because of the deal that was struck the last time there was a debt ceiling fight. there are -- these are sure signs that democrats think they are in a strong bargaining position here. bargaining is apparently what harry reid and mitch mcconnell are now doing with each other. in poker, reid's move is called a raise, which makes the question now, is he, is his party, are they bluffing? i want to bring in nbc news capital hill reporter and producer casey hunt to talk about this with bob herbert, former new york times columnist and alex sites, reporter with national journal and msnbc political analyst joe walsh. also with salon. i'm with salon. you're with salon. alex is with salon.

let's start with you, casey, set the stage for what is happening right now and what will happen in the next few days in washington. because yesterday on the show, we were talking about, it looked like at this hour yesterday morning there was maybe this emerging deal with susan collins that maybe would be forced on the house. since then, john boehner told republicans in the house he's done negotiating with the white house or the white house has done negotiating with him. and senate democrats said the susan collins is no good with them. can you take us through what happened yesterday? >> the susan collins plan is something bubbling along for the past few days on capitol hill. i will say that senate democratic leadership has always been pushing people off of that plan. they haven't really liked it from the beginning. there were some initial conversations, sat down around the table, realized it wasn't going to go where they wanted it to go. harry reid has never really been fully on board with that. while she was selling it really hard after coming out of that meeting on friday, from my perspective, i never saw it actually coming to fruition. but what you're going to see now with reid and mcconnell and my understanding is they'll

probably speak today. there say senate session starting at 1:00. they'll probably speak again on monday as they try to sort of hash this out, but reid clearly wants to take a strong sort of position. he doesn't want to give up any ground to either john boehner or to these other moderate republicans. so him and mcconnell in a room is something that, you know, we haven't seen thus far. but, of course, one thing we learned after the friday meeting with republicans at the white house was that senate republicans and house republicans were not communicating about their two plans. there wasn't a lot of understanding. senate republicans actually came out and came to the white house and said, hey, can you explain what it is that the house has offered to us? but on the flip side of that, the plan after -- excuse me, after house republicans came out of their meeting yesterday, saying the senate needs to stand strong, keep in mind, the plan we were talking about then is whatever collins was offering and that wasn't good enough for reid. imagine how house republicans will react to whatever reid and

mcconnell manage to -- >> that's -- i want to pick up, because the whole house piece, this is fascinating, but let's just -- i want to make sure we understand what it is that harry reid and the democrats are looking for here. this susan collins plan we were talking about yesterday morning, it would have extended the debt ceiling until the end of next january. >> right. >> it would have put in this, like, process, where supposedly the house and senate would agree on a long-term budget plan before -- between now and january or i get -- otherwise, the debt ceiling wouldn't be raised then. the other stumbling block is the plan called for reopening for six months. harry reid is saying that's too long. he wants a shorter deal because he wants pressure on republicans to get rid of the sequester or some of the sequester. >> this is what is so great about what harry reid is doing, he's reminding everybody the democrats already compromised. he thought he had a deal at some point with john boehner. they were just going to bake in the sequester cuts and the continuing resolution and the democrats were going to eat that. they were going to eat this budget level that was close to

the horrible paul ryan budget. and that was their compromise. so by doing this, harry reid is at last focusing on the fact that, yes, we compromise already and it was terrible. so now we're going to up the ante. what he does with it is we don't know, but at least it gives them something to bargain away, the democrats are always bargaining away their power before they start bargaining. >> where did this come from? i think a lot of people seeing the news reports yesterday, wow, suddenly the democrats make a stand here on sequester at this moment, i don't think people saw that coming. is there a back story here that brought this about? >> the playbook they're playing now could not be more different from the 2011 playbook when they caved immediately. i think obama had enough of this. he said the 2012 election would hopefully break the fever of the tea party. that proved not to be true. he's making a stand now. saying no more extortion, no more hostage taking, and trying to set a precedent for any future president, this is not the way to run a government. he is drawing a hard line now. more than about this particular fight, setting a precedent he

can't be extorted in the future. he has to draw a tough line. talk about overplaying your hand, the poker analogy. the sequester levels would be baked in. now not only are they not going to get any serious extractions from obama care, but they might lose sequester cuts as well. >> maybe you can clarify, yesterday morning we were talking about maybe democrats would be willing to go along with this. i think a two-year delay in the medical device tax with obama care. is harry reid saying that's not part of the deal for him? >> that's still something on the table. some sort of alteration to the medical device tax. democrats don't like it either. there are several democrats with major device manufacturers in their home states who want reid to repeal it. you could potentially see that. one thing on the sequester, one idea on the table that had democrats very unhappy was, replacing the sequester cuts with cuts to mandatory spending. cutting benefits, but returning that money over to the discretionary spending side. and there was some interest among republicans like senator lamar alexander who i spoke

with, last weekend who was in the room for this meeting yesterday morning, he was open to it. but reid has basically said no way. >> what about this? alex is talking about the attempt by democrats, the white house, to establish or re-establish the precedent that, you know, you're not going to use the threat of a defaurlt. when you hear about the idea of maybe the medical device tax on the table, if that's part of the deal, are democrats still effectively enforcing that precedent or -- >> i think so. there is a lot of democrats that are on board with the medical device tax issue anyhow. i don't think that's a big problem. i think what the democrats have done, they are, in fact, making a stand. i think they have, one, someone stiffened obama spine to some extent saying we can't do what we did last time. it was disastrous to our priorities. two, i think the republicans to start it off from such a

terrible point when they were demanding, you know, changes to obama care or delaying obama care or giving -- or defunding obama care, none of which was going to happen, even obama couldn't negotiate on that. and then i think also, the democrats, the president, harry reid and everybody else, are looking at the polls. the republicans are killing themselves now and in terms of public opinion, they have essentially zero leverage here. so, you know, all the chips are on the democratic side of the table for the time being. >> that's what i'm wondering, if harry reid and the democrats took a look at the republicans at 28% favorable rating and said, you know what, maybe the compromise here could be a little more, you know, slanted to our side or less slanted against us. i want to pick up what happened on the republican side, what happened in this closed door republican house meeting yesterday. we have the best reporter to explain this, robert costa from the national journal. he's coming up right after this. let's go places. but let's be ready. ♪ let's do our homework. ♪

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all right, joining us now live from capitol hill, we have robert costa, the washington, d.c. editor at "national review." thank you for joining us. you're the best source reporter in washington on congressional republicans. no one i would rather be talking to right now about this. i wonder, there is so much happening on the senate side, the house side yesterday, maybe we could start in the senate on the republican side of the senate where susan collins, from maine, was putting together what she thought was going to be the big compromise that would get through the senate yesterday. can you take us through how that fell apart, and what republicans in the senate and what mitch mcconnell is now doing with negotiations with harry reid, what they're thiir thinking is now. >> it is a fascinating fluid situation here in the senate and in the house. what you saw with susan collins, when they floated her proposal to have the six-month extension, but senate democrats feel like they can push republicans, they see disarray in the house and

they see some unease among senate republicans. so they're really pushing now to get sequester cuts. so the collins plan was floated. it got a lot of coverage, but was never really -- never had political capital behind it. it started to fade away. what you're seeing senate republican leader mitch mcconnell do now behind the scenes is very quiet publicly, but he's very worried now that a senate democrats assert themselves, maybe those bca levels from the 2011 sequester deal, maybe democrats start to go at them and try to adjust the levels, he's very worried about that. politically, whey? if they don't want to put revenue on the table, he has to deal with the sequester. that's always been his plan. and if democrats can make a dent now on sequester, that's a huge political victory for them, and he's very worried about that. >> and can you talk for a minute about mcconnell's ability now to bargain with reid? we're always talking about how mitch mcconnell has to watch his back in kentucky, has rand paul, tea party challenge in the primary next year, not that popular in kentucky to begin

with. how much leverage does he have? if the hopes of getting a deal now are in reid and mcconnell hammering something out, how much leeway does mcconnell have to actually hammer out a deal here? >> not so much. the only argument i'm hearing from senate republicans. they're going to democrats to chuck schumer and harry reid and saying, look, maybe if you push us too hard on sequester, push us too hard on bca levels, only get four or five republicans, that's not going to be helpful to you once you send this volley back to the house. you really should be looking harry reid and chuck schumer for seven to 15 republicans, don't touch the bca levels, if you don't touch those levels, maybe we'll have a lot of people come along and that will put real pressure on boehner to take up the senate's bill. so it is really an argument not only about not touching the bca levels, but about avoiding default, to make boehner pass something by getting some republican support in the senate. >> and that's the other piece of it, so the strategy that seems to be taking shape here, the pathway that seems to be taking shape here, the deal comes together in the senate and like you say, the house is forced -- boehner is forced to put this on

the floor, even if a lot of republicans vote against it. a lot of the reporting i'm seeing about this closed door house meeting, house republican meeting yesterday, was that boehner seemed maybe to be sort of trying to prepare his ranks for that eventuality, for that to happen, and paul ryan and others in this meeting basically riled up the troops against this idea and the conservatives in the house now are ready for a fight with the senate. is that what you're hearing? >> boehner is in a delicate position now. he's not ready to fully push his conference in a certain direction. he's kind of sitting back and that's what he did on saturday morning at the conference meeting. he said, look, guys, it is in the senate's hands now, let's ask them to, quote, stand strong. that's what eric cantor told the group. it is the -- the ball is in the senate's court. the problem is, now that they have almost thrown it over to the senate, a lot of house conservatives including paul ryan, very influential in the house, they feel like they're disengaged from the process. whatever the senate cooks up, even if on a bipartisan basis, when that comes back to the

house, it won't have a lot of support, at least initially. and democrats, who knows where they're going to be on that. house republicans, they feel like they're helping the senate to build the product and they don't feel like boehner is leading them in a certain direction. as much as there may be pressure for baoehner to take up whateve the senate passes, there is no guarantee that the house knows what it is going to do. >> bob herbert here. we know there are some members of the house and the gop who feel that the default would not be that big a deal. is there a way to characterize a general sense of how house republicans feel about default? do they think that this would be disastrous? >> it is a great question, bob. i think politically when you talk to them privately they're very much aware this would be a bad thing for the party if republicans are blamed in any way for default. what they have done, perhaps too much, according to some leadership aids, talked too much publicly about the technical aspects of default but how the treasury can make its payments. they're trying to make an argument to the conservative

base that, it is not that bad, we're going to go to the deadline, don't worry about it. i don't think boehner wants to default. so that's really where the house is now. can they usher some of these conservative members along to avoid default by coming together in a senate deal. right now, it is so fluid, i'm not sure where boehner has the votes on almost anything. >> how delusional is paul ryan that he thought he was going to be the person who was going to come through this and cut between the left and the right and broker a deal that was based largely, not fully, but largely on ryan budget levels? >> i don't think it is the word delusional. there was a moment last week where ryan published that wall street journal op-ed and the house was leading the talks. ryan was engaging directly with the president. for a brief moment, it looked like ryan could be the one to get boehner, the right flank to come along and support a debt limit skeextension. that was always ryan's goal. but the problem for ryan is he

still is paul ryan, just the budget committee chairman and once harry reid stepped into the fray, ryan's whole influence over the process evaporated. >> bob, it is casey hunt. nice to see you. wanted to ask, there was a lot of talk about how the longer this went on, the worse it would look for republicans in polling and they would start to come around. we obviously have seen that polling. my question is, for you, as somebody who talks to the house conservatives, how much has that moved them, if at all? >> not -- i think the polling hasn't been important, and i think some of the major polls last week have had an impact, but two things that are really having an impact are the constituent calls. a lot of republicans publicly aren't very candid about how many negative calls they're getting about the shutdown. that's really bothering them. and long-term they don't think the shutdown will be that much of a political problem for them in 2014. but they're really nervous about the home districts, about the shutdown and how business people in their district are looking at default. >> all right, robert costa with "national review." thank you.

great information there. we'll talk about a lot of what we just heard right after this. [ coughs, sneezes ]

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this is playing with fire. we don't know when the markets will react to this. you can't say it will be no sooner than next thursday. i worry on monday that when the american markets open, maybe because of this vote, that they will start worrying and not only will the stock market go down, but interest rates go up, and the value of the -- the value of u.s. treasury is declining, it is very serious. >> chuck schumer talking about the looming debt default deadline. what we're hearing from robert costa there, we have a deadline

coming up and obviously seeing a blueprint for getting something done, which will require something to come out of the senate that deadline to pressure the house and pressure john boehner to put whatever comes out of the senate on to the floor, but i think a lot of what we're hearing from robert costa, a republican controlled house, the tea party influence in the house is very pronounced, and the house -- the tea party just does not seem to be on the same page when it comes to the idea of the debt ceiling even being a threat. >> yeah, i mean, this has been the question all along, how do you get anything to raise the debt ceiling or reopen the government through the conservative wing of the house. and i don't know if you do. we might end up with john boehner having to, you know, break the house rule or take some democratic votes to get something passed, like he did with the fiscal cliff deal in january. but at least if he has mcconnell's blessing and has, you know, five, seven republicans in the senate, that makes it maybe politically a little more palletablpalletable.

i think he's been avoiding the eventuality. once it comes thursday, he may say he has to go for it. >> it feels like his whole speakership has been building to the moment where he has to put something on the floor that really -- the membership -- the whole thing where the members for the fiscal cliff this he voted no but were secretly for it. >> history is looking at this and speaker of the house is very big deal in the united states government, and if it gets to the point where it is up to boehner. there is the deal in the senate, it has gone to the house, it seems clear that it would pass the house. and boehner is the one who says, you know, absolutely not and causes the u.s. to default. it would be blamed on him specifically, one man, and i can't see him being willing to do that. >> in my -- i'm sorry. >> no, go ahead. >> in my charitable moments toward john boehner, i think maybe his strategy is let the babies cry it out. and just take it to the wire and give them every chance they can

possibly take to broker a deal, to torpedo a deal and at the end of the day, whether the 16th or the 17th, have to go to democrats, have to go to nancy pelosi and say, all right, we're going to do this. i can't see any other way around it at this point. >> well, that was one of the initial theories when this all started was that part of boehner's overall strategy is let the guys dig their own graves. there were not aides who would say that on the record, but there was a sense, if they took it too far and damaged their brand so much that they would have to go back to him and say, okay, we need to cut a deal and to move forward, because boehner always has been known as an institutionalist, he's somebody who actually -- who has said, you know, i came to washington to govern, and so to have it in this state is just not tenable for him in the long-term, not what boehner wants to see. >> and the other thing that is really interesting to me about this too is the idea that right now the senate negotiations -- the negotiations are taking place in the senate between mcconnell and reid, and the story of the last few years has

been when it gets to this point, mcconnell has gone around reid and to joe biden, the vice president, and there is some reporting about reid and a lot of democrats in the senate don't like the deals that joe biden has cut. he caught the fiscal cliff deal. he cut the deal, the debt ceiling deal two years ago, gave us the sequester, the super committee, the fact he's renegotiating this instead of biden maybe shows democrats feel they have more leverage here. >> don't underestimate the rethat the reid felt cut out in that deal with biden and mcconnell. and reid doesn't -- we were talking earlier about somebody having stiffnd oened obama spin that person is probably reid. >> those deals don't -- you're stuck with a sequester that was supposed to be a worst case thing that would ever happen and here it is -- >> i talked to nancy pelosi on thursday and i was amazed how candid she was. she didn't take anything off the table, but the words that came out of her mouth were pretty

interesting. she said, look, we have been enablers. we have been -- we're the responsible party and they know it, they can act irresponsibly. we're not going to enable that anymore. i thought that was really interesting. >> i think obama's plan for years had been i'll cut a deal, i'll look reasonable and the american people will reward me for it and that hasn't proven to be true. the fever never broke. the republicans are still doing the same thing, saying, no more, i'm drawing a hard line. >> i think obama never real realized how intransgent the republicans would be. he always thought ultimately reasonable people would prevail. and that has not been the case. >> that contrast is so interesting too. he tried so hard in 2011 to get that grand bargain to get to that moment. and it wasn't just the republicans who paid the political price back then. that was the lowest point of obama's presidency. we're seeing a little bit of a different dynamic here, from the polling we had so far. want to say thanks to alex sites, and they have been out of office for five years now, but

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and start showing off your #nofilter look. @fresheffects. on "up against the clock," we like to test our contestants' knowledge of american political history. and yesterday i asked our contestants this doozy. >> 40 years ago this past week, this man became the second vice president in u.s. history to resign. >> what? >> 40 years ago this week -- todd. >> spiro t. agnew. >> correct. >> that was todd. he didn't win the game, he did win our respect for identifying spiro t. agnew as richard nixon's first vice president. there is another vice president we want to talk about today, one who didn't resign. but who did manage to shoot his friend in the face while in office. i wonder who we're talking about. we'll discuss that man in new details about his relationship with the president he served under. that's next. ♪

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every four years there is a brief window of time, a period of weeks, really, when every political journalist in the country spends every waking minute trying to figure out the running mates of the presidential tickets. veepstakes season, maybe you love it, maybe it drives you nuts. but somehow all of the names in the air end up getting reduced to a mere handful, the short list. until finally one day word leaks and announcement is made and the ticket is set. and we all say, well, of course obama went with biden. what was he going to do, pick tim kaine? let's go back to the summer of 2000, george w. bush's turn to pick a running mate. republican convention in philadelphia was days away and a short list of two names came into focus. and this was one of them. >> there is new speculation today over the identity of republican presidential candidate george w. bush's running mate. former missouri senator john danforth emerged, this after reports of danforth and bush met secretly last week.

>> and then there was the other name on that short list, the name of the man who bush had deputyiz deputyized, dick cheney. he put john danforth's name on the list and he put his own name on the list. we know which of the two names bush ended up choosing. this is one of those great what ifs in history. we know what a fateful pick cheney was, how different america might be, how different the world might be right now if bush had simply gone with the other name on his short list. if, say, john danforth, a moderate republican, whose reputation, style, governing philosophy couldn't be more different than cheney's, really, if he landed on the ticket and in the vice presidency instead of dick cheney. in his upcoming book, excerpted in today's "new york times" magazine, peter baker revisits the relationship and argues that maybe we have got it a bit wrong that cheney wasn't quite the puppet master he's been pegged as. baker details how severely damaged the relationship was by the end of the bush presidency. said it had been following apart for most of the president's

second term. the president felt burned by the deteriorating situation in iraq, and lack of any wmd, the reason cheney and his neo cons gave for invading in the first place. but the biggest betrayal, peter baker writes, was bush's decision not to pardon scooter libby, convicted of lying to federal officials who were investigating the leak of cia officer valerie plame. bush commuted libby's substance, served zero days in jail, but for cheney, this was not enough. conviction was a deep scar, chain yip saeney said. he has to live with that stigma for the rest of his life. it is obviously a place where we fundamentally disagree. he knows how i felt about it. cheney suggested the president did not want to take the heat. i am sure it meant some criticism of him, he said, but it was a huge disappointment for me. well, here to talk about that, and where else things went wrong

for the two of them, we have robert george, james moore, director of the pac progress texas. still with us, msnbc casey hunt and james, i'll start with you. there are two relationships, two personal alliances that define george w. bush in the public eye, one was karl rove and george w. bush. can you talk about which of those relationships was maybe more significant to his presidency and how specifically that cheney one evolved over the course of the presidency? >> rove is the political guy, the guy that came up with the strategies based upon what he thought would be effective policies. but i think context is important in this whole thing, chris, because bush, the way he governored in texas was with a more of a macro approach to -- he's not a details guy. i think what cheney saw, the reason cheney -- the reason cheney was brought in and asked to find a vice president, and he

found himself, cheney saw the opportunity and bush's naivete that bush did not have the insider washington expertise and understanding of policy and cheney saw an opportunity. when cheney became vice president, you will remember the first thing he did was he arranged a secret meeting with members of the energy industry to try to begin to immediately affect the things that mattered to him most. i think what happened over the course of time is that bush, and bush is good about letting people go and do what they need to do to run the government, what he did in texas. i think it is what he planned to do in washington, but over the course of time, what happened was he saw cheney doing things and going to extremes that he probably was uncomfortable with and he called him off. he said, stop it. he had done that, i mean, he is known for being in meetings and telling people, like, karl rove, and dick cheney as well, saying, wait a minute, i'm the guy in charge here. i'm the guy whose name is out front here. i think this thing sort of

devolved with cheney to the point where bush got to where he was, regarding scooter libby. i don't think bush was ever comfortable accepting the notion that was scooter libby that leaked, but if you dig deeper and deep near the whole thing, there is always a chance that it turns out that karl rove is the guy who orchestrated this whole thing and used cheney's office to make it happen. >> as we found out, the actual leak came from richard armitage who actually sort of was not really -- was still kind of agreed with the policy. that was -- which was ironic here. peter baker's piece is really excellent because it does sort of demystify this whole image of bush being controlled by dick cheney, svengali and so forth. it is true that president bush, you know, was in charge, people may disagree with a lot of the decisions that came out, but he was -- he was in charge and he gave dick cheney a certain

amount of liberty to do what had to be done. but ultimately it came down to it actually came down to bush's taking charge. the scooter libby aspect, i thought, was rather interesting, because it seemed to be what could be considered two other admirable traits that were intentioned with one another. on the one hand, bush believed in the idea of the rule of law. on the other hand, he also believed in loyalty from everybody. he basically fell down on the rule of law by not giving libby the complete pardon that cheney wanted. >> when we look at cheney's role in the administration, we can point to the scooter lby thing, which comes at the end of the administration, a lot of consequential decisions happening before then. i always looked at cheney's role as being particularly outside the vice president's. he had no interest from the beginning in running to succeed, you know, his boss, succeed the president. he wanted to do something in the office of the vice president.

this was a guy who had a long history in washington, he had a history in the executive branch with gerald ford, knew how the white house worked, came in with that kind of knowledge. you combine -- he had that insider savvy, he didn't have the personal and political ambition and had a president, george w. bush, who for better or worse, you can argue it was worse, more laid back than most. had an nba style we talked about and it created this environment where dick cheney was able to be a lot more consequential. >> i that i gets to the point, excuse me, of the bush/cheney relationship. bush was disengaged and no one was more engaged in what was going on in government and politics in washington than dick cheney. so they were a good fit there. and i had always thought that it was a mistake to suggest -- i thought that bush's problem was he was disengaged not unintelligent. i thought it was always a mistake for people to -- some people even wrote that bush was in some sense like this bow. bozo who had become president and was the puppet to dick

cheney. bush was an intelligent guy, anyone who covered him or interviewed him could tell that. but he didn't -- he was not engaged. and that was the real problem here and that is how cheney was able to amass such power and then, of course, you wake up one morning if you're george w. bush and suddenly everything has gone to pot. but on the scooter libby thing, i thought that was really interesting because i don't think -- libby was convicted of lying to federal investigators, i guess. and i think that's a bad law. i mean, i don't understand why that should be felonious to lie to a federal investigator. i thought that bush, when he's listening to the lawyers and other advisers trying to decide whether to pardon this guy, he wants to follow the law, but i wondered how he felt about the law itself. so, for example, if you lie to the police or if you lie to state troopers or something like

that, that's not a criminal offense. but it is a criminal offense if you lie to federal investigators. >> you are going down a really slippery slope if you start, you know, opting to decide which laws you want to follow and which ones you don't. >> i'm saying i don't think he should have pardoned him. he would have pardoned him only because of the influence that scooter libby -- >> about the person -- i want to sneak a quick break in. we'll get casey and we'll play a classic piece of video you may remember, you probably want to enjoin this trip down memory lane. that's right after this. ♪

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campaign 2000, bush and cheney on the stump. remember when that moment happened. >> it was george bush who made the observation and dick cheney who agreed. not the other way around. we know who is number one.

>> that's the first time i heard that interpretation of it. but, james, you were just saying on the break, it is interesting, we talked about how cheney ended up on the ticket, maybe take us further back and talk about george w. bush as a national political figure, as a presidential -- how he ended up in the presidency, the idea went back to 1989 with george w. bush becoming president, and running -- >> bush was running the texas rangers baseball team at the time. and karl rove, that was when he traded sosa. >> sammy sosa. >> in retrospect, not a bad idea given all the steroids. >> i think that was -- but he was running the rangers and rove told another texas political operative who told me when i was writing my initial book that he had this conversation in 1989, saying if i can get george w.

elected governor in texas, i can make him a presidential candidate. given the size of texas and the diversity and the economy, as soon as you're elected governor of texas, you're automatically into the national discussion. and, bob, you asked why not jeb? it was w. who got elected to the state office first. and he had karl behind him. with karl behind him, and the things that were -- >> and there is another interesting what if for you. they both ran in '94. jeb ended up making this critical mistake in the -- close to the end of the '94 race, he ended up narrowly losing and had to run again. if jeb and george had both won in '94, it is very interesting to see within the discussions of the bush family who would be running in 2000, because jeb was definitely the more policy -- >> always looked like jeb and jeb ran against lawton chiles, this character who that this slogan he adopted in 2000, the

hecoon always walks at midnight. made sense in florida. and jeb bush -- >> the negative ad back fired on him. >> just the one thing i would add about this book, we talked about bush and cheney, but this seems to tell the arc of the difference between the first term and the second term. bush came in with 9/11 and relied heavily on cheney's advice during that period. but as he spent more time in the presidency, he became closer and closer to condoleezza rice, which is something we have seen in the really excerpts from peter's book. and just the shift in trust, one of the things she told him was cheney was still willing to break the china and i had decided that we needed to stop breaking so many things, we needed to focus on our alliances, maintain some things in the middle east. so i think that evolution helps to describe what we saw from this relationship between these two men that shaped so much. and the cheney family, by the way, still breaking china in wyoming with liz cheney's run against mike --

>> bob, that's an interesting point. >> at least they're not shooting. >> early in the campaign. >> fishing this time. >> do you look back at bush presidency and the story of his relationship with cheney and how it deteriorated, it sounds to me like it took eight years, but after eight years, george w. bush maybe learned how to be president? >> i think that's true. but he learned how too late. we have seen a lot of presidents learning on the job, including the current president. but the fact that bush was so disengaged and really was not interested in the nuts and bolts of policy meant that he was a slower learner in that sense. and you had these tremendous things going on, you know, september 11th and wars and that sort of thing. and he almost had no choice but to defer to rumsfeld and to cheney. and, yes, i think by this second term, you know, he was catching on to this, that and the other thing. and finally saying these fellows just haven't served me well. and he probably had a sense he

hadn't served the nation well. >> but it should be pointed out very quickly that it was -- it was cheney's plan all along to have bush defer to them. that's how they got to that place. as you suggest, bush then figured it out and evolved as the president. but all along, cheney chose himself for that particular -- >> as we say, not before an awful lot of consequential stuff. a relationship we'll be talking about for years, this isn't the last we'll hear of -- i want to thank casey hunt and james moore, co-author of bush's brain. you have seen the dire polling for republicans this week. and you've seen how little it seems to be worrying the tea party crowd. how this moment has been 50 years in the making. we'll show you next. igle for medice?

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party, the spirit that has led the gop to shut down the government and threaten a default in the name of fighting the president's health care law, if you want to find the root of all of this, you can do worse than to look to the night of november 4th, 2008, barack obama won his job. simple reality of a democrat being elected president of the united states, triggered on the right, reflects relentless and at times way over the top opposition to everything that barack obama did, said or tried to do from that point forward this wasn't exactly new. knee jerk opposition reaction that he contends with is what bill clinton came up against when he took office. this is how the right reacts when democrats win the white house. but there is a key difference. back in the 1990s, clinton beat the gop in a series of confrontation, the government shutdown, the 1996 election impeach. and republicans responded by changing. at least a little. that's how we got george w. bush and what he called compassionate conservatism. it was response to clinton's

successes. the political victories he scored by painting himself as the last line of defense between the safety net and those heartless extreme congressional republicans. if they were going to start winning national elections again, republicans had to show they weren't just trying to dismantle the government, they had to prove they had a heart. that's what george w. bush told them and they got behind him and he got the presidency. but his presidency didn't exactly work out that well. there is a familiar story we all know, when bush decided to invade iraq, divided america, violence spun out of control and fema botched katrina he lost the country for good. after that, the economic meltdown of 2008 only reinforced the intensely negative feelings americans had developed toward their president. the other story of bush's presidency is how much it offended the right. how the compassionate conservatism they embraced in the name of winning the white house morphed into what they came to call big government conservatism. no child left behind, the medicare prescription drug plan, the bailout, the federal

government george w. bush left behind at the end of the presidency was bigger than the one he inherited. this is another crucial source of the energy that is propelled the right into one confrontation after another with president obama. the conviction of conservatives this that he essentially let themselves get duped by bush, they let him grow the government all in the name of winning elections only to emerge after eight years with the presidency with the republican party in horrible political shape. when obama came to office, the right didn't just set out to fight him, they set out to purify the republican party. to purge those who would baited bush. it was more than just the accumulated and in some cases delayed disappointment in the bush years that the tea party grew out of. it is a lot more than that. it is a half century of similar disappointments, of the conservative movement scoring some kind of big electoral breakthrough only to conclude that republican leaders aren't

really as committed to dismantling government as their rhetoric suggests. modern right announced its arrival by nominating barry goldwater for president in 1964. he endured one of the worst general election beatings in history that fall. four years late, richard nixon created a winning coalition that came to define the modern conservative movement in the republican party. white southerners, blue color white ethnics in the north and what he called the silent majority, the predominantly white middle class. nixon appealed to the coalition social conservatism, he channeled their cultural angst, when it came to governing, he fell far short of the right's goldwater ideal. wage and price controls, the epa, universal health care plan, a call for a living wage, nixon is the president who said we're all keynesians now. no wonder why on the occasion of his birthday this year, national review asked of nixon, was he america's last liberal? and there was ronald reagan, a more authentic goldwater republican, election in 1980 supposed to be impossible, no way america would ever choose a

president so far to the right. reagan did slash taxes, but when his eight years were up, the federal government had grown bigger and more expensive. it happened again in the 1990s. by newt gingrich, republicans scored a stunning midterm triumph in 1994. they won the house for the first time in 40 years, finally conservatives believed their moment was here. the gingrich republicans forced an immediate confrontation with bill clinton, but it was a pr nightmare. clinton accused the gop of targeting medicare and the gop backed off. this is the backdrop to keep in mind as the current drama plays out. the polling data is clear, this shutdown, the threat of the default, all of this is killing the republican party. it is hurting the party's prospects of being anything more than a minority party that happens to control the house. this doesn't seem to bother the tea party that much. maybe it makes sense, because as we're now seeing, they can do an awful lot of damage even if they only control the house. that seems to be the point we reached, a conservative movement that is tired of false starts, that is tired of waiting for all

the stars to align, and it now just wants that all-out assault on government, the electoral consequences be dammed. here to talk about how it came to be this way for the right and what it means for this moment of history and for the future, you have robert george of the new york post, also a former staffer to house speaker newt gingrich, joan walsh, sam tannerhouse, "new york times," and bob herbert. sam, let me start with you on this. i'm curious what you kind of make of the history i just laid out there. one of the interpretations i've sort of had for this moment, it is not just a reaction to of immediate politics, it is the conservative movement looking around and saying, look at all -- look at the big government that lbj and fdr gave us and we still largely have that consensus in tact. we're sick of it. is that a part of this? >> it goes back farther than

that. back to 1952. dwight eisenhower was elected. he was a republican. very moderate republican. and conservative movement was to some extent formed in opposition to this moderate republican president. it was in eisenhower's term, as first term, really, that the seeds of national review were formed, and then it was created in 1955 by bill buckley and colleagues in essence to challenge eisenhower in 1956. bill buckley said in a letter to a recruit, i plan to read dwight eisenhower out of the conservative movement. and it wasn't just the intellectuals. the senate was controlled by robert taft during first term until 1954. and taft had the same problem that someone like mcconnell or boehner has now. could not hold his right wing in check. they were challenging eisenhower from the beginning. joe mccarthy was trying to hold up essential cold war appointments in russia for the

united nations. there was the bricker amendment that came out of ohio that actually tried to stop any president from having treaty making power, even of the smallest kind. that was the hard right, fighting against a moderate republican. so it actually goes back 60 years. >> and in the context, in the 50s, the new deal was still new, back in the 1950s and the great society hadn't happened. to give you a taste of -- >> eisenhower in a sense consolidated the new deal and took it under a bipartisan -- a bipartisan framework and that was another one of the reasons why conservatives reacted, people like -- that's when buckley said, you know, we're standing -- we're standing, yelling stop. >> famously said you would be crazy to go after social security and totally solidify social security and wound up, you know, putting federal troops behind integration in 1957. >> the highways and under eisenhower. to put this in context too, this

conservative movement in that era that sam is talking about, here is ronald reagan who -- this is before he was the governor of california, long before he was the president, he was speaking out, said the context is harry truman as president pushed for national health care plan, hadn't worked, democrats were starting to talk now and liberal republicans about that became medicare. this is in 1961. medicare doesn't exist, though. this is ronald reagan, the voice of the conservative movement, one of the voices talking about medicare, 1961. >> write those letters now, call your friends and tell them to write them. if you don't, this program i promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. and behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country. until one day as norman thomas said, we will awake to find that we have socialism, and if you don't do this, and if i don't do it, one of these days you and i are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it

once was like in america when men were free. >> again, he was -- it became medicare. >> and i wouldn't -- i wouldn't say we wouldn't go so far as ronald reagan did that we're living in this kind of socialist america, but conceptually he was right in terms of how the programs would expand and, you're right, he anticipated the entire great society. >> he equated that with a loss of freedom. where does that come from? >> well, there is a sense among conservatives that the larger that the federal government gets, less freedom both for the individual, and at the state level. and that's part -- that's part of the reaction -- >> freedom, if you're a freed people and you decide you want a program like social security or a program like medicare and you vote for it, you know, then you have the freedom to establish those programs and that's what

the united states had. >> that's the paradox you have, you have the republican party, which wants to be a major party in a two-party system and realizes it has to attract people who essentially do want the government to take care of them to some extent, and a conservative movement which is aligned with the republican party, but not identical. >> and this is one of the frustrations that happened with the conservative movement, and they often see these polls that show that the average voter by two to one tends to be more right of center than left, at least identifies it as conservative versus liberal. and i think there is a confusion between the idea of being ideologically conservative and temperamentally conservative. we saw a couple of those signs of tea party rallies saying, you know, government, keep your hands off my -- my medicare. and so those people who see medicare and make use of it, it is sort of baked -- it is baked

in the cake now as part of the -- as part of the structure, so for them, it is conservative to not want to have any changes to it, such as paying for parts of medicare, to pay for obama care. meanwhile, the more ideological conservatives, you know, want to remove a lot of these programs and that's some of the tension you see. >> when you look at the basic appeal of conservatism as a political message, the idea of attacking big government, big bloated wasteful inefficient government, always polls well and is a good selling point for conservatism, the problem that i think conservatives come up against when they get into office and they try to really attack big government, you look at newt gingrich and the republicans in the '90s, medicare, look at the early days of social security and the reagan administration in 1980s, you actually go after what is big government, the social safety net, a program like social security and medicare you find out that's popular. >> the problem with right wing conservatives is they have been on the wrong side of history ever since world war ii and, you

know, they're not dealing with the real world. and it is a mistake to equate the right wing ideologues with the idea of conservative government in general, or until now with the republican party in general. so what the right wing ideologues wanted ever since the new deal is a country that americans do not want. they are on the wrong side of history there, a fight they can -- >> why is it so -- i listen to the reagan clip we played, i remember in the fight over health care reform in 2010, conservatives sort of recycled that and were using that and saying, ronald reagan speaking out from beyond the grave against obama care. but the persistence of sort of this basic conservative vision of not just expanding the social safety net, but in a lot of ways dismantliing it, what accounts for that? >> i think everyone here has touched on it. and the word we haven't brought up, though, is libertarianism.

this is a fascinating moment for us in american history. this is the strongest upsurge of the libertarian argument we have seen, certainly in my lifetime. the closest would have been barry goldwater. if you look closely at libertarian texts, going back to the great founder who is ludwig von mesus, ron paul was a political godfather of a lot of what we're seeing now, it is a moral crusade to strip away as much government as you can for the reason bob mentioned. it will impugn your freedom as government gets bigger, you become smaller. you lose your american values. gary wills may be the greatest political thinker of our time, has a book called necessary evil, which published during the clinton years at the time of the militias, all the rest. he goes back to the founding and says you will see powerful anti-governmental strands, the

foundation of american democracy. remember, too, the figures who gave us what we think of as the nullification politics, which is what we're seeing in action now, the two figures who founded it were the two authors of our greatest documents. james madison and thomas jefferson. it is wound into our dna as a people, to think that government is the enemy, even when we depend on -- >> robert, once again here, we have to squeeze a break in first. ghts always be green. [ tires screech ] ♪ [ beeping ] ♪ may you never be stuck behind a stinky truck. [ beeping ] ♪ may things always go your way. but it's good to be prepared... just in case they don't. toyota. let's go places, safely.

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all right, robert, i rudely cut you off. go right ahead there. >> sam was talking about the libertarian moment, and ironically president obama helped enhance this with issues such as nsa and so forth.

that perfectly feeds into the viewpoint of many in the tea party and many of those who are more libertarian that there really are consequences for large government. and then when you add to that, even those people who may be in support of obama care, when you see the rollouts and the screwups on the government website and so forth, a lot of what is obscured because of the foolishness of the shutdown, but that is why there is a really strong libertarian moment. and i think there is going to be -- there is going to be even more tension within the republican party because of that. you saw a couple of votes against the nsa where the tea party and libertarian republicans combined with many among the democrats, and it was -- they got well over 200 votes to basically not deconstruct parts of the nsa

program. >> and, i mean, rand paul's filibuster which was a real filibuster as opposed to ted cruz, going to a lot of support, i think he resonated even among many on the left because of -- on the issue of drones. there are -- >> there is absolutely real concern about this on the left. i think we would be remiss if you think about 50 years of conservatism, not to talk about race, and not to talk about the way that they -- that people make conscious choices to diffuse the idea of government, turning into welfare, welfare was all about we know who and, you know, i was thinking the other day, is it -- obama care rhymes with welfare. >> there has been this -- there is this personalizing of health, quote, reform going back with hillary care.

>> but joe's bigger point historically, worth talking about here, the rise of the modern conservative movement and the growth of the appeal of conservatism is sort of directly tied to the white southern backlash. the roots in the 1960s, the goldwater voters in the south, the old white conservative democrats who became part of the coalition. >> barry goldwater cultivated the people, he didn't necessarily come out of that. >> as far as -- >> i've been saying for the longest time that for now it is close to half a century, the republican party has been a safe house for racism, it has the fundamental basis of their support going back, you know, at least to nixon's southern strategy, and probably before that. >> the northern component. >> how do you -- being somebody more on the right here, how do you think of the history. it sort of -- where we are right now, we talk about, but the roots of sort of the rise of the nixon coalition, it really was

appealing to that backlash over civil rights. >> there is an aspect of that. there was a backlash on the civil rights, there was also -- there was also a feel that -- in the urban north where you have a lot of these large cities and you got riots and things like that, richard nixon was running not a pure racial strategy, but more of a love of order. >> that's always the great mystery, we saw law and order, was that a code word in some way? one of the lessons we learned from that era too, we talked about racism in the south, sort of white ethnic backlash. >> we can call it code words if we want to, but it was a reaction to things that -- where people were seeing on their television. it looked like -- not looked like, cities were burning, and nixon -- nixon felt that that

kind of an approach is going to resonate. but, i mean, it is not racist if there is -- if you actually are seeing these things -- you feel the need to respond to those. >> let's go back before the riots. you were talking about bill buckley. bill buckley was a racist. he believed that white people were superior to black people, and he said that white people -- whites had a right to discriminate against blacks in the united states. ? he retracked that -- >> we're talk about conservative ideology and it is growing out of that. goldwater, the opposition to civil rights. it is lee atwater. i wrote about what lee atwater said, you know, you can't say the n word, he said, three times, boom, boom, boom, you can't say that anymore. so then you have to turn to the code words. but the point is that this is what the republican party has stood for. and when ronald reagan --

>> i want to make sure -- >> when ronald reagan kicked off this general campaign and did it in philadelphia, mississippi, what is the message that he's sending out there? the free civil rights workers have been murdered in 1964. >> here is what you see again this odd tangle and mess between conservative ideology on the one hand and republican party on the other. the very first modern civil rights bill, very watered down, the first one since reconstruction was passed in 1957. you know how many republican senators opposed it? zero. all the votes against it came from the dixiecrats. >> republicans replaced it. >> the other irony of that was richard nixon circa 1960 was running to the left of kennedy on racial issues. even as late as the 1970s, who actually instituted affirmative

action? richard nixon. just to say that it is -- it is purely richard nixon's strategy and built on racism, it is -- >> i don't think that it was. richard nixon was a pretty liberal president, and very liberal compared to the present day. i'm saying it has been a foundation of the republican party politics ever since the 1950s. >> there we go. just trying to condense 50 years of history into two blocks of television. we left a lot uncovered. i want to thank sam tanninhouse, robert george, new york post. how a reaction or nonreaction from michael dukakis 25 years ago tonight helped create bill clinton. that's next. customer erin swenson ordered shoes from us online but they didn't fit. customer's not happy, i'm not happy. sales go down, i'm not happy.

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michael dukakis just wrapped up debating george h.w. bush for the second time, final scheduled debate for the 1988 campaign. and if you judged it by the post debate rally that he held at the beverly hills hilton, things went well for the duke. >> i think we ought to have that third debate, don't you? i don't know what mr. bush is worried about. >> except, well, it was only one thing anyone was talking about after that debate. a moment people are still talking about today. it helped sink dukakis back then. that's next. [ female announcer ] who are we?

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♪ every now and then i get a little bit tired ♪ ♪ of craving something that i can't have ♪ ♪ turn around barbara ♪ i finally found the right snack ♪ ♪ gives you a long-lasting fresh breath feeling. so you have the courage to jump in... go in for the hug... or make sparks fly. for a fresh breath feeling that lasts up to 5x longer, get scope outlast. can be hard to believe today, but it was eight years as president winding down. there was real reagan fatigue in america. a lot of it. which is why the smart money in the summer of 1988 had the democrats winning back the white house that fall. >> michael dukakis got the boost

he wanted from last week's democratic national convention. a new nbc news/wall street journal poll conducted after the convention shows dukakis leading george bush by 50 to 32%. an 18-point lead for dukakis over george h.w. bush. others had the duke up by similar margins. that summer, he remarked to an aide, look, i'm going to beat this guy. this may be a blowout. you start thinking about the first 100 days. it only took about 30 days for bush to claw back into contention and then in early september, the bush campaign brought down the hammer. >> bush and dukakis on crime. bush supports the death penalty for first degree murderers. dukakis, not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison. one was willie horton who murdered a boy in a robbery stabbing him 19 times. despite a life sentence, horton received ten weekend passes from prison. horton fled, kidnapped a young

couple, stabbing the man and repeatedly raping his girlfriend. weekend prison passes, dukakis on crime. >> that ad aired on cable in two new england markets, but received massive national media coverage amplifying bush's message and elevating crime. context is important here. generation ago, in 1988, violent crime rates were soaring. there was an intense public clamoring for the death penalty, something dukakis had long opposed. all of this led to october 13th, 1988, 25 years ago tonight, dukakis and bush squared off for the final debate at ucla's pauley pavilion. the moderator, bernard shaw, introduced the panel, welcomed the candidates, explained the rules and then asked this as his opening question. >> governor, if kitty dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

>> no, i don't, bernard. i think you know i've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. i don't see any evidence that it is a deterrent and i think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime. we have done so in my own state and one of the reasons why we have had the biggest drop in crime of any industrial state in america, why we have the lowest murder rate of any industrial state in america. >> this is one of the most famous or infamous flubs in presidential debate history, presented with a ghastly scenario involving his wife, dukakis responded with a bloodless, technocratic articulation of his policy position. he played right into the caricature that his opponent was drawing, didn't even wince. as was reported the next morning, gop gloats over debate, dukakis admits it is tough. there are a lot of reasons he lost in 19 8, but this one debate moment and the reaction it generated had a ripple effect. in many ways you can argue the next democratic presidential candidate, bill clinton in 1992, designed his message around

avoiding this kind of caricature, that his center right positions on death penalties on crime and other issues were a response to the perceived failures of dukakis that in a way that helped make the clinton presidency. here to discuss that moment, phil johnson, secretary of human services under governor decaw ki dukakis, joan walsh is here, and bob herbert. there is a lot to get at here. the basic question that i think people still have whenever they watch this moment is the question itself, should that question have been asked at a presidential debate? >> this is the first question in the second debate. it frames your understanding of the entire rest of the debate and no it should not have been asked. crime is a serious issue. but it is generally not a federal issue. the death penalty is about to be put back in place.

and there is a drug bill that will put it in place that is moving through congress. reagan won't sign it until after the election is over. the issue is, should there be the death penalty for drug kingp kingpins. the first response should have been to that first question. the rest reads like a textbook rebuttal of the issues at play. >> that gets to the point, in terms of the actual policy of the federal level, there weren't many implications here in 1988. it was an emotional test. how -- we see this sort of bloodless answer, how should very handled it, any candidate confronted with a question like that, handle something like that. >> first thing, you know, i sympathize with them a little bit in the sense that it comes out of nowhere and you're like you're in shock to hear the question. but as soon as he's talking about -- as soon as it is framed in terms of his wife, then you respond with some emotion, you

know, and something like, well, you know, of course i would want retribution for such a horrendous issue coming into my family this is why we have the rule of law. not -- wouldn't be up to me in this case, and then move on. or however. some variation of that. but, you know, it was well known how emotional an issue the death penalty was. way back, i guess it was in 1977, in new york city, ed koch ran on the death penalty issue in a mayoral race. >> municipal race. >> nothing to do with the death penalty. >> public hangings at city hall. >> yeah. >> phil, obviously, you know governor decukakis really well. i felt he got a bad wrap in terms of his image that came out of the campaign, the aimages that came out because of this question. i wonder if you can talk about just knowing him so well, how he managed to basically flub it like this and what does he this

by it. >> talked about it many times, and he's apologized to democrats around the country for having done that. and then allowed bush sr. to be elected which paved the way for bush jr., which was an even worse disaster. gets totally that he flubbed it. what is poignant about it in particular for those of us who know him and kitty very well is that they have a very tight bond. one of best marriages i've ever seen. prior to that in the campaign, in the primary campaigns, and in the general election up to that point, i think the public got some sense of that, you know, and appreciated the fact that they had such a good marriage. and i think as bob says, the word shock is really an appropriate word in this case. i think he was shocked, shell shocked by the mention of his wife being raped and murdered. and, you know, i remember being with him after the -- right after the gore/bush debate, held at the kennedy library in 2007

and complaining to him about how i felt gore hadn't done as well as he should have. he said, if you haven't been in the room, in a situation like that, don't, you know -- >> fair point. >> i saw him last summer, summer of 2012, democratic convention in charlotte and it was one of -- the third night of the convention and he was sitting with the massachusetts delegation and 80 years old now, his wife, kitty, next to him, and there is no cameras on them or anything and they're just sitting there watching it and holding hands and this very sort of -- a nice scene and you think, again, so unfortunate to the image of dukakis, but, joe, maybe you can talk a little bit about the context of that moment too in terms of the politics of crime, the politics of crime and race in the 1980s, how that -- i don't think people appreciate it now necessarily looking back, what a dominant role crime played in the presidential election. >> it played a dominant role and there was polling that showed

that once people -- people responded to the willie horton ad, but once they were told or somehow telegraphed, kind of racist, they didn't like it anymore. then you have an african-american man, i thought it was interesting he happens to be black, asking this loaded question about the death penalty. that's weird. insulates them from any fear that their reaction is racist. that's one thing. the other thing we haven't talked about is crime is a big issue, but there is also anxiety about the family. and there is also anxiety about the role of women. and there is this notion that, you know, people called the -- the democrats are the mommy party, the republicans are the daddy party. and michael dukakis will not even stand up for his own wife. he's not a real man. at worst he's not a real man. at best, he's a robot who doesn't have any authentic human feeli feelings, when watching it now, what i see in hindsight, but is i see a man shutdown because he's been told something so horrible that he can't even let himself access his feelings and goes into public servant mold.

>> by the way, all three of the other panelists told bernard shaw before the show, not to ask that question, and he said, i disagree with you, i'm going to ask the question anyway. >> and i'm curious, you know, bernie shaw left cnn now more than ten years ago and we tried to track him down for the show, i don't think we could find him, he's fallen off the grid a little bit, in terms of his legacy, we talk about dukakis' legacy, bernie shaw's legacy as a journalist, it was made by this moment. what is -- what did that do for his legacy and is it for his place in journal snichl. >> it means the defining element for the rest of his life and anytime anyone talks about the history of the politics, and what did that answer tell us that was relevant to the presidency? do you want a president in the oval office to react in highly personalized terms to that kind of information? or do you want the person to act analytically and dispassiona

dispassionately? i think the answer that michael dukakis gave, the crime rate was down in massachusetts, the murder rate was low for an industrial state, and he had a good strong drug plan dealing with the issue well in massachusetts was more relevant to the presidency than any of the ansers with fabricated that would be the appropriate response. >> we talked about the longer term implications of this, in terms of the next election, in terms of bill clinton, in terms of everything that bill clinton meant for the country. we'll explain that in a little bit right after this. the end. lovely read susan. but isn't it time to turn the page on your cup of joe? gevalia, or a cup of johan, is like losing yourself in a great book. may i read something? yes, please. of course. a rich, never bitter taste cup after cup. net weight 340 grams. [ sighs ] [ chuckles ]

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i have a big meeting when we land, but i am so stuffed up, i can't rest. [ male announcer ] nyquil cold and flu liquid gels don't unstuff your nose. they don't? alka seltzer plus night fights your worst cold symptoms, plus has a decongestant. [ inhales deeply ] oh. what a relief it is. so talking about the legacy of that 1988 debate moment in terms of bill clinton. bill clinton is the next democrat to run for president four years later in 1992. and in a lot of things that campaign did, in a lot of ways, bill clinton positioned himself to avoid falling into the caricature that dukakis fell into. one thing clinton did as a candidate in 1982 is he left the

campaign trail to oversee, to sign off on the execution of a mentally retarded man in arkansas. it was to me the ultimate statement of i am not dukakis, i did not stand there for that question. and then in the debate, in the general election debate, the issue of crime came up and you can see how clinton handled this in sort of the -- he personalized it, was happy to in a way that dukakis wasn't. let's see how he handled it. >> i know more about this, i think, than anybody else up here because i have a brother who is a recovering drug addict, i'm very proud of him. but i can tell you this, if drugs were legal, i don't think he would be alive today. i am adamantly opposed to legalizing drugs. he is alive today because of the criminal justice system. >> and, kathleen, one of the stories about bill clinton's success in 1992, his success in politics in general, you're talking about in the last segment how sort of from a policy standpoint dukakis' answers were strong in 1988, but

clinton, you see it there, brought that emotional bit to it. clinton sort of is a testament to the power of emotion in politics. >> it is difficult to put back through the dukakis campaign and find any comparable moments to that kind of clinton moment and those clinton moments evaded the campaign. there is also something to know about the clinton history. clinton lost his second run for the governorship, his re-election campaign was soft on crime as an attack against him, even though at that point he was supporting the death penalty. he had signed off on a clemency for about 70 people and it was used against him. he was acutely aware as he was running for president that this was a long lived attack and was used successfully in presidential campaign in the previous run. >> you know, excuse me, clinton had the benefit of seeing what had happened with dukakis. he's a brilliant guy, quick study, and obviously he learned a great deal. but when you look at a candidate's personality, the two personalities were so different,

and clinton almost sort of instinctively connects with -- he has that human touch and he connects with constituents -- constituencies, audiences and that sort of thing. and, you know, just seems that dukakis is a more reserved fellow, doesn't naturally connect in the same way, and i don't think that that's the kind of stuff, excuse me, that dukakis could learn. >> but he did beat two incumbent governors. he was elected governor three times, and came from nowhere to win primaries, the democratic party in '88 against a very strong opponent including al gore and paul simon and dick gephardt. and so he connected at some important levels and i think -- but i'm with bob on what he said in the last segment, which is a lot of these republican campaigns going back to at least nixon have been racially tinged and that's what most of these republican presidential campaigns have really been all about. and i think the ironically was bernard shaw's question that

played into that whole bush, lee atwater strategy and, of course, it was followed by the willie horton ad, which was directly racial. and, by the way, as as lee was his deathbed, he called john sasso, michael dukakis' campaign manager, to apologize to him for what he had done around the racially tinged -- >> has governor dukakis talked to you about how that conversation with him and lee atwater? >> well, it was with john sasso, atwater's counterpart. and remember, you might recall, that as he was dying, he -- >> right. >> he made a round of calls to people that he had damaged unfairly, because his whole strategy in all of his campaigns was to pound on people personally. >> and you know, people don't remember, i did not remember this, but bill clinton got in trouble racially for some of his, whether it was ricky ray

rector, or the sister souljah moment. clinton got less of the black vote than dukakis did. it dips down to like 84%, which is a low number in the modern democratic party. and there's still people on the left, not just people on the left, but there are people who distrust bill clinton, because he learned a little bit of that, of how to sort of sing to that choir. >> again, the derisive name for clinton was bubba, but he did get the bubba vote the democrats had not been getting in the 1980s. >> but i think joe brings up an important point. we were talking about the republicans in the prior segment. and i had wanted to make the point that it's not like the democrats come into the arena with clean hands here. clinton has had his problems and even hillary during the primary campaign against obama made the reference to hard-working white americans. and when the question of obama

becoming a muslim came up, she said, i take him at his word, kind of thing. and so the democrats have had their problems with the race issue, as well. and what that tells us, with both parties, is that race is still a very, very big issue in this country, even though a lot of people want to talk about, we've come to a post-racial moment. >> and i think joe is right, that's part of the sort of complicated legacy of the clinton years. we've talked about before and we'll talk about it again, it was like looking at the failures of dukakis as a candidate in '88 and mondale in '84 and the democratic party as a whole in the 1980s and compensating for it in a way that left a lot of ire. what should we know after today? our answers right after this. ♪

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let's find out what our guests think you should know. kathleen? >> in the coming weeks, the nomination of a new secretary for the homeland of security.

>> we're going to go past the debt ceiling deadline, but not going to default. >> kathleen clark will win the congressional nomination to succeed ed markey in massachusetts on tuesday. >> that's the carl sciortino race, by the way. >> love him too. but kathleen's going to win. >> progressives have had their spines strengthened. it's going to be a very interesting week in terms of continuing to negotiate around opening the government. >> it is going to be an interesting week. patriots 30, saints 27. kathleen, the university of pennsylvania, bob herbert, melissa didn't like that one. she gave a rebuttal. phil johnson, joan walsh of salon.com, thanks for getting up. thank you for joining us. we'll see you next weekend, same time, same place. don't go anywhere, melissa harris-perry is up next. today on "mhp," the gop and their values. that and the latest oen the government shut down coming up next on nerdland. we'll see you next weekend here on "up." ♪

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this morning, my question. what can monica lewinsky teach us about ted cruz? plus, racism and the shutdown. it is not the story you think it is. and big freida comes to nerdland and she's bringing the twerk. but first, that giant sucking sound you heard from the values voters summit, that was the gop leadership vacuum. good morning. i'm melissa harris-perry. the old razzle-dazzle. that's how slick-talking lawyer billy flynn from the musical "chicago" described the power of