that's what the affordable care act is all about. that's its promise. and i intend to deliver on that promise. thank you very much, everybody. god bless you. >> that was president obama speaking from the rose garden in his first major response to the botched roll-out that's complicated if not set back the launch of the nation's health care law. president obama addressed his critics. >> the problem has been that the website that's supposed to make it easy to apply for and purchase the insurance is not working the way it should for everybody. there's no sugar coating it. nobody is more frustrated by that than i am. precisely because the product is good. i want the cash registers to work. i want the checkout lines to be smooth. >> among the fixes outlined by the white house, the ability to preview plans and prices without

filling out an online application. an improved calculator to determine whether or not subsidies are available and the new website design to ensure that consumers are aware they can also apply by phone. >> the affordable care act is not just a website. it's much more. for the vast majority of americans, for 85% of americans who already have health insurance through your employer or medicare or medicaid, you don't need to sign up for coverage through a website at all. >> republicans wasting no time in attempting to pivot off their disastrous strategy to defund the entire law have been eager to use technical failures as evidence of legislative fiasco. >> obama care is indeed a train wreck. a visit to the website is kind of like a trip to the department of motor vehicles in your state. it's a failure. you know, the government simply isn't going to be able to get this job done correctly. even if you were lucky enough,

bob, to get on to sign up, you are going to find you've got fewer choices and higher premiums. >> as of yesterday, 476,000 americans had applied for health care on federal and state-run websites. but the administration has not released data on how many of those applicants have actually enrolled which has prompted the rnc to file a freedom of information act to request the total number of enrollees. at this point, even supporters of reform worry the continued website problems could undermine a law meant to bring affordable health dire millions of americans. speaking to the huffington post, health care expert and law professor timothy jost said if things aren't resolved in three weeks we've got some serious, serious problems. i don't think we're anywhere close to that yet but if the whole thing collapses it will be another generation before we get this whole thing fixed. joining me is josh barrow and senior congressional reporter for talking points memo sak saku kapur.

and former white house press secretary robert gibbs. thanks for joining us. a few weeks ago, maybe it was a week ago time moves very slowly in my world. you said when they get it fixed, i hope they fire some people. we're in charge of making sure this thing was supposed to work. your more confident now that you've heard from the president this morning? >> well, look. i think there's some good things that are happening. obviously, a lot of people are in the process of completing applications, and clearly the demand of almost 20 million unique visitors is huge. that's a great thing. the president was also smart to acknowledge that there are some real problems with the architecture of the website. both at the front end and they are clearly adding things like call centers, increased call centers, the ability to shop for health insurance plans without completing an application. back end problems as insurers are not getting all of what they need on the back end of this. i think the hardest thing the president has to do is clearly

what he was trying to do today and that is, quite frankly, separate health care from this website because i think the personification right now of the affordable care act for most americans and certainly to news media that's covering it is in fact the website. and it is, as a piece of communication strategy, it's a difficult one. he has to acknowledge the problems but also not let those problems dissuade people from signing up and participating in what is a landmark law. i guess i ask you in terms of the transparency around this, did the president do an adequate enough job of embracing those problems and instilling confidence in the american public that they will be fixed in time for these deadlines that are just weeks/months away? and beyond that, should they be telling people -- the president tossed out that 20 million figure of visitors. should they be telling the american people how many people have enrolled? >> i think -- i think getting out the number of people that

have applications is a good thing. look. i think we should not necessarily keep score every day on who signs up when because, quite frankly, the most important number is not how many people signed up today. it's how many people sign up by the end of this period. i do think that the -- it was a very challenging thing today to try to navigate this. and i do think the president was smart to acknowledge that he and others are frustrated by this. and, look, i stand behind it. somebody should be fired or some group of people should be fired because of this. i don't think that changes, but, clearly, what the most important thing to do is, right now, is figure out how to make this work because the consequence of the president speaking about this and he made a joke about this on the 1-800 number. the consequence of the president speaking in the rose garden this afternoon about health care is, now more people are going to go to the website, right? more people are going to go right now to the website. so if it can't handle that spike in traffic in a way that's

easier to navigate, it will be then harder ultimately, i think, to get through the message of the great benefits that are in the affordable care act of which the president enumerated many. >> robert, let me open this up to our folks in new york. jake, watching the president, i don't think anybody disagrees this is a difficult needle to thread. you hear -- when one reads about the problems that are plaguing the website, it is not just the enrollment page. we are talking about, if we are reading the "wall street journal," which is a big if in some circles, emerging errors include duplicate enrollments. spouses reported as children, missing data fields and suspect eligibility determinations. deeper structural flaws here. the president was always going to be held accountable for this. now that he's come out there in the rose garden and said these problems need to be fixed, how much -- how much is he on the line for all of this in the coming weeks? >> i think there's a lesson here about technology. i think he's really at fault. i've been around some big software projects. we started slate at microsoft and i was there in the late '90s

when basically the big software projects kind of stopped working because they were too big and nobody had any control over them. the idea you give this to the technology people and then as robert gibbs said, we should fire them because it didn't work. i mean, you shouldn't think about it that way. it doesn't work that way. they are too big, too complicated. it's more like invading a country. >> don't you -- i guess to robert's point -- >> we don't do that well. >> i would let you respond to this. just to interject for a moment before we go to you, someone theoretically said at one point, we're not going to beta test this, or we're not going to do x, y and z. we're going to jog this out to cgi and let them run with it. on that end, someone somewhere made a decision that was a bad decision. >> the whole thing it wasn't just one bad decision. >> or cascade of bad decisions. >> architected wrong. clearly nobody in charge of this process who could manage it. but this is a huge, complicated, difficult process and i guess

i'm disappointed that someone who had pretenses of being the first tech president didn't have his head wrapped around it enough to take those problems on. i think even the president should have known that you beta test a piece of software like this. >> robert, i would let you respond to that and i would just point out this very strange place that we are in on the tech side as ezra klein wrote this morning. the truth is the obama administration to a much greater extent than it would like to be is dependent on the people who built health care.gov to fix it. they are the only people that know what's going on inside this system. this system is massive. it's dealing with the irs, interface with the social security administration, interface with insurers. not just eric schmidt from google coming in saying, you know what you need to do in rewrite these lines of code. >> well, i think that is true. i think, quite frankly, both of those things are true. we are dependent on the contractors we have now. and, you know, one of the reasons with technology works so well in the campaign and may not

work so well here is we didn't outsource to the campaign technology to the lowest bidder. but secondly, i do think, and you've seen this reported, and i think this is smart, there should be a tech surge. there should be not just the best and the brightest in washington, but the best and the brightest from silicon valley who make this work every single day. granted they get a lot of time to do it because they make this work for big, big websites. those people should be brought in to do triage to get this system working because we don't have an option. this really is ed harris in apollo 13. failure isn't an option. failure can't stop. we have to fix it as we're doing this enrollment. it all has to be simultaneous, which is going to require a lot of really smart people in the room working on this 24 hours a day. >> josh? >> yeah, i think we're getting ahead of ourselves by trying to allocate blame or figure out how this could be done better next

time. the thing needs to be fixed and the administration still has more it needs to disclose about what the nature of the problems are. it's not that i'm so interested in knowing how many have signed up. i'm interested in knowing about these back end problems. what we know about these problems in communication between the website and the insurers is from "the wall street journal" and "the new york times" from anonymous sources inside insurance companies and hhs. we haven't had a full accounting of how exactly broken is this thing on the back end. how do they plan to fix it and on what time frame do they think they can fix it. the distinction the president is trying to draw between the website and the product isn't a real distinction. a key way this works is you need to get lots of people to sign up for insurance. these insurance markets only work if young, healthy people get insurance to basically subsidize the people with big health problems will be expensive to cover. i think national review really had this right. they are saying if you have -- the big problem is not having a website that doesn't work at all. having a website that works really badly so that it's really hard to buy insurance because if you have to try 25 times in a

week to get through to buy the health plan, who is going to do that? not the young, healthy guy. the people with big health care costs and no insurance. it's good that person can get insurance but then the insurance market may fall apart if almost everybody who is buying or these people with really high health costs. so i think i would really like to see a little more panic, frankly, from the administration recognizing this is a problem and explaining what their contingencies are for what they will do if they can't get it fixed. >> and the panic question, i think is a legitimate one. let's look at the calendar. december 15th is the deadline to get coverage on january 1st. january 1st coverage goes into effect if you signed up by then. february 1st is when the penalties go into effect. march 31st is the end of the open enrollment period. between february 1 and hst and march 31st if you sign up, you can still be penalized. that is not a lot of time especially when talking about the problems that may be bigger than 5 million lines of code, whatever that means. structural problems here. and the question is, and i think this is a really unfortunate

position, but the whole question of delaying and delaying the mandate and delaying the penalties has become so politicized that even if that is the wise thing to do here, one questions whether the administration can do it. is it way too much of a concession to republican critics who are going to run in 2014 and 2016, presumably, own this. >> it's a huge concession and would look awful politically if they do it. but if the website isn't running you can't penalize people for not buying it. that's why i thing next few weeks and few months will be extremely important and determinative of whether this law exceeds or not. dare i say the president's legacy is on the line. if enough people don't sign up thenna -- or, including if they aren't young people and healthy people don't sign up, you immediately get insurers raising prices and then you are into that death spiral where fewer people sign up and costs keep going up and up and up. that's conone aspect to look at.

they project 7 million people should sign up. that's another important number. right now these problems with the website, they are bad. they are really embarrassing. i think the president owned up to them, but at the end of it, i think it's going to be the enrollment numbers. we don't know that yet. that's going to make or break. >> robert, to that end, you know, the sort of polit -- the politics of all this. there's a piece in "the new york times" this weekend that i found deeply disturbing. and that is the flip side of this which is the grassroots campaign, the money that has been poured in by the conservative right to undermine people getting access to health care. and really specifically, they talked about the americans for prosperity campaign. i believe it was headquartered -- this was -- they are talking about one piece of the campaign in virginia. but going to the local level, undermining town halls, local officials who were there to decide whether or not to expand medicaid rolls, who are making very tough choices for their constituents and the efficacy and the ruthlessness with which these organizations are operating. you have that narrative happening at the sort of on the ground level.

then the sort of national perception that the websites are broken, and then potentially, the white house needing to delay the mandate. this is, i think, for fans and supporters of this piece of legislation who understand histor ike how historic it is in nature, it's a disconcerting storm system that's gathering. >> well, and the key is not to let it become the perfect storm that destroys so many things. i will say the politics of this, nobody should be surprised at the politics of this. the politics of health care reform, of the aca, of obama care have not been any different now than they were in sort of mid-2009. so the fact that the koch brothers don't want the aca to work is about as surprising as the sun having crested above the horizon in the east this morning. that's baked into the cake. let me address one thing i think that josh said. you know, and i do think the -- well, two things, really.

the administration has a huge stake in making this work because, as was mentioned through health economists, if you don't get enough people in this system, the system will collapse. i don't think we're anywhere near that point. but there's a built-in mechanism for making this work, and that is the whole thing will either work or won't work because of it. and secondly, and i said this when i originally talked about somebody being fired and that is the experience in massachusetts was that people came to the website on average 18 times before they purchased health care. health care purchasing is an extraordinarily personal decision. it is a decision that's based on your circumstances, both on what you need through health care, how many dependents you have, how many tax credits you might qualify for. so i do think there's time to get this right. now one of the things that is concerning for young invincibles, and that's the code name for --

>> that's josh barrow. young and invincible around here. >> 27-plus, they can't stay on their parents' insurance. they have to get insurance. they'll probably get something that amounts to largely a catastrophic policy that if they were to get a horrible debilitating disease or hit by a bus they won't go bankrupt. those are the people that we have to make sure this thing works for and the question is, are they used to technology that doesn't work? right? they are the iphone generation, and if the app that they just downloaded doesn't work they delete it and go to a different app. that's why the website has to work. >> i was going to say, that is such an important point, robert. this is where sort of behavioral study comes into effect. and the fact that we are trying to reach an inherently digital generation. this application has digital problems among other problems. and how sort of patient are 27-year-olds with technology. i'm actually inclined to think people get apps on their

iphones. i'm not a 27-year-old invincible, but in this day and age, and i'd love to know your thoughts on it. if an app doesn't work, i'll reload it. if google maps didn't sync well with my iphone it's a pain but i need google apps and i go back and reload it. there's a higher level of tolerance with digital roll-outs among a certain part of the american public. >> if it doesn't work once or twice, sure. but if the website basically, if there's no good way to buy insurance through it or if it really involves trying over and over and over again for weeks, i think people will quite reasonably eventually give up or say, look, i'll come back to this when the thing works. i think people -- most people if they're not basically just trolling understand that on some time frame the government can build a working website to sell you a health insurance plan. can they fix it in the number of weeks they have available before it becomes a big problem. i think people will have a reasonable level of patience but if the thing is just not working, they're not going to keep trying forever. >> jake? >> but that's even the larger issue here which is confidence

in government's ability to do anything. because you have a conservative movement that has been arguing and arguing more strenuously than ever that government can't do anything. and this is characteristic of yet another thing it can't do. build the website that works. i think when you think in generational terms, the attitude of this younger generation, people in their 20s, towards government is a little up for grabs. and i think this is a kind of test for them. and i think if this isn't sort of rectified convictly and isn't fundamentally a story of something, it is going to become a core confidence issue for people -- for whom the jury is still out about government. >> robert, before we let you go, in terms of the president's attitude towards this, i thought he seemed today -- he was to some degree owning the problems but was, i thought, very much on the defensive. and it's clear that this has been a frustrating period for him, not just because of the aca roll-out, but all the shutdown, syria, everything that's

happened in the last few months. how much do you think his legacy is going to be determined in the next four months? >> well, i think it's much -- i think the time frame is probably much, much longer than four months, but on health care and on the website, i do think, and i've said this for a long time, the most important thing in the president's second term was health care implementation. there's time to get this right. there is time to get this right. but there's no doubt that if -- and jacob is right, too. if we don't get this right, health care won't work, but they'll also be a lack of confidence in other ideas that we want the government to be involved in and that's ultimately bad if you are a democrat. i think this is the single most important thing on their radar screen in the second term. >> former white house press secretary robert gibbs, thank you for your time and thoughts. >> thank you. after the break, while the administration tries to move passed the glitches there is reason for optimism.

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remember this number -- 8 million. according to a report by "the new york times," 8 million is the number of poor uninsured americans who will not receive health care under the affordable care act because republicans controlled states are refusing to participate in the law's medicaid expansion. 26 states dominated by republican lawmakers have refused the expenansion even though the federal government is

picking up the entire cost for the next three years and 90% of the cost after that. compounding the problem, more than half of poor and uninsured residents in america, 58%, live in those 26 states. a former janitor in mississippi who will not be covered under the medicaid expansion because his state rejected it will be left without care when a free clinic runs out of funding next month. he told "the new york times," i am scared all the time. i just walk around here with the faith in god to take care of me. blind faith. that is the only recourse when a system fails its constituents. at least a few republican-led states have put the interests of their residents ahead of ideological purity. arizona governor jan brewer, a notorious critic of the president and his policies, was honest when describing why her state would opt in to the expansion earlier this month. the bottom line is we need that money in our economy to save rural hospitals and jobs in the rural areas. if it doesn't happen, then we will be faced with a calamity. and texas, the reddest of the red states is embracing at least

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bank's manhattan offices. >> we're trying to get it resolved. >> the "wall street journal" -- >> my real -- you've been standing here all morning as people are coming in bright eyed and bushy tailed. 260,000 people doing a great job for our clients. we're gaining market share doing great stuff. we're trying to get our -- >> not everyone shared his attitude about the settlement. "the wall street journal" editorial board called it a shakedown. asserting that the political left isn't satisfied these days with cash, though it will take what it can get, but like medieval justice, the left wants perp walks if not heads on pikes. as a refresher, the financial crisis cost 8.8 million jobs and $19 trillion in u.s. household wealth. to put that in laymans terms, the typical american family lost $50,000 to $120,000. perhaps it's easier to understand the indignation on the left and elsewhere as one

commenter at new york magazine wrote, i would trade $13 billion for 13 arrests. joining us is nbc policy annual "the washington post's" ezra klein. thanks for joining us. >> good afternoon. >> good afternoon, my friend. what do you make of this deal? potential deal? >> this is a big, big settlement. and one thing that is, perhaps, happening behind the scenes and has been happening in a bunch of recent deals. one thing that's been traditional in a lot of these deals in recent years is there's no admission of wrongdoing. one thing they are negotiating now, more recently the obama administration has been pushing for banks to actually admit wrongdoing in these settlements. something that's going to be interesting is whether or not jpmorgan actually has to admit wrongdoing. to be honest, i don't think i quite know what to make of a settlement of this size. it's worth noting in jpmorgan's defense that a fair amount of what they are being sued for are things that bear stearns did. and bear stearns is a company they bought on favorable terms but with a lot of pressure from the u.s. government back during the financial crisis in order to

keep it from collapsing and being lehman before lehman was lehman. so there is an argument out there that the u.s. government said to jpmorgan if you guys buy bear stearns we'll be lenient with you in terms of lawsuits about the mortgage-backed securities. bear stearns purchased. there's an argument the u.s. government is not being all that lenient. on the other hand, this is not just one suit. jpmorgan is under attack here for a lot of different things that various elements and operations of its business did wrong. so i think there is a bit of a message being sent here that banks can't keep operating as if these prosecutions simply are a cost of doing business which is to say being lawless to a certain degree is simply a cost of doing business. a suit, a settlement of this size is kind of a shot across the bow to say, you guys actually have to begin playing by the rules in a more serious way. >> let's talk about that, jake in terms of playing by the rules. jpmorgan has other recent settlements of note. 2012 to 2013. $1.8 billion for illegal foreclosure practices.

$920 million for the london whale episode. $410 million for manipulating electricity markets. $389 million for deceptive credit card practices. are these banks any closer to fixing their evil ways, or bad ways or just economically unsustainable ways? >> well, look. i think what the country never got from wall street was a sense of contrition. taking responsibility for causing this global economic calamity that could have been far worse were it not handled fairly successfully. and i think jamie dimon is the epitome of that. he's very quick to play the victim. he's sort of the -- he's the banker who is saying, stop beating up on us. and i think that's just been this -- we haven't got what we need from these people, which is not $13 billion, although that's not bad. and not necessarily for more of them to go to jail because only people who are guilty of a crime should go to jail. but it's just a sense of responsibility. and i think that plays into the question of whether it's fixed.

because it goes to the question, how do they look at what happened? how are they thinking about preventing what's happening next time? it's clear that regulation can't keep up with the problem. regulation is very important. capital controls. all the things we're doing now are going to make a difference. but at the end of the day, these are -- these banks are innovators and they're innovators at finding ways around regulation. innovators in finding ways to deploy capital that can create kinds of risk we haven't thought of. >> as ezra said, this is a big deal. the wall street folks will push back and say, exactly what ezra pointed out, that, you know, these bear stearns shares were picked up at the sort of request of the federal government, although at $10 a share, a pretty good deal. and that having cases like this, settlements like this, dissuades other sort of big wall street banks from helping out if you will, the u.s. treasury in times of need. "the wall street journal" is reporting that eric holder is using this case as a possible

model for other probes. i'll read it. attorney general plans to use the deal as a model for ongoing probes of other major financial firms conduct in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis according to several people familiar with his thinking. >> if dodd/frank works like it's supposed to, we won't have another financial crisis that has to be resolved in the ad hoc way the 2008 crisis did with the treasury secretary running around to banks and asking them to buy out other banks to bail out u.s. taxpayers. he w we focus too much on fraud and wrongdoing. people should be held accountable for bad things they do. from the perspective of the taxpayer or u.s. consumers, the important thing is not the blame get allocated in the right way but that we prevent future financial crises from happening. >> fundamentamly, the story of the 2008 crisis is not one of greedy wall street bankers running around defrauding people. it's one of both borrowers and lenders having unreasonable

expectations about home prices expecting things would just keep going up and up and up and when things come crashing down you end up with thus housing bust that caused homeowners and banks to go through tremendous pain. to prevent that from happening we need less leverage in the economy. they need more capital n at the homeowner level. we can't have people rung around expecting to get 97% mortgages but the government is still encouraging banks to issue those. we shouldn't expect that if you hold people accountable that will prevent the next crisis. you still need other changes. >> the banks are bigger than ever. the too big to fail problem has not been resolved and there's a complete wall of resistance in terms of any sense of culpability in this. "the wall street journal" says the 2008 crisis wasn't the result of bank fraud despite liberal mythology jising whi my. it was as classic credit panic caused by bad government policy coincide with the ration

exerance of bankers who were responding to the incentives for excessive risk-taking that government created. this was taking advantage of people, defrauding people, packaging bad securities and playing a very major role in nearly bringing down the u.s. economy. >> and this line of thinking by "the wall street journal" which banks have been echoing is driving this case in a major way. one of the big sticking points, according to the reports, is the admission of wrongdoing. eric holder strongly wants that and the banks are resisting that. they don't want this to be used at ammunition to go after them again. the other sticking point is whether or not the executives at jpmorgan get amnesty from possible criminal prosecution. you know, as far as regulation goes, you pointed out that regulation, and i agree, captain keep up with what's happening on wall street but i think that's a big part of what's happening here. and the reasoning behind this lawsuit or settlement is that at the very least the administration can say we're going to throw the book at you. we'll not let you off the hook.

we'll use what tools we can even if congress won't give us more to go after you. >> the fact that holder may continue on with similar kind of settlements or probes, i mean, that -- does that change things, measurably, going into the future? >> i don't know. i really don't. with all these things, we're not at a point right now where another financial bubble is likely. in the periods after these kinds of terrible, terrible crises, you have a lowered level of risk-taking on wall street. you have a somewhat more safe approach to asset allotment. and so these things don't happen that quickly. what you want to watch out for and be careful about is the next period of confidence. because even now people are still insecure about new assets. they don't really understand, which is, of course, true for -- which is what happened with mortgage-backed securities. so it will be the future we really need to worry about that. who knows if eric holder's successor, and on down the line will continue with that approach. these kinds of settlements, they do have some kind of

precedent-making value but on the other hand, 10, 15 years from now, people are going to be looking at the legal and political and regulatory environment of that moment. and if there's one thing i worry about with this kind of trying to get people to behave through legal precedent or doing it through dodd/frank which i think is overly dependent on regulators, it allows for the discretion, both among judges and among regulators that in periods of excessive confidence like we were in in 2007, doesn't work because they simply choose not to act in the ways that this system would lead hem to act and they have the discretion to make those decisions. >> jake? >> here's what we know. we will have another financial crisis. it almost certainly won't be based on mortgages and the excesses we had last time. and the seeds of it are being sown right now. whether it's going to come out of emerging market debt or new form of derivatives or high-speed trade. but there's systemic problems.

the question is will we be prepared? >> and could i just add you brought up "the wall street journal" op ed. they use the word shakedown to describe this. that's exactly the word that joe barton, congressman -- republican congressman from texas used to describe the bp settlement in 2010. and i -- you know -- >> the irony of that is very thick. >> the irony is amazing. i don't think many see that. it's a very tiny portion of people who view it this way. it's going to be interesting to see how wall street and how conservatives react to this. >> and ezra, as we let you go, this underscores the sort of cultural walls that exist between those in the financial sector and sort of main street and wall street. and this notion -- i think shakedown is a word that some people in main street would do. we got shook down by wall street. they did this stuff to the american economy. we picked up the tab. there are various sort of cultural -- narratives here at odds with each other and they don't show any sign of resolution any time soon. >> this is -- a lot of the

feeling, the outrage you're seeing in the editorial page is -- jpmorgan, among the banks that were not, did not need to be rescued by the government, they are in the lead, though. so they feel previously to feel he was a good actor. they felt whatever happened, whatever cultural program they were going to get had been finished up in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012 and that at this point people were kind of content to regulate them a little more and then let them go off on their own and make their money. i think they are somewhat surprised and somewhat angry to find the anger is still fresh and there's still retribution being sought. >> "the washington post's" ezra klein, thank you, as always. coming up, former vice president dick cheney open ups about his heart. yes, he has one. well, a new book opens a door on his role in the bush white house. we'll discuss the decider's decider just ahead. (dad) just feather it out. that's right.

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after a decade of being called heartless, former vice president dick cheney is opening up. this morning on the "today" show, cheney discussed his struggles with cardiac disease, described in his latest book "heart." >> i'd always anticipated after i'd had that many years of heart disease that sooner or later, time and technology would run out on me and that would be the end of my days and i'd reach

that point. and then the new technology came available. the pump that would support my heart and keep me going until i could get on the transplant list. and that's what happened. >> cheney's tell-all comes as -- about his ticker comes as a new book details the many secrets and errors of the bush/cheney administration. as excerpted in politico, peter baker's new book "days of fire" reveals the motivation behind the invasion of iraq. according to one u.s. official, quote, the only reason we went into iraq, i tell people now is we were looking for somebody's -- this is a family program, butt to kick. afghanistan was too easy. so i feel like it's hard for me to stomach, speaking of organs, a book entitled "heart" about dick cheney but i think we wish the vice president well in deal with his cardiac problems. to have this come out at the same time as peter baker's book which is revisiting, i think, a very painful chapter of american history, is a reminder of the

incredibly important role that the president -- vice president played in shaping american history and certainly the policies of the bush administration. >> absolutely. he was one of the strongest proponents of the iraq war as everyone knows now. it was -- what i got from reading the review about peter baker's book, i haven't read the book itself, is how dick cheney tried to revolutionize the vice presidency itself. how he expanded that role and expanded that role and used the fact that foreign policy was at front and center after the 9/11 and president bush was not experienced with that. that's why president bush wanted dick cheney. >> was acknowledged to need a puppet master. but what was also interesting is that politico says that by the end of the administration, in 2008 and 2009, bush and cheney disagreed on north korea, syria, lebanon, russia, the middle east peace talks, gun rights, gay rights, climate change, surveillance, detention and the auto bailout. by the end, sort of the pinocchio understood or i don't

know, the point is, there was a real rift between these two men. >> bush did become more moderate in the end and cheney didn't and the pardon of scooter libby was the biggest issue which bush wouldn't agree to. this question of their relationship, the cheney/book relationship. i wrote a book about this so i can go on. that's the key question. people misunderstand and think that bush deferred to cheney, gave him power. he didn't. i think cheney brilliantly manipulated bush. and one thing he brilliantly manipulated was bush's need to feel he was the executive in control. >> but how did he do that really practically speaking? because you wrote a book on this, how did he make bush feel -- was it that bush wasn't that smart in terms of being manipulated or really, truly skillful? >> i think bush figured out in the end that cheney was manipulating him. but he flattered him and he made bush think that he -- he made bush think, much of the way people around nixon played to his insecurities and feelings

about liberals and people ganging up on him, he played to his sense that he was sort of a lone hero standing up for what was right against people who didn't understand how dangerous the world was. and he got what he wanted for five, six years. and then bush got wise to him and had to recalibrate and cheney wasn't on board for that. >> what's interesting is as the former president sort of comes out of the shadows if you can call dog paintings coming out of the shadow, i do think, you know, bush's approval ratings have steadily climbed. i do not think that history will be as kind to dick cheney as it will ultimately be to george w. bush. >> no, i don't think it will be. and i think we're seeing something heartening about u.s. politics which is that if you have bad ideas and you implement them and they fail, that's discrediting and it causes those ideas not to be used again. and i think the hyperinterventionist foreign policy that dick cheney really was the key advocate for in the bush smrgs now viewed on both sides of the aisle as a failure even if republicans don't want

to say that too loudly. the idea with sequestration was supposed to be that republicans would be so horrified about the idea of big defense department cuts they'd insist on a fix. a lot of republicans are saying that's basically okay with them. you couldn't imagine rand paul becoming the big figure he is in the republican party now eight years ago because eight years ago people would have said we need to go invade countries. >> nor could you imagine the republican establishment getting behind someone like rand paul with dick cheney in the vice president's office. >> there was a great moment in david frum's review of the book of cheney being put in his place in 2007. the heller case when the supreme court was coming up. cheney signed on to a brief that was much stronger that went much further than paul clement did and president bush's chief of staff said don't do that again or you'll not be invited back here. >> whoo! look at that. peter baker, if you are watching, we are moving units for you right now. that is all for us today. thank you. i'll see you back here at noon eastern. "andrea mitchell reports" with guest coast kristen welker is

coming up next. i'm meteorologist bill karins with your business travel forecast on this monday. no huge storms across the country this week. a lot of your travel looks just fine. it's going to be chilly and cold. especially if you are traveling from the great lakes and northern plains. temperatures are going to be much colder this week than they were last week. be prepared for that. a little rain down along the gulf coast. otherwise, have a great monday. my mantra?

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there's no sugar coating it. the website has been too slow. people have been getting stuck during the application process. and i think it's fair to say that nobody's more frustrated by that than i am. >> right now on "andrea mitchell reports," damage control with the health care website in critical condition, president obama vows to fix the technical problems and defends the health care law. white house communications director jennifer palmeri joins us on the latest efforts to fix the glitches. family feud. ted cruz isn't backing down from his defund obama care strategy. but the latest shutdown battle has some leading republicans outside of washington preaching patience. >> i think republicans need to just take a step back and allow -- show a l