edibles. >> which i think he means pot brownies or pot cookies. i thought he meant edible "morning joe" starts right now. . ♪ . >> all right. good morning. it is canada day here on "morning joe." it is thursday, january 30th and a very special day. with us on the set is the chairman of deutch incorporated as we look at pictures of a completely useless story that we won't cover if i have anything to do with it. >> a little late for that. there it is! >> donny, did you do that? turn that down! we actually interrupted live coverage to go to some stupid court appearance. we won't be doing that here.

the president of the council and foreign relations is here, richard haass. he has proposed that we talk about scarlett johansson. >> you gave me two different stories. >> i still have bieber fever. >> still? >> he is having a rough waive it. >> joe? >> guess what? >> i know richard haass is making thaerve is a member of the council on foreign relation very proud this morning wanting to talk about skarllcarlett john and a private drink. >> today is a huge day. can i say it? >> yes! >> amelia is 18. >> i'm the mother of an 18-year-old. >> mika's baby is 18 years old.

we have some pictures, i think. >> no. oh, that is her doing her first reporting on a honeysuckle. how did this happen? any mother of an 18-year-old today will understand this goes too fast, way too fast. so anyhow. i'm very proud. >> look at her! >> it always goes way, way too fast, mika. >> oh, lord. >> she is unbelievable. shes 18 years old. >> she is a cutie. >> you can take that picture down. >> we were in sweden buying lipstick. >> that's what we all do in the summer is go to sweden to buy lipstick. congratulations, mika! >> thank you so much. >> you got to stop talking and let me say congratulations. >> thank you. i'm amazed and old. we move on to talk about later coming up in this blog, we

will go to atlanta. what a mess. incredible pictures. a lady had a baby on the highway because they were not prepared for the weather that was being reported for days before and that was people stuck on the highway on the interstate. people slept in schools and people slept in stores in home depot so everybody could stay warm and off the ice. the mayor of atlanta very defensive because they did some things right but a lot went wrong. we will talk about that and new developments in new jersey with governor chris christie. first, newly released ratings from the nielsen show. president obama reached a new low in viewership for hit state of the union address. the lowest turned in for president obama since he took office. viewership for the president's address congress has declined

every year since 2009, 52.4 million viewers watched his first joint address that year. tuesday's state of the union drew about 4 million less viewers than president george w. bush, his worst rated state of the union in 2008. still those who watched the address online are not taken into account in the nielsen ratings. don't know if that makes a difference, it might be a little bit. in a few hours the president will continue his tour outside of washington and focusing on income equality, an important issue. he will visit a ge plant in wisconsin and then travel to nashville. >> the numbers aren't good. donny deutsche, as far as branding goes, this president's -- let's just talk about it the way it is, man. this guy's image right now is -- i don't know if it's battered as much as it is boring, which is actually even worse. you know, in 2008, i read this

in the "the wall street journal" yesterday. in 2008, independence helped -- independents helped elect him with 54% independents supporting him. today down in the low 30s. a polling group last week said he is on track to be the most divisive president in the history of modern polling. that means the biggest gap between what democrats think and republicans think. he has lost the independents. more importantly you look at those numbers and this is what we were all talking about before, the tune-out factor. he had the lowest number of americans watching his state of the union address of any president since bill clinton in 2000. that is pretty staggering. what is going on? >> two things in play. there is definitely obama fatigue. he is coming off a horrible 2013. there isn't a lot of sexy things to talk about, good or bad. we are in kind of what i'll

call, you know, a dull january news cycle and, you know, there clearly is a fatigue but i think something else happening from a media point of view. i think state of the union addresses in general. obviously, it's part of the constitution. i think it reads from time to time and update congress. i think the american people are a little tuned off in general unless there is big news. i would not be surprised and i'm not defending obama because clearly there is a fatigue for all of the reasons you articulately laid out. i would be shocked in a president isn't in his term there is a major news event we will continue to see a downward slope in state of the union addresses in general. >> that's a trend in all tv. ratings are down and there are different ways to watch it. people watch it on a twitter. >> my daughter watched it online. >> you can read it online. you can read something into the numbers but there is a larger trend. richard, putting the ratings aside for a second. with from a foreign policy point

of view what did you take out of that speech? domestically, maybe immigration people were talking about. >> domestically there was no theme in the speech and there could be something like how do you get economic growth and connect different parts of his speech but you had the laundry list approach to a state of the union which feeds into the lack of interest. on foreign policy, what you essentially saw was moving away from foreign policy. asia which was the big idea of mr. obama's first term, the so-called pivot got one sentence. syria one or two throw-away lines and essentially an argument for more diplomacy and more military force and it feeds into the narrative we are seeing in this country where a greater turning away from the world. >> joe, we have someone who has a great grasp of history. the tune-out factor is bad too.

jon meacham, take it away. >> presidents have this problem historically in the second term but it seems to be especially bad with barack obama because there's a question of what he can accomplish over the next two years. we showed the historically low numbers as far as the state of the union address goes. what is happening historically with this president and can you find any parallels where someone turned it around six years in? >> i think where the turnaround will happen is in places where we aren't watching. there have been a series of examples where particularly late second term, presidents have fell liberated. we make fun of the executive orders and that is, in fact, something that, you know, you never really heard lincoln and fdr say i'm going to rebuild america on an executive order, you know? it's not something that resonates off the tongue.

but he can do significant things, particularly in richard's bailiwick and foreign policy when he applies himself to it. is there a great marshalling of political and popular will for a particular set of programs? no. i would argue that's more cultural than the president's fault for the reasons of the -- just look at the fragmented audience of how people watched or if they watched the state of the union and you see the challenges that face obama more uniquely than with reagan in terms of commanding an american audience. >> real quick, donny. >> there is another thing happening also. i think because of the media, the new presidential election cycle starts 24 to 36 months in advance. >> right. >> we are kind of on to the next one already. >> it is so yesterday what is happening right now. >> takes three years left.

>> that's true, three years left. >> let me push back on everybody saying this is all external forces. donny, who would tune into a program where nothing happened where they saw the program last year and it compromised to deliver 85, 86, 87 things and we turned out that julie anna goldman said he only accomplished less of that. when you know nothing is going to happen and he doesn't know how to broker a deal in washington, d.c. and republicans don't want to broker a deal with him. >> to use a sports analogy he has lost the team. it's both things and why we have seen the dramatic drop. >> between your suit and --

>> willie is like joan rivers. >> see it up close. >> we will move on to a couple of other big stories around the country. parts of the southern united states this morning are finally starting to thaw out but others are in deep paralysis at this hour. in austin, texas, slick conditions caused 300 accidents. this truck was caught parading off the highway. the interstate outside of birmingham, alabama, gridlock in both directions. 11,000 students statewide woke up wednesday morning at their school because they could not get home. no city had it worse than atlanta. look at this! a little more than 2 inches of snow, 2 inches of snow proved disastrous. still under a civilian emergency, most government offices are closed. it is a city defined by its commuters and tuesday's trip home stretched unendingly into wednesday! by yesterday afternoon, even the

national guard was called in to bring meals to stranded drivers who had spent up to 14 hours on the roads while some stretches of highway were totally abandoned. others drew comparisons to the hit zombie show, "the walking dead" intermediate in that city. a handful of children were forced to sleep on their school buses and 2,000 others had to sleep at their schools. the conditions were too icy to get home. other children could not wait! meet grace elizabeth anderson born on the way to the hospital parked in traffic and thank god she and her mother are okay and she is beautiful! but what a horrifically frightening situation. for many, everything boiled over into anger as the region's leaders pointed to faulty forecasts? when one person on twitter said new yorkers were laughing at the situation in atlanta, mayor reed

responded by saying, quote, considering new york city's most recent snow response, they may want to save their laughter during a press conference yesterday, the mayor defended his city's response. >> from the outside looking in, it may look like atlanta simply was not prepared, wouldn't you say that? >> what i would say is the eyes of the nation are on the state, so i'm not going to get into that blame game, but the crisis that we are going through is across the region. there's no one who is doing any better job than we are doing in the city of atlanta. >> what could we do to have avoided that. we can't control mother nature just as we could not make better predictions, neither could school superintendents. that's why the school children were in the situation they were in because they were probably looking at the same modeling that some of our state folks were looking at. >> no, they weren't looking at like a lot of meteorologists.

i don't know what modeling they were looking at. >> a lot of pushback from the meteorologists and al roker talked about his projects for the storm yesterday. >> the mayor and the governor got on tv yesterday and said, oh, this wasn't expected and that is not true. we were talking about this monday that this was going to happen. they took a gamble. they didn't want to pretreat the roads. i don't think they wanted to spend the money and do what they needed to. then they told -- everybody started going home right around noon. by 1:30, i-285 and i-75 and i-85 was a parking lot. this was poor planning on the mayor's part and the governor's part. >> fair? >> let me explain something. you can go after president clinton -- i mean president clinton? president obama, putin. do not mess with al roker. >> do not cross al roker. >> one thing. >> he was predicting this monday and everyone was.

bill? >> everyone lives in atlanta and joe knows this. traffic is bad enough as it is on those roads. this happened so infrequently where they get this storm and ice and they don't have the resources that new york has. they don't have a thousand trucks they can send out on the street. i'm not defending them. they shouldn't have had school to begin with and could have pretreated some of the roads but they are frankly incapable of handling something like this. >> joe, didn't you live in atlanta? >> i did and we go back there regularly. i was born and lived there for a while. i remember as a young kid, you'd get the frequent ice storms that would shut the entire place down. that was a long time ago. the traffic situation as willie said and he lived in atlanta as well, i go back and visit all the time. the traffic situation is there absolutely deplorable. it is a city that -- people commute all the way up to buford. they live on i-75 and 85 and 285

and, again, in the best of circumstances, it is a horrible, horrible commute. we laugh at a couple of inches of snow. well, if you're not used to driving in it and if they haven't treated -- i drive around in new england after a couple of inches of snow and i see people sliding all over the place here. you add to that the fact that it's a region not used to it and the fact that this is one of the toughest cities to commute in in america, and i understand completely why all of those, you know, why they had the traffic jams they had. it was poor -- no doubt, it was poor planning. no doubt, it was poor planning on everybody's part. >> the picture of the baby being born is all very cute, but i wonder when all is said and done, if everyone is okay, because emergency vehicles can't get through that traffic and that is a long time to have a lot of people stranded in the ice. >> i have a good friend i texted

to ask what it's like down there and they said it's like a third world country. people are walking the highways. you said as you said, mika, sleeping in the cvs and aisles of home depot and sleeping on the outdoor furniture and it's crazy. moving to new jersey. a new article in today's "the new york times" explores the attention to detail with which governor chris christie tended to politics in his office. the report begs the question how he be left out of the loop when it came to the george washington bridge closings. the piece lays out how governor chris christie targeted key towns in new jersey to ensure his re-election. the so-called top 100 list included swing towns sometimes called mini-floridas and mini-ohios. bridget kelly head and david winestein headed up the operation.

both have been fired because of their connection to the george washington bridge scandal. a close working environment sometimes around the governor's kitchen table and at metlife stadium in a box, it describes a governor consumed with detail who required that each minor changes to legislation go through his lawyers or chief of staff. meanwhile, the latest "the washington post"/abc news poll shows a majority believes the scandal is an indicator of bigger problem with christie's leadership. some believe he is the best chance to beat hillary clinton but a head-to-head matchup shows clinton leading christie by 12 points. joe, i want to go back to the top 100 list and first part of this story and that kind of planning in a governor's office. is that unusual in the world of politics? >> no, it's not unusual. >> like minute-floridas and mini-ohios? >> it portrays a guy in great

detail of running his operation. you remember at his press conference, he said right after this came out that he wasn't obsessed with details and that he did trust others. however, the story certainly paints a picture of a man who is extraordinarily close, especially to the guy is that ran his campaign. listen, we can have a thousand stories written between now and when the documents are produced and the bottom line is either he writes about it in a text or an e-mail and this story suggests, as prosecutor, he knew not to send things by e-mail, that either he had, you know, working knowledge of it and there is going to be proof of it, or he didn't. none of us know that. who knows. i think there's a danger that maybe he didn't know about it, that somebody told him about it later and made than off-handed

remark in a text that is going to come back or end up haunting him or maybe not. regardless, it's still early. we got a long way to go before 2016, but this story certainly paints a picture of guy who is far from disgaengaged in the everyday workings of his administration. >> for sure. >> joe, do you believe -- >> by the way, mika -- i only say -- why is that relevant? that's relevant because i find it hard to believe that if i were running a state that had the busiest bridge in the world and i had intimate details of everything that happened in pieces of legislation that people on my staff would shut down two lanes of the busiest bridge in the world without my working knowledge of it. that is his real challenge and he somehow is going to have to prove to people that he didn't know. >> joe, i think the challenge he has even if the smoking gun is not there, people doing the same kind of math that you're i want mating that this sticks with him

with or without. this is the way business is done and this is a hands-on guy. forget legally. i don't think people in their decision making process need that straight line. i think they already have the dotted line. >> i guess it depends who his opponent is. look, i think it's bad. i think it could stick with him but you you think of all the scandals that the clintons have come across and they just -- we could maim candidates on both sides of the aisle. >> hookers. >> excuse me? >> no the scandals of hookers and drugs and things like that when it's an abusive power that affects -- >> it has a different taste. >> it does. coming up on "morning joe" -- we didn't know beaver and all that. good. good job, boys. atlanta mayor kassim reed, we will ask him about the crippling response to his city there in atlanta.

then steve schmidt and chuck todd will also join us. up next, the political playbook. first, bill karins -- >> mika, i didn't get caught up on the beaver. >> when are you predicting the big problems for atlanta to end and the southern parts of the country? >> tuesday morning i said 1 to 2 inches in atlanta and it started snowing at 11:00 a.m. >> the issue was the ice too along with it. the temperatures. >> the sleet and snow. it was well-predicted. they can't complain about the forecast in atlanta. birmingham, alabama, that forecast was a bust and not calling for too much snow and they got 2 inches and they are not getting a lot of attention but they had people stranded on the roads also. it's still freezing in the deep south. this is the coldest morning you'll have for a long time. ice and snow on secondary roads but we are watching improvement. by afternoon a lot of it should be gone. today in the 30s and 40s so that will be very helpful.

we do have a snowstorm for you in minneapolis this morning. it's much warmer but your morning commute is going to be treacherous. heavy snow right during the heart of the rush hour and much of the east, it's still cold but it's not as bad as yesterday and look at this. we are heading in the right direction, folks. much of the country finally warming up. by the way, we are getting some rain and snow in california this morning. this is the first significant rain and snow since the first week of december. one of the longest rainy season droughts we have ever had in california. a long way to go but it's a start. atlanta, we are watching you closely! we wish you luck on your morning commute tonight. you're watching "morning joe." ♪ than i am without you but in my mind deep in my mind i can't forget about you ♪ are you ready grandma? just a second, sweetie.

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♪ california history has left some communities on the verge of

running out of water. have you noticed a pattern here? droughts and ice storms and severe temperatures? wells and reservoirs are practically empty in 17 towns in northern california. federal officials are considering trucking in water or digging new wells. governor jerry brown declared a drought emergency earlier this month. joe? >> and from "the washington post" royal caribbean's ill-fated cruise returned to port yesterday with nearly 700 sick passengers on board. that is miserable! the ship docked in new jersey after it suspected norovirus outbreak cut the voyage short. passengers will be compensated for part of the fare and offered hotel rooms if they were unable to travel home. ship is scheduled for another departure tomorrow. >> joe, can i ask you a question? i'm not much of a marketing guy. why would anyone go on a cruise any more? i don't want to destroy the cruises but note to self!

>> they are locked in a big tub with a lot of people eating a lot of food that gets mixed around a lot and i don't get it. >> note to self! >> it sounds perfect to me. >> seriously. no, i'm curious. i'm terrible. who do we talk to in florida once joe who loves cruises? >> people love a cruise. >> i know. but really nice people. >> it's a free country. it's a free country. >> michael steele loves cruises. >> michael steele loves cruises and i do too. >> but that is not -- >> t.j. >> but that is not really an example. michael steele loves cruises. >> i love michael steele but i have to consider my michael steele love now. >> i know t.j. loves cruises. >> i've never been on one but i know i have the right to do it. >> that is still america. >> a cruise is great.

>> "the new york times" a new study. >> well, do it! go! >> look. now did we just take some sel e selfies here on set of "morning joe"? the risk for obesity can begin as early as the age of 5. emory university researchers say kids who are overweight in kindergarten are four times more likely to be obese by eighth grade and nearly every child in the study what obese by age 11 remained that way. 18% of elementary school children in the u.s. are obese and this is a serious issue on every level. national security issue and health issue. it is everything to us to try and solve. joe? >> okay. and a story that everybody in the council of foreign relations are following closely. "usa today" saying actress scarlett johansson will end her eight-year relationship with

oxfan. it relates to her relationship with soda stream. the group publicly criticized the relationship. johansson says she stands by the company and she will have a soda stream super bowl ad this weekend during the super bowl. >> soda stream is a great product. this is part of the antilegitimacy of israel and what oxfan is going after her and she is sticking by what she believes and good for her. >> i knew middle east piece would come down to scar-joe. let's to some politico now. mike allen has a look at the playbook. >> good morning, willie. >> have you a piece up there about donny deutsche is freaking

out. the title of the piece "why the rich are freaking out." tell us about it. >> willie, it's a tough time to be a politico crat. he says the 1%, the wealthy themselves, their advisers say they are worried about the trifecta of president obama pushing against income inequality. mayor de blasio is trying to reduce it there and wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. the pope, pope francis who has talked about the need to also for more inequality. so you have these three huge voices, arguably the three houg voices on the same thing. the occupy movement which sort of faded coming back both in

policies and in mood. so a national, even global, mood turning against the 1%. >> i mean, donny, to be serious, things are pretty good for on rich people right now. i don't think they have too much to worry about. rhetoric is one thing but their lives are still pretty good. >> before you asked that, i was going to say, you know, i think on paper, you read that and, obviously, obama is making the push as well, where he should. i do not think that the 1% or particularly 1% of the 1% are worried at all frankly. unfortunately, this is a big issue we have. >> joe, jump in and richard has something he wrote on this as well or at least applying to it. >> scarlett johansson, i'm sure. richard, the challenge that we're facing as a country regarding income and equality which has just exploded in large part as jeff sachs said, it's a global challenge to the united

states. the rich do keep getting richer in the industrialized countries. bill gates was on last week and said you have to offset that by the rising incomes in china and indiana and what is the third world. across the planet, the poor aren't getting poorer but certainly in western countries, income inequality is a great challenge for american capitalism even the former fed chairman alan greenspan said it's one of the greatest challenges we face in america. >> income inequality is not the problem. it's a reflection and a lack of economic growth affecting the middle class and the working class. the answer is not to shift well. it's not to, if you will, make rich people poorer because that is not going to make poor people richer. the only way you're going to succeed here is with real economic growth and that is going to take things like education reform and require an

infrastructure project in this country and require immigration reform and so forth. this issue can't be framed as income inequality. it will get you into the dead endish of politics redistribution. they have to fight back and on real mobility and on real opportunity for economic growth and advancement. when everything is growing you don't hear the debate about income inequality. this is a sign that too many people are drifting and falling and that ought to be the focus. >> politico's mike allen, thank you very much. coming up, day two of marshawn lynch. avoiding the super bowl media crush. we will show you how he did it yesterday with the help of some teammates. "morning joe" sports is next. ♪ i'll never be your beast burning ♪ [ police radio, indistinct ]

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bob gates, very smart. >> time for smorports. miami heat hosting the oklahoma city thunder last night. final preview, perhaps? okc trailing by as many as 18 points early but kevin durant knocks down the three over lebron. third quarter thunder pulls away. james with a big step-back

jumper over durant but his 34 was not enough. durant has 12 straight games he has scored at least 30. okc blows out miami without russell westbrook. they are on an incredible run. arizona is number one and undefeated in college basketball but a stiff test last night from stanford but came back to win the game. it was tied in the final minutes. the wildcats take it, though. arizona 21-0 and cruising through this season. more outdoor hockey in the bronx yesterday. rangers and islanders last night at yankees stadium. third period. game tied at 1. dominic moore of the rangers gets in the crease. 2-1 lead. that is your final score. all players are required to participate in media days leading up to the super bowl but seattle running back marshawn lynch not a fan of the press and

doesn't do a lot of talking. on tuesday he made a very brief appearance and didn't say much except to deion sanders. marshawn took it a step further on wednesday having teammate michael robinson field his question. >> break the monotony a little bit. marshawn trying not to say nothing to you guys. you can direct your questions to me. check! >> michael, how is marshawn feeling? >> hey, man, he hasn't talked to you guys and i think he just said that. he just wants to play ball. >> michael [ inaudible ]. >> it's a lifestyle, boss. >> michael, how does marshawn feel about skittles? >> he loves those before the game. boss? >> i'm here, man, so i got to play. >> boss? >> marshawn, he said boss. >> can we take the headphones off of these guys? what is this? all of these guys. they are not listening to their

headphones so why are they on your head? >> deion sanders was hiding in the corner in super bowl weekend and deion says how come you don't talk? he said talk to me don't mean nothing, boss. so he doesn't talk. he doesn't do the media. there you go. we are 85 hours away from the kickoff to super bowl xlviii and all of you looking to make the game a little more interesting, we have this to tell you about. remember knowshon's memorable tears during the national anthem? the water works of him doing that again stands 3-2. blackout like in new orleans last year? you can get that piece 20-1. if you're a keen observer of peyton manning line of scrimmage tendencies. >> omaha! >> that was actually -- >> omaha! omaha! hut! >> omaha, omaha.

oen online sports book is taking a bet on how many times payeyton says omaha. you would have to say more or less than 27 times. back in the winter storm in atlanta. mika told us about the baby being delivered by a state trooper on the side of the road. there is a story involving atlanta braves great chipper jones. atlanta braves first baseman freddy freeman was stuck in the thick of a mess for about five hours when he tweeted out an sos and chipper sprang into action. he jumped on his four-wheeler. >> what? >> he rode out to the interstate and picked up freddy freedom and brought him home safely. >> i like it. >> maybe he could throw a couple of civilians on there. up next, mika's must read opinion pages. richard haass breaks down some

of the biggest foreign policy obstacles facing president obama. we will be right back. ♪ [ male announcer ] the new new york is open. open to innovation. open to ambition. open to bold ideas.

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me too! [ male announcer ] so indulgent, you'll never believe they're light. 100-calorie progresso light soups. look at that beautiful shot of capitol hill. so many wonderful things don't happen there. welcome back. 46 past the hour. i'm going to read your piece in "american review." put america's house in order. from there we will jump off into the major foreign policy issues of the day. you say this, richard. the biggest threat to america's security and prosperity comes not from aboeed broad but from . for the united states to act successful abroad it must restore its power and foreign policy needs to begin at home

and now for the oforeseeable future. the united states has conducted since world war ii and more emphasis on domestic investment and policy reform. jon meacham, you want to jump in? >> richard, that argument which you also made in your book, it argues that the most significant foreign policy hot spot, to some extent, may be in washington and the 50 state capitals as opposed to tehran and damascus. is that the right reading? >> absolutely. if we are able to set an example that others want to emulate and more important, if we have the resources to discourage the emergence after great power challenge, we have got to put our economy and our society on a sustainable footing. >> all right. i want to just kind of do a hot list here and start with some of the issues of the day in terms of what does affect us from the outside, even though we should be focusing within. let's start with syria.

which has been perk latelying for months and massive refugee crisis there. >> quite honestly, ghdiplomacy s zero chance of working. the idea is to get people together but no incentive for the assad regime to step down. whether we are willing to work with this very unattractive government against the jihadists. sometimes in foreign policy you have to make choices and i think

we are close to that choice. >> at the top of the show you talked about the pivot to asia we heard about all the time and doesn't heard we have lettered about lately to china and japan. is that smtill out there? >> not enough. the run up to world war 1. people ought to worry that an incident could happen and escalate. we are not putting enough air and forces in the region to reinforce and signal and not spending enough time there diplomatically. i would argue we should spend less time in the middle east and more time than they are. 21st century is much more likely to be shaped and determined in asia than in the middle east. >> ukraine, another story i think we have to stop turning away from and some people are completely ignoring in and massive turmoil in ukraine.

>> turmoil and majority of the ukraine people want to have their future with europe. russia wants to keep it very much in some ways in its orbit. >> this is this week in kiev to give you guys a sense. >> stunning unrest and lately order is breaking down and the president of ukraine is on sick leave, quote/unquote. the russians want to keep ukraine close and want to create a customs union with them. this is the fight of the future of central europe. watch this space. one other point for putin. this is also about russia. he is very nervous that if ukraine goes towards europe, people in moscow and beyond will get the same idea because putin has a narrow view of a controlled russia but many people in russia want russia to be more european so this is not just about the future of ukraine, this is really a debate about the future of the 143 million people who live in russia. >> richard haass, thank you very much. still ahead, why the

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♪ speaking of distractions. joe biden, now, take a look.

i want you to take a look at a little bit of footage here. i want to see if you can spot the exact moment when the vice president strips the event of all dignity. who is he pointing at? well, beltway gossip is that he was pointing to a dude he met in an airport chile's the night before. see? i told you i was vice president. ♪ ♪

>> i love him. >> an observation about boehner. put that clip back up there. his skin is darker than obama's. >> please. >> no, it is! >> says the man in the pink and gray suit. really? >> he is darker than obama there. >> what is wrong with you? >> he is not darker. he is oranger. >> oranger. >> i just like his hair. the picture of biden going like this, my daughter texted me that. she took a green graph of that and while we're on world leaders. look at vladimir putin on the cover of "new york" magazine. he is a nice new yorker -- "the new yorker" sorry. that is hysterical. the judges behind him are putin too. good cover. good cover. >> willie, i've had these fantasies about being -- >> oh, boy. >> an ice skater figure. >> please don't say that.

>> please. >> i'm uncomfortable. i'm admitting it. >> you're basically in a figure skating outfit right now. all you need are the skates. >> donny, it's -- >> hey. figure skating. >> i'm getting glasses. can i try those on? >> yes. the new rugby. >> i'm going to be trying glasses on the air. they are so dirty, donny! they are filthy! is it good? what have you been -- coming up at the top of the how are you, nbc news chuck todd. steve schmidt joins the conversation. that is good, that is good. "morning joe" is back in a moment. was having trouble getting out of bed in the

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because of the state of the union address last night, we put together kind after retrospective. this is state of the union, a look back. a walk down memory lane. state of the union, a look back. >> okay. ♪ >> it is you, our citizens, who make the state of our union strong. >> that the state of the union is not good. >> the state of our union is funky. ♪

welcome back to "morning joe." donny deutch and jon meacham are still bus. joining the table an msnbc political analyst now, steve schmidt, who is solution is crossfit. you look great. i'm so impressed. >> 55 pounds. >> 55! >> wow. good for you, man. >> you look really good. i can't imagine how hard that was. good for you. >> more to go. >> your wife must think you have a girlfriend. >> what? >> and in washington, msnbc chief white house correspondent and political director and host of "the daily rundown," chuck todd. good to have you on board. joe, should we start with the state of the union ratings or you want to go somewhere else? >> sure. >> i am impressed. steve schmidt has gained 55

pounds? >> no, he has lost. look at him. he looks great. it's probably an important issue that you've probably increased your health and your life. it's great. >> okay, okay, let's get to the news. >> maybe a hair transplant? >> no, you're good. you're great. >> maybe a shave up there. >> the dome looks good. >> yeah. >> now it's getting awkward. newly relieved ratings from nielsen show president obama reached a new low in viewership for his state of the union address. 33.3 million people tuned in to tuesday night's speech, lowest for president obama since he took office. viewership for the president's addresses to congress has declined every year since 2009. 52.4 million viewers watched his first joint address that year. and tuesday's state of the union drew about 4 million less viewers than president george w. bush's worst rating state of the union in 2008.

still those who watched the address online are not taken into account in the nielsen ratings. new a few hours, the president will continue his tour outside of washington and focusing on income equality, an then travel to nashville. joe, that is a lot less viewers for the multiple, multiple republican responses as well. >> i guess so. >> 19 or something. >> the president of the united states, though. at the end of the day, he is going to be judged on what he is able to get accomplished over eight years and what he is not able to accomplish over eight years. he is talking about income inequality and that is fantastic but the fact is that income inequality has picked up the last four years since he has been president of the united states. of course, at some point, steve schmidt, this president is going to have to actually own the failures of his administration. he has been president since

2009, income inequality has exploded since 2009 for a lot of different reasons that have nothing to do with political parties or legislation that is before congress right now. but, at the same time, if he goes out pointing fingers at republicans, i think republicans are going to be able to point fingers right back at this guy. he owns the economy. he owns health care. and he has been president for four years and income inequality has exploded at its highest rates in u.s. history. >> look. this is a very complex problem and it's being addressed in a very simplistic and, frankly, a disingenuous way. this isn't caused by republicans, it's not caused by george bush. this is a result of structural changes that have happened to our economy over the course of a generation. it's the fact that we have in cities like los angeles, we have

half of black and latino kids are going to intersect with the criminal justice system. as we look at this issue as a society, simply pointing the finger saying it's the bush administration or i'm going to correct this by raising the minimum wage by $2 or we are going to correct it by raising the top marlgal tax rate by three points is just disingenuous and not fix the problems we have as a country on this issue. the issue is real. >> i don't think he said he was going to correct the problems by fixing the minimum wage. i think he said people who work on minimum wage ought to be able to live on it and instead they can't buy lunch. >> when he talks about income inequality the remedy that is offered and pointed out, all of the solutions are small. they are not systemic. they are not aimed at addressing over a long term what richard haass was talking about. how do we get our country's

house in order? you how do we create upward mobility for the middle class again? how do we restore the american dream? it's just a fact that for the first time in this country's history, the generation that comes behind our kids' generation is going to be living in a less prosperous country area we are going to have restricted opportunities. there is more upward mobility in the uk today than in the u.s. and that is just remarkable. none of this has gotten better over the course of barack obama's presidency. >> actually, has it gotten a lot worse. chuck todd, turn our attention to the republican party. they are going on a retreat and talking about legislation. right now, it seems the conservative base believe they are going to be sold out by john boehner and the u.s. chamber of commerce and the "wall street journal" editorial page. a lot of people are pushing for immigration reform. they would say amnesty. in fact, it does seem like the

leaders of the house republican party are lining up to try to pass some sort of immigration bill. earlier this week, bill kristol and i said, despite what the manhattan, washington axis may be and, you know, think tank axis may believe, that this could be the one issue that could derail the republican party's chances of picking up the u.s. senate in 2014. how is that debate shaking out internally? do we think that john boehner and paul ryan are going to force a vote on a substantial immigration reform package? >> i think they are going to and the question is when. i had paul ryan on my show yesterday. we went back and forth on this. he did everything he could not to use the phrase pathway to

citizenship. i said are these folks going to become citizens? he said it's too soon to tell and we have to wait until we write the legislation. of course, they will end up with a pathway to citizenship. i'm with you. i think this thing could explode in the republican base outside of the corridor and you look at -- you know, right now, you know, the canary in the coal mine are all of these senate primaries, right? all of these guys are favored. all of these senate incumbents are favored. even though they are not the ones dealing with immigration, that is how you would see this sort of prairie wildfire. if they look like they are shoving this down the throat of

conservatives. i think the tight rope they are walking on this, i think they believe they have to do it and they believe it's better for the national party. they believe it's better to get the white house back. i think they are trying to be very careful, slow walk it for a few months, get past some of these primaries so they can be as least disruptive to them in potential primaries as they possibly can be. >> jon meacham? >> chuck and maybe joe, who in the -- who at the national level can make this case in a mainstream way for the republicans? i think one of the casualties of ft. lee is that we expected chris christie, i think a lot of us expected him to counter the post-obama position and right now it feels like it's in senators in particular who are popular with the tea party base but less so with what i would think of as the more traditional

chamber of commerce republicans. >> look. i think on immigration, it seems as if paul ryan is basically raised his hand and said i'll play point in the house on this. he seems comfortable doing that. using his capital. if you just look at marco rubio. to his credit, marco rubio used his political capital with conservatives. now it burned him. he's in a worst place today politically with the republican base than he was a year ago at this time and all because of immigration. is there no other reason. it's only because of immigration and he has run from it. i don't know if is this good for him long term if he is running for president. in a way he has run away from it as it's become unpopular a little bit but he has used his capital. when you look at the landscape, i don't think boehner has the credibility to bridge that divide with conservatives. but i think ryan does. >> joe? >> don't you, joe?

>> yeah. rene can try and i think tough for him. i go back to george w. bush faced in 2006 and 2007 when he was talking about this. i think always this feeling from party types, staebt types that after you lose an election and you lose an election like we lost in 2012 with hispanics rushing away from the republican party there is this idea if you just pass immigration reform that somehow hispanics will magically rush back to you but i don't think that is the case there. the tone during the primaries was so negative that i think that caused a big problem and i don't know that a pathway to citizenship is going to cure all of those problems. you look at the numbers right now. you look at barack obama's numbers right now and, chuck, i guess let's get you in on this

too. barack obama is not doing too great with hispanics himself right now. i don't know a pathway to citizenship guarantees you get 44% of hispanics voting for him. >> not now. >> chuck? >> but i think you have to look at this as a ten-year plan. look. it's not going to magically happen overnight but if you lessen the hostility, right? and then you chip away and you're able to have a hispanics -- i mean, i think the problem that is going on is look at the spanish language television. the biggest story they cover over the last year, when it comes to washington national news, is immigration. telemundo television spend a lot of time covering this issue. if, all of a sudden, that is solved, then it just opens the door, then, you know, have a lot of republicans who believe they could have a conversation with hispanics on school choice, they could have a conversation with

hispanics on more social issues, but right now, hispanics aren't listening to that because of the immigration rhetoric. if you take it away, they will at least then answer the door on other issues. i don't think they will right now. >> some other news to get to. a new article in today's "the new york times" explores the attention to detail with which governor chris christie tended to politics in his office. the report begs the question how could he be left out of the loop when it came to the george washington bridge issue. the piece lays out how governor christie targeted key towns in new jersey to assure his reseler re-election and like a top ten list. staffers bill stepien and bridget kelly headed up a team and both have since than fired or pushed out because of their connection to the george washington bridge scandal.

the piece paints a portrait of a close working environment, sometimes around the governor's kitchen table and at metlife stadium and it describes a governor consumed with detail who require that even minor changes to legislation go through his lawyers or chief of staff. "the new york times" reporter david chen who co-wrote the article about governor christie is with us. good to have you on this morning. >> thank you so much. >> the big takeaway is the attention to detail or what was driving your questions and your research here? >> what we wanted to do was get sort of an under the hood look, if you will, at how the governor's political operation works. i mean, there is a lot of speculation. there are a lot of partisans as this george washington bridge issue has exploded and we just wanted to give people a sense of the sort of the flowchart if you will in terms of his operating. i think what is interesting is that on a lot of levels, it's a very sophisticated sort of data

centric look in breaking down towns who might be a persuadable voters and which leaders might be amenable to extra state shinshin assistance. >> steve schmidt, while there has been no direct correlation between governor christie and what happened with the ft. lee bridge directly back to him, the heavy implication in this piece is this is a governor who knew what was going on at all times within his inner circle. the subpoenas have gone out. we haven't seen the documents yet. we don't know what is out there. over the last month or so, how big is the ding been to chris christie as the guy who was seen as potentially the next nominee, potentially the next president of the united states? how bad is the damage? >> look. i think it's much more than a ding. it's much the equivalent of the type of injury that lines you up

in the intensive care unit. when you build the type of brand that chris christie has had, damage like this is very, very difficult to repair. that being said, i do think at the end of the day there is nothing that directly implicates chris christie through this investigation, the 20 subpoena duces tecum, the -- subpoenas e e-mail. you have to be able to survive these things. it just absolutely part of the process and so the problem that chris christie has with this story, tightening in, is that at the news conference, he goes out and says i'm a big delegator. i think this story pretty much refutes that and says this is somebody who is very hands-on, particularly with regard to political matters, but, you know, at the end of the day, when you have the multiple investigations and the number of subpoenas that are out, you will certainly find out what he knew and when he knew it and i still continue to take him for his

word at it, absent any evidence that he knew, that he didn't, and if he didn't know, then i think he survives this. >> all right. joe. then i'll follow up. >> i was just going to say, i take him at his word too. he's a friend of ours. we have always been straightforward about that. i have no reason to believe personally he is not telling the truth about it. that said, we will see. this "the new york times" article obviously, will race a lot of legitimate questions. but, steve, just reflecting back on this. this is a guy who, a month and a half ago, i wrote a cover story for "time" about chris christie being the head of the republican party and lined up for 2016 pretty damn well. what is it about this story -- what is it about this controversy that has caused the type of political bleeding that this story has caused chris christie? i'm sure he's over there thinking this is almost surreal

how quickly all of this has happened. >> when you look at the polls, you know, they are dominated by the collapse of trust and very nearly every major institution in the country. over the ten years, with the exception of the u.s. military, which has risen in esteem. people have lost faith in trust in washington and our political institutions, the president, the congress. he was the anecdote to this. >> right. >> he is somebody who fundamentally was seen is as apart from washington and different and able to work together and get stuff done and fighting for the people. so this story has landed like a direct hit because of its smallness, it's pettiness and it's partisanship. i think people look at chris christie, you know, through the prism of this story and say, my god. >> yeah. >> stuff like this it could get worse in washington. >> also if he survives, it's a great lesson in how politics works, because as joe mentioned, we do know him.

i also know the major republican donors and republican operatives who were begging him, begging him to think about running the first time around and throwing things at him. i mean, he was getting wooed right and left. i take issue. i think one of our guests yesterday said he was never going to be. i don't know. from behind the scenes, he was getting wooed and filled up with kool-aid and i thought he held himself together pretty well, but it is a sign -- i mean, everyone is gone. everyone is gone. i remember my dad left the white house. it was a big deal. they put the red phone in and secret service. they were gone. pulled the cord out of the wall and left a big henole in the wa and everything is gone. when you're down to politics, it's down to contributing it's and if he survives that, it will be a great lesson. >> steve, i think this sticks for him this reason. you mentioned the word brand before. the very thing that got him there, you know, is in your face that he is going to challenge a

teacher. don't ask me where my kid goes to school. he's a tough guy. now every time he kind of goes back to that, in the chip in the back of people's head is this guy a bully? is this guy -- is it win at all costs at anybody's expense if you will? even if there is no smoking gun and i actually don't think there will be, i think the residue stays with people and actually boxes him in a bit is how he can kind of perform and behave. >> i don't know. joe, jump in. i wonder, joe, because i want to get to david chen and ask one more question. first, how he would navigate that. >> look. i think -- i got great respect for donny and i usually agree with donny but i could not disagree more. nobody wants to see chris christie going around wringing his hands and being sweet and nice and kind to people. if i were chris christie right now, i would be going from town hall to town hall to town hall to town hall, saying this is what i've done for new jersey. this is what i'm going to do for new jersey. if you don't like it, you can go

straight to hell. i'm going to be the guy that i've always been. line your investigators up. i told you i am going to tell the truth and i am telling the truth. go ahead. kick me around all you want to kick me around. you know what i'm fighting for? i'm fighting to bring jobs to jersey and new york state and connecticut, they may want to raise taxes. i'm going to lower taxes. all of the mess that previous big spending governors have got us into, i'm going to keep fighting to get us out of there. people are obsessed about 2016. you know what i'm obsessed? about i'm obsessed about 2014 and 2015 and 2016 and bringing jobs back to jersey. that is what people expect from chris christie. this silence and kind of this sort of -- nobody wants to see him wringing his hands being sweet and cute because that suggests something wrong, does it is not, steve schmidt? >> i think you're exactly right on that but the one thing he has

so show in all of this is growth. what did he learn? how will he be a better leader? i think people are forgiving if you ask for it after you make a mistake but he is not going to be somebody who, you know, to your point -- and i think it's a legitimate one -- but he can't be hand wringing and calculating with every public appearance. if this denies him the ability to be chris christie. >> right. >> it kills his political career. >> david chen, really quickly. the relationship with stepien and bridget kelly, what did you discover about that and quickly, what is the time line in terms of these subpoenas and court appearances? how long could this drag out? because that could be a reason for his silence. >> well, quickly in terms of the time line, february 3rd, i believe, is the deadline by which a lot of the subpoenas are supposed to be answered if there is a joint legislative committee now in trent oon trying to sort through all of that.

there are a lot of people, most republicans, who are telling us because the governor is so obsessed and so good at the politics that he really placed a lot of weight on knowing what was going on and stepien was a part of, you know, that inner circle, he participated in a lot of meetings and bridget ann kelly was a loyal lieutenant and not known for coming up with certain different original ideas on her own but following the book, i guess. a type of circle there. on the other hand, i've heard from a lot of republicans who say that the governor is like many leaders perhaps the kind of person who would give a general order or direction and maybe not wanting to know the specifics necessarily for every single thing. again, until, you know, more information comes out, it's really premature to jump to a lot of conclusions, i think. >> wow. i think it could be very, very, very tough, but we shall see.

i'd love to see him get back out there. david chen, thank you very much. >> thank you. >> steve schmidt, thank you as well. chuck, see you coming up on "the daily rundown." joe, i guess we shouldn't check twitter today, right? >> why is that? >> well, okay. >> i get nothing -- i don't know what your feed looks like but my twitter feed is always positive. >> really? >> i feel loved. you know? >> really? >> when i go on to twitter, i feel the warm embrace of a lot of caring people. you know what i love about it the most? the nuance actually. willie, there is just such a great nuance. sometimes i read those 140 characters and i go, okay, what are they really trying to say when they call me a blank? what are they really trying to say? >> you pick up new meaning with each reading of them. >> i don't know about you. the conversations that you have. >> the positiveness strikes me.

positivity. people are always leaning forward. >> jon meacham, it's like reading -- >> it's text wall exo jesus is what willie says. >> i'm worried chris christie hasn't come out and what does that mean. that is not a positive thing. the story is terrible. i feel very concerned about it. i'll get you -- you are so full of -- and you are -- too. >> you're thinking about it way too much. >> like ten of them will come. >> mika? >> yeah? >> oh, and you're so far off chris -- yeah. >> there are layers and layers and layers of meaning to it. >> okay. >> i give up talking. you guys go ahead. i'm going to walk off. go. >> here we go. coming up, sam polk was angry a few years back when his

wall street bonus was only $3.6 million. h this is a fascinating story coming up. stay with us. you're watching "morning joe." for cross-country, classical. and for jumps, i need something...special. so i use my citi thankyou visa card for music downloads and earn two times the points... plus a little extra inspiration. [ ♪ music plays ] the citi thankyou preferred visa card. earn two times the points on entertainment and dining out with no annual fee. citi, with you every step of the way.

♪ parts of the southern united states are finally starting to thaw out, but others are in deep paralysis. no city had it worse than atlanta. look at these pictures. thousands of drivers were stranded after a little more than 2 inches of snow turned into sheets of ice on roadways. still under a state of civilian emergency, most government offices are closed today. even the national guard was called in to bring meals to stranded drivers who had spent up to 18 hours on the roads. while some stretches of highway were totally abandoned, others drew comparisons to the hit zombie show "the walking dead"

intermedia filmed in the city. thousands of kids had to sleep on their school buses. the conditions were too icy to get home. during a press conference yesterday, the state leaders defended their handling of all of this. >> from the outside looking in, it may look like atlanta simply was not prepared, wouldn't you say that? >> what i would say is the eyes of the nation are on the state, so i'm not going to get into that blame game, but the crisis that we are going through is across the region. there's no one who is doing any better job than we are doing in the city of atlanta. >> what could we do to have avoided that. we can't control mother nature just as we could not make better predictions, neither could school superintendents. that's why the school children were in the situation they were in because they were probably looking at the same modeling that some of our state folks were looking at. >> a lot of people are accusing atlanta officials of being overly defensive to the response of this situation.

man at the center of the storm, the mayor of atlanta, kasim reed joins us ahead. keep it here on "morning joe." [ male announcer ] the new new york is open. open to innovation. open to ambition. open to bold ideas. that's why new york has a new plan -- dozens of tax free zones all across the state. move here, expand here, or start a new business here and pay no taxes for ten years... we're new york. if there's something that creates more jobs, and grows more businesses... we're open to it. start a tax-free business at startup-ny.com. you know the shirt he'll choose... the wine he'll order. you know him. yet now, after exploring vineyards in the hills of italy, he doesn't order the wine he always orders.

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for over 18 years we've helped people take care of the things that matter most. join today. ♪ welcome back to "morning joe." time to take a look at the latest issue of "time" magazine. this week's issue takes a look at the winter olympic games, fevers and cheers inside sochi's ring of steel. deputy managing editor is here with us. >> welcome! >> thank you. >> an interesting cover you have here. a close-up shot of this you can see the olympic rings in barbed wire. obviously, a lot of people have been talking about the ring of steel that vladimir putin has put around certainly the lower area the clusters down by the water in sochi. the mountains are much more open

turf. so what did you learn about the fears and the cheers? because we want to be excited about the olympics but is there a different mindset. >> that is exactly it. on the one hand there are athletes who trained their whole lives and 2014 is a goal to them, aspiration and a positive thing. on the other hand, as we have seen on the run-up to these olympics this is, obviously, a lot of concern about potential terrorism. it's a domestic threat more than anything in russia. so you're sort of walking into this. >> as richard haass pointed out last hour, ukraine is boiling over as well. >> that's right. >> all sorts of implications. it's a terrible reason for it but i think people will be taking an interest in foreign affairs for the first time because the olympics are so

universally engaging. stores of retribution and hope and whatever else. >> it's fun of the few true world events and that means the world is watching and, on the one hand, these games are putin's baby. he wants to show the promise that he made to the russian people when he took office in 2000 that basically he said i promise i will make russia secure and stable. sometimes as we have seen, that has come at the expense of civil liberties. but this is really -- if he has his way, this is the payoff. >> we hear the word terrorism. what are the specific actually groups or actual things j a? are this specific things most worried about? >> i think it's where sochi is located and the regions of dagestan and chechen.

they are trying to blanket the region and have 40,000 troops ready to go in soap soechi. as compared to the last winter games, 6,000 troops. >> putin, himself, has taken this very personally and not just the ring of steel but he is competitive and has been urging people to get behind his athletes' financial, et cetera. >> russia has always been competitive in the winter olympics. i think, yes, this time around, more than any. and, you know, i think putin really wants to win on every level. he wants the medal count but he also wants at the end for people to walk away and say, russia can really do this, they can host a world event peacefully and with

a lot of positiveness. >> radhika jones, thank you very much. a clear idea how to make its soda stream super bowl ad get noticed and that idea is scarlett johansson. >> you're doing it, scarlett. you're doing it. changing the world one sip at a time. >> sorry, coke and pepsi. >> oh, yes, you've done it. soda stream. ♪ love the people who care if i live or die ♪ get paid to do something you really love, what would you do?" ♪ [ woman ] i'd be a writer. [ man ] i'd be a baker. [ woman ] i wanna be a pie maker. [ man ] i wanna be a pilot. [ woman ] i'd be an architect. what if i told you someone could pay you and what if that person were you? ♪ when you think about it, isn't that what retirement should be, paying ourselves to do what we love? ♪

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a lot of people watch the game for the ads and the commercials but they are very expensive. this year's super bowl is charging $4 million just for a 30-second spot. so expensive. some companies are trying to save money by having commercials that aren't quite as long. like check out this one for dunkin' dough nedunk n dunkin' dough nuts. >> dunkin doughnuts. >> that one there, $1 million. >> are you serious? >> you got to get to the super bowl ads. quickly. have you on-to-say hi to daisy. >> i was going to wave to her. she is in london. >> i didn't know who you were talking to, that baby voice on the phone. >> those were real babies! >> i don't want to know.

millions will gather for something is a national holiday, it's super bowl sunday. for many the day is not about the game but all about those commercials. ♪ i'd like to sing >> hey, kid. ♪ the whole world is smiling with me ♪ >> what up? who that? >> hey, buddy. >> when the green bay packers played the kansas city chiefs in the very first super bowl, the price of an ad was $42,000. now, $4 million will get awe 30-second spot. viewership for the big game has tripled since 1967 but are the commercials worth the hefty price tag for advertisers? >> yes, i'd like to be on a commercial. >> what will you be advertising? >> go daddy.com. >> reporter: take go daddy. since 2005, the company has relied on sexual innuendo to sell its web posting services

and last year their nerd kiss helped them add 10 million customers increasing sales by 40% the day after the game. some ads have a detective ad on wall street. fedex shares jumped 6.2% after their caveman delivery spot in 2006. and for brand rivals like coke and pepsi who often battle to outdo each other, the big payoff comes from social media. >> if only i could make this message go viral. >> you're doing it, scarlett. >> reporter: last year, like shares and retweets of super bowl ads on facebook and twitter, jumped 89% from 2012 with 3.3 million shares on super bowl monday alone. nine times greater than during the actual game. ♪ volkswagen the force currently holds the social media record with 5 million online shares and

boosting sales for the passat by 60% that year and helping the company to a record year in 2011. >> don't you think it's time we >> nah. >> nah. >> reporter: as the brands gear up for the super bowl ad war, one thing is for sure. we can expect to see a lot of familiar faces. >> surprise. >> all right. so, we were watching that piece and you pointed out all of the ads your firm had done, especially that vw ad. >> yeah. >> with the little kid. that's one of my favorite ads -- >> yeah, the agency in l.a. >> what makes a great ad? >> that make as great ad, because everybody can connect on the human level. with all of the technology, and the discussion about digital, online, the things that made a great ad with mean joe green are great, human stories that we can relate to. if you're a dad, it's a great attribute of a car attaching it to a human moment.

we did the little nerdy boy with the kissing -- it created a firestorm. the idea is to get attention but attention in the right way for your brand, and create traffic. there's a lot of interesting stuff happening this year. >> was rosacea on the casting call -- is that a burst for that week, does it have long-term impact? >> both. there's been a lot of ads that create attention and don't do that. you into ed to do stuff that is in concert with your brand, not just a one-off, but really, really attaches long -- >> i haven't seen this ad. what's the point? >> you haven't seen this? >> is this to say -- >> last year -- >> okay. >> what's the point of -- like, is that -- >> the point is, you'll see -- >> sexy and smart. >> yeah. we always get a preview now, the companies release the ads. cheerios has produced a sequel to one that, i guess, was controversial in some circles, the biracial family.

here's the second edition from cheerios. >> hey, gracie, you know how our family has daddy and mommy. >> and me. >> yeah, that's right. pretty soon you're going to have a baby brother. >> and? a puppy. >> deal. >> she had leverage, and she used it. a nice play. a nice play. >> i like it. >> great. the world's come a long way. in 1994, my client ikea, we did an interracial couple at the time. 20 years ago. and the amount of hate mail that we got from it. now, this time with cheerios, an interracial couple, there was still that, but the outpouring, the embracing of the different families today. so you ate cheerios, and it's a charming ad. >>, o the girl is adorable.

>> it's a great ad. so audi, i guess, is introducing the world to a new breed of dog, part doberman part chi california. the dober-wa-wa. >> i've never seen a breed like this. >> it's unsettling. >> it's disturbing to look at it. >> how did this dog get past regis, that's what i want to know. >> i'm sarah mclaughlin, will you help these -- >> i don't like the fact that it's looking this way. >> see, it has something to do with audi. >> that's the challenge. it's audi. the ad pays off, you never compromise. >> that's so funny. >> i like attacking sawyer a mclaughlin. >> the crying dog ad. >> yeah. it's going to work. i wish there was a tighter link with the brand, but it will be interesting to see. >> and you have some surprises,

pull out the big guns, big names making cameos. arnold schwarzenegger this year in full table tennis mode, i guess, for bud light's new up for whatever campaign. >> surprise. ♪ >> i mean. >> -- he's working out. >> guys, what's the value? >> i don't know. i couldn't know where the ad's going, about you it's pretty funny. >> it's good. >> yeah. >> we're going to see, this is teaser. you don't actually know what will happen on the super bowl. >> it's a bud light commercial. >> guys, i want to -- actually, a "morning joe" exclusive, we'll show an ad on the super bowl that's not been seen yet anywhere. >> okay. >> let's show it. ♪ >> his alarm clock never rings.

more than once. he showers with his clothes on. he debates nobel prize winning economists for sport. for breakfast, he'll take a big mac, and he prefers it under a bridge. he commutes to work in a wooden motorboat. he is the most interesting morning television anchor in the world. >> i don't wake up on time often, but when i do, i'm on "morning joe." weekdays 6:00 to 9:00 on msnbc. stay sleepy, my friends. >> what's amazing, phil griffin two 30-second spotteds, $8 million, for the world's most -- >> wow. i guess we're getting promos, right? >> yeah. between the bud spot and the

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♪ good morning. it's 8:00 on the east coast. 5:00 a.m. on the west coast, as you take a live look at new york city. back with us on set, we have donny deutsch, richard haass. >> oh, my god, today is a huge day. can i say it? >> yes. >> amelia is 18 years old. >> i'm the mother of an 18-year-old. >> mika's baby is 18 years old. we have some pictures, i think. >> she's on her own. >> that's her doing her first reporting on honey suckle. >> there she is. >> how cute is she? seriously, how did this happen? any mother of an 18-year-old today will understand this, like, goes too fast. way too fast. so anyhow, i'm very proud. >> look at her. >> it goes way, way too fast, mika. >> oh, my lord. >> unbelievable. 18 years old. >> she's a cutie.

>> it flies by. >> it does. >> take that picture right now. >> we were in sweden buying lipstick. >> well, of course, that's what we all do in the summer. >> okay. >> we go to sweden to buy lipstick. congratulations, mika. >> thank you so much. >> you have to stop talking and let me say congratulations. >> thank you. i'm amazed and old. so we're going to move on to talk about, coming up later in this block, we're going to go to atlanta, take a look what happened there over the past 24 hours. what a mess. >> problem. >> incredible pictures. a lady had the -- had a baby on the highway. >> yeah. >> because they were not prepared for the weather that was being reported days before. and thousands of people were stuck on the highway, on the interstate. children slept in schools. people slept in stores. home depots wherever they would to stay warm and stay off the ice. the mayor of atlanta very defensive, because they did some things right.

but obviously, a lot went wrong. we'll be talking about that, as well as new developments in new jersey with governor chris christie. but first, newly released ratings from the nielsen shows president obama reached a new low in viewership for his state of the union address. 33.3 million people tuned in to tuesday night's speech, the lowest for president obama since he took office. viewership for the president's addresses has congress -- has declined every year since 2009. 52.4 million viewers watched his first joint address that year, and tuesday's state of the union also drew about 4 million less viewers than president george w. bush, his worst rated state of the union in 2008. still, those who watched the address online are not taken into account in the nielsen ratings. don't know if that makes a difference. it might a little bit. in a few hours, the president will continue his tour outside washington focusing on income

inequality, an important issue. he will visit a ge plant in wisconsin and then travel to nashville, joe. >> mika, the numbers aren't good. donny deutsch, we ought to go to you. as far as branding goes, this president's -- let's just talk about it the way it is, man. this guy's image right now is -- i don't know if it's battered as much as it is boring, which is actually even worse. you know, in 2008, i read this in the "wall street journal" yesterday, in 2008, independents helped elect him with 52% of independents supporting him. today, it's down in the low 30s. a polling group last week said that he is on track to become the most divisive president in the history of modern polling. that means the biggest gap between what democrats think and what republicans think. he's lost the independents. and more importantly, you look at those numbers, and this is what we were talking about

before, the tune-out factor. he has -- he had the lowest number of americans watching his state of the union address of any president since bill clinton in 2000. that's pretty staggering. >> i think you're -- two things at play here. first of all, there is definitely obama fatigue. he's coming off a horrible 2013. there isn't a lot of sexy things to talk about, good or bad. we're in, what i would call a -- you know, a dull january news cycle. and, you know, there clearly is a fatigue. but i also think there's something else happening from a media point of view. i think state of the union addresses in general, obviously it's part of the constitution, i think it reads from time to time, you'll update congress, i think the american people are a little turned off in general unless there's big news. i would not be surprised, and i'm not defending obama, because clearly there is a fatigue, but i would be shocked, other than when a president is in his first

term, other than when there's a major news event, we'll continue to see a downward slope in state of the union addresses in general. so i think two things at play. >> a trend in all tv. ratings are down. there are different ways to watch it. people follow it on twitter. >> my daughter watched it online for school. >> yeah, you watch it online. you can read something into the numbers, but it's a larger trend. but, richard, on the substance of the speech, putting the ratings aside for a second, from a foreign policy point of view, where you said -- what did you take out of that speech? because domestically, maybe some immigration people were talking about, what did you take away from it? >> domestically, not that much either. there was no theme in the speech. it could have been something, like, how do you get economic growth, and then connected the speech. he chose not to. you had the laundry list approach to a state of the union, which is in some way feeds into the lack of interest. on foreign policy, what you saw was a moving away from foreign policy. which was the big idea of mr. obama's first term, the so-called pivot, got one sentence.

syria, one or two throw-away lines. essentially an argument for more diplomacy, less deployments, a la iraq and afghanistan, so it feeds into the narrative, when a greater turning away from the world. >> so, joe, we now have someone who's such a great grasp of history, but the tuneout factor is bad, too. john mecham. joe, take it away. >> we tuned him out a long time ago. >> yeah, apparently talking. >> presidents seem to historically have this problem in the second term. it seems to be especially bad with barack obama, because there's a question of what he can accomplish over the next two years. we showed the numbers, historically low numbers, as far as the state of the union address goes. what's happening historically with this president, and can you find any parallels where somebody turned it around six years in? >> well, i think where the

turnaround will happen is in places where we aren't watching. there have been a series of examples where particularly late second term, presidents have felt liberated. we make fun of the executive orders, and that is, in fact, something that, you know, you never really heard lincoln and fdr say i'm going to rebuild america on an executive order. you know, it's not something that resonates off the tongue. but he can do significant thi s things, particularly in richard's baliwick, and foreign policy, when he applies himself to it. is there a great marshalling of political and popular will for a particular set of programs? no. i would argue that's more cultural than the president's fault, for the reasons of the fragmented -- just look at the fragmented audience of how people watched or if they

watched the state of the union, and you see the challenges that face obama more -- you know, more uniquely than they did with reagan in terms of commanding an american audience. >> okay. real quick, donny. >> there's nothing happening, also, and because of the media, the new presidential election cycle starts 24 to 36 months in advance. >> right. >> we're kind of on to the next -- >> yeah, it's so yesterday what's happening right now. okay, so we're going to move on to a couple of really big stories around the country. parts of the southern united states this morning are finally starting to thaw out. but others are in deep paralysis at this hour. in austin, texas, slick conditions caused 300 accidents. a dashcam recorder caught this truck. the interstate outside of birmingham saw gridlock in both directions. 11,000 students statewide woke up wednesday morning at their school, because they could not get home. but no city had it worse than

atlanta. look at this. a little more than two inches of snow, two inches of snow proved disastrous. still under a civilian emergency, most government offices are closed. it is a city defined by its commuters, and tuesday's trip homestretched unendingly into wednesday. by yesterday afternoon, even the national guard was called in to bring meals to stranded drivers who spent 14 hours on the roads, while some stretches of highway were totally abandoned, others drew comparison to the hit zombie show "the walking dead" filmed in that city. a handful of children were forced to sleep on their school buses, while 2,000 other has to sleep at their schools. the conditions were simply too icy to get home. other children could not wait. >> ah. >> meet grace elizabeth anderson, born on the way to the hospital parked in traffic.

and thank god she and her mother are okay, and she's beautiful. but what a horrifically frightening situation. for many, everything boiled over into anger as the region's leaders pointed to faulty forecasts. when one person on twitter said new yorkers were laughing at the situation in atlanta, mayor reed responded, considering new york city's most recent snow response, they may want to save their laughter. during a press conference yesterday, the mayor defended his city's response. >> from the outside looking in, it may look like atlanta simply was not prepared. what do you say to that? >> what i would say is the eyes of the nation are on the state. so i'm not going to get into that blame game. the crisis that we're going through is across the region. there's no one who's doing any better job than we're doing in the city of atlanta. >> what could we do to have avoided that?

we can't control mother nature, just as we could not make better predictions, neither could school superintendents. that's why the schoolchildren are -- were in the situation they were in, because they were probably looking at the same modelling that some of our state folks were looking at. >> no, they weren't looking at, like, a lot of meteorologists. >> yeah. >> i don't know what modelling -- >> simply not true. there's a lot of pushback from meteorologists. jim cantore was fighting back against this on twitter. and al roker yesterday on the "today" show talked about his projections for the storm. >> the mayor and the governor got on tv yesterday and said, oh, this wasn't expected, and that's not true. i mean, we were talking about this monday that this was going to happen. they took a gamble. they didn't want to pretreat the roads. i don't think they wanted to spend the money and do what they needed to. and then they told everybody -- everybody started going home right around noon. by 1:30, i-285, i-75, i-85 was a

parking lot. and this was poor planning on the mayor's part and the governor's part. >> fair? >> let me explain something. you can go after president clinton -- i mean, president clinton -- president obama, putin. do not mess with al roker. >> don't cross al roker. >> well, he was predicting this monday. everyone was. bill. >> everyone that lives in atlanta, bill knows this, traffic is bad enough on the roads. this happens so infrequently where they get this kind of storm and ice, they don't have the resources that new york -- they don't have 1,000 trucks they can send out on the street. i'm not defending them. they shouldn't have sent the kids to school to begin with. that's one then. and they could have pretreated some of the roads. but they're, frankly, incapable of handling something like this. >> joe, didn't you live in atlanta? >> i did. we go back there regularly. you know, i was born and lived there for a while. and i remember even as a young kid, you know, you get the frequent ice storms that would shut the entire place down.

but it was a very long time ago. i mean, the traffic situation in atlantas willie said, and willie lived there, as well, i go back and visit all the time, the traffic situation is deplorable. it is a city that -- i mean, people commute all the way up -- up to buford. i mean, they live on i-75 and 85 and 285, and again, in the best of circumstances, it is a horrible, horrible commute. you add -- and we laugh at a couple of inches of snow. if you're not used to driving in it, and if they haven't treated -- you know, i drive around in new england after a couple of inches of snow, and i see people sliding all over the place. here, you add to that the fact it's a region not used to it, and the fact this is one of the toughest cities to commute in in america, and i understand completely why all of those -- you know, why they had the traffic jams had.

no doubt, poor planning. no doubt, it was poor planning on everybody's part. >> the picture of the baby being born is all very cute, but i wonder when all is said and done if everyone is okay, because emergency vehicles can't get through that traffic. that is a long time to have a lot of people stranded in the ice. >> i have a good friend i texted down there to say, what's it like down there. they said it's like a third world country. people are walking the highways, and as you said, mika, sleeping in the cvs, in home depot. >> yeah, that's not america. let's move on to new jersey. speaking of traffic problems leading to big stories. a new article in today's "the new york times" explores the attention to detail with which governor chris christie tended to politics in his office. the report begs the question, how he be left out of the loop when it came to the george washington bridge closings. the piece lays out how governor chris christie targeted key towns in new jersey to ensure

his re-election. the so-called top 100 list included swing towns. sometimes called mini-florida, and mini-ohios. staffers, bill steppian, and later bridget kelly, headed up the intergovernmental affairs operation. both have since been fired or pushed out because of their connection to the george washington bridge scandal. the piece paints a portrait of a close working environment, sometimes around the governor's kitchen table and at metlife stadium, in a box. it describes the governor consumed with detail, who required that even minor changes to legislation go through thinks lawyers or chief of staff. meanwhile, the latest "washington post"/abc news poll show a majority believes the scandal is a bigger indication of his problem with leadership. some believe he is the party's best chance to beat hillary clinton, but a head-to-had

match-up shows hillary clinton leading by 12 points. joe, back to the first part of the story, and the top 100 list and that kind of planning in a governor's office. is that unusual in the world of politics? >> no, it's not unusual. >> mini-floridas, mini-ohios. >> no, "the new york times" paints a portrait of a guy intimately engaged in running the details of his operation. you'll remember at his press conference he said right after this came out that he wasn't obsessed with details, and that he did trust others. however, this story certainly paints a picture of a man who's extraordinarily close, especially to the guy who ran his campaign. listen, we don't -- we can have 1,000 stories written between now and when the documents are produced, and the bottom line is either he writes about it in a text or an e-mail, and this story suggests that as prosecutor he knew not to send things by e-mail, that either he

had, you know, working knowledge of it and there's going to be proof of it, or he didn't. >> yeah. >> and none of us know that. and who knows? i think there's a danger that maybe he didn't know about it, as somebody told him about it later, he made an offhanded remark in a text somewhere that's going to come back and end up haunting him, or maybe not. regardless, it's still early. we've got a long way to go before 2016. but this story certainly paints a picture of a guy who was far from disengaged in the everyday workings of his administration. >> coming up on "morning joe," why politico says the 1% is having a collective meltdown over the new focus on income inequality. but is the national mood really turning against the superrich? mike allen explains in the "morning playbook." first, here's bill karins with a check on the forecast. bill? >> mika, you guys were talking about the atlanta hot mess down

there over the last 24 hours. pictures are starting to improve slowly. some of the roads are getting cleared out. look at the cars still abandoned on the side of the roads. just unbelievable scene. a lot of secondary roads still have snow and ice on them, and hopefully a lot of the people are now out of the vehicles. it's going to be interesting to see how long it takes people to get back to their cars and safely get home. who's to blame for this mess? there's been a lot of back-and-forth between the governor and the mayor and the meteorologists in the area. here's how i saw the timeline. as we went through monday night, the airlines started cancelling flights out of atlanta-hartsfield airport, about 18 hours before the storm. that's a heads-up that the storm is coming. the national weather service about six hours before the first flakes fell issued an emergency travel declaration saying people should be off the roads, and the snow started at about noon tuesday. but the schools didn't dismiss until about 30 minutes after the snowflakes started. so there's definitely some blame to go around, and having school in session was one of the biggest issue the parents and people down there have. we are melting it a little bit.

not yet. 16 now in atlanta. this afternoon, we're up to 38. we should hit 60 over the upcoming weekend. so the storm will be a distant memory now that it has to figure out how to improve the forecasting and preparations for next time. and, also, big smiles out west. finally some rain for our friends this morning. san francisco to sacramento. we just need, like, a month of it. let's take a shot of times square where we're getting ready for the super bowl. forecast looks even warmer. maybe 40 at kickoff. you're watching "morning joe." for over a decade

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all right. welcome back. let's look at the morning papers. from our parade of papers, "the san francisco chronicle" one of the worst droughts in california's history. it's left some communities on the verge of running out of water. have you noticed a pattern here? droughts and ice storms and severe temperatures. wells and reservoirs are practically empty in 17 towns in northern california. state officials are considering trucking in water or digging new wells. governor jerry brown declared a drought emergency earlier this month. joe? and from the "washington post," royal caribbean's ill-fated cruise returned to port yesterday with nearly 700 sick passengers on board. ah, it's miserable. the ship docked in new jersey after its suspected noro virus outbreak cut the voyage short. passengers will be compensated for part of the fair and were offered hotel rooms if they were

unable to travel home. >> joe, can i ask you a question, because i'm not much in marketing -- why would anyone go on a cruise anymore? i don't want to destroy the cruise industry, but note to self. >> a big tub with a lot of people eating a lot of food that gets mixed around a lot. and in small room -- i don't get it. >> note to self. [ laughter ] >> it sounds perfect to me. >> seriously, no, i'm curious. >> stunning. >> who did we talk to in florida once, joe, who loves cruises? >> no, people love a cruise. >> no, i know. really nice people. >> no, a lot of people love a cruise. >> it's a great country. >> michael steele. loves cruises. >> t.j. >> t.j. >> that's not really an example of, like, michael steele is, like, a cool, nice guy. >> oh, that hurts. >> i like michael steele, but i have to rethink my michael

steele love now. >> i like being on one, but i like knowing i have the right to do it. >> that's right. still america. >> still america. >> cruises are great. >> all right. >> "the new york times." >> that's me. >> "the new york times" a new study -- >> well, do it. go. >> okay, look, did we just take some self-if is here on the set of "morning joe"? a new study says the risk for obesity can begin as early as the age of 5. emery university researchers say kids who are overweight in kindergarten are four times more likely to be obese by eighth grade. in addition, nearly every child in the study who was obese by age 11 remained that way. 18% of elementary schoolchildren in the u.s. are obese. this is a serious injury on every issue, national security issue, health issue. it is everything -- everything to us to try and solve. joe? >> okay. and a story that everybody on

council of foreign relations are following today, "usa today" says actress scarlet johansson is going to end her eight-year relationship with oxfam amid controversy. it stems from her new advertising deal with soda stream. the israeli company operates a factory in the west bank. oxfam opposes trade from israeli settlements, and the group publicly criticized the relationship. johansson says she stands by the company and that she will star in the soda stream super bowl ad this weekend. >> that's exactly when i make soda stream at home, that's how i do it. >> first of all, soda stream is a great product. second of all, this is a serious issue. this is the anti-legitimacy issue with israel, and the fact that oxfam is going after her this. is a serious issue. what she's doing is right, good for her. >> all right. >> good for her. >> i knew middle east place would come down to scar jo. >> whatever it takes. the chief white house

correspondent is mike allen. he's got a look at the playbook. mike, good morning. >> good morning, willie. >> okay. so you've got a new piece up on politico that has donny deutsch freaking out. it says the 1% are having a meltdown over the democrats' push to end income inequality. the title of the piece, "why the rich are freaking out." tell us about it. >> willie, it's a tough time to be a plutocrat. the author says the 1%, both the wealthy, and the advisors, say they're worries about the trifecta of president obama pushing against income inequality, mayor de blasio there in new york, who's trying to reduce inequality there, wants to raise taxes on the wealthy, and the pope, pope francis, who's talked about the need to also for more equality. so you have these three huge voices,rguably, the three

hugest voices in the world, all on the same theme. rich people, the advisors, say they're worried that what we could see is the occupy movem t movement, which sort of faded, coming back both in policies and in mood. so a national, even global mood turning against the 1%. >> politico's mike allen. thanks, mike. still ahead, we'll talk to atlanta's mayor from this week' paralyzing ice storm. could he and the city been better prepared? and the price of staying plugged in. staying connected 24/7 is impacting the lives at home and on the john. nbc's tom costello has more on that ahead on "morning joe." [ male announcer ] at northrop grumman, we've always been at the forefront of advanced electronics. providing technology to get more detail... ♪ detect hidden threats... ♪

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♪ how much money you make? >> i told you. 70,000. well, technically 72,000 last month. >> you make 72 grand in one month? >> yeah. >> i tell you what, you show me a pay stub for $72,000 on it, i quit my job right now and i work for you.

hey, pauley, what's up? no, yeah, everything's fine. hey, listen, i quit. >> the oscar nominated film "the wolf on wall street" portrays the life of corporate high-rollers, but our next guest is a man who renounced that lifestyle. former executive director of grocery ships, cool t-shirt he's wearing, sam polk, even cooler the nonprofit itself, which we'll talk about. recently he wrote an incredible piece in "the new york times" about his former life on wall street and the pressures to stay in it. and he writes in part, this, in my last year on wall street, my bonus was $3.6 million, and i was angry, because it wasn't big enough. i was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. i wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink. i was addicted.

the piece is incredibly revealing, incredibly vulnerable, and representative of anybody who's had any type of addiction -- >> yeah. >> -- and i'd like to know, you have to go to it to get the full picture of what you went through and to really sympathize with it, which for a lot of people watching will be very difficult. >> yeah. >> but the addictive part of it and sort of the emptiness that you felt, do you feel you were the only one there living like that? >> you know, that's their call, but i will say that, you know, i had experience with drug and alcohol addiction, but actually by the time i got to wall street, like three weeks in, i had -- i had gotten sober. so i just came to see that my own experiences told me that what i was doing with money was just like what i was doing with drugs and alcohol. >> yeah. and that's -- and then the environment certainly fed it. >> look, it's an environment of, you know, total sort of power for, like, a 25-year-old. i was -- i'd fly in from a business trip and i'd land and there would be a black car

waiting for me. i could go to the world series whenever i wanted to. there was also people around me making millions -- hundreds of millions, so the idea that, you know, about what i thought being rich was when i started changed dramatically. >> what's the epiphany? you're making 3.5 million bucks, and what happens -- the average person is going, yeah, yeah, yeah? so what was the moment? >> there was a moment when i was in a meeting with my bosses, and they said -- they were talking about hedge fund regulations that were being proposed, and everybody was in disagreement with them. and i said, you know, aren't these good for the system as a whole? and one of my bosses said, you know, i can only think about what's good for our business. and i'll tell you what, it wasn't that i judged him. it was that i saw myself in him, and i sort of realized that for so long i had been focused completely on myself and sort of mitigating my own fear. and i also want to say that this wasn't just a moment of epiphany. like, when i started -- when i got sober, i found this teacher that started teaching me, for

eight years, sort of new ideas about honesty and integrity and, you know, facing some of the stuff from my childhood and processing that stuff. so it wasn't like, you know, this moment of epiphany. it was that all this time i had been having this spiritual journey that enabled me to see the world differently. >> one of the challenges of wall street, most of my good friends are hedge fund guys, and what happens is because you are not really creating anything, the only piece of self-worth is keeping score with money. >> absolutely. >> making 30, 40, 60, 80, 100 million a year, and it's keeping self-worth, and they've lost perspective, well, don't you think, to your point, these regulations are good, or should you pay more -- nah. it's just that you lose touch with reality. >> and morality. >> well, that's what i wanted to say, which was that when i was on wall street, i believed that the most important thing in the world was whether i got 1 million or 2 million that year.

and the whole process that i went through was sort of coming to realize that my problems, which were based on fear and, you know, fear of a future moment where i wouldn't have enough -- >> obsession. >> -- were not as important -- were not even as real as the problems of the folks dealing with in groceryships, who literally have no money in the bank and a kid that needs surgery, and they don't know how to pay for it. and to me, when i was on wall street, those things were equal. and so, i feel like in some sense what i gained was just perspective. >> so, sam, you know, in reading your story, you come up middle class, your dad a salesman, you have the american dream, you want to strike it out and make it rich, and do you that. so you're the embodiment of the american dream. >> in some sense -- >> you're dealing with addiction, but you dump that into wealth addiction, and some people term it greedy s.o.b. syndrome, and how do you say in america where capitalism is king, that what you were doing

is wrong when so many people are getting rich of of what you did. >> look, my childhood is ill luce tra tiv of a few things, which is i actually had a rough childhood. my parents were not the worst in the world by any means, but they both had really big tempers. i believe, like, walking through my house, was walk through a land mine, like a field of land mines. so i grew up with this feeling of sort of fear and insecurity. i also want to point out that, like, we were sort of lower middle class. but one of the things i came -- for a long time i viewed it as this sort of great success story, right? i worked hard. but there was a lot of privileges i had that i hadn't taken into consideration. like both my parents were college educated. we lived in a house in the suburbs, like we might have struggled day to day. >> born straight white male, so you have those things going for you. >> that's what i'm saying. >> yeah. >> and the key thing about the childhood for me is that i've come to believe that the reason that i was addicted to alcohol and drugs and the same reason

that i was using money in that same way was that i had a hole in my soul. and whether that came from just my childhood or it came from the culture i was in, or if i was born with that, i don't know. all i know is that something was broken in me, and i was using different things to try to fix that. >> well, it's probably everyone's story to an extent, and then you get into the environment down there, groceryships.com. >> groceryships.com. >> everybody should check it out. the basic theme of it, so -- >> a program for low-income folks struggling with obesity, and it's a comprehensive program that provides money to buy fruits, vegetables, whole grains, but comprehensive program of emotional support. and one of the things i know as a former heavy kid who comes from a family of obesity is that obesity is not just about education or anything like that. it's about feelings and numbing your emotions with food and, you know, keeping yourself away from the world. >> i've got a book for you, and i love that concept.

so from greedy s.o.b. syndrome to really great guy with a great idea, helping people. thank you very much. wonderful story. nice to meet you, sam polk. up next, atlanta mayor, kasim reed. we'll get the reaction to the criticism that his city was unprepared for the ice storm. that's next. (vo) you are a business pro.

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♪ it is a solid sheet of ice out here. driving is impossible. >> drivers found shelter, taking cover overnight in the nearest grocery store. or at a home depot where exhausted travelers sought shelter in the aisles.

>> we're seeing backups as long as a mile and a half, sometimes two. >> some people stuck in this traffic, 15, 16, 17 hours, they are going to give the d.o.t. a grade of "f" for their handling of the situation. >> she told me she walked at least five miles to get off the road. >> 90 students and some 20 staffers spent the night at e rivers elementary school. rick nelson walked six miles in the snow to be with his 5-year-old daughter elizabeth. >> that was the scene during the worst of atlanta's icy weather, and joining us from atlanta, the city's mayor kasim reed. mr. mayor, thank you for being on the show. >> good morning, yes. >> a similar storm shut down your city for the better part of the week in 2011, and after that, you wrote in part, this -- the snow and ice storm of 2011 was a lesson in humility for me, and elected leaders across the metropolitan region. for three days, mother nature showed that even with today's advancements, she can still bring a major american city to a standstill.

in atlanta, we have the world's busiest airport and more than a dozen fortune 500 companies. metro atlanta cannot afford to shut down for days in the midst of a major snowstorm. the storm taught local governments across the region the importance of collaboration and communication, and we will work together to get moving as fast as we are able. so, mayor, i've been watching the coverage, the interviews you've been doing over the past 24 hours. >> yes. >> i first want to know what happened this time. we're talking about two inches of snow that was predicted on monday. >> yeah, the fact of the matter is, it started snowing on tuesday at 12:15. on yesterday by 2:00 p.m., about 26 to 30 hours later, within the city limb limits, our roads was 80% passable and the city was operational and functioning. almost every photo you showed on this program and others are of the highways around the region. and folks on your show know that the highways are not the

responsibility of the city. so we got the city moving much faster. if you had footage of the actual city of atlanta, you would see that people are moving around in a convenient fashion right now and that our roads are passable. >> yeah but -- >> the 2011 event was four days. we certainly learned lessons from that. and we got the city functioning within 24 to 30 hours. the photos you're showing right now are not of the city of atlanta. >> okay -- >> they're of the highways and you all should point that out. >> good, i will point that out. i will point out the highways were a complete and total mess. as far as we know, a woman had to give birth on one of the highways. lord knows whatever else? we learned from the george washington bridge scandal we've covered so closely here that when a highway is impeded in any way, emergency vehicles can't get where they're going to go, and aren't the people who work in your city the people on that highway, who should have never even come in, number one? what is your responsibility in

this? and, by the way, sir, the highway issue, who's to blame for that? name some names, we'll call them. >> i think that it's a fair criticism. what i said is that we made a mistake, and i said it immediately, that we made a mistake by not staggering the release of our citizens to go home. so i said on yesterday that we should -- we should have had a protocol where our elementary schools are released and parents were elementary schoolchildren, and then our private sector businesses follow by government. so i think there are shared responsibility for for that, and i certainly take my part of the blame for it. regarding our highways, the point that i was pointing out was when you say the city of atlanta, i think it's important that you be accurate. we had a challenge on our highways, because we got a million people out, and then we had a very bad snow event. but you started by talking about 2011, which was a four-day snow event, and we have the city of atlanta functioning within 24 to

30 hours. we had zero fatalities. we had about 14 significant traffic incidents. and that wasn't represented in the coverage. so i will certainly take my part of the blame for that, but the images that you are showing are of the highways, and i care about those folks, and we worked very hard to try to get so many of those out. but there is no one stranded in the city of atlanta. >> sir, you don't have any conversations with the department of transportation that -- >> absolutely. >> so where is your leadership with saying, i-85 goes right through directly the heart of atlanta, or georgia 400, or i-20, all through the heart of atlanta -- >> you know what -- >> and you're talking with the commissioner and saying, well, sir i can't get my citizens safely home, what are you doing? and if in 2011 huh this major write-up about the lessons learned in humility. that's just a little over two years ago. where was the proetocol from 201

learned in this? >> the protocol was by 9:00 a.m. we had the deicing machines on the street. we coordinated with the governor's office. we coordinated with the national guard. and we got all of this apparatus up and functioning in a 12 -- in a six to 12-hour period rather than the amount of time it took before. >> so, mayor, let's look forward. >> so, you know, we're not engaging in a blame game here, but i do think that when you show the kind of images that have been shown in the city of atlanta, it ought to be accurate. >> mayor, let -- [ overlapping speakers ] >> mayor, let's look forward. let's say we get another freak storm like this two weeks from now, how is it going to be different? if you're saying you're not responsible for the interstates and you can't tell the schools to close, because that's not your responsibility, how can you correct that in two weeks? >> we will correct it by putting in place the protocol that i just discussed. >> but you had that protocol in place before this storm, didn't you? >> no, no, that's not the case.

the fact of the matter is we have an independent school system in the city. we have the independent state government, and independent municipal government. i think we need to work much harder on coordination, and we certainly will -- and i acknowledge that. so in the future, what we're going to do is we're going to develop a protocol to get our children and parents out of the city faster, to get the private sector businesses out of the city, and then government, hopefully, at the state level, but certainly at the city level would go last. and that would work to prevent the kind of traffic jam that was caused by this severe weather event. >> okay, thank you, mayor. good luck with the next storm. i hope that the two storms have helped a little bit. and if you'd like to send us some names people who are actually responsible for the highways, since you're not, i'd love to talk to them. >> i feel terrible about anyone

who was trapped on the highway, and we did everything we could in a partnering fashion to clear our highways and to keep folks safe. >> so who screwed up, mayor? >> i think that we all have responsibility in terms -- >> so are you responsible or not? >> the question is -- i shared what i was responsible for. >> yeah. >> i think we should have made a different judgment about how we released our citizens, and we got 1 million citizens out of the city. but what i do want to clarify is that the images that you showed -- >> oh, my lord. >> -- as you talked about atlanta were often photos that were not in the city, and that the streets -- >> your government was still in session. you didn't cancel your government. >> it's just not helping you, but thank you for coming on the show. >> thank you. >> we'll be back with more "morning joe."

parents, do you think anyone learned anything today? >> i learned i'm more upset about the atlanta story than i was 10 minutes ago. >> i've never seen you -- >> i wasn't even -- >> i've never seen bill karins angry. you sit in this chair and you get fired up. >> we'll be right back. [ male announcer ] the new new york is open.

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car and hotel together and save up to 20% when you build your custom trip. expedia, find yours. time now to talk about what we learned today. you know what i learned? >> what? >> that 18 years ago today i had the most perfect little baby girl. >> aww. >> and she was a wonderful -- this is her honeysuckle report. look what skill she had at 8 years old. >> like her mommy. >> she's giving a demonstration of how delicious honeysuckle -- >> an adult child -- >> oh. she's perfect. and amelia's 18 today. >> happy birthday. >> an incredibly wonderful journey. i'm so proud of you. >> she still your little baby? >> always be your baby. >> she's always my baby. >> i'm thinking we're only six years away from you being a

grandma. how great is that? >> whoa. >> 18. she just started driving and now her 18th birthday. >> get through college. get through college. >> i mean, seriously. >> get her through college. >> what did i learn today? >> did you learn anything? >> there's a new breed of angry weathermen. al roker, bill karins, they're -- >> yeah, i'm a little mad, too. happy birthday, amelia. i love you. >> happy birthday. >> go to chuck. that's one way to toss it to me. just go here. don't stand so close to me. as house gop leaders head out of town to talk strategy and key issues like immigration, some of them want to make it very clear that they don't agree with the president as much as he claims that they do. so what does matter more? what they're doing or what house republicans are saying? as for the president, he takes his