>> production assistance for "inside washington" was provided by allbritton communications and "politico," reporting on the legislative, executive, and political arena. >> today weekend definitively say that the gaddafi regime has come to an end. >> this week on "inside washington," libya's gaddafi dead. >> you lose all of your standing for my perspective because you hired illegals. >> the republican debate, up close and personal. >> i don't think i have ever

hired an illegal in my life. >> the president hits the road to sell this jobs bill. >> 70% of the people think we're moving in the wrong direction. >> even the presidential bus is a target. >> he is traveling on the canadian bus touting american jobs. captioned by the national captioning institute --www.ncicap.org-- >> president reagan called him "the mad dog of the middle east ." he called himself "africa's king of kings." his reign ended with gaddafi covering in a storm drain begging for his life. republicans have criticized obama for being too slow.

yesterday he said this. >> we did exactly what we said we were going to do in that libya. it underscores the capacity of us to work together as an international community. >> evan, does it capture and death of muammar gaddafi bid to take up as an's policy? >> y -- vindicate the president's policy? >> yes. i was a doubter, but it worked. the country is not exactly stable, but it is free of could top the. >> charles? >> i give him credit for the success of stage one. the mistake the bush administration made was to declare "mission accomplished" when the dictator was toppled. we are good that. but it is only the first stage.

the hard part is the substitution up the regime to follow. that is going to be where the real test is. whether it turns out well or badly, as we saw in afghanistan and iraq, is extremely hard to tell at that time in the region has just been toppled. . >> nina? >> i give the president a lot of credit. i, too, was something of a doubter. he stock by the policy went it was taking a lot of shots. charles is right, now we wait for chapter 2, where we have very little to do iwith of the riding. we can offer paper and pen, but chapter 2 is in large measure oughup to the libyans. because we don't have an enormous amount of control, we don't know what is going to happen. >> mark? >> hard to go when there is a celebratory sendoff when you go

off this mortal coil and the cars are hunting i -- honking in the morning. charles stands virtually all done with john mccain of the other side of the political divide willing to give him credit for what was done. all the republican presidential candidates were silent on that subject or critical. this gives libya a chance for democracy. it gives libya a chance to get out of the wreckage that it has been created in the 42 years you spoken. >> now very popular in libya -- how long is that going to last? >> an hour and half. ther there was an australian prime minister with the russians

helped, and he said "will astonish russia with our and gratitude." theill thdepend on whether islamists, and there are some in the interim government, seized power or not. that is entirely up in the air. we are not sure who the players are and how strong the relative actors are in this play. >> i heard a man whose brother died in explosion over lockerbie, scotland, saying that the way the obama administration dealt with in this should be a blueprint for the future. anybody want to take issue with that? >> the big thing that was the breakthrough was thae drone. but it is a double-edged sword. other people can build the drones, too. they may come back flying our way.

>> that is almost an inevitability, because they are making them smaller and smaller. >> it does constitute somebody who is skeptical about the president's involvement without the constitutional or legal safeguards that we expected to go to war. collective action in place of unilateral action -- that stands in dramatic contrast to what has gone before. the president was careful yesterday when he made his statement. he said this was without the involvement of a single u.s. service member -- >> on the ground. >> nobody doubts that there were in fact cia people who were helping an instrumental in the toppling. >> osama bin laden, yamar al- awlaki, now muammar gaddafi -- does the president score political points? >> jimmy carter managed to negotiate a peace deal in the middle east and that igot the tt

blip in an election year. >> democrats were seen as weak and soft on national security for a long time. you don't hear that so much now. obama has been tough in this narrow, focused way. >> the secretary of state is over there, morning pakistan to get its act together. what were your feelings on that, charles? >> it is our 182nd warning, and i am sure it will be received like a first 181, with contempt and neglect at best. the pakistanis have their own interests. they understand america is here but will be gone in two years. as a result, they will remain in the region for the next hundred or 200. they do not take our interests into account as they would otherwise. that is a fact of life. i am not sure anything is going

to change in our relationship. as long as the haqqani bad guys are in some elements -- they were about pakistan becoming an appendage of india -- the policy will remain the same. >> he does get credit. what is fascinating is the pole or he gets low marks on handling of the economy and mediocre marks on the job rating. by 2-to-one margin on terrorism, he gets terrible ratings. -- favorable ratings. on pakistan, you had the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, general petraeus, and the heads of the cia and the secretary of state -- if they cannot deliver the message, i don't know what is going to be done. >> india and pakistan can go to

war at any time. no administration seems to be able to figure out what to do about this. >> the latest republican debate. >> we went to the company and said, "you cannot have illegals working for the company. i am running for office, for heaven's sake." we fired them. >> i think that is an uh-oh moment. mitt romney responding to rick perry's claim that romney had knowingly hired the wrong people. "i am running for office but was the democratic committee is already running with this. >> this is a crack in his amazingly smith was saw in these debates. -- smooth facade in those debates. there was nothing charming or attractive about rick perry's

approach, by crude tactics he not under his skin in have to do some damage. >> if perry were smart, he would have come back and said, "oh, you were running for office?" he is not smart about these things in any way. watching it, it damage mitt romney but it also damaged all franchise -- it damage to the whole franchise. there is nobody you want to have at your house. >> the bickersons, let's be honest about it. could he win, top four republicans. whatever -- good viewing, tough for republicans. whenever you say about rick perry, he was not decaffeinated. he did penetrate the unflappable exterior of mitt romney, and they started to look like the housewives -- [laughter] >> charles says that he is still

texas and that is not enough on a national scale. >> whenever you ask him what should be an easy question, health care or the rise of china, he retreats to his energy plan. it is not as if he is being asked gotcha questions. it looks as though he knows energy, it knows about education, immigration, although he boote a lotd of the questions about immigration. you wonder if he has sat down and thought about national issues. on one hand, he is not nimble in debate. he had a great opening and he missed it. he had several others, in fact. you can be sure that with the absence of that nimbleness he will be eaten alive in a one-on- one with obama. but the grouting in issues, you worry about that. he could come up to speak, and he is extremely good at retail politics. he could redeem himself that

way. every time you watch him in a debate, you wonder if he is going to make it. >> "national journal" -- the median home price topped since 2006, homeowners lost $7.40 trillion in equity. what did the candidates say about that? >> let's remember, it was a bubble and it burst. it is not as a the value -- the price of a house in 2006 was its real value in gold. it was a bubble and a collapse. >> 5 million americans lost their homes, 3 million more will lose in the next -- >> usually when you have at president in a week re-election situation, over 9% unemployment, which obama is, you have a strong field on the other side. you look at this field, and you compare it to 1980, when howard baker, bob dole, ronald reagan, and george h.w. bush were running. you go, where are the strong

republicans who should be taking the field? >> is this the best they can do? >> these debates are content- free, but so was the presidential debate in 2008, because no politician is going to get into the difficult stuff you have to do to fix the problem. devoid of content. it is merely a test of personalities. not insignificant, but it has nothing to do with content. >> on the question you raised, this is so important, what has happened to home prices. yes, charles is right, it is on paper, but we have not had raises in the median income in the country. the substitute for that had become credit. especially easy credit, getting second mortgages. people spending their equity and their homes to compensate for

the fact that they were not rising economically. that is gone, and that sense of security is gone. now you have to voters who are worried simply about their children's future, their own future, and their countries future going into 2012. >> which is what olympia snowe was talking about at the beginning of this broadcast. 46.2 americans living below the poverty line. >> for the past three years we had a democratic president who would fix -- who promised he would fix this. >> i am asking about republican candidates. >> look, the republicans have a lot of strong politicians. they have ryan, daniels in indiana. they decided, for whatever reason, some personal, some political, that the bank are not

going to run. this is a relative -- lee that they are not want to run. this is a relatively weak field. if republicans lose in this election, they are going to have a very strong field in 2016, where all of these guys are going to write but it is remarkable in a year when the president is so weak and the economy is so much hurting that the opposition field -- as in 1992, i think, with the democrats, were all the heavy weights stayed out and then clinton slipped in. >> the problem is comparable to 1992. in 1991, when people made the decision to run, george h.w. bush was unbeatable. barack obama was the consensus -- conventional wisdom was that he could not be beaten, so he better wait until 2016 did the people who get in -- the only ones who get elected on the ones who run.

>> the president on the road in north carolina and virginia. >> don't be bamboozled. don't fall for this notion that some of the jobs act is proposing to raise your taxes. it is just not true. >> let's put away the talking points and do something to address the jobs crisis. >> senator mcconnell and president obama on his three-day bus tour. this strategy to pass the bill in pieces is not working so far. thursday the senate blocked passage of a $35 billion bill for states and municipalities to deal with teachers, firefighters, cops, keep those on the job and hire some more. >> the republican approach to this seems to be that if you cannot do everything, it do nothing. this is not a panacea by any means, but he is addressing a problem that we have not faced in this country in the history of recorded statistical

information. we have people at -- the average unemployment is 40.5 weeks, twice as long as it has been in the past. we have half of the people now -- close to half the people -- being out for more than six months. this is devastating psychologically, professionally, and personally for somebody to be out of work that long. when you ask, "what you do," and you cannot say anything, that is devastating. the idea of playing political games is unacceptable. >> i sympathize with what mark has said, but the idea that these addition to chronic unemployment is hiring -- that the solution to chronic unemployment is hiring more state workers on a temporary basis is insane. the only way you get a cure for unemployment is to get the private economy running, and the republican ideas of reducing regulation, reducing the

corporate tax, trying to get the private economy stimulated, is the only plausible answer. you may say that it will take too long, but unless you start that, you are never going to have a recovery of the private sector. >> what about doing what roosevelt did during the depression and investing in infrastructure? >> what was unemployment in 3 9037? high as it was in the beginning. >> i was just reading about this period in the roosevelt administration. we have this idea that he did stuff and it all worked. it did not all work. but when he did not work, he tried something else. he was very much practice. "ok, this doesn't work? we will try something else." did have an economy of the kind charles is suggesting, a deregulated economy in the

2000 boston and it did not work. add to what we have now. -- in the 2000's ended did not work. it led to what we have now. obama is trying to do something and i suspect he would try to get -- >> he has the highest tax rate in the world, even obama says that is a liability. that is obvious, easy, and it is lying out there. he won't touch it. >> i love roosevelt, but what got us out of the depression was world war ii. what is going to get us out of this mess, i fear, is a crisis in europe that brings the entire global system crashing down and out of that rubble, finally governments will be forced to do something. > mr. coppolaapocalypse. >> after the apocalypse. >> i was clinging to hope that real reform would happen. but unless we have a crisis, i

don't think it will. >> instead of playing cops, firefighters, teachers to work, what we ought to have is another series of tax cuts for those who need it least. they worked so beautifully well that, my goodness, let's have a symphony of tax cuts -- >> you pretend you are worried about the long-term unemployed. hiring a teacher in alaska is not going to help the unemployed and die in pittsburgh -- unemployed guy in pittsburgh. >> i feel like i am bill murray in "groundhog day," because we come to the same thing. >> tax reform -- everybody agrees you take out the loopholes and lower the rates. it worked in 1986, republicans and democrats. nobody will do it, especially the president. he should at tent meeting on

this. the number one item in the polls that since a report -- the bowles-simpson report -- he had that a year ago in december and he did nothing. >> why didn't they just put their arms around bowles- simpson? >> they should have -- >> why didn't it they? >> don't make me the spokesperson for the white house. >> political consultants' never tell their clients to do anything heart. >> he is the president of the united states. >> "oh, boss, you cannot do that." >> in the end, is open " groundhog day," because he showed and he didn't. he almost did something with simpson-bowles and john boehner backed out. why didn't he embraced it? he had his consultants, his

constituency, say no. >> i am not an apologist for the white house, but you cannot do tax reform with one side. when you have somebody like grover norquist, who, with americans for tax reform, having every candidate sign a pledge that you will not increase revenues -- that is the position right now of the republicans. obama'sin any way, and lack of courage on this, but the position of the rebel against -- position of the republicans is that anything that increases revenues is unacceptable. we are collecting 15% of the gross domestic product in revenues and spending 25%. if you cut it all led back to 21%, you are not going to have an of. -- not going to have enough. he will have a deficit and debt in perpetuity. yes, the leadership has been lacking. >> you said republicans would

not sign on. tom coburn is an extremely conservative republican. he was on that committee. in the bowles recommendation, $1.10 trillion strip out of loopholes, meaning money in the treasury, but returned only $1 trillion in tax cuts, meaning he would leave a surplus in the treasury, a tax increase, of $100 billion. coburn signed on to that. any republican offered a deal like that would do it. the problem is, you need a president who appoints a commission, says he waits until its recommendations to do anything -- you need a president could will embrace it and present 8. he would have had the republicans agree to that. he never even attempted -- >> mitch mcconnell -- talk about a tactical nihilist. his idea is to do nothing.

>> charles has written history, all right? -- rewritten history come alive? before the congress, the kent gregg-judgd proposal. five republicans who co- sponsored the at in the senate were told of it by mitch mcconnell. we had to get 14 votes on simpson-bowles to even make it a serious recommendation. that was put in by republicans. this is not all-virtue, all- vice -- >> the vote simpson-bowles lacked was obama's. >> i have never seen an uglier bus than the canadian wine. he is traveling around on the canadian bus touting american jobs.

>> it was made in canada, with the secret service bought it from an american company in nashville, tennessee, which outfitted the interior. >> the problem is that it looks ominous. it is scary-looking. just a black. i don't know why they made it black. >> the complaint is that it is a canadian -- >> i understand, but come on. >> security service -- i am deeply sympathetic to this. think of how hard their job is now. in this atmosphere, this time we live in, to protect a black president of the united states, with all the hate that is out there, i am willing to give the secret service an awful lot of control, the way, to do whatever they wante. >> maybe he should not use a bus in that case. it looks like a vehicle were to transport a condemned man to the gallows.

>> i will ignore the previous remarks and return to evan's and point out that he is absolutely right. nothing has ever been popular in the united states. we like presidents on trains. >> secret service bought two. the republican nominee will ride in the other one. last word. see you next week.