we're turning it over to jamal simmons. ic strategist, good friend of the program and here as a "friend of bill." jamal, how are you? >> i'm good. good morning. the wheels are a little loose on the rig this morning. >> oh, yeah, we're a little punchy. >> bill: it's tuesday. >> it's tuesday. gin day for mr. press. >> what's in these cups? >> you don't want to know. >> my sister says hello this morning. already tweeted me it is going to make her day that you're on this morning. >> man's gotta have his audience. >> bill: your fan club. >> bill: jamal you'll be pleased to know -- introduce them. they get really pissed. >> i know where my bread's buttered. >> bill: alichia cruz has the phones covered. cyprian bowlding has the video cam covered. you will be glad to know last night that he is back. our good friend bill de blasio has been be on the show many times, one of the leading candidates for mayor of new york. he had a fund-raiser last night and his guest of honor was howard dean and howard dean, it was a back to the future m

. >> my friend jamal simmons, it's his birth tomorrow. >> i've been watching his tweets. >> 42 days untilollege football, a proud wisconsin badger, i'm looking forward to it. >> that is it for this edition of "daily rundown." hopefully, the detroit tigers can come up with a world series championship. coming up next is chris jansing. bye-bye. and i know the results will be fantastic! find out why more than two million members count on angie's list. angie's list -- reviews you can trust. that's a good thing, but it doesn't cover everything. only about 80% of your part b medical expenses. the rest is up to you. so consider an aarp medicare supplement insurance plan, insured by unitedhealthcare insurance company. like all standardized medicare supplement plans, they pick up some of what medicare doesn't pay. and save you up to thousands of dollars in out-of-pocket costs. call today to request a free decision guide to help you better understand what medicare is all about. and which aarp medicare supplement plan works best for you. with these types of plans, you'll be able to visit any doctor o

for a special discussion on race and politics here in america, i've got democratic strategist jamal simmons from the bernard center for women, politics and public policy michelle bernard, and former head of the naacp quas m quasiemfauma. i want to start with you, just your initial reaction to the president doing that, doing what he did friday, and also to address this issue, is the president, is the president a black american who happens to be, you know, is he an african-american activist, enough of one, or just happen to be a president who happens to be black? >> i think he was black before he was president and i think after he's president, he'll still be black. i think he comes into the office of the black person of african be ancestry and he'll have to leave that way. i think what the president did, and i said this a few hours after he spoke, was the right thing. he came to the american public, spoke from the heart about a very vexing issue that is on the minds of everybody. he did it without prompting and without teleprompter. and he did it in a way that i think he tried to express on b

democratic strategist jamal simmons it nbc political producer on capitol hill, casey hunt, and republicanistin soultris anderson who spells her name with a "c" just like i do. casey, president obama heading to the hill today, what do we expect? and it comes just as he's rolled out this so-called new grand bargain. >> as you know, from covering the white house, the president has had an up and down relationship, even with democrats, on capitol hill. so this really sets the stage. it's to reassure people in his party when we come back in the fall, there's a plan, that he has a stage set for these big budget talks for pushing immigration reform and for implementing health care reform. there's a lot of concern especially on the house side about how rocky implementing that health care bill is going to be. and they have a lot of political concerns about hanging on to their seats going on to the next year. >> jamal, some democrats have complained in the past the president has not done a good enough job reaching out to them. in this case he's dropping individual tax reform. what does he need to sa

and this won't be the first time i'll tell this story, we had jamal simmons in and he said that everyn male has a story, where they were profiled or stopped or given grief because they were somewhere where it was perceived that they shouldn't be. >> yeah. i mean, just -- just the other day i was going a white house briefing about health care implementation, and one of the reporters who was there, was african american and the rest of us were white it was a group of maybe six people, and he was telling us this story about how he ordered an uber car, the service that taxis people around d.c., and he was dressed in a suit and going to the white house. and the driver literally sped by him. i mean he couldn't even get his uber cab. just things like that every day that african-americans have to deal with. and what do african american parents tell their children? the most heart breaking comments i heard on that was on harris perry on sunday when she said that when she was pregnant with her daughter she said when she has ore sonogram she prayed it wasn't a boy because she knew the difficulty h

the thing that really made this story click for me was when we talked to jamal simmons and he said everyck man has had a time in their life that someone has come up to them and said are you sure you need to be here? do you need to find your way out of here, boy? or some way of saying we don't want you here. >> bill: or you don't belong here. people cross the street, they see a black man coming across the street, they'll cross the street rather than walk by him on the street. the president said he's experienced it. >> there are very few african-american money in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. that includes me. there are very few african-american men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. that happens to me, at least before i was a senator. there are very few african-americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. that happens

. >> bill: you know, jamal simmons in studio the other day made, i think an excellent point that this got to be -- the president is so right about this. his priority, absolutely right. but the president himself and the white house has to keep hammering this home every and every speech. jamal was make the point that with george w. bush, when he was in the white house whatever you think of him and i don't think much of him as you know, he launched the war on terror. and he knew that he was going to be judged by what he did on the war on terror after -- that's what he called it, he called it terror, after 9-11. and so everywhere he went, every speech he gave, he came -- he included that theme. it may not have been everything he talked about but he tied it in. every single time. and you know what? the american people bought it and they saw him as somebody they knew that that was george bush's priority. i'm not sure people understand. i think it is but people don't understand enough that that is president obama's priority so i hope that yesterday's speech is not the only one we'll hear on