we of course have michael steele and jim messina.tein, they're trying to buy power plants with the crown prince said in an interview on "60 minutes" if iran gets nuclear weapons, the saudis will also get nuclear weapons. for him to buy nuclear reactors and potentially not affirming they won't enrich uranium that can be used for nuclear weapons is pretty significant but we're still trying to sell them power plants. that's why rick perry is sitting there. he went to london and had a meeting with the saudis last week. >> a difficult, odd standing here. the nuclear deal could potentially be blown up in may. that's what the senate leader said his expectations were. at the same time, we are potentially selling nuclear power plant material to the saudis. we don't know whether we'll get the firm commitment to stop enrichment. we have the lingering possibility of direct talks with kim in north korea over their own nuclear weapons program. i don't see how you can juggle all these three simultaneously, especially if you're going to get out of t

joining me now is jim messina former deputy chief of staff under president obama and now the ceo of the consulting firm the messina group. and good to see you. sarah huckabee-sanders said the media wants to talk about but we cover the white house and politics and when there is the kind of turnover that we've seen since january of 2017 in the white house, at some point it is a story that is much more important than the drama in the white house. this is about whether or not the operations of the u.s. government as it relates toten tire world are getting done because of that drama in the white house. >> that is exactly right. you see history turnover. we're talking about a third chief of staff in 13 months and the third national security adviser and we have cabinet people going every single day and the problem with all of that is people are getting fired for doing one thing and one thing only and that is disagreeing with donald trump. when he fired his secretary of state this week, he said they disagreed. when i was barack obama deputy chief of staff he said i don't hire you to agree with

. >> jim messina, deputy chief of staff to president obama. do you ever watch the news or read a paper and think to yourself, we would have been crucified for this? >> like meeting with the north korean president? >> with any of the -- with a lot of the stories released to this administration and this president. do you feel like perhaps you guys were held to a different standard? >> oh, completely. there was this great guy who was my doctor in the white house who was the nicest guy. wouldn't hurt anyone's feelings. always a great guy. just kind of hanging around. donald trump just made him the v.a. secretary. he has no experience running anything. i loved him. he was my personal doctor. he's the worst choice you could possibly imagine for the second biggest agency. it's like having your uber driver park the space shuttle. this guy has no idea what he's doing. and because he's nice, and spends a lot of time with the president, he gets his own cabinet seat. >> this is a president who is not necessarily demonstrated his -- oh, what shall i say, i

ever -- there war so much excitement, they had to move the event to a bigger -- >> to be blunt, jim messina, who was kind of running candidate obama's campaign at that time, calls up and, i think it was 12 days before his acceptance speech, and said you know, we were going to do it in the pepsi center, and we like it, but it would be possible to move it half a mile south to mile high stadium. >> how much trouble could that be? >> 12 days. you have no idea how much the number of fiber optics and cable that you would have to -- it would have stretched from coast to coast. that's how much we had to move and put in place, but we did it. it was quite -- having been there, i think everyone who was in that stadium that night will remember it for the rest of their lives because it was an electric moment where the country really came together in hope and change. >> and governor, now you have been traveling the country, and what would you say is the biggest mistake we make with k-12 education? >> you know, and i think the mistake we have made right now is we have tried to create a one size fits all s

joining me, jim messina, former white house deputy chief of staff under president obama and bill kristol, editor at large from "the weekly standard." if you had seen your president in the cabinet room in a free-wheeling one hour on-camera negotiation with bipartisan leaders and i didn't see mitch mcconnell or paul ryan there. interesting that the leaders themselves were not there, unleeshu unlea unleashed. >> it's unbelievable. at various points he sounded like a democrat, like someone who had never been to the hill before, he didn't know what bills had passed. my favorite moment is when he said we need to stop mentally ill people from getting guns. in february of last year he signed a deal that did exactly the opposite, that said the nics background checks couldn't have mental health records. he was like why don't we have this, we don't have it because you got rid of it. it was an amazing performance. now if you are the hill, you have no idea what he stands for after that meeting. it's like bear hugging the marshmallow man. you can't figure out how to do it. i have no sort of, i worked