host: veronica, a democrat from slidell, louisiana. caller: i have a question. i would really like to know where all these republicans and tea party and people when the republicans ran up the deficit? they are the ones -- they are the reason we are in this situation dick cheney argued that ragan improved deficits do matter and use that argument to help run up this deficit. host: let's take the last point that deficits do not matter. guest:, to talk about who ran them up of. you look at the six years in which the white house and congress were controlled by republicans, 2001-2007, they did a poor job. they averaged $300 billion per year in deficits, and part about was the fighting of two wars as a result of 9/11. let's look at what happened since pelosi became the house leader and harry reid became the senate majority leader in the next four years, we averaged $1.20 trillion deficits and then the democrats controlled the white house. they were four times worse than the republicans. yes, the republicans and not do their job, but what does that say about leadership

mike slidell is live for us in nags head, north carolina. what's the situation there? >> reporter: good morning, veronica. we've got the wind and rain as expected. overnight you could hear the wind howling through the hotel. water will find a way in no matter what happens it's dripping under the windows. our winds have been gusting upwards of 35 to 40 miles per hour. not horrible at this point, we're more than several hours away from the worst of the storm. there's bands, the stronger bands near what's left of the eye. this is a weak hurricane. it's a category one hurricane. it's a big storm. it's going to drop a lot of rain. the impacts don't change a whole lot from here up the coast especially inland with wind and rain there's going to be power outages. on the outer banks this whole beach was visible yesterday now with high tide coming up for the next hour, it's all under water. i can't really tell at this point how much erosion there's been, they just made this beach about 100 yards wide. that's going to help protect them. the next high tide will occur this evening