>>> good morning. i'm chris jansing . the breaking news couldn't come at a better time for president obama . the unemployment rate for september falling to 7.8%, the first time the jobless rate has been below 8% since january of '09 when president obama took office. now the big question is, will this change the narrative of the presidential campaign that was against the president after the debate? this morning we're seeing both campaigns end candidates energized, although for very different reasons. president obama was first trying to shake off his lackluster debate performance. mitt romney trying to capitalize on his new momentum. and he's got a new response to that video where he talked about the 47% going beyond what his line has been that he spoke inelegantly.
>> well, clearly in a campaign with hundreds, if not thousands of sechs and question and answer sessions, now and again you're going to say something that doesn't come out right. in this case i said something that's completely wrong. i absolutely believe, however, that my life has shown that i care about 100% and that's been demonstrated throughout my life and this whole campaign is about the 100%. when i become president, it will be about helping the 100%.
>> i want to bring in carl bernstein , ledge answered investigative journalist and rana assistant editor to "time" magazine. does this change the narrative?
>> perhaps. i think we need to look at who mitt romney is in this campaign. what he's tried to do is shed his manacles of the far right of the tea party fringe of the party which has come to control the republican party and escape it. the question is can he do it without being held accountable for where he's been throughout this campaign. that's the real issue. two issue in this campaign. obviously president obama 's conduct of his presidency and the republican party in washington . if romney can move to the center, as he's trying to do, and slip away from his past statements, perhaps he can have a new life here. i'm not sure he can get away with it because it involves a character transplant.
>> did the president hand essentially a pass to mitt romney at the debate? because now he's able to come out after the debate. he's able to change what he said about the 47%, say i was completely wrong in making that statement and by the next debate it's going to seem like it's a little too old, now the new jobs numbers are out. was this a bigged missed snunt.
>> well, i think the debate clearly romney won. but i think the jobs numbers really do work in the president's favor. they're going to be a strong thing for him to point to. one of the arguments in the debate that romney used is we have to keep lowering taxes because growth is not on track. guess what? the unemployment number is ticking down. that blunts that argue am. i think the president has to come out strong with his arguments around investment and education and keep that momentum flowing. let me give you some of the reaction that's been coming in. mitt romney 's campaign issued a statement saying this is not what a real recovery looks like and he will create 12 million jobs. then this is what david plouffe had to say just a short time ago on chuck's show.
>> i don't think we should focus on the politics today. this is obviously showing we continue to recover from a horrible recession. the recession wasn't an accident. there were policies and reasons that contributed to it. and, you know, reckless wall street behavior, tax cuts for the wealthy unpaid for. these are the same policies mitt romney wants to return to.
>> so what does the president do with this? he's about to speak in virginia in the next hour.
>> i don't tell the president what to do. look, these numbers show some signs of hope. it's time for both campaigns to recognize what's real. we have huge structural unemployment in this country. it's going to last for years. the numbers are going to go down by a percentage point here and there. the voters deserve honesty about where we are. neither campaign has delivered it. yes, the recovery is coming along very slowly. is mitt romney going to create 12 million jobs out of the top of his hat like a magician? no. it's absolute nonsense . and this report shows a bit of movement. it reinforces what obama has said about slow progress, about the reality of our situation, but it's time to end this insane claim making about how one candidate or another is going to transform this economy. we heard romney the other night. he's got no transformational ideas except trickle down economics which we've seen doesn't work. we're not going to have miracles here. we need steady leadership, and whoever can provide that and be honest with the american people about steady leadership in terms of recovery and how he is going to do it as president ought to be the president. but enough of this rhetoric.
>> to your point that the truth is important after these jobs numbers came out, jack welch tweeted, unbelievable jobs numbers. these chicago guys will do anything. can't debate so change the numbers. they are saying, rana, that these numbers were manipulated.
>> that's nonsense. come on.
>> if they were manipulated he would have boosted the manufacturing numbers. they were still down. these were mostly gains in health and education. i'm hopeful actually that the ticking down of the unemployment figure will make it a little easier to come to the kind of grand bargain we're going to need to come to after the election. as carl said, whoever is president will have to lay out a long, hard slog ahead and we need math that works. that means probably raising taxes or at least cutting some loopholes and making the tax code simpler, raising revenue, making some investments but maybe curbing entitlements.
>> i want to bring in ralph nader , three-time presidential candidate and author of the new book called "the 17 solutions." always good to have you on the program. thanks for being here. mitt romney is painting himself as a defender of the middle class . he says he won't raise taxes on the middle class , won't cut education. has a plan to cover people with pre-existing conditions. is this the real mitt romney ? give us your take on this economic debate.
>> it's clearly the new fake romney on the debate and president obama couldn't adjust in time. he said what's this? and i think it's the old romney that counts. i think the 47% really reflected his plutocratic personality, and he still has tattend to his base, which is the primary base. that's what's going to bring him down.
>> that's the political reality. there is a reality that there are people out there who want to know what these guys are going to do going forward. they're not economists. what is the conversation that's not being had, ralph , that you think needs to be heard?
>> this is a corporate dominated economy. i mean, corporations decide where the capital is going to go, where it's going to be invested, who is going to be hired. general electric decides to export more jobs than they build in this country. they do. they decide not to pay taxes and get benefit back from the treasury. they do. and these presidents, they're held responsible for the whole economy even though they're not the czar. this isn't a command and controlled socialist economy , but none of them are willing to say, look, how about some corporate patriotism? how about corporations that were chartered and built on the backs of american workers here in the usa putting back more dividends from their $2 trillion cash hoard? how about paying a decent minimum wage which would be $10.30 now if it was adjusted from 1968 . you can't even get obama and romney to say, let's catch up with 1968 with a minimum wage for 30 million workers who are between $7.25 and $10.50. even though both of them believe in it. they're on the record saying, including romney for ten years, that they want an inflation adjusted minimum wage , but your profession won't ask those questions.
>> ralph is right about the minimum wage , but in just going after across the board, quote, corporate, end quote, riding on the backs of workers, i think we have to look at the banks and separate the role of the banks from corporations. i think the banks in this country have gotten away with murder. i think obama has been fairly articulate about this, and they're holding back corporations in many ways in terms of their lending policies.
>> that's absolutely true.
>> we need structural, corporate and banking reform. it's one of the things that came up in the debates the other night and again it's something that romney seemed to turn on a dime that was never there before. i don't know how he found that dime but all of a sudden he was for regulation. he's been against regulation. we now have a new issue in this campaign now that romney has tried to elude the bonds of the republican right and the people who control the party and have up until now, and that is the basic honesty and character of mitt romney . it might be that he can convince the american people that he is the centrist person who we saw on that stage the other night. but it is a new mitt romney . it didn't exist before in this campaign. it might have existed when he was running against ted kennedy for the senate in 1994 and then after he lost that race and started moving to the presidency, he's been moving increasingly toward being controlled by the republican right message. he picked the vice presidential candidate who most embodies that message, and that is paul ryan , instead of picking portman, who would have sent a clear signal to the electorate that, oh, i'm george romney , i am this centrist candidate who wants to see a big tent republican party . let's see it for real. so far what we've seen is some talk on a debate in which he unquestionably faced a president of the united states who was not prepared for the debate or for the new mitt romney .
>> well, we saw a new barack obama yesterday on the campaign trail. i'm guessing we're going to see --
>> not new, the same as he's been all along. he just happened to lose that persona.
>> different than the debate.
>> he lost the persona in the debate. now he seems to have gone back to it. he does much better when he's out campaigning than he does in debates generally. that was the case previously. it seems to be the case now. he, too, needs to be more consistent in terms of how he looks to this electorate, and i presume we're going to see more of the campaigning obama than we saw in that debate, and at the same time he has got to tell a story here that sticks to numbers that are real. i think that if one party and one candidate can really stick to the real tale of where we are economically and how we move forward in this economy that is inhibited by what's happened in the great recession, that honesty might carry the campaign, but i don't think that pie in the sky is going to do it like we saw especially out of romney the other night.
>> i agree with that, and i think it would actually play to the president's core message about investment. the reason that we are where we are economically is a competitiveness issue. jobs have gone abroad. this is not a three-year process a ten-year process, it's a 30-year process. the labor share of the pie has been shrinking since the 1970s . so i think that that's good for the president because it plays to his message. we've got to invest in education in infrastructure. countries like china spent four times as much on infrastructure as a percentage of their economy.
>> there's a big s infrastructure and how you make the argument for that kind of investment. would you at least agree that on these kinds of issues, big government versus small government , there is a distinct choice and it's not that hard to figure out who is for what in this presidential campaign , ralph .
>> they're not going deep enough. we really have to renovate and repair america. that's the biggest jobs program. the schools, the clin i cans, sewage, water systems, public transit systems. good jobs in every community that cannot be exported. how do you pay for this $2 trillion investment that the american society of civil engineers has outlined? you pay for it by cutting the bloated military budget . you pay for it by getting rid of hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate subsidies handouts and bailouts and pay for it by returning the corporate tax system to the time of the prosperous '60s and you get out of afghanistan, stop being an empire, getting more political candidates on the debates, more voice for the voters. you know, give voters more choice. and this -- it's very interesting, 17 redirections for our country. most of them are supported by liberals and conservatives. there's a big --
>> why can't we get them done?
>> because, because you have got an abstract ideological struggle in washington where two parties are also dialing for the same corporate dollars. look at msnbc. the deal that new jersey cut with msnbc to get it in new jersey for general electric and --
>> and yet here we are in new york.
>> listen to this. the deal was that the state employees -- the state tax that the msnbc pays in new jersey is reverted back to general electric and microsoft.
>> to your point --
>> that's corporate welfare .
>> these legal. nobody is suggesting these are illegal. let me finish with this question and we're way over time but is this going to change after the election? are we going to see a different washington that gets more done because this has been such an infective congress, really quickly.
>> ralph has done a great job over the course of his life of showing americans issues that we ought to be looking at. at the same time i think what ralph is saying also does not pay proper attention to ways in which the two parties can address the problems that we have and we're going to see, i hope, some of that in the summer when the two parties come together and look at the question of i believe that entitlements do have to be addressed, though not in the way that mitt romney says so. there are fiscal issues that go beyond mere tarring corporations that we need to look at specifics in washington and come up with a way of working together within the system and at the same time that brings new ideas to the table that are outside the usual ken of the two parties.
>> the key gridlock now is veteran members of the house democrats, like john larson and others, have told me they're not going to recover the house in november. that means eric cantor and john boehner are going to stop anything that obama is going to try to do if he gets elected for a second term. that's the key focus. obama is not running with the congressional democrats. he didn't even mention them in his speech in charlotte. this is a politically selfish campaign because he knows he can't get anything done unless the democrats --
>> i've got to let that -- i wish we could do the whole hour --
>> too simple, ralph . great ideas, but too simple.
>> carl bernstein , rana, ralph nader , thanks for all of you. and we'll be right back
>>
>> well, clearly in a campaign with hundreds, if not thousands of sechs and question and answer sessions, now and again you're going to say something that doesn't come out right. in this case i said something that's completely wrong. i absolutely believe, however, that my life has shown that i care about 100% and that's been demonstrated throughout my life and this whole campaign is about the 100%. when i become president, it will be about helping the 100%.
>> i want to bring in carl bernstein , ledge answered investigative journalist and rana assistant editor to "time" magazine. does this change the narrative?
>> perhaps. i think we need to look at who mitt romney is in this campaign. what he's tried to do is shed his manacles of the far right of the tea party fringe of the party which has come to control the republican party and escape it. the question is can he do it without being held accountable for where he's been throughout this campaign. that's the real issue. two issue in this campaign. obviously president obama 's conduct of his presidency and the republican party in washington . if romney can move to the center, as he's trying to do, and slip away from his past statements, perhaps he can have a new life here. i'm not sure he can get away with it because it involves a character transplant.
>> did the president hand essentially a pass to mitt romney at the debate? because now he's able to come out after the debate. he's able to change what he said about the 47%, say i was completely wrong in making that statement and by the next debate it's going to seem like it's a little too old, now the new jobs numbers are out. was this a bigged missed snunt.
>> well, i think the debate clearly romney won. but i think the jobs numbers really do work in the president's favor. they're going to be a strong thing for him to point to. one of the arguments in the debate that romney used is we have to keep lowering taxes because growth is not on track. guess what? the unemployment number is ticking down. that blunts that argue am. i think the president has to come out strong with his arguments around investment and education and keep that momentum flowing. let me give you some of the reaction that's been coming in. mitt romney 's campaign issued a statement saying this is not what a real recovery looks like and he will create 12 million jobs. then this is what david plouffe had to say just a short time ago on chuck's show.
>> i don't think we should focus on the politics today. this is obviously showing we continue to recover from a horrible recession. the recession wasn't an accident. there were policies and reasons that contributed to it. and, you know, reckless wall street behavior, tax cuts for the wealthy unpaid for. these are the same policies mitt romney wants to return to.
>> so what does the president do with this? he's about to speak in virginia in the next hour.
>> i don't tell the president what to do. look, these numbers show some signs of hope. it's time for both campaigns to recognize what's real. we have huge structural unemployment in this country. it's going to last for years. the numbers are going to go down by a percentage point here and there. the voters deserve honesty about where we are. neither campaign has delivered it. yes, the recovery is coming along very slowly. is mitt romney going to create 12 million jobs out of the top of his hat like a magician? no. it's absolute nonsense . and this report shows a bit of movement. it reinforces what obama has said about slow progress, about the reality of our situation, but it's time to end this insane claim making about how one candidate or another is going to transform this economy. we heard romney the other night. he's got no transformational ideas except trickle down economics which we've seen doesn't work. we're not going to have miracles here. we need steady leadership, and whoever can provide that and be honest with the american people about steady leadership in terms of recovery and how he is going to do it as president ought to be the president. but enough of this rhetoric.
>> to your point that the truth is important after these jobs numbers came out, jack welch tweeted, unbelievable jobs numbers. these chicago guys will do anything. can't debate so change the numbers. they are saying, rana, that these numbers were manipulated.
>> that's nonsense. come on.
>> if they were manipulated he would have boosted the manufacturing numbers. they were still down. these were mostly gains in health and education. i'm hopeful actually that the ticking down of the unemployment figure will make it a little easier to come to the kind of grand bargain we're going to need to come to after the election. as carl said, whoever is president will have to lay out a long, hard slog ahead and we need math that works. that means probably raising taxes or at least cutting some loopholes and making the tax code simpler, raising revenue, making some investments but maybe curbing entitlements.
>> i want to bring in ralph nader , three-time presidential candidate and author of the new book called "the 17 solutions." always good to have you on the program. thanks for being here. mitt romney is painting himself as a defender of the middle class . he says he won't raise taxes on the middle class , won't cut education. has a plan to cover people with pre-existing conditions. is this the real mitt romney ? give us your take on this economic debate.
>> it's clearly the new fake romney on the debate and president obama couldn't adjust in time. he said what's this? and i think it's the old romney that counts. i think the 47% really reflected his plutocratic personality, and he still has tattend to his base, which is the primary base. that's what's going to bring him down.
>> that's the political reality. there is a reality that there are people out there who want to know what these guys are going to do going forward. they're not economists. what is the conversation that's not being had, ralph , that you think needs to be heard?
>> this is a corporate dominated economy. i mean, corporations decide where the capital is going to go, where it's going to be invested, who is going to be hired. general electric decides to export more jobs than they build in this country. they do. they decide not to pay taxes and get benefit back from the treasury. they do. and these presidents, they're held responsible for the whole economy even though they're not the czar. this isn't a command and controlled socialist economy , but none of them are willing to say, look, how about some corporate patriotism? how about corporations that were chartered and built on the backs of american workers here in the usa putting back more dividends from their $2 trillion cash hoard? how about paying a decent minimum wage which would be $10.30 now if it was adjusted from 1968 . you can't even get obama and romney to say, let's catch up with 1968 with a minimum wage for 30 million workers who are between $7.25 and $10.50. even though both of them believe in it. they're on the record saying, including romney for ten years, that they want an inflation adjusted minimum wage , but your profession won't ask those questions.
>> ralph is right about the minimum wage , but in just going after across the board, quote, corporate, end quote, riding on the backs of workers, i think we have to look at the banks and separate the role of the banks from corporations. i think the banks in this country have gotten away with murder. i think obama has been fairly articulate about this, and they're holding back corporations in many ways in terms of their lending policies.
>> that's absolutely true.
>> we need structural, corporate and banking reform. it's one of the things that came up in the debates the other night and again it's something that romney seemed to turn on a dime that was never there before. i don't know how he found that dime but all of a sudden he was for regulation. he's been against regulation. we now have a new issue in this campaign now that romney has tried to elude the bonds of the republican right and the people who control the party and have up until now, and that is the basic honesty and character of mitt romney . it might be that he can convince the american people that he is the centrist person who we saw on that stage the other night. but it is a new mitt romney . it didn't exist before in this campaign. it might have existed when he was running against ted kennedy for the senate in 1994 and then after he lost that race and started moving to the presidency, he's been moving increasingly toward being controlled by the republican right message. he picked the vice presidential candidate who most embodies that message, and that is paul ryan , instead of picking portman, who would have sent a clear signal to the electorate that, oh, i'm george romney , i am this centrist candidate who wants to see a big tent republican party . let's see it for real. so far what we've seen is some talk on a debate in which he unquestionably faced a president of the united states who was not prepared for the debate or for the new mitt romney .
>> well, we saw a new barack obama yesterday on the campaign trail. i'm guessing we're going to see --
>> not new, the same as he's been all along. he just happened to lose that persona.
>> different than the debate.
>> he lost the persona in the debate. now he seems to have gone back to it. he does much better when he's out campaigning than he does in debates generally. that was the case previously. it seems to be the case now. he, too, needs to be more consistent in terms of how he looks to this electorate, and i presume we're going to see more of the campaigning obama than we saw in that debate, and at the same time he has got to tell a story here that sticks to numbers that are real. i think that if one party and one candidate can really stick to the real tale of where we are economically and how we move forward in this economy that is inhibited by what's happened in the great recession, that honesty might carry the campaign, but i don't think that pie in the sky is going to do it like we saw especially out of romney the other night.
>> i agree with that, and i think it would actually play to the president's core message about investment. the reason that we are where we are economically is a competitiveness issue. jobs have gone abroad. this is not a three-year process a ten-year process, it's a 30-year process. the labor share of the pie has been shrinking since the 1970s . so i think that that's good for the president because it plays to his message. we've got to invest in education in infrastructure. countries like china spent four times as much on infrastructure as a percentage of their economy.
>> there's a big s infrastructure and how you make the argument for that kind of investment. would you at least agree that on these kinds of issues, big government versus small government , there is a distinct choice and it's not that hard to figure out who is for what in this presidential campaign , ralph .
>> they're not going deep enough. we really have to renovate and repair america. that's the biggest jobs program. the schools, the clin i cans, sewage, water systems, public transit systems. good jobs in every community that cannot be exported. how do you pay for this $2 trillion investment that the american society of civil engineers has outlined? you pay for it by cutting the bloated military budget . you pay for it by getting rid of hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate subsidies handouts and bailouts and pay for it by returning the corporate tax system to the time of the prosperous '60s and you get out of afghanistan, stop being an empire, getting more political candidates on the debates, more voice for the voters. you know, give voters more choice. and this -- it's very interesting, 17 redirections for our country. most of them are supported by liberals and conservatives. there's a big --
>> why can't we get them done?
>> because, because you have got an abstract ideological struggle in washington where two parties are also dialing for the same corporate dollars. look at msnbc. the deal that new jersey cut with msnbc to get it in new jersey for general electric and --
>> and yet here we are in new york.
>> listen to this. the deal was that the state employees -- the state tax that the msnbc pays in new jersey is reverted back to general electric and microsoft.
>> to your point --
>> that's corporate welfare .
>> these legal. nobody is suggesting these are illegal. let me finish with this question and we're way over time but is this going to change after the election? are we going to see a different washington that gets more done because this has been such an infective congress, really quickly.
>> ralph has done a great job over the course of his life of showing americans issues that we ought to be looking at. at the same time i think what ralph is saying also does not pay proper attention to ways in which the two parties can address the problems that we have and we're going to see, i hope, some of that in the summer when the two parties come together and look at the question of i believe that entitlements do have to be addressed, though not in the way that mitt romney says so. there are fiscal issues that go beyond mere tarring corporations that we need to look at specifics in washington and come up with a way of working together within the system and at the same time that brings new ideas to the table that are outside the usual ken of the two parties.
>> the key gridlock now is veteran members of the house democrats, like john larson and others, have told me they're not going to recover the house in november. that means eric cantor and john boehner are going to stop anything that obama is going to try to do if he gets elected for a second term. that's the key focus. obama is not running with the congressional democrats. he didn't even mention them in his speech in charlotte. this is a politically selfish campaign because he knows he can't get anything done unless the democrats --
>> i've got to let that -- i wish we could do the whole hour --
>> too simple, ralph . great ideas, but too simple.
>> carl bernstein , rana, ralph nader , thanks for all of you. and we'll be right back
>>