year ago. people just aren t in the mood to hear that. they want to a reckoning of where we are and realistic talk of how we re going to get out of it. i think if they come away with that sense, a sense that he s connected, and that he feels what s going on in their lives, i think that will get a long way down the road to being a successful speech. there is some risk, though, david, right, when a president starts not acknowledging that the country is under stress, but to start to maybe dwell on it, right? because when jimmy carter does it, or tried it, he ended up getting labeled with the malaise speak. he never used the word malaise, but there is that risk there, not being sunny enough. yeah. i noted that very thing in the piece. you have to strike the balance, you have to give people hope, but it has to be realistic hope. listen, i still have the tire tracks on my rear end from the first couple of years of the obama administration, where we were going through another
two weeks away and former senior adviser to president obama david axelrod is arguing that biden should proceed with caution when touting the administration s successes and instead recognize the challenges that still remain, writing in a new op-ed, mr. president, it s time for a little humility. joining us now is cnn senior political commentator and host of the ax files, david axelrod. you know, there is a feeling, i think, and you are sort of running counter to this in what you re saying here, there is a feeling, i think, that perhaps things at the white house haven t been sold well enough. you re saying actually don t go out touting it, use some humility. yes. i m not saying that he shouldn t note the progresses that have been made. he s going to talk about the thing he s done and he should. but i think it is important not to oversell where we are as a country. you know, we have made progress objectively in the last year. but we have been through a
traumatic period during the great recession. joe biden was there. he ll remember this. and our instinct was understandably to tout every bit of progress we could. every time the jobs numbers improved, we wanted to tout that. we talked about green chutes and recovery summer and so on and it actually back fired on us because it felt to people like we weren t in touch with what was going on in their lives and we learned how to hit that right balance to talk about progress, but also to talk about all that people have been through and where we need to go in the future. we set up a contrast with the other party when the president was running for re-election about who was fighting for. the besieged middle class. i think you don t want to go to the malaise, you know, place on the meter, but i think you do want to acknowledge that we aren t where we need to be yet.
could happen any time that vladimir putin should order it. i was, however, able to last night get in contact with vladimir putin s spokesman spes kof and he told me that vladimir putin wants to negotiate and wanted to do so from the very start. and as far as the russians are concerned, ukraine is only one of several topics that they are concerned about as far as it comes or when it comes to this european security structure. so the russians want broader talks, like for instance, the kind that they had between vladimir putin and president biden in the phone call on the weekend. and so today the diplomacy continues. you just mentioned it, olaf scholz, the german chancellor just touched down here and is currently in talks with vladimir putin. and putin as the talks started off already said obviously those talks are going to center around the issue of ukraine and then of course, also around the nord stream 2 pipeline that runs between germany and russia. so we do see some signals that might
this is kyiv. and the arrows here are pointing to a potential russian invasion route, even through the chernobyl area, which you see right over here. that area is, yes, it has radiation in it, but it is radiation that is not going to contaminate troops if they aren t there for a very long time. so all of this stuff, all of these different areas here still indicate that ukraine is in grave danger. if we go to the next slide, what we can see here is the relative strength of the different militaries. ukraine spends about a tenth of the russian defense budget on its defense. so between that and then you have the difference in personnel everywhere from 219,000 on the ukrainian said to 840,000 on the russian side, look at the difference in combat aircraft and the difference in tanks and in anti-aircraft guns and self-propelled artillery, there s a vast difference between these two armies. it s going to be very difficult for the russians to move