dresses his wounds as well as the pediatrician of the town of uvalde and he was there with the families at the moment they learned their child would not come home. he will never, ever get those mother s screams out of his head. i raced to the hospital to find parents outside yelling children s names in desperation and sobbing as they begged for any news related to their child. those mothers cries i will never get out of my head, but what i did find was something no prayer would ever relieve. two children whose bodies were pulvarized, decapitated, whose flesh had been ripped apart that the only clue was the blood-spattered cartoon clothes clinging to life and finding none. i can only hope these two bodies were a tragic exception to the list of survivors and as i waited there with my fellow uvalde doctors, nurses, first responders and hospital staff for other casualties we hope to save, they never arrived. all that remained was the bodies of 17 more children, the two teacher
democrats were smart, they said, yeah, this is who we are. we re more closer to the center of the country, the center of our party is more closer to the center of the country, and that s, i think, the most important thing to learn from yesterday s vote or yesterday s races in california. you know, phil, i m going to say something about voters and i m going to just invite the two people that understand voters better than i do to interrupt me before i get too far. i always have had this sense that voters have as a baseline expectation competence, and when incompetence is displayed and it screws up their lives because the city can t be run or safety can t be created, that i mean, i think our greatest fear matt dowd is it s the incompetent stupid, right? i think if you can be tagged as an incompetent administrator of anything, the dmv, a city, a state, it s a deadly political tack. so my question is about how biden communicates the opposite. they come on and hit all these
states. matt dowd, i hate and i have banned from this program the sort of useless predictions that usually happens in midterms. we know that midterms are hard for a president s party. 2002 defied that because our homeland security was on the ballot. our homeland security is now our elementary school security, and it is most definitely on the ballot. i wonder your thoughts about a simpler message that communicates the reality. well, i think you hit on exactly what i ve tried to say, and i m going to keep trying to say in the course of this, is for all the accomplishments ron has laid out and what the white house has done in a very competent way. that s not what this election should be about if the democrats want to win. that is not what this election should be about. it has to be about something at 10,000 feet that basically says our country is on the line. and the democrats have to do this in a way to connect the dots. i ve said before we ve had this
not show competence, the withdraw of afghanistan last summer was a moment that was a bit of an inflection point, if you look at his approval rating and public opinion polls. he started to decline that summer, last summer and has stayed pretty low since then, and you know, inflation has been whether you fault biden and his administration or not, it at least appears to a lot of american voters to be a sign of incompetence. it s the reason for their frustration. it s the reason they say life is not back to normal as promised when biden ran for president. those are real challenges for him to navigate, and i think you re right that it s all about competence. the challenge for biden and the democratic party is to figure out how to tell that message in a different way. phil rucker, matt dowd, thank you so much for spending time with us today. cornell sticks around a little longer. we ll turn to january 6th, officer michael fanone says he s
the difference between the two parties is clear, and i think that s going to really shape the fall elections. white house chief of staff ron klain on his desk every crisis lands. thank you for starting us off today and making some time for us. it s nice to see you. thanks for having me, nicolle. joining our coverage, phil rucker, matt dowd, political strategist, the founder of country over party, and cornell belcher, president of brilliant corner s research. all of them are msnbc contributors. cornell, i start with you. white house in all white houses juggling myriad crises that dominate the news, trying to get out a story of progress they ve been making is a complicated message. when you were here last time, we talked about how you breakthrough. how do you think they re breaking through and what advice do you have for them right now? well, it is, it s awfully tough for them to breakthrough. my advice to them would be communications 101. that is not try to communicate a dozen