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How poorly the whole sequester fight has gone for the white house because a general rule of thumb going back decades when there is high-profile budget fight between the president and congress in washington the president almost always wins and he is losing this thing because he overplayed his hand with exaggerating the effect of the sequester before it took effect. and then, this white house tour thing has been a debacle. martha: when you look at sort of the big picture here, doug, i think this is something that resonated with the americans alot, they were told this would be such a big scary th...

Would be no problem keeping white house open for tours, ouch, right, doug? >> martha, ouch. rich is onto something. president didn't want to compromise. didn't want to have dinner with republican senators. didn't want to grow up to capitol hill. he is doing that because the numbers in mid 40s. when president numbers start dropping as i say somebody who was in the white house it is very hard to arrest the decline. so the president and his team is really, really unnerved by what is happening. they don't have a budgetary plan. they don't have a strategy. all these symbolic issues as charles kraut...

How did the meeting start? did he begin with his ideas? >> he had -- no, he had a very short opening statement, and he went right into questions. but the questions i think the people had been preselected, so i think he had a little pit of a tipoff -- little bit of a tipoff to what the questions were going to be, but it was still a good dialogue. bill: did you get a chance to ask him a question? >> i did not. i would have liked to. we had some good questions. the interesting thing always with the president is the president's words kind of evolve, so it's really difficult to find out what he rea...

The decision about its budget and to withdraw personnel from tours. >> right. and then -- >> we had to cancel the tours. it is our job to cancel the tours. they can not cancel them. martha: boy, what a mess, right? so we do hear that president wants the tours to resume for visiting schoolchildren but it has not been finalized yet. so they're trying to dig themselves out of this one which is something they probably don't want to be talking about you but its out there. doug schoen joins me, former pollster for president clinton and rich louer, "national review." both fox news contributors. doug,...

Then president obama back in 2010 ordered the irs to crack down on just these kind of instances of contractors getting deals when they owed back taxes. so, i mean, once again, you just shake your head. we have so many rules on the books. why is it hard to enforce rules or there? >> in part it is the fine print because the various agencies can create a waiver for contractors they want to use. so this bill will require that they have got to come to congress for the waiver instead of the department. and i believe will change things dramatically. martha: i think one of the main reasons that people...