[Christi Paul, Cnn:] All right. Hey, you go make some great memories yourself today here.
[Victor Blackwell, Cnn:] INSIDE POLITICS with John King starts right now.
[John King, Cnn:] Labor Day weekend. In a huge mid-term election year President Obama wishes this was the big conversation.
[Barack Obama, President Of The United States:] Companies are investing, consumers are spending.
[King:] But the commander-in-chief's handling of world crises dominates the debate in Washington.
[Obama:] I don't want to put the cart before the horse. We don't have a strategy yet.
[King:] Plus Hillary Clinton breaks her three week silence on Ferguson.
[Hillary Clinton, Former U.s. Secretary Of State:] Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers were three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as black drivers.
[King:] And two months to Election Day give Republicans the edge in the battle to control the senate. But most of the big races are so close nothing is certain. INSIDE POLITICS, the biggest stories sourced by the best reporters now. Welcome to INSIDE POLITICS. I'm John King. Thanks for sharing your Sunday morning especially on this Labor Day weekend. With us to share their reporting and their insights: Politico's Maggie Haberman; Nia Malika Henderson of "The Washington Post"; Amy Walter of the "Cook Political Report"; and Bloomberg's Lisa Lerer. Labor Day weekend, 65 days to Election Day and it is world events not jobs or health care or immigration driving most of the debate here in Washington. On Thursday at the White House listen here as the President takes issue with reports he's close to authorizing strikes inside Syria against ISIS leadership targets.
[Obama:] We don't have a strategy yet. I think what I've seen in some of the news reports suggests that folks are getting a little further ahead of where we're at than we currently are.
[King:] "We don't have a strategy yet." Maggie Haberman, the tan suit got a lot of action on Twitter but that part especially. Now a lot of the President's critics were taking it out of context. He was clearly answering a question about Syria. But he should know better to say we don't have a strategy yet. Why didn't he just say we're not there yet or we're mulling our options or we'll let you know when we know?
[Maggie Haberman, "politico":] Yes to everything you just said. He should know better. He absolutely was taken out of context. And you saw Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary do a tremendous amount of push back on this beginning immediately after the press conference and I think actually during the press conference. He was being asked a specific question about congressional approval for Syria. So it really was a very contextual question. But, yes, after an entire election that was bought out with you didn't build that, somebody else built that for you and all sorts of other phrases of the President's being taken and used to cement a narrative, he should know better. He was answering the question honestly but it did not sound good and it played into a sense that some of his critics have of sort of a foreign policy adrift. I will say though in his defense, this is not this is a very complicated situation and this is not a situation with a lot of easy answers.
[King:] Right. Caution may be the right approach but communicating the caution he didn't get quite right. It was also an interesting moment where he was trying to make the case the sanctions against Russia and Putin are working and then he says but he said their response was for the violence, they are training the separatists in Ukraine, they are paying for it. And the critics say well if all those things are happening, where's the proof the sanctions are working.
[Lisa Lerer, Bloomberg:] Right. And I think part of the problem here I will defend the tan suit. For late August, it wasn't a totally inappropriate choice. But I think part of the problem with the statement was that it was coming after a series of sort of public relations mishaps by the White House. I was with the President at Martha's Vineyard when he came out and gave this very moving statement about James Foley. I think he was at the golf course within ten minutes. And that obviously attracted a lot of blowback from all sorts of places not just Republicans but media and even some Democrats winced. So this on top of that just really contributes to this narrative and it just hasn't been it doesn't feel like the White House has been handling, at least the optics of this very well.
[Nia Malika Henderson, "washington Post":] Yes. And I think in some ways the cart before the horse was a lot of the military leaders coming out and really scaring everyone and saying that ISIL or ISIS or whatever you want to call it is the worst thing they've ever seen, that they got this funding. That they've got you know, they are essentially operating the state and taking taxes [inaudible]. Also in that way he seemed to sort of mixed the message there and what emerged was something that I think was a lot more nuanced and reflective ultimately of what they are doing which is working on a strategy [inaudible].
[King:] It was striking to me that, you know, he understands the timing here. He understands the election is 65 days away 67, 68 days away when he was giving that statement and he tries to talk about good economic news that morning. He spends what 10 or 12 seconds on it and then he himself focuses on foreign policy and every question was about either tough foreign policy and we'll get to this a little bit later on the program or tough immigration choices. Where is the President right now with his party as we hit Labor Day?
[Amy Walter, Cook Political Report:] Well, what's interesting about the economy piece of this which yes, there's been very good economic news over the last few weeks, stock market hitting a record. People don't believe it and people don't feel it. I mean if you've seen anything over the last couple of weeks that's really disheartening, it's not just that people are feeling bad it's that the median income in this country now is lower than it was in 2000. It's when you're looking state by state at hourly wages, how they have declined over the last ten years, not just since 2008. So even the economic news isn't going to break through; in fact that's a lot of what if we want to call it the malaise is about in this country and the frustration is that we're in an economy that while it looks like we're moving, for most middle class folks they feel like they are just trapped.
[King:] Legs feel tired. They have been treading water for a number of years. So part of the foreign policy debate, interesting is the Republicans say the President is too cautious. Some say he's too timid. Now, a lot of them veer away from what they would actually do if they were president. But they also try to say it's his fault and it's her fault meaning Hillary Clinton as we go forward. Here's Rand Paul. And on this one you have Rand Paul and Marco Rubio both ends of what I'll call the Republican spectrum on foreign policy in the same spot. Rand Paul says "We're lucky Mrs. Clinton didn't get her way", talking about Syria, "and the Obama administration did not bring about regime change in Syria. That new regime might well be ISIS." Is that a fair criticism?
[Haberman:] I think that it is very hard to divorce what they are saying about foreign policy from the ultimate goal of beating her up for 2016. So this is not actually about the substance this is all about redirecting the anger, just as you saw from some of President Obama's supporters after Ferguson, an effort to redirect some of the focus on 2016 towards Hillary Clinton, towards Jeb Bush, towards Chris Christie. You will see this from Republicans now on the foreign policy debate because they are trying to come up with whatever weak point they can against her other than just saying she's beatable and we can beat her. This is a way to do it. But I don't think this is about actually getting to a substantive discussion of foreign policy.
[King:] It is an issue on which she actually disagreed with him. Hillary Clinton wanted the President to be more aggressive, more muscular early on in arming what she called the moderate Syrian forces. There are some people who say, "Who are they?" Or they don't exist. But on a point where she's trying to get away from President Obama a little bit, the Republicans are trying to velcro her right back to him.
[Lerer:] That's right. And in some ways I think their responses to her foreign policy or what they perceive to be her foreign policy says more about the Republican field than it does about Secretary Clinton herself. You see Rubio is on one side. Rand Paul is on the other. They are trying to distinguish themselves as well by how they respond to her.
[Haberman:] There's this moment where there's this anti- interventionist sentiment. That is a lot of what's happening in the Republican Party, too. You have Rand Paul who frankly has sort of embraced that label more than he had been for a while and now with that "Wall Street Journal" op-ed it's kind of just going along forward. You do have this debate within the Republican Party but also on the left as well but more on the right about how muscular to be.
[King:] And to the point about Hillary Clinton as they try to get at her armor as Secretary of State and what she thinks is a strength to make it a weakness, a lot of us were asking why did she wait so long. Why didn't we hear from her in the hours, in the days after the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson. Well, she waited nearly three weeks but when she did speak, it was very powerful. She said as a mother she felt the pain of the Brown family. She talked about inequities in the criminal justice system and she asked her largely white audience to look around the room.
[Clinton:] Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers were three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as black drivers instead of the other way around. If white offenders received prison sentences 10 percent longer than black offenders for the same crimes.
[King:] Might we go into a presidential campaign where Hillary Clinton and Rand Paul
[Walter:] I was just going to say that sounds like Rand Paul.
[King:] are traveling the country, telling their largely white audiences that's what mostly you get in the campaign trail to think about this and think hard.
[Henderson:] Yes. I mean because if you look at what she said, you're right Rand Paul made a very similar statement in his "Time Magazine" op-ed. He said if I were in Michael Brown's position and I was a 17-year-old I might mouth off at a cop too, the difference being I wouldn't end up dead because he would have been white kid. So I think this is pretty bold for Hillary Clinton to get out there and say this. We're not used to white politicians asking white people, white Americans to put themselves in the place of African- Americans. So she, of course, got a lot of flak from progressives particularly from waiting so late on I think a lot of they missed the boldness of her statement.
[King:] Does it matter that she waited?
[Haberman:] No, I actually don't think it did. I think that there were elements of the statement that were bold and there were elements of the statement that were also cautious. I mean I think that she I agree with absolutely what she said about trading places but I think she was careful not to offend anyone. I think she was careful to be clear about law enforcement as well which has been a community that has backed her in the past when she was in the Senate. I think that at the end of the day, what good would it have done for her when this was all playing out or for the situation when this was playing out for her to have been another politician putting out a statement? And if you look at the statements that were issued by a lot of politicians with the exception of the Rand Paul op-ed which was clearly different on race but for the most part everybody carved out a very cautious space. Paul Ryan said wait and see. Ted Cruz denounced arrests of reporters.
[Henderson:] Yes. People talked about militarization.
[Haberman:] Exactly. So I don't see I don't think that anybody said it much other than Rand Paul that was particularly bold. And Rand Paul was bold because it was a challenge to his own party.
[King:] And the test I think will be after we get the investigations, after we see what happens in Ferguson after those investigations, do they carry this conversation into the next campaign and beyond? That will be the true test for all of them. Sit tight. Up next, the battle for control of the senate and a guide map to the races that could decide the balance of power. But first this is priceless. This week's "Politicians Say or Do the Darnedest Things". Speaker John King Boehner and his friend the monkey.
[Rep. John Boehner , Speaker Of The House:] This sits in my office on my coffee table because this is me. That's what I do all day. They wind me up about every 15 minutes. No, no. I got to go to work.