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Storm-Weary New York Hit Again; Interview with Bill Akers; Fight for the House; Fiscall Cliff Reality; Obama Top Aides May Go; Future of Republican Party; Teaching Kids About Gun Violence; Florida Voting Under Scrutiny

Aired November 08, 2012 - 11:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

ASHLEIGH BANFIELD, ANCHOR, "CNN NEWSROOM": Thank you so much, Carol, and hi, everybody. I'm Ashleigh Banfield. It's 11:00 on the East Coast and 8:00 a.m. on the West Coast.

Here's some phrases for you, high wind, wet snow, travel snarled, power lost. Any other time here in the northeast we might just call that November, but coming just a week and a half after Superstorm Sandy, this garden variety nor'easter is just wrong and it is cruel, you might say.

And here is how some New Yorkers would actually like to say something on television, this sucks. It just does. Sixty-mile-an-hour wind gusts, that's the kind of wind that knocks out power to tens of thousands of homes, people who probably already went without power for a week.

Businesses, also, that hadn't lost it during Sandy or had just gotten it back, out again. Storm surges, once again, threatening the waterfront areas and parts of Connecticut that today have more than a foot of snow.

CNN's Deb Feyerick is in the community of Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn. How the do things look there now, Deb?

DEBORAH FEYERICK, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, they don't look that great, actually, Ashleigh. This entire area was underwater after the hurricane. Now, it is covered with snow.

And just, if you take a look down this way, OK, the water is at the end of this block. Cars coming up to us right now, but the water was at the end of the block. It was not considered an evacuation zone, a Zone A, because of the fact that there's a parkway and they felt that that would break the wave.

Well, it didn't and, now, people are describing it as a mini-tsunami that they were running to try of get away from it. And, by the time, they were able to get any evacuation orders, one man said that he was up to his chest and it was just simply too late. They didn't get the word.

Over here, you've got a light, a generator that's lighting up this area in a relief center. One of the assistant chiefs told me just a little earlier - excuse me -- that, in fact, people last night were together and they were crying.

And I want to bring in Wendy Taylor here. Wendy, your mom is out here and she is really -- how is she holding up?

WENDY TAYLOR, RESIDENT: She's holding up as best to be expected right now. She has been in the they were neighborhood for 72 years. She's lived in her house 50 years. She grew up here.

And we're basically fending for ourselves right now. We are left to our own devices, to help each other because there has been no help from anybody else.

FEYERICK: Are you getting information? We've seen a couple of people from FEMA. We've seen a couple of insurance people. But are you still feeling that they're just not reaching you?

TAYLOR: There's not enough presence here. We are definitely waiting on FEMA. We haven't spoken to them yet. She was not covered by her homeowner's insurance for anything and, basically, everybody is just kind of waiting to be told what to do next.

FEYERICK: Is she -- you described her a little while ago. Is she vulnerable right now? Is she sort of on her last ...

TAYLOR: Yeah, I mean, everybody is on the verge of cracking right now and fed up and frustrated beyond belief. We really are. It's really sad to see this happening to the neighborhood and to the surrounding neighborhoods.

From what I understand, everybody is on their own right now. The city has not been here. We saw two Red Cross trucks the whole time in 11 days.

FEYERICK: Wendy Taylor, thank you so much.

TAYLOR: You're very welcome.

FEYERICK: We do appreciate it.

And, you know, it's so interesting because, Ashleigh, when you talk to people, you just have to stand here and people will yell out what they need.

They need generators. They need additional help. They need licensed plumbers, electricians, just people that can help them get back on their feet.

And, again, the scope of the tragedy is so huge that there just simply aren't enough people to come out and help. But they really also need folks to come and just deliver some foods because people are just still in their homes. They don't have any place to go and they are freezing, basically, Ashleigh.

BANFIELD: Deb, it's unbelievable and to see that just off to your left there's a relief center that ended up getting hit with this kind of weather. It's remarkable. Stand by the you will for a moment. I want to get over to Karen Maginnis who's in our Extreme Weather Center to try to get a picture of where we're at.

Look, I snapped - I've got to show you something myself. I don't think you've seen this yet, Karen. This is the picture that I snapped out of the airplane of my window last night as I was landing at LaGuardia airport, 6:00 at night, which was really in the thick part of the nor'easter.

That's the jetway filled with snow and it took more than a dozen attempts for that jetway to make it to our airplane because it was blowing so hard in the wind. It took 40 minutes to get off the plane because they couldn't get that jetway up to the airplane.

But I didn't feel the winds this morning. I just saw buckets of snow.

KAREN MAGINNIS, AMS METEOROLOGIST: Yeah. And, Ashleigh, those winds were blowing between 50- and 60-miles-an-hour. Visibility was greatly reduced.

We were looking at some pretty significant delays yesterday in that northeastern corridor. Now, the storm system is winding its way just up the eastern seaboard towards New England, but its impact there is not going to be as widely felt as it was felt across New Jersey and into New York and Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Take a look at some of those snowfall totals that we did see, in some areas, more than a foot, but generally speaking, JFK, LaGuardia, also into Staten Island, generally the snowfall amounts were running about three-to-six-inches.

We've got some pictures out of Yonkers and they had some major difficulty driving on the roadways there. Numerous accidents also reported, but let's show you a little bit better picture as we take a live look. This out of Needham, Massachusetts.

And they're going along the roads there, just a little bit of snowfall on the roads. We haven't really seen any snarls, but they're saying along Route 128, yeah, the wind was really blowing there yesterday, as well.

But moving along, this is from WCVB, our affiliate in the Boston area. The winds, Ashleigh, were gusting up to near hurricane intensity. But we'll look at gusty winds along the northern New England coast for this afternoon.

BANFIELD: All right, Karen. Thank you. Those pictures look just like my neighborhood. Thanks very much.

You know, the brutal nor'easter, there's really no other way to put this. It's just rubbing salt deep into the wounds of so many people, especially people in Seaside Heights.

Remember Seaside Heights, the Jersey Shore town that was so pounded by Superstorm Sandy just nine days ago that these were the images we showed you a day after. It damaged or demolished the homes, the cars. Streets, where there aren't streets before. Rivers where there aren't rivers before. Nothing was spared.

Things that bring in the tourist dollars there, that Ferris wheel and the rollercoaster, just decimated, damaged, destroyed or floating off into the ocean.

Mayor Bill Akers talked to us about his town's heartache and emotional and physical pain, literally hours after that storm hit passed over his town. Have a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL AKERS, MAYOR, SEASIDE HEIGHTS, NEW JERSEY (via telephone): Yeah, my job is managing. Their job -- they're physically out there. We're riding around at 2:00 in the morning and we're pulling people out of the water.

We're riding around in these deuce-and-a-halfs and you see these people and these cars floating down the street. And these guys do this stuff, they do it with no regard for anything other than they want to do the right thing and help.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Mayor Akers is back with me live today and he joins me by phone.

Mayor, thank you for taking the time. I can't even imagine where you are in the clean-up efforts from Sandy and now the nor'easter. How are you managing?

AKERS (via telephone): We're managing. I think we're doing as well as can be expected. And I think we're probably doing a little bit better than most in that so many of these out of state crews have come in along with our local people, have at least gotten a lot of our telephone poles back in place.

DPW's been able to work on the streets. The DOT's been unbelievable in getting our streets cleared and accessible for all these different utility companies to get in and start trying to restore some services.

BANFIELD: So, the pictures I'm seeing on the screen right now, we're driving along the street and looking at these destroyed homes, now with snow banks in front of them.

None of the homes that I'm seeing on this screen right now could be habitable. There's no way that anybody could be living in them and Mayor Bloomberg was talking about trying to house 40,000 displaced people.

Where did you put all the people from the homes I'm seeing on the screen that are now troubled with the increasing snow?

AKERS (via telephone): That's -- you know, we're fortunate that we're a little bit, of course, a lot smaller community and people have turned to friends and family for a lot of support.

But the shelters are overflowing. We had a meeting with FEMA and they put that as their number one priority, is relocation, because it seems there's a really huge push to get the school systems back in service and the children back to school.

BANFIELD: But, Mayor, your kids aren't back in school yet? This is a week and a half. They're not back in school yet?

AKERS (via telephone): No. We're -- school was postponed until the 12th, next Monday.

BANFIELD: Wow.

AKERS (via telephone): But these schools are used as shelters right now, so until they can be cleared out, you can't get the kids back to school.

BANFIELD: And what's the power situation? You know, in looking at the pictures I'm seeing, I can't imagine that the power grid is even up and running. Are you getting spotty service, are there areas that can be serviced?

AKERS (via telephone): We have our -- we have three generators, three huge generators that are capable of powering the town, partial power right now, doing the services that we need at this particular point.

We do have some restored water service, but from Jersey Central Power and Light, they're working on the distribution end of their service and we are unfortunately on the transmission end.

We need our transmission lines. We have five transmission lines bringing power to the borough of Seaside Heights that have not been restored.

BANFIELD: I did not think that ...

AKERS (via telephone): We need those lines restored.

BANFIELD: Do you ever.

I did not think we were going to be looking at these pictures all over again now in a blizzard. And I am so sorry for you, once again. It sounds like a broken record, but, Mayor, I hope you guys get the help you need and you get those kids back into school and people back to work and get some of those houses demolished that need to be and fixed that can be. Sir, thanks so much.

AKERS (via telephone): No, thank you. And thank you for all your good work in helping us. Take care.

BANFIELD: Well, the least we can do is at least let Americans know what you're going through and certainly, you know, you can impact your world, folks.

Please call the Red Cross. Please give at this point. The nor'easter is the latest in a series of problems that very few people can manage.

So, there's your screen. You can see how many people effected. Impact Your World at CNN.com is a great way to help.

Not only that, you stay with us for the latest on what's happening with this nor'easter and where it's hitting and, also, coming up after the break, the business of getting this country back on track. The election is over. What's next? Coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: OK, so you thought the election was over? Think again. The balance of power in Congress may appear just as it was -- Democrats still rule the Senate; Republicans the House -- but the fight continues in a few of those House races, 48 hours after voters were going to the polls, including a heated contest in Florida where controversial Republican Allen West is trying to hold on to his seat there.

Also in Palm Springs, Mary Bono Mack, the Republican widow of the late singer and congressman, Sonny Bono, she is not giving up her fight either.

Our Paul Steinhauser joins us live now. So, let's start with the Senate. The Democrats picking up a couple more seats there. Surprising or not surprising?

PAUL STEINHAUSER, CNN POLITICAL EDITOR: Yeah, surprising, I guess, because the odds were against the Democrats when this cycle first started. They were defending 23 of the 33 seats up for grabs.

You're right. The numbers are still changing. Let's take a look at the Senate, where it stands. Those numbers are now final. We called the final two races yesterday. Fifty-four Democrats will be in the new Senate, including one independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats. Forty-five Republicans in the new Senate.

And then there's that one independent from Maine, Angus King, the former independent governor. Will he caucus with the Democrats or Republicans? The thought is the Democrats which would bring them to 55. That's a plus-two from where they were in the last Senate.

And remember, Ashleigh, also, 20 of the senators will be women in the next Senate. Very interesting.

Quickly to the House of Representatives where this is -- we have eight more races, as you mentioned. Overall, there are eight more races outstanding, 233 Republicans so far, 194 Democrats, eight unresolved races.

If the Democrats capture a few of those they may be up to 198 or 199, which would be a plus-five or plus-six for them.

And then, Ashleigh, you were just in Florida on the presidential side. We still don't know if that's going to go for Obama or for Romney, so the election is truly not over yet. BANFIELD: Well, get your dinner in the fridge because that's going to take a few more days. I'll get to that in a bit.

And, also, no time off for you until you get us the results on those outstanding races. Thank you, Paul. Appreciate it.

STEINHAUSER: You've got it.

BANFIELD: Good solid work from all of our elections folks who have worked around the clock, really, for a long, long time, including the last couple of years putting it together.

Just to let you know, both sides in this divided Congress are promising -- promising -- to work together, to head off fiscal disaster, so we're going to look at that real deep-like with Christine Romans in just a couple of minutes.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, her recovery has been defined by small steps, incremental milestones since her assassination attempt and, today, she will take on perhaps the most painful and most significant figure in her battle. And it's that man, her would-be assassin, Jared Lee Loughner.

Giffords with her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, is going to come face to face with Loughner for his sentencing and it will be her first encounter with him since this horrifying scene in a supermarket parking lot in Tucson, Arizona. The first time Loughner whipped out a pistol, pointed it at her head and fired.

Now, nearly three years later, a bit of justice, maybe a little closure, perhaps somewhat, for Giffords and the families of the six murder victims that Loughner took out and, of course, the 12 others that he also wounded.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BILL BADGER, SURVIVOR OF ARIZONA SHOOTING: You're angry, the first time you see him. And -- but you calm down a little bit.

PAT MAISCH, SURVIVOR OF ARIZONA SHOOTING: I don't know how I'll react. So, I'm planning on speaking. I might change my mind. But I really do have some things I want to say to the judge and to him.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Loughner will be sentenced to life in prison, no possibility for parole, ever, all of that under a plea agreement.

His sentencing will take place less than an hour from now. And Ms. Giffords' husband, Mark Kelly, is expected to speak on behalf of her and, of course, her family.

We have a team inside the courtroom right now and we're going to bring you the details just as soon as that sentencing happens. (COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Well, the president thinks that he has reached the top of a mountain and doing so on Tuesday night -- he did -- but unfortunately he's also getting an up close and personal view of the fiscal cliff that's on the other side. Yay.

So now it's back to that pesky issue of governing and wrangling that pesky place we call Congress, so how is that looking?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: Mr. President, the Republican majority here in the House stands ready to work with you to do what's best for our country.

SENATOR HARRY REID (D), SENATE MAJORITY LEADER: It's better to dance than to fight. It's better to work together. Everything doesn't have to be a fight.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: Well, maybe. Not always, anyway. Kumbaya.

Christine Romans is here, however long that's going to last, that kumbaya moment.

CHRISTINE ROMANS, CNN BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: I can feel so much better, thanks.

BANFIELD: You are not a good actress, but you are very good with business. So, fiscal cliff, no matter what they just said, what's the reality?

ROMANS: Well, they're starting. They're at a starting point now and that's important here. And, even though you have the same players, I think it's important. You said I'm an actress. I've actually been likening it to a play.

We've had the intermission, right, now we're back. They've changed the scene. They've changed the set. They've changed the costumes. And we're going to finish this thing off and they're going to avoid the fiscal cliff.

You know, they all privately agree that we're not going to go over. The president said it in his last debate, remember, when he said, it's not going to happen. It's not going to happen.

The White House has even been telling companies, you don't have to send out layoff notices, which they have to do by law before they have layoffs, because it's not going to happen.

We just don't know how they're going to fix it. We know that they don't think that they're going to do it, but how are they going to fix it? What's it going to mean? It's going to mean tax increases for you, $2000 in tax increases, according to the Tax Policy Center for, say, a middle-income family. You know it's going to be expiring tax cuts like the Bush tax cuts. That means everyone would have higher tax rates.

The alternative minimum tax would - the patch would go away. The payroll tax holiday is $1,000 a year.

I mean, I could go on and on and on. Defense cuts, blah, blah, blah. It would be startling to the economy and, according to the CBO, push you into a recession, so they don't want that to happen.

BANFIELD: Well, they -- I don't, either.

I have been feeling a bit maybe in denial. Much like the doomsday prophecies, I always think, wow, that's sounds serious. That's not going to happen. I feel the same way about the fiscal cliff. I'm not sure why.

But what I don't understand is how Wall Street -- things fell out of the bottom yesterday and much of it is being attributed to the fiscal cliff, which, by the way, how does that have any bearing on whether it was Obama or Romney? That fiscal cliff is there and its Congress.

ROMANS: One of the things that I think today - the reason why stocks did not continue yesterday's sell-off is, in part, because you had the kinds of sound bites you just played. The first day after the election, you had the major players coming out ...

BANFIELD: People are that gullible?

ROMANS: It's not gullible. It's they need a signal that they're going to get this fixed. Investors need a signal that they're going to get this fixed. Although, I guess the stock market is still down 40 more points today. It didn't exactly rally.

But they need a signal. The world needs a signal that the biggest economy and the biggest democracy in the world is not going to fall apart over partisan politics.

BANFIELD: And the president's victory speech where he said we need to work together, et cetera, that's not enough of a signal?

ROMANS: Well, now, they need to show how they're working together. They need to say -- I need to see them dancing, not fighting. And I need to see exactly what John Boehner, the speaker of the House, means by, we're open to additional revenues if, you know, we need to know exactly what that's going to be.

There - there will be the classic, Washington horse trading that's going to start to begin. We haven't had that horse trading for a very long time, so that in of itself is progress.

BANFIELD: People have been too busy campaigning.

ROMANS: I think so. BANFIELD: All right, well, great. You and I have lots of segments ahead and that is specifically revenue, what that means. Is it just taxes or what else can it show itself as?

ROMANS: Close loopholes.

BANFIELD: Closing loopholes.

ROMANS: Finding ways to get the economy to grow. Lots of ways you can grow revenue.

BANFIELD: No vacation for you, either. Thank you, Christine Romans. Nice to see you.

We're back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

PATRICK OPPMANN, CNN HAVANA CORRESPONDENT: The thing that people always ask me is, where do you eat in Cuba, and I always say, paladares.

That means people's homes, private restaurants, the Cubans are able to have in their homes, so let's go into one of my favorites, Cafe Laurent, here in downtown Havana, really one of the best paladares that go to.

We're in Cafe Laurent and, before you go to a paladar in Cuba and it looked like what it was, someone's home. Here, you can see they have a bar man here making mojitos and it's really set up like a restaurant, but it's not a government restaurant. It's actually someone's business and until recently that's not something that was very common in Cuba.

The laws have been changing, allowing people to have their own businesses. This paladar is famous for its seafood, so I think that's what we're going to be trying today.

So, they just brought me this really beautiful plate of lobster and shrimp and fish and it looks great. I have to say sitting out here on this terrace where of you have an incredible view of Havana, this really nice breeze.

It's just a really relaxing place to be. I can't think of a better place to be right now and this looks fantastic. So, I'm going go ahead and dig in.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: Who will go and who will stay? President Obama's in place for four more years, but some of his top aides might not be. In fact, several won't stick around. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, both said they are not too interested in a second term.

Wolf Blitzer joins us now. Wolf, how big a shake-up are we going to see in the cabinet? And, as far as those two are concerned, is it likely that they will honor what they've been saying and is it likely that other people will get shuffled out, who may not have been expecting it?

WOLF BLITZER, HOST, THE SITUATION ROOM: There always is at the beginning of a second term of any administration, whether Bill Clinton's second term or George W. Bush's second term, and now a Barack Obama second term. There always are people who leave the cabinet either because they want to leave or because they're exhausted or because the president and the vice president want them to leave for whatever reasons.

Hillary Clinton has made it abundantly clear four years is the most traveled ever secretary of state is more than enough. She's ready to move on and do some other stuff. Who might replace her, you ask. Might be John Kerry, the chairman of the Foreign Committee. Susan Rice, she certainly was on a very, very short list of possible secretaries of state. But in the aftermath of Benghazi and the war, that could be a problem because of what she said on those five Sunday television shows and Republican anger at her as far as the confirmation process might be concerned. So we'll wait and see on that.

I think you're right. Timothy Geithner, the secretary of the treasury, he made it clear he wants to move on. Who might replace him? Speculation that Jack Lew, the White House chief of staff, who twice served as the budget director, OMB director and Obama administration earlier in the Clinton administration, he could be a candidate. There are others as well.

I suspect Eric Holder, the attorney general, might move on, and we'll see what happens on that front.

But a lot of the other cabinet secretaries, I think are going to stay. I think they would like to stay and they probably will. So it's maybe not going to be as huge a shake-up as there often.

BANFIELD: I want to play for you something that Soledad O'Brien had on "Starting Point" this morning. It was an interview with Kay Bailey-Hutchison, who has been in Congress a very long time, and on her way out, so perhaps she can speak a lot more freely than she might have otherwise. She was talking about in a very blunt fashion, how a couple of Congressional candidates may have done some serious damage, particularly among women voters on their comments about rape.

Let me play that for you and I want to ask you something on the other side. Have a look.

WOLF: All right.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. KAY-BAILEY HUTCHISON, (D), TEXAS: I think we had Republican candidates who got very high profile and said some very stupid things.

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, HOST, STARTING POINT: Akin, Mourdock.

HUTCHISON: Uh-huh. I think that really tainted the party, even though Mitt Romney came right out and said, this is not right, we disagree with this. The party leadership did the same thing. No one embraced Todd Akin after he said those things, including the Republican Campaign Committee. But yet, it was used in the political sense against us. And it was -- it was -- I think it's the feeling that Republicans don't get it.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: So, Wolf, here's my question. She's not the only one coming in with some -- the after-the-fact armchair quarterbacking -- quarterbacking anyway. There are a lot of conservatives who are very critical of their own party right now, suggesting that maybe they just didn't make the right pick for the head of their party.

My question to you is, do you think that the conventional wisdom is they picked someone not conservative enough, or did they pick someone who was too conservative for what has become a changing demographic society in this section?

BLITZER: I think there's no doubt they were close. They got very close in several of these battleground states. And Mitt Romney, you know, with a few things going differently, potentially could have even had a win in some of these battleground states. That could have made the difference.

But, sure, there were plenty of mistakes. That whole Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock uproar, when you had not one but two Republican candidates for Senate talking about rape and abortion. That's not going to necessarily, you know, be positive, positive spillover. Usually, there's spillover from the top candidates down the ballot, if you will, down-ballot. This particular case, it went up. And it hurt, I think, the Republican brand, particularly among women. And that's why you had that lopsided gender gapping into going into the election.

But there were plenty of other mistakes. And there was some bad luck, I think, for Mitt Romney at the very end. You had three or four days when everybody was obsessed with the Superstorm Sandy. It's not necessarily that Chris Christie helped the president so much, but the conversation changed from what seemed to be some momentum going for Romney and it just halted. It just stopped completely while the country was focused in, understandably, on what was going on in New Jersey and Statin Island and Long Island and elsewhere.

BANFIELD: Right.

All right, Wolf, thank you for your insight, as always. So appreciated. Great work on the election. I know you were probably very tired. You deserve lots of days off, but we don't want you to leave.

Thank you, Wolf. To our viewers, don't forget that Wolf is going to be -- he doesn't take a break. He's amazing. He's going to be back on 4:00 eastern. One of the things he will probably talk about as well is the effect of the Hispanic vote. It was a big factor. And the Republicans are going to have to look into that deeply. That's in "The Situation Room," of course, here on CNN. Would it be on anywhere else? No.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: How many of us do you suppose could raise our hand and say we know somebody who has been a victim of gun violence? If you think about that, there's a very unfortunate answer for a lot of inner city kids. A lot would raise their hands if they were asked that question. Kids, kids would raise their hands. In Philadelphia, an educator and a trauma surgeon were so worried about this they're trying to keep more kids from knowing a lot about this and from becoming victims themselves and they're doing it in a very interesting way. Here's what they're doing. They're reliving the last 15 minutes of another young person's life.

Sarah Hoye is checking it all out in this week's "Black in America" story.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SCOTT CHARLES, EDUCATOR & CO-FOUNDER, CRADLE TO GRAVE PROGRAM: Welcome. I work with gunshot patients. How many of you guys know somebody who has been shot?

SARAH HOYE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Philadelphia educator, Scott Charles, is on a mission to save young lives. Charles and Amy Goldberg, chief trauma surgeon at Temple University Hospital, co- founded the Cradle to Grave Program to help reduce gun violence in the City of Brotherly Love.

SCOTT: What we're going to do today is take you behind the scenes, pull back the curtain and let you know what we do.

HOYE: The Cradle to Grave Program brings local high school students inside Temple's trauma center to relive the final 15 minutes of life of a teen killed by gun violence.

SCOTT: That young boy stood over Lamont and fired 10 more shots into him.

AMY GOLDBERG, TRAUMA SURGEON & CO-FOUNDER, CRADLE TO GRAVE PROGRAM: You know, gun violence can kill. I think it's really our responsibility to prevent these kids from coming in.

HOYE: Among America's largest cities, Philadelphia's homicide rate is the worst, with African-Americans making 85 percent of the victims.

SCOTT: You know, statistics suggest that as a young black man you have a greater chance of being shot and killed in Philadelphia than you would have if you were a soldier serving in the conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq. That's absurd to me. HOYE: Since 2006, more than 7,000 students have come to the Cradle to Grave Program.

UNIDENTIFIED STUDENT: I don't want that to happen to me. I want to be able to live, be something my mom wants me to be.

GOLDBERG: We want to really teach them the preciousness of life, that in an instant, your life can be changed forever.

HOYE: Change they want for the better.

Sarah Hoye, CNN, Philadelphia.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: So "Who is Black in America"? Is it being determined by the color of your skin, by your family, by what society says, or is it determined by somebody completely different? My colleague, who is better than anyone else in the business on this one, is going to examine provocative questions about skin color, discrimination, and race in a new documentary "Who is Black in America"? And it's premiering Sunday, December 9th at 8:00 p.m. eastern only on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I want to thank every American who participated in this election --

(CHEERING)

OBAMA: -- whether you voted for the very first time --

(CHEERING)

OBAMA: -- or waited in line for a very long time.

(CHEERING)

OBAMA: By the way, we have to fix that.

(CHEERING)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BANFIELD: President Obama during his acceptance speech, making a reference to Florida, got to fix that, 12 years after the election debacle of 2000 -- the infamous hanging chads, the butterfly ballots. Another presidential election is done but once again, not in the state of Florida. That state is still counting ballots. We're two days past the election now. If electoral votes still unclaimed right now. Unlike in 2000, those 29 electoral votes are, at this point, a nonfactor to the presidency. Thank you. However, it doesn't change this fact. This was the unbelievable situation for a lot of people in Florida. I was there. I saw it firsthand. Long lines wrapping around for blocks on end. Voters forced to wait for hours and hours in the dark and in the light. And one woman passing out after standing in that light sun for two hours. Paramedics having to come to her attention. No shade in those long lines in the Florida sun. Some still waiting to vote even after the election for Mr. Obama had been called. We had our winner and they were still trying to vote. Outrageous.

And remember, it didn't have to be this way again. The legislature led by Republicans reduced early voting days. They took them down for 14 to eight days. Critics say it was done because Democrats are the ones who tend to vote early.

Then, there were those extraordinarily long ballots. Here's just a sample. Look out all of these issues. This is just an example of what was inside a ballot once you got in there, not the actual ballot. In three language. sometimes it was 12 pages. It took a long time to get through that stuff standing there in your privacy booth. Some people spent 30 minutes to vote, to go through it all.

The big question is now, not so much who will win Florida, of course, but who is going to step up and fix this mess? It's ridiculous. Who is responsible for it? Who is going to be held accountable for it? You heard President Obama, "Fix it."

Former Florida Governor Charlie Crist, a Republican turned Independent, had a telling explanation. In an interview with the "Huff Post," he slammed the current governor, Rick Scott, Republican, for refusing to extend early voting hours. He said this: "The only thing that makes any sense as to why this is happening and being done is voter suppression. That's unconscionable. I think it's just the wrong thing to do. And the right thing to do would be to sign an executive order to make sure this doesn't happen and you expand the hours."

Now, we reached out to Governor Rick Scott to explain what I saw and what the world saw unfolding in Florida because he ultimately is the answer to this. Governor Scott's office very politely declined our extension for the interview. This is what he said to us today through his office. Thanks for the invite but the governor's schedule is already set today.

I understand that, Governor Scott. You are a very busy man and we are two days after the election. I understand that. For the record, we are going to keep pressing you for answers until we get them.

We also called and e-mailed the secretary of state. His public relations people said they were going to try to get him on the phone this hour, but he wasn't able to join us.

We also reached out to other Florida election officials who declined to come on TV with me to explain this.

But the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Carlos Gimenez, said, yes. And he joins us live from Miami-Dade, Florida, right now.

Sir, thank you. Thank you for stepping up to the plate and joining me.

I have some very tough questions for you. I just spent a very uncomfortably warm and frustrating two days in Miami-Dade with a lot of people who were very, very nice and very pissed off. Why on earth did this happen? You have plenty of experience with problems. How did it get so bad?

CARLOS GIMENEZ, MAYOR OF MIAMI-DADE COUNTY, FLORIDA: Well, this is a -- what you would call a perfect storm down here in Florida in terms of our elections. Without a doubt, we have some operational issues that we to take care of. I am convening a special council to look at our election sites and why it happened.

For the vast majority of our election sites there were about ten that had unacceptably long times of waiting, and so those are the places we're going to focus in on. And we had the longest ballot in Florida history. It probably took voters two and a half longer to vote.

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: OK, good point, Mr. Mayor.

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: A long ballot.

GIMENEZ: Yes.

BANFIELD: Let me stop you right there because I want to ask you -- you just were elected -- I just checked out on the web site here -- August 14th, 2012. Presumably, your voters and your constituency all had a chance to go to a polling place and fill out a ballot for you. Why could you not have taken some of those Congressional issues and perhaps put them into that election and maybe split them up and made that ballot a lot shorter? I saw that thing in the polling place where I was -- nine pages. Some people said it was a half hour just to read through it. It's not fair.

GIMENEZ: Well, the state -- there are a number of state constitutional amendments that had to go on our general election, and there was also some charter amendments in the county that also had to go on a general election. There were individual cities that also put their questions on the general election, and so that created this extraordinary long ballot.

Look, I sat --

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: But whose responsibility is it to say these are important issues, yes, but we don't have space for you in the interest of making sure people get their right to vote, which is far more important than anybody else's issues that they want to jam on to that.

Listen, everybody wants an issue on a ballot. At some point you have to cut it off. Whose responsibility was it to say, no, you're too late, there are too many issues already on the ballot some?

GIMENEZ: No, listen. The -- this is a -- you're damned if you do, you're damned if you don't. If you don't put the state constitutional amendments on a general ballot, then they're going to say, well, not everybody got the right to vote on a general election on changing the state's constitution. If you don't put charter amendment on a general election, again, people say not everybody got to vote. And the same thing happens with the city. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Unfortunately, what happened is a lot of different entities, the state, county, cities, decided put a lot of questions on the ballot on this particular ballot because it was a general election ballot.

Then we had the issue -- then we had the issue of redistricting. It was very, very late.

Look, in Miami-Dade County, the vast majority of the people, yes, it took some time, but it didn't take them six hours to vote. We're going to take a look at that. We're going to fix that. But we also had fewer days of early voting, and that was changed by the state legislature and signed into law by the governor. So we need to expand early voting hours again like we had in the past. We also need to expand the number of early voting sites that we had here in this county and other counties. And also we need to look at our own operational issues as to why it was that, you know, people took so long to get through the process.

I want to explain one of the reasons is you have this extraordinarily long ballot that, for me -- I was already knowledgeable about everything. It took me 10 to 15 minutes to get through that ballot. Can you imagine somebody who didn't know everything?

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: No, I talked to them.

GIMENEZ: That's the reason.

BANFIELD: They were livid, as was I. From 4:00 in the morning on, I watched people who had already waited four hours in prior lines, early voting, couldn't vote. Came back and after six hours of lines over three days finally cast their ballot. Took them half an hour.

Mayor, I know we're about to lose our satellite line with you, otherwise I would keep you on until the top of the show, because I have all of these questions that I've written out that --

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: I can't even tell right now. I know I'm going to lose you. Go ahead, quickly.

GIMENEZ: I want to say that -- I want to say that we've stopped -- we're done counting in Miami-Dade County. One of the reasons that it took so long is that we had an unprecedented drop of over 55,000 absentee ballots. (CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: I saw that.

GIMENEZ: Those go through a completely different process. The signatures have to be verified by people that are trained in signature verification. That's why it took us a little bit longer.

(CROSSTALK)

BANFIELD: That part is fine. I get that.

GIMENEZ: Like the president said, we are going to fix this.

BANFIELD: OK. Good. Because, you know what, we had this conversation -- not you -- 12 years ago when I was in this mess for 36 days. I had this conversation with many people before who said, never again will you have to go through this in Florida, and here I am. I'm getting too old, I hate to say it.

But, listen, Mayor Gimenez, I really do appreciate. You are the only person who responded to our requests, and I am still going to hold the colleagues that you got up in state, Ken (INAUDIBLE) and Rick Scott to task every single day until they answer. Ultimately, they're at the top of this heap, and they need to answer to this.

Mayor, thank you so much, sir.

(CROSSTALK)

GIMENEZ: Can I say one more thing? Could I say one more thing?

BANFIELD: Yes.

GIMENEZ: I need to -- OK, I need to apologize for those fine people, those fine voters in Miami-Dade County who stood in line for six hours. But I also have to tip my hat to them for standing in line for six hours --

BANFIELD: Yes.

GIMENEZ: -- and doing the right thing and voting. Thank you. It's not going to happen again in Miami-Dade County.

BANFIELD: I'm sure sorry to those people that ultimately, after hours, had to drop out for child care issues, for work, or for my other reason.

Mayor, thank you so much. I hope we talk on better terms --

GIMENEZ: Thank you.

BANFIELD: -- at another time.

And coming up, we're also going it talk to Wendy Weiser, who is the director of the Democracy Program at NYU's Brennan Center for Justice. She's going to talk about what it really means when you just have to stand that long and maybe not even get to vote.

Back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BANFIELD: So you just heard me interviewing the mayor of Miami-Dade County and asking, what on earth is happening in Florida, particularly, your county, which experienced such long lines and such trouble for voters just trying to exercise their constitutional right.

Joining us is Wendy Weiser who is with the Brennan Center for Justice.

And I have to ask you, in your knowledge, what recourse do people of Florida have? How can this be fixed, and how do I know that the same thing isn't going to happen, because I said these things back in 2000?

WENDY WEISER, DIRECTOR, DEMOCRACY PROGRAM, NYU BRENNAN CENTER FOR JUSTICE: Unfortunately, you don't know the same thing is going to happen. It is disheartening that Floridians care, about participating in our democracy that they're willing to wait so long to do so, but it is a national disgrace that they have to do so. Americans are angry about this. The president said let's fix that. This is a real opportunity.

BANFIELD: Does that make a difference that the president said let's fix that in a victory address? Does that make a difference?

WEISER: I think it makes a real difference. This makes it clear that it's a serious national agenda item, that we now have a real national priority to fix our voting system to make sure that our democracy actually works. And there are some real good solutions out there that can make a difference. We need to have minimum voting and early voting opportunities for every American so they can have equal opportunities to participate.