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New Day

Frustration On The Hill; Bobby Jindal Calls GOP Leaders "Democrat-Lite"; New Push To End Fighting In Ukraine; Chris Paul Criticizes Female Referee

Aired February 06, 2015 - 07:30   ET

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

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: A renewed effort from western leaders this morning to slow Moscow's deadly aggression in Ukraine. Vice President Biden meeting with European officials in Brussels, where he said Russia cannot be allowed to redraw the map of Europe. Vladimir Putin also set to sit down 90 minutes from now with the leaders of France and Germany as the E.U. weighs another round of sanctions for Russia.

CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Another warfront: Jordan claims it destroyed ISIS training centers and arms depot during a round of airstrikes in Syria. This is just the beginning of their revenge, says Jordan, vowing to wipe out the terror group to avenge the brutal burning death of their fighter pilot.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: Back here stateside, five babies who attend a suburban Chicago day care have contracted the measles. Officials say ten more children, including some just too young for vaccinations, could also have been exposed. They have not identified the source of those affections -- infections, rather, at the center. So far this year, there have been 102 confirmed measles cases in 14 states, 94 of those are linked to the Disneyland outbreak.

MICHAELA PEREIRA, CNN ANCHOR: -- exposed. They have not identified the source of those infections at the center. So far this year, there have been 102 confirmed measles cases in 14 states, 94 of those are linked to the Disneyland outbreak.

ALISYN CAMEROTA, CNN ANCHOR: Backlash for President Obama this morning over comments he made seeming to equate Islamic terrorism with violent acts committed by Christians. At the national prayer breakfast, Obama said quote, "People committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

The president used the crusades and the inquisition as examples along with slavery and Jim Crow as U.S. examples of atrocities committed in the name of Christ. CHRIS CUOMO, CNN ANCHOR: Accuracy versus popularity, he's going to -- he's going to hear it today about this. Let's get to "Inside Politics" on NEW DAY with John King. What do you think? You know, you're hearing about this. Is there a fair/unfair line here?

JOHN KING, CNN HOST, "INSIDE POLITICS": Between the president's comments yesterday on religion?

CAMEROTA: Yes.

KING: Look, everything is fair game in this thing. The president is trying to remove himself and take an historical perspective. At the same time, he's asking Congress for authorization for use of force. If you believe that, Mr. President, why did you have to say it now? That's going to be a part of the conversation.

If you look at the blogs on the right, they're outraged by this. The big question I have is, does it impact now as he asks Congress for the votes to authorize military force in the ISIS fight. We'll see that one as it plays forward.

The president obviously thought about what he was going to say. He wanted to say it and now he's in the middle of a political thicket, shall we say. Let's go "Inside Politics" this morning, going to try to connect some dots here in Washington.

And here to help me share their reporting and their insights, Jackie Kucinich of the "Daily Beast" and CNN's Peter Hamby. Connect the dots by saying the Republicans are off the rails right now with their new revolution. They came to Washington.

They have a new Senate majority. They have a bigger House majority and they said they're going to govern. They're having some issues. Let's start with immigration and why they have this dysfunction and the dots I want to connect you to pressures from other forces in the party and the political polarization at the moment.

Let's start with the Speaker John Boehner. The House passed legislation that essentially funds the Department of Homeland Security, but tells President Obama, sorry, you can't do all the things you did just after last year, through executive action.

Speaker John Boehner says now it's up to the Senate, right, the Republicans now control the Senate. Why can't they just embrace what we did and pass it. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER (R), HOUSE SPEAKER: The House did its work. We won this fight. Now it's time for Senate Republicans and Senate Democrats to come together, and to hold the president accountable. He's got a tough job. He's got a tough job over there. I've got a tough job over here. God bless him and good luck.

(END VIDEO CLIP) KING: Boehner's sarcasm, Boehner humor, but Mitch McConnell has a different dynamic. His guys run statewide. He's got 13 or 14 guys, Republican senators. Number one, he doesn't have 60 votes. He only has 54.

And then he has Republican senators from states Obama has won at least once and six or seven guys on the ballots in 2016 from states Obama carried twice. Why can't the Republicans get themselves out of their immigration quicksand?

JACKIE KUCINICH, "THE DAILY BEAST": It's also the traditional like House versus the Senate. It was a dream that it would everything would just go through and go to the president and he would veto it and they win.

But I think with immigration, the other thing about the Senate is one person can stop up the whole thing. So you have people like Ted Cruz, who is taking the very right and you're right.

You have people on the swing states, that don't want, don't want to take a vote on immigration. So he hasn't, Mitch McConnell hasn't learned to thread the needle yet.

PETER HAMBY, CNN NATIONAL POLITICAL REPORTER: In 2016, there will be a lot of 2010 Senate Republicans up for re-election in swing states, as you mentioned, Ron Johnson in Wisconsin, Richard Bern in North Carolina is another example.

But Jackie is right, there's so many procedural things going on here, they need to get 60 votes in the Senate and they don't have that many votes. That's about it. So John Boehner loves that the pressure is off him and he gets to point at Mitch McConnell now.

KING: The procedural rules wouldn't be an issue if they had compromise and consensus over what to do the Republicans can't negotiate with the Democrats on immigration because they can't negotiate with themselves first. They can't resolve their own differences over what to do. They're stuck.

As they try to resolve it in Washington, sometimes you say well there's a presidential campaign is unfolding. Let's see if the leaders out there are going to help the party find its way. Jeb Bush has one view.

You have another potential candidate. Listen here to Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. He was in town last night. This is not just about immigration. It's about every issue. Bobby Jindal says why did we elect all these Republicans if they're just going to compromise?

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

GOVERNOR BOBBY JINDAL (R), LOUSIANA: My message to the Republican leaders, Republican Party, elected officials is first, do what you promised us you were going to do when you asked us to vote for you.

Secondly, don't become just cheaper Democrats, we don't need Democrat lite. Quite frankly -- if the whole point of this election was simply to get John Boehner and Mitch McConnell nicer offices, let's give them back.

I mean, what is the point of having a Republican Party if it's only going to become a second liberal party in Washington, D.C. --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: So some of the potential candidates for president are trying to push Congress more to the right. You have a Jeb Bush who in his speech to the Detroit Economic Club said why are we fighting over immigration? This should be easy to deal with, easy for him to say.

HAMBY: Well, one thing Bobby Jindal is talking about here is the Republican proposals to -- for an Obamacare alternative. He's saying that they might raise taxes. So he doesn't want Republicans to be Democrat lite.

But Bobby Jindal, an Ivy-leaguer and a Rhodes scholar is now the red meat guy and the national/political conversation in the Republican Party is more about what he's saying and what Jeb Bush is saying and what Scott Walker is saying than anything in Washington.

So when you have people like Bobby Jindal or Scott Walker or Chris Christie, throwing red meat to Iowans, that's where the media is going. And that puts pressure on people in the House, too, I mean, and people in the Senate. The conservative energy right now is where it's at.

KUCINICH: And Bobby Jindal used to be in the House. So there's that, too, I always have a problem with someone who says they're not a Washington insider and they've actually worked here.

HAMBY: And he's a governor and there are many governors and former governors running for president. This is always the frame for that. That Washington is broken. You need a reformer, an outsider.

KING: But they think this works, the red meat approach you've noted, even though perhaps that wasn't his past history, they think it works because of this. Look at the Gallup numbers today about polarization in America and President Obama now stands as among the most polarizing presidents, you look at the number on the right. It's the average party gap.

In other words, the president, there's a 70 percent gap between how Democrats view President Obama and how Republicans view President Obama. Look at these numbers here. You know, Bill Clinton at 51 percent, it's striking.

This got started in the Clinton administration, but in the George W. Bush administration and the Barack Obama administration, just crazy, President Obama 13 percent approval among Republicans, 83 percent among Democrats.

And so if you're Bobby Jindal and you want to be the Republican nominee or if you're Ted Cruz, you want to be the Republican nominee. You don't speak to Democrats right now because you're dealing with the primary and we live in this parallel universe America.

KING: Right and if you read into that, it says that Obama is on track to be the most polarizing president in history. So the incentive for Republicans is to bash him now. Academics call this not polarization, but sorting. This is a party realignment thing that's been happening for a while.

Gallup framed this as Republican versus Democrat rather than ideological thing. So the old Reagan Democrats giving Reagan a less polarizing score there now are now Republicans. So that's sort of naturally happening, but your point is exactly right about Republicans attacking Obama. That's a win for them.

KUCINICH: But the danger is when you get into a general election is trying to go back to the center. That's the thing that you haven't seen Republicans be able to do in the last couple of elections.

HAMBY: Jeb Bush is trying to do that. He said twice now to win the general election, you have to be willing to lose the primary.

KING: Right. So let's look at the New Hampshire numbers. The question is will if work. We've got a year before people start voting for president. But this is a new poll, Jeb Bush at 17, Scott Walker at 12. Rand Paul, Chris Christie, Mike Muck Bee, 9, 9, 9, in other words, call Jeb Bush your front-runner.

But lower case that front-runner because he can raise more money than other people at moment because he's got infrastructure in place, but this is a wide-open. The Iowa numbers were similar the other day. This is wild, wild west.

HAMBY: What's happening here is that and this was flew Iowa, Des Moines register Bloomberg numbers. You see Walker and Jeb at the top. That's kind of a by-product of them being in the media conversation. They're on fox news, they're on the internet. They have these little boomlets.

We saw this in 2012 in the primaries, that people would kind of rise and fall, week by week. Just depending on where the national conversation was. We've seen a lot of Jeb and Walker in the news. They're leading the polls but not by much. It's a meaningless number at this point.

KUCINICH: But in New Hampshire, we can kind of figure out, this is not the first time New Hampshire has been this close in a while because you had McCain and you had Romney who did pretty well in big bases in New Hampshire.

KING: Jackie, Peter, thanks for coming in. If you want to learn more about New Hampshire, check out the Hamby-cast. I like to watch peter, he as I like to say, finds the right places to eat on the road. We track his expenses religiously.

CAMEROTA: I respect that in a political reporter. Actually any reporter, the Hambycast, that's very cool. I want a Camerotacast, but I don't want to walk down the cold side of the road. Thanks so much, guys. We'll tune into that.

KING: Make it an indoor cast.

CAMEROTA: Yes, an indoor Camerotacast. Thank you. That's the answer.

Make sure to watch John King and his "Inside Politics" panel break down the best political news of the week every Sunday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.

Back to our program, violence is surging in Eastern Ukraine as pro- Russian separatists push to take control. Jow did the crisis get to this point? We'll walk you through the timeline including what comes next.

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CAMEROTA: The U.S. and Europe in overdrive this morning to bring the conflict in Ukraine to a peaceful end. How did the crisis there get to this point and what can world leaders do now?

Here to walk us through it, literally is Lieutenant Colonel James Reese, a CNN global affairs analyst and a former U.S. Delta Force commander.

Colonel, great to see you again. I say you're going to walk us through it, because we're on the map and you're going explain the chronology of how we got to this point. Let's start with a year ago, March of 2014. That's when Russia annexed Crimea explain what happened there.

LT. COLONEL JAMES REESE, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: The bottom line is Crimea down here in the peninsula, very, very critical strategic, because that's where Russians had before, one of their sub bases down there, it sits on the black sea, very strategic. Not giving it back.

CAMEROTA: That's when it got our attention. That Vladimir Putin was up to something.

REESE: Absolutely.

CAMEROTA: And it seemed as though maybe he would stop with that, but he then he didn't stop.

REESE: Correct.

CAMEROTA: OK, so it moves on. Then in April, a month later of 2014, what happens in Donetsk.

REESE: What you have is down here in the southeast corner along the border of Russia, the area that Russian separatists forces and we believe is Spetznatz, very similar to what we're doing in Iraq, Special Forces advising and assisting, down in this area down here. That I think will be the next annexation for Russia into Ukraine.

CAMEROTA: Back in April of 2014, they started crossing the border. REESE: Absolutely.

CAMEROTA: But Vladimir Putin didn't admit that they were crossing the border.

REESE: That's correct. He said those are just separatists down there, doing internal civil fighting.

CAMEROTA: So what's his game here? Why doesn't he want to -- if he's trying to get all of this land, why isn't he saying that?

REESE: Well, first off, you know, you have to know the history of this area here. I mean, this whole area down here in the south -- mostly Russian and through the years, I mean, this is where the Russians back in early 1900s, a million Ukrainians were killed because they starved them.

And then they brought Russians in and taught them Russian in school and all this. So this is a huge historical aspect and this is Putin, just kind of playing his chess game that he's very good at doing.

CAMEROTA: Another key moment, July 2014, that is during the crash of MH-17. What happened?

REESE: Well, we all know, Chris was there, down in this area right down here is where the crash happened. You know we know now that the Russian separatist forces that were trained on Russian anti-aircraft guns shot down a civilian aircraft.

CAMEROTA: I said crash, but truly, the reason that this is on the map is because they shot it down.

REESE: Absolutely.

CAMEROTA: So that was an escalation moment.

REESE: Absolutely, it was.

CAMEROTA: OK, let's move on to February, what we're in now, 2015, and show us on the map what's happening.

REESE: OK, so the big thing now is you see down here, this whole area along the east is really now the Russian separatists and we'll call Russian Special Forces the advice and assist mission going on. The big area now is the Baltsa Bay, which is actually it is back here a little bit.

There's a little peninsula of land in the middle here. That the Ukrainian forces are surrounding. You can see the circled area here. North to the east and to the south, they're surrounded.

And right now, unfortunately, most of the Ukraine Army is holing in. They've got trench lines digging in. It's a very major transportation hub that helps them resupply from Kiev into the west.

But if they lose that, they lose that major transportation hub, this could cause a lot of desertions in the Ukrainian Army, and right now the Ukrainian kids that are down there, a lot of conscripts so it is a very critical time right now.

CAMEROTA: As we speak, world leaders are meeting in Europe to try to figure out what to do. What is the answer for what to do about Ukraine?

REESE: Well, if we're going to push for the U.S., to push lethal aid in here, I think we're wasting our money.

CAMEROTA: Why?

REESE: We have to -- it's a conscript army. You can push all the lethal aid in there in the world, but if they're not trained to know how to use it, it's just -- it's a waste of money and unfortunately, the Ukrainians, they're so corrupt in their military right now it needs a complete change-over and we're just pushing money at the problem is not going to help.

CAMEROTA: So you don't think lethal aid, you think diplomacy?

REESE: Well, diplomacy always has to be. We have to bring lethal aid, but there's going to have to be folks to train and do things along with it it's not a throw $40 million at it and we'll call it a day.

CAMEROTA: Colonel Reese, thanks so much for illustrating all of this for us to help us understand it. Thanks so much. Let's get over to Michaela.

PEREIRA: Great context there. We are going to turn to the NBA. L.A. Clippers point guard, Chris Paul, coming under fire for some criticism he had for a referee. The referee happened to be a woman. He's getting heat. Were his criticisms sexist?

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PEREIRA: A little round ball here for you. Clippers all-star guard, Chris Paul is igniting a bit of a firestorm for his criticism of a female referee. Mike Galanos has more in this morning's Bleacher Report. Welcome to NEW DAY -- Mike.

MIKE GALANOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Great to see you, Michaela.

PEREIRA: You, too.

GALANOS: Listen to the end of the sound bite that's where Chris Paul in the eyes of some goes wrong here. Tough night for the Clippers getting blown out and the referees were dolling out a lot of technical, five of them go to the Clips, four in one quarter, three in 1 minute. Chris Paul gets one dolled out by rookie ref, Warren Holtcamp. Here's Chris Paul.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS PAUL, L.A. CLIPPERS: I got a tech that I got right there is ridiculous. I don't care what nobody says. I don't care what she says. That's terrible. There's no way that can be a technical. You try to get the ball out fast every time down the court. When we did that, she said, uh-uh. I said, why? She gave me a technical. This might not be for her.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GALANOS: This might not be her for. That's the line that he may have to come clarify today. The league may step in as well. See if they make comments. Holtcamp, by the way, one of two female referees in the league, three of all time. Why was he upset?

Because really the Clippers didn't even show up, they were down by 32 at one point. Lebron James, he and his teammates going off. Lebron 23 points, nine assists. Cleveland's won 12 in a row. That's their longest win streak in five years, again, tough night all the way around for the Clippers.

And a tough day for Tiger Woods, he is really struggling. Mentally we know he shot the worst round in his career an 82, and now the back issues flaring up again. He had to pull out of the Farmers Insurance Open. This is the third time he's had to withdraw in nine starts or eight tournaments.

Many wondering, you guys, will we ever see the dominant Tiger again? Will he ever win a major again? He hasn't won one since the U.S. Open in 2008.

PEREIRA: Good question. We wonder. Good to have you with us, Mike.

GALANOS: Yes.

CUOMO: I give Tiger the benefit that he just needs time. I give Chris Paul the benefit also.

CAMEROTA: Me, too. He's a good dude. I don't know --

PEREIRA: But they often are quite critical of the new refs in the league.

CUOMO: If it was a guy and a rookie, maybe he would have said this isn't for him.

PEREIRA: For him, exactly.

CAMEROTA: I love when you guys talk sports and you include me.

CUOMO: It's not a sports story though, that one.

CAMEROTA: A human story.

CUOMO: We've got to go. I'm getting yelled at. Ukraine is coming close to all-out war. Desperate effort by leaders of France, Germany, and the U.S. all rushing to see if they can get Vladimir Putin to end the Russian aggression, we have the latest. CAMEROTA: And Jordan strikes back hitting ISIS targets in Syria, how will ISIS respond and will Jordan's strikes put the fate of an American hostage there in jeopardy?

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