Obama working to avoid second-term curse

>>> less than an hour from now, president obama meets with labor and civic leaders to discuss how to avert the fiscal cliff. let me bring in jodi cantor. jodi , good morning. president is hoping to apply lessons of his failed attempt to cut a budget deal last year.

>> what the president has to do to build his mandate is to play an inside game and outside game. us use that political asset white house more than ever before. i would 40 republicans there, 40 democrats. but the outside game, means he has to mobilize that base.

>> jodi , do you see the president approaching this second term differently.

>> oh, absolutely. remember the debt ceiling crisis was the endear in the president obama . there's only the united states of america . then at a critical moment in his presidency, he couldn't even bring red and blue together to come one a common sense budget deal. he has something rare and valuable right now, which is a chance to almost rewrite that history and to do things very differently this time.

>> without re-election to worry about, how does that change things for him.

>> obviously, things have shifted in congress. you could also feel the change the day after election day , with the republicans recalibrating what they were willing to do. president obama , i wrote in the paper last week, about his difference with people like doris kearns goodwin , to kind of chart his long path. one thing they said consistently to him privately is what doris kearns goodwin said on meet the press. one of the things they told the president he has to do a better job creating a day-to-day link with the nation. having the nation really understand what he's trying to do and being much more persuasive.

>> you talk about they have told him to stop looking back. are the particular sort of skills and mindsets that he has that could help him avoid that?

>> i think what the president has on his side, he's had one of the great learning curves in american political history . think about when he came to washington in january 2009 . he didn't have a ton of washington experience, managerial experience, national security experience. he has all of those things now. he's acquired all of that knowledge the hard way. i think it's very interesting even the administration's language in the past two days has been lessons learned . things that we would like to do differently this time. they're clearly sending a message that not everything went perfectly the first time around.

>> you can't help, i suppose, when you're reelected president to think about your legacy and that you have four more years of opportunities, what do you sees as his priorities as he considers how history will judge him?

>> what's interesting president obama is a little precocious in this regard. all presidents worry about his legacy. his president was worrying about his president legacy when he a couple of years out of the illinois state senate . he said from the beginning i don't want to be a regular president. i want to leave something lasting behind. i want to be a. transformational president. like a roosevelt or a reagan. from the beginning, he set that bar very, very, very high. now his second term is kind of a chance to make good on that promise.

>> jodi , good to see you.

>> thank you.

>>> today's tweet of the day, comes from someone still trying to figure out the whole