Why Hill GOP members should stop being 'slobby' and 'un-unified'

>>> a beautiful shot of the capitol. i just went over to the fax machine . and mika just faxed her "must-read op-ed." she's in nice. this has come straight from nice.

>> unbelievable.

>> mika 's home office in nice, the south of france . it's a good place to go in january.

>> yeah, january. not so good.

>> so why is she there?

>> she doesn't have to get up at 4:30 in the morning.

>> smart.

>> she's got that villa.

>> you've got to use the villa.

>> i didn't know there were, like, 30,000 square foot villas.

>> people to look after her.

>> she will tell you that she is doing this, it's like "downton abbey." you keep the villa in the south of france going on because it's for the staff. it's for the little people .

>> moral obligation.

>> exactly.

>> for the small people .

>> she's in it for the little people . and so mika had one of her little people , i guess, from the south of france fax this to me. and she's picked out peggy noonan 's must-read op-ed from "the wall street journal ." "lessons conservatives need to learn" from our dear friend, peggy . "some conservatives are saying mrs. clinton looked unhinged, angry. in their dreams. she came across as human and indignant and emerged untouched. what air there was in the benghazi balloon leaked out. all this looked like another example of mindless personal entrepreneurialism of the republicans on the hill. they're all in business for themselves. they make their speech, asked their question, and it's not connected to anybody else's speech or question. they aren't part of something that moves and makes progress. minority parties can't act like this, in such a slobby, un-unified way. hill republicans continue not to understand that they are the face of the party when the cameras are trained on washington. they don't understand how they look, which is like ants on a sugar cube . and richard wolffe , as we read peggy noonan 's words and we see hillary clinton 's testimony, some of which i didn't buy, for good reason. and we can get into that later if somebody wants to. but we see their intemperate remarks even about the secretary of state's emotions. i wonder if they've seen ms. clinton 's standings in the poll, you know, the latest poll has her at a 67% favorableability rating and wonder if they really think that they're going to draw blood by making intemperate comments. peggy 's exactly right. this is a party that's not unified. we've got a lot of solo players who make a lot of money, raise a lot of money, saying stupid things that harm the party.

>> right. this does get back to bobby jindal saying let's not be the stupid party here. it's not just going up against clinton with high popularity numbers. it's that she had a strong sense and justified sense of righteous indignation here. and it was about the lives of the people who were lost. so to the extent -- and it's fairly limited -- but to the extent that those republicans who were out there on their, you know, personal mission on benghazi, that they had any justification for pursuing this in the way they did, it was about the lives of the people who were lost. and here you're going up against hillary clinton who was really very genuine in saying that she was moved and that their obscure, arcane questions about sunday talk shows were not nearly as important as the security questions and about the people whose lives were lost. you know, she outmaneuvered them. she outmaneuvered them with genuine feeling. and people across washington need to understand that voters respond to genuine emotion as opposed to the games they're playing around talking points .

>> and harold, give her her due. she's been a great secretary of state. you can do that as a republican. you can say that you're moved by her own heartfelt emotion over the death of her friends. and the ambassador. you can do all of that. but you can quietly -- and i think more persuasively -- ask the question of secretary clinton , secretary clinton , we respect you so much, and we know you did everything you could do. could i ask, though, why didn't you pay more attention to the individual cable that came in from the ambassador before he died? and then, of course, that's when she came back. they actually had her on the defensive. oh, i get millions of ca -- if they had not shifted into overdrive, they could go yes, you do get millions of cables every year addressed to you, but you don't get even a dozen cables addressed to you from an ambassador in a war zone telling you that his life's on the line. i respect you, madam secretary.

>> not only with emotion but with leadership. i think peggy 's point that the discombobulated state of republicans, there's a disconnect between what they're asking. they seemed not to have an overall -- overarching agenda other than, again, to score personal points themselves. and what i never got out of the hearing, i want to hear -- and i thought she did a very good job and would love to have that conversation later. i don't know where she had deficiencies, but i would have loved to have heard republicans say tell us how we can know going forward that cables like this coming in someone will see. and two, what steps are being taken and what can congress do to ensure that you have the resources going forward? that would have been a win-win for republicans and dpemocrats and the country would have felt better.

>> they should have just stayed on it. you got the cable.

>> calmly.

>> calmly. i respect you, madam secretary, okay. and i know you would have done everything you could do to protect these people. but you've got to admit, when you get a cable from an am ambassador that died soon after saying he needed security and you had ignored that and he had been telling people on the hill, we need more security, they should have gone that way instead of questioning whether she was faking emotion.

>> that was the most compelling piece of the whole testimony where they had some room. not that she had to have personally looked at that cable, but if she had said looked, i get 1.4 million cables, fine. who's in charge of reading cables? isn't there somebody who should have read this cable?

>> yeah, there's an ambassador in a war zone that says his life's in danger.

>>> still ahead, "the new yorker's" dexter filkins , david gregory and eugene robinson . we're back in a moment. [ kimi ]