GOP rejects Obama’s proposal to avert a fiscal cliff

>>> pike, ted strickland and reverend joe watkins , a republican strategist. great to have you all here. i know you were listening to the senator there. reverend joe , i want to start with you. the president is going to speak in the next hour from pennsylvania. we're getting live pictures of his plane arriving right now, as i understand it. it's going to be the first time we're going to hear from him since john boehner and mcconnell rejected this initial offer. what cards do the republicans think that they are holding that they can be so ob ststinent at this point, joe ?

>> i don't know if it's any cards. the hope is that we can get this done for the sake of the american people and the time for posturing has passed. it really is a negotiation. and republicans know at the end of the day that revenues have to be raised. and the question becomes is how's that done? is it going to be done by eliminating dividends or done by raising marginal rates ? and of course, they're against raising marginal rates . but i think at the end of it all, both sides have to give a little bit. and in a perfect world , we'll probably end up somewhere around $1.2 trillion, you know, raised.

>> middle ground , yeah.

>> middle ground . somewhere between boehner's proposal earlier of $800 billion and the president's $1.6 trillion proposal.

>> governor strickland , the president will speak at a toy company today. and a white house official telling us that he'll call on congressional republicans to stop holding the middle class hostage. house gop leadership has put out its own ad featuring a small business also npa that would be affected by the tax hike for people above that $250,000 line. a headline on "politico" that i want to show everybody this week saying "democrats bet republicans cave on taxes oichlt oichlt." are taxes turning into this game of chicken between the two parties right now? and is it a risky bet with just ten legislative days left? i know we have 32 calendar days left but only 10 legislative days left to reach a deal.

>> well, robert, the people have spoken. over 65% of the american people agree with the president. senator boxer was absolutely right. pass the senate bill . give 98% of americans the knowledge that their taxes are not going to go up. i mean, the president won the election. and some of these guys just don't want to accept the fact that the president won the election handily in the ee electoral college and now all the popular votes have been counted. and the single thing the president talked about was that he insisted that the rates go up on the richest among us while protecting the bottom 98%. and that's what the president's trying to get accomplished here. republicans ought to come on board and get this over with so that we can move forward.

>> erin , senator chuck schumer issued this statement as the response to tim geithner's meetings on the hill yesterday. i want to show everybody. if house republicans consider the president's budgeted a new offer, then we await their counteroffer. the ball is now in their court to state what they would do on entitlements and taxes. they have given no specifics so far. so john boehner in that briefing yesterday, he would not get into any of the details about this when asked in press by reporters. was the lead offer, though, all about making republicans tip their hand publicly, and then we know where they're going from there? erin ?

>> well --

>> sorry. erin , can you hear me? hey, erin , i apologize. your mike is not good. so we're going to work on getting that fixed up. joe , let me ask you, is that a way -- the way to get the republicans to tip their hand? because that's the one thing, they've been holding their cards very close to their chest about what they want to do. they don't want to lay out the specifics to look like the bad guy .

>> well, i think there's a chance to make this thing work. i think that republicans , as long as they know that there's serious interest in dealing with spending cuts and cuts to entitlements, that they can give some on revenues. again, if the democrats give them leeway in terms of how you raise those revenues, if they don't say it has to be done completely through marginal rates but rather we can do something with dividends, that becomes a big help as well. but those talks need to move along quickly. and democrats need to be willing to give some on entitlements as well. and make sure that we have spending cuts in place that look like we're moving forward where we want to get.

>> all right. one big thing that was in the news cycle yesterday, the picture of the president and mitt romney having their lunch. one thing that has come out now, governor, is the fact that there is new information coming out from "the new republic" about internal polling data that was taking place deep inside the romney campaign, believing that they would be able to win this election, they had it in the bag. now, the campaign's chief pollster conducted the polls the weekend before the election in several key battleground states . and their estimates, they prove to be way, way off. here are two of the examples. from new hampshire, the polls had them up by 3.5 points. he ended up trailing by 5.6 there. in colorado, campaign polls had them up 2.5 points. he ended down 5.4. how could they have been so off?

>> you know, it's a puzzle because i can tell you that the polling that was taking place here in ohio, and i think across the country by the obama folks, never made those mistakes. it's just amazing to me that these pollsters who are supposed to know a whole lot about this were so far off. i felt very confident in ohio because although romney did okay, i mean, he came close, he was always about 47%, he was never able to go above that. and that was consistent over months. and i think that was also true in some of these other states. and how the romney pollsters messed this up the way they did is just beyond me. they're supposed to know what they're doing.

>> yeah, the data drivenness of the romney campaign. erin , i'm sorry about the mike problems we were having. according to newhouse, the biggest problem was misjudging the voters who would turn out on election day who were a lot younger and a lot less white than the romney campaign had expected. as mitt romney had said, as he gave his one speech hope is not a strategy, is that the biggest lesson that they learned, that republicans can't hope for what the electorate is going to turn out to be on election day ?

>> yeah. look, the romney campaign thought that it would hit its targets and turn out the voters that they thought that they needed, but they did underestimate the kind of turnout that democrats were going to get. i think that's the bottom line . but i did speak to some romney campaign aides just yesterday who said that they were not particularly surprised in the outcome. they were looking at public polls. they heard about the obama campaign 's internal polls, and they knew something was a little bit off. so i wouldn't say that they were particularly surprised.

>> our power panel for this friday, erin mcpike, ted strickland and the reverend joe watkins , my thanks to all three of you.