From last night’s “All-Stars.”

On House Democrats accusing the CIA of lying to Congress:

There’s a truth issue, and there’s a politics issue. On the truth, we need to hear from the head of the CIA, what he said.
He’s not going to tell us in detail, obviously, what he said in a closed session, what was it, [but he can give] the general area, where in the world, what time, was something concealed or lied about? And he is the one who would know.
In the meantime, the politics of this are puzzling. The only advantage I can see that Democrats are gaining is to blacken the name of the Bush administration, which is, of course, an exercise in redundancy. There is no advantage in that. It’s been done.
On the other hand, it hurts the Democrats in two ways. First of all, as Mara indicated, it puts the Democrats, who are in charge of the Congress and the executive, at war with their own CIA in wartime. It’s insane. And it’s going to undermine Panetta in the CIA he is supposed to actually lead.
And secondly, if it was an attempt–and it looks as if it was an attempt–to cover for Pelosi and her accusations of lying–(a) it doesn’t work, because, as we heard earlier in the show, this lapse [in CIA disclosure], if it occurred, was not about interrogation, and her issue was interrogation.
So, (a) it will not help her in substance. And (b) it raises the issue of her veracity, her changing stories, which had hurt her a few months ago, and had been dormant. Now it’s revived. It’s on the table again.

On Obama’s approval numbers slipping:

This is the axiom of American politics. In the absence of a scandal or a losing war, the main determinant of a president’s approval is the economy. And what he [Obama] has got on his hands–rising unemployment and a stock market that is now, after a slight run up, again in decline.
So people are feeling unhappy economically, and that’s why his numbers are down.
His problem is that he was elected to fix the economy and this recession. But Obama is an architect. He is not a plumber. His idea is to revolutionize American society with the broad reforms he wanted in education and health and cap-and-trade in energy.
Well, he can’t sell that at a time when everybody is hurting. He had assumed early on that he could use the crisis as a way to get all these reforms done the way FDR did, but, in fact, it’s undermining him. Unless he fixes unemployment and the recession, he is not going to get anything else.
His problem is that he tried it with a stimulus which is, as of now, rather unsuccessful. And I think he’s going to have to have either a second stimulus or a facsimile of it as a way of at least showing–even if economically it’s not sound–but politically, as a way of showing he’s out there trying to get the shovels going.