Obama targeted as partisan; Plouffe responds

>> said all the president has done is attacked the other side and not worked with congress. even mayor bloomberg who endorsed the president for a second term said he was still disappointed by the president. this is part of his remarks or his op-ed he wrote in that endorsement. in 2008 , he writes, obama ran as a pragmatic problem solver and consensus builder. but as president, he devoted little time and effort to developing and sustaining a coalition of centrists which doomed hope for any real progress on illegal guns, immigration, tax reform , job creation, and deficit reduction. and rather than uniting the country around a message of shared sacrifice, he engaged in partisan attacks and has embraced a divisive agenda based on distributing income rather than creating it.

>> well, mayor bloomberg had a lot of other positive things to say. david, you have covered this politic for four years carefully. you know how often he has reached out to the republicans. we have done a lot of things with the republicans. we cut taxes for the middle class and small business . signed trade deals to expand markets. patent reform to help our enttrurs. -- entrepreneurs. ending don't ask, don't tell. no question there's a lot more to do. but here is the picture. governor romney if elected has promised to plunge this congress and this country into a bitter battle over repealing health care . do we think that's really going to help the tone in washington? absolutely not. he has promised to rubber stamp a tea party agenda. you know, senator reid said friday that the romney agenda is d.o.a. so the notion that governor romney will rubber stamp a tea party agenda and help solve the dysfunction in washington, it's going to be worse.

>> before you go, i want to ask you about what is still both a highly politicized and very important question about this raid in libya on our consulate in benghazi that killed our ambassador chris stevens . a lot of misinformation about this and a politicization of this in the time days. but still important questions that seem to boil down to this. why was security at our consulate so inadequate, particularly when there were warnings in advance about an attack on the consulate? why was there such little force nearby to respond to the kind of attack that ultimately took place?

>> well, david, that's exactly why the state department has an accountability review board that's going to -- right now is undertaking a very thorough investigation. obviously, as facts come out, those have been released. but admiral mullen and mr. pickering, these are respected leaders who are going to see what happened, what lessons can we learn from this.

>> why not put out the facts before the election? are you deliberately waiting until after election day before you respond to these questions in a detailed fashion?

>> absolutely not. you know, all the information, obviously, that has been commented on has been, you know, because we have released it. an investigation like this is very important. we have to get it right so we can learn lessons here. and i think the president has been very clear. he wants to understand -- make sure the country understands fully what happened. what lessons do we learn from that. and hold folks accountable. i will speak for one moment on the politics. it's remarkable. look back at 2000 in october. the uss cole took place weeks before the election. 17 sailors were killed tragically. and what then governor bush said was, we need to speak as one voice. and really for that entire campaign, president bush and then dick cheney said we need to speak with one voice. we need to find out what happened here. and i do think the politicization of this has been unprecedented. but the important thing here is we have to fully understand what happened here and take those lessons forward so that we can protect these diplomats doing such heroic work.