Van Hollen on Christie keyonte: He talks about needing more truth-telling...I didn't hear truth-telling from him

Tonight at the Republican National Convention, vice presidential nominee Rep. Paul Ryan will take the state to address the party.

This morning on "Starting Point," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) talks with John Berman about playing Ryan in debate preps with Vice President Joe Biden, and the latest on Hurricane Isaac. Van Hollen first addresses questions of whether President Obama should be campaigning while Hurricane Isaac is battering the Gulf Coast.

"The President has been on top of this storm from the beginning," he says. "He, just the other day, authorized the federal government to provide all support necessary through FEMA for this purposes. I know that he is tracking the storm very closely. The Republicans are having their convention here in Florida. The President is also talking about issues that face American families around the country. But he is always monitoring the storm. And as I said, he's provided all of the relief necessary, authorized all the relief necessary."

Van Hollen also weighs in on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's keynote speech at the convention on Tuesday night.

"What I heard Governor Christie talk about was we need more truth-telling. Unfortunately, I didn't hear any more truth-telling from him. And I think they're going to have to persuade the American people why it's brave to say that we're not going to ask the very wealthy in this country to pay one more penny to help reduce the deficit. In fact, they want to give another round of tax cuts to people like Mitt Romney, and that comes at the expense of everybody else," Van Hollen says.

Van Hollen also talked about the challenges of standing in for Ryan in the debate preps with Vice President Biden.

"When I'm talking about the Vice President, I will - I'll try and give their version of the story. But if you look at for example the Romney ad on Medicare, it's a total distortion of the facts. Because what Obamacare did was eliminate a lot of the overpayments to private insurance companies in Medicare and used the savings to strengthen Medicare benefits. They would turn back the clock on that and ask seniors to pay a lot more so that people like Mitt Romney can get another tax cut," he says.