Transcript for February 19

MR. DAVID GREGORY:  I’m sorry, but I’m not getting answers here, Scott, and I’m trying to be forthright with you, but don’t tell me that you’re giving us complete answers when you’re not actually answering the question. Because everybody knows what is an answer and what is not an answer. And the final...

Mr. McCLELLAN:  Well, David, now you want to make this about you, and it’s not about you, it’s about what happened. And that’s what I’m trying...

MR. GREGORY:  I’m sorry that you feel that way.

Mr. McCLELLAN:  ...and I’m trying to provide answers to the questions.

MR. GREGORY:  But that’s not what I’m trying to do. I want...

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  There also had been an off-camera exchange that Gigot just referred to. Scott McClellan:  “David, hold on, the cameras aren’t on right now. You can do this later.” David Gregory:  “Don’t accuse me of trying to pose for the cameras. Don’t be a jerk to me personally when I’m asking you a serious question.” McClellan:  “You don’t have to yell.” “I will yell,” Gregory. “If you want to use the—that podium to try to take shots at my personally, which I don’t appreciate, then I will raise my voice because that’s wrong.” McClellan:  “Calm down, Dave, calm down.” Gregory:  “I’ll calm down when I feel like calming down. You answer the question.”

Looking back at that a few days later, your sense?

MR. GREGORY:  I think I made a mistake. I think it was inappropriate for me to lose my cool with the press secretary representing the president. I don’t think it was professional of me. I was frustrated, I said what I said, but I think that you should never speak that way, as my wife reminded me, number one. And number two, I think it created a diversion from some of the serious questions in the story, so I regret that. I was wrong, and I apologize.

But I think what—what’s interesting about all of this is that Mary and others in the White House have been eager to stoke this as a false debate between the vice president and the White House press corps, attempting to cast this as the White House press corps is a ping-pong in the culture wars. The reality is that that false debate obscures some real facts. You laid out some of them in terms of questions that were raised about how the vice president initially disclosed this, making the decision to not disclose it himself and have Katharine Armstrong do it.

It also overlooks a very important point, and that is there was disagreement, as Mary well knows, within the White House about how this was handled:  the question of why the vice president didn’t call the president. Also the fact that there were some White House advisers who told me this week, it made the president look bad, it raised questions about who was really running the rodeo in the White House.

The vice president created these questions. It’s also emblematic of the rather secretive style with the press by the vice president. And so I think it—it’s fair to disagree with the White House press corps, or with me, or the White House press corps generally, I think, is more important, in terms of how we go about answers. But I, for one, don’t apologize for pushing hard for answers. I think people who view the news or view what I do for a partisan lens may think I was making a political statement. I was not. I make no apologies for pushing hard for information because sometimes it’s hard to get.

MR. RUSSERT:  Bill Crystal, the editor of the Weekly Standard, said this: “The White House press corps is crazy and pompous, and a lot of them are personally obnoxious as well. Instead of asking about Iran going nuclear, Hamas setting up a government in Palestine, 42 of the 60 questions to Scott McClellan were the White House press corps whining that they didn’t get a phone call late Saturday night.”

MR. GREGORY:  Right. And let me just make one other point. Again, it’s easy to try to make this a debate about the White House press corps vs. the vice president. No matter how you feel about the White House press corps, and—and we’re worthy of criticism, and we can take our lumps—this is about how the vice president chooses to communicate to the American people. We are a proxy for the American people. Whether you have faith in us or not, and we do make mistakes, we are still a proxy. This is about how the vice president chooses to communicate to the public. My view is not that I should have been informed or others should have been informed. It’s not about that. It’s—it’s a question of “Does the vice president have a responsibility to the American people to inform them of his public and private activities?”

MR. RUSSERT:  Paul Gigot, you weighed in with an editorial on Wednesday, and a rather ironic one, I might say. “In the interest of restraining the imperial presidency, we have put together the following cover-up time line with the crucial questions that deserve to be answered.” And this is part of it:  “Five thirty p.m., Saturday. Who is Harry Whittington and whom does he lobby for?  Does he know Scooter Libby?  Seven p.m., who else did Mr. Rove talk to about this in the interim?  Was Valerie Plame ever mentioned?  Eleven a.m., Sunday. Has Ms. Armstrong ever worked for Halliburton?  One thirty p.m., everyone involved confirms more or less everything, or so the official line goes. Their agreement is very suspicious. As for the Beltway press corps, it has once again earned the esteem in which it is held by the American public.”

MR. PAUL GIGOT:  It seemed like satire was appropriate to the occasion. Not looking at this, by the way, David, from—you know, I didn’t speak to anybody from the White House or the vice president’s office all week on this. It was looking at it from outside the Beltway and saying where did this story stand on the relative scale of importance?  Looked to me to be a human tragedy, the vice president made a mistake, it was probably in not disclosing it himself, letting someone else do it. But that’s a relatively minor mistake. I think scandal standards are declining in Washington if this becomes another big, huge scandal which this is supposed to be a metaphor for for governing, a bunker of secrecy which is, I think, what some of the Democrats in the Senate were saying. This is a metaphor for the way this administration operates. I just don’t think that’s true. And so I think mockery was appropriate.

MR. RUSSERT:  Maureen Dowd, Time magazine has been doing some polling on this whole issue. I want you to talk about that and everything else you’ve heard this morning. This is what Time found:

“Most Americans--65 percent—think that the vice president should have taken immediate responsibility. Half--56 percent—do not think he was trying to hide something from the public by waiting to disclose the incident. Ten percent think that the vice president should resign over his handling of the situation. More than half--58 percent says he is too secretive.” And when asked about the handling of the shooting incident, 52 percent approve of the vice president’s handling; 42 percent disapprove. What’s your sense?

MS. MAUREEN DOWD:  Well, I think that the reason this story has evoked such fascination is because the vice president is like the phantom. You know, we hear the creak of the door as he passes, but we don’t really know what he’s up to. We don’t know his schedule. We don’t always know where he is. We don’t know what democratic institution he’s blowing off at any given minute, and so this allowed us to see how his behavior and judgement operated pretty much in real time—with the delay, but pretty much in real time.

And it covered all the problems of the Bush/Cheney administration:  secrecy and stonewalling, then blowing off the rules that are at the heart of our democracy, then using a filter to try and put the truth out in a way that would most suit their political needs, and then bad political judgement in bungling a crisis. I mean, if there’s one thing the Republicans are great at since Reagan, it’s damage control. But he is such a control freak, you know, he doesn’t even care about the damage.

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