SEN. KERRY: Well, I think this impeachment talk is a waste of time. I don’t want to go down that road. What I want to do is get to the things that really matter to Americans. You know, all this, this politics is driving people nuts. Now a censure for inappropriate behavior is appropriate, but you know what they really want us to do? They want us to get something done for America. This is a country that—I mean, I saw this when I was running for office. There’s a great optimism in America. There’s a great sort of tenacity in the American people. And they’re sick and tired of the bickering in Washington. They want us to do health care for Americans. They want us to get the deficit down. They want us to...

MR. RUSSERT: Health care. Governor Romney, Governor Romney did it in Massachusetts.

SEN. KERRY: And it’s terrific. Well, Governor Romney, I hope, will sign the bill that the legislature’s been working on for quite a few years. And...

MR. RUSSERT: Bipartisan. Let me show you what’s happening in Washington. Let me show you what’s happening in Washington. This is The Washington Post, hardly an organ for Republican views.

SEN. KERRY: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: This is their editorial about immigration reform. And here it is: “Democrats - whether their motive was partisan advantage or legitimate fear of a bad bill emerging from conference with the House - are the ones who refused, in the end, to proceed with debate on amendments, which is, after all, how legislation gets made. The unfortunate result is that the momentum toward balanced reform my be lost. ‘The Democratic leadership played politics with the prospect of 10 million immigrants getting on a path to citizenship,’ said Frank Sharry, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, a pro-immigration group. ‘It seems that Democratic leaders wanted an issue, not a bill.’” Your colleague, Ted Kennedy, said the politics got in front of the policy. Why not have a vote on these issues?

SEN. KERRY: Yeah. But let me tell you whose politics. You always, historically—I’ve been here 22 years now, Ted Kennedy’s been here 44 years—you reach agreements that are bipartisan, where you get a majority in the Senate that is in favor of something, and that majority of the Senate agrees on many occasions that there will not be outside amendments that change with that agreement is. That’s what happened. They reached an agreement, and Senator Frist and the Republicans were unable to hold their part of the agreement. There’s nothing new in the—in the, in a, you know, in the majority of the Senate coming to agreement on a piece of legislation. And I believe that if Senator Frist and the Republicans had not had their own internal squabble, we would have had an immigration bill that would be done today based on the agreement that a majority of the Senate came to.

MR. RUSSERT: And the Democrats didn’t play politics at all?

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SEN. KERRY: Well, the Democrats were not going to allow amendments that were going to undo the agreement that had been reached. That’s a normal procedure in the United States Senate. And I think it was a valid one. When you shake hands on an agreement, you say, “We’re delivering on this agreement.” And it happens all the time in the Senate, that people band together and don’t allow amendments to undo what the majority reached as an agreement.

MR. RUSSERT: Do you think it can be put back together?

SEN. KERRY: I hope it can. We desperately need to do this for the country and all of us.

Look, the system is broken. Americans are right to be frustrated about people crossing the border illegally. People are being hired illegally. Companies are breaking the law every single day. We need to crack down. But we also need to understand that kids who’ve been born in the United States of an illegal immigrant are American, and we’re not going to be a country that separates people who’ve been here for 20 years and paid their taxes and have been good members of a community and stayed out of trouble and contributing to the well-being of our country. And so we have to have a balance, Tim, and that’s what I think people are finding. That’s part of the optimism and the sort of broadly shared values of this country which people would like to see Washington reflect, rather than this bickering.

Look, I will offer to the president—they have never, ever called me and asked me, “What should we do in Iraq?” Maybe they’ve read my speeches and they know what I’ve said. But we’ve never had a conversation. This should be bipartisan. We need to find a solution for our country. This is not about politics. It’s about our soldiers, it’s about our nation, it’s about our vital national security interests. I believe if we get tough together with the Iraqi government, we can get a real government. I believe we can withdraw our troops and stand up the, the, the Iraqi forces, and I believe, ultimately, we have to get the stakeholders of the region to be part of this. If we don’t, this administration is courting disaster.

MR. RUSSERT: Are you going to run for president in ‘08?

SEN. KERRY: I don’t know. I’ll tell you this. It was an unbelievable privilege to be the nominee of my party. And the issues that I fought for, Tim, every one of them—health care for Americans, jobs here, a more competitive America, a stronger America, to be safer in the world—all those issues are as alive today as they were when I ran and I’m looking at it hard.

MR. RUSSERT: When’s decision time?

SEN. KERRY: Sometime the end of this year.

MR. RUSSERT: The Boston Globe, your hometown paper, did an article on this subject. They quoted Don Fowler, the former chairman of the Democratic Committee, and he said in the party, “Many in the party remain upset about Kerry’s inability in 2004 to refine his policy positions into a coherent vision, a shortcoming that crystallized with his statement that he voted for Iraq war funding before he voted against it.” Fair criticism?

SEN. KERRY: Well, as I said in the debate with the president, I made a mistake in the way that I talked about the war, but the president made a mistake in going to war. Now, which is worse? I could have done a better job in the campaign explaining what I meant. I voted against it because I believed we should pay for it, and because they didn’t have a plan. And our mistake was one of a campaign strategy of not going out and explaining that. I voted out of principle, and I will continue to vote out of principle.

I have a short plan for America, Tim, and I—you know, it’s called, “Tell the truth, fire the incompetents, get out of Iraq, have health care for all Americans.” These are pretty simple messages, and they’re worth fighting for today.

MR. RUSSERT: Joe Klein has a new book out, and he writes in Time magazine today that when you heard about the prison torture at Abu Ghraib, your instinct was to say something, but your political consultants urged you to take a focus group. And the focus group came back with a mixed message, and therefore you remained silent, never raised the issue in your acceptance speech or any of the three presidential debates. Is that true?

SEN. KERRY: I know nothing about a focus group being ordered, I had no knowledge of it, didn’t order a focus group to be ordered, and I did speak out on Abu Ghraib. I asked for Donald Rumsfeld to resign. I called for his resignation, I talked about not having accountability up and down the line. I talked about the fact that in Abu Ghraib, the, the, the soldiers at the lower end were paying the price, not the people at the higher end. And I talked about its immorality in any number of locations.

MR. RUSSERT: What was the biggest mistake you made, the most important lesson you learned from the presidential race?

SEN. KERRY: Tim, I can go down that road and we can spend a lot of time talking about it. I, I—let me just say this: I made some mistakes. I know what they are and I take responsibility for them. My campaign, I take responsibility. I think the most important thing would have been to spend more money, if we could have, on the, you know, advertising and responding to some of the attacks. But we...

MR. RUSSERT: The swift boat ads?

SEN. KERRY: Yeah, but we—people forget, we had a 13-week general election; they had an eight-week general election. We had the same pot of money. We had to harbor our resources in a different way, and we didn’t have the same freedom. I think the biggest mistake was probably not going outside the federal financing so we could have controlled our own message.

MR. RUSSERT: Senator John Kerry, we thank you for joining us and sharing your views.

SEN. KERRY: Thank you, sir.

MR. RUSSERT: Coming next, immigration. The debate continues in the halls of Congress, and all across the country. Three congressmen with very different views are next, debating immigration.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT: The debate over illegal immigration after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

CONTINUED

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