Transcript for June 11

MR. RUSSERT: Let me turn to some recent polls on the president from the Research Center about George W. Bush, contrasting where he was in December and where he is now—in ‘04 and where he is in May of 2006. In December of ‘04, the president had a 48 percent approval rating, 89 percent of Republicans approved of him, 17 percent of Democrats, 45 percent of independents. Last month, approval down to 33, a drop of 20 points amongst Republicans, 8 points amongst Democrats, 19 points amongst independents. Amy Walter, what does this tell you?

MS. WALTER: Well, the, the two numbers—and you’ve highlighted those two—the drop among Republicans and the drop among independents. Here’s a real concern for Republicans in this midterm election. It’s an intensity issue, it’s an enthusiasm issue. It’s not that Democrats—I’m sorry, it’s not that Republicans are going to go out, necessarily, and vote for Democrats. That’s not the concern among Republicans. It’s that their folks aren’t going to turn out at the rate that Democrats are, that their enthusiasm is not there, their support is not there. And that independents, instead of breaking maybe 50-50 for a Republican vs. a Democrat, now are going to break maybe 70-30 for a Democrat. So even if the turnout is lower all across the board, Democrats will make up a bigger slice of the pie and independents will break disproportionately for Democratic candidates.

MR. RUSSERT: Jonathan Alter, you have a book out called “The Defining Moment,” about Franklin Roosevelt, his first 100 days. You see some parallels between some of the challenges that Roosevelt confronted and George W. Bush now confronts, in dealing with a war, trying to mobilize, galvanize a country. What do you think George W. Bush can do between now and the midterm elections to try to recoup the support from the American people?

MR. ALTER: I don’t think there’s a tremendous amount that he can do, actually. You know, even Franklin Roosevelt, who was a tremendously popular president throughout his 12 years in office, in the sixth year of his presidency, in the midterms, the Democratic Party lost 71 seats in the House. So it’s not going to be that much this time because of the gerrymandering and everything, but there is a fatigue that sets in on second-term presidents. And it even happened to FDR. But I think if he were trying to act more Rooseveltian at this point, what he would do would to be more supple, flexible, responsive, not dig in his heels, not play to the base. FDR did not do that, actually, very often—even on Social Security. When he got that through in 1935 he worked with Southern conservatives, not Northeast New Deal liberals to get that through.

President Bush is taking the opposite tack by going to the base again on issues like gay marriage and, and even on immigration, he’s making some noises about playing to the base. So they’re going to the well again. I don’t think it’s going to work for them this time, and that he would be much better advised to be the kind of supple, responsive, open-minded politician that Franklin Roosevelt was.

MR. RUSSERT: As to the war on Iraq, it was quite striking, after the killing of Zarqawi, we did not hear any notion of “mission accomplished” or “bring it on” or “wanted: alive or dead.” It was much more, “the war’s far from over, there are difficult days ahead.”

MR. ALTER: Yeah, I mean there’s a sense that he is learning that gloating does not help in these situations, and he’s moderating his rhetoric. It seems like he’s getting some better advice. And this may well be good news for him because if you know, leadership is important for good or ill. I mean, my argument in my book is that it made an essential difference in saving the country in the 1930s, the right kind of leadership. But evil leadership is also critical in Iraq. And by cutting out this tumor, it may give them a shot on the ground here. And in fact, the level of violence might come down now some, between now and the election, which obviously would help Bush. The problem is, to continue the cancer metaphor for a moment, it may be too late. It may be that it already metastasized and that even cutting out Zarqawi at this point is not going to do enough good.

MR. RUSSERT: Byron York, how do you see the 2006 midterm elections, and what can George Bush do between now and then to try to influence, affect the outcome?

MR. YORK: Well, actually, I would disagree a little bit with what Jonathan was saying about Bush and the base. If your support goes down as low as Bush’s has gone, it means you are losing some of your core supporters. And he’s done a number of things over the past several months to anger the base, going back to the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, then the Dubai Ports deal, and now he’s angering many, many members of the Republican base over immigration. They feel that he is, is simply not listening to their wishes on this. And there are members of the Republican base who’ve said this out loud. They see something like his support for the federal marriage amendment to be kind of a transparent ploy to attract the base.

So, so right now, the president has real problems with the, the Republican base. They’re still loyal to him, and progress in Iraq, like the killing of Zarqawi, is something that they desperately want to hear. But, but the best thing that he could do for Republican candidates here in 2006, according to what the strategists tell me, you know, is get his own approval ratings up. And the way to do that at the beginning is to regain the support of the Republican base.

MR. RUSSERT: And you think issues like coming out against gay marriage is a way to get his base energized and his approval ratings up?

MR. YORK: Well, I think that, that White House strategists believe that it is, but, but here again, I think that there’s a certain number of people who see through this and they think it’s a transparent effort to energize the base when, in fact, he’s defying the base on what they view is a more important issue like immigration.

Now, there are parts of the base for which it’s very important. I interviewed Jerry Falwell a few weeks ago and he said, “Look, there are just two deal-breakers for evangelical Christians, one is abortion and the other is marriage.” So certainly it’s important to some members of the base, but not as important as an issue like immigration.

MR. RUSSERT: Markos Moulitsas, as you well know, there was a special election in California for the vacant seat of Duke Cunningham, the congressman who had to resign for corruption. This is how the Los Angeles Times characterized the outcome of that race: “Throughout Washington, GOP officials Wednesday shared a widespread sense of relief after Republican Brian Bilbray defeated Democrat Francine Busby in Tuesday’s vote to succeed former GOP Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who resigned after pleading guilty to corruption charges last year. ...

“The outcome may have demonstrated the limits of Democrats’ ability to parlay President Bush’s unpopularity and the public’s disdain for a scandal-racked Congress into concrete gains in districts that had leaned toward the GOP.

“Bilbray’s victory denied Democrats what they had been seeking most from the race - evidence that the bleak poll numbers for Bush and Congress will translate into the same sort of voter backlash that gave the GOP control of Capitol Hill in 1994.” Do you share that assessment?

MR. MOULITSAS: Well, this was—sorry—this was a very heavily Republican district. The fact that it was even competitive says a lot about the position of the Republicans this coming fall. Now, I don’t think that the Democrats are probably going to make as many gains as a lot of people think they might because of the gerrymandering and other factors, but the fact is that Republicans had to pump in $11 million dollars to the Democratic 5 million in order to save and rescue a seat that was heavily theirs to begin with. And they can’t afford to do that throughout the country. They don’t have that kind of money. They have advantages but not enough for that kind of disparity. So I’m, I’m—I mean, I’m hopeful for that reason.

Now, I’m also a little miffed. Democrats didn’t really compete for the seat the way that they could have. I mean, they—the Republicans went all out, they put in all this money. They made sure that they were going to keep this seat. I think back to people like John F. Ken—you know, JFK and Bobby Kennedy and the way they fought these battles. They fought to win and they would have put everything they had into this race to try to win the race. Democrats did not, Republicans did, and when that happens, more often than not, Republicans are going to win.

MR. RUSSERT: Amy, the Democratic candidate for Congress got 45 percent of the vote in that district. John Kerry got 44 percent.

MS. WALTER: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: What did you learn from that district, and how do you see the congressional race for the House in the midterm elections?

MS. WALTER: Well, that is a very good point, and this is the point that Republicans are making, which is she did not expand into the Republican voter base, all right? She got basically every vote that John Kerry got. And this made them feel a heck of a lot better going into 2006 because they say there’s not an appeal that Democrats have right now to Republican voters. At the same time, if I’m a Republican who sits in a less Republican district—remember, this is a district where Republicans had a 15-point registration advantage—I would not take too much comfort in these results. Brian Bilbray also underperformed the president. He took 49 percent of the vote. The president got 55, 56 percent of the vote here. Now, Brian Bilbray could afford to lose a lot of those Republicans.

MR. RUSSERT: There were two other conservative candidates here.

MS. WALTER: There were, and they picked up those votes. But even—he could even afford to lose them to the third-party candidate. There are a lot of Republicans right next to...

MR. RUSSERT: Bilbray broke with Bush on immigration.

MS. WALTER: On immigration. Well, and that’s the interesting thing about the money here...

MR. ALTER: That’s true.

MS. WALTER: ...which is that, and this is where I think Republicans do have an advantage where we’re talking about the 2006 election, the structural advantages. We’ve mentioned redistricting, fund-raisingwise. Democrats are catching up, especially at the committee level, with Republicans in terms of the money that they have to go in to campaigns. But at the same time, what this race showed was that with enough money, what Republicans can do is insulate themselves from this national political environment, make it about the issues they want to talk about. In this case, it was immigration.

MR. RUSSERT: We may know that hard-core Republican voters in a special election may not go over to the Democratic camp.

MS. WALTER: Right.

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