MTP Transcript for Oct. 22

TEXT:

CONGRESS                   NOW      OCT. ‘94

APPROVE           16%       24%

DISAPPROVE        75%       67%

NBC NEWS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL POLL                                

OCT 13-14

MR. RUSSERT: And this question, who should control Congress? Thirty-seven percent say Republicans, 52 percent say Democrats, a 15-point gap. Again, October ‘94, before the Republican revolution, when the Republicans won 52 seats, the Republicans were up 6 points.

TEXT:

WHO SHOULD CONTROL CONGRESS                  

                       NOW      OCT. ‘94

APPROVE           37%       44%

DISAPPROVE        52%       38%

NBC NEWS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL POLL                                

OCT 13-14

MR. RUSSERT: And this, in terms of keeping control. If the Republicans keep control, it’s a good thing say 26 percent of the American people, a bad thing say 48 percent. What about if the Democrats took control? A good thing, 40; a bad thing, 30.

David Broder, what do all those numbers tell you?

MR. DAVID BRODER: Trouble. I think we...

MR. RUSSERT: Right here in River City.

MR. BRODER: I think we got trouble right here in River City, and all across the country. And what we’ve been hearing all this past week, 10 days, is one congressional deceit after another added to the list of worries for the Republicans.

MR. RUSSERT: John Harwood, in the Journal you write similar to that, but also a little caution. You say this: “One solace for Republican incumbents: National polls are decidedly imperfect predictors of local election outcomes, particularly given voters’ historic penchant for saying they loathe Congress but like their own representative. While only 16% of voters approve of Congress, more than twice that many - 39% - said in answer to another poll question that their own representative deserves to be re-elected.” Which one prevails?

MR. JOHN HARWOOD: Well, I think the national mood is stronger than those local factors at the moment. But one of the things I’m hearing from Republican strategists is that the further they get away from the explosion of the Foley story, the more Democrats, race by race, and Republicans are fighting their way back, at least into contention. They may still be behind, but they’re not as behind as they were.

The thing that I think is interesting, with the attention on Foley we forget about the impact of Iraq. I was talking to a Republican Senate strategist yesterday who said, “Don’t forget, Bush, at 38 percent and Iraq are devastating to our candidates. They’ve got to try to separate themselves and fight out.” The other thing in our poll is that Republicans—in that generic vote, Democrats have a 15-point lead—but Republicans still, 87 percent say they want Republicans to win. It’s independents, the center of the electorate, where Republicans have collapsed.

MR. RUSSERT: Charlie Cook, you wrote in your National Journal article yesterday, “This election season has been so maddening: Trying to get a fix on what’s going on has been like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall; it just won’t stay put.” You don’t know my sister’s Jello-O, but—oops, I’m in trouble on that. But the—what are you talking about?

MR. CHARLIE COOK: It—well, you know, we, we had this deterioration on a national level at the 30,000, 40,000, 50,000-foot level for the better part of the year. Things got a little bit better for Republicans in late spring, then it got worse, and then it got better in September, and then the bottom sort of fell out. And the old Tip O’Neill adage that all politics is local, it’s right in four midterm elections out of five. But one out of five it’s just not right, ‘94 for Democrats, ‘74 for Republicans, and it’s like, as, as, as John said, the bottom just sort of falls out. And these are really challenging times for Republicans. That, that—one, one strategist said, “We keep pounding with negative after negative after the negative, and this year they’re wearing Teflon, we’re wearing Velcro.”

MR. RUSSERT: Bob Novak, Barron’s writes for tomorrow that they did an analysis of how much money each candidate has raised and will spend on the election and didn’t look at any polls, and based simply on money being raised, they predict the Republicans will lose eight House seats, a maximum of 14, hold the House, hold the Senate.

MR. ROBERT NOVAK: That’s a ridiculous method of, of forecasting the election strictly on the money. Money is important, but it’s not everything. The interesting thing to me is that we—everybody thinks that it’s going to be a narrow Republican—a Democratic victory in, in the, in the House, the Senate almost too close to call, maybe a narrow Republican victory. Why is it narrow with those huge gaps in the polls? Because the president is very unpopular and the war is very unpopular, and those are the two issues that are killing Republican candidates. So there must be some voter resistance to the Democrats, and I think that’s what the problem is. And that’s why the Republican strategists say this is not a referendum, it’s a choice. That’s a terrible thing to say it’s not a referendum. They say you can’t judge the Republican Party on its record of being the governing party in America, you have to choose between each race. But in each race there are Democratic problems.

MR. RUSSERT: Could it be that the number of Democrats in some of the blue states are so overwhelmingly opposed to the president that it skews the national number?

MR. NOVAK: That’s true. And there’s one other factor, we, we have to mention why it is the, the races- -the race for control of the House is still relatively close, and that’s the gerrymander. A lot of these districts are gerrymandered, so there’s many fewer races than there used to be 40 years ago or even in 1994.

MR. RUSSERT: That they were—divide and cut up...

MR. NOVAK: They’re the competitive race—yes.

MR. RUSSERT: ...to make it a safe seat.

David Broder, the House majority whip in the Senate, Roy Blunt of Missouri, had this to say, “Pelosi’s House,” referring to Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic congresswoman from San Francisco who becomes speaker. “This list of the bills most likely to be championed by committee chairmen in a Pelosi-led House of Representatives would be great fodder for the late-night talk show hosts if it weren’t true. Instead, it’s just plain scary. While Republicans fight the War on Terror, grow our robust economy, and crack down on illegal immigration, House Democrats plot to establish a Department of Peace, raise your taxes, and minimize penalties for crack dealers. The difference couldn’t be starker.”

MR. BRODER: I like Roy Blunt, but that rhetoric gives a measure of how hard up the Republicans really are. I mean, that is not the Democratic agenda. The Democratic agenda is raising the minimum wage, doing something about drug prices, and probably doing something about the war in Iraq.

MR. HARWOOD: But, Tim, the—that was an interesting reflection of how House Republicans are thinking at this point. I talked to a House Republican strategist yesterday. He said, “What we want in the last two weeks of the election is more from the White House, from Bush and perhaps Cheney, attacking Nancy Pelosi, raising the stakes on Democratic control.” Tough challenge for the White House, because if they lose the House in a couple of weeks, they’re going to have to be working with those people. But one of the problems for Republicans is how do you make people scared of the impact of a Democratic Congress if your own Republican Congress has not been delivering for your base? Gay marriage, nothing’s happened; Social Security, nothing happened; immigration, next to nothing. So the Republicans don’t have a great record to talk about.

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