‘Meet the Press’ transcript for June 3, 2007

MR. CARVILLE:  And the crowds he’s generating.  However, there is going to be a lingering—always, as I, as I reduce everything to, to, to Louisiana cooking, is—I say Mama needs more spice, Obama needs more seasoning.  And if there’s any sense that Obama is inspirational, but not, not has, has the depth of the context to do this job, it will be the end of his campaign.

MR. RUSSERT:  Mary, and, look, you know, please, try to be counterintuitive and objective here, if you can, on the Democrats.  I know you can do it. Obama, Clinton...

MS. MATALIN:  If you don’t do it, and I say this to conservatives, if we’re not objective...

MR. RUSSERT:  Yeah.

MS. MATALIN:  ...we will lose.  We have to understand who the enemy is.  And it is them.

MR. RUSSERT:  When you, when you see Barack Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, who would you most fear running against?

MS. MATALIN:  I, I—my party largely disagrees with me.  I think running against Hillary would be difficult.  This is a turn the page election, and if she can turn the page, and they let her be her—they keep trying to compare her—they, the Democratic vapors—she’s not Bill, she’s not Bill.  That’s right, she’s not Bill.  Bill was built for speed, she’s built for the long haul.  Let her be ambitious.  You go, girl.  Women make a difference in elections, and they decide later, and she is—this is a—one thing we all don’t know, we keep speaking in terms like we know where this thing is going. This is a process like none we’ve ever seen.  We’ve not had all these big states move right up into the, into the early states.  So, in that case, I think the Edwards strategy is Bush ‘80, it’s the “big mo.” Win Iowa and jump on.  Hers is the long haul, and no—Florida, Texas, New York, New Jersey, everybody coming forward puts this race more properly in the hands of those who are there for the long haul, and I think she’s tough to run against.  And if she doesn’t—if you can’t push her over, and she won’t, then she’s—the easy thing about her is she’s going to have to defend a government philosophy the likes of which she portrayed last week, of the government providing for the whole world.  That’s not where we are.

MR. MURPHY:  I think there’s a lesson for Republicans in Obama, too.  Our two strongest guys I think are McCain and Romney, obviously.  Obama’s rhetoric of change is going to be important for either party, and McCain is the guy who’s been in Washington fighting all these things, and Romney is a super-innovative guy, like Giuliani, too, from outside.  And I think we have to look at how we’re going to argue we’re going to change government with our free enterprise thing on top of it, or we’re going to run out of gas running backwards, too. So Obama has a lesson for everybody, I think.

MR. CARVILLE:  Everything—if you look at the polls, you look at the fund-raising numbers, you look at the support that’s being generated, everything in the Democrat Party tells you that somebody’s going to, if, everybody’s going to lose a primary along the way.  Everybody is going to go down.  Everybody is going to taste defeat.  And I think that, that, that the determining factor of who wins this is how each of these candidates handle that bad, or more than one bad election night...

MR. MURPHY:  But by the way, that’s...

MR. CARVILLE:  ...because the narrative does not revolve around itself until somebody loses.  And it’s completely likely to happen.

MR. MURPHY:  It’s super-compressed.  I mean, this is the most bouncy compressed campaign.

MR. CARVILLE:  Right, right.

MR. SHRUM:  But that’s always true.  No one gets to the nomination without going through the valley.

MR. MURPHY:  Right.

MR. SHRUM:  Bill Clinton went through the valley.  You led him during that thing.

MR. CARVILLE:  Right.

MR. SHRUM:  And John Kerry went through the valley.  You just don’t get there—and in fact, I think we may not get an early nomination.  I think you could see a number of people doing pretty well in the early primaries go into this big event, where you have—it’s what, 60 percent of the delegation?

MR. RUSSERT:  Tsunami Tuesday.

MR. SHRUM:  Tsunami Tuesday.

MS. MATALIN:  Right.

MR. SHRUM:  And, and three people get pretty high percentages.

MR. CARVILLE:  Yep.

MR. SHRUM:  And under proportional representation, you won’t get an early nominee.

MR. MURPHY:  I’m going to be the contrarian.  I think it’s going to bounce like crazy.  I think there’ll be a valley, but it may be three days long.

MR. CARVILLE:  Well, I mean, I think if Hillary wins Iowa, then—but that’s a, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a, that’s a difficult proposition.

MR. MURPHY:  Yeah, yeah.  Right.  No.

MR. CARVILLE:  And Obama is funded to go way beyond anything else.  I just think that, I think there’s going to be redemption in this, and by, on, on all sides.

MR. RUSSERT:  Before we take a break and come back and talk about the Bush administration, some of the challenges confronting them and how it’ll play out in 2008, Bob Shrum, in your book “No Excuses,” you say some things about Senator John Edwards that’ve created some discussion, and the Edwards campaign has, has weighed in.  I want to talk about one specific instance, and that was his vote on the Iraq war.

MR. SHRUM:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  And this is what you write:  “That fall of 2002, as a vote loomed on the resolution giving Bush authority to go to war in Iraq, Edwards convened a circle of advisers in his family room in Washington to discuss his decision.  He was skeptical, even exercised about the idea of voting yes.  His wife Elizabeth was a forceful no.  She didn’t trust anything the Bush administration was saying.

“But the consensus view from both the foreign policy experts and the political operatives was that he was” just “too junior in the Senate; he didn’t have the credibility to vote against the resolution.  To my continuing regret, I said he had to be for it.

“As I listened to this, I watched Edwards’ face; he didn’t like where he was being pushed to go.  The meeting did him a disservice; of course, he was the candidate and if he really was against the war, it was up to him to stand his ground.” And “he didn’t.”

Senator Edwards is now the first candidate who voted for the war to acknowledge it was a mistake.

MR. SHRUM:  Right.

MR. RUSSERT:  When his campaign learned you were on the program, they sent this statement:  “Bob Shrum’s thoughts about Iraq had zero influence on Senator Edwards’ vote.  The meeting Shrum describes in his book was a meeting about domestic political issues” to which—“in which several people offered their opinions about Iraq to Senator Edwards.  Unfortunately, in Bob Shrum’s worldview, the only conversations that matter are the ones he’s personally involved in.  That’s not the truth, of course—but Bob and the truth have a, had a rocky relationship for a long time and this book is no exception.” What’s going on?

MS. MATALIN:  Rarrr!

MR. MURPHY:  Rarrr!  Rarrr!

MR. SHRUM:  I guess, I guess they don’t like the book, and I’m not going to respond in kind.  Look, that meeting happened.  That meeting was about the Iraq war.  I’m not suggesting that John Edwards or John Kerry or anybody else went out and voted for that war on purely political grounds.  I’m suggesting that the politics they talked about may have shaped and influenced the lens through which they saw and weighed the issue.  People have cherry-picked that book about John Edwards.  I talk in that book about meeting him in 1997, calling my partners and saying, “I just think I met a future president of the United States.” I think that may still be true.  He’s the man who put poverty back on the Democratic Party agenda and the national agenda.  I’m sorry they kind of overreact that way, but Kerry, but, but John Edwards himself confirmed the fundamentals of what I said in one of these early debates when he said, “What I learned from the whole experience was to put more faith in my own judgment.” Well, what was his own judgment?  I think it was an inclination to be against the war.

MR. RUSSERT:  When—in 2004, you had to make a decision to work for John Kerry or John Edwards.  You opted for John Kerry.

MR. SHRUM:  Yes.  I think it was the right decision.

MR. RUSSERT:  Why?

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