‘Meet the Press’ transcript for June 24, 2007

MS. IFILL:  Come back with me for a moment, Tim, to 1992 when Bill Clinton was called Slick Willy.  And there was a restaurant in Little Rock that was called Slick Willy’s.  And we, as reporters, got infuriated by the fact that he always seemed to parse the facts.  Guess what?  He got elected.  Guess what?  Almost every other candidate in this race has some sort of slickness which has been attributed to them from Mitt Romney to Rudy Giuliani to Barack Obama.  And guess what?  It turns out that that doesn’t matter as much to people as the issues which concern them:  How are they going to get their kids in school?  How are they going to get their health care paid for?  So even though it infuriates us, and Ron is completely right about the questions that Hillary Clinton is really good at not answering, I don’t know that there’s any evidence that voters are sitting here thinking, “Well, I don’t know what she thinks.  I’ll have to vote for someone else.” No, they’re just paying attention to what she says they think they agree with.

MR. RUSSERT:  David Broder.

MR. BRODER:  I think Gwen’s right, and what Mrs. Clinton has done extremely well in every appearance that I’ve covered is to be well-briefed, well-prepared and delivers a message that resonates with that particular audience.  And in that respect, she’s very much like her husband was.

MR. RUSSERT:  The Clinton campaign, as you well know, released a video on their Web site, an excerpt, we’re going to show you.  This is a takeoff from the finale of “Soprano.” Let’s watch.

(Clip from Hillary Clinton campaign video)

MR. RUSSERT:  An attempt to soften her image...

MS. IFILL:  Can I just say as a “Sopranos” fan, after I watched the final “Sopranos” finale, I really felt jerked around, and I wonder if people are having this same response to this ad.

MR. RUSSERT:  We’ll find out, won’t we?  Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal wrote this:  “Hillary Clinton doesn’t have to prove to people that she’s tough enough or aggressive enough to be commander in chief.  She has to prove she has normal human warmth, a normal amount of give, of good nature, that she’s not, at bottom, grimly combative and rather dark.  A longtime supporter of Mrs. Clinton’s spoke with candor some months back of her friend’s predicament.  ‘We’re back where we were in ‘92--likability.  Nothing has changed.’”

John Harwood.

MR. HARWOOD:  Well, look, if you take a look at how weak the Republican brand is right now, how strong Democrats are generically as against Republicans, she’s in a very good position.  She doesn’t need to make mistakes at this point.  She’s solidified herself in the campaign trail.  As Ron’s article pointed out, she doesn’t exactly swing for the fences in all these public appearances, but she’s not making mistakes, she’s executing her campaign and, you know, we see—we saw a way for Barack Obama in the earlier part of the spring.  Now she’s sort of strengthened her position.

MR. SIMON:  Peggy, I think, is dead wrong on this one.  The calculation in the Clinton campaign is that after eight years of George Bush, the American people want competence this time, not likability.  And competence and strength is what’s going to win in 2008, not who do you want to go to the bar and have a beer with.  We’ve had eight years of that.  That’s the calculation.  And I think she’s executing that game plan very well.  Plus, since the bar is set so low, when you go to her speeches and you talk to the crowds afterwards, she always make a few self-deprecating jokes.  Everybody laughs.  You interview the people and they say, “She’s not so stern.  She’s not such a bad person.  She’s kind of funny.” It’s working.

MR. HARWOOD:  And, Tim, you saw in our Journal/NBC poll how low Barack Obama scored on the question of “has the experience ready to be president on day one.” She did very well on that.  That’s her key advantage right now.

MR. RUSSERT:  Obama’s money numbers apparently will be quite impressive, however.  Is he still in this race?

MR. HARWOOD:  He’s definitely still in this race.  And, look, John Edwards, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, they’re all going to have enough money to run a decent campaign.  Edwards isn’t going to have as much as the other two, but they could all compete.  Barack Obama definitely has a chance in this race.  He’s an exciting candidate, very charismatic.  He has a lot of assets.  But right now he’s got to show he can make some distance on that competence, ready to be president.

MR. RUSSERT:  Competitive in Iowa and New Hampshire and ahead in South Carolina is Obama as we speak.

MR. HARWOOD:  Sure.  And John Edwards remains ahead in Iowa.  He’s run a strong campaign there.  He’s got that four-state strategy, wants to do well in Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and he’s not in a bad place right now.

MR. RUSSERT:  Rudy Giuliani, this is the way The New York Sun described his week.  “After a particularly tough day for his campaign, Mayor Giuliani has lost two top supporters—one to the White House, one who” would “be headed to prison on charges of distributing cocaine.  Mr. Giuliani’s top adviser in Iowa, Jim Nussle, is headed back to Washington to lead the Office of Management and Budget.  The Giuliani campaign announced the departure of its South Carolina chairman, Thomas Ravenel, after a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of distributing cocaine.

“The developments came on a day when the campaign was responding to a report in Newsday that Mr. Giuliani quit the Iraq Study Group last year after failing to show up for a single meeting.  The report said Mr. Giuliani missed the meetings to give paid speeches and that his absences prompted the panel’s Republican co-chairman, James Baker, to ask him either to start showing up or leave the group.” The Giuliani campaign said part of the equation was he was considering running for president at that time and that presence on the group may pose a potential conflict.  Several commission members have said to me that presidential politics never entered the discussion.  It was all about Giuliani’s schedule and commitments vs.  showing up for the Iraq Study Group.  What—does this week matter?

MS. IFILL:  Even if it were his presidential ambitions that kept him is that really a good answer?  That you were so political that you’d rather focus on politics than focus on the nation’s security when you were supposed—running as the top cop?  I don’t think he had a really good particularly good answer for that.  But, but the interesting thing for Giuliani is that he continues to lead all these national polls.  And we can debate to what degree national polls matter at this point.  But when you put him up against Senator Clinton, dead heat; when you put him up against Senator Obama, dead heat.  When you put Senator Clinton up against Senator Obama, she’s well ahead.  I mean, all of these mixtures right now of these polls don’t really matter because there’s such a—there’s such uncertainty about who these candidates are, that only—even the—even with Mayor Bloomberg, whom I’m sure we’ll get to in a moment, most people who know him say they wouldn’t vote for him.  So what’s—what is to read into any of this, including a single bad week for, for Mayor Giuliani?

MR. RUSSERT:  David Broder, Giuliani had been leading in the polls, was high as 48 percent at one time in the Republican Party, now down to about 25.  How do you size up his campaign?

MR. BRODER:  What goes up real fast can come down real fast, and I think his lead has looked fragile to me for some time.  I have had very few dealings with Mayor Giuliani, but I don’t know of anybody whose reputation is such that—I mean, the stories that you hear about Giuliani from people who’ve covered him in New York are devastating stories.  And this history of his—business history, political history and so on—I think will catch up with him.

MR. RUSSERT:  And yet terrorism is still a central issue on the minds of Americans, and there’s no one who can shape that issue and point to his performance on September 11^th better than Rudy Giuliani.

MR. HARWOOD:  He’s got a strong card to play, but he’s also got some big problems within the Republican base.  And you look at somebody like Fred Thompson, not even in the race, not very well defined among Americans, but among those very conservative Republicans, he’s dominating Giuliani and the rest of the field.  And it just shows you that there’s a big softness to that Giuliani lead right now.  We’ll see how long he can keep it up.

MR. RUSSERT:  Roger Simon, Mitt Romney.  You wrote an article as a syndicated columnist about Mitt Romney and pardons.  And this is what you said:  “Romney says he had a standard when it came to” handling out—“handing out pardons as governor.  He didn’t want to overturn jury verdicts, and so he never granted a single pardon in his four years in office, a fact” he’s “enormously proud of today and repeatedly raises in his speeches.  But Romney’s standard is flexible when it comes to Libby, who was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and whose cause has been taken up by the conservative Republican establishment.  And Romney’s true standard seems to be:  No pardons for nobodies.  Somebodies can catch a break.”

MR. SIMON:  Anthony Circosta, at age 13, shot another kid with a BB gun, didn’t break the skin, got arrested and was convicted of assault.  Doesn’t matter, grows up, works his way through college.  Goes to Iraq as part of the National Guard, wins a bronze star, wants to become a cop when he returns home to Massachusetts.  Applies to Mitt Romney from Iraq for a pardon so he can get this felony taken off his record, Romney says, “No, I don’t give pardons.” This is why people hate politics.  That doesn’t make any sense.  You make a political decision, “I don’t want to give any pardons, so I can say when I run for president I didn’t give any pardons,” and you work over a guy who’s just trying to be a cop and do good things for the state of Massachusetts.  Does that make sense?

MR. RUSSERT:  And we had this bizarre story where the—Governor Romney’s chief of operations, Jay Garrity, was accused of being a state trooper—trying to imitate...

MS. IFILL:  Posing.

MR. RUSSERT:  Posing as a state trooper, pulling a reporter over and, and, and—what is that about, John?

MR. HARWOOD:  Honestly, I’m mystified by that, the idea that you would try to run a New York Times reporter off the road and say you can’t go cover my campaign rally, I don’t get it.

MR. RUSSERT:  Romney is ahead, however, in Iowa and New Hampshire.  Does the entrance of Fred Thompson affect his race?  Or how do you see him?

MR. HARWOOD:  Well, it could.  We don’t really know what—how Fred Thompson’s going to define himself.  You know, what, what is his candidacy about?  He seems to be identified favorably by conservative Republicans as their guy of the moment.  That wasn’t necessarily his reputation as a United States senator.  He had some of that McCain maverick in him, certainly on campaign finance reform and other things.  So we don’t really know exactly how he’s going to position himself in the race and where he’s going to fit.  But I tell you what, Mitt Romney is quite well-positioned right now.  He’s doing very well in Iowa, doing well in New Hampshire, he’s doing well financially.  He’s becoming much better known, and his negatives are very low.  Watch Romney in this race.

MR. RUSSERT:  John—I’m sorry.

MS. IFILL:  For, for a guy who doesn’t readily identify himself anymore as a former Massachusetts governor, he’s doing very—one very cool thing today, he’s renting out Fenway Park for a fund-raiser.  So you got to, you got to give him some cleverness.

MR. BRODER:  One thing about Fred Thompson, I mean, that we do know, when he was a United States senator, he started a bunch of projects, but he didn’t finish very many of them.  And I’m a little skeptical about whether he really has the will and the energy and the, and the stick-to-itiveness to make this presidential race work.

MR. RUSSERT:  Well, in a presidential race, we’ll find out pretty quickly or not about that.

Gwen Ifill, John McCain having some difficulties raising money, by his own admission, slipping in the polls a bit, even in—particularly in the early states.  What’s your sense of his campaign.

MS. IFILL:  I read somewhere he’s give—having, like, a fund-raiser a day between now and the second quarter deadline at the end of this month.  So he’s trying to re-establish himself as, at least, a serious person.  Immigration’s been a tough one for him because he actually took an issue and stuck with it.  I mean, there’s no slipperiness on where he’s been on immigration even though you could raise questions about other issues.

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