‘Meet the Press’ transcript for June 24, 2007

MR. RUSSERT:  And Iraq.

MS. IFILL:  And on Iraq.  And both of those issues have actually worked against him.  Credit is due to someone who sticks with an unpopular issue, even when they’re running for president.  That said, Fred Thompson is a huge threat to him because, in fact, the two of them have almost identical records, to the extent, extent that they have records in the Senate on, on issues like this.  And to the extent that anyone’s casting about in this campaign for somebody else, on both sides, it seems to me that John McCain is far more put in peril by that, that curiosity, that hunger, than someone like Hillary Clinton is.

MR. SIMON:  John—Fred Thompson is John McCain without the pain, without the pain of immigration, without the pain of being the poster child for the Iraq war, without the pain of campaign finance reform, reform, which the Republican Party has still not forgiven John McCain for.  But mostly now, it’s not even the war with the Republican Party, it’s immigration.  Immigration is more problematic for McCain with his fellow Republicans than abortion is for Rudy Giuliani.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me turn to a man who made a lot of news this week, Mayor Mike Bloomberg of New York.  He used to be a Democrat, saw his way blocked to the mayoralty of New York in that party, so switched to be a Republican.  Has been elected twice as mayor of New York, wildly popular across the board—blacks, whites, Hispanics.  He changed his affiliation this week.  He said, “I’m no longer a Republican, I’m unaffiliated.  I’m an independent,” which raised a lot of speculation.  Does this mean he’s positioning himself for a presidential race?  Here’s the mayor’s own words on Wednesday.

(Videotape, Wednesday)

Mayor MICHAEL BLOOMBERG:  My intention is to be mayor for the next 925 days.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  Which would put us well into 2009, David Broder, according to my math.  But he did say “my intention.” What’s your take?

MR. BRODER:  I went to see him about six months ago when I heard these rumors, and he said the same thing to me then, that he’s going to finish his term as mayor, as the best mayor ever, and then he’s going to become a philanthropist.

MS. IFILL:  Did he know exactly how many days he had left then?

MR. BRODER:  He did, actually.

MS. IFILL:  He did?  Yeah.  Funny about that.

MR. BRODER:  And it’s been his standard line.  He has a deputy mayor, Kevin Sheekey, who told me in very plain terms, “This guy would make a perfect presidential candidate, and here’s how we could do it.” I don’t know enough of the dynamics there to know whether Sheekey is the real Bloomberg spokesman or not.  But there clearly are people very close to him who see him as a presidential candidate.

MR. RUSSERT:  Well, they know if the candidates are chosen by early February in the Democratic and Republican Parties, they don’t have to file petitions as an independent until May in Texas.  They’re going to see who’s in the field.  They have—he’s worth $8 billion, he can spend up to $1 billion of his own money, and then decide, and this is a big if...

MR. BRODER:  Yeah.

MR. RUSSERT:  ...can he get 35 percent?  He has no interest in being a spoiler or being another Ross Perot.  If he runs, he wants to win.

MR. SIMON:  For the Bloomberg scenario, I was going to call it a fantasy, but that would be cruel.  For the scenario to work, not just one party, but both parties have to nominate candidates at the extremes.  You have to have a Barry Goldwater on one side and a George McGovern on the other.  How likely is that to happen, especially since both parties know that Michael Bloomberg might enter the race?  Secondly, there’s an overemphasis on Bloomberg’s money.  If you give $5 to a presidential campaign, you’re going to vote for that guy or that woman.  If you self-finance your whole campaign, you don’t build any base of voter support.  It’s just you and your checkbook, and voters, in the end, tend to resent that.

MR. HARWOOD:  Extremely unlikely he can get 35 percent.  The question is does he get in anyway because he’s convinced himself that he might be able to pull it off, and how does he affect the race?  If Rudy Giuliani’s the Republican nominee, that would be very bad news for Giuliani, the Republican Party; they’re competing for the same space.  But if you have a polarizing race, where Hillary Clinton, say, is the Democratic nominee and a conservative—if Fred Thompson runs as a hard right Republican in the primaries and wins, that’s a good scenario for Bloomberg, and it could hurt Hillary Clinton because a lot of those upscale independents, normally lean Republican, might go to Hillary Clinton in that scenario.  Mike Bloomberg would give them another option.

MR. RUSSERT:  The Bloomberg folks believe that if each of the candidates have negatives in the high 40s, the Democrat and the Republicans, Hillary Clinton’s there and the Republican will be there, it’s wide open.  There’s one poll they point to, June of 1992:  Ross Perot, 39; George Herbert Balk—Worker—Walker Bush, 31; Bill Clinton, 25.

MS. IFILL:  And Bill Clinton got elected, you will recall, because of Ross Perot’s presence in the race.  I, I think the best thing that Mayor Bloomberg realized in timing his announcement is that we were entering the summer, and we are desperate to pull out an electoral maps and begin to say, “Well, let’s see, if you shave some votes from California and a few votes from New York, and, wow, there’s a great big New York expatriate population in Florida, he could really upend things.” But let’s take this another way.  Let’s just look at the electoral college.  He could completely run an electoral college election.  Nobody is paying attention to those formulations except us.  But that’s all he needs is us.

MR. RUSSERT:  And they will...

MR. HARWOOD:  Here’s the key difference, though, Tim.  In 1992, the unpopular President Bush was running for re-election.  This President Bush is going to go off stage.  If he were the nominee against Hillary Clinton, maybe Ross Perot—I mean, maybe Mike Bloomberg would have an opening.  But that’s not going to happen.

MR. SIMON:  Let’s suspend our disbelief for Mayor Bloomberg.  We don’t say, as we say in Hillary, “Is he warm enough?  Is he captivating enough?  Is he good on the stump?  What’s his position on Iraq?  What’s his health care plan?” All we care about now is he has money.

MR. RUSSERT:  I...

MR. SIMON:  He doesn’t have a credible plan of getting 270 electoral votes, but he has money.

MS. IFILL:  Well, he does say he’s not running for president.  I mean, let’s give him credit.

MR. SIMON:  We should believe...(unintelligible).

MS. IFILL:  I’m willing to believe whatever they tell me.

MR. RUSSERT:  And the more, the more this is discussed, it only enhances his abilities and power as a lame duck mayor.

MR. SIMON:  Yeah.

MS. IFILL:  Yeah.

MR. BRODER:  You guys are much too dismissive.  There is such a distaste out there among the people for both these parties, and what the Democratic Congress is doing to destroy the reputation of any Democrat who comes out of Congress, as all of the major candidates do, and what George Bush has done to destroy the credibility of any Republican running as his successor leaves it wide open, if not for Bloomberg then for somebody else to come down the middle.

MR. HARWOOD:  You think an independent could be elected?

MR. BRODER:  Absolutely.

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me show you one last poll question before we go.  NBC News/Wall Street Journal 2008 presidential election:  Prefer a Democrat, 52; prefer a Republican, 31.  Twenty-one point gap.  But as Gwen pointed out earlier, when you match Clinton vs.  Giuliani—one poll has a tie, one poll has Hillary up five or six points—it, it closes dramatically.  Why?

MS. IFILL:  Because people don’t know yet what they think.  And because people don’t yet—know yet who these—I mean, 44 percent of Republican voters—Giuliani’s supporters don’t know that he’s pro-abortion rights.  So what does that tell you about how strong his support is, or what these head-to-heads mean?  So you know, I think that the—this—the incredible unpopularity among—with the Republican Party that most Americans have right now does leave some sort of softness there for somebody to come in the middle.  I just—I’ll be curious.  I, I see—I bow to David Broder and his assessment, and I’ll be curious to see if Mike Bloomberg is the one who can walk down the middle of that.

MR. RUSSERT:  John Harwood, 21 point gap, and it’s a generic test, I’m for the Democrat over the Republican.  But when you put it candidate vs.  candidate, it narrows dramatically.

MR. HARWOOD:  What it tells you is the shape of the playing field is very decidedly tilted toward the Democrats.  People want change from President Bush.  However, these things all come down to, to contests of individuals.  Hillary Clinton has very high negatives.  Any Republican—credible Republican is going to be in a competitive position against her, is not going to be terribly far behind.  And so it tells you that there’s still some uncertainty about how this is going to go next year, if she’s the nominee.

MR. RUSSERT:  You all could stay right here, we’re going to have more with our roundtable later in the afternoon online.  We’re going to ask them about their most interesting and strangest moments on the campaign trail.  These are veteran political reporters.  Our MEET THE PRESS Take Two Web extra on our Web site this afternoon, mtp.msnbc.com.  We’ll be right back.

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MR. RUSSERT:  Start your day tomorrow on “Today” with Matt and Meredith, then the “NBC Nightly News” with Brian Williams.  That is all for today.  We’ll be back next week.  If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

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