‘Meet the Press’ transcript for July 8, 2007

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. BROOKS:  It helps anybody who’s totally non-Washington.

MR. GREGORY:  Or Chuck Hagel, as we heard him telling...(unintelligible).

MR. BROOKS:  Yeah, yeah.

MR. GREGORY:  Anne, as you pointed out, this issue overshadowed the issue that was supposed to overshadow Hillary Clinton in Iowa, where she faces, according to polls, a very tough race.  At this point, one, one poll has her at 20 percent, Edwards at 26, Obama at 21.  So here comes the former president into Iowa, and this is how The New York Times wrote about it.  “No matter how much he tries to blend in, Mr. Clinton is one Oscar-worthy supporting actor who can sometimes upstage his leading lady simply by breathing.

“[In Iowa,] Mr. Clinton mostly did what he could to keep the focus on his wife, literally ceding the stage to her at some rallies so she could speak unadorned.” What is the Bill factor in Iowa and beyond?

MS. KORNBLUT:  Well, the calculation, of course, was that she’s in second, maybe third place in Iowa, and that she can’t possibly win the nomination if she doesn’t at least come in first or second there and then go on to come in first or second in New Hampshire, no matter how much of a behemoth her campaign may be.  So they bring him in, at this point, hoping to bump her up in the polls.  They’re going to take him to New Hampshire next week, hopefully to do the same, get his presence out of the way as a big question mark, and also rev up the activists and the, and the sort of base in Iowa that they really need.

But there is a flipside, which is that when you’re talking about him you’re not talking about her.  For all they did to contain his radiance, he, you know, they put him in sort of suburban dad clothing, and they had him in cowboy boots at one point.  They limited his time.  He talked for five to seven minutes.  He talked about her at the beginning.  But it didn’t really matter because the focus—forget the stylistics of it, the substance was on him.  The substance that we were talking about, hearing from them, rather, was what he did in the 1990s, what she did in the 1990s, and for all of his talk when he was running about campaigns being about the future, this was a campaign about restarting the 21^st century.  They actually used that language.

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.

MS. KORNBLUT:  “We want to go back and start over in 2000.” And that’s not forward-looking.

MR. GREGORY:  And you, Todd—I know, Anne, you covered this as well this week—you see Barack Obama trying to seize on that by talking about the need for, for change and by also ratcheting up the criticism of her judgment on things like her vote for the authorization for war.

MR. PURDUM:  Well, I think David makes a good point, and the proposition that’s really yet to be fully tested with the Clintons is whether the country is really ready for another full-fledged dose of Clintons in the White House and, and whether the country is ready for 20 successive years of two families having the presidency.  And I think, no matter how much Mrs.  Clinton may talk about her being ready to lead, she is the candidate of more of the same in a strange way.  Not, not in contrast to the incumbent President Bush, but she’s not something out of the ordinary.  And for better or worse, Senator Obama is really something different.

MR. GREGORY:  Talk about Senator Obama, here he is on the cover of Newsweek. “Black and white:  how Barack Obama is shaking old assumptions.” And Gene Robinson, if you, if you look at the fund-raising figures for the second quarter, there is excitement behind Barack Obama.  He’s outraising Hillary Clinton by about $10 million.  But look at the Newsweek polling.  Asked to choose between the two, this is how it came out.  Among all voters, Mrs. Clinton with a sizeable advantage, 56 to 33; whites, 56 to 34; nonwhites, 58 to 29 percent.  A clear, across-the-board bounce for, for Hillary Clinton. What’s at work here?

MR. ROBINSON:  I’m not quite—you know, I think the experience factor, or the lack of experience, really works against Obama, or really has worked against him so far, in, in polls, in your last poll, he, he scores really, really low on that point.  And now as he—as time goes on and as people become more familiar with him and as he comes to, to seem—I think political figures kind of, kind of grow the longer they stick around, and I think the longer we go into that, maybe, maybe that will start to change and maybe that will move the needle.  But, you know, the fund-raising totals are just astonishing.  The amount of money he’s raised, the number of donors he has, the really innovative ways that his campaign’s been raising money, especially through the Internet.  But, you know, Howard Dean had a lot of that the last time.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. ROBINSON:  And, and we know what happened to his campaign.  So I, I, I think—I think the Obama campaign is—they can’t help but be happy with the, with the money and I don’t think they’re, they’re unhappy at kind of being in second place right now, letting, letting Hillary Clinton kind of take the, take the heat and drafting off of her.  But...

MR. GREGORY:  Right.  And they would argue that—for instance, in South Carolina one poll has them ahead and Mrs.  Clinton...

MR. ROBINSON:  Right, and they’re ahead in...

MR. GREGORY:  Right.  But still, they...

MR. ROBINSON:  But they would like to start moving up, I think,

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. ROBINSON:  ...a bit and get a little closer.

MR. GREGORY:  But isn’t it—but, but the Clinton campaign will write this off and say there’s plenty of money to go around and there’s just so much money in the Democratic Party and so much enthusiasm in the Democratic Party to regain power.  But why is he outraising her?

MR. BROOKS:  She has a—I mean, it is a little like four years ago where it’s enthusiasm vs. calculation.

GREGORY:  Yes.

MR. BROOKS:  And last time it was Dean/Kerry, now it’s Obama/Clinton.

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.

MR. BROOKS:  The last time, calculation won.  I think Obama’s a zillion times better candidate, and I’m glad to see he’s getting a little ink finally from Newsweek.  It’s just a shame that he gets no media attention.

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah, right.

MR. BROOKS:  You know, but his essential problem is, is that, for a lot of people, he’s not partisan.  He is a uniter.  He, he never takes the cheap shot at his enemies.  But a lot of people want the person who leads their party to take the cheap shot at their enemies.  So he has been a little disappointing at a—at debate after debate because he doesn’t, he doesn’t take that cheap shot.  And so, somehow he’s got to find a way to wow people, which he hasn’t done oftentimes.

MR. GREGORY:  Todd Purdum, let’s talk about the Republican field.  The big story this week, of course, is John McCain.  He’s got $2 million left in the bank after a poor showing in the second quarter.  There’s talk of him trying to recast his candidacy, get back to that maverick feel of 2000.  But he’s clearly been pinched in between his, his stance on the Iraq war and the immigration bill that has failed.  This is what you wrote in, in an excellent cover story of him in February of 2007, a Vanity Fair profile.  “Given his popular status as a maverick war hero, John McCain has a good shot at winning the 2008 presidential election - if he can get his party to nominate him.  But one minute he’s toeing the conservative line ...  and the next he’s telling someone what he really thinks...

“John McCain has spent this whole day, this whole year, these whole last six years,...trying to square the circle that is, trying to make the maverick, freethinking impulses that first made him into a political star somehow compatible with the suck-it-up adherence to the orthodoxies required of a Republican presidential front-runner.” This week his aides argued, “Well, at least we can try to put to rest these pandering stories because through all of this pandering we’re really suffering.”

MR. PURDUM:  I mean, the one saving grace for him is that positions that got him in trouble most recently—his support for the Iraq war and his support for the immigration bill—were absolutely consistent points of principle that he’s not wavered from.  He wasn’t trying to suck up to Jerry Falwell, he wasn’t trying to impress the base, he was doing what he believed in and it hurt him. So that may be liberating for him.  He’s a better insurgent candidate than he is a front-runner.  I mean, a year ago now who would have thought we’d be having this discussion?  Last fall when I was traveling with Senator McCain, they’d already spent $1 million on air charters.  Someone spotted him in row 29 of a coach commercial flight the other day.  So he’s definitely got his work cut out for him, but maybe there can be some liberating factor.  How much lower can he go?  So he can start climbing back up.

MR. GREGORY:  Is this a time to start asking about the viability of his candidacy?

MS. KORNBLUT:  I, like Todd, I was surprised that we were actually asking that question.  We were obviously asking it of Senator Hagel earlier.  His campaign hopes actually to take advantage of the insurgent role they’re going to now find themselves in, being the outsider once again as he was in 2000.

MR. GREGORY:  Big behind.

MS. KORNBLUT:  Being very far behind at this point.  What the question is, has he crossed some kind of tipping point where he can’t recover?  They’re going to hope this week they’re going to go to New Hampshire this next weekend and he’s going to talk about his trip to Iraq that he did over the Fourth of July week.  And interestingly, he’s not going to stop talking about immigration.  He’s going to keep talking about it.  They’re going to tweak their message—they haven’t told us how yet—but they’re hoping to really capitalize on what’s seen as his, you know, stick-to-itiveness on the issues that have hurt him.

MR. BROOKS:  It should be mentioned, the GOP race is much more fluid than the Democratic race.  People are much less committed.  And then the second thing to be said is the GOP is collapsing.  I mean, the party is in terrible shape. I mean, I really think it’s in the prospect of just getting wiped out in two years, and that has two ways to play for McCain.  The first way could be that the GOP that he used to do OK in eight years ago doesn’t exist any more. Those independent voters, those independent Republicans, moderate Republicans they’re all Democrats now...

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. BROOKS:  ...or something else.  So those people are gone for him.

MR. GREGORY:  Particularly in New Hampshire, a state where he once...

MR. BROOKS:  Particularly in New Hampshire, but also in South Carolina, Michigan, other states he did well in.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. BROOKS:  The second prospect is that, at some point, the Republicans start acting like er—rational human beings, and say, “We’re in trouble here, we need a change.” And he still could offer that change.

MR. GREGORY:  You talk about the fluidity of the, of the Republican race. What role is Fred Thompson playing kind of being in, kind of being out?  Is he detracting from, from McCain’s level of support?

MORE FROM MEET THE PRESS

Meet the Press Section Front

Nov. 8: Casey, Barbour, Rendell, roundtable, Brokaw Nov. 1: Tim Geithner, David Plouffe, roundtable Oct. 25: Cornyn, Schumer, Burnett, Sorkin, roundtable Oct. 18: Jarrett, Dodd, Kyl, Shriver, Podesta Oct. 11: Levin, Graham, McCaffrey, Myers, roundtable Oct. 4: Ambassador Susan Rice, roundtable Sept. 27: Bill Clinton, Paterson, Kyl, Webb Sept. 20: President Obama, Sen. Graham, Rep. Boehner, roundtable Sept. 13: Durbin, Cornyn, Dean, Gingrich, roundtable Sept. 6: Axelrod, roundtable Meet the Press Section Front   Add Meet the Press headlines to your news reader: