‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Aug. 5, 2007

Unidentified Man:  So will you take a position?

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY):  Yes, I will, I will.

Man:  Thank you.

SEN. CLINTON:  Because you know, a lot of those lobbyists, whether you like it or not...

Man:  (Unintelligible)

SEN. CLINTON:  ...represent real Americans.  They actually do.  They represent nurses, they represent, you know, social workers.  They represent—yes, they represent corporations that employ a lot of people.  So you know, the idea that somehow a contribution is going to influence you, I just ask you to look at my record.  I have been fighting for the same things. I—my core principles have not changed.  But I do want to be the president for everybody, and I want to represent the entire country, and that is what I’m aiming to do in my campaign.

Man:  Thank you.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL):  I disagree with the notion that lobbyists don’t have disproportionate influence.  Look, the insurance and the drug companies—the insurance and the drug companies spent $1 billion in lobbying over the last 10 years.  Now Hillary, you, you were talking earlier about the, you know, efforts you made back in ‘93.  Well, you can’t tell me that that money did not have a difference.  They are not spending that just because they are contributing to the public interest.  They have an agenda.

FMR. SEN. JOHN EDWARDS:  How many people in this room have a Washington lobbyist working for you?  I see two, three.  How many people are in the room? Fifteen hundred, 2,000?  You are not represented by Washington lobbyists. They need to cut these people off, that’s what we need to do.

Man:  Thank you, thank you.  Thank you.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  Different answers to the question would you take money from federal lobbyists.  David:

MR. DAVID BRODY:  Yeah, yeah.  I mean, that was not the visual moment, I, I think, that Hillary Clinton was looking for.  Especially the fact she was sitting in the middle, and you had Edwards and Obama kind of pointing fingers both at her in, in the middle.  But the reality is that the underlying theme here is this experience vs. a fresh face.  I mean, the Obama folks have said for a long time that a—that the experience—they’re trying to tie her to this whole idea of experience and the fact that if she does have the experience, well, wait a minute, that means that ties her to the establishment.  And if it ties her to the establishment, they’re going to try to make the Bush-Cheney issue, you know, they’re going to try to bring that in as well.  And then they’re going to bring up Biden and Dodd and Clinton, put them all together, and say, ‘Hey, that’s 100 years of Senate experience.  Do you really want that?’

MR. RUSSERT:  Let me read to all of you two more quotes about—from these books and then open the discussion wide open.  This was from Carl Bernstein’s book about Hillary Clinton, according to the Daily News.  “Senior political figures quoted by Bernstein described an aloofness and arrogance from Hillary Clinton that turned them against her.  Former Senator Bill Bradley remembered how she said the White House would ‘demonize’ anybody who stood in the” Clinton “administration’s way.”

“‘That was it for me in terms of Hillary Clinton,’” Bradley said.  ‘You don’t tell members of the Senate you’re going to demonize them.  It was obviously so basic to who she is.  The arrogance.  The assumption that people with questions are enemies.  The disdain.  The hypocrisy.’”

And then from David Mendell’s book, “Obama:  From Promise to Power,” we read this:  “What the public has yet to see clearly” in—“is his hidden side:  his imperious, mercurial, self-righteous and sometimes prickly nature, each quality exacerbated by the enormous career pressures that he has inflicted upon himself.  He’s an extraordinarily ambitious, competitive man with persuasive charm and a career reach that seems to have no bounds.  He is, in fact, a man of raw ambition so powerful that even he,” even he “is still coming to terms with its full force.”

Doris Kearns Goodwin, are politicians prepared to read that about themselves?

MS. GOODWIN:  Well, they should be, because that’s how they’re going to learn about how they’re projecting themselves to the country at large.  I mean, for Hillary, the polls show sometimes a difficulty with projecting warmth and compassion.  People who know her say she is warm, she is humorous, she is spontaneous.  But in it—you lose a reservoir of good feeling if you don’t get the country with you.  Eisenhower and Reagan had this great reservoir of good feeling because people felt that they were warm, they felt that they cared about their issues.

The ambition thing is so interesting of what you’ve written about, because ambition is a good thing.  Lincoln had huge ambition, so big that he wanted to be remembered after he died for having changed the world in a better way.  The question is, is your ambition your ego?  LBJ used to say, “Some people want power to strut around, to ‘hail to the chief.’ Others want it to have celebrity.  Still others want money.  I want it to do good things.” So we got to look at the ambition.  If it to social and economic justice, as I think you suggest?  Is Hillary’s ambition partly to be the first woman, a great civil rights thing?  Barack Obama would be the first African-American.  Those are huge things.  That can be good if channeled away from your own self-interest.

MR. RUSSERT:  What do you think, Carl Bernstein, Hillary would say when she reads Bill Bradley’s quote?  The arrogant, disdain, hypocrisy.

MR. BERNSTEIN:  That “I’ve really moved away from those attributes, that I’ve taken a look at myself, that I know the mistakes that I’ve made.” How much introspection is really there and how much of it is for public consumption, we don’t know.  But she is somebody who learns from her mistakes.  She has gone exactly the opposite in the Senate.  In the, in the White House, she was strident, she was right up front with saying what she believed to the extent that it hurt her, too direct.  The opposite in the Senate, ducking issues sometimes, in fact.

But what’s so interesting to me is the clip you put up there.  I think it tells us an awful lot about Hillary Clinton.  She didn’t like the question, she knew she was about to get got.  And you could see her a little bit perturbed by it, and she—at the same time, her answer was really a little less disingenuous, I think, than the other two.  What somebody is—like Dodd finally got up and said is, “Let’s have public financing of our campaigns and end all of this corporate welfarism that we are all beholden to.” But she wouldn’t do that.  What she ends up saying is, “It’s true.  There are lobbyists for good cause.” And at the same time, she ends up getting sandbagged on that, and she—and when you see her sandbagged, she doesn’t like it.

MR. BRODY:  And I would also say that this goes to the underlying, one of the attributes you talked about, which is managing emotions.  I mean, if you think about what Hillary Clinton has done so far in this campaign, she has been a master, at this point, of doing that.  There have been hecklers that have showed up at her events, there have been protesters that have gotten right in her face.  She’s been able to laugh it off somewhat.  There, there’s another part of that that we saw the other day, yesterday, when Hillary Clinton was actually—there were hisses and boos, and she said, “You know, I kind of expected this coming here, a little bit.” So she’s able to have fun with it to a certain extent.  That’s important and that she doesn’t have the YouTube moment.  Because the camera’s always rolling, as we know.

MR. RUSSERT:  David Mendell, when you write that Barack Obama has another side—mercurial, self-righteous, sometimes prickly—has the campaign responded to that?

MR. MENDELL:  No, they haven’t.  I haven’t spoken...

MS. GOODWIN:  Here it comes.

MR. MENDELL:  I haven’t spoken with them since those words have been written.

MR. RUSSERT:  But why did you write that?  What did you see?  Was there—is there a stark contrast between the public...

MR. BERNSTEIN:  It’s really good writing.

MR. MENDELL:  Well, thank you.

Yes, there is a stark contrast.  In private, he’s a—Barack Obama is an exceptionally intelligent man, and, and folks who are that intelligent sometimes think they’re always right, and they find that they are right often. And at times he can have a little trouble with people who don’t live up to his standard, his, his intelligence level, and he can talk down to them at times. He’s—he, he—reporters who invade what he feel is his world and, and aren’t giving him fair coverage, he can have a little—he can have a few issues with them as well.  He’s not—he can get a little prickly at times.  I think a lot of this has been brought on personally himself with this, this extraordinary ambition that he has.  He—anybody who wants to be president of the United States obviously has a great amount of ambition, and he’s learned to temper that, I think, over the years.  He lost a congressional race in 2000, and I think he’s, he’s trying to balance due patience with, with that raw ambition that, that he possesses.

MR. RUSSERT:  Senator Obama made headlines with his speech to the Wilson Center about Pakistan.  Let’s watch that and come back and talk about it.

(Videotape)

SEN. OBAMA:  When I am president, we will wage the war that has to be won. The first step must be to get off the wrong battlefield in Iraq and take the fight to the terrorists in Afghanistan and Pakistan.  If we have actionable intelligence about high value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  Doris:

MS. GOODWIN:  Well, I think Mr. Obama understands that his great strength is to project new directions, new ideas, a different way of dealing with domestic and foreign policy than we’ve seen, not only the Bush administration but perhaps even in the Clinton administration.  You see his polls, people under 45 are much more for him than over 45.  So I think here he’s taking the risk in that statement that he may be bashed for the lack of experience which Clinton went right after him on, but to say, “I’m going to try new things,” and hoping that the country is willing, as he says, to turn a new page.

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