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

MS. GOODWIN:  And I think that shows you why it was so smart for Hillary to get on the Armed Services Committee.  She knew, as a woman, that especially she had to project strength on military issues.  She’s talked to soldiers. It’s almost like that’s the threshold, I think, for a woman candidate, to be strong on military and strong on respect for the soldiers.  And I think she’s done that as well as she can, and that’s an important thing for her.

MR. RUSSERT:  David Mendell, Obama’s campaign, about change, about inspiration.  All those domestic issues clearly on his side as a Democratic candidate.  And yet there’s some real warning signs when it comes to the military question and the homeland security question.

MR. MENDELL:  Sure, is he—does he have the strength of character to lead the country.  He’s a fresh face, he’s brand-new.  Just three years ago, I was covering a, a guy running for the U.S. Senate who was a state senator.  But I think, politically speaking, you look at those numbers and I think you see why he got in this race.  The Democrats, way ahead on, on all those issues.  I don’t think this was necessarily his timetable for running for president of the United States, but I think he saw an opportunity here, and in his gut he just had to seize it.

MR. RUSSERT:  Carl Bernstein, when you see those numbers, all the issues on the side of the Democrats, but homeland security, strong military, moral values, you can anticipate the campaign against Hillary Clinton.

MR. RUSSERT:  You can, but as Doris said, the first thing she set out to do when she went into the Senate was to become a defense intellectual, and she’s really done it.  What those numbers tell me is that the people in this country are so far ahead of we who are journalists in defining in a serious way what we ought to be looking at, and, and we ought to be taking some real note of those polls.  You know, I believe in polls in terms of, you know, 3 percent here, 3 percent there.  They’re a snapshot.  To me, that is a snapshot that says, “Hey, you guys who are reporters, wake up and look at what’s important.” That’s my reading of it.

MS. GOODWIN:  You know, in fact, looking at Giuliani, it seems to me the important reporting that’s necessary is, everybody now knows what an extraordinary job he did after September 11^th—resolute, defiant, decisive, controlling anger, etc.  But then the question is, what was his mayorship like before that?  And sometimes those very strengths of his were difficulties before—intolerance, difficulties with enemies.

MR. BERNSTEIN:  It’s one of the reasons why Hillary’s people would like to run against Giuliani above all the others.

MS. GOODWIN:  So that—we need to know all sides of his career, and maybe he changed after 9/11.  That we need to know as well.

MR. BRODY:  And I would also say on national security, look what happened in the House and Senate over the weekend.  You know, go ahead and, and basically allowing the White House to have their way on domestic wiretapping, I mean, because they know that they can not be pigeonholed this way come 2008, not just for presidential politics, but also for the 2008 broader congressional elections as well.

MR. RUSSERT:  A Democratic-controlled Congress acceded to the White House on the issue of domestic wiretapping.

MR. BRODY:  That’s important.  That’s significant, and, and it goes to exactly what those poll numbers showed.

MR. RUSSERT:  Carl Bernstein, Hillary Clinton refuses to admit a mistake in terms of her vote on Iraq, unlike John Edwards and Joe Biden and Chris Dodd and all the other candidates, and she’s adamant about it.  Why?

MR. BERNSTEIN:  One, because she believes in her vote.  You know, she was in the White House for eight years and watched her husband deal with Saddam Hussein.  She believes that presidents ought to have leverage, and that that vote gave George Bush leverage.  What’s a little disingenuous, I think, to many who know her, including her colleagues in the Senate, is the explanation that she thought she was really voting to send George Bush back to the United Nations.  That’s a problem that gets to a bigger question that’s not in your numbers—candor, openness, truthfulness.  My guess is that the most important figure is going to go to that question come near the election day, but especially after the mendacity and subterfuge of this current presidency and Mr. Gates’ predecessors that, that that’s really where Hillary is going to have some problems with her past.  And, at the same time, we see her moving in a really interesting way.  You know, she said yesterday in, in, in Iowa, “I can’t even count the mistakes I made.” You know, that’s, that’s a big step, and she did it in a—in an off-handed way that—but openness and candor and truthfulness after what we’ve been through, I think, is, is the sleeper issue in this campaign, and...

MR. RUSSERT:  Can she, can she meet that challenge?

MR. BERNSTEIN:  It’s, it’s her biggest challenge in some ways.  And if she explains, I think, as a human being, what her life has been about and what she’s been through and opens up in a way she hasn’t been willing to, for instance, in her own autobiography and says, “You know, look, I had a special prosecutor who wanted to indict me.  I was three years in the White House, and I woke up thinking, ‘This out of control guy wants to send me to the clink.’” If she were to do that and say, “So I was careful in my answers in Whitewater” I think it might, might help her.  I’m speculating, but I, I don’t doubt that’s going to be a problem.  But for, for all of the candidates, particularly the Republicans as well.

MR. BRODY:  Yeah, and I would say connectingness.  You know, one of the character traits that’s, that’s going to underline this whole conversation is this idea of connecting with the voters.  If she comes out and says, “Hey, you know, I, I made a few mistakes.  I did this.  I did that,” it gives her a sense that, that the people can really relate to you because, you know, they make mistakes, too.  And this is why we haven’t really talked much about Fred Thompson.  But Fred Thompson may have this kind of Ronald Reagan-type quality a lot of people are talking about where he can just connect to voters without working to hard to do it.

MR. MENDELL:  But when you’re up 21 percent in the polls, is that what you want to do, come out and start admitting that you’ve made mistakes in the past?

MR. BRODY:  Right.  It’s just that...

MS. GOODWIN:  Well, you know that I think?

MR. BRODY:  Yeah.

MS. GOODWIN:  I think if you admit them—it’s not that we want a mea culpa. We want to know that they learned...

MR. BERNSTEIN:  You know they...(unintelligible).

MS. GOODWIN:  ...from those mistakes.  Because if she can talk about the staffing, the difficulties they had in the beginning of the Clinton administration, the health care debacle, then we’re going to know that her experience is even more important because she’s learned from it, she was there.  It’s not just what we want her to say, “I’m sorry.” That’s a childish thing.  But just to learn from it.

MR. MENDELL:  That’s right.

MR. BERNSTEIN:  She has a history of learning from mistakes.

MS. GOODWIN:  That’s the key.

MR. RUSSERT:  To be continued.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, David Brody, David Mendell, Carl Bernstein.  The book, “Obama:  From Promise to Power,” out next week.  And Carl Bernstein’s “A Woman in Charge,” is out right now.  Thank you all.  Interesting.

We’ll continue our discussion with these four geniuses.  Find out how these biographers and reporters and how difficult it is to get a handle on such complicated political figures.  Our MEET THE PRESS Take Two Web Extra on our Web site this afternoon, mtp.msnbc.com.  You’ll enjoy this one.  We’ll be right back.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT:  On Tuesday’s “Nightly News” David Gregory will have an exclusive interview with Tony Snow about his battle with cancer.  An extraordinary close-up look at the brave battle being waged by the president’s White House press secretary.  That’s on Tuesday’s “Nightly News.”

That’s all for today.  We’ll be back next week.  If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

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