‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Aug. 19, 2007

MR. BROWNSTEIN:  There will be voters, sure.

MR. HARWOOD:  ...Mitt Romney has fewer of those things that would be embarrassing to read on the front page of the paper.

MR. BROWNSTEIN:  Mm-hmm.

MR. HARWOOD:  And that’s going to help him.  You see it when he talks about family at every opportunity.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.  Right.  You bring up Mitt Romney.

And you wrote an article, Matt Cooper, in your, in your magazine, Conde Nast Portfolio, about Romney.  And, and it was very interesting, a portion of it...

MR. COOPER:  Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY:  ...which I’ll put up on the screen about how a President Romney would approach the work at hand.  “Romney’s always analytical,” you wrote, “the hallmark of the Bain”—Bain “Capital approach to both consulting and private equity.  To this day, Romney likes his information ‘voluminous,’ says his campaign manager and gubernatorial chief of staff, Beth Myers.  Romney might be a congenial panderer, but he isn’t someone who would look into Vladimir Putin’s soul and pronounce him a friend.” The contrast to President Bush.  What do you mean?

MR. COOPER:  That’s right.  Well, you know, both he and George Bush, it’s irresistible to compare them.  They’re both sons of Republican politicians who wanted to be president, they both got Harvard MBAs.  But Bush is famously, you know, decides more from his gut.  And Romney is very analytical and, to some degree, I think that’s a, that’s an enviable quality, a good quality in a president.  But I, as I said in the piece, you know, he is also a panderer, and he’s clearly, you know, stretched his positions, to put it charitably. And, you know, that’s a—that may be a detriment.

MR. BROWNSTEIN:  In addition to all of his analytical skill, he is the Republican candidate most going for the three yards and a cloud of dust. There is nothing very complex or nouvelle about the way he’s running for president.  He’s making two assumptions.  The way you win the Republican primary is to consolidate conservatives to the greatest extent that you can and to focus on those early states, in Iowa and New Hampshire.  While Giuliani has talked about putting more focus later in the month, now you have this calendar shift where South Carolina is moving up to the middle of January, moving back Iowa and New Hampshire, and you have the possibility that this race could be largely decided, as it has been since 1980, by the continuum of those three states:  Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina.  And he seems to be the most focused, at least initially, on those very first two states in a very kind of conventional way.

MR. GREGORY:  John Harwood, Mitt Romney also answering questions about where some of his trust money goes.  In a blind trust, he’s got a huge fortune, $250 million, according to estimates.  Some of those investments, in conflict with his campaign positions, say on abortion or money in companies that may be investing in Sudan.  Is this an issue for him?

MR. HARWOOD:  You know, flipside of the issue affecting John Edwards, who’s got money invested with a hedge fund that had been involved in subprime mortgages, and he’s talking about championing the poor.

MR. GREGORY:  Foreclosing on Katrina victims in New Orleans.

MR. HARWOOD:  Exactly.  You know, I think this is a minor issue for Mitt Romney.  He does have his money in a blind trust.  They’re now going about trying to dissociate that trust, the, the trustee has said, from investments that are at odds with Romney’s positions.  But I think people realize that we have a large and complex economy...

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. HARWOOD:  ...and it’s not easy to sort all this stuff out.

MR. GREGORY:  But he’s been aggressive about all this.  Back when he was running against Senator Kennedy, he said “the blind trust is an age-old ruse.” He was quoted as saying, “You give a blind trust rules.  You can say to a blind trust, ‘Don’t invest in properties which might be in conflict of interest or, or where the seller might think they’re going to get an advantage from me.’” That was him going on the offensive about a blind trust against Senator Kennedy.

MR. HARWOOD:  Well, on blind trusts, like on so many other things, that was then and this is now.  The question for Romney, I think, he is a famous analyst of, of problems and issues.  He did that in business.  The challenge for him, he’s running in a belief party.  How much does a belief party want to take somebody who appears to have calculated where he has to be on certain issues and decided to get there.  He’s running against Giuliani.  What Giuliani has going for him is the sense that there is some unbendable core inside him that’s—a spine of steel, if you will.  That may be the—where we end up posing concerns.

MS. O’BEIRNE:  Well, I—there’s an appetite, though, I think, on the part of Republican rank and file voters for that competence that they, that critics believe has been lacking.  And I think Mitt Romney’s certainly going to be competitive in that respect.  The implied criticisms, of course, are to these problems in the past couple of years.  People used to say of Republicans, they might not like government very much, but they can run the place.  Well, they’re no longer saying that.  And I think Mitt Romney’s going to be extremely competitive there, based on the kinds of things Matt pointed out in his, in his article.  He has a real track record with respect to management. And you’re exactly right, Ron, that is the kind of campaign he’s running.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.  Let me talk about the Democrats, and we’ll put up some of the recent polling numbers on the screen.  First you look at the national poll numbers with Senator Clinton still with a sizeable advantage there.  And now look at this California Democratic poll.  Of course, California, one of the states in Super Tuesday, a significant margin there for Senator Clinton over Obama.  And perhaps it explains some of what we’ve been seeing from Senator Obama on the campaign trail, really going after Senator Clinton.  This is how The New York Times reported it on Friday.  “Senator Barack Obama has moved in recent weeks to sharpen his tone noticeably as he fights for the Democratic presidential nomination, increasingly drawing sharp contrasts with his rivals and seeking to turn criticism of his foreign policy credentials into a fresh argument for change.  The recalibration of the campaign is a marked departure from a laid-back tone Mr. Obama often had taken in the first six months of his candidacy.  It comes as he is working to persuade voters of his judgment and erase perceptions among party leaders that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is establishing herself as the front-runner after a series of debates and what some Democrats have viewed as slip-ups by Mr. Obama.”

Matt Cooper, does he have to turn it on here?

MR. COOPER:  I think he does.  You know, my wife works for Hillary Clinton, so in the spirit of full disclosure.  You know, look, I think Obama’s made this argument that she doesn’t really represent change and that he does.  I think that might be compelling to a sliver of the Democratic Party.  But I think Hillary Clinton is so different from George Bush, it’s hard to make the argument that a Clinton presidency would be a continuation of the Bush presidency.  So I think this argument he’s gotten into is, is just not one that he’s going to win in the end.

MR. HARWOOD:  But there’s no question, David, that he does have to turn it on.  You look at the rolling averages at polls of these early states, Hillary Clinton’s now leading in Iowa, now leading in New Hampshire.  If she isn’t stopped in one or both of those places by Barack Obama or John Edwards or both of them, she’s not going to be stopped for this nomination.

MR. BROWNSTEIN:  In fact, she’s a real front-runner.  And this is what you have when you have a front-runner.  They, they lead everywhere.  I think Obama has to make this argument.  I think, I think the Democratic—the structure of the Democratic race is coming together in a way the Republican race isn’t. Basically, you have an argument about what kind of change and how much change. Obama is basically arguing that he can bring more fundamental change to Washington on a variety of different levels than Hillary Clinton.  It’s not so much an ideological argument, because he’s talking about unifying the country after the Bush years.  She’s arguing that she brings the perfect blend of change and experience, that she has the experience to deliver the change that others talk about.  And you know, John Edwards is still out there, especially in Iowa, making kind of an edgier ideological argument, saying, “I’m going to have the big, bold liberal ideas,” in some ways reminiscent of Dick Gephardt’s indictment against Bill Clinton in the late 1990s.  So those different kind of dimensions.

Right now I think the problem that Edwards and Obama has, as Matt suggests, is that Hillary Clinton is more competitive with them on change than they are with her on experience.  She dominates them in all of these polls about who do you trust in a crisis, who’s the strongest leader, who has the best experience to be president?  And I think as long as that dynamic is in place—I remember what one of Obama’s advisers said to me, “Strength was a leading indicator of success in presidential politics.” They have to challenge her on that ground or else it’s going to be very difficult.

MR. GREGORY:  And yet, Kate O’Beirne, is he succeeding in some of these frontal attacks on her?

MS. O’BEIRNE:  I don’t think so.  I think his message about unifying the country is not a message for the Democratic primary base.  It seems to be that Hillary Clinton better knows that, that, that population when she’s running anti-Bush ads, which is what she’s been doing lately now.  Of course, she’s not running against George Bush.  In fact, come ‘08 I don’t think she’ll even be running against a Bush Republican.  But she knows what unifies the base, and I don’t think it’s a call for unifying the country.

MR. HARWOOD:  You know, I think the real wild card in this race is going to be Fred Thompson, as Kate was talking about earlier, when he gets in.  The way that he has tried to make up lately some of the lost ground, saying that he’s going to talk straight on entitlements, that sort of thing, how—what, what is he going to say that’s going to appeal to the Republican base, but also not hurt him badly in a general election?

MR. GREGORY:  All, all right.  We’re going to leave it there.  Thanks to you all.

And before we go, we want to take a moment here to remember a legend in the political world, and that is Michael Deaver, who worked so closely with Ronald Reagan for so many years, one of his closest advisers.  He died yesterday at age 69 after a brave battle with pancreatic cancer.  In what was his last television interview, he appeared right here just three months ago, along with former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, and spoke about his final memories of the man he worked with for over 30 years.

(Videotape, May 20, 2007)

MR. MICHAEL DEAVER:  My final memory of Ronald Reagan was actually the first day in the White House, when—the first day in the Oval Office, right off the reviewing stand, when he sat behind that desk and looked at me, and said, “Have you got goosebumps?”

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Our thoughts and prayers are with the Deaver family this morning.  And we’ll be right back.

(Announcements)

MR. GREGORY:  Start today tomorrow on “Today” with Matt and Meredith, then the “NBC Nightly News” with Brian Williams.  That’s all for today.  Tim Russert will be right back here next week.  If it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

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