‘Meet the Press’ transcript for Sept. 2, 2007

MS. MATALIN:  Well, the reason she has run a near-flawless campaign is because she has to.  She has to.  And the things that she is most vulnerable on is she has to be, to be a credible change agent.  She has to keep moving forward, looking forward.  And anything that references the past, the Craig and the Clinton connection, which is ridiculous.  But this, that re-raises the Johnny Chung issue and all the scandals, which are just symbolic of all the scandals of those years, is the thing that she has to stay away from.  So of course she’s correct.  These guys can never vet all of their contributors, and she does have more than anybody else.  But in her case, and she knows it’s a vulnerability, she should have hired somebody to do special vetting on her FEC reports because if it was easy for the—whoever broke it, The Wall Street Journal, to get it, some, you know, some geek in the basement could have figured it out, too.  She, there’s an extra onus on her to not repeat scandals that are related to that with which she’s trying to avoid people thinking about.

MR. MURPHY:  They’ve always taken a wide stance in the Clinton world of fund-raising...

MR. SHRUM:  Oh.

MR. MURPHY:  I couldn’t resist.  Little callback to Larry Craig.

MR. SHRUM:  I don’t—this is, this is going nowhere.

MR. MURPHY:  No, no, no.  But seriously, and it has been a problem for them. It’s hard in any campaign to filter this stuff through because you take so many small contributions.  But what’s—this is an interesting, I think, look into the situation they’re all in right now, beyond just her.  They’re all having bad quarters.  This is the hardest quarter to raise money.  And so all the candidates are in a quiet internal panic about how do you find more money. So the pressure is on the finance teams to do it, and all of a sudden dodgier and dodgier characters are able to slip through.  But her problem is she just is held to a bit higher standard because of past problems.

MR. SHRUM:  She didn’t do anything wrong, Mike.  Nothing wrong.

MR. MURPHY:  And there’s more, there’s more on this guy, too.  We don’t really know where the money came from, this mystery guy.  All this dough, this thing is not over.

MR. CARVILLE:  You know, these campaigns, they have I don’t know how many contributors.  They have people that to this.  A guy named Fabian, who is, who is Romney’s finance co-chair, was indicted on I don’t know how many different things.  He was a Bush pioneer.  Do these guys know that?  No.  Look at Rudy Giuliani’s South Carolina chairman was indicted on cocaine trafficking.  Or look what happened to McCain’s guy in Florida.  These things are going to happen because these campaigns have sort of human beings here. In—Norman—sorry, I can’t pronounce that.

MR. MURPHY:  Hsu.

MR. SHRUM:  Hsu.

MR. CARVILLE:  Mr. Hsu is not a lobbyist or anything like that.  He was a guy that had raised a lot of money.  He’d obviously been in a lot of trouble before.  He’s going to have to reconcile this.  But somehow or another that this points to some kind of flaw in Senator Clinton, in judge—and other candidates ought to be careful about criticizing this...

MS. MATALIN:  No one said it’s a flaw.

MR. CARVILLE:  ...because they’re going to crop up with her.

MS. MATALIN:  It’s just a distraction she has to run a flawless campaign.

MR. RUSSERT:  Hillary Clinton is the front-runner for the Democratic nomination.

MR. CARVILLE:  Right.

MR. SHRUM:  Nobody, nobody, nobody, thinks that Hillary Clinton knew about this.  Nobody held Hillary Clinton accountable for this.

MR. CARVILLE:  Right.

MR. SHRUM:  Hsu’s given money to lots of other candidates.  The biggest story, by the way, in terms of the primaries, is the Democrats agreeing now not to campaign, all of them, in Michigan and Florida if they go ahead in Iowa.  That actually, in a perverse way, if the states stick to the calendar, could, for example, help Senator Clinton.  If no one campaigns and she wins Florida, wins the primary in Florida, wins the primary in Michigan, that could have a knockout effect in Iowa, could change things.

MR. RUSSERT:  Hillary Clinton, the front-runner of the Democratic primary, perhaps the front-runner in, in the national polls to even win the presidency outright, is the center of attention amongst Democrats and Republicans. Here’s Karl Rove, first on the Rush Limbaugh show and then later on MEET THE PRESS.  Let’s watch.

(Audiotape, August 15, 2007)

Mr. KARL ROVE:  I think she’s likely to be the nominee, and I think she’s fatally flawed.

(End audiotape)

(Videotape, August 19, 2007)

Mr. ROVE:  (From “Meet the Press”) She enters the general election campaign with the highest negatives of any candidate in the history of the Gallup Poll.

(End videotape)

MR. RUSSERT:  Elizabeth Edwards, the wife of John Edwards, weighed in on this debate in Time magazine.  This is what Elizabeth Edwards had to say:  “I do not think the hatred against Hillary Clinton is justified.  I don’t know where it comes from.  I don’t begin to understand it.  But you can’t pretend it doesn’t exist, and it will energize the Republican base.  Their nominee won’t energize them.  Bush won’t.  But Hillary as the nominee will.  It’s hard for John” Edwards “to talk about, but it’s the reality.” Is that fair?

MR. MURPHY:  I believe so, yeah.  I think she is the weak candidate.  I agree with Rove.  I, I think the generic Democratic category could be very strong based on factors that aren’t candidate-driven.  But of the Democratic candidates I see right now, I think she’s the weakest of the big three in a general election.

MR. CARVILLE:  Well, first of all, she’s gotten a lot, lot stronger since this campaign started.  I mean, it—I’d—to be fair, I would be more than fair to her because, as I said, I’m very sympathetic to her.  Everybody says she’s overperformed, and now she’s starting to lead in all of these national polls. These things are pretty sort of meaningless at, at this point.  Her negatives are nowhere near as high as President Bush’s was before the election of 2004. So I think that Mr. Rove was just out pontificating on “Rush Limbaugh.”

MR. MURPHY:  He’s doing one of two things.

MR. CARVILLE:  Yeah.

MR. SHRUM:  Either he’s getting some early licks in or he’s trying to attack her to help her with the Democratic base.

MR. CARVILLE:  Yeah.  All right.

MR. SHRUM:  But you got to be careful about this because we all remember how the Democrats in 1980 were saying, “Boy, we want Ronald Reagan.  Boy, can we beat Ronald Reagan.” And they got—we got Ronald Reagan, and I think we would have been a lot better off with almost any other Republican nominee.

MS. MATALIN:  I love this Svengali stuff that these guys attribute to Karl. How about a third option?  He was answering the question.

MR. MURPHY:  I didn’t attribute anything.

MS. MATALIN:  “Oh, this like three-bank shot.  He’s trying to do, stir up her base,” or—he was answering a question.  Everywhere people like us go is what—because Republicans are scared of Hillary Clinton.  We don’t get it. There’s nothing to be scared of.  It’s just not about polls and fatally flawed.  And one thing Karl has...

MR. RUSSERT:  Do you want to run against Hillary Clinton?

MS. MATALIN:  We, over which we have no control, we do not worry.  I would like to run against a classic Democrat because those sets of principles, that governing, governing—government-operating principle has lost consistently since the founding of this country.  She is a big government centralized thinker, and so that’s what we want to run against.

MR. RUSSERT:  Do Republicans want Hillary Clinton?

MR. MURPHY:  Well, I, to the extent we want anybody, I just, I just think she’s the weakest.  I mean, I don’t agree with my friend James on that she’s doing that great in the Democratic primary.  The fact she’s fighting for her—she’s fighting in the Democratic primary, doing OK, but that she’s in a fight with the assets of being a senator from New York, being pretty well-respected, the wife of a former, very popular Democratic president, and she’s not cake walking through this thing, to me, is a sign of weakness.

MR. CARVILLE:  We don’t have, I have poll, we don’t have cake walks.  That, that, I mean, we just don’t—we’re not that kind of political party.  We just—there’s s no—the Democratic nomination at every juncture is...

MR. MURPHY:  But when I look, when I look at the general, though, I see a Southern white Protestant, Edwards, who’s always trouble, like Clinton or Jimmy Carter for us.  I see Obama, who’s the perfect change candidate in a change election, and I see Hillary Clinton, who, to me, looks like backwards. And I’d rather run against the polarizing backwards than the other two.

MR. SHRUM:  But she’s done, you know, she’s done a smart thing, and strategy is necessity.  I said this earlier, and people thought I was criticizing her. They have actually redefined change as nostalgia.  And Bill Clinton said it, you know, yesterday’s news wasn’t bad news.

MR. MURPHY:  But he hasn’t gotten away with it.

MR. SHRUM:  You know what?  Compared to Bush today, I think people think the 1990s was a pretty good time.

MR. MURPHY:  Today, but it’s the...

MR. CARVILLE:  Right.  But the argument that Democrats should not, not nominate Hillary Clinton because Republicans don’t like her is not very persuasive.  I don’t—ah, it’s not just...

MR. SHRUM:  (Unintelligible).

MR. RUSSERT:  All right!  This debate will continue all day long here, all day tomorrow around the barbecues.  Mary Matalin, James Carville, Mike Murphy, Bob Shrum.  And we’ll be right back.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT:  Find out who’ll be meeting the press right on your cell phone. Text MTP to 46833.  Receive weekly alerts on Friday afternoon with Sunday’s MEET THE PRESS guest lineup.

That’s all for today.  We’ll be back next week.  If it’s Sunday it’s MEET THE PRESS.  Happy Labor Day to all the hard-working men and women across our country.

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