'Meet the Press' transcript for Feb. 24, 2008

MR. RUSSERT:  You know, in history--on Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton gave a speech:  "I see an America where our economy works for everyone." Jimmy Carter, 32 years ago, "I see an America with a job for every man, woman and child." Bill Safire wrote about this in 1987, former speechwriter for Richard Nixon.  He said, "I always admired Franklin Roosevelt's use of the repeated `I see' construction.  Working with writers Samuel Rosenman and Robert Sherwood in 1940, F.D.R. collaborated on a speech that used `I see' to frame an inspiring vision:  `I see an America where factory workers are not discarded after they reach their prime.  ...  I see an America whose rivers and valleys and lakes ...  are protected as the rightful heritage of all the people.  ... I see an America devoted to our freedom.' Working as a speechwriter for Richard Nixon," "I thought:  Why not lift it?" Sure enough, Nixon gave a speech saying, `I see a day when Americans,' just like Carter, just like Clinton.  So then, Safire acknowledges this:  "After that speech, I felt a little pang of guilt..." " I called Sam Rosenman to fess up to using the `I see' construction he and Bobby Sherwood had written for Roosevelt." And this is what Rosenman said, "`Check Robert Ingersoll'" "`10 years after the Civil War.'" "I tracked down the speech.  ...There was the source of F.D.R.'s `I see' in an Ingersoll speech in" '76.  "`I see our country filled with happy homes.  ...  I see a world where thrones have crumbled.  ...  I see a world where labor reaps its full reward.'" This is Ingersoll who nominated Samuel Blaine for president in 1876.  Rutherford B.  Hayes won the nomination.  Doris Kearns Goodwin, I see that politicians have a way of borrowing from one another.

MS. GOODWIN:  Well, look, just as these politicians on the campaign trail are borrowing and absorbing patterns and evolving, so too speechwriters.  They look at the best speeches in history.  It's inevitable that those patterns are going to be get in their heads.  And you know, we can't make too much of this. This is the spoken word.  It's different from the written word, and it becomes part of what's in there.  As you said, there's not that much in their heads anymore that's coming in that's new.  So all that's in there is what was there before.

MR. RUSSERT:  Barack Obama has been criticized about rhetoric over substance. David Brooks, ask not what MEET THE PRESS can do for you, but what you can do for MEET THE PRESS.  This is what you wrote in your column about Barack Obama having some fun with his status.  "Up until now The Chosen One's [Obama's] speeches had seemed to them less like stretches of words and more like soul sensations that transcended time and space.  But those in the grips of Obama Comedown Syndrome began to wonder if His stuff actually made sense.  For example, His Hopeness tells rallies that we are the change we have been waiting for, but if we are the change that we have been waiting for then why have we been waiting since we've been here all along?"

MR. BROOKS:  I was describing what I think is happening, and it's happened to me to some extent.  You go to the rallies, you, you faint, you feel, you weep at your phone because you're watching the--his videos.  And then you actually begin to think about them a little more, and you, you experience a little bit of a letdown, and you start to think.  And I'm, I'm amazing that Hillary Clinton has not launched these attacks a little better.  How is this 47-year-old guy--he'll be 47 if he's elected president--going to change all these 70-something polarized committee chairmen on the Hill?  He's--there's been a lot of bipartisan things that have happened the last couple of years: the gang of 14 on judges, immigration, the FISA got--bill got 68 senators. He's been involved in none of them.  So it's fair to ask, and she should do a little of this asking, "How exactly are you going to bring this unity about?" And you know, it's fair to ask these questions.  It should be said that people who come down from the heights of Obama-mania still do seem to like him.  They know it's going to be tough, they're realistic about it, but they think, "Hey, I share something with that guy, some sense of hope."

MS. GOODWIN:  But, you know...

MR. BROOKS:  And that can't be erased.  That's still there.

MS. GOODWIN:  ...what history argues, and I think this is what he's arguing, is that the only time we've seen progressive change in this country is when the country is mobilized to push the people in Congress to action.  That's what happened in the Progressive Movement in the turn of the century, it's what happened in the New Deal, it's what happened in the '60s.  And I think that's what he's arguing.  That "I can't just get it down by myself; I need to have that movement out there that will push us in Washington, me and them included." And that's what I think is the strength of that message that he's trying to espouse.

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