'Meet the Press' transcript for March 23, 2008

MR. RUSSERT:  All this obviously is part of what superdelegates are discussing, as Peggy Noonan and Jon Meacham and others have talked about. Let's go through these numbers very carefully.  Here are the superdelegates as of now.  Obama has 218; Clinton has 255.  Since--in--on Super Tuesday it was 170, Obama; 260, Clinton.  Obama's gained 48 since Super Tuesday.  Clinton has lost five.  In terms of elected delegates, Obama has 1408, Clinton 1251.  When you add the superdelegates, it's 1626 to 1506, a lead of 120 for Obama.

Contests won, it's 28, Obama; 14, Clinton.  The cumulative popular vote for all the contests, 13.4 million to 12.7 million.

Chuck Todd, you've been scrubbing these numbers.  If things play out the way people...

MR. TODD:  Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT:  ..the way people believe in Pennsylvania and so forth, will Barack Obama go to the convention with more elected delegates, more contests won and higher cumulative popular vote?

MR. TODD:  Definitely on the more contests won.  That's done.  We're at 28. There's 10 left.  She could win them all, and she's not going to catch up there.  So that, that one he can put aside.  The popular vote thing, it's tough.  It's tough for her to catch up.  Is it plausible?  Yes.  Is it probable?  No.  In this sense, she'd have to win Pennsylvania by some 20 points, two million turnout, that would net her 200,000 or 300,000 votes there.  But then she has to win--I, I think the tricky thing here is, is, which one of them wins on turf they shouldn't be winning on?  Obviously, if Obama won Pennsylvania, race is over, she'd probably be out by May 1st.  That does--that seems unlikely.  What if she wins North Carolina?  You know, I was talking with one, one person who said--I said, "If Hillary Clinton's the nominee, that means she won what?" And this person said, "North Carolina or Oregon, and probably North Carolina." That means that she--somehow that this, whatever downturn Obama experienced last week meant, it means it continued and that they aren't just sitting there trading serves, you know, holding their, holding their own but not being able to win on the other turf.  So I think at this point, forget--she's not going to pass him in elected delegates.  She's not going to pass--probably pass him in popular vote.  So the question now is, can she start beating him in enough places and, and basically make it so that he can't win in a--you know, she beats him in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Indiana, Oregon, where she's got all the momentum, then the superdelegates might wake up and say, "Uh oh.  We've got a problem."

MR. RUSSERT:  Gene Robinson, if, in fact, it ended that way with "momentum" for Hillary Clinton, even though Barack Obama had more elected delegates, what happens to the Democratic Party?

MR. ROBINSON:  Then, you--then, then "Houston, we have a problem," or "Denver, we have a problem." It's--I think, is--it's--that's a nightmare scenario for the party, I think, because that would put the superdelegates in a position of, of you know, wondering if they were essentially forfeiting an election if they didn't go with Hillary Clinton or if they were, you know, tearing the party apart if they didn't go with Barack Obama.  I, you know, I tend to think, in the final analysis, they're going to go with the pledged delegates because I don't, I don't think there is a stomach among the superdelegates for, for, you know, what going the other way would, would cause in the party, perhaps kind of tearing apart a coalition that has held together for some time.  It could be very ugly.  But again, that's a, that's a ways past.  That would, that would assume that she develops a kind of momentum that is, is not now likely.  We'll see, unless everything changed this week or unless everything changes next week, I think, we probably won't get there.

MR. TODD:  May 6th is the D-Day.  We will know where this race is going on May 6th.  May 6th is North Carolina, Indiana.  If they split, Obama's probably going to be the nominee.  If one of them sweeps, the race will probably end the, the, the race will end the next day if Obama sweeps.  And if she sweeps, he's got a huge problem.

MR. RUSSERT:  John and Peggy, looking at this debate within the Democratic Party, what's your sense of where we are and where we're headed?  Is there a way for this Democratic Party to unify after this kind of primary, and are we in a situation where, in order for Hillary Clinton to be successful and appeal to the superdelegates, she has to win a nomination even though she won fewer elected delegates?

Jon, why don't you go first?

MR. MEACHAM:  Well, my sense of--at every point in this race, Senator Clinton has benefited from a kind of, if not a majority, a silent big plurality of largely female voters who have stepped in at different points and said, "No, not yet with Senator Obama, and we're going to register our belief in her, and her capacity to deal with issues that we believe in strongly." And I think Chuck's exactly right.  I mean, what, what some Clinton people have said to me is they have to win someplace they weren't expected to win, and then they could begin to make that argument.  I think, depending on where you end up with the, as you were saying, the popular vote, or the pledged delegates, you do have the capacity for a kind of corrupt bargain charge, echoes of 1824, which I think we should always be talking about every Easter.  I apologize for that.  But that was when...

MR. RUSSERT:  Jon, 1824, tell us who it was, quickly.

MR. MEACHAM:  Oh, very quickly, Andrew Jackson won the popular vote, Henry Clay threw his support to John Quincy Adams.  Adams becomes president.  Four years later, running on a, running on a campaign saying, "That was a corrupt bargain," Jackson takes over, founds the modern Democratic Party, and here we sit.  So...

MR. RUSSERT:  And you were, you were there to see it all.  I love it all.

MR. MEACHAM:  We, we, we put Jackson on the cover that week.  But, but, but I do think you have, to be serious, you, you do have a problem of--I think you may have a--if, if Senator Clinton were to overcome this gap, my pure opinion, my guess, based on a couple conversations, is you do have a chance where a lot of Obama voters might not support her in the general election, but I don't think there are any Senator--I don't think there are any Clinton voters who would not support Senator Obama, and I think that's, for the Democratic Party, that's a pretty interesting question going forward.

MR. RUSSERT:  Peggy, take a crack at that.  What's your sense?

MS. NOONAN:  Yeah, I think--I know that Mrs. Clinton is surrounded by people who would adore the chance to be for Obama.  I, I know one of, one of her top aides who kind of privately makes it clear that he knows that he, himself, is an insurgent character, and that it would be wonderful to be part of Obama's insurgency.  But he is where he is, he's backing Mrs. Clinton.  But look, her people'll go for Obama just fine.  I don't think Obama's people go for Mrs. Clinton just fine.  So that's where it's going to be down the road, I think. Short term, there's this funny abstract sense that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama, at the moment, are sort of equal or, or neck and neck.  One of them has to come forward.  I think Obama was looking like the leader in the past month and a half.  He's got to come forward as the leader again in some way so that people look at him and realize, "He's the one who's coming down the pike." He's lost that a little bit.  He'll get a chance to, to do that in the next few races.  My sense of Mrs. Clinton's position is that she's either got to hold on to middle-aged, ethnic, middle and working class women, and that's the only way for her to go, and possibly win; or she has to do terrible, personal, killing damage towards Senator Obama and just keep knocking this guy down.  I think she is communicating symbolically each day with, with her superdelegates, who, at the end of the day, are going to be very important to her.  She's trying to show them that she's a winner.  She's trying to show them she's the only one who can really pull this off.

MR. RUSSERT:  Yes.

MR. MEACHAM:  Can I say one...

MR. RUSSERT:  Go ahead, John.

MR. MEACHAM:  One more historic--sorry.  From 1824 to 1976, very quickly, which I think is the last time where actually a primary battle did have an impact on a general election.  I know that President Ford, after the very divisive battle with Reagan in '76, President Ford very much wanted Reagan to campaign more for him, particularly in southern Ohio.  It's always Ohio.  And President--Governor Reagan, then, was more reluctant to do that, and I know that, until his death, President Ford believed that if Reagan had done more for him in a couple parts of different states that that would have made the difference in 1976.  I think if somehow or another Senator Clinton is in the Ford role, you might actually see a primary battle having an impact on a general election, which doesn't happen very much.

MR. RUSSERT:  Chuck Todd, John McCain has been traveling in Europe and in the Middle East.

MR. TODD:  Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT:  Had some problems when he was in Jordan, he talked about al-Qaeda being trained by the Iranians.

MR. TODD:  Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT:  And then, then Lindsey Graham, who he was with, and then Joe Lieberman both tried to say to him, al-Qaeda is Sunni, not trained by the Shiite Iranian government.  Does that kind of stumble hurt a McCain candidacy?

MR. TODD:  Well, what's odd about the, the stumble is that it--is it a stumble or was it, or was it that this talking point that he'd been, that he'd been using for actually a couple weeks or over a week, where he was talking about sort of almost blurring that the, the enemy of al-Qaeda and the enemy of the, the Shia-trained Iranians and sort of blurring them as one enemy.  And the, the question is, did he just sort of--he truncated it to the point where he ended up misspeaking.  The, the problem, of course, McCain has is that he can't, you know, he doesn't want to make it so that he, he forgot it for a minute.  You know, he's--because of the age issue, he can't ever look like he's having a senior moment.  So instead, he's better off going ahead and saying, you know, OK, so he misspoke.  Even if he gets dinged on the experience stuff, "Oh, he says he's Mr. Experience.  Doesn't he know the difference between this stuff?" He's got enough of that in the bank, at least with the media, that he can get away with it.  I mean, the irony to this is had either Senator Clinton or Senator Obama misspoke like that, it'd have been on a running loop, and it would become a, a big problem for a couple of days for them.

MR. RUSSERT:  Gene Robinson, the fifth anniversary of the war marked this week.  Martha Raddatz of ABC asked Dick Cheney about the fact that two-thirds of American people have real reservations about Iraq, and the vice president's answer was, "So?" And then went on to say we--we're not going to be governed by opinion polls.

Tom Davis, the retiring member of Congress, said that the Republican brand is in real trouble because of the war...

MR. ROBINSON:  Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT:  ...going into the fall election.

MR. ROBINSON:  You know, it, it remains an unpopular war, and I, and I think people don't understand, at least the way I interpret it, is that it, it is, it is entirely possible that most Americans believe the surge has had an impact on the war, has had a favorable impact and still don't like the war and still want the troops to come home.  Those things are not mutually exclusive.

MR. RUSSERT:  But don't want to lose the war.

MR. ROBINSON:  Well, don't want to lose the war but might define winning and losing in a, in a way that's different from the way John McCain would define it.  But I, you know, I think there's, there's inherently a problem in, in running on a, on a position on the war that essentially says, "We're going to keep 140, 150, however many thousand troops in Iraq indefinitely, for five years, for 10 years, for a hundred years." I think that's a problem for McCain.  And, and the fact that he and, and Dick Cheney were in the region at the same time, it looked almost coordinated, and then Dick Cheney says, "So?" That's, you know, that's not good for him.

MR. RUSSERT:  And the alternative will be, but we can't withdraw and let Iraq go into chaos.  And the debate, big one on this.

MR. ROBINSON:  But we want to think about withdrawing sometime soon.

MR. RUSSERT:  This November.

Economy and Iraq, Chuck Todd, all coming our way.

MR. TODD:  It's, it's going to be crazy, but...

MR. RUSSERT:  Gene Robinson, Peggy Noonan, Jon Meacham, thank you all.  We'll be right back.

(Announcements)

MR. RUSSERT:  That's all for today.  We'll be back next week.  If it's Sunday, it's MEET THE PRESS.  Happy Easter.

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