'Meet the Press' transcript for August 3, 2008

(Announcements)

MR. BROKAW: Our Decision 2008 political roundtable right after this brief station break.

(Announcements)

MR. BROKAW: We're back.

Welcome all to our roundtable. NBC's political correspondent Andrea Mitchell, my longtime colleague. My former colleague, Judy Woodruff, nice to have you with us.

MS. JUDY WOODRUFF: Great to be here.

MR. BROKAW: Senior correspondent now for the Jim Lehrer "NewsHour" on PBS. Mike Murphy, an NBC News consultant, former Republican strategist for John McCain in the year 2000.

MR. MIKE MURPHY: Right.

MR. BROKAW: And Chuck Todd, who's our political director.

Good to have all of you with us.

Let's begin with you, Mike Murphy. Was the Senator McCain ad a good idea?

MR. MURPHY: No, I think it was a dumb ad. Not because it asked the question "Is Barack Obama ready for the job?" That's a very legitimate criticism, and I think Barack Obama made it a little bit worse by his stumbling response later. The problem is that McCain--McCain's strategy has to hinge, in my view, on one thing. How does a Republican survive in October/November, a huge anti-Republican vote? Luckily for the party, McCain is a different kind of Republican. So everything in the campaign ought to build toward that case. And when you get off into small juvenile stuff about Britney Spears, you distract from it. So I think part of the ad, the real charge about Obama, pretty legitimate, but that execution, clumsy, juvenile and a mistake. Now, it's only one ad in a campaign of many, it'll go away. I don't see lasting damage, and I think Barack Obama by stumbling into race a little bit and now being, I think, in--a bit defensive about that, almost made a bigger mistake next week. I think that ad was an error.

MR. BROKAW: Mike Murphy, you on MEET THE PRESS, other Republican strategists, not necessarily directly associated with the campaign and other Republicans that I've been talking to around the country are very concerned about the McCain campaign. They think it's improvisational by a factor of about 100. They get every morning and try to decide what they're going to do at the end of that day.

MR. MURPHY: Well, I, I'm still betting on McCain in many ways. I think it's going to be a competitive election. I think it's kind of a--it's almost an irony. I think in some ways the Obama campaign as a machine is a little stronger than Obama as a candidate. I think McCain as a candidate's a little strong than the McCain campaign as a machine. And I think this year people are going to look through all the campaign stuff. I don't really care, and I don't think they will, who has the best, you know, teleprompter or makeup or speech writers, and get to the guys after Labor Day. We'll see. I think it's going to be close. But it has been a bumpy time so far. I'm hoping they'll be improvement, but they've got to get a theme and message that's not about sarcasm.

MR. BROKAW: Chuck Todd, in your column, you said that the McCain people are beginning to define Obama in a way that may not be helpful to him.

MR. CHUCK TODD: Well, and look, the good news for the McCain campaign is they may have found the right strategy, which is--of how to defeat Obama, how to bring him down a notch. Hit him as an elitist, hit him as soft, sort of on, on his readiness to be president. But the problem is, McCain isn't the contrast. It's--McCain is junior Obama or senior Obama, however you want to match them up. You know, McCain wants to be the sort of the new guy, the post-partisan guy. McCain likes to talk in generalities, doesn't like to get specific. Obama doesn't--likes to talk in generalities, doesn't get specific. So I think the, the problem they may run into is that they have the right strategy and just McCain isn't the right candidate to implement it. He can't--I just don't know if he's going to be able to contrast with sort of Obama's weaknesses when they get on stage because the best way to get at Obama now, after they've sort of softened him up as a, as a--on character on some of these things, is to prove that, you know, there's isn't much underneath or that he doesn't know a lot about certain issues. The problem is McCain doesn't go 20 PowerPoint presentations--20 pages deep in his PowerPoint presentation, either.

MR. BROKAW: There have been a lot of truisms in American politics that have been challenged in recent years, but this one remains intact: Money is the mother's milk of politics. And a lot of that money is going for commercials right now. Where are the campaigns spending their money at this point in the campaign before the conventions and before we really begin in the fall?

MR. TODD: Well, I think it's interesting, when you watch, is, is I think the thing that might surprise particularly Mike at this table is that McCain's actually outspending Obama in a lot of key states. In Pennsylvania, McCain has outspent Obama. In Ohio, McCain has outspent Obama. In Michigan, McCain has outspent Obama. All those red states that we have on our map is where McCain has outspent Obama. Now you look on the other side on those blue states where Obama's outspent McCain, it's in some nontraditional battlegrounds. It's Montana, it's Florida, where McCain has put up zero, not a single TV ad yet in Florida. Obama has outspent him there. So they're really sort of--they're, they're both trying to, to do two different things. McCain's trying to keep these Rust Belt battleground states, the traditional battlegrounds, as close as possible, and Obama's trying to expand the map. And they're both--actually, they're both being successful right now.

MR. MURPHY: It's interesting. Obama has the luxury of a lot of money, so he's running one and a half campaigns. You know, planning to litigate the traditional swing states, the Michigans, but also trying to grab a Montana, a North Dakota, even the huge prize of Florida, which is what you do when you have enough money to do one and a half campaigns. Although, you have to--everything has to go pretty well for those kind of long-reach strategies to work.

MR. BROKAW: We're not playing by junior high rules here, by the way. We don't have the boys on one side and the girls on the other side.

MS. ANDREA MITCHELL: It just looks that way.

MR. BROKAW: It just worked out that way.

Judy Woodruff, we haven't heard from Hillary Clinton at all. We have heard from former President Bill Clinton, however, saying you can have dinner with Hillary if you'd just give us a few bucks. He's going to be seen recently--or seen before too long on those interstate off ramps holding up a sign, "Have dinner with Hillary, give here."

MS. WOODRUFF: I think, Tom, that, that Hillary Clinton is going to end up playing ball in this, in this election, if you will. She's going to do what she needs to do for Barack Obama. I think Bill is sending a signal by this trip to Africa that he's, he's ready to, to play his part. I'm one, I'm one of those people, after talking to a lot of Democrats, who don't think that Barack Obama's going to pick her as his running mate. She's been asked to give what's the equivalent of the keynote speech at the convention. So I don't see her as the running mate. I think the--frankly, what I'm hearing on the vice presidential front, and far from--if you're expecting me to give you the answer of who, I don't know. I mean, I'm...

MR. BROKAW: Yeah.

MS. WOODRUFF: I wouldn't bet a cup of coffee on it. But I think there's a real struggle in the Obama camp right now between those who say Obama's got to pick somebody who will bolster his inexperience in national security credentials, argues for a Joe Biden or for somebody he even likes personally better, Jack Reed, 82nd Airborne division veteran who says he's not into it; or on the other hand, somebody who just reinforces that change, anti-Washington mantra. That's, you know, there you're talking about Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, maybe even Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas.

MR. BROKAW: Before we--Andrea, I want to come to you in a moment, because last week I had a chance--as you know, you were there--to talk to Senator Obama about his criteria for picking a vice presidential candidate. He dismissed the idea, by the way, of getting a national security person. He said he had other criteria. Let's just share what he had to say last weekend, and begin our discussion there.

(Videotape)

SEN. OBAMA: I'm going to want somebody with integrity. I'm going to want somebody with independence, who's willing to tell me where he thinks or she thinks I'm wrong. And I'm, I'm going to want somebody who shares a vision of the country, where we need to go, that we've got to fundamentally change not only our policies, but how our politics works, how business is done in Washington.

I think the most important thing, from my perspective, is somebody who can help me govern. I want somebody who I'm compatible with, who I can work with, who has a shared vision, who certainly complements me in the sense that they provide a knowledge base or an area of, of expertise that can be useful.

(End videotape)

MR. BROKAW: The flavor of the week last week was Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia.

MS. MITCHELL: Right.

MR. BROKAW: We just had Joe Lieberman here, and a lot of people don't know that Tim Kaine was the chair of his presidential campaign in Virginia, Senator Lieberman's, in 2000. They've been effusive in their praise of each other as Independent/Democrats. Is Kaine still in the running?

MS. MITCHELL: I think very much so, and I think that it does come out of your conversation with Barack Obama, because he was talking about someone who is not of Washington. The problem with Kaine, though, is that it does double down on inexperience. When you combine the two of them, they've both been only in public life on the national level for a couple of years. Tim Kaine, very popular. Used to drive a red pickup truck when he was lieutenant governor, was a volunteer with the Jesuits as a Catholic missionary in Honduras. There are pictures of him, a bearded Tim Kaine, which reinforces the community organizer. So that is clearly someone with whom he would feel very comfortable.

Then you've got Evan Bayh and Joe Biden on the foreign policy front, and I think that there is, as Judy says, some tension in the campaign that they need to expand this field. I think the most telling thing about it not being Hillary Clinton is Bill Clinton. He's off in Africa, he's only had one conversation with Barack Obama, he is not going out of his way to praise Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton has been, you know, "the good partner." She's done everything right as far as the Obama campaign could hope for. She's going to campaign, she's doing fundraising with them. But Bill Clinton is still standing off on the side. And you can't have a running mate with a former president who is so clearly uncomfortable with the nominee.

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