'Meet the Press' transcript for August 24, 2008

MR. BROKAW:  We're back, live from Denver, site of the Democratic National Convention.  I'm joined by my colleagues and friends, Gwen Ifill, who is host of PBS' "Washington Week" and senior correspondent for ?The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer"; political director Chuck Todd of NBC News; and Jon Meacham, who is the editor of "Newsweek" magazine, has just completed a cover story on Senator Obama.

Let's begin with the Biden selection.  Gwen, help?

MS. GWEN IFILL:  It, it doesn't hurt.  I'm not sure that Joe Biden needed to run across the stage yesterday.  I'm not sure that was the best look for a 65-year-old man, but he was enthusiastic.

MR. BROKAW:  Now, be careful about 65-year-old men.

MS. IFILL:  I got--nothing wrong.  But they both, but they both--nothing against 65-year-old men, but he did what he needed to do.  You heard him, you heard him say, "Your kitchen table is just like mine." He was trying to send that message, and then segued into his attack on John McCain for his several kitchen tables.  And you heard Barack Obama talk about him as a scrappy son of Scranton, Pennsylvania.  I'm not certain that after 29 years in the Senate, you can quite tell most Americans, who do not know who Joe Biden is at all, that he's a scrappy son of Scranton, Pennsylvania, but they're going to try. That's what--Barack Obama conceded what his weaknesses were, and he picked someone who he hoped could help.

MR. BROKAW:  Chuck Todd, a career military person who is not crazy about John McCain, immediately e-mailed me about that crack about seven tables, saying, "Wait a minute, that's pretty gratuitous.  Here's a guy who spent five years in prison not knowing where his next meal was going to come from."

MR. CHUCK TODD:  You know, it's interesting that Democrats are getting a little more upset by that line of defense now coming.  There's a column this morning by Maureen Dowd in The New York Times sort of laying out this case, said, you know, "Is the McCain campaign using the--using that defense too often to try to push back everything." But it does work, I think, with, with voters.

What I think was interesting about the Biden pick is I felt like Obama hired himself a--it's almost he hired himself a defense lawyer, and he said, "I'm going to get him to defend me against some of these attacks.  I'm going to have him go out and make the case against McCain a little bit, and I'm going to have him go out and sell my biography a little bit better because I don't do it very well." And in one speech, Biden showed he can sell the biography of Obama better than Obama himself could.  And "I'm going to get this guy to go talk to these working class white voters, these older white voters who, on all the issues, are with the Democrats, but right now, are more comfortable with John McCain." We see it in our own polls.  Joe Biden seems to become this ambassador/trial lawyer in some ways for Barack Obama.

MR. BROKAW:  But Senator Obama began this campaign as an agent of change, and here is Senator Joe Biden, 35 years in the United States Senate, came out of the zeitgeist of the '60s, he has been a card-carrying member of the Democratic Party establishment all this time.

MR. JON MEACHAM:  One of the things that I think we saw yesterday was the founding of a new Democratic "fight club." If you go and look at the two speeches, the word "fight," the images of combat, the images of striking out against Senator McCain and the Republicans and the linking of McCain and Bush, I think Chuck's right.  I think that Biden is going to be the pugnacious running mate, which is an old archetype.  But I think the more interesting thing is that Obama himself knows how to fight.  He talks about it--you don't get to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States at age 47 without being tough.

MR. BROKAW:  Well, let's talk about your interview with him.  He talked about that day when he was a young man, and his stepfather--he came home having gotten whopped at a schoolyard fight, and his stepfather showed up the next day with a pair of boxing gloves in Indonesia, and began to teach him how to box.  And then he described for himself--and we're going to share that with our viewers now if we can, the lasting effect that that had on his life, that he said, you know, I--"No one can characterize me as someone who won't punch back at some point."

MR. MEACHAM:  Exactly.  He--the stepfather's bias was always protect yourself, and the way Obama views his life is that having an absent father both gave him something to prove, but also hearing stories about his father being larger than life gave him something to live up to.  And I think that one of the things Obama said to us this week, "I had to learn how to fight for myself," he raised himself to some extent.  He credits his family--we're going to hear a lot about that in Denver for the next four days, we're going to hear a lot about food stamps, we're going to hear a lot about the noble struggle--the real struggle of this family and his extended family to raise him.  But at core, Obama says, "I raised myself." And I think that that means this "Obambi" image is probably misplaced.

MR. BROKAW:  Is that, however, a perilous enterprise for him because he has attracted new voters in part because he has been different, he won't get down in the pit with him, and he'll rise above and say, "Yes, we can"?

MR. MEACHAM:  I think--you, you, you can say, "Yes, we can" all you want, but you can't do it if you don't get there.  And I think that the Democratic Party, over the last eight to--a number of years, has wanted a prize fighter. And they have two right now.

MR. BROKAW:  All right, let's take a look at some polls, because it's been an interesting week for that as well.  The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll last week showed that Obama's lead over McCain in the Y universe--and we always have to be careful about characterizing them now, because it's state by state come the fall--has been halved to about 3 percent.

And you have been spending a lot of time looking at the undecided voters, and we want to share with our viewers now just who they are.  A lot of those undecided voters are women between the ages of 35 and 49, they're Catholic, they're moderate, and they're independent.  They all sound like Hillary Clinton voters to me.

MR. TODD:  A lot of them were.  Nearly half of them supported Clinton in the primaries.  In effect, we even slice it even more.  We--we're able to take a look at what our pollsters call "Hillary not Obama," and it's this group of voters that supported Clinton in the primaries, are not there yet with either Obama, supporting McCain, or sitting in undecided.  And all of them look like, in this very respect, they're Democratic voters on the issues, they're picking a Democrat and generic matchups not just for president, but for Congress.  So they are going to walk in that voting booth, and they're going to vote for a Democrat for Congress, they're going to vote for a Democrat for the U.S. Senate, which is why everybody knows that the House and Senate are going to pick up members.  But these women are not there yet on Obama.  Some of them are, are angry.  Some of them--a lot of them live in rural and small-town America.  And when you think about the primary campaign as it wore on, the Clintons campaigned in this area and had a message of "Obama's not ready to be commander in chief, John McCain is." Well, guess what?  They believe, in our poll, John McCain's ready to be commander in chief, Barack Obama isn't.  Obama needs Hillary Clinton at this convention to sell him to these voters.  And, and not just to be convincing that she supports him.  That isn't it.  She's got to say, "Look, this guy's ready to be commander in chief," and mean it. It's a big deal.  Her speech is a big deal, far bigger than President Clinton.

MR. BROKAW:  You think she can do it?

MS. IFILL:  Well, I, I wonder how many of these people, these, these Hillary voters, for lack of a better term, because they're not all women.  There are a lot of people who just aren't concern--her concern.  Democrats are concerned about Barack Obama.  I wonder how deep that goes, whether it's only deep because there is an independent--it's--13 percent of undecided people in a close election determine a lot.  I, I wonder--overall, Barack Obama's still like 20 points ahead among women, in general over John McCain.  So, at this point, it's the last week in August prior to the conventions, I wonder if we overanalyze the possibility that these voters aren't going to focus and come home by November?  I don't, I don't know.  I think this is an election where we don't know a lot of things.  I mean, one of the things we know about Joe Biden, for instance, is that vice presidents don't really make a difference. I mean, people don't really vote on vice president.  But we know that his job is to speak to people like women--you know, he sponsored the Violence Against Women Act, he has a legislative history of--who are not listening to Obama for whatever reason.  Whoever those people are, they're not listening to him yet, and that's the gap--once again, in these--in this little game of inches that we're playing here, that he's supposed to help to fill.

MR. TODD:  Well, that, that is the point.  That is what's left to divide up. What's interesting is that Hillary's so very divisive among the electorate as a whole.  She--49 percent of the--of our poll says she should never be president.

MR. BROKAW:  Right.

MR. TODD:  But it's what's left...

MS. IFILL:  Yeah.

MR. TODD:  ...that she is so popular with.

MR. BROKAW:  We're going to, we're going to run the polls that probably have more meaning at this point now, state by state.  There's been a lot of discussion in this broadcast and other places about the role of the Rocky Mountain West and the Southwest this fall, that if Obama can win the same states that John Kerry did and then pick up three states in particular--New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado--he can be elected the next president.

Here's the latest poll out of Colorado, taken August 13th to 15th by The Denver Post.  As you can see, Senator Obama has a slight lead over John McCain, matches our national numbers.

But let's move now to New Mexico, a state with Bill Richardson as the governor, was very close last time around.  This time John McCain has got a four-point lead in New Mexico at this stage.  Remember, it's early, 14 percent undecided.

In Nevada, which the Democrats are looking at very hard this time, hoping to pull under their column, the McCain lead is even more impressive.  But again, there's a very high undecided number there of 15 percent.

What does Senator Obama have to do in the West to change those numbers, Jon?

MR. MEACHAM:  I think it's, it's a national message.  I think that his task is to become a condensing and authentic president.  I think people, many people, still have a hard time envisioning him in the White House, which is understandable.  I think that this is my view, and Chuck and Gwen probably may disagree, I think this is going to be an incredibly close election nationally. You know, close elections are the rule and not the exception in American politics, and I think that the work that has to happen this week and the next 70 days or so is all of us know a great deal about Barack Obama.  We understand the Hawaii to Indonesia to Hawaii to Columbia.  We--the timeline is something that we've spent a lot of time on.  I think a lot of folks don't, and he still seems somehow foreign.  And I think in each state in the West and also the critical state of Virginia, possibly pulling off one of the confederate states, no Democrats won without doing it in modern times, is going to require him telling his story and fighting back against Senator McCain.

MS. IFILL:  Tom, that's why it was so important, that line of questioning you just had with Speaker Pelosi.  People in the West are concerned about this knee--what feels to them like a knee-jerk opposition to oil drilling on the part of the Democratic Party, and that's why you've heard Barack Obama and then Speaker Pelosi today begin to shade their opposition a little bit to oil drilling.  They're trying to say they're open to it.  I, I call it the "Paris Hilton compromise." All of a sudden they're saying there is room for this. But I don't--but I think that is of great concern.  When you see those numbers in New Mexico, somewhere Bill Richardson is saying, "Doggone it, he should have picked me and this could not be a problem." But this is something which I think they are concerned about in which they are beginning to figure out how to speak to that.  But Jon is right.  which is, in the end, if this becomes about who is Barack Obama all the way to the November election, at some point it's going to be about is--who is John McCain?  But as long as he stays on the defensive explaining himself--it's early yet--but that's the disadvantage.

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