'Meet the Press' transcript for Oct. 5, 2008

MR. GREGORY: Right. It’s about qualifications. But the McCain campaign wants to do something else and make it about who is this guy really? It’s the mystery part of this. In 2004, what they did to John Kerry was say that he was weak and that he was a flip-flopper. You know, tough stuff, but not as bad as what they want to do here, which, I spoke to a McCain adviser who said, “This is about character. This is to prove that Obama is a liar, that he lies to you about Ayers, that he lies to you about our record, he lies to you about his position on taxes.” That’s what they’re going for here in a very difficult climate. Because, as Karl Rove said in 2004, “If the debate is about the war on terror, George Bush wins.” It was, and he did. The debate in 2008 is about the economy, and McCain doesn’t want to fight it on that battleground per se. He wants to make it about Obama’s character.

MS. IFILL: You know, it’s been a—I’m sorry...

MR. GREGORY: Sure, go ahead.

MS. IFILL: ...it’s been an interesting week, because I—it’s one thing to academically sit on the sidelines and say, “Ah, this is what they’re doing. They’re throwing everything out there to see,” as Peggy notices, on both sides, “to see what sticks.”

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MS. IFILL: In, in Missouri, battleground state, here in Virginia, battleground state, in other states around the country you’ve noticed the Obama people spending a lot of money running one ad with him talking to camera...

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MS. IFILL: ...sitting in a place that looks like the White House saying, “This is who I am. This is what change is.” What I discovered this week, in an uncomfortable way, is that when they throw everything in the mix to change the subject, you got to—you can get in the way. I got in the way of it this week.

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MS. IFILL: And I—it was an interesting—I was—I kind of didn’t pay attention to a lot of it, but it was also interesting to realize that if changing the subject from the stakes of the vice presidential debate meant talking about the moderator instead of talking about the candidate, they would do that. If that meant raising questions about anything else that’s out there, which is why if we’ve learned one thing about this campaign, is that every week it’ll be something else.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah. Well, and I could very well be the target of that because coming up Tuesday night—I think we have to explain to our audience—you are in the process of writing a book, which will come out in January, about the change in American politics, especially among African-American leaders...

MR. IFILL: Right.

MR. BROKAW: ...in which you call the “Age of Obama.” And there were people on the right who said that disqualifies you as a moderator for the vice presidential debate. But what you did was keep your head high and not to respond those attacks.

MS. IFILL: I kind of kept my head low, actually. But, but, but no, that’s the truth. I did not respond to it because it didn’t take much to figure out what the book was really about. I mean, it didn’t take but a couple of mouse clicks to discover that what they were saying about the book wasn’t true and that, in fact, I wasn’t writing the book they said, and I hadn’t—I hadn’t even written the Obama chapter yet because I don’t know how it ends. So I—my editors are thinking, “Really, have you written it? Good, give it to us. We’d like to see it.” So they used that, and it wasn’t really much worth fighting about. I figured it would be a 24-hour kerfuffle. But it was instructive about how often you can get in the way of somebody else’s plan.

MR. TODD: But, Tom, this goes to something, and I think if you look and go back to the first presidential debate where John McCain was lecturing Obama about the difference between a tactic and a strategy, and when I heard him say that, I thought, “Boy, that is the debate going on inside your own campaign is you’re a series of tactics with no strategy.” This William Ayers stuff, I talked to one Democrat who says, “Why didn’t they do this when they did celebrity?” You know, why weren’t they setting this up for months? And what’s happened is—and we’ve said this before—the McCain campaign chases the news cycle. They are going to look at today and say, “Hey, they mentioned William Ayers on MEET THE PRESS. They talked about William Ayers,” and they’re going to consider that a success. But did they move—is this about a bigger picture that they’ve been painting for three months? And right now it’s not, it’s just a series of tactics, and I think they are lacking a strategy.

MR. YEPSEN: This is where the primary has been useful to Barack Obama. We’ve heard about William Ayers. We heard about it from the Clinton people, and we heard about it as part of the rough and tumble there. So it’s kind of an old story to a lot of people. And two can play this game. And this is where I agree with Peggy. This could go on a real bad turn here because we may be starting to hear about Charles Keating. I mean, if we want to talk about...

MS. NOONAN: Oh, of course we are. Of course.

MR. YEPSEN: ...Barack Obama’s negatives, John McCain has some, too. We can start hearing about those. He’s...

MR. BROKAW: John—we have to keep explaining to everyone—that Charles Keating was the Arizona developer with whom John McCain had an, a, a strong relationship, and then he got in a lot of trouble. He was prosecuted by the Feds, and John McCain said, “I made a terrible mistake here.” Yeah.

MR. YEPSEN: And it’s all ancient history, Tom.

MR. BROKAW: Yeah.

MR. YEPSEN: American voters want to hear about the future. We’re in a huge economic crisis. This stuff that’s going on right now just doesn’t speak to the...

MS. IFILL: On that Sarah Palin was correct during the debate, talking backwards leaves people cold. Unfortunately, she then began to talk backwards.

MR. GREGORY: But then...

MS. NOONAN: Can I make a point, also, that I think part of the reason this is going to get so rough in the next month, trying to get my, my hands around this thing, is that we live in the age of political strategists. We live in the age of the guys on the plane. We live in the age of the BlackBerry guys saying, “Let’s get them this way. Let’s get them this way.” It exists on both campaigns, the instinct, “Hey, we have nothing to do now but go to, to the jugular.” I have the sense sometimes lately that these guys on the plane think history is their plaything. History is not their plaything. This is big. This is a nation having two ground wars and an economic recession—we hope just a mild recession. This is not a time for playfulness and mischief. It ain’t right.

MR. BROKAW: We’ve been talking a lot about Barack Obama here, but let’s talk for a moment, if we can, about John McCain. He came to Iowa, which surprised a lot of people, because Iowa has been going south for him in the campaign, as far as we know. And he had a kind of contentious meeting with your Des Moines Register editorial board. We want to share just some of that, when they were raising questions about Sarah Palin’s qualifications.

(Videotape, Tuesday)

Offscreen Voice: There...

SEN. JOHN McCAIN: They...

Voice: ...seems to be a pretty strong disagreement over whether there are people who are great fans of hers, and there are people who feel very uncomfortable that she does not have a lot of experience in public office.

SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm.

Voice: You know, even, even among, you know, fairly conservative Republicans...

SEN. McCAIN: Really?

Voice: ...about her policy positions.

SEN. McCAIN: I hadn’t detected that.

Voice: So how do you reassure them?

SEN. McCAIN: And I haven’t detected that in the polls, I haven’t detected that amongst the base. We get 20,000 people that come to our, our rallies. So, again, I fundamentally disagree. Now, if there’s a Georgetown cocktail party person who, quote, calls himself a “conservative” and doesn’t like her, good luck. Good luck.

(End videotape)

MR. BROKAW: Now, that’s the John McCain that we’ve all come to know over the years...

MS. NOONAN: God bless him.

MR. BROKAW: ...from time to time, and people have found it to be part of his charm. I wonder if it works for him, however, with a month to go in the election.

MS. NOONAN: Well, the—I think more and more with Mr. McCain—we’re seeing two different things with the candidates. Mr. McCain has—there’s a sense of containment that you see with him more and more, where he is containing a certain amount of “hm,” indignation, anger, what it is, but—whatever it is, but he has to contain it.

MS. IFILL: Not terribly well. I mean, sarcasm really is not containment.

MS. NOONAN: Well, yeah. Containment can be exhausting, too, you know?

MS. IFILL: Yeah.

MS. NOONAN: Sort of like he’d rather deck the guy, and—but instead he’s a little sarcastic. With Obama, there is a greater sense that if there’s a tiger in that tank, he doesn’t have to work hard to contain it. There’s still that languidness and calm that is serving him well, and it is one of the unspoken things that’s helping him now, I think. American people in the past year in this long campaign have gotten to watch him long enough that they don’t know him quite, but they kind of have a sense of him. I think the impression he’s making is an interesting one.

MR. TODD: You know...

MR. BROKAW: Chuck, is there a longing for civility in American politics? I mean, we always talk about it, but when it comes down to the final stages, it becomes a blood sport.

MR. TODD: Yeah. Look, you’ve had—I think you’ve experienced this, where you, you go out and you talk to folks and you have these meetings, and, and they sit there and say, “I’m tired of red vs. blue. I wish you would stop with the red vs. blue.” And that there was a sense—remember six months ago, we were talking about this, the anti-polarization, and I remember when, when McCain gets the nomination and Obama got the nomination, there were a lot of, a lot of folks writing, saying, “Boy, this is going to be the nonpolarizing election. This is the first time we’re going to get one of those.”

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MR. TODD: We’re not getting one of those because winning, you know, isn’t the only thing, as—Lombardi didn’t say it, it’s another coach. I got, I got lectured about that once. But it was a coach at UCLA—it is everything.

MR. BROKAW: He is widely credited for saying that.

MR. TODD: Yes, he is widely credited.

MR. BROKAW: David Maraniss put that record straight.

MR. TODD: And, and I think we’re seeing “the winning is, is everything” approach right now. And with 30 days, it, you know, elections are worth winning.

MS. NOONAN: Yeah.

MR. BROKAW: Peggy Noonan has written a book called “Patriotic Grace: What It Is and Why We Need It Now.” I’d like to share just a segment, if you’ll allow me to read your words...

MS. NOONAN: Thank you, sir.

MR. BROKAW: ...if I, if I can, off the screen here for our audience, so we’ll know what we’re talking about. “I think there is an unspoken subtext in our national political culture right now. ... I think a lot of people are carrying around in their heads ... a sense that the wheels may be coming off the trolley and the trolley off the tracks, that in some deep and fundamental way things have broken down and can’t be fixed, or won’t be fixed anytime soon. That our pollsters are preoccupied with ‘right track’ and ‘wrong track’ but missing the number of people who think the answer to ‘How are things going in America?’ is ‘Off the tracks and hurtling toward an unknown destination.’”

It seems to me that those are the very same conditions that were existent in 1980 when your political hero, Ronald Reagan, was running for president.

MS. NOONAN: Oh maybe it’s all more so, but I actually think we’re living in a different world. The intensity of our economic crisis seems to me to be greater. But, Tom, also there’s something that we all know, and it’s in the back of our minds but we don’t quite think of it enough, and it is this: We are living in the age of the unknowable, of weapons of mass destruction, of crazy people who can get and harness these things and who can come and hurt us. When you—you don’t want to be dark and you don’t want to be preoccupied, but when you keep your mind on that fact and that we may in our country face difficult days ahead, and even immediately ahead, when you keep your mind on that, you realize, whoa, this old partisan gamesmanship, this “tear out his throat,” all of that stuff, it’s over, it’s yesterday. What we need now is grace. We need real patriotism, which patriotism isn’t used as a weapon in a campaign. Patriotism actually needs grace in order to function. We got to be our best selves right now. We got to hit our game in a higher way. We got to be forbearing. We got to be adults. I sometimes think one of the problems in America is there are too many people that don’t want to embrace the role of the simple grown-up and show the maturity and forbearance of a grown-up.

MS. IFILL: You know, Peggy, I think that’s what we saw this week, too, when we saw what happened on Capitol Hill. I think people looked at what was happening in Washington...

MS. NOONAN: Yes, yes.

MS. IFILL: ...and thought, “What is it we sent you there to do?” And they had to scramble and realize they had to pass something. It was, it was not a pretty moment for Washington.

MR. BROKAW: David...

MS. NOONAN: No, it was not.

MR. BROKAW: ...Gregory, let me introduce a moment of heresy into the political campaign. Isn’t it also time for these candidates to reflect just what Peggy was saying and say to the American people, “You’ve got a role in this, too. You’ve got to step up.” We’re not going to make gain without some pain here in the next year, and, in fact, the American people have been part of the problem that we have right now. A lot of them took loans that they should—ought not to have taken. Credit card debt is very high. And they want to turn a blind eye to things like entitlements, Medicare and how we’re going to pay for it.

MR. GREGORY: Yeah, I mean, the idea that this is going to be tough, that you’re going to have a president who inherits a very difficult problem, and that there’s going to have to be some pain that’s incurred by the American people. And neither candidate has really stepped up to say, in the middle of all this, “You’re going to have to deal with all that.”

MS. NOONAN: Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY: I think that the test for Obama is how he deals with the next 30 days and how he continues to deal with the economy. He’s trying to project calm in the face of all this. But you’re right. I mean, perhaps he wants to name an economic team before the campaign is over to say, “Look, we’re going to get after something that’s going to be a huge problem, and it’s not going to get any easier for Americans here in the next administration.”

MR. BROKAW: The question is, if he’s going to name an economic team, who’s going to be left to name on that team?

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. BROKAW: Because some of the very biggest names in America are now looking out for homeless shelters in which they can spend some time in the next nine months or so.

Thank you all very much for being with us. And we’ll be right back here on MEET THE PRESS.

(Announcements)

MR. BROKAW: That’s all for today. We’ll be back next week. And I know where I’m going to be on Tuesday night, and I hope you’ll be there as well. I’ll be broadcasting from Nashville, the second of the presidential debates at 9 Eastern. A town hall audience, people in the audience and electronically asking questions of these two candidates one month before Election Day. Meanwhile, if it’s Sunday, it’s MEET THE PRESS.

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