'Meet the Press' transcript for Oct. 12, 2008

MR. BROKAW:  All right.  John Harwood, let's just share with our viewers, if we can, the latest Newsweek poll.  In the overall poll, Obama is now up by 11 points, 52 to 41, but here are the interesting internals.  Who's best equipped to deal with health care?  Obama up by 26 percent.  Economy and jobs, 19 percent.  Energy and gas prices, 17 percent.  Wall Street housing crisis, 16 percent.  Taxes and spending, 11 percent.  Social issues--that guns and abortion--7 percent.  The Iraq war, he's even ahead of John McCain on the Iraq war by a percentage point.  The only place where John McCain is leading Barack Obama is who's best equipped to deal with terrorism and national security. With 23 days to go before the campaign, that's a devastating poll for the, for the McCain campaign.

MR. JOHN HARWOOD:  Well, it is.  And it shows again how the strategy of the McCain campaign is at war with events in the world, which are lifting Barack Obama.  John McCain has, as Paul mentioned, wanted to run a character campaign.  Even now, McCain's strategists think their best opportunity of closing this lead--and by the way, the only candidate who has ever closed a mid-October lead approaching this size was Ronald Reagan in 1980 when he was running against Jimmy Carter.  And that was a campaign in which the presidential debate occurred very late.  Once he was seen as a acceptable by the American people, he then moved ahead of Carter.

But the--they're looking at this lead, 11 points in Newsweek, 9 points in the Gallop Track and saying, "How can we knock some people off?" Barack Obama doesn't need any more votes.  He just needs to hold the people he's got.  John McCain's got to dominate the undecided, and he's got to turn some people.  The McCain--I was talking to a McCain adviser the other day who said 1 in 5 white voters is still persuadable.  They're people that we can raise doubts about Barack Obama, and that's why they, they do this Ayers stuff.  They've got to talk about the economy because, as Paul said, it's the issue everybody's thinking about, but it's still not the core of the strategy in the end.

MR. BROKAW:  Mm-hmm.  And, Ted Koppel, I want to ask you about something that Fortune magazine has written.  They say, "A month of historic government intervention shows signs of triggering a political version of climate change, unleashing a new era of class fury that could hurt U.S. companies, business leaders and wealthy investors for years.  A potential calamity, predicts Democratic pollster Doug Schoen." Do you see, in what we're going through, the seeds of some kind of class warfare in this country, Main Street vs.  Wall Street, with a real sense of vengeance?

MR. TED KOPPEL:  In a sense what I see is a, a, an historic change in the way we do business in the country.  One of the things that really has not been mentioned yet is that ours has been a credit card economy for so many years now that much of what has happened over these past years and much of what I think is responsible for the crisis we're in right now is that people at every level--not just in buying their houses, but in buying their cars, in buying their clothes, in buying indeed everything that they purchase--have been encouraged to buy more than they can afford, have been offered credit cards. And then when they can't pay the bills, they end up with 20 percent interest payments, 22 percent interest payments.  That has got to change.

MR. BROKAW:  Do you think the candidates are talking enough about that?

MR. KOPPEL:  No.  I don't think they're talking about it at all.  I don't think they've even dared to address it.  I mean, you know, which political candidate in his right mind is going to tell the American public, "I'm sorry. I'm going to take your Visa card away from you."

MR. GIGOT:  I think...

MR. HARWOOD:  Jimmy Carter tried that, and it didn't work out too well.

MR. KOPPEL:  Yeah.  It didn't work.

MR. GIGOT:  But you know what?  I think at this moment that might be the way to go, particularly if you're John McCain.  I mean, Barack Obama says, "I don't need to do this.  I've got a lead.  I'm going to run out the clock.  I don't need to take any risks." John McCain needs to take--at least to try something.  And if he said, "Look, Barack Obama blames deregulation.  I've been talking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac." Now, there's plenty of, of, of, of blame to go around.  But we had a classic credit mania in this country, fed by easy money by the Federal Reserve, turbo charged by government policies.  We're all going to pay a price for it.  I think if he acknowledged that, it might show a maturity and a leadership that the American people might respond to.

MR. HARWOOD:  That would be serious straight talk, but, but risky because, again, you know, I, I've talked to both of the candidates about this.  Is it a problem with us as opposed to...?  And they all tend to go to the greed and corruption on Wall Street or Washington's broken.  It's very, very difficult to look at the voters and say, "You're part of the problem, too."

MR. GIGOT:  Sure.  I mean, and, and, and that is fine for Obama, because he can say it's all Bush's vault.

MR. HARWOOD:  Mm-hmm.

MR. GIGOT:  But McCain's got to do something else.

MR. BROKAW:  Let me just share with you what The Weekly Standard had to say about the McCain campaign and their kind of gyrating positions.  "Such contradictions have become a defining characteristic of the McCain campaign over the last month as his strategists try to find something--anything--that will stop his slide in the polls.  He suspended his campaign and threatened to skip the first presidential debate unless there was an agreement on a bailout plan.  There was no agreement.  He debated anyway.  He said big government caused the current financial mess and then called for more of it.  He called for a federal spending freeze and then proposed having the Treasury buy individual home mortgages at a potential cost of $300 billion." You were very critical of that plan on your editorial page.

MR. GIGOT:  Well it, it, in particular, because it gives the taxpayers loss right up at the top.  It doesn't even do what the--some other previous proposals had done, which is at least give them a haircut.  So I, you know, I, I, that's a sense of the way the campaign has been lurching without a common theme.  And I, and I agree with The Weekly Standard criticism.

MS. BURNETT:  There's one thing that it does do, though, in your point he is trying, because he's behind in the polls, to come up with something, anything. He tried a mortgage bailout plan.  Now he's trying this refinancing.  But one thing it does go to the heart of that perhaps someone could stand up and talk about would be, fundamentally, housing prices need to stop dropping, and we need to look ahead and figure out what's going to happen with the job situation, which is rapidly deteriorating.  And if someone has the courage to stand up and talk directly about that problem, that might be a smart thing to do right now.

MR. BROKAW:  John Harwood, can you name one thing that Barack Obama has done in the last month that would contribute to the resolution of this financial crisis, one idea that he's put on the table?

MR. HARWOOD:  Well, he helped pass the bailout plan in Congress, which John McCain did in the end, too.  That was, when you got to the end stage of that process, both of those guys were acting like leaders in supporting this plan and trying to get it passed.  Barack Obama, lately, has come out with some smaller bore ideas.  Last week he had a small business, you know, tax incentive program.  But, look, he's not president.  John McCain's not president.  One of the problems is that not only the candidates, but the president of the United States, the Treasury secretary and all the smart guys advising them are making up these plans, plays in the sand.  The playbook's not there anymore.  They're, they're drawing it up in the dirt.

MR. KOPPEL:  There is hardly a day, Tom, that goes by that we don't see a new iteration of how we're going to fix this.  I want to add one comment to this before you move on to your next subject.  The winners in this political campaign are going to end up envying the losers because they're going to be stuck with these problems, they're going to have to deal with them, and they haven't begun to address them with the necessary gravitas that they can only bring to bear after the election is over.

MR. BROKAW:  One of the senior economic advisers for Barack Obama said to him, "From a political point of view, the good news is that the economy will be bad until the election.  The bad news is, when you take office, it'll be much worse."

MR. GIGOT:  But I think this would be an historic opportunity for anybody who wins.  I mean, yes, you--we have a lot of difficulties, but if you're coming in, you have the opportunity to help turn it around.  And if you do and if it does--and housing prices are going to bottom out at some point.

MS. BURNETT:  At some point, yes.

MR. GIGOT:  So then you're in a position to be able to take credit for that even if your policies didn't do much to help it, and then you get the political benefit.  So I, I, I think I'd take the victory as opposed to the defeat.

MR. KOPPEL:  On, on the other...

MR. BROKAW:  We haven't talked about Sarah Palin very much in the course of this hour on MEET THE PRESS.  Here's the latest Newsweek poll on Governor Palin, who continues to arouse the faithful wherever she appears in rallies. But last month it was a dead heat in terms of whether she was qualified to be president, 45-46.  As you can see, now it's a very substantial gap. Fifty-five percent of the people say no, she's not qualified; only yes say 39 percent.

So she serves one purpose, Paul Gigot, about getting people out at rallies. But in the end, is she going to be some kind of a drag on the ticket, especially with Troopergate?  Or is that just a speed bump?

MR. GIGOT:  I, I don't think she's going to be a drag on the ticket, because I think, in the end, she's doing, she's doing more to, to--she's done more already to energize Republicans to help McCain, and some of them had a lot of doubts about it.  And, in the end, vice presidents really don't matter to the ticket, particularly in this environment.  The economy and how the two main contenders deal with it is going to dominate everything.  So I think, in the end, she won't play a, a, a meaningful role.

MR. BROKAW:  We don't like to look in the rearview mirror very much, but would another candidate have been better, given the economic circumstances, a Mitt Romney or Rob Portman, for example, who was here today?

MR. GIGOT:  Possibly, possibly.  Although, I don't think either of them would have given the McCain campaign the energy that it really would--that it really got out of that convention.  And then, ultimately, this doesn't matter what a, what a Sarah Palin or a, or a Mitt Romney says about the economy.  It matters what John McCain says about the, the economy; the command that he shows, the, the, the mastery of the subject that he shows or doesn't show.

MR. HARWOOD:  I do think, Tom, that she will provide zero help in reaching swing voters and much less than someone like Rob Portman were he out making the economic argument.  However, as Paul suggested, you can't underestimate the fact that John McCain had significant problems within his base, misgivings and ambivalence within his base.  She has helped with that.

MR. BROKAW:  We have not talked in this hour, as well, about the factor of race, which is on the minds of a lot of people, and what kind of a role it'll play on Election Day.

Ted Koppel, you've been looking at race in America.  You're doing a report on the Discovery Channel called "The Last Lynching," a series of reports.  As you go around the country and take your soundings, do you think race is going to be much of a factor come Election Day?

MR. KOPPEL:  It can't help but be.  It's a question of how much of a factor it's going to be, and it's always hard to track this.  There is, in politics, something that's come to be known as the, as "the Bradley effect," harkening back to a time when then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African-American, was running for governor, who was far ahead in the polls, and then, come Election Day, all of a sudden he loses.  It may be that that is no longer a, a likely comparison, but I must tell you I think--and the events of the last few days I think have underscored this--there continues to be a considerable amount of racism in this country.  Barack Obama has gone to great lengths to avoid letting that be a subject, doing everything he can to avoid making it the subject.  I think John McCain, to his credit, also has tried to avoid making that any element.  But among the voters is it going to be?  You bet it's going to be.  There's a recent Stanford poll which suggests that Obama might get 6 points more were it not for the race issue.

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