'Meet the Press' transcript for Dec. 28, 2008

MR. GREGORY:  But, Michelle, how much patience does the public really have? He's got a big honeymoon here, the President-elect does, but people are going to expect him to turn over those cards to bring recovery pretty quickly.

MS. SINGLETARY:  I think they will, absolutely.  You know, you, you quoted Larry Summers editorial and at the very end, if you read to the end, he said what we can't do is go back to saying, "Consumers, spend, spend, spend to get us out of this."

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MS. SINGLETARY:  And so I think that Barack Obama has to get in there and has to do some hard work right away, because that's right, we're not going to wait.  Because if you lost your job, if you don't have health care, if you can't feed your kids and you're out on the street, and you've been kicked to the curb, you're not going to wait for the president to, to, to do whatever. You've got to have something happen right now and soon.  And, you know, I think he needs to get in there and, and make some hard decisions and, you know, you know, get in there.  And, and we've ignored HUD for a long time. You know, we've got to get in there and, and--I tell people HUD--we ought to be fearful of HUD as we are of the IRS.

MR. GREGORY:  The Department of Housing and Urban Development.

MS. SINGLETARY:  That's right.  You know, look at that they did.  I mean, it's crazy how they weren't really policing the way they should have, and they don't have enough policing power.  So those kinds of things is what he's going to have to get in there and do, I think.

MR. LOWRY:  It's, it's really an extraordinary moment, because Michelle talked about how debt got us into this problem and the solution that's being offered is more, more debt, government debt, debt.  If you look at the Federal Reserve, you know, there's a water main break here in suburban Washington.  I think everyone saw on, on cable news millions of gallons of water flowing down the street.  That's what the Federal Reserve has done.

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. LOWRY:  Just opened the spigots in terms of liquidity, and now--that's what we're doing in monetary policy.  And now Barack Obama is going to do a version of it with fiscal policy.  You know, the defense budget is about $500 billion.  We're going double that amount roughly in a couple of weeks.  Total discretionary spending by the federal government is about $1 trillion.  We're almost going to double that in a couple of weeks.  And I think this is where the Republican opposition is going to come in.  They're going to tamp the brakes...

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. LOWRY:  ...and say, "Look, there's no way you can spend that much money responsibly."

MR. GREGORY:  But wasn't it--weren't--wasn't it conservatives who said that deficits don't matter?

MR. LOWRY:  Exactly.  You're going to hear that--I was talking to a top Republican aide just over the weekend, and I heard the D word more than I ever have like in eight years.

MR. GREGORY:  Suddenly they're back, they matter.

MR. LOWRY:  Exactly.

MR. GREGORY:  Let's talk about something else that, that a couple of you have written about this week, and that is the legacy of the Bush administration.

Todd Purdum in Vanity Fair, a big spread, an oral history of the Bush administration.  If this is a first draft of a history of this administration, what does it show?

MR. PURDUM:  Well, I think the main point is, is what President Bush's pollster and former strategist in the 2004 election said, which is "Missed opportunity." It was amazing--my editor Cullen Murphy and I did this, we conducted probably close to 60 interviews--and from Bush insiders to foreign diplomats, the common theme was tremendous elegiac regret at opportunities that were missed.  That opportunity after 9/11 when the president had, you know, the country in the palm of his hand and foreign newspapers were saying, "We're all Americans," somehow that moment was never exploited to move forward and the Iraq war, of course, became an incredibly divisive issue for the, for the country and for the world.

MR. GREGORY:  If there wasn't that sense of--I mean, there was a sense of national purpose, but if there was not a specific call for national sacrifice, the president essentially said, "Look, we will worry about this, you should go about living your lives."

Richard, what was that space filled by?

MR. WOLFFE:  National service.  You know, I, I, I'm not sure that the call to service was what was missing.  It was a tone in politics that actually Governor Bush, as he ran for office, talked about bringing in, this idea that Barack Obama is now picking up about, ending the partisan squabbling.

MR. GREGORY:  Uh-huh.

MR. WOLFFE:  And, and he actually exacerbated it.  And 9/11 was a moment to reset the clock, to go back to those campaign themes.  And instead Iraq wasn't just divisive politically.  I think people are still today scratching their heads and trying to figure out why it happened.  The rationale changed so many times.  The decision to move from al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein has never been made clear.  I think we are still waiting for a sufficient explanation of it. And his legacy is, to some extent, going to be defined by that.  But using war and national security for political purposes in those first midterms, in the 2004 election, really, it took us to a new level of partisan squabbling.

MR. GREGORY:  You talk about the tone.

Michelle, what was striking, Ari Fleischer, interviewed in this piece, the first press secretary for President Bush, said this in the Vanity Fair piece: "After the recount, the disputed election, a lot of people said you needed to start to trim your sails:  What are you going to cut back on as a way to show outreach to the other party?  The president rejected that line of thinking." Why, do you think, and was it a mistake?

MS. SINGLETARY:  I think it was.  And, and you know, if I--you talked about his legacy, his economic legacy is selfishness.  You know, you look at what they wanted to do to Social Security.  Imagine if our money was in the markets right now, which is one of the things that he wanted to do.  I think this, this administration failed on so many levels when it came to the economy, including not regulating the banks and letting things happen that shouldn't have happened with the mortgage industry.  And, you know, he should be ashamed of what he, what he has left us.

MR. GREGORY:  Overall that change in tone, missed opportunity there.  There was a real feeling that he would never be accepted.  Karl Rove and others said, "You know what, the country--the left will never accept you.  You've got to put your pedal to the metal here and go for the agenda." And that's what they did.

MR. LOWRY:  Well, I would say a couple things.  One, Bush had a very simple view of how this works.  You run on your agenda, and then you're elected and you try to pass your agenda.  And that seems pretty straightforward and basically admirable to me.  But a couple things happened with the tone.  One, he entered into a Washington where there was this ongoing revenge warfare between the parties, where Republicans were going to get revenge for Iran-Contra with, with Whitewater and the Monica scandal, and then the Democrats were going to get revenge for that.  And you had about a 16-year period where neither side would really accept the legitimacy of the other party's president.  And then also, I think, it, it goes more broadly to Bush's capabilities.  You know, he was much better as a decider than a persuader. You know, he was never good at making the argument, and therefore he didn't, didn't put much effort into making the argument.

MR. GREGORY:  We'll come back to Iraq in just a second, but one--what, what, what's underneath all of this, of course, was the response to 9/11 and the question of, of terrorism.  He gave a speech December 17th at the U.S. Army War College, during which he said this.

(Videotape)

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH:  Here at home we prevented numerous terrorist attacks. We'll never know how many lives have been saved.  But this is for certain, since 9/11, there's not been another terrorist attack on American soil.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Richard Wolffe, that cannot be denied.

MR. WOLFFE:  Sure.  But on American soil is the operative phrase here.  There have been many terrorist attacks on foreign soil that are the direct outgrowth of what we've seen of, of American foreign policy, to be blunt.  And it's true that terrorism is what is responsible for those attacks, not American foreign policy.  But that policy has exacerbated it and has taken the problem elsewhere.  So al-Qaeda has, has grown into a multiheaded beast which is now extremely difficult to control.  Afghanistan is actually in a weaker situation than it was after the Taliban was overthrown.  So, you know, there are--he has a, he has a, a historic record in terms of his response to 9/11, no question. People were looking for leadership, and he filled that vacuum in those very, very troubled moments.  But longer term, America is--has, has fundamental problems now that are really being kicked to this new administration.

MR. PURDUM:  Well, that's another point that people we interviewed made to us is the credibility problem.  Former Senator Bob Graham, who was chairman of the Intelligence Committee and voted against the war, one of the relatively few Democrats to do so, made the point that American credibility around the world is really shot on a lot of important questions now because people say, "If you got Iraq so wrong, how can we trust you on this?" He also pointed out that the threat of al-Qaeda is arguably greater than it was on September 10th, 2001, because of this resurgence.  And other people polled--General Alberto Mora, who was the general counsel of the Navy, said that generals on the ground in Iraq believe that the two worst causes of American casualties there are Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, because of the spur they gave to recruiting jihadists.

MR. GREGORY:  The detention...

MR. PURDUM:  Exactly.  Exactly.

MR. GREGORY:  The detention facility in Guantanamo for, for people picked up on the battlefield.

Rich Lowry, you write--well, first, the--we'll talk about what you, what you wrote in the National Review about Bush exiting.  But the, the theme of the second inaugural, and indeed, much of what we hear the president talk about in terms of Iraq, has to do with the freedom agenda, bringing freedom so that terrorism cannot flourish.  This is what the president said in part during his second inaugural.

(Videotape, January 20, 2005)

PRES. BUSH:  There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment and expose the pretensions of tyrants and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led by events and common sense to one conclusion:  The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands.

The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  The National Review cover that I mentioned says "Bush Exits," and your particular piece, Rich, is headlined this way:  "`The Freedom Speech' in Retrospect.  It was not the grossly simplistic vision of the second inaugural that saved Iraq."

MR. LOWRY:  Yeah.  Look, all inaugural addresses are aspirational at a certain level, so you have to factor that in.  But I think this was overreaching.  Yes, freedom is a important drive in all of human beings.  But there are lots of other important drives.  You know, for honor, for, you know, your way of life, for your ethnicity, your religion.  All those sort of things were ignored.  And one of Todd's interviewees in this Vanity Fair piece, an intelligence official, was asked, you know, why didn't they have more interest in the aftermath of Iraq?  And he said, "Well, if you believe that freedom is inevitably going to triumph and if you just scratch beneath the surface of everyone, you basically have a Western liberal there, you're not going to be that interested in the aftermath because you think it's going to work out." And unfortunately, I think there's a fair amount of truth to that.

I just want to go back to Richard's point about the no attacks on U.S. soil. U.S. soil is a big caveat.  I mean, that is a key thing.  And in our exit interview with President Bush, you're just struck by the extent to which he was a war president.  I mean, that's what drove him most passionately.  And when you talk to him about it, you feel as though he's just sort of been left behind by the public and by history.  And I think that's because of the very success in preventing another attack on U.S. soil...

MR. WOLFFE:  But you can't...

MR. LOWRY:  ...which allowed, which allowed the public to move on to, to other issues that they found more urgent.

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

MR. WOLFFE:  You can't take America's national security across oceans to other continents and then only care about its impact on American soil.  It's grossly irresponsible.

I--just a point about the, the second inaugural, though.  Yes, grossly simplistic, but where's the follow through here?  You say freedom is, is the most important thing, and everyone agrees with that.  But again, America has a unique position on the international stage.  Sustained involvement with fighting tyranny would, say, take you into Egypt where the president was saying he was going to stand with the dissidents and deal with jihadism. Well, you know, the dissidents in Egypt's jails are still there, and they are actually still the sworn enemies of the United States.  So simplistic in conception and execution, and you cannot just say, "Well, here we are in America, we're just doing great.  What about"...

MR. GREGORY:  Let me...

MR. LOWRY:  Well, it's, it's--yeah.

MR. GREGORY:  Go ahead.

MR. LOWRY:  It was impractical on a certain level.  But, look, it's not as though the United States does not care about terror attacks overseas.  And I think perhaps you're exaggerating the extent to which al-Qaeda has been strengthened.  Al-Qaeda just suffered a severe defeat in the Arab heartland in Iraq, and that is a huge benefit to the United States strategically, and President Bush basically was--is responsible for that alone.  His opponents wanted to quit from Iraq and basically hand the country over to terrorists. And Bush, you know, there are two sides to Bush; there's courage and there's stubbornness.  Sometimes, you know, you saw him stubbornly sticking to the wrong course.  The surge in Iraq, which saved the war there and dealt a blow to al-Qaeda, was a hugely courageous act.

MR. GREGORY:  Just have about a minute left.

And, Richard, I just want to touch our top story briefly.  David Axelrod didn't want to talk about what the Obama response would be to this offensive into Gaza by Israel, but what's coming potentially is a long, protracted war, a ground invasion.  Where do you think Obama will stand on these issues?  And how does it complicate whatever diplomatic turn he'd like to make in the Middle East?

MR. WOLFFE:  Well, there's an eerie parallel with what happened with President Bush, because, remember, the Second Intifada started in 2000 just before he took office.  And everyone, every president has this idea of being the peacemaker in the Middle East.  Obama wants to have a more sustained engagement.  Again, one of the things we didn't see through the Bush years. But his capacity to move here is severely curtailed because the Palestinian territory is so deeply divided.  He clearly has some room, the Israelis have some room to try and remake the Gaza Strip, but it's not going to happen by military force.  There needs to be a new political settlement there between Palestinians, otherwise, to use that tired phrase, there's no partner for peace there for Americans or Israelis.

MR. GREGORY:  Todd.

MR. PURDUM:  Well, it's just--I mean, look at the situation there now.  There were elections.  Hamas won the elections.  So, I mean, it's a complicated reality in the world when you start opening the, the can of democracy, and we'll see what happens.

MS. SINGLETARY:  If...

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah.

MS. SINGLETARY:  You know, I listen to this conversation, and I'm sort of thinking, you know, as the, as the regular, you know, mom and, and churchgoer, and I'm thinking, you know, all this--I'm just so disheartened by what Bush did to us, and, and all this focus on fighting a war that we couldn't win.  I mean, all the generals sort of told you that going in.  And you said sometimes stubborn.  He wasn't sometimes stubborn, he was always stubborn.  And, and he did all of this, I think, at the detriment of our country, our economy.  And I think the regular American people are sitting here going, "We're in this war, and you said you couldn't afford health care, and yet all these billions of dollars are over there.  And I have no job, no health care and probably no house."

MR. GREGORY:  And one of the issues, obviously, that the president himself has said that it will take time for some of that vision, particularly in foreign affairs and in Iraq, to be vindicated if it's ever vindicated.  But the reality is a cruel economic reality as he leaves office.

We're going to leave it there, thank you very much.  We'll be right back.

(Announcements)

MR. GREGORY:  That's all for today.  We'll be back next week.  If it's Sunday, it's MEET THE PRESS.  Happy new year, everyone.

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