'Meet the Press' transcript for June 28, 2009

MR. GREGORY:  And we're back with our roundtable this morning:  Dee Dee Myers of Vanity Fair, Republican strategist Mike Murphy, E.J.  Dionne of The Washington Post and David Brooks of The New York Times.

Welcome, everybody.  There is so much to go through here.  Let's begin with Republican turmoil down in South Carolina, and Governor Mark Sanford; the end of an affair or the beginning of a new one in terms of whether he's going to hang on to power.  This was that bizarre press conference earlier this week, a few clips.

(Videotape, Wednesday)

GOV. SANFORD:  I'm a bottom line kind of, kind of guy.  I'll lay it out. It's going to hurt, and we'll let the chips fall where they may.

There are moral absolutes, and, and that, that God's law indeed is there to protect you from yourself, and there are consequences if you breach that. This press conference is a consequence.

Offscreen Voice:  Did you break off the relationship?

Gov.  SANFORD:  Obviously not, if I spent the last five days of my life crying in Argentina.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  David Brooks, how much crying is going on in the Republican Party?

MR. DAVID BROOKS:  Well, over, over a long term there's a lot of Republican crying going on.  This was a story of loneliness, and we've had so many cases; John Edwards and just a whole series of cases.  My observation about these guys, and it's bipartisan, is they work phenomenally hard.  They spend all their times climbing.  They travel a lot.  They get to middle age and they realize there's some emotional vacuum in their lives, and they go off and do totally crazy things, including betraying their family.  So to me this is a personal story about highly successful people in private and public life.

MR. GREGORY:  But is there, is there a political dimension to this?  Is this malfeasance?  Does he have to resign?

MR. MIKE MURPHY:  No, I don't think he has to.  I mean, I feel very sorry for him.  He and Jenny are friends of mine.  It's a horrible situation. Nationally I don't think it means anything for the Republican Party.  In South Carolina it's a huge deal.  He's a lame duck, so his term's ending.  The interesting thing in the politics here, big Republican ax fight, typical South Carolina primary to follow him.  If he resigns early, the lieutenant governor takes power, giving the lieutenant governor a jump on the others who want to be the Republican governor there.  So even some of Sanford's critics may wind up propping him up politically to keep him in office not to give their rival, the lieutenant governor, the jump in the primary.  It's South Carolina.  It's going to be, by day, Bible politics; by night, knife fighting in the Republican primary.  I think, I think, if I have to predict, he'll hang on, though it could go either way.

MR. GREGORY:  E.J., it's interesting.  I asked Senator Graham, he said--I said are values still core to the Republican Party?  He said, "We are a party of sinners." Make them no different than, than the Democrats.  But is that pillar of social values, in terms of what defines the Republican Party, is that no longer the case?

MR. E.J.  DIONNE:  Well, I was struck at your interview that Senator Graham tried to make this bipartisan all of the sudden at the end, and it was a way of kind of pulling the Republican Party out of this mess.  I mean, the Republicans have a problem with the Ensign scandal and now the Mark Sanford scandal.  I mean, is open marriage their latest new idea?  Obviously they don't want to convey that sense.  But I just hate sex scandals as a general proposition.  And you need some kind of compact in the country where people won't parade out their perfect families, where people will not move, including the press, quickly to a sex scandal.  But Governor Sanford, unfortunately for him in this case, really raised the stakes here when he disappeared, and I think for a lot of people it gives them a hook to say, "Well, this isn't really about the sex scandal, this is about his disappearing for days when people in his own government didn't know what was going on."

MR. GREGORY:  Dee Dee:

MS. DEE DEE MYERS:  I think it's interesting how the fact that his disappearance became a national story.  That was probably something put out there by Governor Sanford's enemies in South Carolina...

MR. DIONNE:  Yes.

MS. MYERS:  ...who wanted to focus attention on that.  And then he walked right into the trap by going to that press conference totally unprepared, without having thought it through, maybe in the middle of a midlife crisis. But it does reflect on, you know, a Republican Party that's built on, in recent years, on two pillars:  fiscal responsibility and family values. George Bush destroyed and the Republican Congress destroyed the pillar of fiscal responsibility, and now characters like Governor Sanford who, you know, sort of didn't practice what he preached, have taken down the other.  And so the Republican Party finds itself in the position of having to redefine what its base mission is.

MR. MURPHY:  But we don't define presidential elections--excuse me--backwards.  And while this is an entertaining sideshow, and this one was particularly entertaining as these go, for kind of cynical watchers of politics the presidential race is going to be about issues in the future.  And on those grounds I think the Republicans could be very, very competitive regardless.

MR. GREGORY:  Let's look at the slate of, of, of national leaders in the Republican Party.  We'll put it up on the screen, some of the faces:  Haley Barbour; Newt, Newt Gingrich; Jon Huntsman has, has hurt his chances with an affair that came out; Sarah Palin; Mitt Romney; Ensign; Huckabee.  Excuse me, I said Huntsman; he's--I meant, I meant Ensign.  There was no affair with Jon Huntsman.  He is taken out, he's gone over to China to be ambassador.  Excuse me, excuse me.  And some of the others down the road.

What is--David Brooks, how does this Republican Party of the future chart a new course?  If you look back historically, from Nixon to Reagan and George W. Bush, in each case it was not only a kind of a, an indictment of the past, but also a charting of a new course for the future of the Republican Party.

MR. BROOKS:  Right.  I take a maximalist view.  I fall to the British Conservative Party; they had to lose three national elections before they changed.  I think this Republican Party's going to have to lose two or three national elections.  So I take the long-term, most pessimistic view possible. But how--what is the route back?  It's two things.  The first thing:  boring, sensible practicality.  And that's why I think of the potentials Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana, is the most sensible short-term answer to the Republican problems, a guy who's just a good manager.  You got a guy, Barack Obama, in the White House, fantastic guy, happens to spend a lot of money.  And so that would be my short term.

The long term is they have to learn to talk to people in densely populated parts of the country and to young people.  And so the answer to those problems are the same.  They have to learn to talk the language of community and common endeavor.  It's been too much individual, profit, tax cuts.  It has to be community, what we can do together, including in some cases governing.

MR. GREGORY:  I just want to make sure that everybody heard that, that I misspoke when it came to Jon Huntsman.  My apologies.  No family turmoil there.  But...

MR. MURPHY:  Mrs. Huntsman's on the other line.

MR. GREGORY:  Yeah, yeah, yeah, my apologies.  But speak to that, Mike.

MR. MURPHY:  Mm-hmm.  No, I kind of agree with David.  I hate to be pessimistic about it.  I think we're in a paradox of opposition, which is what works in the short-term, which is complete opposition to certain policies. And I think President Obama, by going to the left not the center, has given us an opportunity in the short term with health care and other things he's doing. We're going, we're going to win some seats, which is a good thing.  But it may teach us exactly the wrong lessons for the long term, where we have these big demographic problems and we have to modernize conservatism.  It may take a, may take a bit of a meltdown before we come back.  And I think it needs to have more social libertarianism and, and maybe not a complete, unerring defense of perfect capitalism at all times and out of control free market.

MR. GREGORY:  E.J., how do you size up the Republicans?

MR. DIONNE:  Well, you know, I am struck that, that there are two kinds of Republicans out there right now.  Younger Republicans tend to say, "Wait a minute, we can't just go back to Ronald Reagan and re-create that.  That was a long time ago.  These are different circumstances, and we've got to think of a new kind of conservatism." David just blew up the old conservative philosophy; in fact, both, both our...

MR. GREGORY:  He does that.

MR. DIONNE:  ...Republican friends here, because what they're saying is, well, they can't be as socially conservative as they used to be, that was the one pillar, and they really have to say capitalism isn't perfect.  So I think what you're talking about is a need for a wholly new conservatism.

And to go back to Sanford for a second, what really disturbs me most is what he did in his public life, the notion that you could turn down the stimulus money that was basically designed to help the poorest people in South Carolina.  No one paid as much attention to that as they should have, and now we're doing all this stuff on his personal life.

MR. GREGORY:  Another historical reference here.  Let's look at the approval ratings for George W.  Bush at a similar point, June of 2001, and President Obama now.  And there you see it on the screen; Obama more popular, 56 to 50 percent.

Dee Dee, how's the president doing overall in terms of his agenda?  Climate change legislation, a big deal, a big priority for this president, got through the House, but you heard Senator Graham say this is going nowhere in the Senate.

MS. MYERS:  Well, you know, we've heard that before about different Obama proposals, and we'll see what happens.  They have not lost a lot so far.  The president's been very successful in moving his big items through the Congress. And one of the things that he's done really well, and this sort of goes back to the point you were making about the future of the Republican Party, is stitching together a broader view and, and, and trusting the American public to understand that all of these proposals fit together in some way--climate change legislation, healthcare legislation, stimulus package--all toward remaking the economy.  And I think those are powerful arguments.  And I don't think we've heard the last from a president who's been able to rally the public to his side making not simplistic arguments, but complicated arguments. And I think the same will be true on climate change and health care.  I think the public understands that unless we solve some of the big underlying problems, including--it's not just a climate change bill, it's a end our dependence on foreign oil bill as well, which is a national security argument. Those arguments are still compelling, the president still makes them in incredibly effective ways, and we haven't heard the last from this administration.  They're, they're going to fight and they're going to win.

MR. GREGORY:  You talk about health care.  Mike, David Axelrod on this program today making it very clear they are not going to ram through a public plan, even though it's clearly what the president wants and it's what liberals expect out of healthcare reform.

MR. MURPHY:  Well, the public plan is really the camel's nose under the tent for single payer.  The single payer crowd knows they can't get that, so they create kind of this shark device, this public plan to go eat all the insurance companies.  So, yeah, I thought that was a huge concession and an important one.  The tragedy, I think, of health care is this bill has a lot of health care, a trillion-plus dollars of health care.  It doesn't have any reform. There's a great reform idea, which is Wyden-Bennett, which has the individual mandate that is, I believe, part of the solution, out of...

MR. GREGORY:  Where you have to buy insurance if you're uninsured.

MR. MURPHY:  Everybody has to have insurance.  But it also uses the private insurance market in a more regulated way, with real cost controls.  It's the real solution.  And hopefully we're back into those principles, because this public option thing is a killer both for the Republicans and I think politically for Obama.

MR. GREGORY:  David Brooks, you wrote this in a column this week about healthcare reform:  "Healthcare reform is important," you wrote, "but it is not worth bankrupting the country over.  If this process goes as it has been going--with grand rhetoric and superficial cost containment--then we will be far better off killing this effort and starting over in a few years.  Maybe then there will be leaders willing to look at the options staring them in the face." And yet, the president says if it's not done this year it won't get done.

MR. BROOKS:  Well, it won't get done maybe in the next two years.  But my--here's the--there are two issues here.  One is, are we going to pay the trillion dollars for the bill?  That, I think, they'll probably do.  The second and to me most important issue is, will they, as they call it, bend the curve, the total cost of health care to American society?  That they're doing--Obama does a great job of talking about, but he hasn't done any of the hard choices to actually do that.

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