'Meet the Press' transcript for Sept. 6, 2009

MR. BROKAW:  Reconciliation is a process that was designed to deal with budget issues, as you know.  And they think if they go to reconciliation and try to keep it focused on the cost of health care, that they can get there. What do they get out of all of that?  They hope that they get a mandate where everyone has to have health insurance of some kind.  And one of the senior advisers to the administration on all of this is also saying we think we can get the exchange process in place where states will organize an exchange, a shopping mall, if you will, for people who are looking for health insurance to go and have a competitive environment.  They're not saying anything about the public option in all of that.  Let me just say one other thing.  At full disclosure, I'm a public trustee of the Mayo Clinic, but I'm not involved in their debate on healthcare reform.  The Mayo Clinic, the Cleveland Clinic and other major healthcare delivery systems in America that are doing well believe that the administration is missing a big opportunity to restructure the cost of Medicare and Medicaid so that you pay for performance and not just for tests.  And no one is addressing that as well.  So there are so many elements in all of this that are in play now and the administration took a big bite and now the question is whether they can digest all of this.

MR. GREGORY:  Tom Friedman, let me end on this political question about health care.  Let's put up that graphic about the independent voters again.

MR. TOM FRIEDMAN:  Mm-hmm.

MR. GREGORY:  Because I think it's telling.  It shows that Obama's approval ratings slipping down to 43 percent, since July, down 10 points.  The issue he's got here in the Democratic Party, he's got a left that really wants that fundamental change that he campaigned on, but he's got a reality among independent voters and centrist Democrats who say, wow, we're spending a lot of money here.  We've got bailouts, as Tom, you know, went, went through.

MR. FRIEDMAN:  Yeah.

MR. GREGORY:  It's just a difficult time to take on all this.  What's his message to his party right now?

MR. FRIEDMAN:  Well, you know, this is a framing challenge.  There's no question about that, David.  You know, just a couple of things I would say. You know, one, in terms of health care itself, to me, one way to frame it, it's a huge competition issue.  Who needs health care more than American business today, taking the burden off business so they can compete globally? And that is, to me, an independent/Republican issue, you know, tends to be more than a Democratic/left issue.  The second is, I keep coming back to this point.  If he doesn't have Republicans who already take yes for an answer, let's look where the administration's going, you could hear it from Axelrod. Public option's not going to be there.  He's drifting toward what--this idea of insurance exchanges.  Where did we see that?  Hey, that was Mitt Romney's idea in Massachusetts.  He's going to drift, I think, to the idea of paying for this by taxing at least some healthcare benefits of some people.  Where did I hear that?  That was John McCain.  Now, can Republicans say yes to McCain, Romney ideas?  And it's not clear to me that they aren't out to pull the plug on Obama much more than anything else.

MR. GREGORY:  Mayor:

MR. GIULIANI:  I think if he, if he had a set of proposals that I don't hear that talked about real cost containment, real reduction in cost, and then, and then a realistic way to cover more people through tax breaks, tax exemptions, subsidies, things like that, I think Republicans could support it. Republicans have--I supported, along with John McCain, a major reform of health care.  If he incorporated a lot of those things in it, I would support it.

MR. GREGORY:  Let me get onto a couple of other things here that are also interesting issues.  The other speech the president planned to give on Tuesday was an education speech to students coming back from their summer break, and he wanted to talk about studying hard.  We brought it up with David Axelrod. Well, this has created such a firestorm.  Here's the New Canaan Public Schools, writing a parent letter, and in it they say this.  "In developing their plans our principals have considered issues such as developmental appropriateness, curricular relevance, the time at which the speech is being broadcast and the importance of teachers assuming responsibility for the selection of instructional materials.  In elementary schools the administration and faculty will view the speech, download it and after discussing it, make decisions regarding how it might be used in the future--including deciding its appropriateness for various grade levels. Parents will be notified, if and when, the decision to show the speech is made." Tom Brokaw, talk about tortured language.  What's going on here?

MR. FRIEDMAN:  Signs of the apocalypse.  I mean, really.

MR. BROKAW:  It's stunning to me.  I come from a time and a place in America where it would be thrilling to have a president of the United States address your school about the importance of studying and staying in school.  And this president, whatever else you think about his political philosophy, is a symbol of working hard, coming from difficult circumstances and getting to where he is in part because of education.  I think it's so ripe for satire, it's unbelievable.  The superintendent of the Gettysburg Public School System said today that they have devised a plan for students to be shielded from a President Abraham Lincoln who will be coming to make an address.  Look, that is the most tortured thing I can possibly imagine, what we just read there. It sounds like East Germany trying to form some restrictions on people leaving the eastern sector to go into the western sector.  I think it's perfectly appropriate for parents to say, "I don't want my child to hear that.  I would rather keep them out or put them in a different school that day." But this is completely out of control, in my judgment.  And it's not--it's not partisan. I mean, if--when I was a student or when my children were in school...

MR. GREGORY:  Right.

MR. BROKAW:  ...if it had been Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or Lyndon Johnson or Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan or George Bush, the idea of hearing a president of the United States saying we should study hard and that's how we advance and we all need to get in on, on this, I think is an appropriate message.

MR. GREGORY:  Mayor Giuliani, you ran for president and one of the things that I've noticed in my experience covering a Republican president, George W. Bush, is the lack of respect for the institution of the presidency.  Whether it's people saying during Bush's time, "Hey, he's not my president." Well, no, yes, he is.  Does that trouble you?

MR. GIULIANI:  Yes, it does, and Tom is right.  But the difference is we looked at President Eisenhower or President Reagan, even up to about that point, even President Bush 41 differently.  There's a lack of respect for the president, there's a lack of respect for politicians.  And David Axelrod said, "Well, this isn't politics." Everything the president does nowadays is politics, for better or worse.  And I think that's what you're seeing.  You're seeing people distrust the president's motives or the administration's motives.  It's not just about the speech, it's about the lesson plan.  I think it's unfortunate and I think, you know, what's the--it almost seems a shame to say what's the harm in a president speaking to a group of children.

FMR. REP.  FORD:  I wish when I was in fourth...

MR. GIULIANI:  I think, I think the president should be given the opportunity to do it.

MR. GREGORY:  Governor Pawlenty of Minnesota, Harold, said, "Look, the only issue with this was it was uninvited." There's a sense that it's been kind of foisted on the schools.  Is there any legitimate criticism?  There were lesson plans that encouraged the students to write letters saying how they could help the president.

FMR. REP.  FORD:  I traveled to Afghanistan in February of '02.  We took with us letters from students in our own congressional districts.  I was along with seven other members of Congress to deliver the students in Afghanistan.  We asked them to do it.  The--we thought a clever and smart, an interesting way for kids to connect.  I wish when I was in fourth grade the president of the United States--when I was in fourth grade, it would've been 1978 or '79, Jimmy Carter was president.  I wish in '82, when I was in seventh grade, Reagan would've come and said study hard, work hard, obey your teachers.  If that's bad in America today...

MR. GREGORY:  Mm-hmm.

FMR. REP.  FORD:  ...we have worse problems than the president going into a, going into a school and speaking.

MR. GREGORY:  What...

MR. FRIEDMAN:  But David, you know, you said, it's a firestorm.  And we live in the age of firestorms.  You know, today, or this week, it's the president speaking in school.  What it needs is for people to stand up and say that's flat out stupid, OK?  That's flat out stupid what you're talking about.  The president of the United States, addressing schoolchildren in this country to study hard, work hard because that's the way you advance in today's global economy.  And instead of that, we kind of dance around it, you know.  It's flat out stupid.

MR. GREGORY:  You talk about Van Jones as well, you know, the fact that in this, in this media age, what he said, by anybody's estimation, was objectionable, to sign a petition saying the government was behind 9/11.  But it goes to something that's going on in this information age...

MR. FRIEDMAN:  David, yeah...

MR. GREGORY:  ...which is you can be a target real fast.

MR. FRIEDMAN:  David, when everyone has a cell phone, everyone's a photographer.  When everyone has access to YouTube, everyone's a filmmaker. And when everyone's a blogger, everyone's in newspaper.  When everyone's a photographer, a newspaper and a filmmaker, everyone else is a public figure. Tell your kids, OK, tell your kids, OK, be careful.  Every move they make is now a digital footprint.  You are on "Candid Camera." And unfortunately, the real message to young people, from all of these incidents, OK, and I'm not here defending anything anyone said, but from all of these incidents, is you know, really keep yourself tight, don't say anything controversial, don't think anything--don't put anything in print.  You know, whatever you do, just kind of smooth out all the edges, and maybe you too--you know, when you get nominated to be ambassador to Burkina Faso, you'll be able to get through the hearing.

MR. GREGORY:  OK.

MR. BROKAW:  Well, I've--one of the things I've been saying to audiences is this question comes up a lot, and a lot of people will repeat back to me and take it as face value something that they read on the Internet.  And my line to them is you have to vet information.  You have to test it the same way you do when you buy an automobile or when you go and buy a new flat-screen television.  You read the Consumer Reports, you have an idea of what it's worth and what the lasting value of it is.  You have to do the same thing with information because there is so much disinformation out there that it's frightening, frankly, in a free society that depends on information to make informed decisions.  And this is across the board, by the way.  It's not just one side of the political spectrum or the other.  It is across the board, David, and it's something that we all have to address and it requires society and political and cultural leaders to stand up and say, "this is crazy." We just can't function that way.

MR. FRIEDMAN:  You know, David, I just want to say one thing to pick up on Tom's point, which is the Internet is an open sewer of untreated, unfiltered information, left, right, center, up, down, and requires that kind of filtering by anyone.  And I always felt, you know, when modems first came out, when that was how we got connected to the Internet, that every modem sold in America should actually come with a warning from the surgeon general that would have said, "judgment not included," OK?  That you have to upload the old-fashioned way.  Church, synagogue, temple, mosque, teachers, schools, you know.  And too often now people say, and we've all heard it, "But I read it on the Internet," as if that solves the bar bet, you know?  And I'm afraid not.

MR. GREGORY:  We're talk--we're talking about our society.  I want to talk about a society halfway around the world that America's engaged in trying to changing and that is Afghanistan and the war in Afghanistan.  It is a critical time.  Tom Friedman, you write about this in your column today on this question of more troops.  The headline, "From Babysitting to Adoption." "We're not just adding more troops in Afghanistan.  We are transforming our mission--from babysitting to adoption.  We are going from a limited mission focused on babysitting Afghanistan ...  in order to prevent an al-Qaeda return to adopting Afghanistan as our state-building project.  ...

"This is a much bigger undertaking than we originally signed up for.  Before we adopt a new baby--Afghanistan--we need to have a new national discussion about this project:  what it will cost, how much time it would take, what U.S. interests make it compelling and, most of all, who is going to oversee this policy.

"I fell a vast and rising ambivalence about this in the American public today and adopting a baby you are ambivalent about is a prescription for disaster."

Two Sundays ago, Admiral Mullen was on this program and I asked him about exactly what the U.S. enterprise was in Afghanistan was.  Watch.

(Videotape, August 23, 2009)

MR. GREGORY:  We're rebuilding this nation.

ADM. DAVID MULLEN:  To a certain degree there is, there is some of that going on.

MR. GREGORY:  Is that what the American people signed up for?

ADM. MULLEN:  No.  I'm--right now the American people signed up, I think, for support of getting at those who threaten us.

(End videotape)

MR. GREGORY:  Tom, are we fulfilling our central mission there?

MR. FRIEDMAN:  David, I want to pick up with Admiral Mullen.  You had him on and he gave, I thought, a really smart speech on this week to a veterans group in which he said, you know, "I'd rather debate this issue than ignore it." And I--and, and what I think he was implying there and implying here, he knows--I actually--the last time I went to Afghanistan was following him.  And I saw a lot of the things that, that, that he saw, and it was very clear to me that the strategy has changed.  Basically what the military has concluded is that the only way we can possibly succeed there is by building the kind of local governance, regional governance and national governance there that will protect and serve the Afghan people so they won't want to sign up with the Taliban for any number of other reasons.  And that's what they have concluded. But the only way to do that is with state building 101.  And I think the thing we all have to debate, OK, and we really knew--I do believe, I do believe we have to redebate this issue on a national level is do we want to undertake that project in this country.  Does it serve our interests?  I believe it is a fantasy to think we can go to this sort of small, mobile, you know, units that everyone wants.  That--if that had worked, do you think George Bush would have figured that out during eight years?  The reason that doesn't work, you can't collect the intel you need.  OK, if you're in small, you know, little units traveling around the country, how are you going to know who's who what? That's not going to happen.

MR. GREGORY:  Mayor Giuliani, This is the cover of The Week magazine.  It's got Uncle Sam wading through the mud of Afghanistan and the question:  Can the U.S. ever tame Afghanistan?  Is this approach the right one?

MR. GIULIANI:  I'm not sure the strategy has changed.  I just heard David Axelrod say the main strategy there is to disrupt the Taliban, disrupt al-Qaeda, that's the place from which the attack of September 11 emerged.  I hope they, I hope they remain focused on that goal, because that is a worthy goal, a necessary one, and it probably needs more troops.  I think the president in this instance is living up to his campaign promise.  I support him completely.  I think he's got the right focus.  I think we have no choice. And we can't become Afghanistan centric.

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