E-mail a friendBill Press
airdate September 15, 2004
Bill Press is an award-winning commentator and columnist. He's also a political insider. His career in broadcasting, politics and government spans more than two decades. A former MSNBC contributor, he co-hosted CNN's The Spin Room and Crossfire. Press began his career as a political commentator on television in Los Angeles, before leaving to run for statewide office and serving as chair of the California Democratic Party for three years. He's the author of Bush Must Go and, his latest, Trainwreck.
Bill Press
Tavis: Bill Press is the former chair of the California Democratic Party who, of course, you can see frequently on MSNBC. His latest book is called "Bush Must Go: The Top 10 Reasons Why George Bush Doesn't Deserve a Second Term." Bill Press, nice to see you.
Bill Press: Tavis, good to see you, too. You don't look 40.
Tavis: Well, thank you. You don't look 45.
Bill: Thank you. I wish.
Tavis: Well, I should thank you, because 40 allows me to look back a little bit. Now I've got a few things in my rearview mirror, and I should thank you publicly. When I first started doing radio, before television ever came along, I called you one day when you were a commentator here in Los Angeles and asked you for advice on how I could do one day what you were doing at that time.
Bill: You brought me tapes of some of the commentaries you were doing.
Tavis: You remember this.
Bill: I do remember that. Yeah.
Tavis: You gave me great advice, wrote me a couple of long letters advising me of things to do, and here I am, so...
Bill: Let me just tell you, the greatest satisfaction that any mentor or friend has is to see that friend surpass them and pass them by and become so successful, and I'm just proud of you and love watching you and love hearing--listening to you.
Tavis: You were kind then. I'm glad to have you on. And thank you for that advice back in the day. Obviously it worked.
Bill: Got any for me now?
Tavis: You've got all the advice in this book, "Bush Must Go," and I want to talk about that. Let's talk about your advice. First of all, speaking of advice, 7 weeks to go, basically. What's Kerry gotta do? Before we get to the book. I know the book is not about Kerry. It's a referendum on George Bush. But what advice would you be giving to the Kerry campaign?
Bill: Well, that's a very good point, because that's one of the things that Kerry has to do. I think he has to do 2 things. Number one, he has to make this election a referendum on George Bush. He started out that way, and then at the Democratic convention in Boston, I think they made a big mistake. They said, "We're going to be nice," right. "We're going to have a feel-good convention. We're not going to attack George Bush." They missed 4 days of opportunity to tell people in this country why George Bush doesn't deserve a second term. Then came the Swift boat ads, and the result of both of those is, through the month of August, this campaign flipped to being a referendum on John Kerry instead of a referendum on George Bush. So John Kerry's got to get it back to being about George Bush. He's got to start talking about and getting people thinking about how's George Bush done over the last 4 years? What about Iraq? What about the war on terror? What about the economy? What about jobs? And focus on Bush. That's number one. I think the second thing that John Kerry has to do is he has to learn to talk like a candidate and not like a United States senator, you know. He's got to get a campaign message, 10 minutes, down. One thing about George Bush, Tavis--you know John Kerry talks in--you know, he can talk in a paragraph, right, just like that. But George Bush talks in short words, short sentences, short thoughts, simple thoughts, but, boy, people understand what he's saying. So I saw Mario Cuomo the other day said that John Kerry has to stop speaking in sentences that have 3 commas in them.
Tavis: That's good advice.
Bill: Yeah.
Tavis: I guess the question is whether or not he can do that. He's a thoughtful guy. I heard somebody say one day that John Kerry--somebody on this program said, maybe Ariana Huffington said to me that she thinks that John Kerry is a horrible campaigner, but would make a good president. Of course, if you don't get over the campaign hump, then you don't find yourself in the Oval Office.
Bill: No. That's absolutely true. First of all, yes, John Kerry can do that. We know he can do that, because we've seen him do it. In the primaries, he was 30 points behind Howard Dean. He was--his back was up against the wall. He knew he had to come through, and so he became a different man. He was on fire in Iowa. He was on fire in New Hampshire. Whatever it was. Maybe 6 years ago William Weld, very popular Republican governor of Massachusetts, is running against John Kerry, and everybody thought that Kerry had lost his Senate seat. A week out, Kerry was 10 points behind. Somehow, Kerry reached down inside of him, and he got that fire back again, and in the debate, he killed William Weld, and he won by 10 points.
Tavis: But can you do that in the last week in a presidential campaign?
Bill: Let me just tell you. Maybe not the last week, but he's got to do it in the next 6 weeks. He's got to--again, he's got to turn this thing around, and you know what, Tavis? There's plenty of ammunition. You know, as I say in the book I think George Bush has been the worst president in our lifetime. That's my opinion, but I base that on looking at how he has performed or not performed on the key issues facing the American people, so, look, there's plenty of ammunition. When you have 45 million Americans with no health care, you got 9 million Americans out of work. We are bogged down in an occupation in Iraq now where over a thousand Americans killed, and we know there was no reason to go to war, because there are no weapons of mass destruction and no connection with 9/11. You've got a $400-billion deficit. The biggest spender ever, ever in the White House, a guy who's taken the economy of the United States from A-OK to I.O.U. What does Kerry need? The issues are right there on the table. Just he's got to talk about them.
Tavis: I want to get to the book here in a second, but we're doing some of this now. Tell me, though, why it is--I say this respectfully to Senator Kerry--tell me why it is, though, that I feel--this is me talking--that Bill Press wants Kerry to win more than Kerry wants to win, Michael Moore wants Kerry to win more than Kerry wants to win, Bill Maher wants Kerry to win more than--why am I feeling that? It may not be true. I'm sure the guy wants to win, but why am I feeling like you guys want him to win more than he wants to win?
Bill: Let me tell you something. You're not the only one feeling that. I think--
Tavis: Tim Russert wants him to win more than he wants to win.
Bill: Most Democrat--I hear this all the time from Democrats out in the country. "What's wrong with Kerry? Why isn't he in Bush's face?" Look, he's an intellectual. He's thoughtful. He's a policy wonk. But he's got to get over it, and he's got to become the candidate. And only Kerry can win. I mean, when Bill Clinton had his heart situation, he goes in the hospital, you know, and on cable TV, they're all talking, "Oh, you know, this is going to be terrible for the Kerry campaign because Clinton, the great campaigner, won't be there for him." Well, maybe he'll be there at the end. I hope he is for a little bit, anyhow. But even if he's not, nobody can win this for Kerry but John Kerry. He's got to realize that.
Tavis: Let's talk about some of the ammunition. You argue on--your top 10 reasons why Bush does not deserve to be reelected, the first issue is Iraq. But you interestingly argue that you'd be happy to send the president back to Texas come November, but that what he did in Iraq is actually impeachable. That's strong language.
Bill: I believe it is impeachable, because I don't think there's anything more--any decision that a president makes certainly that's more serious or more important or affects more Americans than the decision to send--take this nation into war and to send our sons and daughters to die for freedom. And we know--we know that he did so on false pretenses. I think he lied to the American people. I think the evidence is clear. He was told by the CIA before the Iraq war that they weren't sure he had weapons of mass destruction. He was told by many sources that they were sure Iraq did not have nuclear weapons reconstituted and there was never any evidence that Saddam Hussein was connected with September 11, and yet he kept telling the American people, telling the American people that over and over again. I think for a president to lie about war is much more of an impeachable offense than for a president to lie about an act of oral sex.
Tavis: Some folks--I love the bumper sticker "When Clinton lied, nobody died," but Bush's defenders, though, Bill, would say that the president didn't lie, he made the best decision with the information that he had, and your guy, John Kerry, said based upon that information, "I would have done the same thing."
Bill: That was the biggest mistake that John Kerry--
Tavis: It was a huge mistake, wasn't it?
Bill: Biggest mistake in this campaign so far for John Kerry. When they asked John--first of all, he should not have voted for the war, number one, but a lot of people believed the president at that time, and they believed the information as--Hillary did, right? I mean, Teddy Kennedy didn't.
Tavis: They all did.
Bill: He didn't. Teddy didn't, but Hillary did.
Bill: But the bigger mistake was about a month ago when George Bush was needling John Kerry, "How would you vote now?" and John Kerry said if he had known that there were no weapons of mass destruction, he would still have voted to go to war in Iraq. That was monumental bonehead stupid. What he should have said is what Hillary Clinton said. Hillary said--when they asked her that, she laughed, and she said, "Are you kidding?" She said, "If I had known there were no weapons of mass destruction, there wouldn't even have been a vote in the Senate. So it's a ridiculous question." So, um, that's the issue there.
Tavis: The second point you argue--
Bill: And by the way, again, if you look in my book and other sources, if you look at the documents, there are plenty of documents that went to the White House. They never said, "Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction. We know it. Period." There was always, "Well, maybe and maybe not. We're not really sure." You never heard that from George Bush. It was always positive. It was a lie.
Tavis: The second reason you argue why Bush should not be reelected is that we are less safe now on the terrorism front than we were a few years ago.
Bill: I believe we are. First of all, there are more acts of terror committed today against Americans around the world and against our allies around the world than there were before the war in Iraq. The State Department has admitted that. Secondly, we took--you know, by the way, I supported the war on terror. After 9/11, we were hit; we had a right to hit back. I thought the war in Afghanistan was self-defense. We were right to go there, and we were on the tail of the terrorists, we were on the tail of Osama bin Laden, we practically--we were closing in on him, and then suddenly they dropped the ball, they moved to Iraq, where the Al-Qaeda was not, and we've been there for the last 2 years. What's Al-Qaeda been doing in the meantime? They have training camps back in Afghanistan already. They are reg--they've used this time to regroup, to rearm, to recruit new members, to come after us in the United States. That is George Bush's war on terror, which I believe is a bogus war on terror.
Tavis: Tell me why it makes so much sense to you and yet in every poll, the president still leads--although the lead is not what it was coming out of that convention in New York. But why does it make so much sense to you? Are you that much brighter than the rest of us?
Bill: No. There is a good reason. You know why?
Tavis: Why?
Bill: Because not everybody has yet read my book.
Tavis: Ha ha ha! See, that's some of that Bill Press advice I got about how to sell, sell, sell, market, promote.
Bill: Isn't that shameless?
Tavis: No, it's not.
Bill: I'm blushing on national television. No. But I think if a serious answer is still possible here--
Tavis: But doesn't that scare you, though, that people don't see this in clear terms the way you do, that here's a president that you think lied and didn't serve in the National Guard, and yadda, yadda, yadda, and yet the guy leads in the polls. What does that say about your guy or about the American voter?
Bill: Look, you can never underestimate the stupidity of American voters, a certain percentage of them. But I think here's what you got. First of all, there's a whole group of people, maybe 20%, 30% percent who will vote for Mickey Mouse as long as he's got an "R" in the back of his name. They don't care. "R, they get my vote." Then you got these, um...I think they are idiots who listen to right-wing talk radio. That's all they listen to. So they're listening to Rush or Sean or Bill O'Reilly, whatever. They never read a newspaper. That's their whole source of information. They believe all that stuff. And you add that--and then you have the religious conservatives in this country who will vote for him only for one reason: because he is not pro-choice. And you add those up, and you get to about 45% of the electorate. That's scary.
Tavis: We'll see what happens the next 7 weeks. The book is, again, "Bush Must Go: The Top 10 Reasons Why George Bush Doesn't Deserve a Second Term." We only got to 2, but you can now read Bill Press' book and get the rest of 'em. Bill, nice to see you.
Bill: Great to see you, Tavis.
Tavis: Up next on this program, actor John C. Reilly. Stay with us.
Back to September 15, 2004