E-mail a friendJohn Harwood
airdate August 4, 2008
Journalism and politics have surrounded John Harwood all his life. He began his career as a copy boy while in high school and, after graduating from Duke, joined the St. Petersburg Times. His experience includes state capital correspondent in Tallahassee, FL and White House correspondent and political editor for The Wall Street Journal. Harwood is now CNBC's chief Washington correspondent and a reporter for The New York Times. He also does political analysis on NBC's Meet the Press and PBS' Washington Week.
Journalist discusses Sen. McCain's use of the race card against his opponent, Sen. Obama. (1:48)
Full Interview. (11:16)
John Harwood
Tavis: Tonight, though, we are pleased to be joined for a conversation for a look at the race for the White House with John Harwood, political write for "The New York Times," of course, and chief Washington correspondent for CNBC. His most recent book is called "Pennsylvania Avenue: Profiles in Back Room Power." He joins us tonight from New York. John, nice to have you on the program.
John Harwood: Thanks for having me, Tavis.
Tavis: I guess I should start by saying happy birthday to Barack Obama, huh?
Harwood: No kidding - 47 years old, he's got a slight lead in the polls, so I'd say he's probably having a good time with Michelle.
Tavis: You say slightly in the polls; I keep showing polls that show them, given the margin of error - them, that would be, of course, McCain and Obama, dead even.
Harwood: It's very close, there's no question, and some of the Gallup tracking has shown a tight race, an even race, actually. But if you take all the public polls, average them together, Barack Obama appears to have a lead of two or three points, down from the six or seven he had a couple of weeks ago.
So there's no question that John McCain remains in this race and the onus is on Barack Obama to reassure people and try to harvest all of that sentiment for change that's out there.
Tavis: Two questions right quick about the numbers before we move on. Question one, what's your sense of why that three or four-point drop has occurred over the last week or so?
Harwood: Well, I think John McCain has gotten very tough with Barack Obama, gotten aggressive, heeded the advice of some Republicans that he needed to take Obama on.
There's a view among Republicans, Tavis, that there's so much desire for change, so much opposition to Bush, that the only way Republicans can win is by raising and amplifying doubts about Barack Obama and making people think he's not ready to be president, and that's the strategy over the last week or so that seemed to have gotten some traction for John McCain.
Tavis: Question number two, and it is an admittedly politically incorrect question, but I know you'll give me an honest answer, so let me ask you. Even if you were up seven points - that is to say, Barack Obama - on Election Day, would that be enough? And you know what I mean by this. You have to honest, I think, acknowledge that there are a number of Americans, some of them White, who would tell pollsters one thing but will do something else inside the booth.
We saw that in the Wilder race for governor in Virginia, we saw it in the Tom Bradley race for governor here in California. History abounds with examples of Black men who were running for office who did not end up finishing - even if they won, didn't end up finishing as the numbers predicted they would because there were apparently some people who again told pollsters one thing and did something else.
Your take on what - how high up he needs to be to insulate himself from what we know is going to be a particular reality?
Harwood: Tavis, I think seven points would be enough. When I talk to pollsters about what they think the so-called Bradley effect is today, they agree that it exists to some degree, but I think most of the pollsters think it's one, two, three points.
I think if Barack Obama goes into election day on November 4th and he's up seven points, he'll be president of the United States, but every Democrat knows that an African American candidate and a Democratic candidate, frankly, has run stronger in the polls than it's turned out very, very late in the game.
And so nobody is resting on the idea that Barack Obama's got this thing wrapped up, although John McCain has tried to make the argument that the Democrats are a little too cocky. They've been dancing in the end zone, that's some of the rhetoric that they've used.
Tavis: Do you think over the last few days John McCain effectively used the race issue against Obama? I think it was interesting for me - there's a good word, interesting for me - to watch him take Obama's words, turn them on him. What did you make of how he did that rather fancifully?
Harwood: I agree with you, it was a very opportunistic move by John McCain. Look, he's got every right to protect himself against the charge that he's running a racist campaign. However, there are not too many people who would have ever been aware that Barack Obama was doing that or reached that conclusion from Barack Obama's words until the McCain campaign manager took Barack Obama's statement, said, "He's accusing us of running a racist campaign; we're not gonna stand for it."
And what was the practical effect of that, Tavis? It was to elevate the attention to race in the campaign, which only benefits one candidate in this race, and that's John McCain.
Tavis: Shrewd move, then?
Harwood: I think it was a shrewd move by him. John McCain has not, in truth, run racist tactics so far. I think an objective view of what he's done wouldn't justify that, and in fact John McCain had not said the things that Barack Obama was saying - "They're going to make you scared of me, they're going to say that I don't look like other candidates."
What Obama was saying was true, in the sense that yes, he is not the classic candidate. It is a path-breaking candidacy, but John McCain had said that and that gave McCain a pretext to attack and to elevate the discussion of race. Racial polarization has been a big dynamic in favor of the Republican Party for a generation now, and the more that that is a factor in this race, the more it's going to help John McCain.
Tavis: Maybe it is true, John, and maybe we should spend some time talking about this. I haven't seen many other people talk about it. Maybe the "they" that Barack Obama was referring to was not John McCain specifically, as you well know, but the folk around McCain, the folk who want McCain to win.
Harwood: Yes.
Tavis: These institutions and organizations who will - the swiftboaters of the world, if you will, who will engage in that kind of behavior. So maybe the "they" wasn't really John McCain.
Harwood: Absolutely, and I've talked to Obama campaign people about that. That is what he intended to say. He was just a little loose with his words in a way that allowed John McCain to jump on his comments. I know that Barack Obama wants to defuse that discussion and it is dicey for John McCain. He can only push this discussion so far before that's going to turn back on him.
So I suspect it's going to quiet down for a while, but we all know, Tavis, that this is going to be the backdrop of the general election campaign, and we'll see what kind of effect it has in 2008. It's going to be different than it's been in the past, but we don't know how different.
Tavis: So let's move beyond the race question and talk about what you shared with us in the paper today, which is that the McCain camp is now starting to employ some of the Hillary Clinton strategies against Obama that she used in some of her effective campaigns, where she won certain primary states. Unpack that for me.
Harwood: Tavis, it's almost like the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama race never really did end. You've got, in John McCain, like with Hillary Clinton, a veteran senator, serves with Obama, who clearly has disdain for his sudden emergence in politics sort of threatening their ambitions. And so she said in the primaries he's just words, he just gave a speech, and Barack Obama has ratcheted up, turned the dial to say that "Oh, he's a Paris Hilton-like celebrity."
She grabbed onto the federal gas tax holiday; he did the same thing; grabbed on to oil drilling, trying to say, "Barack Obama doesn't get your struggles, blue collar America; I do." And he's also targeting, just as Hillary Clinton did, those White working class voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan. That may be where this election's decided.
And what Barack Obama has to do is adjust to these tactics and try to have a stronger response than he did with Hillary Clinton at the end of the primaries when she ran up quite a string of victories.
Tavis: Is it possible for anyone - Barack Obama, of course, in this case, but anyone; I don't want to cast aspersion on him - possible for anyone to have this level of rock star status, given the comment Mr. McCain made about Mr. Obama, is it possible for anyone to have this kind of status and to ride that for these many months all the way from here to victory in November?
Harwood: Well, I think he has a very good chance of riding it all the way. When you talk to most odds makers in both parties, they think Barack Obama is the clear favorite in the campaign. John McCain's the one who's got to reverse the dynamic. They can call it celebrity, they can say he's a rock star and try to turn him into Paris Hilton, but this is a guy who's inspired tremendous fundraising clout.
He's inspired a lot of people to get active. He's going to fill a football stadium in Denver at his convention - that's a big organizing tool. So nobody needs to feel sorry for Barack Obama, he's got a lot going for him in this election, including the tremendous unpopularity of President Bush, and that's the key difference, Tavis, between what he did against Hillary Clinton in the primaries and what he can do against John McCain.
Barack Obama agrees with Hillary Clinton on most issues, but he's got clear differences with John McCain, and he can say, as he did in an ad on energy today, he is standing with George W. Bush. You want some more of that? No, I don't think so.
Tavis: I guess the question is not whether or not people who support Obama will continue to support him over John McCain, but how enthusiastic Obama's support will be. That is to say that if he continues to be perceived as flip-flopping or certainly pivoting - I like that media term - pivoting on these various issues, on oil drilling, on affirmative action, on death penalty, on gun control, on campaign finance - you know this, you write about this stuff every day.
If he continues to pivot on these issues, will the support in the base that he has energized be there enough for him in November?
Harwood: Terrific question. Both of these candidates have high profile flip-flops. Certainly the most high profile for Obama was on campaign finance. For McCain, it's been on George Bush's tax cuts. And with each of them they've got to worry, do they undermine the brand that's gotten them where they are - John McCain's straight talk express; Barack Obama saying, "I'm going to practice a new kind of politics."
All of the polling measures we have so far, Tavis, tell us that there is much superior enthusiasm on the Democratic side. Will that be endangered over the next couple of months? It's possible, but we haven't seen much sign of it yet.
Tavis: Finally, we mentioned one Clinton; that would be Hillary. The other, Bill - we now that Mrs. Clinton has been offered a prime time speech at the convention. This show, again, will be there covering that convention as well as the Republican convention this summer. But what's your sense or what do you know about the role that Mr. Clinton might play, one, in this campaign, but in the more immediate term, at the convention itself?
Harwood: I don't think the details of when he is going to speak have been resolved, but I think it's pretty clear you got to have the last Democratic president who happens to be the husband of your principal challenger, I think you've got to have him speak at the convention. The only question is how do they schedule it so it doesn't detract either from her speech or from Barack Obama's or his vice president's?
But we'll see him, and we'll see him on the campaign trail in the fall. Even if there are bitter feelings, Bill Clinton has got a big interest in trying to be seen as helping Barack Obama, and in fact helping him win the presidency.
Tavis: John Harwood is a busy guy - CNBC and "The New York Times." I don't know how he made time to talk to us on PBS, but I thank him. John, nice to have you.
Harwood: Hey, it's my pleasure.
Tavis: Thank you.
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