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| ELECTION PREVIEW
NOVEMBER 4, 1996TRANSCRIPT |
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With only hours until the polls open, three political reporters evaluate the impact of Bob Dole's 96-hour, non-stop campaigning; the state of the Congressional races; Clinton's "victory lap" and Perot's late surge in these last days of the '96 campaign.the Los Angeles Times, and Elizabeth Arnold of National Public Radio, who joins us from Dole's latest stop, Lafayette, Louisiana. Elizabeth, the 96-hour marathon of Bob Dole is almost over. What impact has it had, do you think?
ELIZABETH ARNOLD, National Public Radio: Well, I think it's done three things probably. It's fired up the base. It's created a lot of energy and a lot of interest, which he needed--badly needed to do. Secondly, it's brought a lot of attention to the congressional races which Sen. Dole's been very concerned about, so he some key states where there
were very close Senate races. And thirdly, I think this is a very important to Dole. It proves how committed he is. He's been traveling around--breakneck speed. We've had about five hours sleep in four days now. So that's a declaration of where I am right now, but it's really sort of energized the base. The problem is it really hasn't done much in terms of the undecideds. We pull into the airports at 4 AM, and it's pretty much the hardcore supporters who are there.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. David Broder, what do you think about this 96-hour marathon, what it says about Bob Dole that we should remember?
DAVID BRODER, Washington Post: Well, I think it says a lot that is admirable about him. The man is a battler. He has never worried about what the odds were in his legislative career, whether it was the task of trying to find one more vote for the balanced budget amendment or find one more voter out there on the campaign trail. I think it speaks wonderful things about his character.
JIM LEHRER: Now, has it changed the possible result tomorrow in any way?
MR. BRODER: Uh, nothing that I have heard, including the last conversations I had with the people in the Dole headquarters who suggest that they think he is about to pull a rabbit out of the hat and win the election. I do think that he may have moved some states from the Clinton column to the Dole column, but as Elizabeth was suggesting, they're all states which normally we have put in the Republican stands much earlier in the campaign than this.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Yes, Elizabeth. Elizabeth, you had something you wanted to add to that.
MS. ARNOLD: I was just going to say, you know, I covered Bush in 1992, and his campaign was sort of slow to start, just like Dole's was, but now at the very end turned into this breakneck race around the country. And it's interesting to me that back then Bush was sort of slow to realize that the economy was in dire straights and that people were really worried about it and by contrast, Dole has sort of ignored the fact that folks feel pretty good about the economy.
JIM LEHRER: So he had--he had just the opposite thing to deal with that Bush did?
MS. ARNOLD: Right.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Yeah. Ron Brownstein, you have spent some time in the last few days with President Clinton. What has his strategy been these last few days? What is he trying to do?
RON BROWNSTEIN, Los Angeles Times: Well, I think the Republicans caught his attention. I was out with him the week before last in the South, and he was sort of taking the victory lap before he had crossed the finish line. He was giving very sort of amorphous, gauzy speeches. He never mentioned the word “Dole” or “Gingrich” or “Republican” or “Democrat,” for that matter. He talked about medical research and supercomputers. It was very kind of odd actually. In the last few days he's gotten a lot more poignant, as you heard on there. I mean, he--in the excerpt you heard from Ohio today, talking about, you know, the Republicans were wrong on family and medical leave, and I was right, reviving some of the Medicare debates, and I think that he's taken on a little water in the last few weeks with the revelations about the Democratic National Committee fund-raising, and he's very much conscious of trying to get over 50 percent, and I think he's trying to sharpen the message a little bit at the end to get him there.
JIM LEHRER: Why is getting over 50 percent so important to him?
MR. BROWNSTEIN: Well, you know, has labored for four years under being a plurality president.
JIM LEHRER: He had 43 percent.
MR. BROWNSTEIN: 43 percent, which was no better than the Democratic average in the six previous elections, of which they lost five, and I think he's very conscious of trying (a) to build a new majority that can have some legs to show the outlines of the new Democratic political coalition both in geographic and demographic terms, and also because I think he feels that if he has a popular majority and has a big electoral vote, uh, majority, especially in states that Republicans have dominated, his hand will be strengthened in saying to Congress, look, you know, we gave the American people a choice, and they want to go in the direction that I want to go in.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. David, what do you think of the 50 percent figure? How, how important is that?
MR. BRODER: I don't think it's terribly important at all. What is important to the President is whether he can provide any help for these embattled Democratic candidates in the close House and Senate races, of which we have literally dozens going into tomorrow's voting, Jim. Uh, if he can build up his vote in a way that helps them, then it's important. Otherwise, I bet you three nights from now nobody will be able to tell you what the percentage of the popular vote was that President Clinton received.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. David--Ron--Ron.
MR. BROWNSTEIN: I would just say that I think he will probably be able to tell you. Um, he's had his eye on that for some time.
JIM LEHRER: What about Ron's other point, David, that, that the President has taken--to use Brownstein's colorful term--has taken on some water over this campaign financing thing?
MR. BRODER: No question about that. It seems to have affected two groups of voters particularly--independents particularly in the western states and across that band across the top of the country were clean politics model--Minnesota would be an example of this--in Maine, where they just really don't have much tolerance for smelly political practices, and these have been pretty smelly political practices. It's also, I think, caused some second thoughts among some--what the Dole people call soft Republicans, who were not real enthused about Sen. Dole, have been holding out. A lot of them seem to have come back, particularly in the South and in the mountain states.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Elizabeth, is there some regret within the Dole campaign that they didn't go after the “character ethics” issue earlier? You know, it's only been in the last--I don't have to tell you--it's only been in the last three weeks or so that he's really gone after that. What's the feeling about that within the campaign?
MS. ARNOLD: There is some sense that if they had it a little bit earlier, they could have gone more positive in the end and that they made some inroads with women with some of these drug--uh--ads in the very end, and they wished that they had come out earlier on that issue as well.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. I think we need to explain to people that there's a political rally going on behind you. That is the music they are hearing. Yeah.
MS. ARNOLD: I wanted to make one point, if I could--
JIM LEHRER: Sure.
MS. ARNOLD: --in reference to the congressional races. Uh, there is yet to be sort of a debate that, that could have happened in this--in this campaign about the size of government, which is what Dole was after all along in talking about turning power over to the states, but he never really got--he never really connected that message, and Clinton sort of eclipsed it, but that is yet to come in terms of what happens with the House and Senate races.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Ron Brownstein, what is your feeling traveling with the President's people and et cetera about how important it is to him to have a Democratic Congress?
MR. BROWNSTEIN: Well, there are very much--you know, you got to look at two different tracks. On a policy front, it may be easier in many ways to have Republicans chastened with a narrow majority holding the Congress. Certainly, Democratic chairmen in the House would be much more liberal than Bill Clinton is. If the Democrats regain power, it would be very hard, I think, to pass that very austere budget he put out last year. On the other hand, if Republicans hold the chambers, they issue the subpoenas, and they have already suggested they're going to issue a flotilla of subpoenas next year on a whole variety of issues led by this fund-raising but not limited to that. So for that reason alone, I'm sure that he wants a Democratic Congress.
JIM LEHRER: So it's however he wants his poison, is that right, David?
MR. BRODER: I think that's very much the case. And the President has been--you know, he is a great consumer of polling information, and he was told early this year that the worst thing you can do is to go right straight out and tell people you want a Democratic Congress, that that sort of openly partisan appeal would be likely to boomerang on him. So, instead of that, he's had to go state by state and now recently district by district, saying, I want this person in Congress who happens to be a Democrat, and the design was that in the end we would add up the numbers at some point tomorrow night and discover voila, there's a Democratic Congress.
JIM LEHRER: Okay. So, do you think it's working? Do you think his strategy is working?
MR. BRODER: I think it had a pretty good chance of working until all of this financial mess unfolded, and I think since then, as Ron said, he's been taking on water.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Look, starting with you, Ron, there's been much said about this campaign. For instance, there were stories today in every newspaper I saw--and I saw several of them--which essentially said nothing really happened over the last several months. I mean, the campaign began with these two men separated by certain things, and, and we're sitting here the night before the election and nothing--everything's pretty much the same. Do you agree with that?
MR. BROWNSTEIN: Well, it's a little unseemly to begin the autopsy while the body is still twitching.
JIM LEHRER: I know. I know.
MR. BROWNSTEIN: But I think broadly that it's true.
JIM LEHRER: Now I don't mean about win-lose. I just mean about--did--nothing really happened.
MR. BROWNSTEIN: No. I mean, in that sense there was--I mean, there's obviously a series of events. Bob Dole kept trying to shake up the race. He quit the Senate. He proposed a 15 percent tax cut. He reached out to Jack Kemp, an enemy during the 80's, who had been very much estranged from the party, but the basic structure that was locked into place last winter around the budget fight really has been, you know, extraordinarily difficult to dislodge. I mean, we're all looking at a race that in many respects very much resembles what we had in January, February, and March, so in that sense, nothing changed, although I do think that the way the debate evolved with be very important for next year. I think Elizabeth was saying before we didn't get the debate on government, but it was partly because Dole felt that he could not run on completing the revolution of ‘95; that that had lost some of its steam. And that points to me to suggest that both parties next year, if we have divided government, are going to see a lot of incentive to make some deals and get some of these issues behind them. Both sides have found a promising revolution as Clinton did in ‘93, as Gingrich did in ‘95, is not necessarily the way to success.
JIM LEHRER: Elizabeth, what do you think about what this campaign has done or not done?
MS. ARNOLD: Well, coming after what Ron said, I do think there's a very large debate ahead over the size of entitlements and that that's going to come and face both parties real soon, and they're going to have to deal with that. But I would disagree that nothing happened. I actually think that something very interesting happened in the Republican Party, and that's just from being out here on the road, there have been a lot of Reagan folks around, Reagan people saying what should be done, morning in America, these kinds of things, and it didn't work, and I see also a lot of younger Republicans out, very frustrated by that, saying, look, we need to go in a new direction, we need the Republican Party to be something else and stand for something else, and I think that that revolution, that's going to start moving forward. I think a whole new generation of Republicans are going to get involved. I talked to a lot of kids at rallies, college kids at rallies who are frustrated by the fact that Dole is their candidate, um, sort of felt like, well, we had to have him as our candidate, it was his turn, that kind of thing, and they're ready now, um, for some new blood.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah, David, your thoughts about the campaign generally.
MR. BRODER: Uh, Jim, from the voter's point of view not much did happen. I think most voters made their decisions very early this year. I went to Verona, New Jersey, to a couple of swing precincts right after Labor Day, particularly interested to see whether Sen. Dole's economic message was going to resonate in areas which have gone from supporting Democrats for governor in Congress to supporting Republicans in the most recent elections. What I found there was, one, they didn't really believe Sen. Dole's promise that you could cut taxes 15 percent and still balance the budget, and two, that it was very hard to find undecided voters. The only people that I could find who were undecided were people who said, I don't like any of these people. I don't know what I'm going to do. I may not even vote. And I expect a lot of these people tomorrow unfortunately will probably end up not voting.
JIM LEHRER: What about the Ross Perot factor, David? Has he--is he a factor in this election?
MR. BRODER: He's a factor because for those who didn't really want to vote for either Bill Clinton or Bob Dole, he's there now in there. He's raised his visibility enough to the point that they say, oh, yeah, there's another guy there. And I think the reason that we've seen his numbers come up, you know, perhaps from high single digits to low double digits in the last few days has been that he is the alternative option. It's not so much that they're voting Perot. It's that they're saying, give us a better choice.
JIM LEHRER: Okay. Well, David, Ron, Elizabeth, thank you for being with us tonight and throughout the campaign. And Elizabeth, I appreciate particularly your fighting the, the band and all that to be with us tonight from Lafayette, Louisiana. Thank you all three very much.
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