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| POLITICAL WRAP | |
 August 10, 2001  |
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Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot look at the political implications of the president's stem cell decision. |
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MARGARET WARNER: Finally tonight, how all of this looks to Shields and Gigot. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot. So, Mark, how did the President handle this, this big decision? |
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| Using the pulpit | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MARK SHIELDS: Well, it was a big decision for the President. It wasn't the Gettysburg Address but I mean certainly if you listen to his staff you would have thought that he had gone through the hammers of hell before he came to this decision. But he presented it I thought in a way that showed a thoughtfulness and a seriousness. He knew he couldn't satisfy both sides but in his presentation last night I thought that he very effectively showed that he had listened, absorbed and understood the arguments that were made on both sides which, you know, is a side of George Bush that we hadn't seen before. It was the President as teacher. Prior to this we've really seen Mr. Bush as almost an expert pupil of Mr. Cheney or even Secretary Rumsfeld. And I thought last night that he gave a serious, thoughtful and I would say earnest presentation on what is by anybody's definition a truly complex, vexing and difficult subject. MARGARET WARNER: Serious, thoughtful? PAUL GIGOT: It was his best Presidential moment I thought because of Mark's point that he was fulfilling the role of educator but above all because he looked like somebody who was making an honest effort to deal with a difficult moral dilemma. And he led people through his own thinking -- through the choices, through the... Through to different arguments on either side, and then said here's where I come out; here's what I think. So that's obviously not the last word but the idea of the President as an educator, as a moral instructor in some cases, I think he fulfilled that role very well. MARGARET WARNER: So there was criticism going into this that the President and his staff had sort of made too big a deal of this and focused too much attention, as you said, Mark, they kept talking about how he was agonizing. Do you think that was misplaced or a good thing that they made such a big deal out of it? MARK SHIELDS: I'm not sure, Margaret. Obviously, the perception... The public perception and the commentary perception that President Bush has been somebody who is not serious, spending long hours wrestling with great problems that he's a jogger, someone with self-confidence and doesn't seem to be dedicated as some of his predecessors have to endless hours in the Oval Office discussing policy. I think that there has been a sense that maybe he was being regarded a little lightly. And this was an opportunity-- and they certainly grabbed it-- to emphasize that this was something where he was dealing seriously with it, he was thinking about it, he was reading about it, he was talking with people. And, you know, I think there may be a little overkill on the staff's part. I mean the agonizing reappraisal of the lonely figure, and then... I mean we've seen that. It's a Presidential standard. I mean, we saw it with Jimmy Carter. We've seen it with all sorts of Presidents in the past. But I thought that it was... Paul was right. It was the most Presidential moment of his presidency. |
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| The president's process | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MARGARET WARNER: Today Karen Hughes, his counselor, had a press conference where she actually talked about all the meetings he had and date by date. They showed the books he read and the briefing books. PAUL GIGOT: Karen Hughes has a tendency to lay it on a little thick sometimes. But I think it's genuine in the sense that I think he did grapple with this. I mean, I talked to people who quite apart from the White House just reporting other stories. Medicare reform, for example, when people were coming in -- and Bush would say what you think about the stem cell research? It was an hour meeting and we spent 45 minutes on stem cell and 15 minutes on Medicare. So I think that that was legitimate. I think you can argue that they let the issue get away from them four or five months ago to where it became a really big issue on the cover of magazines. MARGARET WARNER: And all the lobbying. PAUL GIGOT: Sure on both sides and everybody was trying to box them in with their different statements and everybody trying to get ahead of the President. So once that happened you had to look deliberative. You had to look serious. You had to look like you were treating it... and so I think in that sense ultimately treating it the way they did with a Presidential address and so on was a good way to go. MARGARET WARNER: Now Karen Hughes also said today that political considerations played no role in the decision and that the President, if you came in to speak to him about the politics of it, would say I don't want to hear it. Yet we've been reading stories for two months about how different White House aides have been making political arguments. How do you square those two? MARK SHIELDS: I think that Karen Hughes has a perception of the President she'd like to share with the American people of being on Mount Rushmore and probably being above politics. I mean, George W. Bush is a politician. Good Presidents are good politicians. Any President that says that there were no political discussions or considerations, I mean, it's just something they do. It's in their bones. It's in their marrow -- not to borrow a medical term but it's there. I'm not saying it determined it. But he was aware and part of the process that Paul has described of being thoughtful and serious was the fact that he was changing just as Bill Clinton had made a throw-away line about gays in the military in 1992, George Bush... It was a line that wasn't central to his campaign but he was stuck with it so in order to leave that position and the people who supported him and... In part because of that position perhaps, he had to be serious and he had to be thoughtful. That was a political move. I don't mean any pejorative about that. PAUL GIGOT: There's low politics and high politics. Low politics is how do we get two percentage points out of those Catholics in Cleveland. There's also a question of how you build a political consensus, how you deal with a big issue where there's a huge fundamental disagreement in the country and a part of a President's job is to find that consensus and mold it. |
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| A winning presentation? | ||||||||||||||||||||
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MARGARET WARNER: And so did he do it successfully, Paul? I mean, with the right and religious conservatives for whom this was really an important moral issue, did he thread the needle? PAUL GIGOT: We don't know yet because this debate has just begun in a serious way. The Congress will take care of it. I will say this: In the first 24 hours the reaction has been much better than I think anybody would have expected. I think the white house is somewhat surprised. On the right there are some criticism, the most vociferous criticism from the people who never liked President Bush in the first place, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes ran against him in the campaign - some others in the right to life movement - but the National Right to Life Committee, anti-abortion group surprisingly supportive, the Christian Coalition surprisingly supportive. Most members of Congress from his own party, right and conservative and moderate surprisingly supportive, so he seems to have won their tentative support for having made a serious effort here. MARGARET WARNER: You also see him today, Mark, and Tommy Thompson was doing this both at his press conference today and with us here really trying to make the case to the centrists or moderates, to the research community, that, hey, no, really, a lot is going to happen here, I mean, as if he's trying to, obviously, please all the audiences. Do you think he's going to succeed? MARK SHIELDS: I think the argument in the debate has just begun. I think as far as the right of his own party, Scott Reed, Bob Dole's campaign manager, said that the conservatives will yell and scream. Some have. But in the final analysis, they'll try and stir things up. They won't break with the President on this. And I think that's probably true. I think that politically, Margaret, within his own party, he's in remarkably good shape. He always has been. I don't think there's going to be a breach here. I think that the President, more than anything else, on this issue, this is his opening salvo. He has to dominate the debate from here on in. They did it very smart. They did it on an August night. Everybody's out of Washington. They did it at 9:00 at night, after all the news shows were over, and they were able to set the terms of the debate very well. Now we'll see the debate, especially in the Congress. You heard Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, say there were 70 Senators who were ready to sign on for expanded stem cell research sponsored underwritten by the Feds. They'll lose some of them now I think because Bill Frist of Tennessee and Orrin Hatch of Utah who have already backed the President's decision -- so I think that's where it moves now. It moves to a legislative forum. MARGARET WARNER: A lot of these members of Congress had actually given Bush... I mean, there were so many pro-life members who for the research that it did give him wiggle room, didn't he? PAUL GIGOT: It did give him some wiggle room, but Mark makes a very good point I think when he talks about this isn't the end of the debate but the beginning. For President Bush he can't give this 11-minute speech as effective as it was, and say I already talked on that issue. He has to continue to come back to this because Congress is going to be... That's not a big thing. I mean, Congress should deal with something like this. A lot of those people up there are going to be... Are going to say, well, he solved it, the President solved it. We don't want to deal with it. But they should. That's the way you end up coming to solve some of these issues. One of the problems with the abortion debate in this country is it was taken off the political table. We haven't resolved it in 20 years or 30 years. MARGARET WARNER: As the President said, this decision is really just at the beginning of a whole lot of moral hazards as Leonard Kass just quoted. MARK SHIELDS: That's right. I think thought Leonard Kass was quite impressive in the segment. MARGARET WARNER: Do you agree with Paul that the President has to continue, for instance, speaking out next time there's news... There's so much news coming out of the private research community about what they're doing, cloning and creating these cells. MARK SHIELDS: There is no consensus. I mean I just saw the Gallup came out right on the heels of the President's speech and said that those people who had seen the President's speech were quite impressed by him. They were far more supportive of his position. When they asked how about stem cell research for embryos that were created for the purpose of stem cell research, by a margin of 2.5 to 1 people are opposed to it. This is a very tricky, very complex, very nuanced public opinion on it which is going to develop as well. There is no consensus at this point by any means. MARGARET WARNER: Last prediction. Do you think that what the President did will take enough air out of the balloon, another steam out of the move on the hill to expand this beyond what he.... PAUL GIGOT: I think that in the House he'll be... They will be with him. I think he can control a majority there. I point to the 240 votes for a cloning ban last week including 36 Democrats. It's not the same issue obviously but it could be a similar coalition to back the President on this thing because Senate is the tougher issue. You've got a tougher area, you've got a lot of Democrats running for office who, John Kerry made a very strong statement. So I think the Senate will be a more difficult place to hold it. But, as Mark said, 61 votes and some of those... Urging him for greater research, some of them he'll lose. MARGARET WARNER: Mark. MARK SHIELDS: I just think when they get 240 House members all wearing blue suits, white shirts and the same red tie coming out against cloning I've always found that fascinating in the House of Representatives... (Laughing) but I will honestly I'll say this. I think the Senate is going to be a big focus of friction and tension between the President and the Congress on this one. MARGARET WARNER: Gentlemen, we have to leave it there.
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