Friday, March 7, 2008

MS. IFILL: And you thought maybe it was going to be over? We'll tell you why the 2008 presidential campaign may just be beginning, tonight on "Washington Week."

The big rebound.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY): Thank you, Ohio. (Applause.) We're going on, we're going strong, and we're going all the way.

MS. IFILL: Hillary Clinton breaks her losing streak after Barack Obama fails to close the deal. But then there's the math.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): No matter what happens tonight, we have nearly the same delegate lead as we did this morning and we are on our way to winning this nomination.

MS. IFILL: The Democrats deadlocked. Who has the momentum? Who has the money? Who has Michigan and Florida?

SEN. BILL NELSON (D-FL.): We've got a major train wreck.

MS. IFILL: All those questions are answered on the Republican side as John McCain officially clinches the nomination.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): My background and my judgment allow me to do the thing that's most important for America: to inspire a generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than their self-interest.

MS. IFILL: President Bush is on board.

PRES. GEORGE BUSH: I wish you all the best and I'm proud to be your friend.

MS. IFILL: Will that help or will it hurt? Deciphering the week, Dan Balz of the "Washington Post," John Dickerson of "Slate" magazine, and Karen Tumulty of "Time" magazine.

ANNOUNCER: Celebrating 40 years of journalistic excellence. Live from our nation's capital, this is "Washington Week with Gwen Ifill," produced in association with "National Journal."

ANNOUNCER: Once again, live from Washington, moderator Gwen Ifill.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. For the sheer velocity and head-snapping quality of the results and the rhetoric, this has been one of the most fascinating weeks of the campaign so far. Now, I know I've told you that before, but I really mean it this time. After Hillary Clinton got her second win, courtesy of Ohio, Texas and Rhode Island, both campaigns turned to resetting the expectations table.

SEN. CLINTON: Well, I think what's important here is that this campaign has turned a corner. It is now about who is strongest against the Republican nominee, John McCain.

SEN. OBAMA: I hope people starting asking is what exactly is this foreign experience that she's claiming. I know she talks about visiting 80 countries. It's not clear - you know, was she negotiating treaties or agreements or was she handling crises during this period of time? My sense is the answer is no.

MS. IFILL: Dan, we have heard the Clintons claim comebacks before. Was that what this was this week?

MR. BALZ: Oh, very definitely. This race was almost over and had Senator Obama won either Texas or Ohio, I think it's likely that Senator Clinton would have been under enormous pressure to get out of the race. But by winning both of those, she has brought herself back in a significant way. And I think in important ways changed the dynamic. The Obama campaign has been making this argument that they have an insurmountable delegate lead in the pledged delegates. There is some truth to that. On the other hand, by not being able to win some of these important states and by not being able to close her off, he has allowed her to get back into the race and now we're in a very uncertain period.

MS. IFILL: Karen, Dan is right. At this table last week, I think obits were being written literally at the table, obituaries, and now she's back. How did she pull it off?

MS. TUMULTY: Well, what this has done has given her seven weeks to - as the phrase - the word that her campaign has been using is reboot the campaign. Essentially it's seven weeks to see if she can sort of convince the Democratic electorate that Obama is not the candidate that they thought he was, that he is more vulnerable than she is in a general election, and also it's seven weeks to hope that Obama makes some kind of mistake.

MS. IFILL: Did the kitchen sink strategy; that is, throwing the whole kitchen sink at Obama, the discussions about NAFTA, the discussions about Tony Rezko, did that actually work in the end?

MR. DICKERSON: And we're also going to add into that kitchen sink strategy, remember, the 3:00 a.m. phone call, is Barack Obama ready to be commander-in-chief? There is some evidence that this worked. If you look at voters who made up their decision in the last three days, that was a group that Obama had won in other states - in many other states. They went strongly for Clinton, which suggests these contrasts, as the Clinton folks would call them, which came at the end of the game there that they paid off. But there were other things that contributed to her victory as well: her coalition was relatively durable with working class folks, with older folks, with women. It had taken a ding in certain states, but it came back for her, which suggests that there are Clinton folks out there who are going to stick with her, and that was another part of the victory for her.

MS. IFILL: So who are those folks? Who are these people who stuck with her or came back to her?

MR. BALZ: Well, as John said, white, working-class Democrats were very strongly for her. She carried white men and white women without college educations by huge margins, particularly in Ohio, and there are a lot of folks like that in Ohio. Women are still strongly for her, although interestingly her numbers among women were not any better in Ohio and Texas than they had been in some other states and a little bit lower than that. But that core coalition of kind of the working class of the Democratic Party was very important, and she spoke to them. I think John is right that some of the kitchen-sink strategy certainly was a factor in this. But I also thought that in the final five days of that campaign, she was running in the same way that we saw in New Hampshire. She was running a better campaign than he was.

MS. TUMULTY: And one more demographic: Latinos, which is something that the campaign argues is a group that in November is going to be very important in a lot of states that the Democrats will win.

MS. IFILL: North of 60 percent of the Latinos in Texas?

MS. TUMULTY: Right.

MR. DICKERSON: And the campaign, this is how they will pivot from these victories and they will say these are core Democratic groups, these are the groups you need with you and she's the one who can grab them and take them forward.

MS. IFILL: And these are the states you need to win in the fall.

MR. DICKERSON: Particularly Ohio, of course. And they have said that in Ohio, a crucial swing state, she was able to talk about the economy better than Barack Obama and that that will play a huge role in the general election.

MS. IFILL: Now, Barack Obama has 25 states that he's won, Hillary Clinton's got 14 states that she has won, but when you look at the map, what you really see is the delegate numbers. And the delegate numbers as of this afternoon - and they shift - 1569 for Obama, 1462 for Clinton. So the real challenge for Barack Obama right now, even though he still leads in the delegate count, is what?

MR. BALZ: Well, the challenge for him I think is to show in Pennsylvania that he can go at her in a big state and probably win it, but Pennsylvania is a terrible state for him. All of the groups that came out strongly for her in Ohio are in Pennsylvania but in bigger numbers, so he has a real uphill climb. I think the other thing he has to do - and one of the curious things about his campaign, this is a guy who left college and went to the streets of Chicago and worked with out of work steel workers, families who were suffering directly from economic dislocation, and yet he has had more trouble than she has had connecting with those kinds of voters. And I think one of the things they have to do is get beyond simply the "I will bring change to Washington" and begin to connect with those voters.

MS. TUMULTY: Another asset by the way that she's going to have in Pennsylvania that she had in Ohio is the support of the Democratic governor and the use of his machine to help turn out her voters, which this is - Obama has been beating her over and over again on the ground. Here she has a very important ally.

MS. IFILL: Fifty-five million dollars doesn't hurt. That's what Barack Obama has this week.

MR. DICKERSON: That doesn't hurt, although she raised $4 million in about the first 24 hours after her victory. The challenges for her - let's go into what she faces, which is that Barack Obama has this lead in pledged delegates and that's likely to be untouched even if we go all the way to Denver. What she gained this week is a storyline, and she can make the pitch in Denver that superdelegates - these roughly 800 folks - should vote for me, give me the victory and sort of undo what the pledged delegates have done.

MS. IFILL: But let's talk about Obama's challenge, because in the end this is who runs the better campaign, as Dan was saying. She ran a better campaign in the end. Did he not - was he not nimble enough? Did he just not run a good enough campaign in the end?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, there are Democrats who think that the kitchen-sink attack - he wasn't fast or nimble enough in responding to her, that he stayed too high-minded that he didn't punch back. He contributed to his own problems by having - and we won't go down into the weeds here - but two instances both on - a controversy on NAFTA and also his relationship with Tony Rezko in which his answers weren't very compelling, and so he sort of helped the Clinton campaign.

MS. IFILL: And today, he spent a lot of the day dealing with it. And yet, another advisor - which is what happened with the NAFTA - who had said untoward things about Hillary Clinton and he had to spend - she was fired by the way, but still it was another distraction.

MR. BALZ: Well, I think it's clear that over the past 10 days or 12 days that his campaign has been off balance. That happens in the middle of a tough fight like they're going through. Each of them has run into difficult stretches. They have not run a bad campaign, obviously. They've run a very smart campaign in many ways, but I think when you get into trouble, you have to step back and say, okay, what is it that we need to do and how do we pivot out of this? And I think that's the test that he faces, and a lot of people are going to be waiting to see.

MS. IFILL: Has the test become this - this tearing each other apart that we've seen so far, not so much out of the candidates' mouths as much as out of the mouths of their staff?

MS. TUMULTY: To some degree, it will be, and this is a very difficult challenge for Barack Obama because the more he plays on that turf, the more he campaigns on those terms, really the more he damages the entire message of his own campaign - the Obama brand - which is a new kind of elevated politics that gets us away from all that.

MR. DICKERSON: That's right. Clinton's message is I'm a fighter, so when she's fighting, she's reinforcing her message. His message is I'm not going to be a fighter, I'm going to be a conciliator, so when he's fighting, he's working against his cause.

MS. IFILL: But at the same time, as they are fighting each other, we still saw Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail today making - or dropping hints that maybe what Democrats' great fantasy might come true. Let's listen to what she had to say.

SEN. CLINTON: This is a moment of historic celebration for America, but you've got to make a choice. A lot of people wish they didn't have to. I've had people say, I wish I could vote for both of you. Well, that might be possible someday.

MS. IFILL: Maybe that will be possible. I don't know. I'll make you all happy, but meanwhile, we'll tear your face off. What is the likelihood of that?

MR. BALZ: Well, if she is the nominee, I think she could well reach out to Senator Obama.

MS. IFILL: Certainly it's happened before.

MR. BALZ: It has happened before. She has now dropped this hint twice in the last several days. And so I don't think that's beyond the realm of possibility. If he is the nominee, I think it is less likely that he reaches out to her, and I think people in her campaign think it's less likely.

MS. IFILL: And the other piece of what I find interesting is they both want to use John McCain who's now the presumptive nominee by saying - he says that she is like John McCain - she tries to link them - and she says, yes, well, I have foreign policy experience of a John McCain. At which point does that become useful for John McCain?

MR. DICKERSON: Immediately. I mean, this 3:00 a.m. ad we talked about who's got the judgment and experience to work in the White House, well, he says he does and voters and polls have said that, and so he's feeling happy about this debate that is about - and another thing she said was, I've passed the foreign policy test or the commander-in-chief test. John McCain has passed that test. You'll have to ask Barack Obama if he has. Well, the answer of course there in her mind is clearly no, so she's given McCain - she's already said well, she's already sort of vouched for John McCain's credentials.

MS. IFILL: We'll get back to John McCain in a minute. Let's talk about this delegate morass. Not only are they trying to keep track of the superdelegates and the pledged delegates, but they're also trying to keep track of Michigan and Florida - all these unseated delegates that happened in the unsanctioned primaries. Where does that stand tonight?

MR. BALZ: Well, it's still a mess. I think everybody knows they have to figure out a way to resolve it, but I don't think anybody has come up with a good way to do it. There were indications 48 hours ago that Michigan in particular was moving to proposing having essentially a hybrid between a primary and a caucus. They call it a firehouse primary. But -

MS. IFILL: It worked so well in Texas.

MR. BALZ: It works - well, it would be better - they've done it in Michigan before. They know how to do it. But that seems to have stalled. In Florida, the cost estimates of rerunning a primary range from $5 million to $20 or $25 million. Nobody knows how they're going to pay for it. There is no consensus on how they do it. Howard Dean, the chairman of the Democratic National Committee says, we're not going to change the rules, but if these states submit plans and we approve them, then we can do something else.

MS. TUMULTY: One idea they're talking about in Florida is a mail-in voting process as sort of -

MS. IFILL: Like Oregon.

MS. TUMULTY: - like what's used in Oregon. Of course, you know, after what we've all been through with Florida, the last thing we want is to see them getting creative. (Laughter.) But that is one possibility that would cost a lot less than a regular primary and would allow them to deal with some problems that are unique to Florida; for instance, how do you make it so that the 30,000-plus overseas military who are registered as Democrats in Florida can vote. As far as paying for it, there's a little loophole in the election law that while soft money - these big unregulated donations from rich people - are banned for federal elections, the state party can raise it. So that may be one possibility for raising the money to pay for do-overs, which at this point, it looks like something is going to have to happen.

MS. IFILL: Something's got to be done over. But how much - how concerned are the campaigns - differently I suppose - about the risk of alienating all these new voters. We've seen this tremendous turnout. We've seen this interest for both candidates. Do they take that into account?

MR. DICKERSON: Absolutely. This is the challenge for Hillary Clinton. When everybody gets to Denver and there is this inevitable fight that people think is going to happen, what the Obama allies have been saying is if Hillary Clinton wins by superdelegates - overthrows the pledged delegate momentum that Obama will have - that African-Americans who are supporting Obama will leave or be disaffected and not show up in November, that liberals who are supporting Obama will do that, and that all these new young voters who are so enthusiastic about him will leave, and that's the threat that they're putting forward to Hillary Clinton.

MS. IFILL: I date myself perhaps, but it seems to me there was a time when a Democratic Party National Committee chairman would step forward, knock a few heads, and fix - I remember Ron Brown doing this and work it out. It's like Tim Gunn on "Project Runway" - work it out. But they don't seem to be close to be working that out.

MR. BALZ: Well, I don't think people have confidence in Howard Dean to be able to do that at this point. I think that their belief within the party is that it's going to require - if there is a point at which you have sort of a council of elders, that it's going to have to be some other people and the names obviously are people like Al Gore, or John Edwards was a name that was thrown out this week. But nobody looks at this point to Howard Dean as the one who will reconcile these two warring campaigns.

MS. TUMULTY: And the party itself is a much weaker mechanism than it used to be. One of the reasons we're in this position is that these two states decided, we don't care what the party rules are. We're going right ahead.

MS. IFILL: Let's go back to talking about John McCain for a moment, because while the Democrats continued slugging it out, the man they both hope to challenge in the fall glided into place assembling enough delegates to claim the nomination, and that he headed off to the White House for the president's blessing. Unfortunately, he kept the president waiting. That's really interesting. But once the two men went off for a hot dog lunch and a Rose Garden endorsement, all was apparently forgiven.

PRES. BUSH: I've got a lot to do, but I'm going to find ample time to help and I could help raise him money, and if he wants my pretty face standing by his side at one of these rallies, I'll be glad to show up. But they're going to be looking at him.

SEN. MCCAIN: He and I, as is well known, had a very good competition in the year 2000, and I was privileged and proud to have the opportunity to campaign for his election and reelection to the presidency of the United States. I appreciate his endorsement. I appreciate his service to our country.

MS. IFILL: A very good competition is a nice, subtle way of putting what happened eight years. So is John McCain sitting pretty now, Karen?

MS. TUMULTY: For the next few months I think he is, especially as the Democratic race gets rougher and rougher. He can start thinking about what his message is for the fall, how he wants to frame the race, how he wants to raise money, how he wants to put organization in. He's in a great spot right now.

MS. IFILL: Is he in the spot where he starts talking about vice-presidential candidates?

MR. DICKERSON: I don't think so. They're going to go on a bio tour, which we all know the John McCain story, but they don't know enough people know it.

MS. IFILL: Is that true, really?

MR. DICKERSON: He's going to go on a biography story - about a 10-day trip, and what he's going to do is talk about his life, remind everybody about his service to the country, and he's going to talk about what he used to talk about all the time in 2000, which is the cause greater than your self-interest.

Now, what does that mean? That means he's trying to eat into the Obama message about joining - everybody joining together, and so that's part of what he's doing. He's also going to go into places like Watts maybe, or these places you don't normally see Republican candidates to get some news coverage, because we're all talking about the Democrats and not him.

MS. IFILL: Who can blame him? But here's the thing: we know that Barack Obama raised $35 million last month - I mean Hillary Clinton raised $35. He raised $55, she raised $4 million more. How much does John McCain have?

MR. BALZ: Far less. (Laughter.)

MS. IFILL: What does he do about that gap?

MR. BALZ: They today appointed Carly Fiorina, who used to be the head of Hewlett-Packard, to head the so called "Victory Fund" at the Republican National Committee and it will be partly her responsibility to make up the gap that the McCain campaign has not been able to do. Certainly, he will be able to raise more money over the next several - next four or five months than he has raised in these primaries, and the party will coalesce around him, but it's a huge problem. He's going to have to rely on the party. The party has a lot more money than the Democratic Party, and that's where he's going to have to make it up.

MS. IFILL: Now, we talked earlier about how Senator McCain's foreign policy experience is playing a role in the Democratic Party, but on a day like today, when they announced 63,000 jobs were lost and everyone is once again consumed with mortgage foreclosures and all these economic issues, that's not necessarily his thing.

MS. TUMULTY: Although today he was giving a presentation where he was trying to I think demonstrate a familiarity, a comfort with economics, and this is of course a candidate who just a couple of months ago, less than a couple of months ago was joking that economics was not his thing - that he basically had read Alan Greenspan's book. (Laughter.)

MS. IFILL: Well, so now, what does he do? What are - I assume he's keeping an eye - a close eye - on the Democratic campaign and he's decided who his favorite target should be. What does he do?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, he keeps picking both targets. He can keep - and for fundraising purposes, he might want to pick Hillary Clinton a little bit more. You can see how Republicans might write checks more if they think she's going to be the nominee. He studies up. He's going to be giving some policy speeches and talking about these issues he's not so good on. He's going to take a tour of Europe and the Middle East to basically pretend that he's commander-in-chief for a little while, and he's going to go perhaps into Iraq and so he will do the commander-in-chief piece overseas, he will do the bio tour, and then he will go to these places you don't normally see Republicans is a way of trying to broaden out his image. The Democratic Committee's already worked pretty hard to paint him as a Bush Republican and he's going to try to create some moments that will suggest he's not.

MS. IFILL: Wyoming next, and then -

MR. BALZ: Mississippi.

MS. TUMULTY: Mississippi.

MS. IFILL: Mississippi, and then of course North Carolina is coming down the road too. All of these things before we get to Pennsylvania. I'm having problems with states tonight. Wyoming, North Carolina - are they really critical, or is it just that every delegate counts?

MR. BALZ: Well, every delegate does count and they are an opportunity for Senator Obama to rebound after losing Texas and Ohio and Rhode Island on last Tuesday. So they see that as a way to come out of next Tuesday and say, look, we've now had two Tuesdays of voting and a Saturday and we actually gained considerably more delegates than she did.

MS. IFILL: Okay. Well, thank you everybody. This has been another fun week and I hope that you all get to catch your breath. We still have a long way to go. We're leaving you a few minutes early tonight to give you a chance to support your PBS station which in turn supports us. Our conversation is short here, but there is more online in our weekly "Washington Week" webcast. You can find it at PBS.org. Keep track of daily developments every night on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and we'll be right here next week on "Washington Week." Good night.