Friday, June 6, 2008

MS. IFILL: History is made as the Democrats pick the nation's first African-American major party nominee, tonight on "Washington Week."

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): Tonight we mark the end of one historic journey with the beginning of another.

MS. IFILL: Barack Obama and the art of the improbable.

SEN. OBAMA: I believe that when all of us come together - black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, young, old, men, women - there is no challenge we cannot meet, no destiny we cannot fulfill.

MS. IFILL: But how tough will it be to come together? Hillary Clinton's concession came in slow motion.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY): I understand that a lot of people are asking, "What does Hillary want? What does she want?" Well -

MS. IFILL: But other Democrats are scrambling to get onboard, even as Republican John McCain hopes to scoop up some of the spoils of partisan war.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): I'll reach out my hand to anyone, Republican or Democrat, who will help me change what needs to be changed.

MS. IFILL: Eleven weeks to go before the party conventions begin. We look back at the primary season and ahead to the McCain-Obama battle royal, plus, today's big economic news, with Dan Balz of the "Washington Post," Gloria Borger of CNN and "U.S. News and World Report," Michael Duffy of "Time" Magazine, and Jeff Zeleny of the "New York Times."

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. Well, this was the kind of week reporters get into this business to cover. History was made on all fronts not only because of the African-American nominee, but also because of Hillary Clinton's near miss at that glass ceiling and the generational clash looming between 71-year-old John McCain and 46-year-old Barack Obama. And there was also this surprising fact: for the first time in history two sitting U.S. senators are going head to head for the nation's top job. Tonight we'll look back and ahead at this remarkable presidential primary season.

So, starting with Dan Balz, who's been there every step of the way, God bless you, how did Barack Obama pull this off?

MR. BALZ: It's really one of the great stories we've seen in presidential history and nominating battles. I think he did it in two ways. One was he clearly inspired a lot of people to get involved in this election who ordinarily would not have been involved. He changed the electorate in Iowa. He changed the electorate in other states. He created an energy behind his candidacy that was much greater than we would have anticipated at the beginning.

The second is he figured out how to use the internet in ways nobody's ever done before, both to raise money and organize around the country. And the third thing he did was he outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton and her supposedly superior team of advisors in how to win delegates, which is ultimately what it took.

MS. IFILL: Gloria, let's talk about Hillary Clinton's miscalculations.

MS. BORGER: How do I start?

MS. IFILL: Well, how severe were they?

MS. BORGER: Very severe. On a general thematic level, she ran as the incumbent, the invincible candidate. It was a year of change. On a tactical level, the campaign thought that this was going to be over on February 5th, Super Tuesday, didn't pay much attention to those caucuses. Didn't pay as much attention, some say, as they should have to the fact that there was proportional representation of delegates given away. And so that even if you lost, you won some delegates. And so at all kinds of levels - message and strategy, tactics - there were lots of problems.

MS. IFILL: Jeff, you spent the better part of last evening chasing around trying to find the great compromise meeting between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Are they close to some agreement now?

MR. ZELENY: I think they're certainly at least speaking to one another. But I have to wonder, once they're inside that room, they're both political professionals here. They both have a task at hand and they both need something, so I think they're getting much closer together. Tomorrow after Senator Clinton - on Saturday after Senator Clinton finally endorses him, says those words publicly, I think that will probably be the biggest step toward this. But the remaining questions are will Senator Obama and his supporters help retire some of her campaign debt. I think that is going to be one of the lingering questions of this campaign. How did they go so far into debt? How did he help maneuver and out-raise her? So it's was the first meeting, certainly not the last.

MS. IFILL: At the same time, Michael, it seems a lot like Barack Obama has hit his stride in terms of confidence, in terms of kind of feeling in charge. Actually, today he was in Chicago at an event that we didn't know about. We didn't know he was going to be there, announcing the city's bid for the Olympics in 2016. Let's just listen to a little bit of what he had to say.

SEN. OBAMA: In 2016 I'll be wrapping up my second term as president. (Applause.) So I can't think of a better way than to be marching into Washington Park alongside Mayor Daley, alongside Rahm Emanuel, alongside Dick Durbin, alongside Valerie Jarrett as president of the United States and announcing to the world, "let the games begin!"

MS. IFILL: Let the games begin indeed. 2016 - we're already down the road on this, Michael.

MR. DUFFY: Barack Obama on the stump, on the campaign trail all year long, has been a very controlled candidate. He holds his body close. He holds his hands close. He's a very controlled public speaker. And he hasn't really had - we've seen a moment of celebration, and that might be as close as we're likely to see.

MS. IFILL: Lost the tie - he was -

MR. DUFFY: And we've seen him grow as a debater and obviously grow as someone who can engage his competition. I'm struck by the congruency on both the Democrat and the Republican races this year because both parties nominated essentially an outsider, someone who was not the establishment figure. Barack Obama took on this extraordinary frontrunner and knocked her off. John McCain is nobody's idea of a Republican sort of establishment candidate. He was certainly not an heir apparent. And both men dragged their parties kicking and screaming to an outsider choice this year. And it's partly because the public is not in a very contented mood. They're not happy with the way things are going in the country on both sides. And that really scrambles what we know to be the race going forward because the map could look a little different, and the public mood is quite unpredictable.

MR. BALZ: Although it's interesting that by the end of this Democratic race, he was the establishment.

MR. DUFFY: He came in.

MR. BALZ: Obama became the establishment candidate. He ended up with a bigger lead among superdelegates than he did among pledged delegates when this finally shook out. The party at a point, for whatever reason, made a decision they were not going to go to Hillary Clinton. And I think it's one of the more mysterious things that happened in this process this year.

MS. BORGER: Go ahead.

MR. ZELENY: I think one of the things along the way was a lot of the superdelegates who are members of Congress or local officials were looking at their own politics. We saw that first of all from Congressman John Lewis, I think, several months ago. He was facing a tough race back home. He'd been supporting Senator Clinton, and he's like, "look, I'm going to support Senator Obama." That really sort of opened a floodgate. But a lot of these Democrats were so excited by all the other Democrats who Senator Obama was bringing in, I think it was hard to be on the wrong side of that.

(Cross talk.)

MS. IFILL: - Not so hard that there was that much of a flood until the very last minute. A lot of these superdelegates you would have thought would be affected by their own political futures waited until -

(Cross talk.)

MS. BORGER: Well, that's why though. They're elected officials. They're party officials. They wanted to see which way the wind was blowing first. I think one of the things that was really important here when you look back on it was the endorsement of Senator Ted Kennedy because that was sort of a signal to party regulars that, okay, an elder statesman of the Democratic Party, who, by the way, was close to the Clintons, took a side.

MR. DUFFY: But there was a point, a magic tipping point sometime in March, where a number of superdelegates from red states in particular, they kind of went first, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a couple of people from the southwest, from North Dakota, who just sort of jumped one day. And you could hear a whole bunch of superdelegates quietly at that point, not come out publicly, but would tell you privately, "I am so ready to make this leap." But it was a magical tipping point.

MS. IFILL: Let's talk about the two things that were a drag on both candidates, in - not roughly equivalent, but in terms of coverage they kind of were. For Hillary Clinton it was Bill Clinton, and for Barack Obama it was Jeremiah Wright. Which hurt in the end the most?

MR. BALZ: Well, you'd have to say in the end - you could argue that Bill Clinton may have hurt her more. But I think in the long run the Jeremiah Wright problem for Barack Obama is a much more serious problem and will be there through the general election.

MS. IFILL: Because?

MR. BALZ: Well, because it raises questions of why Senator Obama stayed in the church as long as he did. What did he know? It raises doubts about a candidate who is still not very well known to a lot of people, particularly the general election audience he now has to go after.

MR. DUFFY: And he's a proxy for people's feeling - those people who may not be ready to elect a black man to be president of the United States, Jeremiah Wright is a convenient reason for those folks. He's essentially (a proxy and we ?) reported this week that he's back in the pulpit at Trinity in Chicago, which means we may be hearing a little bit more from, although probably in a different way. And those issues are general election problems, in a way that Bill Clinton would not be.

MS. BORGER: Because it's about values. It's about - the question we always ask in the exit polls is does this candidate share your values. The problem that John McCain had in the primaries was that Republicans didn't think that he shared their values. Barack Obama has had that problem as well, and that's - that's something that he's going to have to work on because when you vote for president, it's a very personal vote. You want someone who shares your value.

MR. ZELENY: I thought it was interesting this week, Senator Obama was in Virginia of all places, opening up his general election campaign and he was asked on the plane back if he would like Bill Clinton to be campaigning with him, and he said yes, he would. But we'll see when that moment actually happens.

MS. IFILL: Who would say no to Bill Clinton campaigning? The question is -

MS. BORGER: Hillary might. (Laughter.)

MR. ZELENY: But I think that, perhaps, is the most interesting thing to be looking for, the meeting of the Clintons and the Obamas. It's Bill Clinton, not -

MR. BALZ: But you can readily imagine Bill Clinton out on the stump. And in some ways he would want to do that to redeem some of what he lost in the primary process.

MR. ZELENY: Certainly among African-American supporters.

MS. IFILL: Well, as long as we're looking forward, let's keep looking forward. What is Barack Obama, as he sits down and his folks sit down now and start to look at the map and start to look at what has to come next, what does he need to focus on first?

MR. DUFFY: Well, he has two choices and he probably ends up having to do both of them. He first has to look at the groups that Hillary Clinton was strongest with - women, seniors, and members of labor and working class voters - and figure out how he can best lure them back to the Democratic Party. Most will come, most of the 18 million votes. She'll help probably get 16 million of those, but there's two or three million that he's going to have to work for, and that's one challenge.

The second is, as Dan noted, one of the ways he's changed American politics is how he has grown this party, made this party bigger by reaching out to none of those groups, but a whole bunch of other folks who typically haven't voted. And he's done it by leaps and bounds. And so the question is with all the money he's going to have can he make the party bigger by 5 million to 10 million on the other side?

MS. BORGER: And can he turn red states blue, which is his theory of how he's going to win, that he's going to take some states that were red, that he believes because of this new cohort of young voters that he's attracted that he can actually turn them blue. Hillary Clinton's argument was, "no, you can't, and you're going to lose those important battleground states," but -

MR. BALZ: And the flip side of that is that the McCain campaign now sees real opportunities to go after those disaffected Clinton supporters in states like Michigan, in states like Ohio. I was at a session with Rick Davis, who's the campaign manager for Senator McCain, earlier today, and he said that the number of Democrats that we're going after at this point is way beyond what I would have imagined six months ago or four months ago. So they see an opportunity right now.

MR. ZELENY: And you can see it in Senator McCain's language. He was praising Senator Clinton over and over and over, I think perhaps even more than Senator Obama was.

MS. IFILL: Well, since we're talking about Senator McCain's language, he also knows how Barack Obama wants to come after him. Let's listen to what he had to say on Tuesday night.

SEN. MCCAIN: You'll hear from my opponent's campaign in every speech, in every interview, every press release that I'm running for President Bush's third term. You'll hear every policy of the president is described as the Bush-McCain policy.

MS. IFILL: We got to see both of these candidates out there this week. What did seeing them out there almost side by side Tuesday night tell us about what we're going to see in this campaign?

MR. ZELENY: I think one thing it told us is their styles are so different. Just the scripting of that, sort of these back-to-back events, it was extraordinary. Of course, Senator Obama - it was probably not the most fair equation, because he was claiming the nomination, so he had a rally filled with almost 20,000 people. But that could be a typical Tuesday afternoon sometimes for him. And Senator McCain just had a few hundred people. He didn't look that terrific. Even some of his own advisors are like we have to get people behind him. They had green background behind them -

MS. IFILL: They should rethink the green, yes.

MR. ZELENY: So I think just on a stylistic point it showed this generational thing, but it also certainly laid out the markers of this. And Senator McCain was in Louisiana, of all places. He was sort of doing a frontal assault on the Bush administration, that he is not linked to them, he said. So it was interesting - an open chapter of the next phase.

MS. IFILL: Go ahead.

MR. DUFFY: He has to figure out what his relationship with George Bush is. He talked about - in the tape there about "I'm not running essentially for a third Bush term," but it's going to be really difficult, given the problems, the mood of the country, the way they feel about the economy, and the war. He's going to have to find some kind of relationship where he can both hold the Republican Party base and then reach out to all these Democrats that Rick Davis says he -

MS. IFILL: Well, let me ask an example. Today was a terrible day for the economy. The stock market dropped 400 points, new job losses. Oil went over $139 a barrel. Bad. So you see these two candidates, very different. How differently would we, based on what we know - how differently would they handle that?

MR. DUFFY: Well, it's tricky because presidents can't do very much about the economy. There are not a lot of levers on their dashboard. Both parties came together in February, I guess, to do an economic stimulus package, $180 billion. You can almost bet - one thing we can bet is they may do this again, if we have more days like today. And that will all take place and it will all move through the pipeline long before either becomes president.

MS. BORGER: But McCain was unenthusiastic about that at the beginning.

MR. DUFFY: At the time.

MS. BORGER: At the beginning, yes.

MS. IFILL: And now we see him talking about a series of 10 forums, unmoderated debates. I don't even know quite what you call them.

MS. BORGER: Well, but that is - to talk about what Jeff was talking about before, McCain does do really well. We've all seen him at town hall meetings, where he can just walk around the stage, have a microphone -

MS. IFILL: On a stage with another candidate, though?

MS. BORGER: Well, it's interesting, because he'd be better at that than sort of behind the podium in many ways. You just saw him behind a podium giving the speech. So I think what he wants to do is introduce himself to the American public in a kind of forum in which he's already quite comfortable.

MS. IFILL: So if that's true, why didn't the Obama people just reject it out of hand? They said this is appealing.

MR. ZELENY: I think they want to show that they can engage substantively in things. The Obama campaign went sort of back and forth throughout the primary of having big rallies, it's great for us, ooh, and it's not so great for us. Senator Obama is isolated. Just words. So I think that having the two people on a stage shows that he is a man of substance. So they'll do some of those. But they're still going to do these like big rallies because that is sort of what brought him to this occasion.

MR. BALZ: I think there's another reason that he would want to do them, because one of the arguments that Senator McCain will use is "I'm experienced, he's not. I'm going to be a much better commander-in-chief, he's not." The more time Senator Obama can stand on the same stage and get people saying, as happened during the debates with Senator Clinton, "well, there's really not that much difference, or I feel as confident about him as I do about McCain," the more he can do that through those forums, the better off he'll be.

MS. BORGER: Because McCain is going to say - and we got a hint of it in the speech - is that he is a leader, and that his experience plays into that and all that. And Obama is going to say it's his judgment. And the leadership is the way he differentiates himself from George Bush also because he says, while he may agree with him about the war, he wouldn't have mismanaged it. He wouldn't have mismanaged Katrina, for example.

MS. IFILL: Well, and then we have the next big thing we're all going to be paying attention to this summer after we take our little breaks, the vice-presidential derby. How much does it matter? Is it true when Barack Obama says you're never going to hear about this again until you hear me announcing it? I'm going to keep this under wraps. Is it true? How important is it?

MR. DUFFY: What's usually important, it's the most important decision the two men will make all year long now going forward. But the timing is important, and I think that's probably good advice for presidential candidates that Obama gave. Whether they can stick to it is another question. Since McCain's convention is first, he has to start thinking about this a little bit faster. And if I were Obama, I would wait until I knew as long as I possibly could before I had to make this decision because you want to see what the landscape looks like.

MS. IFILL: Is McCain's convention first?

MS. BORGER: Obama's convention is first.

MR. DUFFY: Well, that just takes away pretty much what I just said. (Laughter.) The main point is that you don't really have to make the decision now. It's six or seven weeks and through the summer is a long time. You have to start it. You have to do your vetting, but you don't want to make it until the last possible moment because you don't know what the landscape's going to look like.

MR. BALZ: The other thing with Obama, Jim Johnson is running that operation. He did it for Senator Kerry, but he also had experience with Walter Mondale in 1984, when they did a parade of people in a whole public way, which became a spectacle and kind of a parody. And I don't think you're going to see anything approaching -

MS. IFILL: You didn't think that barbecue at the ranch was a spectacle or a parody?

MR. BALZ: It was, but that's the McCain campaign.

MS. BORGER: But McCain was trying to get attention. Because don't forget - one of the down sides of this long campaign for John McCain is that he's been on page A-25 of the newspaper. Now the upside is it may be good for him at a certain point because he's getting his campaign into shape.

MS. IFILL: Jeff, you've been covering Barack Obama as long as anybody at this table. As you've watched him through this campaign, has he become a different kind of candidate?

MR. ZELENY: I certainly think he's become a much-improved candidate. If he had won the Iowa caucuses and gone on to win the New Hampshire primary, as he almost did, he would be at a very different place right now, I think, certainly in terms of his experience dealing with adversity. He's had a lot of things along the way. His race speech in Philadelphia, for example, was something he had to confront some of his advisors - were saying, "you shouldn't talk about this." So I think in the last five months, what he now can claim is he has this experience. His biggest experience now is this campaign. Had it been over at the very beginning, I think he would have looked much different compared to Senator McCain.

But he still has a lot of growing to do. This is a new phase in the contest. All these audiences are not going to be friendly now. He was in Bristol, Virginia, yesterday, I was with him, and he was taking questions at the town meeting. Someone in the back of the room was saying, "immigration, immigration, immigration." And he didn't call on this person, so it's just a sense of what -

MS. IFILL: Yes a sign of what we're about to see.

MR. ZELENY: Friendly Democrats are giving way to everyone.

MS. IFILL: Okay, well, thank you all very much. We knew that would go fast. But it's been a long, long year. Now, just catch your breath. We'll pick up where we left off again next week. Send your questions to us at washingtonweek@pbs.org and we'll answer them on our "Washington Week" webcast extra. We have to leave you a few minutes early this week, so you can support the local PBS stations, which in turn support us. Keep up with daily developments of "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer." We'll see you here again next week on "Washington Week." Good night.