Friday, June 20, 2008

MS. IFILL: Could this be the first half-billion-dollar election? Welcome to Atlanta, where we'll talk money, politics, and the 2008 campaign tonight on "Washington Week."

AL GORE: Take it from me, elections matter.

MS. IFILL: Better late than never. Al Gore joins the 2008 political fray just as John McCain and Barack Obama prepare to take each other on in earnest.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): (From tape.) I know I have to out-campaign my opponent in every respect, and so I do not underestimate. I consider myself an underdog.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): (From tape.) When it comes to education, Senator McCain, I believe, is out of touch with the situation of many hardworking Americans.

MS. IFILL: Both sides are getting in position for political hand-to-hand combat on foreign policy, the environment, and on which one can create the most unbeatable general election organization. How are they doing? In Atlanta tonight, four Washington Week regulars: Charles Babington of the Associated Press, Jeanne Cummings of Politico, John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times, and Doyle McManus of the Los Angeles Times.

ANNOUNCER: Celebrating 40 years of journalistic excellence, this is a special edition of "Washington Week" with Gwen Ifill from Atlanta, produced in association with National Journal. Corporate funding for "Washington Week" is provided by -

ANNOUNCER: Once again, from the Rialto Center for the Arts at Georgia State University in Atlanta, moderator Gwen Ifill.

MS. IFILL: Thank you. Thank you, Atlanta. It's great to be here. Good evening. We thought we'd come down south this week to see the fine folks of Atlanta and talk a little politics. And the events of this campaign week, as always, cooperated.

Yesterday, all but official Democratic nominee Barack Obama announced what many had long suspected, that he plans to opt out of the public financing system and that he plans to transform the fundraising juggernaut he created for his primary campaign into a huge cash advantage heading into the general election. Want to know what's at stake? Check out this latest Washington Post-ABC News poll. Both candidates draw strongly among members of their own parties, 79 percent for Obama and 87 percent for McCain. But they are in a dogfight for independent voters. Forty-four percent say they like Obama; 43 percent McCain. So the money decision is huge. With one stroke Obama who, by the way, had promised to abide by federal campaign finance limits, may have just blown it all up. We'll talk about the impact in a moment, but first we need to explain why it is that these campaign limits exist in the first place.

Jeanne Cummings is our expert. She actually did well in math, unlike most reporters. And so I turn to you first. Explain first the basics. What is this campaign finance limits and why do they make them up?

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, the law was written in the Watergate era, and the idea was to keep the donations low, keep corporations out. If the public paid through the taxpayer system, gave the candidates money to conduct their campaigns, it would limit the influence of special interests on the candidate once they were in office. And in exchange for those funds, the candidates agreed to spending caps, and so that also kept the cost of running for office down and made it accessible to a much broader pool of candidates. There could be a candidate that's not particularly good at raising money, but might be a great leader, a smart thinker and someone the nation may want for president. They could complete in this environment.

MS. IFILL: Well, Barack Obama and John McCain are supposed to be the great reformers, and here we have the greatest piece of reform legislation passed in the last several decades, and he's opting out. Isn't that pretty significant?

MS. CUMMINGS: It's very significant. And for these two men to say the system is broken confirms what everyone else has been saying. It will make it very difficult to rewrite the law and try to bring it up to date. It is out of date. It's 30 years old. It doesn't envision the internet. It doesn't envision cable and the rising costs of television. It's completed outmoded, true enough. But it's now - now it is really in ashes.

MS. IFILL: How much of a risk, John, is it for Barack Obama to change his mind on this one?

MR. HARWOOD: I think it's a fairly small risk, Gwen. Voters don't focus all that much about the details of the funding of campaigns. Barack Obama knew when he made this decision he was going to take flak from John McCain for flip-flopping, for breaking his word. McCain will try to drive this as a credibility issue and a trustworthiness issue for Barack Obama. But Barack Obama - and, by the way, so will many editorial writers. That's already happened. The press is hitting him as well. But he had to weigh that damage against the possibility of becoming the first Democrat in a very long time to have the kind of enormous financial advantage over a Republican nominee in what ought to be a great Democratic year. They simply weren't willing to give up that advantage in order to keep his word.

MS. IFILL: When we talk about great financial advantage, are we talking tens of millions, hundreds of millions, Doyle?

MR. MCMANUS: We don't know yet. We don't know how much money is going to flow into the system. People are making estimates that Obama could end up raising between $200 and $300 million, but we just don't know.

MR. HARWOOD: And he's already raised almost $300 million, triple the amount that the public system would provide him.

MR. MCMANUS: That's right.

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. MCMANUS: So in fact when you asked at the top of the show, could this be our first half-billion-dollar election, you know, when you bring the primaries into it, it's going to go over a billion. Electioneering every -

MS. IFILL: Wow.

MR. MCMANUS: - four years has become a significant part of the national economy.

MS. IFILL: Especially in certain states, right?

MR. MCMANUS: Exactly. Now, McCain is going to have a very difficult time equalizing that, although there's a good debate going over whether the Republican National Committee is going to be able to raise some of the money that he hasn't been able to raise.

MS. IFILL: Let me ask Chuck about that because it seems to me one - it should be said that John McCain has said he's going to stick with the limits, which is 85 -

MS. CUMMINGS: Four.

MS. IFILL: - $84 million, which sounds like a lot of money to me, but is that going to hurt him? What is he going to do with this?

MR. BABINGTON: Well, he's dealing with reality. The enthusiasm is overwhelmingly on the Democratic side this election. We've seen that over and over in all types of polls. One way that enthusiasm manifests itself is in donating. And one of the real phenomena of the Obama campaign is he's drawing so many people who've never given to a politician before. In many cases he doesn't even - they reach him through the internet. Thousands and thousands, and some of them are - they're sending $50 here, $75, but the great thing is that he can keep going back to them. Now he's - he's got their name and address and their email and he can keep going back to them over and over. And one of the bigger - biggest problems that McCain faces is that in so many ways - and he's going to have to deal with it and confront it - is there's just not that much enthusiasm on the Republican side. They feel sort of beaten down. Their president is at very low approval ratings. And the fundraising is one of those manifestations.

MR. HARWOOD: And Chuck, Barack Obama also has the names, addresses, and contact information now for all those people who gave money to Hillary Clinton who herself raised twice as much money as John McCain did in the primaries.

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, and the way this plays out, why it is such an advantage to him, is that Barack Obama will have money to burn and John McCain is going to have to stretch every single dollar that he has. And what that means is that Barack Obama can put operations here in Georgia, in Virginia, in New Mexico, maybe even in John McCain's home state of Arizona, and go after those voters. He probably won't win them. He might win a few. But that isn't the point. What he does is he backs up John McCain in a corner, and McCain's got to decide what little, mid-size states can I afford to fight for when I also have to fight for Ohio and Florida and all the most expensive states. It is - it is a very shrewd financial way of working your opponent, and it was very effective against Hillary Clinton in the primary.

MS. IFILL: Well, you know, we always fight the last wars in politics, and one of things that Barack OBama said - by the way, he announced this by email to all of those millions of people - is he said, we're going to become under attack by these independent groups who basically - remember Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who took John Kerry down four years ago, and they decided they don't want to at least lose the same way again if they're going to lose. And so he says there is this great specter of the 527s as they're called. Do they exist?

MR. MCMANUS: You know, they're not out there yet.

MS. IFILL: No.

MR. MCMANUS: This is a dog that isn't barking yet. Now, they're going to be there. There are going to be people who get together. It's very easy. In one case a couple of elections ago there were two brothers who got together to run ads. It was actually against Al Gore, wasn't it?

MS. IFILL: Brown.

MS. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MR. MCMANUS: Okay. So that was in 2000. They will show up later in the cycle, and the fact that they're not here now doesn't mean they're not out there, because by and large many of those folks who want to do that are going to want to do it when it's going to be most strategic, but they're out here on both sides.

MS. IFILL: Right.

MS. CUMMINGS: And to know how fast it can happen is these people can give any amount of money, and so you can drop $10 million into one of those accounts and instantly have a national ad up and running.

MS. IFILL: But let's go past the money for a while, because after a while people say, money, money, whatever. What does this tell us about someone's character, that you say, "I am a person who's an outsider of Washington. I'm going to come in and I'm going to do things differently," and then the first thing he does is says, "I'm going to grub for every dime I can get." Does that change people's view of Barack Obama?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, certainly for some people that's the conclusion that they'll reach. A lot of Democrats are trying to think more pragmatically right now.

MS. IFILL: Which is to say?

MR. HARWOOD: Which is to say, I talked to a Democratic strategist yesterday and said, look, he's directly contradicted what he said he was going to do. And he said, okay, well, let's look at the large scheme of things. What's more important, keeping your word on something like who's paying for campaigns that voters don't care about or getting elected and stopping the Iraq war? That's the kind of value judgment the Democrats are going to use to justify this.

MS. IFILL: And you've heard him making that kind of value judgment on the road, Chuck?

MR. BABINGTON: Yes. And the money is just there in such huge amounts. John had it right earlier when he said they're willing to take the hit now. Remember, a year and a half ago Obama said, I'm not going to run for president. You have to say that when you get - and then he later said, you know, events have changed. I've changed my mind. He didn't take much of a hit on that. He's saying that - I think this is a little more problematic - but he's saying events have changed, and the events that have changed is that he's realized, I can't raise millions and millions of dollars.

MS. IFILL: Where is this money coming from? Who is writing these checks? Are these brand new people to the process?

MS. CUMMINGS: Most of them are. I did an analysis when the numbers were manageable last summer. He's up now to about 1.7 million donors to his campaign. When I did the analysis last summer he was in the several hundred thousand. And 89 percent of them did not give in the 2004 cycle. The average gift is $25. So these are brand new people that he has brought into the system. And as others have said, he can now go back to them. And it's the number of them that's so amazing. I'll just throw one fact out and shut up. But if they all just sent him $250 - that's all - he could raise $375 million to spend in two months. That's $185 million a month.

MS. IFILL: That's a hard deal to turn down.

MS. CUMMINGS: It's a hard deal.

MS. IFILL: But Barack Obama wasn't the only one who changed his mind about a major issue this week. John McCain said he now supports offshore drilling for oil and he continues to suppose a national gas tax holiday, something Obama took him to task for.

SEN. MCCAIN: The next president must be willing to break with the energy policies not just in the current administration, but the administrations that preceded it, and lead a great national campaign to achieve energy security for America. I know how to do that, and I will do it, my friends. (Applause.)

SEN. OBAMA: It seems like a classic Washington political solution, which is to go out there and make a statement without any clear evidence that this would result in strengthening the U.S. economy or providing relief to consumers.

MS. IFILL: These are the issues where the money can help tell the story, aren't they, everybody? That's exactly what it is. This is about is issues.

MR. BABINGTON: Sure. And one of the most interesting things that's happened I think in the last couple of weeks is that the issue contrasts in this campaign have become starker. They're now disagreeing on oil drilling, something they didn't disagree on a few weeks ago. They're disagreeing now - there's a very vigorous debate going on - on terrorism policy because of the Supreme Court decision on Guantanamo. So this is not an election that is going to have two candidates who are very close together fighting over nuances the way in many ways that Democratic primary race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton was. This is a race of very, very bright contrasts on a whole range of issues.

MS. IFILL: Is this something that John McCain - you used the term flip-flop before, John. Is this something, this oil drilling issue, that he really has changed his mind on or is it nuance?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, he's changed his mind, but he has a justification for it. And I think this is fascinating. As part of a flip-side to the answer of the question you posed a moment ago, where does the money come from for Barack Obama, one of the things that's happened in American politics over the last 10 years or so is Democrats are doing better and better with upscale voters. There are a lot of baby-boomers who have be come financially successful who can give, in addition to those young people sending $25 checks. This is a play by John McCain to say to a lot of those blue collar, working class white voters that Barack Obama struggled to win in the primaries, that I get that you're paying over $4 a gallon for gas. I want to do something about it. I'm not going to stay in the corner trapped by a concern about environmentalism.

Environmentalism tends to be a greater concern among upscale voters than downscale. So I think we're seeing a little bit of a scrambling here among people to both respond to the changed context of $4-a-gallon gasoline but also pursue different targets of voters. And John McCain I think is talking less to people in the state of Florida, though he cover from the Florida governor, than to some of those voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan to say, I'm going to do something about your pain.

MS. IFILL: Which is the bigger risk, Chuck, for someone like John McCain or Barack Obama - well, just say John McCain - changing his mind on something like offshore oil drilling or appearing to be on the same side as President Bush on something like -

MR. BABINGTON: Most polls will tell you that sticking with President Bush on lots of issues is not a winning proposition. There's a third problem or at least risk for John McCain here in that he - and this is the argument that Obama is making already and will continue to make - is that he's pandering. And that these - so McCain is saying, I feel your pain. I'm relating to you poor people who can't afford the gasoline. I'm going to do something about it. And Obama comes right back and says, yeah, but the solutions you are proposing are phony baloney - you know, this temporary elimination of the federal tax, the oil companies are just going to pocket it. And this offshore drilling, it'll take years, and almost any economist will tell you it would take years to have any effect, if it would have any effect, at the pump.

MS. IFILL: But we don't believe in economists, I'm told, by this campaign.

BABINGTON: Well, and then Hillary Clinton had problems with economists too but -

MS. IFILL: Yeah.

MR. BABINGTON: So you're going to see - that's just going to be an interesting argument to watch for the next few months is Obama is going to try to - even though - just as John's suggested, he's got to show that he is sympathetic and in touch with the middle-class voters at the same time he's holding himself out to - look, I'm the honest broker. I'm not going to pander to you. And I'm not going to offer phony ideas, and when someone does I'll call them out on it.

MS. IFILL: A couple other developments that are worth remarking even though they happened at the beginning and it now seems like a long time ago. Al Gore came out of the closet here and endorsed - we don't know where he's been exactly.

MR. HARWOOD: Careful.

MS. IFILL: Come on. He came out and he endorsed Barack Obama. He's a big Democrat. He was the nominee of the party in 2000. What took him so long and does it make a difference?

MR. BABINGTON: It was odd that it took so long and, you know, Al Gore was one of those big endorsements that a lot of people spent that primary campaign holding their breath over.

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. BABINGTON: And he decided to rise above the fray and not endorse during the primary campaign.

MS. IFILL: So what difference does it make -

MR. BABINGTON: I think he rose so far above the fray that he was sort of somewhere out there - (laughter) - in the upper atmosphere.

MS. IFILL: So does it matter that Al Gore finally comes around? Does it help the independents? I don't know what -

MS. CUMMINGS: No, I - marginally it helps. It's another sign to the Democratic Party that everybody should unify behind this candidacy. And to that extent it's helpful. But I think it is late in the game, so I don't think it has a major - I mean, who thought he wouldn't endorse Obama -

MS. IFILL: Yes. Well, speaking -

MS. CUMMINGS: - or whoever was the party nominee?

MS. IFILL: Or whoever was the party nominee.

MS. CUMMINGS: Yes.

MS. IFILL: Well, speaking of unity, we hear today that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are going to campaign together next Friday. That's going to be edge-of-my-seat time. We're all going to be look at the body language. You know what I mean? Should we?

MR. MCMANUS: Absolutely. We absolutely should be looking at the body language and listening very carefully. I went into Pennsylvania for a few days not very long ago and I went to areas that were heavy Democratic voting where Hillary Clinton really clobbered Barack Obama, and I sought out those voters and talked to them. And are you going to - you're a Democrat. That's what you say you are. Are you going to get on board for Barack Obama?

And of course a lot of them say they will, but a lot of them say, I'm not so sure. And some of them say, very doubtful. He has got to win those folks over. And the thing that will help more than anything else, because these are Hillary Clinton fans, is for her to say in a way that looks convincing and sounds convincing and is convincing, I really want you and I really need you to vote for Barack Obama. That can help him a lot.

MS. CUMMINGS: And beyond the working class voters, which she clearly can help with, obviously the women have - she is his bridge to the women who voted for her and worked so hard for her, and there are many, many of those that have not come to terms with the end of the primary. And I think the visual images of them together is an important step towards bringing those voters back into the fold as well.

MR. HARWOOD: And Gwen, we're here in Atlanta. I bet a lot of people in this audience and in this part of the country remember the fiasco at the Democratic Convention in 1980 when the unity moment was supposed to come and Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter were on the convention stage together and Carter was kind of following Kennedy trying to shake his hand - (laughter) - and it was a hide-and-go-seek thing on the stage and they never quite worked it out. That's what Democrats wanted to avoid. And they're beginning this choreography now of trying to bring the party together to take advantage of this incredible auspicious climate they've got.

MS. IFILL: It has to work I guess. They have no choice.

MR. BABINGTON: It has to work eventually, but it's still a little scratchy. We're getting down into the weeds here, but last week the Obama campaign hired Patti Solis Doyle, who had been fired by Hillary Clinton as campaign manager, and that in a way that is too complicated to get through -

MS. IFILL: They hired her to run the vice president's chief of staff. To be -

MR. BABINGTON: Exactly.

MS. IFILL: To be the -

MR. BABINGTON: Whoever the presidential nominee will be.

MCMANUS: Even though we don't have a vice president yet, right?

MR. BABINGTON: And in a way that is perhaps too byzantine to unravel, that was taken by many Hillary Clinton loyalists as a tremendous slap at the Clinton camp.

MS. IFILL: And we'll save you from explaining why because we have a few others things to do before we go.

Before we leave you tonight, we wanted to take just a few moments to share a thought or two about a giant in our business, Tim Russert. The moderator of "Meet the Press" passed away one week ago today. Some of us worked with him. Some of us watched his work from afar. But the kind of journalism he practiced - tough, straight down the middle, thoroughly reported - it resonates here at "Washington Week."

We'll start with John who was a colleague of Tim's at NBC.

MR. HARWOOD: Gwen, I spent a lot of time with Tim increasingly over the last several years doing the roundtable on the "Meet the Press" show. I happened a week ago Friday to go in to interview with Tim for his cable television show to promote a book that I had done with a colleague called "Pennsylvania Avenue Profiles in Backroom Power." (Laughter.)

MR. HARWOOD: We spoke for an hour to Tim. And you saw all the things that made Tim a great journalist. He had read the book. He prepared. He was completely interested in the characters, some of whom he had worked with on Capitol Hill as an operative. He wove the themes of our book together with the 2008 campaign and we talked about all of that. It couldn't have been a better and sort of more invigorating conversation, and it was one of the most poignant things that's happened to me in journalism, because we lost him a few hours after that in a way that is still -

MS. IFILL: Still.

MR. HARWOOD: - impossible to believe really.

MS. IFILL: Doyle?

MR. MCMANUS: Gwen, television is full of people who love to hear the sounds of their own voice and people who put on a special television face and a television voice when they go on camera. And somehow viewers can tell that. I can testify, as we all can, that the Tim Russert we knew off camera was the same Tim Russert you saw on camera, and that I think is what him special. There was not an ounce of artifice in that man. And that's pretty rare on television.

MS. IFILL: That's completely rare. Chuck?

MR. BABINGTON: Russert's signature interviewing technique was to take a quote, if he a public official with him, sometimes from very far back, put it up on the screen and say to the politician, why did you say that, or explain that. That's a very standard technique. We've all used it. But it's especially effective in television. Because in print if the politician hems and haws and kind of skirts, you can't really capture that in print. You can write out literally what he or she said, but it just doesn't come across. It's very effective on TV because if the person doesn't answer, you see them literally evading and squirming. It's a well-known technique. I think no one used it better than he did.

MS. IFILL: And Luke Russert, his son, said this week he never understood why politicians didn't simply say, I changed my mind. (Laughter.)

MR. BABINGTON: You know what? The smart ones did.

MS. IFILL: Yes, that's true. Jeanne?

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, I did not know him that well. I admired his work obviously. But what struck me was years ago I was at an event in Washington, then working for the Wall Street Journal and bumped into him, and he was - I went to introduce myself to him and he was so kind, and he said, I know who you are. You know, of course I know. And he didn't need to be generous like that. And there are plenty of people who make it big time in Washington who would not have been that generous. And I found that remarkable in someone who had every reason to not do that.

MS. IFILL: Everywhere I have gone in this past pretty terrible week, people in airports, people on the street, people in the public transportation, people here in Atlanta have approached me on the street and offered their condolences in Tim's loss. He somehow reached past that table on Sunday mornings and managed to touch people's lives, writing about his family, writing about his dad. He was really an amazing guy and we're going to miss him a lot.

Thank you, everybody. Thank you so much. It has been an absolute delight to be here in Atlanta. We couldn't have done it without Nancy Hall and her team here at Georgia Public Broadcasting and our friends and hosts here at the Rialto Center for the Arts. Join us online for an additional half-hour of questions and answers, or if you're here in the Atlanta area join us on the air. And I'll be online for my monthly web chat next Thursday at noon. Send questions to washingtonweek@pbs.org. We'll be back around the table in D.C. next week on "Washington Week." Goodnight.