Friday, June 26, 2009

MS. IFILL: The president searches for the right tone on Iran, the Supreme Court weighs in on voting rights and student rights, and the gubernatorial mystery in South Carolina, tonight on “Washington Week.”

With Iran still in chaos, walking the U.S. policy tightrope.

PRES. BARACK OBAMA: No iron fist is strong enough to shut off the world from bearing witness to peaceful protests of justice.

MS. IFILL: But how does the president scold Iran’s leadership while keeping the door open to nuclear negotiation? From climate change to health care – how the president is getting his message across. At the Supreme Court, two critical decisions on voting rights and on students rights. While a three-ring circus erupts in South Carolina.

GOV. MARK SANFORD: And so the bottom line is this: I’ve been unfaithful to my wife.

STATE REP. TODD RUTHERFORD: I’m stunned. This is not what I expected.

MS. IFILL: The dramatic fall of a rising star. Covering the week, David Sanger of the “New York Times,” John Dickerson of “Slate” Magazine and CBS News, Pete Williams of NBC News, and Gloria Borger of CNN.

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.”

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

MS. IFILL: Good evening. If there has been one recurring question in the American dissection of the uprising in Iran, it has been what is President Obama saying, doing? Is it enough? Is it too much? The president gave his most complete explanation today at a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

PRES. OBAMA: We have a continuing set of national security interests that are going to have to be dealt with because the clock is ticking. Iran is developing nuclear capacity at a fairly rapid clip. Even as we clearly speak out in a unified voice in opposition to the violence that’s taking place in Iran, we have to also be steady in recognizing that the prospect of Iran with a nuclear weapon is a big problem.

MS. IFILL: And if you think this is the first time a U.S. president has attempted to strike just this balance, then you haven’t yet read David Sanger’s book, “The Inheritance,” which addresses justice issues. So this is kind – seems to me this is kind of a vintage tightrope we’re talking about here, David.

MR. SANGER: Certainly you could say that President Obama is not the first one to go deal with it. And in this case, the inheritance that George Bush left him was particularly complex, Gwen. President Bush started his term – first term talking about regime change in Iran. And by the second term, he was trying to negotiate on the nuclear issue and didn’t really get very far. In fact the weeks that we invaded Iraq, the Iranians had a very small nuclear capability. By the time George Bush left office, they had 5,000 or 6,000 centrifuges spinning – those big machines that enrich uranium.

So that’s what Barack Obama faced. And his big innovation was he was going to engage with the Iranians. Now, the street protests have broken out. He’s been extraordinarily careful in what he has said. He’s condemned the violence, but he has not condemned the regime because he knows that at some point he’s going to have to sit down and talk to the very people who are ordering this repression.

MS. IFILL: The president said on many occasions this week, you know, I haven’t really gotten tough. Or my words haven’t changed. That’s not exactly so.

MR. SANGER: That isn’t exactly so. The argument that they’ve made to me and some others when they brought us in after the president’s press conference, well it was circumstances that changed. When the president turned out his very mild comments a week and a half ago, a moment when he said that the opposition leader Mousavi and President Ahmadinejad really weren’t very different, at that point, they said, there hadn’t been very much violence. Well, now there’s been a lot of violence, but the differences between these two men are no greater than they were.

MR. WILLIAMS: But you said that president is someday going to sit down with them. Is that true? And if the president were more critical of Iran, would it really make any difference? Would it make U.S. relations with Iran at this point any worse?

MS. IFILL: And sit down with whom exactly?

MR. SANGER: Well, that’s right. Sit down with who is a big issue because for those who objected to the thought that we would sit down with the holocaust denying President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, people said, well, don’t worry about it. He doesn’t really make the decisions about the nuclear program. That’s the supreme leader. Well, who’s been ordering the protesters to get off the streets or face brutal repression? The supreme leader.

Now, one of the thoughts you hear in the White House these days is, what we want doesn’t make any difference, which gets to your point, Pete, because the Iranians maybe so wrapped up in their own problems over the next three months, six months, maybe for years that they may not want to sit down and talk to us.

MS. BORGER: But when you talk about this kind of brutal repression that we’ve seen, even people dying and being shot, what does history tell us about the chances for success of this kind of brutality versus this kind of movement we’re seeing spontaneously erupt in Iran?

MR. SANGER: The historical record here is very mixed. Americans looks at this and they say, ah, Philippines in the 1980s, people power, the government’s

MR. WILLIAMS: Boston Tea Party.

MR. SANGER: – well, for those who really go back, right. In fact, there are some other examples that may be more relevant. If you think about Tiananmen Square, which was exactly 20 years ago this month – I was living in Asia at the time – everybody in Asia was saying the same thing. The communist party is forever injured. It will be gone in a few years. Well, 20 years later, they’re still in power. They figured out how to make some concessions and they also built up their military. The key element is when the security forces either stick with the government or decide that their longer term interests are with the people on the street. It’s the security forces, particularly the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, that runs the nuclear program.

MR. DICKERSON: So David, what happens? The president says the clock is ticking. They don’t want to talk. What options does the president have?

MR. SANGER: Well, they’ve talked about financial sanctions. During the campaign, he talked about cutting off the import of refined gas, oil products, gasoline into Iran. But that’s complicated because it hurts the life of ordinary Iranians and we’re supposed to be siding with them. The Israelis have made it very clear that they think the clock is ticking very fast. Last year, they came to President Bush seeking the bunker busting bombs and the overflight rights over Iraq that they needed to take out Natanz. President Bush held them off. They have not come back to President Obama. There’s a big debate between the intelligence agencies and also within the Obama administration about whether the Israelis will come back and try to do that.

MS. IFILL: But they can’t afford to just look away.

MR. SANGER: Certainly can’t. For however many protests are going on on the streets, those new centrifuges are being built every day. There’s a new National Intelligence Estimate that’s being prepared, which at some point will give the president a current assessment of how close they are to a nuclear capability.

MS. IFILL: Okay, thank you David. As the president looks for the sweet spot on Iran, he’s also been working at how to use the levers of Washington in Congress and in the press to achieve his own goals. From the House floor to the White House press room, to ABC News primetime, the president is determined to get his own way. How is it working for him so far, John?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, today, it worked out pretty well for him. He got his own way, but it was a squeaker in the House of Representatives. They had a vote on the president’s energy plan and they got 219 votes. Well, they needed 218. So that’s awfully tight.

Now, how did they get those votes? Well, the president handed – he had to talk about it in his press conference. He did a Rose Garden statement about it, which is one of the tools he has in the public sphere. Then he got on the phone and he also met in person with some of these wavering lawmakers and said, look, you’ve got to be on this bill now because another one’s not coming. So he had to apply pressure, use all the different levers, and this is what’s happening with this presidency. Things are getting a little bit harder. He now can no longer blame the inheritance from the Bush administration. It’s now his presidency. The opposition knows a little bit better how to deal with him, how to trick him, and so forth. And the issues are getting harder. At his press conference on Tuesday, he started with three issues. One was Iran, not easy. Two was energy, passed in the squeaker. Three was health care, which is going to be our long summer drama, which is very difficult and which got away from him a little bit last week.

MS. IFILL: It struck me more than ever has before in all six months of this administration that he is not above squeezing us and squeezing reporters to do whatever he needs, no matter how much we intend to do what we need.

MR. DICKERSON: Well, it’s absolutely true. In his press conference, he said – he was being pressed on Iran and why he changed his language, made it a little harder. He was trying to say he hadn’t and he said, look, you know, I don’t live by the 24-hour news cycle. You do. Well, this is not true. (Laughter.) He is a 24-hour news cycle –

MS. BORGER: He sets the 24-hour news cycle.

MR. DICKERSON: – yes. He may not like the 24-hour news cycle when it encroaches on him, but he loves it when he can control it. And he is very good at controlling it. and there are many different ways he does this. The press conference is one way. This Rose Garden statement is another way. He was on morning television a couple of times this week. He had a primetime town hall with ABC News, in which he talked about health care, allowed him to talk in front of a big audience about his health care plan. He uses all the little tricks. He even had a little question asked by somebody from an internet website that allowed him to speak – to take a question from an Iranian. So he’s on the internet time as well. So they know very well how to do this.

And one other thing to just show you how carefully they calibrate these things, the messages and the news cycles, is on Iran they said what they were really worried about is looking like George Bush. And so when they put out a statement on Saturday, they just put out a paper statement. They don’t want the president to be up there standing. He was supposed to hold the press conference in the Rose Garden on Tuesday. It was moved inside. One administration official told me that’s because they didn’t want it in the Rose Garden, where he would look like George Bush wagging his finger at the Iranians, so they have a different venue. So they sliced this very thinly, paid careful attention to where all the messages are coming out.

MS. BORGER: Well, health care is going to be the story, obviously, of the summer. And it’s not only that the president has got to deal with Republicans and Republican concerns about it, but he also has Democratic concerns about it, as the energy bill showed today. So how is he going to walk that fine line because he’s going to have to raise taxes? Congress is not very good at that – at paying for things. We know that.

MR. DICKERSON: The question on health care is can he persuade? He can give a big speech. We know that. And people give him raves for his speech, but people in this country – the polls show basically the country’s split. Some people want change. The other people are fearful of change. So it’s like a tug of war and the flag is right in the middle. And people’s opinions can be flipped awfully quickly. So what was interesting is last week he kind of lost control of the conversation. The Republicans were pushing the idea that what he’s offering is going to cost too much. It’s going to change your health care too much. This week, he had to grab control again.

For this president to lose the message that quickly, that means he’s going to kind of keep having to be on top of it. And it’s very volatile. Now, the White House they think this week his message actually took hold. And his message was two things. One, it’s going to be paid for. It’s not going to bust the budget. And two that the status quo –

MS. BORGER: It won’t change your health care.

MR. WILLIAMS: John, the White House people put the president out there because they think he’s good at this and that it works. Are they right? Is he good at this?

MR. DICKERSON: They are right he’s good at some things. They are right to the extent that he’s still popular. His polls, in terms of just the overall popularity people like him. Even people who disagree with his point of view, they still like him and his approval rating is still high. Where he’s having trouble, though, is on the issue particularly of the deficit. And by that I mean for the last two months his approval rating on the deficit has been quite low. There’s a gap between people like him, they don’t quite like his view for fixing the deficit. He’s been talking about the deficit like crazy since he’s been in office. The centerpiece of his argument on health care is this is to fix the deficit. In a “New York Times” poll, 60 percent of the people said they didn’t think he had a plan for the deficit at all. Now, that’s – they don’t disagree. They don’t think he has a plan, which means it’s not getting through. The White House says, well, the reason it’s not getting through is that the deficit is a proxy for a whole host of issues that they don’t like about his administration. And so we’ll see.

MS. IFILL: They are counting so completely on him to be the great messenger. At what point is he overexposed? At what point do his little feuds with the press corps begin to backfire, if they ever do?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, so far it doesn’t look like that’s happened. It starts to be when people think he’s shading, when he’s not giving them the straight story. And that may be on health care if they feel like they’re not getting the straight picture on it.

MS. IFILL: Okay, thank you. If it’s June, it means big decisions at the Supreme Court and a divided court has often meant a raft of five to four decisions on critical constitutional issues, but this week saw two near unanimous decisions on issues where a split was expected – voting rights and the strip searching of a 13-year-old-girl. Now, how are those decisions alike and how are they different, Pete?

MR. WILLIAMS: Alike in the sense that I think both were unexpected. They were surprising based on how we thought the court was heading when these cases were argued in April. Alike also in that the court spoke both times with a pretty unified voice, eight-to-one votes. Unlike in the sense that the court made the tough call on the strip search case, but ducked it in the voting rights case. What the voting rights decisions means is that the court sent a message that the Voting Rights Act, part of it, is now on borrowed time. This is the part in which the federal government says that eight states in the South and some other areas in the country that have had a history of racial discrimination cannot make any changes at all in their local elections until they get the federal government’s permission.

Now, here was what’s so interesting about this decision. You had all the court’s liberals signing on to an opinion that says things have changed in the South. This is the statement that Chief Justice Roberts made in the majority opinion. He said, “minority registration and voting in these covered states in the South,” in many states is actually better than in states that aren’t covered by this law. So that was definitely a warning that unless Congress changes this law, when the next case comes to the Supreme Court, it may not do so well.

And on the strip search case, the court basically said it was wrong for this Arizona school to strip search a 13-year-old girl who was suspected of carrying or passing out ibuprofen tablets. And the court said, look, ibuprofen isn’t that dangerous. So there was no sort of danger reason to do this. And secondly, no reason to think she was hiding them in her underwear. And what the court said is, a strip search is so intrusive and so embarrassing, especially to young people that courts needs some special justification, which they –

MS. IFILL: But during arguments, I recall, the court – it seemed as if the justices were very skeptical off the case. And in fact, Justice Ginsburg famously told our colleague John Biskupic afterward, this is something that none of these guys have ever been a 13-year-old girl.

MR. WILLIAMS: Right.

MS. IFILL: How did that shift?

MR. WILLIAMS: Well, we don’t know for sure.

MS. IFILL: We never know, do we?

MR. WILLIAMS: I will say this. That one of the reasons this was so surprising is that the Supreme Court in the past has seemed to be willing to let schools do almost anything they want to keep out drugs. So you come from that background. There is – in terms of what Justice Ginsburg said about the sort of especially humiliating nature of a strip search, that language is in the majority opinion. Now, how long it’s been there, who knows?

MR. SANGER: Can we ask you about two justices who were critical of this? Clarence Thomas dissented in both cases. What’s that tell us about him? And John Roberts was perhaps surprisingly in the majority in both these cases.

MR. WILLIAMS: And wrote the Voting Rights Act decision. On that, I think there’s something going on here that this was an eight-to-one decision. I think the court decided they wanted to send a very powerful message. And you only do that if you get a lot of the choir singing together. And many people are saying this is a tribute to Roberts that he was able to pull together and find language that they would all support.

As for Clarence Thomas, this is very much in keeping with his like of thinking. He thinks that any distinctions made on race are bad. He thinks the court should have made the tough call and say, look, it’s clearly unconstitutional. Congress when it reapproved the Voting Rights Act in 2006 used outdated data. They didn’t look at the changes in the South. And on the strip search case he said, you know, we’ve gotten carried away with giving students a lot of rights.

MR. DICKERSON: So what’s next, Pete?

MR. WILLIAMS: Well, we now know that we’re going to get the rest of the decisions on Monday and that will include the very anticipated case involving the reverse discrimination claim from some firefighters in New Haven, Connecticut. That case would have been dynamite all by itself, but what makes it extra interesting is that it will examine a decision made by Sonia Sotomayor, the nominee to replace Justice Souter. And the expectation here again, now – we were surprised on these other cases –but the expectation is the court is not going to just give a seal of approval to her decision. It’s going to either overturn it or send it back. My guess is it will not be a huge anvil dropped on our head. That they’ll basically say, look, there’s some other facts we want to know about. Stick this case back in the oven in the lower courts and come back when it’s done.

MS. BORGER: And we’re heading into those hearing on July 13th for her nomination. How would a negative Supreme Court ruling or overturning her – how would that affect her as she goes before senators?

MS. IFILL: Or is that something that people already now know?

MS. BORGER: Or is it something they discounted, right yes.

MR. WILLIAMS: People who were opposed to her already have said that her decision was terrible. And it’s criticized on two grounds. One is the thinking and secondly the brevity that a case of this complexity, which raises all these questions about reverse discrimination that it shouldn’t had been dealt with in such an off hand manner. I suspect that no matter how gently the Supreme Court overturns her decision or vacates it, her opponents will say, see, the very Supreme Court has overturned it. And people on her side will say, you know, look, there were other members of the court who voted along with her and this basically a decision grounded on facts and not on law.

MS. IFILL: And maybe they’ll talk about the firefighters too, when they’re talking about all of this. We’ll see.

MS. BORGER: I think either way they will.

MS. IFILL: Either way, they will. Well one of the more bizarre stories of the week – (laughter) – happened far from Washington, but took the Republican political establishment nonetheless. By turns puzzling, predictable, and lurid, South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford’s admission of infidelity raised questions of more than just personal impropriety. So does this take him off the presidential prospects for 2012, Gloria? (Laughter.)

MS. BORGER: Let me see, Gwen. I’m not sure. Yes, absolutely. I think you’d have to bet that it would and I think the more immediate question, obviously, is whether he’s even going to remain as governor for the rest of his tenure for the next 18 months. Today he came out and he said his hunch is that he’s not going to resign, which is not very clear. But again, as you pointed out the story very quickly moved from a question of whether he had an affair with someone, which he has admitted to, but whether he improperly used state funds to travel to Argentina to visit with her. And of course, that’s really bad news for him because it gives his opponents an opening to use against him. It’s also bad news for the Republican Party generally because they’re just trying to catch their breath after Senator John Ensign of Nevada admitted that he had an adulterous relationship. And this is the party that’s trying to rebrand itself, broaden its tent. It’s a party of family values. And you’ve seen two folks, Ensign and Sanford, who were both considered potential 2012 folks, sort of crossed off the list and now this is a party that is having a hard time growing its coalition.

MS. IFILL: Let’s talk about Mark Sanford, the person, for a moment. John Dickerson, here, wrote this week that the governor is no longer missing as it was at the beginning of the week, but he’s obviously lost.

MS. BORGER: He is lost. I think that if you watch that press conference and I’m sure lots of our viewers have seen clips of it, it was very interesting to me to see a national male politician look so vulnerable. We don’t really get to see that very often. It was almost as if he wasn’t talking to the national media and the world, but as if he was talking to his therapist. And that’s not what you would do if you were a political – or his priest – it’s not what you would do if you were a political consultant saying, okay, here’re you’re six talking points. He didn’t exactly do it that way. So I think this is clearly someone who is still struggling with this at this very moment and is spending most of his time apologizing to anybody who will sit down with him.

MR. SANGER: Gloria, we’ve seen cases like this go either way. Bill Clinton survived something that lasted a year and a half.

MS. BORGER: That was Bill Clinton, though.

MR. SANGER: Okay. Eliot Spitzer didn’t last a few weeks, even a few days. What does that tell us?

MS. BORGER: Well, it tells us that Eliot Spitzer is a very different kind of politician from Bill Clinton and certainly not as popular in his own state, didn’t have as many friends willing to back him up as Bill Clinton did.

MR. WILLIAMS: And what he did was illegal.

MS. BORGER: And what he did was illegal, exactly. But –

MS. IFILL: But let me throw Larry Craig in the mix.

MS. BORGER: – right, well let me just say that the question what was he thinking can be raised in a bipartisan manner and that we’ve seen this. What about John Edwards on the Democratic side of the aisle? So – but bringing it back to the Republican Party, I think in the case of Governor Sanford in particular the reason you’ve seen so many people so critical of Governor Sanford is that he was out there on the floor when he was in the House of Representatives talking about Bill Clinton’s moral legitimacy. And that when the former House Speaker Bob Livingston admitted to having an adulterous relationship, he was one of the first House Republicans to say that Livingston had to resign. So there is a sense here among voters and among his political colleagues, his brethren that, wait a minute, this is a little too hypocritical.

MR. WILLIAMS: You said there was a question about whether his use of state funds to go to Argentina was improper. Isn’t the answer yes? He has said it?

MS. BORGER: He has said it. He –

MR. WILLIAMS: And doesn’t that make it worse that he was willing to use that money before this thing became public and now he has to give it back?

MS. BORGER: He went as part of a legitimate group that went to promote trade in Latin America. He did go to Argentina.

MS. IFILL: Just a little side trip.

MS. BORGER: He did. But the group went. But what he has done is admitted that that was wrong and he has reimbursed the state for his travel there. Obviously – obviously this will give the taxpayers in South Carolina and his political enemies, by the way of which there are many in the Republican Party in South Carolina, a real opening to say, you can’t use taxpayer money like this. And maybe he could be impeached if they were so inclined. We haven’t heard anything about that at this particular point. He’s not real popular, but people are sitting back because they don’t like the guy who would get the job either if he were to resign.

MR. DICKERSON: Can a Republican run on any kind of family values message now?

MS. BORGER: (Laughs.) Well, I think they will and I think it depends on who you are. But here’s the problem for the Republicans also. It’s not just a matter of people calling them hypocrites. It’s also a matter of your Republican base. Your Evangelical Christians, your religious conservatives saying, you talk to talk, but you’re not walking the walk.

MS. IFILL: Okay, well, thank you everybody, a very eventful week. The news keeps rocking and rolling and so will we. That’s my little Michael Jackson homage. The conversation continues online with our “Washington Week Q&A Webcast” your questions, our answers. You can find us at pbs.org/washingtonweek. Keep up with daily developments on the “NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.” And we can’t wait to see you again next week on “Washington Week.” Goodnight.