Friday, September 28, 2007

MS. IFILL: Have the Democrats already settled on a nominee? Maybe yes, maybe no. We'll sort it all out tonight on "Washington Week."

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY): When I'm president -

MS. IFILL: Hillary Clinton's big week forces other candidates to redefine conventional wisdom.

JOHN EDWARDS: I've raised more money in this campaign than any candidate in 2003-2004 raised at this stage of the campaign.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): It's the candidate who raises the most money, but a lot of times it's the candidate who has the best message and then the money follows.

MS. IFILL: Is it the money or the momentum? The Democratic race heats up.

The Supreme Court steps back into two touchy issues: agreeing to decide who gets to vote and how felons get to die. And at the United Nations, Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad enrages some and confounds others.

Covering the week: James Barnes of "National Journal," Jeanne Cummings of Politico, Linda Greenhouse of the "New York Times," and Barbara Slavin of "U.S.A. Today."

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

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

MS. IFILL: Good evening. That crunching sound you may have heard on the political landscape this week was the sound of conventional wisdom hardening. The beneficiary of course was Hillary Clinton, who has worked tirelessly to make her nomination seem inevitable. Witness the results of the "National Journal's" Political Insiders poll where a healthy margin of Democrats, 49 percent, and Republicans, 33 percent, predict she would make the best president. But, and there is always a "but" we here tonight that once again Barack Obama is raising more money from more people.

First let's talk about Senator Clinton's momentum. Jim, how strong is it?

MR. BARNES: It is formidable, Gwen. If you look at some of the recent national polls, her average lead is about 17 to 18 percentage points above senator Obama. In New Hampshire she appears to be surging in the polls and earlier this week on Sunday morning talk shows she appeared on all five of them. And that didn't happen by accident. Her campaign wanted to put her out to talk about her healthcare plan, to begin to define it before some of her opponents could. And that's the kind of press coverage that all of Senator Clinton's rivals would just love to have.

MS. IFILL: There's a certain subtlety to Senator Clinton's inevitability argument, too, because when she's asked about her competitor, she almost always talks about the Republicans. She acts as if the Democrats no longer exist.

MR. BARNES: Yes, that's the tactic that you also see from a frontrunner. You don't want to give any of your rivals for the nomination any chance to make Democrats think, well, maybe Senator Edwards here, Senator Obama here has a better idea. You sort of say, well, we basically all agree on these issue to provide universal healthcare to get out of the war in Iraq. And that way she kind of projects herself forward as the inevitable nominee.

MS. IFILL: When Jim says, Jeanne, that she is creating this aura of inevitability and that none of this is by accident, how much of it has to do with the fact that the end of this week, the beginning of next week is the next deadline for big fundraising numbers and that maybe she's trying to get out in front of that?

MS. CUMMINGS: She probably is because Obama's fundraising once again is going gangbusters. So there seems there is a slowdown, but even for Obama slowdown doesn't mean he won't come out on top. From what the campaigns are estimating, he'll come in, the deadline is midnight Sunday, and he'll post up something around $20 million.

Now, I should caution you, they have always low-balled when they gave they first number out. So it's probably going to be higher than that, but they do say already that they have 75,000 donors in just the last three months. Now, to put that in perspective, in the first six months of the year, the entire Republican field, from Tancredo to Romney, had 80,000 donors. So he has nearly matched them in three months time.

MS. IFILL: Now how does that compare to Senator Clinton's numbers so far?

MS. CUMMINGS: Senator Clinton won't give out her total donor number, which suggests that it's nowhere near his. Her sum though might be close. They're estimating they're going to be $17 million to $19 million. And from what I could tell from the other campaigns, the two of them will be way ahead of everyone else.

MS. GREENHOUSE: So, Jeanne, on the bottom line, how does Obama's money and that big number of supporters translate into voles? What do we think?

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, that's his big challenge, is that he's got to convert it. Now the campaign says Iowa is the example. The polls are tight there. He's done advertising there. He's been around there. They say nationally he's not know, because he hasn't run a national ad campaign in and that these national polls are mostly popularity contests and so she's ahead because everybody knows who she is.

But that's only half the story. They also have got to get a ground game going in Iowa that would be strong enough to compete with hers. And he's got to - he does have to distinguish himself from her in ways that will lure voters to him as opposed to her since she is gaining. He can do that. He has huge crowds. He's got enough time. And so I'm not sure that the Clinton campaign can shake him quite as easily as they might pretend they can.

MS. IFILL: How do you see that? You've been on the ground in Iowa, Jim.

MR. BARNES: Well, I think actually it's a three-way race in Iowa right now. Former Senator John Edwards - I think the Clinton people would concede that is the vote were held today that he would probably win. I think with Senator Obama, what you hear everybody say in a place like Iowa is that he has the most upside potential. So if he can really translate his success in fundraising into building a grassroots organization in that state, then he's very much definitely a player.

And of course Senator Clinton continues that kind of grind-it-out style. And she is advancing in Iowa too. Her people feel that she's made some real progress there. The polls show she's made some progress. You can't count her out.

MS. CUMMINGS: The other danger I think that Obama presents to Clinton is that Obama could be the Howard Dean of this campaign. Howard Dean had a great viral support base and then went out and flopped on election days. But one big difference is when voters turn in late - when they turned in late in the primary, just before the voting was to begin and took a look at Howard Dean. They saw basically a pretty unpolished, undisciplined, unpredictable candidate.

They're not going to see that when they turn around and say, all right, who is this guy? And they look at Obama. He is polished out on the campaign trial. He does inspire large crowds, 20,000 or so in New York just this week, her backyard. He can draw a crowd. He can impress a crowd in ways that Howard Dean didn't necessarily do. So he - he's still got weapons to play and he still remains a threat.

MS. SLAVIN: What kind of shape are the Republicans in? Is there anyone who's inevitable on the Republican side at this point?

MR. BARNES: No, it's a much tighter contest there. I mean Rudy Giuliani leads in the national polls but there's a sense because he's taken some liberal positions on things like abortion that he's vulnerable. And his lead is nowhere near what Hillary Clinton's lead is in the national surveys.

The closest runner up in the polls right now, Fred Thompson is just getting in the race, just kind of finding his footing in the campaign. Just this week he was campaigning in his home state of Tennessee and he was unaware that a federal court had ruled that his state's death penalty of using lethal injection had been ruled unconstitutional by a federal judge.

MS. IFILL: Something like this happens every single week with Fred Thompson. Something he's just unaware of.

MR. BARNES: It's definitely getting to be a pattern and I think if it continues you're going to find a lot of Republicans who initially really kind of welcomed him in race, thought maybe this is the guy who can galvanize conservative voters - they're going to look elsewhere, back to Romney, back to John McCain, who surprisingly, of all the candidates - remember, this is a lesson on inevitability - the guy that a lot of people where writing off three months ago simply because he was having some fundraising problems, and I think that's still a challenge for him, this is the guy who lately has really kind of made the most ground up in New Hampshire in the polls, while Romney and Giuliani's support has been flat. So this is a lesson.

MS. CUMMINGS: It definitely is an analogy between McCain and John Kerry from 2004. It was about this period that Dean overtook Kerry and everybody was writing Kerry off. And Kerry was able to hold on through reputation and time served to come out the winner. McCain still could pull that off, but the numbers I think are going to help us see whether McCain has stabilized. I hear that he has. He's not going to have the big number, but it doesn't appear that any of the Republicans had a very good quarter.

MS. IFILL: What about John Edwards? He said today that he is going to accept public financing, which I thought we had decided earlier this year just as a group that that was now dead in the water and everybody was getting off that bandwagon. He's back on it. What does that say?

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, what is says is that he is not - he just cannot keep pace with Clinton and Obama.

MS. IFILL: Cash-wise.

MS. CUMMINGS: Cash-wise. And he's - the amount of money that he's raised to far is $23 million. They think he'll come in between $5 million and $7 million, so he'll be somewhere between $25 million and $30 million. Normally that would be a very good number. This cycle it's not such a great number. And so what the campaign is figuring is if he goes in to the public financing system, come right after New Year's he'll have an infusion of about $10 million. It will give him cash on hand in which he could compete against Clinton and Obama.

And this is what McCain has done, too. McCain has qualified himself, but he has not said he definitely will do it. But it's with the same calculation that there could be at the last second an infusion of cash that could help them right before the voting begins.

MR. BARNES: But there are some strings that come attached with taking the federal money and that is you have to operate under some pretty tough spending limits. and I think that there are a lot of Democratic insiders who look at this and say if you're going to limit yourself to just being able to spend about $50 million between now and your convention - conventions that are historically late this time, there are a lot of Democratic strategists who believe that's a losing hand to play. You may be the nominee, but you won't have any money to defend yourself.

MS. IFILL: Let's talk conventional wisdom for a moment, because one of the - there was another presidential - Democratic presidential debate. There was a Republican one, too, but half of them didn't show up. At the Democratic debate, the conventional wisdom was Obama had to come out of his corner punching and take Hillary Clinton on. That didn't happen and people said, ah, that's shows. I don't know what it showed. What did it show? Jim?

MR. BARNES: I think one of the things it shows and maybe Obama's going to stick to his game plan, which is to try to be a more hopeful optimistic candidate. And I think one of the dangers in a multi-candidate race - and remember there were six other candidates up on that stage, besides Obama and Clinton - one of the dangers is Obama attacks Clinton, Clinton come back and attacks Obama. Who's the real beneficiary of it? Well, maybe it could be John Edwards. Maybe it could be Joe Biden. So I think launching -

MS. IFILL: That's what happened four years ago.

MR. BARNES: Exactly. Between Dick Gephardt and Howard Dean in Iowa. So I think you have to proceed with caution in throwing those attacks around.

MS. CUMMINGS: But we should note so far Obama has not knocked anybody out at any of these debates. And as much as he's not attacking, he's not inspiring either, and that could be his Achilles' heel, because these debates are important and they certainly are important in general elections.

MS. IFILL: Well, the bottom line here, of course, is that we're just all waiting for the first votes to actually hit the ballot boxes come January. Sooner and sooner every week it seems. But who gets to vote? The Supreme Court agreed this week to reenter that debate. At issue are laws in more than 20 states that require voters to present government issued ID at polling places, whether it's unconstitutional. How did this case bubble up to the court? Linda?

MS. GREENHOUSE: Well, like a lot of cases this comes from the state of Indiana. Indiana passed a law. They were kind of the leading edge for a lot of states who are doing it - passed a law that said instead of just signing the poll book like most of us have done whenever we go to vote, you have to present current government issued ID that is issued by Indiana, not another state, or the federal government. So basically -

MS. IFILL: What is objectionable about that? It doesn't seem unreasonable on its face.

MS. GREENHOUSE: Well, what's objectionable about it is what kinds of IDs are people likely to have? If it's state issued, it's a driver's license - not everybody has one. If it's federally issued, it's a passport. There's not a photo on your Social Security card. There's not a photo -

So the disparate impact of a law like this falls on the elderly, the poor, people with disabilities, and so on. And the Indiana law is a tough one. If you show up without the requisite ID you can cast a provisional ballot which will only be counted if within 10 days you get yourself to a county courthouse, a county clerk, and you either get the ID or you get a substitute ID from the Motor Vehicle's Office, for which you have to show ID to show you're entitled to that.

So the federal judge, Judge Posner, who wrote the majority opinion upholding this law for the Appeals Court said, yes, it will have a disparate impact and it's going to hurt Democrats because poor people are more likely to be Democratic voters. It will hurt them, but it won't hurt them much. The individual vote isn't that important and the state interest in preventing voter fraud is substantial enough that it's worth the price. That was his way of tackling it.

MR. BARNES: Where did this case come from exactly, Linda? I mean, is voter fraud ramped in Indiana? Is this a big, big problem?

MS. GREENHOUSE: Well, that's - it comes from sort of macro - is it comes from of course the presidential election - the debacle in Florida in 2000, where there were lots of claims of voter fraud and voter everything else.

MS. IFILL: One man's voter fraud is another man's voter suppression.

MS. GREENHOUSE: Well - and that's exactly right. So what we have here - and this is nationwide. This is going on all over the country - we have Republicans who say fraud, fraud, fraud. We have Democrats who say voter access, voter access, voter access. Those are two sides of the same coin. So Indiana - the Republican-controlled Indiana legislature passed this law. The plaintiffs are the Democratic Party of Indiana, the NAACP, and the American Civil Liberties Union and this is being echoed all over the country.

MS. CUMMINGS: Linda, sometimes when the court takes a controversial case like this, those who watch it say, well, they took it because they have something they might want to say. Do you expect that we might get some intriguing kind of opinion out of this?

MS. GREENHOUSE: Well, I guess there's two answers to that. One, the kind of neutral reason they took it is because these cases are bubbling up all over the country. The Supreme Court in Missouri struck down its voter ID law. In Georgia, a federal court upheld it. So the court really doesn't like to see a mishmash like that on an important issue, which this certainly is. That's one answer. Another answer is it's remarkable that every federal court that has looked at this so far has broken down - Democratic appointed judges have said no, Republican appointed judges have said yes.

I hate to say that because I'm an idealist and I really argue for the proposition that politics is something different than judging and judging is something different than politics, but this issue just seems to get people where they live politically.

MS. IFILL: I know you want to get out on this, Barbara. I just want to ask you about this other case the court took up this week which is this lethal injection case, which even just last night the court decided to step in to stay in execution - the 27th of the year - in Texas.

MS. GREENHOUSE: Yes, this is very interesting. Within the last 25 years or so, every state that has the death penalty except for Nebraska, which has stuck to the electric chair has gone to lethal injection. It's supposed to be more humane, easier, more palatable, so on and so on. The last few years there has been scientific medical evidence to show that it's botched in a disturbing number of cases - that there is not enough anesthesia, the protocol, the three-drug cocktail that's administered as the lethal injection can cause severe pain and a lot of other problems.

And so thee cases have been litigated all over the country. And the court stepped in and said they're going to look at this particular case from Kentucky, which is typical of all the other cases, not to say you can't have lethal injection, but to say how is a court to evaluate these claims. How much pain is too much in terms of cruel and unusual punishment? It's tough.

MS. SLAVIN: How are the states going to handle this in the interim? Are there any changes that are coming?

MS. GREENHOUSE: Well, so everybody's now on notice that this is before the court. The governor of Alabama yesterday issued a stay in a lethal injection case. The governor of Texas did not, so that went up to the Supreme Court and last night the justices issued a stay. So I think what we may be seeing is the makings of a de facto national moratorium on the death penalty during the six or eight month that this case is going to be pending before the Supreme Court.

MS. IFILL: Okay. Thank you, Linda. And you get - you have the good joy of a court session beginning next week and you can follow it all the way -

MS. GREENHOUSE: First Monday in October.

MS. IFILL: Yes. It's looming.

Such a brouhaha in New York this week about a series of pubic appearances by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was at public forums and private dinners and was - as was perhaps his intent - he made no new friends. This, in spite of sporadic efforts to at least sound reasonable.

MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD [Iranian President]: (Through interpreter.) Our nation, the Iranian nation through history has always extended a hand of friendship to other nations. We're a cultured nation. We don't need to resort to terrorism. We've been victims of terrorism ourselves.

MS. IFILL: Perhaps someday someone will tell me why we always use female interpreters for men leaders. Our Barbara Slavin is the author of the new book "Bitter Friends, Bosom Enemies: Iran, the U.S., and the Twisted Path to Confrontation."

You were in New York watching the Iranian leader all week, Barbara, what did you take away from it?

MS. SLAVIN: Yes, I felt sorry for his translator actually. She got quite a workout. I followed him from Columbia University to the UN, to this private dinner, to a little conference that he gave with religious leaders - antiwar religious leaders. And it was pretty much the same everywhere he went in the sense that he pretty much said the same thing and he pretty much heard the same complaints.

The tone of course varied. At Columbia it was rather strident. The president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, called him a petty, cruel dictator.

MS. IFILL: Which is a nice thing to say to someone you've invited over for dinner.

MS. SLAVIN: Yes. Some thought that was a bit over the top. But everywhere he went he was asked about his views on the Holocaust, on whether Israel should be recognized as a Jewish state, Iran's nuclear program, human rights, and so on. And one could detect - I mean, we don't want to go too far. This is Ahmadinejad and he is a very ideological character and quite narrow, but you can see a little bit of leg - I don't know if that's the right word - here or there. He acknowledged that the Holocaust had actually happened, which is the first time I've heard him say that. He said it was, quote "a reality of our time, a history that occurred."

At the dinner that I attended with other media people and think-tankers, he was told that Americans have compared him to Hitler. And he was asked what he thought of Hitler. And he said Hitler was a despicable individual who was responsible for the deaths of 60 million people. It's kind of nice to hear that out of his mouth.

He still says that the Holocaust needs more research and that the Palestinian should not pay the price for something that was done by Europeans.

MS. IFILL: But he still won't concede that he's trying to build a nuclear weapon and he still won't concede that he is shipping arms to Iraq to be used against American troops.

MS. SLAVIN: This is true. You can't expect that much, after all. It's maybe too much to ask for.

MS. GREENHOUSE: So did he come out the winner in this encounter? I kind of get the sense that he did certainly back home, but how about in the eyes of the rest of the world from the way he -

MS. SLAVIN: I think he did domestically benefit. He's not terribly popular at home. People have to understand he's got a lot of problems. The economy is not in good shape even though oil was, what, $83 a barrel this week? A lot of mismanagement, terrible mismanagement, inflation, sanctions, all the rest. But people thought that he was treated very poorly and that when you do invite someone to speak, you do not begin by insulting them and the same points could have been made with a slightly different tone. So I think he might have gained a little bit from that.

And of course they saw him all over New York in all these different settings and there were - Iranian TV was everywhere filming him and I'm sure picking the clips very carefully. They cut out one bit about - where he said at Columbia that there are no homosexuals in Iran, and they clipped that little bit, apparently -

MS. IFILL: Because people laughed at him. That's why they -

MS. SLAVIN: People laughed at him. Absolutely. What I think he meant to say is that there aren't as many as they are in your country.

MS. IFILL: Whatever. Whatever. Didn't go over well.

MS. CUMMINGS: Now, speaking of the economy, though, his internal issue, we have had this approach of sanctions. What has been our impact and what are our options if things won't change?

MS. SLAVIN: Yes. Now he said at the UN, he said that the nuclear file was closed and nothing more was going to happen. And in a way he is right. At least through the UN Security Council, the Russians and Chinese will not support more sanctions at least until the end of November, maybe beginning of December. So that means that it's going to be individual countries - United States has already sanctioned Iran to the hilt, so there'll be the Europeans primarily.

And there has been some impact. Trade is down, investment is down, European banks aren't doing much business with Iran. And it is some pressure. The question is, is it enough to get them to stop the nuclear program, and so far nothing has worked.

MR. BARNES: Meanwhile, Barbara, back down here in Washington, the United States Senate was voting on a resolution condemning the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. What's the significance of that?

MS. SLAVIN: Well, it provides more cover for the White House to issue an executive order which they've been talking about for some time that would indeed declare the Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization. And this is also a very controversial step.

The Revolutionary Guard Corps is essentially the armed forces of Iran. There's also a conventional military, but the two are completely intertwined and the leadership is completely intertwined. It has some unsavory bits to it but it also has an air fore and a navy and ground forces. And never before has the armed forces of a country been declared a terrorist organization. So one wonders what the implications are. Some people like Senator Jim Webb, others, were very concerned that this could be laying the groundwork for a military attack on Iran.

MS. IFILL: Okay. Well, thank you, Barbara, as usual for all your good work. Even though - well, I have so many other questions we'll ask them later. Turn to our webcast. Thanks, everybody.

Keep up with develops on Iran, on politics, at the court - you name it - every night on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and I will be online next Thursday at noon for my monthly webchat. I'll pick the brains of everybody around here to answer you question. Start sending those questions now to WashingtonWeek@PBS.org. Then, as always, we'll boil it all down for you around the table next week on "Washington Week." Good night.