Friday, May 16, 2008

MS. IFILL: Time for a reality check for Democrats and Republicans. A week of flash points, tonight on "Washington Week." Gauntlets thrown down everywhere, on foreign policy.

PRES. GEORGE W. BUSH: Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals.

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R-AZ): The president is exactly right.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL): That's exactly the kinds of appalling attack that's divided our country and that alienates us from the world.

MS. IFILL: On domestic politics -

SEN. JOHN EDWARDS (D-NC): Join me in helping send Barack Obama to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY): I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign.

MS. IFILL: And in Congress, where Republicans are in the dumps.

REP. TOM DAVIS (R-VA): The Republican brand name - if you were to put this on a dog food, the owners would just take it off the shelf because nobody's buying it.

MS. IFILL: The outlines of the general election come into focus. Covering the week, James Barnes of "National Journal," Jackie Calmes of the "Wall Street Journal," 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. Pick your turning point. This week was chock-full of them. On Tuesday, Hillary Clinton absolutely trounced Barack Obama in the West Virginia primary.

SEN. CLINTON: There are some who have wanted to cut this race short. They say give up. It's too hard. I am more determined than ever to carry on this campaign.

MS. IFILL: On Wednesday Barack Obama trounced her right back, winning surprise endorsements from a leading abortion rights group and from a former rival.

SEN. OBAMA: Please give it up for my friend, John Edwards!

SEN. EDWARDS: There's one man who knows in his heart that it is time to create one America, not two, and that man is Barack Obama.

MS. IFILL: Now, by Thursday the Republicans were getting into the act. Speaking before the Israeli parliament, President Bush complained some are willing to negotiate with terrorists.

PRES. BUSH: We've heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939 an American senators declared, "Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided." We have an obligation to call this what it is, the false comfort of appeasement which has been repeatedly discredited by history.

MS. IFILL: The comment set off a firestorm. John McCain agreed with the president.

SEN. MCCAIN: I have some news for Senator Obama. Talking, not even with soaring rhetoric, unconditional - in unconditional meetings with a man who calls Israel a stinking corpse and arms terrorists who kill Americans, will not convince Iran to give up its nuclear program. It is reckless.

MS. IFILL: And Obama seemed only too happy to hit both Republicans right back.

SEN. OBAMA: If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I'm happy to have any time, anyplace, and that is a debate that I will win, because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for.

MS. IFILL: And there was more. While all this was going on, Capitol Hill Republicans were in meltdown after losing their third special election in a row.

REP. DAVIS: We've got to just run separate races across the country and shift ours strategically where we are. And, yes, that means you don't want to be attached at the hip to President Bush.

MS. IFILL: Okay. It was a crazy week for everyone, but we'll start with Hillary Clinton, who says she is not going anywhere. What does she see that the rest of us don't quite, Jim?

MR. BARNES: Well, she sees determination in some of her supporters. She mentions this when she's out in the field. But Senator Clinton and her staff have been making an argument now for a couple of weeks that she's the most electable candidate, that she's the one who can rally the Democratic base, that she can carry swing states like West Virginia and Ohio.

The problem is a lot of the superdelegates are not buying this. In the week running up to the West Virginia primary, Senator Obama won something like 27 superdelegates. She won three to four. On the evening of the primary, I talked with Harold Ickes, who's sort of the chief delegate hunter for Senator Clinton. He said, well, these were folks who were already leaning towards Senator Obama. We don't know if he's going to be able to keep up this pace of outgunning us among the superdelegates.

Well, since the West Virginia primary, Senator Obama has picked up nine and a half superdelegates to just one and a half for Senator Clinton. And if she can't stop the bleeding among the superdelegates, she is really looking pretty badly right now.

MS. IFILL: Okay. So that's her kind of really rough row to hoe.

Jeff, the week was a lot better in the end for Barack Obama, even though it didn't start off so well.

MR. ZELENY: It started off with the West Virginia primary on Tuesday, which seems like a long time ago because we've suddenly shifted into general election mode. Really at the end of the week it felt sort of like October. But going back to that primary, the Obama campaign knew they were going to lose West Virginia. They spent very little time there. And there was a bit of a debate among some of their supporters if he should have spent more time there and gone sort of in and see if he could have made more support, but he didn't. But by the next day the story on the network news was going to be Senator Hillary Clinton has a big psychological boost. Who comes out of the wings but John Edwards, timed exactly for the network newscasts. So really, from that week forward, it's been a good week for him. And then suddenly he was elevated by President Bush. The attacks are something that we're going to hear in the general election. Is he strong on national security? Is he experienced enough? But in the short term, it elevated his speech and gave him a chance to take on McCain and Bush and link them together, which he's been trying to do.

MS. IFILL: And leave Hillary Clinton, basically, in the dark, in the corner, while everyone is talking at each other right past her. However, John McCain who has been kind of in the dark in the corner for a likely nominee had a moment to come out of that this week and what does he see as his path?

MS. CALMES: Well, he was out front and center more than he wanted to be and in ways he didn't plan to be this week. He started the week with some bad news on the staff. There were staff resignations because of staffers' lobbying ties and bad timing to Burma and its dictators and which, in turn, prompted the campaign manager, Rick Davis, himself a lobbyist in the past, to say that he's going to vet the entire staff. And it just went -

MS. IFILL: There were three different McCain staffers who were implicated in all of that.

MS. CALMES: Right, exactly. And two at the weekend and then a subsequent one. And it was a story that went straight to who John McCain is. They've worked for a dozen years, let's say, on his image. He's worked on his image about being against special interests, against lobbying, the patron of campaign finance reform. And so this went straight to his image. And then he started the week trying to - he's reaching out to the broad middle, which he'll need if he's going to get elected. And he gave his speech on climate change, and ends today speaking at the National Rifle Association convention, which is a completely different - that middle, the independent voters and the centrists, are not NRA people. And then -

MS. IFILL: Like a policy whiplash thing.

MS. IFILL: Exactly. You just had to wonder. And it wasn't an NRA invitation. They asked to speak there. So there was a lot of consternation among some Republicans. and then you have, like you say, the speech that he was - he tried to make a speech yesterday to say that he would have the - the Iraq war would be over by 2013 and to just try to put behind him the Democratic attacks that he was for 100-year war. And George Bush steps on his message and had the additional problem of just reminding voters that he and George Bush are joined at the hip.

MS. IFILL: Now, while all the presidential candidates were busy attacking each other, stepping on their messages, rolling out big-time endorsements at news time, it should not be forgotten that there were down ballot - there was a key down-ballot election that happened on Tuesday night, which also could have a lot of spillover.

MR. DUFFY: I think if you talk to Republicans and Democrats who are not working on the presidential campaigns, and even many who are, and they say that these special elections which are happening really give you as good an indication of where the country is and is heading, for all of the confusion and back and forth that we talk about on the presidential campaign. It's just a rotten time to run as a Republican. And Mississippi - the first district of Mississippi is a swath of territory that runs basically from the suburbs of Memphis through Tupelo, down to Columbus in Mississippi. It's where Elvis Presley was born. And if he were alive today, there was a 52 to 47 percent chance he would have voted for the Democrat, which hasn't happened in a decade. (Laughter.) And this is the third CD in as many months that the Democrats have won that should have gone to Republicans. These are districts which Charlie Cook says aren't just Republican, aren't just red, they're scarlet. And they're winning them by huge margins.

Just to give you an example, the Mississippi district that voted for George Bush in 2004, by 62 percent, and this week it went for the Democrat - the Republicans only got 46 percent of - that's a 20-point move.

MS. IFILL: But why? Is it just that people are unhappy with Republicans in general, or was it the quality of the candidate?

MR. DUFFY: There's a huge problem, I think, for any incumbent sometimes of any party. In this year there's so much appetite for change. In this race the candidate wasn't particularly great for the Republicans. He came from a part of the state that doesn't usually produce that.

On the other hand, there were things about this race that do go to the mood of the country. There was a lot of talk about the economy, a lot of talk in this about just the need for change in Washington. The Republicans counterattacked by coming up with an ad that actually tried to link the Democrat to Barack Obama. That didn't seem to help them much either. So these are - this has happened sort of three times in a row. It doesn't mean the Republicans are losing all of them. They've split about five each since the last election, and if you like this race you get to see it again in November. They're going to run it again basically with the same characters.

MS. IFILL: Okay, now here's the interesting thing about this whole week, which is basically it seemed like it broke down along a couple of lines. One of them is, Jackie mentioned, is John McCain trying to look for a constituency that he can build for the fall. But also we saw Barack Obama. That's - isn't that part of what the John Edwards endorsement was about - trying to shore up his constituency, his weak spots?

MR. ZELENY: No question. And his weak spots at this point are obvious. In a primary that's been going on so long, there's been four straight months of this. So his weak spot is white working class voters. We hear again and again and again. How many of them will suddenly support Obama because John Edwards is on his side? It's hard to say. It's still an open question how helpful John Edwards was to John Kerry four years ago. But certainly it changed the storyline.

But one thing that Senator McCain and Senator Obama are doing is going after the middle, like Jackie said. I think it was in Oregon with Senator Obama, and he was already ignoring Senator Clinton, which he's been doing for a while, but he was talking about John McCain. John McCain arrives in Portland. He's talking about these green issues and things. But like Jackie said, by the end of the week it seemed kind of all backwards.

MS. IFILL: And by the end of the week, Barack Obama was on his fourth day of wearing a flag pin?

MR. ZELENY: That was another interesting thing. This controversy started last October when someone in Iowa asked him why he wasn't wearing a flag pin -

MS. IFILL: With a small C.

MR. ZELENY: It seemed like a small C, but suddenly he's wearing a flag pin, and now looks like shining sort of extra brightly. He said it just happened to be on his suit.

MS. IFILL: It happened to be on his suit?

MR. ZELENY: This was one of the first things that does not really sort of fit into what he was saying, all these new politics versus old politics. This is - was sort of interesting. We'll see if he's still wearing it come November, October. I think he will be.

MS. IFILL: One of the other constituency issues for Hillary Clinton was she's in this campaign still it's because of women voters. And NARAL, the pro-choice and abortion rights PAC, came out and endorsed Barack Obama, enraging many of its old members and other women's groups. How did that fall out?

MR. BARNES: Well, it was an endorsement that the NARAL folks said that they had made this decision. They had surveyed their board, but they were going to do it after the West Virginia - after the results of the West Virginia primary.

MS. IFILL: I think the question is why not wait?

MR. BARNES: Which was exactly the question that Ellen Malcolm had of Emily's List, a pro-Democrat, pro-choice women's group. And she basically accused NARAL of treachery, to undercut Senator Clinton like this. Now, in fairness, politics is a rough business here, and NARAL may want to get some credit with Obama when they can get something and come to his help as he's trying to shut this race down.

MS. CALMES: You know what's also interesting about the NARAL endorsement, I think, is that a lot of us forget - I'll show my age here - but we forget that Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights decision, is now over 35 years old. These groups like NARAL are - their constituency, their membership is aging. And they're thinking of their future and they're thinking how do we appeal to younger voters and how better to do that than to be on the side of the candidate that is appealing to younger voters. So some of the women, feminists, and people who are close to NARAL told me that was a big factor in their thinking.

MR. BARNES: And the candidate, by the way, who appeals to younger women voters, even though women have been the base for Hillary Clinton, it's older women. The younger women - even in the primaries that Senator Clinton is winning, women 18 to 29, sometimes women 30 to 44, are supporting Senator Obama.

MR. DUFFY: We're all seeing a two-week period here, maybe three weeks, but certainly two weeks where the train is beginning to leave the station. And whether you're Bob Strauss in the "Washington Post" today or you're Waxman and Berman, the California congressman who endorsed Obama today, elements of the party establishment, both superdelegates and at the fringes in the interest groups, are beginning to get on board. And some people are going to do this faster than others because they, for whatever reason, need to. And we're going to see this for the next 10 to 12 days pretty consistently.

MS. IFILL: Where is President Bush as the trains leave the station in both parties? It seems that all of a sudden it was interesting, after he's resisted so much being tricked into talking about the campaign for him long-distance to insert himself. So he must have known that's how it would be read.

MS. CALMES: It makes you wonder, because it played right to Barack Obama's message that he wants to end this sort of partisanship, even to go to a foreign country and send subtle messages. Now, in fairness, the White House has said that it didn't mean to imply -

MS. IFILL: And for the record, using the words Hitler and appeasement in a single sentence is not very subtle.

MS. CALMES: No, no, and to refer to an American senator, hypothetically even, as an American senator, as if we're not to think about a real American senator in another situation.

MR. ZELENY: Sort of makes us wonder what the next six months is going to be for his role in this. As he's traveling around the world as sort of his final farewell, is he going to remain involved? Is this a sort of a lesson that he won't be - there were several people on the McCain campaign who thought this was not very helpful at all. So we'll see once he gets back to Washington if -

MR. DUFFY: It forced McCain into a difficult position. Stick with the president or divorce himself. It happened to some extent in the House races, too. The White House sent Dick Cheney down to campaign for the Republicans in Mississippi first, didn't make much of a difference. They're very aware of a couple of things. Republican self-identification in this country is at 27 percent among voters. That's a 35-year low. And one the reasons we're having these special elections. There are 32 retirements in the House, 27 of them are Republicans. There are five retirements in the Senate. All five are Republicans, if you don't count Trent Lott, who just seemed to walk away. So they have serious issues in terms of just holding their party together, and they're losing track of the divisions that are out there.

MS. CALMES: One other thing about these victories the Democrats have had in these two Deep Southern House districts. It's sort of like the dog that didn't bark. Before these elections were - if either one of those Democrats had gone - and certainly both. Imagine that both went down to defeat, which could very well have happened. These are very, like we say, ruby red districts. That would have been - there would have been a sense that superdelegates and other Democrats would be questioning, because they had been linked to Barack Obama, did they go down because of that, the advertising link -

MS. IFILL: And now they're able to say -

MS. CALMES: And now - so you don't hear, if they had gone down to defeat, we would be asking is that a signal that Barack Obama is bad news for Democrats for the November ballot.

MS. IFILL: If we know anything about this campaign, it's that whatever snapshot we see this week feels completely old and different by next week. So given that, how bad a shape, given John McCain's struggles to win moderates and win NRA members to distance himself from George W. Bush and not - and deal with what must be a panicking House Republican base? How bad a situation are the Republicans in?

MR. BARNES: Well, you hear Republicans using the W word, not W as in President Bush, W as in Watergate, the Watergate '73-'74 midterm elections.

MS. IFILL: The election, not the criminality.

MR. BARNES: Not the criminality, no, but when the party was crushed in the 1974 midterm elections. So Republicans are almost in a panic these days.

MR. ZELENY: At the same time, though, it is still a very divided electorate, and Republicans think there's plenty of things that they can use when they're campaigning against Senator Obama. For all the attacks that were thrown out, for all the things that were going on back and forth between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama, it was still relatively mild. I think come August and September; it's going to make it look like this primary is pretty simple. So they think - the Republicans think that Senator Obama still is not defined, and in the next coming few weeks and few months, they are going to define him and I think we'll find out a lot more around July 4th who - (audio break) - Senator Obama has to sort of reinvent himself. But they are going to define him and that's coming up.

MS. IFILL: Before we get to July 4th, let's talk about May 20th, which is the date that the Obama people were signaling wildly they're going to declare it all over. What does that mean?

MS. CALMES: On May 20th, we'll have a split decision. She'll win one. He'll win the other. But Barack Obama will have reached a majority of the so-called pledge delegates, those delegates that are won in the primaries and caucuses, as opposed to superdelegates, who can vote for whomever they want. And they are arguing that by having that majority of pledge delegates, and if you believe that superdelegates, as they are, are essentially following the lead of the pledge delegates, they have won the nomination.

MS. IFILL: I spent the night last night in a room full of Clinton supporters in New Jersey, and let me tell you. They're not really so happy to give that up so soon. They're not going to roll over and say, oh, okay, fine, you've got it now.

MR. DUFFY: Are you seeing a change in the message from Clinton about how willing she might be to give it up? Do you see a change in her temper, her tone?

MR. BARNES: Well, a little bit. She certainly is not attacking Senator Obama.

MS. IFILL: - download it to your iPod and send us questions to answer. Keep track of daily developments on "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," and we will see you back here next week on "Washington Week." Good night.