Special: Webcast Extra: Female swing-voters,two senators star in “Rival Survival” & Mark Sanford

GWEN IFILL: Hi, everybody. I’m Gwen Ifill, and welcome to the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra, where we pick up where we left off on the weekly broadcast. I’m joined around the table by Carrie Budoff Brown of Politico, James Kitfield of National Journal, Ed O’Keefe of The Washington Post, and Molly Ball of The Atlantic.

Molly’s been keeping her eye on swing-voting women gathered at focus groups in Des Moines and Little Rock. These voters could determine the outcome of this fall’s elections, and it turns out that may not be good news for anybody, because they are not happy, Molly.

MOLLY BALL: (Laughs.) Well, voters are mad at everyone. What else is new? But I think there is a new dimension to the attitudes we’re seeing in the electorate, both as seen anecdotally in these focus groups and as seen in a lot of polls recently.

You know, as we talked about on the show, there is a new emphasis on international affairs, a feeling that we’ve got to do something about ISIS. But it’s a more generally pervasive sense of anxiety about security, whether it’s the events in Ferguson, school shootings came up a lot, crime and international threats.

And, you know, we’ve had a kind of international turmoil in the past three years, and it hasn’t registered in quite this way. It seems to be a combination of, you know, the vividness of those images, and also the fact that these economic anxieties that have flown so high since the financial crisis have ebbed a little bit. You know, I’ve been looking at –

MS. IFILL: Because all people ever talked about in these focus groups was the economy.

MS. BALL: Absolutely.

MS. IFILL: And now it’s eased. And, by the way, the president is not getting any credit for it having eased.

MS. BALL: He is not.

MS. IFILL: But they’re not talking about it anymore.

MS. BALL: Well, they are – there is still an undercurrent of economic anxiety. But, you know, in 2008 voters were terrified. You know, they felt like they might – they had to hide their money under their mattresses. And that has steadily ebbed.

And now you hear a lot of voters in these focus groups saying I’m doing OK. I still worry about our country. I worry about our economy. But I’m doing OK. Or, you know, my husband lost his job, but he has a new one now. And so there’s a new tone to some of the worries, and there’s a new attitude toward the president and toward Congress as a result of that.

MS. IFILL: Carrie, I wonder, how does the White House see its role in this, in this kind of anxious time, and in a midterm election where so many people would really rather they just stay away? Does the White House just look at this and say we’re just glad we don’t have to deal with that? Or is this something they wish they could help or shape?

MS. BROWN: I think they wish they could help and shape it, but they clearly have shown that it’s nearly impossible. I mean, they’ve, you know, since the beginning of the year, rolled out executive actions weekly, targeted at key constituencies – women, college students and, you know, other parts of the Democratic base, hoping that that would help them sort of inch up his approval numbers, get some credit with constituencies. I mean, and it’s just everything gets wiped out by these series of crises week after week.

MS. IFILL: And his approval is at a record low.

MS. BROWN: Sure. And it’s just – you know, he’s – he is a weight around the necks of Senate candidates, House candidates; mostly Senate candidates. And, you know, they’ve broadcast that they’re not going to go anywhere that they can’t help, and that narrows the map.

MS. IFILL: Isn’t that part of the reason why they stepped away from the – pushing immigration?

MS. BROWN: Absolutely. I mean, it’s driven – he decided to save the Senate, in his view, what he could do to save the Senate versus keeping this promise he made to – you know, just this promise he made. And he decided that not having the Senate for the last two years or doing anything that can further endanger that was just too risky.

Inserting immigration into that conversation would polarize it for years to come, similar to the way gun control became off-limits after the `94 election. And they felt like they had to preserve the issue. And that’s the argument they’re making to advocates.

And I have to say, I mean, I spent this week trying to, you know, talk to advocates and see what they were saying. And, you know, I think they’re taking the week off. They’re so demoralized, you know, and just sort of not knowing where to go. But you’re not hearing them out there sort of really banging the drum against the White House just yet.

MS. IFILL: Because really, in the end, what do they get if they do that?

MS. BROWN: Yeah. I mean, they want -

MS. IFILL: (Inaudible.)

MS. BROWN: Yeah. They want the president to go big, and they’re not going to really do too much to make him angry.

MS. IFILL: James, talking about crisis after crisis obscuring any progress, let’s talk about Ukraine for a moment.

MR. KITFIELD: Yes.

MS. IFILL: This week an interesting thing happened. Petro Poroshenko, the new president, said Russian troops are now gone from Kiev and we can continue where we left off. And Putin’s response was we never had troops there. What are you talking about?

MR. KITFIELD: Right. You can believe me or your lying eyes.

MS. IFILL: Exactly.

MR. KITFIELD: You know, unfortunately, you know, the cease-fire, which has held, so that’s good news - the bad news is it’s frozen in place basically what Russia wanted, which was to – you know, it has these two breakaway areas inside eastern Ukraine.

It’s the same thing he did with Georgia in 2008. It basically has drawn a new red line in Europe. And, you know, as long as those countries have Russian troops on their ground or separatist areas, they can’t join NATO. It sort of freezes in place the western project of spreading, you know, the European Union and NATO to get a Europe that is whole and free.

So Putin’s won this round. The problem is, now the western countries have to figure out what to do about that. They introduced some new sanctions. But if he gets away with this - annexing Crimea, basically destabilizing Ukraine – he has rewritten the rules of the post-Cold War order, which was you don’t change borders by force.

MS. IFILL: But it sounds like freezing in place is the best anybody could hope for, because at least there’s no shooting.

MR. KITFIELD: Right. And Ukraine was never going to win a war with the Russian military. When it became clear that he was willing to send in these stealth armored columns to sort of turn the tide of the battle, you know, he won. He won with force. You know, he’s brought back in the idea that military force can rewrite borders.

MS. IFILL: Ed, I want to end this part of our show by just talking about some crazy stuff going on on Capitol Hill. There’s always fun stuff, and we don’t always get to talk about it.

Two things that caught my eye. One is a reality show that was shot, unbeknownst to all of us, involving two U.S. senators in a rare and strange exercise in bipartisanship.

MR. O’KEEFE: Yeah.

MS. IFILL: And another very public, weird, never-ending divorce involving yet another member of Congress.

MR. O’KEEFE: Yeah. Well, let’s start with the reality show. Jeff Flake, the junior senator from Arizona –

MS. IFILL: Reality show versus reality, by the way.

MR. O’KEEFE: Exactly.

MS. IFILL: Yeah.

MR. O’KEEFE: He’s the junior senator from Arizona, a bit of a fitness buff, and now, for the third time, has visited a tiny island –

MS. IFILL: There they are.

MR. O’KEEFE: - in the Pacific Ocean. It’s the island of Eru in the Marshall Islands. This time, though, instead of bringing along a family member, he brought along a Democrat – (laughter) – Martin Heinrich, the junior senator from New Mexico, who is an equally, you know, athletic and outdoorsman of his own accord.

The two of them have struck up a friendship. Heinrich had asked a lot of questions about this trip to this island. And in mid-August they met up, under the cover of secrecy, in Hawaii.

MS. IFILL: With a Discovery camera crew.

MR. O’KEEFE: - with a Discovery Channel camera crew in tow, and they made their way to this tiny island where, for about a week, they were given three pieces of equipment, one of them being a spearfish, and they had to basically survive; and the idea being that if two Democrats can do it on a deserted island –

MS. IFILL: A Democrat and a Republican.

MR. O’KEEFE: Right. If two senators of the other parties can do it, then we can do it in the halls of Congress.

MS. IFILL: OK. You have to give me the short version of the Mark Sanford Facebook post.

MR. O’KEEFE: Two thousand three hundred forty-eight words on Facebook this afternoon to announce that he’s hired a lawyer and that he’s no longer getting engaged to his Argentine soul mate. There is a court hearing Monday to discuss a possible gag order in what is now a five-year divorce battle between Mark Sanford and Jenny Sanford.

MS. IFILL: It feels like it’s been years since the hike along the Appalachian Trail.

MR. O’KEEFE: It has been. It has been. And the divorce proceedings are still dragging out.

MS. IFILL: And it still goes on.

MS BALL: More words in that blog post than miles on the Appalachian Trail. (Laughter.)

MS. IFILL: (Laughs.) And you counted.

MS. BALL: Somebody counted.

MS. IFILL: Thanks, everybody.

Stay online and see what else our panelists are writing about and, you know, chatting about, in our daily “Washington Week” feature, Essential Reads. And in my weekly take, I read between the lines of the president’s big speech on ISIS; all that at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

And we’ll see you next time on the “Washington Week” Webcast Extra.