Special: The GOP "Happy Hour" Debate and Jeb Bush's Planned Parenthood Misspeak

ANNOUNCER : This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra .

MS. IFILL : Hello, I’m Gwen Ifill. I’m joined around the table by Dan Balz of The Washington Post , John Dickerson of CBS News, and Jeanne Cummings of The Wall Street Journal .

Let’s talk about the undercard debate, where the seven candidates who didn’t make the polling cutoff struggled to be heard. It wasn’t a bad debate, either. Witness this exchange between Rick Perry and Carly Fiorina about the Iran deal.

MS. FIORINA: (From video.) Day two in the Oval Office I would hold a Camp David summit with our Arab allies, not to talk them into this lousy deal with Iran but to say to them what is it that you need to defeat ISIL. You know, Obama has presented the American people with a false choice every time: it’s what I’ve done or not done, or it’s war. It is a false choice.

FORMER TEXAS GOVERNOR RICK PERRY (R): (From video.) I will tell you one thing: I would whole lot rather had Carly Fiorina over there doing our negotiation than John Kerry. Maybe we would have gotten a deal where we didn’t give everything away.

MS. IFILL : Given that at least one key Democrat, Chuck Schumer, turned on the president this week, might this be fertile ground for Republicans, Jeanne, this whole Iran deal?

MS. CUMMINGS : Well, yes and no. I mean, I think it’s an area where they can really criticize the president for his actions, but they’re all opposed to it. And so in terms of whether it’s a good issue in the primary, I don’t know because they all are on the same page. So it’s who’s better –

MS. IFILL : Except they can say even Democrats disagree with the president.

MS. CUMMINGS : Well, yeah, but they all can say that.

MS. IFILL : That’s true.

MS. CUMMINGS : And so it’s just a matter of whose rhetoric is best. When it comes to the general, clearly this is going to be a choice for voters. And if the president gets this and things are going bad, that’s going to really hurt Hillary Clinton, and if – because there’s enough time that – if this agreement is put in place, there is enough time that we will have some sense of whether Iran is cooperating or not.

MS. IFILL : The people who are the most annoyed about not being included in the big kids table, as it was called, are – include Senator Rick Santorum, who came in number two after all four years ago, and thought for some reason he ought to – because Republicans usually like to bring along the person who was number two last, and he wasn’t there. Did he make any kind of impression? Did he leave a handprint of any kind in the undercard debate?

MR. BALZ : Not particularly. I mean, he didn’t have a bad time, may –

MS. IFILL : You could say that of six of them, actually.

MR. BALZ : Yeah, yeah. I think they all performed pretty well, and it was an interesting debate. And I think they all have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder about not being in the – you know, in the main event.

He had opportunity to make the points he wants to make, which is that he’s got a different message particularly on the economy and blue-collar workers and manufacturing. But it’s been very difficult for him to take what he was able to do in 2012 and translate it into anything so far this time around.

MS. IFILL : Even Lindsey Graham, who has a little bit of a spark normally, for some reason couldn’t light it in this debate.

MR. DICKERSON : Well, he seemed to be on a mission. He had a strategy, and he was trying to – which was basically to take everything and bring it back to national security and the threat from global jihadism. And so there was a question at one point on Planned Parenthood, and he went from the question about Planned Parenthood and said, well, you know, if you really want to know where women are treated poorly, it’s in Afghanistan and Iraq. And so that was – that was kind of – he was – he was kind of a one-note Johnny on that.

MS. IFILL : Let’s talk a little bit about that Planned Parenthood kerfuffle, because it played out on the Democratic side, as you alluded to during the regular program, in part because Jeb Bush didn’t handle a speech particularly well. Let’s listen to what he said and then how Hillary Clinton seized on it.

MR. BUSH: (From video.) You could take dollar for dollar – although I’m not sure we need a half a billion dollars for women’s health issues – but if you took dollar for dollar, there are many extraordinarily fine organizations – community health organizations that exist, federally sponsored community health organizations, to provide quality care for women on a wide variety of health issues.

FORMER SECRETARY OF STATE HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.) Now, the Bush campaign claims that what Jeb Bush meant to say was that we should just defund Planned Parenthood – as if that makes it any better. You know, where women go for cancer screenings and all kinds of other preventive health measures. Now, I’ve been, as many of you have, fighting for women and children and families for my entire life. I’m really tired of the doublespeak.

MS. IFILL : She called it “shaming and blaming.” But the interesting thing is the degree to which, not only in this episode but also earlier I think it was last week, Hillary Clinton has decided that she’s going to take direct shots at Jeb Bush, not anybody else.

MS. CUMMINGS : Oh, they – there’s no confusion in their minds about who the front-runner really is in the Republican primary. I think it’s part the experience that Jeb has, the machine that he has, the amount of money that he has. All those things tell them this is going to be the guy, and they’re going to go after him very early.

What’s also interesting with this stumble by Jeb is that is the issue, the same – those same remarks, that Carly Fiorina chose to attack him on when she said –

MS. IFILL : She did.

MS. CUMMINGS : – in her closing remarks you need a nominee who’s going to throw punches, not pull punches, and not stumble on their way out of the gate, or words just to those effect.

So that – and then we talked to her afterwards. She was as bothered by his remarks as Hillary Clinton was, one when you looked at it from a women’s health perspective.

MR. DICKERSON : Not a tactical perspective, because it seemed to me she was saying – not that she was undone by what – the content of his remarks, but just that he put his – that he keeps putting his foot in his mouth.

MS. IFILL : Yeah, she wasn’t unhappy about the Planned Parenthood argument –

MS. CUMMINGS : Right.

MR. DICKERSON : Yeah, because that’s about the fourth time he’s done that. He did it on the issue of the Iraq war and whether it was a mistake or not. He did it on a Medicare stumble he had. He did it about whether workers should work longer hours. And it seems to me that Jeb Bush’s argument is, I can handle it in the general. And his argument for the general is kind of one that requires a little bit of verbal finesse because he’s saying I can reach into the Democratic coalition and pull in some Latino voters and I can perhaps be more palatable to suburban women swing voters than other kinds of Republicans. Well, if you’re going to pull that off, then you can’t be serially making up for the mistakes you’ve made and the things you’ve said. So the rustiness is starting to kind of collect on him.

MR. BALZ : Let me make two points.

One, with regard to Jeb Bush, as – we were both up in New Hampshire last Monday night for the forum with 14 of the candidates, and then –

MS. IFILL : One of the strangest forums I have ever witnessed.

MR. BALZ : It was an unusual forum.

MS. CUMMINGS : Oh yeah, that was really weird.

MR. BALZ : And then in Cleveland. If you think back to four years ago, Jeb Bush is a little bit like Mitt Romney. He’s the person who a lot of people presume could be the nominee, has assets, has a big network, et cetera. Mitt Romney in debates was almost always very effective, judged to be either the clear winner or tied, but rarely had a bad outing or rarely had people say about him, well, he didn’t show up tonight. I think that in both the forum on Monday night and in Cleveland there were people who came away from that and thought Jeb Bush was not as forceful as he could have been or perhaps should have been. So I think that’s one issue that will make Republicans nervous.

MS. IFILL : Or is able to be, which is the real worry.

MR. DICKERSON : And he was working with some of the
Romney debate prep team. He has some of the staffers who worked with Romney. But it was obviously Romney at the center of Romney.

MR. BALZ : The other point I want to make, going back to Secretary Clinton, you know, she’s become very aggressive and very partisan in going after Jeb Bush and the Republicans in general, and I think part of it is that she doesn’t want to go after Bernie Sanders. She doesn’t see any value in sort of poking that part of the Democratic Party. She wants to cozy up to them. But she needs a foil, because otherwise she’s running against herself. And the more she runs against herself, the less well she does, and we’ve seen what the consequence of that is. And the advertising –

MS. CUMMINGS : And they’re attacking him, too.

MR. BALZ : – that she began this week is a sign of their concern, I think, of what’s happened to her.

MS. CUMMINGS : And they’re attacking her, so.

MR. BALZ : Oh, sure.

MS. IFILL : Well, and there’s also the – just the Clinton drama, which is Donald Trump can say, hey, I hung out with – I invited them to my wedding because I gave them some money, and then he can say – and then they can say, oh, well, Bill called me and we talked about it. I mean, there’s all this drama and dust around the Clintons always that she has to keep the spotlight away from. (Laughs, laughter.) So we’ll be covering all of that, too.

MR. BALZ : Keep drawing those lines. No, that was – (laughs).

MS. IFILL : Right over there. (Laughs.)

That’s it for now. Thank you. Thanks, everybody, for watching. And we’ll catch you on our next Washington Week Webcast Extra .