Full Episode: Republicans Debate the Economy, Paul Ryan Elected House Speaker & Obama Authorizes Boots on Ground in Syria

GWEN IFILL: New leadership in the House. New breakthroughs on the campaign trail. But why does the Republican Party still seem at war with itself? Plus, boots on the ground in Syria. We discuss it all tonight on Washington Week .

FORMER FLORIDA GOVERNOR JEB BUSH (R): (From video.) I mean literally the Senate, what is it, like a French work week?

SENATOR MARCO RUBIO (R-FL): (From video.) Someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.

OHIO GOVERNOR JOHN KASICH (R): (From video.) We cannot elect somebody that doesn't know how to do the job.

MS. IFILL: The Republican divide on full display on the debate stage and in the House of Representatives.

HOUSE SPEAKER PAUL RYAN (R-WI): (From video.) The House is broken. We're not solving problems, we're adding to them. We are wiping the slate clean.

MS. IFILL: But is this the normal drama associated with a change in leadership?

DONALD TRUMP: (From video.) I mean, I am second. It's not, like, terrible. But I don't like being second. Second is terrible to me.

MS. IFILL: Or, is it a sign of things to come?

REPRESENTATIVE TOM COLE (R-OK): (From video.) Nobody is going to be popping champagne corks at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue over this bill.

MS. IFILL: Covering a raucous week, Robert Costa, national political reporter for The Washington Post ; Jeanne Cummings, political editor for The Wall Street Journal ; John Harwood, chief Washington correspondent for CNBC; and Doyle McManus, Washington columnist for the Los Angeles Times .

ANNOUNCER: Award-winning reporting and analysis. Covering history as it happens. Live from our nation's capital, this is Washington Week with Gwen Ifill . Once again, live from Washington, moderator Gwen Ifill.

MS. IFILL: Good evening. After an eventful week, it's time for the long view. The Republican Party by all measures is trying to sort itself out. At their third presidential debate this week, the fault lines were clear. There were frontrunners, Trump and Carson, versus the establishment.

BEN CARSON: (From video.) All this too big to fail stuff and picking and choosing winners and losers, this is a bunch of crap.

MS. IFILL: Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio versus each other.

MR. BUSH: (From video.) Marco, when you signed up for this this was a six-year term. And you should be showing up to work. You can campaign. Or just resign and let someone else take the job.

MS. IFILL: And almost everyone else on stage versus the news media.

SENATOR TED CRUZ (R-TX): (From video.) Let me say something at the outset. The questions that have been asked so far in this debate illustrate why the American people don't trust the media. (Cheers, applause.) This is not a cage match.

MS. IFILL: While in the House of Representatives, the Republican majority elevated a new speaker and passed a contentious budget agreement.

REPRESENTATIVE JOHN BOEHNER (R-OH): (From video.) I made it clear a month ago when I announced that I was leaving that I wanted to do my best to clean the barn. I didn't want him to walk into a dirty barn full of you-know-what.

SPEAKER RYAN: (From video.) They look at Washington and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together. What a weight off of their shoulders.

MS. IFILL: Although I'm tempted to start with the dirty barn floor, we're going to start with the debate, where 10 people on one stage and four on a second jockeyed for a breakout moment. So who – John, you were there – who got the breakout moment?

JOHN HARWOOD: Well, first of all, I have to confess my chances of winning a Republican primary took a blow.

MS. IFILL: (Laughs.) They did. They did.

MR. HARWOOD: But I think, on the positive side, that Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio were the big winners of the debate. Cruz, with that attack on the media, which is something he clearly went into the debate wanting to do and is something that has been building for some time within the Republican Party. And in some ways, it's an evergreen attack. I remember covering the 1992 Bush re-election campaign where the cap that they all wore was: Annoy the media, re-elect Bush. So they came at us. Cruz did that very effectively. Rubio did it effectively. But Rubio had a twofer. He very effectively cut down Jeb Bush when Bush came at him on missing votes in the Senate. And then he did it on the media as well. And I think those are the two big ones.

MS. IFILL: Well, let me – well let me ask you about that, because today the chairman of the Republican Party who's sponsoring these debates, he's come under fire from some of the candidates for the way the debates have played out. And he said he's going to end the relationship with NBC, which had a debate planned for February. What's going on really with that?

MR. HARWOOD: Well, he said he's going to suspend –

MS. IFILL: Suspend.

MR. HARWOOD: – the debate, not end it. So we'll see what happens and whether that debate gets put back on the calendar. But really, the energy and anger within the Republican Party that we saw expressed at us, the moderators in that debate, is very much akin to what was going on in the House. Remember, this is a party that had to have a speaker resign simply to make a deal to keep the government open and raise the debt limit. The speaker resigned. And it's – you know, the internal war within the party, heat’s now being directed at Reince Priebus, the RNC chair. So there’s simply a lot of energy. We're a target. Leaders in Washington are a target. Even Paul Ryan, strong reputation as a fiscal conservative, as he was being prepared to be elevated to the speaker started being attacked for being too liberal on the subject of immigration. It is – it is the mood of the party, the cultural and economic angst that members of the party feel. And it's being expressed at various targets, including us.

MS. IFILL: Well, let's go through some of the scenarios we have seen. Jeb Bush went to the debate, everybody said he had to pull something out. He didn't, I think it's safe to say. And by yesterday, when he was campaigning in New Hampshire, he was forced to say this.

MR. BUSH: (From video.) It's not on life support. We have the most money. We have the greatest organization. We're doing fine. Look, in October – late October of four years ago, Herman Cain was the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. Eight years ago, Hillary Clinton was up by 26 points against an unknown state senator named Barack Obama.

MS. IFILL: Jeanne, is it ever good to have to say that your campaign is not on life support?

JEANNE CUMMINGS: This was a really, really a bad day. That’s really a bad day. Look, he did not have a good night. He’s explaining it away by saying, I'm just not a performer. I'm not a debater. That's not my forum. He can say that if he wants, but he needs to get better at debating by the next one or he may not have much of a campaign left. He spent three days before that debate meeting with already jittery donors in Houston and raising their expectations about the job he was going to do in the debate. Then he failed. So what we are hearing from some of those donors is: We don't want to bolt. We still love the guy. But we've got to see something. So much more pressure on him in the next debate.

MS. IFILL: And so, Bob, if you're Ted Cruz and you're Marco Rubio, this is a moment.

ROBERT COSTA: This is a moment. And they both had semi-breakthrough opportunities at this debate. But they're still going up against two outsiders in Carson and Trump who have been dominating this contest for months. And so when I checked in today with Cruz advisers and allies, and the same with Rubio, they feel good coming off of this debate. They see a path ahead. But it's a difficult one and it's still early.

MS. IFILL: Trump, however, is turning his guns on Rubio, it looks like.

MR. COSTA: He is, but it was interesting to watch Trump when he was in Reno, Nevada the day after the debate. We see a different kind of Trump. Trump in the summer going right after his opponents, an outside presence on the campaign trail. Now Trump is directing much of his ire toward the news media. And you see Trump growing into his role on the national stage, and also seeing the nomination could be his. And so he's also building out a grassroots network across the country. And he’s running more of a typical campaign, one that's also a little more cozy with his rivals and with the national party.

MS. IFILL: The theme, Doyle, seems to be that there are two Republican Parties going on here.

DOYLE MCMANUS: Yeah, exactly. I think in a way you can argue that this debate this week clarified this race a little bit. It looked like chaos up there. It was chaos up there, right? But if you look at the numbers and if you look at the lanes people are running in, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush are basically running for mostly the same voters. They're now the two establishment candidates. And you have to say, Marco Rubio looks like he's the one growing in support easily and Jeb Bush has a long slog getting it back together. Then you’ve got this other interesting contest that is Donald Trump, who really nobody laid a hand on in that – in that debate.

MS. IFILL: No, not really.

MR. MCMANUS: Ben Carson.

MS. IFILL: John Kasich tried.

MR. MCMANUS: John Kasich tried, he did. But, you know, it was – that was brief. And then you’ve got Ted Cruz's breakout moment. He appears to be running in that lane. His strategy all along has appeared to be to try and inherit the backers of Trump and Carson when inevitably those campaigns implode. But those campaigns never seem to implode. We're still in that piece.

MS. IFILL: John, you talked to Ben Carson. You’ve interviewed him. I've interviewed him. And the one thing that I think is true is what you see is what you get. He is that calm. Is that his strategy? Is that what's working for him?

MR. HARWOOD: That's his appeal. It's not – it's not really ideological. He’s got a lot of credibility with conservative Christians and got a lot of credibility period by virtue of his brilliant career as a surgeon. He doesn't have much of a policy agenda, per se. He's got some notions and some ideas which he's put out, not in a lot of detail. And I think that low-key zen, not going to get ruffled demeanor is part of it.

MS. IFILL: And if you’re called on anything just say it’s not true.

MR. HARWOOD: Exactly, exactly. But he's a nice man. And people want to like their candidates. And a lot of Republicans like him right now.

MS. CUMMINGS: Well, definitely his space is different than Trump's. His is evangelicals and a lot of people who’ve read his books over the years and been inspired by his story. And one of the things about Ben Carson is that he's sort of burst on the political scene, but he had another life in which he had a bit of a celebrity place as an author and a doctor. And so those are the people around him. Whereas Trump is pulling some of the angry Tea Party, the working whites. He's tapping into that. And as Doyle said, Cruz is hoping he can bridge that gap and collect them all when, and if, the others collapse.

MR. HARWOOD: And it’s remarkable the certainty that mainstream Republican strategists still have that both of those guys are going to be gone.

MS. IFILL: They are completely convinced of this, even though there's nothing to support it.

MR. HARWOOD: Nothing except their instincts and history in the process. And the question is, is this going to be a paradigm shifting election, or is it in fact going – their instincts going to be justified? We don't know.

MS. IFILL: Chris Christie, Carly Fiorina, they both had decent nights, but is it – are there just too many people on top of them for them to push through, or do they have plan?

MR. COSTA: It's more difficult for Fiorina. Her launching pad, if anywhere, would likely be Iowa because she's such a popular figure with evangelicals and grassroots conservatives. But we saw after the Reagan Library debate, it was tough for Fiorina to sustain her momentum. Christie, I think he’s a diamond in the rough politically because he does have a lane in New Hampshire if Bush stumbles, if Kasich doesn't do well. Christie’s bet that he is a Northeastern Republican, he has a certain swagger that voters are looking for who have gravitated toward Trump. And he thinks if he just can stay in the race, he has a chance.

MS. CUMMINGS: Can I say one thing on Carly Fiorina?

MS. IFILL: Yeah.

MS. CUMMINGS: I think she's a great performer, and we've all seen that. What surprised me was her close, saying I may not be the perfect candidate, but I'm Hillary Clinton’s –

MS. IFILL: Her closing statement, not her clothes.

MS. CUMMINGS: Oh, yeah, her closing statement.

MS. IFILL: Just making that clear, for anyone who’s listening.

MS. CUMMINGS: She’s Hillary Clinton's worst nightmare. Elect me, so I can debate -- nominate me so I can debate her.

MS. IFILL: That’s – she’s been pretty consistent with that argument.

MS. CUMMINGS: Yeah, but that's not a presidential platform. It’s a very, very thin argument to justify nomination for the presidency of the United States. That surprised me from her.

MS. IFILL: Well, let's move on to Congress and Capitol Hill this week, because another huge upheaval. In this case, the elevation of Paul Ryan as speaker of the House, and the – he slipped out the back door, John Boehner, literally, as Paul Ryan was getting ready to take his – give his acceptance speech. How two are – different are these two men, Bob?

MR. COSTA: They're very similar. They're both Midwestern men. Come from Roman Catholic backgrounds. And Ryan, as much as he doesn't like to say it, is an institutionalist inside of the House of Representatives – was a staffer in the Senate, was close to Jack Kemp, elected in 1998 at age 28, rises through two committees. He knows the House. Boehner loved the House. In that way they’re the same. Ryan, though, has more ideological depth and roots with the party, and that’s going to help him as he tries to grapple with the speakership in a very tumultuous time for his party.

MR. HARWOOD: But the other thing that’s going to help him –

MS. IFILL: But as John mentioned, people have already started calling him a RINO, a Republican in name only, because of a couple of things. He cut a deal on the budget in the past –

MR. HARWOOD: Well, because his stance on immigration and because he cut a deal on the budget with Patty Murray, the Democratic senator from Washington, that was in effect mimicked in this new budget deal. But Paul Ryan, because he was becoming speaker, was compelled to criticize the deal and say the process stinks. Look, you cannot overestimate the service that John Boehner did for Paul Ryan by doing this deal because what it means is for the next at least year and a half, Paul Ryan will not have to do the things that make being a speaker in this Republican Party so hard. He's not going to have to cut a new budget deal. He's not going to have to raise the debt limit. They don’t have to do much of anything. So he can kind of consolidate his position and hope a Republican president gets elected and it’s easier to do the things that they want to do.

MS. IFILL: What kind of relationship does Paul Ryan have with the White House?

MS. CUMMINGS: They have – the White House, I don't want to speak too much to how deep that relationship goes, because I don't think I know that. What I do know is when the various candidates were tossed around the White House crowd wanted Paul Ryan to get this job. The White House crowd views him as a workable partner who cares enough and knows enough about budgets, about taxes that they can have – you know, they can work out real deals with him and have serious conversations with him, and that he believes that Washington needs to work. And that’s also –

MR. MCMANUS: And Harry Reid, the Senate Democratic leader, effectively endorsed Ryan in this process.

MS. IFILL: Which couldn’t have helped.

MR. MCMANUS: Which was probably not the endorsement he really wanted, yeah. I think the fascinating thing to watch from here on out is what happens to the Freedom Caucus? What happens to the 35 to 45 members? Ryan is not a member of the Freedom Caucus, never was. But he got support from, what, more than half of the Freedom Caucus? The whole game on Ryan’s side –

MR. HARWOOD: A supermajority.

MR. MCMANUS: Well, the whole game there, it seems to me, is if you can divide the Freedom Caucus, if you can peel off, say, 20 of those, they no longer have the power to block what the speaker and the majority leader want to do. They can no longer threaten the speaker.

MR. HARWOOD: But it’s all contingent on what you're trying to accomplish as speaker and who you have to make deals with to accomplish it. And Ryan’s in the clear right now.

MR. COSTA: I think you bring up a great point, Doyle, because Ryan has a real limitation at this moment because he's entering the leadership having never been in the leadership. He's been a committee chairman, but he’s never whipped votes. He’s going to have to wrangle this group together on – maybe not governing by crisis, that's out of the way, but on spending bills, on anything that comes forward.

MS. IFILL: What are his priorities that are different from John Boehner's?

MR. COSTA: Well, he's much more focused on taxes. He wants to be – maybe do something with the Obama administration in the next year on that. He's wiped immigration off the table. He's promised the conservatives he won't pursue it. But other than that, Ryan wants to project a better face for the party. You see him talking already about poverty. And for Ryan, it's not so much about legislating at this time, it’s about setting the party up for the 2016 elections and helping the GOP repair its brand.

MS. IFILL: The one way most people know Paul Ryan is, of course, he was the vice presidential nominee last time around. And guess who was sitting up in the – up in the gallery when he was being sworn in? And that was Mitt Romney and his wife. And afterward they took a little selfie, which was my – probably my favorite picture of the week. (Laughter.) There it is. This is Paul Ryan's wife on the right, next to Ann Romney, next to Mitt and next to Paul Ryan. And I wonder if there's anything about having been on that national stage which takes the place, perhaps, of having been in leadership? Does he bring something from that to this?

MS. CUMMINGS: I don't think that's transferable.

MR. COSTA: Oh, I disagree.

MS. CUMMINGS: I mean, I – OK.

MS. IFILL: OK, well, disagree. (Laughs.)

MS. CUMMINGS: I mean, I –

MR. COSTA: I mean, don’t you think it brings political capital, to some extent, inside of the House?

MS. CUMMINGS: Yeah, but the skill set that you need running for president is not –

MS. IFILL: Or vice president, more important.

MS. CUMMINGS: Or vice president.

MS. IFILL: Yeah.

MS. CUMMINGS: Isn’t the same as the skill set of running the House.

MR. HARWOOD: But I do think he is going to provide a service to his party immediately by virtue of his persona. He is someone who projects intelligence, projects decency, projects seriousness. And as – he's young, modern looking. I think all of that is a generational shift that is advantageous to the Republican Party. Different thing from legislating, but a service nonetheless.

MS. IFILL: Can he get a highway bill through?

MS. CUMMINGS: That's his first test.

MS. IFILL: That's his first test.

MS. CUMMINGS: That’s his first test. And that will be interesting. And that – his effort to get that bill through is so benefitted by what Boehner has done for him because he can take his time, and he can maybe have it go back into a committee. Maybe he can show some regular order, which is what he promised in his speech. It was very kind of insidery, but those rules matter to those members.

MR. HARWOOD: That was one of the messes in the barn that Boehner had hoped he could clear out for Ryan. Wasn’t that – there was a little too much on the shovel for him to do that. (Laughs.)

MS. IFILL: Who does he talk to? Who are his advisers? Who will influence him?

MR. COSTA: He has a lot of outside advisers: former Education Secretary Bill Bennett; he talks to Pete Wehner, a former Bush administration official; he talks to his advisers, Joyce Meyer, his new chief of staff; Dave Hoppe, was a chief of staff to Jack Kemp. He came out of Jack Kemp’s world. He remains in that world.

MS. IFILL: So we’ll see how that all works out. It’s going to be really very interesting to watch in the next several months.

Another interesting development today: the Obama administration made an about-face on Syria, admitting that circumstances have changed and it’s now time for U.S. boots to officially – notice I say “officially” – hit the ground.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS SECRETARY JOSH EARNEST: (From video.) They do not have a combat mission. They have a training, advising and an assist mission. That does mean that our men and women in uniform are going to be in harm’s way. It means they’re going to be taking risks. It means they’re in a dangerous part of the world.

MS. IFILL: But this is what the president said two years ago.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: (From video.) I will not put American boots on the ground in Syria. I will not pursue an open-ended action like Iraq or Afghanistan.

MS. IFILL: Pretty unequivocal. Admittedly, it’s not a huge deployment. But once again, as in Iraq and Afghanistan, we seem to be moving toward war instead of away from it, as the president has stated he would like to, Doyle.

MR. MCMANUS: Yes, we sure do. And as you point out, this is not the first escalation of the American military role in that part of the world.

Look, here’s the basic problem. We have been at war with ISIS – the Islamic State – for a little more than a year now, and that war is not moving very fast. It’s not moving very fast in Iraq. It’s not moving very fast in Syria.

In Iraq, there has been a gradual escalation of the American presence. Most Americans haven’t noticed, but we now have more than 3,000 troops on the ground in Iraq, advising and assisting Iraqi troops. But that means you sometimes get in combat. Just a week ago there was a raid on an ISIS location to free some prisoners and an American Army master sergeant was killed in that raid.

OK, now switch to Syria. Again, Obama administration policy has been in trouble. The attempt was to bomb ISIS from the air and to equip rebels on the ground. Hasn’t been working. What we now see is a decision to put in up to 50 Special Forces troops on the ground to technically advise and assist, and this is supposed to help those rebels push against ISIS. But just as was the case in Iraq, that puts them in harm’s way. It raises the possibility that they’ll be drawn into combat. It’s not technically a combat mission. It’s called advise and assist.

MS. IFILL: But that may be a distinction without much of a difference.

MR. MCMANUS: But it sure is boots on the ground. There’s no gainsaying that.

MS. IFILL: So should we be applauding an administration that says circumstances have changed and therefore our strategy has changed? Or, as apparently Paul Ryan is saying, there is no strategy?

MR. MCMANUS: Well, you – depends on which side of the fence you’re on.

MS. IFILL: Yeah.

MR. MCMANUS: I mean, the one thing that is consistent is that President Obama all the way along has resisted and resisted the slippery slope, the idea of getting into combat. But circumstances keep pulling him closer and closer. To the degree there’s a strategy, yes, it is slowly assisting those forces on the ground, both Kurdish and Arab, who are fighting ISIS. The problem is the strategy hasn’t been working very well.

MR. COSTA: What does this move – what does it say to the Russians? What kind of policy signal is the United States sending?

MR. MCMANUS: That’s a good question.

MS. IFILL: Yeah, we saw John Kerry walk out today and sit next to Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart.

MR. MCMANUS: Yeah. That’s a great question, Bob, because the signal is – the administration will say, well, this is not a direct response to the fact that the Russians have jumped into Syria. And that’s technically true, like a lot of other – but like a lot of other things, indirectly it’s a response. It’s a signal to the Russians that we’re there to stay, that we have proxies, if you like – allies on the ground that we do not want Bashar Assad’s government to run out. The problem that happened – the problem – the result of the Russian entry into Syria was that some American-supported forces that had been doing reasonably well suddenly found themselves in a whole lot of trouble because, of course, the Russians were targeting those forces, not ISIS as the Russians said they were. So this is a way of bolstering –

MR. HARWOOD: Does this move change the odds that Bashar al-Assad will be there a year, two years, three years from now?

MS. IFILL: That’s where the slippery slope begins, right?

MR. MCMANUS: Yeah, that’s right. No, because the odds were still pretty good that he’s going to be there. Actually, the Russian entry bolstered Assad quite a bit. What this actually does, de facto, is it solidifies the division of Syria into these different zones, the partition of Syria. We now have, if you like, an American-Turkish zone in the north, a Russian-Bashar Assad zone in the west and the south, and an ISIS zone in the east. That’s way oversimplifying.

MR. HARWOOD: Can that be –

MS. IFILL: You can only – quick.

MS. CUMMINGS: What happens – what happens when an American set of troops are embedded with one of these friendly groups that we’re trying to help and the Russians bomb them?

MR. MCMANUS: Well, the whole – the idea here is there are going to be intensified talks with the Russians to make sure that doesn’t happen.

MS. CUMMINGS: So the Russians are going to know where our people are?

MS. IFILL: The proxy war is the great fear, right?

MR. MCMANUS: Everybody’s going to know where everybody else is, you bet.

MS. IFILL: OK. Well, we’ll be watching. I don’t – I think it’s just like things keep changing for the administration, things are going to keep changing on the ground. Thank you all very much.

We have to go now, but as always the conversation will continue online on the Washington Week Webcast Extra , where among other things we’ll take a look back at John Boehner’s political legacy. We’ll post that discussion later tonight, and you can find it all week long at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek. As always, keep up with developments with Judy Woodruff and me on the PBS NewsHour . Happy Halloween. Don’t forget to turn your clocks back an hour, and we’ll see you here next week on Washington Week at the right time, I hope. Good night. (Laughs.)