Rich and Low
JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Shields and Lowry, syndicated columnist Mark Shields and National Review editor Rich Lowry. David Brooks is off tonight.
Mark, what's going on here? What is this debate over why we went to war all about right now?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, Jim, the reality is, and Ray touched upon the polls -- the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll came out and there probably isn't a more respected poll than that one. And the question was asked: Do you think President Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for going to war? Three out of five American voters say yes, he did.
Do you think the president made the case for keeping American troops in Iraq? Three out of five say he hasn't and one out of three voters gives the president credit for being honest and straightforward at this point.
So the president is trying to redress the problem that he has. Before we went to war, to be very blunt about it, I mean, we had the president of the United States, the vice president, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet telling us that 24/7, Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, that he was working on germ warfare devices and he was feverishly, around the clock working to produce nuclear bombs, and the vice president went on to suggest, to argue that he was connected with 9/11, that he was conspiring with al-Qaida.
All of those -- those were reasons for going to war. That was the case that was made. Paul Wolfowitz said it was the one thing we could agree upon, that was the one thing we could all agree upon was that weapons of mass destruction; that was a case that was made. Every single element of that argument proved baseless, proved false.
So it is understandable that people who voted and supported this president whether natural voters or in the Congress of the United States was a sense of first, curiosity, anger, betrayal, fury. Call it what you want. There's a reaction to that. How did we get into this war?
JIM LEHRER: Why is the reaction now, Rich? Where's the chicken and where's the egg in this? This happened a long time ago. We've had presidential elections since all of this happened. Why now?
RICHARD LOWRY: As Mark pointed out, the charge has really begun to take and to really hurt Bush and Democrats and liberals have been making this case for going on two years and it's turned out to be extremely corrosive and to be undermining the president's reputation for integrity and honesty.
If he loses that, it's going to undermine, you know, everything else he tries to do as well. So the administration is finally more aggressively pushing back on this. And I think they have a pretty good case to make because I disagree with Mark; the case may have been wrong but it wasn't baseless. And the consensus of the US Intelligence and other intelligence agencies around the world was that Saddam had these programs still going and in defiance of U.N. resolutions.
And even some of the more controversial things, Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff has been going around lately complaining about Dick Cheney running the government with a cabal - you know -- points out the aluminum tubes. The State Department dissented on the notorious aluminum tubes and said they're probably not for a nuclear program, but then he explains the French came over and said, look, we've tested these things; we think they are for a nuclear program and the State Department dissented on a lot of the nuclear stuff but it was there on the chem and bio.
So there's a reason why the administration was saying all these things, and then many Democrats were saying the same thing because they were all looking at the same body of intelligence.
Accusation of misleading public on WMDs
JIM LEHRER: So you agree what the president says and Dan Bartlett has supported him in saying that there's a dishonest debate going on right now?
RICHARD LOWRY: You can make many criticisms of the war, not enough troops -- all the rest of it. But the idea that the Bush officials deliberately lied about Saddam's WMD I think is totally off base.
JIM LEHRER: But you suggest, Mark, whether or not it is off base or not, the American people now believe that.
MARK SHIELDS: Jim, they believe it. And the question is, Jim, were the US officials, every one of them fooled by bad intelligence, I mean, the Senate Intelligence Committee the president referred to said that some of the foreign intelligence was fabricated and that the stuff they relied upon was dubious, at best. So were they, or was the deliberate hyping going on?
And the question, I think, rises to an important urgent level when you say the decision to go to war, there is no more important decision made. And was it made recklessly, negligent in doing it? Did they make sure that everything was in place? Or did they rush to war? And I don't think there's any question now -- you can argue it -- there was a rush to war.
JIM LEHRER: Rich, back to the president's actions today, I mean, this was quite a departure for him. I mean he is really hot under the collar about this and as you say he is pushing back. Is that going to work?
RICHARD LOWRY: We'll see. What I liked about the speech is he has seemed so understandably, I think, beaten down and off key, recently. If nothing else this was feisty and showed some fight to him. You know, that doesn't obviously bring him all the way back, or even part of the way back, but it is a good sign, I think.
Analysis of president's speech
JIM LEHRER: What do you think of the speech itself, Mark?
MARK SHIELDS: I thought, I thought there were hints in there that dissent was disloyalty, there's no question about it and it was an attempt to stifle debate. But I think -
JIM LEHRER: I mean, when he said this gives comfort to the enemy?
MARK SHIELDS: Comfort to the enemy. I mean, that's a phrase that should never appear just like as we learned in the most recent campaign Hitler should never appear in any discussion.
JIM LEHRER: What do you think about that? Is that over the line when you say dissent and when you criticize me, you give comfort to the enemy?
RICHARD LOWRY: I think it is proper to try to put barriers around the debate and say if you are saying we went to war based on a lie, you are telling all our troops they are fighting and dying on a lie, that, I don't think, is -- that's not an above board argument, and I don't think the Democratic Party should be swinging behind that argument.
MARK SHIELDS: The factual case that was made for going to war was defective. I say it was baseless.
RICHARD LOWRY: It was defective.
MARK SHIELDS: It was baseless. I mean, he had none of the things that were based upon, the president based his case upon he is a threat to the United States of America. There was - certainly there were illusions in some circles creating this democratic Middle East, but that was the reason that we sent American troops and put Americans at peril.
RICHARD LOWRY: Every major Democrat in the Senate, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, they all voted to authorize the war. If the intelligence were entirely baseless, they would have noticed. It is not as though they take George Bush's word for everything.
MARK SHIELDS: There is a presumption -- and I am not defending -- each of them can make his own case -- John Kerry has already explained his vote later - perhaps too late now. He wished this debate were going on now. Jay Rockefeller, the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, has said knowing what he knows now he would not have gone. There are a lot of Democrats who'd vote against it.
But there's always the presumption that the president, who is briefed every single day by the director of central intelligence, who has access to information that no member of Congress has, knows better.
Message to troops
JIM LEHRER: Let me ask you, Mark, you're very sensitive to this, this is Veteran's Day -- you are a veteran yourself -- and the president is making the case not only giving comfort to the enemy but it's very difficult for a trooper on the ground, whether he be a US Marine or member of the United States Army and being told by his or her politicians, hey, you are over there for reasons that were not legit. No matter whether they are right or wrong or whatever, what do you think about that?
MARK SHIELDS: I think, this is a family show, so I won't say it, Jim. I think that it is fair to say that there is nobody in uniform on the ground who is hanging on the split infinitives of George W. Bush to say they are fighting -- they are fighting because they believe in what they are doing and fighting for the people next to them; they're fighting for their unit. That's what they are fighting for. That's what Americans have always fought for.
We can cast this in some other terms, in some grandiose. They're not listening to debate here. That has nothing to do with it.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, Rich?
RICHARD LOWRY: No. I think if you have Democrats saying the war was based on a lie, that goes too far.
Mark, you are right. The president gets a briefing from the CIA director every day. What did the CIA director tell him - that the intelligence was a slam dunk. It wasn't baseless.
You are confusing, if we knew what we know now, that's one point to make. It is totally fair to say if we knew that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction and what we know now we wouldn't have gone in.
But we only know that because we went in. So it wasn't baseless. There's good reason to make the worst assumptions about Saddam Hussein.
Local election results
JIM LEHRER: Let me move this on and ask you, Mark, if the results of the election on Tuesday, are any way related to the debate the two of you are having and the president has pushed back on today?
MARK SHIELDS: Certainly, I think the president spoke today because of those plummeting poll numbers, especially in his honesty, handling of the war and confidence in the war and there's no question. There's one race - I mean, there's at least one race, Jim, you can point to, as very few people have, and that's the mayor's race in St. Paul: Two Democrats running for mayor of St. Paul, Randy Kelly and the Democratic incumbent, no Democrat and no incumbent defeated in 40 years in city hall in St. Paul, Minnesota; he lost 69-31 for one reason: In November of 2004 he endorsed George W. Bush. So that is one. I mean, there's no question about it.
I think there's a dispiritedness in the Republican ranks that -- John Sununu, George Bush's former chief of staff, once said: Remember the ultimate truth of politics: We are all in this alone. And after these numbers come out, believe me, the Republicans are scurrying.
JIM LEHRER: Is that the message, Rich? Do you read them the same way?
RICHARD LOWRY: Well, I think with the exception of the race up there in Minnesota, I am fairly confident that all these results would have been the same absent President Bush or even if President Bush had 50 percent approval rating.
And the only one that would be close, even a close question would be Virginia, and you had a Republican candidate, Kilgore who ran on the death penalty, which is an out of date issue that has no connection with people now. It might have been worked if it were 1993, but it is not anymore. The fundamental factor, though, in the race was the Democratic governor, Mark Warner, the incumbent, had a 70 percent approval rating.
And any time you have a Virginia governor with 70 percent approval rating, his designated successor wins. It happened with Chuck Robb in the 80's, George Allen in the 90's, and again this time around.
JIM LEHRER: So the Republicans should not be sad about this, or concerned --
RICHARD LOWRY: They should definitely be sad, but, look, it's not necessarily predictive but it's not a good sign. And if you put it together with a lot of other things that are going on, then it becomes very worrisome because if Republicans have another year like this one, they are truly in danger of losing Congress. And if they do lose Congress, this is what the prelude will feel like.
You have corruption scandals, you have an unpopular war. You have a weak president. You have what appears to be intellectual exhaustion; you put all those things together and there shouldn't be panic in the Republican ranks but there certainly should be a sense of urgency about trying to turn this around.
MARK SHIELDS: I hope Howard Dean heard that. That's better than anything I've heard from the Democratic National Committee in weeks. But, no, Jim, I think --
JIM LEHRER: Do you want to edit anything to that?
RICHARD LOWRY: Revise it.
MARK SHIELDS: Intellectual exhaustion and moral depravity, I think just about sums it up. But Rich is right in this respect, Jim. The war, which was a popular and helpful factor in the election of 2002, for Republicans, putting the Democrats very much on the defensive and that was the vote to go to war -- remember, Max Cleland in Georgia being defeated.
And 2006 it will not be unless, in fact, the president does pull out troops and there is some sense that we have accomplished our goal or whatever but I don't think there's any question. You look at those numbers and I do think that Mark Warner deserves enormous credit, the governor of Virginia. Not only that, but he raised taxes in Virginia and lived to have a 75 percent approval rating which is totally violative of all conservative ideology and theology and Tim Kaine deserves --
JIM LEHRER: He won. He was the lieutenant governor.
MARK SHIELDS: Well, he did something that no Democrat really has done nationally except Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and that was he talked openly and comfortably about his religious faith.
JIM LEHRER: He is a Roman Catholic.
MARK SHIELDS: He is a Roman Catholic; he talked about his faith and formed his values on the death penalty and on abortion. But they took an oath as governor and would take an oath to uphold the law. And somehow it made him very comfortable and congenial with voters not of his religion and not necessarily of his political philosophy.
JIM LEHRER: A few seconds. Do you want to add anything to that?
RICHARD LOWRY: Well, I think the reason Warner got away with tax cuts is because Republicans -- sorry tax increases. It's sort of reflexively -- the Pavlov thing -- the tax increase, is because the Republicans in the legislature down there split on that and gave him cover and it really muddied up the tax issue for Republicans and also gave Warner an opportunity to have an accomplishment where he hadn't had one before.
JIM LEHRER: We have to go. Thank you both very much.
Mark, what's going on here? What is this debate over why we went to war all about right now?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, Jim, the reality is, and Ray touched upon the polls -- the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll came out and there probably isn't a more respected poll than that one. And the question was asked: Do you think President Bush deliberately misled people to make the case for going to war? Three out of five American voters say yes, he did.
Do you think the president made the case for keeping American troops in Iraq? Three out of five say he hasn't and one out of three voters gives the president credit for being honest and straightforward at this point.
So the president is trying to redress the problem that he has. Before we went to war, to be very blunt about it, I mean, we had the president of the United States, the vice president, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, CIA Director George Tenet telling us that 24/7, Saddam Hussein was stockpiling chemical weapons, that he was working on germ warfare devices and he was feverishly, around the clock working to produce nuclear bombs, and the vice president went on to suggest, to argue that he was connected with 9/11, that he was conspiring with al-Qaida.
All of those -- those were reasons for going to war. That was the case that was made. Paul Wolfowitz said it was the one thing we could agree upon, that was the one thing we could all agree upon was that weapons of mass destruction; that was a case that was made. Every single element of that argument proved baseless, proved false.
So it is understandable that people who voted and supported this president whether natural voters or in the Congress of the United States was a sense of first, curiosity, anger, betrayal, fury. Call it what you want. There's a reaction to that. How did we get into this war?
JIM LEHRER: Why is the reaction now, Rich? Where's the chicken and where's the egg in this? This happened a long time ago. We've had presidential elections since all of this happened. Why now?
RICHARD LOWRY: As Mark pointed out, the charge has really begun to take and to really hurt Bush and Democrats and liberals have been making this case for going on two years and it's turned out to be extremely corrosive and to be undermining the president's reputation for integrity and honesty.
If he loses that, it's going to undermine, you know, everything else he tries to do as well. So the administration is finally more aggressively pushing back on this. And I think they have a pretty good case to make because I disagree with Mark; the case may have been wrong but it wasn't baseless. And the consensus of the US Intelligence and other intelligence agencies around the world was that Saddam had these programs still going and in defiance of U.N. resolutions.
And even some of the more controversial things, Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's chief of staff has been going around lately complaining about Dick Cheney running the government with a cabal - you know -- points out the aluminum tubes. The State Department dissented on the notorious aluminum tubes and said they're probably not for a nuclear program, but then he explains the French came over and said, look, we've tested these things; we think they are for a nuclear program and the State Department dissented on a lot of the nuclear stuff but it was there on the chem and bio.
So there's a reason why the administration was saying all these things, and then many Democrats were saying the same thing because they were all looking at the same body of intelligence.
Accusation of misleading public on WMDs
JIM LEHRER: So you agree what the president says and Dan Bartlett has supported him in saying that there's a dishonest debate going on right now?
RICHARD LOWRY: You can make many criticisms of the war, not enough troops -- all the rest of it. But the idea that the Bush officials deliberately lied about Saddam's WMD I think is totally off base.
JIM LEHRER: But you suggest, Mark, whether or not it is off base or not, the American people now believe that.
MARK SHIELDS: Jim, they believe it. And the question is, Jim, were the US officials, every one of them fooled by bad intelligence, I mean, the Senate Intelligence Committee the president referred to said that some of the foreign intelligence was fabricated and that the stuff they relied upon was dubious, at best. So were they, or was the deliberate hyping going on?
And the question, I think, rises to an important urgent level when you say the decision to go to war, there is no more important decision made. And was it made recklessly, negligent in doing it? Did they make sure that everything was in place? Or did they rush to war? And I don't think there's any question now -- you can argue it -- there was a rush to war.
JIM LEHRER: Rich, back to the president's actions today, I mean, this was quite a departure for him. I mean he is really hot under the collar about this and as you say he is pushing back. Is that going to work?
RICHARD LOWRY: We'll see. What I liked about the speech is he has seemed so understandably, I think, beaten down and off key, recently. If nothing else this was feisty and showed some fight to him. You know, that doesn't obviously bring him all the way back, or even part of the way back, but it is a good sign, I think.
Analysis of president's speech
JIM LEHRER: What do you think of the speech itself, Mark?
MARK SHIELDS: I thought, I thought there were hints in there that dissent was disloyalty, there's no question about it and it was an attempt to stifle debate. But I think -
JIM LEHRER: I mean, when he said this gives comfort to the enemy?
MARK SHIELDS: Comfort to the enemy. I mean, that's a phrase that should never appear just like as we learned in the most recent campaign Hitler should never appear in any discussion.
JIM LEHRER: What do you think about that? Is that over the line when you say dissent and when you criticize me, you give comfort to the enemy?
RICHARD LOWRY: I think it is proper to try to put barriers around the debate and say if you are saying we went to war based on a lie, you are telling all our troops they are fighting and dying on a lie, that, I don't think, is -- that's not an above board argument, and I don't think the Democratic Party should be swinging behind that argument.
MARK SHIELDS: The factual case that was made for going to war was defective. I say it was baseless.
RICHARD LOWRY: It was defective.
MARK SHIELDS: It was baseless. I mean, he had none of the things that were based upon, the president based his case upon he is a threat to the United States of America. There was - certainly there were illusions in some circles creating this democratic Middle East, but that was the reason that we sent American troops and put Americans at peril.
RICHARD LOWRY: Every major Democrat in the Senate, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, they all voted to authorize the war. If the intelligence were entirely baseless, they would have noticed. It is not as though they take George Bush's word for everything.
MARK SHIELDS: There is a presumption -- and I am not defending -- each of them can make his own case -- John Kerry has already explained his vote later - perhaps too late now. He wished this debate were going on now. Jay Rockefeller, the vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, has said knowing what he knows now he would not have gone. There are a lot of Democrats who'd vote against it.
But there's always the presumption that the president, who is briefed every single day by the director of central intelligence, who has access to information that no member of Congress has, knows better.
Message to troops
JIM LEHRER: Let me ask you, Mark, you're very sensitive to this, this is Veteran's Day -- you are a veteran yourself -- and the president is making the case not only giving comfort to the enemy but it's very difficult for a trooper on the ground, whether he be a US Marine or member of the United States Army and being told by his or her politicians, hey, you are over there for reasons that were not legit. No matter whether they are right or wrong or whatever, what do you think about that?
MARK SHIELDS: I think, this is a family show, so I won't say it, Jim. I think that it is fair to say that there is nobody in uniform on the ground who is hanging on the split infinitives of George W. Bush to say they are fighting -- they are fighting because they believe in what they are doing and fighting for the people next to them; they're fighting for their unit. That's what they are fighting for. That's what Americans have always fought for.
We can cast this in some other terms, in some grandiose. They're not listening to debate here. That has nothing to do with it.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that, Rich?
RICHARD LOWRY: No. I think if you have Democrats saying the war was based on a lie, that goes too far.
Mark, you are right. The president gets a briefing from the CIA director every day. What did the CIA director tell him - that the intelligence was a slam dunk. It wasn't baseless.
You are confusing, if we knew what we know now, that's one point to make. It is totally fair to say if we knew that he didn't have weapons of mass destruction and what we know now we wouldn't have gone in.
But we only know that because we went in. So it wasn't baseless. There's good reason to make the worst assumptions about Saddam Hussein.
Local election results
JIM LEHRER: Let me move this on and ask you, Mark, if the results of the election on Tuesday, are any way related to the debate the two of you are having and the president has pushed back on today?
MARK SHIELDS: Certainly, I think the president spoke today because of those plummeting poll numbers, especially in his honesty, handling of the war and confidence in the war and there's no question. There's one race - I mean, there's at least one race, Jim, you can point to, as very few people have, and that's the mayor's race in St. Paul: Two Democrats running for mayor of St. Paul, Randy Kelly and the Democratic incumbent, no Democrat and no incumbent defeated in 40 years in city hall in St. Paul, Minnesota; he lost 69-31 for one reason: In November of 2004 he endorsed George W. Bush. So that is one. I mean, there's no question about it.
I think there's a dispiritedness in the Republican ranks that -- John Sununu, George Bush's former chief of staff, once said: Remember the ultimate truth of politics: We are all in this alone. And after these numbers come out, believe me, the Republicans are scurrying.
JIM LEHRER: Is that the message, Rich? Do you read them the same way?
RICHARD LOWRY: Well, I think with the exception of the race up there in Minnesota, I am fairly confident that all these results would have been the same absent President Bush or even if President Bush had 50 percent approval rating.
And the only one that would be close, even a close question would be Virginia, and you had a Republican candidate, Kilgore who ran on the death penalty, which is an out of date issue that has no connection with people now. It might have been worked if it were 1993, but it is not anymore. The fundamental factor, though, in the race was the Democratic governor, Mark Warner, the incumbent, had a 70 percent approval rating.
And any time you have a Virginia governor with 70 percent approval rating, his designated successor wins. It happened with Chuck Robb in the 80's, George Allen in the 90's, and again this time around.
JIM LEHRER: So the Republicans should not be sad about this, or concerned --
RICHARD LOWRY: They should definitely be sad, but, look, it's not necessarily predictive but it's not a good sign. And if you put it together with a lot of other things that are going on, then it becomes very worrisome because if Republicans have another year like this one, they are truly in danger of losing Congress. And if they do lose Congress, this is what the prelude will feel like.
You have corruption scandals, you have an unpopular war. You have a weak president. You have what appears to be intellectual exhaustion; you put all those things together and there shouldn't be panic in the Republican ranks but there certainly should be a sense of urgency about trying to turn this around.
MARK SHIELDS: I hope Howard Dean heard that. That's better than anything I've heard from the Democratic National Committee in weeks. But, no, Jim, I think --
JIM LEHRER: Do you want to edit anything to that?
RICHARD LOWRY: Revise it.
MARK SHIELDS: Intellectual exhaustion and moral depravity, I think just about sums it up. But Rich is right in this respect, Jim. The war, which was a popular and helpful factor in the election of 2002, for Republicans, putting the Democrats very much on the defensive and that was the vote to go to war -- remember, Max Cleland in Georgia being defeated.
And 2006 it will not be unless, in fact, the president does pull out troops and there is some sense that we have accomplished our goal or whatever but I don't think there's any question. You look at those numbers and I do think that Mark Warner deserves enormous credit, the governor of Virginia. Not only that, but he raised taxes in Virginia and lived to have a 75 percent approval rating which is totally violative of all conservative ideology and theology and Tim Kaine deserves --
JIM LEHRER: He won. He was the lieutenant governor.
MARK SHIELDS: Well, he did something that no Democrat really has done nationally except Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and that was he talked openly and comfortably about his religious faith.
JIM LEHRER: He is a Roman Catholic.
MARK SHIELDS: He is a Roman Catholic; he talked about his faith and formed his values on the death penalty and on abortion. But they took an oath as governor and would take an oath to uphold the law. And somehow it made him very comfortable and congenial with voters not of his religion and not necessarily of his political philosophy.
JIM LEHRER: A few seconds. Do you want to add anything to that?
RICHARD LOWRY: Well, I think the reason Warner got away with tax cuts is because Republicans -- sorry tax increases. It's sort of reflexively -- the Pavlov thing -- the tax increase, is because the Republicans in the legislature down there split on that and gave him cover and it really muddied up the tax issue for Republicans and also gave Warner an opportunity to have an accomplishment where he hadn't had one before.
JIM LEHRER: We have to go. Thank you both very much.
posted by professor rat at 2:51 AM
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