NBC "Meet the Press" - Transcript: Hillary Clinton and the 2016 Presidential Election
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ANNOUNCER: MEET THE PRESS continues with our political roundtable. Joining us this morning, Robert Gibbs, Rich Lowry, Donna Edwards and Chuck Todd.
GREGORY: Welcome to all of you. This is the middle of August, but there's a lot of politics going on, and we want to get to a lot of it. From Hillary Clinton to the RNC, the Republican Party, Chris Christie, a lot to chew on. Let's start with Hillary Clinton, Chuck Todd. She is talking about voting rights on Monday, a series of speeches. She is laying the groundwork for how she comes up with a message. Listen to a part of her speech.
(Videotape; American Bar Association, Monday)
MS. HILLARY CLINTON: Anyone who says that racial discrimination is no longer a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.
(End videotape)
MR. CHUCK TODD (Political Director, NBC News/Chief White House Correspondent, NBC News): I am surprised in this first year that she is getting political this quickly
GREGORY: Really?
MR. TODD: and laying the groundwork this quickly. I really thought she was going to take-- you have sky-high bipartisan approval ratings. You come off foreign policy. It's the least political of the offices are hold. Why not hold on to that as long as you can? The thing that has surprised me by this is that she has done nothing to tamp down this sort of enthusiasm for her, understandably, and now she is embracing it by giving these series of speeches. It-- it means she's going to become political sooner. And with that comes some negatives. It means you're going to get scrutiny, like we have seen this week of the Clinton Foundation. You are going to get dings for things that Terry McAuliffe is doing in the Virginia governor's race, where in-- in the minute you stop being above the fray, and that's the decision she's made. You are then starting the presidential campaign, I think a lot sooner, and at some point, they're going to look back and go, ooh, did we-- should we really have started this soon, that-- that is the one thing about this entire sort of run-up here that surprises me.
GREGORY: Rich Lowry, you were watching, you didn't like what you saw. You wrote about it in Politico. And this was the headline of your column, Hillary's race card, "Madam Secretary hasn't missed a beat," you write, "She knows that the calling card of Democrats in the Barack Obama era is a polarizing politics that seeks to fire up minority voters by stirring fears of fire hoses and police dogs. Its basic vocabulary is imputations of racism; its evidently (sic) standard is low and dishonest; and its ethic is whatever works -- so long as it stirs fear, anger and resentment. Get ready for Hope and Change 2.0."
MR. RICH LOWRY (Editor, National Review): Well, look, she's going to a formidable front-runner if she runs but, as Robert can tell us, she's been a formidable front-runner before. And I think one of the big downsides of her is that as a politician she's not really a natural so she'll be vulnerable again to someone potentially creating a-- a prairie fry-- fire on the left so she's fighting the last war here. She wants to shore up the left, I think, as soon as possible so she, you know, didn't, as you might expect a former secretary of state, to give a speech about Egypt when it's descending into the abyss. It was about voter laws. And these voter ID laws, depending on how-- how you count, about 30 states have them. They're popular across the board. The Washington Post poll not too long ago said more than 60 percent of blacks and Latinos support these laws. They've been upheld by the Supreme Court six to three by a very liberal justice so I think the case against them is extremely weak and inherently demagogic.
GREGORY: Congresswoman, what do you think?
REP. DONNA EDWARDS (D-MD): Well, I mean, I think that this comes on-- her speech comes on the heels of the Supreme Court's action striking down part of the Voting Rights Act. And so it's not a surprise that she would give an important policy speech on something like that. And also I think she's going to really dig her heels in at the foundation, continuing the work that she did at the-- did part-- at the State Department on women and girls and lifting up the voices of women and girls in the United States and around the world.
GREGORY: There is a question, Robert Gibbs, that I have, which is how does Hillary Clinton position herself, vis-à-vis Barack Obama? She wants a coalition that he has built her in 2012. She wants that certainly to be her coalition in 2016, but the legacy of Obama could both help and hurt her. How does she distinguish herself and have room to run?
MR. ROBERT GIBBS (White House Press Secretary (2009-2011)/NBC News Political Contributor): Well, she also has to distinguish herself from her husband, too, right?
GREGORY: You're right.
MR. GIBBS: We-- we-- if her campaign becomes an extension really of either her husband's term or the current president's term, it's not necessarily a good deal for her. I completely agree with Chuck. I, as a strategist, am fairly floored that she has decided to enter the public fray so quickly. She could do the foundation work, she could do issue work, she could build the campaign, she could develop a message without having to be so far out front there. And-- and, you know, Chuck talks about strong bipartisan approval ratings, those will whittle quite quickly as she steps further and further
(Cross talk)
MR. TODD: And by the way, then we're going to get cheap political stories that will show up in certain political news sites that say, oh, look, Hillary Clinton's ratings are falling, and it's simply because Republicans and independents who are Republican leaning will go away as she becomes more partisan.
MR. GIBBS: I'm just-- well, I'm just surprised that she doesn't look at the primary process as one that has shortened for her as being a very good thing. Remember, Bill Clinton got into, because we ran primaries very late in-- in the earlier "90s, you know, he gets in in the fall of 1991 for a 1992 election, and I would have thought that would have-- would be the path she would more appropriately should.
MR. LOWRY: And-- and she-- and she basically has the power, right
MR. GIBBS: Absolutely.
MR. LOWRY: to freeze
MR. TODD: She actually can do this.
MR. LOWRY: that race for a long time
MR. TODD: Not many front-runners have that power.
MR. LOWRY: Exactly.
GREGORY: So it's interesting. Newt Gingrich sat in your chair, Robert, here on this program not long ago and said jeez, I don't know if Republicans have anybody who can really take on Hillary Clinton. This week, changing his tune a little bit on Wednesday. He said, you know, the coronation's not starting now. Here's what he said.
(Videotape; Wednesday)
NEWT GINGRICH (Former Speaker of the House (R-GA)): She's proven an ability to lose so I want to just start and say it's a long way from here to her coronation. And if she moves to the left in these speeches in order to try to block a primary opponent, she will be increasingly isolating herself from the American people. So I'm-- I'm not at all convinced what the choice will be by 2016.
(End videotape)
GREGORY: What do you say, Rich?
MR. LOWRY: Well, Republicans aren't going to have anyone with this kind of resume, but I think although Hillary has quite the resume, I'm not sure she has much substantive accomplishment to back it up, certainly as secretary of state. So, what Republicans have will be a lot of fresh faces, a lot of fresh voices about the direction of the party, and it really shaping up to be the inverse of what we may see on the democratic side, where you have a huge front-runner, whereas Republicans for the first time in recent memory won't have that next-in-line front-runner looming over the rest of the field.
REP. EDWARDS: But when you
GREGORY: Donna Edwards, I want to come back to this point of do Americans-- specifically democratic voters, do they want to see a third Obama term or would they like to see the restoration of the Bill Clinton era?
REP. EDWARDS: Well, I think among, you know, the electorate, President Obama's really popular among Democrats. And so, you know, there's no harm in that, but we didn't mind President Clinton either. And so, I think Democrats really don't really have a problem here. It's Republicans who have the problem. And really, for Hillary Clinton, you know, the fact is, she doesn't need to shore up her base from a fight from the left. She will win the nomination if she chooses to run. I really do believe that, and I think Democrats want to coalesce around a candidate early to kind of put this aside.
MR. LOWRY: By the way
MR. GIBBS: Also, that-- that makes why she's getting involved so much, quite frankly, more and more curious, because she's-- she is the default candidate and she's probably more the default candidate than she was in 2008 because there's not an issue like Iraq that separates her. And if she-- if she has that ability, I do think-- like I said, I think it is very surprising that she's decided to step back into the ring so early.
MR. TODD: David, there is one other unintended consequence here and I don't think she is intending. The more-- there is sort of the split inside the Democratic Party, who's the leader of the Democratic Party right now? Who's the future of the Democratic Party and the more she talks out there, the more you start seeing a gravitational pull back towards Hillary. This hurts the current president of the United States as trying to be leader of the Democratic Party, as trying to move the party as he gets ready for a bunch of fall fights. You know, lame duck status happens in two phases, right? The first phase is lame duck status in Washington between the presidency and the White House. And then there's a second phase of lame duck status inside your own party. Her coming out early I think speeds up that lame duck process of Barack Obama inside the Democratic Party, and that's something if I'm sitting in the White House
GREGORY: You don't like so much.
MR. TODD: I-- I don't like so much. You don't have to start that so quickly.
GREGORY: Let me go to a break here and let's come back and talk about the Republicans. They were meeting up in Boston this week, the RNC. Interesting reporting from Jonathan Martin in The New York Times this morning about how Chris Christie is positioning himself to run and have broader repeal. We'll talk about that with the roundtable, right after this.
(Announcements)
GREGORY: We're back this morning with Sunday Inspiration, a reminder that not all news is bad news, a symbolic step on Boston's road to recovery. The last business to reopen on Boston's famous Boylston Street, the site of the April 15th marathon bombings. The second bomb in the attack that killed three and injured hundreds more exploded outside the front door of the Forum Restaurant. In the chaos that followed, the employees sprung to action and were widely praised for their response.
(Videotape)
MAN #1: Are you heroes?
MAN #2: No.
WOMAN: No.
MAN #3: You know, like, some people have asked-- said what we did was heroic. And the way I look at it was, we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, but we did the right thing.
(End videotape)
GREGORY: Four months later, after being boarded up and remodeled, the Forum reopened Friday for dinner, a true sign of Boston strong.
We're back in sixty seconds with our political roundtable.
(Announcements)
GREGORY: We're back with the roundtable talking 2016 politics in the heat of August here. The Republicans now, very interesting this week, Chris Christie making a lot of noise, the RNC meeting in Boston talking about debates. Here was Chris Christie addressing the RNC meeting on Thursday, sounding very much like a candidate when he said, "I think we have some folks who believe that our job is to be college professors " Rand Paul I think is who he meant. "For our ideas to matter, we have to win, because if we don't win, we don't govern. If we don't govern, all we do is shout into the wind. And so I am going to do anything I need to do to win." Rich Lowry, also Jonathan Martin of The New York Times here saying this morning that you see from Christie something close to what George W. Bush did in 1998, shoring up support among Hispanics, African-Americans, even as he was seeking re-election in Texas in "98, trying to get the broader appeal for the party. It worked for him in 2000.
MR. LOWRY: Yeah. Well, this-- this debate with Rand Paul I think is a little sterile because you have the Rand Paul camp saying the party needs principles.
GREGORY: Yeah.
MR. LOWRY: Well, of course it does, because any party without principles is rudderless and passive. And you have Chris Christie saying you need power and a compelling governing agenda. Well, of course you do because that's the only way to affect your principles. So it's not either/or. It's both. And I think what Christie is after here is exactly the George W. Bush model saying my huge reelection is a model for what I can do in a general election and the presidential race and what he would hope to do is cement that establishment slot in the primary and hope he's facing a divided field on the right. And if history is any guide, that's a pretty good way to win a Republican nomination.
GREGORY: Robert Gibbs.
MR. GIBBS: And-- and the pathway may have gotten a little clearer because the RNC did a very savvy thing this week, right? First of all, they're working the refs on these Hillary documentaries and Hillary specials, right? Reince Priebus is just working the refs so that when this
GREGORY: The RNC
MR. GIBBS: ...when the script goes into production, somebody will say make this scene tougher. The second thing he's doing is he's cutting down markedly on the number of debates, which became the Roman coliseum of Republican politics last time, which are, you know, populated in huge auditoriums where activists want more and more and more. And it becomes you run for president in order to get a radio talk show when you don't win the nomination. If those things fall a bit by the wayside, you've moderated the process a bit, the establishment candidates have more control over this. Probably a better week for Chris Christie than it was for Ted Cruz or Rand Paul.
GREGORY: So here-- we were looking at history this week, going back to Ronald Reagan and so many Republicans do, and looking at his speech at the convention, July of 1980-- and this is part of what Reagan said then.
(Videotape; July 17, 1980)
PRESIDENT RONALD REAGAN: This convention has shown to all America a party united with positive programs for solving the nation's problems, a party ready to build a new consensus with all those across the land who share a community of values embodied in these words--family, work, neighborhood, peace and freedom.
(End videotape)
GREGORY: Chuck Todd, who is the Republican at this point who embodies that or embodies a newer version of it?
MR. TODD: Don't forget that version of Ronald Reagan was a modified version because the guy who sort of was wanting to burn down the party a little bit lost in "76, close, but in a very divisive-- when you basically had the establishment versus the conservatives, and he ran a more uniting campaign, moderated himself a little bit. Look, Christie on paper, as a general election candidate, you sit there and you say, okay, that's probably the best person they could do to go win a couple of purple states. Like, who can go in there and win Florida? Who can go in there and win Iowa or Michigan, right? Who can connect with the working-class Democrats? Well maybe, you know, the overweight guy from New Jersey, and I mean that as-- you know no, it makes him, you know, it makes seem less sterile. Mitt Romney was this scripted type businessman who had this regimen and he jogged every morning. Chris Christie seems like an everyman and particularly against a political dynasty if you're going up there. The problem is, how does he get through this primary process? Because conservatives are going to argue, you know what, Bush was a compromise, McCain was a compromise, Romney was a compromise. We've gone with the establishment or Bob-- we can keep going back, Bob Dole four straight times. What's it really done for the Republican Party? Is it in a better place today than it was back during the Reagan era? And I think that that's going to be the real fight inside the party. And Chris Christie has to figure out, how does he prove that he's conservative enough and it's going to be tough.
GREGORY: Congresswoman, as you look as a Democrat on the outside, you don't have the rooting interests, but how formidable do you look at the Republican Party as being right now?
REP. EDWARDS: Well, I don't see the pathway for Chris Christie, given especially what Chuck has really outlined. And the problem for Republicans is not kind of where they say what they say and how many venues they have to say it, it's what they're saying. And when what they're saying is against immigrants and women and African-American teenagers, it's something that just isn't going to go for the broader swath of those independent voters and-- and-- and the country. So, I don't really see the pathway for Chris Christie.
MR. GIBBS: I will say, I think one of the most important speeches at the RNC this week was when Newt Gingrich challenged the party not to simply be against Obamacare but have positive policy ideas. And you see that in the clip from Reagan. And when you-- and Rich talked a little bit about this sort of, you know, the-- the debates between sort of Rand Paul and Chris Christie. You will see this race form when somebody begins to outline a hopeful, optimistic, positive governing vision for where they want to take both the party and the country. That, I think, is the Reagan optimism that a Republican candidate needs. Everyone knows what they're against.
MR. LOWRY: And Newt was absolutely right about that. It's not enough to oppose Obamacare. Now, Republicans should oppose Obamacare. It's falling apart in front of our eyes. We're seeing rate increases, even though the president is out there every day saying health insurance is going to be cheaper for everyone. But the party needs an agenda where they can say this is how we want to help people get health insurance that's affordable, that's renewable, that's going to be for them-- there for them when they're sick.
REP. EDWARDS: And they're not going to get any help in the Congress because it's a Congress that has intentionally not put forward any kind of positive policy agenda.
GREGORY: Right.
MR. GIBBS: Well, they-- they need-- they quite frankly need a nominee that's not based on Republicans in Congress. They don't need an obstructionist agenda. They need some sort of positive agenda, and I think that's why there was some power in what Newt Gingrich said.
GREGORY: So, we're talking about the Republican Party. We're coming up on an anniversary that is going to give the president an opportunity to highlight some presidential leadership moments. We're talking about the anniversary of the march on Washington coming up on August 28th. That's where Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., of course, made his, I Have a Dream speech. Fifty years ago next Sunday, King appeared on this very program. Here is some of what he had to say.
(Videotape; August 25, 1963)
DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: I think that we must face the fact that in reality, you cannot have economic and political equality without having some form of social equality. I think this is inevitable, and I don't think our society will rise to its full maturity until we come to see that men are made to live together as brothers and that we can have genuine inter-group, inter-personal living and still be in the kind of society which we all long to achieve.
(End videotape)
GREGORY: Congresswoman, next Saturday, the 50th anniversary, President Obama going to recreate that moment, in effect, on the-- on the Washington Mall. How significant is it?
REP. EDWARDS: I think it's really significant when you think 50 years ago, and I think that, you know, Doctor King did have some vision that, you know, some day there might be an African-American in the White House, living that dream. And I think the president is going to speak to that. And most importantly, I think he's going to speak to economic inequality. He's done that a number of times over the last several weeks and months. And I think that the speech in-- in Washington is actually going to give him an-- him an opportunity to follow up on the Doctor King dream, saying it's social equality. We've had, you know, problems around race relations, but it's about economic inequality.
GREGORY: Rich Lowry, does he use any part of this as a way to challenge Republicans to try to jumpstart something in his second term on in-- inequality, on the economy?
MR. LOWRY: I doubt it. And it would sort of be an inappropriate forum for that I-- I would think. And what I take away from the march on the Washington, you know, Abraham Lincoln referred to the declaration of independence as this electric cord going throughout all American history and you had those marchers grabbing on to that chord and using the truth to the declaration to change the country and make it a more just place.
GREGORY: Interesting. Robert Gibbs.
MR. GIBBS: Well, look, obviously, it will be a special moment, and I think, you know, we look back 50 years and see how much the country has changed, how much it still has to come, but understanding the role that Martin Luther King played, as TIME magazine pointed out this week, is probably one of the founding fathers of modern America.
MR. TODD: John Lewis-- John Lewis' speech, right, the sole living speaker from--
GREGORY: John Lewis is going to be on this program next week, a special problem, a special edition of MEET THE PRESS as we mark that 50th anniversary. Thank you all very much for the discussion this morning. That's all for today. We'll be back next week. If it's Sunday, it's MEET THE PRESS.
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