MSNBC "Hardball with Chris Matthews" - Transcript: Syria

Interview

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MATTHEWS: Wow. Congressman Richmond, thank you for joining us. I want to bring in Cedric Richmond right now from Louisiana.

Sir, thank you for coming to the show tonight. What do you think about this? You apparently just got a briefing with the Black Caucus. Is there movement toward the president`s position or not?

REP. CEDRIC RICHMOND (D), LOUISIANA: Well, I think there`s willingness to listen, and today we met with not only Susan Rice, but the president who laid out his case for why he thought action was need, why he came to Congress and the risk that it would be to the country, not on the short term, but the long term, if we didn`t have action. And I think there were some very poignant questions and some, of course, very different views of our options. And I think that everyone in the room prefers diplomacy first, and that was the goal just to assess where we were and to get his thoughts on what we needed to do.

MATTHEWS: Well, diplomacy means say no to the president this week. I mean, he wants an act of war. He wants to attack Syria and punish them for using chemical weapons. Is the caucus, are you certainly -- let me ask about you, are you for an attack on Syria to punish them?

RICHMOND: Well, I`m only for an attack on Syria as a last resort, and I am not sure that we`re there yet. But first it has to get through the Senate, which I`m not sure that anyone`s confident that it would. Another question is -- the other question is, why the rush? This is their twelfth attack using chemical weapons, so through attacks one through 11, we haven`t used force, then I don`t think there`s a rush to do it in the next day and the week, that we can take our time, try to build allies, wait for the U.N. inspectors to come back with proof that it was actually the Assad regime that used it, which I`m pretty sure that it was, but we don`t have to rush into this. And I think part of the president coming to Congress shows that there wasn`t a need to rush and that he`s trying to think it through. So, the unfortunate part about this, Chris, is that this is all going to boil down to trust, whether the people out there who oppose it trust their congressperson to make the right decision, whether we trust that the president has all the facts --

MATTHEWS: I agree.

RICHMOND: -- has all the plans, and that he only intends to do limited strikes and get us out of there. All of it`s a question of trust and part of it`s a question of just how it will play out and what Syria does. Now, the other thing that I`m probably confident in is the fact that I don`t think Syria has the capacity to respond to anything that we did, but that doesn`t mean we have to do it right now. So, I would say there were more questions in there from members than members having answers or opinions.

MATTHEWS: That`s good. Glad you came on, Congressman. Thank you. Let me go back to Jonathan Allen about the analysis. You know, it seems to me the hard left and the hard right always are spoken for. So, this president, as I said earlier in the show, is trying to build a coalition of the center-left and center-right. The problem is the center left and the center right don`t agree. As the congressman just said there, he wants a very limited action taken here if he`s going to support this thing. And yet, you have people like John McCain who say no, this is just the beginning. We`re going to go in for a dime, we`re going in for a dollar, we`re going to help the rebels.
How can you have both sides when they disagree -- centrally disagree over the middle, some more hawkish than the others -- how do you get them to agree on the same resolution?

ALLEN: I think it`s the problem that the White House is having with its messaging on what this strike`s going to be. You heard Secretary of State John Kerry today talk about it being unbelievably small, and then immediately, John McCain says that`s unbelievably unhelpful.

MATTHEWS: Yes, we`ve got to go.

Thank you. That`s what the problem is, you just nailed it. Thank you. Just reported the problem.

Thank you, Congressman Richmond, Cedric Richmond of Louisiana and Jonathan
Allen of "Politico."

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