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January 16, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - January 16

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN BARACK OBAMA (D), ILLINOIS: I certainly did not expect to find myself in this position a year ago. As I've spoken to many of you in my travels across the states these past months, I've read your e-mails and read your letters. I've been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: And so, Barack Obama -- Barack Hussein Obama, has decided that he will have an exploratory committee and indeed that exploratory committee's website is where that video, that you just saw a little piece of, came from. So, at least for the moment, he's in and he will get another bite at the apple, one presumes, when he makes an official announcement. But I think it's fair to say that he's a candidate.

Some thoughts from Fred Barnes, executive editor of the Weekly Standard; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call; and Mara Liasson, national political correspondent of National Public Radio -- FOX NEWS contributors all.

So, Mara, if he's in, he talks about a new politics. I have to say that I've been around long enough to know that I've -- you hear new politics heralded and proclaimed by politicians in the presidential season with some regularity. It is not clear to me that we have a new politics or anybody's ever been able to bring us one. What is he talking about?

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Well, his whole message is really his political style and his persona. It's not a set up specific positions on issues. He talks a lot about bridging divides and overcoming partisanship and getting over the kind of partisan bickering and gridlock and mudslinging that voters hate. And he seems to be the perfect person to represent that desire on the part of voters.

I think he can only go so far with that kind of message before he puts some meat on the bones and apparently on February 10, when he makes the formal announcement in Springfield, Illinois, the home of Abraham Lincoln, among others, he will start doing that.

But I think that he has become this vessel, for a lot of people in the Democratic Party, who believe that No. 1, he's charismatic, he's magnetic, he's post-partisan, he seems to transcend all sorts of divisions, including racial ones. He has a very compelling personal story -- white mom from Kansas, black father from Kenya.

But I think at some point he's going to become -- I won't say an ordinary candidate, but he will start coming down to earth and I think the process is starting right now.

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Yeah, I mean, he said that it's not the magnitude of our problems that bothers me know most, it's the smallness of our politics and that's true except that the magnitude of our problems is quite large. And he's going to have to deal with them and he's going to have to show that there's some "there" there...

HUME: Can we identify, Mort, from the votes he's taken, the positions that he's taken something new about him from an ordinary garden variety Democrat, sort of liberal Democrat?

KONDRACKE: No, frankly, not that I can see. I mean, as Mara says, it's mainly in the manner, rather than the substance so far. And, you know, if for somebody has inexperienced as he has it seems to me that he's got to come up with something beyond the ordinary Democratic positions and also to demonstrate that he can bridge all of these gaps on a policy basis. It's not just enough to be nice. You've got to have -- you've got to be able to form -- show that you can form a consensus that...

HUME: Do we know anything about what he would like to do to try to combat the threat of terrorism, for example?

KONDRACKE: Not that I've seen. I mean, he's...

HUME: I mean, he -- look, he is a very attractive guy.

KONDRACKE: Right.

HUME: There's no doubt about that. He's a very likable guy.

KONDRACKE: Right.

HUME: You kind of can't help but like him.

KONDRACKE: Right. That's it. It's a meat on the bones question. And it's a -- then you've got to factor in the experience, as well. I mean, he's a guy who looks like he's thinks that everyday is casual Friday, you know, and whether in the age of terrorism, people are going to take that seriously. You know, I don't know. He looks awful young.

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: Well he is. What is he, early 40's and, you know, he -- we think of young people, who -- relatively young presidents who have been elected -- Bill Clinton was pretty young, but he'd had 12 years as governor of Arkansas. And as governor of Arkansas, it's a small state, but he had played a big part in national Democratic Party Democratic politics. Remember he was a head of the Democratic Leadership Council.

You think of John F. Kennedy, well he'd been the House for, what, six years and in the Senate for eight years -- had been around for a long time. And Barack Obama has been, what, two years in the Senate and I'm sure he learned some great lessons in the Illinois legislature, as well, where he was, what, four, six years, something like that.

LIASSON: Eight.

BARNES: But, he is remarkably inexperienced, he has a, so far as I know, is a totally conventional liberal and I'm still -- not only am I waiting for something unorthodox there, but I'm waiting to find out which divide he has ever bridged. When has he been...

LIASSON: Look, wait, in fairness...

(CROSSTALK)

BARNES: Wait. He's been in politics a long time. Why does he have...

HUME: Wait, wait, wait, what politics?

LIASSON: In fairness, his reputation in the Illinois state legislature was at a consensus builder, someone who took, kind of uniformly progressive positions on things, but did work across the aisles and did hammer out compromises.

BARNES: Does that make...

LIASSON: But, I agree there's only two years in the Senate and he's sponsoring this ethics bill with Tom Coburn, which is about...

BARNES: Well, a good place to start might be on Iraq. Maybe -- I mean, that's the big divide right now in the country, and in the House and the Senate is over Iraq. And he's taken a rather extreme position and what we have to do now is stop the president. You know, it's not find some middle ground with the president, get together with him and Republicans, it's to stop the president. That's not a divided bridge.

HUME: Next up with a panel, Scooter Libby and his trial in the Valerie Plame CIA leak matter. Stay tuned for more with the all-stars after a break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DICK CHENEY, U.S. VICE PRESIDENT: I have strong feelings on the subject. I am likely to be a witness in this trial. It would be inappropriate for me, at this point, shortly before the trial begins, to enter into a public dialogue with you about my views on positions.

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS SUNDAY: But there's nothing that you have heard, nothing that you have read that shakes your confidence in Scooter Libby's integrity?

CHENEY: That's correct.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, the issue, of course is, Scooter Libby is charged with perjury by a special prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, in the case involving the leak of Valerie Plame's name and CIA role to the news media. Libby, of course, is not charged with being the leaker, although at one point, Fitzgerald claimed, falsely, it seems, that Libby was indeed the first person to talk to the press about it. That has since been pretty well disproved. And he has said a number of other things. And he would like the trial to be conducted narrowly on the question on whether when Libby was asked questions about whom he spoke and what was said and how he found out about the Plame identity, he told the truth.

The jury selection began today. A couple jurors were excused because they were so obviously biased against the administration that it believed they couldn't be impartial.

But what about this case? What about the vice president's express of confidence in Libby? Where is all this likely to end? And how will this be remembered?

KONDRACKE: Well, it's not going to be conducted narrowly, apparently. The -- one of Scooter Libby's lawyer, Ted Wells, is saying that Wilson -- Joe Wilson, who was the subject of the allegedly, the victim of the attack, his wife Valerie Plame was...

HUME: Collateral damage?

KONDRACKE: Her identity was disclosed. But that Wilson's statements that Bush lied about the war are going to be the essence of this case. That they're going to get to this and that Wilson is going to be a major factor in the case to see whether he was telling the truth or...

HUME: We'll he's been called to testify and is resisting, as Wilson.

KONDRACKE: Well, so it's not going to be a narrow thing of did...

HUME: Well, if the judge allows it.

KONDRACKE: Well, I guess that's the case.

HUME: Well, what about the strength of the case on the overall -- Mort.

KONDRACKE: You know, it seems to me that it's farfetched. That since he didn't -- he wasn't the originator of the leak that caused the hubbub about all this and it's a question of whether he mislead FBI agents and the grand jury about when he learned and who he told under what circumstances, that it's kind of a weak case. But you don't know what a jury is going to -- is going to believe.

And, furthermore, how often, and how many times Libby actually told various people things that were false. I mean, we know that his original story was that he heard this from Tim Russert and passed it along as a rumor to other people. If it can be shown by Fitzgerald that he was pedaling this story over and over and over again, then...

HUME: Even though we know he wasn't the leaker who got it printed?

KONDRACKE: Right.

LIASSON: Right, because Fitzgerald started out kind of suggesting that the crime, and certainly that was the referral that the CIA made that the crime was outing her. And if you out someone with the intention to do it, someone who's a covert operative that is a crime. We found out later, after much...

HUME: First of all there was a question about whether it was done by whoever did it, whether it was in a criminal way and then it turned out, of course, that he wasn't the one who did it.

LIASSON: Right. We did find out who finally did it...

HUME: Yeah, Richard Armitage.

LIASSON: It was Robert Novak's source, it was Richard Armitage. Now, as often happens in these cases, what's kind of left is the cover-up, not the crime. In this case it's potential alleged perjury by Scooter Libby and he's going to claim, I understand, that he was busy, he kind of forget what he had said, but he didn't intentionally try to mislead or lie.

BARNES: Yeah, now look, it's very hard to prove perjury because you have to prove what was in somebody's mind when he said that. That he was willfully lying and not just forgetting who he had talked to. I think -- and this may sound unfair to Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, here, but this sounds more and more like the Duke case. You have a prosecutor who knew all along who the first leaker was of Valerie Plame's name, it was Richard Armitage. And, look, his job was to find out who leaked it, whether that was a crime or not. And the case went on, month and month and months after that when he knew who the real leaker was.

And secondly, I mean, in other words, the case had collapsed, but he won't let go. Like Nifong wouldn't in the Duke case and he won't, here...

HUME: And he finally got somebody on something.

BARNES: And he nailed him on something that is almost -- well it's not impossible, very difficult to prove.

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