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February 12, 2007

Special Report Roundtable - February 12

FOX News Special Report With Brit Hume

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We ended up launching a war that should have never been authorized and should have never been waged.

(APPLAUSE)

And to which we now have spent $40 billion and have seen over 3,000 lives of the bravest young Americans wasted.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, Barack Obama didn't have any trouble getting cheers for that line, although there was some boos from his critics, today, that it was a terrible thing to say, that the lives of all those Americans who have died in Iraq have been wasted. But he had some challenges to his view on Iraq, as did Hillary Clinton, over the weekend.

To talk about that now are 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.

Fred, first of all, the Obama comment, will that have some legs or will that likely be passed over as a...

FRED BARNES, WEEKLY STANDARD: You mean the word about American lives wasted?

HUME: Yeah.

BARNES: Yeah, I think, look, he said it, I think that's obviously what he meant, but he apologized quickly for it afterwards, after particularly Republicans jumped on him for it, so, well, it'll probably -- given the wonderful press he's been getting, I think it'll probably not have legs at all.

You know, I was interested in something else he said, he used over the weekend, that is the Lincoln analogy. The analogy with Abraham Lincoln where he said, Abraham -- he said first, you know, "no amount of American lives can resolve this civil war in Iraq." But he's frequently analogizing, I guess, himself to Lincoln. And then he said, through -- this about Lincoln, "Through his will and words he helped move a nation and free a people."

Well, the truth is Lincoln kept the Civil War going, he kept fighting. The slaves were freed because of a war that Lincoln did not give up on despite incredible pressure to do that to settle with the South, to forget about trying to get rid of slavery. The analogy that Obama uses, and this is my point, just plain doesn't work.

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: He -- I was struck by the same portion of the speech where he likens the Civil War to a civil rights struggle neglecting to mention 620,000 Americans died in that struggle. And, you know, it's as if you could do this by raising banners and marching down the street. You know, sometimes it requires sacrifice in order to achieve things.

But look, I think he made a wonderfully idealistic speech. His whole campaign is based on, you know, Americans being decent and all that, which is wonderful, and you know, he's got to bridges the gap. But he reminds me of another novice who ran for president, Jimmy Carter who said he was going to give the country a government as honest as the people, you know, and then proceeded to be a disaster in foreign policy in every possible way. And that raises -- the lack of experience raises the bar, I think, on Obama. He's got to prove that he can do all the stuff that he wants to do, that he's tough, that he knows what he's doing in foreign policy and domestic policy that he's got good ideas that really will bridge differences, and I haven't seen that yet.

MARA LIASSON, NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO: Yeah, and all of them are going to have to prove that, all of the candidates on the Democratic side and he's going to have ample opportunity to try.

I was on the trip with him this weekend, he -- I thought it was an incredible debut. He got big, big crowds in Iowa and all enthusiastic, and the war was his absolutely biggest applause line. It's not only his sharpest difference with Hillary Clinton, because he was against it from the beginning, he wasn't in the Senate to vote for it, she got peppered with questions in New Hampshire.

HUME: We saw that. In this position -- is it your sense that her position on the war is ultimately a potential -- has a potential to undo this candidacy with an alternative...

LIASSON: I don't know about undo. Right now, right now it's forcing her to run not the kind of campaign that I think she had originally hoped to. She wanted to run the campaign with a general election in mind, she's had to really ramp up her criticism and the sharpness and negativeness (ph) of her criticism about Bush, obviously, because she's under pressure from the anti-war base of her party. Where as Obama just reminds everyone, I was against this war from the beginning and he gets rapturous applause and he does say he has a plan for ending it and he said that the contrast between his position and the other candidates is very important. And he repeats all the time, "I had the judgment to know it was a mistake, they didn't."

HUME: Now, let me just as you one further question, Mara, you were out there. Did you have -- you can sometimes tell, you've been around a long time, you've seen a lot of these candidates, you can sometimes tell when a candidate is going to be a flash in the pan and when a candidate has response and really is sort of is sure on his feet and -- what did you think?

LIASSON: I don't think he's going to be a flash in the pan. That's not my sense. I mean, his celebrity has been so meteoric and it has been so phenomenal that people are asking, like, how can this be real? I think he's very intelligent, I think he's going to give a lot of policy speeches, we're going to find out not so much if he has experience, because we know how long he's been in government, but whether he has the depth of understanding of these issues, that's what he's going to show.

KONDRACKE: We were talking of the air and you were going to talk about the gaffe with the press, you know, where he sort of took off...

LIASSON: Oh, well you know, I don't know if it was a gaffe. What I thought was interesting was here's a guy who is getting absolutely fawning press coverage and unprompted he kind of lit into the press, the mainstream media, which is always a good tactic, but in this case he said because of this thread, this narrative that somehow I'm more style than substance and went on to defend himself, he's written these books with all of these -- that have sold a million copies that have all these specific ideas in them, he's given peaches, he has a plane, he's this that and the other thing, and that all the press wants to write about is how he looks in a swimsuit. I thought, gee, wait until they really write something bad about you. How are you going to react then?

BARNES: You know, Brit, I agree with Mara, he's not a flash in the pan and politicians running for presidential usually do not touch off this kind of excitement, they just don't. I mean, Ronald Reagan did, Bobby Kennedy did, Jack Kennedy did, I don't know, maybe there were others, I can't think of too many who did, so this is for real.

LIASSON: Yeah, it's for real.

HUME: Quickly -- Mort.

KONDRACKE: Yeah, I agree it's for real. Just that this point about lacking experience just comes back again, and I think that this is an example of it. It shows thin skin and thin skin usually doesn't carry a politician too well.

HUME: We'll be watching.

And when we come back we'll talk about Iran is doing in Iraq and the latest on that apparent deal with North Korea. Stay tuned.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN CHRIS DODD (D), CONNECTICUT: I am worried about Iran. And there's steps that can be taken, I think, to try and change the direction they seem to be heading in, but I'm very nervous about what the groundwork being laid here, as a premise for military action in Iran.

GEORGE W. BUSH, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: I guess my reaction to all the noise about, you know, he wants to go to war is -- first of all, I don't understand the tactics, and I guess I would say it's political. And on the other hand, I hope that the members of Congress, particularly now a position party, understand the grave danger of Iran having a nuclear weapon. Therefore, we all need to work together to solve the problem.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, that was a big the topic over the weekend, of course, with the Bush administration putting out information through the Pentagon to the effect that Iran has been pumping weapons into Iraq, and of course continuing concerns about Iran's nuclear program. We also have a development today in another area where the Bush administration has insisted on multilateral diplomacy, as opposed to unilateral diplomacy, and that is a tentative agreement reached with the North Koreans among six countries, to the -- which would start a process that could, if it al worked out, ultimately lead to North Korea abandoning its nuclear ambition.

So what about all this weltering issues that's swirling about Iran, North Korea, diplomacy, war -- what about it?

KONDRACKE: Well, my parent publication, The Economist of London, has as it's cover, "Next Stop Iran" with a B-52 bomber, you know, as though we're on our way, you know...

HUME: Newsweek maintains, by the way, on its cover that now there's now a hidden war going on with Iran. There it is, "The Hidden War with Iran" with Ahmadinejad looking rather appealing and George W. Bush looking like he's going to strangle you. No editorial comment intended by Newsweek, I'm sure.

KONDRACKE: Right. Well, the Economists is pretty sober and they say, you know, that there's a chance that they can't quantify that we could actually bomb before Bush leaves power. I don't think that's what's going on. I think that Bush is applying across a broad front, a lot of pressure, psychological pressure, military pressure, economic pressure, diplomatic pressure...

HUME: What sort of military pressure? The presence of the sixth fleets, you mean?

KONDRACKE: Yeah, increasing the number of ships and stuff like that. And also making these allegations, which are -- have merit on their own that the Iranians are killing Americans, in effect, in Iraq. All of that, I think it's designed to scare the Europeans into saying, hey, we better put sanctions on the Iranians, on their nuclear program...

HUME: Or else Bush will bomb them?

KONDRACKE: Or else Bush just might bomb them. And you know, and it's worked. That kind of pressure -- we have applied, maybe we have succeeded in applying coercive leverage on the North Koreans to get them to come to terms on nukes, which is great.

LIASSON: This is like a win-win situation. Bush -- if bush gets to use some diplomacy and threat of military action and get some movement on Iran and meanwhile the democrats get to say that he's going to invade another country and get all kinds of points for that, which -- I think that what the Democrats are raising is a specter that there'll be another Iraq, that we'll actually go in there to do regime change at the point of a gun. I don't think that that's going to happen.

You know, the charge with these weapons that they presented, the military did in Baghdad, on Sunday, yesterday, they were obvious built in Iran but the charge was very cautiously made. If you heard Tony Snow today, the White House press secretary, he was saying well, he wasn't saying that Ahmadinejad, the president, ordered these weapons to be sent, well, there were a lot of freelancers there, so...

HUME: No, he dismissed a freelancer. Tony Snow dismissed the idea of freelancers. He said, he didn't...

KONDRACKE: He said there's a lot of freelancing that goes on in the Iranian government.

BARNES: A lot of freelancing going on.

KONDRACKE: It was our military in the Baghdad that said that this was the highest level of the Iranian government.

BARNES: But the freelancers would be a part of the government, but they would be doing it on their own and not necessarily -- so it wasn't a - - and look, some of the other stuff is working, you know, the lack of investment. Iran has its own oil industry, and it's declining, and then they don't have the investment partly because the U.S. has put pressure on European banks, they don't have the money to invest in new refineries and so on, so the squeeze is beginning to work.

HUME: And what about -- what do you make of this -- very quickly, if you will -- what do you make of this new tentative deal with North Korea?

BARNES: Well, an interesting first step, but you know, trust but verify.

KONDRACKE: Exactly, and what happens to their six to eight bombs if they've got them? Do they get to keep them or do they have to give them up?

HUME: Tomorrow we'll be talking about an article that just appeared at the very moment about the Bush administration, utter failure of diplomacy in North Korea. Mara, your thought, quickly.

LIASSON: Yeah look, the Clinton administration made a deal with the North Koreans and it turned out to be bogus and this one, obviously we'll have to see what happens.

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