Special Report Roundtable - March 1

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCAIN: The last time we were on this program, I'm sure you remember everything very clearly, we say.

DAVID LETTERMAN, LATE SHOW: Yes.

MCCAIN: But, you asked me if I would come back on the show if I was going to announce.

LETTERMAN: Yes.

MCCAIN: I am announcing that I will be a candidate for the president of United States.

LETTERMAN: Oh, boy.

(APPLAUSE)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

HUME: Well, as McCain went on to point that that's not a formal announcement, that's the announcement and he found time to give that on the David Letterman Show, not a bad idea, I suppose, a great big audience, but here in Washington today, there's a great big bunch of Conservatives gathered for the annual Conservative Political Action conference, and John McCain decided he wasn't going to go see them and that got things stirred up.

Some thoughts from Jeff Birnbaum, columnist of the Washington Post; Mort Kondracke, executive editor of Roll Call; and the syndicated columnist, Charles Krauthammer -- FOX NEWS contributors all.

Now, that brings to three, the number of conservative assemblages here in Washington. One organized by the National Review, another by the Heritage Foundation, but John McCain has decided he'd prefer not to attend. On the other hand, he has otherwise been assiduously courting Conservatives. Anybody got an idea what's going on here?

MORT KONDRACKE, ROLL CALL: Well, the explanation that I get from the McCain people is that this particular one, the CPAC, they don't regard it as representative of the grassroots Conservatives all around the country. They think that it's a bunch of Washington insiders who have organized this thing and they don't -- you know, they don't think that McCain has to go.

I mean, I would think that McCain would want to address any Republican audience that he possibly could any time of the day or night. I mean he is -- he is running behind Giuliani now. He's got -- he needs to catch up and I would think that anybody that he could impressed, especially since he's been emphasizing his conservatism, saying he would never, never, never raise taxes and, you know, that he would favor the overturning of Roe V Wade, that he'd want to display those wares.

HUME: Now, let's take a look, if we can just briefly here at this new FOX NEWS poll on the horse race in the Republican Party, such as it is. And it suggests that -- there you see. Now look at where it was a month ago. It was Giuliani 34-22, now that lead has lengthened.

Now, these are early polls. You know, you don't even have a, you know, more than two-thirds of the people or even less than that expressing an opinion. But still, that suggests that he's got some ground to make up among Conservatives. Wouldn't you say -- Jeff.

JEFF BIRNBAUM, WASHINGTON POST: I don't think there's any question about it. And McCain is, I think, trying to alleviate this problem in part by going out to the grassroots rather than talking to Conservative groups. He's going to.

HUME: He could do both, couldn't he?

BIRNBAUM: He could, he's chosen to stay out of the states, mostly, he didn't even come back for one of the votes in the Senate, for example, on the Iraq resolution. He stayed courting actual voters in the early primary states.

I think what's really going on here, though, is that none of the top three Republican candidates for the Republican nomination have very good credentials with the Conservative base. Each of them is suspect. That's Giuliani in particular because he is, you know, pro-choice on abortion, among other social issues. McCain is suspect on a variety of issues, both social and fiscal and Romney was at one time, years ago, very pro-choice and pro-gay rights, but has switched. And so, I think the Conservative that the Republicans are looking for, a unifying figure, and among the top candidates they really don't have one.

HUME: Let's look at something else that McCain said on his appearance last night on the Late Show about -- this is on the issue of the war and its mismanagement, a subject on which he's been very strong although he supports the troop surge. Let's listen to what he said.

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MCCAIN: Americans are very frustrated, and they have every right to be. We've wasted a lot of our most precious treasure, which is American lives, over there.

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HUME: Now, the senator was quick to say today, that he had misspoken and that the word he normally used and used many times in this context is the word "sacrifice" and not wasted, he did not mean to say that and, but there it was. So, Charles, where does all this stand in your judgment, looking at this?

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, SYNDICATED COLUMNIST: Well, you know, on this issue of the waste, he knows he made a tactical error.

HUME: Right.

KRAUTHAMMER: You don't use that word.

HUME: I think he quickly.

KRAUTHAMMER: And he quickly -- you know, Woody Allen once said, "Showing up is 80 percent of life." With CPAC McCain is now working out of the remaining 20 percent which was gratuitous. It's hard to understand why he would've have done it, particularly, has we heard, given his problems with his Conservative base, he doesn't have a Conservative base. His base is really journalists and Independents, at least it was in 2000. But, the point is the other leading candidates are no more conservative than him, and in the end, I think he figures that the judgment will have to be ultimately made on another issue, which is the issue of our time, the war in Iraq, the war on terror.

And if you look at his credentials on that are amazingly strong. He's been consistent, he's also been quite honorable. He's risking his career on the fact that he believes in the Iraq war and it has to be concluded successfully. And also, from his perspective, you know, he's -- McCain has problems with immigration and taxes and campaign finance reform, but if you lose the war on terror, and we live in defeat and in fear, marginal income tax rates are not going to be a major issue in our lives.

I think he figures he muddles through the primaries, ends up as the candidate, and then on the basis of national security he wins the general election.

HUME: Now, so your view is that he remains; although the polls don't suggest that, really the frontrunner.

KONDRACKE: Absolutely.

HUME: Mort.

KONDRACKE: I think he's the front runner, too. And I -- you know, the scrutiny machine has not turned on Giuliani yet both on all the social issues and his personal life and the rest.

HUME: Do you agree with that, still the frontrunner?

BIRNBAUM: Yes. Especially when it comes to money, yes.

HUME: All right, you heard it here, folks. He remains on top with our panel. And when we come back with the panel, how advanced is Kim Jong il's uranium enrichment program? That got to be an issue today, stay tuned.

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CHRISTOPHER HILL, ASST SECRETARY OF STATE: We know as a fact that they made purchases of equipment whose only purpose can be highly enriched uranium. How far they've gotten, whether they've been able to actually produce highly enriched uranium at this time, I mean, these are issues that intelligence analysts grapple with, but what we know is that they have made purchases and we need to have complete clarity on this program.

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HUME: And this comes -- this testimony from David (SIC) Hill on North Korea comes when North Korea's second in command says that yeah, they're going to go through with their promise to dismantle their nuclear program.

In the meantime, there's a story that hit today from the New York Times which said that they -- the picked out the one from earlier, congressional testimony, and said that -- that the level of certainty about the state of the North's nuclear program was lower than had previously been indicated, and that that had perhaps led to a lot of unnecessary confrontation with North Korea -- at least that's how I took the story. Charles, what was going on with all that?

KRAUTHAMMER: Well, the story means to imply that this is Iraq redux, that the administration had hyped the uranium issue four years ago and that as a result, we in a sense, caused North Korea to go to break the agreements and have a nuclear explosion.

This is nonsense. What we had was an agreement in the `90s where the North Koreans said we're going to stop all our nuclear programs in return for all kinds of inducements and bribes. We discover -- the Bush administration discovers the AQ Khan, the rogue Pakistani had sold them the uranium enrichment equipment, meaning that there was a backdoor second program hidden, that would produce nuclear weapons. We confront the North Koreans with this, and they tell us, yes we are actually doing this.

There was a headline in the Times, October 17, 2000.

HUME: The Times itself?

KRAUTHAMMER: The Times itself not cited today, but four years ago it said when North Korean says it has a program on nuclear arms, clandestine one. Once that happened, we expose it, the North Koreans withdraw and then start a plutonium program openly. But there was no dissimulation here and there was no hyping.

KONDRACKE: Well, you know, Charles, that story -- that New York Times story was written by the very same reporter who wrote the story in today's New York Times.

KRAUTHAMMER: And just not citing.

KONDRACKE: Exactly, David Sanger. The store was, "Confronted by new American intelligence, North Korea had admitted that it has been conducting a major clandestine nuclear weapons operation." et cetera et cetera. I mean, you know, so the idea that this is somehow a concoction of American intelligence is baloney. I mean, the minute that the North -- this story came out, the Japanese pulled out of the old agreement old agreement to supply nuclear technologies...

HUME: And the process of isolating North Korea diplomatically began.

KONDRACKE: Right, and furthermore.

(CROSSTALK)

BIRNBAUM: (INAUDIBLE) sanctions than applied by the United States, we and others stopped sending oil, and they, North Korea, stepped out their plutonium program.

HUME: And that eventually offended China to the point where China began to squeeze them. Now, how seriously should we take this latest pronouncement from the North Korean hierarchy that they're going to go through on their agreement?

BIRNBAUM: I'm afraid that the underlying, in my view, the underlying lesson here is that you can't really trust the North Koreans. We don't really know whether they actually, when they admitted to having an uranium enrichment programs, did they actually have one? I think that's what that's -- if this story had been rewritten that might have been a reasonable question.

HUME: So, this is not good news or what, that the guys said today that there.

KONDRACKE: Well, it seems to me that the whole thing has got to be reviewed, and I would think that the intelligence committees ought to be reviewing it to see whether we were flummoxed again.