Frank Luntz's Numbers on the Democratic Race

COLMES: Welcome to HANNITY AND COLMES. I'm Alan Colmes. Ollie North pleased to be here for Sean tonight.

OLIVER NORTH, FOX NEWS GUEST ANCHOR: You are pleased to have me here, I can tell you.

COLMES: We get to our top story tonight, with just days to go until their next big show-down in Texas and Ohio, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama butted heads at again last night's debate. Our own Frank Luntz was in Texas with his focus group for the debate. He joins us now.

Frank, actually, they butted heads a little. It seemed like a pretty friendly debate last night.

FRANK LUNTZ, FRANKLUNTZ.COM: In fact, our participants were disappointed because they thought that there were going to be more fireworks, and they wanted to see a greater distinction. Let me let you in on what was going on, what your viewers would not have seen yesterday. As the debate progressed, Hillary Clinton started the first 30 minutes clearly beating Obama, according to our 29 uncommitted voters.

They liked the fact that she focused on substance. She got to an awful lot of detail, and they thought Obama was hesitant. But as the debate went on, the attitude shifted, and the more that Senator Clinton tried to challenge Senator Obama on some of the things he said, the angrier they got with Senator Clinton.

It is true that at the end, those who supported Clinton walking in backed her and those who supported Obama backed him. It's why you're not likely to see any changes in the polls, but I want to show you the one segment that stood out in people's minds, the one time that Senator Clinton, they thought, overstepped the line.

You're used to our dial-meters, the patented Fox dial sets. The higher the lines go, the more favorable the reaction. They did not really like Senator Clinton when she came right at Barack Obama with a line that I think she's going to regret. Let's take a look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: If your candidacy is going to be about words, then they should be your own words. That's I think a very simple proposition. And lifting whole passages from someone else's speeches is not change you can believe in, it's change you can Xerox. And I just don't think --

OBAMA: Well, that's not --

CLINTON: Barack, it is, because if you look at Youtube of these videos, it does raise questions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

LUNTZ: If you can pause that. I don't know if you can pull it up and pause that last moment there, but you watch the yellow line come down, and the blue line was below a 50. They were reacting very negatively to what they saw. They thought that it was a challenge that was unfair. Someone gave Senator Clinton the line.

But don't take my word for it. Let's hear what our focus group respondents had to say when they heard the charge of what Senator Clinton accused Obama of, and how they reacted to what Obama had to say. Let's listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: He clearly said these are speeches. He didn't plagiarize anybody. He acknowledged that they're speeches from other people.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No, he did not.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You know what --

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Making an issue out of this is ridiculous.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The last time I checked plagiarism in a college course is exactly what I just saw. That's total plagiarism.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: What she's saying about him saying it's just speeches. He was saying that in a rhetorical sense, rhetorically questioning are those just speeches?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Still like a form of plagiarism.

(CROSS TALK)

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: It wasn't verbatim.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I want to hear his words or her words. I want to hear from the heart, not from a script.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The same speech writer wrote both speeches, and Obama was given permission by the originator of that speech, use this argument.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If he got the permission to do that, there's nothing wrong with that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We need something new. That's ridiculous to use a speech that close together. He should have come up with something different.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This would not have changed my opinion. OK, it's not that important.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is dividing the Democrats. We don't need division. We need to pick a candidate that is going to beat McCain. That's the goal, winnability (sic). This does not matter in the grand scheme of things. Who is going to beat McCain?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

COLMES: Pretty well-said.

LUNTZ: It was a brawl at that issue. And so it was great. I must admit that I enjoyed it as a moderator, but I actually had to take a couple steps back. And what you didn't see there, because we edited it out, is that there were several moments there when you had all 29 people yelling at each other, and that doesn't usually happen in these debates. I lost control because it was such a powerful topic.

COLMES: This whole issue of plagiarism, it's a matter of record that Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, and Barack talked about it, discussed how to deal with these issues. And Deval Patrick said, here is what I say. They worked together on this. It's not plagiarism if you do it with the knowledge of the person with whom you're working out specific words and issues. That's pretty much been accepted, correct?

LUNTZ: I agree with that. And in my previous life, I used to write words that I tried to get dozens of politicians to follow. I believe that Barack Obama is right, and I believe that Senator Clinton is going to pay a price for trying to use that kind of trickery word, that Xeroxing it in.

That said, it's the first time that Democrats in our sessions have gone at each other with that kind of venom. We haven't seen it until this point.

NORTH: It's very clear that the young lady in the purple jacket had it right, they both had their lines written for them by someone else, and we can only speculate what Mrs. Clinton may have paid for that Xerox line because we now know --

LUNTZ: She should fire the person. Ollie, she should fire that person. That person should be brought up on political malpractice.

NORTH: Frank, let me ask you this. Do you get any sense of frustration? These are all Democrat (sic) voters that were in there for your focus group. They're all people who came intending to vote for one or -- either one of those two characters or they were undecided about which one they're going to vote for, but they're all Democrats. Do you detect any frustration among them about, for example, when -- and you've got this in one of your bites that you've got -- but when Obama talks about cutting taxes across the board, if a Republican says something like that, everybody asks how are you going to pay for it? Nobody asks in those questions.

Is anybody in that focus group get frustrated that -- not to put it unkindly, but this is an empty suit beneath an empty head?

LUNTZ: No, actually, they're judging Barack Obama by a different standard, and this is where Senator Clinton is correct. She's held to a higher standard when it comes to the substance than Senator Obama because Senator Obama has never said, I'm a substance candidate. He's all about change. It's about his character and his attributes.

The challenge for Obama comes into a charge like plagiarism. He's got to make sure that his character is fully upstanding.

NORTH: We're going to talk more about it, Frank, stay right there. We'll have more with Frank Luntz on the other side of the break, and then, after last night's debate some are saying Hillary Clinton may be throwing in the towel. Our all-star panel is here for reaction.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

NORTH: We now continue with our pollster extraordinaire, Frank Luntz. Frank, last night, when Obama made the pitch about everyone suffering so much in America, what was the reaction?

LUNTZ: Even though our participants were disappointed that the candidates didn't come at each other more, and what they said was that there was no difference in policy that they could determine, this is the example of that. Barack Obama gave his positions on the economy and so did Hillary Clinton.

Let's start with Barack Obama, a very favorable reaction when he talked about his solutions to the potential coming recession. Let's look.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: We've got to stop giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs over-seas and invest those tax breaks in companies that are investing here in the United States of America.

We have to end the Bush tax cuts to the wealthy and to provide tax breaks to middle class Americans, working Americans who need them. I've said that if you are making 75,000 a year or less, I want to give an offset to your payroll tax that will mean 1,000 extra dollars in the pockets of ordinary Americans. Senior citizens making less than 50,000, you shouldn't have to pay income tax on your Social Security.

We pay for these by closing tax loop holes and tax havens that are being manipulated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

NORTH: Picking up old John Edwards' lines about class warfare.

LUNTZ: Yes, and he's doing so in a way that's very effective. You can see that the lines went through the roof. When a politician gets an 80 score, what that indicates is that everybody in the room agrees with it and wants it to happen. In a typical 90-minute debate, about six lines will get a score of 80 or higher. But Obama wasn't the only one who did well on the economy. When Hillary Clinton talked about her solutions, and when she went after President Bush directly, she scored very well with our uncommitted voters. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: There are three ways we need to jump-start the economy. Clean green jobs; I've been promoting this. I wanted it to be part of the stimulus package. I thought a five billion dollar investment in clean green jobs would put hundreds of thousands of Americans to work, helping to create our future.

We also need to invest in our infrastructure. We don't have enough roads to take care of the congestion. We have crumbling bridges and tunnels. We need to rebuild America. And that will also put people to work.

And finally, we need to end George Bush's war on science, which has been way -- science - which is --

(END VIDEO CLIP)

Hillary Clinton has this process, and it works perfectly. Whenever you're in trouble, take a shot at President Bush, and the lines go straight up with Democrats because that's what they want to hear.

NORTH: Alan Colmes was cheering while she was talking. The fact is, neither one of them are willing to say, how do you pay for all of this. Obama is clearly waging class warfare. She's talking about enormous federal investments in everything from infrastructure to new science jobs and all the rest of it, and none of them are coming forward and saying, here's how we're going to do it other than taxing the rich.

LUNTZ: That's the whole point, and the Democrats -- and there is a difference between Democrats, independents and Republicans. Republicans don't want to tax anybody. Democrats want to tax the rich to make them poor.

(CROSS TALK)

COLMES: Let me ease your troubled mind. They're going to pay for it by rescinding the tax cuts for the rich, not increasing taxes, but rescinding the cuts, and not spending, as Barack Obama said nine billion dollars a month in Iraq.

NORTH: How much more do you want to spend in taxes? How much more do you want to pay?

COLMES: Frank, Ollie and I are going to go at it now. We want to be able to pay for things. We have increasing deficit and debt. Let me ask you, though, Frank, about -- we're going to talk about this in the next segment. I want to get your, as the words that work guy, to respond, when she said at the end of the debate, we're going to be fine, and fine was also a word John Edwards used when he conceded his candidacy. What was going on, do you think? What does that mean that she said that?

LUNTZ: What she's saying is that even if we disagree with each other, and even if it gets a little bit sharp over the next two weeks, in the end, the Clintons and the Obamas are going to come together and the Democratic party will be unified. This is not a message of surrender, it's not that she's going to pull out. I promise you that the debate in Ohio is going to be even tougher than the debate in Texas.

But if she comes across as being too negative and too brittle, it works against her. All she's saying is, we may disagree now, but in the end we will agree.

COLMES: She's got a very fine line to walk. She can't be too brittle, as you say. Every time she goes negative, we see the lines go down, and yet she has to break through in a way that gives her the victory that she needs. How do you walk that fine line?

LUNTZ: I'm glad you asked. She should be praising Barack Obama in the first 15 or 20 seconds for the ideas that he's come up were, but she's the one that can actually deliver them in real life. Obama's vision is the vision that should be for America, but I'm the one that can take that vision and make it happen.

I've made mistakes. She has to be candid this way. I've made mistakes, I've got it wrong. But I've learned from them, and I'm going to get it in the future.

COLMES: That's why a combined ticket would be the best thing for America. Right, Ollie?

NORTH: It would be dangerous.

COLMES: It would be the best thing that could happen. Frank, thanks a lot for being with us once again.