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October 15, 2004

Host: Michael Grant
Topics:
The Journalists Roundtable
In-Studio Guests:
· Mark Flatten, East Valley Tribune;
· Bob Robb, Arizona Republic;
· Howard Fischer, Capitol Media Services

Michael Grant:
It's Friday, October 15, 2004. In the headlines this week, President Bush, Senator Kerry squaring off in the third and final debate at Gammage Auditorium Wednesday night. Although he's not running for president, Senator McCain played a key role in the events surrounding the debate. And Maricopa County reports receiving nearly a half million ballot requests. Next on "Horizon". "Horizon" is made possible by the friends of Channel 8, members who provide financial support to this Arizona PBS station. Thank you.

>> Michael Grant:
Good evening, I'm Michael Grant, this is the journalist's roundtable. Joining me to talk about these and other stories are Mark Flatten of the East Valley Tribune and Bob Robb from the Arizona Republic and Howard Fischer of Capitol Media Services. On Wednesday night, 51 million Americans tuned into watch the third and final presidential debate from Gammage Auditorium. During the 90 minute debate, the two candidates talked about a lot of different issues. Mark, recently inculcated into the ASU Journalism Hall of Fame. Congratulations

>> Mark Flatten:
Thank you.

>> Michael Grant:
We bow before your greatness.

>> Mark Flatten:
Not deeply enough, apparently.

>> Michael Grant:
We ought to bring this back to some semblance of reality. Who won Wednesday night?

>> Mark Flatten:
I don't know that you can look to one side or the other and say they really won. Both sides say we cleaned the floor with the opponent. In fact, the spin on the debate that started at 6:00 actually started at 1:00. So if you are looking at who won and how you define who won, I don't know that either did. Clearly Kerry came out in the whole series of three debates. Going into the first one, the talk was, can Bush put him away? Now if you look at the polling, leading up to and even a few polls post debate, or post third debate, we are back where we were in August. The numbers are two or three points to Bush's advantage in most polls, some have them tied.

>> Michael Grant:
We have narrowed the number of swing states. We started out with about 18. Are we down to a dozen or so at this point?

>> Mark Flatten:
This afternoon I looked on a couple of websites that do state by state tracking. We have 11 states where the margins of either Bush lead or Kerry lead is within four points. That's 125 electoral votes, which is almost half of what you need to win. Actually, at this point, if you look at the national poll, state by state, it's still up for grabs. It's still a close race. I think what happened in that first debate, Kerry did close the gap certainly because I think he was able to reassure a lot of marginal voters that, I'm capable of being president. That's a hurdle he had to overcome. The momentum kind of stopped there. He closed the gap. He never did, if you look at the compendium of three or four different polls taken at the same time, he never did surpass Bush but he certainly closed the gap.

>> Bob Robb:
It's pretty clear that Bush won the battle of the conventions and sprinted to a fairly solid lead. It's fairly clear that Kerry has won the battle of the debates and closed that advantage that president opened up, returning, as Mark said, the election to where it was before we began to pay any attention to it.

>> Howard Fischer:
I think a lot of what Bush had to do and what I think he recognized and tried to do in the debate here in Tempe is go back to where he started, the "L" word, liberal, and kept hammering that over and over again. Particularly since this was on domestic issues he talked about health care programs and the $2 trillion health care program that Kerry has. And talk about Kerry and sending jobs away and things like that because of his tax policy.

>> Michael Grant:
I lost track and didn't keep precise count, but I picked up six, seven liberals, three to four Massachusetts and Ted Kennedy kept popping up frequently, as well, as clearly a strategy.

>> Bob Robb:
Bush cited Kennedy almost as much as Kerry cited McCain.

>> Mark Flatten:
If you look at what happened in these debates, both candidates achieved what they had to achieve going in. Kerry had to convince some of the squishy voters, I'm presidential. I will do whatever it takes to protect this country, I can handle the job. And he did that, particularly in the first debate. The president had to convey to people, I'm a man of my word, I don't change with the political wind and my opponent does. That brings us back to where we were in August.

>> Howarde Fischer:
Kind of an interesting point about the president saying, I don't change and Kerry missed the opportunity, saying, even when you're wrong.

>> Mark Flatten:
He's not saying, I don't change, he's saying, I don't change when I'm right. I don't drift with the wind. So the debates allowed both of them to really establish better than the conventions did, you know, here is what I am selling.

>> Howard Fischer:
And the format is what makes it important because during the convention Kerry, in the long-winded speech, when you are told you have 60 and 90 seconds, that's exactly the discipline that Kerry needed to get the point home.

>> Bob Robb:
I think Bush missed a dramatic opportunity particularly in the first debate particularly. His convention had driven home the point that if tough action is necessary to prevent this country against on terrorism, you can't count on Kerry to take it. And that had John Kerry on the ropes. And during that first debate on foreign policy, Bush, I think, lost the opportunity to drive that point home and make that what this election is about. On domestic policy, I think he did a pretty good job using the time he had to equalize the playing field on domestic issues and to say, you may like what John Kerry says superficially, but you better add up the bill before you make the final sale.

>> Michael Grant:
Which is interesting, because the Bush campaign obviously thought it was a good choice to move with international affairs first because they thought that was the one that they would perform strongest.

>> Bob Robb:
That's conventional wisdom. There's been something that's been nagging in the back of my mind. The Bush campaign had to know when the Dolfer report was going to come out, which pretty much put a nail in the coffin of the argument that we went to war to rid Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. And I think if the foreign policy debate had occurred after the Dolfer report -

>> Michael Grant:
You think they moved it away --

>> Bob Robb:
I think that might have been a reason, in addition to wanting to start with their strong suit. Because if the national security issue is framed as who can best protect you against terrorist attack in the future, the president, the polls, all say wins that by strong double digits. On the other hand, if this is a referendum on the prudence of the decision to invade Iraq, that's one that is trending more towards Kerry. And if that debate had taken place after the Dolfer report, it would have been very difficult for that to have a more dominant role in the debate than it had any way.

>> Mark Flatten:
Since we're getting completely Machievelian here, there's also a second component to that which is moving the domestic issues debate later. If you look at what the economy in terms of job growth, economic growth, all of that, Bush likes to talk about the last year because the last year we have been in a good, solid recovery. The figure they cite is the most rapid recovery in the last 20 years. Bush likes to focus on the last year. The longer you prolong the domestic policy debate, presumably the longer that trend will continue.

>> Howard Fischer:
There's a trap waiting here, too. We are about to reach the statutory debt limit, which means Congress is going to have to come in and say the money we borrowed, you know the record we reached? We are going to have to go higher. That's not a good headline for Bush, no matter how you look at it.

>> Bob Robb:
The treasury has now announced that it's discovered an accounting way to squeeze out a little bit more time.

>> Mark Flatten:
It's not going to matter. American voters, I don't think, have ever voted on the national debt. They probably should, but they don't.

>> Michael Grant:
Deficit is not an issue that resounds with most people.

>> Bob Robb:
Unless you can argue it's adversely affecting the economy. And when you've got interest rates as low as they have been, that's a hard argument to make.

>> Mark Flatten:
The national debt sort of reminds me of, I believe it was the old Stalin quote, you know, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. When you talk about a $7 trillion debt, that is a huge statistic that no one can grasp. The electorate has never turned on that issue. Michael: We have a rare piece of tape for the Friday edition, that I thought was important to pick up. Bob Schieffer made the comment that immigration was the one he got most E-mails on. Obviously an important issue for Arizona. Let's take a look at both candidates' responses.

>> George W. Bush:
I see it as a serious problem, I see it as a security issue, I see it as an economic issue and I see it as a human rights issue. We are increasing the border security of the United States. We have 1,000 more border patrol agents on the southern border. We're using new equipment. We're using unmanned vehicles to spot people coming across. And we will continue to do so over the next four years. It's a subject I'm very familiar with. I was a border governor for awhile.

>> John Kerry:
I would respect immigration reform. The president broke his promise on immigration reform; he said he would reform it. Four years later, he is promising another plan. Here's what I'll do: Number one, the borders are more leaking today than they were before 9/11. The fact is we haven't done what we need to do to toughen our borders, and I will. Secondly, we need a guest worker program, but if it's all we have it's not going to solve the problem. The second thing we need is to crack down on illegal hiring. It's against the law in the United States to hire people illegally, and we ought to be enforcing that law properly.

>> Michael Grant:
Mark, you think that both candidates approached the subject pretty gingerly.

>> Mark Flatten:
I think immigration has become the proverbial third rail in politics. It's like the weather. Everybody talks about it and nobody does anything about it. Frankly, that's why we're seeing propositions like 200. How many years has it been -- every two years people run for federal office saying, we're going to get control of the border. And they never do. The reason why I think is, particularly in the presidential debate, but any federal office, they realize that there's a frustration and anger out there. People want to see some control of the border. But when you start doing the things that are necessary to control the border and crack down on illegal immigration, you start alienating constituencies.

>> Howard Fischer:
One thing is the employer sanctions. We have never seen this before in the Kerry plan. In fact, the curious issue is John Kerry is now in agreement with State Representative Russell Pierce who tried to get a bill through earlier this year to deal with at least on the state level, employer sanctions. People say, Okay, we know you can't do much else. You can put people on the border, but why aren't we cracking down on the companies that becoming the magnet to bring people here.

>> Michael Grant:
You're blessing the --

>> Bob Robb:
What I find most interesting about the issue is that neither candidate is taking the position which enjoys the majority support. The majority position in the county is that there is too much immigration, legal and illegal, and we should clamp down on it, that we should have, in essence, have a time-out with respect to immigration. Both of these candidates propose an expansion of immigration with a fairly aggressive guest worker program. The difference between them is that Kerry includes as part of the guest worker program and for those who are here illegally, a pathway to citizenship, and Bush says no. Neither one is taking the majority position in the country.

>> Howard Fischer
: Look at the constituencies. The Arizona Chamber of Commerce, National Chamber of Commerce do not want to cut down on illegal immigration unless they get a hefty guest worker program. The hotels in this city, the restaurants in the city, the construction industry in the city would come to a halt. The Democrats, obviously, are panning to their own particular base, which they see as a liberal, Hispanic, squishy kind of base to say, Oh, no, we can't take on people of color. So of course. That's why you get the fringe groups who want to be on the ballot to say, wait, what about the rest of us.

>> Mark Flatten:
The best description I've heard of the difference between the Kerry and Bush immigration plans is Kerry is offering amnesty, Bush is offering amnesty light. There are not talking about, for instance, the things in 200. What are we going to make sure illegal immigrants are not bleeding our health care system? And what about the people we're holding in the jails who commit crime? These are the issues driving prop 200, but these are the issues that nobody wants to talk about.

>> Michael Grant:
Social Security. The president very careful to turn to the camera and assure people, you're going to get your check.

>> Bob Robb:
And pointed out they were told wouldn't get their check if they voted for him in 2000, and by golly they've been coming every month. These are the two sharpest philosophical differences that were expressed in the debate, health care being the other, where the president is saying, we've got a problem, we've got a declining ratio of workers to retirees. Ultimately, payroll taxes won't be enough to pay the bill. So to get out of this dilemma, younger workers need to be able to set out a part of payroll taxes into their own personal retirement account. Kerry correctly points out that hastens the day you don't have the money in the bank to pay existing benefits. But completely ignores the overall problem and the need to fix Social Security in order to manage the declining ratio. He simply pretends that the issue, which is probably along with paying for Medicare, the domestic equivalent of the effort to protect against terrorism on foreign policy on domestic policy.

>> Michael Grant:
In fact, it was the closest thing that Bob Schieffer got to a follow-up question, after that response, basically, Schieffer came back and said, Alan Greenspan, Senator Kerry, disagrees with you strongly on that particular issue.

>> Bob Robb:
I thought Kerry was disingenuous in his response to that. He said, Greenspan likes the president's tax cut, I don't like the president's tax cut, and if you repeal the tax cut for the wealthy, that would extend the solvency of the Social Security trust fund until 2075. Except there's only one problem: He proposes to use exactly the same money to pay for the health care plan. You can't use it to pay for health care and Social Security benefits.

>> Mark Flatten:
The problem with Social Security, it is the world's largest pyramid scheme. The people working today are paying for people receiving benefits on the sort of promise that eventually they will get their benefits. I agree with Bob, I think the Social Security discussion pointed out the biggest difference in the philosophical approach of these two guys. Bush talks about the ownership society, and that's what he is talking about here. You let younger workers invest in the equivalent of their own 401(k)s. They will realize the benefits and we will wean ourselves from that. Kerry is more, let the government handle it type. The government has been paying the check. The problem is, they both are probably right. Bush is probably right when he says in the future the only way to keep this solvent is to create a more market sort of thing. There is a $1.2 trillion transition to break the pyramid.

>> Michael Grant:
Well, let's go to some contextual things. Did you have fun on spin alley, Howie?

>> Howard Fischer:
The spin, as Mark pointed out, you know, 1:13, I marked it on my sheet, sitting there, I'm already getting things from the Kerry campaign and from the Bush campaign.

>> Michael Grant:
About how tonight's debate went?

>> Howard Fischer:
and how the other side is lying. Followed shortly by the spin meisters out there. Jesse Jackson was already out there, saying, here's why he can't be trusted on weapons of mass destruction. Wes Clark was out there. Again, hours before the candidates even took the stage. John McCain was going from radio show to radio show, because they were on the air and needed some time to kill, explaining how the president was winning. As the debate went on, then the paperwork started. We got buried under paper. A lot of it I understand. Bush made the statement he never said worried about Osama bin Laden. You go online to the White House website and you find that he did make the statement at a press conference in 2002. The spin at the end is worthless. What do you think anyone is going to say? I happened to talk to John Kyl last week. He had done spinning for Bush down at the first debate in Florida. And I said, John, let me pose a question. If George Bush gets on the stage in Tempe and he falls in a vat of manure, are you ever going to tell us that he bombed? Kyl said no. It doesn't happen that way.

>> Mark Flatten:
I think the saddest commentary isn't that the debate started at 1:00 telling you what they're going to say and here's our rebuttal, the saddest commentary is the two campaigns have become so predictable that they were right.

>> Michael Grant:
John McCain, we have mentioned, played a pretty prominent role in the debate, around the debate. I did think it was an interesting photo on the front page of the Republic, Air Force One, John McCain didn't look real happy.

>> Bob Robb:
I think that was just a Snapshot. When you saw the interview, he was pretty enthusiastic. People have a variety of explanations as to why McCain has been such an enthusiastic supporter of George Bush. I don't think it goes any further than the fact that Bush is implementing the foreign policy that John McCain advocated in 2002. He was the guy that said we needed to have a policy of rogue state rollback even before 9/11. And he has called for a muscular response both in Iraq, he has been a staunch defender of the war in Iraq and argued for a more aggressive tact than the president has taken, and he has argued for interdiction, along with Senator Kyl, with respect to North Korea. And that's the most important issue facing the country. I don't think you need to go beyond -- occasionally, you can take -

>> Michael Grant:
I don't disagree, it just seems to be a level of enthusiasm that, I'll put it this way, that I did not expect.

>> Howarde Fischer:
I think part of what happened is, early on when the president, through surrogates, you know, was attacked John Kerry's experience and time in Vietnam and questioning his patriotism, and McCain having worked very closely with Kerry on the P.O.W. M.I.A. issue, I think took the president to task and I think he did it publically, and the president has backed off of that and I think that McCain is much more comfortable with that now. He doesn't like the personal attacks. He has known John Kerry, he gets along with Kerry.

>> Bob Robb:
McCain relishes the role of the official arbitor and umpire of fair campaigns.

>> Mark Flatten:
These guys are joined at the hip. At some point we are going to have a PBS special where they're actually fused together with a medical procedure.

>> Howard Fischer:
It's called, Nip Tuck.

>> Michael Grant:
Before we leave this general subject, the 9th circuit says Ralph Nader cannot be on Arizona's ballot.

>> Howard Fischer:
No big surprise here. Nader, as you remember, had turned in what he thought was a sufficient number of signatures. When the Democrats sued, he said, if you back out the number of signatures gathered by people who are not Arizona residents, we don't make it. Nader goes into federal court and says the residency requirement is unconstitutional as is the early July deadline to file. Fred Martone, the federal judge, said I am not going to issue an injunction. And he took it to the 9th circuit. The 9th circuit said, look, we're not going to go to the merits of the case, you can argue that, but you did notice early voting started two weeks ago and we're certainly not going to order you on the ballot now.

>> Michael Grant:
An Arizona based company, Sproul & Co, under investigation over voter registration practices. Nathan Sproul, the owner of the company, former top official with the Arizona Republican party. What are the allegations?

>> Howard Fischer:
This is an interesting issue, because it comes down to the fact that most states, including Arizona, including Nevada, allow registrations to be collected by people other than independent registrars, if you will. So the Republican party hired Nathan's firm to find Republicans. No big surprise there. The allegation of Eric Russell is that when he brought back in registrations of people who were Democrats, because the fact is if you go up to somebody and say do you want to register, you're going to trip across an occasional Democrat, even in Nevada and Oregon, that they tore up these registrations and when Eric said he complained, they said, Well look, you came back with Democrats, we're going to dock your pay. That resulted in a personnel action. He quit or was fired, depending on who you want to talk to, and has obviously sought out the TV cameras to justify it. This afternoon, Nathan filed essentially what is a defamation suit saying he is under emotional distress because of what Eric's allegations are and wants an unspecified amount money to balm his wounds.

>> Mark Flatten:
There's also a deeper issue here, and it's not just in this case, but there have been other -- I think a Denver TV station exposed hundreds of people -- or people that were registering hundreds of fraudulent names and it's, for a lot of these guys it's purely profit driven. I did a series of articles on the petition gathering industry. And it's not necessarily the situation here, but you get a lot of these people who register these guys who are paid per signature. You're going to get a small number that will make them up, pick them off gravestones, things like that. That's not the allegation in Sproul case, but it goes to the fact that there are a lot of sort of dirty laundry in terms of how we get people registered to vote, how we get signatures on petitions.

>> Howard Fischer:
What's going to get interesting, and we don't know that any of this occurred here, but I bet you there will be people showing up at the polls November 2, they say, We don't have your registration. And then we're going to find the true nature of the problem here, in Nevada and elsewhere.

>> Michael Grant:
A lot of early ballot requests in Maricopa County.

>> Mark Flatten:
These are just the ones that were turned in! 437,000, I believe. I think that's almost a third of the registered voters in Maricopa County. Bob keeps those figures in his head much better than I do. That's huge, like twice what we had in 2000, at least. I'm not terribly surprised. Couple things working together here. We've done all we can to sort of lengthen the voting process through early ballots. Plus, with the presidential race, higher profile ballot propositions like 200 and 400, I would suspect we're going to get pretty close to 70% turnout.

>> Howard Fischer:
One of the things, going back to the race, the Democrats saying we need to those low efficacy voters out. You've got them registered, and maybe you've got an early ballot in their hands because they applied for it at the same time, will they in fact vote? And that's to be proven. There are a lot of people who if you haven't gotten them to vote right then, if the ballot is sitting on their kitchen table they're not going to vote.

>> Bob Robb:
The Republicans have a comparable voter turnout motivation issue with respect to social conservatives.

>> Michael Grant:
Panelists, we are out of time. Thanks very much. If you would like to see a transcript of tonight's program, please visit the website, www.az.pbs.org. Click on "Horizon", that will lead you to transcripts, links and information on upcoming shows.

>> Larry Lemmons:
The debate has come and gone, but what messages lurked in the rhetoric of the presidential candidates? The Crawdad Campaign Tracking Dashboard is on it. Also the Miranda case remains one of the most influential state cases in the country. A conversation with author Gary Stewart about the significance of Miranda Monday night at 7:00 on Channel 8's "Horizon".

>> Michael Grant:
Join us for a preview of the United States Supreme Court session, Wednesday. It's an hour-long ballot proposition special. Thank you for being here on a Friday. I'm Michael Grant. Have a great weekend. Good night.

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