Edwards Returns to Russert Show

After a year-and-a-half absence from the NBC News program “Meet the Press,” presidential candidate John Edwards returned to the show last Sunday.

The North Carolina senator had received poor reviews of his performance on May 5, 2002, under the interrogation of host Tim Russert, widely recognized as a tough interviewer. The News & Observer reported in June 2003 that NBC had tried for months to get Edwards on the program again. His spokeswoman Jennifer Palmieri told the newspaper at the time that the show wasn’t a priority because “voters don’t care.”

On Sunday Russert, in his respectful style, again challenged Edwards on apparent contradictions in his record, beginning with some of his Senate votes on Iraq.

Russert first reminded Edwards of a September 2003 quote, when he said, “I will vote for what needs to be there to support our troops that are on the ground.” Russert then asked Edwards why he voted against President Bush’s request for $87 billion for American forces in Iraq.

“I said over a year ago that for this to be succcessful, it needed to be an international effort, and there needed to be a clear plan,” Edwards responded. “The president came to the Congress without either of those things, without a clear long-term plan for success, still just an American occupation, and my view was we needed to send a clear message to the president that we had to change course.”

Yet Edwards insisted he still supported funding for the troops.

“But if every other senator voted the way you did,” Russert said, “there would be no body armor for our troops; no armed Humvees. What would happen then?”

“What would happen then,” Edwards answered, “is the next day, the president would be back to the Congress with a different plan.”

Russert then asked Edwards what he would do in Iraq if he was president, since the United Nations and The Red Cross have pulled out, and France, Germany, and Russia have refused to help. Edwards said the president needs to be willing to “relinquish control,” and attempt to convince the U.N. to take control of the Iraqi civilian authority. He also said, “I would make this a NATO security force instead of just an American security force.”

Russert also hearkened back to the lead-up to the war, when Edwards voted to send troops to Iraq. The senator issued a press release in Oct. 2002 that said in part that he supported a resolution to “authorize President Bush to use military force to eliminate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” Russert asked Edwards why he thought Hussein was close to obtaining nuclear weapons.

Edwards, who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “There’s a significant accumulative body of evidence about his efforts over an extended period of time to get nuclear capability…” He added that he voted for what he “believed was in the best security interests of the American people.”

Russert followed up by asking why Edwards didn’t demand more evidence from the administration that a nuclear threat was real.

“Because you can’t look at any isolated piece of information,” Edwards said. “You have to look at what Saddam Hussein had been doing over the course of a decade.

“There was a long and very powerful body of evidence that this was a brutal, sadistic dictator who had been doing everything in his power to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and ultimately, his goal was to have nuclear capability….And Saddam Hussein, Tim, with nuclear capability, completely changes things.”

Russert also addressed Edwards’s positions on the Patriot Act, which he supported in its original form after Sept. 11, 2001, without amendments. At a debate in Sept. 2003 Edwards said, “I support dramatic revision of the Patriot Act. The last thing we should be doing is turning over our privacy, our liberties, our freedom, our constitutional rights, to John Ashcroft.”

Russert then referred to a Washington Post editorial, which criticized Edwards for supporting what he called “not perfect, but a good bill.” But Edwards voted against four amendments by Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wisc., that would have “ameliorated some of the civil liberties concerns” that Edwards now expresses.

Edwards reiterated his support for the Patriot Act, but believes some intrusive parts of it should be changed. He explained to Russert that he voted against Feingold’s provisions because they imposed on the federal government “a requirement that they meet individual state law requirements.” He said the Act dealt with national law enforcement and that it wasn’t best “to require our national law enforcement agencies to have to meet procedural requirements that exist in 50 different states.”

Russert then turned to economic issues, and asked Edwards to “describe the economy right now.”

“We’ve seen a little lift,” Edwards said. “The most recent reports over the last two weeks have been some signs of encouragement. But my view is that we’re going to have to see a lot more to indicate that we have any kind of sustained economic growth.”

Russert cited recently released economic figures, which included 7.2 percent economic growth and 250,000 new jobs since August, and called it “pretty encouraging.”

“Yeah, it is,” Edwards responded, “but if you put it into context of what’s been happening with this administration from the time they came into office…they’ve lost over three million private-sector jobs, two and a half million manufacturing jobs.

“We’ve still got an awfully long way to go.”

Asked if the Bush tax cuts helped stimulate the economy, Edwards responded “absolutely not.” He said that the president shifted too much of the tax burden from the wealthy to the poor and middle class. Edwards said he would repeal the tax cuts for people that earn over $200,000 a year, and that he would raise the capital gains rate from 15 percent to 25 percent “for those in the top income bracket.”

Russert also asked Edwards about his views of fellow Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, the former governor of Vermont, and his recent remarks about appealing to voters in the South who have Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.

“There’s an elitism and a condescension associated with that attitude that’s enormously dangerous to [the Democratic Party]” Edwards said. “It is enormously important for us as a party to not be elite, to not look down on people and talk down to them, but to give them the kind of respect that they’re entitled to.”

Near the end of the program Russert asked Edwards why he said earlier this summer in Iowa, “This president is a complete, unadulterated phony.”

“Because he walks around on his ranch in Texas with a big belt buckle and acts like he understands the lives of most Americans,” Edwards said, “at the same time that his contact with regular Americans is largely limited to showing up at events that are ticketed, controlled.

“For him to pretend that he understands their problems and that he has a personal connection with them is not true, and I think what I said there is absolutely right.”

Paul Chesser is associate editor of Carolina Journal. Contact him at [email protected].