Transcript of The Rachel Maddow Show for January 14, 2010

Guests include Brian Williams, Kerry Sanders, John Irvine, Tracy Kidder, Michelle Wucker, Tom Vilsack, Tony Aiello

Transcript:
RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: Good evening, Keith. Thank you.

We do begin tonight with some signs of growing unrest and anger inside of Haiti, to go with the abject desperation there. Within the last few hours, the “Reuters” news organization did receive a disturbing report from a “Time” magazine photographer on the ground in Haiti. According to the photographer, in some places in Port-au-Prince, in at least two places, survivors of the earthquake have set up roadblocks using corpses to protest the lack of aid actually getting to the people.

It‘s now been about 52 hours since that country was devastated by a massive earthquake, and tonight, search and rescue missions continue. And the Red Cross estimates that between 45,000 and 50,000 people may have lost their lives. Haiti‘s president, Rene Preval, announced today that 7,000 earthquake victims have already been buried.

And tonight, the first American victim of the earthquake has been identified by name. She is 57-year-old Victoria DeLong of California. She‘s a 27-year veteran of the U.S. State Department.

Ms. Delong was stationed at the U.S. embassy in Port-au-Prince. She was apparently killed during the quake when her home collapsed.

The grim reality of the situation on the ground in Haiti is evident in some of the incredible reporting that‘s coming out of there right now.

Today, NBC‘s Tom Llamas made his way into Haiti from the neighboring Dominican Republic. Here‘s what he found when he got there.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TOM LLAMAS, NBC NEWS: Once we got into Haiti, it is truly an unbelievable sight. There are bodies on the streets, children, people are actually using their cars as ambulances to transport people to and from the border or to any hospitals, but the problem is there are no hospitals at this moment. People are living outside churches. It‘s just a really unbelievable and unimaginable sight.

The one thing that stuck out is that people are still being civil in Haiti. People are walking around. There‘s at least 2 million people just walking the streets. They‘re trying to walk out of the country but they‘re acting civil.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: According to one report tonight, that civility may be beginning to break down at least in some places.

The main problem at this point is a problem of logistics, getting the tide of rescue and relief aid that has been directed toward Haiti actually to the people who so desperately need it. The chief obstacle right now is most of those supplies are being flown into Haiti from every corner of the globe, flown into an airport that has one runway, has one road in, and one road out.

United States Southern Command has taken control of the airport, but the sheer volume of supplies coming into Haiti has nearly paralyzed that air space.

The other main entryway into Haiti‘s capital is through its port. That option is also presenting problems tonight. This is what the port looked like before the earthquake. Here‘s what it looks like today.

As you can tell from this image the port is non-operational essentially at this point. Three working cranes that have all been destroyed; a main dock that is now partially submerged under water.

But the Haitian government essentially is unable to respond to the needs of its people. It has largely been left to the international community to at least try to help.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: After suffering so much for so long, to face this new horror must cause some to look up and ask, “Have we somehow been forsaken?” To the people of Haiti, we say, clearly, and with conviction: you will not be forsaken, you will not be forgotten. In this, your hour of greatest need, America stands with you. The world stands with you.

We know that you are a strong and resilient people. You have endured a history of slavery and struggle of natural disaster and recovery, and through it all, your spirit has been unbroken and your faith unwavering. So, today, you must know that help is arriving. Much, much more help is on the way.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Today some of that help began to arrive. In addition to aid supplies that managed to get in to Port-au-Prince airport, more than 100 U.S. soldiers from Fort Bragg‘s 82nd Airborne Division landed in Haiti. Their mission is to help distribute aid and provide security in what is now an essentially ungoverned capital.

Joining us now from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, is the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” Brian Williams, and NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders.

Kerry and Brian, thank you both so much for joining us again tonight.

Bring us up to speed.

BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS ANCHOR: Well, first of all, Rachel, a bit of activity here on the airstrip. We have a U.S. C-17. They‘re waiting for at least 100 onboard guests tonight, people who were attached to the U.S. embassy here in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

This is very common, so many aircraft all day and all night. It‘s already impossible to track them. They come in with pallets of material and if it works correctly, they leave with people onboard.

Before handing it off to Kerry, I‘ll tell you, our on-air team today, all of us fanned out to different locations in Port-au-Prince, and it is—it is almost impossible to describe what we saw. On our part, the most banal and insulting sight of what appeared to be a child‘s body on a plywood gurney wrapped in a blanket on a hot day, dead and abandoned. And if you try to count up and care for all of the bodies that are outside tonight in this city, it is an impossible task.

And it‘s beyond sad and wrenching and tragic and shocking. And you run out of ways to describe it.

Kerry Sanders was out in it and saw an entirely different view.

KERRY SANDERS, NBC NEWS CORRESPONDENT: Brian, there‘s not enough space in the graveyards here for all of the dead. I went to a graveyard today where some folks gathered with their loved ones to say good-bye. They got between two graves that were existing graves, space about that wide, they dug the grave and they placed the bodies of four family members, including a small child in there and began putting the earth back over.

As Brian noted, there are roads that are roads of the dead, body after body after body. It‘s very hot here. We—we‘re sun-burned because it‘s 80-plus degrees here. This is the tropical Caribbean island, and that heat is beginning to take an affect on the bodies that are just left there and people have masks on because there are areas where the stench is beginning to become overwhelming.

And, of course, medical authorities are concerned that people who are exhausted, people who have not been fed properly, people who have not had water, who have their immunities down, are now possibly going to be exposed to diseases that can develop with a body or in this case hundreds and thousands of bodies rotting on the streets.

Because there‘s no government, there is nobody really in charge to say, “Let‘s pick those bodies up,” Brian. Some family members are doing it out of respect for the dead. But others are just too stunned and dazed.

And my greatest fear is we began to see some of the anxiety today turn to anger as people were fighting over water. There are some fresh water supplies available. Prices have doubled. People are getting testy and pushing and screaming. And my fear is that if what is arriving here doesn‘t get to folks in the coming days, and I mean quickly, that anger is going to begin to boil over.

WILLIAMS: Yes, you‘ve taken people with very little and taken it down to nothing—Rachel, as we discussed last night, this won‘t take long to convert itself and that‘s our fear here.

MADDOW: We are amid reports of many people trying to maintain civil behavior, maintain order as best they can, and as you describe it, an essentially ungoverned, destroyed space right now. We are seeing some scenes and hearing those reports as you say of anger boiling over, the frustration boiling over, and some growing disorder.

In terms of the ability to alleviate, that we know that U.S. troops are arriving, we know also that the main task is to get that relief out of the airport and into the streets—what can you tell us about either of those plans?

WILLIAMS: Well, first of all, let‘s start with the airport, the hub. It‘s under U.S. control. Not surrounded by troops but the airstrip, when you call in here to make a landing or a takeoff, you talk to an American air traffic controller. There is no tower.

But second, the streets. Only now here is there starting to be a U.S. military presence. Their stance and their posture is going to be critical. Remember in Katrina, it was General Russell Honore who told them to put their muzzles down. They were here to help. And that is crucial part of this when they get here and start to fan out—I‘m sorry we‘re fighting the jet engines as this cargo plane starts up.

SANDERS: I‘ll throw in there—look, the U.N. has been in here for a long time. And they have armored personnel carriers on the road, but, you know, the military speak would be rules of engagement. Their rules of engagement are to stand back. They are not to mix it up.

If there is violence on the street, they are not to get involved in it. And so, if there is violence on the street, they will come by, but they will not get out of their armored personnel carriers. Yes, they have weapons. Yes, they are armed. But they‘re not going to do that.

And I don‘t even know whether the rules of engagement have been set for the U.S. military when they come here. When the military came here, when this country was falling apart, and Bill Clinton sent in the Marines, the rules of engagement were: do not get involved. It‘s a good decision probably because you don‘t want people turning on the military, but by the same token, they don‘t bring the law and order. They bring the supplies which hopefully calm people down.

MADDOW: Brian and Kerry, people have survived a long time inside collapsed buildings in other disasters. But at 52 hours and counting now, there‘s worry that the window of opportunity to save people who are buried is closing.

Are these elite search and rescue teams from all over the globe—are they actually getting out into the streets to do their work?

SANDERS: I know that the folks from Miami Metro-Dade are here. I know the folks from Fairfax County, Virginia, are here. I know that the Chinese sent in a team with a fair amount of experience from their own earthquakes there.

I have not personally seen them out removing any rubble. I did go to some collapse locations today and just the residents who had been removing the rubble and the rocks, looking for those who might still be alive, they‘ve given up. And they don‘t have the expertise, but they‘ve given up.

I‘ve seen—I‘ve seen the dogs that are here to sniff, but I personally have not seen anybody out there doing the digging.

WILLIAMS: There is a French team here, Rachel, and they‘ve been here at the airport all day. They don‘t have their marching orders yet.

But I have to say, we saw L.A. County outside in one of the neighborhoods today. When they arrived today, it was just an unbelievable experience. About a half dozen of the firefighters I had last seen in the fight for Mount Wilson, the station fire in California, wearing the boots that I burned that day, and here they are in another corner of the world, but they‘re also among the best in the world, and I think they are now deployed tonight.

MADDOW: Brian, when I hear you say that the French team was at the airport waiting for marching orders, what I‘m wondering is who those marching orders would come from. The president‘s spokesman today had pains to say that the Haitian government is still in charge of the nation of Haiti. The U.N. is expressing their desire and their intention to be coordinating efforts.

When you‘re there, who does it seem like is in charge?

WILLIAMS: Well, you know what? You see the blue helmets. You see the armored personnel carriers Kerry was talking about, and you see U.N. blue vests and people with clip boards. You see the USAID officials when it‘s an American search and rescue team.

There are overarching organizational bodies, but there is really no secretary of the interior here. There is—there‘s no infrastructure, a white board, a command post, a communication structure. Making a cell phone call, taking down someone‘s number, sending an e-mail—a lot of it is for naught.

SANDERS: Project Medishare, it‘s based out of South Florida, doctors and nurses who have been coming to this country for quite sometime. When they landed here today, I just in chatting with them and said, “It seems to me, the most logical thing for you to do with the expertise that you have is take your supplies, go to one of these parks where people are, and begin treating them right there. There are people in triage right in those locations.”

They told me it doesn‘t work that way. “We will fly in. We will go to a location that we have set up that has security, that has protection. We will work on the people that we can work on there.”

And then they will come back to the airport. They‘ll fly back to Miami, and then they‘ll come back again tomorrow, and it will go like that.

It might seem that it makes sense to go straight there as I thought, but when you hear them explain from their experiences, that doesn‘t make sense. By the same token, you can‘t just take a truck here, load it up with water, and drive out the street and say, “Hey, I‘ve got water,” because the next thing you know, you‘re going to have 1,000 people surrounding the truck fighting, and the last thing they want to do is create a situation that leads to violence.

So, it‘s a very delicate situation. But they all recognize they‘re under pressure. It has to be done soon.

WILLIAMS: Sixty more seconds, Rachel, if you will. There is an air crew on this C-17 that were—the engine noise we‘re fighting. They came in tonight from Jersey. They are—there is sweat dripping off.

MADDOW: And as you can tell, we‘ve just lost the signal from Brian Williams and Kerry Sanders. They‘re joining us live from the airport, Port-au-Prince. We‘ll bring them back up for Brian‘s closing thoughts if we can, but I have a feeling that we cannot. Obviously, the technical challenges of bringing people on live from this disaster zone are incredible.

Brian doing a significant part of his newscast for “NBC Nightly News” tonight with a satellite phone to his ear because that was the way that they could get audio out of the country. Our NBC News team there, Brian Williams, the anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News” and Kerry Sanders, NBC News correspondent, have been there along with Al Roker and Ann Curry from the “Today Show” and we‘ve been all the better for having their—access to their reporting here in MSNBC.

The need for medical care in Haiti is, of course, dire tonight. Partners in Health is an organization that‘s been providing medical care—advanced medical care in Haiti for 25 years.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder works with and wrote the definitive book about that organization. It was a bestseller. It‘s called “Mountains Beyond Mountains.” Tracy Kidder joins us next to talk about the current crisis and how medical care can be provided well in Haiti.

Later, the Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack joins us with an update from the Obama administration about America‘s response.

Stay with us. We will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: An update on the status of medical care in Haiti. Some of the heroic things being done and some of the amazing technology being use today do it—coming up next.

Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Even as aid agencies and foreign governments are working to rush badly needed medical supplies and personnel to Haiti, much of the help has not gotten to the people who need it. Medical care in Port-au-Prince is in crisis right now.

ITN reporter John Irvine filed this report from the capital today. Warning: this includes some disturbing images, but also some on-the-ground reporting. We are otherwise not seeing about the on-the-ground consequences of the bottleneck in getting aid into the streets of Port-au-Prince.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

JOHN IRVINE, ITN REPORTER (voice-over): This is a hospital

overflowing with patients desperate for treatment it can‘t provide. The

casualty unit stretches from the corridors inside to the car park out front

where patients have to endure the daytime heat as well as their crush injuries. So basic are the facilities here that many won‘t get to walk away.



The few doctors and nurses we saw are overwhelmed and under-resourced. No help has arrived and such is the mortality rate, there are bodies all over the place.

The drip sustaining this man has run dry. His family tried to comfort him as his life ebbs away.

(on camera): To me, it‘s ironic that Haiti is within a relative stone‘s throw of other Caribbean islands that are among the great playgrounds of the western world, and yet, the situation here is about as bad as you can get. If you want to know what the expression they desperately need help looks like, look no further than here.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: The medical need in Haiti right now is obviously acute. We talked on this show last night with Sophie Delaunay of Doctors Without Borders—that organization‘s multiple existing facilities in Port-au-Prince were so badly damaged in the earthquake that the facilities themselves are no longer functional. Doctors Without Borders had hundreds of staff operating in Haiti even before the quake. Thus far, they‘ve been administering post-earthquake medical care primarily from tents.

As of today, Doctors Without Borders says it has treated more than 1,500 patients, but as Ms. Delaunay told us on the show last night, they believe that at least 500 people they‘ve been in contact with already are in need of immediate major surgery, something that cannot really be done safely from the tents they‘ve been operating out of.

The next step for Doctors Without Borders is to bring in something I did not even know existed before now. They‘re bringing in an inflatable hospital. Not kidding. They‘re expecting an inflatable hospital to arrive in Haiti by tomorrow.

We googled “inflatable hospital” today. This is part of what we found. It turns out that, first, the military and then Doctors Without Borders have been using inflatable hospital facilities for years.

Here‘s one.

We‘ve also got footage that Doctors Without Borders used in Pakistan after that—the earthquake in that country in 2005.

As the name suggests, it is inflatable but it‘s substantially more than a tent or a bouncy castle. Its modular rooms can be sterilized and even decontaminated. It includes portable operating theaters, beds, rolling trays, respirators, everything medical teams on the ground need to perform surgery.

Here‘s a graphic that was published by “The Plain Dealer” in Cleveland that it shows how these things work.

Each inflatable hospital is about 1,000 square feet when it gets blown up. But it gets stored and transported—get this—in a bundle about the size of a desk. It‘s then spread out and inflated with a pump. Its support beams are made of very thick fabric. They apparently feel as solid as concrete when they are inflated.

Doctors Without Borders has one of those things—one of those inflatable hospitals headed to Haiti right now. We believe it‘s due to arrive by tomorrow.

Another remarkable medical agency with a long experience—long, successful experience working in Haiti is an agency called Partners in Health. Partners in Health works together with the Haitian Ministry of Health in the countryside. They have long been the largest medical care provider in rural Haiti.

And because its 10 facilities are away from the capital city of Port-au-Prince, they were not damaged by the earthquake. They are up and running.

Tracy Kidder‘s bestselling 2003 book, “Mountains Beyond Mountains” was about Partners in Health and about one of its founders, Dr. Paul Farmer.

Joining us now is Tracy Kidder, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, who also serves on the development committee for Partners in Health.

Mr. Kidder, thanks very much for coming on the show. Appreciate your time.

TRACY KIDDER, AUTHOR, “MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS”: Thank you. It‘s a pleasure, I guess.

MADDOW: Well.

KIDDER: I mean, nice to—nice to be on your show but, yes.

MADDOW: In the circumstances, everything is difficult at this point. I do want to ask you about the status of Partners in Health right now. Am I right to say that their facilities in Haiti were not harmed in the earthquake, that they‘re up and running?

KIDDER: That‘s correct. Not only that, Partners in Health is, you know, almost entirely a Haitian operation, though it gets, it is supported by the United States—by people in America and mostly. And—but only a handful of the people working in Haiti are Americans. All the rest of the staff are Haitian.

There are about a hundred Haitian doctors working for Partners in Health. Many of them live in Port-au-Prince and commute out to the various sites of Partners in Health. So, many of those doctors are in Port-au-Prince now, working out of their homes, receiving patients in their homes.

Partners in Health is now establishing a field hospital sites in Port-au-Prince. They, of course, need more supplies, but they are well-supplied at the moment. And their central hospital, which is in Cange, a town that‘s not that far from Port-au-Prince, but a three-hour drive, has been receiving enormous numbers of patients, I was just told this this evening. And, of course, they‘re not turning anyone away. They‘ve taken the school that‘s within the complex and the church and turned them into hospitals essentially.

I was told—this is horrifying—that people, you know, there are some amputations being performed there, necessary ones, and people who have come all the way from Port-au-Prince for amputations, just imagine that.

So this is—Partners in Health, and I know I‘m biased, but Partners in Health is really one of the truly effective organizations working in Haiti and has been there for a long time. And, of course, they have tremendously strong partnerships with organizations like Doctors Without Borders.

But, of course, they are too small to do all of this, but they could desperately use contributions. And if people want to help them, go to PIH.org. I think it‘s a—for my money, Rachel, it‘s the best organization I know about, and it set a model for how—it seems to me, how Haiti might have a better future after this catastrophe is dealt with.

MADDOW: Tracy, people around the world, not just governments but individual people everywhere, are really eager to help out, millions of dollars of donations being raised for a lot of different charities already.

KIDDER: Yes.

MADDOW: In your op-ed for “The New York Times” yesterday, you described a real problem with international aid in Haiti. You wrote that there are something like 10,000 private humanitarian groups that have been providing services and relief in Haiti even before the earthquake, and there‘s a real question as to whether donations to them and support for them end up being right for Haiti and end up getting anything done on the ground.

Why is that? What are the issues there?

KIDDER: Well, not all aid organizations are created equal. There are some very good ones and I didn‘t mean to slam all of them, you know, in one fell swoop. All I meant to say is that there are 10,000 aid organizations in Haiti, and Haiti is still one of the poorest countries in the world then something‘s wrong with the way things are—the aid is being administered.

It seems to me that the real problem is that—that many organizations are not willing to work together or they don‘t know how to, or, you know, the mechanisms for doing that haven‘t been established. But even more than that, that they have not really endeavored to make their projects, to make their work indigenous. And what I mean by that is they have not done what Partners in Health has really striven to do, which is—which is to work as closely as possible with the government and the particularly that agencies, in their case, with the Ministry of Health. There is no other way, finally, to improve the state of a place like Haiti.

And, you know, Rachel, I just have to say this: given your—I know your good friend Rush Limbaugh—good friends Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson have been weighing in on how Haiti has been cursed by God once again, but, you know, the truth of the matter is that this is—this is a manmade disaster in the sense that the extreme vulnerability to earthquakes is manmade. And that has a long history and that‘s a history of—you know, that begins way back with the slave colony that the French established in Haiti, the hideous slave colony, and the fact that the Haitians, the only people on earth who—only slaves on earth who freed themselves and created their own republic and then got punished for it ever since.

And, you know, we need to fix this. We need to fix this problem right now. We need to get as much materiel and doctors and everything in there as we possibly can and do this in a concerted way, but afterward, we need to continue to care about Haiti. It is one of the most beautiful and important cultures ever born under the face of this earth and it is in danger. It seems to me, long-term danger.

We need a concerted effort, one that—one that is not self-serving, but one that attempts to serve the poor of Haiti, the vast majority of Haiti. And to do that through strengthening Haitian institutions instead of doing what the United States has done all too often there, which is to weaken them.

MADDOW: Tracy Kidder.

KIDDER: Sorry.

MADDOW: No, don‘t apologize. That‘s why I asked you on the show, Mr.

Kidder.

Tracy Kidder is author of the book, “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” which is about in part Partners in Health and one of their founders, Paul Farmer. Mr. Kidder‘s most recent book is called “Strength and What Remains.”

Thank you very much for joining us tonight, Tracy. I really appreciate your time.

KIDDER: Thank you, Rachel. Let‘s hope for Haiti.

MADDOW: Indeed.

KIDDER: Thank you.

MADDOW: Our coverage of the catastrophe in Haiti continues right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Today as aid began to flow into Haiti from around the world, help also came from right next door, from the Dominican Republic. Haiti and the Dominican Republic are two countries that share the island of Hispaniola. There is not much else they share, not language, not ethnicity and their mutual history has often been antagonistic.

But right now. The two countries appear to have put any differences in the face of Haiti‘s need. Today, the Dominican Republic‘s president became the first head of state to travel into Haiti leading a delegation of military and rescue personnel.

He confirmed for reporters for the first time that 7,000 quake victims had been buried. He also announced that his country is helping restore power and is providing hundreds of troops, food, aid, and water for the relief effort in Haiti.

The president also said that the Dominican Republic is not even tabulating the costs of its actions at this point. The Dominican government also confirmed for us tonight that some 2,000 Haitians have been allowed across the border into the Dominican Republic already for medical treatment although the country says it is not opening its border as of now to Haitians who do not have immediate medical needs.

Joining us now is Michelle Wucker. She is the director of the World Policy Institute. She has written extensively about Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Michelle, thanks very much for coming in.

MICHELLE WUCKER, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, WORLD POLICY INSTITUTE: Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: First, let me give you the chance to correct anything I just said that was wrong. I probably got something wrong.

WUCKER: You even pronounced my name right. The name of the book is “Why The Cocks Fight: Dominicans, Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola,” which really goes into this very, very long history going back to the Dominican Republic of ups and some pretty dramatic downs between the two countries.

MADDOW: Well, I mean, in terms of just the national history of the two countries, we think of the French as having set up the colony on the western side of the island and the Spanish having done so on the eastern side of the island and lots of fighting therein. But are they two countries that we should really think of as both, not only distinct, but antagonistic?

WUCKER: “Antagonistic” isn‘t quite the right word. They‘ve got a lot of things that they share. They‘ve both been occupied by the United States. They‘ve both got a long history with dictatorship. They‘ve both got a long history of being used as sort of proxies between France and Spain.

Dominicans will tell you that they celebrate their independence from Haiti in 1844 after a brutal and corrupt occupation. They won‘t always tell you that Haiti helped to get their independence from Spain.

Haitians will tell you that in 1937 there was a horrendous ethnic cleansing massacre on the border of Haitians by the Dominican dictator. And of course the Dominican dictator, Trujillo, also did terrible, terrible things to Dominicans as well. So there‘s a lot of shared tragedy between the two countries.

MADDOW: This is a crisis that is confined not only to Haiti right now, but to Haiti‘s capital city. What special role is the Dominican Republic going to have - going to have to have - in the effort to save the people of Port-au-Prince?

WUCKER: Well, I think, logistically, it is going to be incredibly important, getting some of the supplies through the Dominican Republic into Haiti, getting many, many people through the Dominican Republic into Haiti. And I should mention, most people don‘t realize this, but actually the quake was felt in the Dominican Republic.

It was more of a thing that caused a lot of motion sickness but earthquakes are very common in both places. The Dominican Republic is going to be actually very, very crucial in getting food into Haiti, in ongoing medical care, as you mentioned, with the Haitians who have come to the Dominican Republic for medical care.

There is going to be a lot of ongoing cooperation, engineers. Dominicans are going to have to be involved in some of the rebuilding as well. So they‘re absolutely crucial to support for Haiti.

MADDOW: What about the issue of refugees? Obviously, right now, when the president today was asked by NBC - the president of the Dominican Republic - was asked about whether he was worried about a large tide of Haitian refugees coming to the Dominican Republic, he essentially said, “Listen, the earthquake was in Port-au-Prince. And it is a really long walk. It‘s really far. There‘s a geographical problem there.”

That isn‘t always going to be true. People are going to want to leave Haiti. That is going to be the easiest place for them to get to or at least the first place they will think of. What‘s the background - how concerned will the Dominican Republic be about that issue? How will they handle it?

WUCKER: Well, I think it was really striking that he expressed that he wasn‘t quite so concerned about that because in the past, whenever there have been political problems in Haiti - coups, instability, whenever there have been other natural disasters - there‘s been a lot of concern about that in the Dominican Republic.

But I think it is something we should think about in the United States that we shouldn‘t count on the Dominican Republic to necessarily take up the slack. There are a lot of Haitians in the United States who need some sort of legal status, a temporary protected status, that‘s something that‘s often been offered to countries, particularly central American, who‘ve had natural disasters.

And I think it‘s something that would be very appropriate to offer to Haitians right now, not just to help them help Haitians back in Haiti, but also to ease some of the potential pressure on the Dominican Republic.

MADDOW: The United States government may be taking an initial step in that direction already by stopping deportations of people, of Haitians back to that country right now, even people for whom those proceedings had already started.

Michelle Wucker, director of the World Policy Institute, remind us again of the name of your book about the Dominican Republic and Haiti?

WUCKER: “Why The Cocks Fight: Dominicans and Haitians and the Struggle for Hispaniola.”

MADDOW: Thank you very much.

WUCKER: Thank you.

MADDOW: It‘s a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. Since Hurricane Katrina in our country, the American government‘s response to natural disasters has understandably come under some extra scrutiny.

Just ahead, a member of the president‘s cabinet, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, will be here to talk about the crisis in Haiti and the official American response. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Joining us now here in the studio is our nation‘s Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack. He is coordinating with the rest of the Obama administration on relief efforts in Haiti. He has also just returned from meeting with leaders and with farmers in Afghanistan on U.S. efforts to rebuild their agriculture sector. Mr. Secretary, thank you for being here. It‘s good to have you here.

TOM VILSACK, UNITED STATES AGRICULTURE SECRETARY: It‘s great to be here.

MADDOW: Give me a sense of the urgency with which this issue, the issue of Haiti, is being handled within the administration. We keep hearing about a whole of government response. But what does that really mean?

VILSACK: Well, it means that the president has been very clear to all of us that he wants a coordinated, quick reaction. That means that we have to get emergency food to Haiti. It means we have to get emergency medical supplies to Haiti. We have to get equipment, security - all of that has to be done simultaneously and has to be done in a coordinated fashion.

Fortunately, we have got a good person at the point, Raj Shah, the USAID administrator. He knows what he‘s doing. He has put a good team together and we are responding quickly. You‘re going to see substantial amount of progress, I think, in the next 24 hours as supplies arrive, as personnel arrives, as security arrives, food arrives. Over 14,000 metric tons of food is on its way.

So you‘re going to see a significant step in the right direction. Then, you‘re going to have to take a look at the long term. And this is going to be a commitment that the administration is prepared to make as the president said today for the long term.

Not only do you have to search and rescue and recover, but you also have to reconstruct. And that‘s going to take weeks, months, and years.

MADDOW: We are in a situation right now where it sounds like - when people describe what the response is, it sounds like a comprehensive, almost overwhelming response. And then, we see the footage of what‘s happening on Port-au-Prince and it‘s clear that there is a bottleneck, that things are not getting to the people who need them and what it seems from - We‘re able to talk to people in the airport and in the streets, people able to get some close-up view of what‘s happening, is that it‘s a coordination issue as much as it is a logistics issue.

Yes, the roads are difficult to pass, but who is in charge? There isn‘t much of a Haitian government in operation at this point. The U.N. says they‘re in charge. They‘ve got their own challenges. How does America navigate that?

VILSACK: Well, essentially America takes the position that we need to get equipment in place. Let me give you an example. We‘re going to see helicopters. We‘re going to see air transportation provided. That‘s going to make a big difference in terms of being able to move in and around the city and deliver resources.

We‘re going to see heavy equipment. That‘s going to make a difference in terms of moving concrete blocks that might be in the way. It does take a little time to get this organized and get the items in place and the personnel in place to make sure that there‘s adequate security.

But there is no question the president has made it very clear to all of us he wants us to focus on this and he wants to get it done. He wants to get it done right and he wants to get it done now.

MADDOW: We know about the 82nd airborne, the Marines, the USS Carl Vincent on the way. We know USAID, as you say, is in a coordinating role as part of the State Department. What is the role, say, of your agency? What are other aspects of the government doing that Americans should know in terms of our response?

VILSACK: Well, we‘re reaching out to food companies to determine what surplus food they might be able to provide over the course of the longer haul. We‘ve made discussions with Bunge, Cargill, ADM, Wal-Mart stores that might be able to provide assistance and help.

We‘re taking a look at our own surplus commodities to determine whether they match up or not with what is needed. We‘re making sure we have used our Forest Service personnel who are very much involved in incident command. We have five people at the D.C. Incident Command working on logistics.

We will, over the long haul, no doubt be engaged in helping farmers plant their crops later in the year. Our forest people will probably be there reconstructing roads and building dams and irrigation systems that may have been destroyed by the earthquake.

We may also be using satellite imagery to determine the extent of damage beyond the capital area. So there are a multitude of tasks that the USDA will be engaged in and will be engaged in. And that is true, frankly, of virtually every aspect of the federal government.

MADDOW: And hearing you describe those tasks and honestly reflecting on what Tracy Kidder was saying about trying to build capacity, trying to build indigenous capacity, I am struck by some of the strategic parallels here with our mission in Afghanistan.

I know you‘re just back from Afghanistan but it is that same issue of both trying to help directly but also trying to build up local government capacity, trying not to do harm by the way that we are intervening. Obviously, this is not a military operation the way that that is but are there some of the same challenges?

VILSACK There are, absolutely, and perhaps even more complicated in Haiti because there isn‘t a functioning central government as there is in Afghanistan. There isn‘t a minister of agriculture who has enough resources to actually make something happen as is the case in Afghanistan.

So that is going to be a problem. And it‘s going to be a problem to make sure that we work in concert with Haitians, to make sure that they understand that we are helping them. We‘re not trying to direct them. We‘re not trying to dictate to them.

But at the end of the day, the farmers have to put the crops in the ground. People have to be fed. Water has to be obtained. Systems have to be replaced and repaired. Roads have to be constructed. All of that has to be done.

And I honestly believe that this is a tragic circumstance. The loss of life is horrendous. The key challenge for all of us is whether or not we can make something out of this, whether we can put Haiti back in the right direction.

I think the president believes we can. I think he thinks we have the capacity and the heart and the compassion to do it. And I think it‘s up to every single one of us to contribute. And certainly, I think all of the cabinet members are anxious to do that. And we‘ve instructed our staffs to be fully engaged in this.

MADDOW: To hear you express the desire and the president‘s will and this government‘s will to make it a long-term commitment, could make all the difference. But obviously, right now, the immediate need is to get things moving and fast.

VILSACK: That‘s right.

MADDOW: Tom Vilsack, our nation‘s agriculture secretary, I‘ve had a number of chances to interview you over the years in a number of - well, you‘ve had a number of different jobs and I always really find it a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you.

VILSACK: Thanks, Rachel.

MADDOW: Good to see you. We‘ll be right back with more of our continuing coverage on the catastrophe on Haiti.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Many of you have already donated money to help the millions of people affected by the earthquake in Haiti. Many more of you will donate in days and weeks ahead. If you donate by credit card, American Express and Visa and Mastercard have all announced that they will waive the few percentage points those companies would normally skim for themselves off of your payment. And good on them for that.

Some of you, however, will end run around the credit card companies altogether to donate money in a completely novel way. It‘s one of the ways that I personally gave today. I gave by text message. After the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004, Americans donated about $200,000 to charity through text messaging.

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Americans donated about twice that, about $400,000 through text messaging. Last year, for all of 2009, for all causes, fundraising via cell phone hit the $2 million mark nationwide. That was all very good, very philanthropic.

But this time, for this disaster, the charitable donation numbers we are seeing dwarf those totals. A bunch of organizations are raising money this way for Haiti. But to just give you a ballpark idea of donate-by-texting‘s success, the American Red Cross alone has raised almost $6 million through text message donations in two days.

And the icing is that wireless carriers, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile have agreed to waive their standard text messaging fees for those texted donations. Excellent.

Except for Sprint. Sprint not so much with the excellent. They told MSNBC today that standard text messaging charges will apply. They did say that their customers are free to buy text messaging plans from Sprint to cover the cost of that one text. Helpful. Thanks, Sprint.

Joining us now is Tony Aiello. He‘s the CEO and co-founder of M-Give one of the companies making it possible to donate by phone. M-Give is a for-profit company. They‘ve waived their start-up in transaction fees for the charities raising money for the crisis in Haiti in this sway. Mr. Aiello, thanks very much for joining us.

TONY AIELLO, CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, M-GIVE: Thanks for having me this evening, Rachel.

MADDOW: I know that you‘re waiving all your fees for donations to this disaster. Thank you. Before this quake, tell me how this service worked, how it would be set up. I know the donation amount would show up on a customer‘s phone bill.

AIELLO: Yes. That‘s exactly correct, as using this example as perfect because it works for day-to-day fundraising just like it does for disaster relief. So, in effect, the mobile user would, in this case, text the word Haiti to the number 90999 and receive a text message back asking them to confirm by replying with “yes.”

At that point, their mobile phone bill is tagged with a $10 donation. So that donor then actually pays that to their wireless carrier the next time they pay their bill. And the funds are then funneled to a 501 C3 called M-Give Foundation and then distributed to the appropriate charities. In this case - this campaign - all the funds are going to the Red Cross.

MADDOW: I would also say that if you‘re worried about getting spam on your cell phone because you‘ve done this, I did this today, and after you get sent the “yes” and you get the confirmation, you then get a note that says, “Do you keep getting texts from the American Red Cross?” You can write back and say “no” if you don‘t want to. So it‘s sort of a “whew” if you‘re worried about that.

One of the things that I am worried about this, although I think

it‘s cool to donate at the spur of the moment -

AIELLO: OK.

MADDOW: I‘m worried it‘s a quick way to donate but it takes too long this way for the money to actually arrive at the charity that I just donated to. Can you explain that?

AIELLO: Well, sure. As I mentioned a moment ago, when the - if you and I both give today, we might be paying our mobile bill on a different cycle or a different monthly billing cycle.

So the carriers have to collect all of that money and then distribute it to the 501-C3 clearing house and then distribute it to the charity. So everyone in the chain wants to get the money to the Red Cross as fast as possible.

And all parties involved - they‘re working to try to streamline that effort. And right now, in traditional day-to-day fundraising, it‘s about a 90-day - 90 days between the time that the mobile user presses the buttons on the phone and the dollars arrive at the charity.

We hope to streamline that for this disaster based on the size and scope of this situation. The tragedy boggles the mind, so everybody wants to get the money to the charity as fast as possible.

That said, because this is such a major disaster, I think people are going to be needing dollars for quite some time. So you know, clearly your point is well taken. The goal is to get the money to the charity as quickly as possible.

MADDOW: Mr. Aiello, I think it‘s an incredibly successful way to raise money. If that window does get shorter than the time it is now and you talk about these details on your Web site, let us know and we‘ll tell people. We‘ll help get the word out.

Tony Aiello is the CEO and the co-founder of M-Give, a company that allows you to text donations to nonprofits. As Mr. Aiello Said, if you‘d like to text a donation for relief to Haiti, we have a list of charities that accept text donations posted on our Web site, which is Rachel.MSNBC.com. Mr. Aiello, thank you. And we will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: We‘re back live at 11:00 p.m. Eastern. “COUNTDOWN” with Keith Olbermann starts right now.

Transcript for The Rachel Maddow Show, January 4, 2010

Guests: Richard Wolffe, E.J. Dionne, Jonathan Cohn, Kent Jones

Transcript:

RACHEL MADDOW, HOST: Happy New Year to you, Keith. It‘s great to have you back. Thanks.

We begin tonight with some breaking news. On the White House investigation into exactly what happens with the Christmas Day botched terror attempt. MSNBC political analyst Richard Wolffe is actually joining us now by phone with that.

Richard, I know you just shared some reporting on COUNTDOWN about a potentially very inflammatory development in the Christmas Day terror plot investigation. What can you tell us about that reporting and what else you‘ve been able to learn?

RICHARD WOLFFE, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Rachel, this investigation is still very much at the fact-finding stage where the White House is looking at still what happened. It‘s very preliminary. Obviously, the president has just got back from vacation and just started prepping for his big session tomorrow—which I‘m told is still going to focus on things like the screening processes that people face.

But the question here is whether or not the systemic failure that the president has talked about was anything more than human error. Was this some kind of failure because of the system‘s internal tensions? Or was there actually just a surplus of information that people didn‘t understand or report fully?

So, the question about how intelligence was shared is very much uppermost in the president‘s mind. He is still—I am told—very steamed about the whole affair and the failings that led to such a serious breach of security. But it‘s still very early in the phase of where this investigation is going.

MADDOW: Richard, I believe that the—I think the reason that you‘re reporting tonight has an exclamation point on it for many of us who saw your interview on COUNTDOWN, you were thinking about where this might led, is the prospect, not just that intelligence leads that should have been followed weren‘t followed, that intelligence dots that should have been connected weren‘t connected, that there isn‘t enough communication among the different parts of the American intelligence community. That‘s important analysis but not new analysis.

What‘s new and very worrying is the prospect that intelligence was deliberately withheld by one part of the American intelligence community from another either because of a grudge to make somebody look bad or for any other reason that put petty politics above national security.

Is that, in fact, the path that this White House inquiry is going down?

WOLFFE: That I think is 10 steps ahead of where the White House is right now.

MADDOW: OK.

WOLFFE: I just checked in with White House people again. And, look, there are—there‘s lots of finger-pointing going on in the intelligence community, where you have people who are in the center of it all, who are tasked with pulling these things together who say the information was there and it wasn‘t flagged up or it wasn‘t shared adequately. So, there is a line of inquiry that goes to the heart of why wasn‘t this stuff shared adequately?

I think the early suspicions from inside the White House are that this comes down to human error more than this is some willful withholding. But the questions are being asked and they‘re being asked because some people are saying this stuff wasn‘t shared adequately and they say it could have been.

MADDOW: MSNBC analyst Richard Wolffe joining us, helping us sort out what‘s turning out to be both a fascinating story and a deeply troubling story about America‘s response to the terror alert or the terror incident on Christmas Day, and what we could have pieced together ahead of time.

Richard, thanks very much for your time. We appreciate it.

WOLFFE: Thank you, Rachel.

MADDOW: All right. We begin our first show of 2010, now, with the death of a political truism that doesn‘t seem to have survived 2009. The truism is the conventional wisdom that Republicans sure know how to do terror politics. 2010 being an election year—right now, Republicans all over the country are busy waxing poetic about terrorism on campaign trails all around the country.

For example there‘s this gentleman in Minnesota.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ALLEN QUIST (R-MN), HOUSE CANDIDATE: I, like you, have seen that our country is being destroyed. I mean, this is—every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom. This is our fight. And this is our time.

This is it. Terrorism, yes. But that‘s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They‘re not liberals. They‘re radicals. They are destroying our country.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: House candidate Allen Quist of Minnesota. Terrorism isn‘t the big battle. The big battle is between us and the liberals.

That sort of political speech right there is what it looks like when something that used to work for you stops working. Someone obviously once told that Republican congressional candidate in Minnesota, “Hey, you should campaign on terrorism. That always works out great for Republicans.”

That is the common wisdom and it might have been true at one point, but it does actually matter how you do it. And if you‘re saying things like, “I hate Democrats more than I hate al Qaeda,” I‘m pretty sure you‘re not doing it right.

Now that the calendar has flipped to 2010 we‘re experiencing a little outbreak of Republicans blowing it. Republicans blowing something they used to be pretty good at, the politicization of terrorism.

The latest is Republican Senator Kit Bond of Missouri. In trying to attack President Obama‘s handling of the Christmas Day underpants bomber, Mr. Bond stepped on the same rake that a number of his colleagues have already recently stepped on.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CHRIS WALLACE, FOX NEWS: Do you think it was a mistake to charge Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant?

SEN. KIT BOND ®, MISSOURI: Clearly. As you said, in your interview, as soon as he got a lawyer, he lawyered up. We should have held him as an enemy combatant and tried him under the military commissions.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: We should have held him as an enemy combatant.

After facing questions about why he thinks President Obama is wrong to try the Christmas Day bomber in federal court, when President Bush made the exact same decision about the shoe bomber, Richard Reid, back in 2002, Senator Bond, after facing those questions, decided to double-down apparently without checking his own record. The senator is now seeking to go back in time to try to create the impression that he was against the shoe bomber being charged in federal court back in 2002, now, calling it a mistake—even though Senator Bond made not one peep of protest about that at the time.

In fact, at the time, the Justice Department, the Bush Justice Department was prosecuting Richard Reid—at that time, Senator Kit Bond was asked specifically if he had any criticism of the Bush Justice Department‘s role in fighting terrorism. Senator Bond said he had none.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

BOND: I believe that the Department of Justice is observing constitutional guidelines and safeguards, but they‘re going after people who come from areas of the world which might spawn terrorists, and I think that‘s appropriate.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

MADDOW: In 2002, he said what the Justice Department was doing was appropriate. Now looking back on it he says, back in 2002, that was a huge mistake—huge mistake to use the Justice Department for this sort of thing. How dare Obama do this now, this thing I said at the time was appropriate?

Then there‘s Republican Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina. And after facing pressure for putting an indefinite hold on President Obama‘s nominee to run transportation security, Mr. DeMint has now, sort of, caved, saying that he‘ll allow a vote on the TSA nominee as long as he gets time to debate the nomination on the Senate floor. While caving on the TSA issue, Senator DeMint continues to embarrassing himself—embarrass himself by pressing another issue.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

SEN. JIM DEMINT ®, SOUTH CAROLINA: A lot of us have been concerned over the last year that the president did seem to downplay the threat of terror. He doesn‘t use the word anymore.

GLORIA BORGER, CNN: Senator DeMint, how has he downplayed the risk of terror?

DEMINT: Well, it begins with not even being willing to use the word.

The concern that a lot of us have had over the last year is we‘ve even dropped the word “terror.”

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

MADDOW: You know, when you see Jim DeMint saying this sort of thing, it might be useful to remember that he‘s just making it up as he goes along. You should hear a little laugh track in your head when he does that, as evidenced by President Obama repeatedly on tape saying this word that Jim DeMint says he never says.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Terror and extremism that threatens the world‘s stability.

Extremists sewing terror in pockets of the world.

Suffering and civil wars that breed instability and terror.

New acts of terror.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

MADDOW: When Jim DeMint says that Barack Obama never uses the word “terror,” he‘s lying. It should probably be pointed out when that happens.

As we have noted here before the outbreak of people inexpertly trying to politicize terrorism, trying to politicize terrorism but blowing it, that effort sort of has a mascot in Republican Congressman Pete Hoekstra of Michigan. Mr. Hoekstra is now apparently unwilling to defend his decision to raise money off of the attempted murder of 300 Americans on Christmas Day.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Are you proud of that, of fundraising off the national crisis like that?

REP. PETE HOEKSTRA ®, MICHIGAN: Well, I‘ve been leading on national security for the last nine years that I‘ve been on the intelligence committee. And over the last two to three months, I‘ve been very concerned about where this administration is taking us on national security issues, the refusal to acknowledge that the Fort Hood attack was a terrorist attack.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But I‘m asking about raising money off the attempted murder of 300 people three days after it occurred.

HOEKSTRA: I am proud of the role that I have played in making sure that America is safe.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Mr. Hoekstra dodging that question not once but twice yesterday. And that‘s actually a big change from the way the Hoekstra camp had been talking about his raising money off a terrorist attack against American citizens.

Just last week, Mr. Hoekstra‘s campaign told us that Pete Hoekstra himself signed off on that fundraising letter and that we should expect more similar efforts from him. Just a few days later, Congressman Hoekstra has been forced to become embarrassed about this. Now, apparently, unwilling to defend the effort when he‘s personally called out on it.

Even as Mr. Hoekstra apparently realizes the step on the rake face plant that he has made here, trying to raise money off of the attempted murder of 300 Americans on Christmas Day, three days after it happened, even as Hoekstra finally starts to get embarrassed about that, the Republican Party seems to be following Mr. Hoekstra‘s lead.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee sending out a fundraising pitch that reads in part, quote, “This country was one faulty detonator away from an American airliner being blown out of the sky. When a foreigner tries to blow up an airliner, it is an attempted terrorist attack. Will you please give $5 or $10 by midnight tomorrow so we have the money necessary to fight the Obama machine?”

The National Republican Congressional Committee also sending out its own fundraising e-mail using the specter of terrorist attacks against Americans to cash in.

Republicans are doubling down on trying to raise money off of an attempted terrorist attack. And while some are trying to win the terror debate by actively attacking President Obama publicly, others are making the strategic decision to keep quiet.

Peter Baker of “The New York Times” reported this weekend, quote, “A half-dozen former senior Bush officials involved in counterterrorism told me before the Christmas Day incident that for the most part, they were comfortable with Obama‘s policies, although they were reluctant to say so on the record. Some worried they would draw the ire of Cheney‘s circle if they did. They generally resent Obama‘s anti-Bush rhetoric and are unwilling to give him political cover by defending him.”

Republicans are supposed to be good at politicizing terrorism, yet here are four former senior Bush administration officials actually telling a reporter that there are things they think are keeping the public safe that they will not publicly support because of partisan politics. They won‘t let anyone know they support these policies they actually support and think are good for the country because they‘re afraid of Dick Cheney being mad at them. They told that to a reporter.

You know, keeping your name off that quote is not going to be enough to help your cause if you‘re willing to admit to being that craven.

Joining us now is “Washington Post” columnist, E.J. Dionne.

E.J., it‘s great to see you. Thank you for being here tonight.

E.J. DIONNE, WASHINGTON POST COLUMNIST: Good to be with you. Happy New Year.

MADDOW: Happy New Year.

It seems to me like there have been a lot of political missteps as people have tried to sort of politicize and capitalize off of terrorism in the wake of this Christmas Day incident. Are the people who are supposed to be good at this getting bad at this, or has the political context changed?

DIONNE: Well, you know, it‘s like a team that uses one play and does really great one season, the 2002 election, and it works great. The next season, the 2004 election, and they figure they can use the same play over and over again and not adjust it.

And I think what they ran into in the last week is the first couple days, President Obama was trying to reassure people. A lot of folks thought he looked too laid-back, wasn‘t engaged. If they had just hit him a little then and moved on, they might have gotten some mileage out of it, but instead, they sort of pushed way farther. Part of it was just over-politicization. A lot of people objected to the fundraising letter.

Some of it was just pure mendacity, the notion that Obama doesn‘t use the word “terror.” And just part of it was hypocrisy. You know, many examples where policies that President Bush pursued that Obama is pursuing suddenly became bad because Obama is pursuing the same policies and that just didn‘t work.

And so, I think they took a situation where they might have gained a little ground and at the end of it all, I think they lost ground in the last week.

MADDOW: And I think if we‘re going to sort of maintain the pseudo sports metaphor here, in terms of playing.

DIONNE: Forgive me.

MADDOW: No, I think it‘s actually appropriate because what this sort of seems like is an own goal on behalf of the Republicans. It seems like they‘ve tried to turn this into an offensive maneuver—like they always have—and it has back fired on them. They‘ve ended up scoring a goal on themselves.

And I don‘t feel though, like Democrats have made political progress with this. Democrats have been able to turn this to any offensive advantage here for them politically.

Are Democrats playing this same game with Republicans? Or are they just letting Republicans hurt themselves?

DIONNE: Well, the old line that if your enemy is losing a battle, don‘t interfere. And I actually think that there was a moment when it turned and that moment was when Dick Cheney came out and said the things that he said that were untrue and there is, I don‘t think, anyone better at mobilizing the Democratic base than Dick Cheney.

You found all sorts of people who had been critical of President Obama on the health care plan or on Afghanistan suddenly wanting to say, hold on a minute. Dick Cheney is going after Obama on something in, you know, what was, clearly, an unfair way. And so, I think this helped Obama immensely with his own base. I‘m not sure it mattered to a lot of other people, but it sure mattered with his own side.

MADDOW: What‘s your reaction to these anonymous, former Bush senior officials telling “The New York Times” that they support President Obama‘s counterterrorism policies but they won‘t say so publicly? To me, that seems like a relatively craven admission.

DIONNE: Well, I also liked in that Peter Baker article that some of them said, “If we supported Obama, it would actually make his policies more unpopular. If they said they were like President Bush‘s policies.”

You know, some of it is about how tribal and divisive we‘ve gotten on these kind of issues. Professionals used to be professionals and Republicans and Democrats could support each other, you can‘t do that now. And it‘s bad for you in the next administration.

But there are Republicans who have spoken out. I was really struck on “Meet the Press” yesterday when General Michael Hayden, former head of the CIA, and also, Michael Chertoff, who can be a fairly partisan Republican, emphasized the continuity between certain Obama policies in terms of just stopping and catching terrorists and the Bush policies.

And so, when you have the Republican professionals in this field speaking out and saying, “Hold on, you know, some of this stuff, our own side is saying isn‘t true,” they didn‘t put it that way but that was the effect of it—when I saw that I said, this game is really over.

MADDOW: Yes. E.J. Dionne, columnist for “The Washington Post”—it‘s really good to have your insight on this. Thanks very much for your time tonight.

DIONNE: Good to be with you. Thank you.

MADDOW: As Republicans arguably start to blow it on politicizing terrorism, another man bites dog as Democrats seem to be officially out-maneuvering Republicans on health reform—out-maneuvering them in terms of legislative tactics. Yes, I know these are words that you thought you would never hear. It took almost a year but Democrats do appear to be pulling it off. We have that story coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: If man-made islands, an indoor skiing mountain in the middle of a desert, and a billion-dollar Tiger Woods golf course complete with palaces overlooking the greens—if all of those things weren‘t enough to spear Dubai into everyone‘s mind as a place that‘s clearly compensating for something, well today, the tiny kingdom unveiled the tallest structure in the world.

There it is, in all of its tallness. The Burj Khalifa is a 160-story, 2,717-foot high monument to height. The official news agency of Dubai is calling it, quote, “Another unique achievement by Dubai to be added to the pages of humanity‘s modern history.”

For extra credit, can you name the structure that was the world‘s tallest manmade thing before this? Before the Burj Khalifa was unveiled? What was the tallest manmade thing in the world? Can you even guess what country it was in?

If you guessed Warren Beatty‘s little black book, you have a keen sense of topical humor but you‘re wrong. Up until now, the tallest structure in the world was this television transmission tower three miles west of Blanchard, North Dakota. And it transmits the heck out of Channel 11 in Fargo. The KVLY-TV mast northwest of Fargo is now the second tallest manmade structure on earth. That is until Fargo figures out how to one up Dubai over this whole Burj Khalifa thing.

I‘m sure Fargo‘s got something in the works. I love rivalries like this. Fargo, Dubai, Fargo, Dubai.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: If you used whatever vacation time you had over the past few weeks to get away from the relentless debate in the Senate about health care reform, I‘m sorry to tell you vacation is over. The House and the Senate are gearing back up for yet another round on health reform. But according to new reporting today, the Democrats may have found a way to get this bill done, despite the full court press by the Republican Party to try to stop it.

On December 1st, you might remember that Republican Senator Judd Gregg wrote a memo laying out all of the procedural road blocks available to the Republican Party to try to stop health reform, a veritable arsenal of obstruction. TPM posted it all online.

Republicans, it turns out, have used a lot of these techniques.

There‘s this one, for example, from section one, the “new legislative day.” We asked a senior Democratic leadership aide about this today who confirmed to us that, yes, basically, every time you saw 92-year-old Senator Robert Byrd being wheeled into the Senate in the middle of the night, Republicans were using the “new legislative day” tactic as the reason for that.

Then in section two of Judd Gregg‘s how-to-obstruct memo, there was this one: reading of amendments and conference reports in entirety. Remember when Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma tried that one? He forced a tag team of Senate clerks to spend a whole bunch of hours reading an amendment before Bernie Sanders let rip a righteous howl on the Senate floor to put an end to that one?

Senator Gregg‘s obstruction instructions also suggested using Senate points of order to slow things down saying, quote, “A senator may make a point of order at any point he or she believes that a Senate procedure is being violated with or without cause.” We saw that trick pulled out of the bag a few times, including when Senator John Ensign of Nevada unwisely decided to deride health reform as unconstitutional by waxing eloquent about how solemnly he takes his oaths—which was awkward for a married man undergoing an ethics investigation for shtooping his campaign staffer.

Then there was the “motion to recommit” gambit. That‘s where you try to send a bill back to committee asking for changes or additions. That was a tactic the GOP used repeatedly.

But, of course, despite all of these tactics, health reform did pass the Senate. So now the fight‘s over, right? We can retire Senator Judd Gregg‘s version of “The Art of War”? It turns out, no. We can‘t.

Republicans have one last hope, one last arrow in the quiver, one last section in the obstruction memo. It‘s the conference committee process where the House and the Senate reconcile their two different versions of the bill. And according to Sun Tzu, obstruction master of the Republican Party, Senator Judd Gregg, that conference committee process provides yet more opportunities to stall this thing.

Did you know it takes three more votes just to send a bill to the conference committee? Just think what the minority party could do with three more votes. Three more chances to slow this thing down, to slow it down enough to try to kill it yet again.

Well, according to new reporting today, Republicans are not likely to get that chance. As my next guest was first to report today, Democrats are planning to skip the whole conference committee thing and work out the differences between the House and Senate bills informally, which—yes, means they‘ll be working them out without the Republicans.

Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of “The New Republic” and author of “Sick,” is the man who broke the story today.

Mr. Cohn, thank you very much for being here.

JONATHAN COHN, THE NEW REPUBLIC: It‘s good to be here. Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: In your reporting today, you wrote that a Senate staffer had told you it‘s time for a little ping pong. Ping pong being the legislative alternative to the conference committee.

What does it really mean?

COHN: Well, ping pong is basically a reference to the fact that instead of having a group of senators meet and work out a final version of the bill and then have each chamber vote on it, basically, you have—the House will now basically take the bill that the Senate passed, say, “All right, this is our starting template. Let‘s see what we like about this and let‘s modify it a little bit to make us so we can be happy with it.” They pass it. And then they send it back to the Senate and then the Senate does the same thing. Ping pong.

But, of course, as this is all happening, there is an informal negotiation going on. And in effect, the discussions that are taking the place of the conference committee and that‘ll be the Democratic leaders, will be, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid and will be the main committee players and perhaps some other people, and they will be having the discussions how to work out, “OK, how do we come to agreement on this, so as you said we can finally be done with this and we can finally get a bill onto President Obama‘s desk?”

MADDOW: Is it true that by doing things this way, rather than through a formal conference committee, Democrats are effectively denying Republicans further opportunity to slow down, obstruct, or maybe even stop the bill?

COHN: Well, there will still be a few opportunities. There has to be a final vote by the Senate, and as we‘ve seen, the Republicans will take any opportunity they can in the Senate to try to gum up the works. But this greatly diminishes the opportunities.

As you said, if we were going to go through the formal conference process, there would have to be a whole set of votes and a whole set of debates, and this thing could drag out for much, much longer. And, you know, it‘s fine, you know, to have this process of a conference committee and go through this formality if you‘re working with a minority party that‘s sincerely interested in trying to negotiate and come up with a compromise that, you know, some of their members can like. But I think we‘ve seen by now that that‘s simply not what the Republican Party is interested in.

You know, the time to cooperate, the time to talk about how to find some compromise that everyone can live with, you know, we had that time. We had the entire year to do that. And the Republicans made very clear that they were not interested.

So, I think, the Democrats now have gotten that lesson and they‘re reacting accordingly saying, “All right. You don‘t want to be part of this? We‘ll just take care of business on our own and we‘ll get this done and we‘ll try to come up with the best bill that we can.”

MADDOW: I guess the opportunity cost here is the prospect that the conference committee could actually be a chance to make the bill better, that it could be a place to constructively work out any kinks in the bill, to try to smooth out any policy awkwardnesses before it‘s actually signed by the president. I guess by having to do things this way or by choosing to do things this way—depending how you look at it—you do miss the opportunity to actually, in conference, make the policy, a better policy for the country.

COHN: Well, sure. I mean, look, in an ideal world, I‘m sure there are some ideas from the Republican side that would be useful to have as part of this discussion. And, frankly, I think Democrats over the last few months, even with the Republicans being relatively obstructionist about this, have actually made a lot of efforts to accommodate Republican concerns.

But look, at the end of the day, you need two to tango here. And if the Republicans aren‘t going to make themselves available in a constructive way, there is really no alternative but to proceed without them. I do think there‘s probably some opportunity cost there but, you know, you have to weigh that against the benefit, which is we can finally get this done. And I think that‘s the most important goal here.

MADDOW: And I think that any argument about that, and we have seen Republicans—particularly Republicans like John McCain—complaining loudly about Republicans being kept out of the process. But when they go so far as to put in black and white, to put in writing all of the different ways they‘re going to try to procedurally obstruct any form of health reform from going through, it becomes hard to also argue that they want to have a constructive role in the process. I guess they‘ve sort of ceded that territory, politically.

COHN: Well, I think so. I mean, don‘t forget on Christmas Eve, when we had that final, you know, climactic vote in the Senate and everyone was so exhausted, the last thing we heard from the Republicans was Mitch McConnell giving a speech on the floor vowing to fight on. “We‘re not going to let this bill happen. We‘re going to keep resisting.”

You know, frankly I think if Democrats were still trying to get the Republicans to cooperate and still bending over backwards, there‘ll be something wrong with them.

I mean, look, the Republicans have made their point. They don‘t want to be part of this discussion. That‘s their right. Let‘s move on without them.

MADDOW: Jonathan Cohn, senior editor at “The New Republic” - all cross the country right now, people are shell-shocked by the concept that Democrats are just taking the ball and running with it and trying to score. This is a new idea for liberals. I think it‘s just starting to sink in.

Thanks a lot, Jonathan.

COHN: Thanks for having me.

MADDOW: There is news brewing in the political blogosphere tonight about a Palin, a Palin who is not Sarah Palin. We will get to the bottom of it next.

And stay tuned for a full-on review of the constitutional provision that Michele Bachmann says is surely out to get you. Or at least she used to say it was surely out to get you. Now, she‘s not so sure. It‘s an interesting, backsliding story. Stick around.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Still ahead, if you are a Republican member of Congress who has a deep-seated fear of the census, but you also rely on the census for the very existence of your job, 2010 could be a very complicated year for you. TMI on Michele Bachmann and the census she fears, ahead.

But first, a few holy mackerel stories in today‘s news.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON, UNITED STATES SECRETARY OF STATE: The instability in Yemen is a threat to regional stability and even global stability.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: That was Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, speaking earlier today. The head of Cent Com, Gen. David Petraeus, took a surprise visit to Yemen this weekend. It was his third trip to Yemen in the 14 months that he has been the head of Cent Com.

Gen. Petraeus met with Yemen‘s president for about an hour and a half on Saturday. And then, the very next day on Sunday, the United States shut down our embassy in Yemen citing security threats. So did the Brits.

Today, the French, the Germans, the Japanese and the Czechs all followed suit, all either closing their embassies in that country entirely or limiting access to them.

Meanwhile, Andrea Mitchell reported on “Nightly News” tonight that truck-fuls of explosives are said to have gone missing somewhere inside Yemen, which may of course be why everything just got so suddenly shut down. We will keep you posted.

While we are talking about things going wrong in important places, political instability remains the huge story of Iran, a vast, growing, and powerful protest movement that has continued long beyond the summer‘s botched election. Government crackdowns have led to mass arrests, violence, and censorship.

Politically speaking, it is therefore incumbent upon the Iranian regime to at least try to appear unfazed, unified, and gaff-free in the face of this strong and growing opposition.

Now, you can cue the inadvertently hilarious new year‘s related government face plant. It is standard operating procedure for Iran‘s soccer league to send out a new year‘s greeting to all the members of the International Soccer Federation, FIFA.

This year was no different. The message was E-mailed out to everyone including, accidentally, a country whose existence Iran does not officially recognize - Israel, a soccer team that refuses to play in competition. A country its president has made quite a name for himself by insulting, dismissing, and denouncing.

So the message was essentially, “Happy New Year to everybody including soccer team of the country we refuse to admit exists.”

For this grave crime of accidentally forgetting to exclude Israel from the generic international New Year‘s greeting, accidentally including Israel in the happy new year, a senior official from the Iranian Soccer Federation has already offered his resignation.

According to the BBC, for their part, Israel took it all in stride. Quote, “They decided to make the most of it and replied with similar good wishes to, in their words, ‘all the good people of Iran‘ and ending the message with an E-mail wink. So Israeli soccer winning this round of word war three with cunningly deployed emoticons.

And finally, a story that has been percolating on blogs and throughout the Internet today - it has all the trappings of a monumental blockbuster of an Internet scoop. So one of our producers spent all day today looking into it and I have some very important information to share with you about a Palin.

Now, back in September, someone in Alaska filed paperwork to establish themselves as the organizer of a new limited liability company, an LLC. That person was Bristol Palin - 19-year-old Bristol Palin, the daughter of Sarah and Todd Palin, the mother of Tripp, now in the news for something completely un-tabloid-y.

The particular type of LLC that Bristol Palin established uses the federal classification code 541820 which means that Ms. Palin the younger has just formed a company that intends to provide lobbying, public relations, and political consulting services.

This is why it seemed like the real deal. First the lawyer named as the registering agent of this LLC is Thomas Van Flein who practices law at the address listed here on this document that we‘ve blurred out for the sake of his privacy.

Mr. Van Flein‘s previous gig was representing Gov. Sarah Palin during the trooper-gate scandal. Also, this also seemed like it was real, right? The registered company is called BSMP - BSMP - ah, the initials of Bristol Sharon Marie Palin.

Also, and although this is not real evidence, but it is neat, the signature on the document and Levi Johnston‘s ring tattoo of Bristol Palin‘s signature look a lot alike.

So adding all of this up, it seems like what you‘ve ended up with here is Bristol Palin, political consultant, lobbyist and public relations executive at the age of 19. Go, Bristol, go, right?

Actually, no. Mr. Van Flein finally got back to us late this evening. He told us in an E-mail, quote, “The code for BSMP, LLC pertains to several areas but includes public relations. Bristol Palin provides public relations services and is currently an ambassador for the Candie‘s Foundation.

The Candie‘s Foundation is a pro-abstinence organization. Bristol Palin has essentially set herself up to be paid as an incorporated entity as opposed to being paid as an individual and that‘s sort of a common choice people make when they have money coming in from various sources like this.

So BSMP, LLC, may just be a pretty smart financial decision by a very astute 19-year-old, or Bristol Palin is about to launch a lobbying and consultancy firm to run her mom‘s 2012 presidential campaign. Theoretically possible, but probably not.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: As the Republican Party searches for meaning in the political minority, one of its newest members is of course Alabama Congressman Parker Griffith who announced last month he was leaving the Democratic Party and becoming a Republican.

When he made that announcement, Mr. Griffith‘s campaign consulting team announced right away that they would be dropping Mr. Griffith because of his defection to the Republican Party.

Today, saying that Congressman Griffith had made a mistake, his chief-of-staff resigned as well, as did his legislative director and his legislative assistant and his other legislative assistant and his press secretary and his staff assistant and his legislative correspondent and his other legislative correspondent and his congressional fellow and his other congressional fellow. And even his intern quit.

Shout out to you, Andrew Menafee(ph). The entire Parker Griffith staff even waited until after the winter break so they could come back to Washington and do this en masse resignation in person and to release their “you made a big mistake” statement about their former employer.

And Mr. Griffith may have many, many virtues as a congressman and employer. Who knows, but inspiring confidence in those closest to him does not appear to be one of those virtues.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: First, Michele Bachmann encouraged everyone not to participate in the census. It‘s a conspiracy. Now, Michele Bachmann has changed her tune. If anything requires TMI, this story does. It‘s next. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: The secretary of commerce, the mayor of New York, and the director of the United States Census were all together in Times Square today to kick off a big, nationwide ad campaign.

This ad campaign includes a 13-vehicle bus tour traveling more than 150,000 miles, stopping at the Super Bowl in Miami, Mardi Gras in New Orleans, and even, I guess, bus-boating it somehow to Puerto Rico. The goal is to persuade Americans to fill out the census form, the form that should arrive in a mail box near you in mid-March.

The government is planning on spending over $300 million this year to persuade us all to spend 10 minutes answering that questionnaire and sending it back. The patriotic case for participating in the census is being made slightly more difficult this year by conservative Fringy McFringersons among us deciding that this year - even though it happens every 10 years, this year, the census must be some sort of commu-bamanist plot. For help unraveling this we turn to Kent Jones and TMI.

(MUSIC)

Oh, a special report.

KENT JONES, MSNBC CORRESPONDENT: Oh.

MADDOW: Oh. Kent, so tell me, how is it that once in a decade - fill out the census campaign, happens every decade. This year, they have to cope with conspiracy theories about the census, too.

JONES: That‘s right. Two magic words - Michele Bachmann.

MADDOW: Oh, yes.

JONES: Have a look.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

(voice-over): The congresswoman from the sixth district of Minnesota is drawing a line about the 2010 census.

REP. MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): I‘m not encouraging Americans not to fill out the census. I‘m saying for myself and for my family, our comfort level is we will comply with the Constitution, Article I, Section 2, we will give the number of the people in our home, and that‘s where we‘re going to draw the line.

JONES: Don‘t tread on me with your counting the people in my household.

BACHMANN: How do we know that our information that‘s given to the government, personal information, will stay private? What guarantees do the American people have that hackers won‘t get into the system?

JONES: You know what TMI means? Too much information, and that goes for your snoopy neighbors too.

BACHMANN: They‘ll go to our neighbors on our left and on our right and ask our neighbors to give them information about our personal lives. This is very concerning.

JONES: Actually, this is the census, which happens every 10 years, at least until Michele Bachmann can stop it.

BACHMANN: Look at American history. Between 1942 and 1947 the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt.

And that‘s how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. I‘m not saying that that‘s what the administration is planning to do. But I am saying that the private personal information that was given to the census bureau in the 1940s was used it against Americans to round them up.

JONES: Whew! So what kind of deranged extremists would want to do that to its own people? Who came up with this flagrant insult to the Constitution? The guys who wrote the Constitution.

Back in 1787, the United States became the first nation to make a census mandatory in its constitution, quote, “The actual enumeration of the population shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress and within every subsequent term of 10 years.”

It‘s data from that 10-year census that‘s used to redraw congressional maps - congressional maps like in Minnesota, which is facing the possible loss of a congressional seat after the next census.

Maybe that‘s why we haven‘t heard Bachmann railing about hackers or snoopy neighbors or interment camps since at least last August. Because if Michele Bachmann doesn‘t fill out the census and her constituents don‘t fill out their census, then what happens to her district? I think she‘s figuring out.

BACHMANN: The census is the mother load of all data collection in the United States.

JONES: Moral? Be nice to your mother lode.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MADDOW: Thank you, very much, Kent. I appreciate that. A brand-new segment is premiering on “COUNTDOWN” tonight. Keith‘s quick comment on Dick Cheney versus President Obama.

But first is to catch a senator. John Ensign on camera asked about the ethics investigation into him shtupping his staffer and paying her off and getting her husband hired as a lobbyist. That‘s next. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

MADDOW: Tonight‘s “Cocktail Moment” is all about the secretive religious organization known as The Family about which we‘ve reported quite a bit on this show.

First up, former C Street denizen and Family member, Sen. John Ensign of Nevada. Since his June 16th confessional, awkwardly in front of a public restroom sign, he has been particularly adept at avoiding the media when it comes to questions about his extramarital affair with a staffer and about the investigations into his professional relationship with her husband, former aide-turned-lobbyist, Doug Hampton.

In fact, the first time we remember seeing Sen. Ensign actually having to respond to anyone on camera about Mr. Hampton was when CNN‘s Dana Bash and a producer attached themselves to Sen. Ensign outside on Capitol Hill.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DANA BASH, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Senator, why was it so important to get Doug Hampton those jobs?

SEN. JOHN ENSIGN (R-NV): Just look at our state. Just look at our state. He‘s very clear on that stuff.

BASH: Is there any chance that you - are you considering resigning?

ENSIGN: I am focused on doing my work, and I am going to continue to focus on doing my work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: Since that, Mr. Hampton has said in interviews that Sen. Ensign knowingly violated ethics rules by helping him get lobbying clients and meetings less than a year after he left the senator‘s employ.

So when CNN‘s Rick Sanchez got the chance to interview Sen. Ensign at the end of the year, the anchor gamely tried to get some kind of explanation from Mr. Ensign, only to be evaded for a full six minutes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ENSIGN: You know, Rick, I‘ve been dealing with health care reform.

My state has over 12 percent unemployment rate. We have two wars going on.

RICK SANCHEZ, CNN ANCHOR: Right.

ENSIGN: These latest terrorist attacks - there are so many other bigger issues. I‘ve commented on all I needed to comment on those kinds of things. I‘ve commented on all I was going to comment on that.

I‘m not going to answer any of the questions because I‘m focused on doing my job right now. All that stuff will take care of itself over time. I‘ve spoken all that I need to speak on this.

And everything will take care of itself over time. I‘ve answered all of those questions. In the end, everything will be answered in its fullest. We will cooperate, and I think, you know, based on the facts, that the evidence committee would clear me, and I‘ll be able to go on being a senator. I‘ve answered the questions that I‘m going to answer, and I go back to my statements ...

SANCHEZ: All right.

ENSIGN: ... that I have done nothing ethically or illegal in this matter. And in the end, it‘s going to absolutely - we feel that we will be completely exonerated.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

MADDOW: What we, senator? You know, speaking of The Family, the “New York Times” today picked up on the reporting we‘ve done, for the last five weeks or so, on the kill-the-gays bill proposed in Uganda.

As we have reported, the legislator who introduced the kill-the-gays bill and the country‘s president whose government has supported it are members of The Family.

Three weeks ago, we finally found out what the extremely secretive and media-averse Family thinks of the bill in Uganda.

Bob Hunter, a former Ford and Carter administration official, who‘s also been one of the Family‘s key contacts with Uganda, told investigative reporter, Jeff Sharlet, that The Family is opposed to that bill.

And not only that, Mr. Hunter said he‘s actively working to get U.S. politicians to actively fight against the bill. For the first time since we started reporting on The Family many, many months ago, we finally have been able to schedule an interview with someone who is a part of the group.

Mr. Bob Hunter is the interview on THE RACHEL MADDOW Show right here tomorrow night which happens at our regular time, which is 9:00 p.m. Eastern. We are really, really, really looking forward to having him on the show. It is long overdue.

We will see you tomorrow for that. In the meantime, “COUNTDOWN” with Keith Olbermann starts right now. Have a great night.

Transcript of 'Race for the White House with David Gregory' for April 17, 2008

With Joe Scarborough, John Harwood, Rachel Maddow and Harold Ford, Jr., as guests

Transcript:

DAVID GREGORY, MSNBC ANCHOR: I‘m David Gregory, tonight, debating the debate. Now it‘s Barack Obama‘s turn to complaint about the format and the treatment, as the RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE rolls on.

Welcome to the RACE, your stop for the fast pace, the bottom line, and every point of view in the room. Five days now before PA, and the question is, did last night‘s debate change any minds? The key exchanges in just a moment. “Inside the War Room” tonight, we find the new poll numbers that expose Hillary Clinton‘s dilemma, to attack or not to attack? At half past, don‘t forget, that‘s at half past the hour. Tonight‘s “Big Questions,” has Michelle Obama pulled ahead in the battle of the political spouses?

The foundation of the program, of course, a panel that comes to play. And with us tonight, MSNBC political analyst and host of the “Rachel Maddow Show” on Air America, Rachel Maddow; NBC News analyst and chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Harold Ford Jr.; CNBC‘s chief Washington correspondent John Harwood; and “MORNING JOE” himself, the host of MSNBC‘s “MORNING JOE,” Joe Scarborough.

We begin, as we do every night, with everyone‘s take on the most important political story of the day. It‘s the “Headlines.” My “Headline” tonight, gotcha politics. That‘s how Senator Obama‘s campaign manager described the ABC debate. Obama complained today about 45 minutes of questions focused on his negatives, controversial statements, associations, and gaffes.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Now, I don‘t blame Washington for this, because that‘s just how Washington is. They like stirring up controversy, they like playing gotcha game games and getting up to attack each other. And I have to say, you know, Senator Clinton looked in her element.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: Obama argued Clinton twisted the knife at various points during the debate, and learned the wrong lesson, in his estimation, from the politics in the ‘90s. Here is Senator Clinton on Obama‘s bitterness remarks.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. HILLARY CLINTON (D-NY), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: I don‘t believe my grandfather or my father or the many people whom I have had the privilege of knowing and meeting across Pennsylvania over many years cling to religion when Washington is not listening to them. I think that is a fundamental sort of misunderstanding of the role of religion and faith in times that are good and times that are bad.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: Obama had this comeback.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OBAMA: Senator Clinton is right, she has gone through this. I recall when back in 1992 when she made a statement about how—what do you expect, should I be at home baking cookies? And people attacked her for being elitist, and this and that, and I remember watching that on TV and saying, well, that‘s not who she is, that‘s not what she believes, that‘s not what she meant, and I‘m sure that that‘s how she felt as well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: Here‘s the deal, are these the decisive issues? Maybe, maybe not, but personality, credibility, and character do count in campaigns. This is Obama‘s time of testing, and he has to deal with distraction, perception and events beyond his control. How he deals with all of this will determine whether or not he can close the deal and capture this nomination. That‘s my “Headline” tonight.

Joe Scarborough, your take on the debate last night?

JOE SCARBOROUGH, HOST, “MORNING JOE”: David, I couldn‘t agree with you more. The “Headline” last night was—and today is that Obama failed his test. Here‘s a guy who from Iowa on January 3rd through the Wisconsin Primary was a rock star. He was a unifying figure, he was post-partisan, he was post-racial.

Well, the honeymoon is over. Now Barack Obama is another politician getting beaten up. And when he gets beaten up, what does he do? He attacks the messenger. He sounds a lot like Hillary Clinton did a month ago when she kept going after moderators of these debates.

You don‘t do that unless you‘re taking on water. Barack Obama‘s biggest problem is, and this is something that superdelegates are worried about in the Democratic Party tonight, the fact that he had his weakest debate this political season, according to The New York Times, last night.

He should be in mid season form, he‘s not even close. He was testy, he was defensive, and he looked agitated by the fact that he was having to answer some tough questions that Republicans are going to make him answer from Denver all the way through November. He had better get used to it.

GREGORY: A lot to talk about. John Harwood, your “Headline” tonight?

JOHN HARWOOD, CNBC CHIEF WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT: My “Headline” is not a game-changer, David, and sad to say, as brilliant as Joe, he‘s only partly right here. Hillary Clinton had an extremely strong debate last night, Barack Obama did not, but my reporting from Democratic political professionals today, including those in Washington, even though Obama was trashing Washington pols for spreading this kind of stuff, they say this has not shaken the advantage that he has had among superdelegates over the last two months.

He has been accumulating about one a day. She needs to reverse that dynamic very quickly to have a chance in this race. It has not happened yet.

GREGORY: All right. Rachel Maddow, your take on all of this tonight?

RACHEL MADDOW, MSNBC POLITICAL ANALYST: The big winner from last night was the one not in the room. I‘m referring, of course, to John McCain. And I‘m the first person to criticize the utility of head-to-head match-up polls at this point in this type of election year, but the trend lines are good and getting better for John McCain.

The new AP./Yahoo poll that is out today shows him doing better than anybody could have expected at this point in the campaign, and that‘s because Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are doing the Republican‘s work for him at bottom dollar, tearing each other down. And McCain, without even really campaigning, is reaping the benefits of it.

GREGORY: All right. Harold Ford, welcome to the program, your take, your “Headline” tonight?

HAROLD FORD JR., NBC ANALYST: I think the McCain coronation is a little bit premature, although last night we saw a great raging debate between the two Democrats. Once Obama or Clinton emerge from this serious and what has been a pretty agonizing primary process, for those watching, and I would dare say the candidates, they will find a John McCain who is ready to be defined.

I think he is trying his hardest not only to reintroduce himself to the public, and even to his own party, he‘s having some challenge now cobbling together every element, every part of the Republican Party and is going to have a harder time, I believe, as we move forward at bringing more independents as Democrats frame and define him as a Bush third term.

GREGORY: Harold, if you look at last night, though, you have to think, yes, there is a fight going on on the Democratic side, but this really was the opening chapter of a general election debate as well, because even if some of these issues don‘t hurt Obama in the primary, and they are certainly distracting him, they‘re going to be fodder for a general election campaign.

FORD: Look, this is all a great test for both Barack and Hillary. Barack needs to be tested more, we need to hear more from him, we need to see how he responds under pressure. Hillary has shown a lot of that, but she was the inevitable candidate just a few months ago and now we‘re seeing how she responds as an underdog.

GREGORY: All right. Coming up next, most pundits scored last night‘s debate for Hillary Clinton, but the polls show she‘s suffering big time when it comes to trustworthiness, honesty, and favorability. We‘re going to dissect the numbers coming up.

Later, your playdate with the panel, call us, 212-790-2299. You can e-mail as well, race08@msnbc.com. We‘re right back after this break.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREGORY: With all this talk about Pennsylvania‘s primary next week, is anyone looking ahead to Indiana or North Carolina, less than three weeks away? Well, we‘ll get a breakdown of the latest numbers and tell you who is leading in the long run.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREGORY: We‘re back. Special edition tonight of “Inside the War Room” breaking down the latest poll numbers to determine which strategies are working and which are not. Back with us, Rachel Maddow, Harold Ford Jr., John Harwood, and Joe Scarborough.

First up, the pundits are saying Hillary Clinton scored some political points after last night‘s debate by putting Obama on the defensive. But according to the polls, she still has an uphill battle to climb when it comes to favorability and credibility in the latest The Washington Post/ABC News poll.

Her unfavorability score, look at this, up 14 points, from 40 in January to 54 percent in April. Obama‘s also jumped up, but by a lesser margin, from 30 percent in January, 39 percent in April. John Harwood, what does it tell you?

HARWOOD: Well, it tells me that she has got a bit of a box in terms of how to go after Barack Obama. I think she had the best of all worlds last night in that debate, because you had Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC raising these issues, putting Obama on the defensive, she could sort of chime in sadly and say, you know, I may not care about this stuff all that much, but there may be a lot of voters out there, and I‘m sorry that this is an issue, but we certainly have to deal with it.

That‘s exactly what she wants, because every time she goes aggressively on the attack herself, her negatives go up. And by the way, there was a lot of criticism of Stephanopoulos and Charlie for raising supposedly irrelevant issues. I think that is complete baloney. They were legitimate issues. Barack Obama is going to have to deal with this stuff if he is the Democratic nominee.

And from a Democratic point of view, if you are a Democratic strategist, better now than in October.

GREGORY: Rachel, what‘s the deal here? I mean, is there a gender aspect to this, that she gets more negative ratings if she goes on the attack? Why can‘t she effectively attack him?

MADDOW: Well, I think she is effectively attacking him, getting his negatives up by 9 points is no mean feat, it has to be said. And honestly, with due respect to John, I think that there‘s nothing about the fact that this slime is being discussed now in the Democratic debate that means it won‘t be discussed later.

Everything that‘s being thrown at Barack Obama right now has been out there. It‘s just a question of...

HARWOOD: He gets to practice his answers.

MADDOW: It‘s just a question of how much he‘s going to have to deal with it. Look, I mean, Democrats have two things they could have expected from this extended nominating contest.

They could have expected either we‘re going to start the general election campaign and get the slime and the insinuation and the personal stuff out there now so we have to deal with it for six months instead of two, or they could have expected this is going to be a debate that‘s about what—the Democrats competing over how best to identify a Democratic alternative to the Republican politics the country has had for the last eight years.

HARWOOD: But why is it slime?

MADDOW: It‘s slime because the first six questions of that debate—or the first one, which I think was already answered, but it‘s not that much of a surprise they started with, will you pick each other as the running mate? The answer is no. Then we get pastor, then we get bitter, then we get flag pin, then we get Bosnia, then we get the Sean Hannity question about the Weather Underground guy.

That is not...

HARWOOD: That‘s tough, but it‘s not slime.

MADDOW: It is slime. Because if you think about the different options that you have for the way Democrats can fight right now, they could be fighting about what‘s America—what ought America be like after George W. Bush? But they‘re not.

FORD: All right. In fairness to George and Charlie Gibson, understand they‘ve had about 15, 16 debates and they‘ve gone back and forth. I‘ve been on the ballot and then sat through some of these debates, and there are times I‘m frustrated at the questions that are asked.

The reality though is neither of these candidates, one will emerge as the nominee, will be able to avoid these tough, uncomfortable, and frankly, at times, insensitive questions. So I think it‘s appropriate.

(CROSSTALK)

GREGORY: Let me—here‘s the issue, though, character questions, authenticity, trustworthiness, these are issues that voters actually vote on. And last night, once again, Clinton faced tough questions for her Bosnia comments. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: How do you reconcile the campaign and credibility that you have when you‘ve made those comments about what happened getting off the plane in Bosnia, which totally misrepresented what really happened on that day? You really lost my vote. And what can you tell me to get that vote back?

CLINTON: I‘m embarrassed by it, I have apologized for it. I‘ve said it was a mistake, and it is, I hope, something that you can look over.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: But will voters take her word for it, or did the Bosnia flap permanently damage her credibility? Look again at the polling from ABC News/Washington Post poll, nearly two years ago, 52 percent of respondents thought Hillary Clinton was honest and trustworthy. That number has now plummeted to 39 percent.

And now a majority of voters, 58 percent, say no, she‘s not honest and trustworthy. Meanwhile, when asked who was more honest and trustworthy, Obama‘s lead grew from 38 to 53 percent in April, where Clinton has stayed at 30 percent.

Joe, what‘s the significance?

SCARBOROUGH: Well, the significance is, of course, that these are one of the areas where voters do vote on. You‘re exactly right. They want to know whether they can trust the politician that‘s in office, especially if they‘re going to be president of the United States.

And it‘s something that once you get behind the 8-ball there, it‘s hard to get out from behind it. You look at Ronald Reagan, in late 1986, he lost the American people, they stopped trusting him. Iran/contra came, and for the next two years he battled just to survive. He left the White House with positive poll numbers, but still, it was a tough two years.

The same thing happened with Bill Clinton in 1997, 1998. Once you go down in this category, it‘s hard to rehabilitate yourself, and that can have a real impact, especially in a primary election where there‘s not a lot of great differences on policy. When it gets personal, this is a number that you want to have high.

You want to be high on leadership and you want to be high on trustworthiness. She‘s not right now.

(CROSSTALK)

GREGORY: Let me just jump in for a second. I want to go on to this final point here in the polling, and that is, talk about end game. You look ahead to Indiana and North Carolina primaries, the latest L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll shows Obama ahead of Clinton in Indiana, Obama 40 percent and Clinton trailing by 5 points at 35 percent.

Look at North Carolina, Obama well ahead of Clinton with 47 percent. Clinton trails by double digits, 34 percent. With over 15 percent of voters undecided in both states, still the question of whether it‘s anybody‘s game.

Harold, it just shows you that the stakes are so high for Clinton. She needs a real game-changer out of a debate like this to really shift the numbers here.

FORD: Both of them now have to focus squarely on Pennsylvania. If she enjoys a 12-, 13-, 14-point advantage there and a win on next week, where Barack is able to close up to six or seven points, that will influence those states going forward.

I have to think all the numbers you have put up are relevant. But remember, political contests are choices between one or two candidates. Right now, her opponent is Barack Obama. There has not been a bigger force in newness and politics since Bobby Kennedy. So she‘s being compared to him.

When you pair her or match her up against John McCain or even Barack Obama up against John McCain, there are different qualities and different ways we measure these candidates. Joe is right that there‘s a trustworthiness and integrity issue that we look at closely.

But remember, political contests are choices between two people and two parties. Whichever one of these candidates is able to get out and define the other the quickest—to define the other the quickest in the general will be the one who ends up with an edge, which is why I believe a lot of these numbers are really—are not as relevant as they may seem, or not as important as they may seem.

After we get past Pennsylvania, we will have a clear sense of Indiana and a clear sense of North Carolina. If she wins big, she will benefit in big ways in both of those states going forward as well.

GREGORY: And that‘s going to be the key, how big is the margin of victory after so much time campaigning? I can‘t even remember the last time we had a vote in this primary.

Coming up, dueling “Smart Takes,” Marc Ambinder says that Barack Obama couldn‘t have done any worst at last night‘s debate. Another pundit, Mark Halperin, says he came out on top. So who has got the smarter take tonight?

And Mitt Romney provided some laughs at last night‘s Radio & Television Correspondents Association Dinner, delivering his top 10 list of why he dropped out of the presidential race. Here are a few of our favorites.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MITT ROMNEY, FORMER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Number nine, I got tired of the corkscrew landings under sniper fire.

(LAUGHTER)

ROMNEY: Number eight, as a lifelong hunter, I didn‘t want to miss the start of varmint season.

(LAUGHTER)

ROMNEY: Number two, I took a bad fall at a campaign rally and broke my hair.

(LAUGHTER)

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREGORY: Welcome back to the RACE. I‘m David Gregory. “Smart Takes” time. The provocative, the thoughtful, the most insightful. We find them all so you don‘t have to. Here, again, Rachel, Harold, John, and Joe.

First up, doing “Smart Takes” tonight about Obama‘s debate performance, theatlantic.com‘s Marc Ambinder says last night was very bad for Obama. To the quote board: “Keeping the scorecard, there is no way Obama could fare worse, nearly 45 minutes of relentless political scrutiny from the ABC anchors and from Hillary Clinton, followed by an issues and answers session in which his anger carried over and sort of neutered him.”

TIME‘s Mark Halperin says it wasn‘t Obama‘s best night, but he still gave him a B-plus, a higher grade than Clinton. To the quote board: “Subdued and secure, but often peevish and cross, it was a surly, tepid night for Obama, but he still emerged stalwart and in the lead.” Joe?

SCARBOROUGH: I don‘t know how anybody could have said that was a good night for Barack Obama. I respect Mark Halperin, and always read his work on time.com, but, boy, it was a bad night for Barack Obama.

He was peevish, as Halperin said, and unfortunately for him, he has had much better debate performances, but last night was the most watched debate performance, about 10 million people saw Barack Obama, a lot probably for the first time in a debate. That‘s not how he wanted to introduce himself to those people. It was a bad night for Barack Obama.

GREGORY: Well, but, Rachel, here‘s another take on this, which is, is there an advantage—I‘ve talked to some people within the Obama campaign who say, you know, it‘s not so bad to come out looking like he got beat up a little bit here, because they‘ve seen the other side, where it‘s Hillary Clinton complaining about debate coverage and treatment, and that didn‘t work so well for the Obama team. She got some benefit of that before.

MADDOW: I think that‘s right, but kind of for a different reason. I think it‘s not so much that Obama could benefit from the sort of sympathy against a hostile press thing that Clinton benefited from. I think it‘s more that Democrats have been concerned that Barack Obama maybe can‘t take a punch. Well, we have now seen him be punched a lot, and we know what he looks like when he gets punched.

And I think that Halperin is actually right when called him kind of tepid and stalwart. What Barack Obama looks like...

(CROSSTALK)

GREGORY: But this is the important point. You said it was slime earlier.

MADDOW: Yes.

GREGORY: These are qualities of these campaigns, and this—how he responds to issues like this, taking a punch, how he deals with this kind of stress, and stuff that he thinks is a distraction, it matters. That‘s what he‘s going to face in the White House, isn‘t it?

MADDOW: Well, it depends. I mean, it would have been really also interesting to see him take punches on stuff like Iran, and gas prices, and Iraq, and—you know, and the torture story that ABC broke to such effect last week and then they didn‘t discuss at all last night in their debate.

I mean, there are so many substantive issues on which he could have been hit and sort of pulled apart, and they didn‘t. They instead hit him all with the personal stuff. It‘s interesting, but it‘s not everything.

SCARBOROUGH: The question is, how did he take that punch, Rachel? Does anybody believe he took the—because you said that‘s what‘s important, and that is what‘s important, how is he going to take the punch, how will he take it this fall against John McCain? Does anybody really believe he takes a punch well?

MADDOW: Well, we saw what he does, he said “um” a lot. He punched back kind of mildly, he didn‘t lose his composure, and he actually didn‘t wallow as deep as his opponents and the moderators did in going...

(CROSSTALK)

MADDOW: That‘s what he does, now we know.

HARWOOD: There‘s another question, Joe, and that is, who is going to play Stephanopoulos and Gibson on SNL on Saturday night.

(LAUGHTER)

SCARBOROUGH: That‘s the big question.

HARWOOD: But look, I want to make one point about what—the slime issue that Rachel mentioned earlier. Rachel, Harold, and David are all too young to remember this, but Joe and I are old enough to remember the 1988 campaign. George H.W. Bush went to a flag factory running against Michael Dukakis, who had voted against the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, and everybody said in the press, including—what a ridiculous issue, what a slimy thing to do, what a dumb thing to do.

SCARBOROUGH: They mocked him.

HARWOOD: Guess what? Lee Atwater was right in doing that for George H.W. Bush, that‘s why the things like the flag lapel pin are things that Barack Obama has to learn to have good answers for.

SCARBOROUGH: And if I can say really quickly, everybody did, the press was unmerciful against George Bush senior. He went to flag factories, he talked about it non-stop, and I‘ll be damned if that didn‘t have a great effect. A lot of Americans said, I‘m not voting for this new kind of Democrat that won‘t even let kids in Massachusetts pledge allegiance to the flag. These things that people in Manhattan think are slimy, connect.

(CROSSTALK)

GREGORY: I got to get in here, I‘ve got take a break. We‘re going to come back, “Big Questions” of the night of this campaign coming up on the RACE. Don‘t go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(NEWSBREAK)

GREGORY: Welcome back to RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE. I‘m David Gregory. Time now for the three big questions of THE RACE. Still with us, MSNBC political analyst and host of the “Rachel Maddow Show” on Air America, Rachel Maddow, NBC News analyst and chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, Harold Ford Jr., cNBC‘s chief Washington correspondent John Harwood, and Morning Joe himself, the host of MSNBC‘s “MORNING JOE,” Joe Scarborough.

First up, this may have been the marquee moment from the Democratic debate, Hillary Clinton saying, yes, he can, when pressed if Barack Obama could win in the fall. Watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A simple yes or no question, do you think Senator Obama can beat John McCain or not?

CLINTON: Well, I think we have to beat John McCain and I have every reason to believe we‘ll have a Democratic president and it is going to be either Barack or me.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The question is, do you think Senator Obama can do that? Can he win?

CLINTON: Yes, yes, yes.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: Yes, yes, yes. Well, some polls have shown as many as 30 percent of Clinton supporters will vote for McCain if Obama gets the nomination. But last, Clinton seemed to say don‘t worry about that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

CLINTON: I will do everything to make sure that the people who supported me support our nominee.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: Our first question tonight, did Clinton concede her strongest argument to these super delegates, her electability argument? Harold Ford Jr., what do you say?

FORD: No, she was being what any good candidate for president, for Senate, for governor, who‘s in a tough primary, of course you make clear. They have split the votes basically in this race. They‘ve split the delegates basically in this race. I thought she did the right thing. She not only showed a kind of maturity, but showed a sense that she wants a Democrat in the White House.

By no means—but she made the case, as Barack would have said, of course, I‘m going to vote for Hillary.

GREGORY: But the issue is, Rachel, was it just a throw-away line to say yes, he can win the general election, when her entire substantive argument is no, he can‘t because of the issues.

MADDOW: I thought it was a moment of graciousness that was a bit empty, and I think that‘s the way that Barack Obama responded to when he said, essentially, later on in response to that—he said, thank you for saying that, and of course I would say the same thing about you, but you‘ve always called me condescending, out of touch, elitist and inelectable.

So it‘s one thing to say of course, your opponent from your same party could win. It‘s another thing to denigrate not only their chances but the fact—the extent to which they deserve it.

FORD: I was 10 years old when George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan ran against each other in 1980. George H.W. Bush called Ronald Reagan‘s economic plan it Voodoo Economics. They joined together and went on to run the country for eight years.

SCARBOROUGH: He was also pro-choice until the night before the convention.

FORD: Funny how things happen.

SCARBOROUGH: David, if I could say really quickly on this electability argument, last night at the dinner down in Washington, D.C., I talked to a lot of leaders of the Republican party, talked to some people in John McCain‘s camp, leaders of that campaign, they told me off the record, quietly, that right now they would prefer to go up against Barack Obama. They think he‘s going to get wiped out in states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Missouri. They say if they run against Barack Obama, Missouri is in the bank.

They believe now—two months ago, they believed Hillary Clinton would have been an easier target. But on this electability issue, you ask Republicans quietly, behind the scenes, they will tell you Obama is weaker.

HARWOOD: David, that doesn‘t mean Joe is right. First of all, I‘m surprised Joe would be hanging around with all those Washington elitists in tuxes last night.

SCARBOROUGH: I‘m totally elitist.

HARWOOD: But second of all, rather than being gracious, I think Hillary Clinton was doing the necessary thing in saying that he could win. She would offend super delegates a lot more if she said he couldn‘t win the election, and probably hurt herself in the process. It‘s one thing to say that he‘s less electable, to say he‘s unelectable, even if she thinks it, would be very in-politic and backfire.

GREGORY: Let me go—next up, Barack Obama was hit with the charges of elitism, and Michelle Obama is hitting back. Mrs. Obama is providing she can deliver a pretty effective counterpunch, passionately speaking to voters about her family‘s working-class roots. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHELLE OBAMA, WIFE OF BARACK OBAMA: Yes, I went to Princeton and Harvard, but the lens through which I see the world is the lens I grew up with. I‘m the product of a working-class upbringing. I want people to know when they look at me to be clear that they see what an investment in public education can look like.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: For most of the season, in a campaign, Bill Clinton has been the spouse in the spot light, both good and bad, but Michelle Obama‘s strong response to the bitter-gate leads us to question number two: in the war of the political spouses, does Michelle Obama have a new edge? Harold, I have been watching over the last couple days. I think she‘s been a controversial figure in the course of this campaign, mostly under the radar. But in some ways, I felt she‘s been helping Obama find his voice on this background question, more effectively than he has.

FORD: Michelle Obama, whom I know, is not only a great campaigner for her husband, she‘s a terrific mom. She‘s a wonderful lawyer, and has given up a lot of her professional pursuits to help her husband. At the end of the day, these races are about the people running. As Hillary Clinton has told her own husband, I think recently, I make decisions in this campaign, and I‘m the candidate. And Barack is the candidate on the other side.

But she‘s very effective. She‘s very smart. But at the end of the day, neither Bill Clinton nor Michelle Obama will sway votes in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina going forward. This is about these two candidates.

GREGORY: I think you‘re fundamentally right. But Joe, you know as well as anybody that just as the Clintons are looked at as a package, as they were back in 1992, when you have both very accomplished spouses here front and center, they‘re looked at. They‘re judged sometimes together.

SCARBOROUGH: And they‘re judged harshly sometimes. It‘s ironic you‘re asking this question tonight, when last night—it‘s not ironic. It‘s a coincidence. Last night, you had Barack Obama talking about Hillary Clinton in 1992 being slammed for being too assertive. It was trouble for Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, despite the fact they ended up winning, also Michelle Obama is walking a very fine line in 2008.

What does that say about the country? I don‘t know, maybe not a lot of positive things. But at the same time, whenever a potential first lady speaks out aggressively, there‘s always criticism and blow back. The question is, will it happen here? Of course, she has been put in the background over the past month or two.

GREGORY: That‘s right. John, I talked to some people close to Obama‘s camp last night at the dinner that we‘re talking about, who were concerned about Michelle Obama‘s level of intensity. Is she a natural campaigner, does she smile enough? Things you talk about in terms of people campaigning, how they come across.

HARWOOD: I got to tell you, David, to take your question, if you take the last two weeks or last two months, I think Michelle Obama has cleaned Bill Clinton‘s clock. She‘s a very appealing figure. That bit about public schools was very powerful. Most of what Bill Clinton has provided for his wife in this campaign would be say stuff that he would have provided even if he had been out of the country during the campaign. It‘s the Clinton brand from the 1990s. That counts for a lot and it counts for a lot of Hillary Clinton‘s political reputation, and what causes a lot of working-class voters to be for her. But in terms of what they‘ve actually done, the blocking and tackling on the campaign trail, she‘s been fantastic.

GREGORY: Finally today, 2008 was supposed to be the year of the Democrats. We‘ve talked about it a lot. Before Iowa, generic presidential match ups by the AP and Yahoo shows a Democratic nominee with a 13-point lead over the Republicans. But the rise of McCain and the prolonged primary battle have virtually erased the Democrats advantage.

A new AP Yahoo match up, McCain gets 37 percent to the Clinton‘s 36 percent, and McCain gets 36 percent to Obama‘s 34 percent. The key quote from the pollsters: “what‘s clear is that some Republican leaning voters who backed Bush in 2004 that lost enthusiasm for him are returning to the GOP fold along with a smaller but significant number of Democrats, who have come to dislike their party‘s two contenders.”

Our third question then, is John McCain now the front-runner in the general election? Rachel, I have a theory or a question about this that is the McCain brand I think jibes well with people who have an anti-political affect to them this year. He‘s seen as authentic. He may by too close to Bush on the war. But he‘s seen positively by people who are skeptical about the system.

MADDOW: I guess I don‘t feel that, because he represents Washington to such a great extent. He‘s been in Washington since roughly right after the Capitol was rebuilt. He‘s been in Washington for a very long time. I do think you‘re right that he‘s trying to tap into that. I think it‘s important to note that his biography tour, his reintroducing himself to the country tour ended at the time in his biography when he came home from Vietnam. He didn‘t do a biography tour about his time in the Senate.

So he wants people to think of him as an outsider, but for my entire lifetime, he‘s been in Washington, so it‘s hard for me to see him as somebody who doesn‘t represent politics.

SCARBOROUGH: David, how much though—try to put a money figure on how much John McCain has gotten goodwill from the American people over the past seven years by being high profile seemingly every time where he‘s been against George W. Bush. He‘s been a maverick over the past seven years. And I know Democrats can name 1,000 issues where he‘s like Bush. But the bottom like is John McCain has been in the news over the past seven years time and time again by sticking a sharp stick in George W. Bush‘s eye. Try to monetize that. You just can‘t do it.

HARWOOD: John McCain is going to be very tough in a general election, but he‘s absolutely not the front-runner in this race. Whoever emerges from the Democratic primary process is going to be the front-runner. You talk privately with McCain‘s people, they know that too.

FORD: I agree.

SCARBOROUGH: Agreed.

MADDOW: It doesn‘t look like that to me, not when I look at those numbers. John McCain isn‘t campaigning right now—

(CROSS TALK)

HARWOOD: That‘s a bad formula.

SCARBOROUGH: And the fact that he‘s only one percentage point ahead in the middle of this intramural blood bath?

MADDOW: What has John McCain done to earn his numbers right now? He‘s run like one three-minute-long web ad involving spooky multi-colored smoke and his high school English teacher. He‘s not even campaigning right now. He‘s essentially on vacation.

SCARBOROUGH: They‘re voting for the maverick brand that John McCain earned over the past 20 years.

MADDOW: They‘re voting against Obama and Clinton right now, who are spending a million and a half dollars a day for that privilege. Obama and Clinton are spending themselves into the ground. They‘re tapping out their fund-raising to a certain extent. They‘re tied with a guy whose not even running.

SCARBOROUGH: They‘ll come together. Republicans a month ago were talking about how they would never join in behind John McCain. Now you look at the polls internally, John McCain‘s beating Hillary Clinton 95 to five percent among Republicans. They‘re breaking back. Democrats will do the same thing. This is just a phase. They get to Denver, the balloons go up, everybody will cry.

(CROSS TALK)

HARWOOD: There‘s no way that 30 percent of Hillary Clinton‘s voters are going to vote on for John McCain. No way.

FORD: This race will be about change, and the Democrat will wear that label. John McCain—I want to remind every one in this program, ten months ago, many of our friends in the media industry declared John McCain politically dead. Ten months later, he now finds himself—

GREGORY: I don‘t remember that. I think everybody in the media was giving him a fair shot. He had a legitimate shot to come back. That‘s the story I‘m sticking with.

I have to take a break. We‘ll come back with your voice mails and e-mails. The panel has a lot to talk about tonight. You do as well. Or phones have been ringing off the hook, inbox is overflowing. And Vice President Cheney has some fun at Hillary Clinton‘s expense last night at the Washington dinner we‘ve been talking about.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DICK CHENEY, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Did you see that footage of Hillary knocking back that shot with the beer chaser? It looks like she replaced Mark Penn with Johnny Walker. Apparently, it was pretty strong whisky, and there might have been a few more when the cameras stopped rolling. When the 3:00 a.m. phone call came in, it went right to voice mail.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREGORY: Back now on RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE. I was talking about the vice president, Dick Cheney, at the correspondents dinner last night. I want you to look at some of this video as he tells these jokes. Every time he delivered a punch line, he looked very, very impressed with himself. But I thought one of the great lines, where he tried to get serious for just a moment. He went on this litany of I want to tell you that your work matters. I want to tell you that you sacrifice a lot, and that you really try hard. I want to tell you all those things, but I just can‘t bring myself to do it.

In other words, he really doesn‘t like us, and he wasn‘t going to make any pretense about it. But here was interesting, Joe, I was talking to Mo Rocca a little bit afterwards, with Noah Oppenheim (ph), our producer, and I said, what was that like sitting next to the vice president. He‘s not an easy guy to make small talk with. Apparently they talked about Mo Rocca‘s book that he had written about presidential pets. And they talked about President Ford‘s lab, I guess, or cocker spaniel. It must have been an amazing moment up there.

SCARBOROUGH: It must have been. I‘ve had an opportunity in past campaigns to sit down and talk to Dick Cheney behind the scenes. He‘s a very likable, relaxing person, doesn‘t seem impressed by himself, completely opposite from the whole Darth Vader image that‘s been cast on him. I love—that was one of my favorite lines, when he said he went to his wife Lynne, complaining about the fact people were calling him Darth Vader, and she said, don‘t worry, honey, it humanizes you.

HARWOOD: Joe, was the Chardonnay up to your standards.

SCARBOROUGH: You know what, I‘m a working class man. I don‘t know if you saw me but, I had some water, bread, and then I actually helped people serve you elitists. I‘m a man of the people. They don‘t call me regular Joe for nothing.

GREGORY: Leave Joe alone. Joe is in touch with the people. Leave this man alone. Let‘s get the viewers to weigh in. I‘ve had a chance to talk to the panel. You get your turn as well, with your play date starting right now. As you can see, Rachel Maddow, Harold Ford Jr., John Harwood, and Joe Scarborough with us.

A lot of responses about the Democratic presidential debate yesterday. Let‘s start with Jim in Kentucky. He says this --

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: At what point are we expecting presidential candidates to not have any kind of association with somebody of questionable character in their past?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

GREGORY: I think that‘s a fair question. Harold Ford Jr., when does guilt by association go a step too far?

FORD: The American people are smart enough to distinguish between these things. If you have a close relationship with someone who has a very checkered, questionable past, and you didn‘t know them before that time, or you met them during that time, and you steadied and grew the friendship, voters are able to see through that. And I thought Barack handled that question fairly well last night. It was an interesting comparison he made between Tom Coburn, but I understood what he was trying to say. I think voters get it.

SCARBOROUGH: But Harold, if you ran for governor of Texas or ran for Senate again, people in Tennessee know you. If there‘s a questionable association, they go, we know Harold Ford, maybe he hung out with a weird guy one summer when he was younger. Whereas if somebody new runs for that Tennessee seat and nobody knows him, then you start saying, OK, who is this person? Who do they hang out with? Who do they associate with?

Barack Obama can‘t be shocked. He was in Washington for one year before he decided to run for president of the United States. People don‘t know him. They know John McCain. They know Hillary Clinton. They don‘t know him. So who he associates himself with is that much more important to voters.

FORD: That‘s why Jeremiah Wright has been such a big issue as well. Joe makes a good point. But I do think the caller‘s question dealt with how far back—how do we know—how long can you punish a candidate or someone running for office for a friendship? At some level, I just think voters are able to get it. Jeremiah Wright will pay bigger than this --- the Weather guy we talked about last night.

MADDOW: Associates and friendships become an issue when political opponents decide to make them an issue. We talked about this before on the show. The Jeremiah Wright

(CROSS TALK)

MADDOW: Joe, let me make my point and then you can dismiss me. Let me make my point first. Jeremiah Wright as a pastor for Barack Obama is an issue. The political associations that John McCain has made with right wing pastors have not been an issue. The issue that has been made about who‘s giving money to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, because their opponents have decided to go after them on that. For example, John McCain had this incredibly controversial relationship with a Florida campaign co-chair, who was caught in a bathroom offering money to a police officer to do something that we can all imagine in a bathroom. Nobody is going to John McCain and saying he was your Florida campaign co-chair; what do you think about men doing that in bathrooms? What do you think about entrapment from police officers? What do you think about public sex?

HARWOOD: That‘s what a general election is for.

MADDOW: But nobody‘s brought that up to John McCain at this point, and it‘s a decision made by political opponents. It‘s not something that happens organically because of how long you‘ve been around the block.

GREGORY: Let me get a break in before I run out of time. You can play with the panel every night. Don‘t forget to call us or email us. Predictions from the panel are coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

GREGORY: We‘re back. It‘s prediction time. Time for our panelists to peer into the crystal ball and tell us something that they see. Rachel, Harold, John and Joe still with us. Joe, what are you seeing tonight?

SCARBOROUGH: Well, I think I may blow all my time on the predictions to respond to Rachel. I don‘t engage in crossfire type debates and certainly I don‘t want to talk about what people do in bathrooms. I do want to say though that anybody—and you can ask Harold Ford. You can ask anybody that‘s ever run for political office, that the thing you want to do is define your opponent.

You define opponents that people don‘t know more easily than defining opponents that have been in public service for a quarter of a century. It was the only point I was trying to make. And again I don‘t do cross-fire, so if we want to yell back and forth, then Rachel will have to find somebody else.

MADDOW: Joe, I wasn‘t trying to yell back and forth with you. I was starting to make my point and you cut me off before I started my first sentence. You waited for me to start. I started and you jumped in.

SCARBOROUGH: I don‘t mean to be condescending, but I can say that anybody that‘s ever run for political office before knows that there‘s a big difference between John McCain and defining him, who has been in public service for 25 years, and defining Barack Obama who was in Washington, D.C. for one year before he decided to run for president.

GREGORY: All right. I‘m going to shut this particular debate down and move on. John, your thoughts about what‘s coming up ahead.

HARWOOD: After Tuesday, Hillary Clinton is right back in the fight of her life. What she‘s probably done with bitter-gate and with that debate is preserve her lead in Pennsylvania. She‘s got a working margin there. She‘s likely to win next Tuesday. But then she‘s got those May 6th contests in North Carolina. She‘s likely to lose there. She‘s got to win in Indiana, very close race right now. No more than even money bet for her to win that state.

GREGORY: All right. Harold, what do you see coming up?

FORD: The Democratic nominee, once he or she is determined, will surge to a five to 10 point lead over John McCain. I‘m a believer that as this race is joined between McCain and Obama/Clinton, you‘ll see John McCain have to answer questions about how it is that you can believe that going into Iraq, if they had no weapons of mass destruction, was the right thing to do, which he said.

I think Joe Biden laid this case out in the last 48 hours. The Democratic nominee will benefit from the biggest thing happening for Democrats nationally, people want a change, and John McCain doesn‘t represent that.

GREGORY: All right. Rachel, your thoughts tonight?

MADDOW: First of all, Joe and I will go out for a beer and hash this all out. My second prediction is that it will be Cindy versus Laura on morning television. Next week, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, we‘ll have daytime appearances from two major A-list Republican spouses. Cindy is going to be co-hosting on “The View” on Monday, the day before the Pennsylvania primary. Laura Bush is going to be hosting an hour of the “Today Show” the morning of the primary.

I don‘t know if this is a coordinated effort to get Republican family values and very popular Republican spouses out there in advance of that big Democratic contest, but I think it should start an air war, where we see a lot more of Michelle Obama and Bill Clinton being humanistic and interesting on TV in the next few weeks.

FORD: I‘m bringing the Crown Royal for this beer-fest these guys are about to have.

HARWOOD: Joe only drinks white wine.

GREGORY: What is it we‘re seeing with the spouses starting to step it up and go to some of these forums now? It‘s almost the time in the primary season where they think it‘s time to bring them out.

MADDOW: You know, Laura Bush has consistently been the most popular Republican in the country for almost the entire term that Bush has been president. So I think they see this actually probably their best face forward on days that otherwise would be owned by the Democrats just because of the sheer volume of coverage of this Pennsylvania primary.

I think it‘s wicked smart of them to do this. You put something out there that will be non-controversial, that‘s not going to get any sort of push back from the Democrats, that‘s not going to give the Democrats anything to complain about or to put into their stump speeches. But it‘s still going to get this very positive side of the Republican brand out there. I think it is very smart, and I think it was smart for the McCain campaign to jump on “The View” opportunity on Monday after they found out Laura was going to do the “Today Show.”

HARWOOD: Especially since I don‘t think Colin Powell could handle that last hour of the “Today Show.”

MADDOW: Good point.

GREGORY: We‘re going to leave it there. Thanks to the panel. I‘m David Gregory. That does it for RACE FOR THE WHITE HOUSE for tonight. We‘re back here 6:00 Eastern time. Now stay tuned, “HARDBALL” coming up next on MSNBC.