BROOKS AND SHIELDS:
JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Shields and Brooks: Syndicated columnist Mark Shields and David Brooks, late of The Weekly Standard, now of the New York Times. On the debate last night, Mark, was there a winner?
[Mark Shields] MARK SHIELDS: Well, the winner was Berlitz in the sense that nobody is going to get by in American politics with feliz navidad and via con dios in the future. You're going to have to know Spanish, that's for sure. I think the winner, Jim, -- was once said by Mo Udall, the great Democratic from Arizona, when the Democrats organize a firing squad, they begin by forming a circle. That was not the case last night. They saved all their rhetorical fire for the policies and the performance of the Bush administration. So I think in that sense the winner was probably Howard Dean who went into it with a lead, and really came out of it unscathed and without anybody delivering a knockout punch. Dick Gephardt got sort of the new fiery passionate Dick Gephardt, got a pretty good review. It just struck me this way. Politics is a very imitative art, probably almost as imitative as political journalism.
JIM LEHRER: What we're doing right now.
MARK SHIELDS: The thing about it is you can always tell if somebody is doing well by whether his opponents imitate him. That was the case last night. Howard Dean has emerged as the non-Bush, the anti-Bush, call it what you want. And last night, it seemed, all the other contenders were vying for that role.
JIM LEHRER: What do you say?
Who won the debate?
[David Brooks] DAVID BROOKS: I would like to imitate Mark but I disagree. First, I agree on Dick Gephardt; I thought he was fantastic. He has always been a competent, professional politician, very experienced, never had any music, melody. He really I thought had melody, made my little heart pitter-patter.
I actually thought Howard Dean did not do well. He faded into the background. I thought it was because he didn't come out with the angry, sort of aggression that he has had on the stump. And I think that's for a couple of reasons. First of which, now that he is a front-runner, it seems like he has decided to become plausible and show that he is a responsible person you can imagine him being president. But his whole charm is that the guy is mad, bad and dangerous to know and that edge is his charm. If he decides to become Mr. Front-runner, I think he will get a little more boring. The second thing is television. He is doing very well in the speeches where he sees people face to face where the aggression shows, but on television, warmth really pays off which he doesn't project on television. It could be and I'm not saying this for sure, it could be as he gets out of the small states into the national campaign where TV matters a lot more, he will do less well than he is right now.
MARK SHIELDS: I take exception in this sense. I think that if you get somebody who has emerged and he is the rookie of the year. Look at the numbers right now--
JIM LEHRER: He is considered going nowhere when this whole thing began.
MARK SHIELDS: Howard Dean in the latest Zogby poll this week has a commanding lead over John Kerry from neighboring Massachusetts and the New Hampshire primary. I think you have to view debates as one of those rare times in a campaign where the candidates intersect, where they clash, and collide.
[Jim Lehrer] JIM LEHRER: You can compare them one next to the other.
MARK SHIELDS: You can compare them. And when you're behind, you can scramble things. I don't think anybody landed on him last night.
DAVID BROOKS: They're afraid of taking him on for fear of alienating the people who now support him.
JIM LEHRER: But they all took on President Bush and particularly on Iraq. David, what did you think of that?
DAVID BROOKS: Well, I think they were reflecting where the party is. I sort of admire Joe Lieberman for sticking with his Iraq policy against an audience that was clearly hostile. I didn't think what they were saying was substantive. They all said they should go to Iraq with a broader coalition. That's nice to say that France, Germany and Russia and China should go in -- we should have gone in with them - but they didn't want to go in. I don't think John Kerry, Dick Gephardt or Joe Lieberman could have brought them in. Their policies were pretty set. The choice was either do it the way we did it or not do it at all. That's the reality. That's the difference between actually governing and campaigning where you can say I can make the roses smell even better than they do.
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The administration's U.N. policy in Iraq
MARK SHIELDS: I disagree with David in this sense. Jim, what we are seeing this week in the administration is not a fine tuning of policy. What we're seeing is 180 degrees.
JIM LEHRER: Going to the U.N.
[Mark Shields] MARK SHIELDS: Going to the U.N.. we've seen men, Cheney, Wolfowitz, who have disparaged the French, condemned the Germans, who have said that the U.N. was worse than feckless, that it was counterproductive and even harmful. Now, I mean, just swallowing what is left of their pride and in tatters, a policy totally in tatters. 180-degree turn, saying we're going to the United Nations and ask the French who we've called snooty, snotty, naive, patronizing, all those things. We are going to say please, put your troops in what John Edwards called a shooting gallery in Iraq and come back to the reality that after the United States, after World War II, rebuilt Japan, and there was not a single U.S. Company that got a contract. And, you know, Germans, the French, anybody else right now, I think have a legitimate concern. Say wait a minute, you're asking USSR to come in, put up our money, put our blood and our treasure on the line and for what? There is no piece of the action no, there's no control, no autonomy.
JIM LEHRER: David, you did a lot of reporting this week on what caused the administration to make the decision to go to the U.N.. Bear the fruit here before us please.
DAVID BROOKS: The story that was in the Washington Post by a great reporter by the name of Tom Ricks was that Colin Powell had gotten together with the joint chiefs gone around Rumsfeld, gone to the White House, and persuaded that. My reporting has persuaded me, though Ricks is a fantastic reporter, that that was not true.
JIM LEHRER: Rick covers the Pentagon for the Washington Post. He is a superb reporter.
DAVID BROOKS: And I'm convinced it started with the president who may....
JIM LEHRER: Started with the president.
DAVID BROOKS: After the bombing of the U.N. building, decided to internationalize it, went through an interagency process. Paul Wolfowitz played a key role. I was -- read documents given to Donald Rumsfeld before any of the Colin Powell meetings allegedly took place in which Rumsfeld signed off on the U.N. wording of the U.N. Resolution. I think this all preceded any end run around Donald Rumsfeld. I think it started with the president and was worked by the administration for some of the reasons Mark talked about--
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with what Mark said? The policy is in tatters and that's why they had to--
DAVID BROOKS: They made an adjustment. It evolved in the way they planned months ago. That's their line. I believe what happened was they realized things were going badly -- not only because they didn't have enough troops and I don't think we are ever going to get French troops. They hoped to get Pakistani, Indian, and Turkish troops. But because they need more money and I think that's an underreported part of the story, they need more money to support Iraq and that's not going to come from France or Germany or those countries - it's going to come from the IMF and the World Bank and the Treasury Department played a major goal in going to the U.N. so they could hopefully get some money from those institutions.
JIM LEHRER: The Treasury said, hey, wait a minute, we can't afford this on our own.
DAVID BROOKS: Right. We are going to pay for the military but somebody has to pay for the government of Iraq.
[Jim Lehrer and David Brooks] JIM LEHRER: The World Bank, without the U.N. stamp, the World Bank could not really come in here and do that. Or the IMF
DAVID BROOKS: or any other lenders or major donors.
MARK SHIELDS: I have enormous respect for David's reporting and his judgment. I'll say this, Jim.
JIM LEHRER: You are talking about David Brooks.
MARK SHIELDS: And for Tom Ricks, too. But I want to say this -- this administration that has a $65 billion price tag on this, they've never come to the American people, never asked for it. We have no idea who is going to pay for it, Jim. This administration consistently has asked the least from those who are fortunate enough to have the most, whether in participation or in taxation. And I mean, you know, the question of this campaign, I think in large degree, it started last night is who is going to be the Ross Perot of 2004? Who is going to stand up and say wait a minute, what you're doing is you are passing a tab on to your kids. You are passing it on. You are going pass this enormous tab in the form of these tax cuts, and the in the form of the cost of this war on to... why won't you ask those who are best off, who have benefited the most, why don't you ask them to pay their fair share?
DAVID BROOKS: Let me disagree in part. This is so important, this is the future of American foreign policy for a generation. We should not think dollars and cents here. We should think like George Steinbrenner when he buys a slugger, he buys six sluggers because he is just going to throw a lot at the problem. I'm afraid the Bush administration and the Congress is thinking dollars and cents when this has to be done right for the Iraqi people. We need to spend what we need to spend. We can talk about the tax cuts and how we are going to fund it later. But I think the administration so far is being penny pinching and not spending what it needs to get the electricity up, to get all the other problems solved that can be solved with money, of which a lot of them can be.
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Was the U.S. wrong about Iraq?
JIM LEHRER: Do you think politically they can get away with that? Do you think the American people would support what you just said whatever it takes, do it?
[David Brooks] DAVID BROOKS: Everybody from Howard Dean to Jesse Helms or whoever is on the right now says we cannot cut and run. We cannot fail at that. Democrats have different ideas how to proceed, but everybody agrees except for Dennis Kucinich, that we cannot cut and run. This has to work out or else U.S. national interests will be harmed across the board.
MARK SHIELDS: Any time you hear Vietnamization, you know that a policy has lost popular support. They're talking about we have to put the Iraqis out front. We have to put an Iraqi face on it. Jim, this was a policy that was born in a faulty syllogism, which was the Iraqi people hate Saddam Hussein; the United States, Americans hate Saddam Hussein and therefore the Iraqis will welcome the United States. That was a mistake. There is a war memorial, German war memorial from War World II and it reads: The price of pride is high and that price is paid by the young. That's really what we are seeing right now. I mean the unwillingness of these people to even acknowledge that they called it a cakewalk.
JIM LEHRER: A mistake?
MARK SHIELDS: This is not a mistake but an error of historic proportions.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?
DAVID BROOKS: No, absolutely not. They made some mis-judgments; they thought there were going to be refugees, that there were going to be food shortages, there turned out not to be, but they under-estimated the extent of Baathist terrorism after the war and now they're making adjustments by bringing in other troops, by reconfiguring the troops and most importantly by training the Iraqis. One of the problems that has been going on in the past several months since the war is that you walk into the headquarters where Paul Bremer sits, there are no Iraqis there. The Americans are running the government as if there are no Iraqis. And it's important, and they're beginning to make this adjustment, too, which is giving Iraqis real power, and that's another thing they're changing.
JIM LEHRER: Do you think they should admit they made a mistake? Is that a problem that people have at the top of our government?
DAVID BROOKS: Absolutely.
JIM LEHRER: And all administrations?
DAVID BROOKS: Some people, some of your friends pretend they listen do you and don't. This administration listens to you but pretends they don't. They pretend they are so far above their critics they don't have to hear but then they're really listening.
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The Miguel Estrada judicial nomination
JIM LEHRER: And going to the U.N. As a result of that this week. Quickly on Miguel Estrada -- the man who was nominated for the federal appeals court here in Washington, withdrew his name, he had been out there for two years -- no vote. Democrats kept -- filibustered it -- what do you think the fallout from that is going to be?
[Mark Shields] MARK SHIELDS: I'm not sure what the fallout is, Jim. I mean, neither side covered itself with glory: The Republicans trying to make it into an ethnic rejection. The Democrats arguing that they wanted to see the private memorandums which he had written while a public employee, confidential memorandums as solicitor general. If you talk about a chilling effect upon offering open and free counsel, that would be it. But the argument on the other side, Schumer made it last night on the broadcast, when he said, you know, it's a job interview, that hearing is. And when a guy comes in and won't answer questions, that gave them the hook on it. It's not a victory; it's not anything the Democrats ought to feel good about.
JIM LEHRER: How do you feel?
DAVID BROOKS: I think Republicans are enraged. They sunk pretty low in attacking some Democratic judges but they gave them votes. The principle was you get 50 votes, you're in, and the Democrats changed the rules for the first time in American history, 60 votes. That's going to anger --
JIM LEHRER: You have to explain what that means the 60 votes is there because if you don't have 60 votes, you can keep something from coming to a vote. It's a form-- people are not filibustering the old-fashioned way. They're not standing up there talking and reading from the almanac and all that.
MARK SHIELDS: If you want to start talking numbers, the Republicans kept more from ever coming to, after hearings and everything else, denied hearings to absolutely well qualified... irony. When George Bush and the Republicans took power, they said no more of these ABA -- we are not going to look for the American Bar Association for their recommendations. Who are they to tell us? What is their biggest defense on Miguel Estrada? He has the highest rating from the ABA.
JIM LEHRER: And there are two others still, Priscilla Owen -- and William Pryor from Alabama are still being held up by the Democrats. We'll see what happens. Well, look, as I said in the introduction to you tonight, David, that you used to be with the Weekly Standard. You are now with the New York Times and you are starting your column. And we wish you well. Congratulations, and all of that sort of stuff. It means one minor adjustment for us here on the NewsHour because while you get your column launched, you are going to take a hiatus from the program, these Friday night sessions, and William Safire, also a New York Times columnist, is going to fill in for you.
What do you think, Mark, do you think Safire is conservative enough for us.
MARK SHIELDS: I don't know. I know some people on the right who have doubts about Bill Safire's absorption with civil liberties and privacy -- matters like that. But I want to wish David... the New York Times, which has been through rather rough seas, has just made a brilliant and bold and wonderful move.
JIM LEHRER: You are going to write twice a week.
DAVID BROOKS: Tuesdays and Saturdays. It will be embarrassing if I mess up but I'll try not to.
JIM LEHRER: The first one is a week from tomorrow.
DAVID BROOKS: This coming Tuesday.
JIM LEHRER: This coming Tuesday -- have you written it yet?
[David Brooks] DAVID BROOKS: Six times.
JIM LEHRER: I just want to say, as I said, congratulations to you. And this is not a good-bye. This is just a kind of brief so long because we look forward to having you back here and for a very, very long time. Say something nice, Mark.
MARK SHIELDS: I'm counting on that you know, as much as Bill Safire will be wonderful, he is not a substitute. He's just a designated
JIM LEHRER: He's a pinch hitter.
MARK SHIELDS: -- designated sitter -- briefly.
JIM LEHRER: Thank you. Thank you both. Good luck to you.
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