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Monday, March 19, 2007

John F. Kennedy, Jr. Forum, Littauer Building, 79 JFK Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts


B E F O R E:

ALEX JONES
Director, Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy
Kennedy School of Government

MARK HALPERIN
Fellow Institute of Politics & Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy
Kennedy School of Government

MARK MCKINNON
Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy, Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy
Kennedy School of Government


P A R T I C I P A N T S:

For Senator Clinton: Mark Penn
For Senator Edwards: Jonathan Prince
For Senator Obama: David Axelrod


E V E N I N G  S E S S I O N

(6:02 p.m.)

MR. JONES: Good evening. I’m Alex Jones, I’m Director of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy which is jointly sponsoring this evening with the Institute of Politics, and Jeanne Shaheen and I are your hosts for the evening. I don’t know whether to say welcome to the colosseum, the gladiatorial games or what, but I think that the purpose of the evening is going to be, early on in a campaign season that is already whitehot, to get a sense of what the issues are as far as the people who are actually running the campaigns.

Tonight we are examining or we are going to be hearing from three people who are running the most likely, most credible, I think, and certainly the leading, at the moment, Democratic campaigns for Edwards, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  The program tonight is designed to get an early look at something that the Kennedy School takes as a specialty and the Institute of Politics has become a real trendsetter in. Some of you may know that, at the end of the campaign, for many years now, the people who run them have come back to the Kennedy School to talk about what they did right and what they did wrong.  It’s a real moment of truth and one¬upmanship, and it includes losers and winners and so forth.

We felt that this was an idea that probably would play also very well in the early stages of the campaign.  What we had not really estimated correctly was that we would not be early in the campaign, we thought we would be early in the campaign but in fact we are right in the middle of it, it is a very peculiar election season, as you know.

The people who are going to be asking the questions and moderating the panel are two members of the Kennedy School family for this semester.  Mark Halperin, on the far right, my far right, your left, is the Political Director for ABC News, he is the Founder and Editor of “The Note”, the political blog on the Web that is something that political junkies visit virtually every day, I would think.  And he is someone who has, as a joint Visiting Fellow for the Shorenstein Center and the IOP, been a leader in putting this program together. 

His colleague and partner in this is Mark McKinnon, Mark is an adjunct lecturer for the Kennedy School this year, this semester.  He is also one of the sort of real political games specialists, he was the guy who ran George W. Bush’s media campaign in 2000 and 2004.  But he is also the man, the one man, the one person I guess in the world who has worked with both George W. Bush and Ann Richards.  He was a Democrat before he became a Republican.  He told me the arc of his political ideology was anarchist, Democrat, Republican, and where the trajectory goes from there I’m not entirely sure. 

But tonight both he and Mark Halperin are going to be wearing their Kennedy School hats and are going to be using their expertise as a reporter, a superb political reporter on the one hand and someone who is from the profession that I guess are represented on the other.

And it is my pleasure to now turn it to Mark Halperin who will do further introductions. Thank you.

MR. HALPERIN: Alex, thank you. Thank you, Governor Shaheen, and to both the Shorenstein Center and the Institute of Politics for hosting this.

A couple of weeks ago, we heard from representatives from the Giuiliani Campaign, the McCain Campaign and the Romney Campaign, and we are going to have a comparable discussion tonight.  And then, a little later, we’ll have representatives from the other campaigns involved in this race on both the Republican and Democratic sides. 

We are incredibly lucky to have three very busy people here to talk to us, as we were two weeks ago, these are people whose time is much more precious than they thought it would be in March the year before the election.  So it’s great to hear from them, and I suspect it will be the last time they get to see each other face to face until they are in a debate spinroom or some comparable venue a little bit down the road.

So I’m going to quickly introduce them and Mark and I will just ask a few questions because we want to devote most of the time to letting you all ask questions, and we’ll get to your Q&A and the rules of engagement on that in just a minute, but let me just briefly introduce them.

You all should have programs that lay out their biographies in more illustrious detail, but David Axelrod, he is a former political reporter, a resume item he uses constantly to outwit us, working for Barack Obama now, as he did from Barack

Obama’s earlier races in politics.  And he lives in Chicago and has been involved in many races around the country for many years, again based outside of Washington. 

Jonathan Prince works for Senator Edwards’ Campaign, as he did in 2004, also worked in Massachusetts politics, worked in the Clinton White House and has also been involved in those roles in working all over the country.

And finally, Mark Penn, who is a strategist for President, for Senator Clinton and was a strategist for President Clinton—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Was a strategist for President Clinton, I’m big into front runners. And Mark is a pollster but he is also not, as we say, just a pollster but also a senior strategist developing and involved in all aspects of Senator Clinton’s Campaign.

So, with that and, again, I ask you to start thinking of your short, concise questions, not speeches, now, which we’ll get to, let me turn it over to Mark McKinnon.

MR. MCKINNON: Thank you, Mark.

Those of us who have been involved in presidential politics are struck by the incredible intensity of this campaign and how early it’s all happening.  When you look back historically, for example, when Bill Clinton ran for president, he announced in what would be the equivalent of September of this year.  So these candidates are off and running at a furious pace here and it’s only March, and it’s actually been going on now for some time. 

So I have a two-part question for our panelists here and that is how are you going to sustain this all the way up through November and how does this effect your strategy and the dynamics of the race?  And also, since we now have what is the equivalent of a national primary on February 5th, what does that do to the primacy or importance of those early primary states, are they more important or less important?

And, Mark, why don’t we start with you?

MR. PENN:  Well I think that, as I was saying, that the reason why there is so much intensity is that people would really like the election to be next Tuesday.  I think they have decided they are done with the Bush Administration, they want to have an election, they want to have a new president.  But in that rush to have a new president, I think people have to realize that there are a lot of phases we go through.  We may be in the pizazz phase, we are going to go through the ideas phase, we are going to go through the debate phase.

We are going to go through phases where every one of the candidates we represent is thoroughly tested.  And it’s very important for you to see that testing, watch it, watch it unfold, pick the candidates on what they say, what they do, how they react. Because at the end of the day, we have to come out with a nominee, obviously I hope it will be Senator Clinton, who can take on the Republicans, and give you a new president and give you a new president with these kinds of policies that truly change the country.

I think in terms of February 5th, I think nobody knows what February 5th is going to do. I think, if anything, it makes this period here even more important, rather than less important, because after all, the time between late January and the beginning of February is short and the time between what we have here today and what we are going to have in the future is pretty long.  So let’s use the time, let’s savor it, let’s go through all the phases of this campaign.

MR. PRINCE: Let me first of all just say thanks for having us here, we are all glad to be here.

Second of all, just on behalf of all three campaigns, I just want to extend a formal invitation to Mr. McKinnon to come on home any time—

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: --any time you are ready.

So, look, the pace of this campaign has clearly picked up far beyond what any of us imagined it could have, you know, it could have reached at this point.  I think what it really speaks to, I mean to expand a little on what Mark said, that voters are ready tomorrow, it really speaks, because I think you don’t see the same level of energy, you don’t see the same multi-thousand person crowds, you’ve got three candidates on the Democratic side who, you know, we have not quite drawn the 20,000 person crowds that Senator Obama has drawn.

But all of us, Senator Clinton, Senator Edwards, Senator Obama, were drawing crowds in the thousands in December between the holidays, and I think what it really speaks to, more than anything else, is an incredible hunger for change in the country. Clearly we saw that in the midterm elections in November and I think all this excitement and all this energy that is just forcing this campaign to ramp up so much faster than we expected, is really a testament to how much people really are ready for a change in direction.  So that’s part one.

In terms of February 5th, I think that it really increases the importance of the early states in fact. I think, historically, what we have seen over, and over and over again is that momentum coming out of those states just dwarfs the power of money, the power of ground troops, anything else that you might imagine could take over on February 5th is really just dwarfed by the way momentum becomes dominant.  And we have seen that historically many, many times.  Last time, in the last election, Howard Dean has millions and millions more dollars than all the other candidates, spent lots of money in states after Iowa and New Hampshire. 

By the time, for example, we got to Wisconsin a couple of weeks later, the week before that race, Senator Edwards was at five percent in the polls.  He had spent, like I said, millions of dollars on TV, sent hundreds of field workers to the state but, a week later, Senator Kerry, I forget the Nevada number, 36-37, we were at 34, and Howard Dean was half of that. So I think you see that over and over again, the momentum really becomes dominant.  So I think, if anything, this rush to February 5th increases the significance of the early states.

MR. AXELROD: Is my mic on?  I was fiddling with it before because I was talking to somebody and I didn’t know whether it was projecting out. 

But let me just say that when Morris Udall, the late congressman was a young congressman, the last on this committee, he finally got to ask questions and said, well, everything that needs to be said has been said, but not everybody has had a chance to say it.

(Laughter)

MR. AXELROD: So having said that, I want to concur with what these fellows have said, I think this is an extraordinarily important election and I think people really sense it. I think there is a sense of urgency among the American people.  The decisions that have been made over the last six years and the ones that have been deferred have put us in a very challenging place.  And I think they understand that we’ve had not just a failure of policy but a failure of politics in our country, that we’ve been so consumed by the kind of rat-tat-tat of partisan politics, ideology and the increasing power of special interests in Washington that we never get to the solutions that all of us know we have to, to the problems we all know have to be confronted.

So people want to see change, Jonathan is right, and they are coming out, they are desperate for it, Mark is right, they would like to have it tomorrow.  And I think, for that reason, this is going to be a very momentous campaign, momentous election.

MR. HALPERIN: Jonathan, let me start with you and ask about young people and voting. At this time, we are obviously in a close nomination fight and what’s expected to be a close general election, you don’t want to leave any voting group behind, but talk specifically about one group, younger voters who have shown increased levels of participation by some measures. 

I want to ask you two questions, number one, what issues do you think might engage young voters that Senator Edwards is talking about or that are before the American people right now?  And from a practical point of view, if there is a young person here who wants to be involved in a campaign, your campaign, what can they do besides register to vote and vote to be involved in shaping the outcome?

MR. PRINCE: I’m very glad to answer that because it’s kind of a key part of our campaign.  First, in terms of issues, I think young voters are like voters across the country, first in their hunger for change with regard to Iraq, so I think that, like all voters, I think they are really looking for us to end this war.  That’s number one.  But I think young voters care a lot about energy independence, something that Senator Edwards is going to speak about at length tomorrow, you know, global warming, climate change.

And I think young voters also certainly care about the other issues that are on the minds of Americans, universal health care, trying to really have an America that really lives up to the idea of America that we talk about, where all folks really have, you know, where equality of opportunity is something that is real. 

But along with that, and this gets to the second point, besides just kind of signing up, give them five or ten bucks, if you can afford, you know, telling your friends.  This campaign, our campaign, is not just about what can kind of happen when there is a new president, John Edwards really believes that, and it’s kind of the story of his entire life, that real change happens when people are all pulling together, when the government is pulling in one direction but also the country is pulling in that direction.

And that’s why a large part of our campaign is talking about citizen responsibility, not personal responsibility, which is certainly important and we are not talking about that, but also your responsibility to the great community and to the country.  And you know, if you look at lots of different things, if you look at health care, for example, you know that the attempts to bring universal health care in the past have failed because one of those things, one thing that we need in addition to the political will for universal health care is public will.  If you look at energy and climate change, we need not just political will to do something about it but we need not just public will even but actually public action.

And so we’ve got an organization that is part of our campaign called One Corps, which is actually a service organization and students were involved with that with Senator Edwards last spring break, 700 kids went down to New Orleans to work on clean up. We have citizen action days every month where we do various things, winterizing homes, all kinds of stuff like that. 

So one way that we really want people to get involved in our campaign, young people in particular because they’ve got the energy and enthusiasm, and you know, no one appreciates how their actions can actually really bring about these changes.  But join One Corps, we’ve got chapters in every state in the country, lots of different communities, on lots of campuses, and we really believe that starting today to bring about that change is the way to move our country forward.

MR. HALPERIN: David, what did you think of Jonathan’s list of issues?  And if someone wants to work in the Obama Campaign that’s a young person, what are the routes of entry?

MR. AXELROD: Well I think it was a good list.  I think obviously people who have borne the greatest burden of this war have been the young.  Back in fact, in 2002, Senator Obama took a very strong stand against the war, which he said would lead to a commitment of undermined length, undetermined costs and undetermined outcome, and here we find ourselves today having paid a tremendous cost for this.  I think young people are acutely aware of the cost of that. 

But I think there is something larger than that and I do accept Jonathan’s list but I think we have not given young people a very good example of politics and government in recent years.  I think young people have been subjected to the image of people savaging each other, of excessive partisanship, of excessive ideological warfare and a huge special interest influence, and the result has been a sense that you can’t really affect real change through politics, through government. 

One of the heartening things about the Obama Campaign has been the number of young people, and some of them are in this room tonight, who have volunteered and have not just volunteered but organized their own groups through the Internet.  You know, a few weeks ago, Senator Obama was asked by a group that had organized on FaceBook to come to an event at George Mason College, and he expected a few hundred young people to be there. When he showed up, there were 3,500 students there, there were 250,000 students who signed up for the Obama group on FaceBook. This is very encouraging because we want this campaign to be not just a vehicle for one person’s advancement but a vehicle to change our politics, to lower our voices and raise our sights and begin to deal with the problems facing this country.

So the most heartening thing about this campaign so far has been the enormous infusion of young people, and we invite you to come to our Web site at www.barackobama.com and mybarackobama.com, and there are all kinds of tools to help organize your own communities, your own circle of friends and become involved in this effort. And I think through those efforts we are going to make a real change in our politics.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark, I would ask you the same question and also maybe take advantage of your polling expertise.  What do we know about whether young people are going to stop being an under-performing group and start to vote in the percentages of the rest of the public or even greater?

MR. PENN: Well I mean I think the first thing is the senator opened her campaign by saying, look, join the conversation, and the point of joining the conversation was so that people, like the people here, the people in the university, at college, that young people could get involved and not feel that everything is predetermined before they get involved, have the conversation and have their say, and I think that she has been very clear.

Look, today is the fourth anniversary of the War in Iraq, and it’s really time at which we both have to honor the sacrifice the people put out on behalf of this country, and as the senator says, it’s also a time we have to recognize it’s time to change direction. She opposes the escalation of this conflict, she believes that we should be de-escalating this conflict and beginning to bring our troops home now.  And she says that if this President doesn’t end the war, she will be the one to end the war, and I believe she will do just that. 

I think that when you look at the other issues, she has been quite strong, whether it’s on finding alternative energy, combating global warming, bringing universal health care to America, she is going to fight for those issues. 

And I think and I hope that people will not take away from what’s happened in the past or what we’ve seen in the last six years the idea that politics is bad.  She believes you can achieve change through politics.  I believe what we are seeing with so many people here is the belief that she can achieve change in politics and that if you join the kind of movement she has, that she has the knowledge, the experience, the wisdom, that she is ready to bring that change.

And that you have a leader here who not just says that politics is something that you’ve all had questions about but who says, look, in politics, and if you go back to her valedictory address at Wellesley, where she said, look, politics is the art of making the impossible possible, and that is exactly what she believes.  And I believe she has the qualifications and the experience to do just that and she has the heart and soul I think to bring that about. And I see a lot of Hillary buttons here and I hope that we will see more and more Hillary buttons on hillaryclinton.com, on MySpace, on everywhere on the Web—

MR. PRINCE: And johnedwards.com.

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  You missed that one.

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  But most importantly, most importantly, I hope you’ll find them in the voting booths when the voting really starts because that is where it counts.

MR. MCKINNON: I have observed presidential elections, and I have a proposition and I want to see if you all agree and, if you do, if you would comment on how it plays in this election. And that is that, unlike a lot of state elections, say,

U.S. Senate races or other races, presidential elections are really much more than about single issues, there are very few single issue voters in presidential elections.  And so when people are electing a president, they are looking for a much broader constellation of not just issues but what I would describe as attributes.  People are electing sort of the head of the American community, somebody that they want to be comfortable in their living rooms for the next four or eight years.

And so in our particular campaign, we looked at a filter of attributes that we thought about a lot in our communications, in our particular case, and it related to our candidate but not only to our candidate but who we were running against as well, and our particular filter of attributes happened to be leadership strength and trust.

So, David, let me start with you.  First of all, do you agree with the idea of this constellation being larger than just single issues?  And if so, can you talk maybe about the attributes of Barack Obama?

MR. AXELROD: Yeah, I surely do believe that.  I think, when you elect a President of the United States, you are essentially electing someone whom you, to a large degree, entrust the future of the country and there can be profound consequences.

And, Mark, I say this with all due respect but I think the 2000 election was an example of how profound the consequences can be.

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: But let me, but I think that what this country desperately needs is to be pulled together, we’ve divided ourselves.  Senator Obama spoke in this city in 2004 about the sort of red state/blue state mentality and we’ve been divided up into categories, and we’ve been divided up into party and we’ve been divided up by ideology. And I think people really are looking for someone, a leader who can bring us together again as Americans to deal with the big challenges that we face.

And what Barack brings to this process is a lifetime of doing that, starting as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, working in the state senate for eight years. And bringing, he brought Republicans and Democrats around some very difficult issues, death penalty reform and racial profiling and the expansion of health care and a whole range of other issues and ethics reforms which were the first that were passed in my state in a generation.  He has done the same thing in the U.S. Senate, he has worked with Senator Lugar on arms control issues to make some meaningful progress.

He has worked with Senator Coburn, with whom he has very little in common on a lot of issues, to make, to put a cap on no-bid contracts around Hurricane Katrina spending, so the money would go where it should, and there are a whole range of, and he, the one thing he did do is unify Republicans and Democrats, not necessarily because they agreed with him, on some very important ethics reforms that ultimately passed to make lobbyists disclose who they are raising money for and to shine a bright light on that aspect of our government.

But the point is, in all these cases, he has tried to appeal to the best in people.  His theory is that if you, you don’t have to agree on everything to agree on some things, and bring people together, solve problems and move us forward.  And I think that’s what this country needs right now, we have been torn apart for too long and we need to move forward.

MR. HALPERIN: Jonathan?

MR. PRINCE: I think, well, first of all, just in terms of attributes, to get back to the original part of your first part of your question.  I think voters are looking for, first of all, someone who is authentic and honest with them, who treats them with the respect they deserve, because ultimately they really run the country.  And that means being straight about what the problems are, what the challenges are, what we know and what we don’t know.

And I think they also want someone, frankly, who has the kind of courage, because I think there is an opportunity here.  I think all this hunger for change that we’ve been talking about, you know, what George, the one thing George Bush has done with the kind of misgovernment of the last six years is really begin to help forge a consensus in this country that we need a massive change in course.  And so I think they are looking for someone who is going to kind of go beyond the old politics of kind of incrementalism and take kind of some pretty big steps and say, you know, the system has been rigged for too long in a way that rewards powerful interests all the time, as David said, and that doesn’t give a voice or power to regular folks in a way that it ought to.

And I think that means kind of bold leadership on a whole host of subjects which is, why we are what we talked about it, and we are proud of it and we hopes it helps us at the debate, why we are proud that John Edwards is the only guy who has a real detailed, substantive universal health care plan out there, why tomorrow morning he will be the only candidate with a real detailed energy independence and, you know, a plan to halt global warming.  So while we were, we’ve been out there for a year and a half, because it’s one of the issues that is kind of most dear to his heart, with a plan not just to fight poverty but to say let’s set a national goal of actually ending poverty in America in 30 years.

So that’s what I think folks are looking for, authenticity, openness, honesty and kind of the courage to go beyond the old politics and say it’s time for change that really transforms this country into what it ought to be.

MR. PENN:  Well, you know, I agree with David about 2000 and I think in 2000 President Clinton left the country in such good shape that they were willing to say, well, it doesn’t really matter who the president is, and this is what they got.

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  And I think now they are saying, hey, it matters, we’ve got to have a president that knows foreign affairs, that knows domestic affairs, that knows the global economy, that knows the Federal Reserve Bank, who has got experience.  Senator Clinton has 35 years of experience, stepping out from the university on, whether it was children’s issues, or education, or visiting 82 countries, or being in the White House or being a Senator.  And I’ve been through some sessions where we go through the things and it would take me 35 years to be able to relate everything that she has done, because I think she lives every day to try to do something for people and I think that what she fundamentally is about.

And so I think that they are looking for somebody in this presidential race, somebody who is strong, somebody who can be a leader, somebody who is what I would say strong and smart, which is something they haven’t had for a while.

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  And also there is something very unique because they want to break some barriers here.  Women are 54 percent of the electorate, but they haven’t had a woman president in this country yet and I think that the country is ready for that.  I think she is ready to lead, I think she is the best qualified candidate in the race, I think she will accomplish the goals that you’ve heard set out here that the other candidates have talked about. And I believe she can break the barrier that tells millions of others, so that a parent can turn to their, not just their sons but to their daughter as well and say, hey, you can be president of this country, and I think that is a powerful barrier that she can break.

MR. HALPERIN: I want to ask one last question about new media and then get to—

(Applause)

MR. HALPERIN: I assume that applause is not for my saying I want to ask one last question but rather—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: --for Mark’s answer.

About new media, but I don’t want to go into detail because I think we’ll go too long, so let me just ask you, obviously new media is not all that new, Richard Nixon appeared on “Laugh-in” and candidates have often sought out alternate venues besides traditional news programs, but it seems likely that there will be a lot of options at least to do that this time. Now all your candidates have appeared on “Oprah” I believe at one time or another in their career, that seems like a pretty safe bet.

Your candidate did Monday Night Football. Your candidate seems to be like cohost of “The Daily Show”.

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: He is pretty good too.

MR. HALPERIN: Are there new media venues, that you think your candidates shouldn’t do, that are beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate or the president?  Or, if there is an audience—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: If there is an audience to reach, you’ll reach them and you’ll bring your own dignity. Mark Penn, is there stuff that gets floated to all and you say no, no, no, that’s not senatorial or presidential?

MR. PENN:  Well we don’t have it anymore but we if we had the “Gong Show”, we wouldn’t be on it.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: All right.

MR. PENN:  And so I do think that it is important that candidates get out there and be with people, and meet with people and take questions, you know.  And I think one of the things we always say in our campaign is if you’ve got some image, some impression, something you have heard from Fox News or elsewhere, just take a look at her. The best thing we can do is get you closer to our candidate and so we want to go out on more mediums.

But I think you’re right, it’s a presidential race, these are serious issues.  I think it’s important that we find those forums that are not just about entertainment.  And look, President Clinton played the saxophone, so I think there is certainly a very good role for connecting with people and I believe the senator will do that.

But I do think, at the end of the day, it’s very important that we also provide good forums for people to listen to.  Remember, more people, or if not more people, probably remember the State of the Union in this country, it’s like the Super Bowl of politics, 40 or 50 million people tune in, Americans are interested.

I did go to school here and I started polling here after I read a book in one of my courses here by V.O. Key, that said the simple thesis of this book is that the voters are not fools, and everything I have ever done in this profession has been based on that simple fact, that they may laugh, they may have fun, but at the end of the day, they are going to look at their lives, this country, this planet and what will make a difference for that, and let’s never forget that.

MR. PRINCE: Which is why they didn’t elect George Bush in 2000.

(Laughter)

MR. MCKINNON: Jonathan, would you advise as a communications to—

MR. PENN: Get over it, Jon, get over it.

MR. PRINCE: We are still trying to get it over it, Mark.

(Laughter)

MR. MCKINNON: As a communications expert, would you maybe advise Edwards to go on “American Idol” if they offered him a chance?

MR. PRINCE: Well I think actually a contest like this, “Oprah” is a very good genre, I think I’ll draw a very firm line, we will never do “Hollywood Squares”, we will not do “The Dating Game” and we will not go on “American Idol” or any other kind of TV contest.

MR. MCKINNON: “Dancing with the Stars”?

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: Are you cohosting?

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: I actually think Mark makes another good point which is, you know, the emergence of all this new media, the terrific thing about it is the way it allows for a new level of direct dialogue with voters in all different kinds of places and really allows us to inject some transparency into the process where you can really kind of connect with voters directly, and kind of take them behind the scenes and not frankly do everything, with all due respect, through the filter of the media because, you know, the media has got kind of competing responsibilities.

On the one hand, you’re a crucial part of this process in kind of being skeptical about us, asking questions, communicating what’s going on and what you learn, but also the media has a bottom line and they have, that’s why you get so much coverage about the kind of gotcha stuff and so much coverage about the conflict over content and all that. So I think that all this new stuff gives us really a vehicle to kind of, like I said, get out there and connect directly to voters.

MR. HALPERIN: David, your candidate and friend, Barack Obama, has gotten very well known very quickly, gets more requests I think than any other candidate in the race, I believe, for appearances, for interviews and to be on television and other places, are there things that you think he has done so far, like Monday Night Football, that maybe weren’t the best ideas?  And given that his problem may be more to show gravitas rather than to show people he is accessible, are you looking for new media forums that maybe are more serious rather than more frivolous?

MR. AXELROD: Well, first of all, I want to commend you for suggesting that there are things beneath the dignity of a presidential candidate, just hypothetically.

Look, I agree with these guys that I think that, and it goes back to the premise of Mark’s question which is I think people judge you on a whole lot of nonlinear measures when you run for President of the United States and I think the ability to see someone in different kinds of venues, to see their humor, to see their humanity, is all very important. I’m not concerned, first of all, I think the senator has shown plenty of gravitas through his two books, through all his activities in elected office for the last decade and I’m not worried about that.

And this campaign will demand that and it should demand that.  But I also think it’s important to show who you are as a human being because I think ultimately who you are as a human being is very, very important and some of these things, some of these shows, are an opportunity to do that.  I also think the Internet is now a greater opportunity than ever to have an interactivity with people and to give people a sense. There is a ton of material on our Web site, I’m sure on theirs as well, that give people some insights into who Barack Obama is.  I don’t know if you have stuff that gives people insight into who Barack Obama is, but we do.

(Laughter)

MR. AXELROD: And I think that’s all to the good.  And just let me close by saying, just as a historical fact, one of the interesting things, you will remember this well because you are a historian of this sort of thing.  Back in 1992, when Bill

Clinton had difficulties in the spring, there was an offensive launched, it may have been when he played the saxophone, I don’t know. This predated Mark’s involvement there.  But he did a series of shows that were not conventional shows, long format shows where he talked to people about his life and so on.  There was this impression that he was sort of a silver spoon guy who had gone to—

MR. HALPERIN: You can say Harvard.

MR. AXELROD: No, he didn’t go to Harvard, who had gone to an Ivy League school and was privileged and so on, and there was a real offensive on these shows to try and correct that and I think to some good effect, so these things are meaningful.

MR. HALPERIN: Absolutely.

Let’s go to your questions. Four microphones, two on the floor, two up in the loges. We’ll remind you, again, short questions.  We appreciate you have a lot to say but we want to get to as many as we can, so please identify yourself, ask a short question. If I interrupt, it will only be because I think you are going on a little too long, and we’ll get to as many, you can direct your question to one of our panelists or you can throw it open to the whole group.

And let’s start with this, so we’ll start right here.

MR. MESSEK: Hi. My name is Luke Messek, I’m a junior at the college. 

I have not heard any of your candidates yet speak about the shortage of health care workers in Africa, where each year millions of people die from treatable diseases like AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria.  Currently, in subSaharan Africa, three percent of the world’s health care work force struggles against 24 percent of the global disease burden.

The World Health Organization says that we can turn this around with measures to recruit, train and retain health care workers and that the U.S.’s fair share in this effort is $8 billion over five years. If elected, would President Edwards, President Obama or President Clinton commit $8 billion over five years for health care workers in Africa?

(Applause)

MR. PRINCE: I’m very happy to answer this.  Actually, and you may not have seen it because one of the things that we sometimes gripe about with our friends in the news media is that the coverage of substantive policy is not always as prominent as the coverage of kind of the back and forth of the process.  But Senator Edwards actually went to New Hampshire just on Thursday, I was there with him at the St. Anselms College at the Institute for Politics there, and announced a very ambitious, $5 billion a year plan to combat global poverty, that includes three main initiatives.

One, a $3 billion plan to actually educate, provide primary education to every student in the world, I’m sorry, every young person in the world. Because a lot of what we know that’s going on right now is lots of young people, probably 100 million young people around the world, don’t get any school at all and a lot of the are being educated in madrassas run by militant extremists and things like that.  If we can replace that with a real system of primary education so people are getting the chances for economic opportunities and learning about civics, we can kind of replace the ideologies of radical terrorism with ideologies of kind of education and democracy, that would be a wonderful thing and a great way to kind of make us safer.

But the second part of it is about a $600 million a year commitment to preventive health care, a lot of that related to clean water but also related to health care workers. And the third part is initiative support in kind of emerging economies and democracy that is out there is the world.  So it’s not exactly $8 billion over five years but it’s a $5 billion a year ongoing effort to eradicate global poverty as part of the way to make us not just do the right thing but also make us safer here at home.

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: There is no doubt that this is one of the major kind of screaming challenges to our conscience that we have to address.  Senator Obama, you may know, traveled to Africa last summer and he addressed a number of issues there, he addressed the issue of corruption in Kenya, and one of the things that he did in South Africa was challenge the South African Government on its handling of the AIDS issue as part of an effort, an overall effort on his part to raise consciousness about some of the health issues and other issues in Africa, and there is no doubt that this would be a priority of his in his administration.

We have to build, you know, we’ve done a lot to project force in the world, we have to project the force of compassion in the world in the next four years and rebuild trust in America, trust that we are going to do the right thing for the right reasons and that we can help, and we intend to do that.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark Penn?

MR. PENN: Well I think there is no question that health care, both here at home and in Africa, is extremely close to the heart of Senator Clinton.  She has fought strongly for expanded funding to combat AIDS in Africa, she has worked hard to lower drug prices for the drugs that go to Africa.  And there is no question that she will support a very, very substantial commitment to expanded health care in Africa.

MR. HALPERIN: Thank you.

Up there, sir?

MS. NISHULER: My name is Ross Nishuler.

I wanted to ask about the use of families in presidential campaigns.  I’m not sure if they help the candidate, hurt the candidate or in fact are totally irrelevant, and we may expect to see more of it as candidates turn to their spouses and their children to carry some of the weight of the campaign.

MR. AXELROD: I think people, they have a legitimate interest in the family of candidates because it is part of what whole tapestry, that fabric of who they are as people. But you know, the degree to which that is so-called used in campaigns I think is the question that you are asking.  I can only talk to you about this campaign.  I mentioned earlier to some folks that Michelle Obama, Barack’s wife, who also attended this university, is a very, she has a very great story of her own, it’s a great American story, but her particular value in a campaign is that she knows Barack better than anyone else.

I told this story earlier that when she first, she tells the story about when she first began dating Barack, he had been a community organizer in Chicago.  He went to law school and, in his first year, he came back to Chicago and he was helping train other community organizers as he worked at the law firm where they both worked, and he invited her on a date to this organizing meeting where he took off his coat, rolled up his sleeves, some of you may ask what kind of date that is, but—

(Laughter)

MR. AXELROD: And he gave a speech, and she said he gave a speech to these aspiring community organizers and a lot of folks who were very much desperate in their circumstances in a community in the shadow of steel mills that had closed down. And he said there is the world the way it is and the world the way it should be and community organizing is a means to narrow that gap.  And she said that is what has motivating him from the day he became a community organizer through today as he runs for President of the United States.  I think it’s valuable to get those kind of insights, I think that’s appropriate, and we hope she’ll be out there speaking for us, not as a kind of object, not as a display but as someone who can attest to who this man is and what motivates him in public life.

MR. HALPERIN: Come to think of it, all your three candidates spouses have been on “Oprah” too, so they are pretty high powered people.

Gentlemen, do you want to respond to that?

MR. PRICE: --get their spouse in the room, so to speak.

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  Well I sometimes say I’ve done campaigns where one has been a spouse and I’ve done campaigns where the other has been the spouse. But look, I think that, you know, first of all, I think it’s very important, people don’t really realize Hillary’s whole background, that she grew up in the middle of America, that she grew up in the suburbs, that her father was a small businessman.  And she has been, I think she is very fortunate enough to have her mom who can talk about how she grew up, and on their campaign trail.

So look, I don’t know if it’s relevant but people want to know kind of where someone came from, what kind of values that they picked up, and I think that she very much picked up the kind of basic values of America, the whole notion that if you work hard, the family ought to be able to support itself and do something better for the next generation, and that the next generation ought to always have something better than we have.

I think obviously her own family, she is, obviously we are going to have a great additional campaigner in President Clinton, who campaigned very actively in her senate races and I think is going to campaign actively here, and I think that’s a real component in part of the selection and I think a real component in really of the families here, as you pointed out.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark, Chelsea Clinton is older obviously than she was when her father ran, do you expect she’ll play a larger role than she has in the past Clinton Presidential campaigns?

MR. PENN:  She is, but you know, the Senator really feels very strongly about keeping with privacy of that relationship to the greatest extent possible.  So she is older, she will I’m sure want to get out there and have her own mind.  But if you’ve noticed with the campaign, the Senator is extremely guarded about that and wants to keep it personal.

MR. HALPERIN: Jonathan?

MR. PRINCE: There is not a terrible amount to add.  I think as both of these guys have said, family and relationships and all that stuff is important.  Again, it goes to where we started this conversation, which is that you are electing someone, we don’t really know what the issue set will be for sure a year into the job and so a lot of what people are choosing is a person that they can trust, that they believe has the character and judgement that they want in their president. And the relationships that they have, the kind of way that they treat family and how they care about that are clearly relevant to making that judgement.

I think all of us, from John Edwards on down, is super proud of Elizabeth Edwards, those guys have been through an enormous amount together, as many of you know, I mean basically starting with nothing together, kind of out of law school and building a family, losing their son, Wade, obviously.  Elizabeth had breast cancer during the past campaign. And she is, you know, one of the people that, I shouldn’t say one of the people, she is the person whose advice he probably values more than any other’s in the world.

And so, like I said, we are super proud of her and her story, proud of the New York Times best selling book in the fall.  And I think certainly people want to know and should get to know Elizabeth.

MR. GINSBERG: Hi. Jeff Ginsberg, a senior at the Kennedy School. 

A couple of weeks ago, I was one of the a lot less people who were here when your Republican counterparts were here—

(Laughter)

MR. GINSBERG: I think there was about 50 of us.  But I wanted to ask the same question I asked them, out of fairness, which is do your candidates, whom you knew pretty well, believe that homosexuality is genetic, environment or both?  And how does that play into how they form the policy and the politics around the issue? Thank you.

MR. AXELROD: Well, I mean this is obviously—

(Laughter)

MR. AXELROD: No, no. They did what?

MR. GINSBERG: They wouldn’t answer the question.

MR. HALPERIN: But in their defense, they said they didn’t know, not that they refused to answer it.

MR. AXELROD: I’m not quite sure how Barack would answer that question.  But it came up in a different context, this issue came up in the past week which, because of what General Pace said and so on, and the answer was about morality and he said I don’t think it’s immoral.  I don’t know whether he feels qualified to make the judgement that you ask.  But I will say this, I don’t know of any other candidate, and there may have been, and I don’t mean to impugn anybody else, who made a point of speaking to the issue of gays and lesbians as part of our civic life, in both a convention speech and his announcement speech, and I think it speaks to his orientation.

I mean, fundamentally, what underlies in politics is a notion that we have had too much dividing people, wedge issues, trying to inflame people and that we have to kind of pull together and find our commonality as Americans and leave these issues behind, so that we can actually make some progress in this country, and it certainly applies here.

MR. HALPERIN: Jonathan, and Ann Coulter views notwithstanding, do you have a—

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: Good, old Ann Coulter. I mean I think what David said is correct.  I’ve never talked to John about this directly, so I’m not, to be honest, positive how he would answer the question.  I think he would probably consider it to be an open question, I think it’s something that we are still trying to learn about.  But he also feels, I mean he is for getting rid of don’t ask/don’t tell, he is for passing every one of these laws that are out there in terms of enforcing non-discrimination and whatnot.

This is a guy who grew up in the segregated South and so issues of power and respect for others, whether it’s about skin color, or sexual orientation or anything else, are kind of core to, well core to who he is, and he takes them really, really seriously. There are few things that he gets as fired up about as people being treated unfairly and not equally because of orientation, background or any other kind of thing.

MR. PENN:  And I think it’s fair to say you have hit upon a question neither of us have asked our candidates specifically. But the Senator, I think was very clear, she went out actually last week to say, look, in the military, gays and lesbians have to be allowed to serve openly in the military and the don’t ask/don’t tell policy isn’t working. And she said, look, the general’s comments were wrong, his personal comments about it being immoral are wrong. She has fought for an end to discrimination.  And let me tell you, gays and lesbians are a very strong and integrated part of this campaign. It is part of the equality of America, she believes in this, she will fight for it, she will make it happen.

MR. BULGER: My name is Ben Bulger and I’m a doctoral student at Harvard.

And my question concerns the timing and context of your candidates’ way they announced for the presidency. I was wondering if you could comment on first, the timing, certainly Senator Edwards chose an interesting time of the season to make his nomination, and then also the location, Senator Obama chose a very iconic location and Senator Clinton chose a very focused and some critics have said controlled location. And I was wondering if you could comment on how you felt that played out in the media and if it successfully accomplished the goals that you had for when they announced.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark, why don’t you go ahead.

MR. PENN:  Well I felt, and I hope you agree, I felt we had a great announcement.  I think that a lot of the announcement was also Web-focused, to tell people that there is a Web site, we can all get it in, hillaryclinton.com, but that there is a Web site, and to start really with an announcement video and it drove hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people to the Web site on the first day.  And I think that that told people right away, hey, it’s a new kind of campaign.  If you are looking for an old kind of campaign, this is not going to be it.

Get involved, get to the Web, start to have a conversation right now and I think people really enjoyed the idea that she was opening it with a conversation, and then actually she went out and did an event in New York and was open to questions the next day. And her first events were open question events.  So most I think we think, as I told you before, that it’s very, very successful for us when people just hear Hillary, what she has to say, directly.  And so I think we went through the Web, we went through individual events and we went through kind of widespread events where people can ask their questions, all integrated into the announcement and all to tell people to come join the conversation.

MR. HALPERIN: Jonathan, Senator Edwards chose to announce not in his home state but in New Orleans and during a holiday period which is normally a time when campaigns assume they won’t get much coverage and they shy away from it, so why those two choices and how do you think it worked?

MR. PRINCE: Well I think it worked great,  I mean we were thrilled with the announcement.  New Orleans, first of all, I think, as many of you have heard, one of the things that Senator Edwards likes to talk about is this whole notion of two Americas, one of the haves and one for the have-nots, one of the powerful and one for everybody else, and there is perhaps no greater symbol in America today than New Orleans of the two Americas that exist. 

But that’s not all that New Orleans a symbol of, New Orleans is also a symbol of the change that we can all bring, the difference that we can all make even when the government is failing, even when the government is completely screwing up, that when we take responsibility, we can actually do great things for our country.  Thousands and thousands of people have gone to New Orleans, leant a hand, leant money, leant clothing, leant materials and leant their time, like I said a little while ago, he was down there with 700 kids the last spring break, did some more service around the announcement.  So part of what New Orleans also demonstrates is that the power to change this country is ours and we all need to kind of step up and use it, and that’s why he wanted to go to New Orleans and make the announcement there. That’s what a lot of this campaign is about.

And then in terms of the timing, the timing was clearly a little more of a tactical choice, he had gotten a lot of candidates getting into this race and that’s a period of time when typically less news is going on.  Fortunately, we were able to actually, not by design, sandwich between the death of Gerald Ford and the death of Saddam Hussein. But I think we are very gratified with the results. In fact, we were able to really drive really significant national coverage and just because a lot of news isn’t being made, people are, a lot of people still keep watching the morning shows and reading the newspaper. And we feel we had an overwhelming response of thousands of people in Iowa, thousands of people in New Hampshire, thousands of people in South Carolina and Nevada.

MR. HALPERIN: David, for a campaign which is in many ways untraditional, you had the most traditional of the three announcements in the Senator’s adopted home state and in a city where he made his professional mark initially, and a speech that was much more like a formal presidential announcement speech that we’ve seen in the past, so what was the logic of that, as well as his timing?

MR. AXELROD: Well I would say a couple of things.  First of all, we did talk to our supporters on the Internet in January and tell them that we were going to do this on February 10th. He did it for some of the reasons you mentioned, that the location was chosen because he spent eight years in the Illinois State Senate there working on issues that were really significant, bringing people together, Republicans and Democrats, around reform issues and health care issues and death penalty reform and some of the other things that he worked on, and it had great meaning to him.

The second was that we made the speech in front of the old state capital there where Lincoln prepared for the presidency at a time of great gravity for this country.  I think that he believes that this is a time of great gravity and opportunity for our country and that these are decisive years, and we ought to underscore the seriousness of this by giving it the heft that it deserves, and that was the, and the speech itself I think addressed that, he wanted to make a very clear declaration of who he was, why he was running and what his goals are for this country because that ultimately is, in these serious times, what people are looking for.

The most heartening thing about it was, and there are people in the news media here who traipsed out there to watch this announcement and froze with us in near zero degree temperatures, as did 15,000 people who came out and stayed for hours in the cold, because they really believe that there is a possibility here to change the country and change our future for the better, and that was an incredibly heartening thing.

MR. HALPERIN: Did any of you cry at your candidate’s announcement?

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Right here, sir?

MR. BENERGI: I’m Shelvic Benergi, I’m a second year student at the Kennedy School.

In 2004, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth launched a massive attack on John Kerry’s war record and I think they created enough disinformation and confusion to really neutralize one of Kerry’s major character advantages or biographical advantages. And you can imagine in 2008 a similar attack, in August of 2008, on either Senator Obama’s ethnicity, Senator Edwards’ past as a trial lawyer or this massive right wing ferocity towards Hillary Clinton.

So how are your, as strategists, how do you predict and preempt these types of Swift Boat attacks so that when we pick a great candidate in March, we know that they won’t get shot down by the massive right wing conspiracy?

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: David?

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: I think this would be a question for Mark.  No, no, I meant Mark McKinnon.

MR. PRINCE: He’s designing the strategy, there he is.

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: Come on home, Mark.

(Laughter)

MR. MCKINNON: I think there is a Swift Boat Veterans campaign against John McCain right now.

MR. AXELROD: I would say a few things. First of all, we can all go back and critique how that was handled at the time.  I think you learn from those experiences, I think the country learns from those experiences and I think every one of these campaigns is going to be prepared for whatever comes.  And we’ll deal with these things quickly and decisively and I think that was one of the problems with how it was dealt with in 2004. But I also want to go back to the fundamental premise and I totally subscribe to V.O. Key’s theory, as expressed by Mark Penn, which is I think people get shortchanged in this process.

Yes, we have to react quickly. But I also think they can sort things out and they will sort things out, and the key is to give them the information that they need.  And I think now more than ever, given the situation we find ourselves in in the world, the situation we find ourselves in in this country, the changing economy, global warming, the war and our deteriorated position in the world, I think people understand this is a big deal and I don’t think they are going to get dissuaded by, you know, sort of cheap shot tactics, and we are not going to let them get dissuaded by cheap shot tactics.

MR. PENN:  Well, look, I think it’s absolutely critical that you have a candidate who has got experience in this. With Senator Clinton, they spent $70 million, up to $80 million against her, just in New York, and so we understand what it takes to get your message out.  And an equal part of getting your message out is making sure that the opponents, and no matter how much we want a different system or how much we want something to be different, the opponents try to kill your message, and you have to respond to what they say and you have to defeat it so that your essence can come through.

Now I can tell you that what we often do, if you want to know what the attacks are, as I say, read Mark McKinnon, read Novak, read George Will, they sort of outline to you what they are, and I can tell you that the best campaigns think ahead to what the attacks are going to be, anticipate them, see what your vulnerability is likely to be. In ‘96, we would make the opposition ads before they did.  We knew where they were going, we knew where the weaknesses were and then we would test against them relentlessly until we found what an answer was.

And so it appeared miraculously, when they’d come up with attack after attack on the President, that we had an answer, and then it didn’t work because, well, we had already done it months in advance.  And so we weren’t caught, you know, short changed in a moment in the campaign because opinion in this country can turn on a dime, it can turn back on a dime.  And so it’s critically important that you have a campaign, an operation, and most importantly, a leader who knows how to react under this kind of pressure and knows how to win, and I think that’s what we’ve got in Senator Clinton.

MR. AXELROD: Can i just respond to something Mark said.  I think it’s important to be tough and resilient in response to attacks.  If what we allow this election to become is one more war of attrition, one more battle of tactics, one more contest of who can use the most refined weapons of politics, we are going to do the same thing that we’ve done in recent years, we are going to kill people’s sense of idealism and hope.  And I think that would be a terrible thing.  I think this country needs to be lifted and what we need is a leader who can get us to lower our voices and raise our sights, who can call out those tactics for what they are and give people a higher aspiration for this country. I think that’s very, very important.

(Applause)

MR. PRINCE: I agree with that, but I also think a key piece of it is to not allow them to define the terms of the debate and part of the way you do that is by offering a real positive vision of where you want to take the country.  And if you are doing your job and getting that message directly out to voters, and that can’t be all through the media, as we talked about, then I think, when your are prepared for their attacks, as you certainly have to be, and you expose them for what they are, as both these guys have said, voters are smart. 

Ann Coulter, as we referenced, took a ridiculous and offensive swipe at John Edwards a couple of weeks ago. It wasn’t just offensive to him, frankly, it was a horrible slur against the whole gay community and we called her out on it.  And it wasn’t quite a much as the ATM campaign over here did but we raised hundreds of thousands of dollars over that weekend because of that.  And we showed them that, you know, people aren’t going to take that kind of, they aren’t going to take that kind of language, they don’t want that in their politics anymore, and there is actually an outward kind of rise up against it.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark, you’ve made a big deal in the campaign so far about Senator Clinton’s experience, these two other candidates don’t have nearly her experience in standing up to political attacks over many years; does that make her more qualified to deal with this kind of attack than the other two?

MR. PENN:  Look, I think the point of standing up to attacks is so you can get your message of hope and change out.  The Senator stands for a message of change, or bringing together this country to end the war in Iraq, have universal health care, to do something about global warming and the energy crisis.  But you know, to get that message out, to lift the country, you have to defeat the Republican machine.

MR. HALPERIN: Do you—

MR. PENN: And you can’t pretend—

MR. HALPERIN: Do you want to answer the first question—

MR. PENN: No, no, no—

MR. HALPERIN: But is she more qualified than—

MR. PENN:  I think she is the most qualified and I think—

MR. HALPERIN: But the most qualified to shield—

MR. PENN:  She has the most to deal with this, she knows how they think, she knows how they act, she knows how to defeat them.  She is not, at the end of the day, going to be caught off guard with an attack that doesn’t let her message come through, and I think that experience is absolutely critical to actually winning this White House and that’s what we’ve got to do here.

MR. HALPERIN: Do you both accept that she’s got superior experience and therefore superior ability to deal with that kind of a thing?

(Laughter)

MR. AXELROD: Let me just say that I think that our aspirations should be, at the end of the day, not to defeat the Republican machine but to rebuild the American community which has been so torn apart—

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: --by the events of the last many years and so I’m willing to cede that.

I have a great deal of respect for Senator Clinton, I think she has been unfairly maligned over the years.  I don’t know whether that gives her a particular advantage in this election, but I’ll concede that point.

MR. HALPERIN: Jonathan, you have heard the audacity—

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: --about punching people in the nose?

(Laughter)

MR. PRINCE: I’m just not thinking about it, Mark.  But I will say this, I mean, just in terms of experience, I think that Senator Edwards has a couple of things that just are different than the other candidates who we are talking about tonight and one of them is he has run for president before and that kind of gives you a calm confidence that allows you to kind of keep your eye on what’s important and to know that all this kind of back and forth and ups and downs are not what really matter at the end of the day, and to kind of keep your focus on how you want to change this country, how you want to kind of really bring about, realize this opportunity to finally kind of fulfill this idea of America, that everyone really deserves the same opportunities.

And then, also, he has also run against a serious Republican candidate, which is something that neither my friend to my right or my left has done, and defeating the incumbent senator in North Carolina when he first ran for the senate, and they came at him with all those attacks.

MR. HALPERIN: Your answers have all been excellent, I think everybody would agree. We have gotten to only four questions, by my rough count, maybe five. So let’s do some shorter answers, if we can, and maybe not everybody has to answer every one, so we can try to get to as many as we can. 

Up there?

MR. RUBEN: Hi. I’m Will Ruben from New York City, a freshman at the college.

My question is about the early primary states.  Which early primary or caucus do you think is most important in securing the nomination?  And I’m going to ask a question that was asked of the Republican strategists also, does your candidate plan on skipping any of the early primaries or caucuses?

MR. PRINCE: I can be very short. Iowa, no.

(Laughter)

MR. HALPERIN: Mark Penn?

MR. PENN:  Look, we’ll say New Hampshire, Iowa, Nevada, South Carolina and we are not skipping anything.

MR. AXELROD: Well that’s Governor Shaheen sitting in the front row.

MR. HALPERIN: Yeah, but that’s David Yepsen of the Des Moines Register sitting right there.

MR. AXELROD: Right, and Mark obviously took the chance to look around the room while Jonathan was speaking and—

(Laughter)

MR. AXELROD: --included them all. 

I think all the early primary contests are going to be very important, we are going to run, we are running a national campaign, we are going to compete everywhere and I think there is no question about that.  But I did say earlier that I am not one who believes that these, there is much that’s been said about early primaries and how they are unrepresentative, I’ll tell you something, the people in these early primary states, and everybody up here can attest to it, pay an extraordinary amount of attention to what’s going on and they discharge their responsibilities well.  And it’s the only place in the process where candidates can interact in a very personal way with candidates.

I violated your rule, didn’t I?

MR. HALPERIN: That’s all right.  Just do better next time.

(Laughter)

MS. GREENWOOD:  Good evening and thank you very much for being here tonight. My name is Katie Greenwood and I work with Partners in Health, an international health and human rights organization based here in Boston.

And my question can be answered in just one word and I hope that word will be yes from all of you.  It’s also about global health and I hope that, by the end of the

night, you’ll be adding global health as one of those major issues that you tick off on your fingers as you go through the main issues. 

The World Health Organization estimates over 850 million people suffered from chronic hunger in 2006, more than at any other time in human history.  I work in subSaharan Africa, where in many countries, over half of children are chronically malnourished and suffer permanent growth stunting by the age of five, including irreversible physical and cognitive damage.  This unjust situation is even more unconscionable because the world as a whole and the United States in particular, produce thousands of tons of surplus food every year, well over what is needed to meet current food needs.

Recognizing this, the United Nations set forth a clear plan for eradicating world hunger by 2010 in the millennium development goals.  Yet under President Bush, the United States has fallen shamefully short of the benchmarks through this commitment.  If elected, would a President Obama, Edwards or Clinton commit to meeting the millennium and development goal of eradicating hunger worldwide?

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: Let me just say that I am, I can’t answer that specific question because I’m not the, I’m not familiar with the point, the particular measure you are talking about. But I will say that, and if you read The Audacity of Hope, and if you watch what the Senator has done, these issues are a particular moment to him, I think he feels them very personally. 

I think he also, one of the great concerns that he has is that we don’t react to this misadventure in Iraq by withdrawing from our world and walling ourselves off from our responsibilities as a country, and the best way to help secure ourselves in the future is to exercise the kind of leadership that you are discussing here.  So I think you can count on him to be a strong voice on these issues.

MR. PRINCE: I mean certainly, as you all heard me say a little while ago, this is an issue, global poverty, across the board that is really very personal for Senator Edwards. He spent a lot of time in Africa, Northern Uganda and other places, seeing the kind of effects of this poverty and also the effects of these kind of failed states on people, young people in particular and women in particular, and cares about it very deeply.  We announced just a few days ago a really ambitious plan, even some might call it an audacious plan, to combat global poverty.

So, with respect to that question, I, like David, don’t have the exact answer, but I can say, as I said, we’ve got a $5 billion a year plan to do the right thing, the right thing morally, but also help make America more secure in the process.

MR. PENN:  And I could be wrong but I believe that she subscribes to the millennium development goals and I believe if you want somebody that will make it happen, come join Senator Clinton.

MR. HALPERIN: Now I’m baffled by where we are going.  Up there?

MR. DUMA: Good evening. My name is Clay Duma, I’m a freshman at the college.

And my question is directed to Mr. Prince and Mr. Axelrod.  Back in 2000, when George Bush I guess became president—

(Laughter)

MR. DUMA: He was framed as an outsider and he certainly was not well versed in international politics.  Hillary Clinton, by contrast, in addition to obviously her domestic experience you mentioned, Mr. Penn, has visited 82 countries and is very popular around the globe, especially in Asia, I think her book was a best seller in China. In light of the fact that one of the most important, one of the most important issues in reconstructing our stature around the world will be warming ties, warming cooled ties with our European allies and developing cooperative and not confrontational relationships with countries in Asia, like China and Russia.  Where do you see your candidates stacking up against Hillary in this respect?

MR. AXELROD: Well I appreciate the question, but I must say I’m not sitting here thinking about how my candidate stacks up against Hillary.  When I speak of my candidate in terms of foreign policy and security, I think about his experience of having lived overseas as a young man in Indonesia and the perspective that gives him, of having relatives in Africa and the perspective that that gives him.  I think about his work on the Foreign Relations Committee with Senator Lugar on arms control and about the good that he did on his trip to Africa in which he was unbelievably well received, as he challenged governments there to meet their responsibilities.

And finally, finally, I think about the fact that, in 2002, he had the wisdom and the insight to say that this War in Iraq was a terrible mistake and that we shouldn’t go down that road, and if we did, that we would pay a great price for it because there was no way out and it hadn’t been thought through properly.  And to me, that gives you a great deal of insight into the kind of wisdom that he would bring to the presidency.

(Applause)

MR. PRINCE: I would just say that, first of all, I think nobody exceeds John Edwards when it comes to kind of thoughtfulness and understanding with regard to the kind of interconnected complexities of the world today.  He spent an enormous amount of time traveling around the world, meeting with world leaders and working on these issues and I think brings a really kind of comprehensive approach to the whole set of issues. I also think that what people are, and I said a little of this before, what people are looking for in their next president is someone who has, again, the kind of honesty and thoughtfulness, but also the self-responsibility to lead the country and make the right judgements.

And that includes, unlike President Bush, the willingness to say you are wrong when you are wrong, to say you have made a mistake when you’ve made a mistake.

And that kind of flexibility is kind of what’s required to change course when things aren’t going right, and that’s why John as said over and over again that his vote in 2002 was wrong, it was a mistake.  And it was a mistake for two reasons, one, because all the intelligence about their weapons of mass destructions was just wrong. But two, because he, at the time was troubled, struggled with the idea of giving George Bush this authority, and he came down on the side of doing it and thinks that was the wrong decision. So he takes very kind of personal and sober responsibility for that and I think that’s really important in a president.  I mean if George Bush, for God’s sake, could admit he was wrong, we might be getting out of Iraq and ending this war.

MR. HALPERIN: Short questions, shortish answers.

MR. RUBIN:  My name is Bill Rubin, I’m a mid-career student at the Kennedy School.

And I just wanted to follow up on that to Mark Penn.  Hillary Clinton also voted for the Iraq War resolution in 2002 and her position now is that if we had known then what we know now, she wouldn’t have voted for it and there wouldn’t have been any vote, which sort of begs the question as to why she didn’t know then what we know now.

The question I have for you is how do you convince those of us who might otherwise be inclined to support her that she has the judgement not to get us involved in another quagmire?

MR. PENN:  Well, look, I think there are a couple of things, first, if you go back and read her speech in 2002, it said exactly that she, exactly why she laid out her and why exactly she voted as she did, in order to try to make the inspections work, and she was very clear afterward, after Bush took that and used that in pointing out the mistakes that he had made.  I think a lot of you have to think yourselves do you think Hillary Clinton is the kind of person, if president, would have started the Iraq War? No. She is someone who would have required the inspections be finished, find out whether or not in fact, whether or not in fact there were weapons of mass destruction and then acted to curb them accordingly. 

Look, I think the records on this are very complicated.  I think Senator Obama, for example, for having said at the Democratic Convention in this city, look, he didn’t know exactly how he would have voted if he was in congress, because he didn’t have the full intelligence—

MR. AXELROD: You’ve got to read the whole quote, Mark.

MR. PENN:  Maybe the quote, and he also gave the quote at the convention—

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  --he didn’t think there was much difference between Bush and Senator Obama, but let me ask you, David, let me finish, David. 

(Laughter)

MR. PENN:  So now they get to the senate, they get to the senate and Senator Obama who says, look, I don’t think we should vote for this funding, voted for $301 billion of funding. Now the truth is these records are very complex, Senator Obama voted for the $301 billion of funding, so did, so did Senator Clinton.  Senator Obama voted against a definite withdrawal date, so did Senator Clinton.  In fact, except for the affirmation of Casey, which Senator Obama voted to affirm Casey, there is, as far as I can see, and Senator Clinton didn’t, there is very little difference in the senate, where people have to actually cast votes, of their voting records.

And so this election can’t really turn on these records because people can say, hey, I wasn’t in the senate, this is what I would have done.  Hey, I left the senate, let me tell you what I would have done now.  Senator Clinton has taken responsibility for her vote, and she believes we have to end this war and she believes that you have to decide exactly who would do the best job at working with those 82 world leaders, figuring out how to restore confidence in America in this world, bringing home our troops and ending this war. And I believe, when you listen to her, you will conclude that it is Senator Clinton who can do that.

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: Let me just, I kind of regret that Mark went there because this came up the other day, and a partial quote was offered at a fund raiser, and the full quote ultimately was released.  And the full quote was, at the Democratic Convention, Barack Obama was asked how do you feel about John Kerry and John Edwards casting a vote for the war, Mr. Keynote Speaker, and what he said was that, look, I wasn’t in the senate, I don’t know what they were looking at.  But what I was looking at told me that this was the wrong war, that it wasn’t justified and that it would lead to a quagmire from which we would have a hard time extricating ourselves.

And I really think that it is important, if we are going to run the kind of campaign that will unify our party and move this country forward, that we do it in an honest way, and that was not an honest way.

(Applause)

MR. PENN:  I think, David, as you know, he also gave an interview where he said, look, my view is not much different from Bush’s now.  And I think the real question I have, David, is when he got to the senate, when he got to the senate, in fact he voted for all the authorizations, said we had a military role in Iraq, didn’t give a speech for over a year on Iraq, while Senator Clinton gave six, okay?

And now is this election going to turn about what happened in 2002 or about the future?  Who is going to do the best job in Iraq?

MR. AXELROD: I totally agree with you there.  Senator Obama introduced in January the plan, that has now become the model for the democratic plan, to get us out—

MR. PENN: I think that was the—

MR. AXELROD: I agree with you.

MR. PENN:  Well let’s have a discussion on the topic, let’s not say, Jonathan, we can’t have a discussion about how to solve this war—

MR. AXELROD: I agree.

What Senator Obama has said is that we need to be, given the situation that we have created in Iraq, that we need to be as careful getting out as we were careless getting in, and that has been his position, he has spoken on it.  His plan that he offered was, as you say, aligned with the Iraq study group, and introduced in January and it’s now become, as a lot of news organizations have noted, kind of a model for where we are going.

But here is the thing, Mark, because I agree with you the future is what’s important and I did not sit here and comment, I did not comment on Senator Clinton’s decision back in 2002. I am not commenting on her decision in 2002.  You found it necessary to draw Senator Obama into this discussion, and I guess that goes back to the discussion we had before, are we going to spend ten months savaging each other or are we going to try and lift this country up? And we choose to lift this country up—

(Applause)

MR. PENN:  --are we going to get together, are we going to look at everybody’s records, everybody’s votes tell everyone out there the truth about who supported what, who voted for what, when, or are we going to selectively tell people? I think the voters are smart enough to get the full record of every candidate, to digest everything about this war, to look forward and, let’s agree, everyone will support the nominee of this party.  We will support the nominee and let us indeed look forward to who can do the best job and how this party can bring this war to an end.  I agree totally.

(Applause)

MR. HALPERIN: Mark, let me ask you a question.  You brought up two quotes of Senator Obama, one from the convention and then one, I’m hoping you have a more specific citation for those with wireless here, so we can all get the exact quote about it, saying my view on Iraq is the same as President Bush’s.  What do you think those two quotes that you cited a couple of times, what do you think they reveal?  What’s the underlying point you were trying to make by bringing those up?

MR. PENN: Well I think that—

MR. AXELROD: --second quote by the way, but go ahead.

MR. PENN: Well I think that was in the Globe, the first was in the New York Times. Look, I think the point is that the Senator consistently recognized—

MR. HALPERIN:  His senator.

MR. PENN: Right. Recognized that these were complex votes.  He recognized that, look, he said, and we all give him a tremendous amount of credit for the 2002 speech, but we recognized that people in the senate saw other things, may have had to make a judgement differently.  And let’s agree that that’s the reality of what the Senator’s views were. And I don’t really, I frankly can’t explain the second quote, it had something to do with the convention and maybe David can.  But in reality, when they got to the senate, Senator Obama’s votes were exactly the same.

So let’s not try to create false differences when we both agree it’s time to de-escalate, when we both agree it’s time to end this war, and let’s be clear that Senator Clinton thinks that, Senator Obama thinks that, former Senator Edwards thinks that and once we agree on that, I think we can go together quite well as a party.

(Applause)

MR. AXELROD: But the immutable fact is that had we followed Senator Obama’s advice in 2002, we wouldn’t be talking about de-escalation right now.

MR. HALPERIN: Okay, up there?

MS. GNASHA: Hi. I’m Anisha Gnasha, I’m a joint degree student at MIT and a second year student here at KSG. 

My question for all three of you is one of the things that all three of your candidates believes is that a lot of damage was done with this war, irrespective of what the positions were. How are they looking at this going forward in terms of how do they repair the image that America has in terms of credibility, legitimacy?  Are they for, you know, actual force?  Multilateral ties?  Where are they going forward with this in terms of repairing our image?

MR. HALPERIN: Mister quiet?

MR. PRINCE: Well, I mean the first thing that we’ve been talking about and I’ve talked about a couple of times is understanding that kind of America’s moral leadership in the world has, and exercising moral leadership in the world, has a profound and direct impact on our present and future security.  And that’s one of the reasons why it was important to Senator Edwards, and you guys have heard me talk about it a couple of times because it’s certainly something that’s on people’s minds here, which is great.

That’s why, for example, it’s important for the United States to show leadership when it comes to global poverty, it’s also why it’s important for us to show leadership when it comes to what’s going on in Northern Uganda or the genocide in Darfur, so all of these things, kind of reengaging with the world as a whole and restoring kind of our ability to show moral leadership is critical to our success and critical to our security.

It’s also, by the way, important for us to show moral leadership around the world, to show moral leadership here at home and that’s why he is talking about things like poverty, and strengthign the middle class, and universal health care and all those things.

MR. HALPERIN: Do you want to add anything?

MR. AXELROD:  I mean I think that it’s clear that what we’ve learned from, we’ve learned a lot of lessons from this but one is that unilateralism is not tenable, another is that we need to be as aggressive with diplomacy as we are with force.  And the third is the point that Jonathan makes, that there is an awful lot of progress to be made in the world by reuniting with the world community and being the helpful force that we should be.

MR. HALPERIN: Mark Penn?

MR. PENN: Well I think this is really a major concern of the Senator, she is really despairing when she goes around the world today and sees what the image of this country has become, that we could be the most reviled country in many places.  And I think it is a major strength of her with her experience with world leaders, with her reputation and image around the world to really make repairing this go hand in hand with how we end the war in Iraq.

MR. HALPERIN: We are running a bit long but we are going to do two more questions I’m told, so right here and then up there and that will be it.

MS. DEPERRI: Hi. I’m Sara Deperri, I am a masters student here at the Kennedy School.

You almost changed my question when Jonathan literally and figuratively recused himself from the fight between you two but --.  So it seems that young women are among the least politically active in this country and it also seems as though, so far, the Obama Campaign and the Clinton Campaign are just kind of relying on an organic interest in their campaigns, and young people are gravitating towards Obama and women to some extent are gravitating towards Clinton.  But I’m wondering, as campaign strategists, are you guys planning at all on targeting young women, and if so, how?

MR. PENN:  Well, I don’t know if I would use the word targeting, but I think that we have, look, I think the campaign and the goals of the campaign have a tremendous appeal to all generations, that it has an appeal to the older generation and their responsibility to make sure it’s a better world for the next generation and to the younger generation in terms of fulfilling their hopes. 

I think that we are finding that women are a very strong part of the campaign and that there is an emotional connection, in particular with younger women, about what it would mean if she were President of the United States of America, in this world and at this time.

And so I think that there is a capability here to organize millions of additional young women who have not been interested in politics, and to get them interested in politics in this election and to really be the key agent for change in this country, and I actually think that’s what we are going to see.

MR. AXELROD: I would say that, as I said at the outset, I think one of the reasons that young people have been somewhat aloof from politics to the degree they have been, women and men, has been a sense that our system is dysfunctional, that there is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing and that we can’t really change through politics the fundamental things that are challenging us, global warming and education and health care and all the issues that face us.  And there is some evidence of that, I mean there are all kinds of good answers but Washington never gets around to it because there is so much conflict, so much division, so much, frankly, influence that we didn’t get to a larger agenda.

And so we are trying to engage young people, men and women, to become part of this cause because the more people get involved, the more they vote, they more they are active and organize their communities, the more we have a chance to push back in Washington and really change things.

MR. HALPERIN:  Last question up there?

MR. MCKINNON: And if there is any question about Senator Edwards’ party and the youth vote, take a look at Jonathan’s shoes.

(Laughter)

FROM THE FLOOR: This is again a question for Mr. Prince and Mr. Axelrod.  Americans often turn to figures with executive branch experience to be president.  Now Senator Clinton of course was part of the most successful administration in a generation, what kinds of—

(Laughter)

FROM THE FLOOR: At least I think most Democrats in this room will agree about that.

What kinds of executive experience, management experience, experience managing large groups of people do your two candidates, can they bring to being president?

MR. PRINCE: Well I think actually, again, it goes back to where we started the conversation. What voters are really looking for is a collection of attributes and one thing that executives often have is the ability to kind of make good decisions and carry them through.  But I’m very confident that the more voters get to know John Edwards and to do a little bit in four equally important states of Iowa, New

Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada, the messy part of this process is cleaning up, when you try to be a little too glib and clever.

But I think the more that voters kind of get to know him and understand how he makes decisions, the kind of conviction and judgement that he brings to the decision making process, I think the more we are confident voters are going to respond well to him.  So I think, sure, there is a history of electing executives, that’s often because one of the tactics that they bring to the discussion is an ability to kind of, you know, understand kind of bottom lines and follow through on decisions.  But I think that’s something that John kind of possesses in great measure.

MR. AXELROD: I mean just to be clear, I just want to challenge the premise of your question a little bit.  There is no one on this platform who represents a candidate who has had executive governmental experience.  So it’s really not a question of, it’s not a question of whether you have had executive governmental experience, it is I think a question of whether you can provide the kind of leadership the country needs right now, the kind of leadership that can bring people together, that can blast through this kind of morass in Washington, that can end the sort of special interest politics that have dominated, that can get people working together, Republicans and Democrats, that can approach problems in a nonideological way and take from the best ideas of everyone to try and solve the problems of this country.

That’s what Barack Obama has done all his public life from the time he was a community organizer through his eight years in the state senate.  There are legions of Republicans in the state senate and from the U.S. Senate who will attest to his ability to bring people together and solve problems.  After the kind of polarization that we’ve experienced in this country, I think that’s extraordinarily important, so that’s what we offer here.

MR. MCKINNON: Let me thank you all on behalf of the Institute of Politics and the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School for a terrific session.  I’m going to have to admit that this was a much more interesting session than the Republicans had.

(Laughter)

MR. MCKINNON: And much more lively.

MR. PRINCE: We are.

MR. MCKINNON: We are, you are, no question about it.

(Laughter) (Applause)

MR. MCKINNON: We are concluded, thank you.

(Applause)

(Whereupon, at 7:35 p.m., the session was concluded.)


C E R T I F I C A T E

This is to certify that the preceding transcript is an accurate record based on the recordings of the proceedings taken:Before: MARK HALPERIN & MARK MCKINNON, Moderators

In the Matter of:

CAMPAIGN 2008: LOOKING AHEAD

Date: March 19, 2007

Place: Cambridge, Massachusetts

03/27/07

Martin T. Farley Date

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