The Scribe

Interview and discussion with Nicholas Kristof and Casey Parks about reporting on Central Africa and the politics of foreign aid

9/28/06: NPR

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof and contest-winning journalism graduate student Casey Parks were interviewed on returning from Central Africa by Brian Lehrer of WNYC.

Brian Lehrer: ...In the US, we have 5% of the world's population, 30% of the world's wealth... Are we creating or just hoarding global wealth?  Most of us don't feel rich as individuals but when we are so rich as a nation -- and while tens of thousands of children die every day from hunger-related causes in the world, what is our responsibility?  When scarcity contributes to genocide in a place like Darfur, what is our responsibility then?  And in the context of our national elections, how different are Democrats and Republicans on these issues?  We'll have this conversation not in debate form but with New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristof, just back from reporting on poverty in Africa, and the student essay contest winner he took with him, Casey Parks, a student at the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism who had never been out of the country before -- one of the reasons she was chosen... We're delighted to have them back.  Maybe you saw the two heartbreaking columns that Nick wrote from Cameroon about the woman named Prudence who died in childbirth from no access to care.... Casey -- you told us before you left that you had seen poverty in Mississippi growing up but you were curious to see how different poverty looked in Africa.  How would you begin to describe the difference?

Casey Parks:  I imagined that it would be different but I didn't feel that difference at all before I went.  In Mississippi the people I know who are poor can always get food stamps or always get medical care.  We saw so many people who... all they eat is casava which basically has no nutritional value.  We saw so many people dying from malaria because they don't have mosquito nets or because they're living out in the bushes because of instability in certain countries.  We met so many people who have no access to healthcare.  Who,even if they could pay for the healthcare can't get anywhwere near hospitals because they're too far away and the roads are too bad.  This is a completely other level.  I expected it would be different but not at all like what I actually experienced. 

BL:  How different from what you expected?  Was it shocking?  Did it make you see the world any differently?

CP:  Certainly it did!  It's really strange for me to be back in the US and try to make sense of the US after seeing all this.  You know, I didn't really feel it.  I knew the numbers. But the numbers didn't resonate.  There were numbers that are easy to forget or TV programs that I'd flipped through.  When you actually talk to someone -- when you look them in the eye and you see.... You know, the kids break everyone's heart.  When you look at a kid who has absolutely nothing to eat or you see a huge family sharing the smallest of meals that has no nutritional value, it's hard to come back and go out to a restaurant and feel good about yourself. 

BL:  I guess that's why Nicholas Kristof writes so much about stories of individuals.  Nick, I've read a lot of newspaper columns in my life but I don't think I'll ever forget the two you wrote about Prudence, the woman whose life and death struggle during childbirth you told over two columns like a medical and political suspense story.  My god, what a tragic story!  No modern medical care.  A doctor who left her in the hospital without operating for days when she finally got there -- because she didn't have $100.  What was the moral of that story to you ?

Nicholas Kristof:  Well, you know these kinds of things happen every day.  About once a minute.  Half a million women die a year in childbirth and it's really because neither donor nations like the US nor the recipient nations like Cameroon make it a priority.  The number of women dying in childbirth has been stuck for the past 25 years.  As Casey said, you can know that intellectually.  But for me just being there by Prudence's bedside and just seeing her fade away for totally needless reasons... you can't put it away.  Also I think that sometimes there's a tendency for us in this country to think, well, people in the developing world are used to death and suffering because they experience so much of it.  Anybody who was there by Prudence's bedside -- saw her husband begging for us to help save her, see her mother and her sisters stay there every night by her bedside -- would not have said that.

BL:  Casey, I read a lot of the blog that you kept in Africa.  You were obviously very affected by the death of Prudence.  What are you left thinking about now that you're back?  CP:  There are so many things... My first reaction was to get mad at the doctor while we were there because he promised us he was going to do her surgery and then he just left and he didn't do it.  I was so angry at him.  Then you get back and you think, well, he was the only doctor in that whole city, and what can we do about that, and even if I donate money to this one clinic how are people going to get to the clinic?  I just keep going through things in my brain like how can I make this better?  how can I make this better?  And I'm not sure... We have a couple of ideas, but it's hard to implement them.  One we've been talking about is maybe med students could do their residencies in a place like Yokadouma, Cameroon.  What's happening is that doctors are leaving Cameroon because their currency was depreciated and then their wages were cut so doctors are making way less money in Cameroon than they can in bordering countries.  So there are very few left.  But maybe if a medical student went and spent three months residency there, there would be better medical coverage there. If you rotate people coming in and out -- three months in a place like Yokadouma would not be terrible.  It would be a great experience and students could definitely do it.

BL:  ...[Invites callers to call the show.]  Nick, to bring Prudence's story to a political level, this is an area where you identified a clear difference between Democrats and Republicans because of their positions toward the World Population Fund.  Can you talk about that?

NK:  The UN Population Fund is one of the umbrella groups that has really tried to address maternal mortality.  And it has done so all around the world -- in countries like Cameroon.  Indeed, in other parts of Cameroon, they have provided kits and services to improve prenatal care and to reduct maternal mortality.  Elsewhere in Africa I've seen that work.  In Niger I saw a woman who arrived half-dead at the hospital and because of UNFPA's work, she was saved.   But it's not functional in the hospital we visited where Prudence died.  The reason is that the Bush administration has cut off all US funding for UNFPA.  UNFPA is an unfortunate abbreviation for the UN Population Fund.  The Bush administration did that because UNFPA's work in China and supposed ties to abortions there.  Those charges about the China involvement are completely false.  But in any case, it seems ludicrous to cut off all funding for the Population Fund's work in Africa today because of issues in China. 

BL:  Just as an aside, do you think those charges about China are false?  China doesn't engage in forced abortions because of their one-child rule? 

NK:  The allegations about China are absolutely true.  China does engage in coercive abortions, coercive use of IUD's.  For example, they knock down the homes of people who have an extra child in breach of the family-planning policy.  But in fact UNFPA in China has been constantly trying to get China to moderate those policies and to make family planning policies more lenient.  In fact, one of the great triumphs of UNFPA in China was that they pushed China to change the IUD that they were indeed forcibly inserting in women to one that caused many fewer health problems and indeed will end up saving an awful lot of Chinese lives. 

BL:  So we have economic constructive engagement with China but not UN Population Fund constructive engagement! 

NK:  That's a very good parallel because in fact that's exactly what it is!  The UN Population Fund has made a tremendous positive difference in ameliorating [inaudible] a coercive policy.

BL:  And of course the other side:  you also wrote in another column about the AIDS epidemic in Africa last week.  You had high praise for President Bush's AIDS-fighting initiative.  So how do you see his record on that?

NK:  On AIDS I think he's done better than any previous president.  He's dramatically improved AIDS funding.  Also the program has become more flexible over time. It started out with too many restrictions and it's still... for my money it incorporates too many restrictions that emphasize abstinence-only education.  But in fact when you actually go around on the ground, they really are implemented pretty broadly, pretty loosely, in most places.  There are something like 9 million people whose lives who are on the slate to be saved because of that program on AIDS that President Bush introduced.  That's a case where I think he's done great work!

BL:  Everyone's debating Bush's vs. Clinton's antiterrorism records this week.  Is it worth comparing their anti-AIDS records?

NK:  Well, I think everybody who looks at the issues thinks that Bush has done far, far more than President Clinton did when he was in office.  Now, in his defense, Clinton notes -- and he's right -- that he had to work with a Republican Congress that was very hostile to foreign aid of all kinds.  And more broadly that AIDS in Africa was not the issue that it became later on.  I think those are valid excuses but still, in some sense, they are excuses.  I don't think President Clinton pushed as hard as he could have for help in fighting AIDS in Africa.  President Bush, to his credit, has really made a tremendous... you go to southern Africa, you go around, and there really are AIDS programs that are saving lives right and left.  When you have a pregnant woman in a country like Zambia who has HIV, there are programs now in place, a simply injection one can provide that will dramatically reduce the chance that her baby is going to have HIV as well.

BL:  ...Some of you have heard me say on this show before that if journalism is really concerned with what is most important, we would have the same lead story every day: "30,000 children died in the world today of hunger-related causes.  Most of those deaths were preventable."   But we lead more often with what's new than what's enduringly big.  Nicholas Kristof, my guest, who often writes about poverty around the world and an essay contest winner he took with him to see some of the world's worst poverty, Casey Parks from the University of Missouri Graduate School of Journalism.  Nick, given the things that you focus on in your columns, I imagine that those UNICEF numbers, that 30,000 children die in the world on a daily basis because of hunger-related causes really do drive your sense of journalistic priorities, don't they?

NK:  Yes.  If you think about what we in journalism do well, we're good at covering government announcements and politics.  We're good at covering things that happen on any one day.  What we tend to be really bad at is covering things that happen every day and especially things that aren't governmental or political.  BL:  Isn't it ironic!  If it happened once.  If one day all of a sudden 30,000 children died from some preventable, hunger-related cause, and it didn't happen the next day, maybe it would be massive news!  In a way that it isn't if it happens everyday.  And frankly many of our listeners hadn't heard of that state until I just said it!

CP:  I think if one child died from a preventable cause it would be big news.  If it happened in one day. 

BL:  If it hadn't been happening and then all of a sudden it happened.

NK:  Poor people would be much better of if deaths were intermittent and happened... In Darfur, aid workers have been so appalled at what's been going on that it's been suggested that if bodies there could be brought back to the UN so people could actually see what victimization looks like then there would be more of a reaction.  Certainly the same is true of deaths from malaria, by hunger and all these other things that happen every day.

Caller1:  I wanted to say that I feel it's America's responsibility -- aside from the idealism that it's our responsibility because we can -- I feel it's our responsibility because it's also our fault.  I believe that first-world farmers fuel third-world starvation by providing food to locations where it creates a population boom that's... larger than agriculture can support.

NK:  I don't agree with that exactly in that form.  I do agree that in general it's thought that agricultural subsidies in the west, and Europe is the biggest single culprit there, do dramatically hurt Africa which should be a big food exporter.  It's comparative advantage lies in cultivating food.  We hurt poor countries very much by subsidizing agriculture and reducing commodity prices.  It is more complicated, though.  There are indeed some poor countries that are net food importers.  Those countries benefit and others lose.  The single agricultural program that hurts everybody in poor countries, though, is our cotton subsidy.  That's the US.  It hurts countries all over west Africa that produce cotton.  One easy way to help Africa tremendously would be to cut our commodity price supports in the US. 

Caller2:  I lived in Bangladesh for six years and in Africa, in southern Africa, and in the Philippines.  I saw poverty in a different way.  I think what happens in America is even if we grow up seeing and hearing poverty, we don't smell it.  We don't smell the excrement or the open sewers, whether they're in the streets of Dacca, Bangladesh or in the small towns of mountainous Yugoslavia -- or even here in the states where there's that kind of poverty.  We're distant from it.  We're mostly concerned with taking care of our families and our small circle of friends.

CP:  I can certainly relate to that.  The one thing I regret the most about the blog and the videos is that I can't make people smell.  Prudence's death hit me most, being able to smell her room. I've spent plenty of time in hospitals in my life and I've never, ever, in my entire life smelled anything like that room.

BL:  The way the media is progressing -- multimedia -- we may not be far off from that!  But Casey, you saw poverty. You grew up, to some degree, around poverty in the US.  Seeing this poverty which strikes you as being of another type, even.  We have a hard enough time funding it.  Our poverty programs in America, on the political level.  Given what you saw and given what you'd already known, how to we distribute scarce resources?

CP:  I don't know.  That's one thing I've been thinking about too since I got back, is that poverty over there is completely different and completely worse.  But also, if that point is made too well, what happens to those people who are poor in America.  I don't know about how to spread those resources out at all...

NK:  I think there are a lot of problems we want to address.  There are problems of poverty in this country -- or education, or healthcare, or climate change -- and just because we want to address issues of poverty abroad doesn't mean that's our sole obsession or sole focus.  We can do several things at once.  It's a mistake to think of poverty as one global issue that includes the US and the situation abroad because the situation in a poor African country is an order of magnitude different and where you can save a few lives with a $5 mosquito net to prevent malaria, that is something we absolutely have an imperative to do.

BL:  Casey, do you feel less bad for poor people in this country after seeing poverty in Africa?  Do you feel like you even want to tell them to "come on! get it together!  you have so much opportunity here compared to places you don't even think exist?"

CP:  I don't know if I could go up to someone who's suffering in their own poverty and tell them that directly, but certainly I'm thinking that... I'm still thinking I don't have a lot of money and I don't.  But just the other day I was sick and my mother from Georgia had antibiotics called into me in New York in, like, five minutes.  Meanwhile, I watched a woman die because there are no antibiotics in the entire city because the whole city can't afford antibiotics...  It's a whole other thing.  But back to resources:   I think it's important that there be a direct way of giving.  Sometimes you have these huge organizations and the money gets widely dispersed....  We saw a few things over there.... there was money given directly to projects.  That works really well.  We saw a lot of Catholic missionaries who, with a little bit of money, were doing a lot.  It made a huge difference.

Caller3:  I came back recently from a medical mission to Haiti.  I'm a physician.  We were serving a community on the southwest corner of Haiti, a city called Dame-Marie, a city of 40,000 with no sewage.  We set up a primitive little clinic.  There was no running water.  No sterile conditions.  We could only do very, very limited incisions or surgical procedures.  The thing is, Haiti is in our hemisphere.  It's just miles off the coast of America.  It's the poorest country in our hemisphere.  I think it's great that money is being devoted to treatment of AIDS in Africa, but I think that we have to look in our own hemisphere.  We have to look at countries like Haiti, countries like Honduras, where situations obtain that Mr. Kristof is talking about. There's no infrastructure.  There are very few physicians.  In fact, the physicians that there are in Haiti -- many of them come from Cuba.  Castro mandates that every graduating physician spend a year in rural Haiti.  What little healthcare is available is coming from the Cubans. Politically, my best understanding from the reading I've done is that the Bush administration more or less allowed the ouster of Aristide.  Aristide was no prize.  There was unbelievable corruption... What happened was that the situation wasn't good under Aristide but after he was out it deteriorated to total chaos where people couldn't go out in the streets, couldn't go out in the communities.  What little was available....

BL:  Another situation, you're saying, where the US participated in regime change and then didn't provide the necessary security.

Caller3:  That's right.

NK:  I think we don't, often enough, think of providing security as a key part of the foreign aid package.  But it is.  In so many parts of the world, we think of foreign aid in terms of building clinics or building schools.  But really the worst thing that could happen to a country is for security to collapse.  There's no point building schools right now in a place like Chad when you have the whole menace of Darfur crossing the border and Chad being about to fall apart. One of the best things we can do is work with the rest of the international community and provide security in places like Haiti, or in Africa, so that other services can, in turn, follow.

Caller4:  I want to congratulate Mr. Kristof. He really has been a cheerleader and a great individual in doing these things and bring it to the fore.  I just want to press this and say that I was in Africa in a program called Operation Crossroads Africa which really dates me!  It goes back to the dates of Reverend Jim Robinson.... and when they were still in Liberia.  And I was Liberia and Sierra Leone building stuff with a bunch of American students in this program. 

BL:  Did you say "when there was still a Liberia"?  There is still a Liberia, isn't there?

Caller4:  I thought it had changed into a different country.

NK:  No, it's still Liberia.  It's gone through some pretty rough times...

Caller4:  Anyway, it was a basket case then and Mr. Tubman is long gone, thank goodness!  But even then, as the food was being off-lifted from the ships, there were armed men coming in and just stealing it.  And then of course, how do we deal with this problem of robbery and the ruling classes stealing much of the money being donated by the US?  It went on then, it's going on now. It's one of the main reasons -- 90% of the reason -- why the money is not being.. and the goods are not being turned to the benefit of the people.

BL:  You know, I can tell you that when we've done call-ins on how to help Africa -- and I've asked specifically for African callers -- we get many, many African callers who say "Look, don't waste your money on the country that I came from until the corruption ends."  Otherwise it is just a waste.  Casey, I wonder your point of view on this as a young journalist having just made this one trip to several African countries.  I did notice on your blog that you mused about local responsibility vs. international responsibility. 

CP:  One thing about what he was saying about security and things being stolen... In the northern part of the Central African Republic right now, most of the people are too scared to do anything because there are so many rebels.  Or the army is coming through and burning down villages because they're trying to stop rebels or bandits.  And so what's happened is that most of the people up there have gone into the bushes and are now far away from their food supply, far away from their wells, and into areas where there are greater mosquitoes.  So we were in one village where the day before we'd been there three children had died in one day.  The aid programs aren't allowed to get up there.  And if they can, they can't distribute food properly because everyone has scattered and they can't... it's not easy to go to one place and start distributing.  They'd have to go through the bushes to find all these people.  The security problem is very definitely a huge issue that has to be solved before they can make good use of the aid.

BL:  Nick, it seems to me, having watched this issue for a while, there was a time when there was a real, clear liberal-conservative divide on this.  Where the liberal position was just get the aid money in and yes, there's some corruption everywhere, and you have to deal with it, but we have to get as much aid money in as we can.  And the conservative position was no, these governments are corrupt and maybe they were using it as a way to block aid money because they didn't believe in foreign aid anyway.  But now there's a fair amount of consensus.  That a) there should be substantial aid, in Africa, and b) the corruption really does have to be dealt with as part and parcel of that.

NK:  Yes, and I think we're also getting better at knowing what aid is effective.  Corruption is a huge problem.  There's a sense that we need to improve efforts to fight that corruption.  Also that health interventions tend to be the most effective kind and the easier ones to resist corruption over time.  I think in terms of the political [inaudible] in this country, what has really changed has been on the right.  Jesse Helms once famously said that foreign aid was money down a rat hole.  That really reflected the view on the right for a long time.  Over the past five years or so, the right, and particularly the Christian right, has started to come around and be much more enthusiastic for antimalarial programs, or anti-AIDS programs, and indeed that's why...

BL:  Is it a Christian thing?  Does it have anything to do with the Christian Right or, conspiratorially, missionary work?

NK:  It's certainly related.  Part of it that there are a lot of Christian missionaries who went over and saw people dying right and left and wrote back.  That generated some greater empathy for the problem.  There is some evangelizing to it, but it's not just about saving souls.  You get people like Sam Brownback who I disagree with on just about every possible issue...

BL:  Christian Right Senator from Kansas...

NK:  Exactly. He has been a real leader on issues like fighting malaria, for example, and Michael Gerson who's an evangelical in the White House was the one who really pushed President Bush to go ahead with AIDS programs.  The right is still more skeptical of aid than the left, but it's not nearly as starkly divided as it was a decade ago.

BL:  Casey -- one last thing.  I noticed on your blog that you referred to a question one of our callers asked before you left... if you were worried about being a kind of voyeur -- being safely from America just observing poverty in Africa.  Did you feel like a voyeur when you were there?

CP:  For the most part, no.  But there was a point closer to the end of the trip where I thought, I cannot take any more pictures.  I was worried.  You know, everyone likes to get a heartbreaking photo and it feels good to have your heart broken sometimes.  We were in this clinic in northern C.A.R., and there was this kid who was so malnourished.  He'd already been at this Doctors Without Borders clinic for five days, so I have no idea what he'd looked like five days before, but I was thinking about how many pictures like that I'd seen in my life.  They'd always been this background or the thing that makes movies sad and how different it is to actually see it.  It's something I kept in mind the entire trip.  Every day I asked myself, Am I doing this right? or am I accidentally becoming a voyeur? am I doing what I came here to do which is to allow others to see so things get better.

BL:  "It feels good to have your heart broken sometimes"!  What a line!  I guess, Nicholas Kristoff, you'd better watch your back there as New York Times columnist.  You've got somebody coming up behind you in this field!

NK:  It's been great to see Casey show me up on both her blog and in her video!  She's been terrific!

Michael Isikoff & David Corn: "Hubris." Cherrypicking intelligence, burying dissent, influence of Iranian intelligence, the President with an agenda, government experts who didn't speak up

A detailed review of questionable evidence and faulty intelligence used the plan, market, and defend the U.S. invasion of Iraq

9/7/06: NPR: Host:  Diane Rehm   

Guests

David Corn, Washington editor of "The Nation" and a Fox News Channel contributor. He’s the author of the bestselling "The Lies of George W. Bush," the novel "Deep Background," and the biography "Blond Ghost."

Michael Isikoff, investigative correspondent for "Newsweek," a frequent guest on MSNBC and other cable news networks, and the author of the bestselling "Uncovering Clinton."

Diane Rehm:  ...How did you two guys team up?

David Corn:  Well, we share an agent, Gail Ross, who had a lot to do with this project.  Last fall, when it looked like there were going to be indictments in the leak case [Valerie Plame Wilson], we both started getting offers from publishers about doing books on the case because we'd reported on it previously.  Gail was getting offers from different places and thought that instead of competing against each other -- we've been friends for years -- it might be worthwhile to join forced.  As we did that, we ended up putting together a project that really wasn't about the leak case per se.  It ended up being a narrative -- an insight, a behind the scenes narrative -- about everything that went into the selling of the war.  All the intelligence battles  Because it seemed that the leak case evolved out of that.  At least that's my recollection.

Michael Isikoff:  That's essentially the case. 

DR:  There are questions about the two of you with what are perceived as perhaps ideological differences...

MI:  I've never thought of myself as ideological one way or the other.  Certain a lot of the reporting I did during the Clinton years was embraced by some people and criticized by others.  But that's been the case throughout my reporting career.  In this case, although David writes for the Nation, which is obviously a liberal publication ... this book is reporter-driven.  It's what I do.  It's what I've always done. It's not an ideological polemic in any way, shape, or form.

DR:  However, it is quite critical of the Administration.  Would you agree?

MI:  Sure!  And we've unearthed a lot of new details about how the Administration came to embrace the idea of invading Iraq.  And then sold it to the Congress and to the public.  I think it makes the case in a rather compelling way that faulty... false... fraudulent intelligence -- intelligence that should have been known to have been false had people looked and listened -- was aggressively marketed.

DR:  ...I want to ask you both first about yesterday's speech that the President made.  The Washington Post called it "the White House's third effort in the past year to reshape the Iraq debate with new rhetoric."  Do you see that as accurate?

DC:  I think what they're trying to emphasize, obviously, is the "war on terrorism" rather than the war in Iraq.  You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a pollster to know that the American public is truly soured on the war in Iraq.  I've said on this show previously that I think largely that's because it was mis-sold and the President and his advisors and other backers of the war made it seem as though the war was going to be much different than what actually occurred. So now the emphasis, as we enter into the Congressional [elections] season is obviously on the "war on terror."  Mike's done a lot of reporting on that.  In that area, too, our book points out that there are credibility issues at stake.  In fact, we tell the story that Mike first wrote about in Newsweek, about a captured Al Qaeda commander named Sheikh al Libi who gave bad intelligence under torture and it was used in Powell's speech at the UN to make the case that there was a sinister nexus between Al Qaeda and Iraq.  It was wrong.  Mike can go into great detail about that!

MI:  Sure. In fact, it's rather conspicuous that when the President mention the high value of Al Qaeda detainees who had been transferred to Guantanamo yesterday, one who was not mentioned -- and is sort of erased now from Administration vocaulary -- is Ibn Sheikh al Libi who was the first big Al Qaeda commander captured during the war in Afghanistan, during the invasion.  It was his intelligence that was prominently cited -- first actually by President Bush in his Cincinnati speech on the eve of the Congressional vote on Iraq and then later, even more conspicuously, by Secretary Powell in a speech at the United Nations.  Powell talked about "now we know  because a high-value Al Qaeda detainee has told us his story."  Well, that story and that Al Qaeda commander, Ibn Sheikh al Libi, was transferred to Egyptian custody, taken from the FBI over vigorous FBI protests by the CIA.  There was a huge fight over this Al Qaeda commander.  He was aggressively interrogated...

DR:  When you say "aggressively," you report that there was actually a mock burial.

MI:  That one FBI official was told that was one of the techniques used on al Libi. 

DR:  What is a mock burial?

MI:  You put somebody in a hole in the ground and you fill it up with dirt, making the detainee believe he's being buried alive.

DR:  And that detainee then said what?

MI:  That detainee then told a story about how Al Qaeda had dispatched two operatives to Iraq for training in chemical and biological weapons.  That particular piece of intelligence... there's a whole riff in Secretary Powell's speech where he goes on and talks about this. This was provided by the CIA based on the reports of al Libi.  Well, after the war, after this intelligence was used to prove the case of the sinister nexus...

DC: ... This was the core evidence that the Secretary of State presented at the UN, to show that Al Qaeda and Iraq were in cahoots.  This was it!  Then afterwards...

MI:  ...Then afterwards, after the invasion, Ibn Sheikh al Libi recants the whole story.  He's transferred back into -- he was in Egyptian custody -- he's transferred back to CIA custody.  The CIA withdraws all of its reporting. 

DC:  "Forget about it, never mind!  We don't stand by it anymore!"

MI:  Right. 

DC:  And the thing was, when he was first told by the FBI and interrogated quite vigorously, he never talked about this. It was only when he was transferred to Egypt where they use interrogation methods beyond American control... perhaps... that he came up with this story. 

DR:  Did you talk directly with Secretary of State Colin Powell?

MI:  Secretary Powell is quoted in the book.  In fact, it's his first public comments about that UN speech.

DR:  Did he make these comments to you directly?

MI:  Yes, he did. 

DR:  And what did he say?

MI:  He expressed quite a good deal of frustration about the attention that his UN speech has gotten.  First of all, he made the point that "I was Secretary of State.  I was not Director of Central Intelligence.  I said what they told me was true.  I questioned them.  I questioned George Tenet vigorously about the intelligence that I was citing in that speech"  He was particularly upset with the story about "Curveball" which is another fiasco in the run-up to the war.  "Curveball," of course, was the Iraqi exile who tells German intelligence that there is a fleet of mobile biological weapons labs.  Secretary Powell in his speech held up drawings -- elaborate drawings -- of what these mobile weapons labs looked like. Based on the story of "Curveball" -- "Curveball was a detainee whom the US intelligence had never questioned, had never been allowed to vet his story. 

DC:  It's even worse, because there are people within the CIA up to the night before the speech who are raising questions about "Curveball" and his information.  They said, "This isn't checking out.  We have to do something about this."  They were constantly pushed aside by others in the CIA who wanted to use this information. 

MI:  In my talk with Secretary Powell, he was particularly adamant about the "Curveball" case.  "I asked them.  They assured me" ( "They" being George Tenet and senior CIA people.).  "This was a corroborated story.  There were multiple sources for it.  I had no idea it all led back to one guy."  This guy being "Curveball."   Of course all the reporting on "Curveball" was withdrawn and retracted after...

DR:  First email is for you, David Corn.  Lee writes from Bloomington, Indiana, who wants to ask David about this morning's editorial by David Broder in today's Washington Post, who says, "Karl Rove should be issued an apology for the scurrilous claims that he outed Valerie Plame.  I believe your book doesn't say that.  Am I correct?"

DC:  There's no apology -- that's for sure!  Let me first take issue with David Broder for not having mentioned our book!  In the past two weeks, we've had two major news hits from the book.  One was that Richard Armitage was the first source for Bob Novak in the column that outed Valerie Plame. It's on public record that Karl Rove confirmed that information for Bob Novak.  And the other big news hit we had -- which came out a few days earlier -- was that Valerie Plame Wilson was no paper pusher at the CIA.  She actually was Chief of Operations for the Joint Task for on Iraq.  It's part of the Counter-proliferation Division which is part of the super-secret Operations Directorate.  So she was actually in charge of overseeing and running operations for two years prior to the invasion that were designed to find evidence of Iraq's WMD's.  She was actually a public servant who was paid to try to find the evidence to back up the justification for the war that the President and Vice-President and others were presented.  So there is a pretty big touch of irony here.  But on the Karl Rove thing, our book gets into this.  There's a point that David Broder and many others seem to miss.  Which is while he was only -- one can say only -- a confirming source for Bob Novak, before the Novak-leak column came out Karl himself had indeed leaked the same information to Matt Cooper of Time magazine.  Mike Isikoff here revealed the email of July 2005 that proved the point beyond the shadow of a doubt.  Our book gets into the fact that while Armitage -- yes -- talked to Novak about what Valerie Wilson did at the CIA, in the White House Karl Rove and Scooter Libby were quite, quite energetic (to be polite about it) in their efforts to discredit Joe Wilson.  That included leaking information of the same nature.  And that's a point that David Broder completely elided in the column today.

MI:  Couple of quick points I want to make on that.  First of all, conservatives have taken a lot of shots at my partner here -- David -- because he was the first to suggest that there might have been a violation of law here.  You were asking about us teaming up.  It is ironic and interesting that we were the first to disclose, in this book, that it was Armitage who was the original source.  Which has been something embraced by conservatives as somehow undercutting the Patrick Fitzgerald investigation.  So I think that's first and foremost...

DR:  [interrupting]... somehow exonerating the White House saying that Richard Armitage had very little political interest in disclosing Valerie Plame's name.

MI:  That's true.  And Armitage was, with Powell, part of the small, moderate cell within the Administration which had expressed misgivings about the march to war, that was trying to get them to slow down and use the diplomatic angle... The point I was trying to make that it ought to be clear that this is a reporter-driven book, reporting all the facts, regardless of how they help or undermine certain partisans.  But the other point to make is, as David says, Patrick Fitzgerald investigated both Armitage and Karl Rove.  He essentially came to the conclusion that Armitage disclosed, on his own, the conversation with Novak and was not engaged in any deliberate attempt to conceal.  He did not reach that conclusion for quite some time about Karl Rove.  Five Grand Jury appearances.  Karl Rove did not initially disclose his conversation with Matt Cooper to the Grand Jury.  So he had reason to suspect that Karl Rove was not forthcoming.

DC:  And the same thing with Scooter Libby as well.

MI:  And of course he indicted Scooter Libby.

DR:  I want to go back to the central accusations, the central revelations in your book.  You say it was clear to top intelligence officials that Iraq was next on President Bush's agenda after the US military had defeated the Taliban.  What's the evidence?

DC:  There are several different pieces here. Our book exposes new details about a covert operation plan that the President signed in 2002 but it had already been written up in the fall of 2001 after the Afghanistan invasion was mainly over, after the Taliban had been routed. This was a plan that was to include assassinations, blowing things up, developing sources and paramilitary units..

DR:  How do you know this?

MI:  We spoke to one of the two guys who drew up the plan.  And we name him in the book.  His name is John [?]  And we quote him extensively in the book on this.

DR:  Who is he?

DC:  He was Deputy Chief of the Iraq Operations group within the Operations Directorate of the CIA. Part of this has been written about previously in Bob Woodward's last book, Plan of Attack.  We have new details about this plan. There was a secret training site in the Nevada desert.  They set up and smuggled in Iraqis to train them for this.  They had an idea for creating a provocation and sending the men to an airbase on the border of Jordan and Iraq where they would take over an airbase, declare a free Iraq.  Saddam Hussein would have to send in military units to put them down, violate the no-fly-zone.  That would give the US and England a chance to start a war.  And so we go into this.  But to your point, to the larger point here, is that John [?] tells us this was not a substitute for military action, this was a complement.  This was to set up the right circumstances for an invasion. So more than a year -- early on -- they were doing this plan that was a prelude to war long before they told Congress they were even considering this.

DR:  What about the aluminum tubes, Michael?  We heard that they were supposed to have signified something very, very serious.

MI:  This was probably the most critical piece of evidence that the Administration used to support that gripping metaphor that was used first by Condi Rice on the Sunday talk shows and then by President Bush in his Cincinnati speech on the eve of the Congressional vote.  "We can't afford to wait for a smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud."  That, to White House officials, said it all.  It was crafted by Michael Gerson, the chief speechwriter.  It was roadtested by WHIG, the White House Iraq Group. 

DR:  It was a campaign.

MI: Right.  And I've had several White House people say to me, "That sentence said it all. That metaphor said it all in the post-9/11 era."  And the image of the mushroom cloud was based on and first pushed vigorously by Vice President Cheney.  That Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program and was close to -- was on its way to getting a nuclear bomb.  The intelligence supporting that conclusion -- the primary piece of intelligence -- was these aluminum tubes that Iraq was seeking to purchase on the open market.  A shipment of the tubes was seized in Jordan under an operation headed by Valerie Plame Wilson.  She oversaw the operation that intercepted these tubes that were then shipped back to the CIA. A CIA analyst came to the conclusion that these tubes could only be used for a nuclear centrifuge to enrich uranium for a nuclear bomb.  That piece of intelligence was shared by the White House, embraced by the White House, and then jumped on by Vice President Cheney and the Administration to argue the nuclear weapons case. Well, it turns out that there was vigorous dispute within the intelligence community about the conclusion about the aluminum tubes.  The Energy Department scientists who were experts in nuclear centrifuges to the man...

DC:.. the biggest and most prominent experts in the US government...

MI:  ... said, This is not the case, these tubes aren't suited for nuclear centrifuges.  We believe they're for conventional rockets.  There were multiple Energy Department reports written to this effect. The State Department intelligence bureau came to the same conclusion.  Those dissents were recorded in the classified National Intelligence Estimate that was released to Congress on the eve of war but it was not made public.  And in fact the White Paper -- the public version of the NIE -- contained no reference to those dissents.

DC:  We talked to some of these scientists after the fact and they saw this piece of evidence being used to support a war and they all said they were afraid to speak publicly or to get into the debate.  Because they feared they would lose their top-secret classifications.  So the people who knew the most were cut out of the debate internally eventually.  And then when they saw it going public with Cheney citing the tubes and the White House doing the same -- and all these documents -- they sat on their hands.

DR:  Is there any credible evidence that there were WMD's in Iraq -- either in the making or at the ready?

MI:  Charles Duelfer, who replaced David Kay as head of the Iraq Survey Group looking for WMD's after the war, after Kay came out and said they hadn't found anything, Duelfer (who was a little more hawkish) and George Tenet went out to Iraq and told the team David Kay left behind, "We think there are still weapons and you still can find them."  Nine months later Duelfer put in his report which said there were no significant WMD programs since 1991. 

DR: Sunday, on "Meet the Press," Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, in his debate with Bob Casey who is his Democratic opponent, said, "There were WMD's"  He repeated that again and again.

DC:  He should read the Duelfer Report. I don't know what else to say to someone like that.

MI:  I think what Senator Santorum is referring to is that some leftover shells from before the Persian Gulf War had been discovered.  This has been cited as somehow vindicating the case.  In fact, those were old artillery shells.  They were no longer usable.  There were no active weapons programs.  That's the firm conclusion of US intelligence after the war.

DR:  Randall is calling from Memphis, TN:

Randall:  I'm beside myself with rage.  I think I speak for many when I say that.  I saw Rick Santorum.  He said there were 500 shells.  Last time it was 200.  What's it going to be next time, 700?  800?  It was going to be a short war, remember that?  George Bush said the other day, "We don't torture."  Remember that?

MI:  One of the issues we explored sensibly in the book was post-war planning and what was anticipated about what would happen after the invasion... what did US intelligence and US military planners expect?  It is quite clear -- we talked to the chief military planner about what was called the advance-war-post-invasion plan.  He made it quite clear that in the reports he was writing there was extensive planning for and expectation of sectarian strife, of looting, of the prospects for an insurgency and the need for enough troops to take care of all that and to handle the security situation.  The Administration was extremely reluctant -- and in fact refused -- to commit the troop strength that was being recommended by General Shinseki and others.  Because it would complicate the selling of the war to the Congress and the public if people understood the full magnitude of the job that we were undertaking.

DR:  Here's an email from Mario who says:  What was the role or involvement of the Israeli intelligence service in selling the Iraq war?  David Corn?

DC:  We don't really find a lot of evidence of Mossad being involved there.  But one key piece of evidence that we did find was that there were people within the CIA -- CIA officers -- who suspected that Iranian intelligence was trying to influence the US government and public opinion here through the Iraqi National Congress, a group of exiles run by Ahmed Chalabi who very publicly wanted an invasion of Iraq.  There was a fellow who worked for them, in charge of their information and collection program -- they were supposed to get defectors to talk to the US government and the media telling all these horrible stories of Saddam's connections to Al Qaeda and his WMD programs -- and the person running that was actually suspected within the CIA of being connected to Iranian intelligence.  I remember asking one of these guys, Well this is kind of hard to imagine!  So what did you do when you had these suspicions that the INC might have been in the position to be used by Iranian intelligence?  And he said, Well, not much.  You can't fight City Hall!  Meaning that because the INC as so supported by the White House and the Pentagon, no one would care to listen to their suspicions.

DR:  Here's a call from Goldsboro, North Carolina.  Good morning, Chris.

Chris:  I just wanted to take a minute -- I'm not sure there's many people in the country that believe we went to war in Iraq anymore because the weapons of mass destruction proved to be true.  I think there are just so many other reasons that haven't come out in the media very well about the atrocities that went on in Iraq apart from these WMD's.  And to go to war because of that -- I mean, I guess the thing that moved me most Saddam's sons putting the people into human-sized shredding machines.  The horrible things that went on there. And why the media continues to pound this issue of going to war for faulty information when really I think it's pretty well accepted that's true versus now that we're there why can't we talk about the positives that are coming out, the things that are going well...

MI: The critical point to me -- certainly I agree with the caller entirely about the brutality and thuggery of Saddam's regime and I don't think there's any debate or dispute about that -- is that the Administration realized quite early it could not sell a war to the American public based on that.  There are a lot of brutal, thuggish dictators around the world.  And a lot of regimes whom we've been allied with and are allied with in the "war on terror" whose human rights records are pretty atrocious.  But in order to persuade the country and the Congress to take the enormously consequential step of launching an invasion against a country that after all, at the end, hadn't attacked us, it seized on a promoted the WMD's argument.  I think the long term point is the undermining of American credibility around the world because of that is probably, unfortunately, one of the major legacies...

DR:  But our caller said, Aren't we doing good now?

DC:  That's something we often debate on this show every week!  The last couple of months we've seen civilian casualties running several thousand a month.  No one would say everything as fine in the prewar days of Saddam's Iraq.  But the chaos and mayhem that's undeniably there doesn't look like progress to a lot of people.  His point, too, about the reasons for the war:  our book opens with a scene in which George Bush is talking to two of his aides in May, 2002 -- almost a year before the war.  He asks, "What happened in the newsroom today, in the press briefing today?"  And Ari Fleisher says, "Well, Helen Thomas was giving me a hard time about Iraq and what seems to be a move towards war."  According to an eye witness, the President then becomes real steely and he starts using very harsh language that I can't use on the air here without you getting fined!  He says, "You just tell her I'm going to kick his bleep-bleep derriere across the Mideast."  And he goes on in a long tirade.  Now, to get to Mike's point.  There are a lot of thuggish dictators around the world, but there seemed to be something particular about Saddam Hussein that got under Bush's skin...

DR:  That gets to the basic question that many people want answered.  Why did the Administration want so badly to go into Iraq?

MI:  Well, this is going to be something debated and dissected by historians for years to come.  But I certainly think the scene that David just described and we have other scenes in the book in which the President talks about Saddam.  The personal antipathy that the President had towards Saddam Hussein, the way he viewed it in very stark personal terms, has to be considered a major element in the case. 

DR:  We don't go to war because of personal antipathy!

MI:  Yes.  And we do describe the fundraiser that the President goes to in Texas in September of 2002 when he talks about "this is man who tried to kill my dad at one time."  You have figure...  Well, and one of the interesting things about that -- that relates to the 1993 alleged assassination plot against the former President Bush.  That was a trip that Laura Bush was on as well as other members of the Bush family.  I think the President may well...

DC:  There were lots of forces.  People have talked about this... the neo-conservatives and policy advocates who've been talking about war with Iraq for years -- for policy reasons, whether it's a grand geo-strategic vision... whether because it was useful to Israel... whatever the reasons are... we get into that.  But we also talk about how there was a small group of neo-conservatives who were really enamored with the theories of one obscure academic, a woman named Laurie Mylroie who once was (I don't think people know this) an apologist for Saddam.  She tried to broker behind the scenes a deal between Saddam and Israel in the late '80's.  Then after the invasion of Kuwait, she turned on him with a passion of one who feels betrayed and then came up with a theory -- swinging so far in the other direction -- that Saddam Hussein was behind virtually every act of terrorism, particularly anti-American terrorism, in the world.  These were theories that the CIA and the FBI did explore, found they had no backing to them, but yet people like Paul Wolfowitz, Jim Woolsey, Richard Perle, and others endorsed.  And once they came into the Bush administration, they tried to find evidence.  We have Paul Wolfowitz ordering the head of the DIA -- the Defense Intelligence Agency -- to check into this.

DR:  How do you know that?

MI:  We talked to the Chief of the DIA who was instructed by Wolfowitz to look into this theory.

DR:  Okay! We have a call from Scott in Dallas.

Scott:  I'm really disturbed because I listened to Colin Powell's testimony and I listened to the rebuttal afterwards.  They point out all these things that... the aluminum tubes [theory?]... had the Energy Department's approval.  The yellowcake document was an obvious forgery.  Yet nobody picked it up.  The Democrats never reiterated [repudiated?] those claims.  They were devastating charges. And I never heard the media once pick it up.  Y'all need to write an addendum or look into that because it's devastating and it's driven me nuts!

MI:  We have chapters on the yellowcake uranium story.  In fact, it's a central part of the book.  And how that forgery came about. 

DR:  Are you saying that our caller is absolutely wrong?

MI:  I think he had some things confused there about the aluminum tubes, but on the yellowcake uranium... one of the things that we unearthed was that there were people who spotted the forgery within the US government pretty early on.  There was a rather telltale clue that a companion document that came with the Niger papers -- that was the basis for the famous 16 words -- which talked about... that Iran and Iraq had formed a global alliance of rogue states with drug traffickers and... terrorists... There was a State Department analysts who gets this, who looks at the Niger papers and companion document and says, "This is obviously a hoax! The idea of a rogue alliance between Iran and Iraq is preposterous..."

DC:... Like something out of Austin Powers.  And he wrote emails saying, "This is almost certainly a hoax. These have to be a forgery.  How can these be considered credible!"  Those emails were sent throughout the US intelligence community before President Bush uses the famous 16 words based on these documents.

DR:  Akron, Ohio -- Mark...

Mark:  I have a question and a general comment...  It's never really been said but I've always felt that part of the reason we went to war with Iraq was to establish a land base in that theater.  Prior to the second Bush administration, with the Clinton administration he always tested the no-fly zones and there was a lot of pushback from our allies in the area on having troops on their soil.  I believe we really wanted to create a landbase -- a Guantanamo base, if you will -- in that area to address terrorism and no one's really come out and said that.  I was wondering if you'd ever come across any evidence for that.

DC:  Not so much within the Administration.  There have been conservative commentators cheering on the war who talked about the need for America to "come ashore" in the Mideast.  Put a boot print on that region.  So the polemicists and the advocates have raised that issue of the need for America to do that.  For years, I think, some of the neoconservative foreign policy intellectuals have talked about having a greater military presence in the region for the US.  So that certainly has been an idea that's been floating out there.  Certainly something, if true, would not have been shared with the American public.

DR:  An email from Diane in Intervale, New Hampshire.  "One of the terror suspects being moved to Guantanamo as announced yesterday by the President is Abu Zubayda.  According to Ron Suskind's "One Percent Doctrine," Zubayda was a low-level Al Qaeda functionary who turned out to be schizophrenic.  The Bush administration was fully aware of his mental instability, yet he was touted as a key figure.  Do you have a comment?"

MI:  I do know that the assertion in the Suskind book has been disputed by people in the CIA.  But I think the larger question about all this is that there's so little we know about who these people are and the way they were treated and what's been learned and the credibility of what they've said.  Until yesterday, when the President talked about this, it was still considered a federal crime for anybody in the US government to confirm that we held these people!  Much less talk about the circumstances in which they were being interrogated. And that's why -- when we talked about this before -- the Ibn Sheikh al Libi story is so telling.  That's one they don't want to talk about now because it's inconvenient and it doesn't fit the narrative that they've gotten good intelligence from these people.

DR:  Let's go to St. Louis, Missouri and Sean.

Sean:  My question for your panel... Everything they've said just shows that this Administration has been more than willing to use manufactured or questionable intelligence.  And that they've actually punished people who've opposed the intelligence.  So my question is:  how can we hold this Administration responsible and send a signal to future administrations that you can't just cherrypick whatever intelligence might justify your doctrine.  I would also call for your panel to use their public forums to call for accountability for... to move for impeachment or at least censure of the President to show that this is not something that the American people are going to tolerate.

DC: Well, as Mike said earlier, this book is a narrative.  This is an inside account of what went on, and I think it provides a lot more information to anyone who wants to have this sort of debate the caller is interested in.  At the end of the day, accountability is always an issue and we'll see to what degree the reading public -- the book-buying public -- cares about such matters as these by how they respond to the book.  [The book is at #11 on Amazon on 9/12/06.]  But we're both journalists here, though I'm sometimes more outspoken in my views than Mike is!  The job of this book is to get the information out there.  If it makes your blood boil, then you can take action.  If it doesn't do anything for you, you can stay home and worry about something else!

DR:  Here's an email from Charles in Boca Raton, Florida.  "I haven't heard the word 'lie' used yet on the show today.  If credibility is in question, did the President lie when he said we needed to go to war with Iraq?  I am curious as to what the answer might be!"

MI:  We don't use that word...

DR:  Why not?

MI:  Because lying requires you to assume that somebody is deliberately being false.  The analogy I would make is that once the decision was made that it was in the country's best interest to go to war with Iraq, a public case was made based on the intelligence.  At that point...

DR:  But the intelligence was faulty and you argue that the President knew the intelligence was faulty.  Am I correct?

MI:  We conclude that there was plenty of grounds for senior people in the US government to know that there were serious questions about the intelligence being used. The analogy I use is that everybody from the President on down acted like lawyers arguing a court case. 

DR: On their own behalf.

MI:  Right.  They picked the intelligence that they thought strengthened their argument and ignored or downplayed the intelligence that undercut it. 

DC:  I'd have to disagree with my co-author.  Instead of a court case, I would say it was more like a political campaign where the standards are slightly weaker!  In the book, we do talk to Paul Pillar, who was in charge of a lot of the intelligence on terrorism.  And we note that he came out publicly last fall and was asked, why didn't the President make the right case for the war?  He said, I don't know.  I can't understand it.  It would have been in America's interest to have a full debate about this. And then he was asked by a journalist, So then the President lied?  And Pillar paused for a long moment and he looked at the journalist and said, That's your word, not mine!  But clearly, people can come to their own conclusions on that point...

DR:  And it's all right here in the book, "Hubris."

What's happening in the competitive Congressional districts? which races are likely to tip the balance? what's the Democratic message? who are the most motivated voters? A snapshot of Congressional elections two months before voting day.

9/5/06: NPR: Host:  Diane Rehm

Guests:

Alexis Simendinger, White House correspondent for the "National Journal"
Susan Page, Washington bureau chief for "USA Today"
Chris Cillizza, "The Fix" blogger for "The Washington Post"

Diane Rehm:  I always think of the day after Labor Day as being New Year's Day because a whole new season begins and this year it really is a new season!  I wonder, Alexis, how you would characterize the coming fall election season?

Alexis Simendinger:  Make or break!  Absolutely!  The President and his supporters know that.  This could be, in some ways, the end of the Bush presidency, the beginning of the lame-duck status after November  The White House and the President know that and his supporters even talk about that.  This is the difference between a six-year presidency and an eight-year presidency in their mind.  So he and his supporters are doing everything they can to raise money.  They're being very tolerant.  When candidates say they don't want to see the president, that's fine with them.  They'll raise money -- they''ll do what those individual races and candidates think they need.  They're providing advice from behind the scenes.  It has 100% of their attention.

DR:  Chris -- how do you see it?

Chris Cilliza:  I think Alexis is exactly right.  What's interesting is if you look at George Bush's political career beginning in Texas and continuing to Washington he's never really lost.  In 1994, he beat Ann Richards.  In 1998 he had a very non-competitive election race against a guy named Gary Mauro.  In 2000 he was elected president.  In 2002, he oversaw gains in the House and the Senate.  In 2004, he was reelected with more gains in the House and Senate.  So this is really foreign territory for the president.  This is someone who has experienced universal success in his political career.  It's very rare that you see someone... you usually see someone like Richard Nixon, for example, who had his share of wins and losses certainly. But the President has had this unmitigated record of success throughout his political career.  I think this kind of adversity is a little bit foreign to them. They're very used to being able to flip the switch and make things work, pick up seats, use national security, use whatever means at their disposal to win elections.  So I think Alexis is exactly right.  This is make or break for them.  The unfortunate thing is that people remember your last act, not necessarily your whole career.  People remember Bill Buckner from the Boston Red Sox for the ball that went between this legs not necessarily for the fact that he had 3,000 hits.  Remember, if the President loses this one, he's the president where the House and Senate get taken over by Democrats.  Lots of people are going to remember that as his legacy.

DR:  Susan, both Chris and Alexis are focusing on the President himself.  Is that how you see it?

Susan Page:  I think it certainly has great consequences for the President and big consequences for Congress as an institution as well.  The Democrats lost the House with such thunder in 1994 and they haven't had a reliable majority in the Senate though they've had control of the Senate off and on.  One of the effects, if the Democrats manage to win back even one house, is a reassertion of Congressional prerogative that we've seen eroded in the past six years of the Bush presidency.  So that's another consequence.  About once a decade we have Congressional elections that have a big impact.  We had the Watergate election in the 1970's.  We had the Reagan landslide in 1980.  We had that terrible night for Democrats in 1994 when they lost control of the House and Senate. I think the question now is, is this the watershed Congressional election for this decade?  And I think at the moment, it looks like it will be.

DR:  Chris, what do you see as the top issues that the voters have on their minds?

CC:  You know, I think can look at any one poll and there are two that are going to pop up.  Iraq is obviously one of them.  The other on is the economy.  A colleague of mine wrote about this today in the Post.  The economy is an interesting one because it's something of a puzzle.  You'll get national indicators -- and the President, the Bush administration and the surrogates certainly are out there touting the fact that the economy is growing and things are going well.  But you drill down a level below that... I was in Kentucky a few weeks ago and I talked with a bunch of people in Kentucky's 4th District, a competitive race, and they say is that they don't see it.  The problem is they're getting squeezed.  Their wages are increasing slightly but their debts are increasing -- whether it's credit card debt, whether it's the mortgage -- they're increasing even more quickly.  There's a pinch there.  One woman said to me, We have all these dreams of what we want in our lives but we can't get there right now.

DR:  I thought it was interesting.  This morning's Washington Post piece on "mortgage moms."

CC:  Exactly. There are a lot of people out there like that.  These folks -- most people said to me, We're not in dire economic straits.  But what they said is, We're one step away from being in dire economic straits.  It's that level of unease that could be very potent for Democrats if they'd tap into it.

AS:  One of the things that I think is interesting, looking at the national surveys, is that consistently America is saying...  29% or 30% are saying that the country is on the right track but the vast majority of Americans, no matter how prosperous they may be, no matter if they have a good job -- they're saying based on a whole bevy of issues that the country is going in the wrong direction.  They're looking for some change in November, and maybe some better representation.  Chris has highlighted this in talking about some of the races that he's covering.  How many of these races where the voter is saying what they're looking for is someone who is going to better represent what's on their mind.

SP:  It partly depends on where you go.  I was in Connecticut for the primary vote.  People there were talking about the Iraq war and Senator Lieberman's stance on the Iraq war.  Last week I was in Ohio, one of the key states.  It's got a good Senate race, a good governor's race and several competitive House races.  People were talking about the economy.  It wasn't just people on the edge but people in professional jobs, middle management jobs.  An interesting survey came out this week that said between 2000 and 2004 workers with a BA saw their income erode by 5%.  That is bad new for whoever they think is in charge!

DR:  The question on Republicans' minds, however, is whether they can use security as the issue to override the economy.

SP:  That's worked well for them since the 9/11 attacks.  In 2002 and 2004, Republicans gained Congressional seats.  That's historically very unusual and it makes Democrats a little cautious about claiming victory quite yet!  Republicans have shown that using terrorism and using smart turnout tactics can work for them.  After the arrest in London of the airline bombings conspirators...

DR:  ... alleged...

SP:  ...alleged, we saw, in the USA/Gallup poll a bump for Bush, a bump for Republicans on the terrorism issue.  We don't think it's probably lasted.  We'll see when we go out and poll again.  But it does show that the issue continues to have a lot of power. 

DR:  Alexis, there was piece over the weekend in the New York Times about Karl Rove and his dwindling, perhaps, influence.  How, if that's true, might that affect the approach of Republicans during this election campaign?

AS:  My personal feeling about that, based on my reporting, is that the story was just a tad overwrought.  The reason I say that is because Republicans understand, in talking to the White House or Mr. Rove or Ken Mehlman, that they have a wide latitude to construct their campaigns the best way they see fit.  The White House and the Republican apparatus -- the Party committees -- are going to do whatever they can.  One of the things that Mr. Rove and the White House tried to do very early -- and I was listening to this earlier in the year -- was to remind some of the candidates that they might have to really work for these races.  They tried to do that early -- tried to warn them to get going. This was sort of unknown territory for some of these incumbents.  They'd never really had to get out there and run scared.  I think that the story was interesting but perhaps dialled up a little high.

SP:  I had exactly the same reaction.  We'd done a story on Karl Rove as a guy setting strategy for the GOP a couple of weeks ago.  And we did not find what the New York Times found.  We found people still very respectful of Karl Rove's ability to set strategy. When your president has an approval rating of about 40% people aren't flocking to the president like they used to.  He did a Labor Day event yesterday without another Republican candidate at his side.  I think many Republicans feel that it's only Karl Rove that can lead them through this thicket of tough races. 

CC:  I want to sound a note of agreement here.  If you go back to January of this year, Karl Rove gave a speech at the Republican National Committee winter meeting at which he said ... he outlined basically what the strategy is.  He said, What we're dealing with is a pre-9/11 party, the Democrats, vs. a post-9/11 party, the Republicans.  If you look at the framework of how the Bush administration is talking about this election, how many candidates across the country are talking about this election, it's exactly that.  Mitch McConnell said yesterday that Democrats want to "wave the white flag" on the "war on terror."  So whether or not Karl Rove is necessarily out counseling candidates on a daily basis, he provided the essential framework Republicans are going to follow.  So I'm not sure the Architect is done doing his blueprints just yet!

DR:  So September 11 is going to be the big marker.

AS:  Here we are today and this afternoon the President is going to give another address. This is the second in the third series on Iraq and what it means and what's happening and where we go from here.  And the President hopes to follow today's address with a whole round of markers for 9/11, of course, and then conclude when he gets to New York September 19th at the UN.  Today what we're going to hear him talk about is what terrorists say about us...

DR:  Here's an email -- a question from Chellie.  Chellie says, "What do you think about the Arizona Congressional race for Jim Colby's seat, particularly the Democratic race?  What are the chances for Jeff Latas, antiwar veteran, who's become the Howard Dean of Tucson?"

CC:  This is an interesting race.  It's a southern Arizona district that, like many districts in the West, is absolutely huge.  Jim Colby, a very moderate Republican, is retiring.  On the Democratic side, Jeff Latas has done a good job of organizing on a grass roots level.  What he's not done a great job of is fund-raising.  Unfortunately, there are two Democrats in the field.  One is a former state senator named Gabrielle Giffords; the other is a former TV anchor named Patty Weiss.  Both of them have done a considerably better job of fundraising.  The reality in these races, especially in these vast districts where you're talking about five and six hour drives between big cities is that TV and radio are the best ways to reach these people.  Giffords is the front runner.  She has a base in the district.  Weiss is known because she's a TV personality in Tucson, which is the largest market in the district.  But it's definitely a Democratic opportunity.  The main reason is because Randy Graff, who's a very conservative former state legislator, is running for the Republican nomination.  Looks like he's going to win it.  Jim Colby, the current Congressman, has said he will not support Mr. Graff in the general election.  He doesn't think Mr. Graff can win the general election.  The interesting thing about Graff is that he's centered his entire campaign on illegal immigration.  So Republicans are spending a lot of money trying to get anyone but Mr. Graff elected.

SP:  I'd just like to praise Chris for knowing all those details for one Arizona House race!  We might also want to mention the Arizona Senate race.  That's important because the Republican incumbent, Jon Kyl, is favored.  But it's one of a handful of races that could be competitive.  If the Democrats are going to win back the Senate, they're going to need to win at least one of these slightly unlikely races. Arizona.  Virginia.  Or Tennessee.  So people are looking closely at that race.  He's running against Jim Pederson who's a former state chair...

DR:  Let's talk about that Virginia race for just a moment. 

SP:  The Virginia race we didn't think was going to be that competitive.  Then George Allen got a pretty good Democratic candidate against him -- James Webb -- and he had this incident where he to an Indian-American, who was working for his opponent, as a "macaca."  I had no idea what a macaca is, but I knew it didn't sound like a flattering word.  It has really reverberated in a way that has made that race much tighter than I think any of us would have predicted.

DR:  And Rick Santorum's race in Pennsylvania.  Alexis?

AS:  It's an interesting race -- it's an interesting state, too -- because of the changing nature of Pennsylvania, the mix of conservative with much more left-leaning.  Rick Santorum looks like he's really on the ropes.  One of the interesting things too was to watch -- and Chris can talk about this more expertly -- whether he would move or shift his positions in any way to sound more moderate, to come across as more moderate on Iraq.  But absolutely not.  He has not wanted to open up any daylight between himself and the White House.

DR:  I must say -- watching him Sunday on Tim Russert's program, "Meet the Press," up against his opponent, Bob Casey:  no backing down, not one iota.

CC:  I think Alexis is exactly right.  Rick Santorum has decided that he's going to go down being Rick Santorum!  He's rather lose running very true to his principles than win hedging his bets. 

DR:  There's a 14-point difference?

SP:  We had a USA/Gallup poll there that came out last week that showed him down 18 points among likely voters, 14 points among all registered voters.  I'll give you two numbers within those numbers that I thought were very significant.  Rick Santorum is only getting about 1 out of 4 Independents in Pennsylvania.  That is not enough to win a state-wide race in Pennsylvania.  He is losing the support of about 1 in 4 Republicans.  That's a heavy erosion among his own base.  Some of those independent-minded Republicans, moderate suburban Republicans, are distressed by his position on Terry Schiavo, his very aggressive advocacy on some social issues, as well as his support of the war.

CC:  I'd like to add that if you look at Rick Santorum's races. In 1994, he won his Senate seat.  Remember, 1994 was an extremely good year for Republicans.  In 2000, he ran against a Congressman named Ron Klink who raised absolutely no money and the race was not particularly competitive.  It's funny because we're now... Rick Santorum has been in the Senate 12 years now but he hasn't really faced someone like Bob Casey, Jr. -- a well-funded, well-known name.  Bob Casey's father was the governor of the state, extremely popular.  Bob Casey has raised a ton of money.  And he's the first really credible person we've seen against Senator Santorum.  So it's not simply that he's too conservative for the state, it's that there's a Democrat who has the money to point that out to voters.

SP:  And notable also that Democratic leaders insisted on Bob Casey as the Democratic candidate even though there were some alternatives. Controversial in the Party to some degree because Bob Casey opposed abortion rights.  But that, as some of the Democratic leaders point out, creates problems for Santorum because he cannot draw that sharp bright line on abortion with his Democratic opponent. 

DR:  I want to go back to some of the issues that voters are going to be thinking about.  It used to be said that all politics is local.  But I wonder.  What about immigration? What about voting fraud?  Fairness?  What about the "war on terrorism" and Iraq? To what extent are those issues going to play as well as the economy?

AS:  In reading recent surveys and polls asking voters to what extent they've been paying attention, how are they planning to vote, and what issues are going to drive them, one of the easy things to detect is that Iraq and the economy, healthcare also interestingly enough.  Terrorism?  Sort of.  There's a split about whether that's really a driver, whether it's really important to them...

DR: ...And "are you safer now than you were..."

AS:  Exactly.  Homeland security.  That basket of things... Interestingly, Republicans hold a little bit of an edge for voters on that particular issue.  Every other issue you look through -- domestic, immigration, whatever -- Democrats come out ahead.  The sort of generic Democrat who you think is doing a better job.  Of course that's making Republicans apoplectic.  And the war is this ball and chain, as the President is now realizing with his series of speeches.  Karl Rove is saying, Don't run from it! Hit it head on!  And the President realizes he has to keep talking about it and talking about it and talking about it.  And in this tenor of trying to dial up the fear meter a little bit, the President today is using his speech to talk very specifically about the tactics and the tenor of the rhetoric from terrorists to remind whatever voters are out there listening what kinds of concerns they should have.

CC:  The other thing I wanted to add is that this idea that Iraq or immigration or healthcare or the economy is a national issue that won't play well in a local race -- well, I'm guessing that most people who live in these competitive Congressional districts at least know someone who's over in Iraq or has lost someone in Iraq.  They know someone who's lost their job.  They know someone who's having healthcare problems and not able to afford it.  They know someone who can't afford their prescription drugs.  So yes, it's true that if you run simply a national campaign -- Republicans believe they can win on local issues.  But in many ways the war in Iraq is a local issue.  If your friend's son is killed in Iraq and you go to his funeral, that's going to be on your mind.  It's not necessarily a national issue.  That gets closer to home than almost any other issue out there.

SP:  One of the most important things we see in the national polling is how much more enthusiastic Democrats are than Republicans are about this race.  Midterm elections usually have a pretty pathetic turnout.  It's unusual when it's good in midterm races. So it's very important who chooses to vote.  And in every poll that's been done this year -- every big poll -- you see Democrats saying they're much more likely to vote.  That is a really important factor in a non-presidential year.

DR:  Here's an email on that very subject from Spencer, who says:  "As a lifelong Democrat I hope my party will do well this fall. But due to lack of political acumen and passion on the part of Democratic leaders, I have no faith than Democrats will make more than minor gains.  The Democrats mantra should be 'incompetence -- Bush and Republican incompetence,' whether it's the war on terrorism, Iraq, the budget deficit, the environment, the 7 million additional people who have no health insurance, etc.  But I rarely hear Democrats speak clearly and forcefully on Bush and Republican incompetence."

SP:  A lot of criticism of Democrats for failing to oppose President Bush strongly enough especially until recently.  Recently they ramped up some.  And failing to have a consistent and coherent party message.  That's especially true when it comes to the war in Iraq.  You know what President Bush's position is on the war in Iraq -- we need to stay, we need to finish the job, whatever it takes, however long it takes.  What is the Democratic position?  Some Democrats want to withdraw now, some hold to the Bush position, some take an intermediate stand saying we ought to set a timetable.  It's hard for a party that doesn't control the presidency to have a consistent position.  But it would be helpful for Democrats if they had a little more of a consensus about what to do on that very important issue.

AS:  I want to make one addition to this discussion, and that is there are some political pundits who think that the Democrats' victory in the House could be their worst nightmare, in that the margin they might succeed in getting is so narrow that they have the majority but not the authority, not the power to effect the change that this gentleman is looking for.

CC:  To be honest, the best Democratic slogan that I've heard heading into the 2006 election was uttered by none other than former House Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich.  He said, "If I was a Democrat, our slogan should be 'Had enough?'"  Have you had enough with the Bush administration.  It's interesting that Newt Gingrich, of all people, suggested that.  I think what it does is that it encapsulates the idea that people are fed up.  There's a poll that came out yesterday, a CNN poll, that said 76% of people are angry about the direction the country is headed in.  And that's a very potent thing that Democrats can tap into.  Susan's right.  Passionate voters vote.

DR:  Chris -- I have to correct you on one thing.  Some emailers say that George W. Bush lost a House race in 1978!

CC:  Very true!

SP:  Those are very alert viewers [sic]. 

CC:  Midland, Texas.  I've been there and I should have known that!  Thank you!

SP:  Charlie Cook, the independent political analyst who's often a guest on this show, has a great line about this year.  He says, One party will gain a majority, but neither party will gain control.  Because whoever gets control of the House and Senate, the majority is going to be very narrow.  That doesn't mean it's not important.  I think there are very few Democrats who think it would be their worst nightmare to win control.  It would not make it possible, probably, to pass a Democratic agenda or Democratic legislation.  But you can have hearings, you can launch investigations.  There's a lot of pent-up energy that just having a one-seat majority in the House would unleash for Democrats.

DR:  Susan... How likely is it that they're going to win the House?

SP:  Most independent analysts think that if the election were today, Democrats would win the House and not win the Senate.  Of course, the election is not today.

CC:  I think we're at between 10 and 20 seats in the House right now.  I think it can go either way. AS:  I agree. 

DR:  ... Call from Ryan in Asheboro NC. 

Ryan:  I want to make a comment on the independent voter.  Often overlooked when elections come up. Phone calls for Republicans, phone calls for Democrats. Independents never really get any political phone calls!  ... [inaudible]  Ten years as an Independent.  I think it's very important that people understand the war in Iraq, Katrina, things like that... for the independent voter, those are failures of the Bush administration, a failure of the Republican Party.  I'm not interested in Democrats or Republicans.  What I'm interested in is a working government.  And right now, I don't feel safer.  My family doesn't feel safer.  I don't feel like we're heading in the right direction.

CC:  I think that speaks to the "had enough" message, I really do. You hear it from that caller, you hear this frustration.  And I think what you see is the combination of the war in Iraq on the foreign front and hurricane Katrina on the domestic front, causing this confluence of bad news for President Bush. It shows a level of incompetence there.  People worry about that.  Last year when Democrats were saying "dangerous incompetence" as much as they possibly could, I would guess that will come up again.   You may not like the President but he is dangerous to you. He is dangerous to your well-being.  So you don't buy this idea that only Republican can keep you safe.  They trotted this out in the 2002 election; they trotted in out in the 2004 election.  Basically Democrats are trying to say, "Don't believe it!  Look at what's happening in Iraq!  Look at what happened with Katrina!"  It's simply demonstrably false now.

DR:  ... Caller in Warren, Michigan.  Matthew...

Matthew: ...I teach political science at a community college here and of course one of the things I often stress is how important it is to vote.  Which is often hard enough to get across!  But one of the things that's striking me about my students this year is their awareness of things like "How do I know my vote will count?" "What about these electronic voting machines?"  "What about these stories of disenfranchisement that we've heard?"

DR:  Tomorrow we'll be focusing a full hour on voting machines and how secure they are.

Matthew:  I will assign your show to my students!

DR:  Good!  I think that's a great idea!  Matthew:  Another issue, too... something that hasn't really been touched upon and I never really hear touched upon in the traditional media is the idea of incumbency.  When you look at the polls and how upset Americans are with the direction of the country, the kinds of policies they want pursued, and that democratic deficit between what the citizens want and what their government is promoting -- with incumbency rates, do we have a system that in fact reflects or can handle what the citizens want?

SP:  Incumbency is usually a big advantage.  Incumbency may not be such a big advantage this year, and there's a good example of that in Michigan.  Jennifer Granholm was elected governor there four years ago, considered a real Democratic star. The only reason she couldn't run for President was because she was born in Canada.  Now she's in an extremely tight race against a Republican because the economy in Michigan is bad. They've suffered very serious job losses, second only to Louisiana. 

DR:  But she's regaining...

SP:  But it's still a competitive race. If the economy weren't bad and if she weren't the incumbent being held responsible, that would be a safe race for her.

DR:  Here's an email from Mary Frances.  She says "Would you please address the 4th Kentucky Congressional District?"

CC:  Having spent three days there in the very recent past, it's an interesting district.  It's a district that was held by Ken Lucas, a Democrat, from 1998 till 2004.  He retired and the seat was won by a Republican. Ken Lucas is now back running for his seat again.  Apparently he missed Congress -- it's such a wonderful place to be!  Ken Lucas is essentially the only Democrat who would be in a position to win this race.  He's very conservative.  He's pro-life. He's pro-gun.  He's well known in the district.  It's a fascinating district. It takes in northern Kentucky, but it runs from, in the east, Appalachia, west to the suburbs of Cincinnati in the central part of the district, to the rural and the exurbs of Louisville in the western part of the district.... But, again, President Bush won the district by 27 points in 2004.  That's a lot of folks Ken Lucas needs to convince to vote with him. 

DR:  How close is that race now?

CC:  He's ahead in polling that we've seen.  It's going to get closer just because a lot of Republicans are going to come home and vote for Jeff Davis who's the current Congressman.

DR:  One comment:  I don't know what pro-life means anymore!  One is either pro-abortion or anti-abortion.  Just to clarify in my own mind.

SP:  In favor of abortion rights or against abortion rights is another way of putting it.  I tip my hat to Chris Cilliza about all these House races... remarkable!  I'd like to talk about something we've seen happen broadly this year which is the number of competitive House races get higher and higher almost entirely at the expense of Republicans.  In January Stuart Rothenberg, the political analyst who's also been a guest on this show, said there were 21 competitive House seats.  In his newsletter which came out last week, he said there were 39 -- nearly double the number of competitive House seats. Of those, 35 are held by Republicans.  That's what gives Democrats the hope that they can actually get the 15 seats they need to win back the House.

DR:  An email from Tim in St. Louis, who says, "I don't understand these polls!  Are they the same polls that predicted George Bush would be defeated by a landslide during the last election?  It seems that they only pay attention to people on the northeast coast and California.  There's lots of country between these two areas as was shown in the last election."

SP:  Polls are not predictive.  Polls are kind of a snapshot in time. What polls are useful for is to give you a kind of general sense of where the race is and whether there's a trend.  So if you take a poll three or four times in a Congressional race and the trend is all in one direction, you can feel pretty confident that's where their base is going.  But you can't take a poll and say, This is exactly how the election is going to go.

AS:  I want to add to that, looking at some of the polls again, at least half of the people questioned are honest enough to say they're not playing that close attention.  So you assume they haven't really dialed in yet.  You assume that, if half of them are honest, maybe the numbers are a little higher than that...

DR:  A call from Mary Louise in San Antonio, TX.

Mary Louise:  ...I've lived here in Texas since 1966.  I'm appalled that this Bush has done nothing at all that's good for the country.  Head Start was started by Nixon and that has been defunded.  The "war on terror" and the "war on drugs" will never end because too many people are making big profits.  And grandstand plays like bringing a spina bifida kid here to the US to help him don't counteract the fact that we are killing thousands of them.

SP:  I would say Mary Louise is a pretty safe Democratic voter.  Sounds like that for the elections this year!  Let me just mention the governor's race in Texas which is a really fun race.  Rick Perry, the incumbent governor, is probably going to win.  But he's not enormously popular.  The Democrat almost certainly won't win -- Chris Bell, who's a former Congressman.  But there are two independent candidates in the race that could have a big effect.  One is Carol Keaton Strayhorn who tried unsuccessfully to get on the ballot as "Grandma" Strayhorn.  She's the mother of Mark and Scott McClellan who've been big figures in the Bush administration.  She's running as an independent. She's pretty popular.  She's won statewide before.  She's the State Comptroller.  Then there's this guy named Kinky Friedman who's a country-western singer, and he's running on a slogan "How Hard Can It Be".  He's getting some publicity, and for voters who are unhappy with all their choices, they just might vote for him.

DR:  Here's an email from Marilyn in Arvada,CO.  She says, "Right after he resigned following the 2004 election, Homeland Security Secretary Ridge gave an interview to USA Today in which he said many of the terror alerts issued during that campaign were questionable.  The interview was front-page on USA Today that morning.  About midday, a mysterious pilot flew a small plane into White House airspace and blew the Ridge story out of the headlines.  Can Susan Page please recall the Page interview and how much will manipulation of terror alerts impact the coming election?

SP:  I do indeed remember that Governor came in and did a newsmaker with our bureau and the bureau of Gannet News Service.  He said that these were not his decisions.  One of the big internal battles that did not get that much attention was who decides what color the terror alert was.  It was not Tom Ridge as head of Homeland Security at that time, it was John Ashcroft, the Attorney General.  And there has been criticism by Democrats that there's been manipulation.  When you go to orange, when you go back to yellow -- about how those terror alerts have been used.  Even now it's not up to Mr. Chertoff, the Homeland Security director.  It's up to Alberto Gonzales, the Attorney General.

AS:  One other thing, if callers are interested, you can go on the Homeland Security website and they actually post the dates the colors change.  I was interested, when I looked, just before the bombing threat and suspects in London, that there had been a lot of changes, as the caller suggests, during 2004.  Then two in 2005.  And no adjustments in 2006 until the recent London threat occurred.  There's an astute listener out there!

DR:  Cold Spring, KY -- Paul.

Paul:  I'm not one of those people who blames the media for everything including tooth decay. But earlier you mentioned that the Democrats don't have a unified message.  I'm a little disappointed that the media keep looking for a unified message from the Democrats.  I'd rather have individual messages from individual people running for office and hearing what they have to say, rather than something coming from somebody like Karl Rove who never ran for office to my knowledge, never achieved office. Those are the people who are setting the central command-and-control for that party and we never get a chance to vote on that.  I'd rather hear individual messages from individual candidates rather than a unified message.  We've already seen the failure of the unified message...

AS:  This is a two-edged sword.  A party is always trying very hard to communicate and communicate en masse. There are Democrats themselves who complain that they wish they had a party leadership that could communicate better with one cohesive message.  I think what Susan was responding to is that the American public is divided on what to do about Iraq, let alone the candidates themselves.  What the Democrats are struggling to do is not necessarily agree on the idea of exiting or exiting safely or even trying to achieve something which is worthwhile in Iraq.  But what pollsters are saying is they're saying that they want an exit.  They're not with Bush on "we have to win."  They don't believe the "war on terrorism" he's describing is winnable and not in the near term.  I'm always sympathetic to the idea that there should be nuanced messages.  But Democrats themselves are trying very hard to have this bumper sticker...

CC:  To Alexis' point -- I think what you see out of Democrats at the moment... when you talk to Democrats privately and you say "What is the message of the campaign?" they'll say it's "change vs. status quo."  That's a broad, umbrella message.  But they recognize that Ken Lucas in Kentucky has to run on a different message of change than does, say, Joe Courtney, who's running against Rob Simmons in the 2nd District of Connecticut where John Kerry won by 8 or 9 points.  So I think you have an umbrella message.  But they understand that micromanaging these races -- if you squeeze something too tight, you're likely to kill it.  They understand that...  But they want an overall message of change, and that gets back to that "Had enough?"  "Aren't we ready for something different?"

AS:  In Connecticut, voters certainly seized that opportunity to have disparate representation and the idea of Joe Lieberman splitting off and becoming an Independent. 

DR:  Here's an email from James.  "Earlier this week ...Al Gore went on MTV's Video Music Awards to bring some consciousness to the younger generation about the state of the environment. Of course everyone cheered and applauded but I'm doubtful it really sunk in our minds how serious it is.  What do you think it will take for people under 30 like myself, with all our H-3's and bling-bling, to wake up and realize that this is a problem we and our children will most likely be facing?"

SP:  I disagree with James.  I think the issue of global warming and climate change -- the environmental issue of our time -- is beginning to sink in.  I think Al Gore movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," has had a pretty big effect on a certain segment of the audience.  You also see evangelical Christian leaders adopting this as a cause.  Protection of God's creation.  So I think there is an emerging consensus on global warming that's not going to see results until the next president

DR:  Let's talk for a moment about which races out there are likely to tip the balance.

CC:  I think you've got three in the Senate.  I'm going to exclude Arizona from that one right now.  I'm going to say Missouri, Tennessee, and Virginia.  In Missouri, Jim Talent is running for reelection.  Of the five Republican incumbents in a lot of trouble in this election, Talent is the most likely to win.  But that's not saying all that much.  Polling has his opponent, State Auditor Clare McCaskill who ran for governor in 2004, neck and neck with Talent.  He's a good candidate.  He's smart.  He has the money advantage.  That's going to be a tough seat because Missouri, as we know when John Kerry decided not to spend money there in the general election in 2004, is trending redder and redder.  The question is, can they move back to purple!  Tennesee?  Harold Ford, Jr., Democratic Congressman from Memphis, is running for the open seat of Bill Frist.  He's running against the former mayor of Chattanooga named Bob Corker.  Corker was the best candidate Republicans could get in the primaries. More of a moderate.  The other two candidates were former members of Congress, now lobbyists.  So that's sort of a double whammy against.  So again it's Tennessee. The last two open Senate seats that Democrats have won were Bill Nelson in 2000 in Florida -- and Florida's questionably the south -- and Max Cleland in 1996. So during that time a number of seats have opened up and they've only won two.  The other one is Virginia which we've talked about.  Can Jim Webb raise the money to be competitive with George Allen who has about $7 million on hand.

DR:  How do you answer that?

CC:  I think that he can.  Virginia's demographics are changing so rapidly in terms of the growth of northern Virginia, Loudon County, Fauquier County -- that it presents a real opportunity for Webb but he's got to have the money to advertise on Washington TV and that is not a cheap endeavor.

DR:  The lobbying, the scandals -- to what extent are they going to play in voters' minds as they go to the polls?

SP:  There are only a handful of races where they play a really important role.  But those races are important ones.  Ohio would probably be the best example.  Huge scandals in Ohio.  The governor -- Republican Governor Taft -- pleaded guilty.  First governor in the history of the state to be found guilty on criminal charges -- pleaded no contest and was found guilty.  Huge scandal involving a coin dealer who was a big contributor to Republicans.  When I was in Ohio last week, Mike DeWine, Republican Senator, is getting hurt by that issue although he's not been part of the scandal.  And that's also the place where Bob Ney's Congressional seat is.  He's faced questions about the Jack Abramoff scandal.  He's decided not to run again but the controversy has made his Congressional seat a competitive one.

DR:  Brian in Indianapolis.

Brian:  My comment is how surprisingly I have come to despise this administration.  I usually hold the office of the presidency in the highest esteem.  Right now I wish we had recall. I wish we could recall this president.

DR:  Why do you think your feelings are so intense, Brian?

Brian:  I think he has made an utter mess of the country and, of course, of the world.  By his policies he has set us back many, many years.  My other concern is the billions we have spent on Iraq.  I always wonder how much universal healthcare that would have bought...

DR:  He used the word "despise" which is a pretty strong word. I wonder... you all started out by talking about how this election is really about the president.  And our last caller feels so strongly.  Do you think that when voters go to the polls, that's what they're going to be thinking?

SP:  You said earlier something about the old saw, "All politics is local."  All politics is local until it's not!  This may be one of those years when people are trying to send a broader message about the direction of the country when they vote in November.

AS:  Absolutely.  I think there's a desire for change, especially for a certain swatch of voter.  I've even heard Republicans say they voted for George Bush twice and wish they could take those votes back.

CC:  And if you look at history, this is the so-called six-year-itch election.  The second midterm election of an 8-year presidency has seen large losses -- double digit losses in the House and losses in the Senate. So President Bush is not just fighting against folks like this caller who dislike him intensely, he's also fighting against the winds of history.