Meet The Press Transcript (9-14-08)

Obama and McCain surrogates Rudolph Giuliani and Charles Schumer were on Meet the Press this week. Also appearing was Bob Woodward talking about his book critical of George Bush's conduct of the Iraq War. Read the full transcript.

MR. BROKAW: Here's some of the internals in the Newsweek poll. For example, white women. John McCain has a commanding lead among white women, 53 to 37 percent.

We want to take you now to the AP poll. This is the latest poll from the Associated Press and GFK. McCain has a 13 point lead on senior citizens, and he has the same lead among males. Among rural voters, he's up by 23 percent. These are middle-class voters in rural areas, and a large part of the Obama strategy is to try to win in areas like North Dakota and Montana and the Rocky Mountain West, including the state of Colorado. He has significant work to do--to be done there.

SEN. SCHUMER: Yes, but I think the McCain campaign, which did, did a good of sort of turning around the battleship at the convention, going from experience to change, there's a fundamental flaw. John McCain and Sarah Palin do not represent change. They are, particularly on domestic issues but also on foreign policy, a continuation of George Bush's policies. And as the voters learn that--they'll learn them in the debates, they'll learn them now as the excitement of the conventions subsides--I, I think Barack Obama is going to--he's even now in the overall polls--he will break into a substantial lead. The kind of sort of nasty, small-bore, little attacks, they work decently well when America's happy, when America's satisfied, as it was in 2004 and 2000. They're not going to work now because the average middle-class person in America wants change. McCain and Palin do not represent change. Obama and Biden do. And we're glad. Actually, the critics will look back a month from now and say a big mistake of the McCain campaign was to switch the battlefield to change because that is Obama-Biden's strong suit.

[...]MR. BROKAW: Senator Obama, who had an Ivy-league education and could've gone to Wall Street, went back to Chicago on the South Side. As you know, his supporters have defended him for working with poor families, many of whom lost their jobs when the Gary steel mills closed. In that mocking fashion, it seemed to a lot of people that you were belittling the role of a community organizer, and it led to this button. It was addressed to Senator Palin, because she also talked about it. "Jesus Christ was a community organizer. Pontius Pilate was a governor." In retrospect, do you think you had too much sport with his role as community organizer, Mr. Mayor?

MAYOR GIULIANI: No. No. I think he had too, too little of a record of a community organizer. The point is that Senator Obama's record as a community organizer is a very sparse one, as is his record as a state senator. Education Week said that he basically had no record on education, which is why maybe Senator McCain's idea of an accomplishment in that ad goes a little bit too far.

What I was talking about is how little a record he had, how so, how so many of those programs have failed, how little it's been really looked at by the media. This is--and also, the group that recruited him was a Saul Alinsky group that has all kinds of questions with regard to their outlook on the economy, their outlook on capitalism. I think it's at the core of Senator Obama's belief that the tax system should be used for a redistribution of wealth, rather than really for gaining revenues for the country. When, when Senator Obama was asked about his increase in capital gains tax and was told that if he does that, he would actually deprive the federal government of revenues, his answer was, "Well, it's only fair." Which gets you to a very core Saul Alinsky kind of almost socialist notion that it should be used for redistribution of wealth.

I think what we haven't done adequately in this, in this campaign, meaning Republicans, is maybe some of the emphasis on some of these other issues, it should be on the fact that Senator Obama is the most left-wing candidate the Democratic Party has ever had, the most liberal member of the Senate, much more liberal than Senator Schumer, than you just had on. And his running mate, Senator Biden, is the third most liberal member of the Senate. So these are the things we're talking about. And the community organizer thing was consistent with that kind of very left-wing approach. Sure community organizers do good work, and some don't do very good work. Just like lawyers, everybody else. The question is what kind of work did, did Barack Obama do and how effective was it long-term? A lot of those housing projects failed.