Candidates Meet the Undecided

From the transcript provided by the Federal News Service. Charles Gibson of ABC television was the moderator.

Gibson: Tonight’s debate is going to be a bit different. We have assembled a town hall meeting. We’re in the “Show Me State,” as everyone knows Missouri to be, so Missouri residents will ask the questions. These 140 citizens were identified by the Gallup organization as not yet committed in this election.

Question: Sen. Kerry, after talking with several co-workers and family and friends, I asked the ones who said they were not voting for you, why. They said that you were too wishy-washy. Do you have a reply for them?

Sen. John F. Kerry: Yes, I certainly do.... The president didn’t find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, so he has really turned his campaign into a weapon of mass deception. And the result is that you’ve been bombarded with advertisements suggesting that I’ve changed a position on this or that or the other.

Now, the three things they try to say I’ve changed position on are the Patriot Act. I haven’t. I support it. I just don’t like the way John Ashcroft has applied it, and we’re going to change a few things. The chairman of the Republican Party thinks we ought to change a few things. No Child Left Behind Act. I voted for it. I support it. I support the goals. But the president has underfunded it by $28 billion.

Right here in St. Louis, you’ve laid off 350 teachers. You’re 150 -- excuse me, I think it’s a little more -- about $100 million shy of what you ought to be under the No Child Left Behind Act to help your education system here. So I complain about that. I’ve argued that we should fully fund it. The president says I’ve changed my mind. I haven’t changed my mind. I’m going to fully fund it.

President Bush: I can see why people at your workplace think he changes positions a lot, because he does.

He said he voted for the $87 billion -- or voted against it right before he voted for it. And that sends a confusing signal to people.

He said he thought Saddam Hussein was a grave threat, and now said it was a mistake to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Now I can see why people think he changes position quite often, because he does.

You know, for a while, he was a strong supporter of getting rid of Saddam Hussein. He saw the wisdom, until the Democratic primary came along, and Howard Dean, the antiwar candidate, began to gain on him. And he changed positions.

I don’t see how you can lead this country in a time of war, in a time of uncertainty, if you change your mind because of politics.

Q: Mr. President, yesterday in a statement you admitted that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction, but justified the invasion by stating, I quote, “He retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction, and could have passed this knowledge to our terrorist enemies.” Do you sincerely believe this to be a reasonable justification for invasion when this statement applies to so many other countries, including North Korea?

Bush: Each situation is different ... and, obviously, we hope that diplomacy works before you ever use force. The hardest decision a president makes is ever to use force.

After 9/11, we had to look at the world differently. After 9/11, we had to recognize that when we saw a threat, we must take it seriously before it comes to hurt us. In the old days we’d see a threat and we could deal with it if we felt like it, or not. But 9/11 changed it all. I vowed to our countrymen that I would do everything I could to protect the American people. That’s why we’re bringing Al Qaeda to justice; 75% of them have been brought to justice.

That’s why I said to Afghanistan: If you harbor a terrorist, you’re just as guilty as the terrorist. And the Taliban is no longer in power, and Al Qaeda no longer has a place to plan. And I saw a unique threat in Saddam Hussein, as did my opponent, because we thought he had weapons of mass destruction. And the unique threat was that he could give weapons of mass destruction to an organization like Al Qaeda, and the harm they inflicted on us with airplanes would be multiplied greatly by weapons of mass destruction. And that was the serious, serious threat.

So I tried diplomacy. I went to the United Nations. But as we learned in the same report I quoted, Saddam Hussein was gaming the oil-for-food program to get rid of sanctions. He was trying to get rid of sanctions for a reason. He wanted to restart his weapons programs.

We all thought there was weapons there.... My opponent thought there was weapons there. That’s why he called him a grave threat. I wasn’t happy when we found out there wasn’t weapons, and we’ve got an intelligence group together to figure out why. But Saddam Hussein was a unique threat, and the world is better off without him in power.

And my opponent’s plans lead me to conclude that Saddam Hussein would still be in power, and the world would be more dangerous.

Kerry: The world is more dangerous today. The world is more dangerous today because the president didn’t make the right judgments. Now, the president wishes that I had changed my mind. He wants you to believe that, because he can’t come here and tell you that he’s created new jobs for America. He’s lost jobs....

This president rushed to war, pushed our allies aside, and Iran now is more dangerous, and so is North Korea, with nuclear weapons. He took his eye off the ball, off of Osama bin Laden.

Q: Sen. Kerry, the U.S. is preparing a new Iraq government and will proceed to withdraw U.S. troops. Would you proceed with the same plans as President Bush?

Kerry: I would not. I have laid out a different plan because the president’s plan is not working. You see that every night on television....

Sen. Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said that the handling of the reconstruction aid in Iraq by this administration has been incompetent. Those are the Republican chairman’s words. Sen. Hagel of Nebraska said that the handling of Iraq is beyond pitiful, beyond embarrassing; it’s in the zone of dangerous. Those are the words of two Republicans, respected, both on the Foreign Relations Committee.

Now, I have to tell you: I would do something different. I would reach out to our allies in a way that this president hasn’t. He pushed them away, time and again. Pushed them away at the U.N., pushed them away individually.

Bush: Two days ago in the Oval Office I met with the finance minister from Iraq. He came to see me. And he talked about how optimistic he was and the country was about heading toward elections.

Think about it. They’re going from tyranny to elections.

He talked about the reconstruction efforts that are beginning to take hold. He talked about the fact that Iraqis love to be free.

He said he was optimistic when he came here, then he turned on the TV and listened to the political rhetoric, and all of a sudden he was pessimistic. This is a guy who, along with others, has taken great risks for freedom. And we need to stand with him.

My opponent says he has a plan. It sounds familiar because it’s called the Bush plan. We’re going to train troops, and we are. We’ll have 125,000 trained by the end of December. We’re spending about $7 billion.

He talks about a grand idea: Let’s have a summit; we’re going to solve the problem in Iraq by holding a summit. And what is he going to say to those people that show up to the summit? Join me in the wrong war at the wrong time at the wrong place?....

Nobody is going to follow somebody who doesn’t believe we can succeed and somebody who says the war where we are is a mistake. I know how these people think. I meet with them all the time. I talk to Tony Blair all the time. I talk to Silvio Berlusconi. They’re not going to follow an American president who says “follow me into a mistake.”

Q: Mr. President, my mother and sister traveled abroad this summer, and when they got back they talked to us about how shocked they were at the intensity of aggravation that other countries had with how we handled the Iraq situation. Diplomacy is obviously something that we have to really work on. What is your plan to repair relations with other countries, given the current situation?

Bush: No, I appreciate that. I -- listen, I -- we’ve got a great country. I love our values. And I recognize I made some decisions that have caused people to not understand the great values of our country.

I remember when Ronald Reagan was the president. He stood on principle. Some might have called that stubborn. He stood on principle, standing up to the Soviet Union, and we won that conflict. Yet at the same time, he was very -- we were very unpopular in Europe because of the decisions he made.

I recognize that taking Saddam Hussein out was unpopular. But I made the decision because I thought it was in the right interests of our security.

You know, I made some decisions on Israel that’s unpopular. I wouldn’t deal with Arafat because I felt like he had let the former president down and I don’t think he’s the kind of person that can lead toward a Palestinian state. And people in Europe didn’t like that decision, and that was unpopular, but it was the right thing to do.

I believe the Palestinians ought to have a state. But I know they need leadership that’s committed to a democracy and freedom, leadership that’d be willing to reject terrorism....

I made a decision not to join the International Criminal Court in The Hague, which is where our troops can be brought to -- brought in front of a judge, an unaccounted judge. I don’t think we ought to join that. That was unpopular.

And so what I’m telling you is, is that sometimes in this world you make unpopular decision because you think they’re right. We’ll continue to reach out. Listen, there’s 30 nations involved in Iraq; some 40 nations involved in Afghanistan. People love America. Sometimes they don’t like the decisions made by America, but I don’t think you want a president who tries to become popular and does the wrong thing. You don’t want to join the International Criminal Court just because it’s popular in certain capitals in Europe.

Kerry: That’s a question that’s been raised by a lot of people around the country.

Let me address it, but also talk about the weapons the president just talked about, because every part of the president’s answer just now promises you more of the same over the next four years....

The president stood right here in this hall four years ago, and he was asked a question by somebody just like you, under what circumstances would you send people to war? And his answer was, “With a viable exit strategy and only with enough forces to get the job done.” He didn’t do that. He broke that promise....

This president hasn’t listened. I went to meet with the members of the Security Council in the week before we voted. I went to New York. I talked to all of them to find out how serious they were about really holding Saddam Hussein accountable. I came away convinced that if we worked at it, if we were ready to work at letting Hans Blix do his job and thoroughly go through the inspections, that if push came to shove, they’d be there with us.

But the president just arbitrarily brought the hammer down and said nope, sorry, time for diplomacy is over, we’re going. He rushed to war without a plan to win the peace.

Ladies and gentlemen, he gave you a speech and told you he’d plan carefully, take every precaution, take our allies with us. He didn’t.

He broke his word.

Q: Iran sponsors terrorism and has missiles capable of hitting Israel and southern Europe. Iran will have nuclear weapons in two to three years time. In the event that U.N. sanctions don’t stop this threat, what will you do as president?

Kerry: I don’t think you can just rely on U.N. sanctions ... but you’re absolutely correct. It is a threat. It’s a huge threat. And what’s interesting is, it’s a threat that has grown while the president has been preoccupied with Iraq, where there wasn’t a threat. If he’d let the inspectors do their job and go on, we wouldn’t have 10 times the numbers of forces in Iraq that we have in Afghanistan chasing Osama bin Laden.

Meanwhile, while Iran is moving towards nuclear weapons, some 37 tons of what they call yellowcake, the stuff they use to make enriched uranium, while they’re doing that, North Korea has moved from one bomb maybe -- maybe -- to four to seven bombs. For two years, the president didn’t even engage with North Korea, did nothing at all, while it was growing more dangerous, despite the warnings of people like former Secretary of Defense William Perry, who negotiated getting television cameras and inspectors into that reactor. We were safe before President Bush came to office. Now, they have the bombs and we’re less safe.

Bush: That answer almost made me want to scowl.

He keeps talking about let the inspectors do their job. It’s naive and dangerous to say that. That’s what the Duelfer report showed. He was deceiving the inspectors.

Secondly, of course we’ve been involved with Iran. I fully understand the threat. And that’s why we’re doing what he suggested we do, get the Brits, the Germans and the French to go make it very clear to the Iranians that if they expect to be a party to the world, to give up their nuclear ambitions. We’ve been doing that.

Q: Mr. President, since we continue to police the world, how do you intend to maintain our military presence without reinstituting a draft?

Bush: Yeah, great question. Thanks. I hear there’s rumors on the Internets that we’re going to have a draft. We’re not going to have a draft, period. The all-volunteer Army works. It works particularly when we pay our troops well, it works when we make sure they’ve got housing, like we have done in the last military budgets. An all-volunteer Army is best suited to fight the new wars of the 21st century, which is to be specialized and to find these people as they hide around the world. We don’t need mass armies anymore....

Forget all this talk about a draft. We’re not going to have a draft so long as I’m the president.

Kerry: I don’t support a draft. But let me tell you where the president’s policies have put us. The president -- and this is one of the reasons I’m very proud in this race to have the support of Gen. John Shalikashvili, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Adm. William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Gen. Tony McPeak, who ran the air war for the president’s father and did a brilliant job, supporting me; Gen. Wes Clark, who won the war in Kosovo supporting me....

Why? Because they understand that our military is overextended under the president. Our Guard and reserves have been turned into almost active duty. You’ve got people doing two and three rotations. You’ve got stop-loss policies so people can’t get out when they were supposed to. You’ve got a backdoor draft right now.

Q: Mr. President, why did you block the re-importation of safer and inexpensive drugs from Canada, which would have cut 40% to 60% off of the cost?

Bush: Yeah, I haven’t yet. I just want to make sure they’re safe. When a drug comes in from Canada, I want to make sure it cures you and doesn’t kill you. And that’s why the FDA and that’s why the surgeon general are looking very carefully to make sure it can be done in a safe way. I’ve got an obligation to make sure our government does everything we can to protect you. And my worry is, is that, you know, it looks like it’s from Canada; it might be from a Third World. We’ve just got to make sure before somebody thinks they’re buying a product that it works. And that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing. Now, it may very well be here in December you hear me say I think there’s a safe way to do it.

Kerry: You heard the president just say that he thought he might try to be for it. Four years ago, right here in this forum, he was asked the same question: Can’t people be able to import drugs from Canada? Do you know what he said? “I think that makes sense; I think that’s a good idea.” Four years ago.

Now, the president said I’m not blocking that. Ladies and gentlemen, the president just didn’t level with you right now again. He did block it because we passed it in the United States Senate, we sent it over to the House, that you could import drugs. We took care of the safety issues. We’re not talking about Third World drugs, we’re talking about drugs made right here in the United States of America that have American brand names on them in American bottles, and we’re asking that he be able to allow you to get them. The president blocked it.

Q: Sen. Kerry, you’ve stated your concern for the rising cost of healthcare, yet you chose a vice presidential candidate who has made millions of dollars successfully suing medical professionals. How do you reconcile this with the voters?

Kerry: Very easily. John Edwards is the author of the Patients’ Bill of Rights. He wanted to give people rights. John Edwards and I support tort reform. We both believe that as lawyers -- I’m a lawyer too -- and I believe that we will be able to get a fix that has eluded everybody else because we know how to do it. It’s in my healthcare proposals. Go to johnkerry.com -- you can pull it off of the Internet -- and you’ll find a tort reform plan.

Bush: Let me see where to start here. First, the National Journal named Sen. Kennedy (sic) the most liberal senator of all, and that’s saying something in that bunch. You might say that took a lot of hard work.

The reason I bring that up is because he’s proposed $2.2 trillion in new spending and he says he’s going to tax the rich to close the tax gap. He can’t. He’s going to tax everybody here to fund his programs. That’s just reality.

Q: Thank you. Sen. Kerry, would you be willing to look directly into the camera and, using simple and unequivocal language, give the American people your solemn pledge not to sign any legislation that will increase the tax burden on families earning less than $200,000 a year during your first term?

Kerry: Absolutely. Yes. Right into the camera, yes. I am not going to raise taxes. I have a tax cut, and here’s my tax cut. I raise the child-care credit by $1,000 for families to help them be able to take care of their kids. I have a $4,000 tuition tax credit that goes to parents, and kids if they’re earning for themselves, to be able to pay for college. And I lower the cost of healthcare in the way that I described to you.

Q: Mr. President, how would you rate yourself as an environmentalist? What specifically has your administration done to improve the condition of our nation’s air and water supply?

Bush: Off-road diesel engines, we reached an agreement to reduce pollution from off-road diesel engines by 90%. I’ve got a plan to increase the wetlands by 3 million. We’ve got an aggressive Brownfield program to refurbish inner-city sore spots to useful pieces of property.

I proposed to the United States Congress a Clear Skies Initiative to reduce sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and mercury by 70%. I fought for a strong title in the farm bill for the conservation reserve program to set aside millions of acres of land for -- to help improve wildlife and the habitat.

We proposed and passed a healthy forest bill, which was essential to working with -- particularly in Western states -- to make sure that our forests were protected. What happens in those forests, because of lousy federal policy, is they grow to be -- they are not -- they’re not harvested, they’re not taken care of.... And so this is a reasonable policy, to protect old stands of trees and at the same time, make sure our forests aren’t vulnerable to the forest fires that have destroyed acres after acres in the West. We got a good, common-sense policy.

Kerry: Boy, to listen to that, the president I don’t think is living in a world of reality with respect to the environment. Now, if you’re a Red Sox fan, that’s OK, but if you’re a president, it’s not....

.

Now when it comes to the issue of the environment, this is one of the worst administrations in modern history. The Clear Skies Bill that he just talked about, it’s one of those Orwellian names you pull out of the sky, slap it onto something. Like No Child Left Behind but you leave millions of children behind, here they’re leaving the skies and the environment behind. If they just left the Clean Air Act all alone the way it is today, no change, the air would be cleaner than it is if you passed the Cleaner Skies Act.

We’re going backwards. In fact, his environmental enforcement chief air quality person at the EPA resigned in protest over what they’re doing to what are called the new source performance standards for air quality. They’re going backwards on the definition for wetlands. They’re going backwards on the water quality.

They’ve pulled out of the Global Warming, declared it dead, didn’t even accept the science.

I’m going to be a president who believes in science.

Q: Mr. President, if there were a vacancy in the Supreme Court and you had the opportunity to fill that position today, who would you choose and why?

Bush: I’m not telling. I really don’t have -- haven’t picked anybody yet. Plus I want them all voting for me.

I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn’t pick. I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words “under God” in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges years ago said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights. That’s a personal opinion; that’s not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all -- you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of America.

And so I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution. And I suspect one of us will have a pick at the end of next year, next four years.

And that’s the kind of judge I’m going to put on there. No litmus tests except for who -- how they interpret the Constitution.

Kerry: A few years ago, when he came to office, the president said -- these are his words -- “What we need are some good conservative judges on the courts.” And he said also that his two favorite justices are Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas. So you get a pretty good sense of where he’s heading if he were to appoint somebody.

Now, here’s what I believe. I don’t believe we need a good conservative judge and I don’t believe we need a good liberal judge. I don’t believe we need a good judge of that kind of definition on either side. I subscribe to the Justice Potter Stewart standard. He was a justice on the Supreme Court of the United States. And he said the mark of a good judge, good justice, is when you’re reading their decision, their opinion, you can’t tell if it’s written by a man or a woman, a liberal or a conservative, a Muslim, a Jew, or a Christian.

You just know you’re reading a good judicial decision. What I want to find, if I am privileged to have the opportunity to do it -- and the Supreme Court of the United States is at stake in this race, ladies and gentlemen -- the future of things that matter to you in terms of civil rights; what kind of Justice Department you’ll have; whether we’ll enforce the law; will we have equal opportunity; will women’s rights be protected; will we have equal pay for women, which is going backwards; will a woman’s right to choose be protected? These are constitutional rights, and I want to make sure we have judges who interpret the Constitution of the United States according to the law.

Q: President Bush, during the last four years, you have made thousands of decisions that have affected millions of lives. Please give three instances in which you came to realize you had made a wrong decision, and what you did to correct it. Thank you.

Bush: I have made a lot of decisions, and some of them little, like appointments to boards you’ve never heard of, and some of them big. And in a war, there’s a lot of -- there’s a lot of tactical decisions that historians will look back and say he shouldn’t of done that....

And I’ll take responsibility for ‘em. I’m human. But on the big questions, about whether or not we should have gone into Afghanistan, the big question about whether we should have removed somebody in Iraq, I’ll stand by those decisions because I think they’re right. It’s really what you’re -- when they ask about the mistakes, that’s what they’re talking about. They’re trying to say, “Did you make a mistake going into Iraq?” And the answer is absolutely not. It’s a right decision.

Kerry: I believe the president made a huge mistake, a catastrophic mistake not to live up to his own standard, which was build a true global coalition, give the inspectors time to finish their job and go through the U.N. process to its end, and go to war as a last resort.

I ask each of you just to look into your hearts, look into your guts. Gut check time. Was this really going to war as a last resort?

There’s no bigger judgment for a president of the United States than how you take a nation to war.

And you can’t say because Saddam might have done it 10 years from now, that’s a reason. That’s an excuse.