American Morning

Vic, good morning to you.

VICTOR KAMBER, DEMOCRATIC CONSULTANT: Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: Also Cliff may, former RNC communications director, now with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Cliff, good morning to you as well.

CLIFF MAY, FMR. RNC. COMM. DIR.: Good morning, Bill.

HEMMER: Thanks for coming back.  We call it Kamber and May, and it’s Tuesday morning.  Who do we believe, Cliff? The book says Colin Powell was never consulted.  Colin Powell comes out yesterday, and says, that’s not the case, I was in the loop the entire time. Who do we believe on this matter?

MAY: Well, I don’t know it’s a matter of disbelieving anybody.  I mean, I think, look, we debated for how long whether or not we were going to go to war in Iraq? Colin Powell made the presentation at the United Nations about the weapons of mass destruction.

Now, it’s true that President Bush probably didn’t make his mind up until the morning he told the military, go ahead and deploy, but I think everyone understood what was happening.

I think this is a very good book.  I think every should read it and draw their own conclusions.  I think their conclusions will be different than what a lot of people in the media are concluding right now.  I think it’s actually rather positive for Bush.  The headlines I would draw are very different.

Some of these things can be a bit of an interpretation of what people said in the events.  I think, overall, Woodward has done a great job.  I think there are some things which he didn’t get 100 percent right.

HEMMER: What conclusions are you arriving at, at this point?

KAMBER: It builds a different picture of George Bush than the American public knows.  You know, we have 250, 260 million Americans. The book, if it’s lucky, will sell, 300, 400,000 copies, be No. 1, so it’s not going to change the electorate, but the readers of the book are going to be a lot of opinion leaders, a lot of people who are still forming opinions about George Bush.

And what this book says, is it paints a picture of a president who, frankly, is not all that engaged with his principal people, possibly is talking to people outside of his administration about issues that affect money, some foreign leaders.

The issue with Colin Powell, I have no doubt of what took place, that the president had made up his mind.  As the president said in the interview in the book, that he knew what Powell was thinking, so why bother asking him.

I think that’s ludicrous, and frightening that you don’t ask your secretary of state what you want and what to do, but I believe it.

MAY: Bill, this is why people really need to sit down and read the book, because it’s very clear in the book, for one thing, that Powell had a two-hour meeting with President Bush over dinner, and then in the Oval Office, talking all about Iraq, and making the case for why it was a dangerous thing for the president to do, to define his first term based on Iraq, and the president listened very carefully to that.

KAMBER: Obviously didn’t take his advice.

MAY: You know what? You and I have both been advisers.  When you’re an adviser, your job is to give advice.  Your boss’ job is not necessarily to take your advice, rather than somebody else’s.

Let me also point this out. My friend Victor, and others, have been saying for months, oh, Bush “exaggerated the intelligence,” Bush “misled the People” –they’re even saying Bush lied.  Read this book.  It’s very clear that President Bush was skeptical about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq until the time when George Tenet, his CIA director, CIA director for Bill Clinton as well, got up from the couch, threw his arms in the air and said, “Mr. President, it is a slam dunk.  It is a slam dunk.”

KAMBER: And we are a year later, and that same CIA director is there, so my belief would be that George Bush, skeptical or not, still believes in his secretary — CIA director and has kept him there, which says that the president, obviously, doesn’t understand what’s going on in Iraq to this day.

MAY: Then you’ve got to say, and you should say it now, that your argument is against George Tenet, not against President Bush.

KAMBER: It’s against the leader.  The buck stops one place, with the president and who he staffs it with, whether it’s a Bill Clinton staffer that stayed on, or whether it’s his appointee.  We’re a year later.  We found no weapons of mass destruction.  Now we’re doing the typical Bush blame somebody else.

MAY: This is Bob Woodward’s book.  The director of the CIA, who had been studying this problem for years, says it’s absolutely a slam dunk, that there are weapons of mass destruction.

KAMBER: He’s still there.

MAY: One other thing that’s important, don’t forget the president inherited from President Clinton a policy called the Iraq Liberation Act, that was the policy of the U.S. government, bipartisan, to topple Saddam Hussein. But the CIA came to Bush, in this book, and said, you know what, there is no way we can do it, unless we do it militarily, we’ve looked at other ways.  If we are going to fulfill this policy, we have to do it this way.

HEMMER: Final word.

KAMBER: It’s a good read, an easy read, and a lot of people who read it will make up their mind that George Bush shouldn’t be president.

MAY: Let people read the book and make up their own minds.

HEMMER: See you in another week, guys.  Victor and Cliff, thanks again,

Kamber and May, appreciate it — Soledad.