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"Face the Nation" transcripts, September 23, 2012: President Clinton

(CBS News) Below is a transcript of "Face the Nation" on September 23, 2012, hosted by CBS News' Bob Schieffer. Guest includes: Former President Bill Clinton. The Wall Street Journal's Peggy Noonan, political analyst David Gergen, Mother Jones journalist David Corn, Time Managing Editor Richard Stengal and CBS News' John Dickerson.

SCHIEFFER: And good morning again and welcome to FACE THE NATION.

With us today, former President Bill Clinton. We are here at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

Mr. President, this has become an important event. You bring together world leaders, philanthropists, presidential candidates, people with ideas. "Time" magazine said this week it's become kind of an eBay of philanthropy, where you put together people with needs, bring them together with people who have money and the means to resolve their problems, whether it's poverty, disease, just improving their daily lives, you get everybody in one place, and go at it from there.

What do you hope to accomplish at this meeting? CLINTON: I hope to help people design their philanthropy and fit their partners in a way that gives them better and quicker results. I mean, all along, we have been trying to answer the how question, how do you do things faster, cheaper, better? How can these nongovernmental groups working with business and working with government and working with others, like a group in the Congo works with a group in America, and works for the international community, how can they create networks that actually produce the results they want?

And it occurred to us that this whole movement in American business to design what you are going to do, and advance better, might work in this area. So we decided to organize everything we are doing and, in clean energy and education and healthcare and our special focus on women and girls with that focus. I think it's going to produce some very interesting, specific commitments.

SCHIEFFER: And you've got a very interesting group of people here coming.

CLINTON: Yes, we've got President Obama and Governor Romney. We've got the president of Egypt is going to close for us, and I think people will find that very interesting. President, new president of Liberia is coming. Nobel Prize winning president -- I said Liberia, I meant Libya -- and the Nobel Prize winning president of Liberia is coming and a lot of other world leaders from around the world.

And Mike Duke is going to be on the opening, president of Wal- Mart, along with the head of the World Bank and secretary-general of the U.N., because of -- at least among American companies Wal-Mart is the number one user of solar power in America and they use quite a bit of wind too. So, it's very interesting that they have, a big part of their business strategy and their stock has been up and growth is good, it is cutting down on their traditional energy use.

SCHIEFFER: I want to wish you the best of luck with this, but I also want to talk to you a little bit about American politics.

You clearly were the star of the Democratic convention. You probably made the best case that anybody could probably make for your side. Let's just talk about what is going on in the campaign right now.

The big topic this week was this video that Mitt Romney, that came to light, which he more or less said that he was writing off 47 percent of the electorate -- people who he said paid no income, were dependent on the government, refused to take responsibility for their lives.

Do you think that was smart politics?

CLINTON: No. But it's interesting. I -- you know, I know a lot of higher income people, a lot of whom helped me do my work and they are supporting Governor Romney and a lot of people say things like that. But I think it is worth pointing out, if you look at that 47 percent, first they do pay taxes. They pay Social Security taxes. They pay Medicare taxes. They pay state and local taxes.

Second, they are out of the federal income tax pool for two reasons. One is the economic crash, which lowered a lot of people's incomes. Even a lot of the newer jobs don't pay high incomes.

Now the second reason is interesting. It's a bipartisan reason in the past. It's because the combined impacts of the earned income tax credit and the child tax credit.

I doubled the earned income tax credit which I think President Ford signed into law and which President Reagan supported and it's refundable if you work and you got kids and your income is low, the government will actually refund the credit if you drop out of owing income tax. It was designed to support working families.

Then we put in a child tax credit which when President Bush passed all of those tax cuts, that is what he did for middle class people. He doubled the child tax credit to $1,000.

Then when President Obama came in and we had a Democratic Congress, and the economy is reeling, they increased the earned income tax credit so you could get a little more if you had more than three kids.

So an enormous number of these people who were dropped out, were dropped out for reasons of work and family, not dependence. These people are working their hearts out. They would love to make enough money to pay federal income tax. We were all before trying to help them with their work and with their child rearing.

SCHIEFFER: Well, do you think Governor Romney understood who he was talking about when he made this statement?

CLINTON: I don't know, because, you know, the primary they ran kept pushing them all to the right. I remember when they all raised their hand and said, would you oppose the budget, a new budget if it had $10 in spending cuts for every $1 in tax increase? And every one of them said, yes, I'd be against that. So they got pushed further and further and further out there.

And I think, you know, you don't just purge all of that out of your system when you start running for the general election.

SCHIEFFER: You know, the fact of the matter is, though, that government assistance has increased tremendously. Don't you think that the Governor Romney has a point when he says the government has just gotten too big?

CLINTON: I think that, I think we have to wait until normal growth resumes to make that judgment, that is there are only -- of the 33 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, basically, bigger, richer countries, we are 31st out of 33 in the percentage of income we pay in taxes. And we have been 25th out of 33 in the percentage of government spending we have. That's just because of the collapse.

In other words, a heck of a lot of this money is unemployment and food stamps and Medicaid for people who lost their private health insurance. And 2009, in the depths of the recession, insurance profits went up again, 5 million people lost their health insurance, 3.5 million went on Medicaid, working people.

So I think when -- after normal growth resumes, we'll have a better feeling. My hunch is that the number of people depending on the government will go way, way down, once we have got an economy that's functioning again.

SCHIEFFER: Where do you think this election is right now?

CLINTON: I think that the president is winning, and winning in the swing states. I think that the Republican super PACs and the Romney campaign combined will out spend the Democrats probably two and a half, three to one here on in.

And I think this is the only time I can remember when a lot of the national polls are closer than the polls in the so-called swing states. That's because the Obama campaign doesn't have as much money, so they have to concentrate that in the swing states and we are doing pretty well. So I think -- I think, assuming the debates are even a draw, I think the president will win.

But I think you can't know because of the enormous financial advantage that Citizens United to these Republicans super PACs, and because of the work they have done and will do on Election Day to try to reduce the number of young people, first generation immigrants, and minorities voting.

I mean, they have worked hard at this. They have a theory that if the election, the people who vote in 2012 look more like the 2010 electorate than the folks that elected the president in the first place in 2008, that is, they get enough of those folks to stay home, they can still win. So that's why we have got to keep working at it.

SCHIEFFER: You know, the fact is, and you have made -- as I said, you probably made as good -- made the case as good as anybody could make it for President Obama, but the fact is, unemployment is up.

It is higher than when he came to office, the economy is still in the dump. Some people say that is reason enough to make a change.

CLINTON: It is if you believe that we could have been fully healed in four years. I don't know a single serious economist who believes that as much damage as we had could have been healed.

We were losing 700,000-800,000 a jobs a month when he took office. And so you really have got to look at it when the economy bottomed out in about six months after he took office, and we lost jobs for the first year while his programs were beginning to kick in.

Since then, his jobs record is actually better, particularly his private sector jobs record, than in the previous eight years under the Bush administration. So my belief is that his approach is more likely to lift Americans up and to build a modern economy we need and to bring back the middle class.

And I don't think there is any evidence that this sort of militant anti-government deal will work. I also think that if they enact $5 trillion more of tax cuts we will never get out of this debt hole.

And when the interest rates start to rise, as they will when the economy grows, we are going to be in a world of hurt. So I think that the Obama approach is better. It is more likely to produce broad- based prosperity than Romney's.

And I think that people will see that unless they believe that somehow magically somebody could have brought us back to full employment in four years. I just don't believe it could have happened.

SCHIEFFER: Mr. Romney released his income taxes for last year this week. Do you think he has given enough information?

CLINTON: Well, it would be interesting to know, you know, I think some people just get -- I think John McCain only gave two years, but he did make Senate reports before that. I think we gave 10 years or something like that.

That is really up to voters. They can decide. But in the last two years he wouldn't have any ordinary income, which would mean that most of his income would be capital gains, as it is, and they would be taxed at 15 percent, which is what the law is.

And he gave a lot to charity, which is commendable, including to his church, which is commendable. But it would be interesting I think for the American people to see how the ordinary income years were treated, but apparently we are not going to get to see that so the voters will just have to make up their mind.

SCHIEFFER: What did you make up of this that he didn't take all of the charitable deductions that he could have taken? Now he can for the next -- he has the right over the next three years to re-file and claim those deductions but he didn't take them.

And I guess if he had taken all of those deductions he would have been paying at a rate of about 10 percent, something like that.

CLINTON: Yes, apparently they wanted to keep it at 13, 14 percent, but that is -- I don't know what to say about that. I think it is what it is. But I think he shouldn't apologize for his charitable deductions, that is a good thing.

But I don't think we can get out of this hole we are in if people at that income level only pay, 13, 14 percent. And so we will just see what happens. But I think apparently he is not going to release any more income tax returns and the voters will just have to make their judgments about that. SCHIEFFER: All right. Mr. President, we are going to take a break here and we'll come right back in one minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCHIEFFER: Mr. President, the Congress is adjourned again until after the election. The best I can tell the only thing they did was pass a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down.

There seems to be no end to this gridlock now. It was tough while you were there, over the last couple of years, nothing seems to get done. It seems to me that is one of the issues here. President Obama has been unable to get them to do anything. Mitt Romney says he knows how to get them to do something.

What is it going to take to break this gridlock?

CLINTON: Well, I think the election will have a lot to do with it. We only had one really inactive year when I was president, that was 1995, after the Gingrich Congress came in, that sort of pre-tea party, tea party Congress, and not much happened. And then there was two government shutdowns.

The public had a very negative reaction to it, so even in a presidential year we got a lot done in '96. And even with all of the troubles that we had in the second term, we had -- '99 and 2000 were extremely productive years.

So something has to change so that both parties see that they have more to gain from doing than not doing. And I think what will happen is when the election occurs, let's say the president wins, I believe he will.

If he wins, then he can't run again, the calculus of the Congress will change. They will be facing this fiscal cliff. It is doing exactly what it was intended to do. It will force them to concentrate.

And I believe there will be a lame duck session of Congress in which they will either reach the beginnings of a budget deal or more likely agree to some sort of period of time to avoid the fiscal cliff and make the budget deal then.

I think that as soon as this election is over, the incentives for gridlock will go way down and the incentives for action will go way up. Plus you have got -- it's not just a fiscal cliff, we need to get the economy going again. If his jobs program had passed we would have another 700,000 to a million jobs.

But that won't be enough unless we also reach a 10-year budget agreement that will hold interest rates down when the economy starts to grow. See, when the economy starts to grow and people start borrowing money again, and banks start loaning money to small businesses and not just big ones, interest rates will go up, because there will be more competition for money. If interest rates were the same today as they were when I was president, the payment on the debt, that is, what the taxpayers have to pay every year, the financial debt would go from $250 billion to $650 billion a year. They can't let that happen.

If they adopt both an "invest the American" plan now and a 10- year budget plan, then I think it will lead to an economic boom and accelerate economic growth and keep interest rates in balance.

SCHIEFFER: Mr. President, I have to ask you about your wife. She is getting ready to wind up her term as secretary of state. Do you think she will run for president next time out? A lot of people think she ought to if Barack Obama is reelected.

CLINTON: I don't know. You know, she has worked hard for 20 years. We had eight years in the White House, then she ran for the Senate. She served in New York for eight years and then she immediately became secretary of state.

And she is tired. She has really worked hard. I think she has done a fabulous job. I am very proud of her. But she wants to take some time off, kind of regroup, write a book, I hope we will be working together.

She was doing this work long before I was, and a lot of what we do now in women and girls were driven by some of the things she started in the State Department. So I think we should give her a chance to organize her life and decide what she wants to do.

I just don't know. She is an extraordinarily able person, I have never met anybody I thought was a better public servant. But I have no earthly idea what she will decide to do.

SCHIEFFER: Do you think she would be the most qualified person to run?

CLINTON: I have never met anybody I thought was any better than her at this. But, again, we have got a lot of able people in our party who want to be president. There is never a shortage of people who want to be president. We have a lot of bright young governors. We have got a lot of other people who will probably run out of the Congress. We won't have to worry about people wanting to be president next time who are good people.

But I just think, you know, as the decision she will have to make. But whatever she does I am for her first, last and always. She is the ablest -- I know I am biased, but I think she demonstrated as senator and as secretary of state that she has extraordinary ability, a lot of common sense, a lot of, you know, stick to itiveness. She'll push a rock up a hill as long as it takes to get it up the hill.

SCHIEFFER: And if she decided to do it you would be right there to help her.

CLINTON: Whatever she wanted me to do, I would. But who knows. It is her decision and her life, but whatever she decides I will support it.

SCHIEFFER: I am going to go back to one thing, you said back there at one point that you thought with this economy being in the shape it is that it might be necessary temporarily to extend the Bush tax cuts. Do you still feel that way? For everybody.

CLINTON: Well, what I -- but I did say that back in 2010 when I supported the president's decision to do it. What they heed to do now is avoid the fiscal cliff and make a long-term deal. I understand the president's reluctance to extend the tax cuts for upper income people again, have a lot to do with the calendar, the timing. When you had all of those Republican candidates for president saying they would oppose a budget deal that had $10 in tax spending, excuse me, spending cuts for every one dollar in tax increases, that won't work. Nobody thinks it will work.

You can't get this budget deal, as the Simpson-Bowles commission said, you can't bring the debt doubt without three things. You have to have economic growth, spending restraint and some revenues, a balanced approach. I think that is what he wants. That is what I support.

I don't think that he can get that if he gives away one leg of the three legged stool before the negotiations even start. That is really what is going on here.

SCHIEFFER: So if he had to do that just temporarily, you would - you would do that?

CLINTON: No, I think -- I don't know what they are going to do to avoid the fiscal cliff. But if you look at what Senator Durbin is shopping around, he would basically -- basically say we are going to avoid the fiscal cliff for six months and we'll have a deal within six months. That is different sort of thing.

But for him to agree to take that out and say OK you can extend this for another year, to do that one more time would put him in a very disadvantages position and make it impossible for us to get a reasonable budget deal.

I should say that most of the Republicans I know who would have to pay higher taxes agree that they should, if it is part of a budget deal. They just want it to be part of a long-term budget deal where they see it is a balanced plan that will do something about the debt.

SCHIEFFER: Mr. President, I want to thank you very much for being with us. It is always fun to interview you and we will be back in just a minute.

ANNOUNCER: This portion of Face the Nation is sponsored by America's Natural Gas Alliance, smarter power today.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCHIEFFER: Watching our candidates struggle with statements that were supposed to be private and sudden think became public, Barack Obama got burned last time, Mitt Romney this time. I offer the following guide to all candidates of the digital age.

One, never say anything you wouldn't want to see on the front page of the Washington Post.

Two, there is no such thing as a private party. Actually, there is no longer any such thing as privacy, that ended with the coming of social media. Everyone has a camera and a recorder and their own rules for using them.

Three, when you speak to a group, don't expect everyone to keep what you say in confidence. No one is universally loved. The last person to get 100 percent of the vote was Saddam Hussein. Look what happened to him.

Four, if you don't want your words to become public, be quiet. Like suspects in a criminal case, all of us, including candidates, have the right to remain silent.

And finally, and this has nothing to do with cameras and recorders, when you are talking to rich folks about poor folks, be careful. It never seems to come out quite right.

As Herman Melville wrote in Harper's magazine in 1854 of all of the preposterous assumptions of humanity over humanity, nothing exceeds most of the criticism made on the habits of the poor by the well housed, the well warmed and the well-fed.

Back in a minute.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCHIEFFER: Some of our stations are leaving us now. For most of you we will be back with an all-star political panel, including Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, the reporter who uncovered that video of Mitt Romney, David Corn of Mother Jones, former Clinton and Reagan adviser, David Gergen, TIME magazine editor Rick Stengel, and our own John Dickerson. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCHIEFFER: Welcome back to Face the Nation. Back now at CBS News headquarters in New York.

Our political panel: David Corn who is the author of "Showdown" now out in paperback. David also is the reporter who uncovered that Mitt Romney fundraiser video for Mother Jones. We want to ask him about that.

Peggy Noonan is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. She was a speechwriter before that for President Reagan.

David Gergen, and I don't know anybody else who has this on his resume, he worked for both President Reagan and for Bill Clinton, he is now at Harvard University. Rick Stengel who worked with President Clinton on the TIME magazine cover story that Bill Clinton authored this week. And let's also bring in and round out the team with John Dickerson, our own political director.

Let me just start by asking somebody on the panel, would anybody like to volunteer. Did Bill Clinton say that he wants to temporarily extend the Bush tax cuts or did he say not? A show of hands here. Who would like to answer that question?

DAVID GERGEN, HARVARD UNIVERSITY: Do we know?

PEGGY NOONAN, WALL STREET JOURNAL: It was a wonderful, long, complicated answer the end of which left you thinking, what the heck did he just say?

GERGEN; Yes. President Eisenhower liked to do that. He liked to create a fog of words so nobody knew what the heck he was saying. And he left it and everybody sort of went on with life.

NOONAN: And with strategic, not deliberate.

RICK STENGEL, TIME MAGAZINE: Create I think a fog so everybody can find an exit and then when the fog lifts everybody is in a safe place. I think he is trying to say basically the commitments of the sequester and of the tax cuts, we can put those off if we can get a deal but that's the kind of thing that led to the sequester in the first place. So I am not sure...

DAVID CORN, MOTHER JONES: He's giving President Obama a lot of cover, because what he's saying is the economy needs to start recovering before we make any sacrifices, before we ask people to make any sacrifice and I think there the president will be able to if he is reelected to kind of have a Simpson-Bowles moment and that is what Clinton is trying to set him up to do.

STENGEL: Well, I also thought he gave him cover in another way which was to say, there is a lot to be dealt with here, first in the short-term and the long-term, and we don't expect the president to come out and say right now what his negotiating position, what his end point is going to be of the negotiations so everyone should get together and start working on this.

SCHIEFFER: So when President Obama said he was thinking about naming Bill Clinton as secretary for explaining stuff, he also meant not quite explaining it when the need arose.

NOONAN: Yes.

SCHIEFFER: Peggy, let me just start with you. This week, I mean, you write this column for the Wall Street Journal, many conservatives look to you for advice. I mean you are a leading voice on the right. You called the Romney campaign this week a rolling calamity. Did you get any blowback from your Republican friends on that?

NOONAN: Of course not.

(LAUGHTER)

NOONAN: Yes.

I will tell you, Bob, it was very interesting. There was a lot of formal official and public blowback from the Romney campaign, from Romney surrogates, et cetera. What was interesting to me, however, was that privately, the constant communication I got was, thank you for saying that they need help at the Romney campaign, they need to be woken up, they need to raise their game.

The general feeling of just about all Republicans and conservatives who are watching this thing now is that this race is close. You can win it if you are Mitt Romney, if you go forward with meaning and you stop being small and merely tactical and cautious, you get yourself together, you put fundraisers aside, you go into the public, you make speeches and some commercials which show America what you stand for, what you are going to do, how you get from a to b and why the American people should follow you.

So there is very broad feeling that the Romney campaign needed to be woken up and I am here to help.

SCHIEFFER: Well, was it the wrong strategy? What is it, what is their core problem right now?

NOONAN: Oh, their core problem was carefulness, inability to focus on their own essential meaning, and communicate it to the American people. And I would also say people in America now, we talk about politics are throwing around numbers. There is the unfortunate 47 percent for Mitt. There is the question only need 51 percent to win.

The way Republicans win is by thinking of 100 percent of the American people, going to them all, laying out your plan saying you may disagree with me, but this is where I stand, please listen to me, give me a hearing, the American people always will.

So in a way maybe their essential problem was they were slicing and dicing in America. Go bigger.

SCHIEFFER: Well, let's go over to David Corn, who really was the reporter of the week. I mean, you came up with this video. It was just astounding. How long have you had that video?

CORN: Well, I mean, there are a lot of conspiracy theories. I only had it for a week or less while we took -- while I took a lot of time to authenticate it, make sure the video clips are accurate and work out an agreement with the source of the tape about how to present it. So we really got it out as quick as we could do it journalistically responsibly. So even though it happened in May, I didn't learn of the tape until late August and then we moved very fast.

But I got to take issue with my friend Peggy, because I think she is being a little generous here, which is not a bad fault to have. The problem with the campaign, and I think this is what the tape plays into is the candidate. All of the stuff, it is not a slicing and dicing of the American public here and, there it is not just a strategic assumptions that the campaign is making or how they are presenting the message, I think you have seen Mitt Romney in the last seven years he has been campaigning being all sorts of different things and not having either the Obama campaign denigrates him for not having a core, but I would say not having a core message or a core raison d'etre, in his pursuit of the presidency.

And when I did the book "Showdown" what impressed me was the strategy of the Obama campaign comes from one place, really, the president. He puts together his vision, his policy agenda, his own ideas about politics and about governing America into a political strategy, whether you like it or not, whether it is going to work or not but it comes from him and it is really I think sincerely at his core,

And so it seems a much more integrated campaign than we have with the Romney campaign. I mean you shouldn't have to call for James Baker to rush in and save the day if the candidate had something really solid to offer the public at this time in our history.

SCHIEFFER: Well, David Gergen, you have been in the Reagan White House, you were in the Clinton White House, do you think this thing is a gave changer?

GERGEN: The 47 percent?

SCHIEFFER: yes.

GERGEN: No. I don't think the game is over yet. I think what Mitt Romney needs is a game changer in the first debate. I think the problem he now has got in the campaign is that it's starting to slip away from him in the key state. Peggy is absolutely right. It's very close in the national polls, but it's slipping away from him in the battleground states. And that puts pressure on him going into these debates.

Where he actually tied into the swing states, all he needed to do was have a draw in the debates. I think he now needs to win. I think he's got to win that first debate. And he's got to turn that first debate into a game changer in which he does respond to the David Corns of the world and show his true soul and what his message it.

There have been a lot of mistakes in the campaign, starting with the idea he should have called Peggy Noonan for his acceptance address and he would be in better shape now right now.

NOONAN: I am a columnist...

GERGEN; At least he should have called. And because it would have shown the right instincts.

But I agree with David, I think calling on Jim Baker now isn't a solution to this. Jim Baker was at his best running campaigns when he had Ronald Reagan as a candidate. And he was really very, very successful.

And you've got -- it is up to the candidate at some point. The 47 percent didn't come from the campaign, it came from the candidate.

NOONAN: That's true.

GERGEN: So, at this point I think he can still win this thing. I think that Romney can still win this thing, but he has to do it in the debate. He's got to have a game changer. and have a game changer.

SCHIEFFER: Rick Stengel, you are the managing editor of TIME and you worked with Bill Clinton on this cover story that was written to coincide with the Clinton Global Initiative.

I have got to ask you, and I think Dave Gergen is right, you just have the sense, especially in these battleground states that Obama is just pulling away. I don't know of a battle ground state right now where Obama is behind if memory serves.

Does Bill Clinton get some of the credit for this?

STENGEL: I absolutely think so. He is the number one surrogate as we saw and he is the explainer in chief. The president has not done a great job of explaining his own message. I mean, he has to turn to Bill Clinton to do it for him.

And in fact what we are going to see is a lot more ads with Bill Clinton in them. And Clinton will have to decide, am I really going to jump in here and really try to kill that guy or am I going to try to maintain this notion that I am this great philanthropist in chief which in fact he is.

You know, I have to say that the central problem of the campaign, the Romney folks right thought, look this be is going to be a referendum on the economy, the Obama folks thought, hey, this is a choice election and I am the experienced guy. What it has turned into is a referendum on Romney, and that is a problem for him, because that is the central problem because he is not really connecting.

GERGEN: That's a very good point.

CORN: I talked to a number of Republicans this week, one strategist who has been involved in a lot of these campaigns said when he saw that video it was the first time he thought he was seeing the real Romney.

DICKERSON: That's a problem when your most troubled moment is the one people think is the most authentic moment.

And -- and so that's -- that's the problem, if it's true -- and a lot of Republicans believe this -- that Romney has this authenticity problem, that that is the barrier that's keeping him from being able to say, "I do care about you; I do have policies that will affect you in your real life." People don't buy the pitch because they don't buy the guy.

Where he has a possible exit strategy or something that he can hang on to is the Pew poll looked at the swing voters who were still left. They say it's one in five. A lot of people say it's less than that.

On the question of jobs, people -- those swing voters prefer Romney 44 to 27 over Obama. There are 20 million more people on food stamps under Obama, one in six living in poverty, 23 million either unemployed or underemployed.

The economy is still there, ready for Romney to find his way back to it somehow. He just has to do it.

SCHIEFFER: Does any of this go back to the fact that what if, in the beginning, Peggy -- what if Mitt Romney had said, "Look, I'm a moderate? You know, I know we have conservatives in this party and I know we have the Tea Party, but the fact is I'm a moderate. I was a moderate governor. Haley Barbour is not going to get elected governor of Massachusetts anymore than I would be elected governor of Mississippi."

It seems to me that -- that somehow Mitt Romney has been pushed beyond a point where I wonder if he really is sometimes, and certainly if you go back and look at his record, you have to...

NOONAN: I don't know. Oddly enough, I think people do, sort of, look at him and experience him as a kind of moderate conservative. Even though he never says that, I think he does come across that way. But I think he has, as I think Richard said, Romney so far has failed -- the American people look at Romney and Obama and I think a number of them would be willing to say, "Mr. Obama, we gave you four years; I think I'm not going to re-up your contract," except then they look at Romney and he hasn't fully made the sale to them yet.

I also think, interestingly, this year, so many people think they know who they are voting for, but then when you get down to it, they tell pollsters, "By the way, I could change my mind."

So this is still all in play, which actually is an opening for Mitt Romney, but if he doesn't take it now, as David notes, it ain't going to get taken.

(UNKNOWN): But the thing is, he's been running for president for seven years now.

NOONAN: Yes.

(UNKNOWN): I think you're right. The Mitt Romney of 2003, 2004 would have been the ideal Republican candidate in the general election. That guy would have lost, probably, the Republican primary. And that was a chance -- a risk that Mitt Romney wasn't willing to take. So, yeah, he moved so far to the right, he has had all of these flip-flops; he has an authenticity issue coming into the very start of this thing.

And then through the campaign, he seems to go back and forth. He ran as an outsider Now, Obama said something this week, so now Romney runs as the insider.

He just -- he's been reactive to almost everything the president has done, and it has been noticed, when you don't have a rudder, the winds push you back and forth much easier. And I think people are looking at Romney the way they looked at John McCain four years ago when the financial collapse happened and they don't see a steady hand. They don't see this guy who knows himself or knows what he wants to do as president. And I don't know if that can really be changed that much at this point. He is lucky that it's still close because maybe...

(CROSSTALK)

(UNKNOWN): You helped him. I'll tell you why. Because he has an authenticity problem. They should buy an hour ad and run that whole video. That is -- that is Mitt Romney, the real guy. He's fluent; he's articulate; he shows what he believes; he's not optimistic about a lot of things. He connects better in that video talking to those fund-raisers than he has on the stump.

(CROSSTALK)

(UNKNOWN): They should buy that ad.

(LAUGHTER)

SCHIEFFER: This is just getting good, but I have to break here and take a little commercial break. Back in one minute. Don't go away.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCHIEFFER: John Dickerson, I want to talk to you a little bit about -- you know, Peggy has been talking about bringing some of the Republicans say bring back an old hand or something. What about that? DICKERSON: This is one of the things I heard in interviews this week is Mitt Romney has been all over the map. What an old hand might do is say, "Governor, you run the campaign; we'll tell you what to do; you need to step back and, you know, you've just got to accept that role, Governor."

And here is one specific way that might work. Governor Romney jumped in the middle of the violence in the Middle East and he broke a little bit of a tradition by inserting himself. Then he disappeared on the issue. We have since learned that this administration had first thought this uprising in Libya was just a kind of -- something that bubbled up from the ground. Well, now they are calling it a terrorist attack. Well, what went wrong there? What did you get wrong in the first place? Why weren't you securing the embassy the way you should have been?

These are points that a Republican could make, that Mitt Romney needs to make because he knows the press isn't necessarily going to make that case for him. He can make it because he was the one who jumped in and said, hey, this is a very serious issue. But instead he hasn't really come back to it.

What an old hand might do is say, look, you've got to prosecute this case against the president in this way, not just let it be.

NOONAN: I think that was perfectly said, and unfortunately for me, it was what I wanted to say.

And I would also add that an old hand on the plane would have said to him -- to Mr. Romney as soon as Libya blew, Mr. Romney went out there and he tried to make some political hay of it. An old hand would have said, "Buddy, when Americans come under attack, the first thing you do is say we are praying for them; we are asking for unity; we will have no criticism right now for the president, but this will unfold; we will be thinking about it and we will be talking to you very seriously about it very soon."

(CROSSTALK)

(UNKNOWN): ... Romney have that instinct himself?

NOONAN: That's why old hands need to be there, not...

(CROSSTALK)

SCHIEFFER: Let David make the point.

GERGEN: I am an old hand.

(LAUGHTER)

I am -- I am very persuaded that he should have an old hand there. I think having a Jim Baker would help. I think there were a number of mistakes they would have avoided. But my uniform experience has been that what really matters is the person who is running, because what you learn in a campaign is what that president would be like -- what that person would be like as president.

And you know, when they get to the Oval Office, so much depends upon the quality and the character -- you wrote a whole book about Reagan and character -- of the person...

NOONAN: Instincts, also.

GERGEN: ... and the instincts and the way they carried themselves. And Reagan -- you know, some of the things that Romney is having trouble are the very requirements we look to for a successful president, the capacity to persuade people to rally behind your positions. The presidency is not about having some engineer who comes up with the best set of solutions. We saw that with Jimmy Carter. It's a question of how you mobilize people behind you, get them to rally to do the hard things that need to be done.

SCHIEFFER: Well, you know, that brings up a point. I mean, you know, this week you saw President Obama say, look, what I have learned is you can't run Washington from the inside, that you have to run it from the outside.

I guess what he meant was you have to bring pressure from the outside. But, you know, one of the main criticisms of President Obama is he's not very good at the inside game. And one reason that we're in the gridlock we're in right now is he is just not good at brokering deals.

NOONAN: Totally true.

(UNKNOWN): But I disagree with that. I think, if you look at the tax cut deal after the November 2010 elections, that he actually got a lot more than the Republicans, if you look how he got START passed and "Don't ask, Don't tell." There are a lot of stories in which he has gone and done stuff, kind of, more on the inside than on the outside, and it's ticked off his base because they haven't seen this because it has been too much inside Washington. So it, sort of, cuts both ways.

STENGEL: He's nostalgic for the Obama of 2008 when he could run as an outsider. It's always easier to run, even when you're an incumbent, to run as an outsider. And he doesn't have that message anymore. So he lapsed back into that. The problem is he hasn't shown us why he as president needs to be rehired.

NOONAN: When a president of four years says, excuse me, "You can't change Washington from the inside," he is saying "I failed to change Washington from the inside."

He could not negotiate. He was no Reagan sitting down with Tip O'Neill.

GERGEN: Exactly.

NOONAN: If you if you are big, you can make a deal with the other side; you can move it forward. If you can't do that, then I guess you have to talk about how you can't change things. GERGEN: I want to come back to this. I don't think you can read the Bob Woodward book and conclude that President Obama is good at the inside game. You just can't read it and figure that.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: But anyway, he's a (INAUDIBLE), he has spent a lot of time doing it. But beyond that, you know, the classic book on the presidency was written by Dick Neustadt years ago, it's called "Presidential Power."

His whole argument was it is a combination. You have to be good at the outside game and the inside game. So two together. And President Obama's notion that you can do this from the outside simply doesn't work in contemporary politics.

(CROSSTALK)

SCHIEFFER: Well, have we ever had a president that was really good at both?

GERGEN: We have had occasional presidents who were really good at both.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: Reagan was the best.

NOONAN: Ronald Reagan.

GERGEN: And Clinton was very good at it.

NOONAN: Ronald Reagan, LBJ, up to a certain extent.

(CROSSTALK)

CORN: ... the party Republicans, though. And, you know, you listen so someone like -- you know, look at the book that Norm Ornstein and Tom Mann wrote, and they're not flaming radicals.

And they blame the obstructionism mainly, almost essentially, on the Republicans coming in and saying, we don't care if you are Clinton or Ronald Reagan, we are just going to throw monkey wrenches into the works again and again and again, and see what happens at the next election.

NOONAN: Oh, my goodness. Boo-hoo.

(CROSSTALK)

NOONAN: Boo-hoo.

DICKERSON: But if you buy that environment is true, then the remedy may not necessarily be power from the outside. Look at health care, which the president cited as an issue that moved because of outside pressure. He picked up no Republicans because of this outside pressure. He tried to use Organizing for America, his campaign arm, to build a national groundswell for health care, it didn't work. His numbers went down after the president keep talking.

So just as a remedy for gridlock, his own diagnosis is not right because it didn't necessarily work in the way he said it would when he was...

(CROSSTALK)

CORN: And if the other side doesn't want to be de-gridlocked, then you have no inside or outside remedy.

(CROSSTALK)

GERGEN: Franklin Roosevelt was a master as a president. And he was terrific on the outside, with the radio talks and the rest, but he was also a master on the inside.

NOONAN: Yes.

GERGEN: And he had staunch Republican opposition.

(CROSSTALK)

STENGEL: But, David, doesn't it take a while -- you know better than anybody, doesn't it take a while, you learn where the Oval Office is, you learn where the bathroom is, you have to figure out how to negotiate.

And as a second-term president, right, he can actually have some leverage in a different way than he had in his first term.

NOONAN: We have all been reading the Robert Caro LBJ book in the past year. And you know why we have, it is because we are nostalgic for and longing for a man who knew how to do it from the inside, from the days Washington worked.

It is no credit to this incumbent that it does not work.

STENGEL: Bob's own commentary, there is no privacy anymore. You can't do those private negotiations...

(CROSSTALK)

NOONAN: Oh you can do plenty. Yes, you really can.

GERGEN: If the president is reelected, my fervent hope is that he is a successful president because the country so desperately needs to get some things done in his second term. But the problem (INAUDIBLE) in part is in the second term, as you know, power runs down quickly.

Your power runs down quickly, your leverage actually disappears. You have got about a year to a year-and-a-half. SCHIEFFER: All right. Power is slowly running down here, the clock has run out. I want to thank all of you, perhaps the most spirited discussion we have had on FACE THE NATION in a long time. I wish you could all come back every Sunday. So thank you all for being with us.

We will be right back. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

SCHIEFFER: That's all we have time for today, the panel is still talking, they talked right through the commercial, they're still talking over here. We will be back in Washington next week.

Tonight watch "60 MINUTES," both President Obama and Mitt Romney in separate interviews. Thanks for watching. We will be here next week for FACE THE NATION.

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