MR. RUSSERT: Kelly O’Donnell, let me show you some polling data and get your sense of how the White House is thinking, the beat that you cover. Los Angeles Times Bloomberg. The president’s approval/disapproval: 43 percent approval, 54 disapproval. What about the war in Iraq? Forty-one approval, 56 disapproval. Terrorism, the war. Approve 48, Bush performance on that; 49 disapprove. And economy. Only 37 percent approve, 59 disapprove. And look at this, health care. The president’s handling of it: 27; disapprove 64. Is the White House aware of those numbers?
MS. O’DONNELL: Aware and trying to respond in ways that we’ll certainly see Tuesday night. ...advisors…say he will continue to talk about the war in Iraq every single week. They learned that when they sort of shifted gears and didn’t have as much of a public message about that, it hurt them. They also know when the president acknowledged some of the mistakes there, he seemed to have a little inching up in the polls. And of late, on the spying issue for example, where he has been so assertive in his view, we now also see that the numbers have edged back ever so slightly.
MR. RUSSERT: Do State of the Union messages, do they matter, David?
MR. BRODER: Well, of course they matter. I mean, it’s the largest single audience that the president will have for any speech this year. And it also really does set the agenda. I mean, we tend to forget. A year ago, he was talking about reforming the Social Security system. It didn’t happen, but it consumed six months of the public debate. Presidents still have that capacity. And even as we can—as Kelly points out, he is at this point. His speech will set an agenda.
MR. RUSSERT: There has been a lot of discussion, as Kelly mentioned, about this whole notion of domestic eavesdropping and how the White House has been extremely aggressive trying to seize that as an issue, move it from being a civil rights and liberty issue to an anti-terrorism issue.
Again, some polling data was quite constructive. The American people, would you give up some civil liberties to prevent terrorism? Yes, 51; no, 40. What about monitoring U.S. phone calls and e-mails without a warrant? Forty-nine say acceptable, 45 say unacceptable. Would you mind if your own calls were being monitored? Fifty-three say yes, 46 percent say no. Who do you trust to protect the country against terrorism? President Bush 45, the Democrats in Congress, 32. Has the president’s policies made us more secure, 52 yes. Less secure, 21, no. No different, 25.
Byron York, has the White House politically achieved some results over the last few weeks by saying, “This is an anti-terrorism message. You heard that Osama bin Laden tape, I am the protector in chief,” in effect?
MR. YORK: Yes, they have. You know, obviously they didn’t want the leak to happen. They didn’t want this to come out. But since it has, they believe this is actually a big political winner for them. And Republican pollsters tell me it’s all in how you label this. The president’s adversaries want to call it domestic spying. The president is saying this is—we’re looking in on the international communications of people with known al-Qaeda connections. If you ask people in a poll, what do you think about warrantless domestic spying? They’re against it. If you throw in the word “al-Qaeda,” the approval goes through the roof. And so this is all a fight over how to label this.
MR. RUSSERT: The president seemed to suggest in his news conference on Thursday, Roger Simon, that he was anxious for the mid-term elections. His last one, as he said, as a sitting president. And that his message was going to be, “I will protect you and I’m going to cut your taxes.”
MR. SIMON: Sure, it’s the same message we heard at the Republican Convention. “Keep fear alive, vote for us or die.” The poll, what we like to call the Bloomberg/LA Times Poll, show that on the question of terrorism, that’s the only area in which George Bush and the Republicans get a high marks.
This is a weakened president. You saw on the show today, a majority leader, his majority leader, disagreeing with the president on a number of issues. What the president has, the last arrow in his quiver, is protecting the United States against terrorism. And that’s what he’s going to have to use.
MS. O’DONNELL: …Terrorism works for them in part because there is that fear that is hard to describe, and people do have a fear about it. And so when you bring up eavesdropping, if you say al-Qaeda, people will think, “Well, it’s not me and my phone calls. So maybe it’s OK.”
It’s hard for people to understand what domestic spying might intrude upon, because we know so little about the program. So this is a strong area for them. Will it be as strong as it was the last go-around? Probably not. But it is an area where they can continue to fight and say, ‘We will protect you more than, than the Democrats.’ And Democrats have trouble there, because when you bring up civil liberties it seems much more of a fuzzy argument to many people, because if you put that on a scale against protecting the country, often people are more willing to say, ‘I want the country secure.’