[Pt.1] Let’s meet our panel:

BILL: He’s a contributing panel with the Daily Beast – David Frum, Republican Pollster Kristen Soltis, MSNBC Political Columnist Karen Finny. Okay so let me ask a question that I presented there in the monologue is that this one is a big one today, because Obama scored a big one for the latinos. A couple of weeks ago it was the gays – is he picking off demographics? Come on you’re a pollster [Kristen] right? It could be all be about demographics. Is he picking off the Democratic constituencies one at a time and is that going to really win him the election?

KRISTEN: It’s really been systematic actually. First we had the “war on women” because Democrats had normally had more…

BILL: The Democrats didn’t start that.

KRISTEN: The Democrats had had an advantage among women voters and then in 2010 election they lost them, so I’m sure…

BILL: They did?

KRISTEN: They did. If you look at the exit polls…

KAREN FINNEY: No. Not single women.

KRISTEN:That’s correct. But if you look at the polls, you’ve got women, you’ve got latinos, you’ve got young voters. These are all coalition groups that came together to help Obama get elected in the first place. And he knows he needs to shore them back up because he knows that he still needs them to turn out but still vote for him in the same way…

BILL: So it’s calculated?

Kristen But I think he needs a message that is broader than just let’s have one message for this group, and one message for this group, and one message for this group. I think he needs to have some kind of economic message that is consistent that can get across all of those groups.

KAREN FINNEY: I think the message of economic fairness has been across all of those groups and it should not surprise anybody that there’s politics in politics. Which I have no a problem with because it seems to be the right thing to do. And let’s be honest, both campaigns at this point are looking for multiple pathways to 270. You can win in gerrymander districts but if you’re going to win a national election you have to be able to get some portion of – wether it’s the female vote, single woman, (they’re calling them “WalMart Moms” (this time around), Latinos, African Americans. So everybody’s got all of their cards on the table.

BILL: “WalMart Moms”? They’re calling them “WalMart Moms”? They used to call them “Soccer Moms”. They got poorer. I think that says a lot about our economy.

KAREN FINNEY: I mean, but hat’s part of what the strategy is. Right? You gotta reach out to everybody.

DAVID: I have a theory that every campaign has a secret slogan that is broadcasting whether they know it or not. For example in 2008 John McCain’s was “More Wars for a Spanish Speaking America” and that didn’t work too well. You don’t always know the slogan…

BILL: (Laughing) We didn’t hear that.

DAVID: But this time each of the campaigns have a secret slogan, Barack Obama’s is “The Republicans the Feds, the Europeans are destroying my beautiful recovery”, but what he doesn’t know is that he’s saying, “and I’m not tough enough, strong enough and smart enough to stop them.” Mitt Romney’s secret slogan that he doesn’t know he’s broadcasting is, “Obama can’t fix the mess we’ve made.”

BILL: You know what? I have to stick up for the president a little bit. I hear this all the time “Obama’s policies aren’t working”, but he hasn’t been allowed to put his policies in place. So it’s not his policies.

DAVID: That’s what I just said, and that’s not a defense.

BILL: That’s not a defense?

DAVID: That’s not a defense because – yes – he’s faced contractable opposition often unfair and disrespectful but his job is to overcome it, and when he makes that excuse…

BILL:Oh really? How could he do that? Short of actually putting a gun to John Bohener’s and head and saying VOTE for this.

KAREN FINNEY: Which he tried.

BILL: Oh Really? How? I don’t know how you do that, especially since they changed the rules in the Senate and made it 60 votes.

KAREN FINNEY: We only had a “so called” majority for about 4 months because Teddy Kennedy got sick, another Senator hadn’t been seated, and the Republicans did a very good job of obstructing the president performance. So to my point…

DAVID: Now you’re giving me reasons of why it didn’t work. That doesn’t alter my point of the fact that didn’t work.

KAREN FINNEY: But my point is to what the president can do – We don’t what.

BILL: Kristen you tweeted recently “The idea that money buys elections is rooted in the premise that voters are dumb.”, and I’ve always been the one to stand up and say “Voters are dumb”. They hate that on the right, but you know.

KRISTEN: So there’s an excuse you hear, whenever an election happens (and the Republicans did this in 2008) and you’ll hear this kind of both sides now, and it’s like the idea that “We got outspent and that’s the reason why we lost.” I mean anytime a campaign looses you hear all sorts of excuses from the candidate was bad, the strategist was bad, the weather wasn’t good and people didn’t turn out for us. And I think a lot of that is just excuses. You never hear a candidate get up and say, “You know what, I lost because people didn’t like my ideas. People disagreed with me.” You never hear that. And I really think ideas, especially in an election when unemployment’s been so high for so long, it’s going to be an election about ideas.

KAREN FINNEY: But we’ve got two factors working here. On the one hand you’ve got, I mean considering it’s a Republican primary – you’ve got one donor shout down with his money, Shelly Addleson, the voice of republican primary voters, who did not support Newt Gingrich – so that’s what we’re seeing. Not to mention with the kind of voter idea schemes that we’re seeing, that’s going to disenfranchise voters. So the kind of money that’s being spent and the amount of democratic voters that are going to be disenfranchised – that is going to contribute quite heavily to what is going to happen in this election.

KRISTEN: Although money can’t buy everything, I think Rick Perry spent about $20 million dollars to get no delegates. So money will only get you so far.

BILL: Right. No amount. If you’re an absolutely bad candidate, take Meg Whitman out here – no amount of money can save them. But I thought it was, (I might repeat this – I said it in my monologue) but this blew my mind today “Obama has had a more fundraisers than the last six presidents combined and he’s still losing in the money race. And that’s because, let me just introduce this: People like Harold Ham, (I had not heard of this guy before, but they wrote about this week), he’s an Oil billionaire and surprise he’s one of Mitt Romney’s top Energy Advisors. I don’t know what you have to do be an Energy Advisor to Mitt Romney. I think you just have to “Fracking is amazing and Global Warming is a hoax”, that’s what he want’s to hear. So he gave $985 thousand dollars to Mitt Romney’s SUPER PAC. Why not million? That’s the first question I have? I mean, does he really need that 15 grand? I mean am being too cynical about Mitt Romney? Can you be too cynical about Mitt Romney?

So it says in his website [Harold Hamm] that he’d like to see less regulations. Maybe he’s got some personal gain in that just to guess. And it’s a good thing that he can give a million dollars, or 10 million dollars or 50 million dollars to Mitt Romney, because he’s going to be the one whose making decisions about regulations. And I’d just like to throw out a quote here from Justice Anthony Kennedy. He said, [per Citizens United] “Independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption… the appearance of influence or access [coming from unlimited corporate spending] will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.”

Really? What world? What is the color of the sky? This is a Supreme Court Justice? If this guy who is giving Mitt Romney a million dollars or maybe more and is one of his advisors on Energy, if that’s not corruption, then tell me ‘WHAT IS’ Justice Kennedy? Tell me what is corruption?

KAREN FINNEY: What I love on the flip side of that argument is you have conservatives saying that they’re “so afraid of the poor consumers and if people knew that they were contributing my God they might think retribution”. Well if money is speech then I get to use my money to say “I don’t agree with you writing that big of a check and I’m not going to buy your products. But that argument seems to get lost on Republicans.

KRISTEN: But the Citizens United, actually, one of the things that’s sort of like the headline below the headline is that there was this 8:1 vote within the ruling to uphold the constitutionality of transparency, so oddly enough it kind of gets blasted a lot.

KAREN FINNEY: But I don’t think anybody told Mitt Romney that considering that we don’t even know…

DAVID: Super Pac’s are not a creation of Citizens United – they’re the creation by another court case by the DC Circuit and (and more contended) it has a sort of weird intersection at Citizens United. But Citizens United only allowed corporations directly to speak – not to create these anonymous entities. That was created by a different case. But here, I agree this is a terrible problem. It does look corrupt and it doesn’t look like people aren’t buying things. But we are at the end of a 50-year – 60-year period in which we have said ‘the problems has been the political participants.’ What used to happen is people used to give money to political parties and since the 1940’s and especially since the 1970’s we have made it more and more difficult for people to do that. Because we thought the parties were corrupt. And what we’ve done is created this whole alternative candidate center; system of finance with a whole series of laws in each reform that makes it worst. Because each reform has another dose of the poison and the poison is: a dislike and distrust of the parties. If the rule were people gave money to the the Democrats, Libertarians, Republicans, Independents, and those parties could give limitless money tho their candidates – the candidates wouldn’t have to raise it. Right now they can only give $50K each to their candidate. The election costs more than $50K dollars. This is congressional, if the election costs more than $50K dollars the candidate has to go raise the difference himself. And this law was passed in 1940 when $50K is all that elections cost. Change THAT and everything would be different.

BILL: Well what do you think the amount will be (at the end of this election cycle) that each party is going to have to spend on this election?

KRISTEN: A lot!

KAREN FINNEY: The parties or the parties and super pacs? Because remember that the money that’s spent by the campaign and committee’s is more closely regulated than the money that goes to those super pac’s like … you know…

KRISTEN: There is going to be a diminishing return though. I mean at a certain point the difference between airing your ad a million times and two million times and three million times. It eventually just all kind of becomes noise.

BILL: Carpet bombing works. That’s why they do it.

DAVID: You know what works even better, and use a platform for this: ‘there’s nothing more powerful than a knock on the door.’ What has happened in our politics is that we have substituted capital for labor. People don’t volunteer. Nothing could be more powerful and we’ve seen this in 2008 with Barack Obama and other races – that if people were more involved and participatory they would find that THAT is more powerful than the money.

KAREN FINNEY: Is that why Scott Walker paid canvassers in the last election? Paid them. They weren’t volunteers, he paid them to go knock on those doors.

DAVID: Because he’s reading the political science and if you mobilize people. Though a paid canvasser is never going to be as good as someone who believes it. Mobilize them.

BILL: Did you see what Jebb Bush said this week? Because I thought you would be particularly happy about what he said. I always talk about the David Frum wing of the Republican Party — which I call “the sane wing” and you know, they’ve had a tough time in the last few years. [David] You are aware? You’ve been trod marched out to the desert there. You may not see the promise land.

KRISTEN: [to David] I like you.

BILL: But Jeb Bush this week said, ‘You know what if my father were around today or Ronald Reagan they couldn’t get legislation passed. They would be drummed out of the party.’ Which (even though Jeb’s not running for office today) is a pretty gutsy thing to say. Gave me some hope that your wing [David] of the party might be coming back. And there was this sort of nostalgia among liberals now for George Bush (the first). HBO is now doing a documentary about him. Even Ronald Reagan – because Ronald Reagan raised taxes and he was for no nukes, he was very much for collective bargaining. I mean today, that’s Dennis Kucinich.

DAVID: But the most important difference was a commitment to the institutions of the U.S. Government. What has really changed over the past few years is an attack on the institution. That’s one of the themes of my book. It’s one of the themes of our politics – there’s an institutional attack. What George Bush and Ronald Reagan too were – above all were institutionalists. In their day they were very conservative and you would have lots to disagree with them about, but they would not have pushed the country to the edge of bankruptcy in order to make a point. What I’m hoping for from Jeb Bush is that, he started this fight, (he wanted to – he didn’t have to do it). But he was at breakfast, he was asked a question and now — I hope he finishes it. I hope he stays in and believes that he could be the voice that we need, I don’t think he’ll be president, but he could be something much better than president.

BILL: Naw. But I remember his father, you know, the nostalgia for his father? But his father appointed Clarence Thomas, you know ran on Willy Horton, Dan Quaile… excuse me, was Sarah Palin with tits before they had… I mean John McCain did not invent “the bimbo running mate”, George W. Bush did. I just had to say…

KAREN FINNEY: I’d just like to say thing about Jeb Bush for one moment was brave and within a couple of hours when Grover Norquist bitched he started walking that right back. Grover Norquist. Though the Republicans like to say “He’s not in charge of our party. He doesn’t have any influence.” I mean, so you gotta stand by what you say.

DAVID: Finish it. If you start a fight finish it. Steer into the skin.

BILL: Alright. We have something very exciting now, we have a scoop here at REAL TIME. The Romney campaign has made a hologram of Barack Obama. That’s right. Have you seen the hologram of Tupac? And now they have one of Elvis. Okay so the Romney campaign made one of Obama. Why? Because the real Obama is not cooperating. He’s not being the guy they want to run against. They want to run against a socialist who is soft on terror, but they’re running against a guy who has actually spent less in government money getting us out of a recession, (less than Bush or Reagan), and he shot Bin Laden in the eye and took out the rest of Al Qaeda in a cold blooded, methodical and extra legal way. So they have to run against the hologram Barack Obama. Would you like to meet him now? Alright ladies and gentlemen please welcome the man that the Republicans need to run against, the hologram Barack Obama:

Click here: http://youtu.be/bdHw4ZheoO4
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