Copyright 2002 American Broadcasting Companies, Inc.
ABC News Transcripts
SHOW: THIS WEEK WITH GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (10:30 AM ET) - ABC
December 29, 2002 Sunday
LENGTH: 2204 words HEADLINE: ROUNDTABLE TODAY'S HOT TOPICS BODY: GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS, ABC NEWS (Off Camera) Time now for the roundtable. Joining us, as always, George Will and Michel Martin. And our special guest this morning, for the end of the year show, Al Franken. Thanks for being here. And let me start with you, Al. We want to look back first at the big stories of 2002, and for you, the biggest story was one that didn't happen. AL FRANKEN, COMMENTATOR That's right. First, I got to just tell you, it's a thrill to be here with all of you. It's an honor. I've been watching the show for so many years, and just to tell a little process about how this roundtable is done, we had a conference call a couple days ago. And you asked what was the big story? And I said, I think the big story is a story that didn't happen. There was not a terrorist attack in this country, and George, a little grudgingly said, "he's right." GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) He agreed with you pretty quickly. AL FRANKEN I thought so. But that was one of the biggest thrills of my life. No terrorist attack this year, and I don't know why. I hope it's because we're brilliant, but something tells me it isn't, you know. Gary Hart and Rudman put out a task force report a couple of months ago, saying we're woefully unprepared, and sometimes, I get the idea that this Administration is more intent on using homeland security as a political issue, than giving the resources and the will toward getting it done. The American people have not been asked to do that much. We've been asked to stay alert. And they warn us a lot. You know, 9/11, the anniversary of 9/11, we went to orange alert, which is the second highest level of alert. It's the highest level at which you're still encouraged to go shopping. And red alert is the highest level of alert, but that's, there, the President wants you just to shop on-line. But I just don't think that we are serious enough about homeland security. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Do you agree with that, George? GEORGE WILL, ABC NEWS (Off Camera) No, I think, first of all, telling 280 million Americans to be alert, deputizing 280 million pairs of eyeballs and ears matters. Second, you can't improve on zero, and that's what you have to judge this President on in his Administration. Nothing happened this year. That's amazing, considering that we're vulnerable everywhere everyday, and our enemies can bide their time and pick their targets. Now, I don't know what the explanation of this is, but I do know that instantly after 9/11, the President turned to the Attorney General and said, make sure this doesn't happen again. It hasn't. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Luck or skill, Michel? MICHEL MARTIN, ABC NEWS (Off Camera) Luck or skill? Well, gee, I was hoping to be Little Mary Sunshine today, just in honor of the end of the year, but it has to be a combination of both. I mean I think that everybody understands now that these terrorist attacks were not planned in a couple of months. It was a couple of years, and that the people were biding their time and looking for an opportunity, so I don't think that the fact that we, thankfully, escaped an incident this year is an indicator of, it's fortunate. It's terrific. We all feel good about it, and I do believe that there obviously are stepped up security efforts all around the world, for which we should all be grateful. But some of it may have to do with the fact that they haven't picked another opportunity, and that they're biding their time. GEORGE WILL (Off Camera) And the snipers, the two snipers in the metropolitan area, showed how two people, not particularly trained, not part of, so far as we can tell, some large network, could paralyze the law enforcement, commercial, recreational life of a major metropolitan area, for weeks. MICHEL MARTIN (Off Camera) And a very well guarded one. GEORGE WILL (Off Camera) Exactly. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Second big story of the year, the economy. The market tumbled. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco collapsed. The rest of the economy just seemed to bump along, that's using President Bush's words. But George Will, President Bush didn't seem to pay a price. Why is that? GEORGE WILL (Off Camera) Because the market tumbled, but the economy didn't tumble. There is now a disjunction between the market and the economy. Growth this year, George, is slightly under three percent, which means slightly below the post-war average. Unemployment is at six percent, slightly above the post-war average. Inflation, which used to be the scourge of our economy, is at 1.5 percent. Now, what that means, way below the post-war average, that means interest rates are way down, which mean consumer debt costs much less, which means refinancing of mortgages is a big deal. The average refinancing in this country puts $200 a month into the pocket of the refinancing person. So the economy rolls merrily along, 70 percent of it is consumer spending, always has been, 20 percent is government spending. It's going up. The 10 percent that's the problem is business spending, but it's only 10 percent. MICHEL MARTIN (Off Camera) Maybe it's the fact that the people who are most profoundly affected by the economic slowdown are people who are invisible to many of us. I mean, they're not on the TV shows. We don't have, you know, we don't have sitcoms about these people. The number of poor increased in this country last year by 1.3 million. The median household income dropped by 2.2 percent last year. While I agree with you the economy has been remarkably resilient, the fact of the matter is that there are a number of people who are profoundly suffering. The thing we need to look out for in the coming year is whether the number of long-term unemployed increases. It's at one percent right now. That's not a huge number, unless, of course you are that one percent. But if that number starts to go up, then that bill is coming due. AL FRANKEN Statistics, I love statistics. I love misusing them, myself. MICHEL MARTIN (Off Camera) Excuse me? Step light. Excuse me, I've looked these up. These are . . . AL FRANKEN No, no, those were, those were great. I'm going to misuse one now. In the six years, about six years of both Bush administrations, the elder and the younger, there has not been one net new job created, and so here . . . GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Private sector. AL FRANKEN No, not one net new job, just in the whole economy. So this is, extending that logically, that means that if the Bushes had run the country from its inception to the present, no one in this country would have ever worked. We'd be the poorest country, we'd be poorer than Somalia. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) I don't think the Columbia Economic Department is gonna be hiring you any time soon. AL FRANKEN Numbers don't lie. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Let's switch. One other big story, end of the year, Trent Lott. And Michel, I want to start there with you. And, you know, we talked a lot about Trent Lott, the machinations inside the Senate. But just let's take a step back and try to reflect on how did one sentence at a birthday party explode into such a big cultural event? MICHEL MARTIN (Off Camera) Well, I don't know that it was one sentence. I think that this was a year in which, just to use my previous metaphor again, to wear it out completely, this is the year in which the bill for bad behavior came due for a lot of people. This was a year of reckoning, where a lot of people were called to account for things that they had done over a long period of time, and had gotten away with it, and that involved CEOs, who had engaged in abuse of corporate practices, essentially looting their companies, that involved clergy members who had gotten away with appalling behavior over a period of years, and these people were finally brought to account. And I think that Trent Lott was part of that trend. It was his behavior on the same scale. But for some reason, he seems to have felt the need to affiliate himself with a fringe group of people who are obsessed with racial purity. It is a "discarded policy of the past," as he put it. So it really wasn't just a sentence. It was a fact that a number of people finally decided that enough is enough. And I'm wondering whether, and I don't know what you think about this, but possibly, could it be because we are on eve of what may be another conflict, that enough people said, you know, enough of this? We don't have time for this kind of nonsense. We really are at a moment when we want to call upon national unity, and this is the kind of behavior and world view that has no place in a country that needs to move forward on the international stage, and is calling other people to live together in a very different way. GEORGE WILL (Off Camera) I think it is partly that. It's also the fact that, as the years go by, generations change and the younger generation doesn't understand any of this. I mean, the whole idea that we should be preoccupied simultaneously with weapons of mass destruction and the 1948 Presidential election is preposterous. I was struck, Michel, by not just one but two dinosaurs. It was "Jurassic Park" around here for two weeks. That is, you had Trent Lott worrying about 1948 or 1947, as he guessed it once was, and on the other hand, you have the, I have to say, brain dead, old-line civil rights movement that hasn't had a new idea for 30 years, they came out of the woodwork that said more racial preferences. Let's think about reparations. All the while, we're heading down the road toward this coming year, a huge supreme court decision concerning racial preferences at the University of Michigan, and I think we're going to be beyond that now. Both the civil rights movement in its antiquated form and Trent Lott are going to seem equally anachronistic. AL FRANKEN You know, one thing that I didn't understand is you never heard, no one ever asked Strom Thurmond what he thought. I don't know. He would have been a great guest on your show. Someone just said recently that we live in a country where our most popular rapper is white, and our best golfer is black. And I just think what the Trent Lott thing sort of showed was that we're so just beyond this, it's just stupid. One of the most popular shows on Broadway right now is "Hair Spray." And it's this big, fun, happy show about a fat girl who gets the guy, trying to desegregate in the early '60s, a rock 'n' roll dance show, and if Trent Lott had just gone to the show, he just would have felt like an idiot, which, I think, he does anyway. I think now, that isn't to say we still don't have segregation and we don't, I just think this showed that the Republican party takes a risk and pays a price when it panders to a certain part of its base. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) I'm not sure if Trent Lott's gonna go see "Hair Spray." And we only have a little over a minute left. But I just want to ask each of you, then, to look ahead to 2003, and give us something to watch for in 2003. George? GEORGE WILL (Off Camera) Well, aside from another cut against affirmative action inflicted by the supreme court, I do not believe a country with a large and growing middle class will forever be ruled by medieval mullahs, so the great event of the next year could be a revolution in the third of the axis of evil, Iran. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Michel? MICHEL MARTIN (Off Camera) I'll be interested to see whether the Administration takes the advice of a number of countries around the world and gets more involved in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because all of its efforts in Iraq will come to naught if that part of, if that part of the world, these little, these two little countries side by side, can't figure out a way to stop the bloodshed, which seems to be escalating, even as we sit here. We haven't talked about it a lot lately, because it's been overshadowed by other events. But it's the backdrop against so much of what's going on in the world, and I think that the Administration will find a need to get more involved, even as it takes on the North Korea issue. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Al? AL FRANKEN I think the big story, I'm gonna go out on a limb on this, might be the war in Iraq. I think that might be a very, very big story to watch for the next year. And let me explain why. No, I think that's, and what's interesting about it to me, I don't know how much time we have, we're told this is going to be a cakewalk if we do this war. And I guess, you know, Cheney and Bush ran against the Clinton military, saying it was at the lowest readiness since Pearl Harbor, so I guess Rumsfeld just must be a genius. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) Well, we're going to see. Al Franken, thank you for joining us. Michel and George, happy new year. AL FRANKEN Happy new year. GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (Off Camera) We'll be back with George Will finding new meaning in "Murder in the Cathedral." ANNOUNCER "This Week's" roundtable, brought to you by . . . commercial break Go back to the main page.
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