FARAI CHIDEYA, host:
Seven Democratic candidates duped it out at last night's presidential debates in Las Vegas, Nevada. Who came out on top? Some say it was the Silver State itself. It was the first presidential debate ever held in the state of Nevada. It was fiery and even briefly bilingual.
Governor BILL RICHARDSON (Democrat, New Mexico; Presidential Candidate): (Speaking in foreign language).
(Soundbite of cheers)
CHIDEYA: For more on the debate and Nevada's role in politics, we're going to be joined by political strategist Jamal Simmons. First of all, I want to move on to Hillary Clinton. She garnered one of the loudest rounds of applause last night with this remark.
Senator HILLARY CLINTON (Democrat, New York; Presidential Candidate): I'm not playing, as some people say, the gender card here in Las Vegas. I'm just trying to play the winning card. And I understand very well that…
(Soundbite of applause)
Sen. CLINTON: …people are not attacking me because I'm a woman. They're attacking me because I'm ahead. And I understand…
(Soundbite of applause)
CHIDEYA: Jamal Simmons is with us now. How do you think Hillary did last night?
Mr. JAMAL SIMMONS (Political Strategist; President, New Future Communications): Senator Clinton did a great job last night. I think one of the things people were looking to see is whether or not she could withstand the attacks of her opponents and show that she was up to the challenge of being challenged. I think she did that very well.
CHIDEYA: So what about this whole question of a woman running for the White House. How do you think she finessed that whole question of whether or not she was a woman running for the White House or, as she put it, the best qualified candidate?
Mr. SIMMONS: Well, we sort of - this is a rerun of the question. The first pass at it didn't go over so well when she didn't knew how to take the gender - play the gender card on the issue, at least her campaign did and President Clinton did. But last night, she took accountability. She is the leader. It's not about her being a woman. Every other candidate who has tried to make a run of this race has had people come after them and no one mentioned any issues of race or gender. So I think she - in the second pass, she did the right thing.
CHIDEYA: Let's talk about some of the candidates who are not polling so well. There was a lot of focus on senators Clinton and Obama and Edwards. We're going to get to more of that in a second. But what about the other candidates we just heard at the top, a small clip from Bill Richardson. You had a lot of debate over the war. Did any of the other candidates stand out at any moment?
Mr. SIMMONS: Joe Biden is clearly a class by himself when it comes to foreign policy. I mean he understands what's going on in the world at a nuanced level that no other candidate on the stage does. The problem is Americans very rarely vote for the most qualified person on any issue to be president. We vote for the people that we actually trust to do the things that they say they're going to do.
So while Biden has been doing really well in the debates and he clearly, again, knows more about these issues than anyone else, it hasn't been showing up in his fundraising or his polling because of all the other factors that are going on in the race.
CHIDEYA: Now, Senator Hillary Clinton was deemed a loser in some previous debates or not doing as well as she could have. Last night, Senator Barack Obama got a little bit tongue-tied. He was talking about granting licenses in Illinois for undocumented immigrants, whether or not that is something that should happen.
Mr. SIMMONS: Yeah. I think that the, you know, the challenge here is that he spent two weeks talking about Senator Clinton, saying like she's on every side of this issue. And even last night, the answer that she gave wasn't really consistent with the answers she has been giving for the last couple of weeks. At least, you know, there should have been a follow-up question to get her to explain it.
I think most people walked away from the original exchange believing that she was in favor of driver's licenses for illegal aliens. And last night, she said she wasn't. Senator Obama tried to have a nuanced answer to the question as well.
CHIDEYA: Jamal, let me actually just play a little bit of that clip.
Mr. SIMMONS: Sure.
Mr. WOLF BLITZER (Moderator): Do you support or oppose driver's licenses for illegal immigrants?
Senator BARACK OBAMA (Democrat, Illinois; Presidential Candidate): I am not proposing that that's what we do. What I'm saying is that we can't…
(Soundbite of laughter)
Sen. OBAMA: No, no, no, look, I have already said. I support the notion that we have to deal with public safety and that driver's licenses at the state level can make that happen. But what I also…
Mr. BLITZER: All right.
Sen. OBAMA: But what I also know, Wolf, is that if we keep on getting distracted by this problem, then we are not solving it.
Mr. BLITZER: But - because this is the kind of question that is sort of available for a yes or no answer.
(Soundbite of cheers)
Mr. BLITZER: Either you support it or you oppose it.
CHIDEYA: What do you think that exchange says about the difficulty of dealing with some of these issues, where someone argue you can't win choosing one side or the other, you really can't win.
Mr. SIMMONS: It is tough to have a nuanced argument in campaigns especially because campaigns are about differences in trying to find a person that you agree with and the person that you trust to handle the thing you should think are important as a voter. So it is a little tougher when you want to start having a more nuanced conversation about what you think. And frankly, most of these issues are not black and white, they are gray. And so it's tough for candidates to try to pull that together.
I do think Senator Obama was clear that he said that he was for the - he was for illegal immigrants having a driver's license. But in his efforts trying to explain it more broadly, he did get a little tripped up.
CHIDEYA: Before we let you go, I want to ask you about where you were last night, because I understand that you were there but not quite there.
Mr. SIMMONS: Well, you know, in fairness, I think I was actually in the hall for some period of time and I was in the press filing center. What typically happens at debates, the media is all - is put into another room where they can watch debates on TV screens. I mean, it happened sometimes to 20 of these things in the last 15 years.
CHIDEYA: So you were…
Mr. SIMMONS: So that is a typical thing that happens.
CHIDEYA: You were in a basement room with TV screens. Do you think that affected your coverage at all in the sense that you may not have had quite the same access to the crowd and their cheering, their booing, their laughing?
Mr. SIMMONS: Well, again, I was actually in the debate hall for some time because I was actually one of the - I worked with the Nevada Democratic Party. So I was in the debate hall for some period and I was in the press filing center which happened to be in another room that was below the debate hall. To call it a basement would be kind of an overstatement. But, yes, the only difference is you don't get a chance - you get the same experience as a journalist as the viewer gets who's watching it at home.
Because I think it's a fairly fair way of doing these things. But what we did see last night, which we didn't talk about is and wasn't reflected in the clips you played, Barack Obama actually last night, for the first time, I felt like he was the most comfortable he's ever been on that stage. He also had a very commanding presence. And one of the things I've been critical about him in his campaign is that he hasn't sort of shown the command of a president, the bearing of someone who is going to take charge of the country.
And last night, I felt like he did that for the first time, you know, the last couple of weeks, it does seem like he's sort of getting his mojo as a candidate. And so that, I thought, was important. The tough thing though for someone like John Edwards, who is really ready to go after Senator Clinton, is the crowd was not in the mood to have a lot of conflict last night between the candidates. So he really did stop that exchange. And I think he would have had a more eventful debate had the crowd not been as involved with it as it was.
CHIDEYA: Well, Jamal, thank you so much.
Mr. SIMMONS: Thank you.
CHIDEYA: I've been speaking with political strategist, Jamal Simmons.
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