SCOTT SIMON, host:
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.
This week Senator John McCain's health records were released to the public. Presumptive presidential nominees from both parties begin the hunt for running mates. Congress passes 165 billion dollar war funding bill and also overrides the President's veto of the farm bill. NPR's senior news analyst Dan Schorr joins us. Hello Dan.
DAN SCHORR: Hi Scott.
SIMON: And let me please begin before we get to that with the national and bipartisan concern this week over the health of Senator McCain.
SCHORR: Oh absolutely.
SIMON: Is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor.
SCHORR: Well, all right, first you have to say full disclosure. Senator Kennedy wrote the introduction to a book I once wrote on health insurance so I may be biased. In fact on this occasion I'm very very biased. It's hard to know what to say as somebody who has lived these years and contributed so much who has his mark on so much of the constructive legislation, as happened. I guess you get to a point where you say this is not just a politician, this is a national treasure.
SIMON: Yeah, there was a time when he was very controversial, and not just for his politics.
SCHORR: And he would like to be controversial still, but for his politics.
SIMON: I'm going to ask about the farm bill. The House and Senate both voted to override the President's veto, but there were 34 pages missing from the version that Congress enacted. What was in that missing section of the bill? Do you have it?
SCHORR: This is a great congressional version of the dog ate my homework. This bill was going back and forth in getting ready for a veto by the President and there was one title of the bill filling almost all of those 34 pages, which had mainly to do with feeding hungry countries overseas. I don't think that was deliberately dropped out or anything like that, but you can make whatever you want of it, but the result of it was that in giving the bill to the President to veto, he had not yet vetoed the (inaudible) which was missing. And they'll probably spend the next five years trying to figure out what to do about that.
SIMON: Of course more talk this week about the presumptive presidential nominees which seem to be Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic side and certainly Senator John McCain on the Republican side, and the fact that they can't do it alone. They're going to have to have running mates. Let me ask you to join the great national guessing game. Of course, not a guess, you're very well informed.
SCHORR: The one thing I think I would predict is that it will be a senator. They have three senators now and I think they're going to go, both of them, for a governor. They both have governor friends, a couple of governors are spending time on the ranch with Senator McCain this weekend. And I'll put that out, if I'm wrong, I'll obviously apologize for it. I think no senator but a governor.
SIMON: Senator John McCain's health records were released on Friday, anything unexpected?
SCHORR: He apparently is okay. I mean it all adds up to a lot of records and you go through them all, and what it means is there have no recurrence of the skin cancer which he had and no indication that they will, and he is okay. He's healthy.
SIMON: I want to ask about something that also broke on Friday. Senator Hillary Clinton quickly apologized for following criticism from Senator Obama's campaign about making a reference to the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. Now let me be careful on this. She was meeting...
SCHORR: Well, she wasn't.
SIMON: Well, or was she? Let me ask. An editorial board in South Dakota asked her about - calls for her to drop out of the race, she said...
Senator Hillary Clinton (Democrat, New York; Presidential Candidate): Now, my husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California. You know, I just, I don't understand it.
SIMON: Now, were people being hypersensitive when...
SCHORR: What I - no, what I don't understand is this kind of tin ear that politicians sometimes develop maybe where they work too hard and they don't sleep enough or whatever, this is a very intelligent women and to make this kind of a reference as though to say, hey, hang on there, Obama might get assassinated, and then you really would (inaudible).
SIMON: Do you really think that's what she was suggesting?
SCHORR: She was suggesting that since a candidate was assassinated in June and had to be replaced, that that could happen again. Yes, I think so. But she's apologized.
SIMON: And she said, look, my thoughts have been with the Kennedy family this week, as a lot of Americans have been thinking about them and that might've been behind my reference too.
SCHORR: Yup.
SIMON: Senate on Armed Services Committee held confirmation hearings this week for General Petraeus is up for a new job as head of U.S. Central Command. The senators have been grilling them, any information you gleamed out of there?
SCHORR: Well, General Petraeus has things looking a little bit better. We think maybe by September we can draw down some more troops in Iraq, which would be very handy for the administration to have that happen right during the election season. But both he and General Dempsey who is succeeding him both made of point of saying that we think that maybe we can do some work with Iran.
And it was unusual upbeat kind of thing which went with several other upbeat things that happened in the past week. First of all the Hezbollah and Lebanon reached an agreement with the Lebanese government, and then there was the sudden news that Israel had been negotiating with Syria through a third party, Turkey, to see whether something could be done there. So I don't know, little burst of sanity.
SIMON: Thanks very much, Dan Schorr.
SCHORR: Sure.
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