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- [Voiceover] This is the Washington Week
Webcast Extra.
- Hi, everybody, and welcome to the
Washington Week Webcast Extra
where we pick up where we left off in the daily,
the weekly, that is, broadcast.
I'm joined around the table by Josh Gerstein of Politico,
Doyle McManus of Los Angeles Times,
Michael Scherer of Time Magazine,
and Molly Ball of the Atlantic.
While we've all been focused on the apparent
inevitability of a Clinton-Trump general election campaign,
there is still resistance out there.
There is, for example, a Libertarian ticket,
made up of two former governors,
and there are the constant rumors about a draft.
What is true, Molly?
- Well, in fact there is not yet a Libertarian ticket.
The libertarian party's convention is this weekend
and there are several candidates vying for the nomination.
Now the favorite is thought to be
former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson,
who ran four years ago, first as a Republican in fact.
Got into, I think one of the Republican debates,
and then was the Libertarian Party nominee,
and got a record number of votes for the Libertarian Party.
There's perennially a stream in American politics
of some kind of third party movement
to give people an alternative to a part, a two-party system
many people find sort of suffocating.
- Actual candidates from time to time.
- Well, there's two problems with this sort of
impossible dream of a third party, right?
One of them is that there are a lot of people who agree
that they don't like the two parties
in the two-party system,
but they don't agree on anything else.
So, when it actually comes down to formulating a platform--
- Kind of like an Occupy problem.
- For what your third party stands for,
then you lose most of those people,
because some of them are, you know,
want fiscally conservative and socially liberal,
and some them want socially conservative
and fiscally liberal, right?
- Some of them want to audit the FED,
and some of them want to provide free college.
- Exactly, that's exactly it.
And then the second problem.
This election, obviously there's a major contingent
of disaffected conservatives,
people who feel that Donald Trump's Republican Party
is not their Republican Party,
and there's been an aggressive attempt to try to get
either Mitt Romney or somebody like him
to run as a conservative third party candidate.
- Why won't that idea go away?
It keeps coming back.
- Well, it keeps coming back
because there's a lot of people
who really don't like Donald Trump
and are part of this sort of Republican establishment
and are used to sort of getting to run things,
and but the problem for those people is
they don't have a candidate who's willing to do it.
And without a candidate who's willing to do it,
preferably someone quite prominent,
because it's very difficult to get attention
when you're not the major party nominee
for either major party.
They really have very little chance of being anything
other than a sort of fringe candidacy either.
So, the Libertarians, because it's impossible,
it's almost impossible to get on
the ballot in a lot of states.
In some states, their deadline has already passed.
So, an independent candidacy wouldn't even be an option
for many voters.
The Libertarian Party is on the ballot in all 50 states,
and so could provide an alternative if they have--
- Isn't the Green Party out there too?
I think I heard--
- I'm not sure if it's all 50, but that's also,
that would more be for the disaffected liberals.
- Isn't William Weld also being talked about
for vice president on this governor's ticket,
just for the record?
- He is Gary Johnson's running mate,
and so they've got extraordinarily
well-credentialed candidates.
The question is whether the activist base
of the Libertarian Party will accept them.
- I don't know how you break through at this point either.
- Michael, okay you're the math whiz at this table,
at least I now I decree that you are the math whiz.
- [Michael] I'll be for now.
- So, one of the things that,
one of the things that did break through this week,
was that Donald Trump got the required number
of delegates to win.
Now, there wasn't an election that I saw
that made us decide that was true.
So exactly how do we decide when someone has clinched
and are they counting the same way
on the Democratic side?
- The most delightful part of democracy in America
is it's not that democratic.
And so there are lots of fine print
to the rules in both parties.
What happened this week is that
a number of unbound delegates in North Dakota,
who have the option of committing,
even though they've been nominated as delegates
to the convention for any candidate they want,
announced after previously saying
they were going to not be with Trump,
announced that they were switching over and support Trump,
and that was enough to put him over the 1237 that he needed.
- Which allowed him to go to North Dakota
and do a victory lap.
- Well, it was well timed, wasn't it?
- [Gwen] Yeah it was.
- He went there for an interview speech, but yes,
the announcement was well timed.
On the Democratic side,
they have a slightly different system.
Unlike the Republican side,
where there are a lot of delegates who actually have
the ability to change their mind on the first ballots,
the Democrats make it undemocratic
in a slightly different way.
They have a group of superdelegates
who are basically elected officials and other people
that have been named as delegates,
even if they are not nominated or elected
or result from any caucus or primary process.
Given that Hillary Clinton at this point
in the Democratic primary is the only Democrat running,
with the historic Democratic pedigree,
and a lot of people committed to her very early on,
she is way ahead in that count,
and that is what will allow her to--
- [Gwen] Infuriates Bernie Sanders.
- Declare after the California vote
that she has enough delegates to win the nomination
no matter really what happens.
- Even if she doesn't win California.
- Even if she loses California,
because in the Democratic primaries,
it's always proportional.
So she gets 40%, and it's a blow out, Bernie get 60%,
she'll still get 40% of the delegates, and that'll be a lot.
And so Bernie's case at that point will be,
or at least he's saying it will be, "It's not over yet.
"The mainstream media is lying to you.
"The corporate media won't tell you the truth.
"These superdelegates can change their mind
at any point," and that is true.
- And that won't happen until the convention.
- And they could change their mind at any point
over the next six weeks before the convention,
or five weeks.
- I'm sorry, is the convention only five weeks away?
- No, after California, two weeks, yeah in July.
Maybe it's seven weeks.
- Ah, Mr. Math Whiz, I see.
- You called it.
The problem with his argument is
that the people he has to convince to switch to his side
are the people who he has angered the most.
So it's just not a natural argument.
And he may, if he continues on the road he's going,
go full bore for the month of June and beginning of July,
and really rail against the party establishment,
the undemocratic process,
how they're not following the will of the people.
Now it should be noted also that
Bernie Sanders got about two million votes less
at this point than Hillary Clinton.
So, it's not just this undemocratic superdelegates
that are doing this.
He's also losing in the vote count.
- Wow, okay Josh, back to the emails for a moment.
It seems that one of the enduring questions about this,
and every time another statement comes out,
it doesn't really tell us anything that much different
from what the last report investigation came told us,
but one of the unresolved questions
is Hillary Clinton's lieutenants, her staff,
and whether they have been cooperating
with all of these investigations,
and whether they even feel the need to?
- Well, they didn't cooperate
with the Inspector General investigations.
Some of them are cooperating
with the ongoing FBI investigation.
Her people said that the reason why she didn't
cooperate with this IG investigation,
is 'cause they're prioritizing the FBI investigation,
which is a little puzzling 'cause she hadn't met
with any of the FBi investigators.
So, it doesn't seem like her schedule would be full
with that other matter.
But I think that the real question is where
they develop their attitudes about sort of transparency
and response to not just investigations,
but also all kinds of outside queries,
and I think that the answer to that
probably has something to do
with something that Donald Trump actually brought up
this week which was the suicide of Vince Foster,
the White House official back in the early 90s.
It's not specifically that, but that whole climate
in which the Clintons came to Washington.
They were so sort of pilloried,
or felt pilloried during that period,
and the ensuing investigations.
Many of those people are the same people
that are either were working for Hillary Clinton
when she was at the State Department,
contiued to advise her either officially or informally.
They were all forged in that cauldron
of the early 90s scandals
where it did seem that if you gave an inch,
it was only to your detriment.
- It should be said that a lot of us reporters
were forged in that cauldron as well,
and having covered the White House at that time,
I do, does feel all horribly dated to me,
and a lot of things like
the Vince Foster suicide investigation
have been litigated and resolved over the years.
So, I'm not certain what's stirring up
that particular cauldron will do to her now.
- Oh, I don't think it will do any damage to her,
but I think it gives you some insight
as to the baseline that the Clintons
and many of their top aides come from.
You know, we live in this era of extreme transparency,
and it's just frankly not something that
she or her people seem sort of
instinctively comfortable with.
Maybe it's age, maybe it's what they've been through,
it's hard to know, but it doesn't seem their initial reflex
when confronted with some kind of problem
is to say, "Well, how open can we be about this?"
And you do think again and again, this report for example
mentioned that somebody noticed that she had used
this email address in 2013, and some people were like,
"Oh, that's a scandal", so long ago.
But also makes you think, if this came out in 2013,
the many of the events that have played out
in the last year during the campaign,
might have played out a year earlier.
Maybe bottling these things up is not always the best way.
- It should be said, even back in 1994, and '5, and '6,
they were not that transparent.
Doyle, let's talk about Vietnam.
The part of this trip that was actually very amazing
and interesting, but got overlooked by what followed
the president's trip to Asia.
- President Obama was the third American president
to go to Vietnam.
That's a reconciliation that has been a long time coming,
but it still is kind of amazing to look at Vietnam,
this country that we were at war with
for the better part of 15 years,
an impossibly divisive war here,
and impossibly damaging war there,
and how much of that has slipped by,
how much Vietnam wants to have
a close relationship with the United States,
and how much the United States wants to have
a relationship with Vietnam.
And one index of that,
before President Obama went,
the signals were quite clear from the White House
that he was going to lift the arms embargo on Vietnam,
which had been in place since the Vietnam War,
since the communists took over, to some degree.
But most of the experts thought it would be partial,
it wouldn't include lethal weaponry.
It might include boats, vehicles, you know,
help bulk them up, but we wouldn't go
all the way into weapons,
in part because of continuing concerns, problems,
with Vietnam's very tough,
repressive humnan rights policies.
It's still a communist dictatorship,
and they still put dissidents in jail.
So, President Obama goes to Vietnam, and he decides,
and the decision actually apparently was not made until
very shortly before the trip.
He decides that he wants to go big.
He's no half measures.
They get the full embargo lifted.
Human rights groups were furious.
They were rightly furious,
because there was in fact a mini-crackdown
just before the president's trip.
There were three dissidents who wanted to meet
with the president who were blocked from meeting him
by the government.
So, they were playing hardball.
They weren't being very sweet,
and boy that's an indicator of how much
these two countries want this relationship to work,
and then all that goes back to China.
How do you counter the growing influence of China,
economically, militarily?
China's reach for territorial rights in the South China Sea,
where the largest country with the most overlapping claims
on the islands in the South China Sea
is Vietnam, of course.
So, we're not, technically the United States
is not choosing sides in those disputes.
Technically the United States' position is
it should be decided by international judicial means,
but boy it sure looks like there's
a kind of self-reinforcing tendency here
for a China bloc and a not-China bloc
to line up against each other.
- Okay, thank you Den, Doyle.
Thank you everyone else as well.
Anything on your phone while we were sitting there?
Anything interesting you can tell me?
I'm just hoping.
- I was playing with it.
- I knew it. (laughs)
We need our toys.
Stay online and see what else our panel is seeing
in our daily Washington Week feature,
News You Need To Know.
All that is at pbs.org/washingtonweek,
plus be sure to join me Wednesday night
for a PBS Town Hall with President Obama
from Elkhart, Indiana.
And we'll see you next time,
on the Washington Week Webcast Extra.
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