KERRY: I think the person who has to worry about coming down to the South and campaigning is President George Bush, who's had 36 months of sustained loss of manufacturing jobs, who has ignored health care, who's turned his back on the schools in the South and who is fundamentally the worst administration in modern history with respect to the environment. And his foreign policy has been reckless and arrogant and led America to break our relationships around the globe.
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EDWARDS: Historically we've never elected a Democrat president without winning at least five southern states.
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KUCINICH: There's so much talent on this stage that I believe this race is going to go all the way to the convention. And what that means -- no one's going to get 50 percent of the delegates going to the convention.
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DEAN: The president was not candid with the American people when we went to war. It's why I did not support going to war, even though I did support the first Gulf War and I did support the Afghanistan war. I simply didn't believe what the president was saying. What we now find out is that the Vice President Dick Cheney went to the CIA on at least one occasion, and maybe more, sat with middle- level CIA operatives and berated them because he didn't like their intelligence reports. It seems to me that the vice president of the United States therefore influenced the very reports that the president then used to decide to go to war and to ask Congress for permission to go to war. The president himself and the secretary of state have recently admitted that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11; that there was no connection and no evidence of connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. In that case, why are we in Iraq? And why are so many people from South Carolina there right now, when they should be home concentrating on homeland security and when they should be going after Osama bin Laden and Al Qaida?
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KERRY: The president gave guarantees not just to the Congress and to the American people, but to the world, about how he would conduct himself as president. He said he would build a legitimate global coalition. He said he would respect the United Nations inspection process and work through it. And he said to the American people he would go to war only as a last resort. I will tell you, and I think General Clark will share this, that those who've been to war know that the words "last resort" are important. And I intend to hold him accountable in this election, because the American people's pockets are being picked to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, and our troops are at greater risk than they needed to be. And we deserve leadership that knows how to take a nation to war if you have to.
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LIEBERMAN: The statements that this administration made before the war, the questions we now have about the intelligence about weapons of mass destruction, the failure of the Bush administration to be prepared for what to do after we overthrew Saddam have all unfortunately given a bad name to a just war. So I will never waiver in my conclusion that the world and America are safer with Saddam Hussein in prison and not in power.
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CLARK: The president is playing politics with national security when he says we'll be out (of Iraq) by the 30th of June. That's just an arbitrary date related to the presidential election. It's not related to what's going on on the ground.... I heard from the Pentagon two weeks after 9/11 that the administration was determined to go into Iraq, whether or not there was any connection with 9/11; that they were going to use it as a pretext for invading Iraq. And that was common knowledge in Washington. There should never have been a congressional authorization for the president to have a blank check to take this country to war, because everybody knew that's what he intended to do. And they knew what the timetable was. It was a politically motivated timetable to go in the 30th of March, just like this 30th of June date. We've got to change this government.
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SHARPTON: We were told, in the wake of 9/11, we were in imminent danger with weapons of mass destruction. We cannot allow him (Bush) to change this now and say we were just after Hussein because he was a bad guy. Everybody knows Hussein was a bad guy, and there are other bad guys who we didn't go after, and we didn't lie about it. I preached the funeral of a young man, Darius Jennings, who died shot down in a helicopter in Iraq. I preached it right here in Orangeburg, South Carolina. His mother was told he went to war to protect us from weapons of mass destruction. She was not told he went to war because we have a bad guy over there, because there's any number of bad guys. We should find a way to get rid of bad guys, but lying to the American people is not the way you run a country, and George Bush ought to be removed for that.
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BROKAW: Where has the exaggeration been in the threat on terrorism?
KERRY:Well, 45 minutes deployment of weapons of mass destruction, number one. Aerial vehicles to be able to deliver materials of mass destruction, number two. Nuclear weapons, number three. I could run a long list of clear misleading, clear exaggeration. The linkage to Al Qaida, number four. That said, they are really misleading all of America in a profound way. (The war on terror) is primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world -- the very thing this administration is worst at. And most importantly, the war on terror is also an engagement in the Middle East economically, socially, culturally, in a way that we haven't embraced, because otherwise we're inviting a clash of civilizations. And I think this administration's arrogant and ideological policy is taking America down a more dangerous path.
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CLARK: The president did not do all he could have done to have prevented that attack (on 9/11).... When the Bush administration came to office, the Bush administration was told the greatest threat to America is Osama bin Laden, and yet almost nine months later, when the United States was struck, there was still no plan as to what to do with Osama bin Laden. But we had worked really hard with Vladimir Putin to do something about national missile defense and get out of the ABM Treaty, and a lot of other things had been done. This administration did not have its priorities right, and the president, not the intelligence community, and not the previous administration, President George W. Bush must be held accountable for that. That's the job of the president of the United States: to focus attention, to set the priorities, to take the actions to keep America safe.
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KUCINICH: I think the problem is today is that the administration's approach, their doctrine is wrong. The doctrine of preemption led us into Iraq. The doctrine of unilateralism essentially led us into Iraq. The doctrine of first strike puts us at risk of expanding war. So this administration started off with the wrong doctrine. And you know what? It was ideologically driven. Because we know that the Project for the New American Century was talking years before about an attack on Iraq and their ideological adherents came into the administration. We need to re-engage with the world community and work with the world community through the U.N. Tom, that's the only way we're going to be safe as a nation.
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SHARPTON: Mr. Bush and some of his crowd have said they represent a Christian view against the Islamic. And I don't think Christ could join most of their churches. But many of their supporters talk about how they represent Christianity. I don't think they represent Christianity any more than some of these murderers, and mass murderers, represent Islam. So let's not blame the religion. Let's blame those that use religion to do some ruthless, deadly, wicked acts. Having said that, I think we should build relationships with those nations around the world, and I have visited them. And how do you build relationships? Work with them on things of self-interest. Many of them need clean water supplies, clean sanitation, trade. They would become our partners if we engaged in partnership. But I don't that the way we do that is attacking people's religion, trying to act like our religion is better.
And as far as Mr. Bush saying that he doesn't need a permission slip from the U.N., he doesn't think he needs votes from the American people to be president.
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DEAN: I think in some ways, unfortunately, the terrorists have already won. We have an act (Patriot) that allows American citizens to be held without knowing what they're charged with and without seeing a lawyer. To my knowledge, that hasn't happened since 1798, with the Alien and Sedition Acts.... I think none of us mind being searched and have our shaving kits rummaged through in the airlines and all that. But if we start giving up our fundamental liberties as Americans because terrorists attacked us, then we have a big problem. I honestly don't believe that John Ashcroft and George Bush and the members of the Federalist Society view the Constitution the way mainstream American attorneys or the way most American citizens do. We have a right to protection of our liberties. A lot of people died for that in the Revolutionary War. And I am not going to let the right wing of the Republican Party take those liberties away from us.
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DEAN: We ought to change NAFTA. We've only done half the job with globalization. You've globalized the rights of big corporations to do business anywhere in the country, but what we now need to do is globalize the rights of workers, labor unions, environmentalists and human rights. If you do that, you raise the standard of living in other countries. And what happens is our jobs stop going away because the cost of production goes up. It also reduces illegal immigration, because now you don't have to come to the United States to make a living, you can make one in your country. People don't leave their countries because they hate their country; they leave their countries because they can't make a living. And now we can do that.
You've got to put the emphasis on fair trade, not free trade. And what the problem has been that when the Clinton administration and the Bush administration continued to push this, only half the job was done. We forgot about the workers. If you want jobs in this country, here's what you do. First, you've got to balance the budget. Not one Republican president has balanced the budget in 34 years in this country. You cannot trust the right wing with your money. Secondly, you've got to invest in small businesses. Small businesses and self-employed people create 70 percent of all the new jobs in America. That's where our investments should be going, not tax credits to corporations who move their headquarters to Bermuda and their jobs to China.
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BROKAW: Congressman Kucinich, I know you have some strong feelings about NAFTA, but let me just preface your remarks with this observation.
This material that's coming in now from foreign countries -- it's a tragedy to lose the jobs here in South Carolina, but if you go to Illinois or California or the Great Plains and people go to Walmart or Costco or any of the other big, big stores these days, they kind of like those prices. They've gotten used to the idea of not paying as much for shoes or shirts or clothing or any other number of items because they are manufactured offshore.
KUCINICH: Well, that presumes that people of this country do not have a social consciousness. I believe they do. That's why we've lost hundreds of textile plants in this country. That's why our steel, automotive, aerospace, shipping and textile industries are in such severe trouble. What I intend to do as president of the United States is to challenge this global trading structure where corporations are actually controlling nations with their trade rules. That's why I've said my first act in office will be to cancel NAFTA and the WTO... and return to bilateral trade, which will be conditioned on workers' rights, human rights and environmental quality principles.
Tom, with all respect to Governor Dean, you can't just say you're going to fix these trade agreements, because they're written so as not to be fixed. They could have been fixed in 1993 when NAFTA was passed, and in '94 when the WTO went into effect. We are losing our manufacturing base. Some of these trade laws, you can't even buy America the way they're set up.
And so, you know, my position: Buy America or bye-bye America.
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KERRY: I'm going to go to the tax code that's gone from 14 pages to 17,000 pages, and we're going to take out any benefit, any reward, any incentive, for any Benedict Arnold company or CEO to take American jobs overseas and stick the American people with the bill.
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BROKAW: Reverend Sharpton, should wealthy Americans or people who are well off, for that matter, pay more for their Medicare benefits? Should we begin now a real test of means and apply it to the Medicare costs that are beginning to run exponentially out of control?
SHARPTON: I think they should pay their share, which is more. I think that when you have the present set-up that you have and you go above $80,000 and they pay nothing, I think that is absolutely ridiculous. I think that they must pay their share.
And, you know, it's absurd to me for people to come and look at the people in South Carolina in the face and say, "It's an honor for your sons and daughters to go abroad and die for others. But it is a burden for rich people to pay their tax at home." I mean, you can't have it both ways. Either all of us should be honored to sacrifice or none of us should.
In terms of jobs, I want to address that. We need to create jobs. Not only do we need to rescind NAFTA -- and I think we must rescind it. You can't correct it. It has cost jobs. It has sent jobs from this state to Asia and other places. This president has increased the deficit, has not increased jobs and is embracing the rich at the expense of working class and poor people. And it's double in communities of color. Black unemployment in this state is double. We face class and race. I don't think we can tolerate that four more years.
Highlights from the Democratic Presidential Debate in South Carolina
