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Sunday Morning News

Bush Must Reach Out to All People, Parties

Aired December 17, 2000 - 7:13 a.m. ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: When George W. Bush takes office January 20, he faces the challenge of working with a deeply divided Congress and leading a divided nation. Can he make good on his pledge to be a uniter, not a divider?

Joining us to talk about what lies ahead for the Bush administration is Dante Chinni. He's a political columnist for the "Christian Science Monitor" who has covered both presidential campaigns. He's in our Washington bureau and a regular with us here in the morning.

Good night -- or, good night -- good morning, Dante.

DANTE CHINNI, "CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR": It feels like good night, but good morning.

PHILLIPS: Yeah, doesn't it? We're ready to take a nap. Hey, let's begin with the honeymoon period here. Is there truly a honeymoon period for Bush or no?

CHINNI: I think that even Bush, in this very odd circumstance, is going to get something of a honeymoon period. It's probably going to be very short. Normally, I mean -- historically you would get 100 days or so or three months. You know, I think his honeymoon period is going to be as long as he doesn't do anything that's controversial.

The first thing he does that's even remotely controversial, he's going to lose the honeymoon period and the tone's going to get kind of nasty here.

PHILLIPS: So steering away from controversial issues such as?

CHINNI: He wants to stay away from partial birth abortion. It's, that's not going to help him on Capitol Hill. And he wants to, I think he probably wants to stay away from these big tax cuts he's proposed, the tax cut he had in his proposals as he was running for president.

There's been some talk that he wants to kind of push through things as much as possible. He wants to get this big tax cut through. But even on Capitol Hill, there isn't a lot of excitement about that. Denny Hastert is Speaker of the House, has, he's kind of, originally he said we don't want the big tax cut. He was kind of stepped back a little bit on it. But I don't think that's the kind of issue he wants if he wants to work with Democrats. He wants stuff that Democrats will buy into because he needs as many friends as he can get on Capitol Hill right now.

PHILLIPS: Now, big tax cuts, that was one of the main parts of his agenda. Now, should he, you think it's because he's not going to be able to, because the economy is sort of slowing down or it's too ambitious of a plan?

CHINNI: Well, Denny Hastert had a good point. He said that Congress does not do well with these big packages that they try to ram through. Congress does better bit by bit doing piece by piece. I mean, look, if he creates this big tax cut and he starts to try to push it through, the Democrats are going to go back to the stuff that Al Gore was talking about in the campaign about how this is a huge tax cut, it's fiscally irresponsible, it's only going to the wealthy, blah, blah, blah, and he can't, I mean Bush can't have that. He needs to come in and set a tone right off the bat that he's going to work with Democrats and he does not want to put them, you know, at logger heads with him. He wants to keep things, he wants to keep the dialogue flowing.

PHILLIPS: Now, don't you think he'll have an easier time bringing Democrats and Republicans together than Gore would have? I mean Democrats in Texas are definitely different than Democrats in Congress, yes?

CHINNI: Yeah, that's very true. I think that, you know, the situation we're dealing with in Washington, I mean the protracted nature of this post-election, you know, basically sorting out would suggest that actually Bush is better for this situation. This is, you know, in some ways you could argue this is Bush's strength. I mean he's coming in. He's a uniter. This is, this should be, it looks like he's in this awful situation. Expectations are very low that he's going to be able to get anything done. This should actually aid him in some ways, some people think, you know? This is his strength.

But Washington isn't Austin and Democrats in Washington aren't Democrats in Texas and the tone here, politics is what Washington runs on and it's going to be a lot tougher for him. I think he's in for a real, he's going to, he's in for, it's going to be a rude awakening for the first couple of months here.

PHILLIPS: Well, what about reforming the voting process? Isn't this definitely something that he's going to have to do and make a priority after all of this?

CHINNI: It's tough. It's something he would like to do, I think. There were some numbers this week about how, you know, Bush did very poorly with African Americans at the poll. He only got one out of every 10 African Americans, which is very, very low. I mean it's down with Barry Goldwater low. And he needs to try to get, to let African Americans know he's working with them and he wants to help them. And one way to do that would be the reform the process.

But, you know, this is the process that elected him and if he wants to reform it, in some ways he's calling into question his own legitimacy, I think, and it'll be interesting to see the way he handles it. He's got to do something, but he can't appear to be doing -- it's almost like he can't appear to be doing too much on it.

PHILLIPS: I'm glad you brought up the black vote because at 8:30 we're going to be talking with somebody about that, too.

Dante Chinni, "Christian Science Monitor," thanks so much. Always a pleasure.

CHINNI: Thanks for having me, Kyra.

PHILLIPS: All right.

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