Hillary Clinton Preps for Possible Biden Campaign

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra.

JOHN HARWOOD: I'm John Harwood, sitting in for Gwen Ifill this week.

I'm joined around the table by Michael Crowley of POLITICO, Joan Biskupic of Reuters,

Reid Wilson of Morning Consult, and Anne Gearan of The Washington Post.

We talked in the broadcast about Hillary Clinton's strategy going into the first

Democratic debate next week, but there's another consideration we touched on: the

specter of Vice President Joe Biden jumping into the race.

There are reports that Clinton allies are actively digging up whatever they can should

Biden decide to jump in.

HILLARY CLINTON: (From video.)

Now, if he gets into the election, then people are

going to be raising questions, just like they do about me.

That's what happens when you get into the arena.

But I'm not asking, and I don't approve of anybody who is supporting me or say they

support me to be focusing on anyone other than the Republicans.

JOHN HARWOOD: So, Anne, she said that there would be questions raised about Joe Biden

if he gets in.

What exactly are they preparing for?

ANNE GEARAN: Well, the campaign itself says that they are not preparing at all; the

opposition research, which she's trying to disavow there, is being done by an outside

super PAC group supporting her.

But behind the scenes, of course they're preparing and of course they're thinking about

it.

Joe Biden has a very, very long record - longer, even, than Hillary Clinton's.

There's a lot to look at.

Certainly his time as vice president will offer some possibility for some comparison,

certainly on the Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership that we discussed during the broadcast,

that'll be a big one for her.

But, you know, she and he had quite a lot of foreign policy debates during the first

term, principally over Afghanistan and then also to a degree over Syria.

So certainly those would come up.

They have many of the same domestic policies, but there are - will definitely be places

where she will - if he does get in - where she will try to distinguish herself against

him, and he'll probably look more - even more sort of mainstream, central - centrist

Democrat than she does by comparison to the rest of the field, which is pretty far left.

JOHN HARWOOD: Now, Reid, the president was in Roseburg, Oregon this week - today, in

fact - following up on that tragedy that was there a few days ago.

You wrote a story about some gun control measures.

You know, everybody's taking it as a given, well, no, we can't - nothing can pass in the

Congress, and the president's even signaled as much.

What did you find about the level of public support if they were to try?

REID WILSON: So we conducted a survey of 2,000 registered voters across the country and

we found that a clear majority of Americans - 55 percent - favor the concept of stricter

gun control laws.

But when you get really narrow into the actual possible gun control measures that people

could pass, support is much higher, whether it's a ban on assault weapons -

JOHN HARWOOD: That's fascinating.

I thought you were going to say it was high in general, and then when you got to the

specifics it was lower.

REID WILSON: No, it's the opposite.

It's the opposite.

There is, you know, huge support for banning assault weapons, huge support for banning

high-capacity ammunition magazines, huge support for a national database that would track

every sale, and huge support for background checks on everything, including private

sales, which don't exist now.

When I say huge support, I mean 70, 75, 80 percent of Americans - in some cases, 75

percent of Republican voters say that they back some of these measures.

JOHN HARWOOD: More of a consensus than we get on almost anything in this country.

REID WILSON: It is.

This is - it is - it is.

Broadly speaking, gun control is a very popular issue, especially when you get into the

specifics.

And I think you've seen the conversation change on gun control.

We're hearing from the Republicans this week, after the tragedy in Roseburg, a lot of

the same things that Republicans have been saying for 10, 20, 30 years when one of these

things happen: let's not politicize it, let's, you know, talk about mental health and

things like that.

And President Obama has said, no, we're going to politicize it, we're going to make it a

political issue.

Hillary Clinton has - if Hillary Clinton has embraced something on the campaign trail,

you know that the polling is in her favor.

(Laughter.)

You know, the other Democrats were quick to jump on the gun control

bandwagon or lead the bandwagon in some cases.

Interestingly, one person who is not as in favor of gun control as the rest of the field

is Bernie Sanders, the senator from Vermont, who is otherwise far to the left of Hillary

Clinton.

JOHN HARWOOD: Very good NRA record, yeah.

REID WILSON: Very good NRA record.

Vermont has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the country.

You know, Howard Dean was on the board of the NRA.

Pat Leahy, the senior senator from Vermont, has a very good record on guns.

So he's not out of - out of touch with his own state, but he is at least a little bit

behind where Clinton is with the rest of the Democratic electorate.

This gives her an opportunity to distance herself a little bit from somebody who's

becoming pretty popular.

JOHN HARWOOD: Interesting.

Michael, we talked on the show about the shadow that Russia had cast over the

president's Syria policy, but you wrote a piece this week suggesting that this is not

risk-free for Russia.

Talk a little bit about that.

MICHAEL CROWLEY: So President Obama's core message about what Vladimir Putin is doing

is he's wading into a quagmire, he's going to regret it, Russia is weak and lashing out

out of weakness.

One of the kind of sub-messages that I zoomed in on a little bit is, among other things,

he has to worry about a backlash at home.

Russia's Muslim population is estimated between 12 to 14 percent.

It's larger in Moscow.

There are a lot of guest workers in Moscow.

And he has a long history, going back to the 1990s, of Islamist insurgency in the

Caucasus region, which is sort of southern Russia that dips down, borders in Georgia and

Azerbaijan, in a mountainous area there where you have real radical activity.

In fact, the Boston Marathon bombers once lived there.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev went there before he came back.

So it's a rough neighborhood.

And what - I just zoomed in on this and had some U.S. intelligence officials and

terrorism analysts saying to me that this is actually a real thing, it's not idle talk

from the president.

You're already seeing elevated talk on social media amongst

these radical groups that Russia is an enemy, that Putin is an enemy.

You could start to see this effort to recruit lone wolves inside of Russia like we've

seen inside of the U.S. after we began bombing in Syria.

So that's a potential real concern, although one little twist to it is that Putin has in

many ways benefited from this - his own war on terror.

He's quite ruthless about it.

They do not have a vibrant ACLU branch - (laughter) - in Russia.

And terror attacks and his ability to respond and say he's stamping out enemies of the

state at a time of high Russian nationalism that he's been whipping up, according to some

analysts I talked to, actually could help cement his grip on power in Russia.

So it's a complicated question.

JOHN HARWOOD: When's the last time there was a big terrorist attack against Russia on

Russian soil?

MICHAEL CROWLEY: So the last one that I'm aware of - and I don't think there's been a

major one since then - was just before the Sochi Olympics.

And people will remember that there was a real shadow over those Olympics.

They created this ring of steel.

There were twin, I believe, female suicide bombers.

At least one of them was at a train station in - I want to say - I'm going to get the

name of the city wrong, but a southern city.

You had dozens killed, really a major

event.

But if you go back, I mean, there was the Beslan school massacre, there

was the Moscow theater siege.

We kind of forget these episodes.

Hundreds of people dead, ghastly events.

ANNE GEARAN: Many of which had origins in the Caucasus.

MICHAEL CROWLEY: And with origins in the Caucasus and Chechnya.

That's a whole other story we don't have time for now.

But it's a very real issue, and I think people in Washington - of course no one wishes

for a terrible terrorist attack, but there's a degree, you sense of them, if it does

happen, there will be a little bit of we told you so, Vladimir, welcome to our world.

JOHN HARWOOD: Joan, now one of the first cases out of the box for the Supreme Court has

to do with the death penalty.

Now, we know that there was a period of time when the Court outlawed the death penalty

and then reinstated it.

What's left for them to decide?

JOAN BISKUPIC: Well, you're talking about 1976, when the justices reinstated it and

said but you have to have certain safeguards.

Well, last term, in a very divisive moment among the justices, by a 5-4 vote they upheld

lethal injection in Oklahoma as it was carried out with this kind of three-drug protocol.

The question went to the method.

But Justice Stephen Breyer, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, used the occasion to

say it's time to rethink capital punishment overall, let's go back to that period where

the Court was - in the '70s when, in '72, it struck it down as unconstitutional without

certain safeguard.

Now, it was only Justice Breyer and Justice Ginsburg saying it last June, very last day

of the term.

But the fact that they even proposed that got both sides very ginned up.

And it was in a case that turned out to be the most anger-ridden during oral arguments

and then the most angry moment at the very end of the term.

Four different justices read statements from the bench supporting the death penalty and

against the death penalty in this Oklahoma case.

So now we're back.

Everybody's - you know, you think the tensions have subsided, but they haven't in some

ways.

And it was a Kansas case involving these two brothers who had gone on this horrific

killing spree, ended up killing four people, but after a lot of really gruesome, awful

crimes that even had the justices this week saying we see a lot of death penalty cases

and, in the words of Justice Samuel Alito, this is really one of the most horrific.

So this case doesn't test the death penalty per se, John, in terms of is it

constitutional or not.

It tests, you know, the instructions that are given to jurors.

It tests whether these two brothers should have been - their sentencing phase should

have been combined, as it was, rather than severed.

But you can still feel the tensions in the backdrop, and at one point Justice Antonin

Scalia said to one of the lawyers from Kansas, it appears that Kansans - who have at

least about, what, nine, 10 people on their death row - they support the death penalty,

unlike Justice Breyer here who doesn't.

So that was the one way it emerged.

But it was basically on this narrow issue.

So I think what we're going to - we're going to probably see a case that will come down

the pike that will actually give the justices a chance to revisit the Eighth Amendment

question.

But I have to say, as loud as Stephen Breyer was on the last day of the

term and as much attention as it got, you still need five votes - (chuckles) -

to reverse.

JOHN HARWOOD: Right, but public opinion, it's interesting on this,

just as it is on guns, as Reid was saying.

You know, over time, as you know, opposition to capital punishment - it's not a

majority, but it's been creeping up.

JOAN BISKUPIC: Yes.

And here's the other thing that's happened over time, is that executions have gone down.

You know, a lot of municipalities, prosecutors and law enforcement just think it's - in

many cases it's not worth it.

It costs so much more to go through those kinds of prosecutions.

A lot of people just don't have the appetite for it.

Go ahead and put somebody behind bars for life.

That might do, too.

JOHN HARWOOD: Thanks, everybody.

Stay online, let us know what you're thinking

about this campaign.

Upload your videos, share your opinions, at 16 for 2016.

That's at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek.

I'm John Harwood.

Gwen'll be back next week for another edition of the Washington Week Webcast Extra.