I. Introduction by Marian Wright Edelman and video.
II. One-minute opening statements.
III. "Lightening" round--responses of "30 seconds or less than a minute" to question on the war.
IV. First round of questions and follow ups from the panelists.
V. Second round of questions and follow ups from the panelists.
VI. "Lightening" round--question on affirmative action.
VII. One-minute closing statements.

Transcript (IV)
FROM THE CDF TRANSCRIPT

...JUDY WOODRUFF: Thank you.

Senator, we are going to move now to the questions from the panelists. Because of our time, we're going to ask each of you to limit your answers to one minute. Juan Williams has the first question, and it goes to Senator Braun.

JUAN WILLIAMS: Senator Braun, President Bush's single plan, as you've heard mentioned here tonight, for American's children called No Child Left Behind, the key in that plan is accountability in public education. The president condemning what he calls the soft bigotry of low expectations, especially for minority children in America's urban schools. But many parents, teachers, and children question the plan's emphasis on testing. Do you endorse rigorous testing for all school children as required under the president's plan in grades 4, 8 and 12?

FORMER AMBASSADOR CAROL MOSELEY BRAUN: The truth of the matter is that the federal government right now contributes less than 7 percent of the cost of elementary and secondary education, and pushes the rest of the cost onto states and local governments. This plan, which really is No Child Left, not No Child Left Behind, really is punitive and counterproductive in terms of providing quality education. For this program to suggest that the federal government is going to mandate a series of tests to segregate, isolate and otherwise identify "low performing schools," but not send any money to help the communities, help parents, help the local governments pay for schools, is just outrageous and not very thoughtful.
What I would like to see our government do, as president, I would like very much to begin to change the way we deal with school funding so that there's a greater federal contribution, so that we can relieve the burden on local property taxes, and so that the states will get the help and assistance in a constructive way to provide quality education for all children, starting with early childhood education, expanding Head Start, and doing it the right way to provide for quality education.
I think I did it under my minute. JUDY WOODRUFF: Almost.
 

JUAN WILLIAMS: Governor Dean, as governor, you criticized the president's plan of a huge unfunded
mandate. Do you endorse the Dodd-Miller Leave No Child Behind plan, which calls for spending to guarantee housing, after-school care, health care, and even more, this is a plan endorsed by the Children's Defense Fund? On the panel, only Representative Kucinich has endorsed the bill, and obviously that bill would create an even larger unfunded mandate, even though it would be in service of America's children?

FORMER GOVERNOR HOWARD DEAN: What we need is the kind of approach that we took in Vermont. We don't have those kinds of unfunded mandates. We have accountability testing. We have a testing system that's so hard that not one school in the state meets the standards. That brings everybody up and requires everybody to work, the suburban schools as well as the inner city schools. We have something approaching universal early education. We have health care for all kids under the age of 18. We have subsidized childcare up to $40,000 a year. If you want to leave no child behind, that's where you start.
The other thing you ought to start with is refunding the mandates that we already have, such as special education, which stops taking money out of the regular school system, which stops the fighting between the parents with kids with special needs and parents with kids without special needs. I think we ought to get rid of No Child Left Behind in its entirety. If Dodd-Miller were to pass, I think that's terrific. Let the federal government fund it. I do not support unfunded mandates, which is the principal problem with No Child Left Behind, other than its name.

JUDY WOODRUFF: But you would not support Dodd-Miller?

FORMER GOVERNOR HOWARD DEAN: Not as an unfunded mandate. If the federal government is going to ask the states to do something, I want the federal government to pay for it.
 

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right. Michelle Martin has a question for Senator Edwards.

MICHELLE MARTIN: Good evening, Senator Edwards. You offered some very detailed proposals about health care, but as your colleague, Governor Dean, has pointed out, supporting a patient's right to sue an HMO doesn't help you very much if you don't belong to an HMO, and prescription drug coverage doesn't help everybody either. You've talked about college for everyone. What's the plan for health care for everyone?

SENATOR JOHN EDWARDS: I would do these things right now. First of all, the SCHIP, the Children's Health Insurance Program, in which we have six million children eligible for that, plus Medicaid, and we're not taking advantage of it, should be fully funded.

Second, we should expand the Children's Health Insurance Program to include the parents of those children.

Third, we should follow President Clinton's recommendation during the time of his presidency to allow people over the age of 55 who are not insured, to buy into Medicare at cost, and if necessary, subsidize those who can't afford it.

Those are things that can be accomplished and are achievable today, and we should do those things today.

MICHELLE MARTIN: And my follow-up is, how much and from where? How much will all of this cost, and how do you propose to pay for it?

SENATOR JOHN EDWARDS: The way I propose to pay for it is exactly the way I've always described it. Every single plan I have ever made, college for everyone, $2,500 refundable tax credit, all the things that I have suggested, my education plan to get the best teachers into the schools where they're needed the most, my plan for after-school-all those things I have paid for specifically, and the vast majority of those costs come out of stopping the president's tax cut for the top 1 to 2 percent scheduled to go into effect in 2004, which over the course of the next 20 year costs $1-1/2 trillion. That is way more than enough money to do the things that I just proposed.
 

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right. Michelle has a question for Representative Gephardt.

MICHELLE MARTIN: Good evening, Congressman. A similar question to you, it's also about health care. You've also offered a detailed proposal offering tax credits for employers to encourage them to cover more workers. But, as you know, we're in the middle of a recession. We have a number of people who are unemployed-millions, in fact. And in addition to that, we have millions more who have had their hours cut to the point where they are now part-time and no longer covered by employer health benefits. You offered a buy-in program for Medicare for people 55 and up; that doesn't help children very much. The same question to you, the big picture, how are you covering everybody?

REPRESENTATIVE RICHARD GEPHARDT: Well, first of all, I would call for an expansion of the Children's Health Care Program, which is already out there and needs to be expanded. Incidentally, the administration is trying to cut back on that program right now, along with a lot of other programs in the budget for children. We have to stop those cuts.

Secondly, we've got to expand Medicare and Medicaid to pick up people that will still fall between the cracks.

But, finally, my proposal is to require employers to offer health care plans to their employees. I give them a 60 to 70 percent tax credit to help offset that cost, so that they can pass that savings along to the employees. It would be a refundable tax credit, so it would go to companies that now pay taxes and companies that don't pay taxes. We think it costs about $100 billion a year. We're working on the numbers, and we think we've got to get rid of the Bush tax cuts. I said I would get rid of almost all the Bush tax cuts. And, incidentally, this would stimulate the economy. This would put money in people's pockets, it would make the economy work better.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Representative Gephardt, I actually have a follow-up here. We know that Social Security and so-called SSI has brought the poverty rate down considerably among the elderly. It has been cut by something like a third over the last three decades. At the same time, the percentage of children in poverty continues to go up-it has more than doubled. With finite resources, why shouldn't this country, this government, begin to scale back on support for the elderly and bring up the support for children?

REPRESENTATIVE RICHARD GEPHARDT: Well, as Hubert Humphrey I think once said, "the test of any nation is how you deal with the people in the late stages of life, and how you deal with children." And I think we have to be able to do both. We've got big challenges in this country to deal with Social Security, to deal with long-term care, which I think can be added to the kind of tax credit that I've been talking about. But we've got to make sure that we get children out of poverty, we've got to have better jobs for our people. That's why I talk about an international variable minimum wage, so that we can begin to bring up standards around the whole world, so that we can have good jobs in this country. I'm for increasing the minimum wage, which I think is vitally important. It's one of the best things we did in the Clinton Administration; it is Democratic economics, building from the bottom up, not the top down. I believe in "trickle down," it just takes 100 years to trickle down. I want it to go up immediately. I'm for Democratic economics.
 

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right. Mark Shields has a question, first, for Senator Graham.

MARK SHIELDS: Senator Graham, President Bush has proposed a speed-up of the scheduled increase of the child tax credits, from $600 to $1,000 per child, but the administration offers no help to more than one-quarter of American children, including one-half of Black and Latino children, because they live in moderate low-income families, where their parents, who often pay thousands of dollars on payroll taxes, sales tax, and excise tax, do not make enough to qualify under the Bush standard for income taxes. Do not these children need and doesn't justice demand that the full tax credit be extended to them?

SENATOR BOB GRAHAM: Absolutely, Mark. That's one of the problems of Republican economics, is that it focuses on the issue of the income tax exclusively. The fact is, most Americans pay more into payroll tax than they do in the income tax. And if you want to ensure that you're going to have an equitable reduction in the payment for the cost of government, the means of doing so is to reduce the payroll tax so that all Americans benefit.

(Applause)
 

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you want to follow up, Mark? All right. I'm going to move on to Senator Kerry.

MARK SHIELDS: Senator Kerry, abortion remains an enormously divisive and painful issue in our nation.  In our most recent Los Angeles Times poll on the issue, 72 percent of women polled said that abortion should not be legal in the second trimester, and 61 percent of women in the poll agreed with the statement that abortion is murder. Yet, according to today's Boston Globe, you've pledged as president you would nominate only supporters of abortion rights to the court. Beyond this litmus test you've imposed, aren't you telling millions of pro-life Democrats that their views and their values would not be heard in a Kerry Administration?

SENATOR JOHN KERRY: No, Mark, I'm not telling them that. But, I am saying that in the United States of America it is today a constitutional right and, in my judgment, settled law that there is a right of privacy, and that women in our country, women have the right to make that critical and painful difficult decision, as a right between themselves, their doctor, their god, and the government has no business intervening in it.

(Applause)

SENATOR JOHN KERRY: And I think it's critical that all of us understand that in all of these things we're talking about fighting for here, we don't need a Democratic Party that keeps saying to the Republicans, "yes, but a little less, yes, but slower." The one thing we don't need in the country is a second Republican Party, and we need to define the priorities of the Democratic Party in a straightforward way.

MARK SHIELDS: You have chosen to define this as a litmus test you would impose.

SENATOR JOHN KERRY: I don't consider it a litmus test, Mark. I think you have to understand something: that a President of the United States has a responsibility to interview appointees to the Supreme Court of the United States, and in that interview it is important, not as a matter of "a litmus test," but as a matter of their understanding of the Constitution, and of the law of the land that they, indeed, understand what are our rights. I would interview him as to whether or not he recognized illegal search and seizure, what his attitude, or her attitude was about all of the Bill of Rights, and other separation of power issues, and so forth. That is a critical position. And to kid ourselves that a president, this president or otherwise, isn't going to do that is wrong. But here's my test. Potter Stewart had the test that when you read a decision of a justice on the court, you want to know that that decision, as you read it, you can't tell whether it was written by a man or a woman, a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or conservative, a gentile, Jew, or Muslim. You simply know it is the decision of a good jurist. And unlike President Bush who said, "what we need are good conservative judges on the bench," I'm going to appoint good jurists who have a record of jurisprudence we can be proud of.

(Applause)
 

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right. Juan Williams with a question for Mr. Kucinich.

JUAN WILLIAMS: Representative Kucinich, earlier you spoke about poverty among children, homelessness among children, as weapons of mass destruction here in our own land. You're the only lawmaker here on this panel to endorse and co-sponsor Leave No Child Behind, which then begs the question, are there any social programs that you don't support? How would you prioritize your interests in children's affairs?

REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH: What we're really doing in this election is talking about setting priorities for the nation. This election will give America an opportunity to decide whether we favor war and tax cuts on one end, or the reconstruction of a social safety net on the other hand, in this country. And so, my approach is to look to what we can do to rebuild this country and to heal this country. The reason why I support a $20 billion increase in the childcare funding is because I think that we have to have a society which values children if we're truly going to leave no child behind. We have to show that we value children. The children that we see, whose pictures we see here, the children we saw on the board earlier, are all asking us the question, are we listening to the hearts of the children when they ask us are we going to have better schools? Are we listening to the hearts of the children when they wonder, are my mother and father going to have decent health care? So my approach is to look to the heart of America, the social needs of America, and to set aside an agenda that calls for tax cuts and war.

JUAN WILLIAMS: All right.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Do you have a follow-up?

JUAN WILLIAMS: I'm not sure I got an answer. But is there one program you would say, "You know what, even though it would be good for children in our land, I'm not going to support it," and tell me why?

REPRESENTATIVE DENNIS KUCINICH: No, I'm in this to transform the nation, and get it to focus on social programs. I mean, that's what a nation ought to be about-not just war.

(Applause)
 

JUDY WOODRUFF: To Senator Lieberman, a question.

JUAN WILLIAMS: Senator Lieberman, rising out of poverty for children is closely tied to having married parents. How would you, as president of these United States, promote marriage?

SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: I wish my wife was here to answer that question. Look, stable families, and families today are taking very different forms, and in many cases, that are not traditional, providing great upbringings for our children. This is an area where government has to be very careful not to involve itself too much, but to remove disincentives. Remember, the welfare system, as it used to exist, provided a disincentive for couples to live together. That was wrong, and we removed it. And we ought to go through our laws and make sure that the incentives, through our tax system, through our social service system, are to create stable families.

Incidentally, in the next chapter of welfare reform-in the first chapter, we asked a lot of women, and they responded heroically. In the next chapter, we have to ask more of fathers to assume responsibility for their children, and to do everything we can with a combination of more support for non-custodial parents to bring them back home to take care of their kids, and the toughness of law through child support enforcement, to make sure that fathers take care of their children. A strong family, ultimately, is as important as anything government will do. And a strong economy will help families provide better lives for their children.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Right. Senator, I have a follow-up. Your recently deceased colleague Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, we know, almost 40 years ago warned about the implications of the breakup of the family. At that time the Black out-of-wedlock rate was something like 25 percent. Today it is something like 65 percent, while the overall rate is 30 percent. My question to you is, is there something that government should have done, could have done over that period of time to keep those percentages from growing as they did?

SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN: As I said, the welfare reform, which was one of the accomplishments of the Clinton-Gore Administration, was one of the things that I think will help that. I think we have to work through counseling of our young men and women to help them with planned parenthood, and convince them that when they have a child out of wedlock, they're making their futures more difficult to achieve what they dream of for themselves, and making life for their children more difficult. So I think this is a matter-I love the mission statement of the Children's Defense Fund, which not only calls for a healthy, fair head start for America's children, but a moral start. And this ultimately is all about not just teaching our kids how to read and write, but teaching them right from wrong, and part of right is building stable families.

JUDY WOODRUFF: All right.
 

Michelle, a question for the Reverend.

MICHELLE MARTIN: Good evening, Reverend. I'd like to ask you the same question. It is no secret that
there is a link between the poverty rate and the percentage of out-of-wedlock births. In fact, in the last census, it showed that married couple White families and married couple Black families have almost achieved income parity, and yet single parent households headed by African American and Hispanic women are among the poorest in the country. So do you think that the government has a role in encouraging and supporting marriage?

REVEREND AL SHARPTON: I think the government has a role in providing equal opportunity for all of its citizens, and to provide a guarantee for young people in this country to live a life that we promised. You know, one of the things I'm doing in my campaign is dealing with a constitutional amendment that would give us the right to health care, and the right to vote, and the right to a quality education. We cannot become divisive by blaming children if their parents broke up. We cannot act like traditional marriage is the answer to everything. I think, for example, what Rod Page said today about Christian values in education was a disgrace. He should apologize or resign. We cannot have the Democratic Party-and I'm the preacher on the panel-we cannot have the Democratic Party trying to legislate morality, so we duck responsibility for assuring a.life for all Americans.

(Applause)

MICHELLE MARTIN: So, Reverend, I take it the answer to my question is no.

REVEREND AL SHARPTON: I wanted you to ask the follow-up so I can get the extra minute. Your answer is no. I think that we have gone too far in trying to do what we cannot do. Sure, we love marriages, sure we'd like to see homes together. That takes a leap, but it doesn't take a leap to pass Dodd-Miller; it doesn't take a leap to guarantee health care; it doesn't take a leap to immediately kill Bush's tax cuts and invest that in education.  Let presidents do what presidents have the authority to do. We can preach on Sunday, but let's give America the right legislation Monday through Saturday.

(Applause)