Balance of Power on the Line in Election 2000
CONNIE CHUNG, HOST: Good evening. I'm Connie Chung. Tonight: America prepares to choose the course of its future.</s>ANNOUNCER: The final hours, tight races across the country. The big guns are out and the balance of power is on the line: "America Votes 2002." Winona Ryder's Beverly Hills shoplifting trial is headed to the jury. Is the Oscar-nominated actress' acquittal in the bag? More shootings may be linked to the sniper suspects. And John Lee Malvo goes to federal court. How will his age affect his case? An Eagle Scout asked to leave his troop because he doesn't believe in God.</s>DARRELL LAMBERT, EAGLE SCOUT: They told me that if those were my beliefs, than I am no longer welcome in scouting.</s>ANNOUNCER: Does Scout's honor mean anything without a belief in a higher power? This is CONNIE CHUNG TONIGHT. Live from the CNN Broadcast Center in New York: Connie Chung.</s>CHUNG: Tonight, it's the final hours for hundreds of candidates to get their message out to America's voters. At stake: issues that affect every single American: the economy, Iraq, al Qaeda, jobs, street crime and corporate crime, health care, abortion rights. President Bush has been on an intensive campaign tour. He hit four states today. He's focusing on states with close Senate races, such as South Dakota, Minnesota and Texas, and says it's vital for Republicans to win back the Senate so they can approve his policies and put his choices for judgeships on the bench. Al Gore and other top Democrats are also campaigning, saying not all of the president's policies are good for America. Every single seat in the House of Representatives is also up for grabs. Right now, Republicans hold a slim margin of six seats. And most states, 36 of them, will be picking their governors, including Florida, where the president's brother Jeb is seeking another term in a hotly-contested race. Joining me now: "TIME" magazine's Mike Weisskopf in Washington, along with Chuck Todd, editor in chief of the online publication "The Hotline." And at the CNN Center in Atlanta, we have Amy Walter, house editor of "The Cook Political Report." Michael, let's start with you. President Bush has really extended himself for this off-year election. But early indications seem to point to some measure of success for him. Would you say that that's an accurate projection?</s>MICHAEL WEISSKOPF, "TIME": We don't know yet, Connie, because most of this will hinge on very close races. But it is a huge gamble for the president. Predecessors have not extended themselves in the first midterm to this extent. He's raised a great deal of money. He's traveled the country, focusing on the tightest races. A status quo conclusion is not a win for him. If the Republicans gain, it will be a huge win for him. It will scare away Democrats in 2004. It will tremendously add to the money intake by the party. But maintaining status quo or losing a couple of seats will look like a big chick in his armor.</s>CHUNG: All right. Now on to Amy Walter. There was a debate today, highly unusual the day before Election Day. And that was in Minnesota, pitting two men. And I think you know them well. Let's take a look at a clip.</s>NORM COLEMAN (R), MINNESOTA SENATE CANDIDATE: On the issue of partial birth abortion, would you agree that that's...</s>WALTER MONDALE (D), MINNESOTA SENATE CANDIDATE: I'm opposed to late-term abortion, but I also know that the Constitution says that you must protect the life and the health of the mother...</s>COLEMAN: So do you believe parents should be involved in those decisions, Mr. Vice President?</s>MONDALE: They should be involved, but it's their choice, and it's not a legal question. You have been an arbitrary right-to-lifer. I am not, and that's one of the big, many issues that divide us.</s>COLEMAN: Let me just...</s>CHUNG: Amy Walter, of course, that seat that is up for grabs was vacated by Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash. Amy, do you believe that Walter Mondale, who is actually leading in the polls, really needed to do this debate?</s>AMY WALTER, CNN POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, I think for both candidates -- and I think for voter voters, too -- they wanted to get a sense that, even though it is a very shortened campaign, that voters got a fair chance to see both candidates out answering questions. And, certainly, both had their own issues that they needed to push forward in this debate. For Mondale, certainly, it was proving that he can be aggressive, that he can go into the United States Senate, get the job done, be active, be an advocate.</s>CHUNG: And that his age was not a problem?</s>WALTER: That's right. And, certainly, for Coleman, that was -- you heard the term a lot "future, future, future." He used that word as much as possible in that debate, again, trying to get voters back to thinking about age and about, you know, focusing on Mondale's age and then also making sure that voters knew that: "Hey, I'm Norm Coleman. I'm not such a bad guy. You should think about voting for me."</s>CHUNG: All right. Chuck Todd, there's another race in which age is an issue, or at least the opponent is trying to make age an issue. And that's New Jersey, Lautenberg. Do you think that Lautenberg can successfully make the voters believe that age is not a problem for him, because he's 78 years old?</s>CHUCK TODD, "THE HOTLINE": Well, Lautenberg has an advantage over Mondale in that he only left the Senate two years ago. So there was still a fresher remembrance of Lautenberg in the mind of the voters. There's also an advantage that he has in that New Jersey is such a hard free media state that he didn't get the intensive scrutiny. Because there was sort of a month to let the Torricelli hangover cure itself, he didn't get the scrutiny that Walter Mondale is getting on age. And, quite frankly, Frank Lautenberg looks a little more vigorous on the campaign trail, acts it, has always had this sort of the feistier mentality of who he is. And so I think they haven't been able to successfully make age an issue in New Jersey.</s>CHUNG: Aren't there any new-generation Democrats in New Jersey and Minnesota that the Democrats could have pulled in at the last minute?</s>TODD: One of the things that I think that Democrats are getting a little bit of a bad rap on here, with the focus on Mondale and Lautenberg, is that there's going to be at least, by my count, 15 to 20 -- Amy has probably got a better sense of this on the House level, for instance -- of actual incoming members of Congress, Connie, who were born in 1962 or later. So you're talking about folks under 40. So there are plenty of sort of fresher faces that are coming in. I think there's almost an unfair focus on these -- on Walter Mondale and Lautenberg when it comes to the Democrats.</s>CHUNG: Michael Weisskopf, a lot of us in the press have been calling the Thune-Johnson election really Bush against Daschle. But are we making more of that than we should?</s>WEISSKOPF: Probably not, particularly when it comes to the kind of issues they represent. Both of them are there as kind of loyal spear-carriers for either the president or the Senate majority leader. Their whole identities are sort of stamped out that way. Thune was personally picked by the president. Johnson is a protege of Mr. Daschle's. And they reflect the same kind of view of issues. And it's probably a pretty good surrogate contest, I think. What muddies the water is the tremendous amount of money that's gone in there. I think they've spent in advertising enough to give each voter $35, which is a tremendous amount in a tiny state.</s>CHUNG: Amy Walter, the general consensus is that the Republicans probably will be able to hold on to the House. Now, if that is the case, how does that affect Dick Gephardt's chances when he tries to run for president in 2004?</s>WALTER: Well, it's very interesting looking at the House races here. And, yes, at this point, it does look very likely that Republicans hold on. Now, remember, if Republicans actually pick up seats in the House, this would be the only third time in history that that has happened, the third time since the Civil War that the party in the White House, holding the White House has picked up seats in Congress. So that's pretty amazing. For Congressman Gephardt, who certainly has presidential aspirations, this is a man who's worked very, very hard for the Democratic Party for years, toiled in the fields. This man is on the phone, in campaigns day after day. I don't think there is a Democrat out there who thinks that he has not worked hard enough to try to give Democrats control of Congress. And so I, think among activists and those folks, I don't think it's going to hurt him if Democrats don't take control. Now, the one issue I think may get thrown at him is this concept of vision, leadership, where he wants to take the party. Was he able to do this in the House? Can he be able to translate that as president? That may be the more appropriate question.</s>CHUNG: Chuck Todd, a lot of these races are going to be right down to the wire. Are we going to see some of them decided weeks from now, instead of tonight or tomorrow night?</s>TODD: I tell you, that's the assumption. All the news media, the networks, on down to print, we're all preparing for this assumption that everything is going to go later. We have the Louisiana runoff possibilities, not just in the Senate, but what if it decided the House? Yes, you've got to think, though, that a lot of us are hoping the election actually ends within a 48-hour window. I don't think anybody wants to go through what the country went through for 36 days last November and December of 2000. I think, Minnesota, if you're looking for ground zero of a possible place where we could have all sorts of legal challenges, it's in Minnesota. If somehow Mondale comes a few thousand votes short, Democrats are going to scream bloody murder over the absentee ballots and the fact that people that voted for Paul Wellstone, that their votes weren't going to get counted for Walter Mondale. So Minnesota is sort of the one legal wrangling that we're keeping an eye on.</s>CHUNG: All right, Chuck Todd, Michael Weisskopf, and Amy Walter, thank you for being with us. We'll be watching tomorrow night. Keep it right here on CNN tomorrow for continuous coverage of all these elections and more, starting with "AMERICAN MORNING" and heading into the home stretch at 3:00 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday. And still ahead: As the list of suspected sniper victims continues to grow, we'll get some inside details on the super maximum security prison where John Muhammad and John Lee Malvo are being held in seven-by-nine-foot cells -- right after this.</s>ANNOUNCER: Next: a very different stage and a very different audience for an Oscar-nominated actress. A jury may decide her next role. CONNIE CHUNG TONIGHT continues in a moment.