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Angry Demonstrations Against U.S. in Argentina; In France, Another Night of Rioting and Fires

Aired November 04, 2005 - 07:00   ET

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

SOLEDAD O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Soledad O'Brien. Angry demonstrations against the U.S. in Argentina. More on the way. Ten- thousand protesters are expected to hit the streets today. President Bush is in Argentina for trade talks. He's facing new challenges. New polls out today give him the lowest approval ratings of his presidency.
In France, another night of rioting and fires. Violence that began in suburbs of Paris, now may be spreading across that country. We've got a live report ahead this morning -- Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN ANCHOR: I'm Miles O'Brien, live in Pass Christian, Mississippi. Two months after Hurricane Katrina, this town still very hard-hit. Eighty percent of the homes destroyed by that storm. In the wake of Katrina, a lot of focus on New Orleans, but Mississippi still devastated as well. A quarter-million people still without power this morning. We'll take a look at how they are trying to recover on this AMERICAN MORNING.

S. O'BRIEN: Good morning. Welcome, everybody. We continue a split show this show. I'm reporting from New York, and Miles is in Pass Christian in Mississippi.

Good morning to you, Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Good morning, Soledad. All week long, we have been taking stock. Two months after Hurricane Katrina hit, actually a little more than nine weeks if you're really precise about the calender.

Nevertheless, two months later, we are seeing things just as they were after the storm came through. We're in Pass Christian, Mississippi this morning, where the damage is very different than we've seen in New Orleans the first part of this week, which is where we began on Canal Street in the French Quarter, looking at the levees there, St. Bernard Parish and getting a sense there of the kind of damage that there is, and in some cases, the case of Algiers, across the river, how things are relatively normal.

Moving 60 miles to the east this morning, we come to Mississippi, where there were 221 deaths associated with Hurricane Katrina of the 1,289. And this particular spot, Pass Christian, terribly hard-hit. We're right on the beach this morning, where old home sites have just been wiped clean. And in some cases, they have withstood the storm. We look at the damage that occurred here when we were last here on September 8th. In many respects, some of the damage and what you see there remains just as it was as people here, as they are in New Orleans, waiting for some answers to some important questions about what lies ahead and whether they should, in fact, rebuild.

This morning, we're going to talk to a high school senior who's been chronicling her very difficult time, her very difficult senior year for us. Obviously, it's hard for everybody, but in particular for seniors in high school. This has been a tough time.

Tomorrow, a couple of high schools here, one of them got wiped out here in Pass Christian but Long Beach nearby, the high school is still standing. They'll combine their homecomings, and we will check in with her. We'll also check in with mayors in Houston, Atlanta and Baton Rouge, see how they are doing, whether they're getting funding.

And finally, the Oreck plan, the Oreck vacuum plan. It's an interesting story, Soledad, of how to get back in business and take care of workers. We'll take to some of the people there. All that coming up -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: All right, Miles, thanks.

Let's turn to Washington D.C., though, first, there is more cause for concern at the White House today. One year after being reelected, President Bush is hitting a new low in the polls. Take a look at some of the numbers. "The Washington Post"/ABC News poll says 39 percent now approve of the way the president is handling his job. An AP/Ipsis (ph) poll has that number down to 37 percent. And if you look at a poll out of CBS News, that's down to 35 percent. It brings us right to AMERICAN MORNING's Bob Franken. He's live in Washington for us this morning.

Hey, Bob. Good morning.

BOB FRANKEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning. Such an interesting poll. Of course, that's probably why you brought it up. What is also so fascinating about this is "The Washington Post/"ABC News poll talking about the administration's ability to handle the war on terror. Fifty-one percent disapprove, and that has always been one of the foundations of the credibility of this Bush administration. And speaking of credibility, there's another question in this poll that's really important, which shows that 58 percent of those who responded have doubts about the honesty of President Bush. It's the first time in his administration more than half have said so. That is such a significant number.

And of course, there are any number of explanations for that right now. We have all of the attention that's being paid to the indictments handed down in the CIA leaks case in that ongoing investigation, and also on the other side, many people supportive of the president blame the media for some of this, by saying we are, in effect, piling on. I should point out, however, Soledad, that there hasn't been a president in modern times who has had any affection for the media at all.

S. O'BRIEN: Every administration thinks we're piling on, you know. I mean, what can you say? Let's talk about Karl Rove, because there certainly are probably louder calls for him to step down from his job. What do you hear?

FRANKEN: Well, it's interesting. Part of that, any time you're in Washington, you accumulate enemies, and part of that is probably some of those people now speaking about Karl Rove. It's reflected in the poll we were talking about. That same "Washington Post"/ABC News poll shows -- and this is striking -- 59 percent believe Karl Rove should resign. Many in the White House say that would be so damaging to a president who has relied on Karl Rove for his entire political career, but there is no question, no question that whoever is to blame, this is an administration, Soledad, that is under siege.

S. O'BRIEN: Bob Franken, in Washington D.C. for us. Thanks, Bob.

The president' popularity is not so great in Latin America either. President Bush is traveling to Argentina. He's at a summit to talk about the trade, but he's got critics inside the meeting room, also out on the streets as well.

White House correspondent Elaine Quijano is live for us in Mar Del Plata in Argentina.

Elaine, good morning to you.

ELAINE QUIJANO, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Good morning to you, Soledad.

The official theme of this year's summit of the Americas is creating jobs to fight poverty and strengthen Democratic institutions. But, of course, a lot of the focus will be on what happens between President Bush and the man who calls Mr. Bush "Mr. Danger." That, of course, the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez. Now Chavez, of course, has expressed strong anti-American sentiment. He is here taking part in the summit, and he is looking to confront the United States over the issue of free trade. Now the United States is largely glossing over the issue, insisting that the president is focused on economic topics at hand.

But the wider view here in Latin America is that President Bush is not a very popular figure. In fact, thousands of demonstrators are gathering outside of a secure area here in Argentina to protest Mr. Bush's visit, and leading them is a top Argentinian soccer figure.

But as for the president, within the summit here, first up, as you mentioned, the president is going to be meeting with CAFTA leaders. CAFTA, of course, is Central American Free Trade Agreement. That is where the president will focus his attention, but of course there could also be some domestic issues which may follow as well. The president has a news conference scheduled for later today -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Elaine Quijano for us this morning in Argentina. Elaine, thanks for that update.

Well, the date is set for the Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. His Senate confirmation hearing is going to begin on January 9th. The full Senate could vote by January 20th, just days before the president's State of the Union speech.

President Bush wanted the hearing by the year's end, but Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter says the senators need more time to study Judge Alito's judicial history.

Senator John McCain is eying possibly a run for the White House in 2008. Here's what he had to say about that last night on CNN's "LARRY KING LIVE."

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: I'm going to wait until after the '06 elections, Larry, for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that I'd like to know what the political landscape is after that election, and I'd like to see what the chances are.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

S. O'BRIEN: Senator McCain said all senators want to be president. It's just a question of, do you want to run?

"LARRY KING LIVE" of course airs weeknights 9:00 p.m. Eastern.

Turning to France now, overnight more rioting in the suburbs of Paris, and now even in other parts of the country. By some reports, 400 cars were set on fire last night.

You're looking at pictures of a warehouse burning. There was a school that was torched, too. It's the eighth night of violence since two teenage boys died.

CNN's Chris Burns is on the phone for us this morning from Quishi (ph), which is a Paris suburb. It's seen, in fact, much of the violence this week.

Chris, good morning, what's going on where you are?

CHRIS BURNS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, good morning, Soledad.

Friday prayers here. I'm standing outside of a mosque that is surrounded by high-rise, gray crumbling housing projects, full of immigrant families from North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. The frustration, the unemployment here is extremely high, and this is where we saw this rioting break out last week. In the same neighborhood in Quishi is where is two youths of Somali origin of Tunisian origin were electrocuted in a power substation as they were trying to hide from police. Police had been cracking down on crime, but the words from the interior minister, saying he wanted to clean up the scum in some of these areas, has really inflamed these tensions.

And in this very mosque is where a tear gas canister, a police tear gas canister landed last weekend during Sunday's prayers, and the officials here I talked to, the imam, the director, explained to us how they worked so hard to calm the tensions here, and around that time that that canister landed, they did manage to prevent rioting from breaking out. But we've seen it in other areas. We've seen it continuing, as you said, with hundreds more cars torched. We drove by one of those warehouses that was charred, that used to be a rug warehouse.

And this, the fear is that this could continue if the government doesn't get a handle on it. They are deploying more police but is that really the only answer? There are the long-term questions about unemployment, so the tensions may not abade for -- it might take a while to bring down these tensions.

S. O'BRIEN: What exactly, Chris, is the strategy to get a handle on it, outside of sort of more of police officers on the scene?

BURNS: Well, there are calls for more government efforts to try to get these young people jobs, because the unemployment rate among youth in these areas is somewhere over 50 percent. A lot of frustration, also a lot of hooliganism as well, and petty crime. And this is where the government is vowing to keep a strong hand to try to stop the crime. But at the same time, community officials are saying the government has to do more to try to find jobs for these people.

And there is, of course, politics going on between the interior minister, as the interior minister, Nicolas Sarcosi wants to be, president and the Prime Minister, Dominique De Villepin, wants to become president in 2007. And their infighting has also been seen as complicating this crisis here as well.

S. O'BRIEN: You're looking at pictures of the aftermath of some of the rioting that we've seen in some of the suburbs of Paris, and spreading across that country, and Chris Burns is reporting for us live from Quishi, where some of the violence is taking place as well. And clearly not a big solution around the corner any time soon.

Chris, thanks for that update.

Let's get back to Pass Christian and Miles O'Brien. who's reporting from there this morning.

Hey, Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Hello, Soledad.

First light here, so I'll give a little better scene setter before we go toss it over to Jacqui. Take a look at this. We're right on the beach, on the beach road, and just about every home site, the entire home has been stripped clean, stripped clean, nothing left, except look at this one house here. American flag flying. And beside it is a trailer. We, of course, did the wrong thing by showing up, turning on our generator and awakened the owner of this house. I'll let you guess what he does for a living. Well, he's a structural engineer. He's a structural engineer. That is a poured concrete fortress, and we're going to talk to him a little bit later. He's been talking about how houses should be built on the beach. It appears he has the answer.

In any case, Pass Christian, in this town, in this county, 90 deaths. There are still 50 people who are missing, unaccounted for. That doesn't mean there's necessarily 50 bodies linked to the 50 missing. They're still trying to sort all that out, all part of 221 deaths here in Mississippi in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

(WEATHER REPORT)

M. O'BRIEN: Coming up, we're going to check in at the Oreck factory, Oreck vacuums, you've seen the commercials. It's a very interesting story about how quickly they got back to business and how they are taking care of their employees. We'll take you to the place they're calling "Oreckville" -- Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Miles, also this morning, the president's poll numbers an all-time low, but are critics of the Iraq war gaining momentum off of that? We're going to take a closer look on AMERICAN MORNING. Stay with us.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: Welcome back, everybody. Look at that. That is the sun rising in Pass Christian, which is where Miles is reporting for us this morning in Mississippi. We're going to have more on his updates on the situation there in the weeks after the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina. That's ahead this morning.

First, though, back to Washington, D.C. If you're a Republican, Washington D.C. might be time to be a little business depressed. The news out of there lately not good. But are the Democrats being helped by any of this news?

Let's get right to former White House adviser David Gergen. He's in Boston for us this morning.

Nice to see you, David. Thanks for talking bus.

DAVID GERGEN, FMR. WHITE HOUSE ADVISER: Good morning, Soledad.

S. O'BRIEN: Can we start with polls? Because I think this is sort of the big story this morning. Here's a poll for you, "The Washington Post"/ABC News poll. How is President Bush handling is his job as president? Disapproval is 60 percent there. Second poll, how is Bush handling the situation in Iraq? Disapproval, 64 percent. If you're in the White House or if you are a Republican who'd like to be reelected in '06, what do you make of the numbers?

GERGEN: Deeply concerned. You have to be. What this poll suggests, as have others that have come out this week, is that these stories last week were not contained to Washington. You know, many thought they were sort Washington insider kind of stories about Libby and so forth. They clearly penetrated one of -- two of George Bush's greatest strengths have been his leadership, in the sense that he's a straight-shooting guy, he's an affable guy. And on both counts now, on leadership he is under half approval. And on ethics, very important to this president, only 40 percent believe he is honest and trustworthy. That goes right to his character, which has been a great, great strength for him so far. So you have to be concerned now, from a Republican point of view and from a Democratic point of view.

The next test that you want to watch is coming next week, and actual elections, not polls, but elections, in Virginia and New Jersey. They will come next Tuesday, and they'll be a close eye on Virginia, where there's a governor's race, as well as races for the state legislature. In that campaign there for the governor's chair, the Republican was 10 points ahead only a few months ago. The Democrat now is slightly ahead in recent polls. If the Democrat captures that seat, keeps the seat in Democratic hands, and the legislature will go to Democratic hands, that will send a shudder through American politics. That would be taken even much more seriously than these polls.

S. O'BRIEN: So that's something to watch very carefully. When you look at the headlines, and you mentioned Scooter Libby. Of course there's sort of the cloud that's over Karl Rove's head right now. The Democrats invoking Senate rule 21, they claim, successfully. All of that certainly is opportunities, but it's a big difference between opportunity and leveraging that opportunity from the Democratic perspective?

GERGEN: I think that's right. What they know is that the -- this cloud has not been dispelled that Alito nomination, the avian flu announcements earlier in the week. The White House wanted to change the subject. And it -- you know, you can't open a new circus in Washington until the old circus gets out of town. And this Libby-Rove case continues to hang over the White House. We don't know what rove's situation is going to be. I think these calls for him to step down are way too premature. Let's see what the prosecutor comes up with, and then the president can make a wise decision. I think he does need new blood even if Mr. Rove stays, which I think is likely to happen, but let's wait and see until the prosecutor speaks. But beyond that -- go ahead.

S. O'BRIEN: I was going to ask you -- let's talk about the war for a moment, too, because I think that's another cloud in a big way. And you have this growing list of Democratic senators who are saying, troops out. How much of an impact when you look at that, combined with the poll numbers, could that have?

GERGEN: It could build a continuing drumbeat on the president. I don't think it will force a change in policy in the near term. It could well force a change in policy next year as -- if this drumbeat keeps up, and most especially if the violence continues on the ground, and there's no -- and it looks like it's going to be hard to turn this over, I think before next year's election, you could he see a lot of Republicans, not Democrats, but Republicans up for re-election next year softening a great deal on the war and looking for a way out, looking for hard exit dates and that sort of thing.

I think at the current moment, the president can hold, but he has lost his margin for error. These numbers mean that, you know, you have a couple of big explosions over there, a lot of Marines get killed, grenades or something like that, that he can't absorb that very easily right now. He's got to have this -- get this onto a better track. And, frankly, with the number of troops we've got there, I'm not sure he can control his own fate.

Once again, the real issue for the White House is it's lost control of its own destiny. You its destiny is in the hands of people like the prosecutor, or like these insurgents in Iraq. That's a hard place for the president to be.

S. O'BRIEN: David Gergen, from Harvard School of Government and also "U.S. News and World Report." Nice to see you, David, as always. Thanks.

GERGEN: Thank you, Soledad. Good to talk.

S. O'BRIEN: Thanks.

Coming up this morning, big win for Merck in the second Vioxx trial. It has thousands of lawyers saying, what do we do now? Andy is "Minding Your Business." That's up next on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

S. O'BRIEN: The drugmaker Merck finally got the verdict it wanted in the latest Vioxx trial. Andy is "Minding Your Business" this morning.

It's really 1-1 -- Merck's won one and lost one.

ANDY SERWER, "FORTUNE" MAGAZINE: That's right, and there are thousands more to go, but this is an important victory for Merck. They won this case in New Jersey yesterday, Soledad. Jurors finding that the drug giant was not liable for injuries by a gentleman who was taking Vioxx who had a heart attack. He did survive. He was only taking Vioxx for a short amount of time. That could be part of the reason why jurors found for Merck.

Jurors saying the company was simply not trying to be deceitful. They didn't deliberate that long. And as you mentioned, Soledad, this makes it 1-1, because Merck lost a big case in Texas earlier this year. Over 6,000 cases still filed, but this has got to be some good news for the drug company. And what it means is that investors liked it as well. We can talk about the stock market, which was up yesterday, boosted, in part, by Merck, which helped the Dow. You can see here the Dow is up 49 points. Also some upbeat economic reports boosting the markets as well.

This morning, however, I'm sorry to say, futures are a bit lower. We do have a big jobs report coming out at 8:30 Eastern for the month of October, so we will be tracking that for you.

S. O'BRIEN: You've got to imagine lawyers on both sides are sort of scrambling, trying to read in as each of the court cases come to fruition what they're going to do.

SERWER: That's right. And each one, of course, is always a little bit different, so you know, you can't read everything into one case, and it will go on and on for a while.

S. O'BRIEN: And on and on and on. You got 6,000-some-odd still to go.

SERWER: Exactly.

S. O'BRIEN: Andy, thanks.

Let's get right back to Miles, who's reporting from Mississippi for us this morning.

Hey, Miles.

M. O'BRIEN: Good morning, Soledad. Shadow Lawn Avenue is where I'm walking down in Pass Christian this morning. The Shadow of Katrina sure hangs over this place this morning, two months after the storm. In just a few moments, we're going to talk to a friend of ours, a high school senior. There she is talking to our executive producer Kim Bondy, getting a briefing. She's been doing a diary for us of her experience, along with her fellow students, on this very difficult senior year. Homecoming this weekend.

Also the Oreck factory. An amazing story of a rebound and how to take care of your employees. Really it's all in the family for them, coming up on AMERICAN MORNING.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

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