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The Lead with Jake Tapper

Tom Harkin's Steak Fry in Iowa; Sanford Calls Off Engagement To "Soul Mate"; Fewer Medals For Current Service?

Aired September 15, 2014 - 16:30   ET

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

JAKE TAPPER, CNN ANCHOR: When we come back, she didn't exactly announce her candidacy, but Hillary Clinton did finally discuss her presidential aspirations in Iowa this weekend. What she told voters, next.

Plus, almost 50 years after he fought and killed as many as 175 enemy troops, this heroic Vietnam veteran received the Medal of Honor. But will brave vets from Iraq and Afghanistan have to wait as long as he did?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to "THE LEAD." The politics lead now. A potentially seismic event, almost like a tectonic plate, ever so slowly, breaking free of the political Pangea. A possible 2016 candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton came a few millimeters closer to officially running for president this weekend -- maybe millimeters. Now she's officially thinking about it is what we're told. CNN senior political correspondent Brianna Keilar joins me now. Brianna, this all went down at Senator Tom Harkin's 37 and final steak fry fundraiser in this all important state of Iowa. Was this finally the kickoff of her campaign?

BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN CORRESPONDENT: I think it was seen as the de facto kickoff of her campaign, for sure, Jake. But she wasn't declarative about whether she's running or not. And when I talk to a lot of the Iowa Democrats who are attending the state - that's what they wanted. They wanted her to come right out and say, I'm running. They didn't get that. But everyone's operating under the impression that she is running and she did nothing to dispel that impression.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

HILLARY CLINTON: Hello, Iowa!

KEILAR: Hillary Clinton ...

CLINTON: I'm back!

KEILAR: throwing herself into the political fray for the first time in almost six years as she stumped for Democrats facing tough elections in November and hinting that she's running for president.

CLINTON: It is true, I am thinking about it. (CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: But for today that is not why I'm here. I'm here for the steak.

KEILAR: But in the state that dashed her hopes in 2008, Clinton has lessons to learn from her last campaign and needs to reset her relationship with Iowans.

(on camera): What does she need to do differently?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think she just needs to connect with everybody more than she did before. Especially Iowans. I don't think she really showed up as much as Barack did for us. He was here all the time.

RUTH HARKIN, WIFE OF SEN. TOM HARKIN (D-IOWA): Certainly all of us want to see her as much as possible in this state.

KEILAR (voice over): Ruth Harkin wife of Senator Tom Harkin bucked the Obama movement to endorse Clinton in 2007. She says she will encourage Clinton to visit often.

HARKIN: Iowans are pretty jealous about their candidates. So we have an opportunity to see a lot of people and having contact with the candidates is pretty key out here.

KEILAR: After the Harkin steak fry, Clinton spent half an hour on the rope line shaking hands and thanking people.

CLINTON: There's so much at the stake in this election. And both Bill and I will have something to say about that when we speak in just a few minutes.

KEILAR (on camera): You think you will be coming back to Iowa again?

CLINTON: Well, we are going to do what we can.

KEILAR (voice over): Earlier she tried to reboot her infamously bad relationship with the press though her aversion to the media was still palpable, especially compared to her husband's affinity for reporters. There's the question of her message as well. What will it be? She gave a preview selling an optimistic view of the future.

CLINTON: Everything I've seen convinces me that we can meet those challenges.

KEILAR: And targeting a key demographic.

CLINTON: Women should be able to make our own health care decisions.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

CLINTON: And that, believe it or not, equal pay should mean you get equal pay for equal work.

(CHEERS AND APPLAUSE)

KEILAR: That riled up this crowd but it was far from what Barack Obama inspired several years ago.

(on camera): Do you feel like people who supported Obama will transfer that to Hillary Clinton with just as much enthusiasm?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: That will never happen again. That was a one-time event with Barack Obama.

KEILAR (voice over): But maybe it won't even matter.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I think she just needs just to run.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KEILAR: Now a big question, Jake, is how involved is she going to be in stumping for candidates? We know that she's committed to a number of fund-raisers for Senate Democrats, congressional Democrats. But is she going to be out there really campaigning for them out in the states? We don't expect it's going to be certainly as much as her husband. We expect that she will commit to maybe about a handful of candidates and they're still to be determined.

TAPPER: And Brianna, I know former President Clinton wouldn't say anything about his wife's possible candidacy for president. But did he say anything about the midterms? Did he prognosticate at all for the Democrats?

KEILAR: Oh, I think certainly, obviously, he has an optimistic outlook. But what he was really doing that was so much more noticeable compared to her was he was just so much more overtly political. She got into it a little bit. But compared to Tom Harkin and compared to her husband, she was pretty low key when it came to the politics. Bill Clinton was really lamenting the state of Washington, that even people, you know, back in the day people wouldn't get along but they could work together to compromise. He took aim at outside group money, he specifically singled out the Koch brothers. We didn't hear that kind of language from Hillary Clinton. Obviously, she's trying to kind of keep her hands clean a little bit. We've seen her poll numbers dipped as she's gotten back into the public life. And we expect that will continue as she becomes more political, Jake.

TAPPER: All right, Brianna Keilar in Iowa, thank you so much.

Coming up, their affair was front page news when he was then the governor, was caught lying about their secret rendezvous. And now a strangely personal revelation from now Congressman Mark Sanford as he announces their split on Facebook. Will it cost him his political career again?

Plus, tourists take shelter as a brutal hurricane rips through a popular Mexican resort area. And the storm is headed to the U.S., coming up next.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to "THE LEAD." Continuing in politics, you might say Congressman Mark Sanford changed his relationship status on Facebook on Friday. And while the former South Carolina governor did it in an epic heart on his sleeve post as opposed to a mere profile update, one thing is for sure, it's complicated. The Republican's followers and really the world at large got a detailed look at his side of the story and his messy divorce proceedings involving sadly their four sons. A process so painful Sanford writes that had led him to decide to call off his engagement to his Argentinean fiancee.

CNN national correspondent, Suzanne Malveaux, has the latest from a man once considered possible presidential timber until that faithful walk down the proverbial Appalachian Trail.

Suzanne, his fiancee says, is this right? That she first heard about the fact that their engagement was off by reading it on Facebook?

SUZANNE MALVEAUX, CNN NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: So you say it's complicated and it is in a way because here she says that she was surprised -- just as surprised as anybody else in the breakup because she said she learned about this on Facebook, her demise of the relationship. Ouch.

But over the weekend, she told "The New York Times" that they had agreed to split up, but Sanford failed to give her a heads-up that he was announcing this on Facebook. So this is a relationship that ended as it basically began, amidst a media frenzy of their own making.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX (voice-over): She was his soulmate, he said.

MARK SANFORD (R), SOUTH CAROLINA (via telephone): A whole lot more than a simple affair. It's a love story. A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day.

MALVEAUX: But the love story that took Mark Sanford from a would-be presidential candidate to a laughingstock ended as strangely as it began, on Facebook. In a posting that will go down in political history as a cringe-worthy overshare.

South Carolina Congressman Mark Sanford uses 12,312 characters to announce the engagement to his one-time mistress, Maria Belen Chapur, is off. His Argentinean lover told "The New York Times," she was as surprised as everyone else by the Facebook confessional.

The couple had actually just spent a week together in Paris when Sanford asked her to delay the wedding another two years. Belen says she wrote to Sanford saying, I had a spectacular week. You know I love you, but I don't want to continue in the category of mistress. I can't bear it anymore.

The spectacularly public airing of his romantic dirty laundry echoed his first headline-making episode. Back in June of 2009 when the rising Republican star, then South Carolina Governor Sanford, went missing for six days --

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Governor alert, the search for Mark Sanford! Getting weirder. Yes, OK.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's Monday night. Do you know where your governor is?

MALVEAUX: Sanford's version, well?

JASON CARROLL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: At least part of the mystery has been solved in all of this. The governor is said to be, quote, "clearing his head" somewhere along the Appalachian Trail that stretches from Georgia to Maine.

MALVEAUX: It turned out the Appalachian Trail stretched a lot farther, sort of.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I got a call saying the governor was on his way back from Argentina.

MALVEAUX: Back on American soil, Sanford offered this tearful, lengthy mea culpa for his whopper of a lie.

SANFORD: I have been unfaithful to my wife. I developed a relationship with a -- started as a dear, dear friend from Argentina.

MALVEAUX: But the emotional purge didn't stop there.

SANFORD: There was an older couple sitting to our right and I remember them watching us in the way that we interacted. They could see a spark -- or I don't know what you call it.

MALVEAUX: TMI, already, Jenny Sanford filed for divorce and wrote a tell-all of her own. In her book "Staying True," she revealed, I shiver when I think that while I was cleaning up after a delicious family meal, he was e-mailing his soulmate with visions of her tan lines.

In August 2012, he announced he and Beli were engaged. With her by his side, he bounced back. And it looked like voters forgave him. He won the open Republican congressional seat in a special election.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Mark Sanford's always been a loner in politics and he's never cared what other people think.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

MALVEAUX: An irony of this story is now that she has put herself in Jenny's camp, sticking up for her saying that she is not to blame. She describes herself as just another casualty of Sanford saying that, I think I was not useful to him anymore.

He made the engagement thing four months before the election so this is not about his son, this is about his career and his ambitions. It's rather ironic, don't you think, Jake? TAPPER: It's interesting. The whole saga is rather sad to watch. I have to say, you know, Fitzgerald said there is no second acts in American life, obviously, Mr. Sanford has proven that not to be true.

Mr. Clinton beforehand. Can he stomach this? Can he weather this? Is this latest escapade going to hurt him in November or going forward?

MALVEAUX: You know, it's pretty amazing because when you talk to people who know him, they say, he's religious and believes in second and third chances, that the voters actually have supported him. But he's unopposed this November. He still has a term left so we'll see.

I mean, right now, his seat is safe. He's actually safe. I don't know how much this actually plays out when people are like, we've had enough. This is it. We've had enough, but he is saying, look, I like Christ deserve a second chance and turn the other cheek. I'm going to come clean here. We'll see if the voters actually think that that's good enough.

TAPPER: They have four magnificent boys, the Sanfords. It's so sad to see this play out in public. Suzanne Malveaux, thank you so much.

Coming up, hundreds of service members who fought in Vietnam, Korea and the first and second world wars have been recognized with the honor. Why have so few, only four from Iraq and 12 from Afghanistan, have received the Medal of Honor?

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

TAPPER: Welcome back to THE LEAD. In National News, spending your vacation in a shelter with no power or cell service, not exactly an idea of paradise. But that's what many tourists on the Baja Peninsula were dealing with as Hurricane Odile, a Category 3 storm, made landfall at the resort of Cabo San Lucas with 125-mile-per-hour winds.

At least 15,000 vacationers were forced to shelter in place. Odile has since been downgraded, thankfully. It's now a Category 2 storm. But it can still deliver a wallop. The storm bringing torrential rains to cities along the peninsula as it moves north. It's forecast to cross into the South Western United States later this week.

Also today in National News, President Obama honored two American military heroes at the White House today. Sergeant Major Benny Adkins was awarded the Medal of Honor for his service fighting the North Vietnamese. In 1966, he killed as many as 175 enemy troops during 38 hours of fighting.

Specialist Donald P. Sloat was also awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for using his body to protect comrades from a grenade near Deneng in 1970.

While these Vietnam era medals are well deserved, some are wondering whether our contemporary heroes, those who have served with distinction in Iraq or Afghanistan are being shortchanged.

(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER (voice-over): It is the nation's highest military honor, signifying extraordinary acts of valor. And increasingly those who have served in our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are asking, why are so few of today's troops considered worthy?

World Wars I and II, and the wars in Korea and Vietnam brought hundreds of Medals of Honor. Iraq? Just four. All posthumous. And America's longest war in Afghanistan? Just 12. Why?

In 2010, then Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said a change in medals reflected a change in warfare.

ROBERT GATES, FORMER DEFENSE SECRETARY: Particularly in Afghanistan, our enemies generally use weapons at a distance from us. There's less hand-to-hand or in-close combat than there has been in previous wars, although there's still plenty of that.

TAPPER: That reasoning drew ire from veterans such as Congressman Duncan Hunter.

REPRESENTATIVE DUNCAN HUNTER (R), CALIFORNIA: These are men rushing the enemy, looking them in the eye and sometimes finishing them off with their lives.

TAPPER: Another theory comes from Vietnam veteran and historian, Doug Sterner.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have people at the top who are reluctant to admit that we have a broken award system and fix it.

TAPPER: Sterner says the current generation of fighters is being denied such recognition not because their actions are any less valorous, but because their leaders don't know a medal contender when they see one.

DOUG STERNER, CURATOR, MILITARY TIMES HALL OF VALOR: During the Vietnam War, the commanders in the field, most of them were veterans of combat in Korea, they had seen valor and medal-of-honor actions and understood what levels of valor they were witnessing. The commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan had no personal experience on which to base their recommendation.

TAPPER: Pentagon spokesman, Admiral John Kirby rejects that idea, but he notes that Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel this year launched a comprehensive review of the medals process.

REAR ADMIRAL JOHN KIRBY, PENTAGON PRESS SECRETARY: Maybe there are some things we need to clean up. But I absolutely disagree with any notion that our commanders on the ground are ignorant of the sacrifices and the bravery or are somehow not applying themselves. It has since World War II maintained an extremely high level for award. And again we want to make sure that we don't cheapen that in any way whatsoever.

TAPPER (on camera): When you say you want to keep it high, sounds as though you're saying that today's soldiers haven't reached it to the numbers of yesterday's? I know you don't think that's true.

KIRBY: No. I'm not saying that at all. We know there are medals of honor that are being considered right now.

TAPPER (voice-over): Even when a rare nomination is made, those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan experience longer delays in receiving those medals. According to the "Military Times," the average wait between the date of action and the Medal of Honor ceremony has more than tripled since the Korean War.

(on camera): Why has the wait time slowed so much?

KIRBY: We don't know the answer to that. That's one of the things that the secretary wants to review. He wants to look at process.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

TAPPER: The Pentagon has, of course, just launched a new military campaign against the terrorists of ISIS. But there is still plenty of unfinished business remaining for those who served in the last war in Iraq, not to mention the war in Afghanistan, which is, of course, now winding down.

Make sure to follow me on Twitter @jaketapper. This is THE LEAD. I now turn you over to Wolf Blitzer in "THE SITUATION ROOM" -- Mr. Blitzer.