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The Doctor Is In
Aired December 23, 2002 - 14:01 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: We begin this hour with a political windfall awaiting a lawmaker who's not exactly a household name. By some standards, he's still a Senate newcomer. Bill Frist from Tennessee is poised to become first among equals, leader of the incoming Republican majority, setter of the Senate pace and agenda.
We have extensive coverage, with CNN's Judy Woodruff in Washington, Bill Schneider in Los Angeles, and Jeff Greenfield in New York.
Judy, let's start with you in D.C. Let's talk about the fact that he is a newcomer and the pros and cons of that.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the fact is, Bill Frist, what we need to know about this man, first of all, is he didn't vote until he was 36 years old. He ran for the Senate with no -- United States Senate in 1994 with no experience whatsoever in politics. He went straight from a very successful career as a surgeon, a heart/lung transplant surgeon, in fact, surprised everybody, won that race back in 1994, ran the Republican Senate re-election committee operation over the last few years, successful there. The Republicans did well on November 5th.
Now he's going to be the majority leader in the Senate, and I think you have to say he's someone who should not be underestimated.
PHILLIPS: Bill, you want to weigh in?
WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, he also is a favorite of the White House. That's one of the reasons he got this job. He was the chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee in this past midterm election, which as you remember, did very well when they elected a net gain of two Republican senators. It was expected they might lose senators. It was a struggle for them to gain the majority. They made it, with the support of the White House, closely coordinated with the White House. He is a favorite of the White House. And so some senators a little worried he's going to be Bush's man. They don't want too much interference by the president in their affairs.
But in any case, he has the confidence of the president.
PHILLIPS: Jeff, is he in the president's back pocket?
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST: You know, the problem for any Senate leader whose party is in power is the White House is to demonstrate just that, demonstrate that he is not. The Senate is a particularly jealous institution of its own prerogatives, even more than the House, because they have a role to play in foreign policy that the House doesn't. They're always careful to try to say we don't want control from the White House.
But I think that that's something that Senator Frist understands. This is a guy who's a relative novice in the sense that he only entered politics in 1994. But this is a guy whose entire life is kind of overachievement. He not only invented this heart/lung transplant procedure. He's a triathlon runner. One of his aides ones described to me that there is just basically nothing this guy does not do very well, granted that's not an objective source of information, but it seems to be true. He also one of these people who lives on four hours a sleep on night and thrives on it.
So my feeling is it's not going to take him a long time to grasp the notion he is not going to be the White House's puppet if he wants to retain the respect and affection of fellow Republican senators. It doesn't work that way.
PHILLIPS: The issue of skeletons in the closet came up last week, of course. We've been getting a number of e-mails. I want to throw some of these out and touch on a few of these thoughts. This one from Sam House (ph) III: "Is Mr. Frist involved personally in the fraud case of his family's business, if he is involved at all?"
Judy, you talked about the HCA situation on Friday. Maybe you can touch on this. We've talked about Frist's holdings in HCA, and not necessarily any proof that he's been connected to these alleged fraudulent claims?
WOODRUFF: Well, it was his father, in fact, who founded the company back in 1968. It merged with another company in 1994, making it Columbia HCA, the largest hospital corporation in the world. His brother now runs it, but all of Senator Bill Frist's holdings, which we're told run between $5 million and $25 million, have been put into a blind trust. So we really don't know how much he has, but we know he is legally separated from any interest in what happens to that company.
But you're right, Kyra, the company did pay something like $1.7 billion in fines for overbilling on Medicare. The sense that I have at this point is that it's going to be difficult to pin on Bill Frist some of the problems with the company. It's been attempted in his two races for the United States Senate. In neither case did it stop him from winning by very impressive margins.
PHILLIPS: All right. Any thoughts, Jeff, or, Bill, before we move on to another e-mail?
SCHNEIDER: Well, he also has been very close to the Eli Lilly controversy, and the controversy that I've heard people talk about is the fact that he defended a provision in the homeland security bill that protects Eli Lilly and some other drug companies from lawsuits over vaccine additives they manufacture that are alleged to have really devastating side effects. This is a very controversial provision. Some moderate Republicans said they would not vote for the homeland security bill if they were in it. They said it was bad government.
Trent Lott actually made a deal with them, that they would a support the bill and pass it, if it was signed into law, but that provision would be reconsidered. The deal may be dead, because Lott is not going to be majority leader. But Frist was one of the advocates of that provision. He tried to get it inserted in many bills. He has a close relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, the drug industry. Eli Lilly bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. But remember, I'll tell you, the profits from the sale were donated to charity. Nevertheless, his relationship with Eli Lily is a bit of matter of controversy.
PHILLIPS: Jeff, any thoughts before we go to another e-mail?
GREENFIELD: No, not on this. It's always a question of whether or not either you can tie a politician to the industry that he was involved in. It certainly didn't take, hasn't so far, with Dick Cheney and Halliburton, or for that matter, George Bush and Harken Energy. We'll see whether health care is a sufficiently more emotional issue that it will. It doesn't like look like it so far.
PHILLIPS: All right, Jeff, why don't you start off by Addressing this e-mail then, Bruce Moellenhoff saying, "What is the senator's opinion of the Middle East conflict? What is the national interest in supporting Israel??
GREENFIELD: Well, those are two very different questions, but the Republican Party in the Senate is, if anything, as supportive, if not more supportive of Israel than the Democratic Party. Almost like a race to see who is more pro-Israeli. But the second question is way too broad for us to tackle right now, but there's no reason to think that Bill Frist is particularly separate from the administration or from a kind of bipartisan notion that Israel is the United States' ally in the Middle East.
PHILLIPS: Judy?
WOODRUFF: I wouldn't really have anything to add about -- to what Jeff said about the Middle East. But if I can take a privilege myself and sort of speak more broadly about Bill Frist and international affairs. It is interesting that the one part of the world he's taking a personal interest in is the continent of Africa. He, for the last three years, has made, I believe, it's a total of three trips to Sudan, a country, southern Sudan. It's been completely ripped apart by internal civil warfare. He's gone over there and performed surgery on people who've been wounded time and again. He sought little publicity for this.
He has taken and taken it upon himself to work on the greater U.S. funding for fighting AIDS on the continent of Africa, persuading the Bush administration to do a little bit more than they intended, but ultimately compromising and going along with a much lower figure of AIDS funding. PHILLIPS: John King at the White House, I understand we can bring him in to this conversation.
John, I don't know at what point we got you in tune here, but maybe you can add to the international connection with Frist, and I know he has a number of overseas missions, and, as Judy was talking about, the surgeries on those folks in Africa. What else can you tell us about, maybe, his take on Middle East policy, other international issues?
JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: No indications at all, Kyra, that he has any view different from the president or from the Republican Party when it comes to Israel. As to those trips to Africa, White House officials view those as one of Frist's greatest assets. This is a president who talked about compassionate conservatism. This is a president who spends a great deal of time saying, outside of anybody's day-to-day job, it's important to volunteer, give of yourself to the community. So they view those trips, Senator Frist giving up his own time, a surgeon, using those skills, they view that the face of compassionate conservatism they want in a Senate leader.
Again, this White House very sensitive to the idea that perhaps, behind the scenes, they helped engineer what is happening today, the replacement of Trent Lott with Bill Frist, but he is the very outward face of the Republican Party, very similar to this president, a happy face, if you will, on a conservative agenda critics say is mean spirited. The White House would reject that. They expect Senator Frist to be optimistic, and the White House agenda in the year ahead is Senator Frist's agenda in the Senate.
Major health care issues will be a the number one priority of this Senate. Senator Frist has spent months and the past couple of months trying to reach across the aisle to liberals, like Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, trying to come up with compromises, whether the issue be Medicare, the HMO bill of rights. This White House quite happy with what is happening today, although it is a strange political moment. They are sensitive to the idea that behind the scenes, they helped make this happen because of all the feathers ruffled because of that perception in the Senate -- Kyra.
Judy, you've been investigating Lott's voting record. What did you find?
PHILLIPS: And, John, you've talked about the conservative agenda.
Judy, you've been investigating Lott's voting record -- what did you find?
WOODRUFF: Well, maybe investigating is too strong a term. I've certainly looked at it. And the initial indications are that on so many of the votes that matter to the conservatives in the Republican Party, Bill Frist and Trent Lott have voted virtually identically. So I think, you know, for those that are looking, you know, as John King said, looking -- Republicans, the White House, looking for someone to put a more moderate face on the Republican Party, when you look beneath that, many of the votes are the same.
Now, he has moved to the left in a few instances, but I would say by and large, he has voted in-line with the Republican Party, and certainly in line with this president.
PHILLIPS: Jeff Greenfield, how do you create an image that this party is open to minorities, and race relations?
GREENFIELD: That may be exactly the problem. If you're thinking about it -- I don't mean your problem, I mean any party's problem. If you're thinking in terms of image, despite the fact that sounds like a shrewd political motion, it may not work. Look what happened in 2000, the Republican convention, often said had more minorities up on the platform speaking than it did in the audience.
George W. Bush went out and campaigned throughout minority communities and he got barely more of a percentage of the vote than Barry Goldwater did in 1964. Look, I think There's a very long, hard road for the Republican Party to follow to persuade increasing numbers of African-Americans, of Hispanics, and for that matter, of white moderates and liberals, that conservative solutions will actually be better off for people most in need. That's the central argument of a moderate conservative Republican Party.
It seems to me that what they've got to do is to prove it, to put things into effect like school vouchers, empowerment zone, alternatives to big government programs, and demonstrate that compassionate conservatism is a genuine policy notion, rather than just a spin.
PHILLIPS: Jeff Greenfield, Judy Woodruff, Bill Schneider, John King, I'm told we must leave it there. Thank you all so much for your input.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Aired December 23, 2002 - 14:01 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
KYRA PHILLIPS, CNN ANCHOR: We begin this hour with a political windfall awaiting a lawmaker who's not exactly a household name. By some standards, he's still a Senate newcomer. Bill Frist from Tennessee is poised to become first among equals, leader of the incoming Republican majority, setter of the Senate pace and agenda.
We have extensive coverage, with CNN's Judy Woodruff in Washington, Bill Schneider in Los Angeles, and Jeff Greenfield in New York.
Judy, let's start with you in D.C. Let's talk about the fact that he is a newcomer and the pros and cons of that.
JUDY WOODRUFF, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, the fact is, Bill Frist, what we need to know about this man, first of all, is he didn't vote until he was 36 years old. He ran for the Senate with no -- United States Senate in 1994 with no experience whatsoever in politics. He went straight from a very successful career as a surgeon, a heart/lung transplant surgeon, in fact, surprised everybody, won that race back in 1994, ran the Republican Senate re-election committee operation over the last few years, successful there. The Republicans did well on November 5th.
Now he's going to be the majority leader in the Senate, and I think you have to say he's someone who should not be underestimated.
PHILLIPS: Bill, you want to weigh in?
WILLIAM SCHNEIDER, CNN SR. POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, he also is a favorite of the White House. That's one of the reasons he got this job. He was the chairman of the Republican Senate Campaign Committee in this past midterm election, which as you remember, did very well when they elected a net gain of two Republican senators. It was expected they might lose senators. It was a struggle for them to gain the majority. They made it, with the support of the White House, closely coordinated with the White House. He is a favorite of the White House. And so some senators a little worried he's going to be Bush's man. They don't want too much interference by the president in their affairs.
But in any case, he has the confidence of the president.
PHILLIPS: Jeff, is he in the president's back pocket?
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SR. ANALYST: You know, the problem for any Senate leader whose party is in power is the White House is to demonstrate just that, demonstrate that he is not. The Senate is a particularly jealous institution of its own prerogatives, even more than the House, because they have a role to play in foreign policy that the House doesn't. They're always careful to try to say we don't want control from the White House.
But I think that that's something that Senator Frist understands. This is a guy who's a relative novice in the sense that he only entered politics in 1994. But this is a guy whose entire life is kind of overachievement. He not only invented this heart/lung transplant procedure. He's a triathlon runner. One of his aides ones described to me that there is just basically nothing this guy does not do very well, granted that's not an objective source of information, but it seems to be true. He also one of these people who lives on four hours a sleep on night and thrives on it.
So my feeling is it's not going to take him a long time to grasp the notion he is not going to be the White House's puppet if he wants to retain the respect and affection of fellow Republican senators. It doesn't work that way.
PHILLIPS: The issue of skeletons in the closet came up last week, of course. We've been getting a number of e-mails. I want to throw some of these out and touch on a few of these thoughts. This one from Sam House (ph) III: "Is Mr. Frist involved personally in the fraud case of his family's business, if he is involved at all?"
Judy, you talked about the HCA situation on Friday. Maybe you can touch on this. We've talked about Frist's holdings in HCA, and not necessarily any proof that he's been connected to these alleged fraudulent claims?
WOODRUFF: Well, it was his father, in fact, who founded the company back in 1968. It merged with another company in 1994, making it Columbia HCA, the largest hospital corporation in the world. His brother now runs it, but all of Senator Bill Frist's holdings, which we're told run between $5 million and $25 million, have been put into a blind trust. So we really don't know how much he has, but we know he is legally separated from any interest in what happens to that company.
But you're right, Kyra, the company did pay something like $1.7 billion in fines for overbilling on Medicare. The sense that I have at this point is that it's going to be difficult to pin on Bill Frist some of the problems with the company. It's been attempted in his two races for the United States Senate. In neither case did it stop him from winning by very impressive margins.
PHILLIPS: All right. Any thoughts, Jeff, or, Bill, before we move on to another e-mail?
SCHNEIDER: Well, he also has been very close to the Eli Lilly controversy, and the controversy that I've heard people talk about is the fact that he defended a provision in the homeland security bill that protects Eli Lilly and some other drug companies from lawsuits over vaccine additives they manufacture that are alleged to have really devastating side effects. This is a very controversial provision. Some moderate Republicans said they would not vote for the homeland security bill if they were in it. They said it was bad government.
Trent Lott actually made a deal with them, that they would a support the bill and pass it, if it was signed into law, but that provision would be reconsidered. The deal may be dead, because Lott is not going to be majority leader. But Frist was one of the advocates of that provision. He tried to get it inserted in many bills. He has a close relationship with the pharmaceutical industry, the drug industry. Eli Lilly bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. But remember, I'll tell you, the profits from the sale were donated to charity. Nevertheless, his relationship with Eli Lily is a bit of matter of controversy.
PHILLIPS: Jeff, any thoughts before we go to another e-mail?
GREENFIELD: No, not on this. It's always a question of whether or not either you can tie a politician to the industry that he was involved in. It certainly didn't take, hasn't so far, with Dick Cheney and Halliburton, or for that matter, George Bush and Harken Energy. We'll see whether health care is a sufficiently more emotional issue that it will. It doesn't like look like it so far.
PHILLIPS: All right, Jeff, why don't you start off by Addressing this e-mail then, Bruce Moellenhoff saying, "What is the senator's opinion of the Middle East conflict? What is the national interest in supporting Israel??
GREENFIELD: Well, those are two very different questions, but the Republican Party in the Senate is, if anything, as supportive, if not more supportive of Israel than the Democratic Party. Almost like a race to see who is more pro-Israeli. But the second question is way too broad for us to tackle right now, but there's no reason to think that Bill Frist is particularly separate from the administration or from a kind of bipartisan notion that Israel is the United States' ally in the Middle East.
PHILLIPS: Judy?
WOODRUFF: I wouldn't really have anything to add about -- to what Jeff said about the Middle East. But if I can take a privilege myself and sort of speak more broadly about Bill Frist and international affairs. It is interesting that the one part of the world he's taking a personal interest in is the continent of Africa. He, for the last three years, has made, I believe, it's a total of three trips to Sudan, a country, southern Sudan. It's been completely ripped apart by internal civil warfare. He's gone over there and performed surgery on people who've been wounded time and again. He sought little publicity for this.
He has taken and taken it upon himself to work on the greater U.S. funding for fighting AIDS on the continent of Africa, persuading the Bush administration to do a little bit more than they intended, but ultimately compromising and going along with a much lower figure of AIDS funding. PHILLIPS: John King at the White House, I understand we can bring him in to this conversation.
John, I don't know at what point we got you in tune here, but maybe you can add to the international connection with Frist, and I know he has a number of overseas missions, and, as Judy was talking about, the surgeries on those folks in Africa. What else can you tell us about, maybe, his take on Middle East policy, other international issues?
JOHN KING, CNN SR. WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT: No indications at all, Kyra, that he has any view different from the president or from the Republican Party when it comes to Israel. As to those trips to Africa, White House officials view those as one of Frist's greatest assets. This is a president who talked about compassionate conservatism. This is a president who spends a great deal of time saying, outside of anybody's day-to-day job, it's important to volunteer, give of yourself to the community. So they view those trips, Senator Frist giving up his own time, a surgeon, using those skills, they view that the face of compassionate conservatism they want in a Senate leader.
Again, this White House very sensitive to the idea that perhaps, behind the scenes, they helped engineer what is happening today, the replacement of Trent Lott with Bill Frist, but he is the very outward face of the Republican Party, very similar to this president, a happy face, if you will, on a conservative agenda critics say is mean spirited. The White House would reject that. They expect Senator Frist to be optimistic, and the White House agenda in the year ahead is Senator Frist's agenda in the Senate.
Major health care issues will be a the number one priority of this Senate. Senator Frist has spent months and the past couple of months trying to reach across the aisle to liberals, like Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, trying to come up with compromises, whether the issue be Medicare, the HMO bill of rights. This White House quite happy with what is happening today, although it is a strange political moment. They are sensitive to the idea that behind the scenes, they helped make this happen because of all the feathers ruffled because of that perception in the Senate -- Kyra.
Judy, you've been investigating Lott's voting record. What did you find?
PHILLIPS: And, John, you've talked about the conservative agenda.
Judy, you've been investigating Lott's voting record -- what did you find?
WOODRUFF: Well, maybe investigating is too strong a term. I've certainly looked at it. And the initial indications are that on so many of the votes that matter to the conservatives in the Republican Party, Bill Frist and Trent Lott have voted virtually identically. So I think, you know, for those that are looking, you know, as John King said, looking -- Republicans, the White House, looking for someone to put a more moderate face on the Republican Party, when you look beneath that, many of the votes are the same.
Now, he has moved to the left in a few instances, but I would say by and large, he has voted in-line with the Republican Party, and certainly in line with this president.
PHILLIPS: Jeff Greenfield, how do you create an image that this party is open to minorities, and race relations?
GREENFIELD: That may be exactly the problem. If you're thinking about it -- I don't mean your problem, I mean any party's problem. If you're thinking in terms of image, despite the fact that sounds like a shrewd political motion, it may not work. Look what happened in 2000, the Republican convention, often said had more minorities up on the platform speaking than it did in the audience.
George W. Bush went out and campaigned throughout minority communities and he got barely more of a percentage of the vote than Barry Goldwater did in 1964. Look, I think There's a very long, hard road for the Republican Party to follow to persuade increasing numbers of African-Americans, of Hispanics, and for that matter, of white moderates and liberals, that conservative solutions will actually be better off for people most in need. That's the central argument of a moderate conservative Republican Party.
It seems to me that what they've got to do is to prove it, to put things into effect like school vouchers, empowerment zone, alternatives to big government programs, and demonstrate that compassionate conservatism is a genuine policy notion, rather than just a spin.
PHILLIPS: Jeff Greenfield, Judy Woodruff, Bill Schneider, John King, I'm told we must leave it there. Thank you all so much for your input.
TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
