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American Morning
Scandal-plagued Condit Loses Primary
Aired March 06, 2002 - 08:22 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.
JACK CAFFERTY, CNN ANCHOR: To California, where Congressman Gary Condit faced two adversaries in his primary race yesterday -- his former aide and his own past. This morning Condit's Capitol Hill days are officially numbered after his resounding primary defeat. Here's a report from our Frank Buckley.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Gary Condit emerged from his home as a loser in an election for the first time in 30 years of running for political office.
REP. GARY CONDIT (D), CALIFORNIA: Anyway I want to thank everybody in the 18th Congressional District for giving me this opportunity. It's been a great opportunity to be in public service and represent them in Washington, D.C., and I'll never forget it.
BUCKLEY: Few will forget the last months of Condit's time in Congress, the negative publicity resulting from the Chandra Levy case clearly affecting Democrat voters who turned in large numbers to a former Condit aide, State Assemblyman Dennis Cardoza who beat his former political mentor by a wide margin.
DENNIS CARDOZA: Let me thank Congressman Condit for 30 strong years of service and to the tradition to the people of our community and to our nation.
BUCKLEY: Condit didn't mention Cardoza in his brief statement, but Chad Condit couldn't hold back his contempt for his father's former protege.
CHAD CONDIT: What a shameful individual, takes a tragedy of a missing young person and turns it into a run for Congress. Wow.
BUCKLEY: Condit trailed in the polls and in fund-raising, but he hoped three decades of public service...
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
BUCKLEY: And a message to defy the media would help him win.
Some voters stood by him.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'm a Condit supporter, and I'll probably always be a Condit supporter.
BUCKLEY: But observers say a lack of public contrition over the Levy matter did him in.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: That district was looking for that, and he would have been fine.
BUCKLEY: Condit says he doesn't know what he would have done differently.
REP. GARY CONDIT (D), CALIFORNIA: Life deals you all kinds of situations, and it's not the situations, it's how you handle it, and I tried to be a gentleman. I tried to be dignified.
BUCKLEY: Congressman Condit says he will finish out his term, but about his life beyond Congress, he said just before the election, I haven't thought about doing anything else.
Frank Buckley, CNN, Modesto, California.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: And there were a lot of other races deciding California -- well, hello, Jack.
CAFFERTY: Hello.
ZAHN: How are you?
CAFFERTY: Average. How are you doing?
ZAHN: I'm doing just fine. So guess who's here right now? Jeff Greenfield, the man...
CAFFERTY: Indeed he is.
ZAHN: ... who knows more about politics than anybody else I know, our senior political analyst. How are you this morning?
JEFF GREENFIELD, CNN SENIOR ANALYST: All right.
ZAHN: No one should have been surprised by Gary Condit losing. I mean the polls have shown that that was going to happen for many, many months now.
GREENFIELD: Yes this was a race with utterly no political significance. It's -- basically if you're a sitting congressman and you are revealed to your district or in the country, in this case, and somebody who is very different from who they thought you were, and it isn't because you won the Nobel Prize for chemistry, you're in deep trouble, and that's it.
I mean this is a story that, you know, that was flogged to death in the past summer by all or most of us, and it left a resoundingly bad taste in voter's mouth that this guy was into one of the most serious cases of denial anyone has ever seen in politics, and the voters punished him for it.
ZAHN: Well, it begs the question why he ran in the first place. I mean he was told the deck was stacked against him from day one when he started raising money for this race.
GREENFIELD: I just don't think this guy has a clue about what he appeared to be, what he was -- what people really resented about him. He tried to do something that's very smart, in one sense, as you run against the media. And the fact that he was even less popular than we were tells you something about how the voters saw him. It takes a lot for people not to believe somebody who says the media are a bunch of predators.
ZAHN: Let's move on to the issue of the Republican primary in California where there was a big surprise.
GREENFIELD: This is a really remarkable story. It's one for the books. Here you have Richard Riordan, two-term mayor of Los Angeles, the perfect model, Republicans thought, to end their drought of being almost invisible in California for the last eight years. The Bush White House said go, please. Run for governor, and he made about as classic a mistake as you can make in politics, which is this.
You have to make the base of your party happy. It's not that he was pro choice and pro gay rights and therefore, Republicans wouldn't vote for him. The last California governor, Pete Wilson, was pro- choice and pro-gay rights. But you can't get up and in effect say, I am going to do you the great honor of running, and I don't even have to talk to you guys. I'm running for the general election before you make your party happy.
ZAHN: Final thought on the man who beat him.
GREENFIELD: Bill Simon is the guy that Gray Davis, the incumbent Democratic governor, wanted to run against. And by most calculations, California won't elect a conservative. Now let me point this out. In 1966, California Governor Pat Brown, sheered when he found out that the conservative had beaten a moderate in the Republican nomination for governor. That guy's name was Ronald Reagan. So don't...
ZAHN: Oh...
GREENFIELD: ... make any -- now I'm not saying Bill Simon is a Ronald Reagan, but just be careful what you wish for in politics because it doesn't always work out the way you want. Clearly, Gray Davis is the favorite right now, but this is March, that's November.
ZAHN: Mr. Davis, did you hear Jeff Greenfield speak this morning? Interesting. I...
(CROSSTALK)
ZAHN: ... remember that.
(CROSSTALK) GREENFIELD: ... you know, the worst -- the thing we political journalists never do is take a breath and wait for voters to figure out what they think, and we could do a lot better if we just waited a while to see what happened.
ZAHN: Smart move...
GREENFIELD: So...
ZAHN: ... Jeff Greenfield, thanks for dropping by.
GREENFIELD: OK.
ZAHN: Appreciate your time this morning.
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