Meet the Press Roundtable raises some interesting issues about 2008 GOP

This is an interesting little excerpt from yesterday morning's Meet the Press with Tim Russert. You read and decide. As FDT's potential opponents have recently tried to cast doubt(and failed) as to FDT's LIFE credentials (100% Pro-Life in Senate) and support of McCain-Feingold (good idea in concept to take money out of campaigns, but it just hasn't worked out as he thought it would), I thought I would pass this MTP transcript along, many items of which I had not heard of before and I read a lot. No pardon policy? other "devastating" stories lingering in the NY media market? As they say, this will be one wild ride...

From Sunday's Meet the Press 24 June:
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MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, Giuliani had been leading in the polls, was high as 48 percent at one time in the Republican Party, now down to about 25. How do you size up his campaign?

MR. BRODER: What goes up real fast can come down real fast, and I think his lead has looked fragile to me for some time. I have had very few dealings with Mayor Giuliani, but I don’t know of anybody whose reputation is such that—I mean, the stories that you hear about Giuliani from people who’ve covered him in New York are devastating stories. And this history of his—business history, political history and so on—I think will catch up with him.

MR. RUSSERT: And yet terrorism is still a central issue on the minds of Americans, and there’s no one who can shape that issue and point to his performance on September 11th better than Rudy Giuliani.

MR. HARWOOD: He’s got a strong card to play, but he’s also got some big problems within the Republican base. And you look at somebody like Fred Thompson, not even in the race, not very well defined among Americans, but among those very conservative Republicans, he’s dominating Giuliani and the rest of the field. And it just shows you that there’s a big softness to that Giuliani lead right now. We’ll see how long he can keep it up.

MR. RUSSERT: Roger Simon, Mitt Romney. You wrote an article as a syndicated columnist about Mitt Romney and pardons. And this is what you said: “Romney says he had a standard when it came to” handling out—“handing out pardons as governor. He didn’t want to overturn jury verdicts, and so he never granted a single pardon in his four years in office, a fact” he’s “enormously proud of today and repeatedly raises in his speeches. But Romney’s standard is flexible when it comes to Libby, who was Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and whose cause has been taken up by the conservative Republican establishment. And Romney’s true standard seems to be: No pardons for nobodies. Somebodies can catch a break.”

MR. SIMON: Anthony Circosta, at age 13, shot another kid with a BB gun, didn’t break the skin, got arrested and was convicted of assault. Doesn’t matter, grows up, works his way through college. Goes to Iraq as part of the National Guard, wins a bronze star, wants to become a cop when he returns home to Massachusetts. Applies to Mitt Romney from Iraq for a pardon so he can get this felony taken off his record, Romney says, “No, I don’t give pardons.” This is why people hate politics. That doesn’t make any sense. You make a political decision, “I don’t want to give any pardons, so I can say when I run for president I didn’t give any pardons,” and you work over a guy who’s just trying to be a cop and do good things for the state of Massachusetts. Does that make sense?

MR. RUSSERT: And we had this bizarre story where the—Governor Romney’s chief of operations, Jay Garrity, was accused of being a state trooper—trying to imitate...
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MR. RUSSERT: Posing as a state trooper, pulling a reporter over and, and, and—what is that about, John?

MR. HARWOOD: Honestly, I’m mystified by that, the idea that you would try to run a New York Times reporter off the road and say you can’t go cover my campaign rally, I don’t get it.
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Click here for full transcript of the June 24, 2007 Meet the Press online at MSNBC.