Krauthammer: Obama is 'running on nostalgia'
Columnist recaps Republican convention and assesses President Obama's performance
This is a RUSH transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," September 4, 2012. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
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BILL O'REILLY, FOX NEWS HOST: Continuing now with our coverage of the Democratic convention, it's a safe bet to say the national media will be kinder to the Democrats than they were the Republicans last week in Tampa. We asked Charles Krauthammer to monitor the national coverage of the Tampa convention and also have some thoughts on my "Talking Points" memo. Charles joins us now from Washington.
All right, so you know, you're pretty good at hot shot and telling everybody what a dunderhead I am. Where did I go wrong in the "T-Points?"
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER, FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR: Well, it pains me to say this, but this time you've stumbled -- no you've staggered on to the truth.
O'REILLY: Ok, good.
KRAUTHAMMER: Look I mean, the business about incomplete, three and a half years into the presidency, I don't know how it was over at Harvard Law School, but at the medical school society if you got an incomplete, you didn't graduate, you didn't get your MD, you didn't practice.
But forget about Harvard. Obama by his own standard, he said in an interview very early in his presidency that if he didn't have this thing fixed by three years, he was a one-term deal.
(CROSSTALK)
O'REILLY: And he might --
KRAUTHAMMER: This is the one time where I agree with Obama.
O'REILLY: Ok. Now let me point out that Charles did go to Harvard medical school, he's a psychiatrist. Number two, I respect the President for saying I give myself an incomplete. I thought that was an honest statement. It's going to be used against him but he was being honest.
And he was also being honest by saying if he didn't fix the economy in three and a half years, he's out of there. So I don't have any beef with the President on any of that stuff.
KRAUTHAMMER: Well look, I give him credit for honesty, but he didn't have any other answer.
O'REILLY: Yes -- well he could have lied. I mean and I'm not calling the Vice President a liar, I'm not. But you just heard Joe Biden saying hey, you're better off than you were four years ago and -- people are going, do you live in America?
KRAUTHAMMER: That's the point, that's why old Joe is a laughing stock and Obama is still taken seriously.
O'REILLY: Ok because he's an honest guy.
Now Charles is down in -- in Tampa and I actually hung out with him for about ten minutes in the big news room we had there and then he asked me to leave. But I asked him before he -- he had the bouncers remove me to --
(CROSSTALK)
KRAUTHAMMER: But there wasn't room for the two egos in one enclosure.
O'REILLY: That's true. I mean you could see people just with no air left in the room.
KRAUTHAMMER: There was no space, exactly.
O'REILLY: So I asked him --
(CROSSTALK)
KRAUTHAMMER: People were gasping for air.
O'REILLY: I asked Krauthammer over the weekend to look at the coverage on the -- on the national media, network and all of that, to see what kind of shots they took after the fact of the Republican convention. What did you see?
KRAUTHAMMER: I saw one sort of general consensus emerging among the main stream media that Republicans had lied continuously and repeatedly and shamelessly in their speeches. They particularly centered on Paul Ryan to the point where they were calling it almost unanimously -- this is on all the nets -- they were calling it a truth-free zone.
(CROSSTALK)
O'REILLY: And what did he lie about? What was their beef?
KRAUTHAMMER: Well, this is what is so amazing. They -- they don't even pretend to be objective anymore. They said number one, that deal about taking $700 billion out of Medicare and spending it on Obamacare, that is absolutely completely true.
And they say well, Ryan did the same thing. Ryan did not do the same thing. He took the money out -- he made the cuts in Medicare, but he used the money to go into the Medicare trust fund so it will be used for the future.
It's as if you were saving money on your child's education by sending him to public school instead of private school, so you can save the money for college. Obama did the same thing, but he didn't save the money for college. He bought a Jaguar. That's the difference between what Obama did on Medicare and what --
(CROSSTALK)
O'REILLY: Now you think -- because the issue is kind of complicated, do you think the main stream media, the national media simply doesn't understand the issue and just buys the Democratic talking points when they spit them out? Or are they doing this consciously?
KRAUTHAMMER: I think when you get to a complicated issue, they're so used to and they live in the bubble of liberalism, that's the air they breathe.
O'REILLY: Right.
KRAUTHAMMER: That they find it easier to accept it than to actually go into the weeds, as we do on Fox News, Jim Angle, a lot of the people on "Special Report" on your show and other shows, go into the weeds and show that this stuff isn't (inaudible) and they did the same on welfare.
What the Obama administration did is absolutely undermine the central work requirement in welfare which was the triumph of the `86 reform that had made inviolable the requirement of work first. And what Obama did in the HHS regulation is to make that subject to the whims and the waivers of a secretary of HHS, which was never intended in the law and is completely contrary to what the original welfare law was meant to do, signed by Clinton in 1996.
O'REILLY: Right. Ok.
Finally, I don't know whether you saw this, but they had a tribute to Ted Kennedy just a few minutes ago. And I was startled because they used a dead guy, Kennedy, to attack Mitt Romney. Instead of listing all Kennedy's achievements, they had a big portion of Kennedy debating Romney and basically calling him an idiot. Kennedy calling Romney an idiot when they were returning against each other for the senate. So the Democrats has used a dead guy to attack Romney. I went, is that good taste?
KRAUTHAMMER: No. You've got an issue of taste here but you also have a trend. You've got Obama depending on Clinton to endorse him. You've got these ads where Clinton looks at the camera and says, I had a good economy, Obama's got the same ideas. Support him.
Obama's been in office for a full term. And he's running on the Clinton economy, he's running on the Kennedy attacks, he's running on nostalgia and the past and he has the audacity as he did over the weekend of saying Romney is a man of the past and of the last century.
O'REILLY: All right. Charles Krauthammer.
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