CARLSON:   Welcome back to CROSSFIRE. We're coming to you from the George Washington University here in downtown Washington, D.C. Tonight we're departing from CROSSFIRE's normal, scrupulously fair and balanced approach to debating the issues with one host on the left and one on the right and for good reason. Paul Begala, our beloved Paul Begala, has writted a new book. It's called "It's Still The Economy, Stupid." And my collegue Bob Novak and I feel it's time we both confronted him about its absurd claims and shameless attacks on the Bush administration. Ladies and gentleman, the author of "It's Still The Economy, Stupid," CROSSFIRE's own Paul Begala. 
BEGALA:   Excellent. Well thank you for that lovely, gracious introduction. 
CARLSON:   Paul, thank you for joining us. 
BEGALA:   Yes, sir, thank you. 
CARLSON:   I actually read your book, got so mad I yelled at the dog by the end. I agreed with your acknowledgments, they were fantastic. Actually it was very clever, your book. And it makes the bottomline argument it seems to me is that Bush has wrecked the economy. 
BEGALA:   He's done all he can. There are externalities that affected it. We were in trouble when he came into office. It's true Clinton didn't repeal the business cycle. It is true 9/11 did us grievous damage. But when you see a drowning man you don't throw him an anvil. And that's what Bush did. His economic policy took a bad situation made it much, much worse. 
CARLSON:   But you say it's much, much worse. I just want to finish my thought here and have you respond to it. Average people don't seem to agree with you. A lot of polling on this. I want to hit you with two of them. The first poll, CNN/"TIME" poll, asked people about your financial situation. Seventy--seven percent of Americans say their financial situation is good. Next poll, What do you think the effect of the Bush White House is going to be on the economy for next year? Sixty--five percent of Americans think next year's going to be even better than it is this year. So your premise is wrong, isn't it? 
BEGALA:   No, people are always hopeful at the Christmas season. But we just had a poll --- two polls came out this week -- two polls came out this week. Both of them said overwhelmingly that people would rather have the government invest in things that make us safer and smarter and stronger than give another big tax cut to the rich. They didn't ask it the way I would have with that loaded language. They asked it very neutral. Both "The Los Angeles Times" poll and "The Washington Post"/ABC poll asked people about economic issues. All of them come down on my side. Why didn't the party win the recent election? Because they didn't campaign on my book. They didn't campaign on Democratic economic issues. They ran around saying, Oh, I'm for Bush's tax cut, too. No wonder they lost. 
NOVAK:   Paul, I know it's bad form to ask authors how they write their book. But as I read your book, I found so much deja vu of stuff I had heard on the campaign trail this year. Did you run around campaign boiler rooms and pick up the unused parts of their speeches and paste them together? Was that the way you put the book together? 
BEGALA:   No, no, no. I've written a lot of speeches for a lot of politicians. 
NOVAK:   And they sound like it in this book. 
BEGALA:   What's unusual about this book and, I think, as a scholar yourself you would appreciate it, is it's meticulously footnoted. There are 622 footnotes. You don't find that in most of the right wing diatribes. You may not agree with what it says but it's carefully researched and carefully footnoted. 
NOVAK:   Here's a thing that offends some people. It offends me, to tell you the truth. 
BEGALA:   I hate to offend you, Bob. 
NOVAK:   You call the president stupid. 
BEGALA:   Oh, no, no, no. 
NOVAK:   That's what the reference to. You call him during the whole time -- you call him Junior. 
BEGALA:   He is. He's not senior. He's junior. You got to distinguish him from his father. 
NOVAK:   He's not a junior. He's not George W.H. Bush -- George Jr. And you don't -- And you treat him with such disrespect. Do you think that's funny, or... 
BEGALA:   I think politicians should be laughed at. I actually know Bush a little bit and I think he's a good guy. 
NOVAK:   Why should they be laughed at? 
BEGALA:   Well, maybe you lack a sense of humor, Bob. We can treat that, you know, these days. The title comes, of course, from a very famous sign that my pal Carville put up in the war room, It's the economy stupid. And my point is, "It is Still The Economy Stupid." If I wanted to make it about Bush, I would say "It's Still The Economy and He's Still Stupid." But I do not actually believe that. 
CARLSON:   But what if it's still the stupid analysis of the economy, and that is what the "Austin American Statesman" essentially said of your book in a review. I just want to read you one part which I think gets right to the core problem with the book, "Begala assumes that Clinton economic policies will work in any time and place. He ignores the critical fact that the economic boom didn't ignite until two years after Clinton got his deficit reducing budget through Congress. It took technological advances, private sector advances to spur amazingly productivity increases and allow the Federal Reserve to repeatedly lower interest rates." So the bottom line here is, ordinary Americans innovating and working hard are responsible for the boom under the Clinton administration. 
BEGALA:   Duh. Duh. But... 
CARLSON:   Then why do you give Clinton credit for it? 
BEGALA:   Let me finish the answer. Duh. But were they stupid under Bush? Were they stupid under Reagan? Were they lazy under Bush? No. Clinton -- government policies matter. And Clinton removed this god-awful Reagan/Bush deficit, paid it down and then invested in things like education to make people smarter. And that's what triggered the boom. He liberalized capital markets, right? He allowed -- pulled the government out of borrowing all that money to pay off the debt. Allowed entrepreneurs then to borrow money so they could apply their genius and expertise. To believe your theory, you have to believe people were stupid when Reagan and Bush were president. They were not. 
CARLSON:   We don't have time, unfortunately, to deconstruct every misleading thing that you have just said. But let's just take one. 
BEGALA:   It's all factual. 
CARLSON:   You just said that President Clinton invested in education, thereby making people smarter, thereby spurring the economy on to greater growth. Are you saying that in the space of eight years, Bill Clinton was responsible for educating people who then left school, entered the workplace, innovated, created new products, and then spurred the economy? That's ludicrous. 
BEGALA:   Some. Things like working skills matter, Tucker. Job skills matter. When you give people education and training, it has an enormous, enormous effect. Yes, it does. So yes, more people got education than ever before. More people got job training. More people got retraining. 
CARLSON:   So Clinton created the Internet, is what you're saying.  
BEGALA:   That's silly, Tucker. Actually the government did and I'm glad that the government did. But no, it was investing in people, and reducing the deficit, reversing the entire Reagan/Bush economic team... 
NOVAK:   I feel constrained to give the viewers a taste... 
BEGALA:   Please do. 
NOVAK:   ... of the Begala theory. We're going to turn to page 44. Put it up on the screen. 
BEGALA:   It's a great page. 
NOVAK:   "If you want to save Social Security without cutting benefits, without raising payroll takes, without funding Social Security and the deficits, without gambling Granny's retirement on Kenny-Boy Lay's latest Wall Street scheme, there's really only one option: repeal the as yet unrealized portions of the Bush tax cut." Are you -- are you really -- no serious person could say that, that the problems of the Social Security system going bust 30 years from now are going to be solved by not giving the American -- the successful American people the tax cut they've been promised? 
BEGALA:   Let me tell you who says it. A guy named Peter Orzack (ph), a top Treasury official in the Clinton administration, studied this for the Center On Budget and Policy Projects. This is what he found. Over 75 years, the shortfall in Social Security is enormous: $3.7 trillion. You know what the Bush tax cut is? Over $8 trillion. So you could solve the entire Social Security deficit and still have $5 trillion left over to do better things to make our country stronger. 
NOVAK:   That's sheer nonsense. 
BEGALA:   That's absolutely true. 
NOVAK:   Let me use a poll. CNN/"USA Today"/Gallup poll asked on September 20, Should we allow workers to put Social Security taxes into stocks and bonds? This is the thing that all the Democratic demagogues or the demagogic Democrats have been screaming about. Let's look at what the result was. Favor that, 52 percent. Oppose it, only 43 percent. What do you make of that? 
BEGALA:   Well you know what they don't tell them? They don't tell them that in every one of the proposals in Bush's commission, benefits would be cut. Guaranteed benefits are cut in every Bush proposal. And they don't tell us it costs between 1 and $2 trillion to do it. And where is the money going to come from? Do we have a spare trillion dollars to move from one system to another? 
CARLSON:   Paul, let me ask you this. This a little bit off topic but it gets to something I wanted to ask you for a long time. You say in the book, as... 
BEGALA:   I'm married. 
CARLSON:   Well, that's an after show discussion. 
BEGALA:   Sorry. 
CARLSON:   You've said many times on this show, you've said Clinton -- rather President Bush wants to poison America's children by putting arsenic in the water. You make the point that the president, when he came in, suspended a rule that the Clinton administration put lowering the amount of arsenic allowable in water. Here's my question. That rule was put in by the Clinton administration literally in the last week of power. So if it was such a great idea, the environmental lobby had been pushing for it for 10 years, why did he wait until the last week? 
BEGALA:   It was actually the result of a 10--ear study that Bush senior had begun. These things take an enormous amount of time. You don't want to rush them in. It was a 10--year program. Finally, in the book I say Bush does not want to poison children, but he took that bad policy because he's bought off campaign contributors. 
NOVAK:   Paul! I don't have to be polite to you. We're out of time. Thank you. Thank you Tucker Carlson. 
CARLSON:   Bob, it was nice to see you. 
NOVAK:   I appreciate it. 
CARLSON:   When we come back, viewer reviewers. Some of our viewers have actually read Paul Begala's book and they confront him. We'll be right back.
