TRANSCRIPT: The Democratic Debate

And I thought that, based on what he had said and what we were talking about at the time in the Congress, that that would be an appropriate approach.

KUCINICH: Were you tricked?

CLINTON: I would never have diverted our attention to Iraq, and I never would have pursued this war. I think that has been a terrible mistake for our country.

KUCINICH: Were you tricked, Senator Clinton?

RICHARDSON: You know, I think the question was about past regrets and mistakes. I'm making, at this rate, about one mistake a week.

(LAUGHTER)

And, you know, I make a lot of misstatements. I'm not the scripted candidate. But I think when the chips are down, when the time comes to get hostages out from Saddam Hussein or persuade the North Koreans to reduce their nuclear arsenal, or bring back the remains of American servicemen, I perform.

But the reality is, what the American people want is a president who says, "I will follow the Constitution of the United States; I will not go to war unless the Congress authorizes me to go to war."

RICHARDSON: And we're going to get rid of those blemishes that America has, like Guantanamo, like eavesdropping on our citizens, like policies of torture, like returning habeas corpus.

I think if we simply say that we are in an America of checks and balances, where the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches have an equal role, that we're honoring the principles of freedom, where America stands.

Then that's what that enormous confidence that people will have in our country will come back.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Dodd, where didn't you tell the whole truth?

DODD: Well, I'll tell you one issue that I wish I had done more on, recently. And, I think, maybe one of the worst votes cast in the Congress, maybe in the last 20 years, was last fall, on the Military Commissions Act, in which we allowed the abandonment of habeas corpus, returning to torture, and abandoning the Geneva Convention.

I thought about filibustering that bill, and I didn't do it. I regret that deeply. I can't think of a worse vote we cast, to walk away from the Constitution of the United States.

(APPLAUSE)

And I'm committed, on January 20, to bring that...

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STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Dodd, thank you. Let me turn, now, to an issue that hasn't been discussed enough in these debates so far. It's the issue of education. And, for that, let me bring David Yepsen back.

YEPSEN: Senator Dodd, should more effective -- I'm going to ask you about so-called performance-based pay. Should more effective teachers be paid less than effective ones?

DODD: I wouldn't use that approach. What I've suggested here -- this is a huge issue here. We've got to reexamine our whole education process, from beginning to the top here, and I'm a believer that we need to have fundamental reform of No Child Left Behind, and start measuring growth, not abandoning schools that aren't doing well, and providing far less rigid criteria when it comes to highly qualified teachers.

Where I would like to go here is see that we apply additional resources to teachers who will go into the tougher schools in rural or urban America, where they need better teachers coming in, and provide some additional incentives for them, including pay and including the criteria that they have to meet to do so.

But I'm not in favor necessarily of giving more preference for a teacher that's performing somewhat better. Measuring that I think is the wrong direction we're going in.

DODD: Taking snapshots of schools and teachers and students is not measuring how we're doing here. We need a far better approach on No Child Left Behind. I'm offering those ideas. The idea of discriminating one group of teachers against another in that regard, I think is a huge mistake and I'd oppose it.

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YEPSEN: Senator Obama, performance-based pay. How would you do that without alienating the teacher's unions?

OBAMA: Well, I've had a lot of discussions with teachers all throughout Iowa. And they feel betrayed and frustrated by No Child Left Behind. And Chris is right: We shouldn't reauthorize it without changing it fundamentally.

We left the money behind for No Child Left Behind, and so there are school districts all across the state and all across the country that are having a difficult time implementing No Child Left Behind. And teachers are extraordinarily frustrated about how their performance is assessed.

And not just their own performance, but the school's performance generally. So they're teaching to the tests all the time. What I have said is that we should be able to get buy-in from teachers in terms of how to measure progress.

OBAMA: Every teacher I think wants to succeed. And if we give them a pathway to professional development, where we're creating master teachers, they are helping with apprenticeships for young new teachers, they are doing more work, they are involved in a variety of other activities, that are really adding value to the schools, then we should be able to give them more money for it.

But we should only do it if the teachers themselves have some buy-in in terms of how they're measured. They can't be judged simply on standardized tests that don't take into account whether children are prepared before they get to school or not, which is also one of the reasons why we've got to put more money into early childhood education.

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YEPSEN: Senator Clinton?

CLINTON: Well, I have long supported incentive pay for school wide performance. You know, what we're trying to do is to change the culture within schools and to provide the resources, the training and the support that teachers need to do the job they do want to do.

And particularly focusing on kids who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, I think you have to start with preschool, even before pre-kindergarten.

CLINTON: I've advocated universal pre-kindergarten. I think you have to start even earlier to try to help the family be the best school and teaching opportunity for their own children.

You have to reform No Child Left Behind. We're going to try to do that and begin to make it much more in line with the reality of teaching.

But I think that we've got to have a real conversation with our teachers, our students and our parents, because basically you can walk in a classroom today and it looks very much like the classroom I walked into, you know, 50 years ago.

And we have changed as a nation. We don't live and work the same way. But we act as though our schools are somehow off limits to trying to bring technology and other changes to them.

YEPSEN: Governor Richardson?

RICHARDSON: Well, you asked the question, are we for merit pay for teachers? No, I'm not for it. But what we need to do is pay our teachers better. They are disrespected.

(APPLAUSE)

RICHARDSON: I have proposed a minimum wage for our teachers, $40,000 per year.

I also have a one-point plan, like I do on Iraq, on No Child Left Behind: Scrap it. It's a mess; it's a disaster.

(APPLAUSE)

What I would also do is have -- you know, we are 29th in the world in math and science. We need to have 100,000 new math and science teachers. We have to be number one again.

I would have preschool for every child. I would have full-day kindergarten. I'd revise our high school curriculums -- science, math, languages, civics, and an arts-in-the-schools programs to unlock our kids...

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STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to...

RICHARDSON: ... when they -- science and math...

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STEPHANOPOULOS: I want to move on to health care now. It sounds like -- and let me just sum this up -- no one on the stage is for merit pay for teachers, specifically.

(UNKNOWN): I am.

STEPHANOPOULOS: You are? OK, thank you.

(UNKNOWN): Well, and, George, I...

GRAVEL: Can I expand upon that since I've said I'm for merit pay?

STEPHANOPOULOS: Go for it.

GRAVEL: Don't leave me hanging.

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK.

GRAVEL: No, stop and think: They're all talking business as usual, politics as usual.

This country, we're so proud. We think we're number one.

GRAVEL: He just gave you a statistic of how bad we are.

I'll give you another one: We're 46th in literacy in the world -- in the world. Thirty percent of our children do not graduate from high school. What does that mean for the future of this country?

And all we get are the same old nostrums, that we need competition in education. Stop and think: Here, Iran -- not Iran -- Spain, Norway, Finland -- these countries, they're not the superpower of the world, but they pay for their children, from childhood to Ph.D. levels.

Why can't Americans put education as the top priority? And you can't do it when you want to expand, as he wants to expand, 100,000 more troops. Who are we going to nuke, who are we going to fight next?

STEPHANOPOULOS: OK, Senator Gravel.

Go ahead.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: I want to be clear, George. I actually think that we can implement a performance-based system that teachers buy in to. But I don't think it can be imposed on teachers. I think it has to be one that is developed with teachers so that they have a sense -- Bill is exactly right.

Teachers, across the board, have to be paid more. My sister's a teacher, and I know how hard they work and what they go through.

But we've got to give them a pathway so that they can make more money, as they are developing more experience, as they are putting more into the classroom.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Congressman Kucinich, Senator Biden, both on this quickly.

KUCINICH: Let me be the one who tells you how we're going to do this. I've sponsored a universal pre-kindergarten bill that will be paid for by a 15 percent cut in that bloated, wasteful Pentagon budget, which will yield $75 billion a year that we will put right into education.

We will create a universal pre-kindergarten program with a qualitative emphasis for education -- not quantitative so we make our children good little test-takers, but qualitative so our children learn real skills, learning skills, language, arts, and help them grow.

Learning theorists know this. Child psychologists understand this. Piaget talked all about this. Let's give our children the chance to grow, but let's put the money there. And I know where to get it...

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Biden...

KUCINICH: ... and I'm ready to take that action. Thank you.

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BIDEN: Tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock, my wife will walk into a classroom and teach for the 30th year in a row.

BIDEN: And the one thing any teacher can tell you is that the last person you want to base your performance on, judge your performance, is the administrator of the school. That's the first thing everybody figures out if you teach.

There needs to be performance-based pay. The way to do it is start at the front end. Pay those people who perform in undergraduate school. Give them the alternative to be able to go. They'd get the same pay as an engineer gets to go in and work in a math student -- as a math teacher, as a science teacher, et cetera.

So you start performance-based pay by, in fact, paying the best- performing students who want to teach and give them a chance. Every other major country in the world is starting their kids at the same salary they start -- these students, the same salary they start their engineers. We should be able to do that.

My father used to say, "Don't tell me what you value; show me your budget." If you, in fact, value education, then it should be equally as important as engineering or anything else.

(APPLAUSE)

STEPHANOPOULOS: We're running toward the end of the 90 minutes. I have a couple of quick questions, and then a final question.

This is -- this is basically a yes-no question. We've seem all this turmoil in the markets over the last couple of weeks, caused by the credit crunch and the crisis in the mortgage markets.

STEPHANOPOULOS: We saw, on Friday, the Federal Reserve lowered the discount rate for banks. Should they lower rates for everyone else, yes or no?

CLINTON: I'm glad they did what they did. But it can't be just left to a bail-out for the banks. We've got to figure out how we're going to figure out people facing foreclosures.

And I think a number of us have recommendations on that, that do not lend themselves to an easy yes or no.

DODD: Yes, I think it will happen in September. But we also need more liquidity. And they ought to be allowing Fannie and Freddie Mac to put more liquidity in the market.

It has seized up. You can't get a mortgage in America today.

EDWARDS: I agree with that. But we also need a home rescue fund for all the millions of Americans who are worried about losing their homes.

GRAVEL: All I would say is that there's no answer to that question. Just follow the money of the people on this dais and you'll see a response.

(LAUGHTER)

RICHARDSON: This is the Katrina of the mortgage-lending industry.

RICHARDSON: The answer to your question is yes, there has to be more liquidity, more funds in the market. What we need is more transparency between those that are making this business happen.

And what we also need to do is to not appoint officials that are in the industry to regulate that specific industry. The mortgage industry, they've become -- a lot of them -- a bunch of loan sharks.

BIDEN: The answer is yes. But we need, as the governor says, more transparency, particularly with regard to hedge funds and private equity funds. They are the ones that are causing this thing to go under. And there's no transparency, no accountability. We don't know how deep this problem is.

Chris will take care of it in the Banking Committee, and I mean that sincerely.

But we don't know how deep this problem is. But I think it's much deeper. It's almost as deep in terms of dollars, not liability, as the savings and loan crisis.

OBAMA: We do need more liquidity, but we're going to have to not only help home owners who are going to be losing their homes as a consequence of this; we're going to have to go forward and make sure that we've got the kinds of tough regulation when it comes to financial instruments to make sure that people who have saved and are trying to get their own home for the first time are not hoodwinked out of it.

OBAMA: And, unfortunately, the reason that we haven't had tougher regulation in part goes back to the issue of lobbying. This is where special interests have been driving the agenda. We have not had the kinds of consumer protections that are in place.

And that's why, when we have this debate about lobbying, we have to remind ourselves it has very real consequences for the people of Iowa and the people around the country.

(APPLAUSE)

KUCINICH: The answer is no. The Fed is actually looking at bailing out the creditors. And what we're looking at is a continuation of the problem and a postponement of the day of reckoning.

We need to have a government take strong action where we'll loan money to those who are in trouble. But we need to do that in exchange for having the power, the money-lending power that the banks have right now, come back to the government; government spends money into circulation; and then government can maintain control over the economy.

KUCINICH: Unless we take this action, we're looking at a situation of the collapse of our economy, and we're looking at a situation where these hedge funds will try to get a bail-out while millions of Americans lose their homes. Save the American homeowners.

(APPLAUSE)

STEPHANOPOULOS: Final round, final question, about 30 seconds each, please.

You know, presidential biographers are always looking at the turning point in a life, the moment where an ordinary person went on the path to the presidency, the decisive moment.

Congressman Kucinich, what's the decisive moment in your life?

KUCINICH: I would say the decisive moment in my life was when my family was living in a car in the inner city and I thought about all the dreams that I could have as a child. And I decided, at an early age, that I was going to be someone.

And I've had a lot of help along the way to get to this stage, but I can tell you, as president, the American people will have someone who remembers where he came from and has the compassion in his heart to lift up everyone to make sure everyone has a chance.

Thank you.

(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: A decisive moment in my life was the transition from high school to college, because I had gone through a difficult time, not knowing my father, and was, at times, an angry young man.

OBAMA: And partly because of the values my mother had instilled in me, those were reawakened in college.

And it made me serious about, not just what I could do for myself, but what I could do for other people. It's what led me to become a community organizer. It's what led me to go into public service. And ultimately, it's what led me to this stage.

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BIDEN: George, there's a lot of things in my life that led me to be engaged in politics. I worked in the African-American community, east side of my city, as the only white employee for a long while when I was a kid. And I got involved in the civil rights movement.

I thought the question was, what made me run for president.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Decisive moment in your life that put you on the broader path.

BIDEN: Well, the decisive moment in me life that put me on the broader path was the civil rights movement. When I really -- I found out and realized that it does make a difference if you're engaged. You actually can change people's lives. You can actually change the state of the nation.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Governor Richardson?

RICHARDSON: The decisive moment in my life was when my wife, Barbara, decided and agreed to marry me, because it was the best decision I ever made and, hopefully, she ever made. We've had 35 years of marriage. It has given me strength and has been an anchor in my life.

A decisive moment for me to return to public life was 9/11. When it happened, I wanted to get back in public life.

And I just want to make one -- I resent that...

STEPHANOPOULOS: I've got to move on. We're going to run out of time. Sorry.

GRAVEL: The decisive moment in my life came with the insightfulness of realizing that human governance is extremely complex and that representative government is broken.

And so, there's only two venues for change: One is the government, where the problem lies, or the people.

GRAVEL: And so the people must be equipped as lawmakers, the central power of government, in order to make decisions on all the policy issues that affect their lives, working in partnership with elected government.

It's a win-win. The people make the policy decisions, and we then would make the day-to-day operation of government work better.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Edwards?

EDWARDS: When I was a young boy, I came downstairs one morning. It was still dark outside. My father, who worked in mills all his life, was sitting at the kitchen table. The television was on. He was watching public television. And he'd never been able to go to college. And he was trying to learn from public television so he could get a better job in the mill.

And I worked in the mill, myself, part-time, when I was younger. And I made the decision then, whatever I did with my life -- didn't know that I'd be running for president -- but whatever I did with my life, those are the people that I would fight for, as long as I was breathing (ph).

STEPHANOPOULOS: Senator Dodd?

DODD: Well, there were two moments. One was the decision to join the Peace Corps, getting excited about John Kennedy inviting a generation of us to be a part of things larger than ourselves.

DODD: And the second was, about a week before my father died, when he was asked the question, "Had he known how his life would end, would he do it all over again?," I'll never forget him saying he'd do it in a minute, because you can never do as much for the public good as you can through a public life.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Last week, Senator Clinton.

CLINTON: Well, when I was growing up I didn't think I would run for president, but I could not be standing here without the women's movement, without generations of women who broke down barriers, the civil rights movement that gave women and people of color the feeling that they were really part of the American dream.

So I owe the opportunity that I have here today to many people; some of whom are known to history and many who aren't.

But more personally, I owe it to my mother, who never got a chance to go to college, who had a very difficult childhood, but who gave me a belief that I could do whatever I set my mind...

STEPHANOPOULOS: And that is the last word.

Thank you all very much.

(APPLAUSE)

END