KERRY: I understand exactly what Senator Kennedy is saying, and I agree with Senator Kennedy's perceptions of the problem and of how you deal with it.
In fact, last summer, if you'll recall, I said specifically that if we did the things that I laid out -- the training, the international community, the services and reconstruction, and the elections and protection -- we could draw down troops and begin to withdraw them.
 
Friday's Question:
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I think what Senator Kennedy is saying -- and here I do agree with him -- is that it is vital for the United States to make it clear that we are not there with long-term goals and intentions of our presence in the region. I agree with Senator Kennedy that we have become the target and part of the problem today, if not the problem.
Now, obviously, you've got to provide security and stability in order to be able to turn this over to the Iraqis and to be able to withdraw our troops. So I wouldn't do a specific timetable, but I certainly agree with him in principle, that the goal must be to withdraw American troops.
Now, I wouldn't be surprised if the new government, as soon as it's possible, begins to negotiate some modality like that. And I wouldn't be surprised if they even asked us to leave in some way over a period of time. I wouldn't be surprised if the administration privately, behind closed doors, asked them to ask us to leave.
I think there are plenty of ways to skin this cat. But the most important thing is that you've got to have stability. What Iraq is after this is important to the world. It cannot be a haven for terrorism. It cannot be a completely failed state.
Now, you'll notice the administration has backed off significantly of its own high goals of full democratization and so forth, and I don't think you're going to hear them pushing that. There are a lot of conservatives, neo-cons and others in Washington debating now sort of what the modality of withdrawal ought to be.
RUSSERT: Do you have any information that the Bush administration is privately requesting the new Iraqi government to ask us to leave?
KERRY: No.
RUSSERT: You just suppose that may be happening.
KERRY: I think that over a period of time, this administration is going to face the reality of Iraq, which is that a prolonged American presence in Iraq is neither affordable nor wise, nor will it ultimately enhance our goals in the region -- prolonged.
But we're going to have to be there in the short term to do the training we've talked about.
RUSSERT: Short term, meaning a few years?
KERRY: Well, Tim, it's hard to figure out. I mean, if you go at the pace they're going today in the training, it's a long time.
I'm appalled at the level of training that's been taking place. I mean, President Mubarak himself said, "I could take five, six times the numbers of people that are here today and we could be training them." Other countries could be training them.
We could be training from the same syllabus, bring people back into country. We could be training people more rapidly even in country.
And only now I think General Luck and others are coming to the conclusion that what we've been saying for a long period of time is, in fact, finally what they may be trying to move toward.
RUSSERT: President Bush is asking for $80 billion more for the war in Iraq and Afghanistan. Will you vote to authorize that $80 billion?
KERRY: The likelihood is yes, providing that they do some of the things that I've been talking about with respect to the training and so forth. There are indications that they probably will.
You know, the difference between now and the prior votes is there's more of a plan in place. We've had the election, as of today. I think there is a way for the United States to transfer stability. But a year and a half ago, we had no plan whatsoever, and we saw that barely any of that money was spent on reconstruction.
RUSSERT: You remember that well, Senator. This was the ad, part of it, that the Bush-Cheney campaign ran throughout the campaign. Let's watch.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KERRY: I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.
ANNOUNCER: Wrong on defense.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
RUSSERT: Ken Mehlman, the newly elected chairman of the Republican Party, prepared and released to the media a speech just last week in which he said this was the defining issue in the presidential campaign.
And he went on to write, "Given the choice between freedom and fear, between paying any price and cutting and running, between victory and vacillation, the American people lived up to the best traditions of our nation and chose to rally behind our banner of freedom."
Fear, vacillation, cutting and running -- that's how you were defined by the Republicans.
KERRY: Well, sure. And in a campaign, people spread a lot of lies and do a lot of smears and so forth. That happens.
The fact is that I never suggested cutting and running. I took a lot of criticism on my side of the fence, frankly, for not doing that from some quarters.
I suggested a very clear, four-point plan for precisely how we could be successful. I laid out the training requirements six, seven, eight months ago. I laid out the reconstruction requirements, what we could do with the international community.
You are now seeing more offers by the international community, and you will see, if the administration approaches them properly in the next days, greater efforts to provide that and they will provide it. So I think I was right.
Now, was that a silly way to phrase something? You bet it was. I made a mistake in the way that I was talking about Iraq, but as I said in the debates, President Bush made a mistake in the way that he went into Iraq and the way that he has conducted the war. Which is worse?
Now, I think that our party stands clearly for freedom in Iraq, clearly for freedom around the world, but there are differences in how you go about that. I believe this administration has set back America's interests and security on a global basis. And over the next months, I intend to lay out very, very clearly exactly how they've done it and how we can do a better job.
RUSSERT: Let me show you a photograph from Inauguration Day. Here is George W. Bush giving his second inaugural address, and there watching is John Kerry.
KERRY: I was in the wrong seat there, wasn't I?
RUSSERT: What was going through your mind at that moment on that morning?
KERRY: Respect for the process, not feeling sorry for myself at all.
I mean, look, I think we waged a great campaign. Did we make some mistakes? You bet we did. I take responsibility for them. You know, I'm the person in charge, my campaign, I'm responsible. I'm not going to sit around worrying about what we did or didn't do.
But we did some unbelievable things. We raised more money than any Democratic campaign in history. We involved more volunteers than any campaign in history. I won more votes than any candidate on the Democratic side has ever won in history.
I lost, Tim, to an incumbent president by a closer margin than an incumbent president has ever won re-election before in the history of the country. And if you add up the popular vote in the battleground states, I won the popular vote in the battleground states by 2 percentage points. We just didn't distribute it correctly in Ohio.
So I think we did a great job. And we're going to continue to build on that campaign, as I am now with my Kids First health plan. We have over 400,000 cosponsors through the Internet who want to fight for this, and we are going to fight for it.
RUSSERT: At the Clinton Library dedication on November 18th, a few weeks after the election, you were quoted as saying, "It was the Osama bin Laden tape, it scared the voters," the tape that appeared just a day before the election, here.
Do you believe that that tape is the reason you lost the race?
KERRY: I believe that 9/11 was the central deciding issue in this race. And the tape -- we were rising in the polls up until the last day when the tape appeared. We flat-lined the day the tape appeared and went down on Monday. I think it had an impact.
But 9/11, you know, it's a very difficult hurdle when a country is at war. I applauded the president's leadership in the days immediately afterwards. I thought he did a good job in that, and he obviously connected to the American people in those immediate days.
When a country is at war and in the wake of 9/11, it's very difficult to shift horses in midstream. I think it's remarkable we came as close as we did as a campaign. Many Republicans say we beat their models by four or five points, as to what they thought we could achieve.
I'm proud of the campaign, Tim. And I think if you look at what we did in states, I mean, millions of new voters came into this process. I won the youth vote. I won the independent vote. I won the moderate vote.
If you take half the people at an Ohio State football game on Saturday afternoon and they were to have voted the other way, you and I would be having a discussion today about my State of the Union speech.
RUSSERT: And the president will say if he had half the people at a high school basketball game in New Hampshire or Oregon, he would have carried those states, because he lost them by 5,000 or 7,000.
KERRY: Well, the point is -- that's right, and that's the difference. That the difference in this race was 18 electoral votes, 50,000, 60,000 people changing their votes in one state.
That is a mandate for unity, not a mandate to go rushing off to change Social Security, not a mandate to ignore the fiscal crisis of our country, not a mandate to sort of pick some ideological hot buttons and start punching them.
It is a mandate, as I said in my concession speech, to bring the country together, find the common ground and do things that we need to do to strengthen America. And there is a long list of those things.
RUSSERT: But you voted against Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state. That's not finding common ground. She is qualified to hold that job, no?
