If people were looking for some sense of a fresh start with the beginning of the second Bush term, they wouldn't have seen it at the confirmation hearing.

The beat goes on. But I think that's where the people come in. We live in a democracy. This isn't a monarchy. The people's opinion is very important here, and right now 58 percent of them are worried about the way this war is going. And so many people watched the hearing. I was very happy to get thousands and thousands of phone calls and e-mails and the rest. And that's what saves the country many times, the people of this country. If we start abusing power, they catch you. That's what I want to do, keep the people engaged. I was really pleased with the breadth and the depth of the questions that were asked, and I like to think that I had something to do with that.

The questions were asked, but at the end of the day, most of your Democratic colleagues on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee cast their votes for Rice.

Many of my colleagues have different rules when it comes to voting on Cabinet members. I set a bar that's very high because I think these positions are very powerful, and others set them lower because they think the most important thing is that the president gets who he wants. I take "advice and consent" very seriously, perhaps more seriously than others. That's their choice.

Senator Feinstein actually introduced Rice to the Foreign Relations Committee, and she didn't say a word about the problems that occurred on her watch as the president's national security advisor.

Senator Feinstein is going to fight in her own way. I think she has been eloquent on the issue of intelligence reform, for example. I think she will continue to fight in the same way. We're not joined at the hip. We're not in agreement all the time. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. Everyone fights in his or her own way. She chooses her way, and I have my way, and Senator [Joseph] Biden [D-Dela.] has his way.

Biden lambasted Rice for "parroting" false statements from the Pentagon, but then he voted in favor of her confirmation anyway. With so many Democrats choosing that kind of path, what's the value in the confrontational approach you've taken?

America cares. They're watching, and it's an opportunity to lay out the issues, to send a message that you're going to be watching, and I think that was achieved. At the end of the day, we achieved that. Here's the thing, a lot of the people in the media -- and I'm talking about the more conventional media -- all they care about is the score. They don't care about the process. But the beauty of our country is that there is this process called democracy, and it's just as important as the end result.

Your critics would say -- and, in the context of the protest of the electoral vote, they did say -- that you're the one who has trouble understanding democracy. Bush was reelected in November, and he says his reelection was an "accountability moment" in which the American people ratified his decisions about Iraq.

That's what George Bush said, and I don't agree with that at all. We're all responsible for our actions in our lives, and we all have to be held responsible and accountable for things that will happen when we're no longer in office, too. I mean, if we cast a vote for Social Security [reform] so that we end up with senior citizens walking around garbage cans looking for food, it doesn't matter if that happens a year from now or 40 years from now. We're responsible. There's no statute of limitations on bad judgment.

And it's not as if the judgments that the administration made about Iraq during the first Bush term cease to have repercussions during the second Bush term.

They said they were "rolling out a new product." Remember, [White House chief of staff] Andy Card said that. And they did, and the product they rolled out was a war. If it had been a can opener or a new shoe or some product that didn't hurt anybody, fine. But it's a war. And if they "roll out" another "product" like this, we have to make sure that all the mistakes and the misstatements that were made about this one -- we have to make sure that people are aware of it next time.

I think people paid attention to this. I don't think the Bush administration thought people would pay so much attention to this, but they did. I feel really good about it. The process in a democracy is as important as the outcome. You have to make sure that everyone in this country feels represented. And I would bet that, today, everybody in this country feels represented, whether it was me or Senator Biden's questions or Feingold's questions or Dodd's or Chafee's or Lugar's or whatever. They feel represented today.

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