(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

OSAMA BIN LADEN (through translator): Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands. Any nation that does not attack us will not be attacked.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: OK, Walter. What do you make of this?

CRONKITE: Well, I make it out to be initially the reaction that it's a threat to us, that unless we make peace with him, in a sense, we can expect further attacks. He did not say that precisely, but it sounds like that when he says...

KING: The warning.

CRONKITE: What we just heard. So now the question is basically right now, how will this affect the election? And I have a feeling that it could tilt the election a bit. In fact, I'm a little inclined to think that Karl Rove, the political manager at the White House, who is a very clever man, he probably set up bin Laden to this thing. The advantage to the Republican side is to get rid of, as a principal subject of the campaigns right now, get rid of the whole problem of the al Qaqaa explosive dump. Right now, that, the last couple of days, has, I think, upset the Republican campaign.

KING: Are there enough undecideds to tilt this? Or what do you think of the whole election picture?

CRONKITE: Well, I think it's one of the biggest messes we've had in a long time. I believe that we're undoubtedly not going to know the results of this election. I don't want to knock you off the air on Monday night or anything, or Tuesday night. But I suspect that we're not going to know who the next president is, whether it is Bush or the new man, until very probably sometime in the early spring. There's so much controversy that they're planting, deliberately planting at the polls, that there's almost certainly to be a suit going back to the Supreme Court eventually, going through the other courts slowly first.

KING: Who's to blame for this?

CRONKITE: Who's to blame for it really is the intensity of this campaign. Plus the fact that we have a preface to this in the last campaign. What year was that now?

KING: 2000.

CRONKITE: 2000. Thank you very much.
Right on top of events.
We saw that we could go to court. We saw that with watchers on both sides, heavily mounted police to watch from both sides the polling in many states, nearly all of the heavy states. And in those cases, they will be finding every possible reason to file against the results.
...
KING: We're back with Walter Cronkite. Why has this campaign -- and you've been through a lot of them -- been so vituperative?

CRONKITE: I think partly because of the nature of the administration.
It's all Bush's fault
It has offended a large number of people quite seriously, right down to their souls, apparently.
That may of them deny having
The war has not supported fully, certainly by all the people.
Quagmire! Let's have a Viet Nam Redo
The economy has touched a lot of our people. And they feel very strongly about it. So there is a very definite body there in opposition to the administration, as we know. And the administration itself has a lot of support. I think that mostly it's really locked into the Iraqi situation.