Matthews Tries to Force Carter Into Endorsing Hillary Clinton for President

MATTHEWS: "Let me ask you about Hillary Clinton. Have we reached a point -- I know you're very topical in your books. The fact that you've written a book about women's rights and how you have to square with different religions like Islam and how you're championing the cause here of equal rights for women, true equal rights. Is this one of those ideas like -- Todd Purnam's written about civil rights in the '60s and ideas time has come. Has a woman president, has that time arrived? Obviously talking about Secretary Clinton here."
CARTER: "Well, I think it's always been here. We should have considered it a long time ago that women were were we equal to men and should hold public office in this country. If you look at all the local, state, and federal level incumbents, women only occupy about 18 percent in America, which places us about 78th in the entire world number of women compared to men in holding public office. And, of course we've had other countries that had women prime ministers and presidents and so forth. I know a lot of them and have known a lot of them. Some of them were champions of women's rights and some avoided the issue because they didn't want to get involved in it. So I'm not taking any position on a particular election, but showing America lags behind in women holding public office and also women getting equal pay. And we have horrendous slavery in this country. The State Department estimated 100,000 girls were sold into sexual slavery last year in the United States. And we know that rampant on college campuses is sexual assault, with only one out of 25 cases of sexual assault on a college campus reported to the authorities. So those are the kind of things that bother me most about American life and how we can be leaders in a world in promoting women's rights equally."
MATTHEWS: "Well, what do you think would be good about having Hillary Clinton president? Maybe you don't want to say you endorse her or anything, but it seems to me you might have an opinion. Just like having the first African-American president, what would be the emblematic value of having Hillary as president in terms of respect for women?"
CARTER: "Well I don't think there's any doubt that having President Obama in office has elevated the awareness of inequality of treatment between the races. And I imagine that Hillary Clinton would be fervent as a president if she's elected in promoting the equal rights of women. I would like to see personally the equal rights amendment to the United States Constitution passed. As you know, back in the days when Gerald Ford and I were in the White House, we had two-thirds of the Senate and two-thirds of the House approved an amendment to make equal rights amendment mandatory but couldn't get three-fourths of the state to ratify it. I'd like to see that resurrected and passed into law in our Constitution."
MATTHEES:  "President Carter's new book, which is near the top of the New York Times' best sellers list already, is called "A Call to Action." David Corn, that wasn't an endorsement of Hillary Clinton. It was a generic commentary."