The answer to your first question is no. For example if you wanted to search for "What did Al Gore say?", a google wild card search for "Al Gore said wildcard" (the markup won't let me put an asterisk) would not match things like "blah, said Al Gore" or "he said blah" where he is referring to Al Gore, or "Al Gore told someone blah". For the search engine to match those results, some level of parsing is needed.

Yes, but if this is an an important news item, what he said would probably be mentioned on many web pages in many forms, including a form that matches your query.