Announcer:
From the Library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of wall and broad streets in New York city you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years.
Announcer:
Each week we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host Josh king of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
Hey everybody, a special episode of Inside the ICE House for you today. We normally record most of our episodes here in the cozy confines of the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. A very pleasant place here on the sixth floor of the building at 11 Wall Street. And as we are doing our shows in the ornate rooms of the NYSE all around us, every day, you can find thousands of events every year held for or hosted by the 2,300 companies who list their shares on our iconic trading floor.
Josh King:
One of those events a few days ago was our 2019 IR Summit. A day long conference held for several hundred of the investor relations officers of some of the world's biggest companies. During the day, our audience heard important briefings on issues related to environmental, social, and corporate governance, they call that ESG, the regulatory environment from our regulators of the securities and exchange commission, along with an important opportunity for all of these leaders to connect with one another.
Josh King:
We also leavened the conversation with a quick detour to preview The Hardest Job in the World: the Evolution of the American Presidency, an upcoming book written by my friend, 60 minutes, correspondent John Dickerson, which started as Dickerson's tour or divorce for Atlantic magazine, where he sometimes moonlights. So we'll pick up our conversation with John after the introductory platitudes in the magnificent boardroom of the New York Stock Exchange at the 2019 IR Summit.
Josh King:
I should note that, as is my usual style interviewing thought leaders on stage, I flashed up some news photos on our large screen in the room that helped our audience travel back to the time and place of the events we were talking about, but photos don't lend themselves too well for podcasts. So in our post-production work with my colleagues Pete Ash, and Steven Romanchick and Ken Abel we've inserted in our post-production editing work some sound bites that to the trained ears of presidential history will be instantly recognizable.
Josh King:
And with that, we head out to the boardroom of the NYSE. Enjoy the show with John Dickerson.
Josh King:
Our guest for this podcast, John Dickerson, moonlights as the host of two podcasts, Slate's Political Gabfest, which features him along with Emily Bazelon and David Plotz, and Whistle Stop, which John hosts all by his lonesome, but he is joined along the way by the thousands of colorful characters who have joined him on that most epic of journeys, the quest to win The White House.
Josh King:
The debut episode of Whistle Stop was February 22nd, 2015. The title of the episode was Reagan's Nashua Moment.
John Dickerson:
The first question for Mr. Bush-
President Reagan:
Mr. Green, before the question-
John Dickerson:
Excuse me.
President Reagan:
You asked me if you could make an announcement first.
John Dickerson:
Excuse me, President Reagan.
President Reagan:
And I asked you for permission to make an announcement myself.
John Dickerson:
Would the sound man please turn Mr. Reagan's mic off and then...
President Reagan:
Is this on?
Audience:
Yeah.
President Reagan:
Mr. Green-
John Dickerson:
Would you turn my microphone on, please?
President Reagan:
... you asked from me, if you would... I am paying for this Microphone Mr.
Josh King:
John's been hard at work on Whistle Stop ever since, but also never taking his eye off of his day job, which since 2011, when he left time magazine after a dozen years has been at CBS News First as its political director, and then host of Face the Nation, and then host of CBS This Morning, and most recently now as one of the hosts of the Sunday night ratings juggernaut 60 Minutes. His first segment to debut in a couple of weeks.
Josh King:
I don't think John has an episode of whistle stop yet from the inauguration of our first president, George Washington, which is depicted here. It happened at just a couple hundred feet from where we stand. The oath was administered on April 30th, 1789 by Robert Livingston, who was the chancellor of New York, on the second floor balcony of Federal Hall, which is our neighboring building. The crowd was assembled to witness the historic event.
Josh King:
But Dickerson does feature Washington in his mammoth work in the Atlantic Magazine called The Hardest Job in the World, which is set to become his newest book set to debut from Random House on May 5th, 2020.
Josh King:
"Now Washington," John writes, "tells us that he wrote to his friend Edward Rutledge in 1789," the same year that this scene takes place. And in quote, "I greatly apprehend that my Countryman will expect too much of me." And in the 230 years, since Washington took the oath of office, we, his countrymen have indeed invested our hopes and dreams in the president of the United States. Sometimes they've come to pass. Sometimes to become a nightmare.
Josh King:
So will the man or woman who takes the oath of office on January 20th, 20 21 resume or inherit a job that has become too big for the person who occupies the office? Let's find out. Please welcome John Dickerson.
Josh King:
A scene for your next-
John Dickerson:
Yeah. You know, first of all, of course, all men. Yes. What's funny about that inauguration is that if you read his letters that he wrote before he took the carriage ride up from Mount Vernon to that inauguration, he wrote to the governors along the way and said, "Please don't make a big deal of me coming through town because we're trying to not be a monarchy." Rolls into Phil Philadelphia. They have a white horse for him and 13-year-old children are dangled by these cranes throwing rose petals on him. They want to give him a crown.
John Dickerson:
Every town ignores him. When he gets to New York, there's a 13 cannon salute to him. It's just constantly not being listened to as they all celebrate him as the great deliverer of democracy, which is exactly what he didn't want. So president comes into office basically being ignored immediately.
Josh King:
Well, this president that we currently have has not been ignored for the last three years. You were, as recently as yesterday, tweeting, reminding us through Vox stories that paying attention to polls today, a year and two months away from an election day, you could go back four years when they said Hillary Clinton is a lock for the next president of the United States.
John Dickerson:
Yeah. I mean, as you know so well, the polls right now don't tell us anything about where things are going to be in November. They don't tell us where things are going to be in 21 months in Iowa. But there is this very interesting thing that's happening of course, because the people who participate in primaries eat these polls with a delicious relish and they pay a lot of attention to them.
John Dickerson:
And then they do this other thing that's interesting. I was struck by a number recently that said 88% of Democrats think that a woman could get the nomination and could be elected president, but only for 44% of those Democrats think other Democrats will vote for a woman. So there's polling about the candidate and then there's punditry about what your neighbors think. And the reason that matters is because for Democrats in particular, the number one issue they say is important to them in picking their nominee is electability.
John Dickerson:
I think it's at about 58% say that's all that matters. Ideology doesn't matter. Nothing else matters. But electability is based on their punditry about what other voters are going to do and vote for. And so in that sense, those polls you mentioned exactly right. We don't, we can't pay too much attention to them. We always should take polling with a grain of salt.
John Dickerson:
But there's a way in which polling right now is an obsession of the people picking a democratic nominee. And in that sense, polls, misreading of polls, misunderstanding of polls, and just basic folk wisdom about polls are playing some role in the Democratic primary process. And obviously they're picking who gets to go on stage in some way too.
Josh King:
At some point between next November and January, 2021, there will be a presidential transition. I want to talk about transitions in a bit because it's a subject of your, your recent writing, but you've had a transition of your own taking the stool at the set of 60 Minutes. You might say that it was occupied for 30 years by Steve Kroft. How has your transition gone from your early morning wake-ups for CBS this morning to the more relaxed pace of doing about a half dozen major tent pole pieces a year for the biggest show in television?
John Dickerson:
Yeah, well I'm still learning the process and Steve and I happen to happen sort of at the same time. I can't possibly try and fill Steve's shoes. It was hard enough when I came in right after Bob Schieffer. Those were difficult shoes to follow in as well. I felt they were like shoes the size of a rowboat.
John Dickerson:
But it's been fascinating because I started out at Time Magazine in an era basically before the internet. And so you could work on stories for two or three weeks. You would spend days with a source. You would talk to them and your conversations would wind through a series of ideas. And you could really immerse yourself in stories.
John Dickerson:
And now that's what it's like at 60 minutes. The attention to detail, the polishing that takes place at every single level is really... It's a joy. And it's more like what working on a book is like than any of the print journalism I did. And certainly even the longer form pieces I did at CBS This Morning, you do them in a day. This is a multi month process for any piece.
Josh King:
I put up the logo of your avatar of Whistle Stop, which I've enjoyed since it debuted since that Reagan national moment. I asked you before we came on, you're not completely putting that on the shelf, but it's taking a hiatus?
John Dickerson:
Right, I can't commit to the specific day that it comes out. And the great thing is that people don't wake up and think, okay, it's been 14 days since the last one.
Josh King:
You don't know my house.
John Dickerson:
Well that's because I benefited from your work in doing Whistle Stop and your time in politics. So what I'm going to do is basically there are still at least a dozen that I know I want to do moments in American electoral history, so I'll do them. It's just I'll do them on kind of my own pace.
Josh King:
So we are in a moment of electoral history, for sure. There's a lot of talk yesterday. And this morning about the role the media is going to play in the selection based in some part in the way the New York times reported the book excerpt about Justice Kavanaugh over the weekend.
Josh King:
60 Minutes has since it's inception in September 1968 played an outside role in helping viewers take stock of presidential candidates and presidents while they're in office. No more so than in January 26th, 1992 when the chips were down for Arkansas, governor Bill Clinton and his wife, the first lady in Arkansas.
Steve:
Governor, that's what you... Excuse me. That's what you've been saying essentially for the last couple of months.
Bill Clinton:
But that's what I believe. Look, Steve, you go back and listen to what I said. I have acknowledged wrongdoing. I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage. I have said things to you tonight and to the American people from the beginning that no American politician ever has.
Bill Clinton:
I think most Americans who are watching this tonight, they'll know what we're saying. They'll get it. And they'll feel that we have been more candid. And I think what the press has to decide is, are we going to get age of the game of gotcha?
Josh King:
In your editorial offices, as you think ahead to the next 14 months, what is the role and responsibility of the media to get it right and not screw up and cover this election in a different way than they have in the past?
John Dickerson:
Well, it's the fundamental role and the track record there is not is not great. And one thing just about that interview, an amazing act of risk taking on the Clinton's part, which worked out brilliantly for them. I mean, the polling right after that interview went through the roof for him.
John Dickerson:
And when we think out campaigns and whether the campaigns tell us anything about what a we need in a president, one of the things that it can show, often doesn't, but is whether presidents and the people they surround themselves with have that instinct to take a big risk and to move with dash into a very tough moment. Donald Trump did that a lot, whatever you may think of him, and successfully.
Josh King:
Yes, absolutely.
John Dickerson:
And this was an instance in which I think President Obama or candidate Obama's speech on race was another one where they take a huge risk that could go terribly for them, but it pays off.
President Obama:
The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation's original sin of slavery. A question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stale mate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least 20 more years and to leave any final resolution to future generations.
President Obama:
Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our constitution. A constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law. A constitution that promised its people liberty and justice and a union that could be and should be perfected over time. And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.
John Dickerson:
I think the press has a lot of challenges. One of the ones for us is there are so many candidates you want to wait till things get to a certain level before you do a kind of 60 Minutes piece on a candidate.
John Dickerson:
The biggest problem... I mean there are two big problems. One is chasing the shiniest glitteriest thing that usually is dominating what's happening on Twitter where a lot of people spend their time. That's never been what's important. You know this so well. This was true before there was a Twitter and it was true before there was even cable news.
John Dickerson:
When Senator Muskie was supposedly cried in New Hampshire in response to a front page article in the Union Leader in New Hampshire about his wife, that story ended up dominating his campaign. This is before cable news was something everybody complained about. And that was largely because one columnist in the audience wrote that he cried.
John Dickerson:
And so bumper stickers that greeted him in Florida when he arrived said, "Don't make Muskie angry or he'll cry." And this was of course used at him. How could face off against the Russians if he was weeping in a primary contest? So that's not exactly the most serious high-minded thing in politics. So it's been something that's beset us for a long time.
Josh King:
Nor is drawing a Sharpie on a NOAA map, frankly.
John Dickerson:
Right. Now you could, people could argue, right, or whatever this Joe Biden. I mean, you could always make an argument if you, if everybody has the patience for it, about how these frivolous things are important. The problem is when you stack them all up. And, and we should probably talk about the tank too.
Josh King:
We will.
John Dickerson:
Michael Dukakis in the tank.
Speaker 9:
Michael Dukakis has opposed virtually every defense system we developed. He opposed new aircraft carriers. He opposed anti-satellite weapons. He opposed four missile systems, including urging two missile deployment. Dukakis opposed the Stealth Bomber and a ground emergency warning system against nuclear attack. He even criticized our rescue mission to Grenada and our strike on Libya. And now he wants to be our commander in chief America can't afford that risk,
John Dickerson:
Because there are things behind them that are a part of the way we look at presidents and the way we think of the office. But the problem is if you stack up all of these ephemeral moments, you don't have any time for the real questions we should be asking about a person who's going to get into a job and find out that the job is nothing like the thing that they talked about for the previous two years,
Josh King:
I do want to get past the ephemeral moments because although that's my passion, I'm a student of your writing today. And come hell or high water, and often hell and high water play a big part in the office of the presidency and affecting it, someone will be sworn in on January 21st, 491 days away, 2021. The constitution calls on the president to address a joint session of Congress shortly thereafter and deliver remarks state of the union. But as you've looked at it, the state of the presidency, the office, not necessarily the man, is in some trouble.
John Dickerson:
Well, it is. It's in trouble for a couple of reasons. One it's just gotten harder. All presidents complain about how hard the job is. They were doing it since George Washington and even the presidency under the articles of Confederation. We had presidents, they were the president of Congress and they did almost nothing, but even they complained about how the hard the job was and their job wasn't really that hard.
John Dickerson:
But I think two things have gotten significantly different. One is on national security since 9/11. Obviously we're not talking as much about mutually assured destruction with the Russian as we did in the, in the sixties and seventies and eighties. But when the national security advisor goes in to talk to the president every day or most days, depending on who the president is, the list of threats and challenges...
John Dickerson:
Talking to Jim Jones, who is national security advisor under president Obama, he said, "I used to write out 10 things that the president had to worry about that day." He said, "If I was to put that list together now, it would be 25 things."
John Dickerson:
So there are just more things on that list. And now with cyber warfare, the ability of huge and destabilizing things to happen very quickly is just a president has to worry about that more and has to have a structure for that more.
John Dickerson:
I think what we've learned also in finance is that when transactions move at the speed of light, you can have two 2007, 2009. Well, you can repeat 2008 again, where George Bush and Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke had to come up with an argument for how to convince Congress to pass tarp in a two week period. And Harry Reed at the times said, "Senate doesn't pass a bill to flush a toilet in two weeks. And Hank Paulson said, "Well, if you don't do it, the American economy will be flushed down the toilet."
John Dickerson:
That kind of rapid response on the economic front where a president essentially is a global firefighter. We saw it with the Mexican peso crisis in 1995 where president Clinton had to move quickly. That has changed from the president's role in the economy than even during FDR period in response to the great depression where obviously he had to move heaven and earth, but it was on a slower timetable. Those two things have made the job appreciably harder.
John Dickerson:
Now we're in a media environment where you have six news cycles a day. That makes it much harder to focus on... Eisenhower had a quadrant system that everybody here has probably heard about. He didn't actually use it himself, but it was created on something he said, which is "Don't let the urgent crowd out the important."
John Dickerson:
And so the quadrant system. Basically in quadrant one, you have the urgent and the important. In quadrant two you have the non-urgent but important. Quadrant three and four are essentially meaningless. Quadrant three and four is where we spend a lot of our time in politics. Are the things that are neither urgent nor important or they're urgent and unimportant.
John Dickerson:
Presidency should spend a lot of time in quadrant two, the a non-urgent but important, but they spend a lot of their time either in quadrant one or quadrant three. The worst is when they spend time in quadrant three.
John Dickerson:
The problem is that most of our big problems can only be solved through patient focused attention outside of an urgent moment. And that amount of time in a president's day is almost nonexistent. There's so much.
John Dickerson:
Jay Johnson, who was the head of the department of Homeland security, said a good day for him was a day in which he had some control over his calendar. Which isn't to say the things that went on the calendar, but the things on the calendar actually being the things that he spent his day on, because there was so much flux in life that it would that emergencies or potential emergencies would wipe away what he'd even planned to spend his focus and attention on.
Josh King:
A big piece of legislation that you've written about was the Reorganization Act of 1938. It gave President Roosevelt all of six assistants, and that was protested by 100 guys outside The White House dressed as Paul Revere. And today there are about 400 people who work in The White House, 2,000 more in the executive office of the president.
Josh King:
In 1940 the civilian agencies of the federal government employed 443,000 people. Today it's about three X that. None of the CEOs who lead the companies represented in this room would ever take a deal to say, yeah, I'll become CEO of that company in 10 weeks time or 14 weeks time after being named. And here we are at this like single moment of transition between one president and another, there's a real set up for failure in this design.
President Obama:
Well, I just had the opportunity to have an excellent conversation with president elect Trump. It was wide ranging. We talked about some of the organizational issues in setting up a white house. We talked about foreign policy. We talked about domestic policy. And as I said last night, my number one priority in the coming two months is to try to facilitate a transition that ensures our president elect is successful.
President Obama:
Most of all, I want to emphasize to you, Mr. President elect that we now are going to want to do everything we can to help you succeed, because if you succeed, then the country succeeds. Please go ahead.
President Trump:
Well, thank you very much, President Obama. This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes, and we were just going to get to know each other. We had never met each other. I have great respect. The meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half, and it could have, as far as I'm concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer. We really... We discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties.
John Dickerson:
That's right. I mean, not only would no CEOs say I'll take only 10 weeks to be the top of a new company where things can blow up literally very quickly, but they would definitely not do it, if basically what happened on day one is that you spent two years playing football and suddenly somebody said, "Okay, now you're going to spend four years playing baseball."
John Dickerson:
The job that they come in and do... One of the first things they realize is they've been talking about domestic policy for two years in campaigns and usually a very narrow corner of domestic policy. And they come in and they realize that basically 80% of the job is foreign policy and all of the secret stuff that they weren't even told about in their CIA briefings when they were a candidate. And they have to learn out far flung operations in countries, they may, some of them, depending on their experience, haven't heard of.
John Dickerson:
And so immediately they are swamped with that. And then they have to basically learn an entirely new job. And as one person who described it, who's been in several different administrations on both sides, described it basically is presidents come in and the government is this huge box and they drop a penny in the top and it will come out somewhere in the bottom. They would like it to come out this door. They're not sure it's going to. And they really have no idea how the penny gets from the top to the bottom.
John Dickerson:
And when you think about leadership mostly you don't care how the penny gets to the bottom, but you care if it doesn't come out the right door. And so they spend a fair amount of time learning how the machine works. And by the time they've done that, they're up for reelection.
John Dickerson:
So you spend a lot of time trying to learn how to get the thing to do the stuff you want it to do that you promised it would do. And by that time, you're in a reelection fight and the politics have changed. And so you can't really apply that knowledge.
John Dickerson:
And you also have this other big problem in presidencies, which is the turnover is so fast. We are in a record setting turnover with the current administration, but even in regular administrations they churn through people pretty fast.
John Dickerson:
And also by the way, and other complexity of this thing is that when you talk to people who've been from the private sector and go in and then come out and go back into the private sector, there's no real organizational chart. I mean, there are organizational charts, but you hire a bunch of highly competitive people. And then they all kind of have to figure out what their lines of authority are, how they work with each other. That takes a lot of time. Meanwhile your in box is filling up with all of these nettlesome and urgent things.
Josh King:
Keeping the country safe and keeping the country prosperous you argue should basically be the two jobs the president should do. Handing the rest off to the vice president, cabinet members, the first spouse Bush goes to New Orleans. We've got the picture of him in Air Force One here. Obama to Sandy Hook. President Trump to El Paso after the shootings. Even when they say the buck stops here, the path to getting the job done right is often fraught, sometimes self-inflicted by the way they perform, in moments like this.
John Dickerson:
Right. And the idea that you could hand off any of those authorities is impossible, of course, because rightly we hold presidents to account the way we would a CEO. But CEOs have all learned that basically you have to delegate and hope that the way you've built your team and the way you delegate and hold people to account creates the conditions where you are not going to have to be held accountable for some nightmare, because you've built a team, you've encouraged them. You've given them a direction and then you've held them accountable.
John Dickerson:
Even that's hard for a president. Building a team is really hard when you're involved in presidential transitions because you're busy. The team is... It's hard to get the right players in the right slots. Then they have to get confirmed. It takes a long time just to get your team on the field. So the normal rules of leadership and accountability don't quite work in the presidency.
John Dickerson:
You also have the challenge, at least with Katrina, with FEMA where you have a Federalist system where you have governors and mayors who are really the most important in first responding. There was until basically about the Johnson administration no tradition in America of presidents having a role in disaster response.
John Dickerson:
When you look at the papers from the Eisenhower administration, there were lots and lots of hurricanes and lots of devastation. And on the front page where they announce a hurricane hitting the east coast, there's also a charming little piece about Eisenhower being on vacation with his grandson and the vice president joking about how they can all sleep later because Eisenhower's out of town.
John Dickerson:
Can you imagine today if there was a hurricane and there was whimsical jocularity by the vice president about how the president was on vacation? You can't do that anymore. But the point was back during Eisenhower's period, it was basically, and it's still the case that basically you're are governors and your mayors are the first responders in these disasters.
John Dickerson:
And that's why Texas and Florida are quite good at it. They've had a lot of practice. Other other states and Puerto Rico in particular had a really non practiced local response. And at that point FEMA and a president can't do much, even though they get the blame him for it.
Josh King:
Your article in the Atlantic and presumably the book has a long list of ways in which the presidency could be fixed. We don't have time to go through them all today, but I want to maybe focus on one of them, which is just down the street on Pennsylvania Avenue. It'll take courage fixing the presidency both from the occupant of the oval office, but also these 535 members of Congress.
Josh King:
You hold up in your writing this historic moment from 1990 when George H. W. Bush broke his no new taxes pledge that may have cost him a second term, but he was only able to do it because a bipartisan group of lawmakers hunkered down for 11 days over prime rib at Andrew's Air Force Base and worked out a compromise. Many of them having to scatter to the partisan wins after this moment to abandon the president. But do you see in people like Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer any of the ability to get together and do tough things for the country other than those very easy moments of bipartisan bonhomie?
John Dickerson:
Well, first of all, I'd just like to present to you the spring line of Brooks Brothers 1990. This is again all men.
John Dickerson:
So what's amazing about this moment here is you have the Republican president thanking the democratic leader of the Senate and the democratic leader of the House. And then Bob Dole getting up and doing the same. And then the number two democratic leader in the house getting up and praising the Republican. It was a love Fest of cooperation, which you cannot imagine today at all.
President H. W. Bush:
For the first time a Republican president and leaders of a democratic Congress have agreed to real cuts that will be enforced by law. Not promises, no smoke, no mirrors, no magic act, but real and lasting spending cuts. This agreement will also raise revenue. I'm not, and I know you're not, a fan of tax increases, but if there have to be tax measures, they should allow the economy to grow.
John Dickerson:
Now this is also another signature moment in our current politics because what had happened just before this is Newt Gingrich, one of the Republican leaders in the house had bolted from The White House saying he wasn't going to sign onto this deal, that the president president Bush had abandoned Republicans.
John Dickerson:
And so CNN has a split screen of that day, of this moment of the president saying we've all made the hard choices to keep the government open. He writes about it in his journal. He said, "I meant what I said when I said no new taxes, but I also, when faced with the realities of governing you don't want to shut the government down. You have to get the job done."
John Dickerson:
He was feeling the pressure. All of those men there were feeling the pressure. And it's amazing. You've got Senator Graham way in the back there who would end up running as a far more are conservative spending 10 million or so to get very few votes in the democratic nomination or in the race in 1996.
John Dickerson:
I mean, you have the giants of the Senate in that. There's Lloyd Bentsen on the right, treasury secretary under Clinton. And then, of course, vice presidential nominee with Michael Dukakis, who would famously say of Dan Quail who's standing there, "You're no Jack Kennedy. That's Leon Panetta down there, CIA defense. These are some giants of the... Pete Domenici in the middle in the back, the chairman of the of the budget committee. ...who felt like they had a duty to come together and get things done.
John Dickerson:
When Newt Gingrich bolts, he represents the spirit that takes back the House. That is a take no prisoners form of negotiation, which a lot of people put at the heart of our current problems.
John Dickerson:
So could Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and Kevin McCarthy get together and do this kind of thing. I don't think in a million years. In part, because as you know, we now basically have the most liberal Republican is still more conservative than the most conservative Democrat in both the House and the Senate. There are no crossovers.
John Dickerson:
When people talk, you'll often hear them talk about why Congress doesn't get together the way president Reagan and Tip O'Neill got together and put together and came up with a solution for Social Securities solvency problems. The reason that happened is because Reagan could bank on 70 conservative Democrats that he knew he could get their votes and Tip O'Neill had to go along because he wanted those 70 conservative Democrat get reelected because when they were reelected they'd rename him as speaker of the house. So you had this kind of structural system that encouraged bipartisanship.
John Dickerson:
That doesn't exist anymore. Those 70 Democrats are basically now all Republicans in those seats with a few Democrats who are never going to vote with a Republican president and not get reelected in anyway. I'm being a little overly broad, but roughly the case.
John Dickerson:
So if the structure that created this deal... And by the way, this was based on an obsession with debt and deficits, which has fleed Washington and is in vacation somewhere in a location no one can find. So there is both the structural situation in Washington that doesn't exist anymore and as a policy matter people don't obsess about deficits the way they used to.
Josh King:
People don't obsess about deficits the way they used to. They do obsess about every nook and cranny of the presidential campaign, every photo op, every rally. We're covering them live at night on cable news. We've got another 14 months to go. Maybe we'll come back again in a year and check this group again to see how accurate their predictions were.
John Dickerson:
That sounds great. We'll have a new... You're talking about be obsessing about three new people we haven't even heard of yet.
Josh King:
Best of luck at 60 Minutes. Thanks very much for doing a whistle stop here at the New York Stock Exchange.
John Dickerson:
Thanks again.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or a question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us at ICE House Podcast.
Josh King:
Our show is produced by Theresa DeLuca and Pete Ash with production assistance from Steven Romanchic and Ken Abel. I'm Josh King your host signing off in the Library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Announcer:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content here in all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes.
Announcer:
Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
