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JOHN SHATTUCK: Good evening and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Library. I’m John Shattuck, the CEO of the Kennedy Library Foundation. And on behalf of myself and our Board of Directors, some of whom are here tonight, as well as Tom Putnam, the Acting Director of the Library, we’re pleased to present a forum that will unscramble our national politics, no doubt, and set the stage for next Tuesday’s elections and maybe even look beyond to what’s at stake beyond the wildly-contested politics of 2006.
Before introducing our distinguished panelists and moderator, let me thank the institutions that make these forums possible, starting with our lead sponsor, the Bank of America. We’re also grateful to Boston Capital, The Lowell Institute, the Corcoran Jennison Companies, and our media sponsors, The Boston Globe, NECN, and WBUR, which broadcasts all of our forums on Sunday evenings at eight.
Now in preparing for tonight’s debate, I thought I’d do a little basic research, so I checked my Webster’s Dictionary for the definitions of “progressive” and “conservative.” That was useful up to a point. “Progressive” is defined as “moving forward or onward,” but also somewhat unhelpfully, I thought, as a “condition tending toward the extreme in extent or severity as in a disease.”
[laughter]
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A “conservative,” on the other hand, is defined as one who is, and I quote, “disposed to maintain existing conditions or institutions.” But also, somewhat surprisingly, in light of today’s crazy political environment, as someone who is “moderate or cautious in their views and presentations.”
So, like me, you may find these definitions pretty unsatisfying. I think it’s fair to say that most progressives today don’t see themselves as tending toward the extreme as in a disease, even though that’s the way they are caricatured by conservatives. And many conservatives today probably do see themselves as moderates, although that’s certainly not the way they come across to progressives.
So we’re here tonight to sort this out. We’ve invited two outstanding speakers who represent the leading edge of progressive and conservative thinking in America today, and a seasoned moderator who comments regularly for national audiences on the progressive/conservative divide in our country.
Our first speaker is John Podesta, the President of the Center for American Progress. The Center, which John founded in 2002, is a Washington-based organization created as an active source of progressive political ideas at a time when conservative thinking is dominating what comes out of Washington. In its own words, the Center is, and I quote, “a non-partisan research and educational institute dedicated to promoting a strong, just and free America that ensures opportunity for all.” Not much in the self- KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 3 description that seems to be tending toward the extreme; in fact, I would say, it sounds downright moderate, but I will leave it to John to tell you more about his vision of the Center.
From October, 1998 to January, 2001, John served as Chief of Staff to President Clinton. For those of you who don’t know what a White House Chief of Staff does, let me summarize in a word by saying, everything. Under President Clinton, John directed, managed and oversaw all the daily operations-- policy development, press and Congressional relations at the White House. And he also coordinated all the Cabinet Departments and the National Security Council staff, a tall order indeed.
Earlier, he had served as Deputy White House Chief of Staff, and before that as Assistant to the President. And on a personal note, I can say that during my eight years in the Clinton Administration, along with, no doubt, hundreds of others throughout the Government, my principal point of contact with the White House was John Podesta, and he did a terrific job.
Before joining the Clinton White House, John held a number of positions on Capitol Hill, including Counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chief Minority Counsel for the Senate Sub-Committee on Security and Terrorism, and Chief Counsel for the Senate Agriculture Committee, somewhat of a range of responsibilities on the Hill.
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During the Carter Administration, he served as Special Assistant to the Director of Action, the Federal Volunteer Public Service Agency, and as a trial attorney to the Justice Department Honors Program.
Today, in addition to heading up the Center for American Progress, John is a visiting Professor of Law at Georgetown University, where he specializes in technology and telecommunications policy. And he is, as we all know, a frequent commentator in the media on the future of progressive politics.
Our second speaker is William Kristol, co-founder of two of the major institutions in modern conservative politics, The Weekly Standard Magazine and the Project for the New American Century. Just as I did for the Center for American Progress, I decided to check the website for the Project for the New American Century, and here’s what I found. In the opening sentence of its statement of principles, it says, and I quote, “American foreign and defense policy is adrift.”
Of course, this sentence was written in 1997 and was aimed at what it called, and I quote, “the incoherent policies of the Clinton Administration.” But perhaps we’ll hear tonight whether Bill Kristol and other leading conservatives think it might just apply to our foreign and defense policy today.
Bill is one of our country’s most prominent political thinkers and strategists. Before starting The Weekly Standard in 1995, he directed the Project for the KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 5
Republican Future, which helped shape the strategy that produced the 1994 Congressional landslide, Republican landslide.
During the administration of the first President Bush, he served as Chief of Staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. And during the Reagan Administration, he was Chief of Staff and Counselor to Secretary of Education William Bennett.
Before coming to Washington, Bill taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, which continues to exist, despite his departure. But earlier, he was at the University of Pennsylvania. He’s the author or co-author of many books, including a best-seller, The War Over Iraq , and he appears regularly on the Fox News Channel and other media outlets.
Six years ago, The Washington Post described Bill Kristol as, and I quote, “a central part of Washington’s circulatory system, the full-throated advocate with a nice-guy image who is wired to nearly all the Republican Presidential candidates.”
Today, his standing in Washington is probably even higher. He’s close to the White House and the Republican leadership but, I might add, not afraid to criticize them when they fail to live up to his standards of conservatism.
Tonight’s moderator, Evan Thomas, is one of Washington’s leading political reporters and commentators. He’s been Assistant Managing Editor of KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 6
Newsweek since 1991 and a lead writer of many of its major news stories. Evan spearheaded Newsweek’s award-winning coverage of terrorism in the Iraq War, and he’s won numerous journalism prizes for his work, including a National Magazine Award.
He’s a regular weekly panelist on the syndicated public affairs talk show Inside Washington , and he appears frequently as a commentator on the major network and public television news shows.
He’s the author of five books, including an acclaimed biography of Robert F. Kennedy, which was published in 2000. And Evan’s grandfather, I found very interesting, Norman Thomas, was the six-time Socialist Party candidate for President, so politics apparently runs deep in his family.
So please join me in welcoming to the stage of the Kennedy Library John Podesta, Bill Kristol, and Evan Thomas.
[applause]
EVAN THOMAS: Thank you. Thank you John. It’s an honor to be here, I think, for all of us. We’re going to get to the high-falutin’ stuff. But before we do, I want to ask what’s on everybody’s mind which is, what’s going to happen on Election Day? Is it going to change control of Congress? And so what? John, why don’t you take that please.
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JOHN PODESTA: Well, I think that the change of control in the House is almost certain at this point. I think that, if you look at what’s going on underlying all that, you see a public that’s really lost faith in the direction that the President’s taken the country.
A lot of it stems from, I think, the ongoing failure of the President to be able to show a path forward in Iraq. But it’s not just, I think, the sour mood which people feel about Iraq. Now a majority feels that it was a mistake to go in in the first place. I think they see no way out.
But I think, as I reflect on it, I think that the President has gotten most of the big stuff wrong. If you look at the number of uninsured, which has gone up by five million people under his watch; if you look at real wages, which haven’t grown; you look at a security policy in which, I think, the country’s actually lost ground, where we’re less safe today than we were in 2001 when he took over.
I think the public, and in particularly, obviously, Democrats are highly charged and ready to go out and vote for their candidates and against the President, but I think, if you look at the most recent polling, you see that having spread really, fundamentally, to Independents, who want a change of direction. They want new leadership.
I think the woes that the Republican Congress, in particular, has had, particularly in recent days with Mr. Foley and others, the scandals that have KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 8 accumulated on Capitol Hill, have only added to that tendency to want to see change.
I think the Senate is tougher. I mean, I think you have to win some hard-to- win states to pick up the number of seats you need to win. I think the Democrats could do well there and conceivably take control of the Senate, but I think in order to do that, they’re going to have to win some pretty hard states to win, like Tennessee and Virginia.
The other thing, I think, that is likely to happen on Election Day is that you’ll see major gains in governorships in this election cycle as well. The only person who seems to be kind of immune from that is Arnold Schwarzenegger, who became a Republican, then he became a Democrat again.
And he’s kind of shifted back and forth and moved… You know, maybe he’s got a smart wife… But he, I think he, by really, I think, embracing the environment and by embracing environmental protection, the cause of global climate change, you know, he feels like he’s the one Republican who’s out there who’s kind of immune from the sour mood of the public.
THOMAS: Before I get to Bill, let me ask you this so-what question. I mean, if, let’s say, the Democrats do take control, so what?
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PODESTA: Well, no, I think it will be, particularly if they take control of the House, I think it will be a very significant, first of all, rebuke to the President. I think that whether he takes a lesson from that or not is a question that we really can’t know the answer to until sometime after next Tuesday.
I think that the Democrats will press ahead with some legislation that they’ve already put on the table, from raising the minimum wage to giving the government the authority to negotiate lower drug prices. But I think the most significant factor will be that, as they are out there saying, they will demand more accountability, they will demand more openness.
They will demand, I think, and put more pressure on Mr. Rumsfeld, the President and others to come up with a plan to begin to provide an exit strategy on Iraq and, in the context in which we begin to reduce our troop presence there and put more pressure for a diplomatic-- a more diplomatic pressure in Iraq to see a different outcome, rather than the “stay the course” policy that the President’s been pursuing.
THOMAS: Will they try to impeach the President?
PODESTA: I don’t see that, and I don’t think… You know, I think the one thing you have to say about the way Nancy Pelosi has conducted herself as the leader of the House Democrats is that she’s had tremendous discipline and, I think, brought real discipline to the caucus in terms of pursuing both a coherence in what they want to try to accomplish. I think that’s, to some KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 10 extent, a political discipline as well as a substantive discipline. But, it seems to me, that you’ll see much greater oversight.
I think you will see investigations, quite frankly-- not just on the question of what’s happened in Iraq. There’s another front-page story in The New York Times today about the lack of the ability of the Pentagon to account for the weapons that we’ve handed over to the Iraqis. They didn’t even bother to write down the serial numbers of the guns that we’re handing over to the Iraqi Security Forces.
So you’ll see it, not only on Iraq, but I think across the board through-- You'll see some serious oversight now, and God knows there needs to be some, of what’s happened in the agencies that have been plagued, I think with cronyism and corruption, quite frankly.
THOMAS: Bill?
[laughter]
WILLIAM KRISTOL: Yeah. It’s always good to defend cronyism and corruption, I think. It’s sort of the tradition of Boston politics, I might say. Why, that was said affectionately. You shouldn’t be so thin-skinned. You know, I’m a conservative. I’m for the tradition of cronyism and corruption. But first, let me just say, it’s a-- As John said, it’s good to be here in this terrific building in this lovely site, and to be with John and Evan. I don’t KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 11 think I’ve ever told Evan Thomas this before, but my grandfather voted for your grandfather.
[laughter]
THOMAS: If everybody who said that actually had voted for my grandfather, we’d have a Socialist country.
KRISTOL: Right, exactly. That would have been exciting, right. I also feel, since I suspect, there’s not a majority of conservative Republicans here, that I should establish my Kennedy bona fides, by saying that the first race I worked at as a kid, I think I was 10, 11-- no 11 years old-- was Pat Moynihan’s race for City Council President in New York when he had served under President Kennedy, obviously, and stayed for a bit in the Johnson Administration and quit to run for this number two job in New York.
And I volunteered for him, and I launched my very good political career, and my career in elected politics. He lost, and I’ve been very consistent in that respect for the last… Somehow, the Republican Presidential candidates aren’t really lining up to get me on board, you know. I’m such a jinx.
I’ll say, one other thing about Harvard, when I was a student at Harvard, actually I found when I was still a Democrat, I did some volunteer work for Scoop Jackson in 1972, who I guess was a very close friend of John KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 12
Kennedy’s, and had been, I guess, the Democratic Chairman, isn’t that right, when Kennedy was President.
And I remember McGovern upset Muskie in New Hampshire. And I think, at that time, the Massachusetts Primary was right after New Hampshire. It was quite important, actually, and it was a wide open race for Governor… I mean, everyone was running. We all thought Scoop really had a shot. And I worked hard for Scoop, cut classes, went out and leafleted for him in Newton, Brookline, I remember. And Scoop ran seventh in the Massachusetts Primary that year. He ran behind Wilbur Mills.
[laughter]
So that’s my political credentials. On the issue of… Well, the Republicans are going to lose seats this year, probably lose the House. I’d say, the odds are quite good, four or five to one that they’ll lose the House and probably hold the Senate. The odds of that are probably two or three to one. So better chance of the Democrats controlling both bodies than the Republicans controlling both, but the greatest chance is probably that the bodies are split.
You know, if you look at history, ever since 1934, I believe, whenever one party has controlled the Presidency and both Houses of Congress, they’ve lost seats in whatever off-term election was held, and usually lost quite a lot of seats. It’s hard to govern, grievances accumulate, you don’t get credit for KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 13 the good things that happen, you get blamed for everything-- from your own party, from the opposition party.
Obviously, there are also things that people really are unhappy about, especially Iraq. But it’s actually unusual, I would say, for an administration to get so little credit for what has been pretty good economic performance, no terror attacks here, two pretty well respected Supreme Court appointments and the like. But they’re not going to get much credit.
The question, I think, on the election-- and I really don’t know how this goes-- is… And right now, I would say, the Democrats pick up 20 to 25 seats in the House, maybe, which would give them a narrow majority, and probably pick up three, maybe four Senate seats, which will give the Republicans a narrow majority.
What everyone wants to see is whether there really is a big wave that would go beyond that to six or seven Senate seats, 35 or 40 House seats. I actually thought there could be, and I would even have said maybe that there would be a couple of weeks ago.
My experience in politics, such as it is, is that often, when you get this kind of year, it’s such a bad climate for one party, with one party-- the Democrats in this case-- energized, and the Republicans dispirited. It often builds at the end, you know. The bottom falls out, so to speak, for the party that’s already doing badly. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 14
This is really what happened in ’94. What looked like it was going to be a sort of medium battle actually turned out to be very bad in the last ten days. And so I’ve been trying to follow the polls pretty closely in the last few days. And so far I don’t really see the big break. I mean, it may happen. I would have thought it would have happened, actually, but I now am wondering whether it won’t happen.
Maybe the country… the Republicans will rally enough to their candidates in states like Tennessee and Virginia, as John mentioned, in the Senate races and in these close Congressional races, that they’ll hold the losses to sort of a more of a normal, you might say, mid-term situation. And I think we could well end up with a Democratic House and a Republican Senate.
THOMAS: Let me-- I want to get into a general discussion, obviously, about progressivism and conservatism--
KRISTOL: What happened to liberalism, incidentally? It seems to me, when I was growing up, it was liberalism and conservatism. And I don’t know-- didn’t John Kennedy use that term a lot, liberalism? What happened to-- I guess now it’s--
PODESTA: He did it proudly.
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KRISTOL: Well, you should follow that model there, you know. Anyways--
THOMAS: Let me-- Actually, let’s ask John that question. What happened to liberalism?
PODESTA: Well, you know, I think that the-- I mean, people accuse me of being a liberal, and I accept the charge. I think that if liberalism mean that you want to build a society that’s creating opportunity for everyone, that is one of mutual and shared responsibility, one that is trying to bring the world together rather than blow it apart, you know, I accept the charge.
But I think that the reason that the term progressivism has caught on, quite frankly, is that there’s a sense, I think, in the history of progressivism of a tendency for reform, and I think there’s a strong progressive tradition in this country over the last couple hundred years. People have warmed to the phrase, and I think it has meaning.
It is a different world-view than the one that, I think, Bill has, that suggests that we can search out the common good by trying to build, as I said, opportunity through hard work. And government can be an instrument of creating the success for people, as opposed to one in which basically you’re handing off the risk to most of the people in society concentrating the power in a few.
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So I think there are distinctive philosophical differences between progressivism and, particularly, the current radical brand of conservatism that’s being followed in the White House. But I think brands do matter, and I think that labels do matter. People get some sense of it.
And I think that progressive-- the progressive tradition that goes-- that I think you can trace back to the search for the common good in Madison and Jefferson, and that was updated by Teddy Roosevelt… You know, no party has a complete hold on these philosophical traditions. Through FDR, up to John Kennedy and Bill Clinton, I think, is a deep one.
But I think-- Again, what I would say, I think the reason people have gravitated to that term “progressive” is that it-- that streak of reformism that I think we need today, that we need to reform our institutions, both governmental institutions, but certainly private-sector institutions, is one that is in that tradition, and that’s why people have used the phrase.
THOMAS: Bill, you’re a Teddy Roosevelt fan. How do you feel about him-- I think the liberal is taking the progressive--
KRISTOL: Right. I think the reason liberals have gravitated to the term “progressivism” is that liberalism became unpopular, and it turned out to be a losing label in more Congressional districts and, well, even more states than not, fairly or unfairly. And of course, perfectly intelligently, liberals decided, well, they prefer to be progressives, which I do think John is right KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 17 about this. I mean, it captures a certain general, vague, reformist impulse, which, you know, who’s against reform at some level, of course.
And, especially, when you have people like Perot running around in 1992, and when you have a Reform Party, in fact, trying to get going, and people want to be for reform, but not embrace every liberal position, it’s probably safer to be politically a progressive. I don’t know that it really matters what terms people use.
Campaigns have a way of exposing… You know, conservatism became a more popular term in the ‘70s than liberalism, but it doesn’t mean that a conservative can’t lose an election, as the Republicans will lose the House, probably, in a week, if governance doesn’t work.
I mean, reality matters more than these terms, and we could all quarrel about whether, you know, Bush is a truer heir of old liberal Truman/Kennedy kind of foreign policy. And Kennedy cut taxes, and Reagan cut taxes, and all that. But the truth is, the American people are pretty pragmatic, I think, in judging Presidents and Governors, for that matter. And they tend to cut through the terms.
THOMAS: Let me try to get past the terms or the use of the terms, and ask you a question, a historical question. Do you think that the 1960s were good for America-- that the 1960s, broadly defined, were good for America or bad for America? John? KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 18
PODESTA: Well, I think the 1960s broadly defined… You’ll have to forgive me. Last night, I was at a concert that the Rolling Stones did as a benefit for Clinton’s work on HIV/AIDS and global climate change, so there were at least some parts of the ‘60s that were terrific.
And, I would say, to be serious, look. Next week, Massachusetts is going to elect Deval Patrick Governor. You know, Bill might want to fight with me about that, but I think if you look at all the recent polling, Deval Patrick’s going to be elected Governor in Massachusetts.
I think that’s a testament to what happened in the 1960s, that the ‘60s were a time of opening up and dealing with the history of racism in this country, to opening up opportunity for more people, to making this society a more just society, to trying to build up and include more people in this society.
And I think if that’s your definition of the ‘60s, I think that it was, for the most part, a very good thing. And I think that the country has benefited enormously from it. And, you know, and I think if you look around today, those vestiges of racism still exist.
To go to a different campaign, you see it in the Republican National Committee as it were run against Harold Ford in Tennessee, which I think were overtly racist, but people might want to quibble with that. And I think KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 19 that you’ll see it, to some extent, playing out in the Virginia Senate and election as well.
But I think if you look at where we were socially at the beginning of that decade, and where we came to by the end of the decade through the work of people like the Kennedys and Martin Luther King and others, we opened up the society in very good ways.
I think from the perspective of politics, I think we also did something else, which I think has a more mixed history with respect to the Democratic Party and where we are electorally, which is that I think that we lost sight of what bound us together to some extent.
We broke up a little bit too much, I think, into thinking about who we were, as in kind of in our individual capacities and what… And we lost sight of, I think, what bound us together. And our politics got a little bit off-track through the course of the 1970s, and I think Reagan capitalized on that, quite frankly, and sort of used that sense of special interests inside the Democratic Party, that really kind of grew up out of that political milieu.
But I think, actually, one of the things that I’m proud of, having served in the Clinton Administration, is that I think Bill Clinton got that back about right in the course of the ’92 campaign, and I think we end up being with a stronger, more cohesive, more open set of commitments than the Republican KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 20
Party. And again, I think that the history of that does date back, to some extent, to the 1960s.
THOMAS: Bill?
KRISTOL: Yeah, I certainly agree that the civil rights, the movement, the civil rights revolution, the civil rights legislation, was an ambiguously positive achievement of the ‘60s, and those who supported it deserved credit. And of course, that part, I think, was a real achievement, I mean, an unbelievable achievement overcoming centuries of racism, centuries of slavery, a century of post-slavery discrimination. So that I very much agree with John on.
And the ‘60s produced other good facts. I think, from a point of view, the Republican Party and the conservative party began the transformation of conservatism, which-- let’s take ’60-- and ’64 was embodied by Goldwater-- from a somewhat narrow, kind of reactionary, backward-looking craft, sort of, philosophy-- not without its, you know, decent streak and sort of sincere beliefs. And some parts of it, incidentally, I think are somewhat admirable.
But nonetheless, it was never going to be a governing philosophy in America in 1964. And with Reagan, and with, then, the rise of neo-conservatism in the ‘70s, and with the attempt to frame more of a positive, forward-looking, optimistic, internationalist, conservative agenda, I think that began the transformation of American conservatism, which led to the great successes KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 21 of Ronald Reagan, which Bill Clinton was able to build on in the ‘90s, and that was a good thing too.
So I’m happy about the civil rights revolution, and I’m happy about the Reagan revolution in the ‘80s.
THOMAS: But what do you think about the perceived loss of values and respect for authority that came out of the ‘60s?
KRISTOL: Well, that’s very problematic I think and, I mean, it’s complicated. And obviously, certain aspects of it were healthy, and certain aspects of it went way off the rails, and certain things…
Pat Moynihan, I mentioned, you know, wrote that famous paper on the-- what’s it called-- “The Negro Family,” where he was very worried that, I guess, at the time, if I’m not mistaken, it was the rise to 10 or 12%, I think, of African-American births out of wedlock. And he said, “This is going to cause serious social problems. Can we do anything about it?”
And of course, as soon as the report came out in January of ’65, I think it was, it was so politically incorrect, to use a term that didn’t exist then, that, you know, everyone came down on him. And Pat, I guess, quit and came to New York to run for office and ended up teaching at Harvard, until he finally made it into office ten years later.
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But, you know, that the consequences of-- there’s a family break up, and other social pathologies that people in the ‘60s and ‘70s should have minimized, stuff like crime-- I mean the idea that the crime rate triples within about 15 years from what-- about ’60, ’65 to ’80. And only now is it back down to the levels from which it took off.
And those are terrible social pathologies, and we all paid a big price for them. A matter of fact, the poorest paid the highest price for them, because it turns out the upper middle-class can insulate itself to some degree from the effects of family break-up, and certainly from the effect from crime. And it’s precisely the most vulnerable who end up paying the price when social structures decompose, and social norms weaken, and predators become stronger, and all that.
So, I mean, I do think it’s taken, in that respect… It took 20 years, really, to recover, I mean, just speaking statistically, almost, from the damage that was done in certain respects by the developments of the ‘60s. Whether anyone could have stopped any of that, whether those were deeper, social causes that, you know, had to do with modern technology and maternity and all this…
I’m not blaming any party of this on any particular set of public policies even, but it is a true fact that a lot of pathologies were sort of unleashed in the ‘60s, which have taken a long time for us to try to come to grips with.
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THOMAS: And John, what’s the political impact of that? How has that affected politics?
PODESTA: Well, you know, I think that this values debate, I’ll just kind of bring it up to date. It’s based on one question. Out of the 2004 exit polls, we had a major discussion of what, you know, values were in the context of modern American politics.
And, you know, I don’t think the 1960s or any time more recently fundamentally altered the country as a kind of place in which one of the most important values, I think, that people yearn for is to live in a culture where you can raise your children in a way that’s kind of safe and nurturing.
What we saw, I think, during the course of the last period of modern political history, was the rise in use of certain kinds of wedge issues as placeholders for values questions. But I think the vast majority of people still believe that questions of greed and materialism, questions of how we’re taking care of the least amongst us in society-- those are important, moral value questions-- how we’re raising our children, are the important moral value questions that they want to see politicians, if you will, align themselves with on their side.
And I think one of the things that’s happened in the context of this campaign in 2004 is an important fight for what the moral value structure is in the election cycle, so that you see, for example, in Ohio, the organization of KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 24 people of faith, of ministers, et cetera, arguing in favor-- really, kind of almost across from a progressive to a moderate to an even more conservative political structure.
You see them fighting for things like raising the minimum wage, the Ohio Ballot Initiative Question. You see a more conservative Christian community joining with Roman Catholics and more progressives on the question of global climate change.
So I think the values debate is shifting back to grounds that are more recognizable than what we’ve seen when… Really, I think, driven by politics, the moral focus, if you will, was drilled through a very narrow set of social issues, particularly in the 2004 campaign.
THOMAS: Bill, what do you think of that?
KRISTOL: Well, I mean, I’m not sure exactly what John’s referring to, since he was a little cryptic about what issues he doesn’t like being in the political debate. I mean, I think it was a mistake that the Supreme Court, one of the worst… I mean, the Court made sound decisions in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, in overturning Plessy v. Ferguson, like Brown v. Board-- I guess they didn’t directly overturn it, but they probably should have-- and then some of the subsequent decisions on civil rights and some other issues.
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Trying to remove some of these social, cultural issues from the political debate was a big mistake. Roe v. Wade was a disastrous decision, I think, not just because of its direct effects, but I think for the politics of the country, because it then put so much at stake on these Court nominations, and we’ve seen the consequences of that on both sides for the last 20 years.
It overcame federalism and didn’t allow different states to resolve, which they were doing, incidentally, abortion laws in different ways. And I think the Massachusetts Court made a similar mistake in 2003 on same-sex marriage, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for voters to say “Wait a second. Don’t we get something to say about this?”
And if federal legislation is even required to ensure that they have something to say about this which, when the legislation was passed in ’96 that Clinton signed, trying to stop one state’s ruling from, in effect, imposing a new law on other states, I don’t think it’s inappropriate for these issues to be part of the political discourse.
Now when they are, of course, there are going be demagogues, some on both sides. And this is, you know, what happens when issues become political-- foreign policy, domestic policy, economic issues as well.
No, but I don’t agree on the… I don’t think it’s illegitimate for people to raise those issues. I think, in fact, they were not exploited from the top down. They came from the bottom up. Most Republican politicians I know KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 26 hate these issues and would just as soon they go away. They’re made uncomfortable by them, their big-shot donors tend to be more liberal than their sort of grassroots supporters, so they avoid talking about them when they can. But people are concerned about them and are entitled to express their views, and I think that’s happened a lot in the 10, 20--
PODESTA: Well, I don’t think the President seemed like he was concerned with his top donors. The day after the New Jersey decision, he was out there campaigning on it. You know, look-- I think these are fair topics for debate.
I agree with Bill that it’s the question of abortion, the question of whether gay people are going to have their rights guaranteed to them under federal law, et cetera, those are topics that ought to be debated, that people have different perspectives and different views on. They ought to be out there in the public arena.
I think what happened in the demonizing of individuals in more recent elections, a little bit something different, though, where you’re… You know, if you took a position that you believed that, on abortion rights, that women were moral agents, they had a right to make the decision that there were policies.
For example, during the Clinton Administration, the rate and incidence of abortions went down. Why? Because he wanted to criminalize abortion? No, because he supported a set of policies from reducing teenage pregnancy, to KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 27 support for contraception, to support for health insurance for women, to perhaps a more general change in the culture of the times. But the rate of abortion went down.
When you had President Reagan in office for eight years, you saw the rate and incidence of abortion go up. Does that mean that he wasn’t truly, you know, pro-life if you will, that he didn’t really want to criminalize abortion? Well, I think some people might doubt whether he actually wanted to criminalize abortion, given what his attitudes were, but I think the policies do have consequences. They should be debated in the public arena.
But I think what’s happened in the demonization of politics, is that people who hold one side or the other aren’t necessarily going to hell as a result, and that’s the way the campaigns end up getting run.
KRISTOL: No, I don’t think the campaigns end up getting run that way, any more on one side than on another. The most demonized group in American politics today, by mainstream media and by a lead opinion, are religious conservatives, evangelical conservatives.
Stuff gets written about them in The New York Times and The Washington Post that, if it were written about any of the respected and approved minority groups, people would be outraged. But it just happens all the time on TV discussions. I think Evan himself has commented on this at times on TV.
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You know, people will say things about religious conservatives, assume that they’re, you know, idiots. This happened recently in the Foley matter. They treated this affair… You know, they can’t distinguish between individual flaws and the whole party. They’re treated as if they don’t actually care sincerely about these issues, but only are sort of exploited politically for them.
I mean, Clinton’s success as a politician came because he actually knew a lot of these people, having been Governor of a Southern state, and spoke respectfully to them, and expressed his disagreement with them respectfully. And I think we could all agree that that would be a good thing in politics, and I think actually, to be fair, Bush has been very good in this way.
Bush has not demagogued the same-sex marriage issue. Bush has been liberal on immigration and has resisted a lot of efforts from Republicans to be much harsher on that issue, which is, believe me, a tempting one politically for the Republicans.
He probably hurt the Republican Party in the last year and a half by supporting the McCain-Kennedy bill in the Senate and not going with the House Republican security only bill. And it certainly prevented an immigration legislation from being passed, which probably, in turn, has hurt the Republican Congress. They can’t say they achieved anything on the issue that’s of great interest to lots of people.
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So I actually think individuals on both sides, he’s not over the line. But I don’t accept the notion that somehow, you know, the conservative movement’s ascendancy, as some people argue, has somehow been based on this ruthless exploitation of reg issues and demonization of opponents.
THOMAS: One of the clichés that’s out there is that the Democrats are the “Mommy Party” and the Republicans are the “Daddy Party.” Where do you think that cliché stands now? Bill?
KRISTOL: I don’t know, it’s Chris Matthew’s cliché, so I don’t know why I have to defend it, you know.
[laughter]
No, what Chris was capturing… I mean, there are two facts. There’s one fact that since, I guess, by 1980, all right, there’s been a pretty substantial gender gap between the parties. It’s closed at times, but it’s pretty steady. Women are more liberal than men in America. And then you can distinguish among married women and single women, and we all know this data. But that’s just a fact.
It doesn’t mean women are right and men are wrong, or vise-versa. They have very different life experiences, obviously, and that leads them to a somewhat different weighing of, you know, maybe economic growth or competition on the one hand, versus a safety net on the other, the advantages KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 30 of war versus the advantages and disadvantages of erring on the side of the use of force or erring on the side of refusing to use force, and the like.
The gap isn’t that huge, you know, five, eight, ten points in most elections. But it is a significant part of American politics, and I think Chris was probably capturing that. And I don’t know if it’s here to stay, but it seems to be here for a while.
And then, I guess, the second aspect of that is that, you know, the sort of, the liberal party, the progressive party, I should say, tends to project a more nurturing, “we’ll take care of you” sort of attitude-- “I feel your pain,” you know, “we’re going to make sure no one falls through the cracks.”
And the conservative party projects a little more of one, “get up there on your feet and start hustling,” and, you know, “competition’s healthy,” and we want to make sure that people can do well in America, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So these are caricatures both ways, obviously, but there’s some truth to the caricatures.
And it is certainly true that the Democrats, let’s say, err more on the side of the safety net, and Republicans err more on the side of healthy competition. And I suppose-- I don’t know if that really captures-- I’m not sure-- You know, this is a bit of a caricature of mommies and daddies, in essence. But there’s probably some slight truth to the caricature. That’s probably why it caught on, don’t you think? I mean, that’s why the term had a certain KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 31 resonance, because people did have some sense that there was some germ of truth in it, but I wouldn’t exaggerate it.
THOMAS: John?
PODESTA: Well, as you said it Evan, I was thinking that if the Republicans are the “Daddy Party”, then mommy’s looking out the window and Daddy’s laying in the gutter, so she’s saying, “Maybe I should send the kids out to pick him up and bring him in.”
[laughter]
I think that when you think about their… If this is some sort of, you know, if the macho use of military force is the first, second and last effort to try to provide security for the country, I think that then, if you sit back and look at the books that are chronicling the Bush Administration, just that have come out in the last month, we’ve had fiasco, hubris, state of denial, and disaster.
I think that kind of sums up this notion that military force is always the first, right, and only answer, that the war in Iraq was well-considered. I think even Bill would agree it wasn’t well-executed. But I think that if you go back and look at, from a strategic perspective, whether it was a mistake or not, I think the American people, as I said, have that about right, that it’s weakened the United States, that it’s complicated the war on terror, that we’ve over- militarized the use of U.S. power. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 32
We have under-estimated the ability of the U.S. economic power, diplomatic power, its intelligence assets, and its moral standing in the world, which I think have all been harmed by sort of the “Daddy Party” approach, to some extent, championed by a bill going back to the 1990s. John, in his introduction, mentioned the Project for New American Century. This was, of course, their vision, that we are going to create a new circumstance in the Middle East. And I have to say that, of course, we have done that. I’m not sure we bought exactly what they were selling.
I think with respect to where the Democrats stand today from a security perspective, again, you see that-- I think, in the array of people who are standing up and running for office-- Joe Sestak, Tammy Duckworth, other people have served with great honor and distinction in Iraq, who are running as Democrats. I think you see it in a more forceful posture with respect to our Congressional leaders, so I don’t think, to the extent that there was a deficit, was really probably borne from the experience in Vietnam and well, back-- not to the 1960s, but maybe the 1970s…
I think that that’s closing, and I think it’s closing because in the end of the day, facts matter. As Bill’s friend Pat Moynihan said, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, but you’re not entitled to your own facts. And facts do matter, and I think that the prescription that essentially the kind of super hawks that Bill was referring to in the 1990s has proven to be disastrous for the security of the United States. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 33
THOMAS: Bill?
KRISTOL: You know, we started with the standard in September of ’95. About three months in, I guess, the very beginning of December, President Clinton sent forces to Bosnia, intervening there as we had been urging and supporting, and many people of both parties had for a couple of years. And we supported President Clinton’s intervention and chided some of the Republican Presidential candidates-- this was the ’95-’96 cycle, who were demagoguing-- Graham, I think, in particular, Buchanan, obviously-- you know, “This is going to be a disaster. Our American troops are going to be coming back in body bags. Totally the wrong thing for the President to do.” Dole, to his credit, supported the President on this.
And I remember we lost-- we had just started back in September-- we lost about one fifth of our original subscribers in the next month or two who wrote, you know, nice letters saying they didn’t subscribe to The Weekly Standard to read editorials supporting Bill Clinton.
So no, the problem in the ‘90s was that we were too slow to intervene. And the problem, incidentally, today, is not that we’re intervening all over the world, starting wars. Bush started two wars. One of them, no one has any quarrel with, I take it-- Afghanistan. Iraq was controversial, is controversial now, was less controversial at the time.
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Obviously, under Clinton, in fact, we had said we wanted regime change in Iraq and bombed Iraq pretty seriously, more successfully than we knew, actually, in December of ’98, and came close to war in ’98 with Saddam. But the problem, obviously, was that we were too slow to intervene in Rwanda in ’94 and the Balkans, I would say, in ’95, and, indeed, against terror in Afghanistan, in retrospect.
I’m not saying that they could have known, necessarily, or should have known at the time, but certainly in retrospect, to allow the terrorist state to build up there in the late ‘90s. And I still think it is a greater danger to the world that we will retreat, that we will be too slow to intervene. And I don’t think that we’ve overly-militarized U.S. policy. We’ve executed the war in Iraq very badly, and, you know, it’s a very bad thing that Bush and Rumsfeld have allowed it to be executed so badly, or I’d say, Rumsfeld has caused it to be executed so badly, and Bush has allowed it to be executed so badly.
I still think it can have an acceptable outcome, and can be worth having been fought. One would have to compare the outcome with what would have been the case if we hadn’t gone in, obviously. But look, we’re going to have to use force at some point in the next five, ten, 15 years somewhere else. Just as in the early ‘90s, everyone thought it was the end of history, and then Clinton had to use force, and Bush had to use force after 9/11.
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And we need a strong military. I think one attribute I will give to the Clinton Administration is that it abandoned, I think, some of the governization of the Democratic Party that had occurred in the ‘70s and ‘80s. He was willing to use force. And one thing I will say today is that the Democrats on the Hill are not calling for reducing the Defense budget. They’re not calling for shrinking the military. In fact-- and I support them strongly on this-- they’re calling for increasing the size of the military, because Rumsfeld irresponsibly, after 9/11, refused to actually increase the size of the military, which would have been a very prudent and sensible thing to do. And it’s very outrageous that he didn’t actually.
So I don’t agree that, you know, Bush is wildly running around the globe using force. If anything, in North Korea and Iran, we’re being too elusive in my view.
JOHN PODESTA: Well, we have very little force left to use, I think, because we’ve wandered around in one specific place and used force. I think it was very ill-considered, and I think we’re paying an enormous price. Certainly, the nearly 2800 men and women who have been killed paid the ultimate price. The 300 billion dollars we’re still paying the price on. You And that’s just kind of as far as the eye can see.
And I think that, you know, these things have consequences, and I think predictions have consequence, and I think that-- I wrote down a couple of things that Bill said. He said that in 2002 that Americans will be welcomed KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 36 in Baghdad as liberators. In 2003, he said that it was just pop-psychology that the Shi’a can’t get along with the Sunnis, and that Iraq was a secular culture. In 2004, he said that Abu Ghraib is… It’s insane for this country to be obsessing over a small prisoner abuse scandal.
I mean, those things have consequences, and I think that it reminded me a little bit of Bill’s former editorials, maybe some of which you’d sooner forget-- of Dan Rather’s observation, often wrong but never in doubt-- I would say on Iraq, Bill’s been always wrong, but never in doubt.
KRISTOL: It’s good to have Dan Rather sided against me, I would say. I mean, that’s, I’d say, comforting. Can I say a word, though, since he’s gone through the trouble of looking up these things? No, I stand by, in fact, all of those things. I denounced Abu Ghraib, and I’ve called for Rumsfeld to be fired, partly because of his lack of oversight in that.
But nonetheless, it is, in the annals of war, a trivial prison abuse scandal which did no damage at all in the Arab world. Believe me, they are used to a lot worse prison abuse, and we’ve punished people who are responsible, and I’m not going to back off from that.
The 2003 statement was correct. I mean, the truth is that the Shi’a were incredibly patient, really, in terms of responding with sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing to an unbelievably nasty insurgency, which I blame us for not controlling early on and not having sufficient troops there to control. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 37
Now it has spiraled into something much closer to-- well, certainly, into sectarian violence, and into a kind of, maybe, low-grade civil war. But I do reject the pop-psychology that says that Shi’a and Sunni can’t live together, just as I did in the ‘90s, that somehow the Balkans was inevitable.
“Don’t you know,” I was told by all my pseudo-sophisticated realist friends, “Don’t you know they’ve hated each other for centuries?” Don’t I know about the battle of-- what battle was that in Kosovo in 1383-- that was supposedly still on their minds? And therefore, we couldn’t intervene. It was insane to intervene in the Balkans, you know. We’re just going to get into some quagmire. We could never produce anything acceptable, and we had to do something-- not great, not great, but acceptable.
And in Rwanda, don’t we know that they hate each other, and they’re going to kill each other, and we shouldn’t intervene? And that is a very dangerous, I think, point of view, so I will acknowledge that having allowed the insurgency of the terror to go on for so long in Iraq, we have now produced a situation where unfortunately, the worst elements of both communities-- or several communities-- are at risk now of being able to dominate and take over.
And that’s what happens in these situations. It happened in Lebanon in the ‘80s, and it’s a horrible thing when it happens. And then you can look back and say, “Well, what an idiot you were. You didn’t know that this was KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 38 inevitable.” It wasn’t inevitable. It wasn’t inevitable in 2003, it wasn’t inevitable in 2004, it wasn’t inevitable, in my view, in 2005, and I’m still not willing to say that it’s inevitable that they’re just going to slaughter each other in Iraq.
And that’s why, I think, most Democrats even don’t want to pull out of Iraq, so I’m willing to stick by these sentences, stipulating that no one is perfect in their foresight, and I make as many mistakes as anyone else.
PODESTA: I think that we may have some point of mirror agreement on the notion that there are circumstances and times when certainly military action is necessary, and where intervention is important. We could go down the list. We could talk about Darfur, we could talk about the duty to protect.
But I think when you’re positing that, then you have to think about the question of legitimacy, and whether you’re projecting with legitimacy in the country, and what the resources are going to be that you need to undertake the mission once you take it on.
And I think that in both cases, I think that the Bush Administration, particularly in Iraq, squandered. They squandered the legitimacy. They acted unilaterally. They acted based on a preconceived notion of what they wanted to do in advance of putting the weapons inspectors back in and building the case around weapons of mass destruction.
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And they certainly, I think-- I guess, again, I think perhaps we would find a point of agreement-- they unbelievably bungled the job once they decided to take it on.
EVAN THOMAS: So John, what is the progressive solution to Iraq?
PODESTA: Well, you know, I think this is where we again part company, which is that the question really is… And we at the Center have been saying this for now over a year and have been calling for what we described as a strategic redeployment, which is to begin the gradual draw-down of our-- of the presence in Iraq.
You have to ask the question whether, at some point, the Iraqi Government and the security forces will take on the tough decisions, or whether the U.S. presence and the open-ended commitment of U.S. troops and presence acts as a kind of security blanket that prevents them from taking on tough decisions.
Actually, the Administration evidently just came around to that perspective earlier this week, I suppose, in suggesting that the Iraqi Government needed to get on with a timetable, that under our plan, we said that that needed to take place over an orderly time frame; we suggested by the end of 2007 we could be out of Iraq, that we needed to rebuild our ground force, that, as Bill has noted, I think the Center was the first think tank that actually called for a KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 40 buildup-- I think in early 2004-- a buildup of the U.S. Army with 100 thousand more troops.
But we needed to apply greater resources, in fact, in Afghanistan, where we’re beginning to lose the war, because we’re under-resourcing that effort where we had a legitimate cause; where we had, I think, the support of the world behind us; where we had legitimacy going in. But we’re beginning to kind of lose ground there, because we’ve under-resourced the force there.
KRISTOL: What if we draw down and the conflict gets worse?
PODESTA: Well, I think the question is, what if we… You know, I think we neither should conclude that because they made this mess, we should provide no ideas in support of it; nor should we bear the burden of saying, “What if, what if?”
The question is, what if we stayed there at the current state of 130 thousand troops? You know, 71% of the Iraqi people want us out tomorrow. Is it a viable option to retain that force in the middle of not just one civil war, but probably four concurrent wars: Shi’a against Shi’a in the South, but with the militias; the Sunni insurgency in Anbar Province; a low-grade military conflict in the North, in the Kurdish areas; and then, of course, the Sunni- Shi’a clash in Baghdad.
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I think that the question one has to ask is can we provide the pressure on the Iraqi Government to stand up and take control of their own country? Can we provide the diplomatic resources to put pressure from their neighbors? And I think if we can’t do that in the course of a year or two, we’re not going to be able to do it in three or four.
THOMAS: So will you withdraw even if it does deteriorate for the…
PODESTA: Well, I think we need to… You know, we need to make clear to the Iraqis and to the Iraqi Government that we’re not there forever. And I think it’s important that we begin to reduce our footprint there.
THOMAS: Bill?
KRISTOL: Well, now, I was happy when the Center for American Progress called for an increase in the end-strength of the U.S. military, particularly the Army and Marines in 2004, joining the Project for the New American Century, which had been calling for this for four or five years, since before 9/11.
And really it is, I would say… There are a lot of unfair criticisms that can be made, frankly, of Bush and Rumsfeld, because wars are difficult, and things go wrong, and no one knows ahead of time exactly what to do. I think the failure to adjust… The two things that I really hold against Rumsfeld, in particular, are the failure to adjust when it was evident in mid-2003 that… KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 42
Well, the failure to establish order and security right away, which everyone who has looked at the history of these things sees as very, very important, failure to stop the looting right then in April, 2003, and then the failure to send more troops in by about September of ’03, when it was perfectly evident that more were needed.
And McCain and Jack Reed on the Democratic side came back and said they need more troops. We editorialize this way. And it would have been the right thing to do, and it could have been done.
The prior failure was the failure to build up the military, which weirdly came from Rumsfeld’s desire-- well, partly from Bush’s desire, probably-- not to look as if you believed only in a military solution, and then from Rumsfeld’s, I think, just kind of theological view, whether we needed a light or a high-tech transformed military, and that boots on the ground didn’t matter anymore. And they do.
So we now have a very difficult situation in Iraq. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves, you know. The world is the way the world is, and it is not the way we all hoped it might be at the end of the Cold War. It’s not the end of history.
It’s not the ‘90s, where we had very difficult challenges and very terrible things happened in places like Rwanda. But you could tell yourself, “Well, the Balkans, that’s on sort of the fringe of Europe. And Rwanda-- Africa’s a KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 43 special case in terms of the problems there,” and that basically, the world is sort of chugging ahead in this globalized, commercial way, towards peace and prosperity. And we’re sort of past the era of, you know, fascist and Communist-type threats.
And we have a jihadist threat now that, if not checked-- and it has to be checked by a wide variety of means, including political and diplomatic-- but also, it has to lose. It has to lose militarily. If that’s not checked, we have a horrible prospect, I think, of what could happen in the Middle East. The intersection of terror of jihadist ideology and terror and weapons of mass destruction is genuinely scary, and that’s the world we live in.
And whoever the next President is, Republican or Democrat, is going to have to deal with it. And I hope whoever he or she is deals with it successfully and with a useful combination of military, political, diplomatic, economic tools.
But John himself, after denouncing this terrible militarization of U.S. policy, called in Afghanistan for more troops, which I happen to agree with. And our political efforts in Afghanistan have been pretty successful. And it is not unilateral. And NATO is there. And it turns out you still need to defeat the enemy, you know, and that has to be done partly militarily.
I don’t know why John said something at one point that, you know, we had legitimacy for Afghanistan; we have legitimacy for Afghanistan today. And KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 44
I very much hope, actually, that some Democrats put more pressure on Bush to send a few more troops there. It doesn’t take that many, and we certainly… The Army’s not that strapped that we couldn’t do that.
But again, this is where kind of a Rumsfeld stubbornness has really been a little crazy. I mean, we were fighting, you know, on two fronts militarily against the jihadists. It is awfully important for the sake of the future of the Middle East, for the sake of all our friends in the Middle East, for prospective friends from the Middle East, for prospective forces of moderation in the Islamic world, that the jihadists lose. I do think that is the top priority of American foreign policy.
And, you know, one of those fights in Iraq has been much more difficult than anyone hoped, but we still need to do our best to win both of them, I think.
THOMAS: Let me ask you a last question, and then I’m going to open it up to the audience here. Do you think the effect of Iraq is going to make us more isolationists in some way? Either of you?
PODESTA: Well, I think the American public is drifting in that direction, and I think it’s important that the political leaders, I actually think, stand up and resist that. I think that they see the cost, they see the ignoring of domestic problems, they see the loss of life. And I think that the natural reaction is to try to pull in. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 45
I think that if you look at what Progressive leaders, Democratic leaders, particularly those who are going to run for national office, where they’re likely to be, I think they’ll resist that tendency by the American public.
I think this is evident, by the way, in both parties, that, you know, that you see a sense of chagrin, a sense of the fact that both the failure to plan and execute, as well as the inability to kind of imagine a different course in Iraq as a lesson that will cause us to pull in.
But I think, again, most of the leaders in Congress, most of the leaders who are going to run for the Presidency, I think, will have to make the case to the American people that we live in a globalized world, that the problems that we face need to be confronted, that they ought to be confronted, I think. And most of the problems don’t lend themselves to unilateral solutions.
We need the cooperation of people, whether it’s climate change, or infectious disease, or Islamic jihadism, or now what’s happening with regard to where China’s going, where Russia’s going, the questions of nuclear proliferation in Iran and North Korea.
We need to be engaged in the world, but I think that the public support itself is going to have a tendency to withdraw as a result of Iraq. And again, it’s up to those of us who believe that that would be a mistake to argue the case in the opposite direction. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 46
KRISTOL: Yeah, I’m actually not quite as worried about the public. I mean, in polls, of course, people will often say they wish more money were being spent at home, or they wish things were better in Iraq, obviously. They question, perfectly legitimately, whether it was the right decision to go in in the first place.
But if you look at the history of, you know, since World War II, the American public will stick with wars, even when they’ve gotten very, very difficult and very tough if they think there’s some plausible strategy for victory, or if they think the consequences of withdrawing are more dangerous than even staying into an unsatisfactory Korea-type stalemate.
So I think public support remains pretty strong, actually, given, you know, all of the mistakes that have been made, and given the media coverage, and just given that it’s a difficult… You know, it’s easier, obviously, to say, “Gee I wish we were out of there.” But people will say, “I wish we were out of there, but I know we can’t just get out of there, so we have to do what we have to do.”
And I very much agree with John, not just that leaders should do this, but I think it will be politically smart for them to do that. The truth is, short-term, if you look at the polls, is a snapshot.
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There’ll be some temptation, and some people in both parties will go this way and some will believe it, I suppose, that to be this sort of isolation-- either the liberal version of isolationism, the, you know, kind of nice-guy, why can’t we all get along, kum ba yah isolationism, or the right wing version of isolationism, which will rear its head in the next year, certainly. And you’ll see some of it in the Republican Primaries, I would suspect in ’07, a kind of what Buchananites, Perot, Lou Dobbs kind of--
THOMAS: Duncan Hunter announced for President.
KRISTOL: Right, well anti-immigration, protectionist, and you know, tough fortress America, but don’t… None of this nation-building, no use of ground troops, you know, don’t try to save people from themselves. But if we have to defend ourselves, we’ll be really mean and tough and nasty in doing it. And that will have some resonance among some on both sides, frankly, but probably a little more in Republican Primaries.
But I don’t think… Certainly, it hasn’t worked in the past. Actually, in neither party, ultimately, has it worked in the past. And I’m actually pretty confident that we’ll end up with major party nominees who are pretty serious-- we’ll have differences-- pretty serious about the need for America to be strong, to be engaged, to stand with our allies.
Really, what’s in a way amazing for all the hoopla-- you know, for all the difficulties of Iraq, and for the fact that Bush is going to get punished for it, KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 48 and the Republicans will, in this off-year election-- is you don’t hear many responsible politicians in either party calling for abandoning alliance commitments, for pulling out of Afghanistan, for decreasing the size of the military. And that was a big issue. People forget. McGovern campaigned on what-- a 30% cut in the Defense budget. No one’s going around talking about that.
Today, those people understand the world we live in. And in that respect, 9/11 makes a big difference. I mean, it’s very hard to tell…
PODESTA: It’s the Allies who are pulling out of their commitments to us, rather than vice-versa, Bill.
KRISTOL: That’s not true, actually. Japan wants to be tougher on North Korea than… You should be a little more bipartisan, John, you know. I mean, the fact is, NATO enlargement, which was a bipartisan effort, was good and stabilized Central and Eastern Europe. The strengthening of the Japan relationship, which was started by President Clinton and has been continued by President Bush has been good. I actually worry that we’re a little too nice. And now we’re too worried about China and not strong enough with Japan.
The strengthening of the India relationship, which was started by President Clinton, with the first visit, I think, by an American President, wasn’t it, ever, I guess, maybe? KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 49
PODESTA: No, not ever.
KRISTOL: Warped, in their eyes--
PODESTA: Since Carter.
KRISTOL: And it was continued by Bush. So, you know, look. There is more bipartisan, actually. The foreign policy is going to end up being a little more bipartisan, I think, than people think. And I think it’s going to be bipartisan in a pretty healthy way, dealing with the real challenges of the world out there.
THOMAS: There’s still lots to talk about, but I want to open it up to the audience. So there are mikes… There's a mike right there. And if you would just line up, we’ll call on you. As I said, we’ve barely touched on economic policy, the environment… There’s plenty to ask about, so please come up and give your name and ask a question.
As always, we will want questions and not statements if we can. Go ahead.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Thank you. My question is going to be about social programs. The Boston Metro, which is the free paper we get on the subway in Boston, has had very interesting reprints the last couple of days KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 50 on the situation in Paris on the anniversary of the riots in the Paris neighborhoods.
And what was interesting is President Chirac barely could acknowledge, if you will, that égalité of opportunity did not exist for French of North African and Muslim background. We acknowledged it with the Kerner Commission in the ‘60s-- that’s what made me think of that-- that we had separate and unequal.
And we’ve had great society programs and New Deal Programs, and this is my question. It seems to me that under the Bush Administration, there has been an attempt to tear down, starve the beast, get rid of, social programs that have helped Americans over these generations. I would like you to comment on that-- both gentlemen if you would-- is there an attempt-- maybe you feel it’s justified or not justified-- to tear down, dismantle social programs? Thank you.
THOMAS: Bill?
KRISTOL: Yeah, most conservatives I know wish there’d have been a little more of an attempt to starve the beast. This Republican Congress has been pretty happy to spend money. And of course Bush and the Republican Congress created the largest single new entitlement in America in 30 years with the prescription drug benefit of Medicare.
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Education Department, to take a department that I worked in and that was not a core responsibility of the federal government at its inception or for its first almost 180 years Education spending has gone up… Well, the Department of Education spending has gone up more under Bush than the Defense Department spending. So they’re not starving the beast, Bush isn’t, and the Republican Congress isn’t.
One footnote, I think what’s happening in Paris, incidentally, is very interesting. I think it shows something about the advantages of having a society in which government encourages equal opportunity, but also in which we have flexible labor markets and all kinds of free market deregulatory-type situations where people can come up and make it, which I think is a big problem in Europe.
But the other part of what’s happening in Europe, obviously, is that I don’t think your Kerner Commission reference is really apt. I mean, African Americans and caucasian Americans share the same culture, the same background, the same religion, the same history. And once they got over the racial bigotry, we’re fellow Americans. It’s not a big problem.
Europe has a big problem with Muslim immigrants and, more interestingly, with children of Muslim immigrants who have been sort of radicalized against the societies in which they’ve grown up in. I don’t say this with any- - I mean, this is a genuinely big problem.
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And I think-- I just read Mark Steyn’s new book, which I really recommend, called America Alone , which is very interesting on the demography of Europe and on what’s happening, unfortunately, in some of the Arab and Islamic communities within these European nations, among many young people who have grown up in those nations, who were born in those nations. And it’s a terrible problem.
And since we have an interesting, pretty healthy Western Europe, or healthy Europe in general, it’s a worrisome thing when these countries have this degree of social unrest and division.
THOMAS: John?
PODESTA: Well, you know, I think this is a case where we have experiments on both sides of the question in recent days. And I’m proud of having served in the Clinton Administration, that focused on a set of social policies that were aimed at and intended to provide opportunity for individuals.
We expanded the EITC. We raised the minimum wage. We invested in the Child Health Insurance Program, which began to, for the first time, reduce the number of uninsured-- that’s gone back up since Bush came into office. If you go program by program, the philosophy was to try to provide opportunity for people.
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And we use it in new ways, I think in innovative ways, and ways that, as I said in my earlier comments, had a kind of reformist zeal to them, including welfare reform, which not only said that the best social program was a job, and that people ought to get off welfare and into work, but back that up with expanded child care, aid to give people the transportation that they needed to get to those jobs, training, et cetera. I see some of my colleagues from the Administration who participated in that.
In this administration, I think we’ve had three significant, if you will, social programs. One was tax cuts that benefited, by far, the very wealthiest Americans and have left real wages stagnant, even as we’ve had real growth in the economy. We have the highest corporate profits in a generation, but we have the biggest concentration of wages in the top 20% of the population.
That began to turn around a little bit during the 1990s, where you saw all the quintiles rising. You know, I mentioned that. I think Bill mentioned the other one, which was the expansion of prescription drugs, but I’d give them sort of a failing grade there in the design and construction of that, which I think was needlessly wasteful.
And the third was No Child Left Behind, in which-- I’m about to be bipartisan-- I think that the President did focus the nation’s attention on something very important, which is that we can’t let any school or any kid have to go to a school that’s failing, and that we needed more information, KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 54 more resources, more ability to get good teachers into classrooms, you know.
I think that that was not backed up with the kinds of resources that were necessary, but I think the reform and the attention that the President… And, you know, I think he got a lot of political credit for it, quite frankly, in the 2000 campaign, to say that having a set of core federal policy goals that aim at providing opportunity for everyone was critical.
Now in practice, he’s cut aid to higher education. He’s done some other things that I disagreed with. But I think if we’re going to be one country again, we need to provide those kinds of opportunities and build-- it takes us back to the beginning of the conversation-- build on the expansion of opportunity for everyone, including the poorest people in this country.
KRISTOL: I thought John was going to be truly progressive there as he was going through more resources, and better teachers, and more information, and then say more choice, and more competition, and say something about breaking up the public school monopoly and really, you know, rewarding good teachers and good principals, and putting bad principals and bad schools out of business so poor parents don’t have to send their kids there. But I guess there are limits to the progressive impulse, even among today’s progressives.
THOMAS: Before we get into that, let me take a question here. Ma’am? KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 55
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think that-- Linda Markell-- and I think I should probably start by saying that I am a total JFK liberal Democrat and proud that I’m a card-carrying one.
[applause]
And my question to you is, with all the charisma, my first vote was for JFK. And that is what set me on a career of teaching the rest of my life. What I’m asking you is that what neither of you, until that very last sentence, “common core” of the American system, by the end of the ‘60s when, if you go, which you seemed to have slipped over, from JFK straight to somehow the leap over into the Reagan Administration, I think you’re leaving out the fact that the 1968 election was perhaps, outside of religion in previous elections, was one of the ugliest, most horrible elections that we have ever had.
And though I supported Robert Kennedy at the time, and the question of voting for him was obviously taken out of my hands--
THOMAS: Ma’am, what’s your question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: My question is, both of you seemed to be talking… This is the most peaceful debate that I’ve heard on politics in at KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 56 least a month. And I believe that America is almost as volative (sic) and divided as we were by the end of the ‘60s.
THOMAS: So what was your question?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And my question is, where do you think that both your sides, now, with different labels, have to and can come together to create a common goal of where you’re not so antagonistic, that the two sides-- you’ve talked mostly about foreign policy-- that the two sides cannot agree on a common ground? And what is it that can bring this nation back into being a unified--
THOMAS: Okay, thank you ma’am. I guess the question is, how do we get beyond polarization?
KRISTOL: Well, I’ll give you a slightly-- I mean, an answer that’s maybe a little contrary. I actually think that if Democrats win the House, which is likely, and Republicans narrowly hold the Senate, I think there actually will be more legislation passed in the next year than people expect. I don’t think all that will happen in Washington will be investigations by, you know, the House Democratic Committee Chairs and bitter fights-- there’ll be some of that.
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But I think there’s a real chance for immigration reform passing. Bush might decide to come back and try that on a bipartisan basis as he did and failed in ’06. I’m not sure there’ll be much else in the way of big legislation.
But I guess I’m a little less… I mean, there’s a lot of polarization, there’s a lot of bitterness, there are a lot of negative ads. But, you know, boy, there was a lot of polarization-- there was really a lot of polarization and bitterness in, as you said, in 1968. And, you know, God knows there was enough in 1980. And there was quite a lot of bitterness and negativity in ’92, a campaign I remember well, having been in the first Bush White House, and John remembers well.
I’m less-- I don’t know. I actually think the Center is holding pretty well beneath all the fuss. I mean, a lot conservatives… A lot on the left and a lot on the right are very frustrated that actually, policy is hard to dislodge from the center. Bush hasn’t starved the beast.
And the truth is, if Nancy Pelosi becomes Speaker of the House, they’re not going to raise taxes back to 50%, and they’re not going to pass massive expansions of government, and they’re not going to cut off funds for Iraq. So I actually think the country is more centrist, for better or worse, than it sometimes seems from all the debates during election seasons.
THOMAS: John, do you worry about polarization?
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PODESTA: Well, you know, I’ll quote my ex-boss. “Polarization will end when it stops working.” And I think, particularly, the current occupants of the White House have made it work to their advantage to kind of polarize the country, to try to rev up their base. They’re trying it now, you know. The strategy at the end of August was to try to use both the run-up into 9/11 and the legislation that was in front of the House and Senate, to try to rerun one more time, rerun the tape on the politics of fear.
I don’t think it worked, for a couple of different reasons. One was that it was unsustainable, because people came back to Iraq as the central question, I think, facing the country. And second that, you know, Mark Foley sort of interrupted the flow and progression of the campaign, and so there was a different story line for a week or two, so that, you know, those things are unusual, and they happened.
But I think that the public would like to see-- I’ll come back to the first sentence-- I think it’s not just about charisma in terms of who’s telegenic, you know, who’s better on television, et cetera. It’s can you really get out with a story of where the country is, where it needs to go, and provide a compelling vision of a different future for the country, whether that’s on energy security; whether that’s on a question of the national security that we spend most of our time talking about; whether it’s how you get real wages growing again; how do you get job growth back into this country.
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I think that the public yearns for that, and will reward a candidate with votes from the center, as well as, I think, from the progressive side of the political spectrum when that happens. And I think we’re likely to see a lot of that in the upcoming Presidential campaign.
KRISTOL: With all due respect, I mean, Democrats can't, one, at the same time, say Bush’s eavesdropping program-- outrage. Illegal, should have used …(inaudible), needs to be reigned in. The CIA treatment of terror suspects-- outrageous; verges on torture, violates international law.
Then the fact that legislation is introduced-- there’s a vote on it. The parties divide on it, just along the lines that you would expect from those comments from the left and the equivalent comments from the right. And then what? We’re not allowed to say, “Hey, the parties have a different view about the limits on CIA interrogation of terror detainees or on whether it’s the President’s authority to order eavesdropping.” And that’s a legitimate issue. That was a real vote in Congress.
And I actually think the Republicans, they’ve been sort of spooked by all this nonsense about the politics of fear, and how dare you raise this issue. And in fact, the Senate and Congressional candidates probably should be making more of this issue, not less.
THOMAS: Let’s take a question from over here, please.
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AUDIENCE MEMBER: I think we can all agree from the discussion tonight that a lot of the great discord debate between conservatives and liberals or progressives, however you want to define it, in the ‘60s through the ‘80s, has really gotten off track over the last several years. And to what extent do you think the role of the media has, in either guiding some of that debate, or exassing (sic) some of the polarization we’ve been talking about?
PODESTA: I think we can blame Evan. You want to take that one?
THOMAS: I’m just the moderator. You answer it.
PODESTA: Look, you know, I think that the media-- it’s a profit-making enterprise. It lives in what produces eyeballs on the screen and ears on the radio, you know. And I take it increasingly fewer people are getting newsprint on their fingers, unless they, like the previous gentleman, they get it for free at the subway stop or even perhaps through news magazines.
But I think it’s a profit-making enterprise. At one point, with respect to the mainstream media, I think we’re in a moment where sensationalism has actually led to people kind of turning off of the mainstream media. The ratings certainly are down for it in the cable world, as well as in broadcast world and newspapers for sure.
But I think there are alternative media that are coming up to take their place, and I think that that’s a good thing. Whether that’s, you know, wacky KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 61 publications like The Weekly Standard or whether it’s the ability to find information through Internet sources, through blogging, through other sources, I think you’re seeing a kind of balancing out.
I’m not sure that will end up in less polarization, by the way, because I think what’s happened with the multiplicity of choices is that people tend to self- select towards media sources that, in which they already have agreement. So I think it won’t necessarily bring the country back together, but I do think their alternative media and sources of news are probably a good thing for our democracy.
THOMAS: Bill?
KRISTOL: I just want to reassure you all that The Weekly Standard is not a profit-making enterprise. We can’t be accused of that, whatever our other sins. But we’re trying to reduce our losses, I hasten to say, in case our corporate owner is watching this on C-Span or something.
I don’t know… I don’t quite buy the argument, in all honesty, that the level of public debate is worse, or we’re polarized now, so that what often-- you didn’t quite say this, but something one often hears-- I mean, I actually heard this so much, I went back and looked a little bit at sort of the coverage of different campaigns-- 1968, 1980, 1994, to take one that’s fresh in our memory.
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And you know, you could argue, in fact, that over the last three or four years, I think in large part, thanks to the alternative media, thanks to the Internet, thanks to the greater ability of information, we have had a much more sophisticated debate.
The debate about the war in Iraq has been infinitely more sophisticated than the debate about the war in Vietnam was, publicly, in the first five years, I would say. The debate about the Medicare prescription drug bill, to take an extremely complicated, you know, confusing piece of legislation…
Much more information got out much faster and there were, you know, complicated arguments where liberals would say, “Well normally, we’re in favor of this kind of, you know, big, new entitlement, which is intended to help the seniors including poorer seniors. But we don’t like the way it’s been structured, and think it’s a giveaway to the drug companies. And let’s make this argument.” And conservatives split on it.
And there’s been a more sophisticated level of debate, precisely because of the greater sources of avenues of information. Now some of it’s screaming and yelling, and some of it’s distorted, sure. But I’m pretty bullish on the media in that respect, and leaving aside my own interests in terms of The Weekly Standard .
I think citizens are getting more information than they used to and incidentally, participation is up. Voting is up, volunteering is up, small KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 63 donations are up. Sometimes they’ll say, “Well there are people, extremists on both sides are kind of mobilized.” But that’s not true. An awful lot of ordinary Americans who aren’t professional ideologues, a lot of moderates are volunteering on both sides.
One of the really amazing things is if, in 2000 and 2004-- if I remember the numbers here correctly-- Kerry got 8 million more votes than Gore, and Bush got 11 million more votes than he had gotten in 2000. There was a lot of people voting, you know, coming to both sides, who had not participated in politics in the election, at least in 2000. I think that’s not a bad thing.
THOMAS: Let’s hear your question over here, sir.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Putting the titles aside, liberal and progressive and all that good stuff, your discussion has been limited, I might say, to what’s going on within the country. Has either side taken a look long-range as to where the country is going? And I say that with the idea that we have our leaders around the world, either in their own country or in this country, coming in and saying, you know, all sorts of nasty things about us, especially the President.
We’re looking at the dollar that is nowhere near as strong as it used to be. We’re looking at jobs that are nowhere near as beneficial, as rewarding as they used to be. The middle class is almost extinct, because the jobs are going overseas. If you look at how the country developed, has either side KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 64 looked at how we’re going to survive this future, with the global economy, the flat world, and all that good stuff?
THOMAS: Bill?
KRISTOL: That’s such a huge question, I’ll just take one part. Look, I am bullish on the global economy. It’s ultimately good for us, not bad for us. And even in the short and medium term, it’s mostly good for Americans, not bad for us.
One of the great accomplishments-- and this is truly a bipartisan comment-- of the last 25, 30 years in the world-- and it’s an accomplishment for which the U.S. deserves some credit is the raising of hundreds of millions of people in Asia, particularly in China, and then in India, out of pretty abject poverty- - and in the case of India, the real threat of famine and starvation and terrible health problems-- into something like the working class, and then actually into the middle class.
This is an extremely good thing. It’s one of the great moral achievements, really of the 20th Century, a century that in other respects had a lot of moral failures to achieve. And one effect of this, of course, is that there’s much more competition for us. And call centers moved to India. And manufacturing moves to China. But that’s a very good thing for the world.
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And I don’t even believe it actually slows our economic growth. But the truth is, if it slowed our economic growth, you know, .5% of GDP, it would still be a good thing for the world. And I wish, in fact, there were more, you know, such economic growth in other places that have not been able to turn the corner, such as, particularly, in Africa.
So I’m very bullish on a globalized world economy. It’s good for those countries, obviously. It’s a great economic achievement for them. It’s a great moral achievement, really, for them. And they deserve a lot of the credit, but the fact that the U.S. and the rest of the more developed world has, on the whole, had trade open, which has also been a bipartisan effort… I wish the Democrats were sticking to a little more of that. Clinton was courageous on that, to sign that and the like, and push that through Congress.
But that has been important, I think, to provide markets for the developing world, and basically, not to go protectionist, not to go isolationist, not to go xenophobic, that’s been a pretty big achievement of the U.S. and of other countries around the world.
THOMAS: John?
PODESTA: Well, you know, I said earlier, I think that Bush got all the big stuff wrong, not just Iraq, not just the security posture. But, you know, the trade deficit, where we are from a fiscal policy perspective, where we are in terms of trying to invest in industries in the future… With the exception of KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 66 defense, we’re cutting our support for research, particularly medical research, in this country as a result of the fiscal policies he’s pursued.
So I think that these challenges are huge that you mentioned. We’re sending tons of money to China, and then we expect them to get tough, to enforce the trade agreements. I don’t think so. You know, when was the last time you got tough with your banker?
And I think that it reduces our security posture as well. But I would say the one big thing that is, because it’s-- particularly, it’s my pet issue-- it’s in the paper today-- the one place that we have an enormous opportunity in this country is to reinvent our whole energy future, which has a security dimension and environmental dimension, but it has a profound economic dimension.
The former Chief Economist for the World Bank just did a report in the U.K. that suggested that if we don’t get on track in the very near future to do something to mitigate climate change and get on a different, more renewable and sustainable energy path, that it will cost between 5 and 20% of world GDP production, on the order of what the Great Depression looked like.
Now I think our Administration has its head in the sand. I don’t-- Bill probably disagrees with me about this-- but I think it’s an enormous opportunity to create new industry, new wealth in this country, and put people to work in a whole range of new domestic-based industries. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 67
If the Internet revolution powered the big build-up of our economy in the 1990s, I think a new energy future will power a big build-up of the U.S. economy and permit it to be more efficient and compete better in the global economy going forward.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: And we’ll be able to pay off the national debt?
[applause]
AUDIENCE MEMBER: How many years is that going to take?
PODESTA: Well you know, just very quickly-- By the end of the Clinton Administration, we had paid down 431 billion dollars of our national debt. We were running a surplus that was handed over to the new President. And he reversed course, and now we’re-- particularly with the Baby Boomers about to retire-- I think that our fiscal posture is dire.
And I think that, you know, it’s going to take the kind of leadership we saw in 1993 with no Republican votes-- I think that’s just a factual statement-- no Republican votes. President Clinton took that on and got the deficit going down and ultimately created a surplus. But those are tough things to do.
THOMAS: I’m going to give Bill a last word here.
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KRISTOL: I don’t think our situation is dire. The deficit went down in the second term after there was a Republican Congress, and they constrained spending a bit. And then there were tax cuts, including a capitals gains tax cut in ’97. And revenues flooded in because of the Internet boom and then bubble. And the deficit disappeared.
And the best thing we can do for the deficit is strong economic growth. The good news is, despite all this, you know, certain amount of silly rhetoric from Democrats, they’re basically committed now to economic growth, I think. And they will not do-- I don’t think-- things that will fundamentally undermine the basic health of the U.S. economy, which is the healthiest economy in the western industrialized world.
We had an empirical test case of tax cuts from 2003 to now, and I don’t even know if John is going to sit here and honestly say that we’d be better off if we hadn’t passed those 2003 tax cuts, which passed with almost no Democratic votes, and which, incidentally, if we had a competent administration politically and a competent Treasury Secretary and economic spokesman, we would have reminded the voters that we’ve had a recent tax cut.
PODESTA: I think if you asked the middle class, we’ve had no real wage growth. We have all-time high levels of debt load in this country. We haven’t really even had strong GDP growth. We have weak job growth. Stories of weak job growth. KENNEDY LIBRARY FORUM THE PROGRESSIVE/CONSERVATIVE DEBATE 10.30.06 PAGE 69
KRISTOL: Would we be better off with higher taxes?
PODESTA: I think that if the tax cuts, as the Democrats had proposed, had been concentrated on the middle class and working people, if we had raised the minimum wage, if we expanded the EITC by eliminating the marriage penalty of the EITC as well as on the income tax side, people in this country would be a lot better off today.
[applause]
KRISTOL: Well, let me just add that-- No, I think it’s a reasonable division of labor. The Republicans cut taxes on investment and savings, which is extremely important, I think, for overall economic growth. And the Democrats can come in and cut taxes through the EITC and do some of these smaller things that they claim-- I’m not so certain about the evidence on this-- that they claim help.
I mean, now half of the wage earners are off the federal income tax rolls. Bush removed the last chunk of them, incidentally, with his tax cuts. So it’s not so easy to help poorer people with tax cuts. But if the Democratic Party is going to be the party of small tax cuts and the Republican Party is the party of big tax cuts, that’s a good outcome in domestic policy, I think.
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THOMAS: Bill and John, there’s much to debate. We’d like to take all your questions, but we promised we’d wrap up at 7:00, so thanks very much for coming.
[applause]