Online NewsHour: shields and gigot

SHIELDS AND GIGOT

APRIL 5, 1996
TRANSCRIPT

Thoughts on healing. Syndicated columnists Mark Shields and Paul Gigot reflect on President Clinton's speech today in Oklahoma City, which remembers those who died last year at the Federal building, and this week in Croatia.
Click here for the RealAudio version of this discussion.
JIM LEHRER: Now some end-of-the-week thoughts from Shields & Gigot, syndicated columnist Mark Shields, "Wall Street Journal" columnist Paul Gigot. Mark, what we just saw, that is a function of a President of the United States in this world today, is it not, to be the healer at times--Oklahoma City, Croatia, all of that?
MARK SHIELDS, Syndicated Columnist: It certainly is, Jim. It's part of the job description you don't see in the civics books.
JIM LEHRER: It goes with the television age, does it not?
MARK SHIELDS: It does go with the television age. It was said of Democrats who ran against Ronald Reagan, that they were running to be head of the government. And Reagan always aced them by running to be leader of the nation, and that is part of being leader of the nation. It's somebody who speaks to and for the nation at times when one voice must be heard, and one voice is able to be that instrument of comforting people, and, uh, I was thinking Bill Clinton, uh, you know, is the first Democrat who, who's run for national offices who's really comfortable in that. You could say I guess maybe President Carter, but he's, he's very comfortable. He's not at all self-conscious in, in speaking of religion or faith or God or eternity.
JIM LEHRER: Paul.
PAUL GIGOT, Wall Street Journal: His religious training really in--a the Southern Baptist, serves him well in this role because he can call upon the universality of religious principle, which he does so very well at events like this.
JIM LEHRER: Without offending people who may not agree with his particular religion. It's a very hard game.
PAUL GIGOT: That's right. It's not a sectarian thing at all.
JIM LEHRER: Right. Thank you.
PAUL GIGOT: It's more of a bigger C. S. Lewis sense of, of religion's universality. This particular President, I think, also has, has a real gift, a gift of empathy. He can connect with audiences in a way that most other politicians I've seen simply cannot. Sometimes he goes too far in sort of, I feel your pain, but in events where you have a genuine sense of national distress, I think he's risen to the occasion every time.
PAUL GIGOT: Yeah. Ron Brown, what about the political side, the government side of Ron Brown, Mark, what is that legacy?
MARK SHIELDS: Well, Jim, you think of Ron Brown and you think of a smile. I mean, it was a face that was always in smile, and there was about Ron Brown an optimistic can-do attitude that used to be associated at one time with American liberals before they became sort of the crepe hangers and the mourners and all the rest of it. And Ron Brown was that kind of guy. He wanted to do things. He took over the Democratic Party after 1988. In 1988, the Democrats--
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Set the scene for what it was like.
MARK SHIELDS: What happened was in 1988, the Democrats had just blown a 16 point lead to George Bush. George Bush won on a big agenda: The Boston Harbor, the Pledge of Allegiance, and Willie Horton. Okay, he wins the presidency. The Democrats at that point are convinced they are destined never to win the White House and always to win the Congress, a destiny that was short-lived, but--in both cases, but Ron Brown took over the party then and I'm telling you, there was despair and despondency, which was compounded by the fact that in 1991, George Bush won the first clear cut American military victory since 1945 in the Persian Gulf and his personal popularity went to 91 percent. At that point, the Democrats were ready to concede.
JIM LEHRER: And nobody would run again.
MARK SHIELDS: Nobody would run. I mean, Dick Gephardt said he wasn't going to run in '92, wanted to wait till '96 and run against Dan Quayle. Lloyd Bentsen, Bill Bradley, Al Gore, they all decided they wanted to spend more time with their family, and the Democrats had a list of candidates in 1992 that looked to a lot of people like a roster of vice presidential possibilities, freshman senators and small state governors, and former office holders, and Ron Brown, first of all, with Paul Telly, his political director, who was a genius and who died too young himself in 1992, convinced, they convinced themselves and they convinced every Democrat who listened that they could win, that they could win, that in ashes of the Dukakis defeat, with outlines of a victory, North, West, and the upper Midwest and all the rest of it, and they made that case over and over again. He leaned on Mario Cuomo to make a decision--Ron Brown, his former student in law school at St. John's--he had studied under Mario Cuomo--he said, you'd better decide.
PAUL GIGOT: And it still took a while.
MARK SHIELDS: It took a while. (laughter in room) No, but it was interesting because--as long as Cuomo wasn't in the race, it froze activists, it froze contributors, you know, gee, we're waiting for Mario, waiting for Mario, and I got to tell you, he wanted the process to be quick and conclusive and bloody, and he was accused of favoring Bill Clinton in the Spring of 1992, and maybe he did. He wanted a convention in his own city, like every national chairman does. He was from--a kid in New York. He'd brought it back in in New York. It wasn't like the '68 convention that left Hubert Humphrey 16 points behind Richard Nixon, '72 where George McGovern accepted his nomination at 3 o'clock in the morning, which was great for Guam, not much for Cleveland, you know, and all these other devices--and he got it. I mean, I'd say that Ron Brown was as personally responsible as anybody for the Democrats winning in 1992.
JIM LEHRER: Does that make sense to you?
PAUL GIGOT: I would say there's an even more remarkable aspect to the story Mark tells, and that is when Ron Brown came out and ran for the Democratic Party chairmanship in 1989, umm, he came from the left wing of the Democratic Party. I mean, he had, he had shepherded Jesse Jackson's campaign in 1998--1988.
JIM LEHRER: And was his convention manager in 1988.
PAUL GIGOT: That's right, which a lot of Democrats thought was very divisive and contributed to Michael Dukakis's defeat in 1988. And I remember talking to a lot of Democrats from the moderate wing at that time saying this is a disaster, I mean, Ron Brown will send all the wrong messages from the left wing of the party, he's a Jesse Jackson pal, it's going to be terrible, and what Ron Brown did is he proved 'em wrong. He proved that he could, he could appeal to all the elements of the party. He didn't--he wasn't a divisive force. Instead, he was a unifier and a healer, and I think that owes a lot to his skills as a politician and to his pragmatic instincts, to his understanding that politics is about your principles, but it's also about winning. And he brought that kind of skill to politics, and, you know, we drive politics nowadays a lot. We say it's dirty, it's not about things, but at its best, it really is about the things that we believe. I think that Ron Brown's legacy is to demonstrate that you can mix it up and you can play tough, but you can still, you know, play honestly and make a difference.
JIM LEHRER: Well, what was the skill he brought to that? How was he--I asked this the other night, the day he died, of Vernon Jordan and Bill Gray, the question of how could he move from being a Jesse Jackson supporter to what he did, but that was just--you're saying that was just part of him, and he--
PAUL GIGOT: I think it flowed from his character. Vernon Jordan--I saw that--it was interesting--he said it derived, or somebody said it derived from the fact that he'd grown up in Harlem, and then had been educated at some small--
JIM LEHRER: Middlebury in Vermont. Yeah.
PAUL GIGOT: He had a background in both camps.
MARK SHIELDS: He was very comfortable with himself, and Ron Brown didn't--
JIM LEHRER: That was always--
MARK SHIELDS: He didn't walk into a room and say am I the black Ron Brown in a white crowd, or do I have to be the black Ron Brown with the soul brothers? I mean, it wasn't that about him. He had a comfort level with himself.
JIM LEHRER: And he was comfortable everywhere he went.
MARK SHIELDS: He really was, and he was not--I don't want to say he was a plaster saint. He wasn't. I mean, there were things he did. He was under investigation at the time of his death. I think he was, he was probably overly eager to do business in China with the kleenex and Q-tip crowds who wanted to sell anything, forget slave labor, but in the mission in which he died, Jim, I mean, I mean, they weren't bidding for seats on that one. That was one that was real. That was talking about making a major change, about keeping a fragile democracy. He told a wonderful story about himself, did Ron Brown. He'd been one of the few cabinet officers in current years who'd been in the Army, had been four years in the United States Army, and--
JIM LEHRER: As an officer.
MARK SHIELDS: As an officer and as a second lieutenant, he packed up his wife and his family belongings, he was stationed down just outside of Norfolk, and he came down--this is 1963--and here is a Middlebury College graduate, a second lieutenant in the United States Army, and he pulls into a drive-in restaurant--one of those ones where the waitress comes over puts the tray on, and the waitress came over and said, I'm sorry, I can't serve you. This is the first time he'd ever been South. And he said, please, and she said, I can't serve you; I can give it to you in a cardboard box and you can take it over across in that empty lot and eat it there, but you can't eat it there. In his lifetime, the next year was the Public Accommodations Act of--the 1964 Civil Rights Act--in his lifetime he went from that to being not a black Secretary of Commerce but a Secretary of Commerce who happened to be black. I mean, this is a man of enormous self-esteem. He didn't say, I want to do the human services, I mean, the traditional sort of black cabinet positions.
JIM LEHRER: He wanted to be Secretary of State.
MARK SHIELDS: He wanted to be Secretary of State, and he settled for Secretary of Commerce.
PAUL GIGOT: He did transcend his race in that respect, and I think that that is a significant achievement, as Mark says. Now, he was not a, a plaster saint. He was not a saint. He ran close to the edge. He played hard ball. He played rough and tumble with Republicans, and, and public service served him well too. He did very well, but, you know, here's somebody who got into the arena and said politics can be a noble exercise and I can get things done and serve my, serve my principles.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. Quickly, the Judge Baer case, it's the other major development this week, is that going to be an issue in this campaign, the issue of judicial appointments, Paul, a big issue, do you think?
PAUL GIGOT: I think it's going to be a very big one because--here's why--I mean, this election is not only going to be about electing a President and electing a Congress, it's also going to be about who controls that third branch of government, the Judiciary. If you look at all of the major appeals courts, most of them, and you look at the Supreme Court, they're really right now tilted very close to ideological balance right on the edge between Democratic judges and Republican judges, and the gulf and the perception of the duties between the Democrats and the Republicans or conservatives and liberals on judging the limits of judging are very wide now in this country. There's a real polarization there. So I think you're going to see Bob Dole certainly try to make this an issue.
JIM LEHRER: Yeah. You have two seconds to say yes or no to that?
MARK SHIELDS: No. No. It's a political issue is what it is. Crime has been a big Republican issue for a long time. Bill Clinton is next to invulnerable on crime for Republicans. He's a Southerner. He's not an Eastern elite guy. He doesn't come out of Madison or Berkeley or Cambridge. He's a Southern guy who flew back from New Hampshire to pull the switch on the chair. He pro capital punishment, and I'll tell you, Jim, I mean, they can't lay a glove on him, and Paul's own poll shows that he has an edge on crime, so they're going to do the judges--
JIM LEHRER: Okay. Thank you both very much.

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