Brooks and Capehart on Bob Dole legacy, threats to democracy, inflation

Read the Full Transcript

• Judy Woodruff:

  And now we turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That is New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Jonathan Capehart, columnist for The Washington Post.

  Very good to see both of you.

  I have to say, I was at that service today, very, very moving. And, Jonathan, I know you were there too.

  And, David, I want to talk about Bob Dole because I wanted to talk about how much it was stressed he worked across party lines. He started out as a partisan earlier in his career, chairman of the Republican Party, but then he went on to work on food stamps, the ADA. He worked on Martin Luther King's holiday.

  Is there a lesson in all this?

• David Brooks:

  Well, it was a different time, when he — he was a war hero, obviously.

  And he was in Kansas. And some Democrat said to him, you should run for office. You're a war hero. Run as a Democrat. And then a Republican said to him, you should run as a Republican. There are twice as many Republicans here. So, he said, OK, I'm a Republican.

• David Brooks:

  And it was like not an ideological chasm, the way it is now.

  And he was a dealmaker. I mean, he was a guy who counted votes. He never — and people who worked for him, especially on the presidential campaign, were sometimes frustrated that he didn't have a strict ideological line. He just wasn't wired that way.

  And so he was good at counting votes. And he always wanted to know how you could get a coalition of a majority. And he was phenomenally good at it. And he — people liked him. He was certainly acerbic. And he was certainly a tough guy. But he was funny.

  I mean, my favorite Dole joke is, after he lost the election, people asked him, how do you sleep having lost the presidential election? He said, I sleep like a baby. I wake up every two hours screaming.

• David Brooks:

  And so that's who he was.

  So, he was not a product of our age. And we — people like that don't go into politics right now. There are still people like that. They just don't go into politics.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And I was struck, Jonathan, more Democrats were speaking today, Tom Daschle, the former Democratic Senate majority leader, and President Biden, than there were Republicans.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Right.

  Sitting there, I was thinking, one, it was an honor to be there.

• Judy Woodruff:

  It was.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  And I was sitting there thinking, I'm sure people will be talking about this as a Washington funeral because of the pageantry and the solemnity.

  But the more I thought about it, and listening to the speeches of the president and Senator Daschle, and Senator Pat Roberts as well, that this was a national funeral. This was a funeral that was saying goodbye to, as the president said, a statesman, a patriot. Patriot was used — a word used many times, a national hero, someone who reached across the aisle to make deals, who put country first.

  I think one of the earlier ministers remarked how folks had gathered there five weeks earlier to say goodbye to Colin Powell. And the president delivered a similar speech then, I recalled watching on television.

  In this time that we're in right now, where the ideological divides are so wide, that the rancor on Capitol Hill is so intense, that, to be in a place where we're sort of reminded of what is — what used to be, but also what's still possible, if folks could just get out of their way.

  And I can just tell my Bob Dole story. I was an intern on "The Today Show." It was July 1986, big celebration over the — I think it was the unveiling of the refurbished Statue of Liberty. My job was to escort the guests from the ground up the steps on the elevated — the elevated set.

  Bob Dole and Mrs. Dole came, and I had to escort them. And there were rumors that he was going to run for president. So I leaned into him. And I asked him, "Are you going to run for president?"

  And he leaned down and he said: "Yes. Are you going to help me?"

  And I said, "Yes."

• Jonathan Capehart:

  And it was just so — it was so exciting.

  And when you said he just wasn't wired ideologically, that came racing back to me, because that's the person I remembered him then.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And when President Biden today, I mean, made what to me sounded like a direct appeal to — reminding everybody you can't have democracy without compromise.

  But, David, is this a bygone era, we can't bring it back?

• David Brooks:

  I believe in cycles. So I think it'll come back. I mean, we're not in that era now.

  But we have been in polarized eras before in our history. And people just get sick of it. And you think — and I do think people will eventually get sick of a government that is semi-dysfunctional. And you think of Bob Dole, the Americans With Disabilities Act. There were all sorts of pieces of legislation that he worked through, a lot of Veterans Affairs stuff.

  And he — the '86 tax reform, which was probably the peak of legislative craftsmanship in my lifetime, with people like Danny Rostenkowski and Bill Bradley.

  And I just believe in cycles, since we didn't — we weren't born yesterday as a country. And we have been through worse.

• Judy Woodruff:

  It may be a long cycle, though.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Yes, a long cycle, and a cycle where I'm looking for, who are the statesmen in the Republican Party now? Who is the Bob Dole? Who is the Colin Powell? Who is going to be that person who's in the generation of leaders in the Republican Party, in national office right now who we will be sitting years down the road saying the exact same thing?

  I can't think of anyone.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Well, beyond even partisanship David, we reported earlier on this summit on democracy the president was presiding over this week, talking about democracy challenge — under challenge around the world.

  Meantime, you have people seriously concerned in this country, journalists, academics, writers, about what's happening right now, and efforts, in their view, to begin to affect the outcome of the election — the next election, this year, coming year, 2024.

  I mean, where — I mean, how concerned should Americans be?

• David Brooks:

  I think pretty concerned.

  I was in Russia when the Soviet Union fell. I was in Ukraine. I was in the Middle East. And I saw in the '90s that sweep of democratization. And the U.S. was genuinely admired. Ronald Reagan was genuinely admired for saying, the Soviet Union was an evil empire. And I saw America doing good in the world.

  We have lost faith in ourselves to do good, like Iraq and Afghanistan. And I think we have gone a little too on the other side at the same time. As we just heard, technology is swept in. Authoritarian ideas have gained prestige. China's had a big effect on spreading authoritarian ideas around the world, Russia, and then the same forces in our own country.

  And so I'm glad Biden did this, because, even though — with our own failures, because there's one big struggle. And I think Biden's right. It is the defining global struggle. And democracy is just a fragile system.

  How alarmed should we be? There's a piece in "The Atlantic" by Barton Gellman.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Yes.

• David Brooks:

  And that piece says, what's most alarming is not necessarily the laws that are being passed. Most alarming is that there's a large percentage of Americans — it may be only 12 percent or 20 percent — who have detached from reality and believe everything is stolen.

  And you don't know what those people are going to do in 2024. So, that's my main source of alarm.

• Judy Woodruff:

  We talked to Gellman last night on the "NewsHour," Jonathan.

  He said that, according to the best estimates, 21 million Americans, give or take, are prepared to use violence to keep Donald Trump in power.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Right.

  And as he notes in his piece — and I think I'm going to misremember the country he was talking about that had fewer people and spun out of control, based on eight million people. I think it was — I think it was Serbia that he wrote about.

  But with 21 million people — he's making the point that 21 million people, that's a lot of people who can do a lot of damage in key places around the country, if they turn their detachment from reality into an effort to overturn elections, not just by ransacking the Capitol, but going to state capitols around the country.

  What's been so alarming — and I'm very alarmed about what's happening in this country — the voting — the voting bills that have been passed, that have been introduced around the country where they are keeping people from voting. If people vote, they make it — they make it possible that their votes don't count. And if their votes do count, they have now made it so that those results can be overturned.

  That is the key thing. And that is what Barton Gellman is really ringing the alarm about, that we're going down a road that, if we don't do something relatively soon, we might not be able to climb back out of the hole that we're in.

• Judy Woodruff:

  It was — I mean, the article that he wrote is seriously disturbing.

• David Brooks:

  And the other thing which I thought about before…

• Judy Woodruff:

  Yes.

• David Brooks:

  … is, he likens it to Northern Ireland before the Troubles.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Yes.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Yes.

• David Brooks:

  And so it's not only a political — we imagine it would be something with elections, but it could just be civil violence.

  And that's horrific enough.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And when I said they want to keep former President Trump in power, meaning a lot of them think he should still be in power. In fact, most of them do.

  Last quick thing, only in a couple of minutes, but, David, economic numbers out today, inflation getting even worse than it was. The president's poll numbers — we can show everybody the latest Marist/NPR poll, has his approval at 42, his disapproval at 51.

  How much is the president to blame for what's going on with the economy?

• David Brooks:

  I don't think he's to blame for the inflation rates. I think that's mostly the supply chain issues and other things, and the fact that we have a booming economy.

  So we're in an overheating economy. And you could make the argument that we shouldn't have passed that infrastructure bill, but that is not affecting the economy right now. It's too soon. And so you can make the argument we shouldn't be spending more money because the economy is overheating. But I don't think he's to blame.

  What disturbs me is, people have become so disabused, so cynical, that they see the negative, and they don't see the positive. So, as Jared Bernstein — he's right. There's a lot of really great news. And there's a lot of bad news.

  But people are so — have reached a point of disillusionment about our country and our system that they focus on the negative.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And it's all gotten mixed in? Or has it gotten mixed in with how they perceive how their daily lives are going?

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Well, I look at what's happening as a macro and micro issue.

  So, at the macro level, as you were saying, the economy is great. This inflation number came out, but the stock market was up 216 points today. So, if you have a 401(k), everything's great. Unemployment is down. Jobless claims are down. Wages are up. That's a macro level.

  But at the micro level, you go to the gas station, gas prices are high. You go to the supermarket, eggs, milk, meat, coffee, it's all high. So you feel it at a more direct level.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Paper towels.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Paper towels.

• Judy Woodruff:

  You name it.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Yes, I have a whole list, but I wasn't going to read them all.

• Judy Woodruff:

  We have got a List, which means — but, I mean, having said that, David, people will continue to look at whoever is in office and say, can't you do something about this?

• David Brooks:

  That's just the way it works.

  But the thing that's really unique about this moment is that, if you ask people, how are your personal finances, large majorities say, good, the country, bad. And large majorities say that. So there's a disjunction between how they feel they are doing and how they think the country is doing, which is negative. And Biden pays the price.

• Judy Woodruff:

  All right, we will leave it there.

  David Brooks, Jonathan Capehart, thank you both.

• Jonathan Capehart:

  Thanks, Judy.