Brooks and Tumulty on earmarks, Afghanistan withdrawal, NYC mayor’s race

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• Judy Woodruff:

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

  It's so good do see both of you on this Friday.

  But let's pick up, David, with that wonderful report from Lisa Desjardins, a walk down memory lane, at least in Washington.

  Earmarks coming back, a good thing or not?

• David Brooks:

  A good thing. I missed them. They were romantic.

  (LAUGHTER)

• David Brooks:

  First, earmarks allow leadership to pass bills, because they can offer recalcitrant members this or that, your bridge and you — so, they aid passing bills.

  They make Congress less polarized, because it becomes more transactional, rather than just the ideology. They take power. When we got rid of earmarks, they didn't go away. They just went to the executive branch. So, some guy sitting — or man or woman sitting in the Department Transportation made the decision, not Congress. And it was even more hidden.

  And then getting rid of earmarks had nothing to do with federal spending. They were — as Lisa said, they're a tiny, tiny part of the budget. But the money just moved. And it still went out the door. And so there was no decrease in the federal deficit.

  So, on every measure, getting rid of earmarks, like most reforms, I would add, was a mistake.

  (LAUGHTER)

• Judy Woodruff:

  A mistake, Karen?

• Karen Tumulty:

  I think so too.

  It was an understandable reaction to the Jack Abramoff scandal, which was one of the worst to hit Washington in decades. But I think earmarks are also a way that people feel connected to their government. They can point to tangible things in their community that are there because they matter to people in that community, so that members of Congress can then say, this is why you sent me to Washington.

  And, yes, the appropriations committee, where all these deals were done, was one of the last bastions of bipartisanship on Capitol Hill.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And so, speaking of that, I mean, this argument, David, that this is going to bring back bipartisanship, but the argument on the other side that, yes, it may do that, but it's also going to bring back corruption and wheeling and dealing that's — we don't need.

• David Brooks:

  They're both true.

  (LAUGHTER)

• David Brooks:

  There is corruption involved. And it is — it's something that goes to powerful people.

  You can drive through West Virginia, and you have got the Robert Byrd Highway off to the Robert Byrd exit to the Robert Byrd Hospital. So, the — you get — powerful people do you get to control things, and it's not totally fair.

  But you're measuring it against some platonic system, where there's this bipartisan, nonbiased set of judges who decide objectively where a road should be put in. That does not exist in a democracy. We have a democratic process. And this is a reasonably democratic way to go about where these little bits of funding will go or not go

• Karen Tumulty:

  And, also, decision-making is less hyper-ideological. It's — politics has become so nationalized, that I think that is really one of the problems with our system now.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Well, it's fascinating to watch it come back, and we will see where it goes.

  I also — I want to — I do want to bring up with both of you what President Trump spent a good bit of time talking about this week, David, and that's…

• David Brooks:

  Biden. President Biden.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Did I say President…

  (LAUGHTER)

• David Brooks:

  Trump.

• Judy Woodruff:

  OK, President Biden — thank you — spent time talking about this week, and that is his decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan now.

  He made the argument again, David, this is the right thing to do. Afghan — the Afghan leaders ought to be able to run their own country.

  Is it the right decision?

• David Brooks:

  I think he's making a mistake.

  And it's become obvious in record time that it's a mistake. When he announced the policy initially, he said he had faith in the Afghan government to hold Afghanistan together from the Taliban. That has fallen apart. We reported earlier on the show 85 percent of the territory has already fallen to the Taliban. The Taliban seems completely confident they will take over.

  And we all — I think it was 2014 or so, when this Pakistani young lady, Malala, won the Nobel Prize, and who was shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school. There are a lot of Afghan Malalas out there. And we were all moved by her. And we all sympathized and thought that was a very important cause that young women in this part of the world should be able to get an education.

  And we're walking away from that. We're walking away from the idea that Afghanistan will stay one country. We could be walking away from the idea that we can keep al-Qaida out of Afghanistan again. So they could set up a terrorist spot. You could just get incredible turmoil in that part of the world, refugees flooding into Pakistan, destabilizing Pakistan.

  So, to me, what we were doing over the last year, which was like 2, 500 troops, relatively low casualties, was a price worth paying for humanitarian and strategic reasons. And I think it's a mistake that we're pulling out.

• Judy Woodruff:

  How do you see it?

• Karen Tumulty:

  I think that President Biden is very much where the American people are here, Democrats, Republicans, independents.

  As testy as this exchange got with reporters yesterday, the fact is, Joe Biden was a skeptic of a broader mission in Afghanistan when he was vice president. He was a sort of lone voice in the Obama White House on this. But he believes this is one of the things that he was elected to do. And it's where he has been for over a decade.

  And, increasingly, it is absolutely where the American people are.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And, David, this argument that the president has made repeatedly, and that is, how many more young American women and men in the United States going to send their to — either to die, to be wounded, to — just to experience tour of duty after tour of duty there.

• David Brooks:

  Right.

  And every — everybody honors those who serve, and nobody takes their sacrifice lightly. But they're not in combat roles primarily. They — we haven't had many casualties at all in the last year. They're mostly in training and support roles. But, even in those roles, they seemed to have enough influence, along with the other NATO troops, to keep the country relatively — by Afghan standards, relatively stable.

  And so, to me, it's a trade-off worth making, like any other use of force around the world that America has ever done. We weigh the benefits and the costs. And I think it's worth the cost.

  But what Karen says is absolutely true. That country is sick of all this. And I worry about that a little. I understand the exhaustion with the forever war. But America has been, in the post-war era, the superpower. And we have gone in and stabilized places. We have done a lot, made horrible mistakes in Vietnam and Iraq, obviously.

  But we have kept troops in Germany for a reason. We have kept troops in Korea for a reason. We have kept troops. And are we going to continue to play that role or not? We're clearly going to scale it back. How much?

  Even the story earlier in the program on Haiti, if Haiti is asking us to come in to stabilize Haiti, is that our role anymore? It used to be you had some sense of where America's posture was. I don't think I have a sense of where American's posture is right now.

• Karen Tumulty:

  And, as much as President Biden says he doesn't want to be in the business of nation-building, you look at what's going on in Haiti, you look at in Central America, where strengthening these countries is the administration's strategy to getting control of the border, the fact is, every president says they don't want to get into nation-building, and every president ends up having to do it.

• Judy Woodruff:

  But a lot of lives lost, lives changed, money spent in that country.

  Bringing it back home, New York City had its primary elections a couple of weeks ago. We now know who the Democratic winner is. He's Eric Adams, David, former police captain, not the most progressive, not the most liberal in the race. And he only won by, what, 1 percentage point.

  But what does it say that the — that he won, given his background?

• David Brooks:

  Well, the — it used to be you could tell how somebody was going to vote by their income levels. That's less predictable now.

  It's education levels. And so the Democratic Party, the way this shows up, is you have sort of three wings of the Democratic Party, and it showed up in the presidential, and it's interesting to me it showed up in New York just the same.

  You have got the more moderate African American, Latino, some whites, moderate whites, and they tend to go for the Joe Biden/Eric Adams candidate who's more moderate. Then you have got the young college-educated professionals. They tend to go further left. They went to Maya Wiley. And then you have got the upscale, little older professionals who go for the candidates The New York Times endorses, which in this case was Kathryn Garcia, and so the good government candidate.

  And so it's interesting that these three demographic groups pick three different kinds of candidates, and it happened in the presidential race. It's happening in New York. I imagine it'll happen in other Democratic races.

• Karen Tumulty:

  Of course, this is a good news/bad news thing for Eric Adams. Congratulations, you won. Now you have to be mayor of New York.

  (LAUGHTER)

• Karen Tumulty:

  But I do think that this also was the biggest experiment that we have seen yet in ranked choice voting, where you don't have to just pick a candidate. You can express your preferences.

  And, as much as the New York City Board of Elections tried to screw this up, it worked the way it was supposed to, which is that the coalition-building candidate who could sort of reach beyond a narrow slice of the electorate won. And so now he's got to deal with what appears to be the primary issue on people's minds in New York City, which is crime.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And is he — I mean, is this sending a message, though, David, to come back to the question about, he's not the most progressive candidate? He's not for defunding the police, in fact, far from it.

  Does it send a message to Democrats more broadly?

• David Brooks:

  Yes, I think so.

  I mean, the most vocal part of the Democratic Party, is the college-educated younger people, who are more left-wing than the party. And if you go on my Twitter feed with all my progressive friends, there's not many pro-Biden people on my Twitter feed. They're all further left.

  And so the Democratic Party has to remember that, basically, America and even the Democratic Party is not the Upper West Side. It's not SoHo. It's not the West Village. It's Canarsie. it's Bed-Stuy. It's Sunnyside in Queens. It's the South Bronx.

  And those are places where, A, they're actually sending their kids to public schools, so they actually care quite a lot. B, it's not as safe as the Upper West Side. And so they're dealing with crime.

  And so the party has to remember that real life is not Twitter. Real life is not even the activist base. That's something all parties have to remember. And this election is a reminder of that.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Wait a minute. Real life is not Twitter.

  (LAUGHTER)

• Judy Woodruff:

  I got to — we're going to — but, Karen, what — I mean, does it send — is this just a New York City, unique story, or does it send a message of some kind to other Democrats?

• Karen Tumulty:

  Normally, I would say, be very, very careful about taking anything from New York City politics and trying to apply it nationwide.

  But, in this case, you talk to Democratic leaders all over the country, they are very, very nervous about how the issue of violent crime is going to play for their party in what is going to — was already shaping up to be an incredibly difficult midterm election season.

• Judy Woodruff:

  And we see President Biden wrestling with that right now. He's had a couple of conversations about it.

  And, David, we understand he's going to — he's going to be having more to say about it next week.

• David Brooks:

  Yes.

  And, of course, it's an issue he has a long and a controversial past about.

• Judy Woodruff:

  For sure. For sure.

  We are so glad to see the two of you.

  David Brooks, Karen Tumulty, thank you very much.

• David Brooks:

  Thank you.

• Karen Tumulty:

  Great to be here.

• Judy Woodruff:

  Thank you.