Shields and Brooks on who gets credit for jobs growth, protests on race and justice

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Protests have sprung up this week across America, as a second grand jury chose not to indict a police officer in a killing of an unarmed black man. And in Washington, President Obama announced his choice for the new leader of the Pentagon.

We turn to the analysis of Shields and Brooks. That's syndicated columnist Mark Shields and New York Times columnist David Brooks, who joins us from New York.

Hello, gentlemen.

So we have just heard, David, the analysis on the jobs report. Do we finally have something to cheer about here?

DAVID BROOKS:

I think so. We might as well take advantage of it.

We have had a lot of scuffling along. And now that seems to have stopped. And what's impressive to me mostly is our job performance compared to Europe. If you talk to Europeans, they're in a bit of a funk. The economy there, with the possible exception of Germany, is just in stagnation.

You have got these astronomically high youth unemployment rates. And so we're doing pretty well. And I guess that's partly a credit to the Obama administration. They might as well take a little victory lap out of this. They — we have come out of the recession better than our normal peers, partly to the American system, which has some disadvantages, but has some advantages, which is dynamism.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Mark, time to take a victory lap?

MARK SHIELDS:

I think so.

Judy, Reince Priebus, the Republican national chairman today, said that 300,000 jobs, 323,000 created, ought to be expected every month. It shouldn't be an exception. And just a historical perspective, during the eight years of President Bush, there were 2.1 million net jobs created in the United States, and of that 2.1 million, 1.8 million were in the public sector, state, local or federal government.

That means there were 300,000 jobs in the private sector created in eight months — in eight years, rather, net. So, I mean, this is rather remarkable. And I just point out that in the — David touched on the fact that more jobs have been created in the United States in the last four years than in Europe, Japan, all the industrialized modern world combined.

So, it's a record. And there's just one other little item, and it's not unimportant. And this is where David and I do disagree, I know; 70 years since World War II, 36 years with a Republican president, 34 years with a Democratic president, in those 70 years, there were 36.7 million jobs created by Republican — under Republican presidents, while Republicans were office, OK, a little over half the time.

In 34 years, there were 63.7 million created by Democrats. That's 29 million more. Perhaps it's an accident once or twice or what. But, I mean, at some point, the Democrats ought to be trumpeting the fact that they have been better on the economy and job creation than have been their opposition.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

David?

DAVID BROOKS:

I was afraid you were going to turn to me.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF:

I was waiting to see what you had to say about that.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS:

Yes.

No, listen, if the president could turn up a dial and create jobs, that would be great. But presidents can't do that. The correlation between policies and actual job creation, there's a huge amount of lag and they just don't have that ability. A lot of it is just the function of the cyclical labor market.

Mark mentioned President Bush's lamentable job performance. But he created a bunch of jobs, and then they all got wiped out in the last year during his recession, because we had this grand recession. And so business cycles come and go. And what the government can do is create a landscape which can create long-term job growth, but it's rare that an administration has the ability to turn it on and off in that kind of short-term way. So, I just don't think it's that germane a number.

MARK SHIELDS:

It's 15 years since we have had 10 consecutive months of over 200,000.

Those 15 years ago, there was a fellow from Arkansas who was the president of the United States. Those were eight years of rather remarkable sustained growth. There are certainly other criticisms of Bill Clinton's leadership, but it's hard to argue that the fact that there were more jobs created in Bill Clinton's eight years than there were in Ronald Reagan's eight years and the 12 years of both Bushes combined.

Six million more jobs created in those eight years, at some point, policy does kick in and is reflected in the results.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

We may not resolve all this right here.

MARK SHIELDS:

Oh, come on.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

I want to move on.

(LAUGHTER)

JUDY WOODRUFF:

I want to move on to — David, to Ash Carter, the president's nomination to be the next secretary of defense.

We just heard some conversation about how things may or may not change. What's your sense of that? Do you think we are going to see different policy coming out of the Pentagon out of this administration now?

DAVID BROOKS:

Well, first, Carter has the essential qualification for defense secretary, which is that he studied medieval history at Yale…

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS:

… and then got a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Oxford, so obviously an academic slouch.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS:

You know, I don't think things are going to change.

I think this is a very White House-centric administration. I assume it will remain that, but there's no question he's a very strong choice. And I think some of us have been concerned that this administration, as it has gone on, you have had fewer sort of Larry Summers, like, big personalities, strong voices. And Carter certainly qualifies as one of those.

MARK SHIELDS:

I think he brings enormous credentials. And he does bring a record of having stood up to the troops, particularly in providing armor for them and armored vehicles for them against — mine resistance in Iraq.

For that, I commend him and salute him. But he also is on record in 2006 of urging the United States to bomb the nuclear facilities of North Korea. And he obviously was one of the people arguing that we should still keep troops in Afghanistan — I mean in Iraq in 2011 — after 2011.

I do think, Judy, David is absolutely right about the White House. They're on — notice, now, they have had three different, entirely different secretaries of defense, all with the identical criticism of micromanagement from the White House.

They're on notice on that. But, hey, it all begins with Barack Obama. Every administration, every White House is ultimately a mirror reflection of the man at the top. This is what he is comfortable with. This is what he has encouraged, condoned. And this is the structure he's created. If it's going to change, it has to begin by changing with him.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Well, I want to — I want to bring up something — something else that of course we have been covering every night this week. And that is, for the second time, we have had a grand jury, David, decide not to indict a white police officer in the death of an unarmed black man, most recently Eric Garner in New York.

I guess my question is, in this case, they listened to testimony for a couple of months. They listened to 50 witnesses. But when you look at this on top of Ferguson and some of the other cases around the country and look at these protests which are continuing night after night, how widespread is the problem with police use of deadly force against unarmed blacks in this country?

DAVID BROOKS:

Yes, I think it's obviously widespread.

I watched the protests on 14th Street here last night and then in Midtown. And what struck me and what I was curious to see was whether the protesters, who were pretty angry, were taking it out on the local cops, whether there was sort of a class conflict between the protesters and the cops, which is the sort of thing we saw in 1968.

And I have to say there wasn't. The protesters were angry, but very well-behaved, not hostile to the cops who were guarding them or supervising the thing. And so it was actually a good sign that the protesters, it struck me, were angry, but mature and civil and just trying to make their case.

And I say that because there are two issues here. One is the racial issue, which I think in the Staten Island case is blatantly obvious. But then there's the second issue of cop behavior. How do you restore order when — to the streets? Do you always have to go to maximum force?

And I covered cops early in my career, and they have to armor up. They're in a tough job in tough situations all the time, so they put an emotional armor, and they're sometimes very cynical about the people they have to be around, just because they couldn't survive it emotionally if they weren't.

And yet that, I think in this case, can lead to a callousness. And so I think we need to have this racial conversation we're having, but also an authority conversation about how police restore order and whether they're just too macho.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

How widespread, do you think, this — is this isolated incidences or is this in many, many parts of the country?

MARK SHIELDS:

I don't know, Judy.

I would say, given the reaction from people in the minority community, not only African-American, but Latino as well, that enough feel that there is a pattern. I — it's hard to look at the Staten Island film and not believe that this was wrong.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

This is Eric Garner.

MARK SHIELDS:

Eric Garner.

That this was — this was a man who was not a threat. He wasn't physically threatening. He was not menacing. He was selling individual cigarettes to homeless people. So the crime is tax evasion.

If this is the biggest crime of tax evasion in New York City going on at any given moment, I would — I would frankly be astounded. And the idea that you're going to use a chokehold — it seemed that the first police officer was actually talking him down. And then the officer went from behind and grabbed him with the chokehold that ultimately was fatal.

I mean, it's hard to look at this and say that this wasn't overreaction on the part of the police. Ferguson is conflicting testimony. You know, we heard different things. This one just does seem, quite frankly, clear-cut. And it's hard. David's right. The police put their lives on the line in difficult situations.

This wasn't a life-threatening situation. There was no way that any of the — either of the police officers — any of the police officers there felt that he was personally threatened by this situation. This wasn't a menacing figure or a violent man.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

David, you were saying we need to have a conversation about race and another conversation about authority and how authority is exerted.

You now have the Justice Department investigating on its own after these grand jury decisions. Is that a way to have these conversations? Is that part of the way we come together on this?

DAVID BROOKS:

Yes.

I think it's — I don't know if we will come together, but we can certainly change policy. And I — Washington has had a very corrupting influence here. Washington has armored, literally armored up. I talked about emotional armor, but this is literal armor. The federal government has given a lot of the police forces or sold this big weaponry.

And with that weaponry goes a swagger and goes a distance from the people that are being policed. And so we have hyper-militarized. I think we have, in some cases, hyper-machoized. There's just a lot of testosterone floating around. And whether it's Ferguson of Staten Island, there is a time when the police officer has to be secure enough to take a step back and try to defuse.

The Ferguson case is complicated, but in the Staten Island case, clearly, with petty authority comes the sin of bullying. And this guy seems to have just used that petty authority and been corrupted by it and brutalized by it, frankly. And so that has to go into the training. And it's almost like the moral responsibility of people with small amounts of authority, but possibly life-threatening ones.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Mark, only 15 seconds.

MARK SHIELDS:

Oh, 15.

Oh, the reaction, Judy, of the two cities, I mean, a reflection to some degree of the — I think the political leadership of de Blasio in New York, who has a racially mixed child himself, who is different from the Ferguson, where the police force was overwhelmingly white, where the political leadership was white, and where — David described the demonstrations in New York, which have been quite civil and quite orderly and not illegal, and as opposed to Ferguson, where the first protest involves breaking into a liquor store.

I think the situations are far from identical, but reflective in both cases of the situations of political leadership, as well as the relationship to the police in both cases.

JUDY WOODRUFF:

Hopefully a lot of reflecting going on right now, as well as both protesting and reflecting. It's a time, it's certainly a time for people to think some more about this.

And, Mark Shields, David Brooks, we thank you both.