Welcome to Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, chancellor's professor of political science and director of community engagement and the American Democracy Project at Indiana University, South Bend.

Today, we're joined by political columnist Jack Colwell and news anchor Bob Montgomery.

We'll be discussing President Biden's accomplishments and legacy, Pete Buttigieg, his tenure as secretary of Transportation and what to expect from Donald Trump's second term as president.

Thank you both for being here.

Now, Bob, I want to start with you thinking back over Biden's time as president.

What do you see as his key accomplishments and some of the biggest challenges he had to overcome?

Well, there are multiples on both fronts.

I think if you talk about essentially just a lasting legacy, it'll come down to two points.

One will be the inflation that happened both up and down during the course of his presidency.

And I think whether it's fair or not, the age issue and his reluctance to pass the torch, I think those will be the two things that stand out.

Of course, you have other issues.

He he counters the success of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, those things that he will tout as things that are good that happened during his term.

Of course, Republicans might disagree with some aspects of that.

But as far as his lasting legacy is concerned, those two issues, I think the inflation mostly, I think ultimately history will say it's going to be his age and and his reluctance to pass that torch.

Now, with the age, because it was just so unusual what happened that that makes it sort of historically notable.

Is that your thought thing?

Well, it is.

I think I think that is it.

And I think also how the Democratic Party handled that issue, because that issue was essentially swept under the rug.

Republicans would bring it up.

Some people in the media would bring up his age and how he he's always had the ability to find a way, as I do from time to time, to step on your own tongue.

But he, according to some people, was slipping somewhat in meetings and he wasn't able to successfully talk about his programs in a way that perhaps would best reflect what he was trying to do.

And I think because of those issues that people were starting to see that, you know, as Father Time does to everybody, it's not just a Joe Biden issue.

This is a human issue that some people were reluctant to acknowledge what was being seen by a lot of people.

And I think some of the criticism for the Democratic Party was the Democratic Party was was telling people, don't believe your eyes and your ears telling you one thing about the condition of President Biden.

Listen to what we're telling you, because we see him behind closed doors and he's vital and he has all the right questions.

And he said he's plugged in and he's formed, and all those things may be true, but that message was counter to what people's eyes and ears were telling them.

So was it very important then, for somebody like George Clooney, who had been a strong funder for the Biden campaign and a strong supporter of the president, to say, look, what I've seen behind closed doors is, in fact, concerning.

Well, I think so.

I think and that's one of the problems.

And you can argue the same thing on the Republican side as well.

Donald Trump is also not the youngest president we have ever had.

And so there, there have been, some points of discussion with some people that perhaps even President Trump, soon to be President Trump, has had some semblance of age related showing.

And again, it's a human condition.

This is not a negative reflection on either person as an individual or their ability to lead.

But sometimes time catches up with people, and I think that's the complaint from the general public, is all these people from behind the scenes are telling us one thing, but our eyes are telling us something else, and our ears are telling us something else.

Jack and again, it is the voters who picked these folks in the primary.

And then in the general elections, they are supporting older candidates.

And so what are we to make of this?

I mean, Donald Trump will be sworn in.

There have been some concerns and people, particularly after seeing what happened with Biden, have raised those concerns.

But others say, look, he's used to speaking kind of off the cuff and it's that it's not age.

What do we make?

You know, voters keep saying they want younger candidates.

And as you said, when they have a chance to vote in the primaries, they vote almost unanimously.

By state, for a Biden and Trump.

So the voters get what they want, and then they say, but they're too old.

Well, why didn't they think about that when they went to the polls in the primary?

I think, as Bob said, the, the, the age issue was the really telling one against, Biden and the that debate.

You almost there were people who actually were for Trump, but they cringed at Biden's performance.

They just you just had to have some sympathy for any person going through that why that happened at that time.

No one can really define.

But, voters were starting to get concerned about his age, his slow, walking because he had a broken foot.

That was part of it.

But they start thinking, boy, he is.

He's maybe it it's true that he's he's just too old.

Then that debate came and they said, well, he is that who's it now?

What about the accomplishments?

As Bob said, Joe Biden and his entire team certainly tout the infrastructure as a major accomplishment and saying this was the biggest program since the New Deal as well as the Inflation Reduction Act.

And yet many consumers aren't or feel like the inflation reduction fast enough.

So how do you think those will be seen historically?

Well, I think historically, he will get a lot of credit for, for will the infrastructure program.

Certainly.

And also, Joe, remember he inherited an economy in real trouble from Trump.

He is now sending on to Trump a far more robust economy than he inherited from Trump when he took office.

So, a lot of people seem to forget that they look back at Trump's first few years and they think, gee, the economy seemed to be going well.

I was making a decent living.

And and so they forget that when Trump left, the economy was, of course, in tatters.

You know, the pandemic was, was, going on and he had mishandled that.

And I think clearly, but for some reason, they didn't hold that against him.

And then they didn't give Biden credit for turning things around at the start.

They blamed things that were going wrong toward the end of the administration.

And there were indeed some things going wrong.

Now, it is interesting.

Sometimes political scientists call the US presidency the impossible presidency, because the candidates promise that they will create a robust and growing economy.

They'll have great purchasing power for consumers, and there will be world peace, right?

They will control.

They have a robust international plans that will, keep us out of war.

And in fact, they will, you know, keep us on the right path.

But things like a global pandemic, things like the, actions of other nations, sovereign nations or groups, terrorist or otherwise, or we're dealing with Congress.

That's we're seeing global inflation problems.

They have a limited power or so what the president didn't do, is this do you get the sense?

I mean, he talked to a lot of people who observe this closely, that Trump or Biden, they're sort of in an impossible position with voters and with, Americans.

Well, I think the way I've always approached it, it's similar to what many generals have said over the years, over the course of many battles, everyone has a great plan until the first bullet flies and everything and I liken that to Notre Dame football, or any really football player.

A quarterback gets way too much credit when things go well, and probably way too much blame when things go poorly.

You're almost in a no win situation.

And, it's I think the presidency is similar to that because so much is in the eye of the beholder.

Even with a good economy, you can find things that are problematic.

And even with a good world stage, you can find areas of problems.

And, and it depends upon your own personal point of view as to determine how successful the president is or isn't, regardless of what the metrics tell us.

And the metrics and the reality sometimes don't match up.

And inflation is a prime example of that.

The inflation rate a year ago was 9% horrible.

The inflation rate now is down within that range that the Federal Reserve wanted in that roughly 2%.

But the price of eggs is still too high.

So it really depends upon your your vantage point and how it's impacting you personally.

And I think the presidency is similar to that because no matter what they say and what they do, there will always be people who find fault with that, and there will always be people who actually find excuses as well, supporters who will find excuses.

The reason why, for example, you brought up Covid, that's a very real economic issue.

When you shut down the economy, that tends to have a negative impact on the economy.

But but on the flip side of things, when the economy starts to come back, people don't look at necessarily the reasons why you come back.

What were the policies that help the economy improve, perhaps quicker than it would have otherwise.

And so the blame or the credit tends to get shifted depending upon the eyes of the person.

Absolutely.

It's a good point.

No, it's same can be true in foreign policy as you think about foreign policy and Joe Biden's handling of foreign policy, what do you think his legacy will be there?

And what, if anything, did his foreign policy approach do in terms of global perceptions of the United States?

Jack, what do you think?

Well, I think he improved the reputation of the United States.

On the foreign scene, certainly strengthening NATO, was a big accomplishment.

And remember that President Trump was, even talking about pulling out of NATO, in NATO nations were concerned about that.

They were not necessarily looking at the United States anymore as as their leader on, on the world stage.

Biden did change that.

He stepped in.

He he saved Ukraine for a time.

How long?

We don't know.

But he did step in and save it.

It's it's saved right now.

We'll see what, what President Trump does about that.

But I think on the, on foreign policy, Biden will have a pretty good, pretty good great.

Except for Afghanistan.

The handling of that, of course, was very messy, the fatal for some American troops.

And, of course, the whole government there immediately collapsed.

Now, some people would say, hey, wait a minute, it was Trump who made the agreement on the time to pull out that wasn't Biden's timing.

And there's truth to that.

But still, he was in charge when the when the timing came.

And it was a very messy situation.

The pull out of Afghanistan by U.S. troops instead of being smooth was very rocky and in fact, very much so involved fatalities and no stable, lasting peace, as was sort of promised.

And and the rhetoric surrounding the pullout and all the promises that we seem to have made to people in Afghanistan, especially women, that they were going to have rights and not be subjected to the humiliation that they had been subjected to before.

Those promises were not kept.

Maybe they could not have been.

But anyway, that's that's a black mark.

So certainly Afghanistan at the beginning of Biden's term, more recently, we have a possible cease fire, though we've heard this so many times, it's hard to know what to make of it.

In this whole situation surrounding Gaza and Israel, versus Hamas.

Bob, as you think about foreign policy, what will be notable in terms of Biden and is the idea of our reputation and it standing also in the eye of the beholder?

Well, you know, I agree with Jack.

I think the issue of of solidifying the ally base was very important because at times during the Trump administration, there were some questions, even to countries like Germany and Britain were being called on to the mat for not withholding their financial stakes in NATO.

And on the flip side, of course, we saw two wars break out, significant wars with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

So I totally agree with that.

And of course, the the Hamas attack in, in Israel.

It is interesting to see that even President Biden, in his farewell address last night, did give some credit to, President Trump's team to help bring about at least to get us to this point where we have some semblance of a ceasefire deal.

Whether it holds remains to be seen.

But from what I have heard from the people on the inside in Hamas, the reason why they ultimately said, yeah, we'll sign off on this was because they weren't sure what President Trump was going to do.

As you recall, not too long ago, just within the last several days, he essentially said, if if Hamas doesn't come to some sort of agreement, release these hostages, there will be hell to pay.

And, so that is the question as to what's going to happen next, because I think, the unpredictability, I'm not going to say instability, but the unpredictability of what President Trump will do in his second term on the foreign policy stage leads some people to believe that maybe we better get these things back in order.

And that's one of the things he promised.

But the of course, the determination is going to be, how is this going to play out in the real world?

Because you can speculate all day long as to whether Hamas was in the process of of reaching this deal, and they were really close, and they just needed that one last or 1 or 2 items, or in fact, it truly was the unpredictability of President Trump and what he would do about this and what he essentially take the gloves off of Israel and say, do whatever you need to do.

We'll give you whatever you need to fulfill that part of the mission was truly the deciding point.

This is interesting.

This almost seems like, a double edged sword or two sides of the coin with that unpredictability.

It might force the hand in some cases of, Hamas, for example.

And Donald Trump has talked about leading through strength.

On the other hand, NATO allies, folks in the UN, not quite sure what he'll do, or our allies in Mexico and Canada as we talk about trade or the issue of Greenland.

So, hey, there is a lot of unpredictability to just because he wants to do things his own way and in a way we haven't seen other presidents.

So what do you hear in terms of other world leaders or folks here in the U.S who you talked to about how we should think about that or what we should anticipate, or is it just too soon to know?

I think it depends upon how you term the world, the the term world leaders are.

What are they saying publicly?

Of course they're all in favor, and they're hoping for good relations with the United States.

What are they saying privately could be a very different story, based upon their past relationships, especially if that leader was in power at the same time when President Trump was in power several years ago.

So I think that that could play a part of it.

But but ultimately, I think, the question of, of world leadership is going to come down to the presidency, and the hope is from people who are on the inside in Washington, that at least with this experience of having one term under his belt, he has a better understanding of the ramifications of the of the words that come out of the mouth of the president of the United States as the commander in chief of the world's most powerful army and as the, the leader essentially of the free world.

If we still hold that pattern, I think we still do.

And so I, I think there is some, some hope from people who are in other countries that he understands the gravitas of the weight of his position better than perhaps he did the first term, if that makes sense.

Now, we talked about the infrastructure bill and, Pete Buttigieg was part of that because some of that had to do with transportation.

Of course.

We're sitting here in South Bend, where folks know him as Mayor Pete, as you think about that part of Biden's administration, of course, Buttigieg, at one time running in the primary against, Joe Biden before joining his administration.

What does this mean for Pete Buttigieg?

What is his legacy as secretary of transportation?

Or how do you think this might launch his political career for higher office toward, office in Michigan, perhaps?

You know, it'll be interesting to see what he does.

There are a lot of Democrats in Michigan who are encouraging him to run for governor there.

In in 26.

And and there are some problems with that.

One would be if he if he was elected governor in 26, could he turn around right away and run for president in 28?

President still is undoubtedly his his ultimate goal.

Now, he could, I suppose, just declined to run in 28.

But it seems like, you can't decline to too much.

You can't get off that stage for very long or they start to forget about you.

So I think he really if he could, would need to run in 28 now would, would, being elected governor of Michigan, even if he was going to only stay for two years, would that be a real a plus for him?

Well, politically, perhaps it it would.

But what if he lost?

If he lost running for governor of Michigan and Michigan can go either way.

And we don't know what the political winds will be like, in two years.

So it would be a risk for him, because losing for governor of Michigan might be kind of the the end then of of peace.

Goal of of the presidency.

I think his his legacy will be fine.

The the infrastructure projects are moving ahead, but they didn't move ahead fast enough.

They didn't really help Biden because voters didn't see these new bridges, actually constructed.

These new highways actually paved, new airport to actually build.

Yeah.

The plans are there.

Some funding has started.

Maybe even ground was broken in a few places, but they didn't see the actual projects.

So to most voters that, well, this is sort of the pipe dream for the future, but in the future, they won't be just pipe dreams.

They will be actually, constructed.

And as it's, Mayor Peters said, one, one of the ironies about that is that a lot of Republican members of Congress who voted to kill the infrastructure bill will now be there to, you know, cut the ribbons and take credit for all of these projects that would never have taken place if they had prevailed.

Now, of course, his tenure, as secretary of Transportation was not without its challenges, certainly in terms of the airlines and people getting stranded, lots of canceled flights as well as some problems with the trains.

Did he do enough to make him a potential viable candidate for president in the in the future?

What do you think?

First, I think is learning curve was in the right direction.

He started off with with some of the issues that some were within his control, some were without the East Palestine train derailment.

I have a hard time believing that is the fault of the Secretary of Transportation, that the Baltimore Bridge collapse, same scenario.

And some of those issues that he did get some, some flak for not handling, perhaps as quickly as he should have, some of that issue, I think, will stick to him, especially for the Republicans who will use that as talking points against him when whatever, whether he runs for governor or president down the line.

But, most of the people are saying, you know, the fliers Bill of rights is a good thing.

The ability to actually get your money back if if the airlines cancel when they overbooking those sorts of things.

And I think the learning curve for him, ended on an up note rather than the other way around.

And that could tell a very different story.

I agree with Jack that the presidency, I believe, is very much in his political future, whether he gets there or not is another thing.

But I knowing how the American history has worked, that more, presidents come from a governorship versus the South Bend mayor, would tend to be a reason why he will probably try to run for the governorship in Michigan.

Why else is he moving from here?

His his lifelong home up to Traverse City?

Nothing against Traverse City.

It's a beautiful area.

It's a little colder, a little snowier than than it is here.

But but I think that, he will probably try to run for governor, whether he wins or not.

He's young enough that he can bounce back.

He has time on his side, and he will do what he needs to do to stay in the public eye.

Even if he's the governor, he will.

He will be the type of person because the news networks love to talk to him.

Both sides, the CNNs, the Foxs, the MSNBC, regardless of the political spectrum.

He's a good interview.

And it's and it's good for ratings for them.

So he will remain in the public eye in some form or fashion.

And I think that could help his ultimate presidential aspirations.

It's it's like this helped him with the, fliers Bill of rights, too, because he was out there communicating it to pass integers.

And everybody wants to hear that they can get their money back and don't accept no for an answer.

Right now, we only have a few minutes left.

So let's talk Donald Trump.

Obviously, immigration is an issue that Joe Biden also got a lot of criticism, for.

Donald Trump says he's going to work on this issue as well as continue economic growth.

What do you see him tackling first?

Well, it depends on the campaign promise.

He he had a lot of firsts for his campaign, a lot of first day issues, of course, the one that's catching the most attention that has the potential biggest impact is the mass deportation issue of undocumented migrants.

And the question remains, all right, who do I believe within his inner circle?

Do I believe it's a true, deportation of all undocumented migrants?

How is that going to play out?

Who's going to do this?

What are the what's the sausage making process on that?

Or are they only going to try to go after the people who are documented criminals as undocumented migrants?

It remains to be seen how that's going to play out.

I'm sure there will be some form of executive order that will be signed right away, but the actual implementation of that is going to be a whole nother issue.

And it really comes down to like, really any politician, how much of the campaign promises will actually become reality, how much of it was essentially giving red meat to your base, and how much of it is a true aspiration that we're going to actually put dollars and cents towards, to try to make this come to fruition.

But I think that mass immigration issue will be the very first thing we'll be talking about.

In fact, as early as next week, even if it doesn't happen, and especially if it doesn't happen, because we're gonna go back and say, hey, you promised on day one, you're going to sign this executive order.

I'm not saying anything happen right now.

So there will be a lot of that discussion, I think predicted early next week.

Yeah.

Jack.

Well, there's real danger for Trump in the immigration issue because if, hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers are sent out of the country, it's going to have a tremendous effect on our workforce.

And on the economy.

And, if if there's a real worker shortage, inflation will, will go up again.

You'll have the problems where restaurants can't open because they don't have enough workers there to to ban the tables on the kitchen.

So it's, it's, it's something he has to be careful with.

If he really has these mass deportations, I think it could really hurt the economy and and hurt Trump.

So he's got to be careful.

He certainly has to get rid of some of these people that he's talked about with, with criminal records and such.

But he has to be careful not to just sweep all of these workers away and bring on inflation again, so that more narrow focus on people who have been convicted of crimes could be more popular on both sides of the aisle.

Give something to his supporters who say, I'm acting without quite as negative effect on the economy.

All right, well, we need to have three more hours to finish this conversation, but unfortunately, that is all the time we have for this week, politically speaking.

I want to thank our guests, Jack Cole and Bob Montgomery, for joining us.

I'm Elizabeth Fenton, reminding you that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

We'll see you next time