Special: Presidential Job Application, Courting Iowa's Conservative Voters, Mistrust of Iran & ISIS Inspires Attacks

ANNOUNCER: This is the Washington Week Webcast Extra.

MS. IFILL: Hello, and welcome. I’m Gwen Ifill. We had so much to talk about on the regular broadcast that we just had to stick around a little longer to talk about what else we’ve been covering this week.

Joining me: David Sanger of The New York Times, Pierre Thomas of ABC News, Karen Tumulty of The Washington Post, and John Dickerson of CBS News and Slate magazine.

John’s reporting caught my eye recently with something he wrote titled “Seven questions we should ask anyone who wants to be president.” Now, I think about this all the time, the questions – like, my big, main question is why – (laughter) – but what are your questions, John?

MR. DICKERSON: Well, so what I figured is with everybody jumping in, we’re going to have months of chance to ask them about all kinds of different things. But if you look at what anybody has to do – even to be a barista at Starbucks, they give you a set of questions at the beginning and they’re about your life experience and when you face challenges and how you overcame them, and then whether you can make coffee or not is important, but there are a certain set of basic questions.

So mine are – and we should say there are more than seven, but they were all I could come up with on deadline. (Laughter.)

What’s the biggest crisis you’ve faced in your professional life? So that gets at, you know, have you been in an – in an emergency experience? Because you’re going to face one almost immediately when you’re president, either the Bay of Pigs or the downing of an EP-3 spy plane.

What personal crisis have you – have you faced? A different kind of test than professional. Sometimes you have to dig down very deeply in your personal life. Well, you’re going to have to do that as president.

Political triumph. So that’s different. That’s, can you make the people love you? That’s your job as a politician.

And then, what’s your governing triumph? Because getting elected, as we’ve seen, is not the same as succeeding in office.

And then the last ones are – this is a catchall. So what experience do you have that you think might be relevant in the office? Ted Cruz said, well, his period as solicitor general in Texas. That’s not really a governing position, but he tried to make the case that his skills there. Ben Carson might say, you know, I spent 22 hours separating conjoined twins – that’s a high-pressure experience; I would know how to handle pressure as a president.

Then –

MS. IFILL: Scott Walker could say, I survived a recall.

MR. DICKERSON: Yes, and the only one to be reelected from a recall.

Then the last two. What historical presidential moment informs your thinking, and what did it tell you? Scott Walker said that he learned from Ronald Reagan when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers that that told the Soviets that they couldn’t mess with Reagan. Now, some Soviet experts would say that’s a little too simplistic.

And the final one is to tell us a joke. That’s not really a question, but Secretary of State – excuse me, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said that humor was a crucial test of temperament, presidential temperament. Did they have some sense of the lightness of life? Because the job is so difficult. And he said – I asked him about this about a year ago, and he said of all the presidents that I worked for there are only two who had no discernible sense of humor: Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter. I rest my case, he said. (Laughter.) It was the secretary who said “I rest my case.”

MS. IFILL: I’m thinking about – I’m trying to think about the field right now and who has a discernible sense of humor that we’ve seen so far. I’m going to keep thinking about that.

MS. TUMULTY: Of course –

MR. SANGER: You know, four of those seven would work for a barista test. (Laughter.)

MR. DICKERSON: Exactly.

MS. TUMULTY: Don’t forget John Dickerson’s the guy who stumped George Bush by asking him if he had anything that he regretted, and he had no answer and later said –

MS. IFILL: That’s right!

MS. TUMULTY: – I have a regret, and that’s that I let John Dickerson ask me a question. (Laughter.)

MS. IFILL: At a presidential news conference, I remember that. I remember thinking, what a dumb question. Ooh, good answer. (Laughter.) As long as you get a good answer, it’s a great question. (Laughter.)

Karen, I want to ask you a little. You just got off a plane literally a couple hours ago from Iowa, where we’re all going to be spending a lot of time this year. So you get any sense on the ground that people are anxious for this to start, or are they in dread?

MS. TUMULTY: They’re in the – they’re already in the middle of the process. And I went to – particularly I’m interested in social conservatives because they’ve – their pick tends to win in Iowa, and two of their last picks – Rick Santorum from 2012, Mike Huckabee from 2008 – are in the race again. So I went to a big gathering of Christian homeschoolers – who, by the way, are the – they’re the infantry you –

MS. IFILL: They are.

MS. TUMULTY: – you maybe want in your army in Iowa. And I was really struck by how completely open they are. They’re very excited about the new faces. Ted Cruz is getting a lot of attention, Bobby Jindal they’re very open to. They really do – you get the sense that these guys are all starting from scratch, even though they have some familiar figures in the race. And there’s also a sense that they cannot let themselves be sort of split up the way they were in 2012, a lot of them going with Michele Bachmann.

MS. IFILL: Does it worry them at all that when they do – you mentioned Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum – when they do settle on a candidate that that person often doesn’t survive much beyond Iowa?

MS. TUMULTY: But their sense is – and again, you can disagree with this – but is that what they want – and right now, the rallying cries are things like religious liberty and opposition to Common Core, the curriculum standards. It is that we want somebody who is pure, somebody who will push for our issues, push for our values. And so I think that it’s –

MS. IFILL: It’s shaped the rest of the field.

MS. TUMULTY: It suggests that somebody like Jeb Bush is going to have a real uphill climb in Iowa.

MS. IFILL: Fascinating.

OK, let’s move back to foreign policy issues, David. The interesting thing that also happened this week was Yemen, and we see Yemen falling apart before our eyes. Lots of accusations that Iran is secretly behind this and, of course, we’re supposed to be making nice with Iran on the nuclear negotiations. So my friend Judy Woodruff asked John Kerry about this this week, how do you keep these two things? Let’s hear what he had to say.

SEC. KERRY: (From video.) There are obviously supplies that have been coming from Iran. There are a number of flights every single week that have been flying in, and we trace those flights and we know this. We’re well aware of the support that Iran has been giving to Yemen, and Iran needs to recognize that the United States is not going to stand by while the region is destabilized or while people engage, you know, in overt warfare across lines, international boundaries, in other countries. So we’re very concerned about it, and we will – what we’ve made clear to our friends and allies is we can do two things at the same time.

MS. IFILL: I believe that’s called walking and chewing gum. But is it possible to make nice to Iran and also to keep them at bay when it comes to Yemen, David?

MR. SANGER: Oh, it gets even more complicated than that because, of course, we’re on the same side, although not allied, in the fight against ISIS.

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. SANGER: We’re on a different side in dealing with Yemen. And we’re trying to figure out how we’re going to come to an accommodation on the nuclear side.

So there are a couple ways to look at this. One of them is we did arms control agreements with the Soviet Union for years while they were opposing our interests throughout Europe, throughout Asia. You know, we did arms control agreements during the Vietnam War.

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. SANGER: So one way to argue this is you can’t confuse the two.

The other side you get, though, is the concern in Israel, the concern in Saudi Arabia that if, in fact, we got the nuclear agreement – which these days would be a high-class problem to have – if you got it, that it would fundamentally reorient America’s alliances in the Middle East and we could find ourselves really trying to tie up with the Iranians. And people are standing up and saying, is that really the way you want to go?

MS. IFILL: Speaking of ISIS, let’s talk about the degree to which, Pierre, homegrown – I don’t want to call them terrorists, but folks who were born/raised in the United States are suddenly getting caught trying to get in league with ISIS. More and more and more we’re seeing it.

MR. THOMAS: Well, we’ve documented at least 34 cases in the last year where people have been charged or accused of trying to go to Syria to join with ISIS. Just this week we’ve had three people charged in the United States with either supporting or attempting to join ISIS. It is one of the top concerns of federal law enforcement right now, particularly at the FBI. And what they’re finding is that ISIS is using social media in a way never seen before, and where people are going online and seeing all different kinds of videos that they are producing and it’s inspiring them. And we’re talking men, we’re talking women, we’re talking boys and girls. Even teenagers have been caught trying to get into Syria to support ISIS.

MS. IFILL: This last guy’s from Kansas, right?

MR. THOMAS: Right. Guy today just charged from Kansas, young man who planned to enlist in the U.S. Army and then detonate a car bomb to kill his fellow soldiers. That’s the accusation. And again, they only got onto him because he was posting negative things on Facebook, and when they found out about that the Army, which was – which was about to let him in, enroll him in the Army, said, uh, not so fast. The FBI interviewed him. And still, even after being interviewed by the FBI, he fell for a plan when the FBI sent some people posing as radicals near him. He still was trying to detonate a bomb this morning, they say.

MS. IFILL: I never know when I hear these cases whether it’s just someone who’s running on online and saying random things or whether it’s a – or whether it’s a real threat, someone is really going to do something, or whether it matters that this is –

MR. THOMAS: A great example of that the FBI points to is the Boston Marathon bombings. These were two people, the two brothers who were charged, who were not sophisticated –

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. THOMAS: – but they believe that they learned how to make their bombs, by and large, from Inspire magazine, which is an online posting from al-Qaida. And they said that at one point they were on to the older brother and the investigation didn’t yield enough evidence to charge him. They let him go, eventually he moved on. Their argument is that most of these people, if left to their own design, at some point would get the means to do an attack, and that’s the thing that’s driving them.

And I – and I – the one point I would make, too, is that a few years ago the FBI got a lot of criticism that some of the people that they were charging would never have done it –

MS. IFILL: Right.

MR. THOMAS: – and that this was entrapment. Well, since that time they’ve done something very specific, which is they build into the investigation opportunities for the person to say – where the undercover says, do you really want to do this? And time and time again, what they see is that the suspect says, yeah, I want to do it. And one of the cases that we recently brought to light, they let the people actually think they’re making a real bomb and they get them dialing what they think is a phone that would detonate the bomb. So they have them physically there. So when you show that to the defense counsel, most of the cases don’t even get to trial.

MS. IFILL: OK. Well, thank you very much, Pierre. Thanks, everybody else, as well.

So you can stay online all week long for the latest developments on politics and policy from the best reporters in Washington, our panelists. That’s, of course, at PBS.org/WashingtonWeek. And we’ll see you next time on the Washington Week Webcast Extra.