Transcript
P. Light: I'm Paul Light. I'm the director of governmental studies here at Brookings. And I was the person at the Pew Charitable Trusts to whom this original proposal for a little book on campaign etiquette arrived, and I think I had the good sense to recommend it to the Pew board for funding.
Three or four years ago, it seems like just a moment ago, but it was about three-and-a-half, four years ago. Now I am at Brookings as director of governmental studies, where I have the honor of supporting Steve in his work, and seeking funding for the second edition of this wonderful book, which also came from Pew, and I'm sure Pew is proud of the result.
I've had a relationship with Steve Hess now for, I don't know, 18 years almost, having come here as a guest scholar in 1983. He had already been here forever it seemed. He has been at the Brookings Institution for 27 years, 29 years is it, unbelievable, and has produced an extraordinary body of work that really does stand as a body of work on the role of journalism and public life. His books on the Washington reporters, International reporters, reporters of all kinds are wonderful, chronicle and constitute a body of work that continues to be drawn upon. And he's now obviously, and long been a commentator on the way politics is conducted in this country, but he's becoming, at this point in his career, a voice for not niceness, per se, but a form of discourse that I think improves and strengthens the performance of democratic process in this country. Not as a naysayer or a shamer, but as a person who points the way towards better discourse through example and through his writing.
I'm just delighted to be in a position of introducing Stephen Hess, and be in a position in my own career where I could get the opportunity to introduce Steve to talk about the second edition of this wonderful book.
Steve.
[Applause]
S. Hess:: You should only applaud after the person has spoken, I think. I'm not going to really speak about the book. It is, indeed, a little book. It consists of 41 essays arranged alphabetically from A is for Advertising, and B is for Bias, each one attempts to tell something about what the situation is in the United States in terms of niceness, if you will. And then proposes something in the nature of a rule of etiquette. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it. It is a very understand-Brookingsish book, there are no footnotes and other things, although there are some references in the back if you'd care to learn more about etiquette after you finish this.
Paul left out one really truly important thing in talking about this book. And that is, it was his idea. And it was called, as you would expect, because he was a director at Pew, the Manual of Campaign Discourse at the time, but we changed it to The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette. It's been somewhat star-crossed in terms of the fact that when it was launched in 1998, it was on the 8th of September, and that happened to be the day that Ken Starr delivered his report on the president's etiquette to the United States Congress. Today, we launch a second edition, and I wish I had a special chapter on the etiquette for protesters who somehow don't like the World Bank. We could do perhaps a little better in that regard.
What we have done, though, is put together a little five minute home movie. You will see this takes us somewhat through Iowa, into Super Tuesday, at record speed. I want to thank Liz Molesky [sp] who found the tapes for us, and to Marguerite Iyan [sp] who was the producer of this little film. So, we're going to see the little film, and then I will introduce you to our panel.
[Video shown]
S. Hess: That's our home movie.
Now, let me say that I got to this town to work for Dwight Eisenhower. He had a favorite cartoon from the old Saturday Evening Post. It had a man at a lectern like this saying: Our next speaker needs all the introduction he can get. After 40 odd years, I am finally on a panel where I can really say, we have a panel that needs no introduction, and I'm only going to introduce them because I want to.
Al Hunt over there in the first chair ran by my house this morning at 7 o'clock, wearing I guess it was a Wakeforest sweatshirt, I didn't notice, with this running mate Kate Lehrer [sp] with him, and he waved and said, I've been up all night preparing for this. Al Hunt, as you all know, and million readers of the Wall Street Journal, is the breath of moderation that we read every Thursday on the op-ed page of the Wall Street Journal. His column is somewhat in counterpoint to the page across the way. Before that, he was very distinguished bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal in Washington, particularly appreciated for his efforts to create diversity in his bureau, and we go back as friends a very long way. He's a special, special person.
Judith Martin is Miss Manners. Miss Manners is Judith Martin. To her millions of readers and fans of both her column and her books, she does something really quite special, and she does it with elegant writing and wicked, wicked humor. She tells us things that we need to know, but never lectures at us.
E.J. Dionne is my cherished colleague here at Brookings, a senior fellow in governmental studies. The columnist for the Washington Post and syndicated as well, and also has a column on language in the Washington Post Sunday Magazine. He's the author of such books as Why Americans Hate Politics. But I met him first when he was a bureau chief in Rome. He's the only one on the panel, I think, who could probably tell us about the etiquette of electing a pope.
Eventually, we're going to hear from Chris Matthews. Chris, as you know, is the host of the MSNBC Hardball with Chris Matthews. He is also the bureau chief for the San Francisco Examiner. And the two of us have a special connection. We are both members of the most exclusive club in Washington. You may think that it's a the Senate, as Richard Nixon said, you would be wrong. You may think it's the Gridiron of which Al Hunt is the only member on this panel, but, no, it's the Judsen-Welliver [sp] Society, which is a club of former presidential speech writers who get together every other year to give speeches to each other.
And so, I'm going to have us free associate for a bit based on that film. We're going to then have our conversation, and then we'll open it to questions.
How many campaigns have you been through Al, and where does this one sort of fit into the etiquette scheme? Take out your slide rule and figure it out.
A. Hunt: I was going to say, I think it was the McKinley campaign that it began, that's what my wife says. That's not quite true, Steve.
I, as a kid reporter in Boston, I managed to sneak up to New Hampshire in 1968 to the consternation of my dear friend Allen Otten, who was then the Washington bureau chief, who didn't know what this kid reporter was doing up in New Hampshire, but I really started to cover politics in the early '70s, so I guess I haven't counted back, but I guess this is my seventh or eighth.
This is not the most edifying campaign that I ever covered. I thought with John McCain in it, it was one of the most interesting. I personally thought John McCain was one of the most interesting political figures we've seen in a long time. I thought he was--probably since Robert Kennedy, I thought he was one of the rare establishment figures who really threatened to shake up the establishment, and that was fascinating.
Going to your point, and the point of this really fascinating book, I think that there has been a great decline in political civility in campaigns, and there are a lot of reasons. You go through many of them in the book. But I keep coming back to some extent to Pat Moynihan's great observation about the reason that academic politics is so vicious is because so little is at stake. And to some extent I think we don't have the great issues that we had before. And I think those issues produced some very petty and some very nasty politics on occasion, but they also enabled people to rise to great heights. And I certainly haven't seen very much of that in this campaign.
S. Hess: Judith did something for which I am eternally grateful, as is Brookings. She wrote the introduction to The Little Book of Campaign Etiquette. And I suspect, as a journalist going back some time, that you were probably tougher on journalists than you were even on politicians. Is this something that you've noticed over these years in what's happening to the journalism profession that contributes to this etiquette gap?
J. Martin: Well, actually, I see a little progress on the part of the politicians this time, because they're vilifying one another not for being devils, but for being negative, which may have the same effect, but it recognizes that sensibility is required here.
I am a lifelong journalist, and I do not wish to attack my own profession, but I don't think the same progress has been made there, and the realization that you can have strong controversy without, and you can cover strong controversy without being rude. There is still this equation which politicians used rather successfully a few years ago where moral fervor is connected with rudeness, and politeness is connected with a kind of a moral wussiness. That if you really cared, you wouldn't behave civilly. I still don't see that, and I see a confusion all around in what the opposite of rudeness and incivility is. People think, politicians think, well, then they should love one another, and then they'd all be polite, which doesn't explain divorce court, does it.
And journalists have used the excuse of, well, but it's the public trust that enables you to behave rudely to get what you want, which I don't think is borne out by fact. I think when you are disruptive and when you are rude, people close down, and they react in ways that are not journalistically productive. We all know the scam of being sympathetic and how it brings out what people might not otherwise say.
S. Hess: E.J., I was reminded as Judith was talking that I quote you in this book, and you say, "I'm willing to trade a little authenticity for a little courtesy." Do you still stand by that?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I think you misquoted me, and you certainly took me out of context. I guess, yes, is the answer. I worry a lot about authenticity in campaigns because it's usually fake authenticity, that it's an attempt to look authentic, and that we often can buy into that. And in the McCain campaign, what struck me, and this is something I would put to Chris, there were enormous reasons for being interested in McCain. But, in fact, he also was singularly successful because he was the perfect candidate for a moment when so much political coverage focuses on personality, celebrity, and the like, and his personal story was so compelling, it's not his fault that his personal story was so compelling, that I think he actually got an advantage out of this. And I worry sometimes more about the authenticity and the courtesy part.
On the other hand, I was struck. There was a piece in the Washington Post a few weeks back by Dana Milbank, which I thought was very interesting to our conversation, where he said, maybe we should stop waging war on negative campaigning. And I think maybe the distinction that we need to talk about a little bit is between sort of negative and trivial. And that if a member of Congress has voted, you know, cast 980 out of God knows how many votes, and the ad comes up and says, he's missed 100 votes, even though his attendance record is 98 percent, it's a kind of trivializing attack. Whereas, if people really disagree on things, and really go after each other's positions, that's not so bad. And, again, to use the McCain example, his decision to pull all negative campaigning off the air in South Carolina ended up diminishing his ability to challenge Bush on issues where they really did have differences, notably taxes.
Last point, one of my favorite rules in here is Steve saying that journalists should understand that metaphors have consequences. And he cites one of the finest extended sports metaphors ever used in political journalism. It is a journalist who advised Bob Dole, and I quote, "to abandon his conventional half court offense and adopt a higher risk, pressing, trapping, transitional game." Only Al Hunt, the author of that line, and Bob Novak know about basketball to pull that metaphor off.
S. Hess: Oh, my. You missed our little film. We had a little home movie where the candidates started to say that they were all friends, but by the end of Super Tuesday, they didn't sound very friendly.
The premise of Hardball is that politics is not a profession for sissies, isn't it?
C. Matthews: I think there's clean hardball. I think hardball, as I note it, is clean and rough. But there is a point here. I remember Kennedy was chatting with one of his people when he was president about how everybody liked Nelson Rockefeller, and they thought he was going to be the biggest threat to him in '64. And Kennedy was always afraid of Rockefeller, he was afraid he might have lost to him in '60 had he run against him. And he said earnestly what a great guy he is, and he said, don't worry, by the end of the campaign we'll all hate each other. And I think it's a recognition that old friendships die quickly in campaigns. And new enmities outpower the old. And I think it happens. And I don't think McCain likes Bush, and I don't think Bush likes McCain, I think that explains a lot of this bad politics you're getting right now.
S. Hess: There's a lot more than the presidency at stake this time. We have what could be a remarkable election for the House of Representatives, where there's only a six seat difference, and of course the Senate. And, Al, I remember you as one of the most astute reporters on Congress. That was a long time ago.
A. Hunt: That was a long, long time ago.
S. Hess: That's exactly why I wanted to ask you this question, what's happened up there, is it our ancient memory that we remember Everett McKinley Dirksen talking about the beauty of the gladiola, and Hubert Humphrey and so forth, and now there are not Hubert Humphreys and Everett McKinley Dirksens anymore?
A. Hunt: Well, yes, I guess I believe that, but I also remember when I first became a baseball fan when I was eight or nine years old, and telling my dad that Willie Mays was the greatest player ever, he was then I guess 22, or whatever. And my dad said, no, the players today can't compare to the players that I grew up with, and I've had that same conversation with my kids. So they always look a little bit bigger in the past. I clearly think that Congress has changed, I think there are not the characters there used to be. I think that television and modern politics is certainly, you don't have as many big city hacks, and as many marvelous Southern characters as you did before. Other than people that we think of as I suppose "giants", I'm not sure there's been that big a change.
I think that 25 years from now we're going to look back and we're going to say Pat Moynihan ranks with anyone, as far as a incredibly important member of the Senate, certainly Bob Dole was, certainly Edward Kennedy will be. But, I just think the whole climate on Capitol Hill has changed over the last 20 or 25 years. In part that reflects some of the things we've spoken about earlier, about politics. In part it reflects the way the media covers politics, and covers Congress, not nearly as important a beat to the major news organizations as it used to be. When I first started to cover Congress each network had two and usually three or four correspondents covering Congress. Today they have usually about one, who is over extended, and they have twice as many people at the White House as they did before. So I just think things, the whole climate has changed.
S. Hess: This is quick, you're going to get a million dollars for who can answer this question first. What is the last time we had an all Ivy presidential campaign, for a million dollars?
A. Hunt: That's 1912.
S. Hess: Okay, 1912.
A. Hunt: I didn't cover it.
S. Hess: Who was the Yale running?
A. Hunt: William Howard Taft.
S. Hess: And who was the Harvard?
A. Hunt: Teddy Roosevelt.
S. Hess: And who won?
A. Hunt: Woodrow Wilson.
S. Hess: I'm coming back to this, because if that's the last time, 1912, all Ivy, it is the first time we've had an all dynastic campaign, the son of a president running against the son of a congressman.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Steve is too modest to say it, he is the author of the premier book on political dynasties in America.
S. Hess: I was actually not going to quote America's Political Dynasties. I was going to quote Alice In Wonderland, where the March Hare says, they're the best butter. Certainly we have the best butter running, and we've just seen five minutes, and they look like alley fighters. Is there something going on?
C. Matthews: Kennedy once said when he gave the great test ban treaty speech in '63 at Yale, he said, now I've got the best of both worlds, a Yale degree and a Harvard education. I think in the case of George W. Bush, he has a Yale degree and a Bob Jones education. And I'll repeat that a few times in the next few months, because there's no manifestation of an Ivy League manner or diploma for this guy yet. That's just a judgment.
S. Hess: Can we hear from Wellesley.
J. Martin: When Mr. Dionne says, what are we talking about in negative campaigning, that's a very important question here, because there is the misunderstanding that in order to be polite you have to love the other person, you have to be friends, and that you have not to air controversy, because if you point out the other person is wrong, then isn't that rude. And the answer is, no. It is the rules of etiquette that enable people to air controversy, and that's why they're supposed to be very strict in legislation, like Roberts Rules of Order. That's why the courtroom rules of etiquette are so strict, military etiquette, the bigger the controversy the more rules you need.
And so that is a red herring to say that, well, should they not criticize each other's positions. Of course, isn't that what we want to know in a campaign. The difficulty is that name calling and disobeying other restrictions of civility, first of all do not air the issues, and second of all they are not a very good recommendation for a job in government where cooperation and compromise are the skills that are needed. And indeed, you can come up with examples from long ago of people shooting one another on the Senate floor and things like that, but those were the exceptions, they weren't seen as a good way to take a stand. Of course, rudeness has always been among us, but admiring it is the new twist.
S. Hess: Well, let's start to address some distinctions, we agree that negativity in and of itself is misused. And the book plays on that in the advertising section, based primarily on Kathleen Hall Jamison's distinctions as the utility of comparative ads. But, surely, as we've just seen, something crossed the line, weren't there any things that we just lived through from Iowa through Super Tuesday that we feel, in retrospect, that hey, that's not negative, that's just dirty campaigning?
E.J. Dionne, Jr: I can't resist going back to your beginning question about Ivy League, because it brought to mind the line of that great American political commentator Jay Leno, who said one night that the campaign between Bush and Gore is going to get so vicious that the Red Cross is stocking thousands of pints of blue blood. I think that one of the odd things about campaigning now is that most vicious parts are actually the least visible. And I think if one goes back and unearths all that happened in South Carolina, television tends to be less vicious than radio. Radio tends to be less vicious than mail. And now mail may be less vicious than these phone calls that everyone talked about.
For a while after the Michigan campaign when McCain did his Catholic alert, I just checked if Republican consultants had a sense of humor by beginning my conversations, this is a Catholic alert if they were Catholic. And the ones who laughed tended to be critical of George Bush on that. But, I think that what we in journalism I think have moved toward covering better than we used to is the nature of this underground campaign, where you can say and get away with anyone on the telephone. All you have is the script that the campaign purports is being used on these telephone calls. There are always a lot of rumors that the script is for public consumption, what is actually said in the phone calls is quite different. So I think that is the clearest case where that happened.
The honest thing, to go back to what McCain did is that in a Republican primary to compare another Republican to Bill Clinton is worse than comparing him to Satan. And I thought it was just so odd that McCain by running that single ad felt he was really forced to run such a non-confrontational campaign that I think he missed the opportunity to score points. And that why I appreciated Miss Manner's view, because I think it's absolutely right, you've got to figure out ways to air differences that live within the rules.
A. Hunt: May I pick up on something, because I think the current campaign really provides us with some good lessons here, and I agree with Judith's point. Dana Milbank wrote that piece in the Washington Post, he had an interesting theme and he carried it too far. The theme basically is that contrasts are good, that sometimes it's important to be "negative" even, if you will. That's absolutely right. And then he went on to say, so therefore everything is fine, don't be worried. I think if you look at the current campaign I think it gives you kind of a good lesson in why he's both right and also he's wrong. I mean, some negative ads are perfectly legit.
When George Bush goes into the State of New York and says that John McCain votes against breast cancer, that is not legit. That is just sleazy. Al Gore, I think just as tape made clear, just distorted some of Bill Bradley--for Al Gore to criticize Bill Bradley's healthcare plan is totally legitimate. They have a different approach, there ought to be contrasts there. The distortions, and to say that Bill Bradley's healthcare plan wouldn't cover nursing care, for instance, is just an outright misrepresentation, that's not right. In the fall campaign it's totally legit, I think, and desirable for Al Gore to talk about George Bush's record on the environment and healthcare in the State of Texas. It's totally legitimate for George Bush to talk about Al Gore and Bill Clinton's fund raising in 1996. But, for one to say that the other is a sleaze bag, and the other to claim that Bush is a non-caring lightweight, I think doesn't help the public a great deal. So there are distinctions that can be made.
S. Hess: I tried to get Al Hunt to draw some distinctions between Congress then and now, and he said we young and romantic.
C. Matthews: Al's right in a way.
S. Hess: I'm going to ask you, the same way, about what's happened with political parties, because you came in through the party ranks, and it does strike me that there was something when campaigns were run by parties, parties understood that if they were in office today they might be out of office tomorrow, and they would like very much to be treated when they're out of office they way that they are when they're in office. And now, of course, they turn that over to hired hands, consultants and others, who when they go into governance they stay outside and get large contracts from Microsoft and so forth.
C. Matthews: Well, I think there are actually two or three questions, what happened in '94 and '96. It seemed that Newt Gingrich, with all his flaws, had one great understanding, that there was tremendous anger by the Republican Caucus, not just conservatives, but including people from the Northeast, about being in the minority status for so many years, for five decades. And that anger was exacerbated by a classic moment, Al knows this moment, when Jim Wright kept the clock going, remember, and he basically cheated on a budget vote, so he could get one of his guys, Chapman, to come in and vote after the time was up on a budget matter. Now, this is in a parliamentary system the essence of government, passing a budget. And Jim just cheated, and he just said, I have the power of the Chair here and I'm going to juts exercise my majority power, and he humiliated Bob Michael. And the one thing you never want to do in an opposition situation, if you're in the majority, is to humiliate the leader of the minority, because the minute you humiliate the leader of the minority, then you have chaos.
And what happened then was this group of people, Tip used to call them the three blind mice. What did he call them, the three stooges, he called them the three stooges, and it was a mixed group of people, basically around Vin Webber and Bob Walker, and Newt. And they started the guerilla theater, but it so was so angry, and they captured something, the anger of being humiliated for all those years by the majority. I think that's part of it. The other was the anti-Washington flavor of the last X many elections. And I think that combined to be a disruptive and angry force. And those old friendships that you saw between Bob Michael and Tip, and Jerry Ford and his opposite member, they went away because why be friendly with someone who humiliates you. And I think that's what changed. I don't think the Democrats changed, I think the Republicans did. And I think what happened was this sense of real anger.
And now the party, the Contract With America, I don't know how legitimate it was as a fighting weapon in the '94 campaign, but a couple of days after the fact it became very important to those people. They said they won, because they stuck together as a party. Probably the most party led movement in a long time was the Contract With America, where it said Republican meant doing these things, cutting taxes, getting rid of welfare abuse, reforming welfare, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that was successful for a while, and I think it was a reaction to the anger of the minority status for so many years, the anti-Washington feeling. And that dissipated as they ran down their--very effectively, ran down their agenda and fulfilled it. Now, I think Republicans are back to, like the Democrats, every man and every woman for himself. There is no sense of running as a party this time, and I think that's probably going to hurt them, and they'll probably lose the House because of it.
S. Hess: You still choose to be evasive, or very complimentary towards yourself, towards journalists. It strikes me that something is happening here. If I were Rip Van Winkle and I went to sleep 30 years ago and woke up, I would know that's the president, I would know that's the White House, it wouldn't look that different. But, it sure would look different if you said, that's the media, that's cable television, that set, your little set gets 55 stations, or what have you, and those folks have to be on 24 hours a day, and they've got to say things, and they don't sound quite the way journalists do. And now we're going into the Internet era, and there are some people called Matt Drudge, and he can reinvent himself as a journalist. Something is happening there, and it does affect etiquette I think. Any journalists want to take that up or dispute me on that?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I just want to start by saying the Little Book of Campaign Etiquette could also be seen as the Little Book of Journalistic Failure, because so much of what's in here is advice to us on how we mess up. One of the things you might not know is that Steve is also an expert on political cartoons, and his book is full of them, and there are two great ones in here. One is a television interview, where the interviewer says, political campaigns have become so simplistic and superficial, in the 20 seconds we have left would you explain why. And there is another one in here where the news announcer is saying, should a candidate's private life be public, should the media air unsubstantiated charges, we'll look at these and other difficult ethical issues, but first the juicy details. So I think in part the answer to your question is yes on a couple of fronts.
I think every since the Gary Hart controversy there has been great confusion about how we should cover issues relating to sexuality. You have some tips here that actually come from Al on this. But, the uncertainty about public and private has made it much more complicated to have a set of rules of etiquette, and I think etiquette does centrally revolve, at least in one of its spheres, around the distinction between public and private.
S. Hess: Judith?
J. Martin: First of all, I'd like to say something about the old days on that, when I was a young reporter there were many instances you'd see members of the legislature drunk on the floor, it would not be reported. There were all kinds of violations that were clearly part of the job that went unreported as part of what was known, and what was then the gentlemen's club, and the gentlemen's agreement not to bring these things out. On the other hand, now you have this personality, find out everything you can scandal mongering, which is wrong, too. I think the confusion mirrors the confusion on the part of the society, where we have decided that character, whatever that means, character is the only thing. You can reverse your position on something, you can overcome anything that happened yesterday, and it's not fair to bring it up, people think it's in the distant past, but what is character, and often it translates to sex.
But, the boundaries have to be set someplace there, because on the one hand we have a system you can't vote down a government on an issue, you can't bring down the government when it goes in the wrong direction, so in a sense you have to trust people for their term of office, and you want that kind of character. But, again, it's a separation between the professional, what's professionally relevant, which as I say we used to ignore, and what isn't. And Mr. Matthews made a reference to when people on different sides used to be friends, well we call that cronyism, and journalists used to be some of the worst cronies. They would pal around and tell people what would look good and so on.
It's stepping back from the professional role, keeping your personal role, assuming you're a law abiding citizens, and your personal quirks, and charms, and faults separate from what you do on the record, and what you do in office, and what people are hiring you to do. It's a little bit like the privacy issue among private employers, do they have a right to get interested in your sexual orientation, your sex life, or this or that, or is the question whether you're doing your job. And we're not treating our politicians that way.
S. Hess: Let me bite on this. Let me say that these were formulated by Albert R. Hunt, Wall Street Journal, January 27, 1992. So you've got eight years--it was eight years ago, if you would like to revise the famous Hunt Rules of Etiquette on sexual behavior. I remember when I was a little kid and you'd go to the public library and there would be Lady Chatterly's Lover, and there's always one page that was well thumbed, that sort of thing. Well, this would be the page, sex scandals in the Little Book of Campaign Etiquette. And the rules of etiquette were, indeed--Al, I don't know if you want to repeat them again.
A. Hunt: I still think it's an incredibly difficult issue. I wrote then and I still believe today that to cover sexual incidents it has to meet several tests. Number one, a politician has to be lying about it, or it has to be contemporaneous, or thirdly it has to affect their governance in some way, and finally, as I recall, it's if there was a great deal of hypocrisy involved, and otherwise, no. By the way, Clinton would have met most of those tests. But Steve, I think there has been a profound change in our business since I first came to Washington in 1969. I tell my kids I'm a total anachronism, I've been in the same place for so long. I notice you've been in the same place for--in 1971 Steve Hess went from the Nixon administration to Brookings, I mean, the only thing you share in common is Gordon Liddy. I mean, that really was a--
S. Hess: Who is not a senior fellow at Brookings, yet.
A. Hunt: Steve, I think if you look at the business today versus then, the news business, the encouraging things are that most reporters today are brighter, they're better educated, they're better paid, there is more competition and more outlets, and basically, having worked for the Wall Street Journal for 30-some years, I have to believe in competition, and I do. And technology obviously has helped us. But, something else has happened too. There is this tremendous blurring of lines between journalists and politicians, that I think has hurt both businesses.
I think standards and values have been debased, and I think there is sometimes a Gresham's law of journalism, where the bad, the sensational drives out the good. There's a tremendous premium on quick hits. There's a tremendous premium on quick sound bites, the Shorenstein [sp] study of several years ago, in 1968, the average sound bite was something like 47 seconds on the evening news. Today it's what, seven seconds, six seconds. And I think that has all hurt dialogue and discourse, and therefore civility in American politics a lot. And I think we bear much of the responsibility for that.
S. Hess: I think we've run nearly an hour, we might run a little longer, so let's open it up to questions. There's a microphone somewhere, here it comes right now. The purpose of this is not that we won't all hear you, but this is being taped, and there will be transcription on the Brookings web site, as well as the camera up there is for the purposes of our web site. You can tune in some time and listen to yourself. So for the purposes of our record, if you could just say who you are and then make a comment and/or direct a question.
Q: Jodie Allen, U.S. News and World Report. I wanted to pick up on this discussion of whether we journalists really are worse than we used to be. And I'm always amazed by this discussion, because I always think, less civil compared to when? I mean, has anybody ever read Trollop, or Dickens, or heard the rantings of Thomas Jefferson about how awful the press are. I mean, in the 19th Century, and in the Trollop novels, the journalist is always the villain, the arch villain. I mean, he of course professes, just as we do, to care for the public's need to know, but he engages in bribery and all sorts of deleterious behavior. And I also wonder about the sound bite criticism, the thought that news is less properly checked. And here I think about the extra, extra phenomenon. I don't think Hildy Johnson waited for the facts checkers. The newspapers weren't were terrible rivals, and they were rushing editions out onto the streets with the most sensational headlines they could find. I'm not sure that we're not harking back to a golden age that never existed.
S. Hess: Let me add a plug for another book that's out, a first rate novel written by a journalist, and that's Bill Sapphire's Scandal Monger. And if you want to see how mean journalists could be, go back to Jefferson and Hamilton, and Peter Porcupine, and that's the story that he tells quite vividly.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Just a point on Jodi, Jodi is clearly right about the history. I think what's happened is that we went through in the United States different stages of journalism, and very different definitions of what journalism was, from really the beginning of our country until probably the 1870s or 1880s, the ethic was of a partisan press. And so we expected the press to be partisan. We knew from the newspaper we picked up where the bias would lie, and that this different tradition began, I think, for two different reasons. One is, publishers decided they could sell to broader audiences if they weren't partisan papers, and they could make more money. So they ceased to be a Republican paper, or a Democratic paper and tried to appeal to everybody.
And then Walter Lippman came along in the '20s and wrote a series of rules, again, in a sense a rules of journalistic etiquette and responsibility, which said there is such a thing as fairness and even objectivity, using his famous term. And I think that whole ethic has been under challenge probably for about 40 years in different ways. And that right now one of the reasons people are angry and upset about the nature of journalism is that we're in the middle of some kind of revolution where people who admired the old rules and thought they were good for journalism are upset that they're under attack and may be going away. So I agree with Jodi that it's not simply vicious or non-vicious, accurate or inaccurate, but I do think there is a shift going on, and that's why we're having all these arguments.
J. Martin: The objectivity question Trollop covered very nicely in The Warden, where the investigative reporter wants to marry the daughter of the man he's targeting, talk about ethical problems.
S. Hess: I wouldn't want to let the press off the hook so easily, just by saying they were pretty awful now, and so they're no worse now. Let me just go back, not to Peter Porcupine, and Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, but simply to when I got in here, which was Eisenhower. The dominant medium was the newspaper, was print, that was largely set by a few family owned newspapers, like the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, Washington Post, and then a couple of regional newspapers. The scandal was almost exclusively about money, it did not expand to the questions of sex or personal behavior until later. The celebrity of journalism, to the degree that there were celebrities, were a few very serious columnists, whether it was Arthur Crock [sp], Walter Lippman, Scottie Reston [sp], and so forth, who set a tone in this time. The beat reporter had a full day, if you will, to do his interviewing, to check in with his editor, if the story wasn't very important to compare notes with his colleagues.
Then you moved in by the Kennedy administration, the first Kennedy administration, to really the era of network broadcasts. The television news went in 1963 from 15 minutes to a half hour. We had started to have a celebrity journalist. Barbara Walters became the first journalist to get a million dollar a year contract, for example. Scandal started to move, with Wilbur Mills falling into the reflecting pool and so forth, to personal behavior. The time that a reporter had to file a story now was half the time. They had to be ready by the evening news, from a day it went to half a day. We moved into cable. As you trace these things, now you're talking about a time to file a story that goes from a day to a half a day, to an hour or minutes in some cases. You have 24 hours to fill, and you move into an opinionating journalism, from your objective journalism. So I really do think that something is happening along these lines, and each thing I don't think is necessarily an improvement on what went before.
C. Matthews: Why is it a better world to have Kennedy hobnobbing with Joe Alseph [sp], and cutting their little deals or whatever, any president in those days, or with Reston or any of those people, using them as their bleak spot, and shining up to Tim Russert on Sunday. I mean, it seems to me that the power is in the ability to reach readers, or reach viewers. Today to reach them you have a better shot at that first instant, on a Sunday program, than what's read about that Sunday show on a Monday by a columnist. I think there's still enormous power in the hands of a few people, and they have to be responsible about it. But, I think it's much more open today than it was in the old days when you had parties, and you sort of used a journalist of high caliber to get a cross a point, at least we know about it now.
A. Hunt: I think your point in the historical sweep is right, but it's not eh most relevant. I think the most relevant is to compare, you have to look at modern politics, since the advent of television I think has changed so tremendously. Before you had parties, and you had other filters which really have been tremendously weakened today. And for better or worse, and many days I think it's for worse, the media plays that function. So I think the comparison is really much more to 20 or 30 years ago. And it seems to me that no matter how you cut it, if you look at standards and values today, in the broad sweep of our business, they are lower than they were before.
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Steve, could I just say a quick thing about this, and we've talked about this. A lot of people talk about Teddy White's books, and his approach to campaigns. And usually people say Teddy White brought journalists into the back room and we then talked much too much about what the consultants were doing, and what was going on behind the scenes. But, if you go back to the Teddy White books there were two other things he did, that I think we now need to learn from. The first is, he paid enormous attention to what politicians said, and took it very seriously. I learned this when I was writing Why Americans Hate Politics, and needed to find a speech from back then, from somewhere between '60 and '72. Almost always Teddy White had a full page of this speech, the important parts of the speech, and then an analysis of what the candidate meant, said, how it compared to how other people were saying at the time.
The other thing he did really well, especially in the 1960 book, is he used a campaign to paint a portrait of the country. First chapter, Making Of The President 1960 is about the 1960 census. And rather than being an uninteresting recitation of numbers it's a wonderful fleshing out of what the 1960 census told us about our country. And it seems to me that if we went back and wanted to learn the lessons about what we might do now, to me those two are central to how you cover a campaign better, and how you use a campaign to do other useful things.
Q: Tom Mann of Brookings. I like to just pursue this a little bit, because I'm wresting with whether journalism basically reflects the state of politics, or politics reflects the state of journalism. What the sort of nature of the interaction is between the two. And if we're unhappy with certain aspects of public discourse, do we have a better shot at dealing with it through the state of politics or the state of journalism? I mean, look at politics in recent years, we've got ideological polarization, the decline of moderates, Tom Foley replaced by Newt Gingrich. We look at the press, we see TV news magazines, Crossfire, Hardball, the scramble for micro-audiences, which reinforces the clash of ideological extremes, the sort of screaming at guests, the demeaning of people in public life, the contempt for politicians.
And I would argue 1998 brought that to the fore. It was the worst of times for politicians, and the worst of times for political journalism and pundits. So the question is, how do you break the cycle? Do we have a better shot, as Al suggested at his initial remarks, and E.J.'s Why Americans Hate Politics suggests that if we have real things to argue about, if ideas matter, if there are sort of major substantive differences, will this drive politicians to talk about things that reporters will then back off their modes of coverage, or are we going to have to sort of change the norms of political coverage?
J. Martin: I think it's in the hands of the voter there, and what happened, the wisdom up until that point of competing media was that there's an insatiable appetite for juicy details about sex and indignation, and wasn't everybody surprised when the public got sick of it. They really did. And even the fact that they are discussing negativity reflects a public reaction to an extremely rude successful candidates who came in and behaved rudely in office to the point where the government came to a standstill because people would not deal with one another, and the public reacted against it. There's always a danger in saying the press, and I think all of us, everybody, surely every citizen agrees, you don't have a press saying, hey, this is what things should be like, and therefore we'll represent them this way, and ignore what isn't. You have the voter saying, I've had enough of this, it's too sleazy, it's too negative, or whatever the voter chooses to say.
S. Hess: Are we being awfully generous to the voter when, in fact, had not half of them come out and vote. You know, we've just gone through this primary period where everybody said, isn't it wonderful, John McCain, for other reasons, inspired people, and so forth, and so on, and what was the vote? On the Republican side, 13.6 percent; Democratic side where they didn't have John McCain, 10 percent, and so forth. You know, I just wonder the degree to which--
J. Martin: But that's something that Mr. Dionne wrote about.
S. Hess: Would you like to pick up on that Mr. Dionne?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: Tom and I were talking about this last week. I've always loved Barney Frank's line where a voter at a public event asked him a very obnoxious question, and Frank looked out at the audience and said, you know, we politicians are no great shakes, but you voters are no day at the beach either. And he still gets reelected. I think in a more marginal district he might not have said that, although with Barney he might have.
You know, I think there is an inconsistency in the way voters perceive the political system in that you find a lot of times the same voter says these politicians fight too much, are not really about getting things done, and then the same voter might criticize the same politicians and say they're too cozy and close together, and they agree on everything. Now, some of that is clearly a failure of the politicians themselves, and the message they're sending to people. They're fighting about things that don't matter in their own interest, or in a politician's interest, and the people suspect that behind the scenes there, they're on the take, or just care about campaign money.
But I think there is a problem that an awful lot of political coverage is now sort of pandering to a sort of phony populism. And I think that journalists and politicians in this era should beware of a phony populism that says, whatever the passing mood out there is towards politics is inevitably right because these voters know more than we here in Washington do. And I just think a lot of people who say things like that are faking it. They don't believe it. So, in some ways, it's worse than phony populism. But I do think there are things about politics, the nature of the advertising, which we talked about at another session last week, and the nature of the subjects on the table.
But the last point is, the odd thing at this moment, and it's a little bit the reverse of what Al said, I agree with him about his academic politics line and the stakes. On the other hand, I think we're also going to see a lot of extremely harsh stuff this year because the stakes, in terms of partisan control, in this election are so high, the three branch election, the presidency, the House, possibly the Senate, but certainly the House, and the future of the Supreme Court. And so there will be more temptation to break the rules of etiquette or any other kinds of rules in this election by the partisans than there normally is.
And it's not clear whether that's going to raise or cut turnout, because the one thing we know is that we don't fully know how negative campaigning affects turnout because it can vary a lot from campaign to campaign. But negative campaigning reveals a really important issue at stake. It can actually raise turnout. Under other circumstances, it tends to cut it down.
C. Matthews: I think the change in the media powerful. We were out in California months ago, and somebody pointed out, all the technology we were using in that instant didn't exist 30-40 years ago. We're on a cell phone listening to the last debate, and one of the participants, John McCain, is participating on cable TV which didn't exist before CNN with a satellite transmission. So all this is different. I grew up in North Philadelphia, where my grandfather would read the Bulldog or the Inquirer every night. He would go out for his five-mile walk with his cigar because he couldn't smoke the cigar in the house. He would walk in his pea coat and his hat, and he would walk for five miles in the neighborhoods you wouldn't believe in today, and he would come back, get the Bulldog, and he'd sit and he'd read it. He'd read the Inquirer, the first edition, or when Al was waiting for the Bulletin in the old days, I think I was delivering the Bulletin when I was working for him.
But the way people behave now is, people are interested in politics, that subset of the subset who vote, they tend to come home, I think, and eat dinner, they tend to be empty-nesters, they have kids who have grown, and they tend to turn on the TV around 7:30ish, not 7:00. They'll catch Crossfire, they may catch my show, or O'Reilly, or something like that. They tend to look for what I think is what they used to get, these are politically interested people. I saw them in Africa when I was in the Peace Corps, these are the old guys under the trees arguing politics. Not everybody cares about politics as an avocation or an anodyne. They vote. And a lot of people who vote don't talk about it.
But those who do and care about it, like people here probably, looking for--the evening newspaper died because of transportation problems. You could not get a paper home with the stock information after 3 o'clock. You have to print a paper in the morning to get it out in the afternoon. So, we don't have an evening paper anymore. So people wanted that way to sort of digest the food that day, read the paper in the morning, get the news that day, then catch up on it a little bit, but mainly savor it and watch the columnists, James J. Kilpatrick in the old days, these great columnists would argue the right and left. And you'd get that in the paper alone under your mantlepiece around 7:30 or 8:00.
Now you get it on TV. Now, you get it in a much more agitated state because television is much more fast-paced. And if you go slow, and I am constantly being warned by my people, do not interrupt, and be nicer, and to smile more. I'm always being yelled at, smile, stop interrupting, so they know what they're doing. And our best guests are the serious people like Germond and Gergin, and even Hitchins [sp] to some extent on a good day, they tend to be the more slower talkers, the more serious, cerebral types, at least in their manner. But we're all trying to reach that daily newspaper, evening newspaper paradigm, and I think that's what evening television is about. It's louder, it's faster but we're trying to reach that sense where a grown-up who cares about his or her country could sort of digest and savor and realize the arguments, the sharpness of the opinion differences, sometime in the early evening, and that's what we're all trying to do with minimal success, I suppose.
A. Hunt: I think Tom raises a fundamentally important question, and I agree, 1998 really was the bottom. And whatever you're trying to do, Chris, you're not adding to the value of people by and large. It's very entertaining, it may attract audiences, it's not journalism. And I think we ought to just acknowledge that to start with. And, as to what we do about it--
C. Matthews: I don't acknowledge it because most people get their information from television, not from the Journal. And they get information because they listen to these argument shows, including Capitol Gang, and they try to find out information in any way they can, through osmosis, sometimes through arguments. So I don't think they get their information primarily from news reports anymore.
A. Hunt: I agree. And, Chris, you have the same First Amendment rights as--
C. Matthews: No, the information they get from programs like mine not newspapers they don't read.
A. Hunt: You don't have the same journalistic values and standards is all I'm saying. Now, what you do about it, not very much. There's very little you can do. One of the few things I disagree with, and Steve and Judith's marvelous book is, I think the National News Council was a bad idea. I know it's rare when I ever disagree with Steve Hess, and I'm probably wrong on that. So, I don't think that's a good solution. I certainly don't want government involved. I wish we had more of the kind of criticism that a Ken Auletta brings to the table rather than just reporting on it. You know, sit back and thoughtful, more thoughtful critiques of what we do. But I think basically what we want to do now is try to just not make it a lot worse. That's a terribly pessimistic view.
S. Hess: Al.
Q: Al Vecchione, former president McNeil-Lehrer, now retired. Without getting into a First Amendment discussion, I would like to ask each member of the panel if they think there's a need for a greater journalistic accountability? It seems to me that that's kind of the issue we're talking about, especially in this new all powerful technology world. And, if so, I suppose, how do you achieve it?
S. Hess: E.J., would you like to talk first?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I suppose the answer to that question is always yes, and probably more yes now than ever, to paraphrase his old boss' slogan. You know, what worries me, to go back to what Al and Chris were talking about, the problem is, if you looked at television in the Clinton scandal, was this difficulty that people had distinguishing between what was true and what was simply being alleged. Tom Rosensteel [sp] and Bill Cobbage [sp] wrote, I think, a very good book on the problem with journalism where they distinguish between investigative reporting and the journalism of a surgeon. And I think one of the problems with the fast-paced TV show, and I was on some of those shows, is that stuff gets tossed out in the middle of a broadcast which may or may not be true. And when you're dealing with serious allegations against somebody that can be a very big deal. And you can go through periods where something seems to be true on one day, the famous story of the dress, where the journalism turned around, and around, and around. It finally turned out the famous dress existed. There were other charges made that were absolutely untrue. And it does seem to me that the problem with argument as a substitute for the old-fashioned rules of journalism is that in a certain style of argument, sort of the veracity of what's said can go by the wayside.
Similarly, the problem of standards on the web, where you can learn an awful lot of good, true stuff on the web. And I use it a lot, and I like it. But right now we still don't have as clear a sense--I think a lot of users of the web, and I've found this myself, where I picked up something and almost used it, in one case, I almost used it in my language column, and an editor sort of looked up something else and said, I don't think that's true. And we went back and discovered that this particular bit of information which wasn't earth-shattering, but it just turned out to be wrong.
And so, I think we're at a moment where there was a certain confidence, well-placed or misplaced, in the people who were kind of vetting the news, and editing the news, that's not there anymore. And democratization of discussion is good, but facts are still facts. And you want an argument rooted in things that are true. And I think that's where you need accountability. I don't have any good answer on how you achieve it, but I think that's one of the problems I worry about.
C. Matthews: One of the problems is, and why it's so hard to get facts is because there's about, what, four or five, you count them, quality newspapers that you can really rely on the absolute truth of the statements being made, the facts being presented, reported, and the wire services. And when I have a pile of clips come in to me and I say, let's see the wires, I don't want to see the new York Post, I don't want to see the Times, the Washington Times, I want to see reporting from the major quality papers and the wires. And this is what we rely on as facts, and this is the standard we apply.
The danger of that is, of course, it's getting to be a narrower and narrower group of sources, reports. You know, somebody could get a story wrong on the wire. Somebody 23 years old doesn't have a historic context, knocks out a story in a week, and it becomes a piece. Sometimes the Post will run on a Monday a wire story from the weekend which is just really not edited with any kind of completeness. And that does become a fact. I remember the Alger Hiss case was reported as if it was still controversial. I mean, it's not, it's a fact of his guilt. And, it is a very thin line of truth deciders that we're all relying on in television, and that more and more TV is relying on a lower and lower base of actual fact checking and editorial work.
And that is a problem, I'll tell you, and I think some people, and I guess we'll be responsible for it, but most of the time I keep saying to my producers, and they're all very young, right out of college, give me a wire story, give me Reuter's, give me AP, give me a quality newspaper, the Times, the Post or the Journal, or the LA Times, and don't give me anything else but that as a fact, and I'll take that as a fact. Everything else, we'll just talk about it here, but don't give it to me. And this is a problem because there used to be 20 or 30 probably ways to check a story like that.
A. Hunt: But it's not unknown on argument shows to say, let's assume--we don't know this yet, but let's assume X is true, and then it's off to the races. And it turns out X is not true, and you have just filmed--
S. Hess: Judith?
A. Hunt: --a whole discussion based on something that turns out not to be true.
S. Hess: I did Crossfire once, I didn't like it much.
J. Martin: I was just thinking to add to that point that, indeed, there have always been scandal-mongers, there have always been penny awfuls and gossip and things said, and it just gets around more when it's on the Internet than when it's over the back fence.
But I remember, I think the change in the so-called quality group that you could rely on is not only that it's shrunk, but that it has discovered the, have you heard those awful things that people less responsible are saying story, and once that story broke, you could get all those juicy, untrue, unvetted, maybe true, maybe not things in your so-called quality paper. And that's the line I worry about. That the people who are vetting are also talking out of the other side of the mouth.
S. Hess: Al.
A. Hunt: Well, I agree, Judith, and I think that that's what I referred to earlier in 1998, there was a Gresham's law of journalism. And I think the bad sometimes doesn't drive out the good, but it dominates the good. And, yes, we ought to be more accountable, but I don't know, as I said a few moments ago, I don't really have any grand ideas about how to achieve that.
S. Hess: Do you have a question?
Q: Julia Malone of Cox Newspapers. Just a couple of things I'm wondering if you all could bounce around that don't seem to quite fit. One is, we had the fact that Newsweek hesitated to go with the Monica Lewinsky story until Drudge reported it. Maybe it would have done it anyway, maybe it was just a matter of timing, I don't know. But it does seem to be a number of issues, the dress would be another one, where there are things that were not reported by the big press. It was then later reported after being edged on.
The other one is that to what degree are we feeling the after-taste of the Clinton administration? Chris likes to call it the dirty bathtub ring of the Clinton administration, and the distaste for the whole scene there. And because it is so distasteful what happened, therefore, we're sort of turning on the messenger in this case?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: In terms of the reporting, the initial reporting, and Al and everybody else can correct my memory, yes, Drudge reported that Newsweek had sat on Mike Isikoff's story, but the first reporting of that in a big way in the mass media was when, I think it was the Washington Post, and ABC News learned that Starr was, indeed, investigating this. That was the hook that created the front page story, and then we were off. So that even with Drudge putting that on his web site, what finally got it into print was the fact that Starr was investigating it, which is actually quite, if you will, in keeping with traditional journalistic rules. And then Newsweek, once the Post had run this story, ran Mike Isikoff's story on the web after we learned that Starr was investigating it.
In terms of the reaction to the story, my sense is that one of the strange things about this story is, you have a reaction, a 30 to 35 percent of the country reacts strongly against Clinton and says Clinton caused the ring in the bathtub, and 30 to 35 percent of the country says the investigation and the way this came about caused the ring in the bathtub, and it's really the fault of the people who went after Clinton. And I think one of the reasons this story is so difficult for the country is, there is agreement that we really didn't like going through that year, but there is total disagreement on--everybody agrees Clinton messed up, and then you go on from there and say, who bears most of the burden of why we went through that hell. And so, we even argue about the nature of the argument. And that's a recipe for a lot of bad feeling.
S. Hess: The last question to Louis Cabot, former chairman of the board of this illustrious institution.
Q: Thank you, Steve.
I'm one of these people who watches Jim Lehrer. Am I the only one? What's happened to that--what do you guys have to say about that type of television journalism?
E.J. Dionne, Jr.: I think the ratings are good. I don't think that anything bad has happened to the ratings of Jim Lehrer.
A. Hunt: I gave my wife for ten years to Jim Lehrer. And I continue to watch it, and I still think it is, along with Ted Koppel and a few other things--
S. Hess: Al, what would you have, would you have as many as two million listeners on an evening? So the answer, Louis, is about 10 million would be watching each of the competing network news. So 30 million would be watching ABC, CBS, and NBC, 2 million would be watching. And, by the way, then you start listening to National Public Radio, and you start getting the same sorts of audiences. No matter how you slice it, there seems to be about 2 million people in the United States who care for that sort of presentation.
A. Vecchione: Doesn't NPR claim 10 million a week? I don't know how they count that. But, in other words, there is still a substantial subpopulation.
E.J. Dionne, Jr: Correct me if I'm wrong, Chris, I think most cable shows would love to have an audience the size of Jim Lehrer.
C. Matthews: It's a good number, it's a very good number. It's all niche, everything is niche now, and everybody has their own tent. And that's one of the tents. But it's great to be here as one of the Washington Generals. Remember the white guys that played the Globetrotters.
A. Vecchione: I think the other number that's relevant is, on an average night, about 2 million people watch, but about 7 million people watch at least once a week, and something like 25 million people watch at least once a month. So it's a wider pool, it's just that everybody isn't watching every night.
C. Matthews: Well, a lot of it has to do with speed, and I think some people like their news more slow and some like it faster.
A. Hunt: Some like it more accurate.
C. Matthews: No, no. That's not exactly true.
S. Hess: I thought you were going to say, some like it hot, Chris.
C. Matthews: In prime time we have to move a little quicker.
S. Hess: It seems the time I did do Crossfire, my wife said, please don't do that. And I said, it's a very important subject, and the other guest is John Anderson, so I'll be just fine. So, I got on Crossfire, and after about--it's like picadores, they go after you. After about two minutes, I realized that I was shouting like everybody else. And what made it more important, after four minutes, I realized I was having a very good time. I never went on again.
We bring this program to an end. There's just one thing I still want to read to you, and that was the dedication. Two years ago, the book was dedicated for Nathaniel Cody Hess on his first birthday. Now the new is for Nathaniel Cody Hess, now you are two. So this book and this program is for all of our children. We hope that they will live in a etiquette world, in a decent world, a nicer world. They can shout at each other.
C. Matthews: I think Michael Caine was the greatest example of good etiquette when he won the Oscar for Best Actor this year, who spent his entire five minutes, I think he asked for extra time, to pay personal credit to each of the people that he had beaten, including Haley Osment, and I thought that was a wonderful example of great political etiquette. And I think in politics winners should be as good as that.
S. Hess: Now, if you want to continue the conversation, I do a Brookings chat room tomorrow, I think it's 2 o'clock. We can have more conversation in that way. We have somewhere a copy of our little home movie that we made for our four panelists, you have not seen it, so you'll see it for the first time. And we had a good time. And I'm deeply grateful to all these folks.
I need to say one other things about them, another common denominator, one of the first Eisenhower cabinet meetings, here he was, the general had never been involved with all these political types before, and afterwards people had left, and Richard Nixon, the Vice President, was still there, and Eisenhower said, you know, I've been trying to figure out these people, these political people. Some are very bright and some are dim. Some have a great sense of humor, and some don't. But I have finally figured out the common denominator is, they all married above themselves. We have a panel of people who have marvelous spouses, great children, and I hope that you'll come back again.
Thank you.
[Applause and end of event]