Joe Laments the Lack of ‘Quality’ Candidates Running for President
RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
SCARBOROUGH: “You know, Doris, what’s depressing is not just candidates that are there but I may sound like an old man here but I’m not. You can say this objectively by looking at the experience of the candidates out there. We just don’t have the quality candidates that we once had. If you’re on the left. LBJ and remarkable experiences that LBJ had in the House and then running the Senate. By the time he became president of the United States, he knew how to pass historic reforms. On the right, you look at Ronald Reagan who ran a union. It was an actor’s union. Ran a union. Went around the country for a decade talking on the chicken and mashed potatoes circuit for General Electric and got connected to Middle America and then he ran one of the biggest and most complex states for eight years. And then you look at who is running now and certainly on the Republican side the top is filled with novices and it seems like most of the second tier are a couple guys who got into the second and they got into the Senate and started running for president of the United States. There aren’t the liberal lions of the Senate or conservative lions of the Senate and one of the things I complained about is Republicans, my party, they don’t want to get elected. Go to the Senate and learn how to become good senators and actually change Washington from inside out.”
GOODWIN: “I couldn’t agree with you more, Joe. I think there’s something about the people who are joining the political class today, maybe it has to do with fund-raising, maybe with public lives being exposed. That idea that you would join an institution like the house or the Senate and make it your life and love it. I mean, that’s why I had so many fun helping with the forward of this book about teddy Kennedy and the lion in Senate that they wrote because it showed a time when the people who were there — you were there in ‘94. That’s the time when the revolution took place. Republican party was united in goals unlike it being pulled apart right now. The Democrats put up a good fight. Compromises were made. Legislation got passed. Minimum wage, child health legislation despite differences. People went to dinner. They sang together. There was a sense of pride and pleasure in being a politician. I think that’s why the benches are so narrow now or so small right now. You don’t have that same joy in politics anymore. It’s a really scary thing in a democracy.”
SCARBOROUGH: “It really is. I had one of the most conservative voting records in the Senate by all standards. But my best friends were on the democratic side of the aisle. We sat and we would talk and we would figure out how to hammer out compromise. That doesn’t seem to be working anymore. I know this will be hard for you to take this jump. I talked about how we look at Donald Trump and looking at Ben Carson and power of celebrity. I remember reading about the contempt that Harry Truman had for JFK and of course LBJ and Ike. They saw him as a lightweight as a pretty boy as daddy’s boy. There were complaints in 1959 and 1960 that JFK was all about celebrity and all about good looks and this was taking politics in the wrong direction. Is there any analogy to 1960, changing of American politics then, and what we’re seeing celebrity in overdrive?”
GOODWIN: “I think there is in the sense that when that debate took place between Nixon and JFK, something changed when JFK went out on the campaign trail. Before that he was getting good crowds. People listening to him. Suddenly something electric happened. People are screaming. Girls are jumping up and down. It was if he had come through that television screen and become a celebrity. I think that’s the power of television. You saw it first then and then you’ve seen it later. That was the moment. Now we’re certainly seeing it now and people by the tens of thousands go out to see people in part to be at the place where a celebrity is to take a selfie of themselves where a celebrity is and they are celebrities themselves. I mean, politics is about serious matter. Of course it matters if you have charisma but that’s different from celebrity.”
