Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - John Dickerson on The Presidency Post Corona

Episode Date: February 12, 2021

In addition to 60 Minutes, John  recently published his third book, the New York Times Best-Seller The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency. John’s a long-time and award-winning television and print journalist. He was previously co-anchor of CBS This Morning. Before that, he was the anchor of “Face The Nation”. John is also a contributing writer to The Atlantic and co-host of Slate’s “Political Gabfest” podcast and host of the Whistlestop podcast. John has also moderated presidential debates. And was a long-time correspondent for Time Magazine, where he covered the White House.

A disaster is a bad time to be handing out business cards, and you have to build an operational tempo. You think about that because you know the surprise is coming. Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. Will a new American president lead us to a post-corona return to normal? Or has the American presidency become an impossible job, at least impossible during a global pandemic? It is, according to 60 Minutes correspondent John Dickerson, the hardest job in the world.

Well, today we sit down with that 60 Minutes correspondent and put it to him. In addition to 60 Minutes, John recently published his third book, the New York Times bestseller, The Hardest Job in the World, The American Presidency. John's a longtime and award-winning television and print journalist. He was previously co-anchor of CBS This Morning. Before that, he was anchor of Face the Nation. John is also a contributing writer to The Atlantic and co-host of Slate's Political Gab Fest podcast and host of the Whistle Stop podcast. Whistle Stop is one of my favorite podcasts, by the way. If you're a political history junkie, I highly recommend it. John also

has moderated presidential debates, and he was a longtime correspondent for Time Magazine, where he covered the White House. At a more practical level, we also talked to John about how he does his job day-to-day as a 60 Minutes journalist in the midst of a pandemic. And what about the way he does his job now and how changes in television news will outlive the pandemic. Has the American presidency finally met its match in a global pandemic? This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome John Dickerson to this Post-Corona conversation. Hi, John. Hello, Dan. Great to be with you. Good to be with you. So, John, before we jump into the substance of our conversation, I'm very curious. You're a correspondent for 60 Minutes. You're a prolific writer.

You're a very active podcaster. Are listeners always interested in how our guests' jobs have been transformed by the pandemic. Like how you have this very busy job and it was done very much one way for a very long time. And then it's March of 2020, a switch is flipped and you have to say, oh my gosh, I got to do what I do dramatically differently. Tell me what that was like and how you've done it. Well, in some ways it's made the job better. And in some ways, of course, it's impossible. So just as a editorially, you can't go out into the country the way you used to and try to get a sense of where voters are and what they're feeling and what's kind of happening on the ground. As you know quite well, that can

sometimes throw you off. You can go talk to a bunch of people out in the country and you can think things are one way and it turns out you've just got an unrepresentative sample. But nevertheless, it's very hard to really feel like you're in touch with what you're talking about when it comes to politics without getting out into the country and seeing how politics is being, you know, getting that one input that you put into your calculation about what's happening in politics. When it comes to doing stories for 60 minutes, we've pretty much, I mean, obviously foreign travel has been killed. And so my first two stories were in France and Italy. I mean, so that's done. In the States,

what it's meant has been, there's a kind of margin that grows around the actual production of the story. The number of days you have to go somewhere and be quarantined, the number of days you have to go and get tested. So everything takes longer. So you're still doing a lot of travel. Yeah. It's just much less efficient.

Exactly. And then you learn to interview television screens, essentially. So if you can't travel to do an interview, you set it up in a studio where they have a shot of you that looks like you're talking to a human being, but project in a way when we're talking much the way I'm projecting right now. And it doesn't seem conversational. So that adds some complexity, but, uh, you know, assuming you have a good enough camera and, and, and the system, you can appear by remote on any of the CBS shows that I work with, um, you know, CBS this morning or Sunday morning, and I can face nation. I can appear as a, you know, talking head, um, in a way that is not perfect. It doesn't look like a studio that you might've rented in Des Moines. Um, but it's not bad and everybody allow, it makes allowances for the era of COVID. And so you can do your, your, uh, hit on television from your office.

Right. And that costs a lot less. I've been struck, and it gives you a lot more flexibility in your schedule. I've been struck by how tolerant television viewing audiences have become about the sort of homespun quality to television production these days. And just fully comfortable seeing people they view as kind of celebrity journalists always in a polished setting actually just sitting in their home office or bedroom or you know and doing these interviews and it's just like totally normal now yeah and and in fact we shouldn't go back to the other way it was told once to me and i think this

is true that when mtv uh arrived on the scene, it inculcated a whole new generation of viewers to a much jerkier camera style, to much lower recording values, because that was part of the aesthetic. And it created a whole new generation of people who were fine with a kind of less formal aesthetic. And I think the coronavirus is doing that at a warp speed, which is is it's basically allowing everybody to be okay with something that doesn't look so polished. Now, whether they go back to it in the post-corona stage, I don't know. But my guess is that this will be a change that will be with us in some form or another

going forward in broadcast. So let's talk about, I want to talk about your book, The Hardest Job in the World, The American Presidency, which is a terrific book. But one thing I was struck by was the timing of its release. So I, a friend of mine, when the book was first published, a friend of mine said, not knowing that I was familiar with the book, said, oh my gosh, this book is so, the timeliness of this book, I mean, that Dickerson was able to throw this all together in the middle of, you know, leading up to the pandemic, given how hard it is for a president, any president, to run a government in the middle of a pandemic. It's amazing he just did this crash project and got this book done. And I said,

you know, I'm pretty sure John's been working on a version of this book for a very long time. And I know he's written about it a few times before he actually produced the book. So first of all, just could you give us some background on the history of the production of the book? When did you get the idea to do the book? And I remember we had talked about it from time to time. You were sort of dipping in and out of it, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it's one of the things that always fascinated me about the Romney candidacy and still does.

And it's why I interviewed him at such length for the book. And not because he had been a presidential candidate. Actually, in fact, now that I think about it, I don't know that I ever quoted him on what it was like to be a presidential candidate. I wanted to know what it was like to run an organization. Right. As an executive. Yeah.

Romney's executive. As an executive. And also how he saw the opportunities to, um, reshape and rethink the way, uh, an Oval Office is, or an administration is run, given that he'd actually done lots of running of things. But the idea first came to me in the driveway of President George W. Bush's ranch house in Crawford, Texas, in the summer of 2004. I had just finished interviewing him for a cover story that Nancy Gibbs and I wrote for Time Magazine about his presidency. And the interview's over and we're standing in the driveway waiting to get picked up.

And he says, you know, if I were trying to figure out whether somebody could handle the presidency, I'd want to know how they make decisions. Because it's a job where you just make decisions all day long. And what's their process? What do they think about? And how do they do it? And that's why, you know, his view of the job that way is why he named his book Decision Points. And so it was for me the first time I really started thinking about the difference between the job as it actually is, what a president does all day, and then what we talk about on the campaign trail, which tends to be ads and issue groups and hot button issues and all kinds of stuff. But we didn't spend a lot

of time saying, does this person have the qualities that are required in this job? And so I carried that along with me basically through all my presidential and campaign reporting over the years. I wrote a series for Slate magazine about what should we look for in a president. Then I wrote a cover story for The Atlantic in 2019 called The Impossible The Hardest Job in the World, which was based over the years taking these issues and asking about them in debates that I moderated or on Face the Nation or in interviews. The President Obama and his team were fascinated or obsessed with this question about the expectations we have for presidents and whether they are aligned with what the job actually is. And so it was given a real kick by some conversations I had with Obama administration

officials and that Jeffrey Goldberg, who was the editor of The Atlantic when he assigned it, was in the green room of Face the Nation when he'd been a guest on the show. And I gave that article to Senator Romney, and that was the basis for our conversation, which was then the basis for our interview for the book, when I went and redid all the interviews for the magazine and then interviewed a whole mess of other people. And the thing about the timing that is so crazy is that the argument of the book is basically the job is more serious than we treat it during campaigns and that it requires a whole set of attributes that we should think more seriously about as we look at candidates or even as we evaluate presidents to either be tougher on them than we are or have more

context when we evaluate their decision making. And I put my pen down right basically or turned off the computer, whichever metaphor you want, basically seconds before COVID-19 hit. And so COVID-19 ends up being sort of a co-author to the book because all the things that were discovered in terms of the necessity of planning, the necessity of putting a good team in place, decision making, all that stuff I'd written about in the book, not knowing about COVID-19, race relations in America as they played out on the streets. Even the cyber hack that the Russians were behind, that was when I wrote the book, that's what I thought the next big hit would be. One of the arguments of the book based on my conversations with Condi Rice was you got to pay attention to the thing you're not paying attention to because that's- Are you talking about the SolarWinds? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you thought SolarWinds was going to be the, I mean, it makes sense because the SolarWinds, I mean, the big news around SolarWinds was when we were all scattering

because of the pandemic. Well, yeah. Basically, when I was doing my interviews and work after the Atlantic article in preparation for the book during 2019 and 2020, I kept interviewing people. And part of this was because when I went out to Stanford to interview all the Hoover fellows, there was a heavy emphasis on cyber warfare. And I really came out of that thinking the next Black Swan event, which isn't really truly a Black Swan event because Black Swan events are not supposed to be able to predict. And in this case, everybody was predicting it. But when I, when I talked to Condi Rice in particular, she said, what you should ask the next president, because I started every interview by saying, what's the one question you would want me to ask somebody if I

were interviewing them for the presidency? And she said, what is the thing you're not expecting? And what's your plan for it? And what she was trying to get at was, you know, George Bush came into the office with a whole plan to be a uniter president who's going to focus on domestic issues. He's going to reach out to Mexico. His presidency was going off in a direction far different than the one that it went off in. And her point was the presidency is a job of surprises and you don't get to pick the surprises. You have to just be ready for them. And so I thought the big surprise was going to be there was going to be some huge cyber warfare event and it would reorient the way we think about everything and administrations

would have to play catch up and all of that. So I thought that's what we would be facing as the big surprise. I didn't realize it was going to be a pandemic. I remember actually in 2008, during the 2008 Romney campaign, during the primaries, the big issue at the beginning of the primary was Iraq, and Iraq was going off the rails, and McCain had really put himself out there on the surge. And the surge at that point, early in the primaries, had not proved to be the ultimate, ultimately as effective as it was. I mean, it wasn't, there wasn't evidence yet that things were turning around in Iraq. So McCain owned the surge and it was a liability. And then later in the primary, when Iraq started to turn around, one of the big issues was immigration. And McCain had

co-authored McCain-Kennedy, that he had owned the immigration issue. And then that became a huge liability for McCain and also the source of major debate. And here we were hitting on all these issues. And on no one's radar was that we were going to, during the general election, going to be choosing a president, during the general general election, going to be choosing a president. During the general election campaign, going to be choosing a president during a global financial crisis. That's right. And so you mentioned Condi talking about Bush. I mean, during the 2000 presidential campaign, I don't think there was ever a serious conversation about terrorism.

I think you had mentioned either in the book or in one of the pieces you wrote that, I mean, maybe there was one mentioned by Gore during one of the debates about terrorism. I think you mentioned either in the book or in one of the pieces you wrote that, I mean, maybe there was one mentioned by Gore during one of the debates about terrorism, but it was almost like in passing. You're exactly right. It was not asked and did not come up in any of the debates or in any major polling during the 2000 election. And you're right. Al Gore mentioned terrorism, but it was just in a laundry list of things. And that that's my sort of key example of how, you know, life comes at you fast when you're when you're a president. And to your point about the global financial collapse from 2007 to 2009. I, as I was working on this book, I was, you know, I would go down what I thought were just like small one block streets. And then I would go down what I thought were just small one-block streets. Then I would go down

and I would see that there was an entire four-lane highway of information and thinking to go do. That really happened on the global financial crisis because what I started to realize in doing interviews around that was just how important it is to have a team in place and to have experts on that team with a variety of kind of knowledge. And this came from interviewing Republicans and Democrats as they talked about that financial crisis. And the scene that opens up that period, that portion of the book is McCain and Bush and Obama meeting in the meeting that McCain called for, and Hank Paulson, the Treasury Secretary, was there. The leaders of Congress were there. And this was basically John McCain tried to stop the campaign and say,

this is too important for politics. Let's all get together and try to figure something out. It was a gambit on McCain's part, and maybe not a crazy one, except for the way it played out, because what happened is they had the meeting and he had nothing to say because he wasn't in the trenches trying to figure it all out. The people who were in the trenches, according to Hank Paulson, it was really helpful to him to have built the relationships with President Bush, with Nancy Pelosi, with John Boehner, with Schumer, or I guess I should say Reid, and with McConnell, because he needed them to trust him. And that couldn't exist if there wasn't a previous relationship that Bush had asked him to build with those leaders.

And that to me was one, and there are a bunch of other parts of that that are important to understand why team building and why relationship building is so important, not just to get the legislation through that you want, that you're promoting, but when the, when it all hits the fan to have people who can operate on a basis of trust, um, to get things done. So let's go back to the origins in terms of the presidency. How would you describe the founders? I don't know the founders conception of the job of the presidency relative to what it has become it was a job basically for emergencies um it was a job where if if there was something that um you know that that basically after the artists confederation

they decided that we were too many. It was an, we were an archipelago. We were a series of States that needed connectivity. And some of that was just basic commerce. And some of it was national defense that we needed a system to, uh, and a person that could have the power to act in secret and act quickly when there were, there were security threats. Um, and so they would have accepted, they would have expected it to be a

very powerful office to be used in very limited circumstances. And that every time a president, and their biggest fear in the world, they had two enormous fears. One was that the ambitions of anybody who would be sufficient to handle the job of the presidency would be, no matter how virtuous they were, would be tempted by being given power. You don't hire people for that job unless they're ambitious. And if you're ambitious, you're susceptible to the problems of being given too much power. And the other thing they worried about was faction. They worried about the mob basically overtaking, well, I guess I should say they were worried about two things, faction, which was just political parties that would break down the ability of Congress to check the president. And then related to that was the idea

that the mob would basically rule, that lawmakers wouldn't seek their conscience and vote their conscience, but they would vote just basically by what the mob wanted. The president was supposed to be a check on that and supposed to act basically by what his character and virtue told him to do, not based on what was popular with the country. So they would be freaked out, frankly, by the scope of the office, by, and by the fact that we just had a president who's basic, when the president said, when president Trump said I could shoot somebody in fifth Avenue and my voters would be fine with it, the, the, the, the founders would have blanched at that because the idea is that you could do something so bereft of virtue and still be powerful would to them be the ultimate corruption of that the kind of power of the mob to rule this important office and not the power of character and virtue

so they were they were basically a bunch of revolutionaries who were very good at getting rid of a monarchy but maybe they hadn't thought fully through what was involved and what was necessary to build a government to actually run a country that has become as big, as powerful globally, as powerful and as complex as this one. Yeah, well, they did. And they were incredibly foresighted on some things and not about others. Their view of human nature and the corrupting power, the corrupting influence of power and the corruption that came with ambition, I mean, nailed it, right? Just absolutely nailed it. And the system they set up, I mean, it's protected us like right now in that regard. Exactly. And their fear about faction,

the idea that you would have allegiance to the tribe over to the public good, that also was their great fear. And we've seen that play out. And what they did not expect, I think, as much was that you would have... What they thought is that Congress would be the bully and that Congress would grab all this power to itself and not give much to the president because the president under the, there was a presidency under the Articles of Confederation. It was just the saddest ceremonial job

and it had no real power and they thought that that might happen. So they thought that Congress would be too jealous of its power and for so, so long, Congress was jealous of its power. And so they would never have imagined that Congress would give so much power over to the executive, either for national security reasons because of the Cold War and then the war on terror, or for political reasons, because they would have thought the parties would have been mixed enough that they wouldn't just basically hand over so much of their power to the leader of their party in the executive branch. So fast forwarding to today and coronavirus, there's a tendency in press, to be highly critical of Trump's management of the crisis. And obviously some of that criticism is, you know, makes a lot of sense. At the same time,

managing a pandemic illustrates how difficult this job has become. And maybe it's not about the occupant, although the occupant matters, but maybe the way this office is structured is a little outdated. What is your view on that? I think, yeah. So I think the office is a little outdated and the way we view it is outdated, and that makes it very hard. And we've basically, because of the way we run our campaigns and because of the way presidents sell themselves in campaigns, we have built up this idea that the president is a super action hero who can just, through the sheer application of the presidential will, can solve problems and do it in an instant. That's obviously not the case. And I spent a lot of time wrestling with this because in some sense, our expectations for the job are too high.

On the other hand, those high expectations are what force political actors into doing the right thing because they don't want to get judged harshly and lose at the election, which is why it's so dangerous to have an electorate that believes in the Fifth Avenue principle. Because if you can shoot somebody in the head and get reelected, what's the motivation to do the right thing? Because there's never any sanction. You get reelected anyway. So that's a key flaw. But the person who helped me adapt my thinking on this is, once again, Mitt Romney. And he basically argued, and and, uh, Eisenhower has argues this and lots of management books too, too, but in the political context, basically Romney

said, you get all the blame and you also get to take all the credit. Um, and that's the deal. That's what you sign up for. And the reason you have to take the blame is it is an organizational principle. It, everybody works below, you know, is the boss is going to get hammered. And so we've got to hustle and fix the problem. We don't spend our time spinning. Don't spend our time trying to paper over this or make it smell nice. Just solve it because he's going to get hammered or she's going to get hammered if we don't actually produce some results. And that that has a kind of organizing force, which is why presidents should be held responsible even when they didn't initiate the thing that happened. So I think there are ways, and the way I think about COVID-19 is, for me, it's basically the first thing that I started thinking about is team building,

which is not what most people thought about. But basically, a president needs to build a team right away, in fact, before they even get elected, arguably, that can handle surprises. And that team in their period of working in the White House needs to be basically given the free reign, but also kept together and kept tight to learn how to work and solve these kinds of thorny issues, because you're going to get them, whether it's a cyber attack or a natural disaster or a pandemic or a war, it's coming. And so you have to think- So the personalities have to be synced. People have to know how to finish each other's sentences. You don't want to be learning about quirks as it relates to someone's personality in the middle of a crisis. Precisely. In fact, there's a great quote from a former FEMA official who said, a disaster is a bad time to be handing out business cards. And yes, you have to build

an operational tempo. So that's one way that you... And you think about that because you know the surprise is coming. And so that's one way in which I think the Trump administration rightfully gets criticized. I think the second thing is you need to know what the main objectives are. And one of the main, main objectives in a public health crisis, according to all the previous CDC manuals and all the individual state manuals for handling a public health crisis is your information to the public needs to be solid. Even if it's not pleasant information, you need to tell people the truth and develop a system of information that they can trust. And when the system changes or when the information changes, you need to say,

we thought A, we now think B. And if you don't have that trust, and basically all of the manuals argue, don't have politicians do it, have trusted officials do it. But when you have so damaged the communications relationship between a White House and the public, you're already on a bad position when you get a pandemic that hits. And then when you go through all of the difficulties that President Trump had when he downplayed the pandemic, when people were seeing the opposite happen, that damaged the number one thing that in this particular instance, you had to keep your eye on. So those are two things that really are specific to his result that a different kind of president

might've handled better. That doesn't mean that COVID would have gone away. It's just two very specific things that are in a different category than just the normal extreme difficulty of handling a pandemic and handling a response with 50 different states and all the other things. And handling, you know, would the CDC have had a better response

under a different administration at the beginning when they chose to come up with their own testing regime that was different from the global one? I don't know. But also the epidemiology community was, their forecasts and their prescriptions were all over the place. So it wasn't like this whole trust the science, quote unquote. It's not that simple.

When you have a range of views of what that means, and, you know, our political leaders are expected to interpret those recommendations, but the idea that they could have implemented every one of those recommendations without contradicting their own policies or contradicting the public health recommendations, depending on the week. I mean, it's not as simple as just empower the public health leadership and let them go. That's right. But in those instances, since public health officials always know that it's a shifting situation, what you say is, here's what we know today. Tomorrow, we may know something different, but this is the best thing we know today, and we're taking actions A, B, and C. And then tomorrow, we may take different actions. It's not because we are,

you know, hopefully it's not because we don't know what we're doing. It's because this is a moving picture. I should be interviewing you about this because you dealt with complicated moving pictures in an instance where you maybe couldn't say every single last thing that you knew, but where you could tell a lot and that basically what you know in the moment can build trust, even if you have to change the next day. So I think there is a way, what you say is exactly right, which is that it's not like the epidemiologists had a perfect plan. But even given that, what we know doesn't work is when you basically say things that are totally not true about speed of testing, how the virus is

going to disappear, et cetera. How much harder is the job of a president relative to a chief executive in other government structures, like in parliamentary systems? Because here you have a federal system. So the president is also dependent in the middle of a public health crisis, which is different than a national security crisis. In the middle of a public health crisis, which is different than a national security crisis. In the middle of a public health crisis, the president has the bully pulpit, has the pastoral or the ministerial role that you talk about in the book, but has to be dependent on all these governors who are all going to do their own thing. And not to mention the over 2,000 county health commissioners. And I mean, it's a very

decentralized system, which has its virtues. But in a situation like this, to expect the president to be the sole voice in the midst of a highly decentralized model, it's not so simple. No, it's not so simple. And also, you can imagine many ways in which you don't want it. In other words, a federal mask mandate might be necessary and it might even be good policy. But if you're going to get that mask mandate to really take hold, it's going to have to be particularly against people who are resisting it. Well, you're going to want that information to come from trusted local leaders, people you know and who share your sensibilities and who kind of know the

difference of your local community. A distinct and separate point is how masks became, and it's because of the way our politics work today, that everything becomes an identity fight. And so debates that should be over public policy end up being about the most emotional or they touch on some of our most emotional feelings. And that's one of the dangers of the way this was handled too. But, but you're, you're exactly right. It is one of the big complexities. And you have, you know, and you see the Biden administration is wrestling with that too. And they believe as, as much as anybody in the power and necessity of a federal response and

federal coordination. So it's going to be, it is certainly one of the things that presidents have to wrestle with. And it's also a relatively modern thing. I mean, so Woodrow Wilson didn't speak much about the 1918 flu, Spanish flu. In part, he was gone for part of it. In part, he also, there's also a, um, fascinating side story about him having gotten it and perhaps rushed through the end of, uh, the end of the world war one negotiations because he had it, but that's another story. But, um, but there was not an expectation that the federal government would handle, um, handle this. And that basically it is a part of the post-New Deal turning of the country to the federal government for answers that has built up, that has basically made the presidency bigger. Both we turn to the president for actual answers. And then,

as you were saying, that pastoral and ministerial role, we've also increasingly turned to the president as a place for comfort. And in some ways, that makes sense. In other ways, it's overloaded the job and therefore should either change our expectations about the job or we should find some way to redistribute the power because it's too much for one person to handle. So I want to spend a moment on one part of the job that seemed, of the executive branch, that seemed to work during, not the only, but one of the jobs, one of the functions in which the executive branch seemed to work during the pandemic, which was Operation Warp Speed. Which I still believe, as much attention as it has gotten, it has received, I don't think it's gotten enough attention. It's pretty extraordinary, right? So some of the data is worth rehashing. It's a public-private vaccine development initiative. It was launched by the president,

by a presidential order in May of 2020. So not that long after the pandemic was in full sight, it was an industrial mobilization. I mean, comparable to World War II when, you know, the federal government was taking over auto plants and electrical manufacturing plants and building, you know, an arsenal. It was like that. And from the beginning, its mission was development, manufacturing, and distribution of vaccines. So, so far it's produced and delivered something like 50 million vaccine doses with hundreds of millions, you know, obviously on the way to 97,000 certified receivers. That's like an extraordinary 97,000 spots around the country where this is being sent

to the executive branches had to work with FedEx and UPS and get all these distribution, private sector distribution channels lit up. And the goal, Operation Warp Speed's goal was 20 million doses by the end of 2020. And as I said, they're well over that. And I would argue that, I mean, people compare it to World War II. I just did to the world war ii mobilization the debt defense product defense production act the turning on all these all these uh manufacturing plants in detroit and whatnot but once the equipment was manufactured during world war ii it was basically sent to the department of army and department of navy they basically had one client they had to deal with here they had to distribute to these close to 100,000

distribution sites around the country. So super complex. And not to mention the expediting of the drug approval, the vaccine approval process. So that was incredibly complex. So we all say the presidency, or you argue the presidency, is not necessarily equipped for this kind of crisis. And certainly the occupant had serious limitations. And yet, this seems to have worked. Yeah. Well, yes.

Although you did have existing channels for the production and creation of drugs. So in fact, and proof of that is that Pfizer basically went its own way. So, so, and this is really important because what you're trying to figure out is what are the different gradations of presidential success? And this is definitely on the plus side. And, and that means we should be out, there was fast movement. There was a, the goal of synchronizing public and private was very smart, taking advantage of existing capabilities in the drug manufacturing process, but creating a market and basically making promises. Yeah, throwing tons of money at these drug companies.

And so that was smart. By the way, people were critical of how much the administration was committing to these drug companies because they're saying, look, a lot of these vaccination processes won't go anywhere and you're wasting all this money. And the administration, I think, made the right calculation. We will not be criticized for having wasted some money in pursuit of getting drugs through the process. We will be criticized if we don't do enough. That's right.

Right. And then there were some other complexities because in order to spread the risk, they ended up not being able to buy as much of the ones that went. Pfizer, for example, they didn't buy as much as they thought, because if Pfizer didn't work, then they'd be out of luck when some other thing worked and they hadn't created the market for it. So yes, I think, you know, I think you can, so it deserves credit and it is interesting. It doesn't deserve all the credit, of course, because Pfizer went and did its own thing. There was also a way in which the promise of the vaccine was used to kind of

wish away all the other things that needed to be done in the moment. But it's quite important, as you say, even if you are the most virulent anti-Trump person on the planet to pay, to, to look at what happened with Operation Warp Speed, um, because it should be replicated and, um, and, and, and replicated both, you know, if we have another pandemic, but also, and I, and I haven't studied it as much in this regard, but also just what actually needed to fall away to make this happen. Um, and, um, because there's a lot of wishful thinking that you can basically come in and just kind of like grab the bureaucracy by the scruff of its neck and kind of shake out the inefficiencies and make it go. And there's some way in which operation warp speed kind of feels like it fits in that model.

Um, and, and I don't know if that's a fair way to look at it or if they just basically said by promising the market and investing all this money, that was the big thing that worked and that's kind of all you needed to do and that that was a smart and good thing, but that it didn't require... Because then there have been some complexities, obviously, with the rollout,

which was a logistical, which has not been logistically wonderful. So I think it's a fascinating place to look for just the kind of more balanced view of looking at a presidency. And also, the role of the president in here is not that big. In other words, there are lots of other people who are responsible for the success of this. And that's a model for the way we should think about the presidency is that a president says, go, and then, you know, then it's the people who carry it out that are the ones who really determine whether administration is going to be effective or not.

So let's spend a moment talking about our current president, President Biden. And I strenuously resist trying to evaluate a president when he's just a few weeks into the job. But having said that, I will now violate that rule I have and try to evaluate at least how he has arrived at the presidency. And do you think he arrives as a strong president or a weak president? Because you would think arriving in the middle of a, not only a national crisis, but a global crisis. So he's almost elected in part as the leader who's going to save us from this period that we're in, this very dark period that we're in. You'd think he comes in as a very strong president on the one hand. On the other hand, if you look at the electoral

outcome of the election in which he was elected, he seems to have had no coattails. I mean, it was projected that the Democrats with Biden's coattails would win something like a net of 15 or 20 seats in the House. Nancy Pelosi has a razor thin Democratic majority in the House, about five seats. The Democrats lost most of the competitive races in the Senate, many of which they were supposed to win. In terms of state legislatures, there were up to something like 19 state legislatures in play during this last election. Democrats lost all of them. I've never seen a newly elected president have so little down ballot support that comes into office with his first year.

So how do you make sense of that? Well, I would add just a tiny wrinkle, which is that, I mean, taking control of the Senate ain't nothing. And winning in Georgia matters. Barely taking control of the Senate.'t nothing. And winning in Georgia matters. Barely taking control of the Senate. Well, sure. But it's... Yeah, you're right.

Nobody would have expected that. I mean, well, the point I'm trying to get to is you can argue that Georgia was more about not Donald Trump than pro-Joe Biden, either, and in a couple of different ways. I mean, that it was the animus, I don't know, maybe I'm over my skis there. Well, I guess the power of negative partisanship has to be factored in when you think about a president's coattails. So that, you know, often it's a vote against the other person than for the person who wins. And we certainly saw that in 2016. You had lots of people who voted against Hillary Clinton and not for Donald Trump. So the question is, even in places where Democrats won, were they winning because voters were feeling a special kind of power by what Joe Biden had created? Or were they thinking, I just want to

be done with the Republican Party that I associate with Donald Trump, who has taken over this Republican Party? I think you could argue that actually, as I was arguing for Georgia, I could be arguing it actually either way. Because with Donald Trump out of office, you could imagine Democrats not being as interested in voting and Republicans being really interested in voting to be a check on on Joe Biden. And they couldn't muster that. On the other hand, I think it's hard to make a case that in Georgia was a big groundswell for for Joe Biden in particular. But I think the idea of coattails of the kind that we've seen in in the past would be... I mean, just think about how Obama was elected.

In the middle of a crisis, right? He was elected with a strong House majority. He was elected with a strong veto-proof Senate majority. I mean, filibuster-proof Senate majority. You look at, I mean, there is precedent for, it's more common when a president, when a party changes power, when the White House changes parties, that the new president comes in with, you know, Reagan in 80. So Biden does not seem to have that.

No, but you also talk, you're talking about a far different political landscape in America than with Reagan. I mean, so, you know, Reagan had 144 to some odd Democrats who had won and gone to the House in districts that Ronald Reagan had won. That number is now down to, I don't know what it is with Biden, but it's the split ticket voting is, I mean, it's in the teens or lower of red districts that Joe Biden won in. a systemic reason to have a different kind of politics than we have today. Any member of Congress whose constituents had elected Reagan had to think about those constituents and couldn't be fully liberal.

And the same is true with Republicans who had a Democratic presidential victory in their district. So we have less, we just have much more split calcified parties than we used to. So, um, so you're going to have to, the kind of victory you would have to have now, uh, I mean, I just can't imagine a 60 vote Senate unless it basically lines up so that it's all democratic states that are up, um, in a particular cycle that is a presidential cycle, because you're basically in a position in America now where Senate Senate voting takes place along, uh, presidential lines with Donald Trump won in

2016. There wasn't a single Senator. Uh, I mean, every Republican Senator was elected from States that he won. So you just, without you. So my, my point is that the landscape of politics is different now. Um, and that's one of the challenges for Joe Biden that he faces is, um, there just aren't a lot of Republicans that are gettable for him. Um, just as there weren't any Democrats that were gettable for Donald Trump. I mean, you had basically Joe Manchin, um, and, uh, and Heidi Heitkamp and both of his efforts to try to, um, convince either of the two of them to do anything that he wanted were dismal. I mean, in part because he wasn't that good at it, but also because you can't, you're fighting against the needs of the constituents of those senators.

Um, and that's what Biden's going to come up against, is that voting for something that helps him is going to get real blowback for any Republican senator who does it. So he's weak because he didn't get a bunch of Democratic victories. And he's weak because there aren't a lot of senators who are going to come give him, you know, going to help him get to 60. However, you know, there's a lot of, a lot that can be done in the administrative state that undoes what Donald Trump did and that follows also the blueprint of what Donald Trump did. And so, you know, he's not, he will be able

to change things that, that his constituents really care about just simply through the changing of regulations and what he chooses to enforce and not enforce. So the job still has lots of power, but in terms of the old-fashioned big legislative agenda passing, something's going to have to change because, of course, one of the other things affecting politics today is that, as you say, the margin in the House is thin.

There's no interest in Kevin McCarthy or any Republican member of the other things affecting politics today is that, as you say, the margin in the House is thin. There's no interest in Kevin McCarthy or any Republican member of the House giving Nancy Pelosi victories that are going to help her maintain control of the House. Well, it may also be why, right, we're going to start seeing much more executive order oriented presidencies. I mean, you just look at what Biden's done so far with executive orders. It's a problem. Congress is weak. Yeah. Well, Congress is weak. And as Adam White at AEI explained to me when I was interviewing him for my book, Congress,

in a way, its job is to give away its power. The more legislation it passes puts power in the hands of the executive. So in some ways, it does that. Some ways, also, there's just cowardice and letting the president make decisions that they should weigh in on. But the other thing that we're going to learn a lot more about is not just executive orders, but the rulemaking, which sounds a little boring, but the rulemaking inside the agencies about how to interpret existing legislation. The ways you choose to interpret it, legislation is written more and more,

and the Affordable Care Act was certainly this way, with giving a lot of leeway to the secretaries of the agencies. And in that leeway, you can affect some policy in ways that is more effective than trying to get it through legislation, because you might not ever pass that legislation. Two more questions before we let you go. One, you mentioned AEI. My friend Yuval Levin at AEI, who wrote a terrific piece for commentary about this issue, about the legislative branch is just not as serious as it once was. And it's made a huge mistake in many respects in abdicating a lot of responsibility and authority to the executive branch. It's not what the intention was and it's unhealthy. But he also says that there's, and this is not an ageist point that he makes, but he has made this point, I mean,

in conversations with me, he's talked about it publicly. The fact that we have an older generation in almost every leadership position in our government, in our congressional leadership, in our presidency, means that, in his view, it's illustrative of kind of a lack of energetic ambition about how we think about these offices. And it's kind of extraordinary when you think about it. Biden is 78 years old. If you look at the Senate leadership, Chuck Schumer is 70. The Senate majority whip, Dick Durbin, is 76. The Speaker of the House is 80 years old. The House majority leader, Steny Hoyer, is 81.

Jim Kleinberg, the House majority whip, is 80 years old. And it wasn't that much different with the Republicans. Obviously, Trump is 74. Mitch McConnell is 78. I mean, what is it about that? This was not always the case. And do you think this is a problem? Well, it's funny. You have old leadership and then you have the fact that Joe Biden, I think this is the case. Only a third of the senators were there when he was in the

Senate. So you have like, so the leadership is old, but then you have all these young turnover. So it's kind of the worst of both worlds. I mean, to the extent that we need a reestablishment of norms, it's not bad to have some people with a few, with some experience who kind of, and when you read Mitch McConnell writing about Joe Biden, when he was vice president, their familiarity with the dance steps of legislation might actually get some things done. And McConnell's argument is basically Biden wouldn't try and convince me why I was wrong all the time. He would basically just say, how far can you go? And this is how far I can go. And let's figure out-

Right. And when negotiations fell apart between Obama and Boehner, it was often McConnell and Biden who would step in and salvage the situation. That's right. And that's exactly the context in which McConnell wrote that. So I think what, first of all, Yuval Levin is fantastic. And many you have a new crop of politicians, they are less, in many instances, Lyndon Johnson and other old incentives than in the past. The slow production of useful legislation is not deep in the minds of a lot of the most powerful younger people in the party now. And so you have a different incentive structure for the new Turks too. And that, I don't know how you solve that. You know, I was thinking about that just with the news recently of the passing of George Shultz, right?

He served in, he advised three presidents. He led four cabinet agencies, including state and treasury. You know, Henry Kissinger famously said something like, if there was one person I had to choose in the middle of a crisis that I would invest all my confidence in, it would be George Shultz. And I wonder sometimes if we're not in the George Shultz manufacturing business that our government and our think tank and scholarly communities used to be in. Well, I wonder if you could have somebody that comes in and out of private practice

or private sector as easily as he did. Right, the CEO of Bechtel. Good luck getting confirmed now, being the CEO of a big company that does business all over the world. Right. Exactly. And also he knew the difference

between what you need to know as a CEO and what you need to know in government. Same way Eisenhower knew the difference between different kinds of leadership. That's a smaller point, but it should be easier to come in and out and it should be easier. The glory of public service should be lifted up by both parties so that more people think of it as a, you know, the framers used to talk about, you know, the, oh gosh, was it the golden route to glory or the, which is, you know, if you're ambitious, you should want to be in public service. So we need, it needs to be elevated as a way for a broader group of ambitious people, not just people who are ambitious in a very narrow way. Last question for you, John.

I'm just thinking about, and it's, again, too early to tell, but I'm trying to think about what COVID's impacts, COVID's impact will be on our politics, not long-term, but kind of the near to medium term, which it seems to me it's going to be more than we realize. Much like the global financial crisis, its impact on politics was more and longer than we realized. I mean, I think it's a big part of the reason Donald Trump got elected in 2016, which was almost a decade after the global financial crisis. But there seemed to be something unresolved about the global financial crisis in terms of we got out of it.

The economy recovered. The S&P went on a tear. You know, there was all this easy money because of the Fed's near zero interest rates that never really went away. So Wall Street was back in business and, you know, people were making a lot of money, speculating really, in some cases with free money.

And that was it. And then it was like, what global financial crisis? And the country moved on. And yet, I think, or the elites of the country moved on. But it seemed that big swaths of the electorate never moved on. And when you think about it in that context, maybe Donald Trump's election kind of made sense. And I'm wondering, I was thinking about the model of this sort of what I was talking about before, where on the one hand, Biden, the model of this 2020 election, where Biden gets elected, but the down ballot is not clear cut and it's kind of confusing and

doesn't look like he has a clear mandate. Now, maybe there are other more nuanced reasons for it that you cited, but I just wonder whether or not we're going to deal with kind of the lockdown politics, that people are for some time going to say this isn't right. The way it was managed wasn't right. The fact that the whole economy was frozen, schools were shut down, you know, kids were at home, people weren't working. And yet, you know, some companies flourished during this time and a lot of people got very wealthy during this time and different governors had different rules for the public versus themselves and just i'm i'm being a little

glib here but there just seems to be a lot going on and a lot of understandable anger and it feels to me like it's not going to go away just because everyone's going to get vaccinated. Yeah. Well, what's interesting about the, you know, understanding what the root causes are of the various emotional responses is the most important thing. I think going back to the financial crisis, basically a lot of the inequalities in the system were embedded and exposed by the response to the financial crisis. They were all still there after everybody's housing prices. The values of the portfolios for the most wealthy recovered pretty quickly.

People who had a lot of their wealth in their homes, it didn't recover as quickly. People who had a lot of their wealth in their homes didn't recover as quickly. And so one of the things that I thought was going to happen or that I wrote about and spent some time thinking about on the book when I was looking at the financial crisis was the way in which policy options are constrained. When TARP was first failed in the House, it was in part because of a lot of the roiling forces that you're talking about that ended up in part associating themselves with Donald Trump. And basically the idea that, no, we're not going to bail out the government, even though the government really needs it right now. And that sentiment existed after TARP. And in fact, for a lot of people, was confirmed by

TARP and the people who benefited after it. And that was true on the left as well. When Bernie Sanders said, look, the Wall Street guys get bailed out. But when I come here asking for money for healthcare or college education, nobody thinks it's a big emergency. Well, they should. All of that stuff is still embedded. Post COVID-19, I think a lot of that is also embedded. And the question is, I think there are two branches. One is a values branch. One is a group of people who don't like the nanny state telling them what to do. They have an identity with kind of Donald Trump and his worldview. And to the extent that Donald Trump was kind of anti-masks and anti-smarty-pants epidemiologists, they will associate themselves

with being kind of anti-the response, which is basically emotional more than anything else. And then there's the question of, there were a lot of inequities that were elevated and discovered by COVID-19. Who does the work in American society when everything's going to hell and whether there's any safety net for them that's for people who are playing by the rules and working hard, how protected are they really in American society? And who is looking at what was exposed by COVID-19 and saying, here are inequities that we need to address. That's, that's a different, those are, those are policy questions. Um, and that going back to what, you know, the debate over the child tax credit, that's part of what that debate's about. Um, and so the question is

post COVID-19, um, is the, is there going to be an identity response that grows out of it that gets at the anger you're talking about, or is there going to be an identity response that grows out of it that gets at the anger you're talking about? Or is there going to be a policy response that gets at some of the problems in America's society that were uncovered? Or is it just going to kind of, people are going to rush to go back to normal and those existing problems in society, distinct from the identity response, those existing problems are still going to exist, which just builds the conditions for the next kind of spasm in a political response, because people are still going to be unsatisfied with their political leaders. John, thank you for this conversation.

Real big historical sweep. John Dickerson's the author as i said at the beginning of the hardest job in the world the american presidency he you can find him on twitter you can find him at uh the atlantic and you can listen to his uh very good podcast called gab fest and uh hope you come back john it was a uh it was a it was i think our listeners learned a ton about a lot of stuff in a short period of time so i don't know if you're capable of an encore but well it was fun so i'd love to come back dan it's always great to be with you all right great thanks a lot that's our show for today if you want to follow John's work, you can do so on Twitter, at Jay Dickerson, or you can go to TheAtlantic.com. And of course, you can follow all of his television work at CBS News.

The Political Gab Fest and the Whistle Stop podcast can be found wherever you get your podcasts, at Apple or Stitcher or Spotify. If you have questions or ideas for future episodes of Post Corona, tweet at me, at Dan Senor. Post Corona is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.