Today, Explained - 2020 vision

Episode Date: February 18, 2019

Nearly a dozen candidates have announced their run for the presidency and 2019 has only just begun. John Dickerson of Slate’s Political Gabfest explains the endless American tradition. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

There's a podcast about what it's like to set up and run and promote your own small business. It's called Vanguard by Shopify Studios. If you're running your own small business or planning to one day, you might learn a thing or two from Vanguard. New episodes every Wednesday. The federal government is almost completely shut down today, but it's not about a wall. It's not about a budget deal. It's President's Day. And how fitting that on President's Day 2019, over 20 months away from Election Day,

we already have enough people running to field a football team. There's Elizabeth Warren. She's running. Kamala Harris. She's definitely running. Kirsten Gillibrand. The brand is strong. Cory Booker.

Who's he dating? Pete Buttigieg. Who? Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Tulsi Gabbard, John Delaney, Marianne Williamson, and Andrew Yang. You've got to be kidding. And that's not even counting the half dozen or so dudes who were all but certain to declare. How were we already so deep in this? We just had an election.

Well, there's the short version and the long version. John Dickerson has been covering presidential campaigns for over 20 years, and he co-hosts Slate's Political Gab Fest podcast. So the short version is it's a crowded field with no clear frontrunner. Everybody wants first movers advantage. If you can be the first person to capture everybody's attention, then attention and name ID is partially what you want. And the long version? The people to blame for campaigns starting earlier and earlier and earlier are people like either John Kennedy or Jimmy Carter.

Kennedy in 1960 basically said, the old style of picking people through the back rooms is a bad idea. We should expose ourselves to the voters during the primaries, and that's the true test for an election. Well, that moves everything up. So it used to be you picked it at the nominating convention. Now you've got to go through all these primaries. And Kennedy argued successfully, and obviously by winning it was a successful argument, but he argued basically you couldn't be a good president unless you had talked to the people and felt the needs of the people. And he showed this particularly in West Virginia, where he, as a Catholic candidate who the Protestants in West Virginia did not like,

he went and basically converted them. You would be divided between two loyalties into your church and to your state if you were to be elected president. The question is whether I think that if I were elected president, I would be divided between two loyalties, my church and my state. Felt their pain, was exposed to their poverty, and so elevated the primary as a process of finding your way to the presidency, going around the established order of things. Was this an effort to bypass the party? Is that what Kennedy was doing? It was in 1960, for sure, because people like Lyndon Johnson and Hubert Humphrey were the favorites of the old bulls in the Democratic Party at the time. And Kennedy was too Catholic. He was too young. So he had to basically argue, OK, you think all those things about me, those of you who are the gatekeepers,

I'm going to go talk to the people. I came to the state of West Virginia, which has fewer numbers of my co-religionists than any state in the Union. I would not have come here if I didn't feel that I was going to get complete opportunity to run for office as a fellow American in this state.

I would not run for it if in any way I didn't feel that I could do the job. So I come here today saying that I think that this is an issue with Congress. So Kennedy is the one who really leans into primary season. You mentioned Jimmy Carter, too. What did he do? Jimmy Carter knows what it's like to work for a living. Until he became governor, he put in 12 hours a day in his shirt sleeves during harvest at his farm. Can you imagine any of the other candidates for president working in the hot August sun?

Well, you know, Carter wasn't that well known. And he announces in December of 1974 for a race that's taking place in 1976. So we think it's early now. So we're in February of 2019. If I declare my candidacy now, it's later by several months than Jimmy Carter did in December. So Carter basically worked his way in Iowa and created a groundswell for himself. He was not the party favorite. And that is one of the great stories of candidates kind of coming out of nowhere and being able to win despite the fact that the party machinery would have picked other candidates.

And there have been enough candidates who've been successful in doing that, that it's given rise to this notion that if you start early and do the spade work, you can make yourself a contender. My name is Jimmy Carter and I'm running for president. It's been a long time since I said those words the first time. And now I've come here after seeing our great country to accept your nomination. The other thing that candidates have to do and the reason they start early is they're trying to hone who they are. And that takes a little time to figure out how to run for president. If you're a young, inexperienced kind of candidate, you've got to spend a lot of time out on the campaign trail.

Everybody thinks and remembers Barack Obama being an amazing campaigner. He wasn't so good when he first got out of the gate. So what I'm getting here is that I should not think that this year is special and that we are inundated with elections that begin too early because historically speaking, this isn't even a record. Well, it's definitely not a record in terms of starting early, but it is one of those races without a clear front runner. And there's an advantage to starting early if you're trying to kind of make a name for yourself in a crowded field. Of course, the downside is you can kind of have a strong opening and then everybody kind

of forgets you. And this is a challenge for any candidate. You're kind of always in the conversation, and familiarity breeds contempt, they say. And so if you've been around too, or as Shakespeare says, too early seen unknown and known too late, which is if you show up there too early, people just kind of think, oh, yeah, they've always been around,

but they don't really focus in on you the way you might want. Hillary Clinton comes to mind there. Yeah. It felt like so many people knew too much about her, but are there other historical examples that we can look at where starting early kind of backfired? One example that comes to mind would be Bob Dole in 1996. You got to have a little fun in this business. I think people want to see some of that, just not too much, but enough to know that you're quick and you're alert. And I think that that destroys the age issue. Everybody knew him. He announced in the spring of 95. So that's, I think, April. So that's not too far from where we are now. The problem or the challenge for somebody like Dole or Hillary Clinton is everybody thinks they know you. So you've got to start early so that you can teach them that you're not the person they think you are.

Did we learn anything from the way we should approach presidential elections from the last one we had where you had these two extremely familiar candidates who, you know, one seemed all but sure to win the nomination and the other was a dark candidate from the jump who ended up winning and no one really saw it coming. Did something about the way those elections were covered or experienced or predicted teach us anything now that we seem to be in earnest entering the next presidential election? The press has gotten presidential campaigns wrong a whole lot, and it's not just 1948 with Truman and Dewey. The famous one. So, right, because this is one of the great things about campaigns is that the voters surprise us. So humility is always something that people should keep in mind.

I mean, in 1964, a lot of people wrote off Goldwater and then he won the nomination. I mean, you remember there were a lot of Goldwater parallels with this last election of 2016. A lot of people saying, well, sure, Donald Trump got the nomination, but like Goldwater, he's gonna get trounced in the general. So I don't know if there's anything to be learned

in terms of timing. I think certainly the general lessons about coverage, not falling for the superficial, not covering it like a horse race, spending more time evenly distributed among the candidates. is just be a lot more humble about what's really going on and not try to get ahead of what's actually happening, but stick pretty close to what the voters are saying and what the issues are that a president actually has the most opportunity to influence once they get in office. Okay, so now that we know why our presidential elections are so damn long, it's time to ask a harder question. Should we ditch this system altogether? That's next. If you're really into launching a new small business, being an entrepreneur, but you're looking for some inspiration,

check out the Vanguard podcast from Shopify Studios. The episodes are kind of all over the map as far as the businesses are concerned. You've got an artisanal tarot card maker who designed a deck for just a black audience. There's art from queer and feminist artists in Japan. There's wigs for drag queens. This podcast has it all. Vanguard from Shopify Studios. It's hosted by a Canadian named Anshuman Edamseti. It comes from Shopify, everyone's favorite Canadian e-commerce one-stop shop. New episodes come out every Wednesday, and you can find it where, you know, you mostly find your podcast. What do you listen to this one? Try looking for that one there.

It's called Vanguard. So John, in the United States, we've got this two-year run-up to a presidential election in which we have more than enough time to thoroughly vet these candidates, to sit around and speculate who has a chance and who doesn't and talk about every possible policy position under the sun. And meanwhile, the United Kingdom could have an election in like two weeks. Yeah, right, right. What are the advantages of that sort of snap election system? In the UK system, Canada is even shorter. And I think Japan is like a got the life of a fruit fly. It's so short. The big difference, as I understand it, is that you have candidates who come from kind of the political class

more than in the states. I mean, one of the both advantages and disadvantages, and I'm stealing here now from Gautam Mukunda at Harvard of the American system, is that there are no prerequisites. And so candidates can come out of nowhere.

And that was true. Someone comes to mind. Well, Lincoln comes to mind, actually, before Trump. That's what I bet. That's the genius of the American system. That's the way we want it to work when it's perfectly working, which is that you don't have to come up through a political apprenticeship process. On the other hand, the benefit of a political apprenticeship process

is that the party sorts and sifts and allows people to rise up through the ranks, having tested them for some of the attributes and qualities and characteristics that you kind of need to have if you're in a position of leadership. Do they have the temperament? Can they handle working with others? Are they able to focus and make executive decisions? That's what a system in the UK tends to sort through so that by the time you get to one of the shortened elections, there's been a kind of a pre-selection process. Yeah. And there's a really strong case to be made for that if you are of the view that our selection process in American elections pick people based on a set of attributes that are necessary to win a campaign. But those attributes necessary to win a campaign are actually quite a far distance from the attributes needed to actually be a good president. Is part of this, again, about the media and the way the media covers presidential

elections? It might not be about Cory Booker's policy positions, but more so who's Cory Booker dating? I think it's both the media and, you know, at the end of the day, it's also a little bit the electorate. There are obviously plenty of people who only care about what Cory Booker thinks about climate change. But I must say, having spent a great deal of time out in the country covering campaigns, a lot of people come up to you and they think, well, do you think so-and-so is going to win or so-and-so? They ask the horse race question. The horse race question is the first thing on their minds. That's the one.

That's the one. And so, you know, it's not entirely the press's fault for covering the horse race. And also, I should say one other thing, which is that candidates in their policy positions and their willingness to answer policy questions has also atrophied a little bit. You know, I would get rid of the hypothetical question dodge, which is the candidates say, well, I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals. I am not going to contradict the president's strategy on this, and I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals. I am not going to contradict the president's strategy on this, and I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals. All you do as president is engage in hypotheticals because you game out whether certain things are going to happen,

and then you figure out how you're going to react to those things. But voters shouldn't let them get away with that dodge. So I think we all share some of the blame for why the nature of the dialogue is not as sharp as we might like it to be. You cover a lot of campaigns and I wonder when you go out there, do you sense fatigue in voters? I hear NPR, they've already got people on the ground in Iowa talking about the president's state of the union, do voters engage more or less with a longer election versus, say, you know, a snap election in Canada or the UK or Japan? Well, in a place like Iowa, they kind of engage with it all the time and all year round.

And I think this is true. We've got more people than just the political obsessives who are paying attention to politics right now because people think the stakes are pretty high and because people are so concerned about and engaged with what's happening in the presidency itself. Do longer and longer campaigns have an effect on the actual business of governing the country? I mean, the president seems like he's been campaigning since the day he won the election, but how much of the country's actual energy to govern will shift towards, you know, these campaigns and who's going to be in power next? Yeah. Woodrow Wilson used to talk about campaigning as a sort of irritating interruption to governing.

Yeah. And now I feel like it's kind of the other way around. It's flipped. I mean, on the other hand, if you think it's basically about turning out your team, and obviously the party of the presidential candidate is the greatest predictor of how people are going to vote, then that drives a lot of your decision making. And it causes and locks you into more partisan behavior. And so in that sense, if you believe that's what's going to determine the presidential election, then all your governing decisions have that partisan cast to it. And so you can wonder what benefit is there to making deals in the presidential electoral system. And if the presidency and the presidential races start earlier, there's no window where you can say, well, I'll shore up my base and

I'll have plenty of time to go take care of my base. So maybe I'll feel less pressure from doing that. And that feeling of less pressure might cause you to engage in some kind of dealmaking that might actually make some progress in some of these things that can only be solved by bipartisan cooperation. That window doesn't exist anymore. I mean, the honeymoon we used to give presidents is basically gone now. Do you think there's an ideal time for a presidential campaign? In my mind, if this stuff started in January of next year, 2020, that'd be plenty of time to get to know some people and figure out where they stand

and maybe have an election in November. I agree. Because also so much of the behavior that takes place is just all show. And it adds to the disappointment people have. And the feeling that a lot of the conversation isn't really cutting to the bone. And that's frustrating for voters because they think we're in a time where we really need to be having real conversations about real things that are affecting or could affect our lives. So I'd be happy to have a long presidential campaign if it felt like it was making some real progress in either educating us all about the choices the country faces or teeing up debates that focus on those issues. But I guess the biggest question is whether we will feel like there is a period during this campaign where there is a kind of sweet spot where it operates closer to the platonic ideal of

the way these things are supposed to operate. So the debates are real. The choices being debated are close to the kinds that would be decided in a new administration. And that we'll feel like the coverage of campaigns has been rescued from what I think a lot of people rightly feel is a pretty grim way that campaigns have been covered. If that can happen, even for some short, brief period of time, then we really will have won. And then we'll leave the actual voting to the voters. John Dickerson is one of the anchors on CBS This Morning. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. The show's executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Bridget McCarthy, Luke Vanderplug, Noam Hassenfeld, and Afim Shapiro make the show too.

Siona Petros is our intern, and Jillian Weinberger has been helping out the past few days. Music comes to us from the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thanks again to the Vanguard Podcast for their support today. You can find the Vanguard Podcast just about any place you can find this one.

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