Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on September 14, 2000:
Los
Angeles Times Senior Editorial Staff
John
Janet Clayton, Editor of the Editorial Pages and Vice President
Jim Flanigan, Senior Economics Editor
Jim Mann, Foreign Affairs Columnist, Washington
Ronald Brownstein, Times Political Writer, Washington
“Election
2000 and Beyond”
Some
years ago, a literary wit described journalism as “the last refuge of the
vaguely talented.” As a
journalist I wouldn’t quarrel with that, except to note that there are
exceptions. Some of us have no talent at all and some have a great deal
and I would put the four members of our panel in the latter category.
The meeting this evening is my first at the Council and I’m very happy
to be here as Editor of the Times, a job I’ve held for about five months now.
I thought that before we go on to the people you’ve come here to hear I
might take one minute to discuss what’s happening at the Times and where
we’re headed.
As
you’ve noted if you’ve been reading the papers, there’s been a lot of
change. Last spring we got a new publisher, John Puerner, and he
appointed me Editor. More recently,
I appointed a new Managing Editor and there have been other changes, too.
It might seem to some that perhaps the changes have been unsettling, but
I want to let you know that the changes we are making are being done with
reverence towards what has been accomplished at the Times over the last couple
of generations. My experience in the newspaper business is that people tend
to admire newspapers in proportion to how far from the paper they live.
The farther away they are, the better the paper looks, and I’ve been an
admirer of the Los Angeles Times from a distance for many, many years.
For those who take it for granted because you live here and you’ve
received it for many years, I would like to say, as someone who has watched it
from a distance and who reads many other newspapers, that I feel that I’ve
been entrusted with a treasure. It
is the largest metropolitan paper in the country and it has, I believe, the
largest staff. I can’t get good
figures out of the New York Times, but that would be the only rival on that
score.
Going
forward, sometimes people have asked, “Well, you don’t make much money off
foreign and national coverage. What
are you going to do about that?” Let
me assure you there’ll be no diminution of our interest and our seriousness of
purpose regarding our foreign staff and our Washington staff and the rest of the
national staff.
We
also intend to build and develop further our coverage of such other areas as
culture, business, state news and regional news and so on.
In short, we hope to give you a paper that will have the broadest
possible outlook. When I arrived at
the paper I made a point of talking with anyone who wanted to talk with me, and
it was quite enlightening. One
reporter gave me some insight into what I think the newspaper should be when he
was talking about his dream for the Times.
He came up with a phrase that has stuck in my mind.
I think I would like to have people, when I step down as Editor, remember
me for having worked towards this end: that is to make the Times the national
paper of the West, rooted in its region but broad in outlook and globally
respected. So that’s the goal.
We’ll do everything we can to achieve it.
Now on with the program.
Our
first speaker has already been introduced. You’ve already been given
introductions to the panel so I won’t belabor it.
Janet Clayton, who’s going to talk about state and regional matters in
the election year.
Thank
you, John. I’m happy to be here
again with you tonight at the World Affairs Council.
I’m Editor of the Editorial Pages, which includes opinion and
commentary. As a result of that, I
sometimes get a lot of comments from our readers, a lot of e-mail and calls, and
once in a while a few complaints. I
had a call recently about a commentary piece we ran.
It was about the fact that the French conglomerate, Vendee (?), is about
to acquire, in effect, Seagrams--which really means Universal Studios.
Now, Universal Studios has all the archives for the Jerry Lewis movies.
So this writer got the idea that, you know, it would be fun to sort of
play with the idea of maybe now that the French are going to own Jerry Lewis
movies, maybe they also want to throw into the deal Jerry Lewis himself, and so
he wrote a piece for us. The next
day we got a call from a very irate member of the French community here.
We have, as you know, every nation in the world represented here in Los
Angeles, and so this person was calling and I thought “Well, O.K. gosh, what
is it? Is it something we said
about NATO, is it something about the euro?”
So I got on the phone and this person says, “You know, I just want you
Americans to know that this obsession you have about the French and Jerry Lewis
is just too much.” And I said,
“Well, oh, you’re talking about the piece.
Well, you know it’s satire.” So,
the bottom line is he said, “I just want you to know that the French are
really not insane about Jerry Lewis. I
mean, we gave the guy an award, but we give a lot of people awards.”
And so, I just want you to know officially for the record that the Los
Angeles Times does understand--any members of the French community here tonight
that we do understand that the French taste for and appreciation for culture
does extend beyond Jerry Lewis.
I
want to talk tonight a little bit about the fact that this is an international
place that we live in. I thought
about that the other day in terms of how everything is local--and local is
international, and international is local.
We had a story a few days ago about the GOP candidate, or V.P. candidate,
Dick Cheney, which revealed that he didn’t vote in about a dozen elections and
he sort of shrugged it off and said “Oh, well, mostly local elections in
Texas.” The thing is, in a
presidential race in which the presidential candidates sometimes sound more like
candidates for the school board, there is really nothing just that strictly
local. California’s public
schools, for instance, public schools in general, but here in California they
are still seen as the great equalizer, the vehicle by which immigrant and poor
children can get into the social and economic middle class. Public schools are
very much of national and international importance in this state with the
nation’s largest immigrant population.
On
the ballot in November we have a proposition, No.38, which would give $4,000 to
parents to educate children in either private or religious schools.
This could be a watershed moment for vouchers. It’s an idea, of course, that’s gained currency
nationally, but has had some mixed effects nationally also.
George Bush is for vouchers, Al Gore’s against them.
But what’s interesting here in California is that vouchers are becoming
more popular with people who in the past would have more naturally opposed them.
Latinos, Asians and Blacks, who see little to lose in trying for an
alternative to some unsatisfactory public schools.
It doesn’t mean that vouchers will win in California, the polls are
actually down for it now, but the old paradigms are shifting. The old assumptions about which way certain types of voters
are going to go are shifting.
That’s
also happening in Los Angeles’ politics.
Running for mayor in the next April election next year are two veteran
Latino politicians, one a San Fernando Valley businessman, another a local
long-time politician and the first openly gay man to run for mayor.
Also one woman who now holds statewide office, Kathleen Connell, is
expected to jump in also. Who is
running is a reflection of the widening range of power in this region.
In the not-too-distant future it just won’t be news anymore in the Los
Angeles Times for a minority or woman to gain a position of power.
Given the internationalization of this region, we may have to change, or
even vary our language, our very definition of what a minority is.
In California, where interracial marriage and the number of offspring
from interracial marriages is the highest in the nation, we are, once again, at
the cutting edge of defining race itself. So
that keeps the local story here international and, I think, as Dick Cheney has
probably learned now, it also keeps local relevant.
Thank
you.
Our
next panelist, Jim Flanigan, is well known. His picture is in the paper
frequently, he is the columnist on the business page who writes about the
economy, and he will talk about the prospects for the stock market and for the
economy in the next administration.
Thank
you, John. Good evening. Well, yes, I’m going to talk a couple of minutes about the
results of the election, how it will affect the economy—only a fool predicts
the stock market. Actually, you
might think that it’s easy to say how it will affect the economy because each
candidate, George W. Bush and Al Gore, have programs. They have fully documented economic programs.
We’ve devoted a lot of column inches to explaining and printing these
things, but it really isn’t that easy. I
have the benefit of learned economists, and I had breakfast with one the other
day and I said, “Well, if Bush gets elected then he is going to cut taxes
because his whole campaign revolves around a big tax cut and that will spur the
economy.” And like a true
economist this man said, “Not necessarily, because if you cut the taxes then
the government, you see, will have to replenish its funds another way so it will
be issuing more bonds and it will have to raise interest rates to attract the
purchasers for the bonds. So the
interest rates may go up and that may actually slow the economy.”
At this point I thought, “Well, this is quite a complex subject
here.” So, we here we have Bush
who will cut taxes, let’s say and then the government may have to borrow more
money in treasury bonds and treasury bills and we may get little effect at
all.”
Gore’s
campaign says “We’re going to pay down the national debt,” and we all
understand that if we have debts in our own homes or [say] “Gosh, I’m going
to pay off the mortgage. I’m
really going to get that credit card debt down.”
Gore is going to keep the money in the treasury and pay down the national
debt, but he also has some spending plans—prescription drug benefits that are
direct. He’s going to give the
money, not necessarily indirectly through tax credits and stuff like that, and
other good things, you know, social goods and he will have some tax cuts.
Now,
my economist friend at breakfast the other morning explained that government
money disbursed in that way, government spending, that is a real boost to the
economy. I mean, it just goes out
there and, gee, people get some new money.
If they got a tax cut from Bush they might say, “You know, we’d
better save this because the American savings rate is low.”
But if they get the money directly, they may say “Well, gosh, I got a
benefit. It says go buy some
prescription drugs. I’ll just run
right down to Walton’s and I’ll buy some prescription drugs,” and you’ll
get a boost to the economy that way. I
didn’t ask him what happens after that. Does
this also make Mr. Greenspan raise the interest rate and we’re back where we
started?
Two
things you can predict, and I will. One,
you can predict that there will be tax cuts in the next several years, no matter
who’s elected, no matter which party is elected.
To a degree, this depends on the Congress, the complexion of the
Congress, because the surplus you’ve been hearing about really [occurred]
because there are more people working than there are retired right now and
there’s a lot of money flowing in, as we know, to the government.
The surplus in the next four years will average almost $200 billion a
year. I looked this up before
coming here, folks. The figures are
accurate, and Congress and the White House will decide how to cut taxes. Then
one side says “Well, we’re going to cut it for the middle income people and
not for the upper income people.” But
the upper income people pay a lot of taxes so, therefore, you can hardly cut the
taxes without giving the upper income people a tax cut also.
So much for that.
What
all this will do to the stock market is unknown.
The greatest thing ever said about the stock market, of course, was said
by J. P. Morgan. He was asked by a
member of Congress in a hearing in Washington what will happen to the stock
market, and he said, “Stocks will fluctuate.”
But J.P. Morgan’s bank, the venerable J. P. Morgan’s Bank, is being
purchased now. It’s being sold
and it’s being bought by the Chase Manhattan Bank—the Chase Bank was the
bank of Rockefeller. So does oil
trump finance? In this case, yes. Oil trumps finance and what about oil?
You
all are familiar with higher prices at the pump, and there really is now a bit
of an oil crisis in the world. I
mean, when the gas stations close in Britain and when the price goes back up
things begin happening. San Diego has to pay more for electricity.
Something’s going on here. One
certainty for the next president [is that he] will have to have an energy
policy. There are going to be big
decisions to make. Decisions about
developing oil and gas, natural gas especially. Reserves in the areas of Alaska.
They’re going to be faced with energy deregulation and the need to
build up transmission lines and power plants since we haven’t done anything
like that in years. We’ve gone on
for the last several years saying, “You know, that old energy crisis, we
don’t have that anymore. We’re
more efficient. Our economy
doesn’t depend on energy that much.” And
now all of a sudden we’re worried about it, and President Clinton said,
“Well, gee, if the Saudis don’t produce more oil, we may have a
recession.’ I think, “Wait a
minute. That shouldn’t happen.”
But it is happening and so these questions will continue.
Right
now, no, there’s not going to be a recession.
Not in this country. Actually,
the American economy depends less on energy now than it did in 1975, but you
know a lot of things are different than they were in 1975. Oil has gone up 174%
in dollar terms this year, and if you’re not in the dollar if you’re in the
euro, or if you’re in other currencies it’s gone up more.
So, some economies are slowing, lots of things are happening.
The real source of concern when you say, “Well, why do the markets keep
trading oil and they keep sending the price up?
Don’t they read the headlines, don’t they hear the pronouncements of
OPEC that they’re going to open up the production?”
Yeah, they do, but they think there’s a margin of safety, a cushion
that was there this time last year in OPEC’s output of oil of 6 million
barrels a day. Now it’s half that. And
so then people begin thinking, “You know, any accident, any darn thing in the
world that goes wrong, could really upset this apple cart, couldn’t it?
And upset a lot of economies.”
The
way that’s defined is about a 3 million barrel a day cushion in the amount of
oil—and you can relate that to natural gas and all this other stuff.
Now, one country produces 3 million barrels a day and puts it into the
world’s market even though it’s under the control of the United Nations and
that is Iraq. So, the world now
depends on Saddam Hussein to produce that margin of safety of its oil. It will
be an interesting time for the next president.
I’ll
just close with a little reminder, since this is the World Affairs Council, how
connected we are to the world and how much does the world do for us financially.
The annual rate of foreign investment in U.S. stock, back again to that
stock market, is now 150 billion dollars a year.
As other countries, such as Britain right now, have problems with their
energy or their economy, even more overseas money is likely to flow into
investments in the United States. It’s
all a big world, folks.
Thank
you.
Our
next panelist is Jim Mann. He’s
been here before. He came in
especially for this evening from Washington where he is the Times foreign
affairs columnist. Jim’s had a
distinguished career, which I won’t recite at length, but I’d like to just
mention that he has been a correspondent in Beijing, he has written a couple of
books on China, he has been a Supreme Court reporter.
Jim’s brief remarks will be on the subject of the foreign policy
challenges facing the new president.
Thank you. Before I start, just a couple of seconds of delayed, long-overdue thanks to you all at the World Affairs Council. I did do a book last year on the United States and China. I spoke to the World Affairs Council about it. The book wasn’t written to be a best seller. It was really written to be used as it is now, in sort of college courses on the history of China or diplomacy, but so many of you turned out that night that for one week, one week, I appeared on the L. A. Times’ best-sellers list, allowing my publisher to claim, somewhat fraudulently, that I’m a best- selling author.
I
would like to talk about the foreign policy problems that the new president is
going to face, and, being a China junkie, I sort of divided it up by numbers. There are two big specific pending decisions, there are two
bits of leftover diplomacy, there are two normalizations that he can address,
and there are a bunch of pending crises. Let’s
take a look.
Left-over
decisions. First, above everything else, although I think our paper and all
others reported the missile defense decision by President Clinton rightly, and
he reminded people that he was just putting it off, inevitably, people get the
impression that it’s all over--and it’s not.
The new president, whether it’s Gore or Bush or Buchanan or Nader, is
going to have to decide soon after taking office whether to go ahead with
missile defense. That, I think, above all, is going to determine relations with
countries like Russia and China.
Secondly,
and less well know, but President Clinton also sort of shelved, swept under this
year or put off, a big decision on what kind of arms systems to sell to Taiwan.
That’s an annual process but I can predict, and all of you can watch
next April, the next President is going to have to decide, make some major
decisions about arm systems to Taiwan, and that’s going to be the first and
probably biggest test of the new president’s policy towards China.
Left-over
diplomacy. I’m assuming that at
the time Dennis Ross comes and speaks to you all in a few weeks that there will
not be a Middle East peace agreement, and that next January a new president is
going to take over and see what he can do on that.
Secondly, an ongoing diplomacy of potentially far-reaching implications
is North Korea. We don’t necessarily think of this as ongoing diplomacy but in
fact when the presidents of North and South Korea met at their summit this June
that was a move by North Korea because their diplomacy with the United States in
an effort at normalization was not going well. That diplomacy goes on, and a new president will have to take
that up.
Normalizations.
These are long-standing problems that the new president will have to
face. What to do about Iran?
At the moment, and I think it makes sense, the Clinton Administration has
decided to let the dust settle in all the factional fights in Iran.
But sooner or later a new president is going to have to face that.
Then there is the long-standing question of what to do about Cuba, a
question that is alive once again because there is some movement in Washington
on the idea of using the trade embargo.
Flashpoints!
Of course, there can be crises anywhere in the world but the most likely
ones, if you’re going to ask people in Washington to guess, center on
Indonesia, where there are all kinds of signs that the country, or the
government, may be losing its grip. Pakistan has a similar situation. The question is, can the
government control the country, is the country going to fall apart.
Then, whether you count this as the same or as problem number 3,
India-Pakistan. That’s a
flashpoint, that’s not just a metaphor, of course.
The fear is that these two now-nuclear powers would engage in a war that
could turn nuclear.
Relationships
to manage. A new president is going
to take office. He’s going to
have to manage American relations with Japan, with Mexico, with NATO, with
Europe. Each of these has pending
issues, pending negotiations. Some
of them will probably go on the back burner, and the new president is going to
have decide on the issue of NATO expansion.
And then there are big strategic questions.
I talked about Korea before, but the question is what happens if there is
some kind of rapprochement movement, towards reunification on the Korean
peninsula. What does that mean for
American troop deployments in Asia? Is
there pressure, as there is among the South Korean public, for the United States
to withdraw its troops from South Korea? If that happens, what about the Japanese?
Will the Japanese government be able to keep American bases there if it
wants to do so?
And
then the long range questions. Future
American relations with both Russia and China.
I talk about those separately but it’s a little more complicated than
that. What if, for example, Russia and China deepen what now looks like the
military cooperation between the two countries? The dynamics facing the new
president, political dynamics, both political parties are deeply divided on
foreign policy. The Democrats are
divided especially on a trade issues. Of
course, that shows up with China, but also on other issues.
The new president will have to decide what to do about fast-track trade
legislation. The Democrats will be
divided. It can come up with other
countries like Vietnam or Indonesia or Mexico.
Republicans are similarly divided on broader issues of U.S. foreign
policies between people who favor internationalism or what they would call uni-lateralism
or isolationism, and that shows up on issues like China, once again, but also in
involvement in places like Bosnia and Kosovo.
One
thing we’ll watch is the personnel. It’s
kind of odd. I’ve watched
transitions before. The Bush
campaign has a very specific well-defined foreign policy team.
The long and short of it is it’s the veterans of the Reagan and Bush
administrations; the Gore campaign has less [of them].
I would expect that if Gore takes office his longtime advisor since his
days on Capitol Hill, Leon Furth, would be the National Security Advisor and
probably Dick Holbrook would be Secretary of State, but beyond that there
isn’t much of a team. There
aren’t a lot of Democrats waiting in the wings because a lot of them have
already served and he may have to look for out-of-staff administration.
I’ve
seen a lot of presidential transitions, I think each one since Jimmy Carter. Each one is interesting.
I think probably nothing that we see this time will ever match the day
Ronald Reagan took office in January of 1981 when at the same time you had an
inauguration and swearing in and the release of the American hostages in Iran.
I think, in my memory, that was when television invented the split
screen. It may not be that dramatic
but I can guarantee you that it will be once again very worth watching.
Thanks.
Our
concluding panelist is Ron Brownstein, who is National Political Correspondent
based in Washington and author of a weekly column on national politics for the
Times. He’s also a familiar
figure on CNN, CBS and other serious-minded television venues, and he is the
author of several books. Now
earlier Jim Flanigan failed to deliver on my promise of a prediction for the
stock market, but I have every confidence that Ron is going to tell us who will
be president.
I’ve
actually been traveling with Governor Bush over the last two weeks so I’ve
developed a healthy respect for the microphones.
The first thing I always do now—is this thing on?
The other thing I can say... liability of senior management but if
anybody here is very sharp-eared they will know that there is an almost
inaudible, below frequency message that’s going out that says “buy more
papers.” Some in Seattle heard it
and called us on it.
I
cover the presidential campaign, and it’s only been going on for two years
now. I got a call this summer from
a friend of mine who’s the chief speechwriter for Bush, a terrific
speechwriter, Mike Gurson is very eloquent, and he called me up because he was
very excited. It was in June and he said, “We’re now closer to the
November election than we are to the New Hampshire primary.” It turned out he was wrong by a week, which was pretty
crushing.
But
I want to talk a little bit about where we are in the presidential campaign
which is headed into the home stretch and, by historical standards, surprisingly
far along and the clay is set a little bit more than people think.
I’ve felt all the way through and continue to feel that there are two
sort of fundamental currents shaping this election year.
Not surprisingly, they run in completely opposite directions.
I summarize it in a sentence that says, “As far as the public is
concerned, America works and Washington is broken,” by which I mean there is
enormous satisfaction with the basic direction of the country.
When you look at things like the economy, crime, welfare, most social
indices are pointing in the right direction and you see very high levels of
voter satisfaction with the way things are going in the country.
I’ll come back to those numbers in a second.
At
the same time, though, there is enormous dissatisfaction with sort of the state
of things in Washington, where I live. And
not only the humidity and weather and all that.
We have, on the one hand, sort of Clinton fatigue, which is a real
phenomenon for a portion of the electorate, a sense that after eight years of
turmoil and tumult and scandal there’s a desire to sweep clean the stage. You have from many voters also, I think, a sense of
exhaustion with the hyper-partisanship in the capital, sort of a sense of
gridlock, that very little has gotten done in the last two and one-half years, a
sense that the capital is awash in money, many of the themes that McCain was
able to play on.
These
two currents argue and push in different directions.
The dissatisfaction with Washington points towards change, points toward
bringing in new players, and for much of the past year or so Governor Bush has
very skillfully played on this when he talks about a “fresh start” and
“turning the page” and “restoring integrity and honesty to the White
House.” I think it also benefits the “outs” in Congress and provides some
momentum for Democrats trying to take back the House.
On the other hand, the current of satisfaction with the way things are
going in the country is historically the strongest weapon, the strongest wind in
the sails, of the “ins,” of the incumbent party.
Dick Wirthlin, who was Ronald Reagan’s pollster, developed what was
later dubbed the “Wirthlin Rule.”
It was a very simple way of looking at American politics. You know, we go
through all of this day-to-day, we put it on the front page of the paper, and
you see it lead the news about the back and forth between the candidates.
But Wirthlin, looking through the data, postulated that about
three-quarters of the people who say the country is on the right track, things
are going well in the country, tend to vote for the President or his party in
presidential elections and about two-thirds of the people who think the country
is on the wrong track tend to vote against him.
This
has always been a very compelling argument, not least because it has shown a lot
of empirical basis. In the L. A.
Times exit polls in 1996 and 1992, exactly three-quarters of the people who
thought the country was on the right track voted for Clinton in ’96 and for
George Bush in ’92. What Wirthlin
basically postulated was that the presidential elections-- and he’s not the
only one to have this view--were more a referendum on the basic state of the
country than they were anything else, than on the candidates or on the
campaigns, and I sort of rank them in that order.
Well,
for most of this year, this relationship, to me the single most important number
in this campaign, was that the relationship was not holding up.
Al Gore, up through the Democratic Convention, was only winning about
half the people who said the country was moving in the right direction.
Now why is that? Well, there are a variety of reasons why that’s so.
Some of them are structural: that
voters now are less likely to see economic prosperity as tied to decisions in
Washington, D.C., than perhaps Redman in Washington State or Silicon Valley.
They’re less likely to see Alan Greenspan and Bill Clinton than Andy
Grove and
Bill Gates as driving the economy. So there’s something of a deterioration of the relationship between the incumbent party getting benefit for the economy. But the biggest thing that prevented Al Gore from tapping into these good feelings was something much more fundamental. There were doubts about him personally, about his strength of leadership, about whether he was capable of going from, as he somewhat indelicately put it, “the woman behind the man” to become the president himself and, you know, this is not a unique problem to Gore. By the way, before I say that, this was reflected in the second number that mattered the most in this year: when voters were asked “Who do you think would be a stronger leader? Up until the Democratic convention, George Bush led Al Gore by 20, 25, 30 points. Enormous, chasm-like difference. Well, as it turns out every vice president running for president has faced this problem and the Al Gore situation was almost identical to George Bush’s, the father’s, situation in 1988. It’s easy to forget now that Newsweek had a cover, “The Wimp Factor,” and people saw Bush, the father, as weak and ineffectual. It goes with the job, along with the funerals you get to attend around the world in Air Force Two. Those are the upsides. You get the downside in that the American people tend to think of you as the guy who stands behind the president and claps. And in Al Gore’s case, he doesn’t even know how to clap, so it’s like an added difficulty. But what Gore was able to do at his convention was essentially what George Bush was able to do at his convention in 1999, which was not a very complex task. It was to remind and show the American people that he had a life before he was vice president. He had a family, that he had a career, he had interests, he had passions, he was “my own man,” as he said, or, as George Bush said in 1988, “I am that man.”...