Jack Germond

For four decades, Jack W. Germond has crisscrossed America, taking the measure of its politicians and the temperature of its voters. While much of the electorate may be fed up with politics, this crusty political columnist still has a passion for the process and the players. As the 2000 presidential campaign nears its first crucial tests, in Iowa next week and New Hampshire the week after, Germond is bouncing between those states, studying this latest crop of presidential wannabes.

Germond is 71 now and will turn 72 two days before the New Hampshire primary. Having covered every presidential campaign since 1960, he proudly considers himself a political reporter from the old school. But, he asserts, “The generation of political reporters behind me is very good, every bit as good as we were.” Then adding, “Not better. But as good.”

He does see a couple of differences, though. For one thing, they “don’t drink as much as we do and they don’t play poker. The woman have had a civilizing effect.” For another, many political reporters today want to be editors. “When my generation got to be political reporters, we had the job we wanted to have for the rest of our lives,” he says. “We had the best job we could have.”

Forty years of observations from that job are chronicled in Germond’s recent autobiography, “Fat Man in a Middle Seat,” a reference to all the times he flew standby on rainy Friday nights to cover one politician or another.

Germond, with Jules Witcover, still writes a highly respected five-day-a-week column of political analysis for the Baltimore Sun. But he is more widely known from television, where his quick-witted, no-nonsense style was on display for 15 years on “The McLaughlin Group.” He resigned from the show in 1996, having grown tired of the off-camera antics of the moderator, John McLaughlin. (“He was always irked when I [would say] that it was ‘just television’ and that my ‘serious job’ was writing a newspaper column,” Germond writes in his book.) But he is still on television, appearing regularly on “Inside Politics” and occasionally on “Meet the Press” and “Hardball.”

Germond lives in Washington and West Virginia. His wife, Alice, is executive vice president of the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. Their daughter, a physician, is on the faculty and staff at the University of Iowa Medical Center in Iowa City.

When not covering politics, Germond can be found, at least once a week, playing the ponies at the racetrack. It’s his way of escaping. Thoroughbreds, he says with a chuckle, “are nicer animals than politicians.”

Question: One has the impression that people today are less interested in politics than at any time in the more than 40 years you’ve been covering it.

Answer: Yeah, I think they are more turned off by the politicians than they’ve ever been. And the reason for that is quite clear: In 1992, you had a sort of suspension of disbelief or triumph of hope over experience, . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. But all of a sudden the voters said: “We’re really worried about the economy, and we think you can change it through the political system.” So they voted out George Bush and put in Bill Clinton. . . . What they saw after they did this was the same gridlock between Congress and the White House. . . .

The megastory about this year’s campaign, if there is one, is whether or not the candidates who are perceived as independent of politics, not tainted by “politics as usual”--McCain and Bradley--prosper. So far, they are.

Q: Are the candidates willing to tell people what they don’t want to hear? Are they leading or following?

A: I think the reason McCain and Bradley are the story at this point is because they are willing to take some chances and do some things.

Maybe, in McCain’s case, there is no option. But the fact that he is defying the establishment as blatantly as he is carries with it risk. It might be the only strategy available to him, but let’s leave that aside.

He is very blunt; . . . when he makes mistakes he says so. And he’s very available to the press. He sits on the bus every day and says whatever is on his mind.

Bradley is interesting because he is trying to lead in areas in which his position is counterintuitive and counter to polls.

Q: In what way?

A: The best example is the race question. It’s been an unspoken article of faith among Democrats in the last 10-12 years that you make your appeal to black Americans as invisible to other Americans as possible.

Clinton arranged his schedule in 1992 so his events with blacks came after the evening news or were early in the day, so they would be trumped later in the day by something more visual. It was a very deliberate strategy, and it worked.

Now Bradley comes out, and he has five main areas in which he offers leadership. And one of them is race. . . .

He wouldn’t have to [do this] to compete with Gore. He could compete with Gore on the ground that you need a turnover of the Clinton administration, on the ground that Gore is guilty of mopery, knavery and whatever else you want to make him guilty of. . . . [laughs]. There are ways without the race issue.

But Bradley is really relying on the race issue. I asked him about this, and he said he can’t believe that most people won’t agree with him on this, and if he’s wrong, he’s toast. That’s what he says. I’ll be anxious to find out, to tell you the truth.

It’s a very difficult topic. But very big. And we political reporters don’t pay enough attention to it.

Q: How big a role does race really play in a campaign?

A: Sometimes, you’ll see it in detailed polling or focus groups, particularly with a black candidate or a white liberal candidate identified very closely with black issues. Democrats who agree with that candidate on 95% of his positions on issues still vote for the other guy. You have to infer from that that race is a factor.

It is most visible in the difference between polling results and election results. Polls have gotten so good, and yet they consistently overstate support among Democrats for black candidates by 10 points or more. All the time.

Q: Steve Forbes seems to have made an effort to include blacks on his staff and to address black groups. That wouldn’t seem to be a very productive primary strategy for a conservative Republican.

A: It’s not productive at all. I don’t understand it. His staff is made up of a bunch of hustlers. . . . The vast majority are getting more money from him than anyone else would possibly pay them. He’s got a bunch of bums working for him, paying them all $10,000 a month or more. They’re just milking him.

But, you know, the guy’s a joke. What he really needs is a friend who will say to him, “Steve, get off it, get a life, you’re making a fool of yourself. . . .” Poor guy. He doesn’t have that kind of friend.

Q: What’s missing from the political debate today?

A: There’s a lot of candor missing, on the Republican side particularly, about these minor candidates. They all act like Forbes, Gary Bauer, Orrin Hatch . . . are real players--and they’re not.

In terms of issues, the one thing that’s really striking . . . is that candidates aren’t talking about the issue of our time: the long-term permanent construct of the entitlement programs, both Social Security and Medicare.

There was reason to hope that a second-term president with a lot of popularity to spend, which Clinton had when he was reelected, . . . would have used that popularity to devise a serious proposal for Social Security and Medicare and then to take the lead in trying to sell it.

But he chose to use his popularity to get this little intern to pleasure him, playing slap and tickle in the Oval Office. That is a failure on Clinton’s part that history will regard as monumental.

And it’s a failure of this campaign because, while some of the candidates are saying they are going to have such a plan, nobody has offered it. Instead, we have all this cheap-shot warning stuff.

I’m going to be curious to see how candidly Bradley addresses it. He is the one I have some hope will address it. I’m also curious to see, if he addresses it candidly, if he gets his head knocked off. That’s always a possibility.

Q: How will history judge Clinton’s two terms?

A: As an aberration. He’ll get some credit for the economic growth. But he has no legacy. He’s done nothing. He’s done all this small stuff.

The one thing [his people] claim is a big thing is welfare reform. He betrayed everything he’s said about welfare reform. He threw that out in fright after the 1996 election. He and the Republicans, both of them, threw it out.

Q: What do voters care about now? Is it still all about pocketbook issues?

A: Pretty much. Economic issues and the personas of the candidates. But economic issues, yes. The electorate is selfish, and we’ve always known that. It takes a very strong, forceful leader to get Americans to vote against self-interest, or even to adopt attitudes against self-interest.

Q: Conventional wisdom says voters shouldn’t care about the personas of candidates. But persona is important, isn’t it?

A: Yes, of the candidate himself and the people who surround him.

Political scientists, among others, will tell us we ought to take a list of issues, and study where the candidates are on the issues. And that’s how we should decide on who we’re going to vote for.

That’s fine, up to a point. You may have some issues that are absolute bottom-line with you. But you cannot anticipate the issues a president will have to deal with. So you want to know what kind of person he or she is, and what kind of people he or she has around him. Knowing the person and the people around him is a good indicator.

I knew Bill Clinton pretty well. I should have known how he was going to turn out. I didn’t. I wasn’t rigorous enough in my thinking of him as a candidate.

Q: How did you misread him?

A: I just thought, given the opportunity, he would be better. Not play all this petty crap. That he’d get by the point where he always relies on his golden speech. He always thinks he can talk anybody into anything. I use that line from Arkansas--that he thinks he can talk a dog off a meat truck. In fact, he probably could. . . . But it’s betrayed him. It’s made him be political when he could have been substantial. In other words, rather than leading, he’s been trying to get everyone to agree with him.

Q: So how about the personas of the candidates today?

A: If you look at Gore and Bradley, they don’t disagree on anything basically.

So you look at who they are. This is what a lot of Democrats are doing right now in the states where they’re getting a lot of attention

They’re looking at Bradley and they’re seeing him as sort of laid-back, low-key, but obviously self-assured. Then they look at the vice president, who has got this incredible resume [but] who is 51 years old and still trying to figure out what clothes to wear. That makes people uneasy.

I hear this from people, . . . they’re uneasy. If you don’t know who you are at 51, when the hell are you going to find out? Running for president is no time to start doing your earth tones. Wear the damn blue suit.

That, to me, is a very clear thing--this concern over who you are.

Q: And the Republicans?

A: The same thing is true. There aren’t really any differences between Bush and McCain. People are looking at McCain and they’re seeing this guy who is really heavy. . . . He’s real, God knows. And they look at the other guy, who seems to be charming and amiable. But they’re thinking, maybe he’s a little light. That’s what they’re trying to find out now.

Q: What will be the effect of impeachment on the elections this year, especially congressional races? Will people who had a high profile in the prosecution of the president benefit or be hurt?

A: It’s probably going to harden the partisanship. The Democrats will try to use it against them [Republican leaders], because they were so partisan.

The other half of why those races will be polarized is because it gives them [Republicans] that celebrity. I mean, if you’re on television, no matter what you do, you become a celebrity. And when people see you, they start smiling, and they want to talk to you. You see this with the worst hoodlums in the world.

Q: And it doesn’t matter what you’ve said.

A: That’s absolutely true. It’s totally mindless, the whole thing. Everybody went through all this hand-wringing about what are the biggest events of the last century. In terms of our culture, there’s nothing that compares with what television has done to us. It is such a wonderful medium, and at the same time so destructive. *