LIVE from the Crosscut Festival: All the President’s Men

Good after­noon from Seat­tle Uni­ver­si­ty, Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate read­ers! I hope you are enjoy­ing NPI’s live cov­er­age of the Cross­cut Festival.

The first pan­el I attend­ed this after­noon was “All the Pres­i­den­t’s Men”, dis­cussing what it is like to be in the inner cir­cle of the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States.

Pan­elists include David Frum, for­mer speech­writer for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush; David Litt, for­mer spe­cial assis­tant and senior pres­i­den­tial speech­writer for Pres­i­dent Barack Oba­ma, and Scott McClel­lan, for­mer White House Press Sec­re­tary for Pres­i­dent George W. Bush. The ses­sion was mod­er­at­ed by Greg Hanscom, the Exec­u­tive Edi­tor at Cross­cut and KCTS 9, Seat­tle’s PBS affiliate.

Hanscom start­ed by ask­ing the pan­elists if they could imag­ine work­ing for the White House now. McClel­lan answered with a resound­ing “no,” elic­it­ing laughs. He said it is hard to imag­ine work­ing there now and how chaot­ic it is.

McClel­lan joked that the Pres­i­dent he worked for did­n’t have Twit­ter, but if he worked at the White House now, he would have to be con­stant­ly check­ing the Pres­i­den­t’s Twit­ter account to be able to do his job.

Litt still lives in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. and said that the lack of a full staff of peo­ple work­ing in the admin­is­tra­tion is sur­pris­ing. He also said he has a neigh­bor that works at the White House who, a few days before the gov­ern­ment was about to shut down, got home from work at 6:30PM, and he just could­n’t believe that every­one was­n’t work­ing con­tin­u­ous­ly to try to pre­vent the shut­down. He not­ed there is now “a cul­ture of mal­ice and a cul­ture of not caring.”

Frum thought Lit­t’s last phrase was accu­rate and well put. He said he does­n’t feel like the peo­ple in the Trump admin­is­tra­tion are work­ing for the Amer­i­can peo­ple in the way that peo­ple in pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tions did.

Hanscom asked the pan­elist if, look­ing at the White House now, they ever ask them­selves the ques­tion, “why did I try so hard?”

Litt replied that it is actu­al­ly the oppo­site for him. “It does­n’t make me upset that I worked hard and took job the seri­ous­ly,” he said. He added that ulti­mate­ly the job is not about you as an indi­vid­ual, but about the impact you could have in the White House and in issues effect­ing peo­ple across the country.

McClel­lan point­ed out that most peo­ple get into pol­i­tics for the right rea­son. But he also said, “pol­i­tics is the art of com­pro­mise, and that’s been lost.” He says that he and the peo­ple he worked with in the George W. Bush admin­is­tra­tion went to the White House to make a dif­fer­ence and get things done for the Amer­i­can peo­ple. He thinks it’s sad that the White House “can’t get things togeth­er now.”

Hanscom next brought up how the polit­i­cal estab­lish­ment was broad­sided by Trump’s pop­u­lar­i­ty and ulti­mate elec­tion.  He asked the pan­elist what they think Trump under­stood about the Amer­i­can peo­ple that oth­er polit­i­cal insid­ers didn’t.

Frum said that it was not so much that Trump under­stood Amer­i­can peo­ple but that he under­stood the Repub­li­can Par­ty, and once he got the nom­i­na­tion, then it’s a 50/50 chance to become Pres­i­dent. He says that a gap in the opin­ions of dif­fer­ent fac­tions in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, with it roots in the fall­out of the eco­nom­ic cri­sis of 2008–2009, left a space for Trump to fit in.

He not­ed that Trump took first place among Repub­li­can can­di­dates in polling with­in three weeks of declar­ing his can­di­da­cy in 2015, and held the lead spot almost the entire time up through win­ning the GOP nom­i­na­tion. He says Trump saw the anger in part of the pub­lic, so he talked about de-indus­tri­al­iza­tion, and talked about race and eth­nic­i­ty “in vicious ways,” but that struck a chord with people.

Litt agreed with Frum’s analy­sis about Trump rec­og­niz­ing some­thing about the Repub­li­can Par­ty. He said he’s sur­prised that Trump became Pres­i­dent but he is not sur­prised that there was a vac­u­um in the Repub­li­can Par­ty that he was able to exploit. “Democ­rats were all say­ing that this was not nor­mal and that the GOP was going off the rails.”

“Where do we go from here?” Hanscom asked.

“Trump exposed the moral vac­u­um with­in the Repub­li­can Par­ty, pol­i­tics and cam­paign­ing have tak­en over gov­er­nance. George W. Bush and Oba­ma both ran on a pol­i­tics of unit­ing, and both ran into a buz­z­saw.” He not­ed that Oba­ma took a lot of his ideas direct­ly from the GOP (the Afford­able Care Act was based on Mitt Rom­ney pol­i­cy) in attempts to com­pro­mise, but “the GOP still ran screaming.”

“Can the GOP reclaim their moral cen­ter, or do we leave it behind and try some­thing new?”

Frum not­ed that sim­i­lar things are hap­pen­ing in oth­er coun­tries, so it is not just the Unit­ed States. He said there is a gen­er­a­tional loss of con­fi­dence in democ­ra­cy, because democ­ra­cy “stopped deliv­er­ing the goods.” He says that is was essen­tial­ly an acci­dent of who hap­pened to be in pow­er at the time this is happening.

“Democ­rats, don’t con­grat­u­late your­self,” he said. “We got the dis­ease, but the con­ta­gion is in the air.”

Frum also said that the par­ty sys­tem has real­ly changed since about 2000. He says pol­i­tics and par­ties used to be based on one’s rela­tion­ship to the means of pro­duc­tion (own­ers vs. work­ers), but now it is a pol­i­tics based on group iden­ti­ty. Just like the loss of con­fi­dence in democ­ra­cy, this too is a glob­al problem.

After Litt said that Trump’s elec­tion was not just like being on a roller coast­er, but like being in a car acci­dent, as things went in a direc­tion that was not where intend­ed, Frum offered a fur­ther analysis.

“You know how you’ll be on the high­way and not as atten­tive as you should be, and the lights of an oncom­ing car jolt you to your atten­tion?” he said. “And the adren­a­line from that near miss gets you safe­ly home.” He hopes that the Trump pres­i­den­cy will be a near miss that gets us, as a coun­try, safe­ly home.

When Hanscom asked McClel­lan, who worked for George W. Bush not just in the White House but back when Bush was Gov­er­nor of Texas, if still iden­ti­fied as a Repub­li­can, McClel­lan gave a clear no.

He said he worked for Bush because he “saw hope there.” He vot­ed for Oba­ma for the same rea­son, he said. He did not vote for Trump. He says he believes in bipar­ti­san­ship, and stress­es that pol­i­tics is not a zero sum game. He notes that Trump plays in to peo­ple’s worst fears, uses divi­sive tac­tics, and has zero sum beliefs. He believes the only thing hold­ing up Trump now is the economy.

After McClel­lan said he still believes we can get back to bipar­ti­san­ship, that the prover­bial pen­du­lum swings, Hanscom asked all the pan­elists what bright spots or sil­ver lin­ings they see.

Frum said he sees a bright spot in the rise of civic engage­ment, includ­ing events like the Cross­cut Fes­ti­val. He said this sad chap­ter “may make us bet­ter able to solve things by knock­ing the smug­ness out of us.”

He said jok­ing­ly that since he grew up Cana­di­an, he does­n’t have that belief that Amer­i­cans do that every­thing will always turn out okay, just because this is America.

McClel­lan said that he sees the sil­ver lin­ing in the stu­dents at Seat­tle Uni­ver­si­ty, where he has been Vice Pres­i­dent for Com­mu­ni­ca­tions since 2012, in his young sons, and in the increase in civic engage­ment across the county.

Litt offered an answer along sim­i­lar lines. He said he is pleas­ant­ly sur­prised that as he talks to young peo­ple at book sign­ings across the coun­ty that peo­ple are not cyn­i­cal or detached like he was expect­ing. Rather, he is hear­ing peo­ple talk about vol­un­teer­ing, run­ning for office, and get­ting involved.