Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership and vision and global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years.
Speaker 1:
Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh king:
As we're sitting here in the library today, the partial government shutdown continues. It's clearly taking a toll on the 800,000 federal workers who have missed their first paycheck. But for those who keep their eye on the podium of the New York Stock Exchange, looking for which company is celebrating its initial public offering, it's taking a toll on the IPO pipeline too.
Josh king:
You see, over at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal agency that must approve corporate paperwork for IPOs, most of its 4,400 person staff is furloughed. The lawyers who pour over documents setting the stage for those nail-biting hours on the floor of the NYSE can be found somewhere in D.C or the nearby counties of Virginia and Maryland idling away their days while companies waiting in line to tap liquidity in the markets have to wait and wait and wait.
Josh king:
I know what it feels like to idle away days on a furlough from a shutdown. Back in late 1995 and early 1996 when I was working at the White House, I was sent home during the standoff between President Bill Clinton and House Speaker, Newt Gingrich over funding for Medicare, education, the environment and public health in the 1996 federal budget.
Josh king:
Two successive shutdowns in that period lasted a combined 26 days, a record never matched until now. The issues of 1996 and 2019 may be different. We're now talking about a border wall rather than the budget, but the drama is very much the same. In fact, the way tribalism among political parties evolved and played out in the 1990s, pitting a president against a house speaker and the officials who lined up in their respective camps wrote the script for what we're watching play out every night on the news today.
Josh king:
One leading newscaster who's reporting on the ramifications of Trump's shutdown and how it may affect the 2020 election has gone back and dissected the decade of Clinton and Gingrich, Mario Cuomo and Ross Perot and Al Gore and George W. Bush as the prelude to our current mess.
Josh king:
Steve Kornacki, national political correspondent for MSNBC and NBC news is out now with The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism. Our conversation with Steve right after this.
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Josh king:
Few people alive today understand how the counties of Maryland and Virginia, with all those furloughed federal workers, to say nothing of those in Ohio, Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado, where a lot of federal workers and members of the military also live and work might vote their views of the shutdown at the polls next year than our guest today, Steve Kornacki.
Josh king:
If you watch MSNBC or Nightly News or the TODAY Show, you've seen Kornacki crunching the number in real time. Sleeves rolled up, khakis slightly wrinkled, pacing in front of a digital scoreboard drilling down into counties whose names most struggle to pronounce. Steve has an encyclopedic knowledge of how they all add up, in the case of a presidential election, to 270 electoral votes.
Josh king:
For those of a certain age, Steve's passion for politics recalls a man he watched growing up near Boston, Tim Russert, the legendary host of Meet the Press who used a whiteboard and dry erase markers to make many of the same points Kornacki makes with the touch screen. And when the technology fails him, Kornacki is quick to fall back on the Russert-style whiteboard to keep doing the math. We don't have a whiteboard here in the library, but we have Steve, welcome Inside the ICE House.
Steve Kornacki:
Thank you. You know what? We should just ditch the board, I think it fails so much, and go with the whiteboard. That's not a bad idea going forward.
Josh king:
When I've seen you having to go to the whiteboard, you do just fine.
Steve Kornacki:
It's more natural when you think about it. And actually it doesn't fail in the same way the board just flickers out sometimes.
Josh king:
If my math is right, Steve, you were a lad of 16 when Clinton and Gingrich shut down the government in 1995. And yet you reconstruct it in such riveting detail in the red and the blue. I know where I was passing the days along with my fellow furlough workers, drinking margaritas at Lauriol Plaza. What are your recollections in that pre-MSNBC era of what you were seeing back then at 16?
Steve Kornacki:
I was in high school back then and I was into politics. I was following it and I did not have many points of reference going back more than two or three years at that point. But what I remember is the media coverage was that this was, from the instant it happened, this was a huge event. This was a momentous event, it was a traumatic event, it was certainly covered that way.
Steve Kornacki:
And I think what media and political world had, took from that or the way they approached it was with urgency. There had to be a resolution to this pretty quickly. There was going to be a winner, there was going to be a loser. This was going to be decided. And I think back on that now, just what that one felt like as a consumer of news, I guess, back then and compare it to right now. And I guess that's the thing to me, a generation later, that's clearly missing here is that same sense of urgency.
Josh king:
When Ecco gave you the opportunity to write a book, and you've got a big brand now, you could have written about anything, you could have written about current Trump, more recent Obama, the George Bush years, why did you go back 30 years to do the 1990s?
Steve Kornacki:
I guess in some sense it may be because it's my point of entry and it's become a reference point for me just as the years have passed. I've always found myself looking back at those foundational moments in the 1990s where I first learned about politics and I can always compare, here's what I remember from '92. How does it look different in 2004, 2008, 2012, whatever point we're talking about.
Steve Kornacki:
So, I think I always just had a natural connection with it, but also I just I'm very interested in, I would say, modern, media age political history. Going back a little further, my political memory begins in the early 1990s, but I think anything from the late sixties on, I'm just very interested in.
Josh king:
No one roots for government shutdown, unless you've got the house speaker and the Senate minority leader on your sofa at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. And yet for you and your book, timing is impeccable for comparison to 23 years ago. Here is President Clinton from November, 1995.
President Clinton:
The government is partially shutting down because Congress has failed to pass the straightforward legislation necessary to keep the government running without imposing sharp hikes in Medicare premiums and deep cuts in education and the environment. It is particularly unfortunate that the Republican Congress has brought us to this juncture because after all we share a central goal, balancing the federal budget.
Josh king:
Balancing the federal seems like such a wistful goal.
Steve Kornacki:
And think about it. Is it the wall now? The big thing back then, it was Medicare. I think that was the one that stood out above anything else. And that shutdown had been building all year, 1995. You had that first Republican Congress in 40 years, you had Newt Gingrich, the speaker of the house, who, he was a gadfly when he first came to Congress in the late seventies.
Steve Kornacki:
And this was somebody who at the start of 1995, as Newt Gingrich is taking over as the first Republican House speaker since the 1950s, he's got to be thinking there's a part of him that feels every political instinct he's ever had has been validated. He took the Republicans to where even Republicans didn't think they could get, control of the house. And there he is taking over the gavel from Dick Gephardt at the start in '95.
Steve Kornacki:
And from that point forward, it's building the shutdown. Because Gingrich's political instincts, the ones that have just been validated on the grandest possible scale, are telling him, "This is where Clinton's vulnerable. This country is fundamentally anti-government. This country thinks the government spends too much money. And if you get into a shutdown with Bill Clinton over the welfare state, over Medicare, in the name of balancing the budget, you will win. You'll finish them off, you'll finish the modern democratic party off."
Steve Kornacki:
And Gingrich took that confidence into the show down with Clinton. And you can hear in that clip you just played. Clinton was just as confident that if he stood that ground, he would prevail politically.
Josh king:
Did you see the Clinton affair last year on A&E?
Steve Kornacki:
Yes.
Josh king:
I'm curious, as you're trying to reconstruct the images and sites and sounds for your book, your thoughts as you looked at all the atmospherics and aesthetics in that archival video.
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah. Well, I mean, part of it was trying to figure out how to tell the story, because there's obviously so many things we know now that we didn't know as it was playing out. And the decision I made in the case of the shutdown and in other parts of the book was try to recreate the story as an American in that moment would have absorbed it and processed it. So, that means something like the intern who Bill Clinton might have been encountering during the shutdown was left out in that moment.
Josh king:
The A&E documentary focused on the White House. What did you learn as you wrote, was going on in the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue?
Steve Kornacki:
It's funny because I talk there about the confidence that Gingrich brought into that confrontation. I should say the fuller context though is that already, this is, we're talking November, December, 1995 right here. Already by that point, Newt had taken a lot of political blows. He was always a loose cannon.
Steve Kornacki:
He would always have these inflammatory statements that would just come out of his mouth. And for 16 years, from 1978 to 1994, he was a member of the minority party in the house, the permanent minority, it was thought to be.
Steve Kornacki:
So, folks in Washington knew who he was. He had a reputation with people in Washington. No average person knew who Newt Gingrich was. So, he would say these things and people in Washington were kind of, they were numb to it by 1994. Then all of a sudden in the 1994 elections, there's a Republican revolution. It's a bigger night than anybody had imagined for Republicans. And this guy's going to be a speaker of the house.
Steve Kornacki:
And for tens of millions of people, it's the first time they've ever heard of Newt Gingrich. And he starts talking this way, same way he's always talked. And now every one of these inflammatory utterances becomes a major news story. And he finds himself on the defensive.
Steve Kornacki:
And so, his popularity had really taken a hit. There he is, the government, he's in these negotiations with Bill Clinton. They go over to Israel for the Rabin funeral and he just muses the press. This is the way he always talked. Seeming to say, you know what? I didn't get treated the way I wanted to in Air Force One. So, maybe this shutdown's going to go on for a while. It couldn't have been a bigger political gift-
Josh king:
New York Post has a-
Steve Kornacki:
... to Bill Clinton's field day with a cry baby and-
Josh king:
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Steve Kornacki:
Chuck Schumer, then he was a democratic Congressman trying to make a name for himself, this famous press conference. He blew up the front page of the New York tabloids and just, it's Gingrich in the diaper and everything. I think he was holding a rattle and I'm watching Schumer try to give Trump the same treatment now. And I say, I know where he learned that from.
Josh king:
I mean, and that's where I wanted to go next because when the story of the current shutdown's written, what kind of picture will be painted of what's going on in today's West Wing and down Pennsylvania Avenue in Schumer and Pelosi's office?
Steve Kornacki:
What feels different this time is I get the sense, especially among Republicans, they're sitting there saying, "Are we sure? We're paying a huge political price right here." And you look at Mitch McConnell and the Senate right now, who I think in the past, certainly if you look at the McConnell of 1995 in Washington, he was on the side of those Senate Republicans, I think, who was hoping to get the thing resolved.
Steve Kornacki:
I think they've been through several. I mean, I think Republicans remember 2013 in particular and say, there were predictions that 2014 would be a massacre for them because of the shutdown and it wasn't. And you just look at Trump and look at everything that Trump managed to get away with essentially that no other politician would have on his way to the presidency.
Steve Kornacki:
I do think there's just this question there of, well, if you're a Republican, it doesn't look that good for us. The polling isn't great, but it's never been great for Trump. Is it that much worse? I think they're asking themselves that question, whereas in '95, and I mean especially with that Rabin funeral comment, but also just in general, there was an understanding among most Republicans in Washington right away.
Steve Kornacki:
The politics were breaking against them on the shutdown and they needed to find a way out, and it became this battle. Ironically, it was the freshmen, it was the revolutionaries who wanted to keep going. And it was Newt who created that revolutionary freshman class who even he could see what was happening and was trying to get them, trying to walk them back from the ledge that's what ended up happening in '95.
Josh king:
And yet today, I'm always interested when I'm in a grocery store checkout line in Upstate New York, very different from here in New York City. And you overhear conversations of people and they are cheering the president on. They're happy that he's sticking it to the people who infest the swamp, like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. So, there's a sense that we are in a bubble here in New York and not seeing the way the rest of red America in the red and the blue today think.
Steve Kornacki:
No, I think there's a lot to that. It's just that the challenge of trying to understand politics after November, 2016, I would say is that so many of our assumptions, and I mean, the political consensus, media political consensus, so many of our assumptions about you must do this as a candidate or a president to be popular. You can't do this and win an election.
Steve Kornacki:
So many of them are blown up by the experience of Donald Trump that when you get into a situation like this, you start to question, okay, 49% say blame Trump, 32% say blame the Congress. That's about what the numbers looked like. That was about the split in '95 in the shutdown Republicans were on the losing side of that in '95. That sent them into a panic in 1995.
Steve Kornacki:
You look at it now in the wake of that 2016 election and you're a Republican and you say, "Do we really know what these numbers mean?"
Josh king:
Let's go back to the 1990s and the red and the blue. The C-SPAN archives must have been a permanent bookmark on your browser as you went through from 1988 onward.
Steve Kornacki:
What an incredible resource that is. For folks who don't know, they've basically taken everything that's ever aired on C-SPAN and they've made it available online, searchable. You can play the video ad-free. I'm always one of those C-SPAN junkies. I've never been one of the callers, but all the callers are always the first thing they say is thank you for C-SPAN. And I feel the exact same way. It's just an incredible resource.
Steve Kornacki:
And yeah, that's one of the reasons I say I like modern media age politics is because that's an important component just in shaping politics in modern time is how these things look on television, the pictures, the images, what it sounds like to people. And on C-SPAN, you can go back. I mean, a couple of the moments in the book I went into great detail recreating.
Steve Kornacki:
Obviously, that's C-SPAN playing a key role there, but that's the, in modern politics, part of the story is understanding how these things looked to the viewer on television.
Josh king:
In chapter six, you go back to 1990, the GOP standard bearers, George Bush in the White House, Bob Dole in the Senate, Bob Michael in the House against the backdrop of his no new taxes pledge two years prior during his campaign, you write and I quote, "The play seemed obvious to Bush. Break the taxes pledge now, take the hits, endure the jokes, pay the political price then reap the benefits in 92." Here he was in the Oval Office delivering a speech to the nation.
George Bush:
Tonight, I want to talk to you about a problem that has lingered and dogged and vexed this country for far too long, the federal budget deficit. Thomas Paine said many years ago, "These are the times that try men's souls." As we speak, our nation is standing together against Saddam Hussein's aggression, but here at home, there's another threat, a cancer gnawing away at our nation's health. That cancer is the budget deficit.
Josh king:
Bring us through the maneuverings on the deal that led up to that night in the Oval Office, a bipartisanship, as you write about in the red and the blue that's now all but extinct.
Steve Kornacki:
Right. And it was the deficits had exploded in the 1980s. And the key there, of course, was that Bush in the eighties was Reagan's VP, and Reagan was the tax cutting Republican president. Reagan bought in his supply side economics in the late seventies. It was at the time a revolutionary theory. He bought into it.
Steve Kornacki:
In campaigning against Reagan in 1980, Bush called it voodoo economics. And he said it would explode the deficit. And he was against Reagan's plan. Then Reagan makes him his VP and Bush can see that the party's changing. It's Reagan's party. Bush spends the 1980s trying to convince the Reagan wing, "Eh, I'm really one of you." And he really wasn't.
Steve Kornacki:
What you saw in 1990 is what George H. W. Bush actually was. Those were his instincts when confronted with a national debt. At that point, it was reaching $3 trillion. I think it had crossed $3 trillion. It was going to explode, hundred of billions of dollars every year.
Steve Kornacki:
And his instinct, his real governing instinct once he was in the Oval Office was, we got to make a deal here. We got to make a deal with the Democrats. They control the Congress. They're going to want to raise taxes. That means I've got to raise taxes. I'll try to keep it as minimum as I can, but I will do that. And we're going to cut some spending here, and that's how we're going to cut the deficit. And if we cut the deficit, the economy's going to study itself, I'll get re-elected in 1992. Those were his real instincts.
Steve Kornacki:
But when I say the party had changed and become Reagan's party, I mean, that was real. And that's what Newt Gingrich, at that point the number two Republican in the house, that's what he embodied. He was serious about that. He was serious about, we don't raise taxes as a party.
Steve Kornacki:
So, Bush cuts the deal. He expects he's going to take some heat. What he doesn't expect is what he gets, the number two Republican in the U.S House, Newt Gingrich, party leadership. I'm not with you and there's a rebellion. And the Republicans, the Gingrich Republicans kill it on the house floor. Comes for a vote, they kill it and Bush is humiliated.
Steve Kornacki:
And of course, as he says, he's massing troops in the Middle East at that moment. He's humiliated. He has to go to the Democrats and he has to cut a brand new deal. And it's basically all on their terms. They pass it more with democratic votes. He signs it. And then the killer, if you will, politically for Republicans is, two years later, okay, you put this big tax-like deal through economy was what knocked Bush out of office in 1992. It's the economy stupid. Remember the Clinton thing?
Steve Kornacki:
So, the lesson Republicans took, even the pragmatic Republicans, the lesson they took out of that episode was Bush took all that political heat. He got his tax hike and it didn't even help him and the economy tanked. And I think that is, when I say that's a big moment. That's what I mean. Because a generation later, try getting a Republican vote in Congress for tax hike. That's the origin story of it right there, I think.
Josh king:
I mean, you write about the retirement of Bob Michael, and here comes this player from nowhere, Congressman from Georgia, House minority whip. I've got a clip of him roasting Pat Buchanan, another big player in your book at the Spina Bifida Association in 1991. Let's hear it.
Bob Michael:
... going to be here with Mark Shields and Pat Buchanan. Shields and Buchanan are essentially perfect for this kind of a roast because they're basically twins. They're soulmates in life. They're classics. They represent the tuxedo-wearing charity roast inside the beltway working class. Reagan only seemed like an actor compared to these two. They have made a fabulous living with great incomes out of the equivalent of professional wrestling.
Josh king:
Having fun at the expense of Shields and Buchanan, partisan squabble still seem like a bit of a show, but Gingrich was about to make it real.
Steve Kornacki:
It's so funny to go back and listen to in part. Because that captures something, I think, important about Gingrich in that moment. I say in 1991, that is, he's number two house Republican. He has been gaining influence on the Republican side for more than a decade. Again, he was the laughing stock.
Steve Kornacki:
If he was anything in his early days in Congress, he was the laughing stock of the Republican conference. They did not take him seriously. He had all these grandiose ideas about history, his importance to history, and there he is in 1991. And that is what he's describing in the joke there. That's a real, big, Inside the Beltway event right there. Media, political players.
Steve Kornacki:
Gingrich at that moment was simultaneously transforming congressional Republicans into a much more populist-spirited group, a group that embraced the idea of political combat, partisan combat, partisan warfare, fight the Democrats on just about everything, don't compromise in anything, spell out clear differences with them. There's that Newt, but he was also, in that moment, a key difference between the Newt then and now is he was, I don't want to say embraced by the establishment, but he was comfortable in it.
Steve Kornacki:
And they were comfortable with him, and he was a character in the establishment. And that was where he was in the early 1990s. Right up until he becomes obviously into his speaker-ship. And then when he leaves Congress and leaves that part of his career, he becomes a full fledged anti-establishment, not just in rhetoric, but in terms of his life.
Josh king:
So, to continue our chronology, we're approaching the 1992 election, and maybe Bush's gambit with the budget deal will pay off but the economy is in this tailspin after the Gulf Wars, you said. If it's just Bush against Clinton, those two, who wins based on your electoral analysis?
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah. I honestly believe it's Bill Clinton. I honestly believe it's Bill Clinton. I think the margin looks about the same. I think the electoral map looks about the same. There might be one or two states that flip. I think the thing that's forgotten about Perot, the independent who gets about 20% of the vote in '92, it's remembered that there was a lot of overlap between his style and his politics and Pat Buchanan.
Steve Kornacki:
And Pat Buchanan had challenged Bush in the primaries that year, got a little over 3 million votes. So, it is absolutely true. And I think it's very true, particularly of the Perot folks who stayed loyal after the '92 election. And he created this United We Stand movement and they had local chapters. The folks who really got involved in that tended to be Buchanan-ish.
Steve Kornacki:
But to get close to 20 million votes, about 20% of the vote in 1992, you need something broader than that. And we forget the other currents of discontent that were out there. Jerry Brown on the left, 4 million votes on the democratic side, calling the system corrupt, trying to blow it up. Paul Tsongas, democratic party runs against Clinton in '92. Pro-business liberal, pro-Wall Street liberal. That's what Tsongas has called himself in 1992.
Steve Kornacki:
There were a lot of Tsongas' supporters who didn't like Bill Clinton who ended up voting for Ross Perot because Perot's big issue was the deficit. That was Tsongas' big issue. Tsongas said it was a moral issue, it was a generational issue. He was pro-business. Perot was pro-business and deficits.
Steve Kornacki:
So, there was a lot more overlap than just Perot and Buchanan. And the test to me, the ultimate test is Perot, there were two phases. He ran in the spring of '92, he cracked up under the media spotlight and dropped out of the race.
Steve Kornacki:
When he gets out of the race, it's a democratic convention. First polling out there has Clinton ahead by like 20 points. Clinton stays ahead all summer. Republican convention's held, Clinton is still ahead. Labor day, Clinton's up 10, 15, 20 points. Bush never leads in a single poll. And at the start of October, Perot gets back in the race.
Steve Kornacki:
And the race actually gets a little closer in October, but again, Bush never led in a single poll. With Perot in the race at the end or without him in the summer. So, that tells me it was a broad coalition that was with Perot. And I think the race is the same no matter what.
Josh king:
You said you're a student in politics and also a student of political media as it evolved. And well before Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann or Rachel Maddow, there's Larry King and the platform that he offered to anyone who would sit across from him and his suspenders on the CNN set. And one of them was this businessman from Texas, Ross Perot. Here is that first appearance he had on King, February 20th, 1992.
Ross Perot:
Let's go down to grassroots America where the people are hurting. And everybody's saying, "Why are we in this mess?" First thing I'd like you to do, all of you is look in the mirror. We're the owners of this country. We don't act like the owners. We act like white rabbits that get programmed by messages coming out of Washington. We own this place.
Larry King:
Is there any scenario in which you would run for president? Can you give me a scenario in which you'd say, "Okay, I'm in."
Ross Perot:
Well, number one, I don't want to.
Larry King:
I know, but is there a scenario?
Ross Perot:
Number two, if you're that serious, you, the people, are that serious, you register me in 50 states.
Josh king:
Larry King, huge influence in the 1990s. The platform to launch the Perot campaign. What happens next?
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah. I mean, just think about that too. It's so easy to, I feel, when we look back to lose sight of how much the media culture has changed in the generation, there is no internet basically back then. It's a primitive internet.
Josh king:
Nothing.
Steve Kornacki:
There is no social media, right? There's no Facebook, there's no Twitter. Okay? There's no cable news except CNN. You don't have partisan cable news or anything. So, you got 9:00 PM Larry King. You want to make news? You got Larry King at 9:00 and Ted Koppel at 11:30 on ABC. Those are your two choices. What that set off, I think, would be extraordinary at any point in history.
Steve Kornacki:
But I think it's particularly extraordinary when you consider what I just said about the lack of the kind of viral media we now have. He said, "Ah, I don't want to do it. Register me, put me on the ballot in all 50 states and I'll do it."
Steve Kornacki:
From that, you had, it was a genuinely grassroots movement that sprung up. People organized themselves, again, almost without any internet. People organized themselves around the country. That was February, 1992. In May of 1992, you had the first major state ballot deadline, Texas, huge state. And the rules in Texas were, you basically need to get a quarter million signatures to get on the ballot.
Steve Kornacki:
They submitted well over a quarter, the volunteers, well over a quarter million signatures Perot makes the ballot in Texas. He goes 10% in the polls, 20% in the polls, 30% in the polls. There are polls by the late spring in 1992 that have Ross Perot in first place, 40% nationally. He's beating the incumbent president, George H. W. Bush who he hates, by the way, and who hates him.
Steve Kornacki:
And Bill Clinton, the soon-to-be democratic nominee is left in the dust. 25% of the vote. Perot is in first place. He's on the cover of all the, again, the major news, weekly magazines. They really mattered back then. And there's these scenarios where it seems very possible this election's going to get thrown to the House of Representatives because no one will get 270.
Steve Kornacki:
But at that point, there's electoral maps that are out there that have Perot clearing 270 and winning the election. I mean, we have seen third party candidates who've-
Josh king:
He's got Hamiltons Jordan. He's got-
Steve Kornacki:
He brings in Ed Rollins.
Josh king:
Ed Rollins.
Steve Kornacki:
Right. And that was Ed Rollins who had done Reagan's campaign, Hamilton and Jordan who's done Jimmy Carter. He brought them both in. Looks like it's going to be a really serious campaign. And that's when I say he cracked up under the scrutiny. That's what started to happen. He didn't want. He wanted these political professionals to be associated with him. When they tried to exert control over him in the campaign, he bristled at it. They bristled at that. They both left the campaign.
Josh king:
Sounds like a guy we know.
Steve Kornacki:
It really. And that was, what did they call it? There was, I forgot who it was, but there was a journalist who called Perot the world's first populist billionaire. And that's very much what it was. He's a billionaire. He was quick with his folksy expressions. He railed against the establishment. He talked about these stupid bureaucrats in both parties in Washington, DC. There were strong populist undercurrents, like we were saying, already in '92.
Steve Kornacki:
And he was positioned to tap into him with his implicit promise of, "I'm worth billions of dollars. I know what I'm doing. These guys in Washington, I eat guys like this for lunch. You send me there, I'll fix it." That was essentially what Perot was running on in '92.
Josh king:
But Clinton gets through, as you write in chapter 14 and I'm quoting now, "He'd come to power facing a unique challenge. Never before had so many Americans had so many doubts about the character and integrity of a president they had just elected. For the opposition party, there was an opportunity in this and it meshed with a particular component of the Gingrich playbook." What was that component?
Steve Kornacki:
Gingrich believed that there was a majority. It's the old concept Richard Nixon had with a silent majority. It was rooted, in a lot of ways, on cultural issues, on a backlash to the liberalization, if you want to put it that way, of American values that came out of the late 1960s.
Steve Kornacki:
He called the Clintons at one point Bill and Hillary Clinton, Gingrich did, he called them counterculture McGovernics. George McGovern, the 1972 democratic presidential candidate was Pat Buchanan who came up with that amnesty, acid and abortion to stand for what McGovern represented.
Steve Kornacki:
And Newt said that's the key. You make any voter in a country, no matter where they are, see the democratic party as the party of counterculture McGovernics, and they will vote Republican and you'll win the presidency, you'll win the Senate, you'll win the house, you'll win everything. And that was his theory.
Josh king:
And in many ways, and we've seen this pattern repeat itself, but I was certainly there at this moment in the early days of the Clinton White House, they dug their own grave. I mean, here's Dee Dee Meyers, the press secretary at her daily briefing May 19th, 1993.
Dee Dee Meyers:
We've been looking at a number of different operations within the White House as part of the National Performance Review, headed by the vice president. We've been looking at the different functions within the office of administration. And last week, we began to take a look at the travel office.
Dee Dee Meyers:
Within the travel office, we found gross mismanagement, if you will. There's basically very shoddy accounting practices, mismanagement, a number of things. And in order to correct those, we thought it was advisable to take immediate action. And so, the previous staff has been dismissed.
Josh king:
I mean, you can feel her reticence, can you?
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah, it sounds very defensive. Doesn't it?
Josh king:
I mean, Whitewater and the suicide Vince Foster followed. Dan Burton isn't a name on the tip of our tongues nowadays, but how did he become a thorn in the Clinton side throughout the 1990s?
Steve Kornacki:
I think basically what happened there, this was true in the eyes of a lot of the media, this was certainly true in the eyes of Republicans was Bill Clinton came to office probably at that point the least trusted incoming president we'd ever seen. The Slick Willie nickname stuck to him in 1992.
Steve Kornacki:
There was the sense that he was a fundamentally dishonest guy and that it was a certain kind of dishonesty too. There was a precision to it often, that he might be saying something that was very, very technically, if you parsed it all out, true or accurate. But it was entirely misleading. It was entirely deceptive. And that was the sense. It was the sense that he was hiding something.
Steve Kornacki:
And Hillary Clinton too obviously was from the very beginning and he's predated the presidency, was very distrustful of the media in particular. So, they brought that with them and those suspicions were already on them when they got there. And so, when something like you showed there with the travel office, well, what the heck is the travel office? Nobody even knows.
Steve Kornacki:
They fire the travel office staff. This is May, 1993. The travel office is this obscure White House office. It deals with the presses there. Makes their arrangements for them as they're-
Josh king:
Kind of the worst people to pick on are the people we put them on 747s, feed them and find them in the best hotels around the world.
Steve Kornacki:
Right. They're these anonymous folks, but the press knows them. They deal with the press, they have relationships with the press. And so, the press knows who these people are. And it's very suspicious because who goes after the travel office? And then they're alleging, Dee Dee Meyers and the Clinton White House is alleging all this gross wrong doings.
Steve Kornacki:
And then the press starts looking into it, starts picking apart the story. And there's a lot more to. It turns out Hillary Clinton was a driving force by behind it. And then you see, the first lady was a driving force behind going after the travel office. And then the White House lies about that.
Steve Kornacki:
So, now all of that suspicion that was already there is compounded. And it's over what? It's over the travel office. And then as you mentioned, there's the Vince Foster suicide, deputy White House Council, summer of 1993.
Steve Kornacki:
And who was foster? Well, he was from the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock with Hillary Clinton and Whitewater's becoming a source. Whitewater's already been introduced at that point. And there's all these suspicions around the Clintons. And now, well, wait a minute, didn't he have all the Whitewater records?
Steve Kornacki:
And so, there's suspicions around that. It start to percolate, it start to build. It turns out that somebody else from the White House went into Vince Foster's office hours after the suicide. And then, well, what was he doing there? Was that an innocent thing? Was he just trying to help investigators or was...
Steve Kornacki:
So, all these suspicions are there. And basically in early 1994, the political pressure builds and it even includes democrats.
Josh king:
White House Council, Bernie Nussbaum.
Steve Kornacki:
It was Bernie Nussbaum who did that. That's correct. And in early 1994, the bipartisan pressure builds. You've got Democrats like Daniel Patrick Moynihan from New York who join in and say, "We need a special council." And so, initially, it's like we have now with the Mueller investigation, the justice department, Janet Reno, the attorney general, appoints a special counsel.
Josh king:
Bob Fiske and then Ken Starr.
Steve Kornacki:
Fiske. But what happens too is there's this movement at the same time in Congress to say, "You know what? That old, independent counsel statute that they had back during, in the wake of-"
Josh king:
Watergate.
Steve Kornacki:
"... Watergate, let's bring that back." It had lapsed. Let's bring that back. And Clinton, Clinton doesn't want it, but you got to say you're for it. So, therefore it too, it gets through Congress. And then it's that summer.
Steve Kornacki:
Okay, Fiske is the special council, Janet Reno has appointed Fisk to be the special counsel. The assumption is, she will make him the independent counsel. He's already put a preliminary report out. It doesn't actually sound like it's going to be that bad for the Clintons if this guy stays on the job.
Steve Kornacki:
And that is when the three judge panel has got to make the pick here. Reno recommends Fiske but the three judge panel's got to make the pick. And the three judge panel comes up with Ken Starr. And Ken Starr, the newly revived independent council statute. This can be as expansive an investigation as he wants. The budget is limitless, the portfolio is limitless and now Ken Starr is in that job and the rest is history, as they say.
Josh king:
The rest is history. Divided government, tribal government, one arm of government investigating another. Heading into a presidential election with an incumbent president presumably running for reelection. If we go back and look at 1996, 2004, 2012, these similar year precedents, what did the lessons of the 1990s prepare us for what's ahead?
Steve Kornacki:
The clear reelection lesson for Bill Clinton was that politically, he found his footing only when Republicans got control of Congress, only after the Republican revolution of 1994. And in a way it was, he benefited from the same thing that Gingrich always thought Republicans would benefit from, and that was contrast.
Steve Kornacki:
And that was Gingrich's plan, as I just said, on his way up and the Republican Party's way up in Congress. It was to create this very clear and stark contrast between the Republican party and the Democratic party. And in '93 and '94, for all sorts of reasons we're just discussing, the brewing Whitewater Scandal, the sense that Clinton was dishonest, pushing through a tax hike in '93, having Hillary Clinton oversee a healthcare and having that blow up, Bill Clinton's popularity really falls in Republicans. It's a tsunami, a political tsunami in 1994.
Steve Kornacki:
Well, okay, now that you have Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House coming in at '95, the equation changes. And now there's a contrast, as I say, people are just learning about Newt Gingrich for the first time. And voters, this was true particularly of suburban voters. We talk about them a lot now, we talk about college-educated suburbanites fleeing the Republican Party.
Steve Kornacki:
This, I think, is when it really begins. It's the mid-1990s. And these are voters who had gone for Reagan, they'd gone for Bush Senior, they'd definitely gone for Nixon. On pocketbook issues, they considered themselves Republicans, but they were culturally moderate, culturally liberal Republicans. And they'd been comfortable with a Ronald Reagan and they look up and they see Newt Gingrich, this guy from Georgia, and he's surrounded by Southern Republicans.
Steve Kornacki:
That was new at that point, believe it or not. And there's this Alliance with Evangelical Christians, and he wants to shut the government down over Medicare. And that really helped Bill Clinton find his footing, being the guy who was standing against that. And you see it in the 1996 election results, he won re-election pretty easily.
Steve Kornacki:
Look at it on paper. It looked about the same as 1992. When you went into the individual states, New Jersey, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Illinois, the Pacific Coast, the places we now think of as blue America, that's where the big movement was. That's where you had the biggest defections from the Republicans to the Democrats. That was the backbone of Clinton's re-election and it's something we've been talking about really for a generation since. Democrats have had their eye on that demographic ever since. And in some ways, it was in the 2018 midterms that it finally really came to fruition for them.
Josh king:
So, as we look to 2019 and 2020, is there a solve for the president having now a foil a mile away at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue plus 57 million Twitter followers?
Steve Kornacki:
Well, I mean, that is still, and that certainly was coming off the 2018 election, what I was looking for. We're seeing our first test of it though, and it's so far playing out differently than it did in 1995. Bill Clinton versus Newt Gingrich, government shut down. The politics immediately worked against Gingrich and the Republicans, they pretty quickly relented. Gingrich was certainly trying to get them to Rollin pretty quickly. Clinton's approval rating started to climb by the end in 1995.
Steve Kornacki:
Again, he had been wiped out in the '94 midterms. It was taken as a given that he was a one term president. The question was, would he run for re-election or he'd just be voted out by the public or would a Democrat take the nomination from him? A year later, end of 1995, he's winning the politics of the shutdown. His approval rating is clearing 50%. He's suddenly in good shape to win re-election.
Steve Kornacki:
Okay. Well, we're three weeks and counting now into the shutdown of Donald Trump versus Nancy Pelosi. Trump's approval rating, it's not crashing but it's not climbing. It's down a couple of points. It's not helping him. There's no indication in the polling that it's helping him, no indication in the polling it's helping his party.
Steve Kornacki:
There's a question of how much will it hurt him? But if you're looking for something that was going to change the political equation in the way that the Republican Congress changed the political equation for Bill Clinton, there's no evidence right now in this showdown that it's changed the equation in Trump's favor. At best for him, it looks like a continuation of the last two year years. At worst, it looks like it's heading south for him.
Josh king:
When we come back, we talk more about 2019 and 2020 informed by the 1990s and Steve Kornacki's journey from Boston to 30 Rock. That's right after this.
Speaker 11:
Arlo's a next generation smart home company that provides a super simple do-it-yourself home security solution with up to 48% market share and class-leading internet technology. We're looking at new products and even grow internationally. The NYSE obviously has a tremendous history. The way that they actually bring the stock to market, there was a human element that stabilizes the market. And you could see that in the stock opening today. Having a strong partnership to actually bring Arlo to public company was really important to us. You only get to do this once.
Josh king:
Back now with Steve Kornacki, national political correspondent for MSNBC and NBC news, an author of The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism. Before the break, we were on a nostalgic time trip through the Bush 41 and Clinton years leading up to that at moment where, Steve, you start your book.
Josh king:
November 7th, 2000, Dan Rather interrupting Mike Wallace, Tom Brokaw muzzling Doris Kearns Goodwin with, as you report, two stops and five Dorises, a tide presidential election. As the nineties end, did we reach full tribal warfare broken only by five four Supreme Court decision?
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah. I mean, the title of the book. I mean, obviously we all now talk about red states, blue states, red America, blue America. And I think the thing that I have found just going around talking about this book, there is a sense that we've always been dealing with this. We've always lived in the America of red and blue, and it's basically a 20-year-old concept.
Steve Kornacki:
It's basically a two decade less really, it's a 19-year-old concept at this point. And it's a product of that election night 2000 and the 36 days that followed the recount. And that election night itself, I should say, is I believe the product of the 1990s, the product of Newt versus Bill and everything that came with that and the divergence of the two political parties under them.
Steve Kornacki:
And you look up on election night 2000, and you're not just seeing the closest presidential election we'd had in a generation, but it was. Not since 1976 had you had one that was at all suspenseful an election night. But the pattern that emerged, basically the entire south, once Florida was finally called the entire south, is Republican red. The Northeast minus New Hampshire by about 4,000 votes, I think it was in New Hampshire. The entire Northeast is blue. The Pacific Coast is blue. The interior is red. It's the basic pattern that we know today.
Steve Kornacki:
And that's the other thing was that the colors were random. There was no significance at all to red and blue for the two parties. They had been in the past-
Josh king:
Gone back and forth depending on what the set designer decided.
Steve Kornacki:
Random things. One clip I found I remember was at start of election night 1984. This is Reagan versus Mondale. David Brinkley on ABC says, "And we've got this map behind us. And you'll see tonight that the Republicans are red. And we've chosen that because red and Reagan start with the same letter." That's the level of thought that went into this stuff. It just so happened, all the networks were on that same scheme, red for the Republicans, blue for the Democrats going into election night, 2000.
Steve Kornacki:
And then that map, you're just watching it all night fill in one state after the other, you see those patterns and then the whole country is just left to stare at it for more than a month because this presidential race is unresolved. And it was during that that David Letterman, on The Late Show on CBS, he had this joke one night where he said, "We've got this Bush/Gore impasse here. Good news America, I think I solved it. We're going to let Al Gore be president of those blue states, George W. Bush be president of those red states."
Steve Kornacki:
And it was a novel concept, but you could see this. It was sinking in with people then. New states have emerged on both sides as targets since 2000, but it's the most stable. You look back over the last two decades, it's really the most stable the electoral map has ever been overall. Those same basic patterns have stayed in place from that night.
Josh king:
The networks themselves didn't know what to do with what they were handed at 11:00 that night.
Steve Kornacki:
There was really no precedent for it. And again, you think about what had come before that immediately, Clinton in '96 was a very easy re-election for him just in terms of that night. Short night for the networks. '92 was momentous. You had a transfer of power from one party to the other, but it wasn't close. And in the eighties you had Reagan winning 44 states in 1980, 49 and '84, Bush winning 40 in '88.
Steve Kornacki:
I mean, these were just landslides. They were used to killing time from like 8:30 on, on election night. And in 2000, it was also spent, then you add into that, there were all sorts of errors. The other thing that strikes me too that I've just noticed going around, looking at this too, it just, I guess from my standpoint, I remember it vividly.
Steve Kornacki:
There is a generation I'm seeing that's coming up now that doesn't remember that night. Because I remember the before and after. I remember the America of the nineties when this stuff was taking shape. I remember a little bit of the America of the late eighties, but I can remember what it was like before we talked about red states and blue states and after. And it just really struck me going around talking about this book that there's a generation coming up now that's only known in their entire lives red and blue as a reality.
Josh king:
Take us behind your process. I mean, Tim Russert's whiteboards seem quaint compared to the data and technology that you and John King have at your fingertips. How does it all unfold for you on either the week and then the hours leading up to poll's closing?
Steve Kornacki:
I guess I use 2016 as an example here because there's an election night that's a lot like 2000 in that the total suspense. 2004 was like that, but 2016, I think because the outcome was so unexpected. You go into the night, obviously I have looked at every poll we've seen all year. And so, I have a set of expectations in my head and I have a set of things that I'm looking for.
Steve Kornacki:
You've looked at every poll all year, personally, I have just done my best to make sure in any state or any area that might possibly be critical at some point in an election night that I am ready to just look at that state and say something intelligent about the political geography of the state compared to the results that are coming in.
Steve Kornacki:
So, I've done that. I'm ready for that. And the first thing that happens for us is at 5:00 we get the first round of exit polls. And obviously you're, okay, how do these match up against our assumptions? And in 2016, they were right where our assumptions were and it looked just like the polling before election day.
Steve Kornacki:
So, you take that and you get the early results to start to come in on election night. And in 2016, again, the early results were matching up with that. I remember being at the board probably 7:30 or so at night and looking at Florida. And you've got all of Florida except the panhandle was closed at that point.
Steve Kornacki:
So, you can't really characterize it on the air, but you can show people what's happening. And I looked at the big three democratic counties, Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach. And they were coming in and a lot of the vote was there. Clinton was getting a higher percentage of the vote than Barack Obama had gotten four years earlier. And she seemed to be getting better turnout than Obama had.
Steve Kornacki:
And the exit polls suggested Florida was looking okay for Clinton. The pre-election polls had looked pretty good for her there. So in my head, it's now 7:45 at night and this looks exactly like it's looked all fall. And it was in the next, I'm going to say, 15 to 20 minutes that it all changed.
Steve Kornacki:
And what happened was, especially it was the counties, in Florida first. That's where I first noticed it, in Florida. It was the counties on the Gulf Coast. You started to see, okay, Clinton's outperforming Obama a little down here. Trump is outperforming Romney a lot. And these are some big counties. Just right north of Tampa, for instance, outperforming Romney a lot in the turnout.
Steve Kornacki:
This is an even bigger jump here. And the statewide lead suddenly, Clinton had been winning by, I remember by 110,000 votes. The next time I check, he's down to 4,000. You're starting to see it. And then I say to myself, "Hmm, wait a minute. Look at these Gulf Coast counties. Who lives here? These are retirees from the Upper Midwest, from the industrial state. These are Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan. This is where they live, the Gulf coast."
Steve Kornacki:
So, if you're seeing it here, are we actually going to see it up there? And then I'm going into North Carolina and I remember North Carolina, Clinton had an early lead. Now Trump's pulled ahead. Now he's puling ahead.
Josh king:
Sheen, Bon Jovi were there just hours earlier making their last push.
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah, they thought they might have a shot in North Carolina. And no, now Trump's ahead comfortably in North Carolina. And I'm looking at Virginia, Clinton's ahead but we thought this is a double digit Clinton state. Tim Kane's on the ticket with her and Virginia hasn't even been called.
Steve Kornacki:
It was a very rapid sequence of events. And what I can tell you is from about, I'm going to say 8:30 until 2:30 in the morning, it's one of the few times in my life I can remember the things that happened, I can't remember the sequence. This was 10:00. This was 11:00. It's a blur, because so much was happening so quickly. And it was challenging so many assumptions we had about how the night was going to go. I was moving at a faster speed, I think, mentally than I'd ever been asked to move before.
Steve Kornacki:
It was an exciting thing to be a part of, just in terms of trying to tell that story. But I do remember sometime about 2:30, things finally calmed down enough and it was like, I remember we were just hanging on Wisconsin and we knew where it was going to go. We were just waiting for our decision desk to call it. And that's when I could calm down and start processing things again. I never had an experience like that on air.
Josh king:
Steve, you're so different than the average panel of pundits who are so quick to bash us over the head with an opinion, or more subtly wink at us with a little aside in how we should think. With you it's just the facts.
Steve Kornacki:
Appreciate you saying that. And that's what I try to be. And I think the answer is just from my standpoint, I'm doing elections and whatever side of the aisle you're on, you're a Democrat, you're a Republican, you're something else, everybody...
Steve Kornacki:
It's one of those things. You're always like, I think you ask people what they want in coverage and they answer aspirationally. We only want the issues, we want policy, and those things are very important. And there are people out there who are excellent at covering it. And there's definitely an audience for it. But it's always struck me for a long time when I'm just talking to people, socially. People I know, people I don't know, I just happen to encounter. And they find out what I do for a living.
Steve Kornacki:
They're always asking me who's winning, who's losing? Whatever side they're on, they have an interest in it. Voters on all sides are invested in who wins and who loses for all sorts of reasons. And so, my role I've always said is trying to facilitate that conversation.
Steve Kornacki:
It's not just who's winning and who's losing, but what is the campaign looking at right now? They're spending a fortune on polling. Okay. Well, here's what we think the polling is showing. They're going after this group of voters because, well, this is what the polling is showing. They're worried about this group of...
Steve Kornacki:
So, trying to make people understand the campaigns. They're so fixated on the kinds of things that I'm trying to cover on the air. I view my role as trying to bring that to some daylight. And then just trying to facilitate a conversation with people.
Steve Kornacki:
I develop in my own head, a set of expectations. They're changing constantly, often, but I'm not there to say on the air, "I have looked at the numbers and there was a 96.3% chance that this is going to..." I'm not looking to do that. I'm looking, I think, more to facilitate a conversation.
Steve Kornacki:
And I think it's like, I hope if I'm doing it right I can say the same things to a group of Democrats I can say to a group of Republicans. And I found that to be the case. And I found that just for me, again, personally, I found that in this moment, in our political history. I've been gratified by that. If that's the right word. I feel like I've found a little island where maybe you could still get the two sides together and you could speak the same language, have the same conversation. And the more I've seen that, I found value in it and I want to maintain it.
Josh king:
I want to go back to a part of your life when you might have felt that it was okay to take a side because the person that you were liking was actually in the middle. You grew up outside of Boston.
Steve Kornacki:
Right.
Josh king:
We mentioned earlier, our Senator in the 1980s was Paul Tsongas. Self-styled, pro-business guy. Let's hear one of his ads when he ran for president in 1992.
Speaker 12:
He's no movie star, but Paul Tsongas is something else. When no one thought Chrysler could survive, Paul Tsongas forced the agreement in Congress that saved a hundred thousand jobs. When special interests were grabbing up our last great wilderness, Paul Tsongas pushed through what has been called the conservation bill of the century. And while others feared the president's popularity, Paul Tsongas took him on with a new economic vision for America, getting the tough jobs done. It's called leadership paid for by the Tsongas committee.
Josh king:
You said here, and you said in a recent article that he was the best friend Wall Street ever had. 30 years later, we forget about people like Bob Michael, just right of center. Tsongas just left of center. But now that we're sitting here on Wall Street, what was his appeal to a kid like you?
Steve Kornacki:
For me, it was really specific. 1991 when he got in the presidential race, I turned 12-years-old that year. I grew up... He's from Lowell, Massachusetts, which is a Old Milltown, about 25 miles Northwest of Boston. I'm from outside of Lowell, I'm from a town outside of Lowell.
Steve Kornacki:
He was a giant in our area. He was a giant in our area because he'd made it big in politics as an underdog, but also because he had kept such deep roots in the area and in Lowell. And Lowell was going through particularly tough times in the seventies, in the eighties. And he did an incredible amount of work to bring resources into that city, to bring businesses into that city.
Josh king:
Wang.
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah, Wang's the big one. And people now probably say, "What's Wang?"
Josh king:
What's Wang?
Steve Kornacki:
Right. Wang in the eighties, because it was cutting edge. The Wang Country Club was in the town I grew up in where they had their employee country club, I remember that. But yeah, he brought public money in there. He had national park designation, was instrumental in bringing business in there. He had left the Senate diagnosed with cancer in 1984. It sounded like a death sentence at the time. At the early 1990s he's still around, he's healthy, he's swimming, seems healthy. It was more complicated than it turned out.
Steve Kornacki:
And he gets in the presidential race as George H. W. Bush has just won the Gulf War, 91% approval rating and Tsongas gets in the race. And I just remember he was, I mean, and this is four years after Dukakis. All the jokes about another Greek from Massachusetts. That's what Democrats are really looking for. Right?
Steve Kornacki:
You heard it in that ad there, he's not a movie star and he's running against Bill Clinton who is as smooth as they come.
Josh king:
He's got a squeaky voice.
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah. His lack of charisma was his charisma because it read against Clinton's authenticity. You got Slick Willie, that's the image of Bill Clinton. And you got this totally non-telegenic guy, Paul Tsongas, who's got this 85 page booklet on economics he wants to hand out to you. The contrast image-wise was so stark.
Steve Kornacki:
And then against the odds, he gets traction. He wins New Hampshire primary. He wins Maryland. There's a moment there when it looks like could this guy actually knock off Clinton, win the nomination? There's polls that at that point show him beating Bush. Could this guy actually be president?
Steve Kornacki:
And I just remember, I bring the youthful political nerd's perspective to it, I guess. I just remember the excitement where I grew up as he caught fire. I remember they chartered buses on weekends. You could go down to Maryland and campaign for him. And the Lowell Sun Newspaper, which was a very conservative newspaper, but they loved Paul Tsongas. They were totally on board.
Steve Kornacki:
So, you get that afternoon newspaper every day and you're just, it wasn't Democrat, Republican left. I couldn't even really explain a lot of the agenda, but he just seemed like a really good guy and he was from our area. And it was one of the most exciting things to watch for a while.
Josh king:
So, for you after college at BU, it was on to exploring opportunities in L.A. You had ambitions to make a tidy living gaming in the game shows. Explain.
Steve Kornacki:
I wish I could explain. It was a whim. After college. I had some friends who were going out to Los Angeles trying to do film, television stuff. I said I'd go with them. I said I plan to go very short term. What I really wanted to do was drive around the country and I felt, "Well, let's just drive across the country."
Steve Kornacki:
I said, "This is a good chance I'm ever going to have." So, I went with them thinking I'll stay maybe a couple of days and come back. I ended up staying a little longer because I got out there and I was like, "I used to watch these game shows on TV. I always thought I might be okay on them." And this is where they tape them all. So, let me see if I can get on one or two of these. And if I can win, I could survive for a little while out here and then who knows? That was to the extent there was a plan, so I tried.
Steve Kornacki:
I basically struck out even trying to get on them. I think I was about to make it, if people remember the show, Win Ben Stein's Money. It was on Comedy Central and then the show got canceled. So, they called me back.
Josh king:
You never got your shot?
Steve Kornacki:
Never. I think I was going to get it. And they called me back one day and they say, "Yeah, we're going off the air. There's not going to be another season." So, that wasn't in the cards. I taped a pilot for one. I think the show aired on USA briefly, but yeah, I never got the big bucks game show career I was expecting out of that.
Josh king:
So, you trudge your way back across the country, you find yourself in New Jersey, of all places, covering politics. You burst on the scene really in September, 2013, when two of the three toll lanes of the George Washington Bridge were mysteriously closed during rush hour. Here's New Jersey governor, Chris Christie explaining himself.
Chris Christie:
... has certainly tested this administration. Mistakes were clearly made, and as a result, we let down the people we're entrusted to serve. I know our citizens deserve better, much better. Now, I'm the governor and I'm ultimately responsible for all that happens on my watch, both good and bad. Now, without a doubt, we will cooperate with all appropriate inquiries to ensure that this breach of trust does not happen again.
Josh king:
What put you in the middle of the story?
Steve Kornacki:
Well, it stems from covering New Jersey and I covered politics in New Jersey at a pretty local level. It was statewide, but it was, we were covering the politics of politics. So, I'm going, one day I'm in South Jersey talking about a big county race down there, the next day in Bergen county.
Steve Kornacki:
And as I got to know just all of the behind the scenes people throughout the state in New Jersey politics, got to know a lot of the politicians. And it put me in position where it turned out the mayor of Hoboken, city right across the Hudson River from New York City in the wake of the story you're talking about right there felt like she had been threatened by the Christie administration and wanted to come forward and make the accusation and make her case.
Steve Kornacki:
And I was at MSNBC at that point and I had the Saturday Morning Show. She showed me all of her materials. We were able to go check them out. We're not just putting her on the air to say things that she doesn't have supporting material for. You can make of what she was saying, what you wanted. But we put that story out there. That was in early 2014. And yeah, that was on the MSNBC Weekend Show.
Josh king:
I mean, when Christie won re-election, I can remember, I can actually still see his acceptance speech. You thought, for all intents and purposes, he was the presumptive Republican nominee in 2016, not Donald Trump.
Steve Kornacki:
What do I know? What does anybody know? We're always wrong about everything. I have my gut, for whatever it's worth, is that Christie absent that scandal at the end in 2013. There may not have been a Trump who even emerged. And I know all the arguments that are made, like why Christie was unnominatable in the Republican party.
Steve Kornacki:
People make them with a lot of conviction. And I always come back at them and I say, "Look at Donald Trump. Look at how many things Donald Trump had on his record? Things he said that you were programmed to say, 'you cannot say this and win the Republican nomination for president.'"
Steve Kornacki:
Donald Trump campaigned for president saying, at one point he said that George W. Bush lied us into Iraq, right? Something somebody on the far left is going to say. If you would just sit in the abstract and a Republican president candidate say that in South Carolina and win every congressional district in South Carolina in the primary, you'd say, "Of course not."
Steve Kornacki:
Well, Trump did. So, Trump tested a lot. And I think what was key for Trump was the personality. It was the, whatever you want to call it. Swagger, the posture. And Christie had a lot of that.
Josh king:
Christie had that swagger that would get me and my wife, moderate Democrats, thinking about coming over.
Steve Kornacki:
And that's the other-
Josh king:
Practical, common sense, good government.
Steve Kornacki:
And there's the difference between that Christie and Trump, is that Christie could get buy-in from a Republican establishment. He could sell that demeanor, that posture, that these fools don't know what they're doing. A lot of that is what Trump tapped into. But the establishment of Republican Party, when they thought he was electable, would have been happy to go along with it.
Steve Kornacki:
And I think he could have put together a coalition there, a very powerful coalition that spoke sufficiently to that rest of grassroots base that got behind Trump but that didn't, while doing that, freak out the establishment the way Trump did. And I'm not sure, Jeb certainly couldn't do it, but Christie wasn't Jeb.
Steve Kornacki:
I mean, you saw a little bit of it. If people remember the New Hampshire primary debate the Saturday night before, and Christie at that point knows-
Josh king:
Stephanopoulos moderating.
Steve Kornacki:
Yeah. And Christie at that point knows, it's not going to be me. It's not happening. But he was so mad. He believed he had a chance until Marco Rubio folks, around him had gone after him in December, 2015. And you can see, Christie is basically saying to himself, "It's not going to be me, but by God, it's not going to be Rubio."
Steve Kornacki:
And he goes after Rubio in that debate and Rubio unravels. And it was an amazing thing to see. And that's why it's one of those what ifs. You look back at the 2016 Republican primaries and he said, "Geez, if that didn't happen, Rubio, did he have a little bit of momentum there heading into New Hampshire?"
Steve Kornacki:
"Would he have been a lot closer to Trump primary night in New Hampshire? Would that have gotten Jeb Bush out of the race? Would there have been some consolidation around Rubio coming out of New Hampshire if that doesn't happen? Did Christie alter a thing?"
Steve Kornacki:
You could play all the different what ifs out, but all I would say is, what you saw there was that political talent, he got a little taste of it right there from Chris Christie and I think that guy unburdened by the scandal that affected him so much. Yeah, I wonder if Trump even just doesn't see the opening that he saw.
Josh king:
So, from New Jersey, you mentioned you were at MSNBC when Bridgegate broke. It brought you across the Hudson to MSNBC, a change from some of the hosts of old, at that network. People like Alan Keyes, Pat Buchanan, a new generation of millennials, The Cycle with Krystal Ball Toure S.E. Cupp and you. Let's have a listen to the beginning of one of your commentaries back then.
Steve Kornacki:
I am a sucker for traditions, especially quirky traditions. The running of the balls, the green jacket in the masters, that thing in Detroit where fans of the red wing throw octopuses or octopi or whatever it is on the ice during playoff games.
Steve Kornacki:
Back where I grew up in Massachusetts, there's a group of old men who celebrate every New Year's Day by putting on their bathing suits and jumping into the freezing cold Atlantic Ocean because, well, just because. And I think it's great. But in politics, there's one quirky tradition that I really, really don't like. The electoral college.
Josh king:
The Electoral College, Steve, it's Donald Trump's favorite subject. Every last one of the 304 votes he won, you still hold your view as the race to 270 starts to heat up with a basketball team's worth of Democrats already forming their exploratory committees that you don't like the Electoral College?
Steve Kornacki:
It's an interesting one. And I'll tell you, it grows out of, I've always been fascinated with the electoral college. And try to go back to before the 2000 election, when in modern times, we hadn't had that situation where one candidate wins the popular vote and loses the electoral college. Hadn't had that since the 19th century. So, it was a what if? How would modern American politics handle it if that ever happened?
Steve Kornacki:
And actually, it was an open question. Nobody really knew. And you can find it. You can go back and you can find news clippings from late 2000. The expectation was if it happened on election night, 2000, it would be the opposite. It was going to be Bush who won the popular vote and Gore who won the Electoral College.
Steve Kornacki:
In the Bush campaign, there's news reports from back then was getting ready for that and was going to fight it. There'd be a group called Democrats for Democracy, whatever it was. And I just remember, I always believed, my sense in the nineties was if it ever happened, the country wouldn't stand for it. And I obviously was proven wrong by the 2000 election.
Steve Kornacki:
But I remember coming out of the 2000 election and thinking there's a solution here that seems pretty obvious that merges the two. Because I get the benefits people argue for at the Electoral College. And it's the idea of the congressional district-based vote.
Steve Kornacki:
How do you apportion the Electoral College? Right? It's a vote for every district in the state plus two at large for the senators for winning the state at large. Maine does this right now. We saw a Maine split. Clinton wins one district, Trump wins one district. Clinton wins the state, she gets two. Three to one was the vote in Maine.
Steve Kornacki:
I was like, "Why don't you do that for the presidential election?" The state still matter. There's still some autonomy to the states. It is still possible you're going to have the president who loses the popular vote and wins the Electoral College. I think it becomes less-
Josh king:
Far less likely in California, Texas.
Steve Kornacki:
It's more precise. I think it still rewards the autonomy of the states and the state strategy and all of that. Now it has happened twice where the same party's benefited and the same party's been on the losing side of it. To change it in any way, it's got to happen the other way.
Steve Kornacki:
The Democrats lose the popular vote, win the presidency. Then I think maybe you could get what you need, which is buy-in from both parties to say, okay, let's rethink this. Let's do this a different way. But yeah, I think right now it's an academic discussion because it's not going to change once. They're so locked in each side right now.
Josh king:
I want to see a seventies book from you, an eighties book from you, a 2010s book from you. Can you do it?
Steve Kornacki:
Boy, I'm looking for... I want to do another one. I loved writing this book. I really did. It was my escape in the last couple of years from the 24/7 news cycle. Got to live in the nineties, basically, again. I'd love to do that. Seventies. Seventies is cool. I've been thinking more of modern, but seventies, I like that.
Josh king:
Come on. Shaft.
Steve Kornacki:
There's some fun stuff.
Josh king:
There's just stuff-
Steve Kornacki:
gas lines.
Josh king:
Gas lines, Nixon.
Steve Kornacki:
Disco.
Josh king:
Yeah.
Steve Kornacki:
Ford.
Josh king:
Thanks so much, Steve, for joining us.
Steve Kornacki:
Thank you. This was fantastic. Thank you.
Josh king:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Steve Kornacki, national political correspondent for MSNBC and NBC news and now author of The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism.
Josh king:
If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle in a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @NYSE.
Josh king:
Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolf with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steven Porter. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
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