Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 225th episode of the Atlas Society asks. I'm jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society. I am so excited today to speak with someone from my old days in Washington, DC, Elaine Kmark. She's the director of the center for Effective Public Management at Brookings. She's an expert on american electoral politics, having worked in many presidential campaigns. And she is the author of several books on politics, elections and presidency. So timely to have her on the show a couple of weeks before an election. Elaine, so great to see you again after all of these decades.
[00:00:42] Speaker B: That's right. And it's nice to see you, too. Thank you for having me.
[00:00:46] Speaker A: So we met many decades ago through our mutual friend Jim Pinkerton, who I actually interviewed him last month, but you in particular, of course, he's always mentioning you, but you in particular popped back up on my radar screen because, you know, our main audience, the people that we serve at the Atlas Society, are young people ages 15 to 30. And you had this insightful analysis you co authored for the Brookings Institute on the growing gender gap among young people. So tell us a little bit about that. What prompted your study and what were some of the key findings?
[00:01:29] Speaker B: Well, we started the study a couple months ago because we were seeing in the polling data that there was a big difference between men and women in general, but particularly between young men and young women. Now, let's put it in context. We've had a gender gap ever since 1980 in american politics.
And overall recently, young people have been more democratic than have older people. Okay? That particularly was strong in 2008 when Obama won and he had a huge vote from the millennial generation. And what we've seen now lately is that democratic tendency persists among young people. But there's a little bit of a bifurcation between young men and young women, with young women being more liberal and more democratic and young men being more conservative and more republican. And this is the case as we go into November.
[00:02:31] Speaker A: So you write in that analysis, quote, when it comes to party identification, Democrats have lost significant ground with young men. In 2020, 42% of young men in Harvard's poll identified as Democrats versus 20 who identified as republican. Now, 32 are democratic, so that's a ten point drop. And 29 are Republicans. So that's, again, nearly a ten point rise. So what do you contribute to that shift?
[00:03:06] Speaker B: Well, everyone asks me that, and, I.
[00:03:10] Speaker A: Mean, I'm so curious. And I actually ask a lot of people because, you know, it's just fascinating.
[00:03:17] Speaker B: I don't really know, frankly, okay. And.
But we do know a couple of things, right? We know that women are more concerned with social welfare type issues.
We know that recently, even though this gender gap predates the Dobbs decision. But recently, women are obviously concerned about the Dobbs decision in the Supreme Court and the loss of choice for abortion rights in many states in the United States. So we know that that's contributing to it. But I think there's something bigger going on. And I direct people to the work of Richard Reeves, sociologist, who's written a lot about men and boys and where they are in this world.
And that may be just an adjustment that's being made to a very new era where women are more dominant and do more things than they ever have before, are in more roles than they ever have been before, including running for president of the United States and commander in chief of the. Of the us arm military.
And it may be causing a little bit of unease.
What is men's role, then, if women are taking on all of these roles? And I think that Richard Reeves and some other people have studied this, look at the role of men in modern society and say, okay, there's gonna have to. There's an adjustment going on because brawn is no longer the most important thing. Although as a woman of a certain age, I can tell you I am greatly, I greatly rely on young, strong men for many things in my life.
But brawn is not nearly as important in the economy as our brains, and brains are pretty evenly distributed through, between the sexes. And so that's an adjustment. That's an adjustment. That was a long time coming, but I think this generation is feeling it.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Especially grappling with it. Yeah. So you also note that the shift in favorability ratings for Donald Trump among young people. If we can show that figure from the study, that outstrips the favorability among all other population subsets, aside from Democrats, what is that kind of the same thing that he's representing?
A more active male Persona and energy? Or is it, you know, are there other things, like people not being able to afford homes or concerns about the economy?
[00:06:01] Speaker B: I think it's a larger cultural issue. Okay. All you have to do is look at the last night of the republican convention. I was astonished. I didn't think I'd ever see Hulk Hogan being on the stage of an american presidential nominating convention. I mean, it was all macho. It was all worldwide wrestling, all these things.
[00:06:25] Speaker A: Lots of testosterone.
[00:06:27] Speaker B: Lots of testosterone on that stage.
People have been talking lately about podcasts and noting that Trump is particularly into male podcasts being on a lot of those.
So there's that going on. There's also the, there's also the mobilization of young women because as young men have moved a little bit more towards, more towards Trump and the Republicans, young women have moved very much more towards democrats. So you have this, you have a sort of movement in two directions away from each other.
[00:07:05] Speaker A: Well, let's talk about young women in particular. And I see that, like, when I go to speak at some of these more conservative conferences, I remember I spoke at one, and it was a sea of 85% young men, which is why I'm all the more proud of the fact that when you go to an Atlas society conference, there's a lot more parody. And maybe that has to do with one thing, with Ayn Rand's very firm stance on abortion, and that it remains the sole moral responsibility of women. But she was a female author. She had a strong female characters. And so, and, you know, all young people, I think, are with the decline of religion, searching for some means of making sense of the world and their role in it. But, you know, with regards to young women in particular, identifying as progressive, you had another chart which will show it kind of went up and down since 2000. And again, you mentioned that this was something that really began in 1980, but then it started a pretty persistent climb in the charts in 2013, again before the Dobbs decision. So how much of that in 2013 do you think was a reaction to Donald Trump? How much does it have to do with other issues? We've talked about abortion, but, you know, to a certain extent, if these are young women coming from college and educated situations, that they may be also being fed more feminist ideology narratives of male oppression of women, that thing.
[00:09:01] Speaker B: Well, I think a lot of this has to do with Donald Trump himself and the image that he projects and his family. Like, for instance, look at the women around him. It's like they're cookie cutters. You know what I mean? Everybody's got the same straight blonde hair, everybody's got the same form fitting dresses. Everybody's got the same four inch Manolo Blahniks. It's like, it's a little Stepford wifey. It's a little creepy to some people to see how identical they all look. Even his lawyers, even picks lawyers who look like that. It's a little strange. And Trump also, in his Persona, is somewhat of a bully. I mean, let's face it, he's always insulting people. He's yelling at people. He's. He's certainly insulting. You know, he tells every single day, he tells people that Kamala Harris is stupid.
There's a, there's a bully aspect to Trump, which I think for some young men, they're saying, yeah, that's right, that's right. And we like him because he tells it as it is. I think for some women, it just like, is like, oh, yuck, who is this guy? Yeah, I don't want to sit next to him. He's a weird old man, and I don't want to sit next to him on an airplane.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: You know, the terrible, some of the terrible things he said about women or.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, the things he said about women, he's going to grab them by the, you know what I mean? There's, there's just also everything about him reeks of sort of Howard Stern at his most rabid. And, you know, let's face it, a lot of women are really turned off by that, which is why I think you see that line begin to go up as the ascendance of Donald Trump in our national media goes up. And I suspect that when he's no longer in the political world, whether he loses this time or whether he spends one more term, I suspect that those lines might go back a little bit more to normal.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: All right, so you also point out this research regarding how young men, this is figure five in that 18 to 29 year old demographic, increasingly say that there is some or a lot of discrimination against men in society. Do you think that this is a function of feminist messaging that casts men as problematic? Or, you know, is there, is it kind of going back to what you were discussing later that they are feeling like they maybe are facing more competition from women and don't see as, as much of a clear cut role for themselves as they might have in generations past?
[00:11:59] Speaker B: I think it's a little of both.
I think that Democrats haven't been good enough about being inclusive. Okay. And saying, you know, there's, when you empower women, there's all sorts of advantages to families, to children, et cetera? I think Democrats haven't been very good about that. They've been so focused on women's rights. But I also think it's just a basic change in society.
You know, you and I, jag, 100 years ago, we wouldn't have been doing this. Why? Because we probably would have had six or seven or eight children who would have been constantly pregnant and constantly breastfeeding from the time we were 17 or 18 to the time we were in our forties. And this is maybe the biggest change in human society that we've ever seen, because for most of the world, most of world history, women were not in history. Right. Women were outside of history because the business of procreating was a completely all absorbing business beginning in the 1960s that switches. Right. I mean, I was pregnant three times, and I have three grown children now. That's incredibly unusual for the rest of human history, where pregnancies were difficult, where children died in childbirth, children died when they were toddlers or older. I mean, we have really, really changed. And it's not surprising that there's a lot of psychological adjustments that go along with that, including men feeling that they don't have a role anymore or that their role has been usurped by women.
[00:13:50] Speaker A: All right, so here's the million dollar question. And I don't think that there's any scientific answer to it or research on the subject. But as the mother of three young people, maybe you would at least have anecdotal evidence or ideas on how things turn out. So we've got this growing gender gap.
What might be the implications for, you know, relationships, for future birth rates, social cohesion? I put up as a meme. I saw some research that was looking at Republicans, independents and Democrats on the question. Two questions. One, would you be more likely to, would you be likely to cut off ties with a family member if they expressed a political opinion that you found inappropriate? Same thing was done. Would you be more inclined to cut off a friend? And what it showed was that the Democrats or the more progressives were markedly more likely to say that that would be a deal breaker for them. Republicans also were up there. It was independents who were actually the most refreshingly saying, I can handle somebody voting differently than I do or what have you. So anyway, long, roundabout way of asking which who's going to convert the other? Is it going to be the women who are going to kind of shift over to their boyfriend's and husband's perspective, or is it going to be the other way around?
[00:15:36] Speaker B: Well, that's a good question, and I frankly don't really have an answer to it, although I think there will be some generational change. So, for instance, I have two sons. One was a Navy pilot, and then I have a son in law who's currently an army pilot.
Their experience in the military is kind of different. They have both flown in combat with female co pilots or female weapons personnel.
That's, you know, to their father's generation, certainly to their grandfather's generation. This is really amazing. Right. But they've been in combat and they've been in combat with women. So there. There's going to be some change here. There's going to be, I think, more acceptance of this because, remember, what's going on at the same time as this gender gap is this massive change in the economy from bronze to brain. So when I was in the White House, I went up to a paper factory in Maine to talk about OSHA and occupational safety. And I looked at the paper factory and all it was was a mammoth, mammoth place enclosed in glass. And there were these enormous rollers putting out the kind of paper that you have in beauty magazines or architectural digest, you know, really thick, glossy paper. And there were four men in there, and they were all dressed like they worked in a factory, but all they did was they stood in a glass cage and they ran a computer. I mean, they might as well have been wearing tutus, right? But for all the work they did, you know, on the ground, but they were wearing steel boots and, you know, flannel shirts and rugged dungarees, etcetera, etcetera. It's a huge change in the economy, and it has a lot of implications for sexual roles because it is simply now easier for women to do a lot of jobs that previously were not women really couldn't do. So I think that these things are kind of coming to a head. But I think if we look forward, I think we'll see that people will get used to these things. But we're. Right now we're in the transition, and transitions are hard.
[00:17:57] Speaker A: Yes. Growing pains. All right, I'm going to dive into a few audience questions because they have been piling up, but then I'm going to get back to my own questions because I have a lot forward to this talk. So Alan Turner says you mentioned Obama's presidency as a time when things changed markedly among young people. In terms of party identification, are there any other notable events in the past ten or 20 years which shifted things one way or another?
[00:18:30] Speaker B: Well, let me step back for a minute, because this is a very good question.
When we study generations, right, in politics or society or business or anything else, right. You have to look at the size of generations. And the Obama generation, I call them, really are the millennials. The millennials came of age voting for Obama, you know, hanging, making phone calls for Obama, putting stickers on doors and windows for Obama. They were really the Obama generation. And it shows up in his margins. He won people under 30 with 60 percentage points and all the other age groups he tied. Okay, so that was his margin. His margin were younger people. And the. What makes its significance is there are a hell of a lot of millennials. In fact, their millennials were the biggest generation, are the biggest generation in american history, even bigger than us baby boomers, or. I don't think you look a little younger, but I'm a baby boomer. And even small, even bigger than baby boomers. The generations after that, Gen Z is a smaller generation. So the generations that make a difference in politics are the ones that move through the electorate. Like the proverbial pig in the python, okay. You know, think of a snake, and he's eaten a baby pig, and it's a big lump as he digests the pig. That's what happens to generations. So we're in the midst of the millennial generation coming into its own. And the one thing we do know about politics, a lot of things political scientists get wrong. But one thing we do know about politics is that as people get older, they vote more. So I think the thing to do in this election, and especially in 2028, is watch the millennial generation as they move through the electorate. Do they retain their democratic preferences, or do they change and go back? Because it's a very big generation. It is also a generation where more people are of color than in previous generations. So the two sort of overlap. But it is not by any means just an all black generation or all hispanic generation. No, it's a lot of Caucasians as well.
[00:21:02] Speaker A: Interesting, because we do talk a lot about generational differences on this show, including having gene Twenge on to talk about the kind of different cohorts, but we talk less about the size of the size matters.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: I mean, look, even in marketing, right? Look at. Look at the way baby boomers, you know, shaped the market for goods, right? Goods and services for them from their whole lives, from the time we were teenagers to now that we're old people. Well, we're now a declining piece of the electorate. But who's behind us is the millennials in between? You have some generations, but guess what? They're smaller. It's really the size of generation that that makes them important in politics and, of course, in commerce, in marketing.
[00:21:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I hadn't thought of it that way. All right, another really interesting question from Jackson Sinclair asking any speculation on the role of social media. What role has it played in regard to men or women identifying one political way or the other?
[00:22:13] Speaker B: I'm. I'm less of a. I'm more of a skeptic about the role of social media, okay. Than a lot of people are, because the same things happen on social media, certainly in politics that used to happen through the mail, through meetings, in, you know, in different ways. It just happened faster.
I do think that people can find each other more easily. So men who are really unhappy about their job prospects, etcetera, can find camaraderie on social media and perhaps turn that into more of a political force. But I don't see it making that much of a difference. We, we've always had divisions in society, and we've always had economic disruptions that affected people's lives and affected how they felt about things. And I think it just, everything now just happens a lot faster.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: All right. We have a super chat from Fountainhead forum. Thank you for that. And he says men are going to the right because of a culture that encourages false accusations against them. And he also said, we have some great guests.
[00:23:28] Speaker B: Great guests.
[00:23:30] Speaker A: So thanks for that. And also, one of the reasons I was looking forward to this is for people who think that we only have conservatives on or this party or that party, we definitely look at a broad variety of views. We don't want to echo chamber here. But. Yeah, what about that, Elaine? Like, the sense that men feel that they are walking on eggshells, that they are going to be accused of sexism or, you know, worse, sexual, you know, harassment or what have you. Could that be a factor as well?
[00:24:09] Speaker B: Well, I think it could be. I think, I think some men feel that they are walking on eggshells. On the other hand, there was a real writing of the vote that had to happen here because of many decades or centuries, shall we say, of violence against women that went basically unpunished and women had to just, you know, bear it. And so I think that in the course of that, there are men who feel that they are being singled out or they have to be very, very careful of what they say and what they do.
But there's another side to that. And the other side to that is that just for so, so many years, women were afraid to report rape. They were prejudiced against in the courtroom when it came to reporting rape and trying to prosecuted. So I think there's a writing going on here that obviously some men feel that way, but there are a lot of women who suffered a lot in previous decades.
[00:25:13] Speaker A: Well, and having worked in some of those previous decades across my career, I actually wrote an article about this, called me first, not me too, as an alternative of having the presence of setting boundaries and have early experiences with harassment and inappropriate this and inappropriate that, including a very egregious one in college.
And anyway, just a different perspective on how objectivism can empower you to have more proper boundaries and set off signals that you're not going to be easy prey.
All right, go to a few more of these. Alan Turner again, asking any studies, any evidence regarding the decline in marriage and men quitting the dating pool? I think that's a little bit beyond the can of your research. Is that right?
[00:26:12] Speaker B: Yeah, it's a little bit beyond. I don't know much about that. You know, we know. We do know. We do know that marriage is happening later. Okay. But I'm not sure. I'm not. I'm not sure that humans being what humans are, that. That we're gonna give up on each other. I just. I don't see that happening. Hold on, I gotta just move for a minute. So the lakes go back on in here.
[00:26:35] Speaker A: Okay.
All right, well, we're going to take a break from audience questions for a moment. Those of you who are subscribed to our YouTube, which, by the way, if you're not, go ahead, subscribe. Hit the like button. That would be awesome. But, you know, we had, and we put a video up on this of our 8th annual fundraising gala with Abigail Schreieren as our keynote. And in her latest book, bad therapy, she wrote something that really struck me, quote, what seems to motivate a large portion of Gen Z is not hope or optimism or a belief in themselves. It's fear, end quote. So first, would you agree with that assessment? Any speculation on what might be driving this. This fear, this anxiety?
[00:27:31] Speaker B: Oh, you know, I think being subject to a pandemic, I think. I think I'm fascinated with the sort of hangover we all have from the pandemic. We don't talk about it very much. I did get my Covid booster, but I almost forgot to do it. We don't talk about it much. We clearly want to put it behind us. But I think the younger you were, the more it affected you. And you found yourself in this strange, strange world where you didn't have human interaction. You were all doing. You're doing video like this, etcetera. I think it was very difficult for young people, very difficult for people in high school. I can tell you my grandchildren really suffered through this. Their academics suffered. They were socially just, you know, miserable.
I think that there's a lot of. I think if that's your first experience as sort of a conscious human being, I think it's inevitable that you're going to be fearful about a lot of things, like what comes next. You know what's going to come next? Your grandparents may have died. Your parents may have been very sick. I mean, there's just, there's a lot of pain out there. And it doesn't surprise me that young people experience a lot of fear.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, of course, there was the pandemic, and then there was also the response to the pandemic, which was the school lockdowns and vaccine mandates for young people and mask mandates. And, you know, that I think maybe whether or not it drove fear certainly drove a sense of feeling, you know, powerless or cheated. So.
[00:29:11] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, you were. I mean, look, we, we did things that most people thought we had to do, but they were not things that anybody ever thought we would be doing, like closing down the whole economy. That's pretty dramatic. Now, it will be years before we figure out if that was the right thing to do or not.
But no doubt it left a residue of fear and anxiety.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, unfortunately, we do have examples of places where they didn't follow that model, like Sweden, who didn't shut down the schools and that their mortality outcomes were actually better than here in the United States. Of course, we have morbid obesity here in the United States, which is a big factor. But I do hope that there will be a willingness to look at the evidence. I mean, as somebody who advocated against these measures, I would love to see more of a willingness to put aside our prior cognitive commitments and take a look at the statistics. But don't get me started on that, because that's my hobby. Horace, I'll go on about the rest of the show. And this is, again, a really great opportunity to speak with somebody where a couple of weeks before the election, you have worked on so many different political elections. So, you know, maybe just tell us a little bit about, you know, how you got into that and what were some of your roles in different campaigns. And.
[00:30:54] Speaker B: Well, I went to do graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, which to your audience may mark me as a flaming.
[00:31:05] Speaker A: We've had a lot of Berkeley grads.
[00:31:06] Speaker B: On the show, left wing radical.
[00:31:09] Speaker A: She went to Columbia, but anyway, but.
[00:31:12] Speaker B: At that, at the time, I was.
[00:31:14] Speaker A: It was a bastion of free speech.
[00:31:16] Speaker B: That's right. And, but when I was at Berkeley, the political science department was actually a very conservative place for Berkeley. In other words, we were for Hubert Humphrey, which in the eyes of many people in Berkeley, made us kind of right wingers, you know, but we were very much centrist and practical politicians. It was a great education.
And then when I came to Washington, with my husband, I was supposed to write my doctoral dissertation, but, you know, I was young and impatient, and that seemed sort of boring. So I got a job at the Democratic National Committee just in time to be smack in the middle of the big nomination fight between Carter and Kennedy, which is now ancient history to most people.
But it got me interested in nomination politics, and I wrote my dissertation on this. And in the course of that, I mean, I had lived the democratic side of it, but to write a dissertation, I needed to know something about the Republican Party and its culture and etcetera. So I got an interview with a guy named Lee Atwater, who was a.
[00:32:27] Speaker A: Brilliant technical mentor of Jim Pinkerton's, who we mentioned earlier.
[00:32:32] Speaker B: And he handed me over to Pinkerton, and we became lifelong friends.
And he also sort of took me by the hand and guided me through the stuff about the Republican Party that you. That you couldn't get from reading books, and there's a lot of that. So, anyway, so I got involved in. I wrote a dissertation on presidential nomination politics, and then I worked in a bunch of presidential campaigns. I worked for a guy named Bruce Babbitt, who later became Clinton's interior secretary.
I worked for. And then I worked for Bill Clinton and that he wondez. And I went into the White House then and worked on government reform movements.
[00:33:18] Speaker A: Yeah. So just for context, so we talked about Jim Pinkerton. He was a protege of Lee Atwater. Jim Pinkerton and I met in the first Bush presidency, where I became a speechwriter, and he was a policy guy.
I got, you know, introduced to Elaine because Jim and Elaine were working on some initiatives where they could find common cause. One is a Republican, one is a Democrat. So I always thought that that was a really healthy example of how we can find coalitions. Hopefully not something of the past, maybe something of the distant future.
[00:33:59] Speaker B: Maybe something of the future. Yeah.
[00:34:02] Speaker A: Yes.
So. But, yeah, you'd mentioned your time in the Clinton administration and some of the policy reforms that you worked on. I understand you developed and led the national performance review, an initiative aimed at improving federal government processes. So how did that go? How has it been, you know, in the ensuing administrations?
[00:34:25] Speaker B: Well, you know, you forget how far back that was. Right.
The short way to say it is that all the changes we made then are now standard operating procedure in the federal government and in most governments. Most american governments or first world governments, we take it for granted that you can renew your car registration online. We take it for granted that you could do your taxes online. Back in 1993, when we began this, you couldn't do any of that stuff. So what we did, really the way to best understand it is we took the federal government into the information age. Companies were starting to do that. They were about a decade ahead of the federal government at that point.
And we kind of pushed the federal government along to become part of the information age. And as a result, we were able to downsize the government by more than a quarter of a million people. We had the smallest government since John Kennedy was president, smallest civil service, and we were able to do that without affecting service to the citizen because, in fact, we were using information technology efficiently and to cut out layers of bureaucracy. So that's, that was really, that was the overall achievement, whether it was at FAA, whether it was at, in, at DHS, at HHS. I mean, that was really what we were doing.
[00:35:59] Speaker A: Well, of course, Bill Clinton is the one that got me out of a job, so I was pretty happy about that. But though my ire should have been directed at the guy who broke his no new taxes, read my lips pledge. But, yeah, we forget, you know, Art Laffer has been a previous guest on this show, and he was a big Clinton fan. And, you know, I think a lot of the reforms now, this was again an interplay of the 94, you know, red wave and Republicans taking over the House and the Senate and, but between, you know, the. Gingrich.
[00:36:40] Speaker B: Right. And Gingrich. Gingrich was really, Gingrich understood this, too. I mean, Jim and I, back when we were doing our seminars together, I mean, Gingrich was a big force in those because he understood, too that the government was going to be done in a different way. Just as simultaneously, business processes all over the place were being done differently. We were going to have to do government differently. And today we do. Now there's, you know, this has been almost 30 years, so there's no, I'm sure there's a next generation of this that I won't be part of, but I suspect many people will. Many people will be when the tide turns and people say, let's look at government reform again.
[00:37:21] Speaker A: So if you could wave your magic wand, what would be some reforms and government processes in terms of, you know, I mean, look at this, $37 trillion in national debt. It's completely unsustainable. So what are you, what are some areas that you think should be looked at regardless of who wins the election?
[00:37:44] Speaker B: Remember that no reforms in government will make the slightest difference in the national debt, okay? Because the whole operating budget of the government is miniscule compared to the national debt compared to entitlements, etcetera.
There are a lot of things we can still do in terms of government operations. So, for instance, it's ridiculous that most of the country still files an income tax return.
Most people in the country don't own a house. They pay rent. They have one job, one source of income. The taxes are taken out and they don't need to file a form. The government can send them a postcard saying, hey, this year you paid this much taxes and you earned this much interest. And guess what?
We think we're cool. Tell us if you think not, and that's all you have to do. So we're still waiting. I mean, when we conceived of this back in 1997, there were all sorts of interoperability problems between state taxes and county level and stuff like that, that computers made their head explode. These days, that's not the case anymore. So now, if you're rich, if you're upper middle class, you've got charitable deductions, you got a lot of things, et cetera. Obviously, that won't work. But for an awful lot of Americans, it's kind of ridiculous that we make them file taxes every year when the government already knows all the information they need about them. So those are the sorts of things that are yet to be done. Because in between the late nineties and today, the ability and the flexibility in just computing and information technology is so enormous that there's clearly a next generation of this stuff to be done. And I think that's where you'll get some savings, etcetera.
But you're not going to work away the national debt by doing government reform.
[00:39:50] Speaker A: Right.
[00:39:50] Speaker B: It's just, it's impossible.
[00:39:52] Speaker A: It's entitlement reform, among other things.
[00:39:55] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:39:56] Speaker A: So, all right. So you said, you mentioned charitable deductions, and so for those of you who are watching that are regular viewers to this space, I know just the fact that we continue to do this and we're all the time out there on social media, it's easy to forget that the Atlas Society is a nonprofit. If you're looking for your charitable deduction, we got you. Head over to Atlas Society and hit the, hit the donate page.
So you were also a senior policy advisor to the Gore campaign back in 2000. So moving forward through history, before the whole dimpled Chad phase, what were some of the policy issues that were that most swayed that election one way or the other?
[00:40:47] Speaker B: Well, I think what most weighed, it was not actually a policy issue. It was a personal issue. It was Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. That hung over the campaign. It hung over the subsequent impeachment for lying hung over the campaign. Remember, this happened in the last two years of the administration.
We had a really ideal setting right at the end of the second Clinton term.
Deficits were small. The size of government was small, unemployment was big. In fact, when I campaigned with Clinton, I would notice he would go out on the stump every time and he would say, this was in 96. He would say, we have 21 million new jobs and the smallest government since John Kennedy was president. The only two things he said, and he wiped the floor with Bob Dole.
All of those good metrics continued between 96 and 2000, except thrown into that was this really sort of sad affair with Monica Lewinsky and all of the, you know, yuck that came out of that. And people really turned against Clinton as a person, although they didn't turn against him as a president. So in comes Al Gore, who's got this burden on his shoulder, even though he has nothing particularly to do with it. And he's, you know, he was always in a sort of, how do you talk about a great record? But there is this elephant in the room, which is Clinton and this intern and, you know, all that mess. So I think that was really, that really shaped it. And I was in that campaign, and there was a constant tension in that campaign. When Clinton was prominent in the news, Al Gore's numbers would go down. I mean, okay, he was, it's like Clinton, you know, Clinton had a cold and Al Gore got pneumonia from it. So it's just, it was really difficult. The other funny thing about that is how little they, the issues were, the issues that were really before the country. Both Gore and Bush spent their time in that campaign talking about education. You would have thought they were running for school board chair. I mean, because, you know, having been in the White House for four years, I knew very well how much time a president spends on education versus intelligence and military stuff and foreign policy, etcetera. So it was like they were trying to be, you know, running for governor or mayor or something and not for president. And interesting on that one, Bush was just a warmer and friendlier person than Al Gore was, who was, and retains it reputation of being sort of stiff.
[00:43:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow. You know, I lived through that time with the Lewinsky affair, and I hadn't realized that there was, that it had had so much of an impact and that it created this hangover. Do you think that there is a similar hangover dynamic going on now with, you know, thoughts about Biden and that whole mess and, you know, his mental competence and how people feel like that they were hiding something. And now Kamala has. Is there a similar dynamic going on between the two candidates?
[00:44:23] Speaker B: No, I don't think so at all. I mean, you know, the story about Biden, and I am 99% sure history is going to, you know, confirm this. It's a very human story. And I'll tell you my. My experience in this, which is echoed by many other people because of my husband. I went to the democratic retreat in February of 2024, and this was just for congressmen and their spouses. And during, the president came, as he always does, and the president gave a nice speech with a teleprompter. Right. And then the press were escorted out of the room, and he left the stage. And then once the press was gone, he came back with Hakeem Jeffries, and they sat down in chairs, and for an hour, he took questions from the members of Congress, and, you know, he made jokes with them. He knew everybody's name. He, you know, was he. He had a briefing book, but he never looked at it.
And he was, you know, he was quite competent. So I left there thinking, oh, my God, this guy's fine. What's. What's going on? Other than the fact that he did walk funny, okay. He. He had this funny, weird gait. Yeah, yeah, the gate was terrible. But, you know, what you worry about in president is not their gait, but you worry about their head. So I thought, oh, the guy's fine. Well, then, of course, came that debate, and you couldn't say after that debate that the guy was fine. And interestingly enough, George Clooney and other people then started to say, you know, I saw him here, I saw him there. And I think what this was, and I think my mother just died. She had dementia.
I think what this was was people coming to terms with a deterioration that was going on. But it's not a straight line, you know, it's not like, one day up, boy, you have dementia. It's, you know, you're good one day you're not good one day. There was the. Right before the democratic retreat was the fabulous state of the union that he gave where he was. You know, he was totally with it and totally in command of. So I don't think there was any.
I mean, people love conspiracy. I don't think there was. I can tell you, I don't think there was any conspiracy. And I'm fairly close to the power brokers in the democratic party. There was no conspiracy. To hide this. But there was an evolving sense that, uh oh, something was happening from him. And also, like, when you like somebody, and certainly when you love somebody, like your grandparents or something or your parents, you, when you see this happen, you say to yourself, oh, they were tired, they were jet lagged. You make excuses for.
[00:47:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:47:16] Speaker B: And then by june, you know, everybody run out of their excuses. They said, oh, something's really wrong here. And that's when, that's when the pressure began to, for him to get out of the race.
[00:47:31] Speaker A: Yeah. No, it's interesting because I have seen, the other thing is that with the kind of blood in the water, there was always, you know, extreme focus on any gaffes that he might have had or any freezes or what have you. Now, you know, when you see him talking at a press conference, he seems like the old Joe Biden. So. Yeah, so who knows?
[00:47:55] Speaker B: Remember that this business is, you know, for anybody who's lived with a parent who has this, it's up and down. Right. There's good days, there's bad days.
Joe Biden, during his NATO press conference, which was right after the disastrous debate, gave a brilliant, long answer on NATO and China and all these intricate international relations. But he also mixed up the names of leaders. So it's a very uneven process.
[00:48:27] Speaker A: Right, right.
So you've worked in both administrations and in campaigns, which is more fun?
[00:48:38] Speaker B: Oh, it's hard to say that.
[00:48:41] Speaker A: I've worked on, I've worked on both, too. Worked on Michael Huffington's Senate campaign, and then I've worked in, you know, obviously the White House. Yeah. Working at, you know, maybe campaigns are fun when, when you win, but they, boy, they're brutal.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: Yeah, campaigns are brutal. And there's, they're so cutthroat, too, whereas in a White House, you have more, more time. The scary thing about working in the White House is your decisions are really major. You know, your decisions affect real people, and that's that, you know, there's a lot of pressure to make sure you get it right and you've got a political pressure to make sure that the president doesn't get hurt, in fact, gets credit. But you've also got the real world pressure of this better work. This better actually work out or, you know, you're going to be blamed for it.
[00:49:34] Speaker A: So we talked about young people and the shifts with women going in more progressive direction, you know, overall, still remaining more democrat than Republican as a total generation together, just a little bit of a, well, more than a little bit of a division among the genders wondering how you see this whole thing that's been playing out on campuses since November 7 with the protests and blaming Israel for these horrific attacks. Do you think that's going to have an effect one way or the other, or thoughts on what's driving it?
[00:50:22] Speaker B: I don't think it'll have an effect on the election.
If it was going to have an effect anywhere, it's probably Michigan. And of the swing states, I think Michigan has been most steadily trending towards Harris. So I don't think it's going to have an effect on the election. And I also think that things have shifted a little bit. I think a lot of young people who didn't know the background of this conflict saw this as big, bad, powerful, rich Israel pounding into the ground, this very poor population in Gaza.
I think what's happened in the last couple months, since October 7 of last year has changed some of that perception, because now you see that this is what's really going on as a proxy war between the United States and Iran. I mean, Hamas doesn't make long range rockets in the Gaza. Hezbollah doesn't have any factories making these rockets. This is all about Iran and a very complicated situation in the Middle east where Iran wants superiority.
And part of that is that they are using, they would like to get rid of Israel in the middle of the Middle east. So I think this has changed somewhat, and I would be surprised if the college campuses are as intense on this issue as they were last spring.
[00:51:59] Speaker A: So with just seven more minutes to go, any thoughts on how we talked about Biden and pressure leading up to him stepping down as a candidate? Thoughts on how the process of Kamala becoming the candidate, how that was handled? You also wrote a piece on how Kamala wrapped up the nomination 32 hours after Biden dropped out and referenced something called a rule 13 J. So can you give me, give us a brief summary of what happened?
[00:52:38] Speaker B: This I know intimately. I was in the middle of all of this.
Look, the Democrats after 1980, where they had a Carter and Kennedy feud, wrote a new rule, and it said that the delegates to the convention shall in all good conscience vote for the person they were elected to represent. So if you know you were elected as a Carter delegate, you should remain as a Carter delegate. Okay.
That rule was kind of forgotten because nobody ever had to think of it from 1980 all the way till 2024. That's a long time since I'd written a book on it. I was very cognizant since I was a young woman in the 1980 convention, I was very cognizant of this. And I must have done 100 interviews saying, no, the delegates are not bound.
But this was, remember, this was June of the convention year.
The convention was two months away. Now, if somebody had wanted to get into the race, they could have. There's nobody said to people, you can't get in the race. Absolutely. And that's, that's bullshit. I mean, you hear that people saying, oh, yeah, the Democratic Party got together. Well, I'm sorry, the Democratic Party power brokers who I know very well, they are not that powerful. They're simply not that powerful. Nobody could have said that. But there was a very practical issue. And the very practical issue is, let's suppose you're Gretchen Whitmere, the very popular governor of Michigan, and maybe you want to be president. You have basically two months before the opening of the convention to figure out the politics of Alabama, how they differ from the politics of California. Who are these people? Who are the delegates? Who will make the decisions? Right? What makes them ticken, how do I get in touch with them? How do I even get a list? I mean, these people couldn't even find out how to get a list because you had to, they were still being, still being formulated. You had to go state by state get a list. I mean, it became, as I'm sure that there were people looking at this. There's no doubt that a Gavin Newsom, that a Gretchen Whitmere, that a Joshua Piram, there's no doubt people were looking at this. And it was, frankly, there was no time. There was absolutely no time. And people came up with these ideas. Oh, they were going to have a mini primary. Well, okay, fine, have a mini. Who the hell was going to do that? Who was going to pay for it? Was the state going to go offer to put up money to run a second primary? I don't think so. I think the voters would not like that extender. I mean, there was literally no time. And you didn't need a second primary because the 4000 people who had the legal responsibility for determining the nominee were there and they were ready to do it. And what those people did and what I wrote in this article is that they began talking to each other, and it was mostly the state party chairman representing the state delegations. And they were hearing, they were listening to the state delegations and they were keeping their powder dry because they knew all along that they were the deciding. I mean, people had these wild ideas that Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were going to get into that room and pick the nominee. And it was bizarre, okay. Absolutely bizarre. That's not how it happens. But these people in the state parties were listening to each other, and they were listening to the grassroots, and they knew they could see that boy. People didn't want to run with Biden at the top of the ticket. He just wasn't strong enough. And so that's why, as you led up to the weekend where Biden got out, these people were talking with each other. I put that in the article and talked about it. And then the minute Biden was out, the state delegations began meeting and polling themselves. I was a delegate from Virginia. I got a questionnaire from. Oh, I'm so sorry about this. Let me just get my lights up. These lights go off?
[00:56:55] Speaker A: Yes. Some of the perils of environmentally. Right.
[00:57:00] Speaker B: Lights go off automatically if you haven't moved.
Anyway, I got a questionnaire. It said, we will vote for Kamala Harris, or will you vote for another candidate? If so, put in the other candidate. And I said, I'll vote for Kamala Harris. The reason was she actually knew people in these delegations. We forget that vice presidents move around the country a lot. And in four years, you didn't see much of her. Everybody said, oh, we don't know what she does. Well, I'll tell you what the hell she did. She was in every one of these states. She was meeting the party people. She was meeting the chairman. She was meeting the county commissioners.
She was doing this sort of grassroots politics which, which results in a presidential nomination.
And she was also, by the way, getting a pretty good education at the, with, because of Joe Biden, who, you know, knew a lot of things about foreign policy and knew a lot of things about the government after 30 some years at the, at the top of the government. So it was a natural, easy thing to do. And the states, they just went and no, even got in the race because it was too hard.
[00:58:15] Speaker A: So we are at the top of the hour.
Any predictions?
[00:58:20] Speaker B: Oh, I can't tell on this one. I mean, we're all gonna.
[00:58:25] Speaker A: Hopefully. Well, hopefully we'll find out, you know, soon enough.
[00:58:28] Speaker B: Hopefully we'll find out. I think Kamala will win the popular vote. I think that's the case. But I do not know who will win the electoral college.
[00:58:36] Speaker A: There is a prediction for you, so.
All right, Elaine, well, again, great to see you after all of this time.
Sounds like you're doing great work and really interested in having you on, and hopefully we'll get a chance to connect again sometime in the future. So thank you.
[00:58:59] Speaker B: Nice. Thank you so much.
[00:59:01] Speaker A: Thanks. Thanks to everyone who joined us today. Thanks for your great questions. Sorry I didn't get to all of them, but as mentioned before, if you like the work of the outlet society, please consider heading over to our website and putting a tip in the tip jar and then make sure to join us next week. This is going to be an interesting guest. Otto Pensler. He is the owner of the mysterious book shop in New York and he's a world leading authority on the genre of crime, mystery, and different kinds of suspense fiction. So that'll be fun. I hope to see you next week.
