Transcript: Well the best advice is to show up every day. I mean there’s nothing that substitutes for being on the scene when people are making the decisions and taking the actions that you’re writing about. And the more that you are present, the more willing people are to say, “Well perhaps this reporter really wants to understand. We’ll help him figure out what’s going on.”

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well the person that I’ve covered who I probably admire the most was Mike Mansfield, the former democratic leader of the Senate and our long time ambassador to Japan. He was a remarkable individual who, well into his 90s, was current on public affairs and invariably wise in his comments. I’d love to know what Mike Mansfield thinks we ought to do about Iraq and other issues today.

Well thinking about this presidential election coming up, I think the issue that will be on my mind is which, if any, of these people are prepared to tell the American people the hard choices that we really face as a country; and build the degree of confidence that would enable people to make that choice. It’s going to be a very tough presidency, and it’s gonna take a remarkable person to prevail in it. And I hope we find that kind of leadership.

Recorded on: 9/12/07

Transcript: I would have very little (laughter) to tell you that. I think there have been times when I’ve been able to help define a political moment. The best work I’ve done was actually in a couple of books that I participated in – one on the healthcare fight after the Clintons came in in 2001, and another earlier one when I took a year off and looked at what was then the emerging generation . . . younger generation of politicians – the people who included Newt Gingrich, and Bill Clinton, and Al Gore, who I managed to catch on their way up to power, and I think defined well for the problem that that generation of boomers has faced from the very beginning, which is the divisions that were sown into them by Vietnam and the other conflicts of the 1960s have never healed. And they have, therefore, had a real struggle ever finding ways of unifying the country as leaders of the country.

Recorded on: 9/12/07

Transcript:I think there is clearly room at this point for a third party because the Democrats, since they’ve taken control of Congress, have done very little to build public confidence. The public approval ratings of Congress are as low now as they were before the 2006 election. The Republicans are carrying the burden of the Bush administration. I think it’s wide open for an Independent or a third party candidacy.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well the challenge for the Republicans – and particularly for whoever emerges from that field as the nominee – is going to be to define for the American people how they would be different from the Bush administration. It’s pretty clear that Americans are ready to move on beyond, and in a different way from, where Bush has taken us. Republicans have the challenge because it’s much easier for Democrats to say, “We’re different. We were not part of that.” Republicans who have, at this point in the stage . . . in the campaign, mostly identify pretty closely with the Bush policies, will at some point have to separate from those policies if they’re going to have any chance of winning.

Well with rare exceptions, there’s not a lot of eloquence so far in the American campaign. And the tendency to reduce everything to a sound bite – the willingness of the people who are formatting the debates, for example, to limit candidates to one minute or 30-second responses – it makes it almost impossible to . . . for people to have extended thoughts in graceful language.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: I think it’s mostly the failure of the Republican administration, and the shortcomings of the years that the Republicans controlled Congress that have propelled the Bush . . . excuse me, propelled the Democrats to an advantage. I don’t find a lot of new ideas being generated by the democratic campaigns.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well it’s certainly a pattern. Whether it’s a problem or not, I . . . I don’t know. I . . . I’m inclined to think that we judge these presidents as individuals, not as parts of a dynasty. Though in the case of Mrs. Clinton, it’s very clear – particularly now that I’ve read Carl Bernstein’s really good biography of her – that if she becomes president, he becomes, once again, a principal player in our nation’s politics and policy making, because there is no way that they can humanly separate their two roles and either of them be affected.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well I think that the most significant change . . . I mean there have been many of them. But the most significant change is that historically in this city, there have been political issues, and there have been issues that have been recognized as having enough significance for the country that they have been dealt with on a different level. To take a recent example, it’s hard for me to think that in the old days of the United States Senate, when the issue of immigration – which has been tearing the country apart – came to the floor finally, that the Senate as an institution would allow that bill to be sidetracked – hijacked, if you will – by the obstinance of a relatively few number of backbench Republican members of the Senate minority. There would have been a sense, I think, in times past that the Senate as an institution was there in order to deal with that kind of an issue, and they weren’t going to let go of it until they had dealt with it. That’s a kind of a deterioration and a loss, in a sense, of institutional responsibility that is so pervasive now. Nothing gets handled except on the basis of “Is it gonna help our side, or is it gonna help their side?”

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: The system is pretty badly bent if it’s not broken. And it is beyond our capacity as reporters to fix it. I think a lot of it has to do with institutions. Start with the fundamental structure of the Congress; the ___________ in which Congressional districts are now drawn makes it almost impossible to have the House of Representatives function in its historical role of representing short-term swings in public opinion. Because so many of those districts have been gerrymandered to fix permanently for one party or the other. The political parties themselves have been weakened over the years, though they have come back somewhat in financial terms. And the relationship at the personal level between members of the two parties is as poisonous as I’ve ever seen it, and that is something that they have to solve. We can’t solve it for them.

I think it would be changing the way in which we draw the Congressional districts to make more of them competitive. I think if we had 200 competitive House races every two years instead of 30 or 40, you’d have a totally different kind of Congress – one where issues would be dealt with, not kicked down the road.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: Well it’s changed enormously. I mean television was already the dominant factor when I came in, but . . . in 1960. But there was a real sort of balance between print and television at that point. On the campaign buses, the print reporters still sat up front and the television people sat in the back of the bus. That changed pretty quickly. And now of course with cable, both networks and the print are in the back seat and cable is driving the bus.

It’s a problem that is a kind of an artifact of the . . . I think mostly the television role as the dominant channel of communication for politicians. What the politicians learned was that if they maintained the old-fashioned way of campaigning – set speeches, complex talks on foreign policy, or foreign policy or economic policy – that reporters had wide range as to what they chose to report from those speeches. But if they framed their message each day in a single sound bite, particularly if they could do it in front of a dramatic setting – a closed steel mill or a polluted stream – that became the message for the television coverage. And so with television, what you had essentially was a shrinkage of the daily message from the campaigns to that sound bite level.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: That’s a hard one on which to generalize. I think what’s happened is that in the restructuring and economic downsizing of the print side, there’s been simply a reduction of resources on coverage of the White House in particular, the administration in general. And relatively few papers now really have the human resources to go beyond the briefing room and dig into what’s happening behind the scenes. Washington Post is one of them, and I don’t think we’ve backed off at all. But if you’re talking about the press in general, I think there probably has been a loss of energy there – of commitment to it. And obviously at the state level where I do a lot of reporting, in almost every state capital that you visit now people are worried about the reduction in the size of the news bureaus, and the loss of coverage at that level of government.

There is no such thing as objectivity if you think of that as being something, as the old phrase used to be, “holding up a mirror to reality”. Because what we do every day in journalism is omit most of the information that we’ve gathered. You go to a hearing, you hear all the testimony as we did with General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker. You come back with notebooks filled with notes, and you select little bits of it for your story. That implies news judgments, and news judgments imply values. So we are applying our own value system to our work every day. You can hold yourself to some kind of a standard of fairness in doing that. And the best definition I know of “objectivity” has not to do with the product, but with the process of trying to measure what’s happening against the evidence. And that’s something that reporters can do and should do.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: No. Well because journalism implies some kind of a standard or discipline, even if it’s a self-discipline. And I find no . . . none of that concept in most of the blogs that I read.

Recorded on: 9/13/07

Transcript: I think that’s an open question. Our audience is clearly migrating – and pretty rapidly – from the print version to the Internet version. I’m inclined to think that this is a transition period and not just a steadily accelerating decline. Washington Post has had a smart strategy of building its web site and building revenue on the web site, so I think that we’re gonna be able to survive.

Well I think the biggest problem is our economic question mark. Are people going to be willing to finance the kind of costly investment that it takes to produce quality journalism? That labor-intensive work. The two women who __________ the Washington Post who broke the story about the abuse of prisoners . . . of veterans at Walter Reed Hospital spent four months on that story. That’s very expensive to have two highly trained, professional reporters working for four months on one story. But that story produced an enormous change of policy. And the question mark is whether people are willing to support that kind of investment in quality journalism.

Recorded on: 9/13/07