David Brooks

Published Oct 8, 2012, 4:00 AM

This week on Here’s The Thing, Alec talks with David Brooks on stage at Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in Manhattan as part of the Public Forum series. David Brooks has been a New York Times op-ed columnist since 2003. He is known as a Conservative voice -- he was a senior editor at The Weekly Standard -- but former Obama advisor David Axelrod described him as a “true public thinker.”

Join Baldwin and Brooks on stage at Joe's Pub for a wide-ranging conversation: Brooks tells Baldwin about writing a humor column in college; about William F. Buckley’s “capacity for friendship” and about his evolution of opinion toward the Iraq war. They debate fracking -- Brooks says, "I am where President Obama is. So I'm a good Democrat on this issue." Brooks wonders about the possibility of Hillary Clinton in 2016; and he explains to Baldwin his basic feeling about college education: "Every course you take in college should be about who to marry."

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing. I don't know about you, but after my last interview with George will I can't seem to get enough of conservative commentary. This week, we're at Joe's Pub at the Public Theater in Lower Manhattan for the Public Forum, a series of conversations pairing someone like me. I've been connected to the public in various ways over the years with a voice from outside the world of theater. Today, I'll be speaking with one of the leading public intellectuals of our time. David Brooks is a writer whose political opinions and judgment are so revered that he often gets calls from the White House in anticipation of a column. At the same time, he's also willing to say things like, quote, every kid should take a course on how to choose a marriage partner. Unquote. Few topics are off limits to Brooks. He's been a New York Times op ed columnists since two thousand three. He's known as a conserve bit of voice. Brooks was a senior editor at The Weekly Standard, but former Obama advisor David Axelrod described him as a true public thinker. I was lucky to have David Brooks joined me on stage in New York City. Joe's Pub is cozy. It seats just under two hundred people who are eating and drinking throughout the program. The pub sits right on top of the subway. Sometimes you can hear and feel the train rumble. Below. Take a listen to some of my conversation with David Brooks, recorded last week on October one at Joe's Pub as part of the Public Theater's Public Forum series. Thank you all for coming, by the way, I didn't. I don't have as much time to read the op ed page of the New York Times as i'd like to these days because of my schedule, so I thought to make it easy, I would just invite someone and hang out with someone right for the otbed page and kind of get a whole kind of, uh, the background of what I've been missing in political opinion. But thank you very much to David Brooks, and I haven't in thirty rock and months, so you better hurry because we're off the air. Um Anyway, I just wanted to begin by asking you just first to describe your own background and where you grew up and what was politics in your life when you were in a high school and beyond as an undergraduate. So I grew up here in Stivesontown, not too far away from here. I grew up in a somewhat left wing background. When I was five and my parents took me to a b in Uh in Central Park, where it explains everything else hippies would go to just you know, be Uh. And so one of the things they did was they set a garbage can on fire and threw their wallets into it to demonstrate their liberation for money and material things. And I was five and I saw a five dollar bill on fire in the garbage can, and I ran up and grabbed it and ran away. And so that was my first step over to the right. And then even closer to here, I my father was teaching an n y U. I went to Grace Church School, where I was part of the all Jewish boys doving in choir. So we were about fifty Jewish and we'd sing the hymns, but we wouldn't say the word Jesus to swear it with our religion. So the volume would drop and then it would come back up. And so I grew up here, went to Philadelphia Uh. Then went to college at the Chicago the school where Fund goes to die. Um, what did your dad teach it? He taught English literature. We were part of a culture in New York Jewish circles. The culture was called think Yiddish, act British, and so you were very anglophilic. And so he taught Victorian literature. And actually this is true in my grandfather's generation. All the Jews wanted to fit in, so they gave themselves names which they thought were super English, so nobody would think they were Jewish. Well, no, they picked Irving, Sydney Milton, and so it didn't really work out. What did you study at Chicago? I studied hit American history. The other thing about Chicago was, if I can get this right, it's a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students. St. Thomas Aquinas and so. But actually I began to turn there. So how did that evolve when you're in Chicago? Yeah? So I was a lefty and I was assigned a book called The Reflections and the Revolution in France by Edmond Burgh. And here's a guy saying, you know, you really shouldn't think for yourself the power of reason is weak. Well you should do is rely on the just prejudices that have survived the test of time. And I just loathed that book, that idea, because that I want to think for myself. I want to come up with my own ideas. But as I got older, and especially I became a police reporter covering crime, murders and rapes in the South Side of Chicago, I began to see that he's right. Our power of reason is weak. And part of the core of my conservatism is a phrase epistemological modesty. The world is incredibly complicated. We can't know much about it. We should be very suspicious that we can plan. And then I covered really a horrible housing projects in Chicago, Cabrini Green and others and legendary. Yeah, And so to me, they were part of the unintended consequences of pretty bad welfare policy, which enabled families to break up and and tore down good neighborhoods. What year was that when you were That was the early eighties, And so I became more conservative of a certain story. And would you say that alone like kind of failed urban policy, I mean it was part. I mean it was partly. I mean it was a period incredible social decay. I mean you look at all the social indicators they really starting a seventy they just collapsed, divorced, drugs, crime, And so you're growing up in that and you think what's going wrong? But did you think that I'm sorry for spitting on you, even from this distance. I'm used to it, and I would never spit on you intentionally. I would just say the do you think that people that are more left leaning they're the ones whould say drugs, divorced crime, or the results of other failed social policies, and those policies proceeded that that those things are are symptoms of something which has failed, of public policies in terms of jobs and fairer taxes. And did you think that some of the problems that we're facing our society in the sixties and seventies and were the results of other bad policies that might have some conservative things on them as well. I've gotten more educated about it since, and I think the sort of the classic more liberal position is William Julius Wilson, the sociologist at Harvard. He said the real problem was all the urban jobs went away and when the jobs went wait for the working class, then the social decay came, and I think there's a lot of truth to that. I would say there was also a breakdown in social Moray's they should stick around in hand, and that's exactly my view now that they became a spiral. And so now you know, I had a conversation with I always have conversations with, let's say, senior administration officials, and I say, you know, the breakdown of the family. Kids are born out of wedlock. Right now, if that remain it's true, and every we all know people who are born with single parents and they're doing great, but the odds are higher. And so I say with if that remains true, then thirty years from now, we'll have more inequality than we do now, and the skills gap will be greater from that fact alone. So why don't you take on family policy? And if you're gonna do it right, you got to do it in two ways. One, you've got to encourage people to get married and stay married or not have kids until they get married. But you also got to make give men money so they're worth marrying. And that's basically the problem. You've got to give them earning come tax credit or some other wage subsidy you gotta do you mean also give women money so they're worth married. Not well, now see, yes you did mean that. You just don't know it, but you did mean. We're here. Don't try to make me popular. I'm just trying to make you more popular than when I think one of the reasons why the marriage has fallen apart it's mostly I think on the male side. When you talk about, you know, the decay of the family and stuff, and then you talk about I mean, do you have any particular opinions about birth control? So well, I might have a little different view. I mean, first, on social issues, I'm still as left wing as the day is long. On the I'm I'm not only for example, well so I'm not only for supporting gay marriage, I'm for coercing gay marriage. I mean, I think we should say, are you guys married yet? Are you married yet? You guys can get married, but say on in Africa. You know, I was at a village in Mozambique a couple of years ago where there were no adults. There was grandparents and kids. All the adults were dead from AIDS, and so you asked the grandparents, are the kids replicating the behaviors that killed their parents after they nursed them to their deaths? And they said yes, they're doing all the same stuff. And so the question becomes, how do you change that behavior? And the short answer is you give contraception and you try to change behavior by lectures at the same time. But who's been most effective at changing behavior in my experience, it's not us Westerners with our technical expertise, it's the Church. And the Church will say it's about your soul, here's how you should live. And one of the reasons so many the religions there, the Protestants and the Catholics are so incredibly conservative, is because they need that ammunition to change behavior. And if you don't follow these rules, your souls is damned. That I find pretty persuasive as a way to get people to change their behavior when you're living with a life threatening disease. But they haven't been successful. Well, it's when the Catholics are opposed, I mean the Catholics in terms of the brass, if you will, of the Catholic Church. They're opposed to. Yeah, that's yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. I guess my point is they're opposed in theory. But you go into a Catholic mission in in the maybe or anywhere, and the rubbers are sitting right there on the table. They don't have the luxury of being abstract about this, and they say, if you gotta thirteen year old kid who comes in, you preach abstinence. If you had an eighteen year old, you can hand him a rubber. I want to make out that check. I want to pay to the Order of the Vatican ten thou dollars and in the memo for rubbers, and to see to see what happens now from Cabrini Green, where do you go? What happens? How much longer? So we all have these weird things that happened in our lives. While I was in at college, I wrote a humor column, which is hard to believe if anybody reads my current column, I know, uh, I think you still write a humor college? Yeah, thank you, thank you. So I'm just pretty funny, yeah that. And then I was trying to be funny, and so William F. Buckley came to campus and I wrote a piece calling him a name dropping blowhard basically, And so I said, you know, he wrote the first three volumes of his memoirs in the day of his birth. All of human history up to Buckley was glorious dawn. And then he in college, he founded two magazines, one called The National Buckley, one called the Buckley Review, which he emerged to form the Buckley Buckley. And so it was all just one joke after another. And he came to campus and he gave a talk to the student body and he said, David Brookster, if you're in the audience, I want to give you a job. And so that was my big break. Now, sadly I wasn't in the audience, and I and I and I wasn't that conservative. But three years later I was drifting a little bit up the right and I called him up and I said, is that job still open? And he said yeah. And so literally, from twenty four hours I was covering a murder on the West Side of Chicago. Twenty four hours later I was up in his Park Avenue apartment having dinner with finger bowls. Uh, and I, you know, I thought it was a watery soup. And but so when you get when you became his associate editor, you became a pseudo sung for a year and a half. So he took me yachting, he took me to bout concerts, he asked my opinion, and so it was one of those magical experiences where a guy who's a real mentor and so I worked in National View for a year and a half and he was would you admire most about him? There's many people who worked with have worked with him, have speak glowingly about him. But by the way, incredibly diverse group of people, Joan Diddy and John Leonard, a lot of people, and so his greatest capacity was his capacity for friendship. If you went over his house for dinner. First of all, there were not that many conservatives there. There were not many political people. It was writers mostly. Anatol Broyard, a literate critic, was yeah, and so we we never talked about what the tax policy was. It was what Dostoevsky had written about this. One of his biographers estimated he wrote more personal letters than anybody else in the twentieth century. He was one of these guys his brain just couldn't stop output had to become and he wrote all these letters, cultivated all these friendships, and so it was an intoxicating experience to him based in d C or here here. How long were you with him? About eighteen months? And what happened? So then he sends me off to start my career and I went and became a movie critic at the Washington Times, and then I came became a book review editor at the Wall Street Journal and then a movie critic for the Wall Street Journal in the Washington Times. When you were doing the movie criticism and the Messiah, yeah, the Reverence, the late late he was a big movie fans. I'm young Moon. Yeah, like we were like a Jennifer Anniston fan. When was his ill, it was more Hunt for October that Actually he funded a movie. He funded Pearl Harbor. He funded some movie that bomb, And so I was in Pearl Harbor. I did bomb. But thank you, thank you well if you asked me for Reverend, what was it like writing movie criticism for for I mean, the Washington Times is a is a very very conservative paper. Yeah, I must say, when I was there, we had a very talented staff. So Malcolm Ladwell was one of my co authors. And so when you weren't touch you you were free to write whatever you would And I had the best interview of my life until this one. It was with Jackie Gleason and he was just about the funniest person I ever met in my life. When when you wrote movie criticism, was it the classic thing where like the movie critic died and you were writing the gardening column and somebody said, kid, you're the movie critic. When that happened to me at the film well, I kind of resent right now that you were a movie critic for the Washington Times because what was your background in film? You're recovering murders in Careeny Green? I had a PhD in film from USC and no, I didn't because of my rich social life at the Chicago I saw a movie almost every night. Uh and so I recall in one eleven week period, I saw seventy seven movies, and I for kidding, I would do my homework from seven and nine to go to the move of the student thing with outstanding film thing, I'd go and then I'd go to the bar. That was my life and friend, Yeah, I did that lasted eight team was why did that end? Because I got a hired by the Wall Street Journal to come up here. Okay, so how do you how do you How do you go from the Washington Times writing film to the journal Because I got towards a good piece of advice. And I don't know if you followed this. But never say no to anything. Say yes everything, at least at a certain point in your life. I said yes to Pearl Harbor, and I have to beg to different. I said yes to a lot of things I shouldn't said yes. Yes were the creato with my businesses? Say no until you have to say yes? Who never said no? One who rang your bell for the Wall Street Journal? Who came after somebody asked me to do a piece on economics, And because of my deep background and film, I wrote an essay on economics. Uh and and the editor of the Wall Street Journal saw it and liked it and and called me up and said, we need a book of your editor. So I edited the book of your section. And then I went out from from New York. And then I went out and covered the decline in Soviet Union. For five years. I was in covering half the world. Yes, I lived in Brussels, but I covered the Soviet Union. Um and Della coming out of prison married at the time, I was married at the time. You have a very patient wife. If I told my wife we were moving back to Brussels, she would put an axe in my head. Right, so you're at the Journal for how long? For nine years? And then where do you go? So then I go to the Weekly Standard of Conservative magazine owned by Rupert Murdack. At that point, what was that like? That was the best experience A lot like Buckley. People say, people who know Murda personally, and they all say that he's like Buckley. He's this very charming, very you know, uh, devoted to his friends, you know very was he that way when you work with him? I confess I never talked to him, and the one time I did was at a party. Any mumbled. I couldn't understand what he was saying. But you know the problem with writing, especially my current job, it's solitary, and so at the magazine it was all my friends getting together, right a magazine. I was here for a panel about a year or two ago, and we were backstage and it was like I was my little glimpse of the theater world. It was like group hugs and I remember there was even tissues out on stage here in case we started crying and and and and believe me, if you go to the Brookings Institution and you're you're doing a panel on tax policy, there's not a lot of group hugging. Uh. And so I sort of at the magazine was my closest experience to being part of a team, putting on something together as a group, And so I really like that. Well, being on a team that way and being and having that kind of collegiality with people is really Um, I'm gonna come and do a play in New York in February only because it means like I'm literally starving for the oxygen of being part of an ensemble and being part of a work where the best work is done when we all do it together and integrated together. Now, if you're in the theater, can you put on a good production? If people don't like each other, do they have to do? People have to purse genuinely like in the theater because more, presumably more thought goes into the piece. Like whether we did street Car on Broad Bay and Greg Moser said the great line, he's it, but we know the material works. If we bomb, it's us it's like we know, like we did revivals. If you do original pieces, it's different. But then from Weekly Standard, what happens? We're there for? How long? I was there also for nine years? Nine years? What do evolved you during that We were you traveling all around the world at that time. I'm mostly a little I did a lot of Middle East stuff and I wrote a book called Bobo that was nineties six to two thou three or if I've got the numbers right, ninety Weekly Standard when nine eleven happens, Yes, you're a Weekly Standard. At the end of the Clinton years and the beginning of the Bush years and nine eleven and the war, Yes, you're turned. When I was just joined the Times somewhere, we were there doing the Clinton if I mean think about that, You're there doing the Clinton impeachment. Bush is elected nine eleven, the war in iraqis declared. How did your politics evolved during that time? Well? I married Ken Starr's daughter, and no I didn't. Yeah, I'm gonna say this, and it's not to curry favor, but it's on the record if you go back. I was doing a show called The News Hour on PBS, which I still do and on NPR, and all things considered, I was not a big impeach Clinton. Guy, I'm basically a believer. I'm sort of an older style of conservative that human nature is extremely complicated and flawed and a lot of people do a lot of horrible things, but they can still be served their purpose in society. Yeah, um um. Having said that, to turn it the other way, I definitely supported the war yellow Cake, all of it. And even even with all the valerie, all that hocus pocus, is still supported attacking Iraq. Yes, so, I basically, and I covered the Middle East a bunch. I basically thought, you drive through all towns in Jordan and Egypt and it's just deadly dull, and these people have no lives and no prospects because they live in stagnant societies overseen by oligarchs or worse, dictators in the case of some were absolutely true. But I thought, if that part of the region is ever going to be healthy, they have to have normal societies where young men and women can rise and have normal lives. And do you believe that in pursuit of having that normal society, in pursuit of because whenever anybody says they want to uh, this was about, you know, exporting democracy to an area and so forth. I mean, I support that in theory, but I think that in practice with the Bush administration, that was complete bullshit. Um they they had they I mean, I just for one I never for one second, I bet everything I own that Dick Cheney doesn't roll over in bed and his wife says, Dick, what's wrong, Darling, And Janey says, God, I can't sleep. I just I've got to export democracy to the Middle East. We just got to get this thing done. I really, I care so much about these people like Lee and I'm sorry, let me get up and go get a glass of water. I've got to think it is uh So, I mean to me, Iraq was about what we ultimately got to and this was you know, now the war had moved on to Afghanistan, and the press had moved on to Afghanistan, but was under report it was they lifted the ban on the U. S Oil companies coming in and pumping oil there, which was their ultimate goal. Right, So first of all, you disagree that that happened, you just agree that was the goal that I didn't agree that was the goal. I don't know anybody in the oil business who wants instability. Saddan was pumping oil. They had a stable market. That's what they wanted. I never heard of any oil company, anybody in the energy business lobbying, and it was a oil if. If Saddam was pumping oil, and we knew that he wasn't making weapons of mass destruction, you still don't think he might have been. I think we thought that at the time. So here so I would say there were multiple schools within the bushop and sustration. There was the Cheney Rumsfield school, who didn't you're right, did not care about democracy. They were afraid of the weapons of mass destruction. They were afraid that he would pass them off to some terror group and they bought They both yes, that that that he might he he wanted to do it. He wanted to pass them off, and so did the Clinton administration, by the way, and so that was their reasoning. They did not want to establish democracy. They wanted to get in, take him out, get out of there. The other people, I think, mostly including President Bush, but a lot of other people like wolf Wits, they wanted to do the human rights and democracy thing. And so I think those are the two factions and the problem was faction democracy and human rights champion the war faction, let's get out, fought the war or planned the war, and as a result, it was a big screw up. You know, the war has had a huge effect on me in the year since. And so I mentioned Edmund Burke earlier to be careful, you can plan because societies are extremely complicated. And so I'm sitting there, I'm torn. Before the war, I'm thinking, I really think we need to help promote normal societies, not democracies, just normal societies. But then Edwin Burke teaches me, don't go in there. It's way more complicated than you think. And so I have this little internal debate, and I wrote a column at the time said all these concerns. Burke wouldn't like this. Burke wouldn't like this, and then the last paragraph I said, but we got to do it anyway. And so I think that last paragraph was probably wrong. And I know this is a bogus question, but I'll ask you winning because I think you have an interesting answer to this. And then if we had it to do over again, what would you do differently? Would you go to Pakistan instead? I know I would, Yeah, I wouldn't go there. Now, I don't say from the beginning back in three, I would have gone to Pakistan first because that's where the old were. Ultimately we were going to get Rock is complicated. Rocks was not behind nine eleven, and Iraq was not a training ground of al Qaeda for what the stated purposes of the attack in two thousand three were, Pakistan would have been the better place to go. Correct that that's certainly potentially yeah, I mean it's worth pointing out that more Iraqis died in the ten years before the American invasion of Rock than the ten years after. It was a pretty horrible regime. Uh, if we're gonna be worried about horrible regimes, we could be. But it was a horrible It was an exporting regime. I mean, it was monstrous. What do you think it needs to happen? You know? So I've been humbled since then about what we can achieve, and I you know, it took me some multiple stages. Even in Afghanistan. I've been there a couple of times, and you would go there and the people in the n g O S at the u N they really believed in the nation building part when I was there, and even that hasn't worked. It's just cultures are really hard. I was interviewing a Bush administration official, and I can't tell you who she was because we were off the record, but I once asked her, uh, you know, did you guys got to get the culture of a rock wrong? And she said, I don't really believe in culture. I think you changed the institutions of a society, change the society. But that's wrong, that's wrong. Cultures are really hard to change. One of my favorite quotes, by the way, it's by Daniel Patrick moynihan, which was, if I can remember correctly, this central conservative truth is the culture matters most. The central liberal truth is that government can change culture. And I think that's generally true, but you have to do it very slowly and cautiously, I think in my lifetime, and I could be wrong, because I want to switch to the current election. What's your assessment of what do you think the American military there are are military policy should be in what you predicted might be in a Romney administration if he wins in a couple of weeks, or if Obama continues changed. I wouldn't romanticize how popular we were Nixon whe he was vice president to Latin America and they had a riot and nearly killed him. We were nine. I think we're popular pre nineteen sixty. I'm saying during this during Vietnam, it all sort of all the wheels, sort of people never like number one. I was at Camden Yards where the Orioles play, and there was a Yankee head in the parking lot, and on the way out of the game, the fans started kicking the Yankee hat and a crowd gathered, all of them kicking and chanting at this Yankee hut. If you're the Yankees, you're not going to be popular. Um. Nonetheless, I I happen to think we're in a period of relative bipartisanship on foreign policy. No matter whether Obama wins or Omney wins, we are unpopular. You're right about that. We're usually less unpopular than whoever the local power is. So the Japanese and the Koreans definitely want us around a world off the Chinese, the Central Europeans definitely want us around a world off the Russians. And so I think our role will be to you know, we're not going to be going abroad and doing a lot of stuff our self confidences and there are exactly. But I do think we still have a role to just try to stabilize the world and to keep various regional hegemon's from taking over. So let's let's talk about the election. Um uh. And I wanted to ask you, you know, for me, in my lifetime, I remember and this again, this is my recollection of it. I could be I'm not saying this is a fact, but in my lifetime, there was a way that the Democrats behaved, and there was a way that the Republicans behaved during the nominating process and beyond they seem to have switched places of the last ten or twelve years. Why are the Republicans now like the Democrats and they're just fumbling the ball inside the red zone here? What the hell's going on? Because Obama was there is for the taking? Do you agree? I completely agree. I mean, if you ask people as a country head in the right direction, thirty six percent say yes, should Obama be reelected? Say yes? Should have been able to beat this guy? What happened may still well, you know, I I do think the people who happen to be hired by Romney or not the a team and that's that would be the consensus in Washington. There was an A team and he didn't want them. Why do you get him lolco he didn't know? I think he didn't generally didn't know who the A team was. But I think you could take Carl Rove, Michael Deaver and Nicola mckiavelli put him up in Boston. They still couldn't run a good campaign with this guy. It's always the candidate. Reagan knew who he was, Romney knows who he is, but he's not running as that guy. And he's not that great an actor, so he's uh, and so he's faking. I think he's genuinely a non ideological guy running and it look like Marlon Brand, you know, by the way. You know what. One of the really interesting conversations I once had with Bush w was, you know, when you do a press conference, you walk out of the hallway and then you walk up to the party about thirty yards and you're on national TV. That walk And he once spent about five minutes describing to me how you do that walk, where you put your hands, how you stride, had taught it all through and there's just some level of acting. I guess how you present yourself. Um, Romney is pretending to be much more ideological than he really is. He don't think he really engages himself. He's pretending to be much more that he's just not being true to himself, and that's coming through, that's leaking out. I genuinely think you can't fake it. I once got to have dinner with Tom Clancy when I was Book of Your editor, and he like him really I this was my one and only meeting, okay, and my memory of that dinner was he just got on a battleship and seeing a new weapons system and he was really excited. He was it was fascinating to him. And as he was enthusing about it, I was thinking, you can't fake that unless you feel that, you can't write Tom Clancy novels. And so Mitt Romney is pretending to be a tea party guy, just not who he is. And so as a result, sometimes he gets too hard core, he steps on it too strong. Sometimes he pulls back. You know, I would just wish. I think he'll spend the rest of his life, assuming he loses UM, regretting that he didn't run as himself. Now, the interesting when you talk about running as yourself. And this may be a very naive question because I don't I really don't know how these things work. Why don't people who are running with the and the GOP. Now, I mean, Bush is a born again Christian and he operated from that vantage point as such. Romney, of course, is not a born again Christian. He's have a different faith. I think that there's a there's there's a critical element in our society who they're not so clear about Obama and they're waiting to be wooed, but they're not going to be wooed by an ultra right wing observative crowd, especially on social issues. And I think that that the Republican candidate who would come in This is just an opinion. The Republican candidate would come in and tamed the conservative right wing, who got the heads of six or eighty of these groups in the room and said, you gotta shut up and don't be behind me squawking like some kind of a course until I think this thing is over. I gotta get out there and I gotta play this a little more moderately, and we're gonna win. As long as you just tone it down, we're gonna win. They don't do that. But don't you think it's going to cost him the election? Yes? Well I think it's already cost him a bunch of Senate seats and could cost them a bunch more. And so you know, of course, from where I stand, i'd much rather they ran am much more. What's the guy's name in Missouri? Why isn't he gone? How the hell that? You may win? You may win, he may win. You think he'll be Claire? He's about right now? Yeah, um is there is a funny state. It's it's going the other way funny. That's an interesting word. Legitimate. One of the odd things about why he's losing right now is that he's losing like two nationally, but by ten even in these key swing states, which is why he's really behind. So why is that? Why is there a dis junction? It's because the Obama administration has gone brilliantly after they know they can't win white working class men, but they've hit white working class women. They've run these brilliant ads on Judge Judy, on Dr Phil and it's all this guy is rich, he does not get you. And they started with Baine, they unfolded with Medicare and so if you look at the polling white working class women nationwide maybe about UM support Obama in the swing states where they're seeing these ads, it's and that's the margin right there. And so his problem, I think it is not so much ideology. It's that he's just a rich guy, doesn't get you. I've defended him on this because people say that, you know, he's got a house in San Diego where he has a garage with elevators, and I've tried to point out that he has many other houses where the garages do not have elevators, and it's not fair, but but he needs. But you know, I think it's essentially it's he would be running more right than me. But I think he'd be winning if he were a candidate who related right. Um the what's your opinion of campaign finance reform? As you see the numbers pile up now, it will be a record again in terms of spending in a presidential race, what's your opinion of campaign finance reform? So I'm for for reform. I think our system. What style of reform would you favor of what you've seen? Well, I I've grown tired and exhausted by changing the rules here and there. I think you either got to go to full disclosure, complete disclosure or full public finance, just one or the other because where we are now and to me, the you know, say, for example, on tax reform, I'm a big believer we have to simplify the tax code. But if every little provision in the tax code has some special shows who can drop five million dollars in a congressional district, There's no way we're going to do that. I would you simplify the tax code. I would eliminate essentially a flat tax. Well, you know, there's a consensus I would do what Simpson Bowl suggests get rid of. I would cap the mortgage in deduction, a lot of the deductions for people learning, say above one fifty and then lower what is it now a million? Well, what I do is, I'd say, if you say you're in over two dollars, you can only take so many deductions. And how you want to partial out your deductions that's fined by you charitable deductions. Yeah, I might. I want to preserve that one. I've believe in that one. But but having said that, I think that Bush tax cuts should be repealed top to Botta, the middle class parts all the um because you can tax the rich to forever until this island is empty and you will not raise enough money to pay. People always threaten they're going to leave, but they really don't leave it. They say they're always about to go to Canada. Maybe they moved to Brooklyn Um. What do you think of term limits? Definitely against them, you are y they empower staffs. It's also politics is really hard, and legislation is really hard, and things take a long time to learn. One of the things I'm in favor of term limits. Now you are in the Congress, I am man if you're in and out in four years. First of all, you're thinking about your next job right away. Second to permanent staff just takes over. I don't think anybody should serve in the Congress for more than twelve years. More importantly, you have to have one of the other. You either have to have the campaign finis formative level of it's meaningful. You have to have the term limits because right now, my friends who work in Washington, the old I mean, this was nauseating enough right when you think it can't get any more disgusting, My friends who will work on the Hill told me that these men and women in the US Senate has been one full day, one full day out of five days on the phone raising money. All they do is they don't do any Senate business one day out of the week. Our friends said to me, in the last six years, it's become two full days. They're on the phone two days out of five. That to be any work that you sent them to do. And then they're raising money for their campaigns. That's a cent that's a crime. That makes me six So I think that to me two six year terms and get him out of there. And I'm a liberal. Yeah, I think the problem is more tribalism than money. We haven't had tax reform, we haven't had complicated legislation with hospible exception of healthcare, because we don't have the legislative skills of a Lyndon Johnson. People just don't how to do it. Like I cover tax reform, there was a guy named Packwood, Bob Packwood, Dan Rostenkowski, Uh, both of whom had accursed to me either went to jail or resigned in disgrace. But but but they knew how to legislate. They were really good at Bill Bradley, and that takes time. You gotta learn to do that. And by the way, I think the people in their first year are just as money grubber as the people in the thirty second here. But I wanted to just finish by asking you that you also, UM, you wrote a book, or you wrote a segment of your book about marriage. What was your I wrote a book called The Social Animal, which is really a compendium of the research on unconscious processes and what leads to happiness. Motivated you to write that book? Well, the short ans the official answer is that I wanted to know why kids drop out of high school. And it turns out the factors are determined very early and within the first eighteen months of life. You can take a look at a kid who's eighteen months how the kid relates to mom and predict with seventy seven percent accuracy who's going to graduate from high school. There are certain emotional attachments, so kid who can form an attachment early on is going to know how to form an attachment with teachers and peers, life is going to be okay. If you can't form attachments, UM, life will be very frustrating. That doesn't mean you're determined, you're sentenced it to life of eighteen months. You can have a mentor later on that will change you, but those early formations are really important. You've been married to the same movement for how many years? Uh? Twenty six years? What's the secret? Uh? And it's got read, got real. I'm not smart on this, but I did read a really good blog post on this. H My wife would kill me if I started giving advice on how to do this. Marry someone really patient. But I read this blog post and one of the pieces of advice was brag about your spouse and let them over hear you. That seems like very good advice. Another one to be so advice she gave was sometimes they tell you, you you know, never go to bed mad. Sometimes you just got to go to bed, go to sleep, sleep on it, cook breakfast for the other person. Sometimes you just go to sleep. And this struck me as very realistic advice. But you know, the part of what the book was about was the first time we find our mates, and so a lot of it, a lot of his uncome what a critical decision he was saying, because I feel the same way. I mean, I wrote a book about that. Was a critique of the family law system and the divorce system when I got divorced, and how it was just being thrown into this quicksand it was just so painful and so agonizing and I and I say that to but all the time, I say, this decision is it is fundamentally the most critical decision you're gonna make in your life. Who you I mean, if you're of that mind to marry and and and to and to make that kind of a home with someone and make it legal, and and the and the and the criteria with which people use to get married. Now, my dear friend who left the country for several years. He's a he's an artist, and he and his wife, after running an art gallery in New York for many years, they just took off and they went to the Italian countryside or something. He was gone for like nine years. And I said, what's one thing you noticed? He says, all these kids were these devices in their hands. He said, I came home and they have all these devices in their hands. And I said, yeah, that really is alarming, is And he says, he says, these kids will never get to know each other in real time. He said, they're never going to stare into each other's eyes over a table with a checkered tablecloth and a candle shoved into a bottle of mattouse. He goes, he said, eating a really shitty Italian meal, but over the course of a couple of hours, really get to know each other in real time. Everybody's so hurried. Is such a hurry to get to the fast? No, he said to me, that's created this horrible mechanism for intimacy in our society. Well, so the I go go to college. As I tell kids, if you have a great career in a crappy marriage, you'll be miserable. If you have a crappy career in a great marriage, you'll be happy. So every course you take in college should be about who to marry. So like you should take literature courses, theater courses, science courses. Think hard about this one. They look at me like I'm crazy, But that that is absolutely true. So if you want to know what correlates to happiness, money correlates a little, but when you hit a certain point it stops. Age correlates to happiness. So people in their twenties are happy, and then they go through a shallow you shaped curve. And the native of happiness for the average person who's aged forty seven, and that's called having teenage children. And then and then they hitched it on the spot on the peak happiness is the first ten years after retirement. But the people who are happy, marriage is equal to doubling your income. Having a good marriage produces the same happiness gains doubling your income. I tell people that the rule in marriage is the rule that I failed to apply in my movie career, which is just say no until you have to say until you meet that woman where you seeing your stuff, she's out there and the idea that she's out there and I don't have her, it just drives you in. Say you have to have right then you marry her. Until you feel that way, then maybe you just have to take your tom We're going to take some questions. I think yes. One audience member asked about the gridlock in Washington and wondered about a pathway to resolve that problem. This was brookes response. You know, say, when you were at g W if you ask people do you trust government, you're the right thing most of the time in those days said yes, said yes. Now if you ask people. Do you trust government to the right thing? Most of the time it's or nine percent, and so there's just no trust that government can do the you know, the big things. And so I'm in favor of doing some big things. I would if you know, my tru others, we would have just this big human capital agenda where we do a lot of our early childhood alternative energy. Would that be one of them? Well, I think that would be one of them. I'm you know, I happen to think fracking is a good thing. Why why Why? Because I think it provides us cheaper energy that's much cleaner than coal and oil. Let's talk about that, because fracking where and you can. I love to hear your your opinion and or your facts for that matter, because everybody seems like I've got my own set everybody has their own set of facts about fracking, because I'm very anti fracking, because I mean, of course, the natural gas being cleaner than coal thing is is? Is it given? But I mean, we can't have a Price Anderson Act for the natural gas industry where if they spoil all the water in the southern tier of the state of New York in these designated zones, I mean, Andrew Cuomo is going to say, here's a zone, and I'm being very good about it. But it's basically like everybody raise your hand and wants to have fracking down in the southern tier of New York and those Binghamton adjacent areas that wanted, He's gonna probably let them have it. And then when all that water gets screwed up, if it does, if all that water gets contemnated, who are they going to come to to clean up that water? Who are they going to hand the bill to to clean up that water. You want to say that burning natural gas is cleaner than oil, I agree with you, But the same argument goes with nukes. The nuclear industry will sit there before Night eleven, before we got into the terrorists target issue, they were sitting there going, well, you know, you're like a mountain. We don't know and the stuff's just gonna sit there in a pile and we're gonna haven't figured it out. Yeah, but co nuclear is cleaner than oil, I mean coal. Everybody just keeps saying it's cleaner than coal. But I'm saying, what happens if the water issue becomes a big let alone, all the stuff that Bobby Kennedy riffs on about the roads they're gonna build and who's gonna be They mean, they got trucks going up there now that are smashing all the roads to pieces. And you think those natural gas companies are gonna pay for it. Here's the ps I don't mean to mug you here now, but here's the But here's the ps L n G is building all these sports right now on the East coast, and is that gas? I mean all these companies that are fracting saying we're gonna go down into the southern tier of New York and up in Ohio and northern Pennsylvania, and we're gonna blow all these holes in the ground and maybe risk having some earthquakes and maybe spoiling all these trillions of gablets of war because we're gonna get this gas, which is going to lower the price of natural gas and fuel here in the United States. Bullshit, they're gonna pipe that stuff to the coast and put it on tankers and put it on the market and go sell it to the Chinese or sell it on the open market. It's not going to lower the cost of energy here. So why are you in favor of fract Let me get my pad. I guess I want to hear your opinion first. No, but I just I'm burning on this issue. So I'm where President Obama is, So I'm a good Democrat on this issue and where I think the Republicans. And so basically, there's been a ton of research done on this, and like every single energy source, it has costs and it has environmental costs. The benefits to fracking that I saw a Yale study on this are measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The costs, including what you just mentioned, are measured in the hundred millions of dollars. So you can take some of the benefits and regulated. And the report that calculated those courts was written by who it was Yale University, I don't know, some scholars, so a very fine institution. And so basically, if you are if you think the there is one price of gas in the world, there is one price of oil in the world. So it will if we lower the if no matter, if we increase the supply tremendously, which is what's happening. The cost is going down. If you're making twenty five dollars a year or thirty five thousand dollars a year. It really actually kind of matters to you if you're sitting out there in western Pennsylvania or South Dakota or North Dakota without a job, it kind of matters to you that there's a fifty buck an hour job to you if you want there to be a working class But but but it's but it's proven that it's a fifty buck an hour job up in the southern tier of New York and up in northern Pennsylvania for people that are coming from Oklahoma, in Texas and Louisiana, none of those people that are getting the high paying jobs are from that area. They're bringing gas people down from the South and bringing them up there. You go up to the fracking zones in New York and all the license plates are from down south, and they're gonna take that job, and they're gonna take that money. They're gonna spend it up, they're gonna spend it on to cigarettes up there, and then they're gonna go home. There are a a lot of condom but coming to condoms, the big if you if you go to the North Dakota, you're pulling on McDonald's and you push the button in the drive through, you are talking to somebody from Texas because they cannot find anybody work at McDonald's in the drive through because everyone's out in the oil fields or in the gas fields, and those places are becoming I don't care, but but I'm saying that this is sure, they're costs, and sure it has to be regular. And by the way, the responsible gas companies want to regulated. They don't want their response. But the many you talk about them, I mean, and then again, and I know that there's a there's a there's a good uh cover for this. I mean, I've heard it before, but the many you talk about, well, the it's hundreds of billions and benefits and its hundreds of millions in costs, and it's cleaner than cold. And I want to say, I go, then why are we going renewable? All my friends who work in renewable say, if you build Derek's on the Great Lakes for wind turbine, we have enough power for wind turbines on the Great Lakes. On Derrick's. They would build on the Great Lakes, floating Derrick's on the Great Lakes and would power one third of the country. And if you put photo voltaic elements in the southwestern United States, you power another quarter of the country with photovoltaic. And if you want to get serious about cutting costs to the Americans energy independence, we need to have the Apollo project of renewable energy. Why don't they spend any money on that? Forget about cylindro, What do you think about that? Because I think gas is gateway to those renewables. We are not there yet. It is just simply not competitive. Where will we be there and how do we get there? Which we have to have more technological advance so they're economically competitive. They are simply not economically but the government has to. China is now closing down their renewables because even they with the massive subsidies, cannot exploit They've run out of place the export two. They just can't afford it. These renewable industries are growing, They're going to be the future, but it's gonna take a little while to get to there. When until we pumped the last drop of gas out of the ground. No, well, it'll it'll probably be a tooth course thing. As renewables get cheaper, they'll come down to a market price and as gas becomes Dear little Rosa, I think that, you know, I think that the government has to make renewables cheaper by investing that money themselves to to kick start that program. Um, the last thing I want to say before we go is that you know, one thing I'm mindful of is as Obama's term uh may end. I mean, who knows what's gonna happen. We really don't know what's gonna happen. We live in that world now where you know, if the election were called now, they're sing Obama would win, but they don't know what's going to happen. And if Obama we're gone. What I didn't want to ask you is what do you think would have been different in Hillary clinton administration if she had been president? And what do you think will will become of Hillary Clinton now in her career? Henceport let me ask the answer the second one. I think it had to first. Um, First of all, I think the Democrats have a reasonably weak bench for no matter who whether he wins or not, so I think there would be a big draft Hillary movement. I don't think at the moment from what I understand that people who really know her that she's of a mind to do that right now, she's tired, but a few years of resting, I think the opportunity will be It's tough to not be the first woman president, so I would I think she still has a future in Parkers. They're just aren a lot of Democrats who are sort of obvious candidates. As for the difference, there's some who view themselves as obvious candidates every Democrat in the U. S. Senate, but that but as for the difference is one of the things. I'm a big personal admirable Obama. I've known him for a long time. I have covered him and spoken him a lot. But one of his weaknesses that I think she would have done a better job is personal relationships with fellow Democrats and so antiseptic. They say, you know when you um, you know, most politicians they you know, they grab you, they rub your cheek, They just they invade your personal stay to him. Um that you know, you've spent a lot of time around them. They're just animalistic in there. But they connect Obama, you know, with the staff. They'll they'll say, you're going to such and such a city, why don't you call the mayor up and invite him to ride with you from the airport downtown. Let's say I don't want to do that. I don't want to do that, and the friends and then but he really, but he really won't He just in my view, he has a writer's person lity. He likes the solitary time to think, and so he just doesn't do that. And even going up to the Hill. There was a call that was made to the White House and a couple of years ago they wanted to send him up to lobby for a peace of legislation. The centators called up and said, don't send him. He doesn't like us. We know it's it won't help. That's a bad place to be when it seems when you're told premptively that it's undoable. So I think she would have been a little bit, don't She wouldn't have been as great as her husband that one of the people in his administration. Obama doesn't make the call to the hill. Clinton would make sit there and make thirty two calls in a row. His problem was his position on call thirty two was eighty degrees from where it was on call one. But but he would make the calls. And so I do think she would have um done the inside She's done a good job in the position she's in them, Yes, I do. I think she's been a great Secretary of State, great secretary. I wanted to end by saying, and I mean this sincerely, not only are you the most likable when charming conservative I've ever met, here, by far the most likable when charming writer for The New York Times I've ever so thank you very much for coming. Thanks to the Public Theater and to Jeremy McCarter of the Public Forum. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the thing.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
Social links
Follow podcast
Recent clips
Browse 421 clip(s)