This week, Alec talks with Pulitzer-prize winner George Will, whose passion for politics began early: he remembers Truman’s election when he was seven years old.
George Will is a political conservative, but he’s not afraid to direct criticism to the right. Will analyzes the current election for Alec – this isn’t a “slam-dunk for either side,” he says, and offers some historical perspective on the current animosity in political life. “We've been through really violent times,” says Will, “and we're in one of those periods now. And it will burn over.” With over 40 years in political journalism, George Will is a voice worth listening to.
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I'm Alec Baldwin. And here's the thing. With political discourse on television, dominated by bombast fact twisting and outrageous personal attacks, it's easy to dismiss every bit of it as a worthless side show. But one of the rare voices worth listening to is George Will. He won a Pulitzer in nineteen seventy seven for his political commentary, much of which was critical of President Nixon. He has a column in both The Washington Post and Newsweek, and he's been a regular panelist on ABC's This Week on Sunday mornings since ninety one. While politically conservative, he's not afraid to direct his criticism to the right and extend dinner invitations to the left. George Will's passion for all things political started early, well, at the first election I remember was Dewey Truman and forty eight. I was, I guess seven years old, and I remembered how and why. Well, I just remember the static on radio, the stuff about it going on, and a chair you pull up with the adult exactly. In nineteen fifty two, I remember Taft his running and for the Republican nomination against Eisenhower, speaking in Champagne Illinois, and I went to see that. I remember ST's Key Farber, Tennessee senator who is running for first and fifty two and again in fifty six. Uh in fifty six when he became Stevenson's running made at the convention when Stevenson, through the convention opened to pick the vice president. So I saw a few of these national candidates and got interested. His career in political journalism started forty years ago when he was hired to be editor of the National Review. Over the years, he's established himself as a consistent and respected voice in American political life. George Wills also a baseball writer and a passionate fan. I can't remember life without it. And growing up in central Illinois on the Illinois Central Railroad, the main line of Mid America as it was called, taking trains to Chicago, sort of fixated on Chicago. And this was pre television, so baseball was literally in the air. There were two teams in Chicago and two in St. Louis. The St. Louis Browns were there. St. Louis was the westernmost outpost of baseball, and I just got hooked on the radio, the voice of it all. It was my connection to Metropolitan America if you will sports, and particularly about baseball, then because it's a rich sediment of numbers, it was one of the first things a young person could peg up with adults on that you could know as much about Jimmy Fox as your father did. Will's book meant at work. The Craft of Baseball was a New York Times best seller. But back to politics, namely the presidential election, about which Will has no shortage of opinions. He considers the number of debates during the recent Republican primary season excessive. When I spoke with him earlier this year, he told me the primaries were just a mess, and he says the current race is far from over. I certainly do not think this is a slam dunk for either side. Give you a little background into Republicans in the Senate or the White House of White House, let's start with it. In two thousand and eight, Barack Obama had all the wind at his back, everything going from it was an African American at a time when the country was eager to do that. The Republicans had, in the view of many of us, pretty much disgraced themselves at home and abroad. Free years they nominated in the implausible seventy two year old Warrior and a really implausible running mate. The country was in economic meltdown. Just everything was going wrong. Obama had been two years out of the Illinois State legislature. He was a raw shock test for the nation. You could project whatever you wanted on him as a fairly unknown candidate to get be all things to all people. Still, he got fifty two point eight percent of the vote. Question. Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the world. How many Democratic candidates in the history of that party have got more than fifty three of the vote and is only three Andrew Jackson for Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. The Republicans, a younger party, have had ten candidates good over which means that in two thousand and twelve Obama is probably going to get less than fifty two point eight percent of the vote. Why do you think the Democrats have a harder time getting about I don't know. I have an opinion. Well, because they're they're typically very often when they're at their best, and both sides I want to focus on them at their best. The Democrats are asking people to vote against their own interests very often where the Republicans are asking people to vote for their interests for it, which is an easier row stone to push up there slightly tendentious presentation. When was the last time the Democrats asked the United Auto Workers to vote against their interest When the last time they asked the teachers unions to vote against their interests? I should think it's exactly the reverse. The Democratic problem in addressing the country is that it is so much a mosaic of vested interests that the Democratic Party has become, in my judgment, a had done of reactionary liberalism. Whatever is should always be only bigger. Well, when I look at the you know what are considered liberal policies, democratic policies, progressive policies, I think to myself, well, at least there was an effort by them, albeit sometimes an ill conceived one, to solve a real problem. Do you think that these people are not really trying to solve a problem that they try to the Democrats, Sometimes they're trying to solve problems. Sometimes the problem they're trying to solve is the unsliked appetite of an interest group. Right, you think Obama has a chance to win, Sure, you do, Yeah, what do you think Roby's biggest problem is people don't warm to him. They don't dislike you, but they don't like him. That's different and in some ways more deadly, because if people don't like you, it's because you've said something or stand for something, and you can always persuade them or change into something else. Right, if they just don't cotton to you, it's it's hard to think about you at all. Well, it's hard to repeal chemistry. It And what do you think is going to be Obama's biggest battle in the election. I think the sense that he's Jimmy Carter, amiable, decent, well meaning, and out of his depth. You know, there's an old saying in Washington at least, that overnights a long time, and a week is forever in American politics. We haven't heard the last from Spain. We haven't heard the last from various economic difficulties. If the economy stalls, which it easily could do, who knows. You mentioned earlier about the mess of the Republican primary season and what happened, and I was joking with some friends how I thought that, to some extent, the only thing Obama needs to do when he runs against Romney, has show clips of all the things that gang Ridge said about Romney during the primary period, and he might be halfway there. Well, except being criticized by new gang Ridge is not necessarily a problem. But in my lifetime, this was really the realm of the Democrats, the circular firing squad, and the Republicans in my left and were never like that, I mean the Republican they fell in line and supported the nominee. What happened do you think this time around? Well, first of all, the varsity didn't show up. The best players didn't the Mitch Daniels and others, Jeb Bush, and so you had people who are trying to establish a kind of status and purchase on the electorate that that didn't bring to the party to become stars. If you become stars, and we had this lunatic proliferation of debates. When a baseball team, thirty baseball teams go to spring training, they know everyone I'm gonna win sixty games, everyone I'm gonna lose sixty games. You play the whole damn season to sort out forty two games. It's a little bit that way in politics. The Republicans are going to vote Republican, particularly in this polarized climate. The Democrats are going to vote democratic. We're really going to be fighting this fall, all this money and time and energy over twelve percent of the electorate. I think I watched you on Colbert and you said that parties were you quoted whoever it was you quoted, where parties were systems by which we organize our hates and our Henry Adams and that. But do you think most people that's that's true? Do you think, for example, I vote the way I vote because I'm voting against someone as opposed to force someone else. You're voting against someone else, but not hatred. The American people are really not haters. We're big boys and girls. We've been doing this a long time. We're the most experienced democracy. We understand that people have different political sensibilities. Those people cluster, we call the clusters parties. We fight it out a big deal. But when you say that people, it is not a hatred involved. Would you agree that in your lifetime, in your career, you've seen that it's reached a kind of an ugly time now in terms of media, meaning, especially in the conservative media, where it was liberal too because I mean, obviously Olberman, and there's a whole MSNBC crab which seems to have been wanting to mimic their counter parts over at Fox. But do you see that the rhetoric has changed over the last several years and somewhat although I mean it used to be Republicans against Republicans. My first vote for president was in the Goldwater election. I was a cheerful Goldwater right. In fact, I will it a visit a button. You're gonna give me no, no, But our Kennedy listeners can't see this. But anyway, I've got a Goldwater button is the wallpaper on my cell phone, and some of us never forget. But again, a little perspective. In the seventeen nineties, in the Great Election of eighteen hundred, the Adams sites said if Jefferson's elected, they will confiscate the Bibles and women will not be safe on the streets. The Jeffersonian said, if Adams is elected, we will have a monarchy installed in this country and will be subservient to France. In the eighteen fifties, Preston Brooks of South Carolina Congressman goes on the Senate floor accompanied by an aide holding a gun to hold off the other senators on the Senate floor, used his cane to beat Senator Charles Sumner mass Usetts so severely he was out of the Senate for three years. People of South Carolina were so approving of this they inundated his office with new canes. We've been through really violent times and we're in one of those periods now and it will burn over. But in your profession, in the political professional class, the punditocracy, whatever you want to call it, now we have a whole network which is very, very tilted in one direction. Did you see them coming to have two whole networks? Well, look, thirty years ago CNN was found in an eighty one, I think thirty years ago at the dinner hour in this country, of all television sets in used were turned to Cronkite Chancellor and Peter Jennings. Today we have this cornucopia of news sources. People to find journalism on their own terms, get it on their own time. I was told by an activist in South Carolina during the primary this year that a survey showed that seventy two of all Republican primary voters in South Carolina get all, not most all of their news from Fox News. On a Republican candidate buys an ad on Fox News, he's not broadcasting, he's narrowcasting right into Republican voters now. In a way, this too is a reversion when the party system developed in the seventeen nineties and early eighteen hundreds, American newspapers were largely factional papers. Some of them were paid by the parties. So we may look back upon the Some would say the pretense of objective journalism or nonpartisan journalism as an episode of parenthesis in our nationals last incarnation and something. Have you ever been approached by some of those folks. I would imagine that they would have been dying Fox and Ales for you to come work. Did you know? I? I know and like your l's and Brett Human and these people of friends of mine. No, I've been with this one show on ABC for thirty one years and there was never an attempt by anyone to try to poach Shoot to enhance their credentials to have a truly sober voice among that crowd. They've got sober boys. Look Brett Bears six o'clock news program on foxes as good as it gets. What do you think about those labels? If you had to, how do you prefer to be labeled on the conservative? Conservative? Sure? To you that's defined by what today limited government government, the Madisonian project that we shall have a government of dual sovereignty, national and state, and that the national government shall be as he said in Federalists forty five, the Proposed Constitution. Because we're the Federalist papers were newspaper columns advocating ratification of the constitution. The powers granted to the federal government by the proposed Constitution are few and definite. This is the argument in the sp in court over the healthcare plan. That is, if the commerce clause is so elastic that it can accommodate the action of mandating the purchase of healthcare, then we really do not have any longer the Madisonian vision of a government of limited, delegating and enumerated powers. But do you think that the way that those powers have shifted, and you do think that the way that the government has in its role in our society has evolved over the last two hundred something years, do you think that some of that has to do with the fact that it was in a grarian society that was fueled to a large degree by slave labor over two h years ago. Obviously a change in the role of the central government was inevitable. But you can accommodate a lot of changes in the central government without undoing the principle of limited government and enumerated powers. If you could pick three things that are policy issues right now that you really think need to be changed, but that's what's best for the country, what do you think that they would be? What areas would they? First of all, I'd strike down the mandate and with it the entire healthcare plan is. I think it doubles down on all it's wrong with the health care system. Second, I would deregulate American politics. McCain find gold on all the rest have made a perfect message. Why do you think they've set out to do something flagrantly unconstitutional, which is ration the quantity, limit the content, and dictate the quantity of timing of political Citizens United. You approved of that, of course, Oh absolutely. The funny thing about Citizens United is some of the people who most spociferously dislike it are so enraged they haven't had time to read it. New York Times editorially said. What Sheldon Nadolson, the Las Vegas casino mogul, has been doing and contributing money fifteen at least fifteen million dollars to the superpack supporting New Gangbridge, is an example of what Citizens United has done to our politics. What Sheldon Nadolson is doing has nothing to do with Citizens United. What he's been doing has been done in America since George Washington to day and has been a constitutional right since Buckley B. Vallet in n s. But what do you think campaign finance reformed regulation was an attempt to address Do you think that we just was just drawing at a thin air? Do you think that there was a real problem? To shock you by telling you where I think it really began where it wasn't Watergate wasn't. It was nineteen sixty eight, Geene McCarthy set out to challenge Lyndon Johnson. You know how I did it. He couldn't do it today because it's illegal. He got about eleven wealthy liberals to give him what in those days, with serious money, hundred thousand dollars a piece or something, And with this large liberal money, he mounted a campaign. Democrats were so horrified by this disruption of their party's presidential selection that they began because of Jeane McCarthy, an attempt to make it more difficult for that to happen. Uh, I think you can put the entire necessary and constitutional regulation of campaign financing seven words, no cash, full disclosure, no foreign So transparency is something that you're not opposed, not opposed to. What do you think about do you think about public financing? I can just gas, but go ahead and let's I'm just teeing up the ball for food stamps for politicians. I don't. It is the most regularly and accurately polled issue in our country because every April fifteenth, when people complete their tax returns, Americans vote on this the little box they can shoot and they can give three bucks. I think it now is to fund politics. It doesn't increase their tax liability at all. And percentday American people refuse to do well. It's this is the one act of tax defiance that they can exhibit. It props when they're filling especially when they're filling out that form at that time of year. Anyway, it's not gonna happen. You know, this is an issue. I've spent a lot of time working on and you know, to me, the problem that exists that led to the recent culture of campaign finances is we just have lousy people running for office. A lot of people don't want to because they don't want to raise money. It's gone from one full day now. My friends told me that anance. It's too they spend forty of the work week raising money. I'll solve that problem in ten minutes. Repeal the limits on giving. They're raising money and these little dribs and drabs, and you don't think there's a quid pro quo attached to that fundraising. I do not think that corruption, of the appearance thereof it should be addressed that way. Let them take a hundred thousand dollars from anyone. Let them take a hundred thousand dollars from Philip Morris, put it on the internet at the close of business every day. Let the journalists wallow around and not let the country make up its mind the problems you're seeing. The transparency is more the issue that transparency is at most the issue. What I'm saying is this, the lion's share of political money goes to disseminate political speech. Therefore, as justice William doug said, a liberal icon on the Supreme Court to regulate political spending is to regulate the quantity of political speech. We're constantly hearing from the political reformers there's too much money in politics. There's no other way to translate that, and saying there's too much political speech. I disagree. Money is not all powerful. You know who the great money raisers have been on politics in the last fifty years. The really exciting one's George Wallace and Bury gold Water, and they did it with small contributions. This country is a washing money, they said earlier this year. It turns out probably not true, but they said, you know, Barack Obama and the Republicans might each raise a billion dollars this year. Gosh, every year in March and April, the American people spend two billion dollars on Easter candy. The country's swimming in money. That's not a lot of money, but at least with the money that's spent in easter candy, they're getting their money's worth. In my judgment, the most remarkable fact is how little money we spend on politics, considering the stakes, the trillions of dollars influenced by political decisions. We spend remarkably including money that spent on lobby. Now that's different. I'm talking about the political the electoral politics. No, we spend much more money on lobby and sensibly so why sensibly so? Well as you know it's a lobbying as one of the few professions I'm on one journalism, Uh, clergy is a second, and lobbying is the third profession protected by the First Amendment. It's called petitioning for redress of grievance. It's a pressuring the government. It's a good thing to do. You said that earlier that the people who showed up this year we're not the stars in the Republican primary period. And you mentioned Mitch Daniels was one who you were. Were you hopeful Daniels was going to give an amazing just in terms of pure interest, not in terms of your own favoring him as a candidate. I was four him. It was your candidate at a bottle eleven o'clock at night on Saturday May one, ste a call. I got a call at home from him. Both Mary and my wife and I are old friends of his, and he says, I'm not going to go at that point, I decided I didn't have a dog in this fight. And what about Jeb Bush, Well, you know, if his name were Jeb Smith would be a different matter. And once you've had Bush Clinton, you believe in you, you believe he'd be a worthy candidate. Why based on what, first of all, his tremendous accomplishments was, particularly regard to primary and secondary education in the state of Florida. Is it just a grown up, sober, happy, cheerful politician. How do you look back on his on his brother's presidency, now the eight years he was in office, Well, I'm not a compassionate conservative. Uh. Do you think he was for limited government? No, certainly not. That's well he said at one point, when somebody hurts, government has to act. No, not really, certainly not the federal government. Uh. The grafting on a new entitlement on the Medicare, the prescription drug entitlement, the first entitlement we've ever had with no dedicated funding. Just threw it out there as I will pay for it somehow. He campaigned in two thousand promising a more humble foreign policy that didn't work out so well. When you say I mean I had a friend of mine once explained to me in so many words, and this is many years ago, so I might not get this prepared him. But he articulated a kind of a libertarian view which I think sounds similar to yours. And his take was that the mantra of the Republican Party was I'm a winner and I just don't want you to ruin my party. You know what I mean. I want to be able to put my feet up at the end of the after eighteen holes at the clubhouse, and I want to enjoy myself. Do you believe that in our society that people the federal government is an attempt to address to give something to the losers, if you will to placate then to the welfare state ALEC is a huge regressive transfer of wealth from the working, young and middle aged to the retired elderly in the form of pensions and medical care. And because the elderly, after a lifetime of accumulation, are the wealthiest cohort in the country, the welfare state is a regressive transfer of wealthy idea that the welfare state exists primarily to help the poor is refuted by a cursory reading of the federal budget. I believe the transfer goes to the elderly. Sure transfer goes to the organized, most muscular interests. Big government is big because it has big ambitions. It knows how wealth an opportunity ought to be allocated. Big government is therefore inevitably responsive to big, powerful interest groups. I subscribe to what the poet Robert Frost said. He said, I do not want to live in a homogenized society. I want the cream to rise. Certainly, you do not want an egalitarian society dictated the regardless of your ability to add value, everybody gets a trophy. Yeah, it's it's like soccer for eight year olds. You showed up, given a trophy. Is there anything about the health care bill that you like, or the or the or the spirit of it that you like? Nothing about? But I'm sure in two thousand, seven hundred pages it would be the law of averages. He had to get something right. What do you think is the proper way to address the healthcare crisis? How would you recommend we would solve that problem of health insurance for Americans. It's an amazing thing to me, is that John McCain got it right in two thousand and eight. I say, that's amazing because John is not interested in domestic policy. If it doesn't fly or explode, I don't care. But John McCain said, look, tax all employer provided health insurance is what it obviously is compensation. But give people a large tax credit to go into a national market. I'll come to that for that in a minute, and shop for healthcare among competing approved plans. That is basically what all federal employees have, including Barack Obama. That's how that's how we do with federal employees. National market is crucial. You know, turn on your television. You're going to see State Farm auto insurance competing with Progressive Auto insurance, competing with All State auto insurance, competing with Geico Auto insurance. I could see that with healthcare insurance. Why because we are not allowed to buy health care insurance across state lines, which is so dumb even a caveman can understand. Because the state legislatures like to keep this captive industry so that when the acupuncture lobby comes to Springfield, Illinois and says, we will show our gratitude to you if you will just put make it mandatory that acupuncture has to be covered in our in the state point of that insurance. Not sure, So the plans get more and more comprehensive and lavish, and people are forced to buy things they don't want to buy. Acupunct your coverage, therapeutic nail trimming, and up up, up, up goes the cost of health insurance. Uh, let's have a market and competition. So they wanted to have like each state wants to be a closed shop that each state is. Even though you said you're not a compassionate conservative, what's something you think Obama could do? You think he has it in him to do, You might even be doubtful about it. But what's something you think you hope Obama will do in the second term if he gets selected, he may come to his senses in your in your ideology about well, this is not coming to his senses, but something he's uniquely qualified to do. He's an African American, he's an exemplary husband and father and family man. The immeasurably biggest tragedy in American life today is that seventy four percent of African American children are born to mothers with that husband's We know the whole range of social pathologies that accompany this particularly a large, constantly renewed cohort of unparented adolescent males, meaning chaotic neighborhood schools that can't teach all the rest. I would like to see Barack Obama address that his community, that he kiss, community that he could I mean, it's not his. His community is the American community, his roots in the inter city. I mean, because he is one of the most the greatest things about American life today inve is the the picture of the Obama family. Is that something that's especially deeply held to you about family and about Pat Morenahan was at the time of his death, probably my best friend. Pat in nineteen sixty five brought down upon his head a reign of acid abuse and accusations of racism because he then he was an assistant Secretary of Labor in the Johnson administration, published a book on the crisis and the Negro family said, there is today a crisis in the Negro family because the out of wedlock birth rate is I think it was twenty four seventy four to day. For American society as a whole, it's thirty three sixty of children of all races and ethnicities born to women under twenty five born to single women. Family disintegration is at the heart of most of our problems. You think that's a result of what feminism? No one knows. No one knows what it is because it's happened in Wales, It's happened all over the world. No one knows what it is everywhere with its contraception. Now, it's not just it's not No one knows and anyone who thinks they do and hasn't looked at the problem. Right. And I live in a time, and I've lived in a time where I never dreamed Obama would beat Hillary Clinton. Never and and and it's interesting in those comments you made on the television show I watched, where you said that the Clinton have lost a lot of their their lure and everything. At that time, I just couldn't conceive that Hillary would lose the nomination. I really really thought she was going to win. And I think I told George Stephanopolis in March two thousand seven, March two thousand seven, I said Barack Obama will be nominated and elected. I just could not see the country saying we're nostalgic for the Clinton years, which they weren't, right, They weren't. Well, what do you think her political future is? Zero? Zero? There's a whole generation of coming candidate Andrew Andrew Cromo and New York Governor Malley and Maryland countless people and Paul Ryan, all kinds of good people out their governors. The rest. What do you think, gangwige Is future is books? And yeah, it's it's a books and talking on TV and commentating, talking. He does lots of that. You you mentioned in one conversation you had that you thought that Bill Buckley was the most consequential journalist of the twentieth century. Did you have a personal relationship with him? Yes, it was a fresh it's a good Well how did you meet him? When I was a college professor at the University of Toronto, I wrote a few things for National Review, and then I went to work in Washington for a senator from Colorado, Gordon Ella. Seventy through seventy three. You moved to Washington, win to work on the Senate staff from the University of Toronto. As seventy two, donned. I decided three years was enough. I wanted to go into journalism. So I picked up the phone and I called Bill, and I said you need a Washington editor of National Review, and Bill said, essentially, your right eye do and you're in. He hired people like that, Gary Wills, John Didion, people like that and me and others who just struck his fancy and he hired them. He was good at that. I started work for National Review the week Sirika's sentence caused James McCord to crack and the Watergate thing began to unraveled. So here I was the Washington at a or of the flagship conservative publication, and I was quite convinced that Nixon was guilty and it was going to have to go, and it was really hard on National Review. Bill was a wonderful and didn't I'll agree that Nixon had to go. We'll tell you tell your story. No, no, no. Bill's brother, Senator Buckley, as he then was Jim Buckley, was the first to call for Nixon to resign, first of the Republican Senate contingent. But we were meeting down in the National Review offices on thirty Street, and Bill was at one end of the table and I was at the other. Nie said, George, UM, what's going to happen? And I said, Nixon's guilty in the system works, and Bill flashed that electric Jack Nicholson smile and said, I think he's guilty in the system doesn't work. Why why, Well, he just meant that he'd get away with it. But Carl Bernstein said in a in a thing we were talking about. I did a program with him, and Carl said that border Gate was the last time quote unquote the system worked in this country because both sides of the aisle work together to try to restore the dignity of the presidency. And it was Republicans and Democrats who both were seeking the truth and scissor result of that thought that Nixon had to go. I think the system works more often then people think it doesn't work in a tidy and pretty way. But no one ever said democracy is Do you think it worked during irround contract? Yeah? Matter, Well they stopped it, it was revealed, it was investigated, God knows, it was investigated to death by congressional committees, by independent on the people. Both both sides. I don't want to accuse one side of the other other of this. Do you think that both sides because I look at the whole world. I've grown up as a pre worter Gate post Wartergate world, and you would not want to know how Franklin Roosevelt used the FBI and how Franklin Roosevelt used the I R S to punish enemies and people like that. I'm sure that they did. They don't do it anymore. I mean the system is much more policed and self policing. I believe it's true. So buck so Bucklets of the system didn't work. Now, Buckley was the I cost National Review a lot of trouble because National Review then as now relied as small magazines generally do new on contributions to keep it going, and National Review would analyze its male and the memo had a category called subscription cancelations. And George will because they were the same thing, I was making people mad. Bill never once, not once, tried to restrain what I said about Next year. He was a wonderful guy and tremendously fair. You look back on Nixon, now, what do you think of him? The forty years? Next year he resigned? Next year? Ye, we're getting old. You can say the Nixon was You don't want someone in politics who didn't enjoy it. He was so miscast for a profession that is ninety percent making small talk with strangers. They have to kind of like it. And Nixon was an unhappy man in the profession. You want happy people in politics. When did the television thing? From from Buckley? When did the television thing begin? Almost immediately? I started with National Review and seventy three, and I started a syndicated column in seventy four, and I started doing television on a regular basis. Did that happen? Who approached her? The Post Newsweek stations? They own five owned and operated stations at that time. I post that kather and Graham. Do you think that you're being so even handed with Nixon? Is what had Katherine Graham want to hire you for a televisionsion. No, I'll tell you exactly what happened. I left the Senate staff to become a writer at the end of seventy two, and Agnew was crashing around the country maw mowing the press about being too liberal, and the press was responding by desperately seeking conservative columnists. And Bill Sapphire left the White House, and Sapphire, Will and Pat Buchanan, another White House guy, all started columns at the same time The Post, Washington Post in the New York Times competed for Sapphire the post lost and settled for me. That's how that's exactly when you started with them. Then still enjoy TV. Yeah, it's as you know, television is survival of the briefest. And it's uh, it's inherently unsatisfying. I mean, like writing better, oh much more. Yeah, it's wonderful pleasure, tactile pleasure putting together a nice paragraph. So do you have I mean, when I think you'll help clear up this image, I have an image of an office of yours with a gigantic corkboard and there's about two d and fifty post it's on it with different ideas. I mean, you must have it. Just a limitless, bottomless ideas for columns you want to write. Actually, I have in my pocket. This is not suitable for radio, but I have always a list in my wallet with the next columns I want to write. Have about a dozen pots that are on the stove. Now. When I started writing, I asked Bill Buckley the question that I now know is that most commonly asked question of a columnist, which is how do you come up with ideas of things to write about? Bill said, the world irritates me three times a week. I would say, we say the world irritates or amuses or piques my curiosity. Do you read in the paper? Man? In print? Radio, listen to and watch on TV? I don't listen to radio. Why because when I'm in my car, I'm listening to books, audio books always. I listen to audio books. I've got my little smartphone here. I have twenty books on here. I'm listening to right now. A biography was coming up to the studio. I was listening to a biography of President Monroe. Television. I watch, you know, if it didn't on ESPN, I'm to miss it. I go in the morning, turn onto Major League Baseball Network at seven thirty, and turn it off when I leave. Um. I read my good friend Charles Kraudhammer. Bob Samuelson writes about economics for the Post, every Post, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, all the newspapers. Yeah, in print. Not God. Now me to my friends, I want to tear it up and file it. When you're not working. What do you do go to baseball games? You're a national san I'm a cub fan. Cut your cup fan? Yeah, proximity year there at the Nationals and I have a handicap son works in the clubhouse of the Nationals. How old is your son? Forty? You have how many children? And you have been married twice twice? And you're how many kids with your first wife three? And you have one child with your second one? Yep, he's a sophomore in dying to ask George Will this question, what's your advice to me on my second marriage? Well, you know it's the definition of second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. As I say to people, even people from the Deep South, visit Grants tumb every now and then. You know, we gotta put the past behind us. Love is more wonderful the second time around. All the Great American Songbook, The Great American Songbook contains all of philosophy anyone needs. Yeah, maybe you're right, George Will. The Washington Journalism Review named him best writer any subject. After talking with Will, one question stayed in my mind. Hello, Hello, Yes, so I called him up. So my question for you is your political philosophy if you will makes me think that you believe that people will do the right thing if left alone, without government interference, without government regulation, that you trust that people will do the right thing if left to their own devices. Do you still feel that way? Not exactly? Universal free public education, the requirement to send children to schools of some sort indicates a powerful belief entertained by the Enlightenment founders of our country that people need to be schooled in the virtues necessary for a free society. Far sightedness, discipline, all of that. So the more freedom you have, the more care you need to take in nurturing people suitable for it. I do believe that the American people have fairly sturdy virtues, and that left to their own devices, which is to say, left to make voluntary arrangements and transactions with other free people, will more often than not a do the right thing or be do better than any alternative arrangement for advancing society. I lost the bet. What what was the bet? My bet was I would ask you, if left to their own devices, would people do the right thing? And you would simply say yes and hang up the phone. No, not that temple. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing before un