By By JOHN EBY / Dowagiac Daily News
BENTON HARBOR – A "wave" election decided by the disintegrating war in Iraq makes this "a very delicate time for our country," Bob Schieffer of CBS News said Thursday night.
Addressing The Economic Club of Southwestern Michigan at Lake Michigan College Mendel Center, the Texan described the Nov. 7 midterm election "as one of those rare times" like 1974 after Watergate and 1994 when Republicans reversed 40 years of Democratic rule.
"A wave election is when voters – and they very seldom do this – consider a national issue more important than a local issue. That almost never happens," Schieffer said. "The Democrats needed 15 seats for a majority and got about 30. Some people say this is a shift in the political landscape. I do not believe we can say that with assurance at this point. What we saw was people fed up and frustrated with the government, which has grown so big and so cumbersome that it sort of can't get out of its own way," from the Hurricane Katrina response to devising a coherent prescription drug plan.
Schieffer remains "pessimistic" that Democrats taking control signals a period of new cooperation.
"Our political system, I basically believe, is broken," he said.
Looking ahead to Wednesday, when the Iraq study group with former Secretary of State James Baker and former Indiana congressman Lee Hamilton offers recommendations, "I'm afraid – and I'm really worried about this," Schieffer said, "that expectations are too high. I don't think there are any magic solutions or simple answers. I'm not even sure there are any good answers anymore. I think we're faced with a series of very bad choices. It's always easy to look (back) rather than forward," but the March 2003 invasion with "good intentions" was carried out with a flawed plan, from no weapons of mass destruction to disarm Saddam Hussein of to a too-small force.
Where President George H.W. Bush and Colin Powell assembled a coalition and committed 400,000 troops to the Gulf War, President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld mobilized a force of 150,000 which swooped swiftly into Baghdad, but once there, could not contain looting.
"They did not have enough people to guard ammunition dump that Saddam Hussein abandoned," Schieffer observed. "Many of those weapons have been used against us. We misjudged our reception and thought we would be greeted as liberators. Saddam's army faded away, took off their uniforms and went home to fight another day.
"A major error in retrospect – and I did not recognize this at the time," he admitted, "was disbanding the Iraqi army, one of the country's few organized entities, creating not just a military problem, but an economic problem. All of us know the negative impact on a community when they close a military base. When we disbanded that army and there were no other jobs, suddenly you had an unemployment rate over 50 percent. Instead of creating a stable environment that might have bred an orderly transition, we created a vacuum where various militias could come together and vie for power. Whatever it is – civil war, insurgency, unadulterated mess – it's out of control," in Schieffer's assessment.
"We have reached the point now, it seems to me," Schieffer said, "that it's not doing any good for us to stay, yet on the other hand, we cannot turn around and leave."
"The commission is going to recommend Vietnam in reverse. We first sent advisers to train their army, then when they weren't able to do the job, we put our own troops in there. What we're getting ready to do is to pull our troops off the front line and put trainers and advisers with the Iraqi troops and force them to the front lines to restore order. If you can't cross the street from a hotel in the capital city, you're not going to be able to build a democracy. I think you'll also see a call for a much broader diplomatic mission" perhaps involving Iran and Syria.
"The neocons thought the way to bring peace to the Arab-Israeli conflict was to install a democracy in Iraq" because of the positive impact it could spread throughout the region. "One thing we know that does work," he insisted, is a U.S. foreign policy based on American values that sets an example, but does not try to impose our system on others."
American values stand as "our core strength," Schieffer said to applause.
"Hubert Humphrey said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was the greatest foreign policy initiative by this country. He meant it showed the world who we were. That we believed in treating other people fairly and in openly debating our problems. That's where America's greatest influence is. I think when we base our foreign policy on who we are, we are successful. When we imitate, or adopt the methods, of those who oppose us, in my view that's when we weaken the country. We don't need secret prisons or torture," the three-year Air Force veteran said to more applause.
Coming up on his 50th year as a reporter next summer, and at the risk of Tom Brokaw shooting up a television (as the retired NBC Nightly News anchor kiddingly threatened to do on Tim Russert's program while Schieffer promoted his book in 2003), Schieffer shared his small role in President John F. Kennedy's assassination coverage on Nov. 22, 1963.
Then a 26-year-old night police reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, in the city where JFK spent his last night, Schieffer recalled the exclusive that got away after he drove Lee Harvey Oswald's mother, Marguerite, to Dallas and almost slipped undetected into the first meeting between her, the suspected killer and Oswald's wife, Marina.
Schieffer, the Sunday "Face the Nation" moderator who anchored the CBS Evening News in the interim between Dan Rather and Katie Couric, arrived in Washington in 1969.
Schieffer is one of the few print or broadcast journalists to cover all four major beats – the White House, Capitol Hill, the Pentagon and the State Department. He's covered every presidential election since 1968 and been a national convention floor correspondent since 1972.
He's been CBS's chief Washington correspondent since 1982, won six Emmy Awards and been inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame.
He told Judge Herbert Phillipson of Dowagiac to call him Bob, as that – and not Robert – is his given name.
Schieffer structures the "six or seven" speeches he gives a year for exposure to "focus groups" outside the Beltway buzz based on advice Helen Thomas gave Henry Kissinger when he was instructed to deliver 40 minutes of remarks in 20 minutes: "Start at the end."
Schieffer identified Lyndon Johnson in 1948 as the politician who most influenced him. LBJ, then a congressman running for the Senate, visited Fort Worth, landing his campaign helicopter on the vacant lot on the northwest side of Fort Worth where they played baseball.
While Harry Truman and Thomas Dewey slugged it out for the White House, Johnson popped out of his chopper, bullhorn blaring, and "we were terrified. We knew how Moses felt when that burning bush talked right at him."
The candidate capped his rousing remarks by hurling his hat into the crowd, where a future congressman attending the University of Texas was the designated "hat catcher" for the notoriously tight politician.
"I love that story because it's such an illustration of the difference in politics of that day and the politics of today," he said. "Politics wasn't perfect because Johnson went on to win by 87 votes out of millions counted. They did not find the votes that put him over the top until the week after the election when they found the ballot box in one county. It turned out that 200 people had all voted in alphabetical order. That was the beginning of (the future president's) career."
In the previous era, "Politics was an amateur sport" absent big money that calls the shots today. "The guy who ran the hardware store was the adviser. They had real jobs and lived in the community" – where they returned to live if they lost.
Now, "There's such pressure to raise money to get elected, all the adviser jobs are turned over to professional consultants who don't live anywhere near the community. They come in with polls and graphics. They don't know who we are. We don't really know who they are," Schieffer said. "We've taken people out of the process and put in all of these primaries because we were trying to get it out of the backrooms and give more people a voice.
"But as it's worked out, taking it out of the community and putting it on television made it more expensive and fewer people influenced our politics. Only people who gave money became influential. I'd do away with these primaries and go back to the old system of selecting precinct delegates for the county convention, then those people go to state and national conventions. If that happened, you'd again see gavel-to-gavel coverage because it would be news. Some TV executives will tell you we don't cover these conventions because people have no interest in politics anymore," which he disputes.
"That's not true," Schieffer said. "What people have no interest in is two-hour infomercials. If we went back to this system starting at the precinct level, we'd put spontaneity and fun back into our politics and eliminate some of this nastiness by putting it back into the community and giving people a voice again." His audience applauded.
Schieffer attributed his pessimism about Congress accomplishing anything to money. Getting elected means being beholden to so many special interests that a new lawmaker "can't compromise. His views are already set in stone. When a legislative body is not able to make compromises, nothing gets done. This recent session is Example A. Congress nibbles around the edges, but can't attack any major problem."
Last month's election was about "throwing bums out," in his assessment, not "a shift in the political landscape. If this Congress doesn't figure out a way to come together on something, in 2008 voters will throw them out, too. We need to make it more responsive."
Schieffer said of divided government, "Eisenhower had a Democratic Congress and he managed to get some stuff done. Harry Truman's do-nothing Congress came up with the Marshall Plan. Bill Clinton operated with a Republican Congress. Ronald Reagan had a Democratic Congress. The extremists in both parties tend to fall to the side. The people in the center find ways to work together.
"Nancy Pelosi's problem isn't going to be the White House," but uniting the disparate wings of her Democratic Party.
Congress might be able to craft an immigration bill. Schieffer said the theoretical 600-mile fence at the 2,000-mile border "has to be a little more complicated than two cowboys in a pickup with cedar posts and barbed wire. To give you some concept, that's as far as from the Sears Tower in Chicago to the Washington Monument. We simply have to find a way to deal with immigrants who are already in this country. We still can't get 11,000 FEMA trailers from Arkansas to New Orleans. What are you going to do with 20 million illegal aliens? How many buses is that going to take? We have to be realistic."