Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. Recently, John Dickerson spoke with author Gautam Mukunda about how we avoid the “seeds of disaster” that are embedded in how we pick presidents. Mukunda writes about how to choose the right presidents and avoid catastrophe in his new book, Picking Presidents: How to Make the Most Consequential Decision in the World.
This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.
John Dickerson: As we have this conversation, the presidency is changing. Because one of the things that struck me about Joe Biden is: here’s a guy with all of the slap and tickle talents of a senator, and he pretty much can’t use them because we are in a place now where if a president is associated with a piece of legislation, the chances it’s going to get bipartisan support diminish because the other side doesn’t want to be a part of anything that a president from the other team is for. So, the human portion of the job is shifting, but where does the human portion of this “brilliance” play in?
Gautam Mukunda: So, I still think it’s important, and it’s important in a few ways. One is some of it is probably happening behind the scenes. Joe Biden broke the vertical axis of the graphs in my book because I was sort of doing graphs of how many years in what I call “filtering positions,” senior political offices, do people have, and the record holder before Biden was 24. That’s tied between Gerald Ford and James Buchanan. And Biden is 44. Right. I mean literally just off—not metaphorically—off the chart, he was literally off the chart. And he has gotten more bipartisan bills passed than I think almost anyone expected. Certainly more than I expected. I don’t know how that happened, but I’d be pretty surprised if that didn’t involve exactly the slap and tickle senatorial skills you’re talking about.
Or you could make the case—and I’m not making this case because I’m not sure I have the evidence one way or the other; I just am uninformed—but you can make the case that certainly Truman did this, which is: staying out of conversations is sometimes the more impressive example of emotional intelligence than your ability to woo everybody in the room.
Oh, absolutely. I think it is a unique ability—“unique” might be overstated, but it’s rare to yield focus. Alice Roosevelt said of her father, Theodore, that at every wedding he wanted to be the bride, and every funeral he wanted to be the corpse. And I’ve said that about Bill Clinton. It is just part of being the president. Biden doesn’t seem to be that. In a way that is different and I suspect is part of what the party elites were looking for when they picked him as their front runner.
I want to make sure that I prepare those who are watching and listening for the next selection. Everybody’s got a role to play. So, you say that the seeds of disaster are embedded in the way we pick presidents. What do you mean?
I would say there are two sets of seeds of disaster, and they both worry me. One is the way that we are so prone to selecting unfiltered presidents, so uniquely among major countries, we pick unfiltered leaders about half the time. Let’s put that in context.
If you look at filtrations of years of experience in the upper levels of the government, the least experienced, least filtered British prime minister of the modern era, meaning since 1832, is John Major, who spent 13 years in Parliament before he became Prime Minister. I am the only person in history ever to use the phrase, “the meteoric rise of John Major.” But that puts him in the upper quarter of American presidents in terms of experience.
In terms being filtered, yeah.
So that’s kind of scary. Someone who literally has the ability to end human civilization and even one step down from that, controls, not controls, but has enormous influence over the military and every single facet of not just American life, but world life. Do you really want to give that to someone whom you don’t know a lot about and you don’t know how good they are? That’s pretty scary. And that not just something can go wrong. It has gone wrong.
So, Andrew Johnson was Abraham Lincoln’s successor. President of the United States. Only became president because of Lincoln’s assassination. No one wanted him to be president. Andrew Johnson set back civil rights in this country by a century. Black Americans had more civil rights in the United States in 1870 than they did in 1950, probably more than 1960.
That’s kind of hard to imagine. But that was because of Andrew Johnson, because when the war was over and the South had been so thoroughly defeated in the Civil War, they were ready to accept Black rights. They were ready to accept civil rights. And then Johnson essentially said to the South, I’m going to give you victory and peace even though you lost the war. You’re going to lose the war and win the peace because I want to restore the social structures of the south to what they were before the war. And he was impeached for this, too late, eventually. But by the time he was done with that, he had given them hope that they could maintain their old structures. And we got a century of bitter resistance to civil rights that we didn’t have to. It just didn’t have to happen. So, one bad president can do that. Short of nuclear war. It’s kind of hard to be worse on the scale than that.
