Politics

A little tip to my replacement. If you’re ever going to interview Barbra Streisand—do it live. At least then you’ll know when you’re going to start.

I learned my lesson years ago when we set up a taped interview with Barbra at the Plaza in New York. She tried on many different dresses, changing over and over for hours, checking how each one looked not only in the mirror, but on camera.


This is a woman who once taped twelve versions of “Happy Birthday” for Frank Sinatra. I mean, come on, it’s “Happy Birthday”!
So finally, we’re about to start the interview. Ten, nine, eight . . .
“Hold it!” she screams.
“What’s wrong, Barbra?”
“Do you believe those flowers?” she says.
“What?”
“Yellow flowers,” she says. “That’s just not the right color . . .”

The only way to keep your sanity is to play along. I smashed my hand down on the desk and screamed, “Who the hell brought those yellow flowers?” She drove me nuts. But then, she made me think about it.

As Barbra said, “A man is commanding, a woman is demanding. A man is forceful, a woman is pushy. A man is a perfectionist, a woman is a pain in the ass.” One thing’s for sure. Barbra’s always worth the wait. What a guest! She’s great at everything she does. Her voice is one of the wonders of the world, yet she considers herself more an actress than a singer. And she sees with the eyes of a director.

On the Sunday before the final week of my show, we taped an interview at her home in Malibu. At least, I thought, there won’t be any holdups because of the flower coordination in her living room. Part of the interview was about a coffee-table book she’d written about designing her New England–style home. It’s part barn, part cottage, and part mill house with a water wheel, all set along the Pacific Ocean. Barbra took fifty-seven thousand photos—that’s right, fifty-seven thousand!—to document getting it just the way she wanted, right up to the eagle weather vane on the roof. There’s a painting of George Washington that our first president actually posed for in the room where we did the interview. Everything was perfect. We were only running an hour and a half late.

It’s only natural that someone like Barbra would be passionate about politics—an arena where getting it exactly the way you want rarely, if ever, happens. She’s a big D Democrat. So it was not easy for her to watch the trouncing the Obama administration took in the midterm elections. We compared the loss to the one Bill Clinton suffered in his first midterm election. But you never know how events will be perceived later on in history.

I sometimes wonder what I would have thought if I’d witnessed Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Would I have known it was great? Or would I have been silent like the crowd for a while, then applauded? How would I have viewed it at the time? When I do speaking engagements, I’m often asked during the question-and-answer session to compare the presidents. It was hard enough in the past to do this because you have to assess not only their situations, but the makeup of the Congress they were working with. Now it’s almost impossible. The culture moves too fast. When I interviewed President Obama during the week of my show’s twenty-fifth anniversary, everybody was talking about the oil spill in the Gulf. People were calling it the worst environmental catastrophe in our country’s history, and we all wondered when the well would be capped. Now you don’t even hear about it. You already don’t even hear much about Gabrielle Giffords, the congresswoman in Arizona who was shot shortly after I left my show. These days, everyone’s wondering how Obama should deal with Muammar Gaddafi and the unrest in the Middle East. Who knows what will happen from the time I speak these words until the time you read them?

In the meantime, our perception of Obama can change daily. No president has ever been scrutinized like Obama is on the Internet. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bill Clinton weren’t judged by the minute. This much we know for sure. Obama inherited a country that was in the worst shape it had been in since Roosevelt took office. FDR did major, dramatic things during the Depression. He created projects that put people back to work and revitalized their cities. Firehouses were renovated. Bridges, parkways, and dams were constructed. The post office took on more employees. When people are selling apples on street corners and the song of the times is “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” the government is your last hope.

Roosevelt got Social Security passed. Back then, there was no way in America to take care of someone who was sixty-six years old and out of work. Unemployment insurance came from Roosevelt. Right-wingers fought these innovations all the way. “Who’s going to pay for this?” they screamed. FDR took a lot of flack. There were a few Republican congressmen who were obstructionists. They tried to block all his plans—and many didn’t go through. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court by adding up to five new justices. The congressmen who stopped him were Martin, Barton, and Fish. So the president went after them in his speeches. Who would take us down when we try to advance? Entire crowds would scream: Martin, Barton, and Fish! He painted the Republicans as dark enemies of the soul. He didn’t seek their friendship. He was less of a compromiser than Obama. Obama is trying to push through his agenda, but he seems to be doing it from the center—more like Kennedy. That’s what has disappointed the liberals. People forget that Kennedy was frustrating to liberals when he first came into office, too. He didn’t sign a civil rights bill. He didn’t stand with Martin Luther King Jr. during the march on Washington. A lot of liberals didn’t want Kennedy to get us into Vietnam. Kennedy sent advisers and sold the war—a decision he would later regret. But you have to remember: Kennedy won the 1960 election by the skin of his teeth. So he was beholden to the center.

Obama had much more of a mandate. He had control of the Senate and the House and a chance to ram through the things that he really wanted. But Obama campaigned much stronger than he governed. His campaign was the very concept of boldness. He made those fiery speeches. Yes, we can! But when he got into office he didn’t turn Yes, we can! into Now we can! Hey, there’s no school for presidents. Something happens when the candidate steps into the Oval Office. There’s a differ- ent point of view. You can relate it to baseball. At first you say,

“Let me manage your team. That guy shouldn’t play third. I’ll put him in center.” Then, the first day you put on the uniform, it becomes apparent that you don’t have a middle reliever. And you’re wondering, How’d I overlook that? Barbra will tell you: Obama did stave off a Depression. He passed the first major health care bill in seventy-five years. He pulled our troops out of most of the principal cities in Iraq. He bailed out General Motors, settled the economy, and made money for the government in the process. Those were all winners. He inherited Afghanistan. I don’t know how you win there. Prime Minister Putin told me years ago, “I’m not one to give advice—especially to a nation as big as yours. But don’t go into Afghanistan. They’re indominable fighters. They’ve got caves to hide in. They love their land and will fight until the end.” Considering the circumstances, you could make a case that Obama had one of the most productive first two years in presidential history. But it didn’t look that way to people without jobs or somebody facing foreclosure. Colin Powell told me that what Obama lacked was a main attack. He said Obama would have been better off if he’d focused on the economy and fixing unemployment to the exclusion of everything else. Not that the other issues weren’t important. But it would have put a spotlight on this one area that was vital to every American and given him a clear way to communicate his victories. It could have been a Now we can! that opened the door to the other issues, like health care, that were deeply important to him. But because he didn’t govern with that focus, his accomplishments were not well understood and he got shellacked in the midterm elections.

It’s ironic that the very characteristic that helped get Obama elected—his communication skills—were a disappointment once he got into office. But it makes sense when you look where he positioned himself. It’s easy to be a moderate when the economy is good. But people generally don’t get roused to action with speeches from the center. They’re roused by the extreme.
Think about it. Remember Ronald Reagan in Berlin.
“Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” The resolve in Winston Churchill’s voice helped the English stop the Germans in World War II: “Hold forth!” Billy Graham convinced people to swear themselves to God. A lot of us had great expectations for Obama. But we have not yet heard a “There is nothing to fear but fear itself” to rally around.

Lines like that don’t come every day. But Obama’s defense of the center looked passive in re- sponse to the growth of the Tea Party. It’s hard to separate righteous anger from mean-spiritedness. I often don’t know where the Tea Party is coming from. But it speaks with an angry voice, and Fox is there to make sure everybody hears it loud and clear. Can somebody tell me what the Tea Party is all about? They say that God is being taken out of our Constitution. Well, God isn’t in the Constitution.
Do they have a leader? A logo? Exactly what are they angry at? They seem to be saying: Bring us back to what never was. What do they want a return to—the days of slavery? I’m not calling anybody I don’t know a racist. But there’s been so much hatred thrown at Obama, a lot of it hidden beneath the constant questioning of whether he’s an American citizen and legally fit to hold office. I’m sure these feelings go much deeper than that. I remember being surprised at the size of the Secret
Service contingent surrounding Michelle Obama when she showed up to be interviewed at our studio in Washington. The comedian Chris Rock said something that I can only hope is true. He said that when he sees the Tea Party it makes him feel like racism is almost over. He compared the Tea Party to the way little kids go crazy just before they go to sleep. We’ll see what happens in the next election. Let’s not forget that Bill Clinton is one of the greatest communicators whoever lived—but after his first two years in office, he lost the House of Representatives. Then he came back two years later and romped in the election.

There was a reason they called him the Comeback Kid. It happened over and over in Clinton’s career. As governor, he was defeated—not reelected. Then he came back to take the office again. That catapulted him onto the national stage, where he made one of the worst speeches in history—the keynote address at the Democratic Convention in 1988. It was so bad that when he said, “In closing . . . ,” he got a standing ovation. Four years later, he won the nomination. And then he came back after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So you can never count anyone out. Harry Truman turned it around because of what was seen as guts. When they stopped polling because Thomas Dewey was so far ahead during the campaign in 1948, Truman kept speaking to crowds from the backs of trains. He wasn’t a great speaker, but he ran with gusto against the “do-nothing, know- nothing Congress.” Later he fired Douglas MacArthur. A lot of it is sheer determination. A lot of it is simply finding your way. Obama has two years to find that Clintonesque strategy that recaptured the House in ’96. He’ll certainly need a Democratic Congress in 2012 to leave his mark. It wouldn’t hurt him to be a little gutsier. But I think he’s going to be hard to beat in any event because there’s no single candidate surging forward on the Republican side. Sarah Palin may win the primaries if she runs against nine guys. But when I interviewed the Bushes, Barbara was very pointed about her. She said, “I think she’s very happy in Alaska and I hope she stays there.”

I don’t think Palin has mass appeal. She scares a lot of people. The Tea Party is still a minority. Fox News reaches only a couple of million people. It doesn’t win elections. Neither does Rush Limbaugh. Aside from the Tea Party, the average person doesn’t dislike Obama. You may not think he’s being effective. But you can’t not like him. What’s not to like? There will be some budget cutting because of the deficit. The key is to solve the riddle that Mario Cuomo so eloquently presented: You’re a family of four. You live in a tenement in New York. Whatever you make each week you spend. You pay the rent, you eat. You have nothing left over. You manage. There’s crime in the neighborhood. Police come by and recommend that you put another lock on the door. The lock costs ninety dollars. Your daughter comes down with an infection. The cost of the medicine prescribed is ninety dollars. What do you do?
Do you get the medicine?
Maybe you’ll find a way to get the lock next week. You take that risk.
But you’re risking your family’s security for your daughter’s health. That’s the other side.

The key is to figure out the way to get both. Maybe that will take a combination of capitalism and socialism. Lyndon Johnson said that this combination is the only system that will ever truly work. I think that’s where Obama is aiming, and I hope he accomplishes much of what he wants. I’m in favor of national health care. I’d like to see wars end. I don’t want to see our military in harm’s way. We’d have much more money for domestic needs if we weren’t policing the world. It would be nice if we were only doing peacekeep- ing work as part of a UN group. It would be nice to have a strong message from the top that standing up for gay rights puts us on the right side of history. It would be good to see the immigration issue solved. Getting down to 5 percent unemployment again would be a major achievement. Obama’s inauguration was a great moment in history. We’ll have that day no matter what happens. It’s a symbol of growth. The sad thing is, if he doesn’t pull it together during the next two years, he’ll be remembered mostly for the opportunity that he had.