Transcription – Dan Balz Interview

Q: Did you feel that or sense that when you were out there?

BALZ: Oh, sure. You know, I remember — this was not the ‘04 campaign, it was a couple of cycles before that, and I remember having covered an event that happened to be on television. And I got an email from a person, a very thoughtful email. The basic message of this was, were you watching the same event I was watching? And the person made, I thought, actually some quite good points. And it was a reminder to me that the public now had access to information and to events that they had not had in the past. So, that was one difference, that people could see, and therefore, they would kind of judge our coverage based on what they saw and heard, but the other, as you suggest, is the rise of a more partisan environment, not just in political terms, but in media [00:09:00] terms. And, you know, I know that in that period, I would get emails from people who would say you’re shilling for this side, or you’re shilling for that side, based in part on their own world view. But what we realized in that era, in that period, and it’s, I think, intensified since then, is that, you know, people seek out the information that tends to agree more with their view of the world, and screen out things that challenge that. And when you work for somebody like The Washington Post, you know, which still believes we should try to tell it straight, to the degree that that’s possible, that we are likely to come in for criticism from one side or the other at any given moment, because people are going to see and hear things differently than we necessarily think is the way it is.

Q: I’m going to ask in a minute about Bush 2000 and Bush 2004, but first, you’ve covered a lot of campaigns in which there was no incumbent running, and you’ve [00:10:00] covered a lot of campaigns in which there was an incumbent running for reelection. Is there something sort of intrinsically different about those two kinds of elections?

BALZ: Well, the open races tend to be livelier and more exciting, I mean, just because you know that there is going to be a new person in office. And very often, reelection campaigns are sort of cakewalks. I mean, Reagan ’84, though the Mondale Campaign, at a couple of different moments, thought they were kind of closing the gap, there was never really a lot of suspense about how that election was going to turn out. The ’96 Clinton reelection campaign, with Bob Dole running on the Republican side, similarly, was not a particularly exciting or contested campaign. I mean, Bill Clinton had the advantage, almost, from start to finish. The 2000 campaign between Bush and Gore was a very exciting campaign that was, you know, it went into overtime for 37 days in Florida. You know, the ’04 campaign turned out [00:11:00] to be very exciting because of the state of the country, and the state of the Bush presidency at that point, and some of the controversies, particularly over the war. And, you know, the Obama 2012 election, similarly, was very highly contested. But in general, I think, when you have an open race, you have — for starters, you have competition for both the Republican and the Democratic nominations. And I’ve always thought that those periods are, in many ways, more interesting, because you have more candidates, you have more things happening at any given time, you have two distinct stories, and so journalistically, they’re very exciting because you get a read of the Republican Party in transition, and a Democratic Party in transition, which you don’t necessarily get in an incumbent reelection race.

Q: Talking about Bush now. I mean, granted, he’s President Bush in 2004, whereas he was Governor Bush in 2000, but he’s still, [00:12:00] in both elections, George W. Bush, the nominee of the Republican Party. What’s it like covering — what was it like covering Bush in 2000, as compared with 2004?

BALZ: Well, the big difference is that when somebody is the president, the access to that person is so limited. You know, in the 2000 campaign, Governor Bush was quite accessible to people. I mean, the candidate rode on the same plane with reporters, he would come back and talk to reporters, joke with reporters. Many of the reporters who were covering him had known him as governor, and had covered him, whether they were part of the Texas reporting team or the national reporters, like myself. And so, it’s a looser environment, and you have more access to everybody. You know, the president rides on Air Force One, and the press, for the most part, rides in a separate airplane. There’s a few members of the pool on Air Force One, but they’re in a cabin many, many, many yards away from the president, and they don’t often see him. [00:13:00] I, in ’04, I spent only a little bit of time traveling directly with the president, in part, because our White House team was doing it. But I remember that the access was, you know, very limited, as it was in 2012 with President Obama when he was running.

Q: And could you compare the George W. Bush you saw in 2000 with the George W. Bush you saw four years later. Was he different?

BALZ: Yes, I think, the presidency changes people. And there is a — you know, there is a weight that goes with being president that doesn’t exist if you’re the governor, even of a very big state. And his first term, obviously, had been — his whole presidency was reshaped by what happened in 9/11. And I think that that had a huge impact on him. And so, I think he was a different person at that point. I mean, you know, there are aspects of every [00:14:00] person’s personality that don’t change. I mean, you know, he could be a wisecracking president in the way that he could be a wisecracking governor. But I think we saw less of that in the ’04 campaign. You know, he had gone through traumatic experiences with the terrorist attacks. He had gone through, or was in the middle of, a change in public opinion on the Iraq war. And I think all of that weighed down on him in a way that what he was doing in 2000, you know, was just entirely different.

Q: Two thousand, honestly, was it all about foreign policy, was it on national security? And I don’t know, I guess the sense was that having Cheney on the ticket was supposed to be enough to cover that base. And in 2004, I mean, it’s a wartime election.

BALZ: It’s very much a wartime election. And you’re right, the 2000 campaign, really, was not fought out at all on foreign policy, and the degree to which there were questions about him, [00:15:00] they were answered, A, by his name, George W. Bush, son of George H. W. Bush. I know I talked to people on the campaign trail that year, and you would ask people about George W. Bush, the governor, did he have the experience to be president, and people would routinely say, well, you know, he was raised by his father, and he spent a lot of time around the White House, he understands what this office is about. We know — he knew that you don’t understand what that office is about until you are in it, which is why the Presidents Club is such a special club. And foreign policy was not an area of his expertise, other than, you know, US-Mexico relations, which he spent some time as governor dealing with. But beyond that, he didn’t. And, you know, the addition of Dick Cheney to the ticket, I think, was intended to help answer that question of would he have around him the right kind of people who could, you know, help make the decisions in a foreign policy [00:16:00] crisis.