[question]: Why do you think theres such a gap between your point about getting the voters point of view and the sort of pundit mentality of the national press that basically stays on the bus. Where is the gap? How does it change? Should it change? Is that even possible?

Roberts: Yes its possible, if you want to make the effort. One of the reasons why theres that gap is because people are lazy. First day I covered a national political campaign, it was 1968 and I was a kid and I was assigned to cover the McCarthy campaign in Wisconsin. And the first event we went to was some dinner in a hall about twice this size. There were thirty or forty reporters on the bus and McCarthy was going to an event in the back room for an hour, so we had about an hour before he spoke. So I got myself to the front of the bus thinking, God, theres all these voters out there, but all these other reporters are going to want to interview those voters too so Im going to get to the front of the bus. I was 24 years old! Im going to get to the front of the bus so I can get out there first. And I went one way into the room and everybody else went into the bar. I looked around behind me, I thought, Where is everybody? Oh sure, they had been around and they had seen McCarthy and they were kind of bored.

     It was a very telling moment that I never forgot, because it was easier to go to the bar, it was easier to be on the bus. I think that it is very important to push our reporters, particularly our younger reporters, to get off. Yeah, it can be done and, yes, there is a pundit mentality of, you know, sitting around sucking your thumb. Again I plead guilty to being in this world, but I see an awful lot of colleagues who start living off their seed corn, who dont get any fresh information and dont go out and talk to people. Thats not true of everybody, there are some who still work very hard. David Broder works as hard as anybody. He talks to more voters in an election year than any other six reporters put together, but hes the exception rather than the rule. It is very, very important to push our young reporters and to train them to look at elections from the bottom up.

     By the way, Im a big fan of polls. I know a lot of people that are not. I am. I think polls can be very helpful in covering voters. I think they can be very useful guides to trends and one of the things that Ive always liked to do when Ive done polling stories is actually call people back who were real people in the sample. Pollsters dont like you to do that because they say its unscientific. I think its a very useful device because I think that polling stories can be dreadfully dull and very dry. But if you say, All right, these are the real people we called.

     How many times have any of us have been out talking to people in our local communities and someone says to you, I dont believe in those polls because Ive never been polled. Weve all heard that. Its not only a very good reporting device to put flesh and blood and real life onto these numbers, but it also helps our credibility with our own constituents, with our viewers and with our readers to show, Look, we talk to real people, therere your neighbors. So thats another way I think we can bolster that coverage from the ground up. Theres also a certain glamour to being on the bus. Theres a certain cachet: Well, I traveled with McCain.

     But heres another thing, by the way, that I think really works in terms of covering voters. In our newsrooms today, were dealing with a lot of people with two-career families and we have to be sensitive to the schedules people have. I live in two-reporter marriage and one of the things that Cokie and I both found that was an advantage to covering voters, was that you could control your own schedule. Everybody here knows that when youve got kids at home its not necessarily how many hours you work, but who decides which hours you work and one of the ways to get people off the bus and out into communities is to say, Its actually better for your family life, because you can control your schedule. Im not kidding about that. It actually can make a big difference.

[question]: I am still uncomfortable with your comment about personal lives and covering their past. You mentioned Gary Hart: okay, fine, he had dared people to spy on him or check him out. Then you mentioned Henry Hyde and how it happened a long time ago. What about the issue of George Bush and whether he did or did not use illegal drugs? Because theres sort of a two-sided argument, even if he did, it was a zillion years ago, who cares? But at the same time, if he did and now hes Mr. Tough Crime, anti-drugs, wanting to throw people in prison for doing what he did, so as that example…

Roberts: You just answered the question, which is its a tough call, but these are all tough calls. Look, none of our newsrooms has a list of 18 qualifications or conditions and all you got to do is follow those and you come out with the right answer. Thats not how it works, you know that as well as I do. I do think there are certain ground rules, certain general guidelines that do make sense. Not from a moral point of view. When you say this to the general public they say, But what about morality? Im not talking morality, Im talking practicality. I think there are three or four things that really make a difference.

     One clearly is time. It makes a difference whether Gary Hart is involved with someone in the middle of a campaign as opposed to Henry Hyde 20 years ago. Maybe not a moral difference, but it does make a difference. The Washington Post, for instance, during the 1996 campaign had a story that was flat out true, the woman was willing to talk publicly that Bob Dole had had an affair with a woman during the period when his first marriage was crumbling. And they tracked this woman down, she was willing to talk on the record, they didnt run the story. Why? Well, again it was a question of time. Also, frankly, they knew Bob Dole was going to lose and if he was going to win it would have been a much better story, it would have raised the worth of the story.

     Another very important factor is legality, in the Bush case. I think the one reason why that story continues to persist is because, whether you agree with the drug laws or not, if in fact he broke a law thats a little bit different from saying, I didnt inhale. I also think that a very important factor, particularly in sexual cases, is whether you are dealing with an adult consensual relationship or not. I think one of the reasons why the Monica story was so damaging to the President was that this is clearly a case where he misused his official position. This was not a relationship between two equal, free, consenting adults. But look at the case of Bob Packwood. One of the reasons why that story persisted was because clearly in a number of the cases where he abused his official power, he used it as a lever, so that makes a difference. I mean these are not written in stone moral questions, but I think we as professional journalists can make our way through these variables and make judgments in saying, This qualifies, this does not.

[question]: What about the character story, to put it slightly differently. Andy Kohut at the Pew Research Center likes to say that thats what people care about, which is another way of saying what youre saying. People want to know what makes up the character of the candidate. What character story would you want to write that would tell us something that we need to know about Al Gore or George W. Bush?

Roberts: [long pause] Its a very good question, Dave. Id like to find a story that tells me how each of them has reacted to stress and pressure. I think one of the reasons why John McCain caught the popular imagination was that people could look at John McCain and say, Hes been there, hes been in a crisis, he has come out of that and he has handled it with dignity and with courage and therefore, I can be reassured that if he faces a crisis like that as president, we know what were getting. Were getting someone tested. This could be a personal crisis, it could be a professional crisis.

     Im not sure what the story is, but if I were editing or producing coverage this fall, Id ask my reporters to find the moments, find the experiences where they had to cope with difficulty and how did they handle it. And I think one of the things that is a problem for George Bush, a problem for both of them frankly, is that neither one of them necessarily has ever faced anything (leaving aside being a P.O.W, thats a kind of crisis that no normal person ever has to face) but even much less stressful or dangerous or consequential situations: they both are people of real privilege.

     One of George Bushs problems, frankly, is that when John McCain was in the Hanoi Hilton, where was George Bush? He was downing a couple of brews with his buddies at the Deke house, which is not quite the same thing.

     I came to believe that, in a very perverse way, Bill Clintons problems actually worked to his advantage as a political candidate because I think they conveyed to people a sense that he had actually survived a crisis, that he was not unscarred by experience. If you go back to the beginning of the Clinton campaign, when they looked at the public perception of Clinton they were appalled to find out that what people knew about Bill Clinton was that he was a person of privilege. He had gone to Oxford, he had gone to Yale law school, he had gone to Georgetown, that he was unmarked by experience or crisis. And thats when you got the Boy from Hope, thats when you got the Comeback Kid.

     If you think about it, the very fact that he faced the Gennifer Flowers problem, the very fact that he had to explain the draft stuff, in the end, I came to believe, worked to his advantage, because he almost wore those as scars. He almost said, You cant be the Comeback Kid if you havent been knocked down. The final irony of this is that one of the reasons why Bill Clinton survived the last two years was that people looked at him and said, Well, he aint perfect, but Im not, either.

     Take someone like Jimmy Carter. Apart from lusting after Playboy centerfolds, clearly he was a moral paragon, or seemed to be a moral paragon. Did Americans feel that Jimmy Carter understood them? No! They thought Jimmy Carter looked down and them and in some ways Bill Clintons problems gave him a basis for people to say, Hes been through something like this. So thats the kind of story I think we should be looking for.

[question]: I wanted to know, as a teacher, what you make of the young ones coming up and what youre trying to give them?

Roberts: I learn from my students every day and I am very encouraged. I think Im dealing with a generation thats active and alive and interesting. Now I have a self-selected group of students at George Washington [University]. Theyre in Washington already, theyre already semi-professionals when they come into my classroom. You know, Im not teaching physics at State U.

     You deal with 20-year-olds today and the way they receive information is so different from people just a few years older. If you deal with college students today you are dealing with people who have grown up with the Web and who have a whole different way if ingesting information and we as professional journalists got to understand that because they are not newspaper readers, they are not even TV viewers apart from The Simpsons.

     Their first instinct, not their second or third instinct, their first instinct is to go to the Web. But in terms of involvement with politics, in terms of seeing politics as a worthwhile enterprise and seeing journalism as a worthwhile enterprise, Im very encouraged, actually. And I think that this talk that the younger generation is all turned off and cynical…if we found the earliest writings on some subterranean cave in France and it was the very first writings done by human beings, Id be willing to bet, if you could get them translated you know what theyd say?: What is the younger generation coming to? So its easy to complain about them, but Im actually very fond of them.

[question]: Its just an observation because there wasnt a response to Al Gore and being from Texas I just wanted to throw out a couple of observations about George W. and that is, in terms of any crisis that he might have faced, that would be the Midland years, when he started up an oil business. It cratered, he had to have somebody come and rescue him, but it was a business failure. Coupled with that was the first time he ran for Congress against Kent Hance and lost that race. So there were two major losses in his life. Also, when he talks about the fact that he has given his life over to Christ…when do you do that? Its when you have encountered some crisis and its not the drugs that people keep reporting on in his younger years, but it was the heavy drinking that he did in those Midland years that caused that conversion.

Roberts: I think that those are all fair observations and I agree with you that drugs is a sexier, more titillating notion. One of the issues thats going to be very interesting is how the popular press handles his faith, because we tend to live in a pretty secular environment in the world of journalism and, of course, when he made that comment about Christ at the debate, there was a lot of skepticism. And particularly given the role of organized religion in the campaign, which is going to make it doubly difficult to write about it, but Id like to see a lot more about those years.

[question]: What about Hillary and her run against Giuliani?

Roberts: Best show in town!

[same questioner]: And also, what happens to Bill after the White House?

Roberts: We all know that television, lets be honest, at times can be a pretty stupid medium. By that I mean that it demands drama and conflict and personality and celebrity. Rudy versus Hillary is the best TV story going. Its better than JonBenet Ramsey and O.J. rolled into one. I think that it will take a lot of attention away from the presidential race. I think Al Gore and George Bush might put this country to sleep for eight months and Hillary and Rudy certainly will not. As to whos going to win that race? Youve got to remember New York is a Democratic state and so Mrs. Clinton has an enormous advantage, but she has an enormous disadvantage shes never run for public office before and that was part of the point I made about Elizabeth Dole.

     I dont care whether your husbands been president, I dont care whether your fathers been president, I dont care whether your brother has been president, until you are the person in the crosshairs you never know what its going to be like.

     Look at what happened to John McCain. Heres a guy thats been a senator for17 years, hes used to the national press up to a point. But remember McCain said after New Hampshire, And now I have a megaphone. He was right, the megaphone was us. But with the megaphone comes the microscope. And things that John McCain said two months ago that went unnoticed all of a sudden were being weighed, and when he made that crack about Forces of Evil he might have thought it was a joke, but he was in a different position. He was in a position now where people could imagine him actually being president and the coverage changed and he didnt figure it out.

     This always happens. Ask Dan Quayle. Ask Geraldine Ferraro. I mean, the scrutiny, that microscope, the power gets ratcheted up, the spotlight gets so intense. Mrs. Clinton, for all of the years she spent in the spotlight, for all of the ways in which she is very experienced, has never been a candidate before. Its already proven to be a significant problem and, while shes getting better at it, its a pretty steep learning curve and the scrutiny is going to get worse as she goes out there more. So I think shes got a lot of drawbacks, too.

     Youve got to remember something else about Rudy Giuliani, which is that hes a carpetbagger outside of the Bronx. They are both carpetbaggers in Syracuse. The record of New York City mayors running statewide is not very good at all. I cant remember the last time a New York City mayor won a statewide race. So they both have a lot of strengths, they both have a lot of drawbacks. If I had to bet, Id bet on Giuliani, but I think its going to be very close and I think that another key variable is this: if the Bush campaign decides that they cannot win New York, which is entirely possible that they will decide that, and New York is so expensive to run in, they might decide, Lets put our money in California, lets put our money in Florida. Key swing states and take their money out of New York, that could work to Mrs. Clintons advantage in that race. That decision has not been made yet, but I would not be surprised if, at some point, the national campaign decides to cut its losses in New York.

[question]: A quick word on Bill Clinton being appointed the next ambassador to the Vatican?

Roberts: Ok, yeah, final point about Clinton. I actually saw this in print the other day, but I heard it from one of Clintons good friends the other night. Dont be surprised if two years from now, Bill Clinton runs for the Senate from Arkansas. He has never done anything else in his life except run for office. He loves it. Hes been president for eight years. Hes basically run a permanent campaign in the White House. It is the thing in the world he loves, well maybe not the thing he loves most, one of the things he loves most.

     He could well go through the same thought process his wife went through. Now I think there are certain personal reasons Mrs. Clinton ran. Weve all been in a spot in our lives where weve felt rejected or felt unappreciated and whether its in a personal relationship or in a professional situation and suddenly someone says, We want you, we love you. The most human reaction in the world to say, My goodness, isnt this wonderful. I think, to some extent, that happened with Mrs. Clinton. I think her humiliation was total and it was public and here are all these people in New York saying, We love you, he doesnt, but we do. I think that was totally understandable and totally human that she would have that reaction, but I also think she looked around and said, What can I do that would give me anything like the platform Ive had? And with all this talk about, you know, partner in a law firm, president of a university, head of a foundation…eh, not even close. Senate? There are no rules in the Senate, you can talk about anything that you want all the time, plus the fact that if shes a senator, she gets on Meet the Press. As president of Barnard [College], she doesnt get on Meet the Press.

     I think she looked around and said, This is the best I can do in terms of providing a platform for the next stage in my life. I think the president could well look around and come to exactly the same conclusion: that the Senate is the one place that he could remain active and visible in a way that he wants to, in a political way. So I think for about two years, according to the people who are close to him, they say that his plan is for two years to raise money for the library which is, you know, what all presidents do. Make some money speaking (and hes got a lot of lawyers to pay off), although he is not a person whos ever cared about money, he never has been a person who cares about money, but he does have legal bills. Hell probably write at least one book, maybe two, Im told, but of course they never sell. Hell get a big advance, but whoever publishes it will take a bath because presidential memoirs never sell.

     He has no role models. Jack Kennedy was killed, and the only other president thats ever been remotely his age was Theodore Roosevelt and what did he do? He ran for president again. So we dont know what happens to former presidents in their mid-50s. So dont be surprised to see him run for the Senate from Arkansas.

     Thank you.

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