The Axe Files - Ep. 37: Dan Balz

The Axe Files - Ep. 37: Dan Balz Released March 27, 2016 [00:00:00] UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And now from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN, "The Axe Files" with your host, David Axelrod. DAVID AXELROD, "THE AXE FILES," HOST: I love talking with Dan Balz, the National Correspondent for "The Washington Post." He is the best political writer in America and sort of the gold standard by which other political writers measure themselves because he's thoughtful, he's sensitive and insightful. And I sat down with him the other day to take stock of this very, very crazy presidential race. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) AXELROD: Dan Balz, you are -- people used terms like "The Dean", the dean of jour -- of Washington political journalism, the dean. But you really are the -- you are the sort of gold standard when it comes to Washington and to national political coverage. Did you start out with the thought that someday you're going to become a political reporter? DAN BALZ, NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT, "THE WASHINGTON POST": No, I really didn't know. I started out with the idea that I'd become a reporter. And AXELROD: You always wanted to be a reporter? BALZ: Well, I mean, you know, always being how far back do you go. I mean, it's hard to recall exactly when it kind of crystallized until college. I mean it was really in college that I focus on becoming a reporter. I saw us some reference to something my mother had saved years ago that when I was much younger I said I wanted to be a writer or something, but that was a pretty unfocused thing. It was AXELROD: You grew up in Illinois? BALZ: I grew up in Illinois. I grew up in Freeport, home of one of the -- or site of one of the Lincoln-Douglas debates up in the northwest part of the state. AXELROD: Yeah. BALZ: And went to the University of Illinois for college. And it -- my brother who also later became a journalist urged me when I was a freshman -- at the end of my freshman year. He said, you should go to work for the student newspaper, "The Daily Illini," which was a five-day week kind of independent, you know, newspaper for the -- that we ran. And I did that in my sophomore year and got hooked on journalism. AXELROD: What about it? BALZ: Everything about it. You know, I love reporting. I love writing. I love watching the, you know, this was in the old days of, you know, of hot type of metal (ph), you know. I love being in the composing room when the compositors and the printers were putting, you know, pages together. I think there was something infectious about it. You felt like you were part of, you know, watching unfolding history. And this was back in the '60s when history was really unfolding on college campuses. 1

AXELROD: Yeah. BALZ: So, almost everything about it kind of captivated me and I kept at it. AXELROD: Well, let me just ask you, what -- you mentioned the '60s was -- there was really a lot of activity in the University of Illinois, campus anti-war activity BALZ: It came later. I mean, this -- the year I started at "The Daily Illini" was 1965, fall of 1965. You know, Vietnam was an issue at that point on many campuses. It had not quite come to the U of I at that point. But it did later and, you know, in my, you know, in my last couple of years on the paper there, there was a lot of activity, a lot of anti-war protest and AXELROD: And you were covering those? BALZ: We were covering those, yeah. I was covering those and in the fall of '67, the March on the Pentagon, Roger Simon who you know well and I AXELROD: Yes, yes, great columnist now for the "Politico." BALZ: Now with "Politico." One of my oldest friends and we were on the paper together, and a third friend named Don Ruder (ph) drove out here to Washington to cover the March on the Pentagon. And so, we were in the thick of it. The other thing that happened to me during those years was I got a summer internship here in Washington. My congressman at the time was one -- John B. Anderson AXELROD: Oh, yes. BALZ: who later became well known for running for the Republican nomination in 1980 and then running as an independent. So I worked in Washington for a summer and it was that combination of journalism and, you know, in Washington that, you know, that stimulated in me a kind of a desire to be a Washington reporter. I'm more or less stumbled into political reporting when I went to the Post in 1978. I had spent five and a half years at "National Journal" starting out there as an economics reporter, if you can believe that and [00:05:05] AXELROD: Pretty active beat back in the '70s. BALZ: It was a very active beat. I mean the wage and price controls and the Russian grain deals and, you know, and budget issues and, you know, it was not quite Watergate, but the beat I was on was not quite Watergate but it was a stimulating time. But it really wasn't until I got to the Post that I kind of shifted or got drown into politics. AXELROD: What was the first presidential campaign you cover? BALZ: Well, I mean, the first convention I covered was Chicago '68. I was -- I had just graduated from Illinois and had gone to work for my hometown paper. I was 1A in the draft so I -- my days were numbered in one form or another. 2

So I went back home and spent the summer at home working for the paper there. We had one credential for the convention and nobody wanted it. And, you know, I was the junior person on the staff, and so I said, well, I'd -- you know, I'd love to go. So I spent the week in Chicago. AXELROD: Yeah, that's an amazing part of history. BALZ: It was unbelievable week for me. I mean, because I spent a lot of, you know, I spent the early evenings at the convention hall. And then, you know, later in the evening, watching the clashes on the streets. Yeah. AXELROD: Do you ever go back and look at those stories? BALZ: I looked at them a few years ago. They're -- I mean, they are so -- once I started reading they are still so vivid. I mean, because as, you know, I mean, that week was an extraordinary week in American political history. AXELROD: It really changed everything because that was the beginning of the sort of move to primaries and the evaluation of party bosses and so on. BALZ: Yeah, yeah. AXELROD: When you think about your early days as a political reporter and think about how you cover elections now, how different is it? BALZ: Well, I could answer it in two ways. It's not different at all in one sense and it's totally different in another sense. AXELROD: You sound like a politician. BALZ: Yeah, I know. Thank you. It's not different in this respect. I mean, covering politics is still -- and particularly presidential politics is, you know, a quadrennial exercise in trying to understand where the country is and kind of what the collective hopes and dreams and fears and concerns of voters are and then trying to match that with candidates who are doing the same thing. In other words, they're trying to, you know, they're trying to match their appeal to where they think the country is. And so, it's an effort to tell that story and, you know, we tell it on a daily basis or, you know, or it used to be a weekly basis with the news magazines. Now it's on a minute by minute basis. But in that sense, it's still trying to explain and understand this, you know, this remarkable circus pageant exercise in democracy. The ways in which has changed are, the media has totally changed, the nature of the way political campaigns has changed and the country has changed. I mean -- and so we cover it in a much more minuet way today. We cover everything that moves whether it deserves to be covered or not. AXELROD: Right. BALZ: And we have, I think a greater difficulty stepping back even a half step or two steps to keep the larger questions in mind as we are trying to follow it. 3

AXELROD: Yeah, you know, I -- as you know I covered a couple of campaigns before I went over to the other side. And I like you saw some of the great David Bauder' who -- David Bauder was your mentor at the "Washington Post" BALZ: Sure was. AXELROD: and Jack Germond and Jules Witcover and a whole generation of political reporters that who used to get in their cars and drive around states and actually talk to people. And that is less common now. Now, it seems like we cover polls, we cover tweets, and it's -- and as you say, it's very hard to get perspective that way, especially, you know, one of my (inaudible) view is polling. Public polling is notoriously unreliable. And so, you know, we anoint people as front runners in a given state when they may not be and we cover the horse race. Do you find that frustrating? BALZ: Terribly frustrating and it's not as though I'm not as guilty over does anybody else. AXELROD: We kind of have to be, don't you? BALZ: You have to be in the moment and that requires, you know, greater attention to every poll that comes out. I think what frustrates me is not only is a lot of public polling, you know, not terribly reliable, but every poll seems to get seized upon as if it is new information and therefore the most important and reliable information. [00:10:14] And so there are swings back and forth based on one particular poll. Maybe it's an outlier, maybe it's accurate. Nobody knows at that moment. And I think that more so than ever that tends to dictate the way coverage moves. And we've seen it in this campaign more than any because there, you know, there just so many polls that come out. And because cable news and, you know, the big news organizations are following and competing for attention. And so they're looking for things that they can grab readers with. AXELROD: Yeah. And in that void strolls one Donald J. Trump. What do you make of the Trump phenomenon? It seems like he in certain ways is the personification of the modern sort of media environment -- I mean, he has sees on it in a way no one ever did before. BALZ: He seems to understand it better than any other candidate. He's come out in a very unconventional way as you know and has made that in a sense the conventional way to do it. But nobody else can quite do it. I mean his ability to dominate a new cycle or a week of coverage has been quite extraordinary. And to some extent, the media has been complicit in that because he's a controversial character and controversy drives news coverage. AXELROD: Right. BALZ: And he knows that direct conversation with journalists, particularly television journalists live on the air, not only fills time and brings attention to him, but then creates the narrative for at least the rest of that day. 4

And he's been, you know, he's been brilliant at it. It's probably not accidental that he was a reality T.V. star for, you know, a decade before that. So he understands modern media. He understands Twitter and what it can be. I had a conversation with Newt Gingrich, the former speaker recently and he said something very effective. You know, Trump understands that every Instagram is good, every tweet is good, you know, the more volume the better whether it's good or bad for him. You just keep feeding that and he's been, you know, he's been amazing at that. AXELROD: What do you think the larger -- I know you got -- you talked about it -- campaign is a way of engaging where the country is. What is Trump's ascendance say about the country? BALZ: That the country is divided. That there is a lot of -- in the country, a lot of voters who are disaffected, who are alienated, some are really angry, some are moderately angry. There's a lot of resentment. There are lot of people who think they have not been paid attention to. And I think that's the core of the Trump constituency. Everybody could see that coming. I mean, we all knew that was kind of out there. You could see it in every poll or every focus group or every conversation not just in the last year or year and a half. I mean, you could see it in the 2012 campaign when we were out on the trail. And that's on top of AXELROD: You could see that the McCain-Palin rallies in 2008. BALZ: You absolutely could. And I think one of the interesting things is we all kind of put that aside at the -- in the fall of 2008 because, you know, the election of Barack Obama was a historic moment for all sort, you know, for all the obvious reasons. And I think that there was a feeling that the country was in one way or another, if not coming together had a good feeling about his election. There were lot of people who did, but as we know -- as we should have known at the time and knew fairly quickly after, there were lot of people who didn't and that polarization has been there. And so, that has contributed to it. So, you know, I did a piece a few weeks about kind of the roots of the Trump constituency and the degree to which a lot of them are in that kind of a white working class, blue collar group, you know, who haven't seen their wages rise, who have gravitated over the years from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party and yet have not gotten much in return. I mean, the Republican economic orthodox that use tax cuts that are skewed to the upper incomes. And along comes Trump and basically taps into the economic frustration and also the cultural frustration. I mean, we know that this is a country that's changing rapidly in more diverse and more tolerant, and there are lot of people who are alarmed by that, who fear that it is taking away what made America great that quote Trump's AXELROD: Hat. BALZ: Yeah. It's a quote in his hat. And so he's, you know, I think he is focused within all of that. [00:15:04] AXELROD: I just want to take a quick break for our message from our sponsors, Stamps.com. 5

We'll be back in a second with Dan Balz. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) AXELROD: Dan, we're talking about Trump and sort of Trumpism and the roots of Trumpism. And I think of that rally -- you talked about harbingers of this. That rally in Minnesota in 2008 when John McCain confronted someone who said that Obama was not a citizen, was a Muslim, was -- and I thought it was actually one of the great moments of McCain's campaign because he showed what is -- what people kind of expected from him, which is to stand up to that. But what was clear was in a country that's becoming much more diverse very quickly that Obama was a symbol to a lot of people of that change and they weren't very happy about it. BALZ: Oh, I think -- excuse me. I think that's absolutely right. And you could see in those rallies in the fall of 2008 that anger building and that resentment building. And I think if you put that together, if, you know, put the overlay of the Republican leadership decision early in Obama's presidency basically to resists anything he tried to do. That combination snap the country back in the opposite direction of what we thought was happening. I mean, you -- I think you and I have talked about this. There was a feeling in early 2009 that the combination of -- that the sense of a barrier broken with Obama and good will about his presidency along with the depth of the problems, economic problems that the country was facing, that there might be a moment in which people would kind of come together to try to solve these problems. That didn't happen at all. And we have been on that -- we've been on that circuit ever since in which the passions on both sides have so intensified and the hostility toward the opposition. I mean, I think that's the other thing that, you know, debates politics as, you know, it's a rough game. It always has been. Campaigns are rough. But I think that in the past the bad feelings toward the opponents didn't exist to the degree they do now. AXELROD: Yeah. BALZ: I mean, I remember going around in 2012 and asking people at Obama rallies and Romney rallies, what happens if the other guys wins? And there was just sense of almost the, you know, of "Armageddon" or the "Apocalypse" that Republicans saw another four years of President Obama. And, you know, everything that was good about the country would be washed away and people at Obama rallies thought, every bit of progress that have been made over the last half century would be reverse if Mitt Romney and the Republicans took power. AXELROD: Yeah. I, you know, I remember when I was a kid when Richard Nixon was elected, my mother was crying and I said, "Why you're crying?" And she said, "Well, you know, this guy is going, you know, destroy America or whatever." And I said, "Mom, you know, we've had Republican presidents, we've had Democratic presidents." I think she was an outlier then. I think back in the day, you know, there was this sense that we have this fights and then we come together and that's gone. I would say this about the Obama election, one of the paradoxes the Obama election is that we -- meaning the Obama campaign, the Democratic Party gained a huge majority in the House, in the Senate, that was largely fueled by people who had this sense of -- this desire to see the country come together. 6

And the Republicans in Congress reacted in a very pragmatic way thinking, if we don't get these seats back, we've got to create some distance here. And if we would cooperate, we're not going to get anywhere. And so we're going to oppose and let him grapple with the crisis, the economic crisis, make the hard decisions, and that gives us our best chance to get these seats back. [00:20:00] And so we got these large majorities, largely because we were talking about bipartisanship and they ushered in a period of really severe partisanship. BALZ: Rapid partisanship you could say. I mean, it's just a deep, deep and polarizing partisanship. AXELROD: I think the other thing that happened, Dan, is that Republicans then promised their voters that they were going to overturn everything that Obama was doing and they couldn't. And so you talked about the Republican electorate that has become disaffected. I think that the inability or, you know, that I think their base, the Republican base sees it as, you know, a lack of will to turn -- overturn ObamaCare and common core and all of these things that became kind of headline causes for the Republican base was a sign to them that the traditional Republican establishment had failed them. I think that creates part of the Trump base as well. BALZ: I think very much so. And I think -- I mean, I think directly related to that is the total lack of trust of every institution in the country with the exception of the military problem. AXELROD: Yeah. BALZ: And if you think about what the "Republican establishment" has tried to do vis-à-vis Trump, I mean, you see the kind of other futility at least up to this point of their ability to affect anything with a good (inaudible) to the Republican electorate. That the Republican electorate -- that the Trump voters have no faith in those leaders. They're not listening to them and as a result to that, the attacks on Trump just sort of fade away. Now, you know, if he becomes the nominee, we're into a different situation because with the broader electorate he's very unpopular and he would have to do something about it. But he has benefited from the failure of other Republican leadership in a sense to deal honestly with their own people about what could be done. I mean, they've, you know, they've stoked fears and opposition to the Obama agenda in the midterm elections to great effect and been able to win big victories. But they can't deliver on the promises as long as you've got the president of the United States there with the veto pen (ph), and so AXELROD: Yeah. It turns out that we have a system of checks and balances that's designed to produce gridlock when the country is divided and it's working pretty effectively. BALZ: And yet the country seems to like divided government, I mean in one form or another. Well, I mean, we'll see this fall whether that begins to change. I mean, my sense has been we're in a very difficult bad period in American politics in which with each, you know, with each election cycle it seems to drive things farther down or farther apart. And at some point you have to think, well, you know, collectively the country will say, enough of that, we've got to get some things done, but I don't know that we're there at this point. I mean, if you, you 7

know, if you look forward to the fall campaign, it has all the air marks of being even more negative than 2012, by far more negative than 2008. And one in which, you know, instead of appealing to the better angels, it's going to be attack after attack after attack. AXELROD: Well, isn't that sort of by definition what it has to be? You have two frontrunners in Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton who have a very high negatives and that generally is a prescription for a very tough and negative campaign. BALZ: I think that's right. I mean, if it's those two and then I think that -- I think the consequences of a kind of campaign like that are -- that whoever wins that election has an almost impossible task at trying to govern. I mean, it will take a (inaudible), an effort after a campaign like that to try to govern and I don't know. I mean, one thing we know about Hillary Clinton is she is dogged about trying to get things done. I mean, if she becomes the president of United States, she's going to work hard at trying to make the system work. But we also know that the hostility to her that's built up over the last 20 years will make that very, very difficult. If Trump's though -- if Trump becomes the president, if he's the nominee and wins in the fall, the opposition to him will be, I think even more significant. AXELROD: Well, let's talk about for -- I want to get to Hillary and Bernie Sanders and the Democrats. Let's talk about whether Trump actually will be the nominee. [00:25:00] It seems fairly likely that he's going to be the delegate leader if not the nominee by the end of this process. What do you make of the whole brokered convention, open convention, whatever you want to call it, the notion that the party will come together in Cleveland and essentially take the nomination away from him if he doesn't hit the 1,237? BALZ: You know, we talked about a brokered convention, but there aren't any brokers anyway. AXELROD: Right. BALZ: There's nobody to broker it. There's nobody who has that stature to bring the warring sides together and say, let's, you know, let's get this work out. I think the only way that Trump would be denied the nomination is if he was well-short of 1,237. And there were -- there was in a sense an organized coup to prevent him from getting it. I mean, that the convention can do what it wants. The convention will write its own rules on the eve of the convention. We can't say at this point exactly what those rules would be. We think we sort of know what they are because of the way they've been in the past, but the rules committee will write those rules. They'll be voted on. They'll be voted on by the RNC and then the full convention and then we'll see what happens. But, who would be strong enough at that point? Who would be able to become the consensus anti-trump candidate? It's hard to say right now who that would be and whether they would be close enough to Trump to be able to overturn it. It will be very hard to deny him the nomination even if he somewhat short of the 1,237. 8

AXELROD: If that happens, if they were to deny him the nomination, what happens to those voters who you already said are deeply alienated from the leadership of the Republican Party, deeply alienated by the institutions generally? Where do they go? What happens with those voters if Trump is denied the nomination? BALZ: Well, I mean that they have two choices or they have two emotions that they will have to wrestle with. One is the anger they will feel about Donald Trump being denied the nomination and that will be significant. But the other is the anger they might feel at the prospect of, let's say Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders becoming president of the United States. And one of those emotions is going to win out when they, you know, when they decide whether they will go and vote. You know, it's possible that many would stay home and in that case it would, you know, it would be devastating for the Republican Party. But it may will be that the combination of eight years of President Obama and the prospect of another Democrat in the White House be it Sanders or Clinton is enough to bring them to the 4 in November. But, it would take a while to get there. It would be -- I mean, you remember what John McCain in 2008 wanted to do Joe Lieberman AXELROD: Yes. BALZ: as his vice president. And he was talked out of that in part because his folks said, "If you do that, you will tear apart the convention and we will spend the next six weeks trying to bring the party back together." And that's what the Republicans may will face under almost any scenario. Fortunately for them, the convention is in July rather than in late August. But it's going to be -- I mean, it could be a ruckus rowdy convention. AXELROD: Yeah. We're going to take another short break for a word from our sponsor. We'll be right back with Dan Balz. (COMMERCIAL BREAK) AXELROD: Dan, let's talk about the Democrats. You began to talk about Hillary Clinton. Why does she had -- the challenge that she's had consolidating the party? This is the second straight -- second time around for her in a presidential race. Each time she started as a prohibited favorite and obviously she didn't win in 2008. And now she's in this protracted battle with Bernie Sanders who I would venture to say if anyone in Washington were ask two years ago who the principal opponent to Hillary Clinton would be and who would be giving her the challenge that she's got, no one would have said Bernie Sanders. BALZ: David, you're absolutely right. I mean, that the Sanders phenomenon is one of the remarkable stories of this campaign and no matter what happens, you know, he's going to get a big piece or whatever. Books are done about this campaign. I think a couple of things, David. One is Hillary Clinton comes out of innocence, the centrist part of the Democratic Party at a time the centrist part of the Democratic Party barely exists. And so she has been -- I mean, she has been forced to adapt to a Democratic Party that is different from the roots of her husband's campaign and presidency. 9

[00:30:10] And it has been I think hard for her to do that in a sense she's been playing on Bernie Sanders turf or Elizabeth Warren's turf, whoever turf you want to describe it, but on turf that is uncomfortable for her. And she's had, I think a very hard time kind of reconciling where she has been, particularly where she has been in public on issues and where the party is now? You know, there is just, you know, President Obama is well like by all types of Democrats, but there is pent-up frustration on the left in the Democratic Party. And Sanders has, you know, has capitalize on that. I think the second is, you know, I think you've said it yourself. Bernie Sanders has a very simple and direct message. He has diagnosis of what he thinks is wrong and a prescription for fixing it. You can argue about whether that is a realistic prescription. But there is no doubt that what he is saying comes straight from inside Bernie Sanders and that he is thought about it for a long time and he's delivering it authentically. She has had a great deal of trouble crystalizing a message. She has a lot of messages. AXELROD: Right. BALZ: She has a lot of ideas. She's a programatic person. AXELROD: Yeah. She substitutes policy for messaging. BALZ: Yeah, yeah. I mean, for every problem she has a solution, a particular solution. But, she doesn't have a kind of over arching -- she doesn't have the diagnosis of the problem that Bernie Sanders does and because of that, I think it's been very difficult for her to settle on a message. And I think that to some extent, as you watch that evolve, what -- you have this feeling that its words and sentences and paragraphs that are written by committee or that are straight out of a focus group or poll tested as opposed to, you know, the directness of Bernie Sanders. AXELROD: And that goes to that question of authenticity that you're -- both elements of this do which is the left of the party doesn't really trust her, embrace her as one of them. In fact, the Bill Clinton Democratic Party was reaction the left. And so, by embracing some of the language and emphasis to Bernie Sanders, she calls into questions or authenticity there. And then there's this other element of -- in scrambling to get to higher ground on the stuff or safer ground. She does sound sometimes, you can see the tactics. You can sort see the wheels turning not a great contrast with Bernie. And yet, she seems to be on -- in the execrable march to the nomination here. BALZ: Oh, I don't think there's any doubt about that. I mean, she is -- it's funny because in some ways she is now using the play book that you all used against her in 2008, which is to say that this is a number's game. It's not a matter of who wins which state. It's simply a matter of accumulating delegates and because of the Democratic rules or proportionality, once you get a lead and pledge delegates. Let's put aside super delegates, that's all another issue. But once you got a lead and pledge delegates it is very hard to AXELROD: Because of the rules of the Democratic Party. 10

BALZ: Yeah. I mean, Bernie Sanders would have to win, not just win states. He has to win state by a big, big margin in order to get a big enough split in the delegates. That's the challenge he faces. So, she is -- I mean, it would be hard to imagine a circumstance under which she is deny the nomination unless something totally dramatic or unexpected happens. AXELROD: In fact, she has a more -- a much more significant delegate lead then Obama ever had in the 2008 campaign. So she -- by the way, she's got Obama's delegate guy, Jeff Berman, who's really an expert on this process working for her. BALZ: The interesting thing, though, is that up until now they have been somewhat reluctant to sort of play that delegate math. They've done it a little bit, but I remember in 2008 when you all and I remember Plouffe in particular said, you know, this is now -- we have a lead in pledge delegates. This is all about delegates and here's why, you know, Hillary Clinton can't catch up and change the narrative of that race even if she begin to wins the primaries. [00:35:01] And in the sense, you're going to hear that more and more from the Clinton campaign, but it doesn't take away the questions about her as a candidate. AXELROD: Is it -- is there a danger also in the fact that Bernie Sanders whole deal is the game is rigged by the establishment and the sense that if he starts winning, but she's on the road to the nomination that you create alienation on among the Democratic base? BALZ: Well, there is that risk. You know, on the one hand the rules are the rules and, you know, it behooves every candidate to figure out how to take maximum advantage of the rules. I think what Sanders is hoping is that he can create a kind of a wait a minute sensibility within the party that would in one way or another try to go against the, you know, the inexorable rules of delegate math, but that's very difficult. But given the kind of sensibility at the grassroots of the Democratic Party, he has an audience such prepared to hear that argument that he's going to make and it will create an additional problem for her. AXELROD: Do you think he is been scrutinized as the potential nominee? I mean, do you think -- because there is assumption and you and I just air it that she is going to be the nominee. He's been -- it feels as if he's got less attention, not attention to what he says, but attention to his record to, you know, the practicality of his ideas and so on. Or am I miss reading that? BALZ: Well, our editorial pages have been very, very harsh about his agenda. And, obviously, I don't speak for the editorial page or write the editorials or know what they're going to say, but they've been very tough on him. But I think your point is correct that in general the news coverage has been much tougher on Hillary Clinton than on Bernie Sanders. Now, to some extent you would expect that she started out the race as the front runner and is continue to be the front runner. And the front the runner always gets more scrutiny. I think that the closer Sanders had he gotten it very, very close, the scrutiny would have been increase. But I think that in many ways until he can show that he's got a real path to the denomination, there will be less attention to the details what he's talking about and particularly the practicality of what he is talking about. 11

AXELROD: So it seems to me there's a larger thing and you've sort of hinted that in this conversation. There's a larger question in this race between them which is -- and maybe in both parties, the notion of what is achievable and possible in a closely divided country in a system that's design to make change very difficult versus a candidates who give a full voice to the kind of aspirations of their base even if what they're proposing may not, you know, I give an example. Bernie Sanders on his podcast, he said (inaudible) single-payer healthcare. I acknowledge -- I wish we did have single-payer in healthcare, I think it would be great. But I point at him that he was there when we couldn't even get a public option in the Affordable Care Act. And I asked how he was going to get any so we can have millions of people march on Washington and so on. But, the fact is when you look at polling, the country is pretty divided on the notion of single-payer healthcare. So, you know, you can see Hillary Clinton's frustration because she -- you saw it 2008 as well, she's a master of the system and her point is, you know, I know how to get things done and I know what we get done. And you can see her sort of see thing as she listens to him. But it is -- there is a larger question here, which is what -- on the one hand you want to be aspirational. On the other hand, you don't want to mislead people. BALZ: It's a terrible dilemma and you can -- you really can see it in her candidacy. I mean, she's -- I remember having a conversation with Ann Lewis, who's long time friend of hers years ago. And I said, how do you explain -- I mean, what's the core Hillary Clinton? And she pointed me to what Secretary Clinton now often says in public is John Wesley. Do all you can and every way you can, everyday you can. I mean, it's just a kind of you get up every morning and, you know, if you can only get forward one inch you do that and then another inch to the next day, that's not an aspirational message. [00:40:02] AXELROD: Right. BALZ: That's a practical message. And people want to be inspired. I mean, that's one of the realities of life. People want to fluke the leadership that is inspiring and that in one way or another says we can do terrific things. We can, you know, we can build a great country or whatever, you know, whatever the slogan is. You know, President Obama had it. You know, Donald Trump has it in and, you know, what I would say is a negative, but it's a message that resonates. Bernie Sanders has a big message and the reality is, people want on either side a kind of winner take all notion. If we win, we get to do these things. And, therefore, they're looking for a candidate that says yes. We're going to win and we're going to do all the things that I'm talking about. The system will not allow it right now. The system, you know, the political system is too divided, but it is not a system that rewards practicality or AXELROD: In campaigns. BALZ: in campaigns or a kind of small bore message and I think that's the frustration that people feel. And that's why after we get through an election, things settle in, in one side or the other or both sides feel that down. 12

AXELROD: Yeah. I mean, one of the realities to the Obama presidency is a lot of the major pieces that he achieved, he achieved when we had large Democratic majorities in the Congress. And without them, he wouldn't have been able to achieve them. BALZ: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And there's no foreseeing, you know, if the Democrats win the White House, the president is going to be dealing with a Republican House and probably a Republican Senate and lots of Republican governors. I mean it's, you know, it is a red and blue country and that, you know, whoever is smart enough to figure out how to go through that maze might be rewarded, but it's going to take tremendous effort. AXELROD: Yeah. Dan Balz, always a pleasure to talk to you. We've had many, many conversations through the years. BALZ: Yes we have. AXELROD: And I always -- and they always end with me thinking, there's thoughtful guy, so BALZ: Thank you. AXELROD: And so I appreciate you being here. BALZ: It's been a pleasure. Thanks David. (END VIDEO CLIP) UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you for listening to "The Axe Files," part of the CNN podcast network. For more episodes of "The Axe Files," visit cnn.com/podcast and subscribe on itunes, Stitcher for your favorite app. And for more programming from the University on Chicago Institute of Politics, visit politics.uchicago.edu. 13