A few bloggers are raising hell about one part of my interview with Rep. Joe Walsh. They’re reacting to his analysis of the role race played in electing Barack Obama to the Senate and the White House.
This wasn’t a point Walsh made by accident. I brought it up in our interview because he’d just said something similar in his remarks to the Blogger’s Briefing at the Heritage Foundation – an event that’s recorded and streamed live. It went to my point that Walsh is becoming a TV star because he’ll say what Republicans think, even if they don’t want to say it. In this case, Walsh is saying something that, boiled down, might not be controversial. Barack Obama’s race, and the possibility of him becoming the first black president, played a huge role in how he was covered and how other candidates responded to him. One reason Republican strategists told me Haley Barbour would be a flawed presidential candidate (this was before Barbour dropped out) was that there were independent voters who wanted to vote for the first black president, and would feel conflicted about replacing him with a white guy from Mississippi.
Since the comment is getting attention, I think it’s fair to post more of the (lightly edited for clarity) transcript of our interview. This way, I can also publish Walsh’s comments on the 2008 tax cut deal and on whether taxes always generate revenue. (The interview was conducted on Tuesday, hence the references to what will happen in NY-26.) I’m focusing on the stuff that didn’t make the article as well as the full context of the Obama section, so I’ve left some stuff out. Many, many thanks to Jessica Leader for transcribing.
SLATE: At Heritage, you walked in as a school choice expert was talking. You said the ideal would be universal school vouchers, but I couldn’t quite tell where you came on the possibility of that happening in the next couple of years.
WALSH : In the next couple of years, no. It’s not a federal issue, it’s a state issue, and I really don’t envision any K-12 government ruling on education. But I believe it’s the next great civil rights movement in this country. I don’t know when it’ll happen. It’s a cause I’ve always wanted to devote myself to. Inner city blacks, and inner city Hispanics are imprisoned in miserable public schools and other interests keep them there. The only way to free them is to let parents escape.
SLATE : And you had hands on experience with this, but what crystallized your views on this, if you could point to examples. I mean, I’ve heard and read from Olasky and other theorists about this, but again you have experience in watching this work.
WALSH: One of my first jobs out of college was a at an organization downtown called Jobs for Youth. It worked with inner city high school kids with basically on GED prep and job training. And so again you begin to see the product of some of these kids coming out of schools or dropping out of these schools. I then went to the University of Chicago, got a masters in Public Policy, with a focus on urban poverty. Then I did a number of things, worked at think tanks. Then, probably the closest real life application when I literally ran Chicago’s largest privately funded school voucher program. We in the suburbs have choices. If we don’t like our public school, it’ll cost us some money but we can go to the Catholic school down the street or a private school, you name it. This is something Milton Friedman talked about for years. Talked about this idea going back to the 50s and just seeing it up close and personal in the inner cities.
SLATE: At this event you were critical of any Republican criticizing what Republicans are trying to do on the budget – what all but four republicans are trying to do, and I think all but two or for voted against the budget because it didn’t take it far enough. But why are the are the critics wrong? If they are watching somebody possibly go down in the new York special election, why are they wrong about this being a time to scale back and focus on something else?
WALSH: Just vis-à-vis the ny election, [Corwin] probably will go down. And I know what the media’s gonna do with this thing, they are gonna make broad generalizations. Look, theres a self proclaimed tea party candidate in the race who’s been a democrat his whole life. He’s not a tea party guy, and I think the Republican party didn’t realize what a threat this guy is. So he’s the reason this race may be close and that she might go down.
But look, most of us came to Washington this year to adamantly stop what this president’s doing. We are bankrupting future generations. We say things like that, but we mean that. So then to not boldly set out to try to do something about that is negligent. Medicare is in crisis. It is almost insolvent. You have to do something. To not acknowledge that, you have to be delusional. So the question is, what do you do? The Republicans put forth a very bold, potential start. In truth, I’ll tell ya, it doesn’t go far enough. It does two or three things I’m not happy with.
SLATE : Like what, exactly?
WALSH: It doesn’t balance the budget for 30 years. Which is too long. Which is why I support the RSC budget which balanced the budget somewhere between 9 and 10 years from now. It doesn’t ask anything of people 55 and older. I think we should. I think they want to be asked. And finally, it stays away from Social Security. But again, he put something out there. The other side hasn’t and so they are on their backsides trying to score political points. The absolute worst response is to be afraid of the politics.
SLATE: You’re pretty convinced of that? You’re convinced that people are willing to sacrifice?
WALSH: Absolutely. Again, polling data on this is mixed. You know better than I do that so much depends on how the question is asked. But I can just tell youI’m a living breathing example of someone who wanted a classic swing district. There are very few members of congress who’ve held more town halls than I have, and the vast majority of people 55 and older at my town halls raise their hands and say ‘I’m willing, I know we gotta do something.’ Now, I think that if you ask Republicans privately there are some real wobbly knees.
SLATE: You also mentioned earlier that we e are going through “a revolution right now.” And it’s unlike anything we have seen in a very long span of time. What is the last thing you can think of that is comparable to this? Was it when Edmund Burke was writing? Was it, other side of the ledger, during the Progressive era?
WALSH : Well, you can hark back to after the Great Depression, the onslaught of the New Deal. There was initially a loud opposition to the expansion of the federal government, but it quickly whimpered away. That was the last time, the last time I can remember where you have a profound, really a seismic shift of how to deal with the role of government in our lives. And we owe this right now all to Barack Obama, and I really mean that. I’m not being cute when I say that. If John McCain won? I don’t think you’d see this explosion of people who are increasingly frightened at how big government’s gotten.
SLATE: I was in Illinois when Obama won his Senate race. Did you predict what would happen with him? The backlash, or what he would do in office? Because certainly, during the election he did talk about some of what he wanted to do. He didn’t talk about a stimulus package of the size we got, or about an auto bailout, but he talked about some of what he’d do. I should ask, how did you read Obama before he became president?
WALSH: That’s a great question. It’s a great question because hes the least well known figure we’ve ever elected. We knew very little about him. So what did I think about him? Hard to answer that question. He was in the state senate for who knows how many years, he was a back bencher, really didn’t do anything of much consequence, famously voted present 218 times. Then he was plucked out, gave a good speech, was voted in as president. He is who he is. The rest is history. I believe that very few people voted for him because of what he said. I think very few people voted for him because of how he said it. Most people voted for him because of who he was. He was a historic figure, our first black president. And so, a lot of people that don’t know what he said during the campaign, that couldn’t tell you what he stood for. I am older than you, but I don’t ever remember a candidate for president that we knew so little about.
SLATE: And what is your sense about why that was? One thing I want to get into is that you’re are on cable a lot, you’re interviewed, and you see how the media works. The media in Chicago didn’t go easy on everyone. It didn’t go easy on Blair Hull or Jack Ryan. [Obama’s Democratic and Republican opponents.]
WALSH: No, they didn’t.
SLATE: I voted for Jack Ryan in the primaries, so…
WALSH: It would have been an interesting race.
SLATE: A 15 pt race, probably.
WALSH: Look, I don’t think this is complicated. A, he doesn’t really have a history. Not only does he not have, and I say all of this respectfully, the least well known guy we have ever put in a presidency, and theres no one even close. Hes probably got easily the lightest resume of anybody we’ve elected. Think about this! You think about this: we elected a state senator as our president. You can’t find the year he got here, because the year he got here he was running. We elected a legislator. Never before came close to happening. So why was he elected? Again, it comes back to who he was. He was a black, he was historic. And there’s nothing racist about this. It is what it is. If he had been a dynamic, white, state senator elected to congress he wouldn’t have gotten in the game this fast. This is what made him different. That, combined with the fact that your profession, not you, was just absolutely compliant. They made up their minds early that they were in love with him. They were in love with him because they thought he was a good liberal guy and they were in love with him because he pushed that magical button: a black man who was articulate, liberal, the whole white guilt, all of that.
SLATE: You’re quoting Joe Biden now? [I was jokingly referring to Biden’s 2007 interview with the New York Observer, in which he suggested Obama was a “dream” candidate because he was “articulate, and black, and clean.”]
WALSH: I don’t know what Biden said, but it pushed all their buttons. So immediately, they stopped any exploration of who he was and his record. And I pity the candidate running against him, because it will continue. That profession will protect him, and they will crucify whoever the republican nominee is. That’s why. Your profession, not you, fell down on the job.
SLATE: You don’t know me that well. I could have been part of the problem.
WALSH: No, no. Your profession fell down on the job, and I understand it.
SLATE: No, I don’t think many reporters covered that race and thought, ‘Oh boy, I really wanna be there when the first black presidential candidate goes down in flames.’ I definitely think that’s true. I’d admit that.
WALSH: So that’s why he was so little vetted.
[Here I’m leaving out some stuff that was quoted in the article, about his TV success.]
SLATE: You studied acting for a year.
WALSH: Stage, a little bit of film, TV… never did anything, just studied. I was fascinated by the craft. Did a little bit of that in NY, did a bit of that in LA, that was ages ago. Yeah, that was like mid-eighties.
SLATE: But there’s nothing you picked up from that?
WALSH: Yeah, heres the deal. And you know this. We all have strengths and weaknesses, we are all better at certain things than others. I still am someone who doesn’t understand the way the legislative process works. I do, but I don’t. I can’t find my way around the capitol, I have a hard time with protocol, but advocating for issues and speaking in front of people comes easily. I’m a pretty good advocate, which is probably one reason why pl are constantly asking me to be on tv- to advocate positions. I’m sure I picked up a lot of that from my teaching, I’ve done a lot of teaching, and from some of the acting Ive done. I’ve been in professions that typically, the think tank work I’ve done. Ive spent a lot of my time talking about or writing about issues. Arguing for school choice, arguing for the flat tax. So it all, I think has evolved into what im doing now.
SLATE: Since you’ve mentioned the flat tax, if we can get into history. I’m wondering what your understanding is of the double dip recession in 1937. We had some growth…
WALSH: Not a lot, though.
SLATE: Yeah, but we cut unemployment from the thirties to the mid teens. And then we bounced back.
WALSH: I just think it’s a longer stage play of what’s been going down in the last two years. We tried to publicly stimulate the economy over a longer period of time. And ultimately you can prop up the economy by doing that for a little bit of time, maybe, but you are not fundamentlally gonna grow the economy doing that. And I think most of the history I’ve read is clear that, at its core, the New Deal, everything we did to try and yank us out of the great depression, in the main, didn’t have a lot to do with getting us out.
SLATE: So why are you convinced that the way to get out of this is spending and tax cuts? We’ve had mixed experiences with that. If we want to get back to the level of revenue we had four years.
WALSH: What was it? Do you remember what percent of the GDP it was?
SLATE: Well, the highest it got in the last decade I think was 20 percent.
WALSH: Historically it’s played around between eighteen and nineteen percent. Look, some of this is a pragmatic argument, and some of it is philosophical. I don’t fundamentally want the government involved in the economy, period. Its anathema to me that anybody should be taxed at a rate higher than X.
SLATE: What’s X?
WALSH: My X is pretty low. If you give me a flat rate of 17 percent, I’m happy. But its not [happening right now.] You can make the practical argument that a 50 percent tax on those making a million dollars more will do A, B, C or E. A, I don’t wanna go down that [road]. On principal I feel that’s expensive. B, history generally tells me, and we all hang onto our generalities, that when you keep rates low and regulations generally minimal, the economy long term tends to grow and prosper. And again, I think that’s clear. I think clearly that, long term, if you raise tax rates eventually revenues are gonna dry up. People are gonna hide money, people just aren’t gonna pay taxes.
That’s why this is such an important time. The guy in the white house has a much different viewpoint.
SLATE: What have you thought about the way hes interacted with Republicans since the election? With the compromise last year before you got here?
WALSH: It was a joke!
SLATE: Why?
WALSH: All we did was keep tax rates the same and increase spending. That’s all that this did. And it went a long way towards helping the president, politically. Everything this president does is political, plain and simple. It still amazes me what he did with his budget. He proposes a budget early February, mid February, like they all do, and it’s an inconsequential document that makes no tough decision, doesn’t even talk about entitlements. He waits for the Republicans to come up with their budgets, which makes some tough calls. And he gets propose a second budget? Where’s the media?
SLATE: I think the media did whack the hell out of that budget.
WALSH: Just the very fact that he got to do that two step—its never been done before. He got a do over on a budget. Hes a political animal who is totally vested in his own reelection. He’s doing it at the borders, he’s doing it with that budget, he’s doing it with entitlements. It’s hard to take him seriously. It really is. The list is long if you look at everything hes changed his mind on since hes become president, you know, from Gitmo to… he’s just a political bean. And he’ll get a pass. He’ll get a pass.
SLATE: We’re talking about deals. In retrospect how bad does the CR deal look? You voted against it.
WALSH: How does it look? It looks just as bad as it did when I voted no.
SLATE: Bad or worse?
WALSH: Even the final number we thought we were voting on, 38 billion, we knew at the time it wasn’t really gonna be 38 billion. And we tried to let leadership know that it was nearly far enough. And what it did was… look, here’s a president who for all practical purposes was not even involved in this issue. And here he comes in on his white horse at the last minute to try and broker a deal. The American people want us to be firm, they want us to be bold, and we will not do that with the debt ceiling fight. God, I hope not.
SLATE: So what were you thinking when Republican leaders came back in the room, with you guys in the House, and the deal was announced?
WALSH: For the speaker and leadership I was happy, because he [Boehner] had out-negotiated the president. He still cut a deal with a guy who didn’t want to cut spending at all. So, hats off to the speaker. But I was disappointed. I walked away sad. This isn’t what we came to Washington to do. We didn’t come to cut 38 billion out of a budget for a year, and it really wasn’t close to 38 billion when the federal deficit will go up another 28 billion next month.
SLATE: Certainly there are senior members of the conference who said what people didn’t understand about the numbers…
WALSH: Oh yeah. But even if it was what it was billed to be, that wasn’t enough.
SLATE: It seems to me like the ball really has been moved down the field. Dems will try and win the election on Medicare, sure, but there’s a discussion about Medicare. We’re discussing debt reduction, not spending. Are we not seeing some ground move on this?
WALSH: The Tea Party influence has influenced the direction things have gone here. We’ve moved our leadership, and then our leadership moved the other side, and that came from us. I agree. Listen, I think the speaker is bolder in his proclamations on this debt ceiling than he was in the CR debate. I think there’s a reason for that. His fiscally conservative group in the House has been bolder about what they want. And bolder about saying were gonna go public with what we want.
SLATE: And what’s been the impact of the way the CR turned out? The fact you didn’t get 100 billion, and there have been reports about less being cut than we though.
WALSH: I’d say that within the conference it’s made many members very careful about what they would support in this next fight, absolutely.
SLATE: But careful in what way?
WALSH: They are going to demand more. We cannot nibble around the edges in this fight. We just can’t. Its why there’s a notion of putting in front of the speaker this week, a letter from 90 of us, saying boom, boom, boom and the biggest boom is a balanced budget amendment. We have one chance in history to do it, and the amendment is my bill and I’m very happy about that. We can get it, and it would be a great thing for this country.
SLATE: Redistricting. Right now, do you wan to continue serving in the House or run for higher office?
WALSH: I am 190 percent focused on doing right and getting reelected. To here, to the House. I like not knowing what district I’m running in, or knowing the lay of the land. I am doing right, and I’m hoping that doing right will get me re-elected.
