Welcome to The Confab. I'm Eric Felton. This is where the editors and writers of the Weekly Standard get together to talk about what's in the magazine, what's in the news, and whatever else may be on our minds. Fred Barnes is here to give us chapter and verse on how the Republicans are screwing up.
And then Ethan Epstein is coming by to talk about the fallout from the strange and mysterious sonic assault on the U.S. Embassy in Cuba. All that coming up on the Confab. Oh, the Confab is very happy to welcome to the Confab Studio, Mr.
Fred Barnes, Executive Editor of the Weekly Standard. Hi, Fred. Hi. Glad to be here.
Glad to see you. So this weekend at weeklystandard.com, you're writing about the many, many problems besetting the Republican Party. Let's go through a few of these. Well, I went on the beginning.
They're almost all self-imposed. The Republicans inflict moons on themselves. Yes, starting at the top with Donald Trump, the President, who seems to like nothing better than attacking by tweets. People who either work for him or members of Congress in his party.
It's an odd way to exert presidential leadership. And yet, for all the fact that there is a Republican President, you say that the first problem for Republicans is no one is in charge in Washington. Well, no one is. I mean, look at Trump.
I mean, he's in charge sometimes of doing things, but never for the whole party, the whole administration. That's not the way he operates. I think he's obviously ADD, attention deficit disorder. Look, a lot of, by the way, stuff, most politicians suffer from that.
One example of it is they don't read books. You know. Although, to work to your advantage, which is you get a setback, you kind of bounce on to the next thing. Yeah, but it accumulates.
These setbacks accumulate. And you suffer. You can only have so many setbacks without people who are involved with you, politically, ideologically, or just playing citizens in the United States. Let's start to get upset.
So one of the things people are upset about is that Congress doesn't seem to be able to get anything done. And yet, they've come painfully close on multiple times to getting things done. And Donald Trump wasn't able to get them over the goal line. And you say that the second problem besetting the Republicans is that the President is not capable of persuading or twisting arms to win votes.
And those are two different things with the same end in mind. And that's in having success with the Republican agenda. Let's start with the first one. What is Presidential Power?
You remember the famous book by Richard Newstad at Harvard University? I actually met him once when I was an even fellow at Harvard. This is a number of years ago. But the book came out nearly 60 years ago with a very simple definition of Presidential Power.
And he wrote that Presidential Power is the power to persuade. Now, if you see Trump's speeches or his tweets or any communication, they don't try to persuade. They assert, they accuse, they denounce, they brag, but there's no effort to persuade. Even on the current issue where Presidential persuasion is needed, and that's tax reform.
What's interesting about Newstad's book about Presidential leadership and being the power to persuade is he argued that a President to be successful has to not just be persuading lawmakers to go along with him or persuading voters to support him. But he argued that a President has to always be looking to persuade his own staff to support him. They can make or break him. And if they're not persuaded by the President's agenda and the things that he's pursuing, he's going to be sunk.
And we've seen a lot of backbiting in this Administration, which suggests that he's failed to persuade his own people on too many occasions. Indeed, and that's a good point. Of course, Richard Newstad had been a staffer in the Truman Administration. And I don't believe he was disloyal to Truman.
I think he learned a lot that went into that book that still read. I hadn't read that book until about, oh, I don't know, 15 years after it came out. I certainly knew about it, but it's a book, Presidential Power, that's relevant today. And I'm sure there's staffers in the Trump White House who've read it and must be appalled at the President.
They can still be loyal to him, but appalled the way that his speech is, for instance. I went back and read President Reagan's great speech in late July of 1981, pouting the tax cut that was later passed, a week or two later. It was a speech to the nation. It was long.
It had a lot of details. It was an argument. It tried to persuade not only Congress, but the American people. This was the way to go.
And he persuaded so many, they shut down the phones because so many people were calling in responding to Reagan. Now, Trump tried that in a speech in Indiana a couple of weeks ago when he was beginning the push for his tax reform bill. And I don't think I read anything at all about the phones being Trump. The switchboards were fine.
Yeah. So the problems aren't just from the top. The problems aren't just the responsibility of President Trump. As you suggest, there are also self-indulgent members of Congress, not team players.
Yeah. Well, I beg on politics being a team sport. And parties need to be united. Now, was there a particular reason, I mean, an overriding reason for Lisa Murkowski, the Senator from Alaska, to vote against, repealing replace of Obamacare, something she talked about doing for years.
But then she couldn't vote to do that. I mean, did she have to, was there some big reason? Well, she didn't let off, let on if there is one. Ultimately, John McCain, a very heroic Senator, someone I've known a long time like, all of a sudden voted against repealing replace to, which he voted for, on an earlier repeal and replace bill.
And yet was there some overriding reason. I don't think so. I mean, look, they can vote that way, but three Republican senators defeated the 51 other Republican, the 49 other Republican senators, just for reasons which didn't seem compelling or large. Whose job was it to persuade them?
Well, that's a great point. I know you've been around Washington a while, and I've heard this said many times, and that is when there's a close vote on a big issue, the President can step in and persuade that person to go with the President's party and his agenda and his legislation. So far as I know, Trump won no Republican Senator, got zero votes with all the time he spent with Republican senators. He had 49 of them in for lunch at the White House.
Now, that's not a way to persuade them. When you've got to say, well, you've got to vote for this. That doesn't do it. And yet, none of this is a secret as we talked about Richard Newstadt's book was 60 years ago, practically.
It's been read by, I'm sure, anybody who majored in political science or a lot of other things too, in the for decades. Maybe somebody should put a new cover on the book that says the art of presidential deal. Yeah, well, that'd be a good idea. If you slip it on the bed table for the President.
And the ultimate thing here, my ultimate conclusion is that Republicans have trouble governing, but they're very good at winning elections. And Democrats are terrible in elections unless they have some gigantic candidate like Barack Obama. I wonder, though, the Republicans are great at winning elections and then poor at governing. Is it that they renounce their principles when they get to Capitol Hill?
Or is something else going on where their principles end up just not allowing for them to make the compromises that are necessary to get legislation to happen? So is it that they are hypocritical and unprincipled or too principled by half? I would not call them unprincipled. Some of them are too principled.
I mean, Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky. He won't vote for any repeal and replace of Obama bill unless it completely gets rid of all parts of Obama and we start from ground zero. And yet that will never pass. There's no chance of it passing whatsoever.
It cannot become law. So he votes against all these, even though what does that mean? It means he's preserving Obamacare. And yet I try to explain that to Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, which I'm sure his colleague, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader has tried to do, and yet it doesn't get anywhere.
So some of these conservatives are, I think, mindlessly overprincipled or insistent about their principles. If you didn't make compromises, if you didn't think of your party as a team, then it's going to cause problems. Democrats think of themselves as a team. Most Republicans don't.
One reason Democrats have trouble winning elections is that they aren't conservative. Successful Democrats seem to go to great lengths to make themselves out to be more conservative than they actually are, perhaps less liberal than they actually are. And sometimes it works, but a lot of times it doesn't. And they divide up the party between identity groups.
You know, when I hear we have the feminists, and let's see, here we have the African-Americans over here in the Hispanic. Oh, and then they're the union people. We can't, you know, and there are all these slots. They're pretty divided.
The truth is, though, when it comes to being in the minority trying to thwart Trump and Republicans in Washington now, they're doing a pretty good job. What's your prediction on tax reform? Are Republicans going to finally get their act together? Are they going to fall apart yet again?
Well, I worry about them falling apart again, because in this time, they're really organized the White House, the Treasury Department, and Republican leaders in Congress, particularly the people, the Republicans who know a lot about taxes. Paul Ryan, the Speaker, is one of those. So they look like they're primed and have the votes. Cutting taxes is the essential Republican issue, and yet it could fall apart.
It wouldn't take many Republicans insisting that it's not a flat tax. And without a flat tax, he's not voting for it. I think there may be other issues like that, but that's a perfect example. And so Republicans could lose it.
They really ought to win this. And I think they have a better than 50-50 chance of doing so, but not much better than 50-50. We'll see. If they can't win this, then they think so.
I think so. I'm going to need to look for new careers. Fred Barnes, thanks for joining us on the Confab. I always enjoy being on the Confab.
And now joining us on the Confab, Associate Editor Ethan Epstein. Ethan, welcome. Thank you. You're here to talk about Cuba policy.
Can we say Cuba or do we have to say Cuba? I'm going to say Cuba because it's fun. I don't know if it's mandatory, but it sure is fun. All right.
Well, it's the only fun thing going on with regard to Cuba policy at the moment, which is the US just kicked out 15 Cuban. See, I told you it's fun. So just kicked out 15 island diplomats in what has been a baffling and longstanding issue that has marred this effort to normalize relations between the US and Cuba. Yes.
So as our listeners probably remember, it was just a couple of years ago that we even reestablished our diplomatic relations with Cuba. There was a very long- You said Cuba. I know. I know.
I want to keep a straight face while giving this little silly little quiz. I'm just going to go with Cuba. It was only a couple of years ago that we even reestablished diplomatic ties. There was basically a five decade deep freeze.
The President Obama towards the end of his reign attempted to get a date on going. And part of that was the reestablishment of diplomatic ties. So we reopened our embassy in Havana. They reopened their embassy here.
Things seem to be going okay for a couple of years ago until this year where our diplomats, and not exclusively our diplomats, some Cuban diplomats, or I'm sorry, some Canadian diplomats, who have long been on happy terms. That's right. They experienced the same thing too. And it was, it appears to be some sort of audio attack on the diplomats.
The diplomats were suffering dizziness, hearing loss, and perhaps nausea, all sorts of irreversible hearing loss. Yeah, that's the sickest part of this is it appears to have permanently damaged these people hearing. And I can speak a little confessionally now. I actually have tinnitus myself, and I know what a horrible affliction that is.
So this is actually pretty serious attack on these people. Now, if the CIA knows exactly what was the cause of this affliction, they're not letting on at this point. Nobody is. So the Cuban government is actually denying any involvement in it whatsoever.
We're not, we're playing our clothes, our cards pretty close to the vest too. But I think it's a tell that we've both removed some of our diplomats and kicked some of theirs out. That suggests to me that we actually know about some involvement on their part. And short of actually accusing the Cuban government of malicious behavior, the US instead has accused the Cuban government of not sufficiently protecting the health of America.
Precisely. And I mean, that's actually a reasonable course of action to take because it's the responsibility of the host country to protect diplomats. As you know, our office is, for example, right by the residents of the Russian ambassador, and that home is guarded by US personnel. I mean, that's just part of the arrangement that you have.
What's the best guess at this point about what actually did the hearing damage and dizziness and other afflictions of the US personnel? It's unclear. You mean like what tool itself? You know, there seems to be some assumption that this was a listening device that was employing sonic waves.
Exactly. And that perhaps it was not intended to cause damage to American diplomats. But it was a powerful tool that the Cuban agents did not exactly know how to use without causing that. That'll teach them to buy, you know, Belarusian and Moldovan spy equipment or something.
No, it's certainly that seems possible. Although I would note that the attacks seem to coincide with the time that President Trump announced that he was actually going to backtrack on some of Obama's pro-cuba moves. So it's so cool. So it's a costable retaliation.
Yeah. So what comes next? Well, you know, as with Cuba, usually the 50-year pattern is no change happens next. I mean, it's utterly sclerotic regime.
I think the problem, you know, I understood the logic of Obama trying to change the calculus given that 50 years of embargo had not gotten Cuba to change. However, I think that we had a little more leverage than we could have used. We should have pressed the Cuban government to make reforms to make those changes. Hopefully we'll see the Trump administration do that.
And if not, I think we're going to go back into deep freeze. Well, let's hope the American diplomats heal and that their hearing is not permanently damaged. And in the meantime, be on the lookout for sonic wielding Cuban agents. Cuban agents.
Exactly. Even Epstein, associate editor of the Weekly Standard. Thanks for joining us on The Confab. Thanks so much.
That's it for The Confab this week. Be sure to tune in to The Confab every week. Just go to iTunes or Google Play for a free subscription or go to our website, WeeklyStandard.com. Thanks so much for listening.
I'm Eric Felton. Catch you next time.