I hope he forgives me for the headline. I am a big fan of Mr. Kondracke’s work on Special Report wiith Brit Hume, his Beltway Boys program, and Roll Call.

If you are a political news superfreak like me, I would highly recommend subscribing to Roll Call. It’s not cheap but it’s worth it. They cover lots of stories long before they make headlines anywhere else.

Yesterday. I had the honor of speaking at length with Mr. Kondracke. We talked about his long time friendship with Fred Barnes, Fox News and the MSM, his film career, the left’s hatred of George Bush, illegal immigration, and of course a little bit about blogs.

Here is our interview:

TUA: OK, my first question is, how long have you been a journalist now?

Mort: Well it depends on when you count. I first had a real job for a real newspaper in 1954 for the Joliet Harold News in Joliet IL, writing sports. Which, by the way, is the same job that Bob Novak had when he was in high school.

TUA: For the same paper?

Mort: Same paper.

TUA: So you’re a sports fan then?

Mort: I’m a sort of a sports fan. I can’t say that I’m a rabid sports fan. Novak is a rabid sports fan. Fred Barnes is a rabid sports fan. I’m a sort of an intermittent sports fan.

TUA: Some people may not know this: You are more than just a journalist or a pundit. I have seen you in two movies: Dave and Presidents’ Day. I am curious how that came about/ Did they approach you, or do you just have a good agent?

Mort: No, no, it was via the McLaughlin group. They approached McLaughlin and it was, you know, cameo roles. Chris Matthews has been in endless movies. Larry King has probably been in even more. They use reporters, famous or semi-famous journalists to establish points in movies — you know, as newsmen — so that’s how we got on.

TUA: It looked like it would be kind of a fun thing to do.

Mort: It is fun; forever after, you sort of feel that you’re semi-immortalized.

TUA: I would like to ask you about your partner on the Beltway Boys, Fred Barnes. How long have you guys been friends now?

Mort: Well, let’s see. We covered the Ford White House togethe, so that would have been 1975, and then let’s see, I was a Nieman fellow at Harvard in 1973/74 and he became a Nieman fellow either the year after I was or two years afterwards. I mean, he and I have sort of been trailing along before and after each other, but we really became friends when he joined the McLaughlin group in about 1988. I think it was when Pat Buchanan quit to run for president one of his times. I can’t remember if that was ‘88 or ‘92. Fred was the chief substitute on the McLaughlin group for a long time, so it was during the mid to late ’80s that we really became good friends.

TUA: So you guys kind of came to respect each other and became friends over time.

Mort: Yeah, we’re about as close as you can get.

TUA: Now you guys don’t always agree on things, but you do agree quite a bit. Did you find yourselves agreeing more over time after you’d both been exposed to Washington politics for so long?

Mort: No. We’re different. You know, he’s a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. He’s a born-again Christian fundamentalist — I don’t know, evangelical, not fundamentalist but evangelical. I’m a moderate. I’m liberal on some things, conservative on foreign policy. I’m a moderate, you know, serious Christian, but I don’t believe every last word in the Bible, and I think Fred almost nearly does, and I think he’s much more conservative socially. I’m for stem cell research. I’m pro-choice, you know, I believe in evolution, all that stuff, and he doesn’t. And on economics I tend to be a little bit more liberal than he is. I’m basically a free marketer but I believe in estate taxes, I believe in raising the minimum wage. We agree on immigration, let’s see, he hasn’t met a tax cut he doesn’t like. I think it’s more important to have enough revenue for the government and not run up big deficits and have to borrow a lot of money. So there are things we disagree about.

In foreign policy we tend to agree. I mean, I think he thinks that the Iraq war was the right thing to do, [despite] the fact that there were no WMD found. I wonder whether it was the right thing to do. All I think now is that we need to win, so I’m for hanging in there. Whether it was the right thing to do under the circumstances I question, but now we have got to win, so I’m for it, I support the policy. So we have differences.

TUA: I was going to ask you about this later, but you’ve covered it pretty well. So it’s pretty safe to call you a moderate liberal — would that be fair?

Mort: Ahhh. no. I would say I’m a moderate moderate. I used to be a liberal once upon a time, but I stopped being a liberal a long time ago, so I wouldn’t even say I’m a moderate liberal. I would say I’m a moderate independent.

TUA: OK. You said on foreign policy you guys tend to agree more. Is 9/11 a factor in that agreement? Did 9/11 change your political views at all?

Mort: Nah. I have always been pretty — well not always — it was actually the Vietnam War, the end of the Vietnam War. that made me stop being a liberal most of all. I was covering the Ford White House when the North Vietnamese began their final offensive against South Vietnam, and I remember President Ford asking Congress for 600 million dollars to help the South Vietnamese fight their way, to save themselves, and Congress refused and the minute Congress refused the South Vietnamese army threw down their weapons and ran. And that was the end. And I was just so disgusted with the Democrats at that point that I said, you know, what do Democrats do but spend money? And to save an ally, they weren’t even willing to commit money, so that’s when I bailed. And even before then I thought the Soviet Union was a menace and that it had to be resisted, so I have been a foreign policy hawk for a long time.

TUA: OK.

Mort: And 9/11 — I’m appalled at how lots of liberals act as though 9/11 never happened. 9/11 was probably the scariest moment of my life. Even during the Cuban Missile Crisis I never — mistakenly — I never thought we were in any danger of actually having a nuclear war. Actually we were in danger but I didn’t know it or I didn’t think it. But the weeks after 9/11 when you didn’t know when you were going to get hit by another terrorist attack, possibly even worse than 9/11, was as scary a time as I have ever experienced.

TUA: I want to come back to this because I have some other questions related to this as well, but let me jump back a little bit here and ask you about Fox. Everyone else in the mainstream media loves to hate Fox. They’re accused of being a right wing news organization. Do you think its a fair characterization?

Mort: Well, I think it tilts to the right certainly in its choice of hosts. I mean, Bill O’Reilly is sort of a populist conservative. Sean Hannity is emphatically a conservative. You know Brit Hume is scrupulously fair when he is doing his Special Report, and the reporting on Special Report is scrupulously fair, and the news reporting at Fox is scrupulously fair, but when Brit is on the Sunday show, for example, there is no question that he is coming at things from the right. So I think that the balance of the programming, I think what Fox does is its fair and balanced, emphatically fair and balanced in its news presentation, but the commentators tend to be conservative and the whole package I think is fair and balanced in the sense that it balances out all the rest of the news media, which are emphatically left of center.

TUA: Which was my next question. So you think it is fair to say that ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and MSBC, they all lean left?

Mort: Right, You know, I don’t think they sit down and say, OK, how can we help the liberals today? I just think that the people who populate the mainstream news media tend to be liberals. You know they’re not raving liberals. They’re not far left liberals. But they have a mindset which is to the left of the center of the country and they don’t understand conservatives at all. They don’t understand what conservatives think about, and therefore they don’t present a fair picture of the world. Certainly not a balanced picture of the world.

TUA: And they don’t believe that they’re left of the rest of the country either.

Mort: No they don’t. They believe that they are right down the middle. But there are certain moments when you can tell. I remember myself, this is sort of ancient history, but when Jimmy Carter announced that he was a born-again Christian and that he didn’t favor publicly financed abortion; the mainstream media — and I was one of them — gasped. They couldn’t believe that a Democratic candidate running for president would declare himself in the open a born-again Christian. They thought he was from Mars.

And similarly, I think, an example from last week is — if you looked at the whole treatment of NSA spying — this latest SWIFT story. the mainstream media acts as though George Bush is a greater danger to American liberty than Osama Bin Laden. And my favorite small example was the Washington Post’s coverage on Friday. The New York Times beat the Washington Post on Friday to this story, so the Post had to do a quick hurry-up job and try to catch up. On the basis of limited information, they had an interview with somebody from the Treasury Department and they had to wing it after that. And the piece was so tendentious that [it implied] this was all part of a vast enterprise by the Bush administration to restrict American liberty. It was almost like a left wing rant. And it came out of their gut. I think it was a revelatory moment about the world view of the mainstream media.

TUA: And it was presented as a news piece, not an opinion piece.

Mort: Oh absolutely. It was a news piece. Front page, first lead article in the Washington Post on Friday.

TUA: I’m going to come back to this as well. On another point here, I know you appear on Hugh Hewitt’s show. Have you ever heard him ask a journalist who he voted for in the last election or even the last time they voted for a Republican?

Mort: Ahh. No.

TUA: They never answer the question. I honestly cannot recall any normal person ever refusing to tell me who they voted for.

Mort: Well, now journalists tend to want to be seen as nonpartisan. I think it’s ridiculous that some of them say they won’t even vote in order to maintain their appearance of nonpartisanship. But I can see not advertising who you voted for. I’m a little reluctant to say who I have voted for.

TUA: OK, and that kind of goes to my next question; as news consumer, I just don’t believe there is such a thing as an objective detached journalist. I think as you mentioned earlier where Brit Hume tries to be fair, Tim Russert tries to be fair but you can see Brit is coming from the right and Tim is coming from the left. I think any consumer of news who, again, is trying to be fair, and of course all of us consumers, have our own world view as well that clouds that coverage.

Mort: Yeah, Sure. I agree with that. But I think that some journalists do better than others in compensating or disciplining themselves. It’s a discipline; that’s what it is.

TUA: Right. Trying to balance your own opinions to be fair. So I take it with that last answer you won’t tell me who you voted for in the last presidential election.

Mort: I’d just as soon not. Yeah, I’d just as soon not.

TUA: OK. Going back to what you said earlier, and I heard you say this on the Beltway Boys this weekend too, when you were talking about the New York Times with this latest story exposing the Swift program; you said “these people think that GWB is more of a danger to American liberty than Al Qaeda is. It’s crazy.” The question is why do you think some people hate George Bush so much?

Mort: Wow (long pause). I frankly can’t capture it myself because it’s so out of sight. I have to say that there were people who hated Bill Clinton with similar passion. You know there was nothing that Bill Clinton could do that was OK. Now I can understand it better with Bill Clinton because he so violated their sexual mores. You know, he was practically the poster child for the 1960s. And the conservatives who think that the 1960s ruined America looked at Bill Clinton and they said, “Aha, this is it and now he’s become President of the United States, and how could such a thing be?” So I sort of understand where that’s coming from.

In the Bush case I think that it’s partly the fact that he is a born-again Christian, and some of them fear born-again Christians are going to try and impose their belief system on them, they are going to impose their belief system on the country, and as a result women aren’t going to be able to get abortions, and we’re not going to be able to do stem cell research. And I gotta say there is some truth to the worry about that. I mean, I do think that right wing Christians if they had their way would impose on other people their morality to the point where things like stem cell research would not be able to go forward and you wouldn’t be able to teach evolution in the schools and stuff like that, and I think it would be a bad thing. So that’s part of it.

TUA: Do you think…? (NOTE: I tried to interrupt him here to challenge him on his assertions about “Right Wing Christians” but Mr. Kondracke was on a roll. If you have ever seen him Fox’s Special Report or Fox News Sunday you know he’s hard to stop when he’s rolling and I didn’t feel I had the authority of a Brit Hume to stop him)

Mort: I think part of it is the 2000 election. I mean, I think that they think Gore was legitimately, well maybe not some of them, think that Bush stole the election. I don’t credit that for a minute but that’s part of it too.
Part of it is sort of Texas style. Part of it is he won’t ever admit a mistake. You know they just don’t like him. They just don’t like his style. And a lot of it’s got to do with his foreign policy, which was unilateralist before the Iraq war and here he goes, he gets the country into a war, and I think the war has got a lot to do with it, but it’s far from all of it.

Beyond that I have sat and listened to liberals denouncing Bush — that he’s a liar, and on every point it’s just arguable. Our politics has become so polarized that nobody ever makes a mistake anymore. Nobody else is wrong about something.

TUA: Right. You’re a criminal.

Mort: You’ve got to demonize your opponent. So I think that’s what’s happening here.

TUA: Now I am speaking in generalities here, but it seems to me the foundation of most of the complaints coming from the left — we need to try or release the Gitmo prisoners, the NSA program is Illegal, Bush Lied people died, etc — is the left just honestly does not believe we are in a war.

And the first question is, would you agree that this is the source of the hostile and over-the-top rhetoric? And second, do you have any explanation as to why they don’t believe we are in a war?

Mort: I think they believe that we’re in a war, but that we can fight this war without any invasion of anybody’s privacy. But I’m not even sure about that. A lot of this has to do with distrust for George Bush. George Bush has expanded, as a matter of policy, executive authority and he is given to excessive secrecy. I’ll give you one example. One of the first things he did when he became president was to deny historians access to presidential libraries for a 25 year period. Expanding the amount of time for that stuff, and he gave the authority to do that to the sitting president. Now my guess about that is that he was trying to protect his father and records pertaining to his father’s involvement in the Iran/Contra scandal. But nonetheless that was a major, and I thought unnecessary, expansion of executive power. Now the Liberals look at everything George Bush does and he seems to be trying to expand executive power, and I think they so profoundly distrust him that things that another president — I mean, if Al Gore had been elected president on 9/11 and the NSA came to him and said we can track international phone calls from terrorists should we do it, he would have said absolutely. I don’t think Al Gore is such a dove that he wouldn’t have prosecuted a war against Al Qaeda. Now whether or not he would have invaded Afghanistan I don’t know. He might have just bombed.

TUA: Iraq, you mean?

Mort: Well, no. I mean Afghanistan right after 9/11. The liberals all say that they’re fine with Afghanistan, as a matter of fact they would increase the troop strength in Afghanistan, they think that Afghanistan is the true place to go fighting terrorism, that Bush expanded the war into Iraq, and Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror, and all it’s doing is expanding the number of terrorists. The bottom line is here that they do not think that we’re not in a war; it’s just that they so profoundly distrust George Bush that whatever means Bush wants to use to fight that war; if it arguably impinges on their morality, they find it equally offensive whether it’s Guantanamo or whatever. It’s a symbol of what an evil man George Bush is…And Dick Cheney.

TUA: Of course. Who really, in their opinion, controls the country.

Mort: Yeah. Because they don’t think George Bush is smart enough.

TUA: Now you and Fred also talked about Joe Lieberman facing a serious primary challenge from Ned Lamont, and how this was a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party. Now I am a JFK-Truman Democrat. Do you think people like me are the odd man out, or is a small minority of hard-core activists seizing control of the Democratic Party and forcing people like me to vote for Republicans?

Mort: Ahh. Yes, I do. I think that the company is dwindling. You just look at the polls and you see that 74% of Democrats want to declare a deadline; no, I’m sorry I don’t know that. I haven’t seen a [poll] question on a deadline, but my guess is that overwhelmingly Democrats would like to have a date certain for withdrawal. It was 74% of Democrats who believe that we should be out either immediately or within a year, and the rest of them — which leaves 25% — believe either that we should stay until the job is done, or don’t know. So you are in a distinct minority.

TUA: So you think, and this is another point I guess, I have become and I think most Americans have become very distrustful of poll questions like that. Because you see how it’s reported, and then occasionally we get to see how the question was worded and it seems that the questions are worded to get a certain answer. They’re not really, the pollsters are not really looking for honest answers.

Mort: Some are and some aren’t. A Gallup question is generally fairly asked, and an NBC/Wall Street Journal question is usually fairly asked, so you can’t just dismiss all polls, because they do say something, and on a question like this you can just tell from the atmosphere. You can tell from the way politicians are behaving that they’re representing their constituency… dovish-ness is the trope of the Democratic Party. And it’s because most Democrats are more dovish, or they’re multi-lateralists, they’re force-averse, and I don’t think those polls are wrong.

TUA: And now, switching gears, I have to ask about illegal immigration. Let me preface the question by saying, personally, I am in favor of greatly increasing legal immigration from Mexico and even offering them preference over immigrants from other parts of the world. Now, that said, I have heard you berate a couple talk radio hosts and heard you say several times that conservative talk radio has riled up their listeners into frenzy. And I agree with you in part, but don’t you think it’s fair to say that most Americans want border enforcement that includes a fence?

Mort: Yes, you could pass border enforcement; I mean, everybody is in favor of stronger border enforcement. I don’t know anybody who is not in favor of stronger border enforcement, and the question is whether that’s all we’re going to do.

TUA: So you agree also that that extends to most Democrats as well as Republican voters?

Mort: Yeah… There may be some ultra-left Democrats or ultra-right Republicans… you know, there are some libertarians who basically believe in an absolutely free market in labor.

TUA: With open borders, right?

Mort: Open borders, so that’s not gonna happen and shouldn’t happen. And there may be some ultra-liberals, I don’t know if they’re ultra-liberals, but there are probably Hispanic activists who want to have Mexicans pour into the country and become the dominant population of the former Mexico.

TUA: There is definitely some of that.

Mort: Everybody in the basic American political system who’s an activist believes in stronger border enforcement.

TUA: So this is the problem with the comprehensive bill. We have heard this promise before. Don’t you think Americans are right to be skeptical of a comprehensive immigration bill being enacted before the government proves they are serious about securing our border?

Mort: Ahhh, Yeah, I guess so, I can understand why people would be skeptical, and they should be especially skeptical about a crackdown on employers. According to the Washington Post, there was a story in the Washington Post the other day that indicated that basically employer controls on illegal employment have just vanished.

TUA: Yup. A couple of last quick questions and I know I have taken a lot of your time here.

Mort: Just to finish this out, though, the reason for a comprehensive bill is that you want to have [it], and I can’t believe George Bush is not going to try to control the border. You know he — as a trade for getting a comprehensive immigration bill — he’s not gonna wink or cross his fingers when he says I’m gonna enforce border control. He’s going to enforce the border. If Congress demands that he build a fence, he’ll build a fence. I don’t think a fence is the most attractive thing the United States ought to do, but virtual fences and barriers, and stepped up border enforcement, I’m absolutely for it.

Employers need more workers. And what are you going to do with 11 million people? You’re keeping them here in a state of illegality where they can be exploited. You know these are very hard-working people. It’s not as though they are a bunch of people who are doing nothing but sapping up welfare.

TUA: No, I agree with you 100 percent, and that’s the part from the right that’s hard to understand. Number one, there is no way we are going to send 11 million people out of the country. It’s just not going to happen. And number two, they are hard working people, and their government’s been pushing them out, our government has been pulling them in. We all share in the blame of them being here.

Mort: And I would add one other thing. I think it’s the federal government’s responsibility to pay for local areas when they are overburdened in their hospitals, or their schools or something like that. I think the federal government ought to have a program of paying localities what it costs to bear the burden of the failure of government policy.

TUA: Because they failed to enforce the border, it’s their responsibility to pay for the social costs. And one more quick thing, and I do want to move on, but this is the other problem for me and I think for a lot of people. George Bush has this guest worker program and anyone who has ever seen a guest worker program anywhere in any country knows there is no such thing. They are going to be here forever.

Mort: You know, that’s not true. In Canada — and I didn’t know this until this last weekend — in Canada they have guest worker programs that everybody is required to go home. When your work permit runs out you’re not welcome anymore. You gotta leave. There is a way you could do something like that. The way the current bill is fashioned, I’m not even sure what the Senate bill provides, I think you can get two renewable 6-year work permits or maybe it’s two 3-year renewables, and then you can apply to become a permanent resident, but theoretically there ought to be a plan for true temporary work permits where you’d come, and you would work, and then you would leave.

TUA: Again, it just doesn’t seem realistic. I grew up on the border in San Diego and when you look at where people are living in Mexico versus the poorest immigrant worker here, there is no comparison. I can’t see any reason why someone would go back to living in squalor once they have been living here.

Mort: Well, that’s a question of the law. It’s a question of what kind of system you set up. The liberals all hate the Bracero program, which was a temporary program, but I’m not exactly clear on why, but if you wanted to do that you could do it.

TUA: Anyway, let’s move on. Just a couple of last quick questions here; do you read any blogs, and if so, which ones do you read?

Mort: You know, I don’t read a lot of blogs. I need to read more blogs, but there are so many blogs and I just can not keep up with blogs, but I will try yours.

TUA: And there are always more, every day.

Mort: There are so many blogs; I just don’t know which ones to read. What I get on my computer is an inundation of stuff from politicians and all kinds of things, and I tend to read what’s in my inbox. And I go to Realclearpolitics.com and I read columns and stuff like that. And I guess what I ought to do is link from there to their blogs. They do link to blogs.

TUA: Well you are on Hugh’s show. Hugh’s blog is a good place to start as well, and you can fan out from there.

What do you think the news media will look like in 2 years, 5 years, or even 10? Do you think blogs and talk radio will continue to get bigger while network news and newspapers continue to get smaller?

Mort: That’s the way it looks, I think that there’s… I cannot believe that we will ever arrive at a stage where there is not a meeting place for the whole population like a network news show. It could be a cable channel just as easily where, if there is a big national event, everybody doesn’t just flip on NBC or something like that. We are getting less and less of that, that’s for sure. I don’t think it will go out of business. I don’t think network news will go out of business, I just think it will shrink.

TUA: What do you think will happen to magazines like Time and Newsweek?

Mort: Ahhh. I don’t know.

TUA: Because the news cycle is so short now, where blogs can instantaneously react.

Mort: No, I think that there is still a market for in-depth how did something happen, what is a national trend? If I had one major criticism about the cable news channels, it’s that they do nothing in depth. Nobody ever does a real documentary, nobody ever investigates anything consistently. It’s basically news and talk. And there is very little in the way of color or beauty or anything like that. It’s all grab and run. So you know there is a need for a New Yorker magazine, and there would be a need for the Atlantic if they could ever figure out how to do it. So I think that there is a future for magazines.

TUA: OK.

Mort: There is always going to be a market for rich reporting, and I wish that more of it went on in cable news.

TUA: Are you familiar with the new integration of talk radio with a web portal / blog portal that Salem communications is doing with Townhall.com. Hugh Hewitt is involved with that.

Mort: No. How does this work?

TUA: Well, all of the talk radio hosts on Salem — Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, Mike Gallager, Bill Bennett — will now also be writing original pieces and blogs for townhall.com, and they will be referring people back and forth to each other as well as the website. It will be a base for conservative activists. Teach them how to circulate petitions and contact their representatives. Kind of like — and you may not be familiar with it — the Daily KOS, which is the left wing guy, doing something similar to that but integrating it with talk radio.

Mort: That’s interesting. The left wingers sort of got the march on the internet, whereas the right wing got the march on talk radio, so the left has yet to get anywhere on talk radio. So, I see that the right is getting internet savvy.

TUA: That’s all I have, Mr. Kondracke. Thank you so much for all of your time today.

Mort: OK. Thank you.

End of interview

**Note**

A huge thank you to Robert who checked the spelling and grammar for me.