Q&A: David Rubenstein on the presidents, and George W. Bush’s theory of populism

Ben Smith: You write about how different these people are who became president, and what a diverse group it is in a certain way. I was curious what they have in common. Why would anybody want this job?

David Rubenstein: Well, look, obviously, if you’re going to be a leader of any organization, you have to have a certain leadership interest or a certain willingness to kind of put yourself ahead of other people and say, Look, I’m competent enough to lead this organization, this newspaper, this nonprofit, this university, this presidency, this country. Well, they obviously have certain ambition. Now you can argue Calvin Coolidge wasn’t the most ambitious person in the world. He didn’t really like the job. He did run for for Governor of Massachusetts. He did put himself forward in that way, and obviously put himself forward to be president one of the campaigns. So I think they have that in common. They also have the ability to, I think, communicate reasonably well to other people what they want.

The key to being a leader is you have to communicate to your followers what you want, and you do that through either writing well, speaking well, or leading by example. And all of these people have some skill set in either writing reasonably well, talking reasonably well, or doing things that other people will follow. And therefore they lead by example. I think they all the ones in the book generally have, I would say, you know, reasonably good family lives. They’re all complicated, as you probably know, no politician’s family life is perfect, unlike everybody else’s family life, of course. And you know, all the presidents you know had spouses, except one

But all of them have, I think, got a lot out of their family life, either their children or their spouse. All of them really wanted to do something to help the country, make the country better in some way. Maybe some were better at it than others.

Ben: The Lincoln chapter, you write in passing about how narrow his election was. There is a sense here now that our very, very divided elections produce a weaker federal government, a weaker president — that it’s been a long time since anybody had an electoral mandate to govern. Do you think that’s overrated?

David: It might be overrated. Look, if we had a parliamentary system, we wouldn’t do what we do in the House of Representatives. House of Representatives, let’s say the Democrats, Republicans, are ahead by five votes, yet they run as if they’re ahead by, they operate as if they’re ahead by 50 votes. And the presidency is somewhat that way. Even if you win narrowly, you feel you’ve got a mandate and you don’t have to put a lot of people from the opposite party in your cabinet. So the other day, Kamala Harris got a lot of news by saying, I’m going to put one Republican in my cabinet. Wow. Suppose she wins by 1% is one Republican enough? Why not have three or four Republicans? Or the same would be true if the Republican got elected. We don’t tend to do that. But also, when you think about it, when you get somebody who won overwhelmingly, and they theoretically, by what you’ve just said, should govern by being very strong, they often have had weaknesses that were such that their governance post their very big landslide victory didn’t work well. Obviously, Nixon won 49 states. Didn’t survive that term. Reagan won, what, 49 states as well, and he had Iran-Contra second term.

Some presidents who had very, very narrow victories managed to be seen as strong leaders. John Kennedy being a good example, he barely won the election, more or less. It’s hard to say, in my view, I’m not sure that winning narrowly means you’re a weaker president, or winning overwhelmingly means you’re going to be a better or stronger president, because it just hasn’t worked out that way.

Ben: You write about the expansion of the power and grandeur of the presidency, first with Wilson and then with Franklin Roosevelt. Do you think it would be healthy for the United States to shrink that office back down?

David: Well, remember, if you shrink the office to less power, then you’re really going to have a hard time getting almost anything done in the government. Because look, right now, with a reasonably powerful president, and he’s still the most important figure in the world, presidents rarely can get everything they want through Congress. Congress still feels that it’s a truly equal branch and doesn’t really want to succumb to just what the president wants to do. We’ve rarely had times in your lifetime or mine where the president was so powerful that he could get almost anything he wanted through Congress doesn’t happen that way. He got 535 members of Congress, each of whom thinks they should be president.

Ben: The part of the book that kind of stuck with me most was something George W. Bush said to you about the financial crisis of 2007:

I listened to (Hank) Paulson and (Ben) Bernanke and spent your money to bail out the guys who created the instruments in the first place, which is an absolute political disaster,” Bush said. “You wonder why populism is on the rise. It starts with taking taxpayers’ money and giving it to the powerful. It really irritated a lot of Americans, and they haven’t gotten over it yet. That’s just part of it; there’s a lot of other reasons why. But we’ve had candidates say, “You’re mad, I’m going to make you madder.” As opposed to, “You’re mad, I have some solutions to make you less mad.” We’re kind of in the madder stage, where people are exploiting the anger as opposed to dealing with it like leaders should.

Do you agree with his diagnosis of this political moment?

David: George W. Bush, although he went to Harvard Business School, was not basically a Wall Street fan, needless to say. And when the financial crisis came, he couldn’t believe that his Secretary of Treasury and everybody were telling him, Ben Bernanke, that they have to do this kind of bailout, because he thought this is basically bailing out the banks for the mistakes they made. But eventually he became convinced that if he didn’t do that, the economy would collapse. So I think to a large extent, what was going on in that period of time was that Hank Paulson did not want to be Secretary of Treasury. He had to be importuned several times to take the job. And in the end, he took it because he was assured that he could run economic policy, wasn’t going to be run out of the White House, and therefore Bush tended to honor that commitment and basically delegated everything to Paulson. And so Bush went along with what Paulson wanted. Though I think George Bush’s Midland Texas instincts were the opposite of what his administration actually did.

Ben: You’re such a good interviewer, but you’re an elusive interviewee. Do you agree with Bush’s diagnosis, that, like the root of contemporary populism is that bailout?

David: I don’t really know that that’s the case, because populism has been around for a long time, and I’m not sure that that bailout by itself did. I think what my own view of what’s going on now is something along these lines, that the United States in 1960 for example, was a white country. It was 90% white, 8% black, 2% Hispanic. That was it. And around that time, and you could say the 1950s as well, when the population percentages were roughly the same, people who were white, who were not college educated, kind of saw the country as their country.

It was started by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, and they kind of thought that they were descendants of that, and this was their country. Then the world changed, and as globalization came about, many of these people in the Midwest, the South, the kind of people that JD Vance has written about. They kind of feel they were losing power. Their country was going away, and as more and more percentage of the population became non-white Christian, they felt they were losing more and more of their power and more and more of their influence.

And so today, for example, 60% of the US adult population is not college educated. Those people are not doing as well as the college educated people, and as globalization has made our economy much different than it was before, manufacturing jobs have gone offshore and so forth. I think that is the root of populism, that shrinking of power, and many people fear that it’s going to the elites on Wall Street or in Hollywood, or California or other elite kind of cities. I think that’s kind of what’s been going on. What Trump has been able to do brilliantly, from his point of view, is to capture that. Despite the fact that Donald Trump is not a poor person, didn’t work his way up from nothing, and lives a lifestyle that’s not one that a lot of his constituents could ever dream of. He’s been able to make those people feel like he is one of them, and it’s a masterful job that he’s done in that respect, because he’s probably not one of them, but he’s made them feel that the white, Anglo-Saxon country that they grew up in or they dreamed about is now moving away, and that’s his core base.

Ben: I’m curious where you see Barack Obama as a historical figure. Is he overrated? Is he underrated?

David: Well, as I tried to say in the book, he’s going to be remembered for two things. Being the first African American president…. But I’d say Obama also will be remembered for Obamacare, which only passed the House by, I think, one vote. And you think about it, remember when Trump was running for president the first time, he said, I was going to get rid of Obamacare, and he was railing against it. I’m not sure if you ask him, ‘What specifically would you like to change in Obamacare, or what do you specifically object to?’ Whether he would have had a really good answer, but he railed against it, and then now he doesn’t talk about it. Why? Because it’s now accepted. So Obamacare is like Medicare. It’s now part of our social fabric, and isn’t going to change. And therefore Obama deserved credit for it. I think it probably was prescient to think that he should get it out of the way early in the administration, before he became unpopular.

Ben: Did you leave the conversations in this book with any surprises?

David: Well, I guess I’m surprised at how people are still interested in the presidency, like, people write so many books about it. You know, more books have been written, about eight about Abraham Lincoln, any other person who’s ever been on the face of the earth, other than Jesus Christ. It is amazing. It’s amazing how the presidency fascinates people and that’s something I’ve always taken away, and also how presidents, when you get to know them, they have the same human frailties and worries and concerns that other humans do. If you spend time interviewing presidents, and you probably have done that, you can see that they are, you know, they’re humans, and they make a lot of mistakes, and they, you kind of wonder how this person gets to be president.

Ben: What do, you know, we now have Kamala Harris, Donald Trump, two major party nominees, election couple months out. What do you think of the process that put those two people on the ballot?

David: Well, Donald Trump is an amazing phenomenon. He is the nominee three straight times. I don’t think the Republican Party has ever nominated anybody three straight times to be president of the United States, and this is even after he was indicted many times and all the events of January 6, nominated three times. So he obviously has political skills that were unseen by people like you and me who are probably part of the Eastern establishment. We didn’t see those political skills. We didn’t take them seriously when he said he was going to run, and he was one of 17 people.

I interviewed him one time at the Economic Club of Washington when he was thinking of running. It was December of ‘14, he came down. We had 800 people, and when I interviewed him in the green room, he said, ‘Ask me any question, but ask me for sure if I’m going to run for president.’ I said, ‘President, president of what?’ He said, ‘President of the United States.’ I said, ‘Come on, you’re not going to be president.’ He said, ‘I know, it’ll help my brand.’ Because I don’t think he really thought he would be president of the United States, and then obviously turned out to be more skilled in the debates and other things than other people.

In Kamala Harris’ case, I think she never, never thought this would happen, because she didn’t think Biden was going to pull out.

Ben: You write a bit about the role of ex-presidents. Should we pay them and ask more of them?

David: Well, we do pay them.

Ben: Or pay them better?

David: No, I wouldn’t say that, because presidents get paid staggering sums. You know, in other countries, as I say, in some part of the book. You make your money while you’re president. You can get paid a lot of money, obviously, illegally, but in our country, we pay our presidents when they leave. So, you know, it was very unusual at the time, when Dwight Eisenhower left, he got a book deal that was thought to be very attractive. He made a lot of money doing that. Truman did the same. But that’s basically all they did, they would write their memoirs, and that was how they made their money. Ulysses S Grant made money writing the most famous memoirs. Today we have, when Gerald Ford left the presidency, he went on corporate boards, that shocked people. Ronald Reagan made $2 million in one speech in Japan, that shocked people. But today, nobody is shocked if you say somebody, Barack Obama charges a million dollars a speech, his wife charges $750,000 a speech. Nobody’s shocked because, you know, it’s just accepted as part of the system now that ex presidents are going to make money.

My former boss (Jimmy Carter), for all of his flaws and weaknesses, never actually got into that. He didn’t. He never charged for speeches, and he made his money writing books. But that doesn’t mean he’s better or worse than the others, it’s just different.