John Dickerson: Should Obama pulverize conservatives?

When CBS announced in April that John Dickerson would become the host of its venerable interview show Face the Nation, many conservatives saw that as one more sign of big media’s leftist bias. Breitbart’s Big Journalism website referenced a column Dickerson wrote early in 2013 and headlined its story, “New ‘Face the Nation’ Host Urged Obama to ‘Pulverize … Destroy … Delegitimize GOP.’”

The story told of how “Dickerson demanded Obama stop working with Republicans and declare war” and quoted his column at Slate: “The president who came into office speaking in lofty terms about bipartisanship and cooperation can only cement his legacy if he destroys the GOP. If he wants to transform American politics, he must go for the throat. … Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents.”

Since I’ve written several books about media bias it would not surprise me to hear most Washington reporters offering such advice, but Dickerson is different. I interviewed him before students at Patrick Henry College, and there he declared his faith in Christ and explained it coherently. So I asked him about his infamous column.

Right before President Obama’s second inaugural you apparently offered him some infamous advice: To achieve the legacy you want, pulverize your opponents. That piece was not intended as actual advice. We knew two things about President Obama going into his second term. One is that he’s highly ambitious and sees himself in the Reagan/FDR mold. This is not a person who thinks of himself and has doubts. He wanted to achieve greatness.

An additional spot on Mount Rushmore … Exactly. At one point he thought his route to greatness was to rewire Washington and create a new bipartisanship and all of that. At the beginning of his second term he, and particularly his advisers, said we can no longer work with Republicans. So if that’s true, his route to greatness was to take advantage of what he saw as the weaknesses in his opponents and try to destroy them. Remember, his ambitions are vast. He’s not just trying to pass a bill, but to rewire and change American politics for generations. If you look at his second inaugural address, he doesn’t say, “I’d like to do a few, small things.” He talks about the sweep of history.

So, the opposite of Bill Clinton, who when chastised plays small ball. Obama goes bigger. Yes. I was trying to say that if you look at Obama’s goals and ambitions and the way he thinks about Republicans, this is the only way he’s going to go. Obviously, I didn’t do it beautifully enough that everybody was saying, “Wow, that’s a great theory.” People thought, “This is the advice you’re trying to give.”

An editor took out a line? I had a line pretty high up that said: This is not advice. In the article I had called it a math problem: If you take the following things this is the only conclusion you could reach. And that was taken out because he felt like it was obvious to the reader.

Which it wasn’t. It clearly wasn’t. There are a lot of people who saw that and thought, “Of course. This is the natural view of people who write and cover politics.”

See also “John Dickerson: Thinking about press bias.”