So it turns out that the quotes that CBS released on Friday were actually the only things approaching news in the big Greenspan 60 Minutes interview Sunday night. Other than getting to see him at RFK with a Nats cap on his head, and learning that he wooed Andrea Mitchell by asking her to read a paper he had written on the Sherman Antitrust Act, there was nothing else to be learned from watching the show.
I am very curious as to what else he actually said to Leslie Stahl, though, given that the TV interview was so obviously spliced from a much, much longer conversation. I know is true of all interviews we media people publish or broadcast, but it seemed especially true of this one. Clearly the producers at 60 Minutes thought there was only so much on financial matters that their viewers could take (maybe 45 seconds?), so they just crammed together a bunch of newsmaking quotes with no real context or explanation, then cut to him walking hand in hand with Andrea.
But even the unbroadcast portions of the Stahl interview must not have addressed what is turning into the big news from Greenspan’s book–that he sorta feels bad about having given his endorsement to George Bush’s tax cuts and that he thought Bill Clinton was swell. They would have aired that if they had it, no?
I’ll go into more depth about this when I get my hands on the book Monday, but having talked to Greenspan a couple of times in the early 2000s, I can report this: He simply didn’t think the Bush deficits were big enough to matter all that much. (In fact, as a share of GDP, they’ve been smaller than the deficits of the 1980s and early 1990s.)
The deficit that Greenspan thought mattered was the far larger looming shortfall in Social Security and Medicare (here’s a recent rundown from my new pal Alan Sloan). While he never said this outright, I suspect that Greenspan thought Bush might actually address these long-run deficit problems, and therefore deserved to be cut some slack on the short-run shortfall.
But Bush didn’t, beyond jabbering fruitlessly and disingenuously about Social Security reform for a couple of years there. (Yes, he gave up on it because of Democratic opposition, but I don’t think he ever made a serious attempt to address that opposition.) And that was Greenspan’s big miscalculation.