Intro (0:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.

Mitch Daniels (0:16):
Greetings, our guest today on the latest installment of the Future of Liberty is a man who has led one of the great lives of public citizenship, accumulated more titles than we’re going to use here. I think I’m safe in saying that he’s a friend and would like to be referred to as Lamar. Lamar Alexander, welcome and thank you for spending some time with us.

Lamar Alexander (0:36):
Thanks, Mitch. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Daniels (00:39):
He is also the author of an important new book. It’s called The Education of a Senator, and he chronicles this astonishing life in which he has known and worked with 10 presidents. Very few people in American history could say that. So let’s start there, Lamar.
You mentioned that John Meacham, one of our finest current historians, says there’s a portrait test when we think about presidents. So explain what he meant by that, and what comes to your mind when you see some of these portraits?

Lamar Alexander (01:15):
Well, what he meant was that when you look at a presidential portrait, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? The first word, first sentence. For example, with Nixon, it might be Watergate. Could have been China. He was on his way to being the most consequential president in recent times, I think, until Watergate derailed him. George W. Bush, I think of most normal. I mean, he welcomed being born on third base. He used it as an excuse to steal home instead of for a therapy session, and he was a very comfortable and decent person as a president. Clinton; best politician.
Reagan; by use of language, temperament, character, demeanor, best suited to the job, I think. You would probably know that better than anybody. One of the things I admired about him was, like Lincoln, he brought in his rivals, very experienced people, the vice president who’d run against him, Bush, his campaign manager, Jim Baker, then later on, Howard Baker, who had tried to run against him, and because he had them around him, he was a better president.

Mitch Daniels (02:33):
Say a little more about Nixon as the most consequential president. I thought that was an interesting observation, but not everybody would immediately make it.

Lamar Alexander (02:43):
Well, he didn’t turn out to be, but he was on his way to being. I mean, the opening to China. We forget how radical that was at the time for a conservative Republican. He presided over the end of the Vietnam War. He got rid of the draft, got rid of the gold standard. He created the Environmental Protection Agency. The clean air and clean water laws passed under him. He had a very talented senior staff, talented junior staff.

Mitch Daniels (03:17):
Including a young Lamar Alexander.

Lamar Alexander (03:19):
Well, I was there. Elizabeth Dole was there. Senator Blumenthal from Connecticut was there. Pat Moynihan brought in some whiz kids from Harvard, including Checker Finn, Chris DeMuth. Those were the kids. The senior guys were people like Pat Moynihan, a Democrat, Henry Kissinger. So he had a really talented team around him until Watergate just blew it up.

Mitch Daniels (03:43):
An observation similar to Meacham’s, Clare Boothe Luce used to say that every president gets one sentence in history. She told Reagan, “Yours, Mr. President, will be, he’s won the Cold War without firing a shot.” I always asserted Reagan was that rare two-sentence president because he also restored the American economy and morale, which was an unusual achievement.

Lamar Alexander (04:09):
Yeah. And he knew what he wanted to do. My late wife, when I wanted to run for governor the second time, she said, “Now wait a minute. You’ve lost once. I want to know why you’re running. What do you hope to accomplish before we run again?” Which is really the hardest question in politics. If you asked Reagan that, he could answer it in a minute. He’d say to put a harness on the Soviet Union and a harness on Washington.

Mitch Daniels (04:38):
That’s right.

Lamar Alexander (04:39):
I did ask George H. W. Bush that one time, and it flustered him. He thought I was being cute with him because I think he felt like he was just destined to do good for his country and he didn’t have an agenda.

Mitch Daniels (04:51):
Right. No, it was a moment that caught my attention in your book when, Honey, your wife, asked you that. I’ve counseled so many young people who are on fire to be involved in politics. First, you have to answer the why question, and I should not be in the answer. It shouldn’t be about “I” have a passion and so forth.

Lamar Alexander (05:13):
She said, “Why is this good for the state? What do you want to accomplish?” And people said, “Well, that’s an easy answer.” It’s not. It’s hard.

Mitch Daniels (05:21):
Maybe she should have run.

Lamar Alexander (05:22):
Maybe she should have. I remember Roger Mudd asked Ted Kennedy that question, and he stammered around for 21 minutes. And it ended his career. And as a presidential candidate, he then became a very effective senator.

Mitch Daniels (05:34):
So let’s talk about the Senate. You saw it as a close hand as a young person and then later served a sentence there.

Lamar Alexander (05:45):
Well, that’s the attitude of most governors toward the Senate.

Mitch Daniels (05:47):
Right. I don’t think it’s too harsh to say that today’s Senate doesn’t stack up too well against some of those, not all, but some of those we have seen in the past. But am I being nostalgic when I say that we’ve had days with a greater degree of statesmanship?

Lamar Alexander (06:12):
Oh, no, we have. The Senate is a remarkable institution when it works, but it’s like our country. Senators have a lot of freedoms. A lot of things happen by unanimous consent, if you can imagine that, getting a hundred people from Rand Paul to Bernie Sanders to agree to open the Senate at 10:00. If one grumpy senator says, “No, you don’t.” You wait until he gets over it.
So you learn restraint, and you learn to accommodate other people on some things, sometimes big things, which is the way our country is supposed to operate too, but we’ve lost some of that in the country, and we’ve lost some of that in the Senate.

Mitch Daniels (06:51):
The Senate was set up very purposely to be the deliberative body; longer terms and rules now that it is set for itself that slow things down. Is it still well-suited to a digital age in which things change instantly and constantly?

Lamar Alexander (07:10):
Well, none of us have learned how to deal with this digital democracy we’ve been in since about 2008. I mean, it’s affected sports, news, politics, the Senate, everything. So the answer’s no, it’s not. It takes a long time, but it still works. And the advantage of a Senate is when you do agree on something, when you get 60 out of the 100 to allow something to come up, and you vote on it, you get something most senators can vote for, and most Americans can accept.
As a university president, you’ll remember the FAFSA, the form that 20 million families fill out every year to get federal grants or loans. That thing was ridiculous. It was 108 questions long. I worked on it probably 15 years, finally got it reduced to a handful of questions. It took a long time, but now that it’s done, it won’t be changed. It’ll be permanent.
Same with a lot of the other things that I worked on. They took a long time, but because it forced a consensus, it forced bipartisanship, they’re not going to come along and change it in a couple of years like would happen if just a majority could change it every time the winds blew a different way.

Mitch Daniels (08:19):
Right. Well, you mentioned the magic number, 60. There has been a lot of controversy about the filibuster lately. What should Americans think about the Senate’s rule?

Lamar Alexander (08:30):
I would say an American does not want a Senate where any president, whether it’s Trump, Obama, Biden, all of whom wanted rid of the filibuster when they were presidents, can ram through the Senate what they can ram through the House by a majority vote. President Trump has been beating up the Republicans; get rid of the filibuster. He wants to pass everything that a Republican dreamed of.
You can make your list of things, if you’re a Democrat that you would worry about if all the Trump proposals could go through the Senate as fast as they go through the House on immigration, abortion, taxes, et cetera. But if you’re a Republican, you can make a pretty good list too. What if you had a Democratic president and a Democratic Senate, and they came up with DC statehood, getting rid of the right to work law in Indiana and Tennessee, gun bans, all these other things.
So, Tocqueville argued in the early part of our country that one of the greatest two dangers to American democracy was the tyranny of the majority. And the Senate’s there to provide restraint against the president, against the excesses of the people and to force consensus.

Mitch Daniels (09:47):
Has the Senate and the Congress as a whole abdicated some of its constitutional responsibility? This is a common criticism these days. Presidents who may have been frustrated because they couldn’t ram through their whole wishlist have taken to operating through executive order independently, launching military actions, some think that the Congress should have been involved in. Do we need a Congress to reassert, or the courts to continue requiring them to reassert their rightful prerogatives?

Lamar Alexander (10:25):
The answer is yes to that. I don’t look back very much, but if I were still in the Senate, I’d get a bipartisan group of senators and meet for breakfast every week, and we’d read Article I of the Constitution to each other, because Article I says that only the Congress has the power to spend money. Only the Congress has the power to declare war. Only the Congress has the power to set tariffs. And that might come as a surprise to most Americans to hear that because the president has been doing that lately.
And the reason that’s important, at least the justice that the Republicans usually revere the most is Antonin Scalia, and he said this, “Every dictator has a bill of rights. What gives us our freedom is the structure of our constitution, the checks and the balances. If we ever give all the power to one entity or one person, we lose our freedom.”

Mitch Daniels (11:23):
I sometimes point out to younger people, or not so young, it’s Article I for a reason.

Lamar Alexander (11:29):
Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (11:30):
There’s a reason that it was put there first.

Lamar Alexander (11:32):
It’s not very long. I got it out the other day and reread it just to make sure I hadn’t misread it or forgotten it, but it’s very specific. I mean, the president can’t spend a dollar. The president can’t set a tariff. The president can’t create a tax. That all belongs to the Congress.

Mitch Daniels (11:51):
Well, the courts have begun to remind presidents, it’s not just this one who’s expanded the boundaries or tried to of his authority, and the courts are playing the role that the Constitution imagined them playing, may restore some balance.

Lamar Alexander (12:08):
They did. I’m sure a lot of Trump supporters say, “Well, they’re just after Trump.” But no, under Biden, they came up with a major question theory. It said, “Look, if Congress has given you some power, they say you have the power to go walk around the block, you can’t go walk around the world with it. You’ve got to stick pretty close to what the Congress said.” And now they’re applying that to Trump on the tariffs.

Mitch Daniels (12:34):
We generally mainly talk here about longer-term questions, but as we’re taping this, a very timely and important issue is hostilities that the nation is conducting against Iran, and they’ve been done without Congress’s approval or even consultation in advance. Is there an argument that that’s what you have to do in this world, or should there have been some prior process or even formal approval?

Lamar Alexander (13:07):
Well, we don’t know how this one’s going to come out. That’s been a gray area. Article I of the Constitution is very explicit. Congress has the power to declare war, but most presidents have ignored that. I would give President Trump credit for doing what I suspect some American president was sooner or later going to have to do, which was use force to stop Iran from building nuclear weapons and terrorizing the neighborhood. But I’d rather have H.W. Bush’s team and President Bush himself in charge of this war.
Because if you think back to the Gulf War in 1991, they planned for it for months. They had allies all over the world. They actually got them to pay for it. We didn’t even have to pay more than a few billion dollars for the Gulf War. Today, President Trump has already asked for $200 billion for the Iran war. President Bush put a million troops on the ground. The casualties were small. The war was over in a few days. They met a clear objective and went home. That’s the kind of management of a war I’d like to see.
But I think one other thing in response to your question: President Bush did ask the Senate to approve going into the war. He did ask the United Nations for approval. The Senate did it by 53, I think, to 47, 52 to 47. And if you’re going to have a war, you’d better have the support of allies in the world and especially the people at home.

Mitch Daniels (14:48):
Churchill said that the only thing worse than fighting a war with allies is fighting one without them. And we’ve put ourselves in that position.

Lamar Alexander (14:57):
Well, and just very practically, I mean, Jim Baker really went around the world and got all the other countries to pay the bill. So the United States spent six or seven billion dollars, I think, about that on the Gulf War, and it’s already 200 billion on this one.

Mitch Daniels (15:14):
You write in the book, and millions of Americans are concerned also about the polarization that we’ve drifted into. You’ve been in a lot of elections, and you’ve seen the evolution of all that. We seem to have a system these days rigged for polarization.

Lamar Alexander (15:32):
We do.

Mitch Daniels (15:33):
Is there a way out of it? Are there reforms that you’ve seen that might make the situation a little better, empower the middle in a way it’s not right now?

Lamar Alexander (15:46):
You’re right about polarization. I think when I was elected governor, which was in 1978, ’79, half the states had one Republican Senator and one Democratic Senator. That would have been true for Indiana; been true for Tennessee. Today it’s three or four. When George W. Bush was elected president, there were probably two dozen battleground states. Today there may be a dozen or fewer than that. About 80% of Americans live in a state that’s dominated by one party or the other party. So there’s no two-party competition. And I think the government is a lot worse.
How do you fix it? If I pull it out of my pocket, it’d be the iPhone, the digital device that’s really changed the world. It’s changed politics; it’s changed sports; it’s changed everything.

Mitch Daniels (16:46):
It’s changed people.

Lamar Alexander (16:48):
Yeah, it’s changed people. It drives people to the edges. And what happens in politics, and Senator Ben Sasse is very eloquent on this, said, “If you’re center-left or center-right and a majority of us are, you’re left out. Your vote doesn’t count because so few people vote in the primaries that the far right or the far left pick the nominee, and then if you are center-right or center-left, you don’t have anybody to vote for.” So that’s where we are.
The only solution I can think of is … social media caused the problem or a lot of it, use social media, solve it, use social media to get more people back in the primaries who are center-right, center-left, let them vote, or just start ignoring the social media that all the course language and the stuff that drives people to the extremes.

Mitch Daniels (17:40):
Well, you just anticipated the next question I want to ask you, and that has to do with course language, vulgarity, sort of the debasing of the national conversation that we preferably would have around big issues. Is decorum, first of all, does it matter that we have some standards in terms of the language people use?

Lamar Alexander (18:11):
Yes, is the answer to that. And I think of a place where you were on the stage in 2019, which was Senator Richard Lagar’s funeral in Indianapolis, and Senator Sam Nunn, who had worked with him on reducing nuclear weapons, said Dick Lagar was an Eagle Scout. He lived his life by the scout law, and he started to recite it: trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, et cetera. And I was thinking, and I imagine others were too that day, how’s President Trump living up to that? How am I living up to that in public life? How are we doing? We’re not doing that well.
I’m a conservative, very Republican, but for me, character and temperament come first ahead of whether you lean right or left in public life. And we especially expect that of the American president. The use of language, temperament, character, demeanor, all of that sets a tone for the country. And there are over a half million Americans who are elected to public life, and school boards, all the way to the top; they all behaved a little better. The country would work a little better.

Mitch Daniels (19:12):
I think I’m safe in saying no previous president, those I admired, those I didn’t, would have used the words ever that are commonly used now by our president and his imitators, words that you wouldn’t let your children use, or that we’d ever hear a president celebrate the death of anybody, let alone a decorated veteran and public servant. What worries many of us is that this may be not a pendulum which will swing back in a more positive direction, but a ratchet. Once standards like that are lowered, sometimes they’re stuck there. They can only get worse.

Lamar Alexander (20:18):
Well, that may be right. On the other hand, I first ran for office in a bad year for Republicans; 1974. That’s when Richard Nixon had to resign because he lied. And what did Jimmy Carter say when he ran in a year? He said, “I’ll never tell a lie.” So whatever you may think of Carter, that was a reaction to Nixon. There may be a reaction among the American people to this kind of behavior. I hope there is.

Mitch Daniels (20:45):
I hope there is. It’s certainly been commonly the case that as we change presidents, whoever comes next counter-poses him or herself to whatever seems to be lacking in the predecessor, so that could happen. I think some of us think it’s important that it does.
You have been a leading figure in the world of education in more than one capacity. You were, I think, the Congress’s leader, thought leader in education; you were the secretary of education and later president of a university. There’s a strong movement afoot today to require, or maybe reinstate, the teaching of history and civics across the education system. There does seem to be a profound ignorance about history; many of the questions we just talked about. What are the pros and cons of government or legislators at the state or federal level making such requirements?

Lamar Alexander (21:55):
I think it’s a good idea. I mean, my maiden speech as a senator, my first speech was to propose creating summer academies for teachers of American history and civics. And we did. I used to take them on the Senate floor, and they’d wander around, looking for Daniel Webster’s desk. I’d point out Jefferson Davis’ desk who resigned to head the Confederacy. And Vanderbilt University today has created a similar program for that. The University of Tennessee has a new program for American history and civics. A lot of them have blown up because the conservative Republican legislatures pushed it, and the liberal faculties at the universities resisted. But at the University of Tennessee, they were smart enough to get the faculty to approve the curriculum, so they’re off to a great start.
We badly need it. I mean, you can’t have a government if people think Judge Judy’s on the Supreme Court. I mean, that doesn’t work very well. And we need more understanding of how our government works.

Mitch Daniels (22:59):
Say a little more. What would be the proper content, and are there things that you’ve seen prescribed here or there that maybe go too far or too prescriptive or one-sided?

Lamar Alexander (23:12):
I mean, some of it’s just very practical. I mentioned earlier that if I were in the Senate, I’d have a bipartisan breakfast, and we’d read Article I to each other. You might start that out with some students and say, “What is Article I? Why is it Article I? And what can the Congress do that the President can’t do, and why would we do that? Or why is the filibuster important? Why do you insist on 60 people coming to a conclusion in the Senate? Why don’t you let a majority do it? ” Those are questions that don’t really answer themselves without a little thought, but they’re the most important.
I mean, the answer is for the Senate; it’s the most important institution we have if it functions to take tough issues, get some agreement or consensus on them so that most senators can vote for it and most Americans can accept it. We need that in a big, diverse country like this.

Mitch Daniels (24:08):
You’ve been one of our, I think, wisest exponents, but also practitioner of federalism, one of the innovations of our constitution. There’d been a longstanding pressure to nationalize things that once were seen as the prerogatives of states. So I want to ask you a couple of questions about that.
In 1981, you made a typically, I thought, creative suggestion to then President Reagan, I guess, that the federal amount of Medicaid, take all the cost of Medicaid, which is shared with the states and give the state’s education, which is most cases, their biggest expenditure anyway. That seemed like a good idea at the time. Should we bring that back?

Lamar Alexander (24:58):
We should have. We should have done it. Think of what would happen. I mean, Medicaid would be better run if one entity was running it and it wasn’t split, and education belongs at home. President Reagan agreed with that.
I’m not much of an ideologue, but one thing I am stubborn about is it just drives me nuts when I come to Washington and come to the Senate and everybody thinks they know everything here and that nobody knows anything at home. I mean, I’d sit there in the education committee and somebody would say, “Well, let’s have a dress code in the schools.” And I’d say, “Well, that might be a good idea in some places, but there are lots of different dress codes and there are 100,000 schools. Why do you think that we’re the only ones who have enough sense to make a decision like that?”
That would happen all the time. We don’t need Washington telling us so much about what to do. That’s a big part of our freedom. It’s hard to operate this big, complicated country with a small group of people telling everybody what to do. That’s the way China does it. They don’t have much freedom there.

Mitch Daniels (26:06):
Well, there’s been a longstanding theme of certain factions in our politics that you can’t trust those Yahoos out there in Tennessee and Indiana to make these decisions. They’ll do things that are ignorant.

Lamar Alexander (26:21):
There are a lot of people who think the reverse: you can’t trust the Yahoos in Washington. That something gets into them when they get to Washington that makes them think they’re smarter than they were when they left home. I don’t know what it is.

Mitch Daniels (26:33):
You said a lot of things that stuck with me. One, I’ve repeated to a lot of, again, typically younger people, you said a person who’s interested should go to Washington to get vaccinated but not infected.

Lamar Alexander (26:45):
That’s right. Stay long enough to get vaccinated, but not infected.

Mitch Daniels (26:47):
That is one of the wisest things said on the subject. But back to education and who should decide at the higher ed level, where there’s been such concern about ideological imbalance about indoctrination as opposed to education. The current administration has selected some schools and demanded a so-called compact; change your ways in these ways we define, otherwise forfeit the money that we’ve been sending you. Is that a good idea?

Lamar Alexander (27:30):
No, it’s not. I’ll give President Trump credit. One of the most important things he’s done in his second term is get this woke business, this dividing people by gender, race, identity, to get that on the run everywhere. Justice O’Connor 25 years ago said, “In 25 years, we should get back at least to the idea that we’re all Americans. Where you come from, what you look like doesn’t matter.” And that’s happened.
But the idea of Washington running 6,000 colleges and universities is a very bad idea. I mean, I thought that the Republican idea was to move decisions about education out of Washington, not into Washington. The president’s done a good job of that with K through 12 education, moving decisions out of Washington. But the idea of a compact, sort of a national board of trust of all colleges and universities, is impossible to do and a very bad idea, and totally against conservative or Republican doctrine to me. And hopefully it’s kind of drifted away and people are paying more attention.
It’s right to try to squeeze out of the universities this wokeness, this you don’t have open inquiry, you’re not promoted based upon scholarship, but on whether you’re a man or a woman or black or white or whatever. That’s not right, but you don’t destroy research, which is another subject, and you don’t run it from Washington in order to do that.

Mitch Daniels (29:21):
But is it fair to say that something had to be done. In addition to the issues you just mentioned, there’s no denying the incredibly lopsided, one-sided viewpoint.

Lamar Alexander (29:36):
That’s right.

Mitch Daniels (29:37):
That dominates across so much, maybe almost all of higher education. So should the remedy be left to the states to pressure for greater balance?

Lamar Alexander (29:48):
The president has the bully pulpit. You can do a lot with the bully pulpit. Bill Bennett, Reagan’s education secretary, went to Chicago and said they had the worst schools in the country, and everybody stirred around and worked on it.

Mitch Daniels (30:03):
Although they may still have the worst schools in the country.

Lamar Alexander (30:07):
They might. There are the civil rights laws which to some degree work on that. There’s the federal spotlight. There’s embarrassment of boards and university presidents who do a bad job of that and celebrating those who do a good job, but cutting out cancer research in order to get rid of wokeness is not a good tactic.

Mitch Daniels (30:38):
You were Secretary of Education for a time. You just mentioned Bill Bennett. I still remember Bill Bennett in a meeting saying to President Reagan, “Mr. President, you came to office saying you’d like to close the Department of Education. We can’t do that, so we’re going to run it so that the people who created it want to close it.” And now we’re back to that argument.

Lamar Alexander (31:01):
I also remember Bennett, and you might have been there, coming into a cabinet meeting, having been in the news, being heavily criticized by all the newspapers for his conservative views, and he was expecting President Reagan to criticize him when he came to the cabinet meeting and Reagan looked at him, and then he looked at all the rest of the cabinet and said, “Well, what’s wrong with the rest of you fellas?” So he liked what he was doing.

Mitch Daniels (31:27):
But the issue has been put back in front of the country. Would we miss the Department of Education, the US Department of Education if it went away?

Lamar Alexander (31:36):
No, I think Congress has to make it go away. Here’s another example. I mean, the president can’t just by edict get rid of it.
I don’t think we need a Department of Education. It really boils down to two major subjects. One is all the money for grants and loans for colleges and universities. That can be administered by the Treasury Department or some other agency. The other is all the K through 12 money. And I’ve always thought the best way with that is to give that money to the states. In fact, I proposed that several times. If you took all the money that we spend for K through 12 and created scholarships out of it that would follow half the children to public and private schools, about half of American children would have a couple of thousand dollars following them to their school, which their school could use.
That would be a better way to spend the money. Let it follow the kid to the school they choose. Even if it’s just the public schools, that might be the compromise that you have to have, but you don’t need a Department of Washington to administer the K through 12 money.

Mitch Daniels (32:48):
Virtually all the money that the US Department of Education spends is spent on adults, not children. And your way has a lot greater appeal to me.

Lamar Alexander (33:00):
Yes.

Mitch Daniels (33:04):
Talking about the money that Washington spends, we continue to spend vastly beyond our means.

Lamar Alexander (33:09):
Yeah.

Mitch Daniels (33:11):
So, say a word or two about where that leads us. If there’s a way out, short of a genuine crisis, how might that happen?

Lamar Alexander (33:26):
It’ll take presidential leadership to deal with it. And no recent president has wanted to tackle it, because almost all the problems are Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and interest on the debt. That’s it. That’s 80% of the money. If you get that under control, you get the debt under control, and they don’t want to tackle that.
The only way I know to do it short of a crisis is for if I were 35 years old and running for the Senate, I’d make that the issue, and just beat it and beat it and beat it and beat it. And I think maybe I could win a Republican primary on that and then vote for it when I got an office. It’ll take a generation of politicians.
I mean, the reason I wrote my book really was to try to persuade people, maybe inspire them, that if you really want to change the country, if you want to help the most people, if you want to keep the Republic from falling apart, the best way to do it is to figure out how to get yourself elected to public office or go to work for somebody like you who has been.
I mean, that’s where these decisions mostly end up. You can sit around and talk about them at conferences, and we do that all the time, but in the end, you have to go to somebody in the office and say, “Will you do this? Will you vote for this? Will you get this done?”

Mitch Daniels (34:46):
We’ll learn over the next few years whether we’re still the sort of people who can make a mature decision and favor the future over the present, but we’ve waited a long time. It’s going to be harder than it needed to be.

Lamar Alexander (34:59):
Yeah, it is harder. Last time we had a big movement in Congress to deal with it in the Senate, we had commissions and talk and discussion, but nobody ever introduced a bill. The only one that introduced a bill was Senator Corker, and I joined it and the two of us did, and we would have reduced the growth of spending by a trillion dollars over 10 years, but it affected Medicaid, Medicaid, and Social Security, and we were the only two co-sponsors.

Mitch Daniels (35:26):
Yeah. React to a pet theory, maybe wishful view of mine; we’re going to arrive at a crunch in which the federal government has to deal with this because we’re not going to slash Social Security payments by the legally prescribed percentages. We’re not going to dismantle the safety net. When the time comes, we have to act to save the safety net. It seems to me that part of the emergency plan might be to turn back to the states many of the things the federal government’s been borrowing money to spend. We might get federalism by default. Am I dreaming?

Lamar Alexander (36:09):
No, you certainly could do that with highways. I mean, when I was governor, for example, we needed better roads, so we raised taxes and built the roads rather than borrowing money. So we have road debt in Tennessee.
The federal government doesn’t need to spend much money on roads. It doesn’t need to spend much money on education. There are a number of things the federal government could not do, but somehow you’ve got to get control of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid. And you can do that, or at least you could up until now, by looking forward, by not affecting people who are already getting the money, but saying, “As we go forward, we’re going to reduce the growth a little bit.” And you may have to raise taxes.

Mitch Daniels (36:57):
And the age of eligibility, and things like that.

Lamar Alexander (37:00):
Yeah, they’re “tweaks” that you can make to the system that would make it much less painful than people think.

Mitch Daniels (37:07):
I just worry that the arithmetic says we could absolutely have done that at the time of the Bowles-Simpson Commission, if that had moved forward or things like it, your proposal with Senator Corker. I’m afraid we are going to have to be disadvantaged or soon to be recipients as part of what happens now.

Lamar Alexander (37:28):
You may be right.

Mitch Daniels (37:29):
I hope not. Many parts of the book that made me smile; somebody asked you, you report having held this dazzling array of jobs, they said, “Well, senator, governor, cabinet secretary, university president which was the hardest.” And you said, if I read it correctly,” I can tell that you’ve never been a university president.”

Lamar Alexander (38:01):
What I really said was, “You’ve never been a university president, or you wouldn’t ask a stupid question like that.” You’ve been one, I’ve been one. I don’t know how you feel about it, but it was the hardest of the jobs I had. It’s really challenging and you’ve got so many differences. Maybe my temperament wasn’t as good for it as yours was.
The faculty probably cheered when President Bush asked me to be the education secretary, and I left the University of Tennessee. I remember one of my first weeks on campus, one faculty member said, “Well, welcome. “You remind me of Clark Kerr, the president of the University of California.” And I was complimented because he was a good president. And I said, “Well, how is that?” She said, “He arrived and left the same way; fired with enthusiasm.”

Mitch Daniels (38:57):
I believe President Reagan is the originator of that line.

Lamar Alexander (39:00):
He may have done the firing.

Mitch Daniels (39:02):
That is very accurate. Yeah. Well, some of us had very mixed feelings when you returned to public office then because you, during the time you were there, were an important thought leader in an area which much of our discussion has been surfacing, and we do need university presidents, like we need senators and other key people to be, I think, public advocates for positive change and you were one.

Lamar Alexander (39:37):
I tried to be. I mean, I was very lucky. I mean, I got a chance to do things that most people don’t get to do. I woke up every day as governor or senator thinking I might be able to do something good for my country, and I went to bed most nights thinking I had. And all the criticism and dignities that go with it, I just pretty well ignored.
If you have a real sense of purpose and if you have a sense of humor, serving in public life can be very satisfying, and you can do that. I read in the paper this week about how the CRISPR technology combined with authority that we gave to use stem cell research in the 21st Century Cures Act is now being used to cure rare diseases in addition to lymphoma and other cancers. Well, if you know you’ve had some role in doing that at a time when medical miracles are just right on the horizon, it’s hard to think of anything more useful you could be doing with your life.

Mitch Daniels (40:44):
I know I absorbed consciously or subconsciously so much from knowing you and watching you and what you just said about your sense of humor and also learning just to let the slings and arrows go was worth two of those lessons. One of the best lessons I was ever taught: an Indiana farm woman, a friend of mine at a time when I was taking a lot of grief, said, “Mitch, keep going.” She said, “Dogs don’t bark at parked cars.” And from that day on, I took comfort there.

Lamar Alexander (41:18):
Yeah, that’s right.

Mitch Daniels (41:20):
So we like to close the conversation each time with the same question. So I’d like to ask you, and that is: taking into account all the issues we’ve talked about and some we haven’t in the year 2050, will Americans be more or less free?

Lamar Alexander (41:40):
Well, it depends on, and this is a good year to think about it, on whether we remember the lessons of the last 250 years. If we remembered Tocqueville’s warning about the tyranny of the majority, and if we remember the founder’s insistence on creating checks and balances and giving states a lot of authority so that we have the maximum amount of freedom, then the answer is yes. If we elect a generation of officeholders who see the threat to freedom of runaway debt and have the courage to deal with it, the answer is yes. So it’s yet to be decided. It all depends on the next generation.
And there’s no reason we shouldn’t be more free. In fact, we should want to be more free. We should want to have more checks and balances. We should want to have more things in the hands of states, and less chance that a president or even a member of the judiciary or the Congress could have excessive power.

Mitch Daniels (42:48):
Throughout our history, providence or circumstance has turned up people who lead in just that way when we need it the most, and you’ve been one of those people. My answer to that question would be if we get a few more Lamar Alexanders, we’ll certainly be more free and let’s hope that happens.
Senator, Governor, Mr. Secretary, President, I’ll just say Lamar Alexander, thank you for being with us. Your book has the, I think, typically self-effacing title, The Education of a Senator, but you have taught many of us much more than you ever learned, and we thank you for that and for the life of service.

Lamar Alexander (43:31):
You’re generous to say that. Thank you for your leadership and your continuing leadership.

Mitch Daniels (43:37):
And thank you all for joining us on this latest installment of Liberty Fund’s the Future of Liberty.

Outro (43:43):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.