John Harris, Politico’s global editor-in-chief and a Carleton College trustee, talked to Northfield Rotarians recently about the state of American politics today.
Harris told the Rotarians that he views Donald Trump as a movement politician, who is capitalizing on American voters’ anger and resentment at the establishment. That anger, Harris said, was forged in cultural and ideological battles that began in the 1960s.
From the likely voter data that he has seen, Harris said Trump’s chances, at this point, are good. Trump has a psychological appeal that seems to be more fierce than that of Biden, who is much more policy-oriented. A Trump felony conviction, however, could possibly alter the dynamics of the race.
“But, I’ve been wrong before,” he said.
Harris said he’s innately an optimist, so he ultimately has hope that a more positive, honest brand of politics will return — although he refrained from suggesting which election cycle would likely benefit from its re-emergence.
Harris told the group how his foray into journalism and politics began: with a summer internship that turned into a two-decade stint at the Washington Post. “I graduated from college on a Saturday in June of 1985 and started as a summer intern at the Washington Post on a Monday,” he said. “At the end of the summer, editors asked him to hang around a while longer.”
That “while” ended up being more than 21 years.
At the Post, Harris covered local politics, state politics in Virginia and national politics. From 1995 to 2001, he covered the Clinton White House. Later, he expanded on that reporting in a history of Bill Clinton’s presidency, “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House.” Harris is also co-author, with friend Mark Halperin of ABC News, of a book on presidential politics, “The Way to Win: Taking the White House in 2008.”
After 20 years as a reporter, Harris was drawn more to editing than writing.
“In part, this was just a sense that I had been around the track plenty of times and was ready for something different.,” he said. “Even more, however, it was a conviction that, at a time when journalism is undergoing wrenching upheavals, everyone who cares about the profession should be involved in answering the question, “What’s next?”
Becoming an editor, he explained, was a way to be more immersed in those conversations about the future — about how to use the Web more creatively, about how to sustain serious journalism at a time of diverse threats.
His brief editing career led him to Jim VandeHei — a co-worker at the Post — to have blue-sky conversations about what we would do if we ever had the chance to start a publication about politics from the ground up. Initially, those conversations were mostly a way of passing the time. But, in the fall of 2006, they became a lot more serious after Robert Allbritton made clear that his notions about the future of journalism were very much in sympathy. Allbritton offered them the chance to start something from scratch.
That is how Harris and Vandehei wound up at Politico, a print newspaper in Washington with a well-read and highly regard digital presence, Politico.com
He said they assembled a team of reporters and editors who wake up each day looking for fresh ways to attack the best political stories in and around Capitol Hill and the campaign trail.
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