On Campus with Gary McCaleb,
tonight's guest is Horace Busby, a
political analyst, and now
here's Gary McCaleb.
On campus today, we're pleased to welcome
one of America's top political
class, Busby has, for the last thirty
five years been watching very closely
many of the things that have been going
on in America that many of us have
not noticed.
He serves as an adviser for
many of the top companies,
what are sometimes called the Fortune 500
companies, and also an adviser to U.S.
presidents.
Thank you for being with us today.
Pleasure to be out here.
As you look at what's
going on in America today, are there any
particularly significant trends
you noticed that would
be helpful to draw attention to?
Well, there are many it would be
difficult to identify all of them, but,
uh, trends that bear on
what kind of people we're going to be,
what kind of country we're going to have.
They range from such
things as our great
obsession right now with fitness, with
health.
We're that that's
a country that is concerned with its
fitness and its health is the kind
of country that is not going to be
looking for patronizing politics.
People are more feel more independent.
They don't want government doing things
for them.
They don't want to go to a protest
rally because they've got to go jog.
They've got to play tennis, they've got
to play squash.
And and that's very healthy,
very wholesome thing.
We're much healthier people than we've
ever been before.
The trend in
raising the educational level is, of
course, of profound importance
politically.
The.
Census data with which
necessarily you work a lot if you're
doing this sort of thing, have long
made into a very interesting
on that in the.
Age group that we have now,
the largest ever, twenty seven million
people over age 65.
Among that group, only 40 percent
completed high school.
That's the group who, by
and large, were in power were
they're part of the group that was
the majority of the voters back in the
30s when we had a more.
We were running for more government.
The age bracket right now between
twenty four, twenty five and thirty
five.
Almost 90 percent of the people, black
and white, male and female, have have
at least completed high school, 30
percent of them have completed college.
That's not happening anywhere else in
the world. It doesn't happen in Europe,
but the educated mind is.
Like Lamar said about Texas, educated
mind is the guardian genius of democracy,
nothing's ever been truer.
The of course, the
emergence into a new role of new
being of women.
We don't know where all that will
lead, but the self-sufficiency of women,
the de facto equality,
I mean, ERISA is.
About what to which many people
have great emotion, pro and con.
It doesn't matter whether you have Yaara,
you do in fact have.
You're approaching a much more equal
opportunity for women and much
greater participation.
More than half the workforce.
Well, these are all trends that, uh,
that mean we're shaping.
Reshaping a different America.
You know, when you talk about that, I
think it's sometimes difficult for us as
Americans to really appreciate what
America is as a country,
comparatively speaking, to what's going
on in so many other countries.
Um, have you
been able to identify anything
that, uh, is
that helps explain why things
have worked in such a way in
America when so many other countries,
I think, keep looking at America
keeps saying, uh, is
there are there are ways we can learn
or duplicate what they're doing and make
our country more successful,
more effective, raise our our own
standards of our culture and society?
Well, that question can be addressed
in any number from any number of
directions. Let me mention some
of the things, first of all.
We have what almost no other country
in the world has, and that's a middle
class.
Most of the world.
You have in terms
of human population,
you have a handful of people in the
country who have nearly all the wealth.
Dropped down to the great mass
of people who have almost no wealth.
You know, subsist on roots
and berries, the diets.
And, uh, uh,
those countries.
In the US, nothing more than they
do, the fact that we have a middle class
now in Latin America, for example,
you will find a middle class, but it's
made up of professional people, doctors,
lawyers, not the kind
of.
Well, we have of faculty and
middle class managers and all like that,
that's one thing, because you do
not you cannot stabilize the society
if you have that that vast differential.
We set out in this country around
in the 30s, very
deliberate, very, very deliberately, this
was not political. This was private
sector people thinking this way.
They said if we want to stabilize this
country, we want to not
have a class revolution as it
look like we we came close
to in the 30s, they said it's very
simple.
You have to let the workers
have a stake in the system.
This led to the invention.
We don't think about this now.
The very deliberate, calculated invention
in the thirties, at the very worst of
the unease that the society
felt came up with an invention that has
changed the whole history of the nation.
What it is, what it was,
it's the even level
monthly mortgage payment, fixed
rate mortgage payment.
In 20 years, exactly 20 years from
the time that went into effect, was
offered to the public.
We change the society from 70 percent
tenants to 70 percent homeowners.
You see what this did?
That's a beautiful thing.
The working class, which goes
back to the beginning of time
in all the world, the working class had
never held equities.
They didn't own anything.
They they were Tennant's.
When they died, they had nothing to pay
us on except sometimes debt to
their heirs, the equity
that that the working Americans were able
to build up in their homes and
then they could have life insurance and
all these things that they didn't used to
have.
It gave them a status.
And when they died, instead of the
widow being destitute or the children
being destitute, there was something
to pass on.
Well, that's been a very, very important
part of what we have now.
The other thing is a very great
investment.
Well, I don't mean to say just one other
thing, but one thing
is an investment of a sort that we
have seen a lot of here in ability,
not just at Abilene Christian, but at
heart and Simmons and that
McMurry.
Education.
One of the things that that helped to
reshape the society was
the G.I. Bill of Rights after World War
One, prior to World War
One.
Very, very small number of.
Young people graduated from college,
I think it was one hundred.
I don't recall exactly, but, you know,
like a hundred thousand
college degrees in 1940
now, we were awarding millions
may not be the same.
Quite the same degree,
but nonetheless, we
have bet on education.
What that has done, it has raised
the the
like, particularly in business.
I know a great many men who are retiring
from Fortune 500 companies as chief
executive officer in this decade, they
went to school on the GI Bill.
They couldn't have gone to school without
it.
When they went to work at their company,
after they'd gotten that degree,
several of them were among the first two
or three college graduates those
companies had ever hired that include
some of the best known country companies
in the country.
They tell the story about how the other
executives that, you know, didn't have
often didn't have high school, how
resentful they were and how they tried to
keep them out.
But what you've seen happen in business,
of course, it's happened in other fields,
too, is today.
If you want to be a manager in business,
you have to have a college degree.
Are we in danger of losing any of those
things that have made America the kind of
country it is? For example, we hear
people sometimes today saying it's
becoming more and more difficult for a
young family to own their own house
now.
Well, that's that's the housing,
the one of the next great
social and political crises.
I don't know whether it will come in this
decade or in the 1990s is that
it's two things.
It's the availability and secondly,
the affordability of housing.
Because, well,
there are indexes of affordability
that the National Realtors keep,
and right now about seventy six
percent of the people could not afford
the average price home.
If they leave the east and go in to,
say, the mountain states, they can find
housing much cheaper there than
you can in the east where land prices are
so high. But it's a problem and it's
a severe one.
Uh, just to speculate.
There is such speculation in business
that before too many years pass,
one of the perquisites that corporations
will be offering
to attract recruit new employees
or top employees
will be low cost sort of subsidized
mortgages,
or maybe they provide the housing bill,
the housing and.
Sell it, it's it's becoming
a challenge in a lot of cases to move
employees the way that they were
as movable as they in the in
the 50s, in the 60s, these
national companies, I'm thinking
particularly of a company like IBM, has
offices everywhere.
They moved people all the time.
In this decade, people will move.
And between the two.
Now, let me say on that, between the two,
I think it is healthier
that companies don't constantly
move their employees.
Let them come into a city like Abilene,
put down roots, become
truly a part of the community.
Instead of being here for three years and
being in Brunswick, New Jersey,
the next three and.
Somewhere in Montana, the next three,
California, that that's too much like
the life that
that people have sometimes and
some branches of the military.
You mentioned a number of the things that
are very positive trends today.
Is there any particular trend that you
see that is disturbing to you
at the present time?
Not not socially.
There are there are there are problems.
By socially, I'm not I
don't look around and say, well, you
know, the greatest mistake you can make
is to say that something is going wrong
with the American character.
It's not. It gets better every
year.
We care more about each other.
We care more for our community,
communities, wherever they may be.
We care more for our churches.
Strongest forces in the society today
is the concern and feeling that Americans
have for family.
Both political parties this
year are they can't make a speech
without talking about family.
It's not because they're going to do so
much for family. It's that they know
people want to hear that.
Well, those are all very good.
You have problems that
occur that occur
not because of character, but because of
the monstrous size of the things that,
for example, the deficit is a problem.
It can be dealt with, but it's it's a
problem.
Medicare is a problem for Social
Security, for the annuitants.
We have to work out some way in which
in the.
Very near future.
You're the payment of
Social Security is not killing
off the incentive to young people to work
because it's taking so much of their
taxes.
A lot of Americans who are on Social
Security, I know
because I speak with their groups,
they're very surprised to learn something
that's important for them to know.
Most people are under the impression
that when they're on Social Security,
they are receiving back just
the money that they paid in.
Once upon a time.
That was that was true.
That's a long, long time ago today
if you have paid Social Security
at the highest level.
From the time you started working until
the time you retire at 65.
You're a
recipient and spouse.
OK, they receive
back every dollar of principal
that they paid in an 11
and a half months.
Oh, my goodness.
From then on, somebody else
is paying for it, like you and me.
And we need to take a break here for just
come back. I'd like for us to talk a
little about the upcoming election.
OK, we're visiting today with political
analyst Horace Busby.
Abilene Christian University is a place
where people really matter, a concept
held since the school's beginning in
1996.
Well, today, more than 4500 students
from across the nation enroll in ICU
in the middle of west Texas because they
know it's where people really matter.
The university's academic program
reflects people orientation and
preparation on both the undergraduate and
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If you agree that people really matter,
you'll love Abilene Christian University.
We're back on campus and continuing to
visit with political analyst Horace Busby
at the upcoming election.
That's something it's always interesting
to people.
How do you see it developing and what's
your prediction of the outcome?
Well, you don't
I don't believe in dealing in
predictions, particularly
the fact of the matter.
Is this about presidential politics.
Our presidents are elected by the
Electoral College.
The Electoral College meets in December
after the election in
November. What it is, is that under
the Constitution, the
secretary of state of the state counts
or certifies the votes.
For the two candidates, and when
one candidate wins the most votes,
then the secretary of state
notifies the electors.
That that party has filed with
them, this is our slate of electors
and they meet.
Same day in every state, but they meet at
the state capitol, they never come
together in Washington.
The Electoral College is not a college
with a campus, its name,
and so they
certify.
They look at the votes and they start to
sign their names to it, then that goes to
Washington.
You have a joint session of Congress.
It's presided over by the vice president,
United States, which this December
will be George Bush.
He calls the role of states.
They open the envelopes and the first
man that gets two hundred and seventy
votes, her first ticket has won.
Well,
in the if you study
the Electoral College.
A long time ago, when he was still
senator, Lyndon Johnson
started me off on
studying this. What you find is this.
It's what I've called the Republican lock
in eight.
Successive presidential elections from
1952 when General Eisenhower was
elected through 1980, when
President Ford was elected.
There are twenty nine states.
Which have voted at least
seventy five percent of the time
for the Republican candidate, one state,
Arizona, has never voted for a Democrat
in that period, 16 states,
including California, have voted for a
Democrat. Only once, 12
states have voted for a Democrat only
twice, meaning six out of eight.
That's 75 percent
of those states have two hundred
and eighty nine electoral votes, which is
19 more than it takes to be elected
until the Democrats.
Do something to take those
states away from the Republicans.
That's the way it's going to come out.
Now, those obviously are conservative
states say they have conservative views
of thing.
It does not make sense,
as a matter of logic, that the most
liberal Democratic ticket in that's
not a partizan opinion is just
simply fact.
Mr. Mondale and Ferraro
are both from very much from the liberal
spectrum.
I don't know that that kind of a ticket
is going to go out and appeal to the
people in Idaho, Utah,
Colorado, which have only voted for one
Democrat. That was Lyndon Johnson, who
was not that kind of Democrat.
I don't I don't see.
Those kind of states slipping away.
So if that's the case, it would be a
Reagan Bush victory.
So are you saying that really there's
very little that can happen between now
as far as campaigning and things?
Obviously, there's always the possibility
of the unexpected not.
Yes.
There you obviously it makes sense to say
that there's not possibility of the
unexpected. But but you see,
we are misled.
We mislead ourselves when
you see the candidates running around the
country, as they are wont to do, and
then go into this state and they go into
that state and they're putting on a show,
we're doing it the first race
and they do it is to be sure that they
are on a nighttime network television,
that all they're after is about a minute
or 30 seconds or a minute and a half,
something like that on nighttime
television.
When you've been in the management of
campaigns as as I have for
I'm quit doing that some
time back. But you recognize
that candidates will not because of what
they do in those kind of things, but
despite what they do, if I just if
President Reagan would just
stay in the White House and come
out every once in a while and make a
little statement, he'd do just about as
well as he will running all over the
country. Mr. Mondale's got to run
around the country because
he the situation for
the Democrats this year
and I
the party really doesn't like to face up
to this. They really don't.
I know, because being still a Democrat,
they get pretty angry at me sometimes for
saying this, but this isn't me
on Saturday before.
Leaving Washington to come here, I read
The Washington Post.
Has done its first count
of the electoral the prospective
Electoral College vote.
I sort of got this thing started in 1980
because I did what I was
talking to you about and came up with the
forecast in nineteen eighty that
President Reagan.
Would win by four hundred and forty
electoral votes and everybody all the
opinion polls were saying it's too close
to call.
Well, he won by more than four hundred
and forty four. So this year, everybody
studying the Electoral College in the
Washington Post's big number
of reporters fanned out to all the
states.
And they came to the conclusion in this
article that Mr. Mondale
stands to carry at present
the following states, Minnesota,
which is the state he's from Maryland.
West Virginia and the
three votes of the District of Columbia,
those two those four entities,
three states and the district, together,
they cast out of five hundred and.
Uh, thirty eight electoral votes, they
cast 15, that's not
very promising start and yet there's a
chance you're saying that the popular
vote could appear much closer than that.
But once you turn it over to the
electoral, the final vote in that
electoral college.
Yes, uh, I missed
one year. I missed it.
Nineteen seventy six in
this approach, saying
in 1976 that, uh,
Jimmy Carter would win the popular vote
by a wide margin because of the turnout
for him in the South, particularly of
blacks and
some of his fellow religionist in the
Baptist Church.
Big enthusiasm for.
But I also said that Jerry
Ford would win the Electoral College.
Well, the big popular vote
was there for Carter, but
Jerry Ford actually came within
it 40.
If a total of fourteen thousand votes had
changed in Ohio and Mississippi,
Jerry Ford, not Jimmy Carter, would have
won despite the popular
vote.
I do not really.
In my heart of hearts, see any
particular basis to think that the
Democratic ticket this year
will do all that well in the popular
vote?
I ask you this question.
How really important to the final
outcome is the selection of the vice
president?
We tend to see that as being a
very strategic consideration
that the president feels he must
make, and that could make the difference
in whether that ticket is elected or not.
And then specifically, how
do you analyze the
decision to select
Ferraro this time?
And what difference do you think she will
make specifically?
The course was
very close to one of those kind of
situations in 1960
when John Kennedy
selected Lyndon Johnson to be his
running mate.
I think that the selection mattered
to the outcome.
John Kennedy was reaching back
to call upon the two things
that the party had long stood on
the immigrant Catholic Northeast
and the Southerner.
He's trying to those were the they
were being lost, they were lost to the
Republicans under Eisenhower.
He was reaching back for them.
And very shrewdly giant
Lyndon Johnson himself maintains that
maintain no one goes
out and votes for vice president, they
vote for the president.
I think perhaps that's true, except that,
like in Kennedy's case,
the Southerner who vote, they did
vote for Kennedy as opposed
to voting for Johnson.
But what when he selected Johnson,
that told the Southerner, OK, it's all
right to vote for him.
And in the case of Miss Ferraro,
I'm delighted that the not
so much for her, but for women that
we've gotten this question out of the way
about whether a woman can be nominated.
I would not expect to see another ticket
of either party in this century
without a woman on it.
President Reagan says that there will be
a woman elected president someday and she
will be a Republican. And I think he's
right.
But the
way we've gotten past the hump was when
I went to Washington first.
You could not elect a Southerner.
You could not elect a divorced man.
You could not elect the, you know, a
number of things to be president.
You couldn't elect a Texan.
Well, all those things are out of the
way. Women, it's not
a matter of election. But you put a woman
on the ticket.
Uh.
Miss Ferraro is
not able to do for the ticket.
What they some of the times the Democrats
are about, they're talking about her
causing all these women to come out and
vote that way.
Well.
Women form fifty five
percent of the electorate, women
are the big vote
in the presidential elections,
but most women
on the evidence that we have
are conservative.
Relatively few of them are
liberal, what Miss Ferraro
will probably do.
We'll never be able to show this, but
as the Democratic vice presidential
candidate, she will increase the number
of women working for the
election of the Republican ticket.
Uh, she does not
add any particular strength
to the Mondale ticket in, for example,
not only does she not help him carry New
York, which Governor Cuomo says
they will not carry.
Uh, Reagan and Bush will
carry the Queens district that she's from
based on 1980 and other years.
They've carried very handily one
of the issues that seems
to be figuring in every campaign.
Senator, Congressman,
presidential level is the
huge deficit that we seem to be
dealing with today.
Uh, but it seems that nobody can really
get a handle on what to do about it.
Uh, do you realistically
see us being able to turn that deficit
that just keeps building bigger and
bigger, turning that around?
Or we can turn the deficit around,
but not quickly?
Some people are saying now, you know, if
Reagan wins big, that we'll
have a deficit down and a
new tax bill passed in the first six
months of 1985.
That's ridiculous.
It'll take the
rest of the century to work this thing
out because we have so many decisions
to make.
I make this point about the deficit,
the the
the money that is causing this is not
it's not defense money.
It's the money that we're paying out
under entitlements programs.
Where there's a program set up and if
you meet a certain qualification of age
or sex or any
number of other things, you walk in
and the government has to pay and has no
control over that.
Well, the
there are twenty seven entitlement
programs.
Six of them are based on the other
words, for poor people, for mothers,
for mothers with children, they have a
nutritional program to
feed them some other things like
that.
Most of the money, though, under
entitlements, is going to the middle
class to people who do not have a
stipulated need, but it's like retired.
Government workers, retired military
and, uh, well, retired
workers of any kind, you don't
have to show that you need the money to
get Social Security.
So we're paying to the middle class.
But where's the money coming from?
It's coming from taxes on the middle
class.
That's just not going to go on forever.
But we do have to the bigger
end of the problem.
Yes, taxes.
We have to have some new source of
taxation there only to
we're presently taxing income, people
are not paying the income tax.
It's loosely estimated
that probably the government is losing
two hundred million dollars a year,
billion dollars a year in
what's called the underground economy.
Uh, you know, not taxes
that aren't paid, people are dealing in
cash and not paying taxes, I'm sure
it's not known in Abilene, but it's
not good.
Many other places I'm sorry we're out
of time because it's been a most
fascinating discussion.
Thank you so much for it.
It's been very wonderful to be here
today. Thank you for investing today with
political analysts
will be back with us again on the campus.