Every Thursday, the Spy hosts a conversation with Al From and Craig Fuller on the most topical political news of the moment.
This week, From and Fuller discuss the abrupt departure of Tucker Carlson from Fox News and its political impact on the 2024 election. Al and Craig also discuss the much-anticipated announcement by Joe Biden that he and Kamala Harris will be running for reelection.
This video podcast is approximately eighteen minutes in length.
To listen to the audio podcast version, please use this link:
Background
While the Spy’s public affairs mission has always been hyper-local, it has never limited us from covering national, or even international issues, that impact the communities we serve. With that in mind, we were delighted that Al From and Craig Fuller, both highly respected Washington insiders, have agreed to a new Spy video project called “The Analysis of From and Fuller” over the next year.
The Spy and our region are very lucky to have such an accomplished duo volunteer for this experiment. While one is a devoted Democrat and the other a lifetime Republican, both had long careers that sought out the middle ground of the American political spectrum.
Al From, the genius behind the Democratic Leadership Council’s moderate agenda which would eventually lead to the election of Bill Clinton, has never compromised from this middle-of-the-road philosophy. This did not go unnoticed in a party that was moving quickly to the left in the 1980s. Including progressive Howard Dean saying that From’s DLC was the Republican wing of the Democratic Party.
From’s boss, Bill Clinton, had a different perspective. He said it would be hard to think of a single American citizen who, as a private citizen, has had a more positive impact on the progress of American life in the last 25 years than Al From.”
Al now lives in Annapolis and spends his semi-retirement as a board member of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University (his alma mater) and authoring New Democrats and the Return to Power. He also is an adjunct faculty member at Johns Hopkins’ Krieger School and recently agreed to serve on the Annapolis Spy’s Board of Visitors. He is the author of “New Democrats and the Return to Power.”
For Craig Fuller, his moderation in the Republican party was a rare phenomenon. With deep roots in California’s GOP culture of centralism, Fuller, starting with a long history with Ronald Reagan, leading to his appointment as Reagan’s cabinet secretary at the White House, and later as George Bush’s chief-of-staff and presidential campaign manager was known for his instincts to find the middle ground. Even more noted was his reputation of being a nice guy in Washington, a rare characteristic for a successful tenure in the White House.
Craig has called Easton his permanent home for the last five years, where now serves on the boards of the Academy Art Museum, the Benedictine School, and Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum. He also serves on the Spy’s Board of Visitors.
With their rich experience and long history of friendship, now joined by their love of the Chesapeake Bay, they have agreed through the magic of Zoom, to talk inside politics and policy with the Spy every Thursday.
Michael Snizek says
This was an excellent and very insightful analysis from both men. They are my can’t miss weekly analysts.
Carolyn Jaffe says
Me, too! I SO appreciate this series! Thanks, gentlemen … and The spy!
Deirdre LaMotte says
I can hear the GOP now: beware of voting for this “old man”
because we will end up with a black woman as President.
Wink, wink.
Truly disgusting Party.
Reed Fawell 3 says
It has been said many times in many ways that America increasingly is broken, riven apart into two halves now warring with one another, and splintering too, in what increasingly appears to be irreconcilable ways. This has been going on with ever more vitriol since the Bush/Gore campaign of 2000.
Now, today, almost 23 years later, we appear increasingly unwilling to compromise at all, much less talk rationally and honestly with one another, or even show a modicum of mutual respect toward one another. Instead we seem to relish ever more attacks on one another with increasing fury and growing array of weapons, social, political, legal, racial, cultural. And, correspondingly, we see all around us now the destruction wrought by our failing society, culture and political system. Riots in out streets, our rapidly deteriorating cities, our failing public education, our broken open national borders, our increasing entanglement in foreign wars and vicious regional disputes, our failing international alliances, the rise of foreign actors intent on our destruction, our failing rates of enlistments in national defense services, our out of control national debts, the ongoing destruction of national monuments and institutions, private and public, and traditions and cultures, replaced now by ever more warring tribes, and gangs of lost citizens, particularly among our young. The list goes on and on.
Hence,
America’s future, to many of us now, appears increasingly bleak, a future without viable options save for increasing violence, until the destruction of our civil society, and the rise of a dominant tyrannical state that imposes the will of the victorious few onto the many. Or so the story goes. I do not believe we have reached yet this point of no return. But I believe we are headed rapidly in that direction, and that it mostly driven by our many irresponsible leaders who are riling up and cheering on their growing mobs for personal advantage on both sides of the divide. I believe this discussion between From and Fuller, by their conduct of it, tends to illustrate this point. As do the comments above that follow it.
Deirdre LaMotte says
White Supremacy has been at the core of every
bleak time in our Nation’s History. May I recommend
Jon Meacham’s Lincoln biography, And There Was Light?
We are in the mid-1800s all over again because of it.