JOHN DICKERSON
John Dickerson may look mild-mannered, but the CBS political director is known for asking questions smart and to-the-point enough to unsettle world leaders. Dickerson, who replaced
Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation in June, will be asking some tough questions when he moderates the second Democratic debate Nov. 14 from Des Moines, Iowa, at 9 p.m. ET on CBS.
How do you prepare for a debate? I think about what the job of president requires, whether people have the skills for the job or a theory about the job. It’s against that theory that you make your decisions about how to do the job. So what’s their theory? It can be revealing. Often debates are not really debates; they’re parallel interviews. We’ll see what ours is.
Has there ever been an election like this one? In 1840, William Henry Harrison was the first person to ever campaign for the office. Political rallies were all-day affairs with booze, huge floats in parades, and the whole community came together. Politics was a spectacle. So in that sense, when Donald Trump buzzes by a stadium in his plane, it’s touching on that deeply American sense of politics as a circus. How do you walk the line between reporting what’s popular and
what’s really news? Sometimes the circus is the story, right? There are our jobs as reporters and as analysts. If 20,000 people show up for an event, that’s a story. Why are they all there? Is it the person you’re covering or the phenomenon? Is the phenomenon about entertainment or is it about people’s feelings about the country? Trump is shaking up the conversation in a way that should force the others to fight for what they believe. Some people see this as a weakness, that this circus has taken over our politics, but the alternate view could be that there’s nothing better than a circus; it forces us to ask, “What do we actually believe?”
How do you keep in touch with what really matters? Family is crucial, because there’s nothing more humbling than trying to raise kids and be part of a marriage and family. [Dickerson and his wife, Anne, and their son, Bryce, 13, and daughter, Nan, 11, live in D.C.] Reporting out in the country you’re exposed to people with lots of different fears and challenges and hopes and passions, and that shakes you out of being consumed by your own concerns. Going to church helps too. I go to mass at 5:30 p.m. Saturday nights, at the church I went to when I grew up.