- I'm Pete Williams in for Gwen Ifill,
and this is the Washington Week extra.
Hilary Clinton wasn't the only woman
to make history on election day.
Donald Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway
was the first female presidential campaign manager
in American history, so Jennifer she was
actually his third choice for the job,
but what was the secret to her success?
- Well she came in late, she came in
in mid August, so she was only campaign manager
for two and a half months, and the original team
had put in place the structure that was actually
the one consistent strategy that was in place
from the very beginning to the very end
and that was that made for TV rallies
that were the vehicle for Donald Trump's message
and it really got him elected and created that
electricity that got people to
come to his rallies and go vote.
But she actually gets a lot of credit for doing one thing
which was figuring out how to manage Donald Trump
and the way she did it was by not necessarily
just talking to him in person, but she would
talk to him through the TV screen.
So she would go and do these news interviews
and then she would make these little subtle hints
suggesting things, or saying I think we should do this.
He doesn't, you know, personally insult people.
And so she would send him these little subtle messages
via TV, and she acknowledged it much
that she very often did that.
But you know one interesting thing is
here she is, the first female to do this
but she gets points for defeating the woman
who would have been the first female president.
- So there's no question in your minds
that she made a difference?
- Ms. Kellyanne Conway?
I suppose, I mean she is campaign manager.
But as you point out, she was the third campaign manager
and she came in in August, and you know,
he was riding a wave, and it's hard to know
how much any individual--
And election like this, where the results were
so shocking, and it was such a change race.
I think it's hard to know how
much one person made a difference.
- [Jennifer] She kept it from blowing up right at the end.
- Yeah, but she wasn't setting strategy, perhaps.
I don't know, I mean, so I think it's hard to say.
- But the trio that came, Steve Bannon and Dave Bossie
and Kelyanne Conway, worked better than
previous iterations of his team.
And they each found a role, and hers was
as you say, she did a lot on TV.
Both to explain Donald Trump and to defend Donald Trump
and to send signals to Donald Trump.
And also to try to settle him down,
and I think that as a group, they were successful
in both keeping the energy level high in that campaign.
I mean they were racing at the end
and they were very opportunistic and effectively so.
And so they all together were instrumental in that.
- Well now of course the speculation is all about
who he will enlist for his administration.
That even began before the last ballots were counted.
So tell us Michael, who are the leading contenders
for some of the big national security positions?
- So Pete, I'll start with a disclaimer that
you know, a lot of this is sort of
chatter around Washington, you don't know exactly
where it came from, and there's an echo chamber effect,
so names are in serious contention, because--
- [Pete] All right, we won't hold you to this.
We won't be playing your sounds
from the Washington Week vault.
- Right! (laughing)
Having said that, on Secretary of State,
I think there are some pretty logical contenders
and a couple people who've said they might be
interested in the job. One of them is
Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker,
a Tennessee senator. Said earlier this Summer
he would be interested in the job.
He's advised Trump on foreign policy,
considered a pretty serious and credible figure.
Some people have said Newt Gingrich, who we remember.
Speaker of the House, having largely a domestic agenda
but actually has taken great interest in
foreign policy and foreign affairs.
A name you hear, Donald Trump himself has praised
John Bolton who is George W. Bush's ambassador
to the United Nations, although Bolton is quite a
divisive figure, even by the standards of Trump world,
and I think that would be a difficult sell.
He I think was unable to get confirmed by
a Republican Senate at one point, and
I think with Democrats still having
filibuster numbers, he would be a tough one.
Attorney General Rudy Giuliani makes a lot of sense
and was asked about his appetite for that job on television
a couple of days ago, and as we all know
the Washington custom is to say
I'm not even thinking about that, oh I don't know.
Rudy's answer, I can't quote it verbatim,
was more or less like sure, yeah, that sounds pretty good.
(laughing)
- Who knows the Justice Department better than me?
- Exactly. Chris Christie might make sense,
but for Bridgegate I think that makes it complicated.
But he was a federal prosecutor, so let's keep that in mind.
Defense Secretary, just this evening there was a report,
Somebody is floating Kelly Ayotte, the outgoing
defeated New Hampshire Republican senator
who was sort of friends with John McCain
and Lindsey Graham, they kind of cosigned a lot of
tough hawkish security press releases,
took a lot of interest in foreign policy
and defense issues, a kind of a hawkish posture.
Be kind of an interesting answer to the presumed
Defense Secretary Hilary Clinton everyone expected to name
Michelle Flournoy, the first female Defense Secretary.
This would be a potential retort to that.
Another name that we're hearing is Stephen Hadley
who was George W. Bush's last National Security Advisor.
Real kind of gold-plated establishment,
basically centrist figure, center-right,
but somebody that Democrats could get along with.
I hear people saying Hadley could even
have served in a Hillary Clinton administration.
And am I forgetting a slot? That's a lot of ground to cover.
- [Several Simultaneously] Jeff Sessions.
- Jeff Sessions is a possibility,
as a Senator who provided Trump with a lot of advice
although does not have a deep background on
foreign policy and foreign affairs.
And National Security Advisor is a really important one.
And by the way with all these appointments,
you asked during the show, what will
Trumps foreign policy look like?
The personnel will really send big messages
about how serious he is about some of these things.
National Security Advisor will be a big one.
One name we hear is Michael Flynn
who was a former Defense Intelligence Agency director
who advised Trump through the campaign,
was potentially a running-mate for him.
Flynn has a lot of detractors even within
the Republican party, I think there are a
lot of Republicans hoping he doesn't pick Flynn.
I think Steve Hadly would be another
potential candidate for that job--
- [Pete] He's done it before.
- Has done it before, so he may feel like
he's been there and done that.
- All right, speaking of other candidates for
other positions in the wake of Hilary Clinton's loss,
the Democrats find themselves in a tug of war
between the progressives and the so-called
establishment wings of the party,
and there's also jockeying for the position of
Chairmen of the Democratic National Committee.
So Lisa, who are some prospects for that.
- Well, so this happened pretty quickly,
that we started to get names out there for
the head of the DNC. This is of course
the only post really Democrats have left in town,
having lost Congress and the White House.
So Martin O'Malley seems like he's claiming people
are asking him to throw his hat in the ring, which means
that he is of course throwing his hat in the ring.
Howard Dean, who ran to John Kerry's left in 04,
and ran the DNC from 2005 to 2009 is mounting a bit.
It looks like Keith Ellison, the Congressman from Minnesota
is gonna jump in there, he was a Bernie Sanders supporter.
He's a liberal guy, he's also Muslin,
so that would be a pretty interesting choice for the DNC,
for the party. So you know this is really a fight over
where the Democrats want to go, and what they see--
how they evaluate their mistakes in this past election.
So we'll see this play out over the next couple weeks.
We don't expect any kind of an election
for the DNC chair to happen until early 2017.
So there's certainly more time as Democrats
emerge from their shell shock of this week,
for this evaluation process to happen,
and the soul-searching to go on, and for people
to throw their hats in the ring.
- All right Dan, this last one's for you.
So we're gonna end tonight with a clip from
the Washington Week vault about another
historic Presidential election.
Moderator Paul Duke introduced the segment
by saying this. "The country has voted for change
"and the capital prepares for the first
"Baby Boomer administration. Voters were dissatisfied
"with the status-quo and looking for change,
"and they got it."
- The striking thing about this election from the beginning,
everybody you met really did want a change in the beginning.
They felt that there was something desperately
wrong in the country, like something had been broken.
It wasn't just the economy in the usual sense
about the economic restructuring, jobs being lost.
That was there, but it was the feeling that
America itself was in deep trouble.
Something was larger than politics.
It had nothing to do with Republicans, Democrats.
Liberals, Conservatives, nor this other--
They really did want a change.
The second element in the election was the fact
that when they started this year, they were
so cynical about the process that
they didn't believe it might happen.
- So that clip is from November 1992.
So Dan, what strikes you about that?
- Hanes Johnson was a very smart analyst.
So I would say what went on in that campaign,
I mean he's absolutely right about that campaign.
I think what's different from that one to this one
is in a sense the order of magnitude
of the shock of what happened.
I mean by the end of that campaign, it was clear
Bill Clinton was going to be the new president,
and George HW Bush was going to be
driven out of the White House.
But this one had a much more of a sense of a
populist revolt, and a question about
what it really means for Washington.
I mean Bill Clinton did a brilliant job
of redefining the Democratic party in that 1992 campaign
to make the party acceptable to voters
who had abandoned them during the Regan era.
But what we've got this time is--
And he was very well connected.
He was connected everywhere.
You've got Donald Trump who is a true outsider.
Bill Clinton was a governor of Arkansas,
but in many ways he had kind of an insider quality.
It's totally different with Donald Trump,
and I think that makes the question of
what happens now much much different.
- All right, thank you. Thank you all very much,
and you can see that entire clip by the way
from the 1992 election on the website.
And while you're there, take the Washington Weekly
news quiz to test your knowledge.
I'm Pete Williams, see you on the next edition
of the Washington Week extra.
(smooth saxophone music)