JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No one in Washington knows national politics like Dan Balz.

He's a master of the granular detail and he is also an early spotter of grand and sweeping trends.

He first came to Washington in 1972 after a stint in the Army to work for National Journal, and he joined the Post a few years after that.

He's also been a regular on Washington Week for decades.

He's seen it all and he is here tonight to share with us his hard-earned wisdom.

Dan, welcome to Washington Week.

DAN BALZ, The Washington Post: Thank you.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Just you, no panel to lean on.

You're going to -- we're going to -- we're going to go all -- we're going to go.

DAN BALZ: This is scary.

This is scary.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We're going to do like 50 years of American politics in the next 23 minutes.

Good luck to you.

So, I wanted to note something that I found amusing that you started in D.C. reporting actually in 1972 as a very, very young reporter, and your first story concerned the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

So, actually, nothing has changed.

DAN BALZ: Nothing has changed.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We're still talking about controversy at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What was that story?

DAN BALZ: Well, the story was actually a very in-depth look at how.

The economic statistics were prepared by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

But over the course of the time I was doing it, and then later there was controversy about whether the BLS had become politicized.

Unlike what we're going through now, this was not a question of manipulating numbers.

It was an issue of the interpretation of the numbers.

And the -- sorry, the Nixon administration did not like the way the professionals at BLS were interpreting the numbers.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

There were a lot of controversies about that at the time, including anti-Semitic controversy, if you recall.

DAN BALZ: Well, they ordered Fred Malek to go count the number of Jewish employees at the BLS, which was part of this.

DAN BALZ: Ultimately, the director of the BLS lost his job during the transition of 1972 to '73.

But when he -- when Nixon appointed a new director, it was a professional statistician.

So, it wasn't a political person.

It was a person highly respected.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Nixon did not do the things that we see today, for all of Nixon's faults.

It's an interesting thing.

So, the question I have for you about that is then is that in your half a century in Washington, have you found that time is just a flat circle, that every story is kind of like a story that you did earlier in life or there -- do you discover novel things in politics all the time?

DAN BALZ: Well, a little of both.

But, in some ways, you do feel like you are doing a version of the story you had done before.

But it all comes -- always comes in a different context and in a different time.

And over the course of the 50 years that I've been doing this, I think that the most important shift is that with each kind of iteration of that, politics has gotten tougher, coarser and meaner.

And so, you know, you look back and you say, well, I used some of these same words 20 years ago when I wrote about, you know, a similar kind of controversy, but this feels worse than that one did.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Has it been a one-way downhill slide or have there been moments when you thought politics was elevating and then coming back down again?

DAN BALZ: Oh, I think there's always ebb and flow in it.

And I think that, you know, this is a generally optimistic country and I think people want, you know, the system to work and to succeed.

But if you chart it, I mean, if you chart trust in government, you know, it fell off the cliff during Vietnam and Watergate.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

DAN BALZ: And it's basically been down ever since.

So, in terms of public trust, you know, I think the only moment when it changed was the immediate months after 9/11, when the country rallied, understandably.

But that dissipated pretty quickly within -- you know, certainly within a year or 18 months.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I mean, these are questions of almost impossible sweep, but the question -- you know, a question I would love you to answer is, you know, the overall trends of government function versus dysfunction, and what has caused what as a coring of that.

Describe in the 70s and 80s what national politics was like.

We all know, we all remember the story of Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill meeting after work to have a drink and talk about the day, even though they were clashing during the day.

When did that -- what was that period like and what were the benefits of it and maybe what were the deficits of that?

DAN BALZ: Well, one important element of that is that each political party was a coalition of liberals, moderates, and conservatives.

So, to really get work done, you had to do -- often you had to do cross-party coalitions.

The Democrats clearly controlled the Congress through that period.

But nonetheless, they had a conservative flank that they had to worry about.

And so, you know, Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan's ideologies were miles apart.

But they were a couple of old Irish guys.

And they kind of understood one another, and I think they understood the boundaries in which you had to play the game of politics.

And so they were not prepared to kind of blow things up.

That began to change.

I mean, I mark something that most people have no memory of at all, which was a big battle in 1985 over a disputed election -- Congressional election in Indiana.

The details are, you know, complicated.

But the upshot was the Democrats ended up seating a Democrat who the Republicans thought had not legitimately won the election.

And on the day that they seated him, the entire Republican conference in the House walked out and down the steps of the Capitol and held a press conference in protest.

That, to me, was a moment in which within the Republican Party, confrontation overtook cooperation as a kind of guiding principle.

And the architect of that strategy was none other than Newt Gingrich.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

I want to come to Gingrich for a second.

Go back to this 1985 incident.

Who was actually right and who was wrong?

DAN BALZ: You know, it's impossible to know because there were a handful of votes that had been absentee votes that had not been notarized properly.

Some votes in some areas had been counted, but this small panel that had been created within the House itself to kind of adjudicate this came to a dispute about what should be done with those ballots.

So, I think at this point, nobody quite knows what -- if those votes had been counted, what the outcome would've been.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: But it's a moment that set off some hard feelings.

DAN BALZ: More than hard feelings.

It was a moment in which the minority, which -- you know, the permanent minority at that point was the Republican Party.

The minority was like, we are not going to take this anymore.

We are done with trying to get along with you all.

Now after that, they, you know, they got along in ways.

So, it's not as though it ended.

But I think that was a prelude to what we later saw in, you know, like 1990, '91, '92, and ultimately in '94.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.