Mike Pesca

So

I don't know if our foreign policy would have changed all that much, but I do agree with you the emphasis might have been different.

There may have been a more methodical approach that Bush and Baker would have had.

I mean, essentially what you're saying is what if Jim Baker had been running things here, right, in helping democracy in the Eastern Europe?

Maybe.

Maybe.

It's an interesting what if that I'd like to put a little more of my own efforts into.

I need to go back and there's a great Jim Bakker.

memoir, not a memoir, excuse me, a biography that was written by my friends Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.

It had some cooperation from Baker.

It is a really, look, I think Jim Baker's, Jim Baker and Leon Panetta are probably the two great, equally the greatest Republican and greatest Democratic

public servants that weren't the best politicians, right?

I think Baker ran and lost a state AG race in Texas.

Leon Panetta obviously was a member of Congress, wanted to run for governor, never could find a way to do it.

But boy, they were really good at

They had a politician's eye with sort of CEO capabilities, kind of like Cheney.

Meaning they knew how to, not all politicians know how to run an institution, know how to actually have employees.

You get the sense that Panetta and Baker did, and this is why they were sort of the super staffers of their era.

One on the D side, one on the R side.

But I almost would want to go back and reread the Baker books, both his and then the one he cooperated with, with Glasser and Peter Baker.