He has been described as the last of a generation of gold standard political reporters.

I think of him as the Cal Ripkin of the Washington Press Corps.

Tonight, a conversation with the Washington Post's Dan Balls, who is stepping down as a full-time political correspondent with the paper after 47 years on the job.

That's 12 elections and 8 presidencies he's covered.

I'll ask Dan about the state of American democracy and we'll find out which political

leaders he thought fulfilled their promise and which ones he thought were actually terrible.

Good evening and welcome to a special edition of Washington Week. No one in Washington

knows national politics like Dan Balls.

He is 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's here tonight to share with us his hard-earned wisdom. Dan, welcome to Washington Week. Thank you. Just you. No panel to lean on. You're going to, we're going to go all, we're going to go. This is scary. 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 DC 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. Nothing has changed. We're still talking about controversy at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. So actually, nothing has changed.

Nothing has changed.

We're still talking about controversy at the Bureau of Labor statistics.

What was that story?

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,

...