Evan Osnos, Meredith Shiner & Rebecca Katz

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos examines the petty tantrums of the richest people on Earth and why they’re no longer serving the public the way they once did. Meredith Shiner details her article on why we need to primary every sitting Democrat. Plus, we have a special bonus interview with Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz about how Democrats can win.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics,
where we discussed the top political headlines with some of
today's best minds. And Gavin Newsom sues Fox News for
seven hundred and eighty seven million dollars in a defamation
case over Trump's call. We have such a great show

(00:21):
for you today. The New Yorkers Evan Osnos stops by
to talk about the richest people on Earth and the
wedding that a lot of people are talking about. Then
we'll talk to Meredith Shiner about her article why primary
every sitting Democrat? But first we have a special bonus

(00:42):
interview with Democratic strategist Rebecca Katz about how Democrats win.

Speaker 2 (00:48):
My birthright citizenship. The Supreme Court has come for this
is really really sickening stuff. And we've had a week
of really bad Supreme Court rulings and this takes the cake,
the cake factory, the batter, mix, the whole fucking thing.

Speaker 1 (01:06):
In my opinion, the surgical term for this is very fucked. Okay,
Supreme Court limited the ability of federal judges to temporarily
pause Trump's executive orders. This is a huge victory for Trump,
but they made no ruling on the constitutionality of his
move to end birthright citizenship. Basically, Trump can't end birthright citizenship.

(01:28):
Trump probably didn't even think he could end birthright citizenship.
This was always about trying to make it so that
lower courts couldn't interrupt his judicial rulings. So this is
actually a win for him. But it's not so much
about birthright citizenship as it is about executive orders and

(01:50):
the courts trying to have power over them. It's bad
because it gives Trump even more power. We shouldn't be
surprised because this Supreme Court is pretty partisan and deeply, deeply,
deeply trumpy. I think it's worth reading what Justice Sonya
Sotomayar wrote in the dissent. She said the majority's decision

(02:13):
is a travesty for the rule of law. The Majority
stress that it was not addressing the merits of Trump's
attempt to end automatic citizenship for babies born on US soil,
But instead they're saying that his administration can in fact
make these executive orders and the lower courts can't necessarily
pause them.

Speaker 2 (02:33):
Yeah. This on the heels of as well saying that
states can block plan parenthood funding or really any dystopia.
This week.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, Oh, this is fucking insane. I mean, it's such
an insane thing for the Trump administration to get more
and more from the Supreme Court, which doesn't need to
do this, which and it does really remind you of
just how how much this court is really in the
pocket of Trump, because we certainly have seen Justice Amy

(03:06):
and Justice Roberts side with the liberals. We've seen that
a few times, and it really is worth remembering that
that is very much that's not in the majority. Most
of the time they side with the other conservatives. Most
of the time they rubber stamp whatever Trump wants. And
remember this was never about birthright citizenship. It was really
about the Trump administration having executive orders that had even

(03:28):
more power to go against the courts. So it sets
Trump up for being able to do some really crazy
shit at the end of the at the end of
season two, Democracy in peril, and I think we'll probably
see that. It's scary, it's bad. And again it's worth
remembering if you're waiting for this Supreme Court to run
a check on Trump, it's going to be very, very

(03:50):
very unusual for them to do it.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Yeah, So the housing market, this graph that I just
looked at, it's kind of the opposite of what you'd
want to say in a graph on the housing market.
It looks like it's falling off a cliff. Not very good.

Speaker 1 (04:05):
Yeah, this is really bad. And part of what's going
on here is that people are scared, right, they don't
know what's going to happen. Trump behaves very erradically. We
were promised ninety deals in ninety days. We have half
a deal and we're almost at eighty days. And you know,
for people to make huge financial decisions, they're just waiting.

(04:28):
And what that means is that they're not buying houses.
And when they're not buying houses, then the value of
houses go down. And this is not rocket science. Look
in Trump one point zero, he passed a monster tax
cut and then he did some tariffs. And Trump two
point zero he did a lot of tariffs and can't
pass the monster tax cut. In fact, the monster tax
cut will eventually expire if these guys don't pass something.

(04:53):
So this is why the economy is not happy. And
we're seeing a lot of soft data that shows us
and consumers sentiment is down, that people are not buying houses,
people are nervous, and it only takes a while for
that nervousness to morph into a recession. Right, people don't
spend money, then money doesn't get spent. Then the economy shrinks.

(05:15):
The shrinking means a recession. The recession means less money,
less money, it means less jobs. I mean, this is
where this goes. So again, you could have Donald Trump
in the trade war tomorrow, or you could have Congress
take back their power on tariffs. But they're not doing
it because they're scared of Trump, because they gave away
their power because they refuse to stand up for their constituents.

(05:37):
And so you find yourself in a situation where everyone
is waiting on this made up trade war. And we'll
see if we slip into a recession.

Speaker 2 (05:44):
Speaking of things, we're about to see John thun under
a lot of pressure of the poor guy.

Speaker 1 (05:49):
Yeah, it's hard. I hope he has time to ten.

Speaker 2 (05:52):
Yes, I'm not poured one out for him. Impoortant, like
three or four out for him because I'm just so
sad for him. The big bullshit bill, it's got to
get through the parliamentary, it's got to get through all
these hoops got to get passed. If he doesn't want
to upset mister Trump. It's not looking good for him.

Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, it's very sad. Is he going to be okay? Oh,
I don't care.

Speaker 2 (06:09):
Well, I'll tell you see, this is a lie that
you don't care because there's one thing in here that
you care a lot about, the salt text.

Speaker 1 (06:19):
Shut up. Here's what's going on, and there's a lot
of shit in this bill. They want to get it
passed by July fourth. Do you know what day it.

Speaker 3 (06:27):
Is right now?

Speaker 2 (06:28):
It is June twenty seventh. I'm very aware because I
have to catch up flight very soon.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
June twenty seventh. You know what's not happening of Vodorama today?
Do you know what that means? That means this fucking
bill is not getting passed by July fourth. So Trump
is now trying to muscle the members of the Senate
and the House into passing this thing. I think that
it's not going to work, but we will see. He's
certainly going to try. And you know, there's a lot

(06:55):
of evidence to support the idea that this is not
going to work. But we'll see, right, we will say,
And now the news. Evan os Nos is a writer
for The New Yorker and the author of The Haves
and the Have Yachts. Welcome Too Fast Politics, Evan.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Os nose Hi, Molly junk Fast.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
I'm so excited to have you here. I feel like
you are trying not to crack up because I'm wearing
like thic TV makeup.

Speaker 5 (07:25):
But some of my best friends wear thick TV makes
Let's be honest. This is this is this is the
time we live in.

Speaker 1 (07:32):
So we we have you here to talk about your
excellent collection of essays the Have and the Have Yachts.
But I'm also going to talk to you about other stuff.
I'm sorry, that's okay. I do widen my reading and
thinking of it these days. But so talk to me
about the Have and the Have Yachts. You put together

(07:53):
collection of really smart and interesting essays. How do you
get to do that? Because I want to do no now.

Speaker 5 (08:00):
I'm well, I'll tell you one thing, which is, there
are ideas that come along and you sometimes think this
is a topic that I feel like is of interest
to me. In this particular case, the big blinking topic
was that we're living through an era of really almost
unprecedented wealth creation. But of course, big you know, shocker,

(08:25):
it's not being particularly widely distributed, and so it's this,
I know, a news break, but that combination of facts
is really interesting. But what I didn't honestly anticipate was
that there would be this conjunction of events this summer
that seemed to drive this point into our into our focus.
I mean, I don't know if you've heard, but there's

(08:47):
a wedding going on in Venice, Italy that seems to
be rather enlivening the subject of the haves and the
haveats with some vibrant detail.

Speaker 4 (08:58):
So are you.

Speaker 1 (09:03):
Yes, I'm in Venice with the Kardashians and Jeff Bezos.
You can tell because I have enormous filler in my
upper lip. Oh wait, so I wonder. Yeah, this wedding
has been such an is really an interesting case study
in what I think has been really interesting that we've seen, uh,

(09:26):
this new group of billionaires do, which is not do
any of this sort of giving place. So we had
a group of billionaires that I'm thinking of like Warren
Buffetts and you know, even Mackenzie Bezos. You know that

(09:46):
these people who really were bloomberg to to a certain extent,
you know, even the the Koch brothers did some of this.
You know, there's been a really a long tradition of
if you are a billionaire, you know, supporting museums and
hospitals and doing good public works. Now Elon Musk has

(10:07):
a family office and a foundation that has been in
trouble for giving so little money. Bezos, is that complicated?
So talk us through what these new sort of billionaires
who don't give any money to charity, what the thinking
there is.

Speaker 5 (10:26):
It's a really fascinating development because, as you described, there
was a period about ten years ago when the mainstream
view among the wealthiest people in America, or certainly at
least among the most prominent figures people like Bill Gates
and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, that they were signing

(10:47):
on to the giving pledge. They were devoting the lion's
share of their fortune to philanthropic initiatives, and that was
let's remind ourselves. I mean, that's a long standing American tradition,
goes back to the Carnegie and the Rockefellers, and we
have always historically as a country been more philanthropic than
other comparable countries. I mean, the next closest philanthropic competitor

(11:08):
in a sense is the United Kingdom and we give
about three times as much just as a as a
as a as as a fact. However, there's been a
change and that the current crowd, dominated of course by
musk by Bezos, adheres to a different philosophy, which is
that in a sense they believe that their businesses are

(11:31):
a substantial and almost adequate form of diving, and that
I think that there's a you know, what's fascinating about
that to me is that it reminds us that there
are fashions people.

Speaker 1 (11:43):
I'm sorry, go on, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 5 (11:44):
Yeah, Well that's there's that's that was a little bit
like the inner monologue and the outer monologue. But I
think what it is is that there are, like any community,
there are ideas that pass through and almost like you know,
quite literally, like fashions, and they will take over the
same way that they can take over a high school
about what it is that is the cool thing to

(12:07):
do or what is the wrong thing to do, and
at the moment the dominant idea. And I say this
having interviewed a lot of I mean a lot of
people for the course of this book who have enormous fortunes,
who have made it in technology and elsewhere, and their
view is that they tried to get along with the
East Coast elite. They tried to play our game in

(12:27):
a sense, as they would put it, and meaning that
they gave to the big organizations and that they felt
like they were rejected that finally in the end, well
this is yeah, I could there is.

Speaker 1 (12:39):
A I'm trying to keep from crying here.

Speaker 5 (12:41):
But it's well, they they get they this is part
of it is the thin skinness is kind of fascinating,
Like why it is that they they feel so batalized
when they have so much power?

Speaker 4 (12:55):
Yeah, Trump, this.

Speaker 1 (12:55):
Is the Donald Trump origin story, right, Obama? They thought
of him at the White House Correspondence Danner, he was like,
Obama wasn't born in this country, and now we have
a second Trump presidency and then we have I mean,
and that's the Elon Musk story too. So is it
just that these people were not able to get into

(13:18):
country clops.

Speaker 5 (13:19):
I would not underestimate the scale of history that rests
on facts as pathetically small as that.

Speaker 4 (13:28):
I mean, if you.

Speaker 5 (13:30):
Hang around people involved in understanding the real kind of
micro movements of democratic politics over the last few years,
people will tell you and it's true. And you know this,
I think you've heard it as I have Molly, that
the decision within the Biden administration to not invite Elon
Musk to an event on electric vehicles, I mean literally,
you know, didn't invite him to the party kind of

(13:51):
thing was for him this radicalizing, radicalizing event, which I
think can sound to any sane, normal person like, that's
crazy that he really transformed his political character based on that,
except for the fact that it happens to be true,
and I don't know what we do with that. Except

(14:12):
for me, I can tell you what I take from that,
which is that this is a demonstration to the fact
that we are just evolutionarily as humans not psychologically equipped
to be as powerful as Elon Musk, meaning he, you know,
the fragility of his ego, The fact that he could
allow himself to succumb to these kind of essentially juvenile

(14:34):
insecurities is a sign that nobody, frankly, is able to
have that kind of money and power and not ultimately
find themselves using it in really destructive ways when it's
captive to their ego.

Speaker 1 (14:48):
I'm going to respectfully push back here and say that
certainly there are people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Bill
Ackman is another one man guy. But there are certainly
people on the other side. Mackenzie Bezos fdo totally true.
You know, powerful people who have been able to handle

(15:11):
it and still consider themselves to be you know, not
to consider the world to include characters who are other
who are playing characters, right the Elon Musk, everyone else
is an n P.

Speaker 4 (15:26):
Right, Well, here's here's how I am.

Speaker 5 (15:28):
So we're at dangerous risk of agreement here because I
actually completely agree with you. And here's the difference is
that it's a difference of scale in the sense that
if you actually look at the sheer amount that that
Elon Musk has accumulated. I mean, it's worth reminding ourselves.
Ten years ago he had ten billion dollars with a
b which is a huge amount of money, but now
he has four hundred and really almost no nobody has

(15:50):
ever gone from that to that so fast, and it
broke his brain. And I think that part of what
we're contending with is that it's sort of that it's
the scale and acceleration is the is the particular risk.
But I agree, and part of the reason to write
about it and talk about it. The way that I
that I do is because I want to point out

(16:11):
the fact that there are multiple ways to live at
that scale, and I don't think that you have to
be like Bezos and musk. You can there are sort
of other choices on the menu. And I'm very excited
about the I mean that we are living as as
you know, we're living in this period where Mackenzie Scott
and women.

Speaker 4 (16:33):
Yeah, yeah, that they are the model right.

Speaker 1 (16:36):
Yes, yeah, women and not not the model men.

Speaker 4 (16:40):
Yeah, I'm afraid so yeah, I mean.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
There are I think Bill Gate, I mean, there are
definitely Bill Gates. So he did go to that wedding,
which is a little bit disappointing, by the way, do
you if you're a celebrity and your like that wedding
strikes me as like just a good one to skip.

Speaker 5 (17:00):
I do find it fascinating to wonder why people go
when they are at risk of such obvious blowback. I
mean it's fascinating, I know, kind of state the obvious here.
You know, you and I think a lot about politics,
about like big things, and we're talking about a wedding
precisely because it is a political juncture in its way.
I mean, it's fascinating to compare it to the idea

(17:23):
of what happened. Remember George Clooney and Amal Clooney got
married in Venice, and Venice didn't have any problem with it.
They thought, this is great, go to it. And you know,
it's a sign of the change in I think the
culture around the public reaction to wealth about how profoundly
different it is today. It's not just that one was
a movie star and one made his money on e commerce.

(17:44):
It's that the whole environment is different. We're having a
conversation in this, you know, around mom Donnie's winning the
mayoral race.

Speaker 1 (17:49):
Huge, it's hot. It's hot, commy summer. But as the
granddaughter of a communist, I don't hate it. So I
would say though George is so George Cliney is so
incredibly careful, so involved in philanthropic stuff, and so much
smarter than many many celebrities that I do think he has.

(18:15):
You know, even if he got married today, he would
not get the kind of blowback because what I think
about Bezos is he has been very unfocused on the
you know, you could like it would be easy to
be Jeff Bezos and say I'm giving twenty percent of
everything I make today on Amazon to the Amazon rainforest.

(18:37):
I mean, it's a rounding error. But he could do that.
I mean, if he had ten minutes to think about it,
he could. He could. You know, it would be quite easy.
And I mean, this is the baffling thing about Elon Musk, right,
Elon Musk cut all this money for USAID. Right, So
three million people, three million, thirty million, it's huge. Millions

(18:58):
of people are dying because because Elon Musk didn't like USAID.

Speaker 5 (19:02):
And I have to say I've become on this topic
pretty fierce in my belief that we now need to
adorn every mention of Elon Musk with a reminder of
the fact that his wanton destruction of USAID has cost lives.

Speaker 4 (19:18):
There's just no.

Speaker 1 (19:20):
Way millions and I children dying of malaria because he
was like, we're going to get waste for Onden abuse,
and what he meant by waste Forden abuse was stuff
I don't like and helping my companies.

Speaker 5 (19:32):
And I also think it was a kind of methodological
error in the sense that it wasn't just that you're
actually I think almost giving it a little bit more
credit as a worked out idea. I think it was
almost more of just a reflexive hunch that you know,
as you say, you know, I don't like this idea
of giving money to these foreign countries. I can't figure

(19:53):
out what its utility is, so I'm just going to
exit out without any deep thinking. I mean, this is
where I think there's a The pattern that bothers me
most is when somebody who has assembled obviously some success
in one realm then applies it into this other thing.
We see this pattern a lot. But the really scary

(20:14):
fact is that the consequences that accrue to that bad
decision will not redound against Musk.

Speaker 4 (20:22):
And that's that's like.

Speaker 5 (20:24):
A huge problem in the machine of decision making and power,
because you know, it's it's like the actual consequences will
rest on the shoulders of others. And as long as
that's the case, as long as he lives in a
world of essentially no accountability, then you're going to see
more of these kinds of catastrophic, catastrophic mistakes.

Speaker 1 (20:45):
I also would love you to talk about sort of
progressive taxation, because this is something anyone who has a
phone and rich friends has gotten a number of very
agitated text messages is about Mandani. I'm sure you have. Yeah,
I certainly have. Uh, they are very mad and there

(21:08):
is certainly a lot of anxiety about taxes. So we
pay pretty high taxes, but not nearly what people might
pay in the you know, the level of taxation under FDR. Right,

(21:28):
but I would love you to talk about progressive taxation,
I mean even wrong. You'll remember pretended to give this
a thought when he said that maybe people make over
two and a half million dollars a year to be
taxed at one percent, but you know, some something that
was pathetically low, and he pretended he was going to

(21:48):
do that. And then again, I never think that he
was going to do that. But then people in his
orbit were like, no, no, those people put you in office. Baby.

Speaker 4 (21:56):
Yeah it was he, but he did.

Speaker 5 (21:58):
He sort of flirted with it briefly because he knows
that it has He gets a huge dividend in public
conversation by flicking at it, because it kind of reignites
that little tiny flicker of hope among the members of
his base who kind of imagine hope against hope that
he still is the guy who is going to from

(22:20):
the inside create fairness where it doesn't exist, and that,
of course I think is a fallacy, but it it
you know, it brings eternal to your point. I think
this is just like an absolutely fascinating issue, which is
that in some ways I think when we talk about
taxes and progressive taxes, that by focusing on the income

(22:42):
tax rate, that that's a bit of a of a
distraction from what is the heart of the matter, because
you know, look what the reality is that today, if
I am talking to you from a room in which
I have a Matisse on the wall and a pile
of gold bullion on my desk and a yacht out
side my door, I'll pay less taxes if I organized

(23:04):
my income correctly, then you would if you were a
social worker making forty thousand dollars a year, because we
don't tax wealth. We don't tax what's sitting on top
of my desk or outside at my doc it's what's
coming into your income. So as a result, as you know,
according to Pro Publica, there were eighteen billionaires during the

(23:25):
pandemic who had such little income that they qualified for
COVID relief funds. I mean, Jeff Bezos has engineered his
income down to such a low level points according to
Pro Publica, that he actually qualified for the child tax credit.
So in a way, what we need to which is
an amazing fact and an amazing fact, and it's and

(23:45):
I think what that tells us is that, I mean,
right now, the Big Beautiful Bill, I hate even saying it,
but it's just you know.

Speaker 1 (23:53):
And we refer to it as the BBB.

Speaker 4 (23:55):
That's true, the BBB.

Speaker 5 (23:59):
It is it includes provisions for instance that yes, as
we know, they extend the tax cuts, and that's piece,
that's a piece of it. But one of the things
that doesn't get enough attention is what it does on
the estate tax, which is that it allows people to
pass along many millions more without being subject to the
state tax. The estate tax has been so grinded down

(24:21):
that it is now as Gary Kohne, who was of
course in the first Trump term, he said to never worked.

Speaker 1 (24:26):
At Goldman Sachs. I mean, this guy's not as socialist
Yan gone.

Speaker 5 (24:31):
Well, what he said about the income about the estate
tax was he said he was. He was said to
have told members of Congress only morons pay the estate tax,
meaning that it is so easy to escape that, you know.
But as I mean, it used to be that a
substantial percentage of Americans was subject to it. It is
now down to literally maybe two or three thousand people

(24:51):
a year that pay it. Think about how and the
reason why that's so important is the estate tax was
created essentially as way of preventing the rise of aristocratic
dynasties in this country of the kind that defined Europe
in contrast the United States.

Speaker 4 (25:07):
This was at the core of the whole American idea.

Speaker 5 (25:11):
But there's a reason why conservative activists went to war
against the estate tax in the nineties and renamed it
the death tax and turned it into a cause celeb
because they knew that if the sheer power of the
math is that if you can allow yourself a couple
of generations where you escape that kind of tax, you
can develop fortunes that make your family essentially essentially a fortress.

(25:35):
One last thing on that that I think is fascinating.
There's a law that was passed in medieval Europe called
the Law against Perpetuities, which was designed to prevent this,
which was the kind of passing on of endlessly compounding
dynastic fortunes. Because even the kings decided this is probably

(25:56):
no way to run a state, it's not going to
work very well. And in fact, we now have states
in the United States, starting with South Dakota then Nevada,
that have essentially done away with the law against perpetuity,
so returning us to a kind of pre medieval European
condition in some of those states. And that's the reason
why you see, for instance, Rupert Murdoch going in this
lawsuit against his children, against three of them in the

(26:19):
state of Nevada, and so he's kind of trying to
return it to a condition of medieval Europe.

Speaker 1 (26:25):
Yeah, medieval Europe has went great for ever. Yes, that's right.
Excited to see how this plays out. And the anti
vad stuff really plays into the medieval Europe thing.

Speaker 4 (26:37):
Oh certainly.

Speaker 5 (26:38):
I mean that's a pre Enlightenment ambition, is to say,
you know, don't believe what these scientists with their fancy
microscopes tell you. Just you know, pray to the right
belief system and you'll get there.

Speaker 1 (26:51):
Things are going great. Thank you, thank you, Thank you, Evan.
I hope you'll come back.

Speaker 4 (26:56):
Always. Great to see em.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
Ali Maretitha Shiner is a freelance journalist. Welcome to Fast Politics, Meredith.

Speaker 3 (27:05):
Thank you for having me, Mollie.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
We're going to talk about two different really smart ideas
that you've written about. Okay, I'm going to start with
the first one, which I wrote to you about in
August twenty twenty four, because I actually think that this
first article informs the second article a little bit. So
you write for the New Republic. We all love the

(27:29):
New Republic. We think Mike Tamaski is a genius, at
least I do. Let's talk about this idea. So during
the twenty twenty four cycle, I feel like that's one
hundred years ago, but it informs where we are at
this moment. You talked about Beware the pundit brained version
of the Democratic Convention, and I just want to talk

(27:49):
about that because I think it sets the stage here.
Everyday Americans turn in tune in to watch Kamala Harris
receive for Parties nomination, they should trust what they see
with their own eyes is actually as DC's chattering class
tries to gaslight them. Exactly, So said the stage here,
what you mean by prend and brain, what you mean
by DC's chattering class trying to gaslight them? And then

(28:11):
we'll move on to the next one.

Speaker 6 (28:13):
Well as a longtime listener, but first time guest. I
think it's important to give the context that I covered
Congress and national politics in Washington for almost a decade,
so I saw all of these dynamics up close. And
I think one of the things that I like writing
about and exploring is thinking about how all of the
stakeholders in Washington have agency. And I'm particularly interested in

(28:34):
how the national media has agency in shaping the national narrative.

Speaker 3 (28:39):
I think so.

Speaker 6 (28:40):
Much of what we hear from the pundit class, and
you're right, it's timely now be as we see Jake
Chapper non stop showing a book on CNN trying to
sell us on this idea that like the greatest lie
or the greatest cover up ever perpetuated in our American
politics was that Joe Biden was old, which everyone saw
with their own eyes, right, was.

Speaker 1 (29:00):
Napolling, Like, you know, eighty percent of Americans thought he
was too old.

Speaker 6 (29:03):
There's something yes, and so like if you, as a
reporter couldn't see that with your own eyes because you
were having drinks at Johnny's Halfshell and someone was telling
you he was young and vigorous, and that's the narrative
you believed that wasn't on us, the consumer of news.
And so this gets back to the idea of agency
and trying to shape a national understanding. So, you know,

(29:24):
I did live in DC for almost a decade. I
live in Chicago now, and I think that in DC
people really undervalue the role in of the national media
to help shape our collective understanding.

Speaker 3 (29:37):
And I think that that is.

Speaker 6 (29:38):
A moral obligation of our political media and that they've
abdicated it. And so when we think back to the
summer of twenty twenty four, obviously, you know, the way
that we got a new Democratic nominee was not really typical,
and yet there was excitement, like I remember, and this
goes back to Jake Tapper, and I wrote about this

(29:59):
in the piece at the time. You know, watching that
announcement rally with Tim Walls, and you could hear the
crowd in the background, you could hear the music, you
could see people dancing, and the entire time on the
CNN set, Jake Tapper was talking about was this a
catastrophic mistake not picking Pennsylvania Governor Dras Shapiro. And so
they had this trump track that wasn't mattering the visuals,

(30:22):
and so you have to think about, you know, what
was the incentive structure for the national media during the
Trump presidency, what was their biggest failure? And what is
the life that we're living now? And for me, you know,
like the sort of takenaway from the Trump presidency was
that it was incredibly profitable for those reporters. They sold books,
They tried to make sense of what was chaotic without

(30:45):
actually providing the proper context of what was happening to
our government, what was happening to the young people who
wanted to be involved in politics and its impact on
real people. And then, secondly, the biggest fail of the
national media, which was another essay that I've written in
The New Republic, was fail year to properly characterize January
sixth and the devastation of so many of those reporters

(31:06):
being there that day, of those rioters writing murder, the
media on the doors, people fearing for their lives, but
then trying to snap back to normal right to be like, Okay,
I can stand here and interview a Senate Republican about
debt or deficus and ignore the fact that they voted
to reject a free and fair election and were complicit
in the mob that tried to get me killed.

Speaker 3 (31:26):
Right, So that was the second failure.

Speaker 6 (31:28):
And honestly that was really fueled by the Biden administration
narrative that they wanted to get back to this normal too.
And I think for me when I think about this
time and sort of the complicity of the stakeholders that
have brought us to this messy moment is that they
wanted to get back to normal.

Speaker 3 (31:44):
For them, they wanted to.

Speaker 6 (31:46):
Be able to go to the White House correspondence dinner
and their cocktail hours and feel like things were right
in the world, to have state dinners, like you know,
Joe Biden had a state dinner and he invited Kevin
McCarthy and he called him a great guy, even though
again he voted to reject your election. And so all
of this normalization just led us to this place where

(32:07):
reporters who were programmed by traditional both side rules or
horsephrase punditry, they weren't equipped and aren't equipped for the
moment we're living in now. But they also played a
role in shaping public perception about Kamala Harris's candidacy. And
that's to say she ran a perfect campaign, or that

(32:27):
the administration didn't sort of set her up to fail
in the campaign that she ultimately was able to run.
But everyone played a role in shaping this moment. I
would say, like the last thing is like the irony
about to me about the Jake Tapper Alex Thompson Biden book,
is that twenty twenty was such an unusual primary season

(32:48):
because of COVID, that the national media actually played an
outsized role.

Speaker 7 (32:52):
In helping me shape the idea of electability and who
the nominee would be.

Speaker 3 (32:57):
Like.

Speaker 6 (32:57):
If you remember back to the South Carolina primary, basically
the national media consensus was Jim Kleibern likes Joe Biden
the best. Ergo he represents like all black people in America. Ergo,
he's going to be the nominee.

Speaker 3 (33:09):
Yeah, and that was crazy.

Speaker 1 (33:11):
Yeah. I don't want to spend too much time talking
about that book because it's many other people are talking
about it. But I do think it is interesting that
Tamper was so strong about not having election deniers on
and he was so principled for a while.

Speaker 3 (33:26):
Oh, but here's actually something that's instructive.

Speaker 6 (33:28):
I think that that was sort of performative and that
was like what got currency in that moment? Like remember
like when Jensaki, the White House Press Secretary, would always
fight with Peter Doucey, like for the cameras, Like that
wasn't actual good governance. That was an audition for an
MSNBC show and for Tapper in that moment, and Trump won,

(33:49):
Like fighting with those officials, that conflict was good television,
But I'm not sure the result was better public education
about the issues. It was just normalization of people who
stand against government and who are also now currently looking
to oppress people.

Speaker 1 (34:05):
Right. I happen to really like jen but I understand
that White House Press Secretary is a job about reforming
press performance. But I do think of her as like
a very good egg. But what's a really good point
is that we're watching sort of how this works.

Speaker 6 (34:22):
We're watching theater while also living in this like really
devastating real world at the same time. And I think
that's the heart of the disconnect and the overall sort
of takeaway.

Speaker 1 (34:32):
Yeah, so this new piece you wrote is called Primary
Every Democrat are You're going to be people who listen
this podcast, My dad, Hi Dad, and a lot of
people who I love who are going to be very
unhappy with that title, but I think that the ideas
in it are really important. So explain to us how
you got here.

Speaker 8 (34:50):
Well, you know, I think the sad thing is is
the piece isn't actually that new, but it always resurfaces
because the goodness for people talking about it, it is ongoing.

Speaker 1 (35:02):
Well that's how you know, you hit it.

Speaker 9 (35:03):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (35:04):
So it was week.

Speaker 6 (35:05):
One of the Trump administration, this Trump too, and I
just found myself so angry by how flat footed everyone
who had power and influence in this country seemed to
be about this particular hostile takeover of our government and
the idea that we should try to have a normal inauguration,

(35:27):
that a person who was impeached twice should be treated
with all of the pomp and circumstance, or greeted at
the White House, like all of these things were happening,
and simultaneously this administration started doing everything they said that
they would do, and what they said they would do
was just rip apart the fabric of American democracy, to
rip apart our government. And I think the sort of

(35:51):
id of primary every Democrat and the thing that people
keep coming back to is this idea that government is
good actually and going back to the sort of Reagan years,
Democrats have run away from that idea. In this fight
over big government or small government, the conversation has always
sort of been skewed to the conservative view that last

(36:12):
government is better, to the point where everyone ended up
being upside down and not able to articulate the value
of government or public service. And at the end of
the day, every average person, even a person who doesn't
live on Blue Sky or listen to this podcast, benefits
from good government. And we're seeing what happens when we
lose it. What happens when we lose it is that

(36:33):
we don't have air traffic controllers and Newark Airport has
to shut down. What happens when we lose it is
that we don't have scientific research happening anymore. And people
are not only going to die of measles today because
we've put anti vaxxers in charge of our public health infrastructure,
but people are going to die thirty five years from
now from diseases we could have cured today. People benefit

(36:54):
from having a postal service, from having an infrastructure that
helps make sure that people who get PUSS education in
this country are getting the highest quality education available, they
benefit from PBNs, they benefit from MPR. We benefit from
all of these things. And the idea that we have
like empowered arsonists to ruin everything with no apparent true

(37:18):
strategy other than to own the Libs without aggressively fighting back,
without showing any fight. Like the average person doesn't agree
with what is happening now, and yet there is a
total leadership vacuum at the top of the Democratic Party.
And you know, some people get a little bit sort
of prickly about the idea that is related to the gerontocracy.

(37:40):
And we do have leaders who are older and that
has necessarily made them out of touch, but it is
also just a general level of competence and being able
to use all of the tools of Congress to slower
Republican Congress down and to message I do use that
an opportunity and to leverage those media moments to actually

(38:00):
message in defensive government and defensive government workers, I mean
defense of their own staff.

Speaker 3 (38:05):
Like when the Senate, when Senate.

Speaker 6 (38:08):
Democrats led by Chuck Schumer caved on the Continuing Resolution.
There were so many negative impacts from that moment, but
these people walked into their own offices and looked at
their own staffers, knowing that they allowed a billion dollars
to get stolen from the District of Columbia, three hundred
million dollars from DC public schools, their own people. So

(38:31):
they're failing their constituents, they're failing their staff, but they're
failing this moment and this democracy.

Speaker 3 (38:37):
Like I think.

Speaker 6 (38:38):
About it turned out today, Corey Booker is out with
a book based on his twenty four hour filibuster. This
is a guy who stood on the floor and bless
him for breaking strom Thurman's record. Strom Thurmant shouldn't have
a record for anything. But then he turned around, like
Corey Booker, voted for things like confirming Jared Kushner's dad

(38:58):
to an ambassadorship.

Speaker 3 (39:00):
No one was asking for that.

Speaker 10 (39:02):
These people voted to confirm David Purdue, who they spent
more money David Perdue, former Georgia Democratic senator, who was
Republican senator investigated by the Department of Justice for insider trading.

Speaker 7 (39:17):
His race was one of the most expensive Senate races
in the history of our country. They spent like more
than one hundred million dollars trying to defeat him, and
then something like a dozen Senate Democrats voted to confirm
him do a job of public trust.

Speaker 3 (39:30):
And so not.

Speaker 6 (39:31):
Only is this bad morally and ethically, but it's horrible
politically because they're not creating a clear and consistent message
to get amplified in the media or to bring directly
to people who don't really have a sense of the
full depth and breadth of the destruction that's happening.

Speaker 1 (39:51):
Now, Yeah, I mean, I think that's a really really
strong point. And look, one of the things that we
have been doing a ton of interviews on crypto, and
what we see with crypto is that there are a
lot of Democrats because Crypto is now the exon of
twenty twenty five, there are a lot of Democrats who
get money from Crypto and are signing on to the

(40:12):
Genius Act, which basically is yet another opportunity not to
regulate and to pretend you're regulating. So there are definitely
big problems here. Part of that piece is a sort
of Schumer Durban trifacta. So talk to me about that.

Speaker 3 (40:28):
One of the things that I think about a lot.

Speaker 6 (40:29):
So I arrived in Washington in two thousand and nine,
I covered the rise of the teap Party, the entirety
of the Obama administration, and for whatever reason, I feel
like a lot of reporters who were there for some
of these seminal moments have either like totally forgotten what
happened there or are willfully forgetting. But I think about
all of these sort of touch points that really destabilized Congress,

(40:54):
like the idea that we would normalize taking the full
faith in credit of the United States passage that we
were constantly fighting over, the debt limit, that congressionally directed
spending or earmarks were taken away, and all of the
authority to choose and fund projects in different districts was
given to the executive. And that you had members of
Congress who then had to go to the executive to

(41:15):
ask for those things. So all of these powers sort
of shifted to the executive because Congress was dysfunctional. And simultaneously, Republicans,
led by Mitch McConnell, really laid the groundwork to co
op the judiciary. And that was sort of a combination
of you know, citizens United and unlimited money in politics,

(41:37):
which was Mitch McConnell's end wall, mixed with this idea
that you could put young ideologues at every level of
the court that you could confirm them by either distorting
Senate precedent or eliminating it. And Democrats for the longest
time were just stuck in this position. Were they prioritized

(41:57):
norms over results. The average person has not watched nearly
as much C SPAN two or C SPAN as I have.
They don't care, or they don't they or us you know,
or some of your listeners maybe like they don't they
don't care about blut slips like Dick Durbin.

Speaker 3 (42:14):
Did they care about.

Speaker 6 (42:15):
Whether or not things like abortion are legal in this country,
or whether gay marriage.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Will continue to be legal in this.

Speaker 6 (42:23):
Country, whether diversity programs in colleges across this country will
continue to be legal, whether birthright citizenship will continue. I mean,
all of the tempets of our democracy were beginning to erode.
And I want to change that because as an active verb,
Republicans were eroding them before Trump, and they will continue

(42:44):
to try to erode them afterwards. And so they let
a Supreme Court seek get stolen and they didn't really
fight that hard on it, and I feel like the
lessons that they've learned is fight less. Like one of
the things that I was thinking about you know, recently
they were having the budget on the big beautiful bill.
I don't know why these presidents, whether it's Trump or Biden,
like love their b word of alliteration, like why are

(43:07):
do we build that better?

Speaker 3 (43:08):
Big big quote?

Speaker 6 (43:11):
Moving on, When Paul Ryan released his budgets after the
Tea Party takeover of the House of Representatives starting at
twenty eleven, they were politically catastrophic. They were like ads
of Paul Ryan, like pushing people in wheelchairs off cliffs,
like it was used to devastate Republicans and that helped

(43:33):
fuel reelection for Barack Obama in the next presidential I'm
not convinced we'll have a next free and fair election. However,
this budget bill was so much worse, Like it was
exponentially worse, and I feel like the fight really wasn't there.
And I think that's where you have this asymmetry of energy,

(43:54):
and that's where I think, like primary, a pre Democrat
continues to get clicks or continues to allow me to
have a conversation with you, like this is because there
are people who care about basic things like having their
kids get vaccinated and go to school safely every day,
and like potentially have a future. I'm a millennial. I
think I had sort of accepted the idea that boomers

(44:17):
were going to do better than us financially no matter what.
But I never assented to democracy being fully taken from
us and for that to radically reshape our ability to
live our lives peacefully, freely, joyfully. And so when you
have all of these people who are seeing everything that's
happening and then a frustrated and they're just clamoring for

(44:38):
someone to do something. And then you have Democrats like
Chuck Schumer Kim Jeffreys being like, we're just gonna sit
back and let him get unpopular, No, make him more
unpopular and help define why he's unpopular. Because the average
person I talked to here in Chicago, who does not
really follow politics, like, they hear about the tariffs, they
hear about the renaming of the Golf of Mexico to

(44:59):
the Gulf of a America. But I think the dot
connecting over all of the people who are losing their jobs,
all of the oversight that used to exist, the full
collapse of the government, I don't think that they will
fully understand it until it's really truly real, and that
day's coming soon. But it's really devastating to think about.

(45:20):
And you want the people.

Speaker 3 (45:21):
Of power to care more than we do, or at
least as much as we do.

Speaker 1 (45:25):
As much as we do. I think that's a really
good point. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I hope you'll come back.

Speaker 3 (45:31):
I would love that. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 (45:33):
Molly.

Speaker 1 (45:35):
Rebecca Katz is a democratic strategist and the founder of
the Fight Agency. Welcome to Fast Politics for BACKA great
to be here, Molly. You know, you and I know
each other, and you have worked on a lot of
really important campaigns. But the reason why I said I
have to get you right now and made a whole

(45:55):
stink of it was because I read your editorial in
the New York Times about Mondani and it wasn't so
much about Mondani, but it was about how democratic candidates win,
which is something that you and I are both obsessed with.
You worked very tangentially on the Mondanni campaign on the ads.

Speaker 9 (46:13):
And they Firm did his ads, and Morris Cats at
our firm was his chief at right.

Speaker 1 (46:17):
But you've also worked on some other campaigns which I
feel like are in some ways even more relevant, like
Ruben Diego's campaign, where Ruben ran about eight points ahead
of Trump. So I'd love you to talk about your
thesis and this piece.

Speaker 9 (46:36):
So basically, I think Democrats are doing this wrong. You know,
I remember going back to Bernie twenty sixteen, there were
people who liked him and people who didn't. I liked him,
but the people who beat him were so happy to
have beat him and so mad at him for running
in the first place, that they never really asked the

(46:56):
question why did he inspire so many millions of people?
There was no curiosity coming from the top of our
party as to why it happened. There was no audit
to figure out what went wrong when we lost, and
there was no curiosity as to think about, like how
do we get those those voters back in the fold?
And if you look at the traditary many of those

(47:16):
twenty sixteen Bernie voters went to Trump by twenty twenty four.

Speaker 1 (47:20):
Right, So those voters never came back, is the point
those voters. How did Zoran get those voters?

Speaker 9 (47:27):
He talked to people, right, Like, the whole point of
his campaign is that he ran on a real message
that affected people's life affordability. He talked about making their
life better. He had easy to understand messaging freeze the
rent free and fast buses, like expanding childcare. These are
things that people gravitated towards and they understood that was

(47:48):
part of his message. But also he showed that he
was up for new things, he was listening, he was communicating.
It was just a different kind of campaign, And I
think Democrats in the past have run these really bored
and campaigns where they're so to mix it up or
say the wrong thing that they actually convey nothing right.
And that is the whole problem, like what do we
stand for? Well, we're not as bad as the other guys.

(48:11):
That wasn't compelling enough. I mean, there are stories out
of the election where you have these focus groups where
let's say a voter says, I know Trump is evil,
and then at the end of the focus group they
ask again, well what do you think and they said,
I'm on the side right. We could not those people
over to our side. We could not have a reason
to vote for us. And I'm not saying what works

(48:31):
in New York City is going to work in Arizona.
I'm actually very much nothing. I'm saying we have to
try new things. And we shouldn't be so afraid. We're
afraid of everything, and we're particularly afraid of things we
don't know, right. And that's the thing. Like a lot
of the most interesting candidates are coming from somewhere else.
They're not like my firm fight agency. We don't have
any lawyers that are candidates rights, right. We're trying to

(48:55):
get people. We've had candidates who are mechanics, right, Like,
you have to connect to people on like a very
real level. You don't want to just have candidates who
have been trying to be president for their whole life.
They have to have real, lived experiences and they have
to connect with working class voters.

Speaker 1 (49:10):
I want you to talk about Ruben because I don't
want to have a conversation about mon Donnie for any
number of reasons. I mean, I really like him, but
there's so much going on around it that I don't
think it highlights our point in the same way that
Ruben actually does.

Speaker 9 (49:29):
I am happy to talk about Ruben Diego because that
is an incredible individual. Like, just to give you a
little bit of his life story. Raised by a single mom,
it was him and his bunch of sisters living working
class area of Chicago, grew up, got himself into Harvard
all by himself. Listed in the Marines, was in one
of the deadliest units in the war in Iraq war,

(49:51):
ran for office out of Arizona, very compelling Latino working class,
the whole thing that we're looking for now. I would
say that we lost. And when he first ran, there
were no real Washington Democrats who came out for him.
You know, even after Cinema left the party she was
an independent, we still couldn't get the top folks in

(50:11):
Washington excited about his race. And it literally wasn't until
Cinema said she wasn't running at all that the rest
of like Washington came in for him. And this is
a guy who outran Harris in Arizona by eight points,
right Like they thought it was a risky bet, Ruben
Diego was the safest bet we could have made. And

(50:31):
nobody saw that. And that's what I'm worried about.

Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, And one of the things that we saw was
Ruben were these Trump Diego voters. You think it's important
to have a minute to talk about what that looks like,
because I believe that what Trump did very well was
offer people something. It wasn't something he had any intention
of delivering, but he was offering it, right, So we'd say,

(50:58):
you want free IVF. I mean IVF. There were people
who voted for him for free IVF. There was no
world in which that man was ever gonna give you
free IVF is a gazillion dollars. But they just think
that for whatever reason, Democrats seem so scared, we.

Speaker 9 (51:15):
Worry about everything we're not. I mean, what Reuben Diego
did so well is he just talk to.

Speaker 1 (51:20):
People, which is what Zorin did too.

Speaker 9 (51:23):
Yes, whatever, it was like, people would come up to him,
they would they would talk to him. They would say,
you know, I voted for Trent, Like are you are
you a crazy liberal? Like talk to me, you know,
and then they would talk to him for five minutes
and then they would say, well, maybe I don't agree
with everything, but I'm gonna vote for you. Right. Because
he connected with him on a real level, he understood
how it's like, we have this tendency to want robots
who are careful with every single word they say, and

(51:43):
that doesn't resonate with voters. They don't want that the
error of the perfect candidate is over. We don't want
perfect hair and a perfect like iron shirt and like
every you know, like we want candidates who have lived
something because life in America is hard right now, and
if we can't get candidates who can talk to voters
like they understand what they're going through, we're going to
keep on losing.

Speaker 1 (52:03):
I interviewed Harris twice. I have always been a champion
of women in politics. I think, or try to be
as much as I can be in still being an
opinion columnist. But I just wonder, why do you think
she was so careful and sort of what role do
you think the people around her play in that it.

Speaker 9 (52:24):
Is harder for women. I want to just start there.
That is real, like your words get taken out of context,
like there's just it's harder. I do think Harris had
some great people around her. I'm not here to crap
all over them. This is she read very hard one
hundred day campaign. What I will say is that I
think we have to take the fight to different places,
because what would happen is Harris would do an interview

(52:44):
and reporters would say, here's all the things she did wrong,
or the right wing was hair or whatever, and they
would be in defensive mode. And what was interesting watching
the Zoran campaign is you literally saw like different playing
fields happening, Like he was getting beat up in the
press every day, but still like doing a thirteen mile
walk down Manhattan getting tiktoks all over.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
The lad you know.

Speaker 9 (53:04):
Like, so he was able to have a duel or
like campaign where he was getting beat up in one
direction but able to be happy in another. That Harris
I think, and a lot of Democrats struggle with other
mediums and platforms to bring their message to and and
what we do is if we do an interview Democrats
and they get and they get picked apart, then they

(53:27):
don't do an interview again. They're just like, oh, I
messed up. I'm not gonna do it. You got to
talk through it. I mean, look at Trump, who knows
what his gafts are. There's so many you can't even remember, right,
you go to remember how you were outrage about something
a week ago, much less yesterday. Like it's just it's
so much. And he just keeps it going. And Democrats
don't know how to keep going.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
They just get too.

Speaker 9 (53:47):
Nervous, or our donor calls them, and then they retreat
and they say, well, I didn't really mean it that way.
We're always on defense. We need like we need to
like go out there and punch people in the face
in a nice way. But like you know what I mean,
Like it's like got it, we.

Speaker 1 (54:00):
Got to have in a non violent way. Yes, you know.

Speaker 9 (54:03):
I'm in Philadelphia, right, And so when I when I
talk about campaigns, I try and think of, like what
will we do in filming and we would talk people
lighte and just sit there and like wait for our turn.
We would we would take it. We would take what's
our and Democrats need to go out and take it.

Speaker 1 (54:18):
So right now, there are a lot of people on
the right who are super excited about Zorin because they
think that they can turn him into this sort of
boogeyman atwar.

Speaker 9 (54:32):
Clmall thought too, right, and they ran tens of millions
of dollars in like ad campaigns talking about it, like
let's take a step back for a second, because Republicans
do this every cycle where they try and turn somebody
into a crazy.

Speaker 1 (54:46):
Socialist or whatever it is.

Speaker 9 (54:48):
Right, they said for years that Obama wasn't born here,
that Obama is a socialist, that Obama is a Muslim,
Zoramondanni is all of those things. And basically people were like, well,
Obama was great, so why are we scared about Zora?
Do you know what I mean? Like they have scared
people for so long that nobody has scared anymore. Like
it doesn't These same tactics do not work because it's

(55:10):
just it's like the boy who cried. Well, regular voters
understand negative attacks. They're not going to see the news
and say, oh, I saw this commercial, he must be terrible. Right,
there's more cynicism now than there used to be about
that stuff. And so I think what Zorn did is
he ran a pretty positive campaign where he was accessible
and I think that and Ruben Diego was accessible too,

(55:31):
Like people were always coming up to them the rodeos,
the fight nights, like he was somebody that people saw
in their community. That's important.

Speaker 11 (55:39):
So you're saying, get out there, talk to voters, do
a ton of media, be every engaged with everyone.

Speaker 1 (55:49):
Yeah, talk about that.

Speaker 9 (55:51):
So Zora had two amazing things going well, actually a
lot of things. One, he's incredibly intelligent, like a great
candidate's he listens. He's somebody who was generally interested in
other people and happy to be here and as.

Speaker 1 (56:04):
Fair as beautiful, which Burne you said is beautiful.

Speaker 9 (56:08):
He very good head of Harry, yes, but he also
had this ability to get other people excited. Where he
wound up having, you know, thirty thousand volunteers knocking off
one million doors. That's just in New York City. I
feel like the Harris campaign for the entire country broke records,
but it was still only I don't know, eight million
doors or I don't even remember, but like, one million

(56:28):
doors in one city is astronomically amazing. And this team
did that. They did They had volunteers who believed in
their candidate and loved what he was saying. The affordability
message resonated with him, and they wanted to campaign for
him for a better New York, right, That's why. But
also he would have these videos where he would talk

(56:49):
about what he was doing in a very approachable, accessible way,
and those videos took off. And then with debates, right,
like a lot of people don't tune into debates on
Donnie had one of the greatest debate performances I have
ever seen. I mean, it was It reminded me of
when Elizabeth Warren kind of wiped the floor with Mike
Bloomberg back in Vegas, like he just he just laid

(57:11):
it all out about all of Cuomo's flaws. And then
he said, and the name is Mom Donnie, and he
spelled it out right. That of him, what like tens
of millions of us of that quick. There was like
TikTok songs about it. It was like at the like nightclubs
in Brooklyn. They were sampling it like it it popped
right right, it broke exactly. And you know, there's so

(57:34):
many democratic words where we're arguing over like a line
in Politico or something like that.

Speaker 1 (57:39):
Nobody reads political really compared to breaking through. I mean,
I read it too, but it's not the same bo.

Speaker 9 (57:47):
And what he was doing is he was getting he
was getting to everybody, young people, non traditional voters. A
lot of what we call non prime voters voted in
New York City, people who don't.

Speaker 1 (57:57):
Vote all the time, right, young people.

Speaker 9 (57:59):
And there were people who were not no, not even
young people. I'm talking about like occasional voters, right who
might vote Angela.

Speaker 11 (58:05):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (58:06):
So the people who voted for Trump the threason fours
or the ones, the ones, the ones. Yeah.

Speaker 9 (58:12):
So and also people who are not like yet on
the books that Poland couldn't catch. Those are the young
voters who hadn't voted me. They came out for him.
So progressives talk a lot about expanding the electorate. Zora
Mamdani expanded the electorate.

Speaker 1 (58:25):
Yeah, I thought that the race Sa Cuomo ran, he
did almost no media and he was very cloistered. I
would love you to talk about why that didn't work
and also why that's a danger.

Speaker 9 (58:38):
I would say a rose garden strategy isn't going to
work at all for anyone.

Speaker 1 (58:42):
Any explain to us what a rose garden strategy is. Please.

Speaker 9 (58:46):
That's like, you know, taking out the rose garden in
the White House that I guess is no longer there
but was once there, and people would go like, you know,
you would be running for reelection and you could have
press conference there, use the bully pulpit of the White
House and not have to like go out and you
shake hands and all that, and you can't unless you're
in the middle of a pandemic, which hopefully will never
happen again in our lifetimes, you can't do that, right.

(59:09):
You have actually, you know, meet voters everywhere. And Cuomo
had been governor for so long. He was so used
to these very tight, controlled press conferences where he had
been in his own office, you know, like exactly what
he wanted to say, with exactly the visuals he wanted,
with exactly the reporters he wanted to pick on, right,
and New York City doesn't work like that, you know,

(59:30):
like voters here expect you to like they expect to see.
And it wasn't until the last few weeks of the
campaign when Zorimandani was actually surging that you saw Cuomo
out and about. I remember seeing him on TV. He
was doing what we call a stand up so like
right after like an event, he was did a pull
aside with a reporter and I had never seen him
like out in the wild before, like he was at

(59:51):
a park. I had never seen him, and like I've
been watching him on TV for you know, Deagge had
never seen him like in nature. So I think it
was he just they thought Mom Donnie was the candidate
that they most wanted to take on, but they completely
underestimated how Mam Donnie was resonating with voters. And that's

(01:00:13):
you know, Ruben Diego a much more conservative candidate than
Mam Donnie. But he was able to connect with people
the same way and was also underestimated.

Speaker 1 (01:00:21):
You're saying, go everywhere, do everything great.

Speaker 9 (01:00:24):
But also and compete on every platform too.

Speaker 1 (01:00:27):
Yes, you know what YouTube shorts are?

Speaker 10 (01:00:29):
Do you know?

Speaker 9 (01:00:29):
Like like short like short video, maybe people are watching it,
you know this way, we do YouTube shorts in fact,
so we had these YouTube videos, we have reels, we
have TikTok, and people are used to seeing their news
in these like short, digestible ways. And if you are
a reader of the New York Times, there's a whole
world out there that you don't know about. And that's
the thing, like the disconnect in the electorate is because

(01:00:52):
everybody's getting their news in a different way. Now. One
of the canaries in the coal mine about Biden to
me was a week before a debate, there were these
videos all over TikTok on Biden at the Juneteenth event
where he didn't move. He was like frozen, and it
was all right wing Twitter, right wing everything was all
over it, and you didn't see it anywhere else, right,

(01:01:15):
but I kept seeing these videos of him not moving
at this Juneteenth event, and then when the debate happened,
you know, like the rest of Amrit was like where
did this come from? You know, and right wing media
had been talking about it, and it was just completely
missed by mainstream media, right it was. It was just like,
there's so many different ways that people see the world,

(01:01:36):
and if you were a candidate trying to get votes
from every direction, you got to perform on every kind
of platform there is.

Speaker 1 (01:01:43):
Yeah, no, it's a really good point. Rebecca. Thank you
so much for making this work. I really appreciate all
your insights.

Speaker 9 (01:01:51):
Thank you, of course, thanks for having me. No so far.

Speaker 2 (01:01:59):
Jesse Cannon Molly Ice held a Canadian citizen in custody
and they died in their custody, and Canada is now
pretty unhappy with us, as they really should be.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Yeah, good work. I mean, by the way, we have
the nicest neighbors and all we do is piss them off.
So this is a guy. He was forty nine. He
died on Monday while in custody in Miami pending a
removal process. He had been in the US for forty years. Okay,
forty years. We have seven other detainees who have died
in ice custody in twenty twenty five, so they're killing

(01:02:35):
They're literally killing people. Okay, And this guy entered the
US in nineteen eighty eight on a legal visa and
became a lawful permanent resident in nineteen ninety one, so
he was, that said, a drug dealer, and he was
sentenced to twelve months in prison for racketeering trafficking oxy
an hydrocodone. So that's not great. But the fact that

(01:02:59):
he died and ice facility, and that we have so
many people dying in ice facilities is.

Speaker 9 (01:03:04):
Really, really, really bad.

Speaker 1 (01:03:06):
And the fact that we have this ongoing situation with
Canada where they're already so mad at us from the
trade stuff and the you know, wanting to take over
the country stuff, that this in fact will make everything
ten times worse is really fucking bad. I really want

(01:03:28):
just for a minute to talk about this, which is,
we really are in a moment where Trump is constantly
agitating both Canada and Mexico for seemingly no reason. It
is really such a stupid waste of time. He could
be working with our friends and allies and not agitating them.

(01:03:50):
It's just this is so incredibly stupid and shortsighted and
disappointing on every sense. And also is really really scary,
and we're just seeing every day, we're seeing more and
more really really scary bits of information about what ICE
is doing, and it's really really shocking.

Speaker 2 (01:04:11):
Under educated people in masks with weapons bullying people around
doesn't lead to good things, No, it does not.

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in
every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best
minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If
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and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.