Full Episode - From Teflon To Velcro: Why The Epstein Files Could Trigger Trump’s Lame Duck Presidency + The Democrats’ Roadmap To Becoming A Majority Party Again - The Chuck ToddCast

Episode Transcript
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Hello there, Happy Thursday. Welcome to another episode of the

(01:24):
Chuck Podcast. I got a loaded show for you today.
We're gonna obviously tackle the question that I've gotten a
thousand times today from various walks of life, which is
do these Epstein emails mean something more on Trump? Is
this gonna? Is this problem? We're gonna tell it. We're
going to dive into that fairly deep here in a minute,

(01:45):
I'll give you We're going to debate Teflon versus Velcro,
and we'll get there in a few minutes. My guest
for today is Adam Gentlsen. He is a long time
Senate a to the late Senate Majority Leader Senate Democratic
Leader Harry Reid. He started a new I guess he

(02:08):
calls it an action tank, but basically it's a think
tank of sorts that is called the search Light Institute,
named after the town that Harry Reid was born and
he came from search Light, Nevada. And the point is how, basically,
how to broaden the tent, How to get Democrats to
broaden to not be a stereotype of what perhaps they

(02:32):
are perceived to be as a brand over the last decade,
certainly in the post Obama era, how did they broaden out?
And we discuss how there was wasn't that long ago
that Democrats could elect senators, had senators from thirty six
different states at one point when they got sixty senators
in two thousand and nine. Right, that wasn't in the

(02:55):
twentieth century or the nineteenth century. That was in the
twenty first century. So it's an interesting conversation. We delve
into the whole thing of the shutdown debate. You know,
how do you confront Trump? Should they have cave, not cave?
All of those things? I think you're going to enjoy
that conversation, even if you no matter the side that

(03:15):
you might be on on that one. Then of course
after I'll do a little few more q and as,
and I'll have my big college football preview going into
the weekend. But I want to start, obviously with this
question and look the world of independent media, the world
of content creators. Right, we are in an Epstein frenzy,

(03:37):
and it's a deserved sort of feeding frenzy of the
moment because there's new material out there, right, There's new emails,
there's new shock emails, and the swearing in of Adelita Garalva,
the Arizona congresswoman who's been waiting to be sworn in
for over a month now because of the Speaker Johnson's
bizarre decision to keep the House out. I really think
he really did a disservice to his own party and

(03:58):
his own members here, because it's pretty indefensible, you know,
the lack of the lack of action, the lack of
anything from the House Republicans, and they're running. They're on
the ballot before anybody else, is right, it's the House
Republicans are all on the ballot come in November twenty
twenty six. And I think Mike Johnson has put his
own members in a terrible situation. Obviously, he made a

(04:21):
it feels like he made a decision that the White
House has him to do, not what was in the
best interests of the House Republicans, and you know these
in some ways, this controversy over the Epstein file is
the same thing. Mike Johnson is consistently doing what's in
the best interest of the White House, which is a
branch of government. He does not lead, nor is he
a member of. He is actually the leader of the

(04:44):
legislative branch. The Speaker of the House is essentially the
de facto leader of that branch of government. The same
way John Roberts as the Chief Justice, is essentially the
current leader of the judiciary branch, and he is essentially
outsource decision making on what Congress should do to the
White House. You get it. Politically, I understand why they

(05:07):
feel like they have to. And we live in this
jerrymandered world where primary voters matter more than the rest
of us. That of course, you know, this gets into
the larger conversation, which, by the way, I get into
with Adam Jentlesen right the filibuster. He wrote a whole
book about the filibuster and what was the founder's intent?
And you know, how should this all work? And when

(05:28):
do you have supermajorities and when don't you et cetera.
But I will tell you, I think what Mike Johnson
has done with House Republicans is so damaging, and I
do not think they fully appreciate how much damage he's
His decisions here, again, all were only to the benefit
of one person, Donald Trump. None of it to the

(05:49):
benefit of anybody that's actually going to be on the
ballot in twenty twenty six, namely every single one of
those House Republicans that he is charged with leading. The
discharge position is here. It's interesting that the White House
apparently was working Lauren Bobert seeing if they could talk
her out of being a signer, trying to do whatever
they can to stop this. And I think that, you know,

(06:12):
the question is will this You know, this is a
guy you know axis Hollywood didn't end him. January sixth
didn't end him. I mean, look at the things he
has done since coming into office. I mean, I'm going
to give you a quick rundown. These are just the
people he pardoned on January sixth that have committed crimes

(06:36):
since right and none of this has hit him yet.
Edward Kelly pardon for January sixth, later convicted to conspiring
to murder FBI agents. Daniel Charles Ball was pardoned in
the January sixth pardons, and he was rearrested on federal
gun charges. Kyle Colton was pardoned with his January sixth participation,
later had to be indicted for receiving child pornography. Christopher

(06:58):
moynihan was pardoned for the January sixth pardons and in
October twenty twenty five with charge of threatening to kill
the House Democratic leader Aqim Jeffreys. And then there's Robert
Packer pardon another January sixth partony in September of twenty
twenty five, charged in connection with a dog attack that
left four people injured. So people he's pardoned have gone
on to commit more crimes and have become menaces to society.

(07:22):
Never mind the other pardons he's done of some really
questionable figures, like the one where it looks like he
sold the pardon with Sheng Peng Zao, the finance founder.
That guy's in business with his sons and he magically
gets a pardon. I wonder how that worked. This guy
apparently had billions and illicit transactions, and it was Trump's

(07:44):
Department of Justice the first term that actually prosecuted him,
But we digress. George Santos, the serial liar who defrauded voters,
defrauded Congress, did all sorts of things. He gets pardon
ed Martin who handles his pardons. He gets pardoned. He
got convicted of financial crimes, misusing nonprofit funds, and he

(08:08):
gets pardoned. And of course I think works for Trump.
Denesh Desuza, who is traffics and made up Propatcanada with
his Mules movie and all this stuff, well, he was
convicted of illegal of the straw donor scheme. He received clemency.
A couple of other crypto fraud financiers that he's pardoned

(08:31):
ever since. So he's got and I say this, none
of this stuff has mattered, right, I throw all that
out there. All of this happened this year. He's you know,
did the bailout of Argentina instead of bailing out US
beef producers. None of this has hit him, stuck to
him yet, So why should the Epstein file stick to him. Well,

(08:53):
there's another way to look at this is that there
are times in any presidency where you have Teflon as
a president, and there are times in every presidency where
it feels like you're dressed in velcrow. There was you know,
Richard Nixon had teflon in his first term. By the
second term, it was all velcrow, and everything that was
connected to Watergate or loosely connected to Watergate or any

(09:16):
sort of presidential abuse of power seemed to stick to
him and stick to him. But why did he go
from a teflon guy to a velcrow guy? A simple reason?
The economy sucked. Why did Bill Clinton not get essentially
punished by the political system or by voters when it

(09:40):
came to Monica Lewinsky the economy was great. Why did
the stuff in Trump's first term not stick to him?
There was a perception that he oversaw a successful economy
pre coronavirus. Why is this possible that this time he's
in this is why could this time be different? Because

(10:02):
too many people in this country think this economy sucks. Because,
as we've discussed, if you have money, you're doing okay.
If you don't have money, you're struggling. You're barely out
of you're barely above water. You're seeing your electric bill
go up, You're seeing the grocery bills go up, You're
seeing everything in your life go up. In price. Trust me,

(10:24):
even if you have some savings, you're seeing everything go up, right,
The cost of everything has gone up and feels like
it's going up substantially, particularly when you look at electricity.
So you know, Epstein's been out there as an issue
for Trump arguably for years. The question is when does

(10:45):
it does a you know, why would it matter this
time more than before. You can say, well, there's more
evidence that connects them that he knew something. I definitely
think there's always going to be. But you could make
the argument you kind of new, right, like, there's this
great quote from JD. Vance that actually which was you know,
there's always a tweet, right, This is JD Vance Sarkha

(11:08):
two thousand and one, So you'll be forgiven. I know
that way you have to go way back in his past,
right some four whole years ago. But the quote, and
I just want to get it directly here. I had
it up. Remember this is him. He was a tweet

(11:28):
he made in twenty twenty one. Remember when we learned
that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to
a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring,
and then that guy died mysteriously in jail and now
we just don't talk about it. Of course, that was
when there was a democratic administration that he did tweet this,
right number one, And that was back when the right

(11:49):
was convinced this was a cover up having to do
with Bill Clinton. But of course Jeffrey Epstein's closest friend
was not Bill Clinton. It was Donald Trump. And with
a the point I'm making here is do I think
Trump could Jedi mind trick his way out of this? Well,
he has for a long time. And why has he Well,

(12:12):
there's been other things. There's been And again I go
back to the first term, even when Jeffrey Epstein was
in custody, even when this whole thing consumed a cabinet
secretary of his who had to essentially drop because of
his lenient sentencing that he oversaw down in South Florida,
it was because the perception, well, yeah, we knew all this,

(12:34):
this was all baked in. We kind of knew Trump
was this. And this is why in some ways people
already know. Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and
most powerful people were connected to a guy hard stop.
So that's problem number one for Trump is that Trump
has made it clear he's been part of the establishment,
part of the elite. He knows everybody. He knows all

(12:56):
these guys, he's been there. He himself has quotes of him.
Oh yeah, Jeffrey likes him young and he knows. There's
that other quote that's floating around where he said, man,
it was the nineties, a lot of crazy stuff was happening.
I don't remember, which is always code for I don't
want to talk about what I might know, or what
I might have seen, or what I might have participated in.

(13:16):
The Point is, it isn't going to be hard for
people to believe that he had a relationship with Epstein,
that he was close with him. The difference is they're
pissed off about he's not doing what he promised to
do as president, which is bring down the costs. They're
doing anything, But if anything, his policies have hurt you, right,

(13:38):
it is the price of coffee is up, not down.
Notice the Treasury Secretary says, we're going to lower the
price of coffee and we're going to lower the price
of fruit. Translation, they realize these tariffs actually impacted everyday people.
And when you teariff Brazil over a political obsession of yours,
all you do is attack all Americans in the book

(14:00):
because of the price of coffee. So I'm always has
it in to assume, ah, this is it. But look,
every presidency comes to an end and their influence comes
to an end. And the way we mark the end
of a presidency as we say, oh, he's becoming a

(14:22):
lame duck, and you're starting to hear the words lame duck.
I think when you measure when does a president become
every president becomes a lame duck. The question is win
does it begin. Well, trying to figure out when a
presidency is an official lame duck status is like trying
to guess when we're in recession. Right. There's a great

(14:42):
line about economists with recessions. They can always tell you
when it started. After the recession has started, there's not
a single economist that can tell you when it's going
to begin.

Speaker 2 (14:52):
Right.

Speaker 1 (14:52):
They never tell you when it's going to be, and
they we always are, We're always informed of when it began.
I actually think there's the same thing with when it
comes to a lame duck presidency, is this begun? Are
we in the midst of it? Are we at the
beginning of it? We're not going to know for sure,
I think for about six months or a year. But

(15:14):
I'll tell you this if we fast forward a year
and the Democrats sweep the House in the Senate, which
to me, you know, and you're going to hear this
actually in the Adam Jenlsen interview, and I think he
sets this bar correctly, which is, if Democrats don't win
the Senate, they don't win the midterms.

Speaker 2 (15:30):
Right.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Winning the House is simply participating, right, that's table stakes.
Winning the Senate means you won an argument, you won
the campaign because you convince people who normally aren't on
your side to be on your side. That's winning, right.
Winning the House is simply participating. Winning the House is
a participation trophy. Winning the Senate is winning the midterms.

(15:54):
So a year from now, if we're in a situation
where we say the Democrats swept the House in the Senate,
we will then go back and say Donald Trump's lame
duck presidency hit lame ducks status election Day twenty twenty five,
and arguably it probably happened a bit sooner. We might
say that essentially the symbolic beginning of his lame duckness

(16:16):
was the destruction of the East Wing when he became
so consumed with his personal legacy and he stopped worrying
about the American voter. Right. Look, Donald Trump's history is
he wants to get everything he can out of you
that benefits him. And once he drains, once you've given

(16:37):
him everything he can get out of you, he moves on. Right,
My substeck this week is about how I think I
think he has treated the Republican Party the way he
treated many of the casinos that he operated or businesses
that he's run, which is he essentially leveraged it for
his benefit, left this entity with a huge debt. In

(16:59):
this case, the debt he has left him as moral
and ethical bankruptcy. And then he's gonna walk away. Meanwhile,
the Republican Party is going to be the pardon of
shitty pardons, is going to be the party of that
doesn't care about the rule of law unless it applies
only to the other side, like he is gonna that

(17:19):
they're part of that. The legacy is somehow the Republican
Party is the party of crypto scammers. Like that's not
a good legacy. And then you throw in Epstein here,
and he's the party of protecting the Pedophiles. This episode
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(19:14):
Republican Party can do for Donald Trump. There is no
opportunity to run again. So now Donald Trump's worried about
Donald Trump, and because of that, does it appears to
not even be worried about the voter anymore. And this
is where he goes from having a teflon suit and
he was teflon Don and he's been teflon Don. Right.
You know, he can attack John McCain and not lose somebody.

(19:39):
He could shoot somebody apparently on Fifth Avenue and not
lose a supporter. But if this economy sucks, and if
the grocery bills, he can't Jedi mind trick away a
grocery bill. And then suddenly when that happens, and they think, well,
my life sucks, and this guy is worried more about
the East wing of the White House. Oh yeah, and

(20:01):
this guy protected a pedophile for decades, and this guy's
going to commute or the sentence of said pedophiles partner
in crime, literal partner in crime, and Gallaine Maxwell, that's
how this that's how this story matters, right, And now

(20:21):
you've got this orchestration of a series of votes where
you know Epstein is one of these few stories. We
live in this siloed information world where literally, you know,
I could say, you know, I mean, I'm gonna have
an interview with Clay Travis in a couple of weeks.
I don't think my mother knows who Clay Travis is.

(20:42):
And I say this with no, you know, why should
she you know he is? He is in a different
media ecosystem than my mother travels in. She doesn't, you know,
she watches a lot of college football, but it happens
she doesn't watch anything on Fox because Miami doesn't ever
play on Fox. They usually play on the ESPN or ABC,
so she might be aware of ESPN personalities, but she's

(21:04):
not aware of any Fox Sports personalities, let alone aware
of his radio show or any of those things. And
Epstein's one of these stories that every every single silo
has an Epstein corner. Right, Your MAGA silo has an
Epstein corner, Your sort of never Trump silo has Epstein corners,

(21:26):
your sort of center, your sort of mainstream media has
an Epstein corner, Your progressive wing has an Epstein corner. Right,
there is this collective interest in Epstein. And let's be honest,
why there is. It's all you know, at first, the
rights interest in Epstein was all about Bill Clinton, nothing else.
It was always about Bill Clint. That's how the right

(21:46):
got fascinated by this. They were hoping to paint and
it was all these you know, democratics are all part
of this weird pedophilia conspiracy that QAnon launched. All this
it's all sort of wrapped up in that. And then
Trump's names showed up in the Epstein files. Right then
we realized. And then Trump became a cornerstone of MAGA

(22:09):
and became sort of created somebody's created mega, right, certainly,
it's always a question, you know, like anything. Trump doesn't
create anything. He just sort of got in front of
a parade that was that was starting to form, and
then suddenly he became their leader and their unifier. But
here we are, and now everybody else is interested in
it because you're like, whoa, So Trump's involved in this

(22:31):
and this side, you know, and it's just one of
those stories that everybody's got a stake in. So this
is going to be a story that constantly, just like
the economy is right, the economy breaks through every because
you can't sort of information silo your grocery bill. You know,
there isn't a Fox News version of the grocery bill
or an MSNBC version of the grocery bill. So you

(22:53):
can't do that with the economy, and in this unique case,
you can't do it with the Epstein story. And this
is why this feels like a very lame that this
is what lame duck. What happens to lame duck presidencies
is that they can't stop feeding frenzies anymore. You know,
this happened with George W.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
Bush.

Speaker 1 (23:10):
You know a lot of people will say the feeding frenzies,
you know, sort of the lame duck period of the
Bush presidency began with the twenty oh six midterms. I'd
actually argue, or you could go backwards and say it
began with the Terry Schivo thing, when they went full
bore on that and the public revolted and they couldn't

(23:31):
sort of, you know, their typical positions didn't work, their
typical media spin didn't work. And then you realize, you know,
his credibility was shot. It was already weakening due to
our rock. Terry Schivo hits, then Katrina happens, and then
the whole thing is over. But Katrina didn't start the
lame duck period. The lame duck period actually began at

(23:52):
the tail, at the at the beginning of five when
he started messing around with the Shivo business, social security investments,
et cetera. And so that's where I think this if
we're if indeed we're able to in a year from now,
really in it. We have the environment that we have

(24:12):
and it does turn into a democratic suite, we will
say this lame duck period began in the fall of
In the fall of this year, just like with Joe
Biden's presidency. It turned out the beginning of the end
of his presidency happened really early in his presidency, right
with the Afghanistan withdrawal and the inability to to sort
of hold anybody accountable, fix it, explain it, and he
never recovered from there. And while because he was a

(24:35):
first term president, you'd never say lame duck, in hindsight,
you know, that's when he lost. That's when he lost
the plot, and it was and everything went downhill from there.
You know. That's I think the situation we may be
living him now, and the nightmare for the White House
press shop is is, you know, Trump has not helped

(24:58):
them at all. You know, I argue that he actually
had a you know, Trump's problem is going soft on
Maxwell because by going soft on Maxwell, but he is
essentially confirmed the idea that Maxwell knows some stuff, that
he's friendly with her, that he knows her, and it

(25:19):
undermines the story that he had sort of lived with
for a while when it came to Epstein that I
that mostly worked with his supporters, which was, yeah, I
knew Jeffrey Epstein very well. And then our relationship ended
because I didn't like what he was doing to, you know,
women on my at mar Alago. So we had this
sort of story that was that had some credibility to

(25:43):
it that you know, he didn't because there was it
was true he recruited apparently he recruited one of these
women from mar Alago, and Trump said he kicked him
out of mar Alago and said, you can't come back here.
Now we now learned that that that the reason for
the real breakup between Epstein and Trump wasn't that it
was over a piece of property in Palm Beach. We
eventually learned about that later, but he had a story

(26:06):
that he was feeding his supporters that yeah, I knew Epstein,
and then when I realized what he was doing.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
I was out.

Speaker 1 (26:11):
I didn't want that Slee's bag around. Okay, then why
are you soft on Delanne Maxwell? If you're so outraged
by what Jeffrey Epstein did, then your Justice Department should
have made life harder for Maxwell, not easier. But you
went soft on her. And what he did was is
essentially made it impossible to defend Trump's actions. You couldn't say,

(26:33):
you know, if he was as disgusted by what Epstein
did as he said and he's as disgusted as his
supporters say they are disgusted. Then this idea of leniency
on her, giving her, you know, the club fed treatment
when it comes to transferring her in prison, sending your

(26:54):
personal attorney who happens to be the Deputy Attorney General,
to coax answers out of her, including the I never
saw anything untoward. Uh, it was so important to him
to get that on the record. But Trump seems to
be worried about something with Maxwell, when if he actually
wanted to keep his con up on Epstein, and let's

(27:17):
assume I'm gonna assume it's a con. And you know,
with Trump, it's it's hard not to assume that. So
let's I'm gonna assume it's a con. He'd have been
better off playing he said she said with her, and
said he'd and then made life tougher on her. And
and if and if she threatened to go public with stuff,

(27:37):
let her go public. She's the one sitting in prison.
She's got the credibility problem. And then if you were
being tough on her and she was then pushing back,
it could simply be she's squealing. But the fact he
didn't do that right, whatever she he thinks she knows,
he seems to be fearful enough of that. It's leveraged

(27:58):
that she's successfully used with him and with Todd Blanche
and that's why his story falls apart. Now again, does
any of this matter politically, Well, I go back to
every Republican's been carrying around Trump baggage for a long time,
and in some ways they're now used to it. But

(28:19):
when the economy is as bad as it is right
now for so many people, and as frustrating of an
economy as this is, and that's what it is. It's
a you know, it's one of these things that you
can look at it statistically and say, well, this is
going well. Like I saw a stat today that said
that publicly traded companies are having one of the best
years earning wise that we've seen. Ninety two percent of

(28:39):
them are reporting earnings above the normal average. And you're
just like wow, And yet jobs are decreasing, not increasing, right,
So that means Wall Street's being rewarded for its efficiencies
in its companies. Wall Street's being as they as a
company should make. Your productivity is up and your labor

(29:00):
costs are down. Good for you. Investors like that. But
that means there's a whole bunch of people in this
economy not succeeding. And so that's why it's very hard
to you know, when Trump's using the stock market as
a as a as proof that his economy is doing well,
it's like, yeah, you're you're you're with the hat your

(29:21):
your economy is working for the haves. Your economy is
not working for the have nots. And the irony is
that he built his political coalition on the have nots
very successfully and now he doesn't seem to care about
the have nots anymore. And that's where what when these
That's when I go back to Epstein for the longest time,

(29:44):
it is basically run into teflon don and has slid
off of him. Well, I think it's I think he
is now has a suit of velcrow on. More things
are sticking to him than ever before. Right, you've got
sleepy eyes Trump, Now that's sticking to him. You've got
the medical issues. Huh, something's going on. If he passed
his MRI. You don't pass an MRI, but congratulations, I

(30:09):
guess you know you're not at You don't you don't
do an MRI unless they're wondering what, unless they can't
find the problem of something that's bothering you. So you
got that he's just doesn't seem healthy, doesn't look healthy,
doesn't behavior low. And you can see he's really aged

(30:30):
a lot in the last six months. Go look at
clips from April and then look at clips in the
last two weeks. His voice is thinner. Maybe there are
days that you know, you could just tell he there
are days where you know he's tired, and that's always
a sign of aging. And of course when you're at
a certain age, and this happened with Biden, just because
things are fine six months ago, you know this is

(30:52):
one of those things. At some point in your late
seventies early eighties, you can you know, you don't age
at an equal rate. Okay, you sort of go. You
have fits and starts, and then you know, we've seen that.
I've had elderly relatives where everything's fine, and then you
don't see him for six months and you're like, holy cow,
what happened to uncle Joe? Or I have a real

(31:14):
uncle Joe, So no, nothing's happened to uncle Joe. I
don't want uncle Joe. That isn't about about you. I
was just using like Jane, and I'll go uncle John Doe.
I don't have an uncle John, so I'll do uncle John.
Oh my god, what happened to Uncle John? Or what
happened at Jane? And you know that happens in these
three and six months. And the point is is that
you know, it's like the you know, it's like in business,

(31:38):
your hockey stick moment, but going the wrong way. You're
going along, You're going along, and all of a sudden, Yep,
it's off a cliff. It just collectively feels like he
has now got a suit of valcrow. And so if
we have essentially six weeks of every couple of days
there's an Epstein development, which now there's going to be

(31:59):
now that this discharge petition has happened, they're going to
have this vote at some point in the next couple
of weeks that will be there. Then you then it
has to go to the Senate. I you know, there
was a time I thought, eh, the Senate will kill it.
I don't know anymore. Right, it's going to be an
interesting test. How many Republicans will there be thirty, will

(32:19):
there be thirteen Republicans who joined forty seven Democrats to
force this release and force it on is you know,
for you know, have both the House and the Senate
have this. That's an interesting development. Is it a moment
where some Republicans decide, I need to show some independence

(32:41):
from Trump? Is this the safest place.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
To do it? Right?

Speaker 1 (32:45):
It could be the healthcare subsidies could be a way
that Republicans distance from Trump. The tariff ruling when it
comes out likely saying that his his tariffs are unconstitutional.
Is that at the moment is that the Epstein files.
The point is there's a lot of ways now that
Republicans can start to put some distance in a in

(33:10):
what will look like a baby step, right just voting
against him on Epstein, or voting against him on tariffs,
or voting against him on healthcare subsidies. That suddenly what
is a trickle turns into of you know, a rush
of you well of water coming out of the faucet,
essentially trying to get away from him. So that's how

(33:36):
I think this story is potentially that you know, it's
it's like javert, do you got him? Now? You know?
It's it's the accumulation and it's the fact, because of
this sour economy, he's now wearing a suit with velcrow
on it and more things. More of this other stuff

(33:57):
is now going to start to stick to him because
he he didn't handle the main thing. He was elected
for one reason and one reason, only bring down costs,
and he's failing massively at that, which means every other
secondary issue becomes a problem for that voter because they think, wow,

(34:20):
he can't do this well. He must be that. He
must be that, he must be that. And that's why
this Epstein story could be just yet another sign that
the lame duck status is now the You know, if
you were to go to Trump's Facebook page, he should change.
He may have to change his status to lame duck.
So with that, I'll sneak in a break and we'll bring

(34:42):
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(35:48):
So joining me now is Adam Gentlelsid. I've known him
a long time. He was a longtime staffer for the
late Senate Majority leader Harry He's author of a book
about the Senate called kill Switch, The Rise of the
Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. So we'll
have a little fun about about how broken is the
Senate and how to repair it? But I have them

(36:11):
on because you just started anew and I'll be curious
what you describe it, Adam. Is it a think tank?
Is it a research institute? But it's named after the
hometown of Harry Reid, search Light, Nevada. It's called the
search Light. May make sure I get this right? Well,
you could tell me for sure, search Light Institute? Is
that right? Right?

Speaker 2 (36:28):
Got it?

Speaker 1 (36:29):
Here we go, so basically trying to get Democrats to
broaden the tent, make the case that this is a
big tent. And given that you worked for Harry Reid,
who was for years known as personally pro life or
pro gun at times, you know, certainly was culturally a
bit conservative, if a probably an original populist on economic

(36:51):
issues that I think people if you didn't follow his
career closely, might not realize. So in many ways, naming
it after Harry read makes a lot of sense to me.
But what is it? What do you describe search Slight Institutes?
The think tank? Is it something else?

Speaker 2 (37:05):
We are an action tank, Chuck?

Speaker 3 (37:07):
And that feels like a focus group word, dude, Well,
you know the reason I call it that is that
is that you know, we we develop ideas, but we
don't want them to sit on the shelf.

Speaker 2 (37:19):
You know, these aren't white papers that are designed to
just sort of be read by academics and policy wonks.
You know, they're they're well thought through, their credible, but
we want them to be put into action, and we
want them to become legislation. We want them to become
talked about on campaigns, and we want them to shape
the debate. And so the part of the reason we
have both a policy development arm of what we do

(37:40):
and and appolling arm of what we do is to
you know, try to get that balance right between being
responsive to the public listening to the American people. I
think in a democracy it's very important to actually have
the policies that are developed reflect the will of the people,
but then factor that in to how we develop our
own policies, you know, And we don't just pull to
say what's popular. We just want to understand people think

(38:00):
and then design people design policy in a way that
sort of bridges the divide sometimes between what we think
is correct on the policy and where the American people
are in their own thoughts and feelings on the issue.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
Compare yourself to cat Center for American Progress, which is
arguably the sort of the leading progressive think tank these
days in Washington. We're more head of Then and Then
and Brookings, you know, more center left, I guess, or
you might say very academic in comparison to the other two.

Speaker 2 (38:26):
That's exactly right. And I think on sort of ideology
compared to both of those, we are more heterodox. We
will take the best ideas from wherever they come from,
from across the ideological spectrum. And it's my own personal
view that the best and most durable and frankly the
policies that bring the biggest change to this country tend
to reflect points of view from across the ideological spectrum.

(38:50):
So I think a lot about social Security, right and
you know, people have called social Security liberal ends by
conservative means. It's the greatest anti poverty we've ever implemented.
Is you know, a core part of Democrats appeal to
the American people, but it also embraced conservative principles of
personal responsibility people paid in FDR himself was personally would

(39:12):
rail against the dole and cabinet meetings. He would say,
this is not a dole, this is not welfare people
are going to earn what they get, they're going to
pay into it through the payroll tax, and then I
get something back in return. So you know, we try,
we try to think about that balance as we develop policy.
We're smaller, we're nimble. I think we're more action oriented
than some of the folks who've been around for a
long time. And I think, but you know, it's it's

(39:33):
the more the merrier as far as I'm concerned.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
We were talking off camera here for a minute and
you were talking about how your office space is right
in your heritage, and it's interesting you brought up Social
Security as an example that sort of meshed a liberal
and conservative idea. I could argue Obamacare did the same thing, right,
you know, the infamous heritage. You know, the heritage has
been through a lot of shall we say, facelifts over

(39:58):
the years. Maybe they have a mar lago look now
that they went to the doctor and got my joke,
not years, but in the nineties they came up with
essentially the healthcare plan that was the model for Mett
Romney and arguably the model for Barack Obama.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
That's exactly right, and you know, having sort of been
actually a cap for a little while while while the
affordable character was being debated during the OI campaign and
then legislated and then being on the hill through a
lot of that too. That's exactly right, and you know,
part of the way that we were able to pass
that was by embracing conservative ideas, and in fact it

(40:35):
was modeled You're one hundred percent correct. There was a
Heritage study in the nineties that sort of provided the
intellectual basis for it, and then it was put into
practice first by Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney when he was
governor there, and people called it Romneycare, so you know,
before it was Obamacare, it was Romneycare, and it certainly
reflected you know, the idea of having an individual mandate,

(40:58):
you know, and other aspects of it were and you know,
frankly being aimed at bending the cost curve, at bringing
down the deficit. These are all conservative principles that were
incorporating into that development, although Heritage walked away from it.

Speaker 1 (41:08):
You know, every once in a while, I always try
to give little breadcrumbs to sort of like, you know,
how my political mind was shaped by my parents, and
you know, my father had this saying when I remember
as a kid, he'd said, you know, and I'd ask him,
you know, and he was he became a he was
a Reagan Democrat that became a Reagan Conservative. And he'd
say he left the Democratic Party over LPJ and Vietnam.

(41:28):
That was that was sort of where you went. But
he used to also say, he goes, you know, I
want the Democrats to come up with the ideas and
I want the Republicans to implement them. It was like
that that was his in his mindset, you know, at
the time, and that back in the seventies and eighties,
the perception of the two parties was, you know, the
the managerial brain was on the Republican side and the

(41:50):
the empathy brain was on the Democratic side, and that
you know, if you had too much empathy, it would
be too expensive. You needed, you know, that sort of balance.
And in some ways what you're describing here was what
you describe to Social Security, what we were retelling the
story of Obamacare somewhere that does sort of work itself
out right, that the stuff that sticks is the stuff
that is more ideologically diverse when it comes to the

(42:16):
cooks in the kitchen that create the policy.

Speaker 2 (42:18):
Right, that's that's exactly right. I mean, you know, we've
fallen out of this balance, and we're talking.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
About for polarized.

Speaker 2 (42:25):
We're so polarized, we'll talk about Philbuster, you know. You know,
I think that's a big part of it.

Speaker 1 (42:29):
I argue the two parties aren't as you know, I
always say, what's the biggest change in American politics in
my lifetime, It's been the lack of ideological diversity inside
the two parties.

Speaker 2 (42:40):
Oh well, you know, I mean think of that was
the huge chain, one hundred percent. I mean, I think
a lot about what the Senate Democratic Caucus looked like
back when I worked for Harry Reid in the Senate
and we had first of all, we.

Speaker 1 (42:50):
Talk about all those northern red states that had Democratic
senators for well.

Speaker 2 (42:54):
I mean, yeah, both Dakotas, you know, we had senators there,
We had a senator Nebraska. We had both Senate boat.

Speaker 1 (43:02):
Centers in Nebraska for a long time.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
That's right, Bob Carry and Ben Nelson. We had both
Senate seats in Montana for a long time, both seats
in Arkansas. If you want to move further south, Louisia
had one seat in Louisiana. I mean you know, we
had I think when I went to count it, it
was we had at least one one Senate seat in
thirty six of the fifty states, right, so just really
spread across the country. And the reason why was this

(43:25):
ideological diversity that you're describing. You know, senators like Max Bocchus,
ben Nelson, mary Landrew, Blanche Lincoln. They were four things
like you know, mary Landrew was strongly in favor of
the fossil fuel industry, coming from a state like Louisiana
where that was critical to the economy. Ben Nelson was
pro life, Blanche Lincoln was in favor of fiscal responsibility
and balanced budgets.

Speaker 1 (43:46):
Right.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
And that didn't make them not Democrats, right, They still
were strongly Democratic on most issues. They still voted with
the party, you know, on most issues. But embracing that
ideological diversity is what allowed us to win that seats
in those states. And what we've done over the last
ten years is to try to purity test out anybody

(44:07):
who has any kind of ideological diversity, particularly when it
goes to the right, and that's just shot ourselves in
the foot. It's left us unable to win seats in
those red states where we barely can can't even compete
these days.

Speaker 1 (44:19):
You know, it's funny you brought up Blanche Lincoln and
remember that primary challenge she had to deal with sure
do yep and organizing him right, And it was it
was you're just sitting there going, guys, what are you doing.
She's already in a tough general election. What are you
doing to her? And it made a tough situation worse well.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
And it's a good point because you know, I think
what gets mixed up in the sort of debate on
social media and elsewhere about this is that to embrace
somebody like Blanche Lincoln doesn't require you or your friends
or most other Democrats to change their points of view. Right,
I'm strongly pro union. Most of my policy views are
probably pretty far to the left of the American electorate.

(44:58):
But for someone like Lincoln to win in a state
like Arkansas, she's going to have to take different positions,
positions that diverge from my own, and that impulse towards
purity is going to guarantee that our caucus is smaller,
that the number of Americans Democrats are able to represent
is smaller that the number of Americans who look at
Democrats and say that is a party I want to

(45:20):
be a part of. Is smaller.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
You know. I got my start at National Journal, and
they were famous in the seventies and eighties and nineties
for doing this.

Speaker 2 (45:30):
You know.

Speaker 1 (45:30):
Now we've got a whole bunch of other ways that
people look to use sort of votes to put people
on the political spectrum. But there was always when I
first started at National Journal, when the Almanek would come out,
it was always interesting how many Democrats are to the
right of the most liberal Republican and how many Republicans
are to the left of the most conservative Democrats. And

(45:51):
there was always you know, and we would lament, Oh,
it's getting smaller every year. I think it's been a
decade since the streams have crossed, meaning like you know,
I think Mansion and Collins were like this. If I'm
for those of you just listening on audio, my hands
are very close together but not touching, almost in the
way it was almost felt like they were being repelled.

(46:12):
Do you think that is a bad thing or a
good thing for the US c oh.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
I think it's I think it's a very bad thing.
I think that you have to have people on you know,
you have to be able to build bridges across the
logical lines, and you know, sometimes you can do that
in a strange Bedfellow's way, where you know, you have
you know, a Bernie Sanders alliance with a Josh Holly
or you know on some.

Speaker 1 (46:34):
Is sure and you see this in some of these populists.

Speaker 2 (46:36):
Yeah, yeah, but I think that it shouldn't be the
case that you know, the sort of you know that
there's no senator in the Democratic Caucus who is anywhere
close to Republicans on ideology. I could get beat up
by some of my party for saying that, but I think,
you know what if that is the case, you know,
there are consequences, there are trade offs to taking that approach,
and that's what we have here where Democrats can only

(46:57):
win forty seven sentence seats at best, you know, maybe
scrape by to the narrowest imaginable majority, but that's you know,
there's a consequence of taking that approach and narrowing your
tents simply means you can win in fewer places.

Speaker 1 (47:10):
Look, and to me, this is the I think the
baseline of what I remember seeing your press release when
you first came out. I think an op ed that
you wrote as well. You know, I think that the
twenty thirty two presidential election, if you just if Kamala
Harris carried the same the Democratic candidate carries every state
that Kamala Harris carried, and they won Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Well,

(47:38):
and right now, that was worth two hundred and seventy
electoral votes. She'd have won right on the nose. That's
only going to be worth two hundred and fifty nine
electoral votes come twenty thirty two. That path, so every
state she carried, plus the three in the Midwest, the
three Midwestern states, and then when you look at Senate seats,
because I've done this math, if Democrats sweep the seven
battlegrounds in Senate seats, right, and when every Senate seat

(48:02):
in every blue state that she carried, the max I
think is fifty two.

Speaker 2 (48:07):
Yep, that's right.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
I mean you just said thirty six states at one point, right,
which is why I mean, let's look at Barack Obama's
first year, that six month period when you had sixty
Senate seats. All right, it was a brief period, and
it was you know, we can yes, it was some weird.
You know, you had the specter party switch and all that.
But the fact of the matter is, I don't know

(48:30):
what a path to sixty would look like. Let's say
that was your goal, you know, got to get to
sixty Senate seats. What's that path look like in today's politics. Well,
that is our goal. I mean's that's what Searchlight is
here to do. We are trying to craft an agenda
and an approach that will allow Democrats to aim at
sixty Senate seats. We talk a lot about this idea
of super majority thinking here, and a supermajority mindset is

(48:52):
not to aim at two hundred and seventy electoral votes
and to try to scrape by there or aim at
you know, narrow majorities in the House and Senate. It's
to aim at three hundred and sixty five electoral votes,
which is what Obama won in two thousand and eight,
and it's to aim at sixty Senate seats and then
work backwards from there. So you know, what that looks
like is much more flexibility on issues across the board.

(49:14):
You know, I personally think that if you were to
sort of devise a basic template, you know, and again
I sort of am allergic to templates. I think part
of what we're trying to do here is is create
more flexibility. But just for the sake of argument, you know,
let's let's root this in some you know, concrete idea
of ideology. I think, you know, economic populism is.

Speaker 2 (49:32):
A powerful force. It's so powerful that Trump has embraced it.
Trump has moved to the center on issues like social
security and Medicare.

Speaker 1 (49:41):
And the only reason Republicans got have won the popular
vote exactly right. I mean, I think it is at
that specific decision he doesn't make that. You know, we
all there's a lot of people that you know, say
Paul Ryan had a high character guy and all of
those things, but the Paul Ryan view of entitlements was

(50:02):
a losing issue for the Republican Party, which is why
Mett Romney never won the president.

Speaker 2 (50:08):
And this is part of what our theory of the
case is, is that a Democratic presidential candidate can just
decide to embrace a different set of policy positions like
we are here to help provide that infrastructure and help
you know, create those ideas and provide the air cover.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Put a little bit of a blue stamp on it.
So it doesn't feel so hard for some left maybe.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Right, but you were there. It's difficult to overstate how
sort of encased in concrete. The conventional wisdom was in
twenty sixteen that entitlement cuts were part of what you
had to be in favor of in order to succeed
in a Republican primary. You know, Paul Ryan was the
vice presidential nominee in twenty twelve. He was the Speaker
of the House by the time the primary was in

(50:49):
full swing in twenty sixteen, Ryanism was considered, you know,
orthodoxy among Republicans, trying which lays the stool, right, that's irresponsibility. Right.
Trump just threw it all out the window, you know.
I mean I remember him standing on the debate stage.
You know. The Iraq War is another issue that was considered,
you know, orthodoxy. In twenty fifteen, he stood on a
debate stage in South Carolina and he turned to Jeb

(51:10):
Bush and said, I think the Iraq War that your
brother started was a big, fat mistake, you know. And
so it is really difficult to imagine a Democratic candidate
diverging from their party and taking stances in opposition to
the Democratic ideology on that level, you know, of that magnitude.

(51:31):
But that's what we need is we need Democrats to say,
you know, we are here to break that rigidity, We
are here to open up a new pathway and to
bring in more voters. And you know, Trump, it is
an underappreciated aspect of his appeal that he was truly heterodox.
He defied his party's orthodoxy on three or four or
even more very high profile issues that were considered core

(51:52):
to the Republican ideology. And that's part of why people
saw him as a different kind of Republican.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
Oh, I'm convinced. And this is also why you can
sort of see I mean, I'm convinced that this is
a coalition it's not going to be able to hold
itself together without him in whatever you know, we you know,
set aside the character issue the guy has the guy
created a coalition that was unique. It was durable for him. Right,
It's not really been transferable, but it's been durable for him.

(52:19):
And and the thing is is you can see it, right,
the conversation on snap benefits the conversation on healthcare. They're
not singing off the same song sheet because they're actually
a coalition that that sort of got forged together and culture,
and they're they're all over the place on economic policy,
and I think that's where this thing starts to break
apart pretty soon.

Speaker 2 (52:40):
I think that's right. I mean, that's that's the optimistic
view for sure, and I think it's probably the right one,
you know, especially the economy keeps feeling the way it
definitely this it's a I always say, it's like, if
you have a little bit of money, this economy is okay.

Speaker 1 (52:54):
You know, everything's a little more expensive, but it's okay.
If you have some money in the stock market, you
feel like, okay, I'm I've got Pad. But if you
don't have Pad, this economy is horrible. Right, that's the rendous.

Speaker 2 (53:05):
It's the Disneyland phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (53:06):
Right.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
If you can afford the express pass, you know, it's great.
But if you can't, you know, you're stuck in three
hour lines the whole time for one ride. So yeah,
it's you know, it's you know, I worked for I
don't know of your listeners. Remember John Edwards the Center
of North Carolina in two thosand and eight. He talked
about two Americas, And I think that's what we're seeing these.

Speaker 1 (53:26):
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really resident today. I agree more so. I mean, you know, Edwards,

(55:19):
he was a blast being there is a ton and
I sort of I have not to go off on
a tangent here I have. I think there's more empathy
that that the Edwards family deserves. You never get over
losing a child, and and I've always thought that their life, so,

(55:40):
you know, and it threw him into politics, I get
in some ways it did, But you know that that
I think that you can't judge Edwards without understanding that.
So I'm always a little more empathetic, I think than
the average person on him. But boy, his you know,
and what he was was it's old Southern populace and
it's no different Zell Miller, Bill Clinton, Dick Riley. I

(56:02):
think about all everything you're describing here. I think about
what Trump is doing. This is what the Southern Democrats were,
Those Southern Democratic governors were. They would they were like, hey,
government can be a good thing for you, and we
want to help you. But they were also culturally somewhat conservative, right,
your Zell Millers, your Bill Clinton's, your Dick Riley's. But
those Southern governors of the eighties, in some ways, the

(56:25):
economic policies they were pushing are exactly what's popular.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
Today, that's right. I mean, you know John Edwards, son
of a mill worker, you know, I mean he was
in touch with with regular people, and you know that
that economic populism, I mean, that was the foundation of
the New Deal coalition, you know. I mean that that
was the foundation of lbj's coalition too. You know, as
you mentioned your father, I mean, you know, some of
the cultural stuff, that's that's the you know, on the

(56:50):
Republican side, it's it's can you hold people together on
cultural issues while you pass economic policies that primarily benefit
the wealthiest and the big corporations, and the Democratic side,
it's can you hold people together on economic populism issues,
you know, while you often take stances on cultural issues
that the American people don't agree with. And I think
when Democrats and liberals succeed, it's when they're able to

(57:13):
center their message on those core economic populist ideas and
provide some flexibility on cultural issues in a way that
will allow us to win in more states.

Speaker 1 (57:23):
Let me introduce an uncomfortable question about Democrats. I can
make an argument that the four Democratic presidents of my
lifetime that have been elected, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden,
none of them win without the economic downturn that was
happening during their initial campaign. And I say that in
that is that the only path to the presidency for

(57:45):
a Democrat?

Speaker 2 (57:47):
Well, I think what that those downturns do is they,
you know, when you're in times of prosperity, people people
gravitate more towards cultural issues, you know, And I think
that's that's sort of a pattern there, and then Republicans,
you know, win on cultural issues past policies that benefit
the top one percent and often you know, run up

(58:07):
huge deficits, despite their you know, their claim to care
about this corresponsibility, and then that leads to a crash
and Democrats have to come in and you know, and
refocuses the public's attention on how unbalanced and tilted towards
the one percent Republicans policies, where I don't think it's
a necessary precondition, but you know, it certainly focuses voters'

(58:28):
minds on the unfairness and gross inequity of Republicans economic policies.
For sure.

Speaker 1 (58:34):
Does that stark reality because I could argue that the
last Democrat to win the White House without help from
a poor economy was Kennedy? Does that stark reality mean
that the Democrats should be less leaning into some cultural issues.

Speaker 2 (58:55):
I yeah, I think that's one hundred percent the case.
I think that, you know, part of what some of
the work that we've done here at Searchlights has shown
is that, you know, it's not just that we are
out of step with the public on a lot of
these cultural issues purely on the merits, it's also that
focusing on them distracts the public's attention from the economic issues.

(59:16):
It's it's what we call a crowding out effect. Where
you know, simply, you know, you listen to the average
Democrats stump speech today, it's a laundry list, and they
go down and they acknowledge every issue under the sun,
you know, and.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
The land acknowledgment. And I say this, I'm not trying
to be snarky about it, but I just that listen that.

Speaker 2 (59:36):
You know, the DNC's most recent meetings started out with
one and so I think, you know, look, Republicans will
seize on that, and they'll attack you for it, you know,
but you don't have to give them so much, ammo,
and we and we do that all the time. And
so then you know, it is not it is not
inaccurate for a voter to fike to themselves.

Speaker 1 (59:53):
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (59:54):
This Democrat seems more focused on these cultural issues that
prior I don't agree with. But yeah, so where is
your economics? You know What's really interesting, though, Chuck, is
somebody who did an incredible job of avoiding that crowding
out effect was Zoron Mamdani. We went through and we
analyzed his paid media and you know, you do a
word cloud based on the analysis, and in you know,

(01:00:16):
words like affordable rent, freeze, billionaires like all those words
were huge in the cloud. You literally could not find
the words climate change or LGBTQ issues didn't appear in
the cloud because didn't appear in the cloud either. He
chose not to talk about it, you know, and and
so he became sort of almost like, you know, a
joke by the end of the campaign that he could

(01:00:37):
take any conversation and steer it back towards affordability. Right,
So that kind of message. And of course Zorn cares
about climate change. Of course he cares about LGBTQ rights.
You know, He's not throwing those causes under the bus.
He's making a conscious decision to focus his campaign relentlessly
on kitchen table issues. So you know, I wouldn't take
all of his ideological positions and try to apply them

(01:00:58):
in other states, but I certainly would take that discipline
practice and avoiding crowding out that he demonstrated as a
lesson that can be universalizable in other places.

Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
So, look, we're taping just to timestamp this on a Wednesday,
November twelve, where the government is in the process of
being reopened. Perhaps the release of the Epstein emails has
distracted the left's anger at the at Schumer and the
Democratic senators that chose to put a pause in this

(01:01:30):
in this debate. And I call it a pause because
I I'll just be I think a better messenger. You know,
I think you and I both know Bill Clinton would
have been able to say, we're going to feed people,
We're going to let you get to grandma, and we're
going to make sure grandma comes home to you to
this holidays. We haven't given We're we're not giving up
this fight on healthcare. And in fact, we've got more

(01:01:52):
people focused on it than ever. We've got them super
nervous about it. But yeah, we're going to reopen the government,
and this is why we're going to reopen the government.
But it's only for the next and they they're on
the clock and they have sixty five days. Why was
that not an effective way to sell the reopening of
this government.

Speaker 2 (01:02:07):
I think expectations got completely out of whack, you know,
And this is this is a responsibility of leadership, you know, Frankly,
is that you know the idea Republicans were never going
to give Democrats a full year extension of the subsidies.
You know, this was just not.

Speaker 1 (01:02:20):
Without a fight. I mean, they still might. I still
think there will be. My theory is it won't be
a majority of Republicans that do it, but that there's
going to be enough to force the issue.

Speaker 2 (01:02:30):
Well, I think that's right. I mean, I think as
the political pain takes hold, you know, that's that's probably
the case. But you know that's got to have You
got to give that time to breathe and give that
time for people to start feeling that. You know, I
don't want them to feel the pain, but because of
the Republicans policy choices, they're going to. So I think, look,
you know, I mean the problem with being a congressional

(01:02:53):
leader is that the skills that help you get that
job aren't always the same skills that make you good
at communicating with the public, you know, And so it
is a very inside baseball job. It is about. You know,
you worked for.

Speaker 1 (01:03:08):
A senator who was really good behind the scenes, and
he was was the best community care Let's.

Speaker 2 (01:03:12):
You'd be the first to say it, you know, I
mean it was.

Speaker 1 (01:03:17):
I I say this, I love talking to him. Right
the minute it was on the record, his everything changed
about it.

Speaker 2 (01:03:25):
Well, he didn't care, you know. I mean that's the
other thing is that he didn't care that he didn't
have a you know, a you know, flowery SoundBite. You know,
he would give you exactly what he wanted to say.
He'd say it very quietly, you know. Uh, And and
that was it because he had the confidence of knowing
that he you know, he thought through the strategy that
he had the caucus behind him. So it's always been

(01:03:46):
the case. I mean, Nancy Pelosi was an incredible leader,
but was also you know, a huge target of Republican attacks, right,
so he wasn't the best communicator. That's that's right, And
it's it's a difficult combination of skills, you know, and
especially today in a medium vironment that prioritizes or that
you know, where the ability to communicate across mediums, to
be natural on camera, to be quick with the quip,

(01:04:07):
you know. It's so that's just something that is evolving
and we're going to have to figure that out as
as the caucus decides, you know, what's the right mix
they want to see in the next leader.

Speaker 1 (01:04:17):
So it's funny, it's it's one of these cases where
it's Schumer's fault that this is being misinterpreted, whether it's
you know, it's this is not. It's not as much
about the tactics, it's more about how he communicated.

Speaker 2 (01:04:34):
I think there's a there's a communication aspect, but there's
also a decision making aspect to this too, which is
that at some there was never really an end game here, right,
and at some point.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
And every shutdown ends almost exactly how this shutdown is
exactly the same. Whether right, you don't get what.

Speaker 2 (01:04:51):
You want, you never get literally never in the history
of shutdowns has the side that is demanding a major
policy concession gotten that concession. Right, just doesn't happen. And so,
you know, a the decision to do in the first place,
I think probably that was inevitable, especially after one in
the spring. The caucus just wasn't You.

Speaker 1 (01:05:08):
Could feel it. It's like letting steam out of about
you kind of had it, and they found the issue, right,
that's right. I look, the reality is this was a
shutdown in search of a rationale and they found a rassial.

Speaker 2 (01:05:20):
Yeah it was, And they succeeded in elevating the conversation
about healthcare they have not succeeded up to this point
and being able to drive a consistent, clear message about healthcare.
So they did that Trump's numbers came down significantly, whether
you know, that's a function of the healthcare conversation, you know,
images of the east wing getting demolished, whatever it was,
you know it. You know, part of the reason the

(01:05:41):
east wing conversation was so salient was that we're in
the middle of a shutdown and he's out here building
a ballroom. You know. So they really did a great
job driving a message, setting them on their terms. You know,
I think a lot. I think a lot about the
fall of twenty eleven, where Democrats came off a really
tough summer, you know, coming off bad intermin in the
first place, the whole debt ceiling, you know, debate in

(01:06:02):
twenty eleven got our butts handed to us. But then
we were able to fall to shift the conversation more
towards our terms by shifting the focus to what we
call the Jobs Act at the time, you know, which
was just a bill we put together out of the
most popular policies, was never really going to pass. But
you know, President Obama did a speech to the Joint
Session of Congress, you know, and we put that bill

(01:06:23):
on the floor and made Republicans vote on it again
and again and We didn't pass it, but it got
us back on our front foot going into twenty twelve,
and we were able to sort of take that momentum
going into twenty twelve. So I hope that you know,
the legitimate anger the Democrats are feeling right now because
I think they were fed some false expectations. You know,
we should be able to move on and say, look,

(01:06:44):
we take the good here, which was driving the conversation
about healthcare, getting the conversation back on our terms, and
play that forward into the midterms.

Speaker 1 (01:06:52):
You know, it's interesting they hold THEMS in disarray, you know,
the fund meme that gets put around, and I think
about the fractures that were you know, you sort of
it's like watching, you know, a fault line start to
start to crack, and you see the the ones on
the left, and you see the ones on the right.
The divide on the left right now is not it's
really just tactical. This is not. What's interesting is is

(01:07:16):
you know, you you talked about the word cloud of
mom Dannie. You probably could have applied that to Spamburger
and and Cheryl right and and they both you know,
as far as messaging, we're talking about the same issues
they may have, they may have leaned in different ways,
they may have talked to different constituencies, but they were
always on the affordability message. So like, this is one

(01:07:38):
of those cases where it's like democat, you guys are
all rowing in the same direction and you still want to.

Speaker 2 (01:07:43):
Fight right like this we find it out like what's
the line Jurassic Park? You know life, Life finds a way, right,
Disarray finds a way with Democrats.

Speaker 1 (01:07:53):
But the big tact I always say, the biggest I
think the biggest divide right now on the left is
do you start to look pa Trump or do you
continue to fight Trump? And I think it is an
either or conversation, even though some might argue no, you've
got to do both. There are entities that should be
thinking about fighting Trump. Like that's what I expect my

(01:08:13):
ACLU to do, and that's what I expect. You know,
where the hell are the good trial lawyers around? Like,
you know, ultimately I expect the courts to be doing that, right,
I expect the elected officials to be thinking about, Okay,
what's next? Right where I have a feeling I know
where you are, but I assume you're on the side

(01:08:35):
of it's about thinking of the post Trump.

Speaker 2 (01:08:38):
One hundred percent. I mean, that's why that's why I
created Searchlight, you know, I mean, that is what we're
trying to do here, is to craft a vision that
will get people excited about the prospect of democratic governance again.
And we're going to go big on how we're thinking
about that. But I think you know, look, I think
there's also a little bit of a difference between a
mid term election and a presidential election. And so for me,

(01:08:58):
my formative elections were two thousand and six in two
thousand and eight, and Democrats did a good enough job
in two thousand and six of putting forward a positive vision.
They had this six roh six agenda that focused on
you know, we were the original drain the swamp. I mean,
we wanted after Mark Foley was a really salient issue
that year, hugely salient. I mean, you know, so every

(01:09:20):
opportunity to make corruption salient again. This year, we had
ideas about you know, getting out of iraqs, minimum wage
and ethics reform, and then you know that was and
that was solid, right, I mean, because you have to
have something that every Democrat in every corner of the
country can can run on.

Speaker 1 (01:09:40):
And you guys are running in tough states. I mean
think about six, I mean the six pickups to get
they needed six Senate seat's less more than what it
is for this cycle. And you had to win in Montana. Virginia.
Was a big deal at the time because that was
the tough tad of a sitting Republican senator that many
thought was going to be a presidential candidate until he

(01:10:03):
sort of his own words, got in, got him, got
him in trouble, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, Right, like, think of
the the antenna that was Tester. Tester wins in six,
mccaskell is in O six. You have Casey winning in Pennsylvania.
You had Shared Brown in Ohio, Jim Webb. Look at

(01:10:23):
all the people I'm describing all of them in the
economic populist category.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
One hundred percent. Jim Webb was very culturally conservative on
a lot of issues, but was was was a committed
economic populist, you know, and John Tester, Claire mccaskell, you
know the same. And I remember that was you know
when when mccaskell won, you know, at his watch party,
read got down and kissed, kissed the television because I
think she was the one who put us over. Although
actually think the Virginia election, I think.

Speaker 1 (01:10:48):
Because it was late counting. I was on the air
for that, like literally called people about Fairfax County. How
much more is coming in?

Speaker 2 (01:10:55):
Right? Yeah, But that's the thing is it was defied expectations.
You know, the pundits did not expect us to take
back the Senate. I think the House was expected, although
I think the margin was higher than what people predicted,
but the Senate was considered a reach at best. And
so that's but that's where we find ourselves again here
and so for me, the litmus test for success though

(01:11:16):
in twenty twenty six really should be do we take
back the Senate? Because you have to push yourself through there? Yeah,
because look in the cycles where the you know, the
cycles are, you know, a lot of it is determined
by the fundamentals. The Senate is a gnarly beast because
you only it's resistant to big swings because you only
have a third of the chamber up for reelection at
any election, whereas you know, everybody in the House is

(01:11:38):
every seat in the House is up. So what you've
got to do is you really got to maximize your
gains in the cycles where the fundamentals are in your favor,
and for us, that maximizing our gains would would look like,
you know, winning holding all the seats where we have
incumbents up and then winning you know, all of the
swing states and then throwing in someones that are reaches

(01:11:58):
for us, like.

Speaker 1 (01:11:58):
Yeah, I mean I look at the you know the path,
I mean, you know, North Carolina, Maine or quick and
then you start going, oh boy, okay, you need Ohio
to come in again, you probably need one of the
following and then you need one of the following three Alaska, Iowa, Texas, right,
and then you don't want to be you know, then
you got to sort of probably throwing a couple others
like you did that six for oh six. There were

(01:12:21):
two other races that were top tier races in that
last month of the campaign. One was Harold Fords Tennessee
race against that that was a Ford corker, was a
competitive race. And then you had I think Jim Peterson
in Arizona. If I remember that, Kyle, that's.

Speaker 2 (01:12:36):
Right, And I mean you look you know, so yeah,
you know, we look, Ohio, Iowa, Alaska. We have held
Senate seats in all three of those states. Within the
last ten years, we should be able to win there again.
And then yeah, you've got it. You've got to reach
in a place like Texas. That's how you put together
Senate majorities, you know. And what's crazy is that even.

Speaker 1 (01:12:56):
That argued Kansas and Mississippi to be on the mat
You look at those two, they're both there are what
I call green shoots for Democrats in both of those states,
but they need some work, Like you've got to actually
tend that guard.

Speaker 2 (01:13:10):
Ye had a democratic government, Cathleen's we have currently have
a democratic governor, you know. I mean, the Democrats can
win in these states.

Speaker 1 (01:13:16):
Sixteen to the last twenty four years in Kansas has
been that's right, that's right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:20):
Talk about economic populism. I mean, that's the home of
prairie populism. And yeah, exactly. And so it's really a choice,
you know. I mean, Democrats can simply choose tomorrow to
start running on a mix of issues that can appeal
to folks in those states, the way that Trump just
simply decided to throw core tenants of Republican orthodoxy out

(01:13:43):
out the window. And you know, again that doesn't mean
that the entire party has to shift its position on
some of these cultural issues. It just means we have
to embrace people who are going to have different views
than us because they're the only ones who can win
in states like that.

Speaker 1 (01:13:58):
How do you think the unofficial presidential campaign presidential candidates
are doing right now in moving message? Because I look
at a guy like Gavin Newsom, who, on one hand,
it's impressive to me how much the bases embraced him
and that they love the fact that he's fighting. But
at the end of the day, he's introduced himself as

(01:14:18):
one of the great d n C chairs of all time,
right like he is, meaning like he's attacked, he's he's
he's winning on tactics. It's not as if there's some
great policy proposal that is just taking the world by storm.
So I'm a skeptic that this holds for him right that,
because this is a process moment. Let's a policy moment.

(01:14:41):
But in general, how would you you know I had Bashir,
I've done, interviewed Pher, I've seen we've got the rom
stump speech. I've got to be interviewing by the time
this hits well, I've interviewed Wes Moore at Texas the
Texas Tribune Festival. What what do you think so far
of the of the field and how they've tried to
communicate about twenty.

Speaker 2 (01:15:01):
Eight Yeah, I mean we are we are a wash
in raw talent, and it's it's gonna take. But I
think there's still very powerful forces pushing our candidates to
stay firmly inside that liberal box, you know. And so
and it is true that the sort of there's gonna
be sort of a you're gonna have to marry two
things together, I think to get the right candidate here,

(01:15:22):
and that's marrying the aggressive, you know, taking the fight
to Trump and the Republicans, that pugnacity that you see
in someone like Gavin Newsom, that's why he's he's sort
of risen to the top of the conversation in a
lot of places. But you're gonna have to marry that
pugnacity with an issue mix that can appeal to a
broad swath of Americans. And so right now, you know,

(01:15:47):
I think there's some more of sort of tinkering around
the edges there. You know, you look at at a
Josh Shapiro, who is who's sort of you know, defying
the left wing of the party on some issues. But
I think I think we're gonna need somebody to go further,
you know, if we're going to talk about a supermajority,
and I you know, look, you could eke buy. You know,
in a polarized nation, every election's a coin flip, right,

(01:16:09):
you could you could get to seventy. You may even
get to fifty in the Senate. But but that is
a recipe for you know, whiplash.

Speaker 1 (01:16:16):
Biden didn't get to govern very well, didn't He had
all three, but he barely had all He barely had
the trifecta.

Speaker 2 (01:16:24):
You lose it, you probably lose.

Speaker 1 (01:16:25):
I think we could have the trifecta. Yeah, I think
I managed it. From the White House perspective.

Speaker 2 (01:16:29):
I agree. And I think even if you're lucky to
have the trifecta, you probably lose it in the first midterm,
you know, and then and then you're stuck. And so
I think, you know, what I see as a super
majority is having a durable governing majority that sustains itself
at least through a few election cycles, that you can
actually pass a robust agenda. Most of what Biden has

(01:16:50):
passed has already been undone with Republicans. But this has
already been undone by Republicans, you know it. At best,
your accomplishments are extremely fragile. They don't last, they're quickly repealed,
and then the other side comes in and does the
same thing, and then we're stuck in this this back
and forth. So I think that the time is right
right now for one side or the other to craft

(01:17:12):
the supermajority appeal that can actually build a governing coalition
that can sustain you in power. You know, beyond just
one one two year period.

Speaker 1 (01:17:26):
Do you worry about a insurgent third party or independent?
And do you worry that? You know, I look at
it as somebody who's always dabbled, And my first professional
year covering politics was the year of rouss Perrot, So
you know, when you get introduced to politics that way,
and how crazy it shook up the map and it
shook up ideologies and it really I've always thought that
the Paro Paro's third party candidacy was extraordinarily successful because

(01:17:51):
he made both parties change who they were, you know,
he made the Democrats a bit more sensitive on fiscal issues,
made the Republicans a bit more sensitive on trade issues. Hey,
that's that's to me, that's an accomplishment, right. That was
in theory originally why ross Pero got it right, he
was trying. He thought, Hey, these guys don't know what
any in those two issues. He accomplished a lot. We're

(01:18:13):
in a moment. There is a vacuum, right, you see,
sometimes it's simply a vacuum in a place like Nebraska,
South Dakota, or Idaho. And I single those guys out
because I've interviewed all of them. There. There are a
bunch of really strong candidates running as economic populists who've
chosen to run as independence instead of Democrats, and they
just simply all. I had two of them on together

(01:18:34):
and they said, it's simply so they can have a
conversation with local voters, like they agree with the agenda.
But if the minute they find out they're a Democrat,
then they don't want to like they won't. It's like
they close their ears, so they're trying to open their ears.
Do you worry that there's a vacuum out there that
can be filled by a non democratic entity?

Speaker 2 (01:18:51):
Oh, I one hundred percent worry that there's a vacuum,
and I think it's incumbent on the party to close it,
you know, and if they don't do that, then yeah,
they leave themselves very It is a it's a regular,
you know, not a not every election, but you know,
every once a generation or so, an independent candidate comes
along and identifies the sort of the ways in which
neither side is meeting the demands of the American people.

(01:19:12):
Nineteen sixty eight, George Wallace, You know, he did, and
that caused you Nixon was sort of running on a
light southern strategy in sixty eight and.

Speaker 1 (01:19:20):
Then probably wins by a bigger margin without Wallace, I think, right,
but I don't think that's yeah, that's probably that's probably right.

Speaker 2 (01:19:27):
But then he sort of, you know, just I mean this,
I don't see this is a good thing being a liberal.
But then he know, decided to close off that that.

Speaker 1 (01:19:33):
He didn't let that, but he wasn't going to let
that happen to him a second time exactly.

Speaker 2 (01:19:36):
And then Reagan sort of refined that approached and you know, so,
I mean, I think I think that, you know, it's
it's sort of a market feature of if if neither
side is meeting the demand then you know someone's going
to step in. They won't win, I don't think, but
they can certainly, you know, cause Democrats to lose. And
so it really is incumbent on Democrats to take it
upon themselves to craft a broader appeal to sort of

(01:19:59):
pre the possibility of getting, you know, having an end
run around them by an independent candidate.

Speaker 1 (01:20:05):
Yeah, let's talk about the Senate. You wrote a book
about it, you know, and and the filibuster. You know,
one of the things the philibuster that I always want
to take a little time to educate people. It is
not in the constitution. The philibuster is a choice, right,
its Senate rules, right, that's right. There is the mythology

(01:20:31):
that you know I grew up with, certainly was mister Smith, right,
the famous Jimmy Stewart movie of the fifties, and it
sort of celebrated the idea that one senator can sort
of stand up. So give me the ideal. What's your
ideal of I assume you still embrace the ideal that
a a senator should feel as if that they can

(01:20:54):
do that if they so choose to. How should that
work and how should we be using it as a
governing tool in your mind.

Speaker 2 (01:21:01):
Yeah, exactly. That. That's the thing is that people think
when they think of the filibuster, if they think about
it at all, they think of they think of Jimmy Stewart, right,
But that's not how it works.

Speaker 1 (01:21:10):
I don't. I'm hopeful actually that most of the people
that are listening to this podcast are younger than I
am and probably are like, who the hell is Jimmy Stewart.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
Yeah that's true, but but I think that. But still,
the idea of, you know, of somebody standing up and
talking is what people think of, right, And that's just
not how it works anymore. You know. What's happened is
it's become a sort of a quiet, you know, passive filibuster,
where any veto it's pocket veto. I mean you literally
have your staff call the cloak room and say I object.

(01:21:41):
You know, that's it, and nobody has to do to
show up to the floor. They don't have to say
a word. And then that automatically raises the threshold for
procedural reasons that will borrow your readers to tears to
sixty votes. And I think what's important to understand is
that you know, according for the first two hundred years
of its existence, from the from the time it was
conceived of the Framers until you know, about century in
the twentieth century, the Senate was a majority rule institution.

(01:22:03):
It was it was intended to be that way, and
the Framers, it wasn't an accident. They thought very hard
about whether there should be a super majority requirement in
Senate rules, and they decided against it. And the reason
they decided against it was because they had just had
experience with the Articles of Confederation, where there was a
super majority threshold in the legislature, and they put it there,
you know, on the theory that it would promote compromising consensus,

(01:22:27):
when what happened in reality was that it empowered a
minority to be obstructionist and to grind things to the
halt when they didn't get their way. And so the
Framers saw that happen and said, okay, well, we're not
doing that, you know, And so they designed the Senate
to be different from the House in lots of other ways,
by giving every state equal representation, by having senators serve
for six year terms so they can be a little

(01:22:47):
bit less responsive to the whims of the moment staggering
those elections, like we talked about, you know, basically sort
of building in things that made it a more deliberate institution.
But they were, and they wrote about it in the
Federals papers. They debated the Concerts Convention. They said, we
are not putting in a majority a super majority threshold,
because that would allow and they said explicitly, because that

(01:23:08):
would allow a minority to obstruct, you know, when they
didn't get their way. And so that's the that's the
difference in the filibuster is that there should be unlimited debate.
You should have the opportunity to stand and say your piece,
to join with other colleagues to keep a filibuster going
indefinitely if you want to. But you should have to
put in the work. You know, you should not be
able to do it passively. Why is it so hard

(01:23:29):
to sell, to sell that bipartisanly? That to me seems
the proper use of the filibuster. I agree, you know,
it's it's it's it's just the sort of the proverb
of the frog being boiled in water, where you know,
the Senate never decided to have it be the way
it is. It was a passive accumulation of one norm

(01:23:50):
being laid on another in layered form over several decades,
where basically when you're in the minority, you find this
thing to be useful. But came up with the filibuster
happened what sometime after direct election of senators. Yeah, well
so in nineteen seventeen they when seventy of the amendment, right,
So when direct election happened, it was around the same

(01:24:10):
time during the progressive era. You know, there was this idea.
But what's really interesting about it is that the rule
that today gets used to cause the super majority threshold
was originally put in place to end filibusters.

Speaker 1 (01:24:24):
It's I don't want to get yeah, it's like it's
like you're describing one of my favorite things. You know,
a reform in one era turns into it a problem
in another. You know, the seniority system was actually instituted
in the House at the turn of the last century
because there were so many cronies that a speaker would
put into place, and they said, well, we can't have that.

(01:24:46):
So the seniority system was actually a reform that's right,
to improve representation.

Speaker 2 (01:24:52):
So the super majority rule was, you know, put in
place because if you had a talking filibuster that was
going on for way too long, right you You said, okay, fine,
you know what, We'll give you a tool to bring
that to an end. And that's if you know sixty
at the time it was three fits. It was three
thirds or something, or at the time it was two thirds.
Now it's three fits. But they said, look, if three

(01:25:13):
fitts of the Senate can decide that, you know, mister
Smith has talked too long, you know, presumably that's bringing
people together from both sides of the whatever issues being debated,
you can sort of say, okay, that's enough guy. Even
then you still have like thirty hours, so you know,
in true Senate fashion, it wasn't moving that precipitously. But
but that was supposed to be able to say, okay,
that's gone on long enough, let's let's let's end it.

(01:25:34):
Let's move to a vote. Now what happens is because
of the ease of implementing the filibuster, because you don't
have to go to the floor and you can just
have your staff call the cloakroom. That's all it takes
to do a filibuster. So there's no there's no you're
not putting any onus on the person blocking, but that
simple act of calling the cloakroom triggers that super majority requirement. Now,
so every time the Senate votes on the super majority,

(01:25:56):
they're technically still ending a filibuster, even though there's nobody
on the four filibuster. So it's completely a mutation of
what the original rule was decided to do, and it's
just accumulated in this sort of like you know, accretion
of layers of norms and made the sound of completely dysfunctional,
just like the Framers predicted it would be if a
supermajority requirement was put in place.

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
So let's talk about the different like hacks that were
essentially created to avoid the filibuster reconciliation. I got a
fun viewer question back to my last episode about it,
and I said, well, it was correct me if I'm wrong.
It was a creation essentially of Robert byrd right.

Speaker 2 (01:26:33):
That's right, you know it was. It was sort of
downstream of the sort of imperial presidency under Nixon, where
you know, Nixon seized a bunch of powers to the
executive branch, and so in the post Watergate reaction against that,
they wanted to shift more power back to the legislative branch,
and so they created this thing called budget reconciliation, where
you know, under the power of the purse, one of

(01:26:55):
the most important functions of Congress is to pass a budget.
And you know, if Congress gets you know, stuck on budget,
that's an advoication of their powers. It shifts more powers
to the executive because Congress hasn't told the executive how
to spend the money. So they wanted to make sure
that budgets could not get stuck or blocked by a minority.
So they created a separate pathway for anything related to

(01:27:18):
the budget, and they put in place strict rules where
it said, you know, it has to meet these standards.
But if it meets these standards and applies to the budget,
it has its own pathway where there's no supermajority requirement.
It's a straight fifty vote threshold all the way through.
But there is sort of almost a talking filibuster built
in of this thing called voterama, where you know, anybody

(01:27:38):
can bring an amendment, and so before passage you'll have
these night you know, sessions that go all night where
everybody's so you know, kind of they sort of tried
to recreate the original Senate, but only for issues related
to the budget. Those those criteria that determine what can
pass along that pathway that's been expanded steadily over the

(01:27:59):
since the seventy when this was enacted to sort of,
you know, expand the definition of what's allowed to pass
through it. But even so, you know, anything that's not
economic and nature definitely can't pass through that pathway, and
even a lot of things that are economic and nature,
you know, still get kicked out.

Speaker 1 (01:28:14):
I think the first Bush tax cuts were not reconciliation.
I think he did that with sixty because I remember
him finding five Democratic senators.

Speaker 2 (01:28:24):
I know, No, I think I think it was reconciliation
he did, and both those things are true. He did.
Max Bockus supported those, some Democrats supported him, But I
still think it was on the reconciliation. But with which,
by the way, is the way it used to happen,
which was that just because something passed, you know, along
majority rule pathway, didn't make it party line, you know.
I mean, look, medicare you know. So the things we

(01:28:45):
think of as the greatest by partisan accomplishments generally happened
during the period when the Senate was majority rule, and
what would happen is people would fight it tooth and nail.
But then as soon as it was clear that the
majority had the votes, a bunch of people who were
holding out for something would would then come on and say, okay,
I'm going to join on board anyways, on the way
on the right.

Speaker 1 (01:29:02):
I want to be on the right side of that boat.

Speaker 2 (01:29:04):
Sure that.

Speaker 1 (01:29:05):
Yeah, Well, let's talk the judiciary, because this is where
I I I you know, there have been separate rules created,
and I kind of think everybody's gone the wrong direction, right,
Meaning if I read Federalist seventy eight, which is the
Alexander Hamilton Federalist paper on the judiciary, it is pretty
clear that the description of the judiciary that the founders

(01:29:27):
intended was for what I call referees, so the least
partisan individuals you could get in the least partisan way.

Speaker 2 (01:29:34):
Right.

Speaker 1 (01:29:35):
That was the reason for the lifetime appointment. That was
But so to me, he didn't say there should be
and maybe you could make the argument, you know, he
should have said, you know, all federal judges should be
super majorities. But that's where my head is at, Like
I don't trust the two parties anymore, and to the
point of, with the way the judiciary works, would we

(01:29:57):
be better off if if we didn't instead of lowering
the threshold from sixty dowe to fifty, of raising the
threshold from sixty to seventy five. And the reason I
have come down on this idea is looking at I
got to know somebody who worked in the Bush White
House Counsel's office in the first Bush forty three and

(01:30:19):
they were the last Republican presidency under the sixty vote
threshold right until Trump came in, and then it got lowered.
He got to lower it, all got lowered, and he
said they'd have nominated completely different people for federal judge
ships if the threshold was fifty and not sixty. Much
more ideological, much less you know. That to me was

(01:30:43):
that is why I'm like, Yeah, this is why we
shouldn't have lowered the threshold, because ultimately I want the
least partisan people as my judge. I don't want partisan
people as my judge. I know we're a long way
away from us from a situation going back to that,
but why is that so difficult? How did we allow
the judicial? Why did we decide to politicize the judicial.

Speaker 2 (01:31:07):
Yeah, I mean I think one hundred percent. See you
know where you're coming from on that. I think that
you know, it is a bit cyclical, right, I mean, like,
you know, a lot of judges did used to be
pretty part of it. I mean, you know, the nineteen said, look,
the nineteenth century judiciary general was corrupt.

Speaker 1 (01:31:23):
Yeah, okay, yeah, and there was a ton of a
lot of corruption there. I'm not gonna I take your point.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
Right right, So I think I think those things work
in cycles. I think where I come down on this
stuff is that it's really hard to you know, enforce
good things like you know, good judgment, moderation by rule.
It's just very hard. And that's when you run into
this problem we were just talking about, of the rule,

(01:31:50):
you know, having unintended consequences. It's just if the nature
of the times is such that, you know, this is
what people are demanding, it's it's going to find a way.
And I think that you know, you know, I'm not
a conservative by nature, so I feel, you know, slightly
incoorporable saying this. But when you go back to the

(01:32:11):
framer's design, you know, I think I am an originalist
when it comes to the system designed, you know, and
this the system was designed to just not have a
super majority threshold anywhere in the path from beginning to end.

Speaker 1 (01:32:28):
The only thing that required a super majority, it was was.

Speaker 2 (01:32:31):
Was cast, social amendments, impeachment, you know, but they specified
those in the Constitution, which just goes to show how
they consider this to be.

Speaker 1 (01:32:39):
It's a very fair point. The fact that he didn't
argue for it, you know, he certainly argued. He argued
hard against judicial elections, which to me tells you that
what I mean, you want to talk about corrupt, Those
state supreme court partisan races, to me are just ter
I mean, I think they just the mere existence of
them under month rule of law.

Speaker 2 (01:33:00):
Well, and you're seeing more and more money start to
flow to them too, you know. I mean, they're going
to become just as political as any election. I think
that's right. So I think it's it's just a tough
thing to do by rule. And so, you know, there
are many bad features of the times we live in.
I think, you know, sort of a return to the
basic features of our system that allow things to move
and allow our system to I think if you went

(01:33:21):
to seventy five, which you'd probably have is just massive
judicial backlogs and seats not getting filled.

Speaker 1 (01:33:27):
Well, this gets to the whole chicken and egg thing.
Like we began earlier talking about the lack of ideological
diversity in the two parties. When we had ideological diversity
in the two parties, we regularly had these sixty and
seventy vote confirmations because there was this ideological diversity as
we polarized ourselves right as you know, the embedding of
red and blue right, which you know, we could make

(01:33:49):
an argument it began in two thousand. I sort of
think now in hindsight, it began with the fallow of
the Berlin Wall. That that's when both parties bases, you know,
got reanimated again. We're like, okay, cold War's over. We
can't be told to sit sit quietly in the corner anymore.
We're coming right. But you know, that's the I guess

(01:34:12):
it is the better solution than open primaries, getting rid
of all partisan primaries, and that then you then you
just get a different type of nominee.

Speaker 2 (01:34:20):
I think that's I think that's I would be in
favor of opening up primaries for sure, you know, and
I think that you know, you look at someone like
would Bernie Sanders have won the twenty sixteen presidential nomination
if their primary had been open, you know, it's or
more primaries and along the way had been opened. Maybe
they I think they argued that at the time. You know,
he's interesting because you could say he's ideological. But also

(01:34:42):
he was sort of an underappreciated aspect of his twenty
sixteen campaign was that he was more moderate on cultural
issues than Hillary, and he was actually sort of presenting
much more of that classic point. Remember how Hillary talking
about attacked him, kept attacking him in sense, Yeah, attacking
him from the left, not the right, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
You know, he had at.

Speaker 2 (01:35:01):
Some point said the interest groups are the establishment. You know,
plan pared to all these groups. So I think that's
I think you've opened the doorway for a more interesting
mix of ideologies.

Speaker 1 (01:35:11):
If you did that, well that uh, let's land the
plane this way. What do you plan? You know, do
you see searchlight? On one hand, you want to you're
going to be an incubator of policy ideas and also
an incubator of campaign tactics.

Speaker 2 (01:35:31):
Well, I think if we had a sort of campaign advice,
it would be basically to be heterodox you know, I mean,
we would say which, and I think that's more powerful
than any campaign tactic. We are, we are a political
culture that's a wash in. You know, this or that
media strategy, this or that platform, and all those things
are important, but fundamentally, the most powerful thing you can
do is offer a different mix of issues to the

(01:35:52):
American people. And so much else flows downstream from that.
So our advice to candidates would be decide to be heterodox.
You know, if you look through your issue positions, and
every single position on that page on your website, you
know is a rigidly ideological left wing position, then you know,
if you're running in a competitive race, then you're probably
doing it wrong. So and listen, look and look in,

(01:36:15):
Look to your beliefs, look to the people that you're
seeking a represent.

Speaker 1 (01:36:18):
This only works those issues you are right, Like, yeah,
I look at Grand I look at the Grand Platner situation,
and you know how I look. I got my skepticism
on the tattoo story. I will admit that, Like, you know,
I think you put a permanent marking on your body.
You're going to research what that is. But so look,
that's me as a voter or as a as a

(01:36:40):
consumer of this. But what do you make of his
staying power. What does that tell you about what you're
what you're advising people to be.

Speaker 2 (01:36:49):
I think I think it's it's it says a lot.
And I think that you know, he's he's a person
who served in the military, you know, and enlisted in
a war that he says he didn't agree with. But
I think that's a powerful story. He loves this guy
loves guns, you know, not just in the sort of
carried a gun once way, but I mean, you know,
that's that's a heterodoxy that fits the state of Maine.

(01:37:11):
People are looking for authenticity. They're looking for that that
desire to fight that, that authenticity being imperfect, having made mistakes,
all that stuff. I think it's it's very powerful. And
so far, the way voters in Maine are reacting to
those stories is to dismiss them or even to say
that's making me back him even stronger. So I think
that's a very powerful phenomenon that's going on right now.

(01:37:32):
And his level of heterodoxy could win a state like Maine,
which is, you know, pretty blue. If you're going to
be running in a state like Iowa, Ohio or Nebraska.
You know, you got to be even more heterodox. And
that's the that's the advice I would give to candidates.

Speaker 1 (01:37:46):
And is this about finding how much of this is
on the party seeking out those candidates and how much
is it just simply more candidates need to not seek
out the groups looking for I mean, you see this
a lot where and I'm sorry, I think that I
watch the committees do this, right, Well, if you don't
do this, then we're not going to be able to
bunge your general election. They sort of hold you hostage

(01:38:09):
on certain things.

Speaker 2 (01:38:10):
Oh one hundred percent. I mean people, you know, the
questioning gas a lot is like, oh, these are just
little nonprofits, you know, doing the best they can. And
that's that's in the post Citizens United world. These groups
wield war chests of millions and millions of dollars, and
in the primary, if you don't take their preferred positions,
they spend those millions of dollars against you and in
favor of your opponent. So it's still a lot of power.

(01:38:31):
But I think, you know, it would be smart for
the groups to get a little bit smarter in what
they're asking people to do and make their asks more
about you know, can you beat the Republican then than
you know, going through a purity test. But I think
candidates should, you know, if they're being asked to take
crazy positions, they should just say no, and they should
make they should be clear of the voters that they're
saying no.

Speaker 1 (01:38:50):
I think would you no longer do questionnaires?

Speaker 2 (01:38:53):
A questionnaire with one question, which is the tell me
why you can beat the Republican? That would be my FoST.

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
That's just the questionnaire.

Speaker 2 (01:38:59):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:39:00):
Are you Can you imagine search Light funding a campaign
for against a candidate in a primary.

Speaker 2 (01:39:06):
We are acumenical for now. I think what we want
to do is just sort of put out the best
ideas and approaches and hope that that, you know, people
adopt them. So that's that is our stance for the
time being. We'll see.

Speaker 1 (01:39:18):
Well, I love your marker for success in your mind.
If Democrats don't win the Senate, they can't say they
won the midterms.

Speaker 2 (01:39:24):
That is exactly what I think.

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):
Yeah, it's a high bar, but guess what if you
want to if you want to succeed, you got to
go meet a high bar.

Speaker 2 (01:39:33):
You've done it before, you know, it's important name.

Speaker 1 (01:39:35):
High anyway, Hey Adam, this was great. Uh. Look, you
have a book out about the Senate. You talked in
such detail. Why don't you want to tell people how
they can go by it?

Speaker 2 (01:39:44):
It's absolutely good. Kill Switch by by Me is available
on Amazon and anywhere books are sold, So.

Speaker 1 (01:39:51):
Go check it out, check it search Light Foundation.

Speaker 2 (01:39:55):
It's about the Senate, but it's not boring. It's the
best is the mind.

Speaker 1 (01:39:58):
Think you did a good job sort of talking the
little history. I mean you you you sort of you
scratched all the itches I was hoping you'd scratched during
our conversation, which was talking about the founder's original intent
all this. And you've certainly been persuasive to me about
the lack of mention of supermajorities in certain parts of
the founders versus where they did intentionally bring up the

(01:40:21):
decision super majorities. I think if you're going to be
an originalist, you got to pay attention.

Speaker 2 (01:40:25):
To that as well. That's right, that's right.

Speaker 1 (01:40:27):
Well, thanks check Fran, good to see it. Well you
heard Adam Jennison there. I do think the bar I
think he makes a fair argument, and I think that
you know, there's gonna be a lot of Democratic protectors
of the Democratic brand who are going to tak that's

(01:40:49):
not fair. This is too hard of a Senate map.
But he's right if you can't say you won the
midterms if you don't win both the House and the Senate.
And yeah, the senate's hard, but they only need four seats.
In twenty oh six they needed six and they got
the six. So it's not like you know, this is
four is not an unreasonable number. So if you're truly

(01:41:12):
winning the argument, you win the four seats. And you know,
which is why if you're going to mess around with
the with the prediction markets, now's the time to buy
shares in Democrats win the Senate because and then, to
be frank, then you sell them sometime in mid October

(01:41:35):
and cash in your profits. So with that, let's take
a few questions ask Chuck. First one comes from Max
w from Alexandria here in the DMV sains. I've been
a fan since before you hosted Meet the Press. Thank you,
and I particularly enjoy your political analysis and how you
use American history. Explain what we are going through towards
that end. Have you watched Death by Lightning? On Netflix.

(01:41:57):
I am in the middle of it or not finished
Part one. It's four part series telling the story of
James Garfield's rise to the presidency after winning the nomination
on the thirty six ballot at the Republican National Convention
in eighteen eighty and his assassination after only three months
in office. It's filled with political intrigu corruption, spoils, and
patronage near the end of the nineteenth century. Right up
your ally, Max, You're right, and I will sort of

(01:42:18):
give you a little insight here. I've been obsessed with
the Garfield story for a long time. Have a writing
partner off and On by the name of Adam Pearlman,
who has done some terrific work billions in particulars, and
he and I have and I have a pilot script

(01:42:40):
actually that we had once been working with a major
production company and the Game of Throne guys bennyoffen Weisse
got the Netflix deal and they ended up pitching a
Netflix Garfield series. And let's just say they had a
longer track record than my Adam and I did on this.

(01:43:02):
I have watched episode one, I've enjoyed it. It is
not the take I would have done, and I'm not
This is not to be critical. I think they've made
an interest, They've made some interesting decisions. I'm looking forward
to where they go, and that is the beauty of
this story. I'm I'm obsessed with the period itself. Right,
this was we were so close to getting reconstruction back.

(01:43:25):
And I'm somebody who thinks a Garfield presidency. You know,
the Garfield presidency got a civil service reform, which was
not a small thing. Trump's actually trying to the Trump
now is trying to undo some of the civil service
reform that that Chester Arthur, who ends up the you know,
a forced vice president on by the political machine in

(01:43:45):
New York, ends up after the death of Garfield, sort
of sees the light and stops being a cog in
the Roscoe Conkling New York political machine and actually pledges
to fulfill a Garfield presidency. But I think Garfield himself,

(01:44:05):
had he lived, I think you might have seen reconstruction
come back. I think, you know, he he was. He's
the closest thing we've had to sort of the out
of nowhere president. Right. It's the you know, I've always
said the mythology. I was telling this to my wife
when we were watching and I said, you know, the
the mythology that you know, the out of nowhere candidate

(01:44:26):
can get the nomination with a speech. The reason the
mythology existed with conventions is because that had happened once, right,
James Garfield, right, his speech moved enough people to suddenly
start considering him because of this sort of deadlock when
it came to the grant side and the machines and
all of this stuff. So, you know, Getteau and I

(01:44:48):
think there I like how they're portraying Getteau because I
think he was mentally ill and sort of a guy
with delusions of grandeur who clearly had a trouble upbring
had a troubled relationship with his father. I mean, there's
a lot of you know, not to play spoiler here,
but you know, Gato ends up trying to defend defends
himself when the first real sort of feeding frenzied trial

(01:45:11):
of the century that the media was obsessed with was
actually the trial and the Gettou trial, which began before
Garfield died. Because Garfield's you know, Gettoau Getau, you could
argue didn't kill Garfield. The doctors who didn't know what
they were doing killed Garfield, right, they stuck there. There's

(01:45:32):
a kind named doctor doctor and I haven't I don't
know if they're going to portray him or not. But
the guy's name really was doctor doctor. Like sometimes you
just can't make it up right, it's going to sound
like it's been fictionalized. But he didn't believe that you
had to wash your hands before you I mean, this
was still like debated medical science. Do you do you

(01:45:52):
do you do?

Speaker 2 (01:45:53):
You?

Speaker 1 (01:45:53):
Should you wash your hands? Do you need a sterile
environment before you? You know? Which I know seems but
it was a there was this was so called new medicine,
new medical practices that was coming out of Europe, and
it was a guy named doctor Lister, which if you're
wondering if doctor Lister invented listerine, he did not, But
doctor Lister was sort of the godfather of this sort

(01:46:16):
of idea that you wash your hands and you need
a sterile environment before as a doctor, before you give
medical care. So Lister Reene was though named after you
know Lister, is that part? But no, the treatment, the
attempt to save Garfield's life killed him. It's possible if
nobody touched him. That he that he might have that

(01:46:38):
the bullet wouldn't have killed him, and he might have
lived and recovered with the bullet in him, but the
attempt to get the bullet out actually killed him. So
but that's obviously stuff that you've scientifically figure out later,
which in the moment we didn't have. But I am

(01:46:59):
obsessed with the entire period. Again, it's interesting how they
chose to sell it, which is, here's two guys you've
never heard of or you've forgotten, who have been forgotten
to history. One was the twentieth President of United States.
It was It's an interesting choice. I get it. They're
trying to mass appeal it, and I'm enjoying it. I

(01:47:24):
fully will confess I would have had a slightly different way.
I would have done it different way. I would have started.
Nothing wrong with what they did. And here's my goal.
I want this to be successful enough that there is
more appetite for more. I think Roscoe Conkling if you
want to go and read about one of the most

(01:47:45):
you know, the Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi of their day,
and I say both right. He was a congressional leader.
Congressional leaders are both lionized and backroom transactionalists at the
same time. And don't let anybody tell you that you
got to have the mix of both of them. Conkling
was an interesting cat, and he's going to be portrayed

(01:48:06):
sort of, I think a bit simply here. It's less
simple than it is. But boy is he is he
a character that if there really was a demand for
more about this era, he could get his own mini series,
Like you could really develop something just on him. He's

(01:48:27):
that colorful of a character. And yes, the way they
have him dressing, he was always for the day, dressing
in brighter colors than everybody else. He was flamboyant man
about town. I don't think he ever spent a night alone.
So there's a it is. You are right, Max that
it is up my alley. It was so up my alley.

(01:48:48):
I wanted to make my own version of it, so there,
all right, But kudos to those guys, and thank you
Netflix for for green lighting a period piece like that.
There's great history to be told through incredible storytelling, and
I'd love to see more production companies support stuff like that.

(01:49:10):
Next question comes from Stafford from downtown la Hey. I've
been a fan since your days of Meet the Press,
and I'm loving the new podcast. Before my question, I
wanted to say that you appear to have done the impossible.
You've gotten me interested in both professional and college football.
Having grown up a Chargers fan, I had largely washed
my hands of the sport after nineteen ninety five. My
question is this, can anything be done in the short
to medium term about electricity costs? I'm a school teacher

(01:49:32):
and my partner is a grad student at USC fight On.
We live in a one bedroom apartment in LA and
while our incomes are enough to get by, it's starting
to pinch. I just opened our electric bill for a
single month and it's easily fifty percent more than we
were paying a couple of years ago. I know data
centers are affecting energy prices, but is there more to it?
Thanks for all the wonderful analysis and for making your
episodes lengthy. I really get a lot of detail I
can't get elsewhere. Sincerely, Stafford from downtown LA. How about

(01:49:55):
that somebody thanking me for the length. I'm not going
to go Joe Rogan on you. I must no three
hour podcasts right. Simmons pushes the envelope in the two
hour plus range. I'm going to still try to keep
a one in front of that number on that front.
So it's interesting with electricity, it's such a complicated thing.

(01:50:15):
I was digging into this, and in fact, I'm going
to be when you hear this, I'm going to be
down in Austin, Texas, interviewing the governor of Maryland, Wes Moore,
And I was talking with his staff about a few issues,
and we were talking about electricity, and I said, you know,
I was asking about the data center issue in Maryland
and Maryland, doesn't you know Virginia is a data center state.

(01:50:37):
And he was noting how you know, he says, Maryland's
a transmission state. You know, a lot of electricity goes
through our state and we pass it through. And you know,
some states are elect energy producing and they add to
the grid. Others only take from the grid, Others help,
you know, sort of the grid itself is a complicated thing.

(01:50:57):
California has its own set of rules that only add
to it. And it's it's one of those things that
I think that you know, we're we're in this. You know,
elect elect electric companies are are private companies, but they're
but they have to get public approval for what they

(01:51:20):
do and how they do it. And I think that
we're about to see, especially with the data center, you know,
obsession and drain, and it's a real issue in the
state I live in Virginia because it is like Virginia
is a huge got a bunch of data centers, and
we have some of the highest spikes in electricity. So

(01:51:41):
I think there's going to have to be some federal
legislation here because I do think that you know, every
state is set up to try to regulate itself, right
You're you're in a you're in a state where where
they're using a lot of air conditioning and there's always
a high an a little more usage of energy, particularly
in the southern part where you know, they're constantly having
to regulate it, and it is done on a state basis,

(01:52:06):
based on state usage. But if we're going to have
more of these sort of drags on the grid coming
from other states, and all of this is interconnected, so look,
I think this is going to be I think the
electric bill issue is going to be what the price
of eggs were, right, and grocery bills were in twenty

(01:52:27):
twenty four. You know that this is going to be
the thing that everybody comes back to. We saw it
in the New Jersey race. Because this is happening across
the board. Everybody's electric bills are going up. There's just
a more and there, you know. And what people do
is they cherry pick the thing that they don't like
to say this is the reason it's going up. It's

(01:52:48):
just everything is the reason. And I think that there's
some argument that what Trump has done with canceling some
of these all of the above energy strategies, that he
actually limiting new energy getting onto the grid, like we
need more diversified sources of energy in order to keep

(01:53:09):
everything going that we're going and him sort of you know,
essentially torpedoing the Biden Energy Bill mandates when it came
to wind and solar and things like that. It's going
to directly impact the cost of electric bills. So I
don't think there's anything short term that's going to get done.

(01:53:31):
But I will say this, I think you're going to
have more political rhetoric about it. You know, we're all
going to have to start to recalibrate what's warm and
cold in order to save a few dollars. I can
tell you what I'm looking into is trying to figure
out is there's some solar alternatives, you know, to at

(01:53:51):
least minimizing the cost on some things. Right, is there
and it may be tough in an apartment situation to
the benefit of that. But will you start to see
landlords who maybe maybe you know, I don't know how
you're building a set up and sometimes you everybody sort
of splits the utility costs. It's part of a larger fee,

(01:54:13):
and in that sense, the landlord is incentivized to want
to maybe put you know, solar panels and come up
with a different way. But I think you're going to
see a lot of people looking for alternative ways to
minimize their drag on the grid. But they're still going
to want need energy to power their electronics or power
their car or power whatever. So but I I you know,

(01:54:35):
I'm not gonna I'm going to keep researching this more
and more to give you a better answer to this question, Stafford.
But I can tell you I think this is this
is an issue that isn't is only going to get
more in the mainstream in the conversation because it's the
type of issue that everybody feels, right, everybody sees the

(01:54:55):
cost of that, and we're seeing these giant spikes throw
in extreme weather where in some places you're using your
air conditioner longer than you normally do, or in some
places you're using heat maybe at a time you never
used it before. That also does weird things to the
grid and ups the costs of what you're doing on it.

(01:55:16):
So I think there never definitely needs to be a
little more federal involvement with how this grid, with how
the electric grid is operating, because it's it definitely feels
and you know, who knows Texas is not on the grid.
They sort of created their own system. That thing it,

(01:55:39):
you know, feels like it's it could trigger a bigger
problem if they have a tough winner. It's always the
winners that really put a lot of stress on that
Texas grid, And if that collapses and it's come close
a couple of times, it could really sort of sober

(01:55:59):
up everybody and realize that we have a federal problem here.
This isn't going to be solved in one state. I
don't think states have this have the ability to do this.
Now you may get some states try to find financial
help for people, but I'm not sure. There's only only
so much money that might be available for that. But

(01:56:21):
I do think this is going to become the most
symbolic issue that's talked about when it comes to cost
of living challenges. Next question comes from Jim Philadelphia's It's
Big Fans in c NBC Days. Congrats on a great
start to the new chapter. One been wondering, what do
you think Trump's real motivation is for intervening in Venezuela

(01:56:42):
under the narco terrorism label. He's never shown much interest
in preserving democracy. Is this really about removing Maduro? Or
is it just another self serving move, maybe even a
play for a Nobel Peace Prize. Jim, I'll tell you
what my thesis is on this. So Marco Rubio, you know,
after starting off his relationship with Trump making Dick jokes

(01:57:02):
about him right at a debate talking about his hands, right,
Why is the hands part of the thing? Right? It
is Rubio that made that meme famous. Rubio has since
done a one ad ent Trump right. We saw it
sometime during the first term, and he has gone out
of his way to endear him endear the Latin American

(01:57:26):
political activist community that is on the side of ousting
some of these guys, but that diaspora that has a
lot of political and financial power in South Florida who've
been very supportive of Rubio's politics over the years. He essentially,
because Trump is such an important figure now in South Florida,

(01:57:47):
he essentially helped Trump cement whatever you know, cement this,
or you could argue Rubio had to catch up to
where all these folks, they all were going, they were
going to gravitate towards Trump anyway, but this began where Trump,
where Trump started. Basically doesn't make any decision in Latin
America without Marco Rubio. And that was true in sort

(01:58:08):
of the last year or two of the Trump era,
the first Trump term. And it is and then you know,
Rubio really ingratiated himself during Trump's exile at mar A Lago.
He'd constantly go there. He'd bring these Latin American figures
to meet with them. He'd be So this is a

(01:58:31):
long way of me making the case that this is
not a Donald Trump obsession. This is a Marco Rubio obsession.
And I think that Rubio has you know, there is
there is a demand. Look go see the I hope
you heard my conversation with Billy Corbin and he did

(01:58:52):
a documentary called Men of War about a failed sort
of bizarre coup, a you know, group of US mercenaries
working with a former bodyguard of Trump's to somehow get
on the get into Venezuela and overthrow Maduro. Kind of

(01:59:12):
a bay of pigs, Venezuelan style type of story. It's
one of those you can't believe this is true, but
you know, Billy always has the receipts. There is a
group of folks in South Florida that that are, you know,
frustrated with Maduro, and this is Rubio cares about this.

(01:59:33):
Rubio believes in this, and I think Rubio has got
enough stature and status in Trump's world He's both Secretary
State National Security Advisor that it is Rubio that is
helping to steer him in this direction. And I think
that there's no doubt in my mind that this is

(01:59:54):
a Rubio project that Trump has adopted and he's you
you know, this narco terrorism thing is you know, if
you had to prove it, I don't know how they would, right,
you know, where do you prove that the drug money
is being used to fund terrorism. That's number one. Number two,

(02:00:16):
what fentanyl. You know, this is not where our fentyl
problem comes from. It's not in Venezuela. It comes from
Mexico and China. So this is a pretext that's sort
of been created. Look, I would feel better about this
if the argument were we're trying to enforce democratic norms,

(02:00:37):
then we can debate whether we should be using the
military to do that. That should be the debate we
should be having as a country about this Venezuela move.
But instead they're essentially lying to us about the rationale
for what they're doing, saying this is not about regime change,
it's not about the democracy. This is about a specific thing.
And yet what are we doing. It looks like we're

(02:00:58):
on the verge of of overthrowing a government. So it
feels like we're you know, it feels like we're doing
this all the wrong way, Which is why a couple
of weeks ago, in my toodcast time machine, I wanted
to make the Panama Canal Anniversary the Liberation of Panama,
if you will, an important story because anytime, you know,

(02:01:20):
whenever we're involved and we lie about why we're involved,
we do not help our long term ability to have
influenced the right way in Latin America. And I just,
you know, I am I want to see Maduro go.
I am, you know, sort of like it's like it's
like Saddam. I'm glad Saddam left. But was that the

(02:01:40):
way to do it? I don't know if this is
the right way to get rid of Adua. Next question
comes from Dan, and then I'm going to get into
my college football preview for the weekend. We'll do it
through the prism of the college football playoff. He goes,
I've been enjoying the podcast is always. Something I noticed
is that the election coverage shows that Andrew Cuomo outperforms

(02:02:02):
on Mam Donnie among voters without a college degree. NBC
reports that Mam Donnie won only twenty six percent of
white non college graduates, and similar trends appeared in the
gubernatorial races. Despite overall wins, Democrats still seem to underperform
among non college educated voters, raising concerns about their strengthen
states like Michigan and Nebraska. Is it fair to interpret
these results as evidence that Democrats have not yet repaired
their image with working class white voters. If so, what

(02:02:24):
steps should the party take to become more competitive with
this group? Thanks Dan, Well, look, I hopefully you're listening
to the answer this question after you've heard the interview
with Adam Gentilsen. It's exactly what he's trying to do,
which is, how do you get you know, the irony
is you know, I think Democrats have struggled culturally to

(02:02:46):
connect to this group of voters for some time. They
used to be sort of Democrats and they were just
sort of Democrats, and it was they were culturally Democrats
that and the Democrats they thought economically were looking out
for him as is That explains why there were two
US senators in Nebraska for you know, not an insignificant

(02:03:06):
period of time, and almost always one a state that
you know, is the birthplace of the the perhaps the
original Prairie populace William Jennings. Bryan, Right, So I think
you're right to point out those things. I think this
is to me the great danger of the midterms on
the Democrats, which is they don't need they could do

(02:03:31):
as mediocre as they did with non college educated whites
in the midterms because they won't turn out in the
same numbers that they'll turn out in a presidential election,
giving Democrats an opportunity because they'll they'll sort of over
index on their more frequent voters and college education voters,
and they will be a bigger share of the electorate

(02:03:51):
in a midterm than they will be in a general.
It's why, you know, have they been a presidential like
turnout in say Virginia, Maybe she only wins by eight
instead of fifteen, and maybe if you got although you know,
to me, the New Jersey thing is why I why
I believe this was a Trump referendum. When you have

(02:04:13):
the Republican candidate actually getting more raw vote than he
got four years earlier, but he lost by ten percentage
points more than when he lost before, shows you a
whole bunch of voters that didn't show up four years
ago that decided to show up. Well, you didn't have
an equal basically, a whole bunch of presidential only voters
decided to show up in a governor's race on the

(02:04:33):
Democratic side. You didn't get the presidential only voters to
suddenly show up in a governor's race on the Republican side.
And then you can see how lopsided things can get.
I think the biggest, the potential worst outcome for the
Democrats hopes in twenty twenty eight. Weirdly will be thinking

(02:04:55):
that if they win the House in the Senate, that
they've solved their problems and it's just a it's you know,
there going to just coast to the presidency like what
happened in six going into eight, and I would just
say it's very possible they could have a midterm revival.
Eighty six midterms were terrific midterms for the Democrats, and
then they after getting clobbered in eighty four, and then

(02:05:17):
they go and get clobbered in eighty eight. So I
do think the Democratic makeup of their more likely voter
automatically puts them at advantage to overperform in the midterms.
It's why even in a bad midterm year like twenty
two was, they didn't get clobberd the way they that
an out party gets clobbered or an inn party gets clobbered,

(02:05:39):
simply because more of their voters are just are more
regular voters. No, I think that the party still has
a problem and until it you know, in fairness to
the party on this one, neither Virginia nor New Jersey
is a huge It had a rural vote that the
candidate had to make an effort. That's not going to

(02:06:03):
be the case in trying to win an election in
North Carolina. That's not going to be the case. In
trying to win in Ohio. That's not going to be
the case in trying to win in Iowa or Alaska,
or Kansas or Mississippi or even Texas. You know, you
can't win Texas just by winning the cities that a
Roar came close, but he couldn't do it. He want
all the he won all the cities, and he won

(02:06:24):
all the the big media markets, but he couldn't. He
got killed in the ex serbs and the world voters.
So uh yeah, I don't think they've solved any other
problems on that front. And I still think they the
Democrats are you know, they have to be seen as
a stronger party. Strength And I know that's an elusive word,

(02:06:45):
but I think strength's a big, a big thing with
this with with this voting group. If they're going to
try to reconnect back with them, and you know, the
economy will be an entree. It's not lost on me.
If you think about it. The last four Democratic presidents
in my lifetime who've won all one during an economic downturn.

(02:07:07):
You know, it's possible that Democrats are just you know,
in my lifetime have culturally been on the wrong side
of where the country is, and Republicans have culturally been
on the right side where the country is. But that
Democrats when the economy's in the tank. It was true
in seventy six, it's true in ninety two, and although

(02:07:27):
the economy was recovering by the time Trump Clinton won,
but the perception was it was in the tank. It
was true in eight, it's true in twenty right, it
was certainly virus related, but still it was an economic downturn. Sadly,
it may be that there's an economic downturn in twenty
eight and that powers everything. And let me just tell

(02:07:48):
you this, when you have an election that's all about
the economy, it suddenly papers over all of your different
interestscript problems, right because everything becomes about that. So for Miami,
it's their last home game. I know you're on pins

(02:08:08):
and needles. The College Football Playoff Committee is getting a
little better at giving some respect to the University of Miami,
though not A. Ton, the guy who runs the committee,
who was the spokesperson, basically said Miami is the only
team in the ACC that has won a decent non
conference game, like completely forgetting that Ala Fingbama lost to

(02:08:33):
Florida State in Week one and so what you see
as you see. And this is why I do not
trust the ESPN Invitational Committee. I think all of these
athletic directors and they're all I mean, my god, they've
all realized they work for ESPN and the SEC and
nobody else. Apparently. It is it is, it is why

(02:08:54):
we have to get rid of this committee. They are
not you know, I and if yous me, you know,
you could say I'm being you know, yeah, I'm being
biased towards the ACC. My bias is I want the
ACC to get treated fairly. I'm just asking for fair treatment.
This is a committee, and this is a network that
has already punished the ACC two years ago with denying

(02:09:16):
an undefeated ACC champion access to the playoff of Florida State.
This is a ESPN Invitational committee that denied the number
one ranked offense in the country with ten wins and
two losses, the Dederus from Miami. They did not put
him in the playoff simply because they were in ACC
school the exact same resume, but an SEC school, and
I promise you they would have made it when you're

(02:09:38):
literally the top ranked offense in the country, because supposedly
those outside metrics matter. No, their metrics matter only when
it is about getting the matchups that they want for
the television show. And now it is a head scratcher
to me that they didn't think cam Ward was good
for their television show. I would argue cam Ward would
have been great for their television show last year in

(02:10:00):
the exhibition that is the ESPN Invitational. But the fact
that the committee is literally lying about the ACC's resume
on national television with Rhys Davis or misinformed, okay, lying
and inquires motive, But there is a motive here. They're
going out of their way to make the case against
the ACC because apparently, if you're if you're in the

(02:10:21):
ACC and you have a competitive conference, your conference must suck.
If you're in the SEC and have a competitive conference,
it's proof that your conference is great. I mean, I'm
just sorry, it's subjective bullshit on this, Okay, Yes, is
it true that the SEC program spend more money collectively
than the ACC does. So you assume you have more talent, yes,
but you know is produced like something I like if

(02:10:44):
you want to sit here and play that game. The
ACC has I think produced the second most amount of
first round draft picks over the last ten years, right
behind the SEC and ahead of the Big ten in
the Big twelve. But again we can you can find
little things like that all the time to slice and
dice things. But they went out of their way to

(02:11:05):
punish to and it would have been some other ACC
school and they've done it. And again this goes back
to the where the hell is the commissioner Jim Phillips
is way too meek uh in this conversation he lets
Greg Sankei go move around with them up and down.
I told you last week about my source that that

(02:11:26):
told me how much that every week Greg Greg Sanki
must have had a hissy fit. That that Herbstreet and
Fowler were out doing a Texas Tech game. That must
have freaked them out. But that every week he lobbies
that you must be in the SEC. You must be
in the SEC. And again I get it. ESPN's in
business with the SEC, but they're also in business with

(02:11:48):
the ACC, and I think the ACC could be suing
ESPN for breach of contract. This is a network that
has gone out of their way to diminish the value
of the ACC. The ACC is increased its value, and
ESPN tries to diminish the value of the ACC, and
they're your biggest business partner. The ACEC should be in court.

(02:12:09):
Don't sue each other. Sue ESPN for essentially for diminishing
the value of ACC sports in general and ACC football
in particular. I'm sorry the lack of pushback, and again
it's you know, ESPN controls the college football playoff, a mistake,

(02:12:29):
which is why you got to get rid of this committee.
We ultimately got get rid of this committee. There is
a way to make all of this and on the
field issue, you can you know, if you basically say,
you know, if a conference, i'd love to see sort
of actually an eighteen playoff that essentially had each conference
have their own sort of six team round robin of

(02:12:52):
some sort that decided who their representative was in the
eight and you'd have your four conference champions, your group
of five champions after they had a little tournament. But again,
you had to win on the field to get in,
and then you might have and you might have three
wildcards which Notre Dame would be eligible for, and the
next two highest winning percentages in the power for just

(02:13:13):
like the NFL wildcard works. And yes, sometimes you might
have somebody left out, but it was done on the
field with metrics. Everybody understands at the beginning. You know
what nobody says from this committee. They can't tell you
to this day. What matters more your wins are your losses.
It's a win right. If they want to make the
case that Miami is in, they will make a big

(02:13:35):
deal out of their wins. If you want to make
the case that Miami is out, you will make a
big deal about their losses. Dinno. With Notre Dame, what's
the case to put them in? They lost? Two of
their losses were by a collective of four points against
two of the most talented teams in the country. What's
the case not to put Notre Dame in? The two
times they faced talented teams in the country that belong

(02:13:55):
in the playoffs, they couldn't beat them. But Notre Dame
is a brand. Look, Miami has been a brand. Miami
is the number one rated ACC school as far as
television audience is concerned. It has been the last couple
of years. You know, for the most part, Miami's been
a brand and that usually helps them in situations like this.
I do believe when college football continues this what they've

(02:14:19):
done to the conference with the SEC and the Big
Ten have done everybody else, Miami will probably be a
half And unfortunately, my friends at NC State, Miami's opponent
this week may end up being a poor have not. Now.
I don't think that's healthy for college football. I think
we could be doing this a better way. But anyway,
here we are, so college football playoff rant over. It

(02:14:42):
does look like Miami's path is not crazy anymore. They
finally have them. They're still a bit under ranked. You know,
are you're really ranking Miami behind Utah? No offense? To
my producer, Lauren is a big Utah guy, and you
know they do the you the wrong way. It's not
this way, guys, It's like this, but that's okay. That said,
do you think I have a lot of confidence in

(02:15:05):
this coaching staff to be ready to put a licking
on NC State on Senior Day at Miami? You know,
I got a sixty five percent confidence level, but I
don't have a ninety percent confidence level. You know, Miami
should be able to put a number up on NC State.
A forty five to ten victory should be what they

(02:15:27):
do if they want to make the playoff. They kind
of need a forty five to ten. But if you
told me this was a thirty one, twenty four to
twenty seven game that Miami eked out or somehow screwed
it up at the end due to poor coaching decisions,
I let's just say I fear it a little bit now.
I don't think NC State has the defense and I

(02:15:49):
think Miami's defense. You know, again, we're I'm going to
learn a lot about how much these players want to
play for these coaches, because if they do. I did
not like the first half of what I saw in
the Miami Syracuse game. It looked like it didn't look
like I mean, it does feel like the offensive coordinator,
Shannon Dawson is just out of ideas they continue. They

(02:16:12):
are clearly not comfortable with Carson Beck making some decisions
because they seem to fear putting him in positions to
uh win it, you know, to either make a big
player potentially, you know, put him in a precarious position.
It's a shame how they coach it, how they do this.

(02:16:33):
So we'll see. I'm nervous. I'm very nervous. I'm not
gonna lie to you. I'm very nervous about this game
because I actually think coach Crystal Ball is feeling the pressure.
I think Shannon Dawson's feeling the pressure. And sometimes pressure
is good on people respond to the pressure and they

(02:16:54):
give you their best work, and sometimes the pressure puts
them and they get parallel La. We'll see. The biggest
game on the board as far as Miami's playoff rankings
are concerned, is actually at the sight of where game
Day decided to go, which is an interesting decision. They're

(02:17:14):
in Pittsburgh and they're for the Notre Dame pit game.
This is arguably Notre Dame's toughest game left, which is
really so they're there because you know, Notre Dame has
they can't lose in order to have a shot at
the playoff. They went out, They're going to get in
because a ten and two Notre Dame team will always
make the playoff no matter who their two losses are.
To and no matter if the ten wins are against

(02:17:36):
the entire MAC conference, it's Notre Dame. You know, it's
TV show people, So as long as it's an invitational,
they'll always get the invite. Pitt's been an interesting team
ever since they put in this freshman quarterback. He's been
on He's lit it up. A patent our doozy team. Usually,
isn't this free flowing on offense?

Speaker 2 (02:17:56):
Right?

Speaker 1 (02:17:58):
Miami has to play Pitt last game of the year,
so this will be a common opponent. So everything about
this game I have to I'm going to be watching
every inch of it. It goes. It's on, it's the
noon game, it'll be on before the Miami game, which
is a three thirty. This is a huge game for
the playoff. It's a huge game for Notre Dame. It's
a huge game for the ACC. It's a huge game

(02:18:21):
for Miami. It is this is interesting, right, what's better
for Miami Notre Dame winning. I think I want Notre
Dame to win by a field goal and then Miami
to beat Pit by thirty. That's probably the best outcome
because this will be if Miami and Notre Dame are

(02:18:41):
both ten and two the Pit game will be the
most recent comparative they'll both have played at PIT, So
I have a feeling Pit and by the way, Pit
seven to two, they're not out of this, all right,
I'm not, you know. I don't know if they can
make get all the way through their schedule and finish

(02:19:02):
it off right. The two of their two of their
next three games or Notre Dame and Miami, and the
other one is Georgia Tech. So pitt literally might be
facing three playoff teams at the end of their season.
But they certainly are going to have an impact on
Notre dames chances, Miami's chances, and Georgia Tech's chances. And
they it's their last three games. So look, Pitt's had

(02:19:24):
kind of an easy schedule. We still don't know how
they lost to West Virginia, and I think they're trying
to figure out how they lost to West Virginia and
then their only other losses Louisville, which is a loss
that Miami also has, but they've not They've not had
the toughest of schedules. They opened with Duquine and Central
Michigan and then West Virginia was their third game of

(02:19:44):
the year. Which because it's a it's a regional rivalry,
you throw the records out, right, But it's it's easily
the single most important game as far as the playoff
is concerned. That's on the board. A few other game games. Uh,
do you buy that Wisconsin can play two good games

(02:20:04):
in a row and give Indiana and Indiana plays two
bad games in a row? Hard hard to see that one.
This one's at Indiana. Boy, after this, Indiana only has Purdue,
you know, the end of the season. And that's that
could be fun, right, even though Produe is winless, they're

(02:20:25):
gonna they care about this game. It's do you have
to throw the records out? We shall see South Carolina,
Texas A and M. I was not going to pay
attention to this game. And one of my favorite betting
podcasts made the point that South Carolina is coming off
of bye after firing their offensive coordinator, a guy named Shula,
one of the grandson of Don Shula, And uh that

(02:20:46):
they're gonna make you know, and they already know that.
Miami and other schools are already sniffing around Leonora Sellers
for the for their portal QB for next season. I
have a feeling that South Carolina offense is going to
be a bit different showcasing Sellers, let him do his
thing a lot more. It's going to be an open offense.

(02:21:08):
So either it works and we see an exciting game
and Lenora's sellers is the is the quarterback we all
thought he was at the beginning of this season, or
an m just rolls and they win by three touchdowns. Anyway,
it's certainly worth turning on that game. Don't sleep on
South Florida Navy South. You know, this is just the

(02:21:29):
type of game that could turn into a weird shootout.
The way Navy now can score, South Florida can score,
it will this This shouldn't be close, but it is
at the Naval Academy. It will be a little chilly
in Annapolis. You know, this is just the type of
game that USF could blow. Do you believe in Oklahoma?

(02:21:49):
I don't so I think Alabama pays them, But it
is worth noting Alabama is not the best favorite all
the time. Is Caleb de Borera so far? But I
just I just you know, I just don't buy that
that Oklahoma can score much on them. And do you
how do you think they have a good I know

(02:22:11):
they statistically have a good defense. Do you believe they
have a good defense? Have they really played anybody? Just
something to think about it. I guess their Tennessee win
that was that was a pretty good performance. You got
to give them that. But obviously still has playoff implications
right now, Oklahoma has to win, and I guess Alabama
doesn't because it would only be their second loss, and

(02:22:32):
and you know they and apparently their first loss doesn't
even count anymore as far as the College Football Committee
is concerned. Other than that, Iowa USC. You know, USC
still has the outside chance. Iowa's lost. Iowa had it all,
it was there for the taken. If they beat Oregon.
This game is a whole, but it's a big a

(02:22:54):
lot different. It suddenly becomes a playoff game. Now does
Iowa know it's over? And if they do know it's over,
USC could pace them. The only other game that might
be intriguing to keep an eye on, of course, is
Georgia and Texas. Texas can't lose, they have to keep winning.

(02:23:15):
This game's at Georgia. There's been a part of me
that's wondered, what does all the arch manning commentary of
the last two months. What happens to all of it?
If suddenly Texas beach Georgia this week, beach Texas A
and M in the last game of the year, and
is sitting there at ten and two, and suddenly, with

(02:23:36):
wins over Georgia and Texas A and M, they're probably
a top ten team if that's what happens. Oh, by
the way, so that's anyway. Let's see what arch Manning
looks like. Let's see if the Georgia defense. You know,
I think Georgia can score on anybody. They've proven that
that offense has turned out to be pretty good this year.

(02:23:59):
This Texas defense show up and slow down Georgia. Obviously.
The good news is this is the primetime game and
we'll all have a lot of time.

Speaker 2 (02:24:08):
To watch it.

Speaker 1 (02:24:08):
So with that, let's go Canes and I'll see you
next week.

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