November 15, 2025 • 36 mins
On this special “New Voices” episode of the Chuck ToddCast, political strategist Lucy Caldwell joins Chuck to reflect on her journey from running Joe Walsh’s anti-Trump Republican campaign to registering as a Democrat. She discusses the fractures within the conservative movement, the erosion of space for moderates, and why independent efforts like the Forward Party struggle to gain traction. Lucy and Chuck explore how partisan incentives discourage compromise, why the best candidates often emerge from nonpartisan races, and how her personal battle with cancer reshaped her perspective on healthcare policy. It’s a candid look at what it means to be politically homeless in today’s polarized landscape.
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Timeline:
00:00 Lucy Caldwell joins the Chuck Toddcast
00:45 Experience of running Joe Walsh’s campaign
02:00 Walsh’s campaign was meant to be a “path back” for Republicans
02:45 Trump is not a small government conservative
04:15 Feeling politically homeless on the right
06:00 There are many fractures within the Never Trump Republicans
08:00 There used to be at least some common cause across the aisle
10:00 The incentive structures don’t reward moderates or compromise
12:00 The threat of MAGA is so great Lucy registered as a Democrat
14:00 Why independent movements struggle to get off the ground
15:00 Independents struggle to build general excitement
16:00 Independent candidates can vary wildly in their politics
17:30 The Forward Party struggles to find an identity & platform
19:00 Rob Sand ran as a Democrat because it’s only viable option
20:45 Races without partisan primaries produce better candidates
21:45 Executives need different skill sets than legislators
22:30 Which past president would you clone and bring back?
23:45 Our great presidents still have complicated legacies
24:45 Any interest in running for office?
25:30 There has to be something wrong with you to run for office
27:15 The draw of running for office?
29:30 Lucy’s cancer battle informed her views on healthcare policy
31:30 MAHA embraces messaging they priorly rejected
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
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Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Joining me now as part of our New Voices series
is Lucy Caldwell. She's got an interesting and background and
that she is sort of I think she is hard
to put in an ideological box, which I think is
as you guys know, always interests me more when it
is hard to compartmentalize somebody, because I think that's what
makes politics more interesting and most people live in a blurry,
(01:45):
nuanced world. So Lucy, welcome to our new Voice series.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
So as somebody who ran a campaign of now I
think he's a Democrat Joe Walsh, former member of Congress
who ran an insert and sort of primary campaign, how
do you describe your politics and where would you put
yourself on the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well, it's funny that you bring up Joe, because when
I was running Joe's campaign, or when I was when
I was telling people what we were doing, which I
would describe as well at best, at kamikaze kind of
effort right to primary Donald Trump in the twenty twenty cycle.
People would say, oh, were you a member of his
(02:29):
congressional staff? And I would think, oh, my god, no,
God no, because for people who go far enough back,
they know that Joe was quite a wild man, and
we did not.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
He was a talk radio guy right that got into politics.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
He was he was, and so he was a congressman
elected as part of that Tea Party wave from Illinois
and then ultimately was unseated by Tammy Duckworth off a
redistricting year. And I loved Joe, And as you can imagine,
going through something like that bonds you to someone for
(03:09):
a while.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Oh it's a fascinating and it was clear what you
were doing. You weren't doing to win, You were doing
to sort of like galvanize, like, you know, try to
make him answer to a different constituency, which makes sense, and.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
So to force them to show people who they were.
And it's weird because I think now we look back
on that time, and it seems obvious that Donald Trump
was going to win the nomination, but even in that
time in twenty nineteen, there was still at least a
little bit of a sense that maybe there was a
path back for Republicans. And in fact, Joe got in
(03:45):
around in late August early September of twenty nineteen, and
Bill Weld was in, Mark Sandford was getting in, and
there was this idea that there actually still were many
people on the right who were interested in these manidates
because they felt like Donald Trump wasn't conservative enough.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We cently wasn't a small government everybody you just described.
What links all three of them is that they were
part of the Republican Party. I was raised with, Okay,
which was a small government party. You know. Sure, Weld
was socially more liberal maybe than a Mark Sandford, but
Sandford was much more of a libertarian on social issues.
(04:26):
But they all were united on the idea of no, no, no, no,
there should be less government. And that's not Donald Trump.
And I don't know where that wing of the party.
I assume they're dormant and they will it will show
up when Trump disappears, But I don't know where that
wing of the party is right.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Now, Yeah, I'm that's right, that's right. At that time,
there was still even this thought, because it was around
the time of the now infamous phone call from Trump
to Zelenski, and it was right before the first impeachment,
like someone really big might get in this race, and
(05:01):
like and Weld, Sanford and Walsh, we'll all have to
kind of get out, Like maybe Mitt Romney is going
to get in into this race. And it's it's it's
so weird to think where we are now from even
just that was six years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
So, you know, do you feel homeless politically? Sorry, you're
speaking from a we work, which would be another way
of saying, oh.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well, you know, I'm on office. I'm on office.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, I think that to the degree that I feel
politically homeless, I probably always was somewhat politically homeless, even
when I thought of myself as a person who was
on the right. When I was coming up in politics,
(05:55):
I really had kind of small l libertarian oriented policies,
and I felt like the Republican Party was the best
place to make my bed. It felt like the closest
to my beliefs. The Republican Party is so far from
that now that I certainly could not imagine ever becoming
(06:17):
a Republican ever again. But I think that even in
that time, I was making a lot of I was
making a lot of concessions to fellow Republicans and breaking
bread with and forming bargains with people whom I had
(06:39):
a lot of political differences with already. And so I
was never a hardcore social con I was never I
was always probably more like a Cato Institute kind of
gal when it came to issues like immigration. So there
were plenty of people that I was quite at odds
with within the Republican coalition. And now I sometimes see
(07:03):
efforts that former colleagues and current friends are undertaking to
bring the Republican Party back together. Right, the idea that
we could get those old constituencies back and unite again
around a vision that has the Republican Party has gone
away from. But I think that actually a lot of
(07:24):
those constituencies, even those of us within the never Trump camp,
to the degree that there is one, still don't even
want to be in coalition with each other. Now. I
was never a big Reagan gal, Right, Like.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Tell me, tell me about how you grew up. I mean,
did you grow up with sort of with politics front
and center in your house or was it something that
you took an interest in later.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I did. I did. I grew up with divorce parents
who were so I mostly grew up in Arizona with
a dad who was in Washington and was deeply engaged
in journalism. So my dad was an editor at the
(08:13):
Weekly Standard. My stepmother's father was Bob Novak, and so
I grew up actually with a lot of this stuff
in the mix. For me.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Of my favorite, by the way, memoirs was Bob Novak's
memoir The Prince of Prince of Darkness. Yeah, but you know,
I'm of another generation. So he was a you know,
he was he was. He was a leading light back then.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And I would come to I would come to Washington
as this kid who was really growing up in Phoenix,
but it was in Washington a lot, and I would
get this front row seat to you know, the Crossfire
set or you know, the Evans and Novak and and
Bob was.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Very close with people like Pop moynihan, right like you were,
you were. It was just such a different time that
the relationships people had and those affinities that they were forming.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
See, this was normal. This was the Washington I grew
up with. It was perfectly normal for your I mean,
my my best friend worked for Papyuchanan and I came
off the Tom Harkin campaign, and yeah, we're lifelong best
friends and we had a ton in common. And it
turns out even politically we were we had a ton
in common. We didn't fully know it because we were
just simply constitutionalists who just sort of picked aside when
(09:35):
we were in college and then sort of said, why
do we do this? Yeah, when when I was perfectly normal,
it was perfectly normal. Now we make it seem like
it's like whoa, as if like we've we've like taken
a pig and bred it with a sheep, and you're
just like, you know, it wasn't unusual for for for
Libs and cons to get along.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Do you think that's because we were con doing more
overlapping content? Like do you think that that's hard? You
think it was, because yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
It's hard not to assume that you know, But I
think I'll tell you what you know it's and it's funny,
I don't know on the chicken and egg answer, because
we also were living. That was we were regularly we
we regularly had divide a government, right, I grew up
in an entire era. You know, the Democrats always controlled
(10:28):
Congress and the Republicans basically always controlled the Presidency. Every
once in a while the Republicans would get the Senate,
but that would be about it, right, and then you
know where things got polarized, you know, the Berlin Wall falls,
and then we go through these essentially periods where one
party gets control for two years, and it became these
sort of ideological arms races. Right, well, get as much
(10:52):
as you can get done in your two years, and
get as much as you can get done in you
and then the other six were just essentially fights to
keep your poll ses implemented. Right. That was sort of
Bill Clinton's eight ears. Arguably domestically, that was George W.
PUSH's eight ears, and it was Barack Obama's eight years.
But before then it was almost and I think because
it was normal that you had the two parties had
(11:14):
to function with each other. People talk about Tip O'Neil
and Reagan as if that somehow they wanted to do this.
They didn't want to do it, They had no choice.
Half of Tip O'Neil's caucus were conservative Democrats from the
South whose voters were all voting for Reagan, so they
had to work with him. So was it. And that
goes back to it's all about the incentive structures. What
is your incentive structure, and when the incentive structures changed, right,
(11:37):
and in some cases, media incentive structures gained. Right, we
had more partisan media and all those things. So it is.
We could argue that chicken and egg all the time,
but I will say this, when when governments divided, more
people share the same reality. When power is not divided,
that's when I think you get the different realities. That's
(11:59):
a inclusion I've come to.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
That's interesting. I haven't I haven't thought about the kind
of bluer red trifectas as a driver of that kind
of division. But that makes a lot of sense. That's
that's an interesting I.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Mean, it's you know, it's you know, all you can
do is look at it backward. I always joke that
I'm trying to become more of a political anthropologist than
anything else these days. Right, you're trying to understand how
these tribes will interact with each other based on changing environments, right,
And that's kind of you know, and I think it
it's why I find myself you know, if you told
(12:35):
me to pick a party, I couldn't. But I've just
looked at it too long. From this direct from this,
from this perch where it feels uncomfortable becoming a member
of one of these tribes.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, I I grapple with that because I think
of myself as an as a political independent. But I
actually recently re registered as a Democrat because I thought
to myself, and I have also spent a lot of
time working to help to build scale in the independent
(13:11):
political movement, and that is a movement that I care
a lot about and want to be successful. And I
am no big d Democratic Party booster. But I looked
around and I thought, I think that the threat of
(13:31):
MAGA is so great and to me, my fear of
what I see as Trump's brand of authoritarianism, and try
as I might working as an operative in trying to
lift independent voices, in trying to help build capacity, I
(13:52):
don't see that happening in the very nearest term, that
that I can really justify doing anything other than being
a Democrat, Because at this moment, I think that the
Democratic Party is deeply, deeply flawed. But I also, at
this moment, believe it is the only vehicle against MAGA.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
So look, you're not the only person that's like you know,
it's interesting. I've spent a lot of time with various
forces in these third party or independent movements, right, And
you know, I always joke jokes the wrong word. I
think the there's never been a climate that has been
(14:38):
more potentially opportunistic for an independent than what we have now. Right,
both parties are inpopular I mean, I look at the
conundrum of the Democrats, right, They had an a higher
unfavorable rating right now than the Republicans. But Trump's unfavorable
rating is higher than the Republicans, and therefore whoever's running
(14:58):
against Trump becomes the default for a swing voter. How
do we know this? Just look at Virginia. Fifty two
percent of the electorate said they had an unfavorable view
of the Democratic Party, and she won by fifteen points, right,
the Democrat. So it is you're not alone. And it
sounds like in making this choice, why do you think
the independent movements can't get off the ground? Is it
(15:19):
just logistics?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I think there are a few things, I think, and
we saw a version of this last year with some
of the third party presidential efforts, including no labels, but
we've seen it in statewide and people trying to wage
Senate races goom natorial bits whatever. I think people tend
to really misread the tea leaves around what it means
to be an independent, and so this comes up a
(15:44):
lot in the polling phenomenon where you ask voters Okay,
would you I mean, you can name me any race.
I can go do a poll and get you these results, right,
which are like would you like you know, Bob Republican,
Joe Democrat, and then you know generic independent And everyone
(16:08):
is like yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, like.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
If we can elect president generic, we would have elected
president generic a long time ago, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
But so the independent movement suffers from getting people excited
over and over again about generic independent and independent voters
are not a monolith. You have people who are independents
because they're right wing firebrands, like they just think they're
you know, like they're people who uh love what Thomas
(16:40):
Massey is doing right like there or Rampaul They're like,
that's a good.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Way of putting a Massie and Paul. They're super on
some issues, super conservative on the other issues, super libertarian
like you know, right, like Iinron, like I always joke,
they were the guys that carried the book. They carried
an iron book around with the in high school like
you know, and had it dog eared like that was
clearly high school Massy and high school Paul, right, right.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Right, And then you have you have analogs to those
guys on the left, right people.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Bernie Sanders is an independent totally perfect there's right because
he's super perfect exam he's not a mainstream democratic capitalist.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Then East set right, and then you have independence, like
if we're going to stick with current officeholders like Angus King,
who just was one of the eight senators who helped
wage that deal, you've got recent outpop folks like Kirstin
Cinema or Joe Manchin, even just those people we named.
(17:42):
That's not that does not a political movement make. Those
are all people who have very different politics from each other.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Mansion and Cinema are on the opposite sides, for instance
on trade right, yes, you know, and and yet they're
both quote unquote centrist independents and for the most part
they are, but only to a degree.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, and so I think that that that is one
piece of it. That just independent voters are not a monolith.
There's the fact that often then wishful belt Way, a
CELA corridor, people like me do a thing where they
project onto independent voters. I am. I am a process
(18:28):
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(20:20):
And it's interesting. I've spent some time with the Forward
Party and they have this debate like do they try
to create a platform that keeps their coalition together or
can they have a platform that says no, we're truly independent.
We're we're for competency and process and fairness in order
(20:41):
to open the door for ideas to have a chance.
And it's like, yeah, I mean it. It becomes really
difficult to figure out how to galvanize that those these
what I call radical independence mm hmmm.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah. I was a longtime advisor to Forward, and so
I'm very familiar with their work. I think it is
a challenge to in fifty states, you know, fifty different places,
not to mention cities and towns and counties to it
is a challenge to bring people together in that kind
(21:17):
of way where downstream of that you have leverage as
a party. It's a challenging thing, and of course I
think that the I think obviously there are structural realities
around non partisan primaries being kind of necessary to be
(21:38):
able to help independence or people who are parts of
new parties get grant. But also just the infrastructure, right,
it's a chicken or it's a different kind of chicken,
or the egg problem, which is there aren't strong candidates
because there are not big audiences of independent voters throughout
around them. But then you don't have those because there
are no candidates.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And so I had Rob the Democrat likely Democratic nominee
for governor in Iowa, Rob sand state auditor, pretty sort
of center left kind of guy. He said, I said,
why are you running as a Democrat? And he said,
because it's the only viable option. And he was he
wasn't you know, he's saying, you know, it was more
of if if there were a viable, truly independent option,
(22:21):
he would have done it, right, if it were easy
to get on the ballot in all of those things,
but it isn't.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
He's somebody that said that part out loud, right, Not
all candidates will.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
There are several current groubernatorial candidates around the country who
have said that very same thing to me, right, and
and they have had to make a choice. And they're good.
They're good people. They're people that I'd like to see elected.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
And you know, and it's funny, it's like mayors get
elected as nonpartisans. And it's funny how we are Expectations
for a mayor are always simply about just making sure
the trash gets picked up, making sure the roads are paved,
like you know, when you are you are the constituency
(23:17):
that votes for you, you know, meaning if you have
a partisan constituency, you're going to be a partisan governor
a governance basically, And if you have a broader constituency
that you have to get elected by, you're going to
then seek out the broad things that eighty percent want done.
And there's something about the way we elect mayors that
(23:37):
I kind of think, why aren't we doing this with governors?
Why aren't we doing this with you know, going the
non partisan primary route seems to produce pretty decent public
officials on the mayor level. Why wouldn't we want to
see that in the state wide levels?
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I wonder. I don't know the answer to this, but
I wonder what we would see if, in terms of
the pipeline of mayors to hire partisan office, whether whether
or not, how many of them wind up aspiring to
bigger office Because of certainly mayors in large cities, even
even those who are running in mayor's races that are
(24:15):
non partisan in some places, you kind of have to
already be part of the machinery. You at least have
had chosen a team.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is not It's not lost
on me, though, that that among the eight senators that
voted to open the government. Three of them were former governors.
M that's interesting, right, shaheen, Angus King, Tim Kaine. And
there's something about like you know, a mayor, governor is
(24:43):
usually slightly less partisan than a legislator.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, well it's a different it's a different skill set too, right,
it's an executive skill set. There's a there's a sort
of a a governor has to deliver and get things to.
I mean, a legislator can. I'm luxurious, so you can
just run your mouth to do whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So let me let's go, let me go this way.
Who's your favorite president if you could have if you
could clone a president and have them any president of
our forty seven, of our forty Actually, I guess we
have to say of our forty five presidents, two of
them get numbered twice. But of our forty five, any
of them worth cloning and bringing back.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I mean, there's a lot to be said for Lincoln,
but I don't know. Actually, no one's ever asked me that.
I don't have a good, highly thought out answer, but
Lincoln comes to mind. Who's yours?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
I may? I think are there's only two presidents that
have been the two presidents that I think have been
the closest that being in behaving as political independence are
the two presidents that were also commanders in chief of
armies before they became commanders in chief, and that's General
Washington and generalized in our that both of them were
(26:12):
more likely to put country before party. In fact, one
preached against party and the other one was sort of
a reluctant member of the Republican Party. Right, So those
are the those are the two. I do think it's
interesting to me, and I always say that, you know,
when we talk about the history of a president, we
usually are we talk about them through the current politics
(26:32):
that we're in. And it's not lost on me that
Eisenhower is getting a moment right by historians, because I
think we all long for somebody who was just simply
less partisan.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah. Yes, it's interesting that some of our most flawed
presidents also had some other great accomplishments, right that how
complicated their legacies are. No one would ever say, oh, Nixon,
like a Knicks back, got right, but we could actually
filter Nixon through a different light and say that that
(27:05):
was actually pretty things that we're really good And LBJ
has parts of his personality that are very similar to
Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yes, yet tell somebody who loves LBJ that and they
don't want to be reminded of that. Nice, you know,
but no, it's there is some you know, Teddy Roosevelt
is lionized. Teddy Roosevelt was an imperialist, right, and he
would love what Donald Trump said about Greenland, right. But
we don't fully. You know, It's funny how we how
(27:35):
we view those You know, they're quick essential Americans one
hundred years later, but at the moment, yeah, absolutely, we
see them differently. Do you want to run for office?
Speaker 2 (27:49):
I had truly never thought about it, and I actually
if you had asked me that like six months ago,
I would have given you the canned answer that I've
given for years, which is that you have to truly
have a screw loose to decide to run for office,
because you have decided, as a grown up adult person,
(28:12):
that you're going to subject yourself to the kind of
popularity contests that we all were so glad to be
free of when we got out of the school yard,
and that they're just there has to be something really
wrong with you.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Used to make I used to make the argument too.
I used to say, if you cut open all presidents
and we study their DNA, we'd find out they're the weirdest.
Right that were the normal ones and they were the weirdest.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many are left handed, which I actually
also am, but that's a different but but no, I
but more recently I've thought I'm rounding the corner to forty,
so I'm you know, youngish but not too young. And
(29:00):
I've thought that that form of public service, I could
imagine being open to that at some point. I can
imagine that it would be.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
A huge.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
That would be a huge shift for me, and I
think it's very unlikely that I would do it. But
I've had I've had moments more recently where I've thought
that could be a thing that I what's the draw?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Is it being in the room? What's the draw? What
would be the draw? I mean, nobody runs for office
because they're excited about raising money, and so I'm not
going to I assume that isn't the draw. And I
think and subjecting yourself to a popularity contest and having
nobody wants to do that, and I don't buy that anybody.
You know, there are people I think now that view
(29:44):
politics as a if you can't make it if you
couldn't make it as an actor in Hollywood, why don't
you trust off so I And that sometimes irritates me. Yeah,
I get I get that, But it's what's what would
be the draw? If you did this, You'd be doing
it despite what you just said about the schoolyard, right,
despite what you said about that. So what would be
(30:05):
the draw? Because you have to me, you've got to
really there's got to be a part of it that
you really want to do right, either an issue you
want to change or you want to be in the
room because you don't think somebody like you's been in
the room to discuss X. What would that be?
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, I think I would be succumbing to the screw loose.
But in I think for me, I think that it's
actually very easy as an operative, as a political operative,
to just be in a kind of you're always in
battle and you're trying to figure out, like what's the
(30:41):
lever that I could pull here to to basically elicit
this outcome. And there's a gamesmanship to it that's thrilling.
But ultimately, I think the draw of public service and
of running for office when I think about that, and
(31:02):
again this is not a thing that I'm strongly considering,
But I think that the draw would be to shape
a party, to shape a movement in a way that
you really only can as a principal who is the
elected leader in that situation. And I think in particular,
I've spent so many years in the wilderness as an
(31:22):
ex Republican and then trying to help the independent movement
scale and feeling like the Democratic Party really is the
vehicle at this point. But there's a lot that I
would like to see changed about the Democratic Party because
of ways in which I don't think it's serving people.
So for me, the issue of health care is a
really important one, and I don't mean health insurance like
(31:44):
the shutdown debate that was not about healthcare, that was
about health insurance coverage. And so meanwhile, I think on
the Democratic side, healthcare is a crucial issue. And I
had a person no experience and that I was diagnosed
with cancer earlier this year, and I am okay, I
(32:06):
had thyroid cancer, and I had the thyroidectomy and radiation
and went through the oldest prescription drugs there is, Yes,
it take sense through it every morning.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Getting that right, that's the tricky part.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Is it is really tricky. It's really tricky. And and
I'm a person with a lot of a lot of
blessings just beyond most people. And I found the best
surgeon to go to, right, Like I learned in the
course of that that ninety six percent of thyroid ectomies
are performed by patients or by doctors who the status
(32:41):
something like ninety six percent of thyroidectomies in the US
are performed by doctors who performed five or fewer thyroidectomies
every year. Like, there's horrible rates of complication, right, Like
when you have radiation, no one is like, what how
much of the poison am I getting? Like am I
(33:03):
going to get like a secondary cancer from that? Because
my risk of dying from thyroid cancer is low. But
if you just like, if you just like overload me
with radioactivideine, I might die of radiation induced cancer. Right,
So all these things, and and I had had this
feeling about healthcare already, like I think talking about you know, sugar,
(33:30):
talking about metabolic disorders, those are really important. And the
Democratic Party actually has really made it hard for people
to have those conversations. And we have people that I
think are like mad men like RFK Junior who are
increasing vaccine skepticism and saying things that are dangerous in
(33:52):
my opinion about things like taking tail and al But
they have united movements around them because they're also right
about a bunch of things that resonate with people. And
so for me, when I think about what I will
do and what I've done in the past forty years
and what I'll do in the next, I could see
(34:12):
something like running for public office as a way to
use my voice to say this is how I want
to shape this movement. Right, Like, we're missing a lot
of stuff, And my own lived experience and watching other
people's has caused me to conclude this.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Well, it's funny about the wellness movement on the left right.
It did exist, and it got mocked by the right.
It was basically Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg. Yeah, the
two most prominent people who sort of tried to tackle
the Hey, we got to eat better and we've got
to be careful of sugar. And you know, I'm old
enough to remember when Sarah Palin came out with a
(34:49):
big gulp and mocked it. And now this same movement
is embracing it, you know, in a different way, and
I think you're right. It's interesting in you know, how
did the left lose those voters? It's a fascinating pennundrum.
How they lost the wellness voter.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, yeah, and we're seeing it, we're saying it play
out over and over again in how people are getting trained.
We began this conversation by talking a little bit. I
asked you what you thought about people's media diets, that
this this this top down approach where even like non
(35:32):
partisan commentators who are not even political, based on talking
about certain issues in certain ways, get lumped in depending
on whom you're talking about. Like you could go into
a room in Washington and get told off by like
DEM insiders that like Andrew Huberman is like a right winger,
(35:56):
right like, when in fact he's just a Stanford professor
who has gone really deep on a bunch of a
bunch of these issues. So those kinds of those kinds
of things, they've got a change, They've got a change.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
It's not sustainable, Lucy, this was a great conversation. Uh,
And I'll admit at the next half hour i'd love to,
you know, make you tell me. Bob Novak stories. But
but this was great. I appreciate the time.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This was great.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Got it.
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Speaker 2 (01:21):
Well.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
Joining me now as part of our New Voices series
is Lucy Caldwell. She's got an interesting and background and
that she is sort of I think she is hard
to put in an ideological box, which I think is
as you guys know, always interests me more when it
is hard to compartmentalize somebody, because I think that's what
makes politics more interesting and most people live in a blurry,
(01:45):
nuanced world. So Lucy, welcome to our new Voice series.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Thanks for having me. It's great to be with you.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
So as somebody who ran a campaign of now I
think he's a Democrat Joe Walsh, former member of Congress
who ran an insert and sort of primary campaign, how
do you describe your politics and where would you put
yourself on the spectrum.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Well, it's funny that you bring up Joe, because when
I was running Joe's campaign, or when I was when
I was telling people what we were doing, which I
would describe as well at best, at kamikaze kind of
effort right to primary Donald Trump in the twenty twenty cycle.
People would say, oh, were you a member of his
(02:29):
congressional staff? And I would think, oh, my god, no,
God no, because for people who go far enough back,
they know that Joe was quite a wild man, and
we did not.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
He was a talk radio guy right that got into politics.
Speaker 2 (02:47):
He was he was, and so he was a congressman
elected as part of that Tea Party wave from Illinois
and then ultimately was unseated by Tammy Duckworth off a
redistricting year. And I loved Joe, And as you can imagine,
going through something like that bonds you to someone for
(03:09):
a while.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
Oh it's a fascinating and it was clear what you
were doing. You weren't doing to win, You were doing
to sort of like galvanize, like, you know, try to
make him answer to a different constituency, which makes sense, and.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
So to force them to show people who they were.
And it's weird because I think now we look back
on that time, and it seems obvious that Donald Trump
was going to win the nomination, but even in that
time in twenty nineteen, there was still at least a
little bit of a sense that maybe there was a
path back for Republicans. And in fact, Joe got in
(03:45):
around in late August early September of twenty nineteen, and
Bill Weld was in, Mark Sandford was getting in, and
there was this idea that there actually still were many
people on the right who were interested in these manidates
because they felt like Donald Trump wasn't conservative enough.
Speaker 1 (04:04):
We cently wasn't a small government everybody you just described.
What links all three of them is that they were
part of the Republican Party. I was raised with, Okay,
which was a small government party. You know. Sure, Weld
was socially more liberal maybe than a Mark Sandford, but
Sandford was much more of a libertarian on social issues.
(04:26):
But they all were united on the idea of no, no, no, no,
there should be less government. And that's not Donald Trump.
And I don't know where that wing of the party.
I assume they're dormant and they will it will show
up when Trump disappears, But I don't know where that
wing of the party is right.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
Now, Yeah, I'm that's right, that's right. At that time,
there was still even this thought, because it was around
the time of the now infamous phone call from Trump
to Zelenski, and it was right before the first impeachment,
like someone really big might get in this race, and
(05:01):
like and Weld, Sanford and Walsh, we'll all have to
kind of get out, Like maybe Mitt Romney is going
to get in into this race. And it's it's it's
so weird to think where we are now from even
just that was six years ago.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
So, you know, do you feel homeless politically? Sorry, you're
speaking from a we work, which would be another way
of saying, oh.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well, you know, I'm on office. I'm on office.
Speaker 1 (05:34):
It's funny.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
Yeah, I think that to the degree that I feel
politically homeless, I probably always was somewhat politically homeless, even
when I thought of myself as a person who was
on the right. When I was coming up in politics,
(05:55):
I really had kind of small l libertarian oriented policies,
and I felt like the Republican Party was the best
place to make my bed. It felt like the closest
to my beliefs. The Republican Party is so far from
that now that I certainly could not imagine ever becoming
(06:17):
a Republican ever again. But I think that even in
that time, I was making a lot of I was
making a lot of concessions to fellow Republicans and breaking
bread with and forming bargains with people whom I had
(06:39):
a lot of political differences with already. And so I
was never a hardcore social con I was never I
was always probably more like a Cato Institute kind of
gal when it came to issues like immigration. So there
were plenty of people that I was quite at odds
with within the Republican coalition. And now I sometimes see
(07:03):
efforts that former colleagues and current friends are undertaking to
bring the Republican Party back together. Right, the idea that
we could get those old constituencies back and unite again
around a vision that has the Republican Party has gone
away from. But I think that actually a lot of
(07:24):
those constituencies, even those of us within the never Trump camp,
to the degree that there is one, still don't even
want to be in coalition with each other. Now. I
was never a big Reagan gal, Right, Like.
Speaker 1 (07:39):
Tell me, tell me about how you grew up. I mean,
did you grow up with sort of with politics front
and center in your house or was it something that
you took an interest in later.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
I did. I did. I grew up with divorce parents
who were so I mostly grew up in Arizona with
a dad who was in Washington and was deeply engaged
in journalism. So my dad was an editor at the
(08:13):
Weekly Standard. My stepmother's father was Bob Novak, and so
I grew up actually with a lot of this stuff
in the mix. For me.
Speaker 1 (08:26):
Of my favorite, by the way, memoirs was Bob Novak's
memoir The Prince of Prince of Darkness. Yeah, but you know,
I'm of another generation. So he was a you know,
he was he was. He was a leading light back then.
Speaker 3 (08:39):
And I would come to I would come to Washington
as this kid who was really growing up in Phoenix,
but it was in Washington a lot, and I would
get this front row seat to you know, the Crossfire
set or you know, the Evans and Novak and and
Bob was.
Speaker 2 (09:00):
Very close with people like Pop moynihan, right like you were,
you were. It was just such a different time that
the relationships people had and those affinities that they were forming.
Speaker 1 (09:11):
See, this was normal. This was the Washington I grew
up with. It was perfectly normal for your I mean,
my my best friend worked for Papyuchanan and I came
off the Tom Harkin campaign, and yeah, we're lifelong best
friends and we had a ton in common. And it
turns out even politically we were we had a ton
in common. We didn't fully know it because we were
just simply constitutionalists who just sort of picked aside when
(09:35):
we were in college and then sort of said, why
do we do this? Yeah, when when I was perfectly normal,
it was perfectly normal. Now we make it seem like
it's like whoa, as if like we've we've like taken
a pig and bred it with a sheep, and you're
just like, you know, it wasn't unusual for for for
Libs and cons to get along.
Speaker 2 (09:57):
Do you think that's because we were con doing more
overlapping content? Like do you think that that's hard? You
think it was, because yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
It's hard not to assume that you know, But I
think I'll tell you what you know it's and it's funny,
I don't know on the chicken and egg answer, because
we also were living. That was we were regularly we
we regularly had divide a government, right, I grew up
in an entire era. You know, the Democrats always controlled
(10:28):
Congress and the Republicans basically always controlled the Presidency. Every
once in a while the Republicans would get the Senate,
but that would be about it, right, and then you
know where things got polarized, you know, the Berlin Wall falls,
and then we go through these essentially periods where one
party gets control for two years, and it became these
sort of ideological arms races. Right, well, get as much
(10:52):
as you can get done in your two years, and
get as much as you can get done in you
and then the other six were just essentially fights to
keep your poll ses implemented. Right. That was sort of
Bill Clinton's eight ears. Arguably domestically, that was George W.
PUSH's eight ears, and it was Barack Obama's eight years.
But before then it was almost and I think because
it was normal that you had the two parties had
(11:14):
to function with each other. People talk about Tip O'Neil
and Reagan as if that somehow they wanted to do this.
They didn't want to do it, They had no choice.
Half of Tip O'Neil's caucus were conservative Democrats from the
South whose voters were all voting for Reagan, so they
had to work with him. So was it. And that
goes back to it's all about the incentive structures. What
is your incentive structure, and when the incentive structures changed, right,
(11:37):
and in some cases, media incentive structures gained. Right, we
had more partisan media and all those things. So it is.
We could argue that chicken and egg all the time,
but I will say this, when when governments divided, more
people share the same reality. When power is not divided,
that's when I think you get the different realities. That's
(11:59):
a inclusion I've come to.
Speaker 2 (12:02):
That's interesting. I haven't I haven't thought about the kind
of bluer red trifectas as a driver of that kind
of division. But that makes a lot of sense. That's
that's an interesting I.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
Mean, it's you know, it's you know, all you can
do is look at it backward. I always joke that
I'm trying to become more of a political anthropologist than
anything else these days. Right, you're trying to understand how
these tribes will interact with each other based on changing environments, right,
And that's kind of you know, and I think it
it's why I find myself you know, if you told
(12:35):
me to pick a party, I couldn't. But I've just
looked at it too long. From this direct from this,
from this perch where it feels uncomfortable becoming a member
of one of these tribes.
Speaker 2 (12:46):
Yeah, yeah, I I grapple with that because I think
of myself as an as a political independent. But I
actually recently re registered as a Democrat because I thought
to myself, and I have also spent a lot of
time working to help to build scale in the independent
(13:11):
political movement, and that is a movement that I care
a lot about and want to be successful. And I
am no big d Democratic Party booster. But I looked
around and I thought, I think that the threat of
(13:31):
MAGA is so great and to me, my fear of
what I see as Trump's brand of authoritarianism, and try
as I might working as an operative in trying to
lift independent voices, in trying to help build capacity, I
(13:52):
don't see that happening in the very nearest term, that
that I can really justify doing anything other than being
a Democrat, Because at this moment, I think that the
Democratic Party is deeply, deeply flawed. But I also, at
this moment, believe it is the only vehicle against MAGA.
Speaker 1 (14:17):
So look, you're not the only person that's like you know,
it's interesting. I've spent a lot of time with various
forces in these third party or independent movements, right, And
you know, I always joke jokes the wrong word. I
think the there's never been a climate that has been
(14:38):
more potentially opportunistic for an independent than what we have now. Right,
both parties are inpopular I mean, I look at the
conundrum of the Democrats, right, They had an a higher
unfavorable rating right now than the Republicans. But Trump's unfavorable
rating is higher than the Republicans, and therefore whoever's running
(14:58):
against Trump becomes the default for a swing voter. How
do we know this? Just look at Virginia. Fifty two
percent of the electorate said they had an unfavorable view
of the Democratic Party, and she won by fifteen points, right,
the Democrat. So it is you're not alone. And it
sounds like in making this choice, why do you think
the independent movements can't get off the ground? Is it
(15:19):
just logistics?
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I think there are a few things, I think, and
we saw a version of this last year with some
of the third party presidential efforts, including no labels, but
we've seen it in statewide and people trying to wage
Senate races goom natorial bits whatever. I think people tend
to really misread the tea leaves around what it means
to be an independent, and so this comes up a
(15:44):
lot in the polling phenomenon where you ask voters Okay,
would you I mean, you can name me any race.
I can go do a poll and get you these results, right,
which are like would you like you know, Bob Republican,
Joe Democrat, and then you know generic independent And everyone
(16:08):
is like yeah, yeah, yeah, of course, like.
Speaker 1 (16:10):
If we can elect president generic, we would have elected
president generic a long time ago, right, yeah.
Speaker 2 (16:15):
But so the independent movement suffers from getting people excited
over and over again about generic independent and independent voters
are not a monolith. You have people who are independents
because they're right wing firebrands, like they just think they're
you know, like they're people who uh love what Thomas
(16:40):
Massey is doing right like there or Rampaul They're like,
that's a good.
Speaker 1 (16:44):
Way of putting a Massie and Paul. They're super on
some issues, super conservative on the other issues, super libertarian
like you know, right, like Iinron, like I always joke,
they were the guys that carried the book. They carried
an iron book around with the in high school like
you know, and had it dog eared like that was
clearly high school Massy and high school Paul, right, right.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Right, And then you have you have analogs to those
guys on the left, right people.
Speaker 1 (17:12):
Bernie Sanders is an independent totally perfect there's right because
he's super perfect exam he's not a mainstream democratic capitalist.
Speaker 2 (17:21):
Then East set right, and then you have independence, like
if we're going to stick with current officeholders like Angus King,
who just was one of the eight senators who helped
wage that deal, you've got recent outpop folks like Kirstin
Cinema or Joe Manchin, even just those people we named.
(17:42):
That's not that does not a political movement make. Those
are all people who have very different politics from each other.
Speaker 1 (17:50):
Mansion and Cinema are on the opposite sides, for instance
on trade right, yes, you know, and and yet they're
both quote unquote centrist independents and for the most part
they are, but only to a degree.
Speaker 2 (18:04):
Yeah, and so I think that that that is one
piece of it. That just independent voters are not a monolith.
There's the fact that often then wishful belt Way, a
CELA corridor, people like me do a thing where they
project onto independent voters. I am. I am a process
(18:28):
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(20:20):
And it's interesting. I've spent some time with the Forward
Party and they have this debate like do they try
to create a platform that keeps their coalition together or
can they have a platform that says no, we're truly independent.
We're we're for competency and process and fairness in order
(20:41):
to open the door for ideas to have a chance.
And it's like, yeah, I mean it. It becomes really
difficult to figure out how to galvanize that those these
what I call radical independence mm hmmm.
Speaker 2 (20:57):
Yeah. I was a longtime advisor to Forward, and so
I'm very familiar with their work. I think it is
a challenge to in fifty states, you know, fifty different places,
not to mention cities and towns and counties to it
is a challenge to bring people together in that kind
(21:17):
of way where downstream of that you have leverage as
a party. It's a challenging thing, and of course I
think that the I think obviously there are structural realities
around non partisan primaries being kind of necessary to be
(21:38):
able to help independence or people who are parts of
new parties get grant. But also just the infrastructure, right,
it's a chicken or it's a different kind of chicken,
or the egg problem, which is there aren't strong candidates
because there are not big audiences of independent voters throughout
around them. But then you don't have those because there
are no candidates.
Speaker 1 (21:57):
And so I had Rob the Democrat likely Democratic nominee
for governor in Iowa, Rob sand state auditor, pretty sort
of center left kind of guy. He said, I said,
why are you running as a Democrat? And he said,
because it's the only viable option. And he was he
wasn't you know, he's saying, you know, it was more
of if if there were a viable, truly independent option,
(22:21):
he would have done it, right, if it were easy
to get on the ballot in all of those things,
but it isn't.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
He's somebody that said that part out loud, right, Not
all candidates will.
Speaker 2 (22:33):
There are several current groubernatorial candidates around the country who
have said that very same thing to me, right, and
and they have had to make a choice. And they're good.
They're good people. They're people that I'd like to see elected.
Speaker 1 (22:53):
And you know, and it's funny, it's like mayors get
elected as nonpartisans. And it's funny how we are Expectations
for a mayor are always simply about just making sure
the trash gets picked up, making sure the roads are paved,
like you know, when you are you are the constituency
(23:17):
that votes for you, you know, meaning if you have
a partisan constituency, you're going to be a partisan governor
a governance basically, And if you have a broader constituency
that you have to get elected by, you're going to
then seek out the broad things that eighty percent want done.
And there's something about the way we elect mayors that
(23:37):
I kind of think, why aren't we doing this with governors?
Why aren't we doing this with you know, going the
non partisan primary route seems to produce pretty decent public
officials on the mayor level. Why wouldn't we want to
see that in the state wide levels?
Speaker 2 (23:52):
I wonder. I don't know the answer to this, but
I wonder what we would see if, in terms of
the pipeline of mayors to hire partisan office, whether whether
or not, how many of them wind up aspiring to
bigger office Because of certainly mayors in large cities, even
even those who are running in mayor's races that are
(24:15):
non partisan in some places, you kind of have to
already be part of the machinery. You at least have
had chosen a team.
Speaker 1 (24:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it is not It's not lost
on me, though, that that among the eight senators that
voted to open the government. Three of them were former governors.
M that's interesting, right, shaheen, Angus King, Tim Kaine. And
there's something about like you know, a mayor, governor is
(24:43):
usually slightly less partisan than a legislator.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Yeah, well it's a different it's a different skill set too, right,
it's an executive skill set. There's a there's a sort
of a a governor has to deliver and get things to.
I mean, a legislator can. I'm luxurious, so you can
just run your mouth to do whatever.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
So let me let's go, let me go this way.
Who's your favorite president if you could have if you
could clone a president and have them any president of
our forty seven, of our forty Actually, I guess we
have to say of our forty five presidents, two of
them get numbered twice. But of our forty five, any
of them worth cloning and bringing back.
Speaker 2 (25:33):
I mean, there's a lot to be said for Lincoln,
but I don't know. Actually, no one's ever asked me that.
I don't have a good, highly thought out answer, but
Lincoln comes to mind. Who's yours?
Speaker 1 (25:47):
I may? I think are there's only two presidents that
have been the two presidents that I think have been
the closest that being in behaving as political independence are
the two presidents that were also commanders in chief of
armies before they became commanders in chief, and that's General
Washington and generalized in our that both of them were
(26:12):
more likely to put country before party. In fact, one
preached against party and the other one was sort of
a reluctant member of the Republican Party. Right, So those
are the those are the two. I do think it's
interesting to me, and I always say that, you know,
when we talk about the history of a president, we
usually are we talk about them through the current politics
(26:32):
that we're in. And it's not lost on me that
Eisenhower is getting a moment right by historians, because I
think we all long for somebody who was just simply
less partisan.
Speaker 2 (26:43):
Yeah. Yes, it's interesting that some of our most flawed
presidents also had some other great accomplishments, right that how
complicated their legacies are. No one would ever say, oh, Nixon,
like a Knicks back, got right, but we could actually
filter Nixon through a different light and say that that
(27:05):
was actually pretty things that we're really good And LBJ
has parts of his personality that are very similar to
Donald Trump.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
Yes, yet tell somebody who loves LBJ that and they
don't want to be reminded of that. Nice, you know,
but no, it's there is some you know, Teddy Roosevelt
is lionized. Teddy Roosevelt was an imperialist, right, and he
would love what Donald Trump said about Greenland, right. But
we don't fully. You know, It's funny how we how
(27:35):
we view those You know, they're quick essential Americans one
hundred years later, but at the moment, yeah, absolutely, we
see them differently. Do you want to run for office?
Speaker 2 (27:49):
I had truly never thought about it, and I actually
if you had asked me that like six months ago,
I would have given you the canned answer that I've
given for years, which is that you have to truly
have a screw loose to decide to run for office,
because you have decided, as a grown up adult person,
(28:12):
that you're going to subject yourself to the kind of
popularity contests that we all were so glad to be
free of when we got out of the school yard,
and that they're just there has to be something really
wrong with you.
Speaker 1 (28:29):
Used to make I used to make the argument too.
I used to say, if you cut open all presidents
and we study their DNA, we'd find out they're the weirdest.
Right that were the normal ones and they were the weirdest.
Speaker 2 (28:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Many are left handed, which I actually
also am, but that's a different but but no, I
but more recently I've thought I'm rounding the corner to forty,
so I'm you know, youngish but not too young. And
(29:00):
I've thought that that form of public service, I could
imagine being open to that at some point. I can
imagine that it would be.
Speaker 1 (29:09):
A huge.
Speaker 2 (29:12):
That would be a huge shift for me, and I
think it's very unlikely that I would do it. But
I've had I've had moments more recently where I've thought
that could be a thing that I what's the draw?
Speaker 1 (29:23):
Is it being in the room? What's the draw? What
would be the draw? I mean, nobody runs for office
because they're excited about raising money, and so I'm not
going to I assume that isn't the draw. And I
think and subjecting yourself to a popularity contest and having
nobody wants to do that, and I don't buy that anybody.
You know, there are people I think now that view
(29:44):
politics as a if you can't make it if you
couldn't make it as an actor in Hollywood, why don't
you trust off so I And that sometimes irritates me. Yeah,
I get I get that, But it's what's what would
be the draw? If you did this, You'd be doing
it despite what you just said about the schoolyard, right,
despite what you said about that. So what would be
(30:05):
the draw? Because you have to me, you've got to
really there's got to be a part of it that
you really want to do right, either an issue you
want to change or you want to be in the
room because you don't think somebody like you's been in
the room to discuss X. What would that be?
Speaker 2 (30:19):
Yeah, I think I would be succumbing to the screw loose.
But in I think for me, I think that it's
actually very easy as an operative, as a political operative,
to just be in a kind of you're always in
battle and you're trying to figure out, like what's the
(30:41):
lever that I could pull here to to basically elicit
this outcome. And there's a gamesmanship to it that's thrilling.
But ultimately, I think the draw of public service and
of running for office when I think about that, and
(31:02):
again this is not a thing that I'm strongly considering,
But I think that the draw would be to shape
a party, to shape a movement in a way that
you really only can as a principal who is the
elected leader in that situation. And I think in particular,
I've spent so many years in the wilderness as an
(31:22):
ex Republican and then trying to help the independent movement
scale and feeling like the Democratic Party really is the
vehicle at this point. But there's a lot that I
would like to see changed about the Democratic Party because
of ways in which I don't think it's serving people.
So for me, the issue of health care is a
really important one, and I don't mean health insurance like
(31:44):
the shutdown debate that was not about healthcare, that was
about health insurance coverage. And so meanwhile, I think on
the Democratic side, healthcare is a crucial issue. And I
had a person no experience and that I was diagnosed
with cancer earlier this year, and I am okay, I
(32:06):
had thyroid cancer, and I had the thyroidectomy and radiation
and went through the oldest prescription drugs there is, Yes,
it take sense through it every morning.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Getting that right, that's the tricky part.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
Is it is really tricky. It's really tricky. And and
I'm a person with a lot of a lot of
blessings just beyond most people. And I found the best
surgeon to go to, right, Like I learned in the
course of that that ninety six percent of thyroid ectomies
are performed by patients or by doctors who the status
(32:41):
something like ninety six percent of thyroidectomies in the US
are performed by doctors who performed five or fewer thyroidectomies
every year. Like, there's horrible rates of complication, right, Like
when you have radiation, no one is like, what how
much of the poison am I getting? Like am I
(33:03):
going to get like a secondary cancer from that? Because
my risk of dying from thyroid cancer is low. But
if you just like, if you just like overload me
with radioactivideine, I might die of radiation induced cancer. Right,
So all these things, and and I had had this
feeling about healthcare already, like I think talking about you know, sugar,
(33:30):
talking about metabolic disorders, those are really important. And the
Democratic Party actually has really made it hard for people
to have those conversations. And we have people that I
think are like mad men like RFK Junior who are
increasing vaccine skepticism and saying things that are dangerous in
(33:52):
my opinion about things like taking tail and al But
they have united movements around them because they're also right
about a bunch of things that resonate with people. And
so for me, when I think about what I will
do and what I've done in the past forty years
and what I'll do in the next, I could see
(34:12):
something like running for public office as a way to
use my voice to say this is how I want
to shape this movement. Right, Like, we're missing a lot
of stuff, And my own lived experience and watching other
people's has caused me to conclude this.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
Well, it's funny about the wellness movement on the left right.
It did exist, and it got mocked by the right.
It was basically Michelle Obama and Michael Bloomberg. Yeah, the
two most prominent people who sort of tried to tackle
the Hey, we got to eat better and we've got
to be careful of sugar. And you know, I'm old
enough to remember when Sarah Palin came out with a
(34:49):
big gulp and mocked it. And now this same movement
is embracing it, you know, in a different way, and
I think you're right. It's interesting in you know, how
did the left lose those voters? It's a fascinating pennundrum.
How they lost the wellness voter.
Speaker 2 (35:09):
Yeah, yeah, and we're seeing it, we're saying it play
out over and over again in how people are getting trained.
We began this conversation by talking a little bit. I
asked you what you thought about people's media diets, that
this this this top down approach where even like non
(35:32):
partisan commentators who are not even political, based on talking
about certain issues in certain ways, get lumped in depending
on whom you're talking about. Like you could go into
a room in Washington and get told off by like
DEM insiders that like Andrew Huberman is like a right winger,
(35:56):
right like, when in fact he's just a Stanford professor
who has gone really deep on a bunch of a
bunch of these issues. So those kinds of those kinds
of things, they've got a change, They've got a change.
Speaker 1 (36:09):
It's not sustainable, Lucy, this was a great conversation. Uh,
And I'll admit at the next half hour i'd love to,
you know, make you tell me. Bob Novak stories. But
but this was great. I appreciate the time.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. This was great.
Speaker 1 (36:27):
Got it.
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