Matt Iglesias, welcome to the podcast. Glad to be here. How's it going? Crazy time, huh?
Yes. I mean, I think, you know, in the news business, like we always, we like to sell the drama, you know. And I think people often experience that. And I'm always hearing like, this is so crazy. You know, this year felt like a lifetime.
And I'm normally like, you know, guys, like, this is not actually as dramatic or as unprecedented as you think. But this turn of events. I mean, it's not literally without precedent in American history, but it is very unusual.
It is a really sharp break with the recent traditions of American politics, harkens back to some much older moves when the whole structure of political parties was different. So, you know, even if you look at situations where, you know, presidents have not run for reelection, there's nothing comparable to Nancy Pelosi coming out of retirement. with an assist from George Clooney to, you know, reconfigure a political party. I mean, it's weird. What is the last I'm not sort of as up on the sort of hits of American presidential history as you are probably.
I mean, LBJ not running for re-election in 1968. But, I mean, he decided that well before sort of whatever the equivalent of primaries was at the time, right? Well, no. So it's I mean, it's actually so LBJ was challenged.
in the primaries. Oh, that's correct. And then he's doing badly.
And he did poorly in New Hampshire in the very first primary. And so then he stood down much earlier in the cycle than Harris to try to hand things off to his vice president. And so he was losing an intra-party factional struggle about the substance of the Vietnam War. And he tried to stand down to essentially help the kind of Cold War hawk faction stay in charge, because Humphrey had a more liberal record on civil rights going back decades earlier. And the thought was, you know, the Northern Union bosses liked him better, etc, etc.
So it was, it's structurally similar in that the incumbent president was unpopular. And there's certain resonances around Gaza and the happenstance of the convention being in Chicago, but it's quite different from a president being pressured after having, I mean, Biden had the formal tools to force himself back onto the ticket. Johnson was afraid that he was going to lose, you know, and that's, that's also, I mean, also, you know, 1968 was in a sense, a more classic political fight where there was just deep dissension within the democratic coalition over the Vietnam War. particular and some other things. And so, you know, a more moderate incumbent president wants to win re-election and he's challenged by the progressive wing of the party.
You know, what's interesting about this political fight is that the ideological lines were very, very strange. You know, if you had found some bet maker willing to take a bet in 2020 that the last supporter standing of Joe Biden would... consist of, yes, Jim Kleinberg and a couple of moderate figures, but most loudly, most pronouncedly, Bernie Sanders and AOC, that would have seemed absurd.
And not just 2020, right? I mean, I think if you went back as recently as February, right, when Ezra Klein wrote his op-ed, you know, calling on Biden to step aside at the beginning of this year, which I think is sort of the beginning of this cycle. But I think it that point, you would have said, look, the most plausible challenge to Biden would come from the left. And if Biden were to step aside and have a kind of open nomination process, it would be an opportunity for the critics of this administration on the left to sort of push their agenda forward.
And that's not how this wound up playing out. I mean, the people, the Democrats who were most vocally concerned about Biden, in the first instance, were frontline members of Congress, you know, people who were going to need to run for reelection in difficult districts, like Representative Jared Golden. They got some backup from people like Michael Bennett, who, you know, is known to be a sort of a moderate, kind of pragmatic senator.
And then Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, who are not really factional figures, but were making an argument of pure political pragmatism. at doing a lot of work along those grounds. And Biden started to gain support from Bernie Sanders, from AOC, from people who I think don't like the idea of...
electability considerations weighing heavily in the Democratic Party, who don't like the idea of donors and kind of, you know, guys like the Pod Save America podcast guys, who I don't want to say that they're not substantive people, but those were like communications operatives from Barack Obama's campaign. And I think there's always been a concern on the left that if Democrats truly just optimize for winning in the Trump era. that that's going to mean ditching certain left-wing commitments that they believe in strongly, which I agree with, but just in a, and that's good kind of way. Right, right.
Yeah, I mean, there's a, you know, sometimes in foreign policy, the quickest guide to understanding the position of certain people, perhaps a lot of people, but some influential people, is to think, well, the enemy's enemy is their friend. And, you know, anybody who looks like they're arrayed against the United States, we're going to find excuses to find positive. And perhaps it helps to explain sort of the last holdouts on the pro-Biden side, because I really struggled. I mean, to me, you know, I think Joe Biden served this country honorably for 50 years.
I think his financial record has been somewhat mixed, but he's done some really positive things. In terms of personal qualities, I have a good amount of respect. For him, I certainly wasn't, you know, happy at the prospect of him having to step down.
But it's just both, you know, before the debate, frankly, when he saw some of the video clips circulating, which were dismissed as, you know, misinformation by parts of the mainstream media. But certainly after seeing the debate, it was just anybody with eyes to see could tell that he was not going to be an effective campaigner and that he had deteriorated quite quickly. over the last years, meaning that we have no damn idea, and I say this with sadness, what kind of mental state he's going to be in in two or three years.
So to me, it was just sort of like, you know, it's a test of basic sanity, whether you thought that he could be the nominee in a way that I try. to always understand different political opinions and see, look, like you have different ideological motivations, different views, and God knows everybody can be wrong sometimes. But in this one, it just seemed so obvious.
And so it's hard to understand. But I think you're right that sort of seeing it through the, you know, all the people were skeptical of, the whole party establishment, the donors, Nancy Pelosi, all the people who annoy us are on the side of Biden having to step down. So we instinctively got to take the other side. But that perhaps is the best explanation on this.
I don't want to overdo well on that little side piece of the saga. Look, the presidential race was looking very bad for Democrats. You know, Biden was behind in the electoral average every day of his year.
He had been ahead in the electoral average every day of the year 2020, as Harry Anton pointed out recently. So there's a stark contrast. You know, there are some quotes from anonymous senior Democrats, whether or not they were truthfully reported that the party had basically given up on trying to win this election.
You know, now, you know, it is looking likely, I think, tell me if you disagree, that Kamala Harris is going to be the nominee. She's also unpopular. She also has some real liabilities. She's less unpopular than Joe Biden right now.
For big stretches of last year, she's been more unpopular than. than Biden. She is a sentient, intelligent human being who can actually make a case, which is surely preferable.
What do you think her chances of success are? And what does she need to do in order to increase them? I mean, she's an underdog. You know, there has been an incredible wave. I was telling people who were very nervous, Democrats very nervous about Harris a week ago.
I was saying, listen, if Biden steps aside, and everybody rallies around Harris, you who are telling me right now that you're nervous about her, you're going to be thrilled. You know, like the vibes are going to improve an incredible amount to have this monkey off her back and have a real candidate out there. And that has happened. The bad news is that this was always, I think, the problem with having selected Harris as VP. She is a person who made core Democrats feel better.
about a ticket led by Joe Biden. That's why she was selected in 2020. She is an image that core Democrats like. for the party that they feel good about Kamala Harris.
Just a brief interruption. Who do you mean by core Democrats here? Because one of the things that always struck me about Kamala Harris is that, you know, she came of age politically as a kind of political moderate, in a very progressive context of San Francisco politics, California politics, but she was a tough and crime prosecutor and so on.
And she kind of ran as this pretty radical progressive in 2020. And my impression is, you know, I know moderates in the party better than I know progressives in the party, but I know some progressives too. And neither of them seem to particularly like her, particularly neither of them seem to particularly trust her. So is core Democrat sort of like not party elites, but just like rank and file?
Like, did the core Democrat who he was reassured actually exist? Yes, I mean, I mean, but like, I think this is the problem with her, but it's like the true ride or die Democrats, like Kamala Harris, you know, and putting her on the ticket helped Biden a lot with grassroots small donors, for example. back in 2020. But it's bad strategic decision making. You know, you don't need to like feed the people who have the least actual concerns about your ticket, but you just don't love the idea of like putting up an old white man there. So the challenge for her, the opportunity for her is that, you know, she like, she can campaign, she gives, she can, she can give a good speech, she can do an interview, etc.
But, you know, she's gonna have to do a two to three day victory tour, lock all her people down, get the small donor surge, do the rollout, do the memes, etc. But then like, they've got to get to work and deal with the fact that she is stronger than Biden is with young people, where Biden had lost a lot of support, but she's weaker with old people. And she is less underwater than Biden was, but she's still underwater.
She is losing to Trump. by less than Biden was, but she's still losing. And her natural coalition is probably worse in the Electoral College than Biden's was.
And she needs to really dig in on what is always the core. You know, Democrats need middle-aged to old white people who live in the suburbs of the secondary cities of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania to vote for them. And it's a party that...
is grounded. I mean, you could talk about more moderate Democrats, more progressive Democrats, but like even the moderate Democratic elites, like you and me, just like living in New York, living in DC, living in LA, living in San Francisco, and the actual people you need to reach are living in Grand Rapids. You know, they're living in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, you know, kind of unfashionable places. They're 50-something.
They're white. And like, you've got to connect to them. I think, you know, auditioning Andy Beshear, Josh Shapiro, Roy Cooper as your vice presidential nominees is like, picking a good VP doesn't like solve political problems for you.
But they are asking the right question, right? When those are the people you're looking at, you're asking who's going to help me reach those kind of non-core voters. But you need to ask that question about.
everything that you do, right? Like, what is the message? What are the policy positions we take?
And in particular, you know, she is inevitably going to face certain kind of baiting attacks, right? Republicans deliberately mispronouncing her first name, Republicans referring to her as a DEI candidate or a diversity hire. And I'm interested to see how they will respond to that.
right? The way you respond to that, if you're trying to... How should they respond to that?
And how should they not respond to that? I mean, well, so I think her instinct, right? Because to succeed in California politics is hard, right? It's a crowded field, but you just play to the base.
So there's a certain kind of like, yo, that's racist response that's very powerful inside progressive circles, right? And you can weaponize really exaggerated, overblown, false things. accusations of racism to like great effect inside progressive circles.
So the inclination is to think, oh, if I've got a good accusation, like I should definitely run with that. But you know, I think if you're trying to go to the electorate, you want to find a way to brush that stuff off and make it clear that your focus, that her focus is on like the problems of average people, you know, so it's some version of I don't mind if Republicans mispronounce my name. I mind that they... And then, you know, fill in the blank with some message point. Make the attacks look petty and small by clearly implying and stating that you find them to be wrong, but sort of rising above it and pivoting.
And pivoting to your good issues. Right. Because the problem is, is that an argument that's about microaggressions is not favorable to Kamala Harris.
You know. Regardless of what the substance is, it's like she wants an argument that's about health care, taxation of billionaires, the stability of the global economy, you know, all these other things, not a kind of vindication of her personal role in the world. Because, you know, I think a tricky thing for people in her position to deal with is that— You know, of course, if you are an African-American woman who's prominent in American politics, you will attract racist and misogynistic criticisms. At the same time, like, she's a very powerful and important person, you know, and like people want to hear that she's advocating for them, not that she's advocating for herself.
And that's like a big knock on Trump, right? Is that like, he's this really selfish guy. You can't imagine him sacrificing his personal interests the way Democrats asked Joe Biden to and Biden did it, right.
And that's like, that's the trick, you know, on everything is to not get sucked into this like vortex of self interested complaining. I want to circle back to a couple of the things you said. I mean, one of them is that, Joe Biden had a certain kind of strategy since 2020. And it was basically to play for party unity.
over everything else. And I think that that strategy, frankly, had mixed results. I think that's one of the reasons why he's significantly underwater in popularity. But there was a context to how that worked, which is that he read as an old fuzzy daddy moderate.
And he also happened to read as an old white guy, fuzzy daddy moderate. And so the fact, you know, that I think helped him immensely. in the 2020 election, and it helped him public perception. Nobody really thought that Biden was going to be sort of this radical who moves the country hugely to the left.
And even for that was the attack line from Fox News and a bunch of people on Twitter. You know, it never really worked. I mean, people called Obama a socialist.
And some people believed that, but it mattered that he wasn't in fact a socialist. That's why he got reelected twice and got reelected reasonably comfortably, right? I worry that if Kamala Harris, you know, who had tacked far more to the left in 2020, and perhaps for some demographic reasons and unfair demographic reasons, isn't naturally read as that kind of instinctive moderate.
Also, she doesn't have a track record of decades and decades of moderate politics in a consistent way in the way that Joe Biden did. If she sort of follows in the footsteps of Biden and says, party unity over everything else, I'm going to broker all of these deals with a progressive wing and try and be somewhere. in the sort of ideological center of Democratic Party elites, right, of delegates to the DNC and the donor class and so on, not only is she going to continue being far to the left of where the median voter is in the United States in general, and swing states in particular, in a way that'll harm her, but that perception is going to be a lot more pronounced than it ever was with Joe Biden, because nobody really believed that Joe Biden is a kind of progressive, right? Whereas with Kamala, I don't actually believe that she really is a progressive, but it'd be much easier to believe that. than it was with Joe Biden.
So sort of how does she mitigate against that risk? And if she was going to break with the left on a few issues in a way that helps to cement a public image of her actually being a moderate, what do you think those issues should be? How should she go about doing that?
I mean, I think the first part of this is that she has to try to have some kind of an honest conversation with the left about what the prospects for American politics realistically over the next four to five years are in the first place. This is just going to be a defensive era for progressives. The Biden administration accomplished a lot of stuff. The part of his unity first strategy that worked is that he got a lot of bills passed.
It was a legislative masterstroke. Whoever is on the ticket, whatever they say, it's like, that's not going to happen again in 2025. She's going to try to stop. Republicans from repealing everything that Biden did. And then she needs to run, you know, with the knowledge that women in particular are stereotyped as more left wing than men. And you can see this in experimental settings.
And of course, it's factually accurate that women are on average more liberal than men are. So it's not, it's not like a crazy stereotype that people have. And so if you're a Republican, a woman is naturally perceived as more moderate, and it's an electoral advantage. If you're a Democrat, it's an electoral handicap. Some people get into, like, fatalism about this, right?
And, like, women can't win. Hillary was doomed. There's lots of-One of the very weird subplots of the last weeks was that it was some of the most progressive voices who were trying to say that Joe Biden should stay as the presidential candidate who started to say a black woman can never win in this country.
And so, therefore, Biden should continue to be the nominee, which is kind of like- It's just a very strange argument for deeply progressive people to be making. And I think it flies against the evidence of lots of elections in which female candidates, black candidates, and black female candidates have done quite well. Everybody in politics, it's hard to win elections, right?
And so the challenges you face are different depending on who you are. But she needs to look at the template of Raphael Warnock, of Tammy Baldwin, of Amy Klobuchar, of the people who overperform in swing states. They all do things to sort of neutralize people's identity-based stereotyping.
What do they do? Give us some examples. I mean, some of them are weird, right? They found out that posing Senator Warnock with dogs seemed to improve people's image of him. It just made him seem more like a bougie suburbanite who people were comfortable with.
Tammy Baldwin, though, I think is a great example. She's a lesbian. And if she had the career she had in California politics, there would be all kinds of stuff about that.
You know, the first lesbian United States senator, et cetera, et cetera. She never talks about it. She's not in the closet. But, like, this is not her line.
She talks a lot about the Wisconsin dairy industry. And she, like, breaks hard with the left on the question of, like, soy milk. And she has this bill about how you shouldn't be able to call soy milk a kind of milk, that it's not milk, and all kinds of stuff like that. If you've got to translate something stupid, make it soy milk.
Well, sure. I mean, for her, right? This is not like my personal greatest grievance with the American left, his enthusiasm for soy milk.
But it's one that's salient and relevant to Wisconsin. For Harris, I mean, look. She, before she was District Attorney of San Francisco, she was a line prosecutor in San Francisco. Then she was DA there for seven years. She beat an incumbent by running to his right.
You know, she took criticism from the left for aspects of her record as Attorney General of California in particular. She tried hard to keep convicted felons in prison in ways that alienated some left-wing people who felt that she tried too hard. that she pulled out too many stops on these kind of things. And the best thing, the easiest thing for her to say is that she is aware of the problems of the far left in the United States of America, that she has actually taken that on in key respects. And I think, frankly, that as a Black woman, she is not going to be bullied by some of the people who may be able to get over on.
a Joe Biden or a Mike Donilon or some of the other people in his circle there, that she has a greater level of comfort with coming out and saying, you know, like, Her parents immigrated to this country, right? And there's a great immigrant patriotism story to tell about that, right? That like, they did not come naive about some of the problems with the United States of America, but they felt it was the greatest land of opportunity that raised their daughter there, etc, etc, that, you know, she put criminals in prison, because some criminals need to be in prison. I think her 2009 book, about this called Smart on Crime is actually quite good, you know, and just reflects a different period in American politics than her 2019 campaign.
I also think, you know, it would be to her... There's two different views of this. I got into...
There's two different views on this. You know, one is that, you know, Kamala Harris has a political core, and that political core is more moderate, that she won the... DA race by wanting to write of a candidate, that she was a tough on crime prosecutor, but that she made that her big public coming out nationally with a book with Penguin Press about, you know, how she is, you know, a compassionate prosecutor and believes in justice, but, you know, she's a tough one, right? And on that telling, she was kind of uniquely unlucky. I think you said something along those lines, that when she ran in 2019, 2020, for the Democratic primary, you know, it was the moment when public opinion from Democratic coalition was most to the left in 30 or 40 years, or at least it was perceived to be most to the left.
And she was one of the people perceiving it as that. And so she did a whole bunch of things to ingratiate herself with the far left that now look deeply unpopular, like her tweet, encouraging people to contribute to a bail fund that was used in part to bail out people who had committed violent crimes and protests. And that she just wasn't able to be authentic.
She just wasn't a good candidate at that time because she was pretending to be somebody she was not. The other interpretation is that she's never had a political core, that when it seemed to be in her interest to be a centrist Democrat and to claim to be really tough on crime, that's what she did. And by the way, she did that not just to keep some criminals in prison, but my understanding is that she did, in fact, prosecute quite hard people for marijuana.
convictions. I'm not up on the details of this, but my understanding is that she did, in fact, resist releasing some people who had seemed to be proven innocent or something like that. I may be wrong about that, but I know that's one of the kind of criticisms that is often made against her. And then when the mood was to the left, she swung to the left, and now the mood is somewhere in the middle. She's swinging someone to the middle.
And that doesn't just matter because it gives us a less flattering picture of her, but it matters because it should lead us to a less bullish. prediction about how well she'll perform. In the first story, she's a natural good performer.
She's had the bad luck of being most exposed on the national stage at the one moment where she had to twist herself into pretzels. Perhaps there would have been better ways of dealing with that, but tough luck, that's a hard spot to be in. And now she'll be liberated.
In the second interpretation, no, she won't perform much better than in 2020 because she didn't have the sincerest set of views to argue from then, and she doesn't have the sincerest set of views to argue from now, and we should expect her to do roughly as well or badly as she did in 2020. Which of these two interpretations do you think is more, is closer to the mark? Because I'm genuinely agnostic at this point. I mean, I, you know, I think, I think sincere views are a little bit overrated.
In the grand, I mean, what's Joe Biden's sincere views? I, you know, I don't know. I know Biden has a longstanding set of political instincts. He does. He does.
Listen, I feel personally that I just know much less about Kamala Harris than I would like to. You know, in all candor, I mean, I have spoken. to Joe Biden. I've spoken to Barack Obama.
I've spoken to Nancy Pelosi. I've spoken to almost everyone who was in the 2020 Democratic Party field. I've never spoken to Kamala Harris as vice president, as a presidential candidate.
I met her once when she was attorney general of California. She, at that time, she was introduced as like, this is a rising star who's going to have a bold future in Democratic. politics.
She gave what I thought was a kind of boring but wonky address about something to do with foreclosures and stuff she was dealing with as Attorney General of California. I chatted with her a little bit in a smaller group setting after that. And again, it was all, it was conversation about stuff that just didn't feel relevant five to six years later. And I don't, it's unusual. To have a presidential candidate whose real work experience has been in this.
prosecutorial kind of stuff. Because, you know, with anybody you ask, it's like, what's the core, right? And I think for Biden, like the core of Biden's thinking is really stuff about foreign policy, right?
More than anything else. That's what he spent the most time on in his own presidency. That's where he was most willing to break with the base of the party and say, like, no, I'm going to chart a different course.
When he gives his arm. his most important speeches. He dwells a lot on Ukraine, the future of democracy. When I spoke to him, he tried to incorporate everything he does domestically into this theme about the Democratic coalition, small d Democratic coalition globally.
I have no idea, just candidly, what the equivalent of that for Harris is. Like, is it something about crime and urban policing, which is what, like, the plurality of her work? has been doesn't seem like it right because she doesn't seem to circle back to those themes that much in having elevated out of it it does not she seems more like the kind of person who got a district attorney gig early in their career and then moved on to other things um and did other stuff you know she is the best spokesperson has long been the best spokesperson this administration has on dobs and abortion rights and things like that um But that doesn't seem like enough to sort of flesh out a campaign, things like that.
So it's a big question. I mean, I think it's odd to call the incumbent vice president of the United States a sort of unknown political enigma. But I do feel that I personally, as a journalist and also as a reader of journalism, have actually less information about what's important to her and who she is. who trusts like what her team is, then, you know, you would expect with any of these kinds of people. And that in a weird way means that the range of outcomes that we could see in the next month is quite wide, because perhaps she is actually able to shape her image in a way that is appealing, and that overcomes some of the weaknesses, or perhaps she'll be defined in ways that you know, limit her appeal radically and actually make her electoral coalition decline.
I feel like we're going to talk a lot about Kamala Harris in the next month. I want to touch on a few other things. You just mentioned what you spoke to Biden. When was the last time you spoke to him? It was, that is a great question.
I think about a year ago. How long did you speak to him for and what kind of... you know, what kind of setting, what kind of status he is. I mean, it was a while.
This was a, you know, kind of off-the-record chat with a small group of about four, I think four columnists were in there in the Oval Office. And, you know, he is old, which was perfectly evident in there. Like, he spoke with a softer tone of voice than I remembered from, I never spoke to him when he was vice president.
He was a senator a long time ago, and, you know, he just, like, used to be louder. But, like, I came out of that conversation feeling really thrilled to vouch for his ability to serve as president in a way that I was not after watching the debate and other things like that. And how do you now reconcile that with his performance at the debate? Is it that, is your best guess that he had good and bad moments and you got him at a good moment?
Or is your best bet that he just... deteriorated a lot over the course of that year. So I mean, I've had a lot of opportunity to try to have reporting conversations with gerontologists, which, you know, was not something I engaged with previously in my career. They, of course, can't diagnose somebody from a distance. But what people have told me is that when you have somebody who becomes frail and elderly, and you're trying to treat them responsibly, You know, what you do, similar to an athlete recovering from an injury, right, is you try to take it easy to manage the situation better over the longer haul, that you will be able to get more done in your life over a 10-year horizon if you slow the pace down.
And I think if you look at 2023, that's pretty clearly what they were doing with Biden. You know, he did some public events. I was in there for this conversation with him.
But he was not doing a lot of that. that kind of thing. And it clearly had something to do with his age, and it was bothering people.
There was criticism. There was polling, but there was elite criticism, like, he's got to get out there more, he's got to do some more stuff. And the campaign was saying, we're going to show you guys. He came out for the State of the Union, delivered a strong speech, did some rallies. And I think what happened is that when they tried to increase his activity level, it didn't work.
You know what I mean? That it's like, you could have... When they made really sure that he's well rested and that he wasn't over-exerting himself, he sort of was able to function.
And the moment that they went beyond the sort of level of activity that was still compatible with his health and his mental faculties, that's when he started really messing up. I think about my wife is a huge San Antonio Spurs fan. And at the end of David Robinson's career, you know, their kind of former star, he would play about 12 minutes a game.
And he was quite effective during those 12 minutes. But normally a star player would play much, much, much more than that. But they were managing his health. And then years later, when Tim Duncan, who had been their young star then, became their age star, it was the same thing. He wouldn't play back-to-back games.
They would limit his minutes. They would save him for the moments when they really, really needed him. And I think that's what they were doing with Biden. And it worked fine.
But running a presidential campaign is a full-time job over and above being president of the United States, which is also a full-time job. And by the time of the debate, he was both doing less stuff than you would expect, but also you were starting to see these glitches, which, you know, they spun as this is misinformation, this is misleadingly edited. But then you saw not only at the debate, but when he tried to recover from the debate, he didn't do like a blitz of seven interviews, you know, they were very spaced out, but still at a more rapid pace.
They weren't as bad as the debate, but they still weren't very good. And, you know, I mean, I think that's just the nature of it. And it's not a responsible way to handle the medical condition of a person experiencing that kind of elderly frailty.
Which is one of the things that shocked me about the reporting that really the main voices wanting Joe Biden to stay in the race were his wife and his son, because he thought that if they have his best interests at heart, they should have wanted him to wind up his term and get some rest and enjoy, you know, the last years. that he has on this earth. Try and give me sort of your best read, or if you like the most sort of sympathetic case, for why journalists messed this story up. And perhaps you don't agree with the premise, but it does seem to me that voters were onto these concerns a long time ago, right?
A lot of voters were really concerned about Joe Biden's age for the last years. There were viral clips. of him looking disoriented at fundraisers, at the G7.
Now, some of them were slightly misleading the editor, but you could also tell that, you know, however mildly misleading the editor, there was an underlying sense of certainly lack of vigor and probably mild disorientation. Here's the problem. That made those viral, right? Some people, like your old friend Ezra Klein and like David Axelrod, You know, people who have reason to stay in the good graces of the Democratic coalition and have access and so on, were earlier than many others in calling this out. Why is it that there was so little coverage over all of this and there was, especially among commentators, so little courage in, you know, calling out this situation earlier than people did?
Here's the problem. with people who want journalists to be right all the time, is that people get very upset. I think about when Trump was shot, right?
The very first headlines that came out were very restrained and accurate. And they said things like Trump was rushed off the stage after a series of loud popping noises. And then as it became clear that those had been gunshots, the headlines were updated.
But there were a lot of conservatives who were angry about those early headlines that didn't call them gunshots when they said, I think correctly, that it was pretty clear they were gunshots. But I think it would have been irresponsible to say that there were gunshots when you didn't know that there were gunshots, right? If it had been that a car was backfiring and Trump was rushed off the stage by mistake and people had thrown the country into panic by calling it gunshots, that would have been bad too. On that I'm with you. I want to paint the analogy.
Journalists were trying to get the story about Biden and his agent. If you read something like Olivia Newsy's story about this that came out. after the debate. She says that she was working on that story for months.
The problem was that her sources became a lot more forthcoming with her after the debate. You know, you can't write a story responsibly. That's like, if you kind of squint at these video clips, and you see that the people I'm asking questions to are being a little squirrely, that, you know, it's like, what can you do? And so, you know, there was a lot of reporting in The New York Times on things like how the White House had changed what kind of shoes the president wears and how they were trying to stage manage his motions up and down, you know, Air Force One, things like that.
There were stories about political concerns about Biden's age. But until people who had been in the room with him were willing to say things. There just wasn't a lot that you could do journalistically.
I think the most striking thing where I messed up is that I wrote about this, but five days before the debate, a friend of mine who was at the Los Angeles fundraiser that had been a week before that told me— That's the famous one that Clooney later wrote about in the New York Times. But critically later, right? But this is before. My friend told me, like, Biden, look— terrible at this debate.
I don't think he can serve a second term. We're going to have to white knuckle it through the next four months, and then Harris is going to have to take over. And I was like, whoa. But my reaction to that was, all right, this guy's kind of blowing stuff out of proportion.
They wouldn't be barreling forward with the debate unless they were confident that he was going to be okay. He was not okay. I... Should have tried to scramble and like find somebody else who was in the room at that debate and confirm his story or not confirm it. Then after the debate, I wrote that I had been told this thing.
Then a few days after that, George Clooney wrote his article. Then after George Clooney wrote his article, the kind of Pod Save America people who had been at the debate were like, yes, Clooney is correct, etc., etc. And that just goes to show, like, you can have a room full of people who see something, and if none of them talk about it, like, it's hard to know what happens. No, but two things, right? I mean, first of all, I assume you mean the Pod Save America people were at the fundraiser, not a bit of a debate.
At the fundraiser, yes, yes. Okay, so two things, right? So, like, number one, that shifts the blame from sort of...
beat reporters or the White House press corps to other key figures in this alliance. And the people at Pod Save America are, of course, a sort of weird mix between political operative and journalist, but they claim to be journalists at this point, right? They run a media company.
They have a very, very listened to podcast. If they all were there, right, they didn't need a source. They have a pretty damn big microphone, a bigger microphone, I believe, than certainly me and probably you, right?
They've got a huge microphone, yes. So it is on them to have said this. And it is, I think, understandable.
People are saying, why can we trust any of these damn journalists? They were in the room and they didn't say it. So I think there were plenty of people who... You know, there is a line between journalism and the democratic world and the donor class and so on, sort of to pretend that there's this sort of like hermetically sealed off world of journalists who just couldn't get the confirmation, I think is slightly overstating the case.
I understand that for a kind of straight news report in the New York Times, you need a certain number of sources in a particular kind of way, something that the Times is sometimes willing to play fast news with in other circumstances. But it's just, you know... I... I cannot imagine that he couldn't have put together a story saying there's all of these people fretting about this and we're going to go for unnamed sources. But, you know, I've been in some conversations.
I just don't think that's... The other point, let me just make the other point, but I'm looking forward to your pushback, is what about the commentariat? Right, like as a commentator, you don't have to say, you know, our sources say Joe Biden has Parkinson's.
I get that the sort of, you know, the standard for writing that as a news story in the New York Times is rightly very, very high. But I wrote two years ago, I don't know what's going on with Joe Biden. I don't know whether he's just, you know, an average 80-year-old who's just not aging particularly well and perhaps not particularly badly.
Opa. Perhaps he may have some form of cognitive degenerative disease, but it's quite clear that he's not as vigorous as two years ago. And this is not going to be tenable. And I know from conversations with lots of people that they agreed with me, including lots of people with opinion columns in various kinds of places.
And yet very, very, very few of them made that opinion public. And I just don't think that for them to write that story in a way that I caged it, right? It seemed to me. like it's a little bit more than just him being an average 80-year-old. But the point holds, even if he's just an average 80-year-old. The average 80-year-old should not be president of the United States.
There might be 80-year-olds who are particularly vigorous who are. He did not seem to be momentally vigorous when the average 80-year-old. That was enough for me to feel that I could responsibly write that as a commentator, not as a straight news story. Why is it that so few commentators did that?
Well, my pushback on you on that is just like I think a lot of commentators wrote that. I think that that was a very widely aired. take. I didn't write that because I didn't think it was true until I did think it was true. And then that's what I wrote.
I can quibble with certain people who were at that LA fundraiser who maybe should have said something 10 days earlier than they did. But I just don't... I thought during the three-week struggle, I thought that there were like two... parallel rewritings of the narrative.
One was people saying that nobody had said this before, sort of a version of what you just gave. And then the other was from the Biden camp, was them being like, are we really going to toss the candidate overboard after one bad debate? And the answer was like, no, it wasn't just one bad debate.
There had been two years of intense public concern about the president's age and activity level. And they had been telling us. They had been telling sympathetic commentators, like, just wait and see, we're going to show you at the debate.
The reason why that debate completely broke the operation is precisely because these problems had been so widely discussed, right? If that had just come out of nowhere, if everyone the morning of the debate was like, I have no concerns about Joe Biden's age and mental acuity, and he'd have like a crazy bad debate. then we'd be in a different world because he would have done more stuff, et cetera, et cetera.
But it just, the debate validated exactly what a lot of people had been saying. What we've got since the debate that's a real change, though, is the inside dirt, you know, the foreign governments, the congressional allies, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. To me, we talked a lot about Harris and her sort of like macro politics. I think the biggest problem with sort of rushing to pass the baton to the vice president, is that people are going to have a lot of questions about what exactly has been going on in the Biden administration, and who knew what and who said what.
And this is why the really strategic move. And either Kamala Harris knew that her boss was no longer really cognitively able to perform the duties of a presidency, which she should have shared with the public, or she's a pretty clueless damn person. to not recognize that.
Well, and also it's embarrassing. Like every vice president, I think is a little bit more out of the loop than they would like to be. But that's not something you want to admit. Whereas if you're governor of Michigan-There's this amazing moment when I believe Kamala Harris was diagnosed with COVID back before people were vaccinated, I think, or at least relatively early in the thing. And the press release from the White House said, don't worry, she hasn't been close to the president in over a week.
Right. Whereas, you know, if your nominee is the governor of Michigan, it's just way easier for her to say, like, I don't know, man, I wasn't there. Right. In a way that doesn't make her look clueless, but just like, I was in Lansing, I was in Detroit, I was doing my job.
I am a normal Democrat who's like, basically in agreement with most of Joe Biden's policies, because we're in the same party. But I wasn't like literally there. And that would also let somebody like Reggie Whitmer throw under the bus. aspects of inflation, some bad policy calls, etc, etc.
The move to the VP is cleaner in the sense of a process, but it also means that the upside of switching candidates is just much more limited. Because, you know, these are very valid questions to ask. I mean, now, common sense, like, of course, she had to vouch for the president, if she was vice president, whether or not she knew what was true.
But still, like, you're officially not supposed, like, you're not supposed to lie, right? Like, we teach my kid, like, you tell the truth, not... Well, the reality is, if you're vice president, and there's a move to get the president off the ticket, you need to prepare to take over but also appear to be a loyal.
So you know, like that, that's not like that's not good look for anybody. And I wish that I think it's striking that Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama, who proved to be the heroes of this crisis month situation, they did not come out of the gate with immediate Harris endorsements, like clearly. their plan was to try to make a bigger switch if they could. And it didn't work.
They couldn't sell people on it. They couldn't take us that far. But those are the shrewd strategists who held their nerve and tried to get things done here. And the pass to Harris is better than the alternative of sticking with Biden, and maybe is better than some kind of really messy meltdown.
But she's just not an optimal pick on a number of different levels. And there's an initial wave of enthusiasm for her, but she's got big problems to address, you know, both in terms of public perception of her, but particularly just all this stuff related to Biden. You know, like, it's not—people are going to want to know, like, how often did you meet one-on-one with the president?
I think the accurate answer to that is like not that much. But like that also doesn't reflect that well on when you're vice president. To be able to say honestly, like I wasn't involved in this cover up because I was mostly touring the country doing sort of C-tier political events is like that's a mixed bag as an answer. Perhaps if you have a well-documented ideological clash or there's a kind of reason why people feel that the president throws you out.
then you can just about get away with that, right? I mean, saying, look, I have agreements with the president, I also have disagreements, you know, he kind of, you know. But Kamala Harris can't do that either.
I want to talk a little bit about Republicans and Donald Trump. Oh, yeah. Because obviously we're recording this, you know, very briefly after, you know, Joe Biden decided in this. pretty historic turn that he's not running and it became very clear the common house is going to be the the nominee but um but obviously it's very important to think about what trump is up to at the moment i mean one of the questions that's been going around in the last days and weeks is whether there's a kind of vibe shift um whether somehow trump has not just been able to uh significantly increase his support in parts of the american elite um particularly on wall street and silicon valley But whether more broadly, a certain kind of taboo against supporting Trump has broken, whether the kind of consequences that people fear from publicly endorsing Trump have sort of dissipated.
And this, of course, against the background of, you know, particularly younger and non-white voters trending to Trump in recent polls. At the same time, when you look at sort of the share of Americans who, have a very unfavorable opinion of Donald Trump. It's a little bit lower than it was two years ago. I was looking at the New York Times-Siena poll.
It's about 5% lower than it was in 2022. But it's still very, very high. It's still in the 40s. So do you think this vibe shift is real? And if so, what produced it? You know, I think there's like two different things happening.
One is the political scientists say there's thermostatic public opinion, right? So when Trump was president, at progressive-minded people became very favorable to immigration, like getting, I think, like, more favorable to immigration than they really were, like not thinking it through. Now that Biden has been president, there has been a shift in the other direction, very notably on immigration, but on a lot of topics.
I mean, I think there's been a kind of a perestroika around, like, woke culture in certain segments of the progressive universe. But there's also been a rightward swing in mass opinion on sort of broad kinds of topics. That's a... kind of a vibe.
You can call that a vibe shift. The term in the political science literature is more boring than that. They could have called it vibe shifts going back to the 80s.
I also do think that there has been a change in the culturally... Traditionally, Wall Street and Silicon Valley were very... socially, culturally liberal kinds of places, right?
Because of which cities they were located in, because they have very, very high IQ people working in those fields. And those people tend to be quite left wing on progressive issues, because the workforce at those companies tends to be pretty liberal, etc. And so an executive of a software company was expected to do a lot of virtue signaling around diversity and around climate change. And not necessarily in like a partisan political way. But you know, so a company like Apple would both lobby furiously for right wing tax policy, because that's like what you do when you're a big company.
And, you know, brutal fights with the Obama administration about tax issues with 10s of millions of dollars at stake. but also do a lot of talk about, you know, we're going to be have carbon neutral stores, things like that, that made it very hard for anyone in that field to say positive things about Donald Trump, even though they, again, like lobbied very aggressively in favor of his tax policies, which were just really good. I mean, if you look at like, what did Trump actually do as president, right?
The main thing he did. was pass an enormous tax cut for multinational corporations. They could onshore money at a discount tax rate, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
But Tim Cook was never going to say that in public, be like, I'm really excited about this giant tax benefit. Elon Musk, David Sachs, a few other people, venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, have made a push over a course of years to change that and to say that like, If you just like Trump's policies, you should go say that and stop saying that you really care a lot about net zero goals or girls who code or all this other kind of stuff and just be like, we're Republicans now. It'll be interesting to see where that goes, right?
If Harris is reelected, I think the vibes will keep shifting in that direction. If... If Trump becomes president, I think there'll be a backlash in the other direction because Trump is going to start to govern.
This is not unique to Trump, but anybody who makes policy generates backlash. Trump would be starting with underwater favorable ratings. To make controversial policy changes from a starting point where 53% of the public views you as unfavorably, It's really tough.
Like Biden became unpopular, but he started popular, right? And that like waned away over time, which is a kind of normal presidential cycle. So, you know, I don't really know.
To an extent, right? Like Elon Musk is a singular individual, right? He's both the richest man in the country. He also owns Twitter. So like one man's eccentric opinions have a really large influence on the vibes.
And, you know, I think we struggle to understand what the future of that, you know, may hold. Does it mean the Trump administration will be more favorable to electric cars than it otherwise might have been? Like, that could be good. Hmm.
On policy, it's a little bit hard to read where the Republican Party is on the economy, because on the one hand, as you're pointing out, You know, the actual actions of the first Trump administration were in many ways those of a quite classic Republican administration. The biggest tax reform was one that really helped big multinational corporations. On the other hand, you do have this real sense that the rhetoric and some of where the initiative is and public policy in the party is starting to shift. I mean, George W. Bush in 2000 ran. part in privatizing social security.
You know, in 2016, Trump distinguished himself from the rest of the field by saying that perhaps the state does have a role to play in healthcare. And, you know, now he chose with J.D. Vance, you know, one of the younger figures in the party who do appear to be at least somewhat intellectually serious about wanting to build this kind of multiracial, you know, working class coalition and who's, you know, much more comfortable lambasting. big corporations and so on than previous generations of Republicans would be. You know, you had the president of a Teamsters Union address the Republican National Convention.
And one of the indications that there might be something serious to this is that, you know, the people in the party who are really driven by, you know, an older form of laissez-faire economics or an older form of, you know, economic conservatism or Reaganite economics, if you want to call it that, are really quite... unsettled by this, right? I mean, JD Vance has received a good amount of pushback from those circles of the party, for those circles of the party clearly are not in charge at the moment.
So, you know, is this the sort of thing that's just fake all the way down? Or is this the thing that sort of seems fake, seems fake, seems fake, until suddenly, it takes real effect? How should we think about the sort of evolution of economic policy in the Republican Party? So I mean, I'm working on a piece about this.
I think, I don't want to say that it's fake. I think that that's sometimes overstated. I think it's less new than it is often cast to be.
You know, George W. Bush ran in 2000, saying that he was going to be a compassionate conservative and criticizing House Republicans for, I mean, there's a quote, trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. His father ran in 1988, promising a kinder, gentler America that would be characterized by a thousand points of light. Ronald Reagan actually ran and won as a kind of like hard, hard right on economics guy, which is why he was so striking.
But Gerald Ford was from the moderate wing of the Republican Party. Richard Nixon said, we're all Keynesians now. Dwight Eisenhower said, like any man who doesn't accept the New Deal and Social Security is a fool.
So the traditional template for Republicans to win elections. has been to say that they oppose new progressive economic ideas, but that they accept the policy ratchet of the past. On that level, I don't know that Vance even does accept that policy ratchet.
I mean, as far as I know, he favors repealing the Affordable Care Act. He favors large cuts to Medicaid. So he's got some speeches where he like, here's, I think, a good example I was looking at. This is super obscure, but there's this question about Basel III capital regulations for banks.
So the idea here is that like, banks should have to take less risks in their lending to have lower risk of failure. So he put out a letter saying that um, These enhanced requirements should not apply to banks of between $700 billion and $100 billion in assets. So in his speech about this, he frames it as like he's standing up for small businesses against these giant Wall Street companies.
Small businesses making $70 to $100 billion a year. I mean, as a bank with $100 billion, I don't know. So I'm from New York. So I don't happen to have this kind of like small town bank sentimentality in my bones. But like to me, you know, a bank with $300 billion in assets, a bank with $800 billion, like who cares?
So I don't want to say that that's fake, though. Like I think it's there's a kind of a sincere Midwest republicanism that wants to champion the interests of medium sized. business enterprises that are headquartered in states like Ohio.
I just don't actually know what that, like, what does that amount to exactly? You know, in a kind of, it's a complicated policy conversation, a policy conversation. But I think that that's like, to me, that's different from championing the interests of working class or poor people. You know, it's championing the interests of heartland business owners rather than the interests of the owners of the biggest companies in the world. Otherwise, we were talking about with the vibes, the Silicon Valley investor class also seems quite...
enthusiastic about Vance. Now, of course, they could say to themselves, a VC firm like Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz, that is a much smaller enterprise than Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan. So when we champion small business, is that what we mean?
Small regional banks, like the world's biggest venture capital company? I don't know. So I think it's a bigger shift in presentation.
than it is in the kind of historical groundings of the Republican Party. But, you know, the way like responsible, the way politics works, if it does work, is that center-right political parties see the activist left, and they see some things that the activist left is putting on the agenda that are irresponsible, or toxically unpopular. And they see other things that are like responding to real social crises, and conservative movements try to preempt social revolution by co-opting aspects of those kinds of concerns. That's, I think, like the generous interpretation of J.D.
Vance, you know, that like, he hears what left-wing radicals are saying about problems with the status quo, and he is trying to find a way to like, wrestle that into a conservative framework. I find it a little hard to have a generous interpretation of Donald Trump on that score. But you know, in the broad sweep of history, right, like, that's how functional democracies work is that the conservative party is always putting a new foot forward and caring about working class people's concerns.
To return to the vibe shift for a moment, and perhaps that'll round out our conversation. You know, one vibe shift that I have felt in my own social circle is not that people suddenly love Donald Trump or not that they're suddenly enamored of him. That's certainly not true in the vast majority of people that I know.
But in 2016, people didn't think that he was going to be reelected, going to be elected. And yet there was a genuine sense of emergency. There was a genuine sense of being scared. And a lot of people in my social circle were doing stuff. I mean, some were involved in Hillary Clinton's campaign, but a lot of them were donating and, you know, doing phone banks and, you know, writing op-eds.
And it just felt like there was this kind of moment of civic organizing to stave off something that seemed incredibly scary, even if it didn't seem likely to happen. And what I've been struck by all year long, and perhaps that had to do just with... Joe Biden's state and his inability to mount an effective campaign, but I think it may have gone beyond that, is that I would ask people, you know, do you think that Donald Trump is going to win?
And most of my friends and acquaintances would say yes. And when I said, you know, do you think it would be bad if he wins? Oh, yeah, it'd be terrible. And when I say, well, are you doing anything?
He said, no, not really. And that does seem like a vibe shift. Right, I mean, there's something, you know, even among the people who would register in that poll from New York Times-Siena as having very unfavorable views of Donald Trump.
We do hold these very unfavorable views of Donald Trump. It somehow doesn't feel like an emergency in the way it did in 2016. And so I guess my first question is, do you share that interpretation of this moment? And secondly, do you think that there's a rational thought process? behind that? Or do you think that, that, that, that, you know, do you think that even as people are saying, oh, he is going to be terrible, they just kind of don't quite believe it anymore.
And perhaps that's because he's a better known figure, and perhaps in certain respects, he's moderated? Or do you think that's just exhaustion? And they should be as alarmed as, as aware in 2016? I would say my views on Trump softened somewhat.
And my experience has not been that that's the general view in my social circles, I've got yelled at a lot. by people for being not in full panic mode. But I have experienced some of your kind of demobilization, you know, ask people, like, well, what are you doing?
This is where I think switching the ticket is going to change a lot, vibes wise. I think that Democrats were in a little bit of denial with themselves about how sad they were about needing to try to drag Joe Biden across the ticket. Trump is favored in this election, and there's a good chance that Harris will lose. But the people who vote for Harris will do so feeling good about their vote.
You know what I mean? Like, They like Kamala Harris. I don't like the idea of going like for somebody who's a pretty slender Democrat, which is the kind of person who mans phone banks, like the idea of making calls on behalf of Kamala Harris is perfectly acceptable.
Even if Harris wasn't a favorite candidate, the idea of sort of having to explain to ordinary people why it is that Joe Biden can be president for another four years just feels demoralizing in a completely different way. Exactly. So people are going to be excited because, you know, political work is partially instrumental and partially expressive. The expressive side of it is now going to work for Democrats. They will give her money.
They will post her memes. They will do her phone banks. They will yell at their less political friends about why they need to vote for Harris. A lot of that is going to be about why Trump is so terrible. But it's like when the conversation inevitably flips back to like, isn't your candidate terrible?
They'll say, no, she's not terrible. Right? So again, that's not enough to bring you to victory, but it is a totally different. change in the atmosphere around the kind of campaign.
And I'm seeing now already, you know, I saw Gary Tan, who's the head of Y Combinator, and has been very involved in San Francisco, local politics and stuff. He's got a Twitter thread out this morning, as we're talking about the good work that Harris did as prosecutor about how there's some clip of her, like, fighting with left wing activists, and she was right. And this is like, common sense, you know, it was heretical, but she speaks the truth.
And that's just like, again, I don't know that that wins it for her. But these are just like, people are going to come back home, they're going to be excited, they're going to be excited to go leave it all out on the floor. You know, as we say, in sports, and like, I think that that will generate some re-stigmatization of Trump as just a kind of natural, you know, downstream byproduct. That being said, like Trump was president for four years. Sometimes Trump people say like he was president for four years and everything was fine, which isn't true.
Some terrible things happened in America. But to the extent that people felt he was, I think the day before Election Day, I think most Democrats I knew felt that Trump was blundering his handling of the pandemic. As soon as Biden took over, I think it became clear to people that however irresponsibly Trump may have talked about this or that, there just wasn't some obvious solution to these dilemmas. That every decision Biden made about COVID-related stuff, some people liked and some people didn't like, because it was actually a hard problem.
And I think that visceral dislike of Donald Trump had obscured that reality, that there wasn't... like a magic solution to this problem. And I think that as, you know, Biden ground on, people sort of came to recognize that, that foreign policy is hard, crisis management is hard.
There were problems with Trump era America, but replacing Trump with Biden did not actually make those go away, which returns you to like baseline politics that Trump and Harris have very different tax policy views. They have different ideas about abortion. They have different ideas about Supreme Court appointments.
But that's like normal politics, right? You have two different political parties. They have different policy agendas.
People disagree. People argue. People choose. Whereas 2016 was this state of emergency politics.
And I personally like normal politics better than emergency politics. It's what I came up with. It's what I feel more.
comfortable with. It's still true that if Trump gets in and he pardons all the January 6th defendants, that does seem bad. That's kind of emergency time, in my opinion. But I don't like it.
Well, Matt, we'll have to have you back on November 6th to talk about what we are facing in four years of a Donald Trump presidency or a Kamala Harris presidency. Thank you so much for making the time today. There you go.
Thank you.