Biden Digs In

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Speaker 3 Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favreau.
I'm John Lovett.

Speaker 4 I'm Tommy Vitor.

Speaker 3 Happy fourth and welcome back. We're back.
You guys managed to unplug for the holiday weekend? Stop thinking about politics?

Speaker 5 I know you're joking. I really did try.
I really did try. No, I see every once in a while I go into the box of screams and I'm like, there you are with your megaphone, screaming with everybody else.

Speaker 5 Screaming with a bunch of blue check marks, calling us traitors in funny fonts.

Speaker 5 Good stuff. Good stuff out there on Elon's internet.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Tommy, what about you?

Speaker 4 Yeah, sure. Yeah, no.

Speaker 3 I will say

Speaker 3 I was not too offline while I was in Maine for the week, but it was a nice place to be staring at my phone the whole time. That's what I thought.

Speaker 3 And I did, as Emily likes to say, you know, saw all of my in-laws live there, all their friends, and she's like, you've basically done the pod a couple times a day for everyone here in Bitterford Pool

Speaker 3 because it's all anyone could talk about. I don't know if you guys got this.
Everyone.

Speaker 3 We've been worried for a long time about attention on this race. People's attention is now focused on this race.
Oh, yeah. Big time.
In a way that I have not seen in a a long time.

Speaker 5 And look, we'll get to some of our critiques, and we have a few, but in fact, I wish it was in other circumstances.

Speaker 3 Right, sure.

Speaker 5 In fairness, the Biden strategy of using the debate to draw more attention to the race has succeeded.

Speaker 3 It absolutely worked. Check mark.
Check mark on that one. Okay.

Speaker 3 So it's been almost a week since our last episode, so we got a lot to catch up on.

Speaker 3 On Friday, Joe Biden sat for a taped 20-minute interview with George Stephanopoulos in an effort to dispel concerns about his age and fitness, explain why the debate went so wrong, and reiterate that he isn't dropping out.

Speaker 3 We'll talk about how well he did in a bit.

Speaker 3 The president then did a few fiery campaign events over the weekend in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where he focused his attacks on Trump and the people urging him to step aside.

Speaker 3 He doubled down Monday morning when he responded to the small but growing group of Democrats in Congress who've called on him to drop out with a letter to all House and Senate Democrats that said while Biden's, quote, not blind to the concerns people are raising, he's still the best person to beat Trump, has quote, rock-solid support from the base and elected Democrats, and that bowing out of the race would overturn the will of the primary voters who chose him overwhelmingly over the course of the spring.

Speaker 3 He then called into Morning Joe, as one does, to hit the same themes and belittle the people calling for him to go.

Speaker 3 Biden does not have plans to campaign this week because he's hosting the NATO summit in Washington, including a Thursday press conference where he's going to get asked about all of this yet again.

Speaker 3 And then I believe he's going to have some campaign events this weekend. So, love it.

Speaker 3 You're going to be talking later in the show to Congressman Rokana of California, who is a key Biden supporter and liaison to the progressive community about where things stand on the hill.

Speaker 3 Now that a few more Dems have come out with statements of support for Biden, just before we're recording, there's others who are

Speaker 3 no one,

Speaker 3 Adam Smith, I believe, called on him to step down today, Monday afternoon. And then some senators now are saying, like, hey, this is serious.
We need to figure out who's going to beat Trump.

Speaker 3 And so we're not going to say more, but let's just have this conversation.

Speaker 4 They want to meet tenants. the person.
The senators are all like, we're now finally in Washington. We want to get together and talk.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And so Lovitt's going to talk to Rokana all about that in a bit.

Speaker 3 But let's start with the Stephanopoulos interview from Friday, especially since more than 8 million people watched it live, which is far more than any of the other events Biden has done since the debate.

Speaker 3 If you haven't seen the interview, here's some of what you missed.

Speaker 6 Did you ever watch the debate afterwards?

Speaker 7 I don't think I did, no.

Speaker 7 Well,

Speaker 6 what I want to get at is what were your experiencing as you were going through the debate? Did you know how badly it was going?

Speaker 7 Yeah, look,

Speaker 7 the whole way I prepared, nobody's fault, mine. Nobody's fault but mine.

Speaker 7 I prepared what I usually would do sitting down as I did come back with foreign leaders or the National Security Council for explicit detail. And I realized about partway through that,

Speaker 7 you know, although I could quote quote it, the New York Times had me down at 10 points before the debate, nine now or whatever the hell it is.

Speaker 7 The fact of the matter is that what I looked at is that he also lied 28 times. I couldn't, I mean, the way the debate ran, not my fault, no one else's fault.
No one else's fault.

Speaker 6 And if you stay in and Trump is elected and everything you're warning about comes to pass, how will you feel in January?

Speaker 7 I'll feel as long as I gave it my all and I did the goodest jobs I know I can do. That's what this is about.
Look, George, think of it this way.

Speaker 7 You've heard me say this before. I think the United States and the world is at an inflection point

Speaker 7 where the things that happen in the next several years are going to determine what the next six, seven decades look like.

Speaker 7 And who's going to be able to hold NATO together like me? Who's going to be able to be in a position where I'm able to keep the Pacific basin in a position where

Speaker 7 we're at least checkmating China now.

Speaker 7 Who's going to do that? Who has that reach?

Speaker 7 Who knows all these people? We're going to have, I guess a good way to judge me is you're going to have now the NATO conference here in the United States next week. Come listen.

Speaker 5 I didn't realize we were on the verge of checkmate against China.

Speaker 3 That's huge. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Knock that queen over.

Speaker 3 Reaching that key Pacific basin voter constituency.

Speaker 3 It's Joe Biden calling for love it.

Speaker 5 It's after six. I don't think so.

Speaker 4 It's after six. See you with Mika?

Speaker 5 You hear mine?

Speaker 4 Let's try that again.

Speaker 3 I think we should leave that in. I don't know.

Speaker 3 Great. Okay.
So, what did you guys think of the interview? And

Speaker 3 how are you feeling in general since you guys and Dan talked last week? Excellent, pod. It was great to just be a listener.

Speaker 4 You basically produced it because you were sending so many goddamn clips of this.

Speaker 3 I was, I was. that's true.
Well, you know what? You did a great job. Tommy, why don't you kick us off?

Speaker 4 I thought it was bad and at times very hard to watch. And in fairness to Biden, I don't think that that interview could have solved the political problem that stemmed from the debate.

Speaker 4 It could have stopped the bleeding. For me, it made me more concerned.
And here's the reason why.

Speaker 4 Every time I've seen President Biden speak off a teleprompter recently, he has struggled to communicate clearly. And I don't mean it's a bad message.

Speaker 4 I mean like struggle to speak in a clear, coherent way.

Speaker 4 The sentences run together. They're hard to understand.
And I think we just heard it in that clip. All of us were wincing, it was hard to listen to.

Speaker 4 And that is separate apart from my concerns about the message itself, which is Biden just mostly being very defensive about his record and not like articulating a second-term agenda that is compelling and makes me want to vote for him over Donald Trump if I'm a swing voter.

Speaker 4 But like the explanations for why the interview, why the debate went badly, range from having a cold to jet lag, even though he'd been back for 12 days to blaming debate prep.

Speaker 4 But like, I just don't think any of those

Speaker 4 answers fully explain how bad the debate was. And so I don't know.
It was hard to watch. The cut shots are not kind to him.
He's consistently misstating polling data about himself. Like, I don't know.

Speaker 4 I came away very concerned.

Speaker 3 Love it.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 5 So the interview itself, before he's even taken a question, I think it was a hard setting for him to succeed, even at his absolute best, because it's hard to justify why it was more than a week after the debate that it was so brief and he was only doing one.

Speaker 5 That's the first problem. The second problem is the debate wasn't just a bad night.
We all saw it. And it is barring an explanation, which he keeps denying, he keeps denying outs, right?

Speaker 5 Like that I was, that he was very sick

Speaker 5 or that he has some condition that has been repaired, whatever. The explanations are kind of vague and they're about having a cold or having been jet lagged or having been run down.

Speaker 5 But that doesn't do enough to assuage our concerns about what we saw that night, right? And so the explanations don't offer anything.

Speaker 5 But even with those caveats there about why his job is so difficult, if you were going to raise the stakes on one interview, it can't be another example of you being hard to understand, not because he's soft, not because he's mumbly, but because his train of thought doesn't make sense.

Speaker 5 And so you've now told us that he's up for this job. Everyone's saying, why isn't he out there? Why isn't he out there? Why isn't he out there?

Speaker 5 He goes out there and he offers this mid-link performance and it ends up being the absolute worst of both worlds because he's right, right? The stakes are incredibly high.

Speaker 5 Trump is an incredible threat, but either he will prosecute that case or someone else will. And right now we get neither.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I heard some people say that it was more coherent than the debate. I do agree with that.
I thought he looked better than the debate.

Speaker 3 I thought he sounded a bit more coherent than the debate for sure.

Speaker 3 But I came away thinking, all right, they had a week.

Speaker 3 It took a week to do another sort of live-fire event like this, right?

Speaker 3 Where it wasn't a, he gave a couple rally, he did a couple rallies that weekend as well, or he had just done a rally in Wisconsin and energetic, just like the North Carolina rally on a teleprompter, okay?

Speaker 3 And then, but they've had a week to prepare for this interview.

Speaker 3 And even if you

Speaker 3 go through the transcript, right? And because some people were like, well, the sound was off. And maybe AB, there's, you know, a lot of conspiracy theorists out there.
Maybe ABC was fixing the sound.

Speaker 3 Forget it. Say you just read the transcript and say you do him a favor by cleaning up all the garbles and all the syntax issues in the transcript.
You are left with what is his message?

Speaker 3 And of course, it's difficult to deliver a message when George Stephanopoulos is asking you multiple times, well, are you okay to serve? Do you feel like you're cognitively okay, right?

Speaker 3 But as you're preparing for that interview, you would think

Speaker 3 that your staff, and I'm sure they did, would say, okay, so you say,

Speaker 3 I had a bad night. I know why people are concerned.
I'd be concerned if I saw that. And I blew a big opportunity for sure.
You know what? I feel okay.

Speaker 3 I'm going to prove in the next several weeks just how energized I am and how important I see this race. And I'm going to make the case everywhere I go.
And this is the case.

Speaker 3 And then you just keep pivoting back to that. But like, that didn't happen.

Speaker 3 And I do think that, like, as we were saying, he's back to a defense of his record, which at times before we criticized for being a defense of like all the economic accomplishments when people weren't sort of feeling the recovery.

Speaker 3 That would have been better than talking about AUKUS. Careful.
I know, Tommy, I'm sorry, but even the world, though, I'd love to hear what the world was.

Speaker 3 Talking about AUKUS, talking about the Pacific Bent, talking about NATO. And I'm just like, what? I don't, I just, the urgency was not there.

Speaker 3 And it made me really worried that he's going to be able to prosecute the case going forward and and make up for the debate because guess what he was behind before the debate and now he's still behind by more whatever you think about the polling even his own internal polling has him behind right now so the question is what are you going to do to win over say you don't lose any voters say you don't lose any Biden 2020 voters from the debate

Speaker 3 You're still behind. What are you going to do to win over voters who were undecided between Biden and Trump when you have that message with George Stephanopoulos?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, we went from NATO to AUKUS to getting the Japanese to spend more, I assume, on defense was the context.

Speaker 4 Like, just to level set, in July of 2020, Joe Biden was up nine points in the polling average of national polls. In July of 2023, Trump is up three points.
So that's a huge swing.

Speaker 4 If you look under the hood, it gets worse. 70% of the electorate, if not more, thinks Biden is too old.
His disapproval rating is 57% in the 538 average.

Speaker 4 There was an Emerson swing state poll that came out today that has Biden down in every single swing state.

Speaker 4 And CNN found that 75% of voters think that someone else would do better and more likely to win. So for Joe Biden, the question of whether I should step aside is a very difficult one, no doubt.

Speaker 4 But if you were stripped away the names and the emotion and just kind of looked at it based on the data, it seems like a very clear cut choice and that we'd have a better chance with someone else.

Speaker 4 But like his perspective here seems to be that, you know, I'm only going to listen to the Almighty.

Speaker 3 Well, Tommy, also,

Speaker 3 the campaign was touting the set of Bloomberg Morning Consult swing state polls that also came over to the weekend that showed Biden doing better than their last set of polls.

Speaker 3 And, you know, they're tweeting them with like, there goes the narrative, and this is just Twitter being Twitter again. And look at how great Joe Biden's doing.

Speaker 3 It's a set of polls that have him losing to Donald Trump by two, down seven in Pennsylvania,

Speaker 3 and 55% of voters in the swing states saying that he should step aside. And that's the poll that the campaign is saying proves proves that he's like on the rebound.

Speaker 3 I find it's like,

Speaker 5 so, you know, he's not delivering the message effectively. I, if you actually watch that for that first answer that you played, what you kind of see is, oh, like, I see what he's pulling from, right?

Speaker 5 Like, I see there was some argument about how his polling wasn't that impacted that the Times has him down now, but had him down before. And you see, he lied this many times.

Speaker 5 Here's what he lied about. What you see in that interview is actually a campaign that's being let down by the candidate, right? Like that's what this is about.

Speaker 5 This is a campaign that is being, and a White House that is being let down by their principal over and over and over again.

Speaker 5 I would be very comfortable having a conversation about like, how are the polls moving?

Speaker 5 Is it not as bad as it looks if the Joe Biden we were seeing was more like the Joe Biden we were seeing at the State of the Union or even a slightly worse version of that.

Speaker 5 But the Joe Biden we have seen in the past couple of outings, other than when he's on teleprompter, and even there, he's not, he's, I mean, better than this.

Speaker 5 Like that George Stephanopoulos interview was painful to watch.

Speaker 5 As we were sitting here listening to the clip, I actually was thinking, oh, should we cut this down so people don't turn off the podcast? It is ridiculous.

Speaker 3 I know, and I read it, again.

Speaker 5 It is ridiculous that we were talking about this interview in a series. Like, it was a terrible interview.

Speaker 5 He did a terrible job articulating why he's in the race, what happened at the bait, and why he's the person to beat Trump. He is doing a terrible job.

Speaker 3 I know, and I read it.

Speaker 3 I read the transcript on the plane home last night because I was just like, again, I'm just going to try to read the transcript, like put the, because, you know, his voice sounds whatever.

Speaker 3 And it just, it did not make much sense. And like, to your point about the campaign, the campaign knows what they have to do.
They know the case they have to prosecute and the message that works.

Speaker 3 You can tell from their Twitter accounts, from their press releases, and also

Speaker 3 their ads, right? Yeah. They're, you know, over the weekend, they've been talking a lot about Project 2025.
We're going to get to that in a bit.

Speaker 3 And there were a lot of people complaining, why aren't we talking about Project 2025 more?

Speaker 3 Why isn't the media covering Project 2025? Joe Biden, in front of an audience of 50 million Americans at a debate, did not once mention Project 2025.

Speaker 3 Then, in an audience in front of 8 million people with George Stephanopoulos, did not mention Project 2025. The campaign knows that what...

Speaker 3 Joe Biden has to do and what they have to do is talk about what Donald Trump means for the next four years and the danger that he represents, and then what Joe Biden will do and fight for the next four years.

Speaker 3 You didn't get any of that from any of his appearances.

Speaker 3 What you get is he calls Donald Trump a liar, which every poll shows a vast majority of Americans already believe Donald Trump is a liar, and he's still ahead in those polls. You get that,

Speaker 3 you know, Joe Biden did something amazing on the economy, which we've already said most voters do not believe in, so you've got to prosecute that case better.

Speaker 3 And then Joe Biden kept NATO together, which no one, no voters fucking care about. I'm sorry.
Or

Speaker 3 at least not the critical voters you need to win. Well, the problem with all of this is

Speaker 5 some 70% of people believe Joe Biden is too old.

Speaker 5 Donald Trump is only getting between 45 and 50% of the vote, right? What does that tell you?

Speaker 5 That means there's a sizable group of people out there that right now believe Joe Biden is too old, but they're still going to vote for him, right? There's a lot. And that tells you something.

Speaker 5 Like, Donald Trump is baked. People know who he is.

Speaker 5 They're looking for reassurance about whether or not Joe Biden can do the job and Joe Biden is not right now at all able to persuade people that he's up to do the job his outings are if in a campaign rally I would say fine like maybe assuage some people but his interviews his off-the-cuff conversations the videos that are circulating online are damning and he's got those people you know I mean a lot of people are like well I think he's I think he's old and I'm I thought the debate was awful but I'm still voting for him it's like yeah no he's he's gonna get 90 something percent of voters who he got before,

Speaker 3 like us, who were like very worried. But if it's Joe Biden, Donald Trump, they're going to pick Joe Biden.
That's not the race now, though.

Speaker 4 Right. That's why the focus on how little or how much the horse race number moved is kind of silly because it's a polarized country.

Speaker 4 And the more concerning numbers are under the hood of the questions about age and fitness to do the job.

Speaker 3 Yeah. So.
That interview happens Friday over the weekend. A bunch of news stories hit about Biden's age and health and potential decline over the last year.

Speaker 3 Olivia Nuzzy did extensive reporting in New York magazine. It was titled The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.

Speaker 3 The president's mental decline was like a dark family secret for many elite supporters.

Speaker 3 The New York Times interviewed a current senior White House official who said they worked with Biden during his presidency, vice presidency, and 2020 campaign, but now believe Biden should not seek re-election.

Speaker 3 And the quote is, the official, who insisted on anonymity in order to continue serving, said Mr.

Speaker 3 Biden had steadily showed more signs of his age in recent months, including speaking more slowly, haltingly, and quietly, as well as appearing more fatigued in private.

Speaker 3 Small group of people that could be that worked with him as vice president, 2020 campaign, and then now senior officials currently serving in the White House.

Speaker 3 Then just before we started recording, We got quite a story from the Times about how a Parkinson's disease specialist from Walter Reed Medical Center visited the White House eight times from last July to this past March, which is the end date for that batch of visitor logs.

Speaker 3 All visitor logs in the White House are made public, so if you visit the White House, your name is on the visitor log.

Speaker 3 White House spokesman Andrew Bates responded, quote, a wide variety of specialists from the Walter Reed system visit the White House complex to treat the thousands of military personnel who work on the grounds, and that Biden has only seen a neurologist once a year as part of his annual checkup, and that those exams have, quote, found no signs of Parkinson's, and he is not being treated for it.

Speaker 3 There was a medical report released in February from the president's last exam that does say that about Parkinson's and other neurological conditions.

Speaker 3 It is worth noting, though, that the statement did not flatly say that these visits were unrelated to Biden and his care.

Speaker 3 And White House press secretary Corinne Jean-Pierre refused to answer that question during the White House briefing. She cited unspecified security concerns as to why she couldn't get in.

Speaker 3 And privacy, yeah. Yeah, and privacy.
So that's a lot.

Speaker 3 What did you guys make of the Olivia Nuzzy story and the Times interview with the senior White House official? Let's start there, and then we can move on to the others, the Parkinson story.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think big picture, I sort of found the kind of voicey first-person reporting less compelling than like this anonymous official quote in the Times who worked with Joe Biden over the years and said that he shouldn't seek reelection.

Speaker 4 I mean, I think that is very damning. And I think the problem, the challenge

Speaker 4 for the Biden campaign to push back on quotes like that is that they are backstopped by the fact that Joe Biden hasn't really been campaigning, right?

Speaker 4 We had this rough debate on, when was it, a week ago now, week plus, and his schedule has been relatively light. So, you know, I don't know.

Speaker 4 And then we should get into this Parkinson's story because it consumed the way I was briefing today.

Speaker 5 Yeah. So the problem, like, I'm just being very cynical about this.
And it's like, okay,

Speaker 5 there's a, there's a, like, a feeding frenzy right now, right? There are people that have, there are reporters going to people that work there, trying to get whatever they can. How old does he seem?

Speaker 5 Does he seem too old? Like, there's a, and, and people are speaking in a way they maybe weren't speaking before. It is hard to tell in these stories the difference between,

Speaker 5 wow, Biden is really showing his age.

Speaker 5 He is slower, more lethargic, but still copus menta, still up to the task of doing the most important parts of his job, and stories that are insinuating something worse.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 5 I think part of it, right, is that if you're somebody interacting with Joe Biden once in a while, right, like you're saying, oh, that was

Speaker 5 he's, he's older than I expected, but is that, is that him on his best day? Is that him on his worst day? You know, like we went to the White House before the correspondence dinner.

Speaker 3 And made me think, and I thought of this story reading Olivia's piece because Olivia ends with her seeing Biden the night of the correspondence dinner and feeling like, oh, gosh.

Speaker 3 I mean, she, she describes it in much more vivid detail, but we saw him the night before.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And the experience of seeing him was, oh, wow, like he is, he's slower.
His speech was halting.

Speaker 5 He kind of gave remarks that were like a little bit, like, I think there was one point where he kind of went back to an anecdote, kind of did it twice.

Speaker 5 And you kind of, you know, you see people that you know, like, oh, you know, he just got back from, I think it was either the G7 or Ukraine. He'd just been on a long flight.

Speaker 5 It's, it's a Friday evening. The president has a, every Friday evening is an evening in which the president is exhausted.

Speaker 3 And you're like, okay.

Speaker 4 He's giving remarks to some random group of people. He doesn't even know why he's there.
He doesn't even know why he's there.

Speaker 3 That's every president. No, that's every president.
It was confusing. I don't know who the group was.
It was like us,

Speaker 3 some influencers, some other people.

Speaker 3 It was a weird mix of people. So I'm sure when Joe Biden comes down and has to give like 15-minute remarks, he's like, who the fuck am I talking to right now? Right.

Speaker 3 And so you're in there and you're like, Obama would have felt the same thing.

Speaker 5 Of course. And so you see this and you're like,

Speaker 5 I don't know. Like, that was pretty bad.
But

Speaker 5 what is this event? He's probably exhausted. You chalk it up to that.

Speaker 3 We were saying to each other, like, hey, maybe there's like, is there a national security thing going on? Like, he seems,

Speaker 3 I remember, that was the first moment that I was like, wow, he really seems,

Speaker 3 it doesn't seem great. I had seen him, I've told this before, but I had seen him in December of 22 when my whole family was at the White House.
He brought us up to the Oval. He was incredibly kind.

Speaker 3 He recognized Emily's mom from meeting her in 2018. That's because she's so hot.

Speaker 3 Marnie's going to, she's going to listen. Yeah, she's going to listen.

Speaker 3 And he recognized her, and he was like telling details of the Bork nomination fight to my father-in-law as a federal judge. And it was, you know, we left being like, that's Joe Biden.

Speaker 3 Tells a lot of stories, a lot of details, long-winded, but like seemed, I was like, you know what? People call him, he's with it.

Speaker 4 He's with it.

Speaker 3 The night before the correspondence dinner, I was nervous. Then I remember going home and then watching the correspondence dinner night on TV and seeing him there.

Speaker 3 And I wasn't nervous because I was like, oh, well, he seems better, right? The same thing happened when we all went, all three of us went to the fundraiser in L.A. that his dad talked about a lot.

Speaker 3 And he looked, it was really bad. It was like debate style bad.
And I remember thinking after that, like, well, the debate's in a week.

Speaker 3 Either he'll do great in the debate and we'll all be like, well, you know what?

Speaker 3 He was tired from doing two trips to Europe and that's why he was bad at the fundraiser or he'll be like this is the debate and then everyone will be talking about it and here we are yeah i mean just we all walked out of that fundraiser here in la

Speaker 3 and we're talking to each other and to people around us who are you know in politics and we're like that was chilling it was a very very very unnerving and especially like we follow this all the time emily and hannah do not were there and they do not follow it all the time and they do not see joe biden all the time and they more than us even were like what was that and now look the reason i think we're i want to it's important, I think, to tell these stories is because there is a, a growing narrative, too, that there's been this like cover-up by everyone who's ever talked to Joe Biden or like everyone who was a Biden supporter.

Speaker 3 And I think it is, as you pointed out, Levit, it's difficult when you see someone once in a while where you're like, is it showing signs of age? Is it just like a president's job is

Speaker 3 really brutal and they're traveling all the time and sometimes they're just off. And like Obama, when he was tired, his remarks would be terrible.
Like this happens all the time.

Speaker 3 And so you just don't, you don't know.

Speaker 3 It's more of a gradual thing, I think.

Speaker 5 Well, I think that's part of the issue here. And I think part of why even his ability to explain it in these interviews is so difficult.

Speaker 5 And why I think some of these stories are not dishonest, but are also a bit over-torqued in terms of like a conspiracy of silence.

Speaker 5 If the Joe Biden we were seeing in the last couple of weeks was the Joe Biden we were debating whether or not to nominate or whether there should be a challenger, I think that conversation would have been different.

Speaker 5 The facts have changed. The information has changed.

Speaker 5 Do I know how much, how often these kinds of moments where he seems like he's lost a step to the point where you worry about him being the candidate?

Speaker 5 Do I know that these weren't happening frequently in the past? I don't.

Speaker 5 But my sense of just watching this is everyone collectively has been watching a slow decline that came into stark relief when we saw him at the debate that put other moments where we saw him in better context.

Speaker 5 That doesn't mean like the reason I think we didn't sort of say, oh, we have to talk about a new nominee after we see him with Julia Roberts and George Clooney is because, think, I don't know, maybe he's having a bad day.

Speaker 5 We'll see him at the debate, right? Like, you don't know what his best and his worst is. You don't know what his median is.

Speaker 4 Well, in the LA one, he'd specifically gotten off of a plane from, I think, the G7 that day. So everyone's like, oh, he was exhausted.

Speaker 5 Same thing we said after the White House thing.

Speaker 4 This is why the White House is in such a terrible spot is because where before you might have gotten some grace in moments like that, now everyone is looking for the conspiracy because some reporters feel misled.

Speaker 4 They feel like the White House came down too hard on the Wall Street Journal story from a couple of weeks back about his age.

Speaker 4 And I guess, you know, the Olivia Nuzzy piece was like emotional and well-written as all her things are.

Speaker 4 But I thought like she made a lot out of, for example, Jill Biden giving her a look without having really any idea why Jill Biden was giving her that look.

Speaker 4 But like now the White House briefing today was consumed. top to bottom with questions about why a doctor who specializes in Parkinson's research visited the White House eight times.

Speaker 4 And there's just no way for that to be a good thing for the White House. I mean, poor Corrine Jean-Pierre was up there for 45 minutes trying to deflect questions.

Speaker 4 They said they wouldn't comment on why the doctor was there, privacy issues or something, or security. It's just, it's not going to stop the questions.

Speaker 4 And I mean, I went back and I re-watched the ABC interview. It seemed like there, Biden said he had not gotten a cognitive test.
Corrine Jean-Pierre today said he'd gotten one every year.

Speaker 4 It seems like there's some inconsistency here in the story that's being told, or at least in precision.

Speaker 3 Well, yeah, I was going to say, I couldn't tell if it's the difference between a neurological exam and a cognitive test, which I believe are two different things.

Speaker 3 But it is hard to, again, because Biden is not necessarily clear in his comments.

Speaker 3 And then also, you know, there are, of course, there are privacy concerns here and there when a doctor visits and you don't want to start.

Speaker 3 But like at this point, it's going to be, like you said, it's going to be very hard to just keep saying, we have a report, medical report from February and that's it, and that's all we're doing.

Speaker 3 It's just, it's a hard thing to do.

Speaker 5 I watched that entire briefing, and I actually, it was actually kind of very difficult to understand what the name is in a public log. The question is, did this person see the president?

Speaker 5 And then the answer is, oh, there are privacy concerns because this doctor could see other people at the White House. And maybe there's a way of not understanding it.

Speaker 5 I also don't put it on the press secretary because this feels like an incredibly impossible position that Joe Biden has put everyone around him in.

Speaker 5 But the issue here is those questions won't stop. Because Joe, first of all, it's wild to me that Joe Biden isn't doing everything he can.

Speaker 5 You know, he's writing letters to members of Congress about how the stakes are total. He's telling Morning Joe, the stakes are the stakes, the stakes.
Joe Biden, we can't let die.

Speaker 5 It's so the stakes, the stakes, the stakes. But then, okay, well, then get out there more, right? Like nobody would give a shit.

Speaker 5 about when his last neurological assessment was if he had spent three days mixing it up with reporters, shaking hands with voters, talking to journalists, being the Joe Biden of three or four years ago who would certainly be doing that right now.

Speaker 5 So he can't, he's not out there. He's saying, oh, the cognitive test is me being out there, but he's not out there.
They're getting these confusing answers about what tests he is getting.

Speaker 5 It is as if their response is designed to continue this morass, like to keep us trapped in it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's tough. And I get it.
Like, say they have nothing to hide on this, right?

Speaker 3 The, the reason they're probably avoiding answering more questions aside from whatever real privacy and health concerns there are and guidelines and rules there are is like if they say, sure, he'll take another test, then it's like they're thinking, then we lose more news cycles focusing, waiting.

Speaker 4 they won't give an inch.

Speaker 3 They don't want to give an inch. That's exactly right.

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Speaker 3 From a campaign perspective, Biden's strategy seems to be punching back hard at critics who want him to step aside and making appearances with his strongest supporters.

Speaker 3 He spoke at a black church in Philadelphia this weekend and did events with John Fetterman and Governor Josh Shapiro.

Speaker 3 Biden's also trying to rally support among older black Democrats, consistently his best demographic group in all the polling.

Speaker 3 Jonathan Martin reported in Politico this morning that he's counting on his relationships with unions and the black political establishment to be a kind of firewall against calls for him to drop out.

Speaker 3 Jay Mart reports that Congresswoman Maxine Waters told a gathering of black voters in New Orleans over the weekend that the nominee will be Joe Biden, full stop, and that she told other Congressional Black Caucus members, particularly the younger ones, in a Friday conference call that they need to get in line behind Biden.

Speaker 3 Today, the CBC chairman, Congressman Steve Horsford, was one of the members issuing statements of support for Biden.

Speaker 3 As we mentioned, Biden also sent that letter to all congressional Democrats and then took a page out of the Trump calling into Fox and Friends playbook by calling into his favorite morning show, Morning Joe.

Speaker 3 Let's listen to how that went.

Speaker 18 We're not going anywhere. I am not going anywhere.
I wouldn't be running if I didn't absolutely believe that I am the best candidate to beat Donald Trump in 2024.

Speaker 18 Who else do you think could step in here and do this?

Speaker 19 I expanded NATO.

Speaker 18 I solidified NATO. Ask your brother about it.
Remember, all this talk about how I don't have the black support? Come on, give me a break.

Speaker 19 Come with me. Watch.
Watch.

Speaker 18 I'm getting so frustrated by the elites. Now, I'm not talking about you guys, but about the elites in the party who they know so much more.

Speaker 20 Said, well, as long as I did the best I could do,

Speaker 20 that's the most important thing. That's caused Democrats concerned who believe

Speaker 20 that losing is not an option. What would you say to those who are concerned by that answer?

Speaker 19 It's not an option. And I've not lost.
I haven't lost.

Speaker 18 I beat them last time. I'll beat him this time.

Speaker 20 But any of these guys don't think I should run against me.

Speaker 19 Go ahead,

Speaker 19 announce for president.

Speaker 18 Challenge me at the convention.

Speaker 5 I thought AI Joe Biden did a great job in that.

Speaker 5 I think that I think whoever was on those

Speaker 5 buttons, like the zoo 100, did a pretty good job.

Speaker 3 What do you guys think?

Speaker 3 We can get to the morning Joe of it all in a second, but what do you guys think about the overall strategy of sort of using his closest supporters as a firewall and dismissing his critics as a bunch of elites?

Speaker 4 Nothing says I don't care about elite opinion like a phoner at the morning joe.

Speaker 3 You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 It's basically like a mainline. It's a Beltway's brain.
I think, like, on the one hand, I'm sympathetic to like Joe Biden cannot show any daylight on whether or not he's dropping out or it's over.

Speaker 4 Right. Right.
So they're 100% in until they're not. But I do think that a lot of the pushback has been inaccurate and some of it has felt pretty cynical.

Speaker 4 The inaccurate part is the idea that only people in Washington care about his age or his ability to do the job for former years. The polling shows the opposite.

Speaker 4 This is an issue with every voter in all demographics, age, race, gender. Democrats, majorities of Democrats in some of these polls have concerns about his age.

Speaker 4 And sometimes Joe Biden kind of is a bit of a polling truther when he's confronted with this reality and pushes back on polls and sort of cites ones that he says his internals are better.

Speaker 4 And it's just, it's, it's not accurate.

Speaker 4 And then the cynical part is the suggestion that it's somehow racist to tell Joe Biden to step down or disrespectful to black voters when, you know, the most likely person to come after him would be Kamala Harris.

Speaker 4 I mean, I find that the cognitive dissonance there to make that argument is hard to wrap your head around.

Speaker 3 I laughed at first when I read it because I was like,

Speaker 3 What?

Speaker 4 I just think also, but like what I resent is the attempt to silence the conversation about whether he should drop out by saying, shut up.

Speaker 4 You could silence us by doing a one-hour press conference at a bunch of campaign events and knocking the cover off the ball, and then I'll shut the fuck up. That's how I'll shut up.

Speaker 4 But like, the idea that people shouldn't have this conversation given what we all know the stakes are in the selection, I find offensive.

Speaker 3 If I thought that Joe Biden attacking elites, attacking media critics, attacking whatever it is, if I thought that was an effective strategy to beat Donald Trump, I'd be like, go for it, man.

Speaker 3 Call us whatever the fuck you want. I don't care.
Hit us every single event.

Speaker 3 Make it part of the stem speech. All the elite, like, it's my kink.
It's not, I don't, I don't feel hurt.

Speaker 3 Who cares? You know, it is, but it's coming from the voters. The concerns are coming from the voters.
And look, it's not just post-debate either. Like, let's, I just want to...
Pre-debate.

Speaker 3 Let's talk about where we were before the debate. The polls right before the debate, right? And there was the New York Times Sienna poll, but this was all the polling averages, right?

Speaker 3 Think of where we were. Donald Trump was convicted on May 31st.
For a month, for several weeks. Straight, we had non-stop coverage of Donald Trump, Donald Trump in courtroom.

Speaker 3 Donald Trump is a conviction. The Biden campaign is out with tens of millions of dollars of ads in the swing states, mainly on their own.
The Trump campaign was not spending in the swing states.

Speaker 3 So you got the Biden campaign. Joe Biden is out there campaigning.
He's campaigning. Donald Trump's a convicted felon.
Everyone's talking about it.

Speaker 3 All the press that everyone's, that a lot of people are complaining about now that's not covering Trump, they're all covering Trump for a whole month.

Speaker 3 And then the polls right before the debate show, and the New York Times poll showed Trump 48, Biden 42. They asked, do you think Biden should be replaced as nominee? 64% of all voters said yes.

Speaker 3 55% of black voters, 66% of Hispanic voters, 48% of Biden voters, people who said they were supporting Biden. And then, do you think Biden's too old to be an effective president?

Speaker 3 69% of all voters, 62% of black voters, 68% of Hispanic voters, 55% of Biden voters. Now, that's the New York Times poll.
Maybe that was an outlier. There are similar numbers in every single poll.

Speaker 3 And we know from now from post-debate that the campaign's internal polling, their own polling, even though they think that polling was broken, they do a lot of internal polling. And guess what?

Speaker 3 They don't think it's broken broken when you talk to them. Their internal polling had the race closer, but still

Speaker 3 extremely close, if not behind, a little bit in the battleground state.

Speaker 5 So, like, what people are more worried about Joe Biden's unfitness because of age than they are Donald Trump's lack of fitness due to his criminality and abuses.

Speaker 5 That is such a damning fact about where the electorate is, not where the elites are. And this idea, even just like this,

Speaker 5 this is not

Speaker 5 what they're not a strategy to persuade. It's a strategy to embarrass people into silence.
That letter was about provoking cowardice.

Speaker 5 It was about provoking cowardice on the part of House Democrats to let them know,

Speaker 5 don't gut out there too far on that tree branch. We're going to saw it off.

Speaker 5 So as much as you're texting each other and talking to each other and telling reporters anonymously that you're terrified of Joe Biden as the nominee, not just because of what it means for Trump to be president, but because you're afraid of the down ballot impacts for the Senate and the House, as much as your honesty in private is telling you that Joe Biden shouldn't be the nominee, keep your mouth shut

Speaker 5 because I'm not going anywhere and it will only hurt you.

Speaker 3 I've heard people make two arguments as to why critics should shut up right now. One is it's pointless because Joe Biden is the one making the decision and Joe Biden has already said he's in it.

Speaker 3 So why are we wasting our time? And the second is the criticism is hurting him more. It wasn't the the debate as much.
It's the criticism that's hurting him.

Speaker 3 The first one, I would say, like he's still not the nominee. He still has not been nominated.
He could still make the decision.

Speaker 3 We are running out of time for sure, but in the next couple of weeks, he could still make the decision to step down. That decision could be influenced by the people around him.

Speaker 3 If the people around him are taking the temperature of the voters and swing, again, forget the elites, forget the pundits, look at the voters, look at the polls.

Speaker 3 And if people around him on his campaign team see the numbers really drop or they have real concerns that they're hearing from Democratic Senate campaigns, House campaigns, that not only could Joe Biden lose, but those Democratic Senate and House candidates could lose.

Speaker 3 Yeah, then maybe they'll have another conversation with Joe Biden before the convention. So I don't think it is useless.
The second one that is hurting is just, so our

Speaker 3 BSG polling, which is Joel Benenson's polling group, Mike Kulishek, who is a pollster there, worked with us on wilderness stuff, he did a set of polls before the debate and a set of polls after the debate.

Speaker 3 And he said that we could share this. So voters who watch the debate, who watch the debate, prefer Trump over Biden 51 to 46.

Speaker 3 Voters who did not watch the debate are split 43% for Biden, 40% for Trump. And voters who just heard about the debate also favor Biden over Trump by 53-45, an even bigger margin.

Speaker 3 So the idea that it was the criticism and reaction and press narrative after the debate is not not borne out by the polling. It was the people who watched the debate in its entirety.

Speaker 3 Those were the people who moved against Joe Biden, even if it wasn't by a huge margin, but they did.

Speaker 5 So the one thing I also, I feel like, I think one reason this has been such a kind of heartbreaking and anxiety-provoking experience is that we all feel like two things are happening at once, which is on the one hand, it's like this is just Joe Biden's decision.

Speaker 5 It's entirely up to Joe Biden. Whatever happens is, is up to Joe Biden.
But on the other hand, the feeling like

Speaker 3 that's the problem.

Speaker 5 Yeah, this is that his decision has great effect on all of our lives and we don't want to feel powerless in this process. And so I do think, by the way, like

Speaker 5 members of Congress are going to be important in this because

Speaker 5 if a bunch of House Democrats and a bunch of senators start saying that they want Joe Biden to step aside, it'll be harder for Joe Biden to ignore that.

Speaker 4 That will move him.

Speaker 5 So if you think that Joe Biden should not be the nominee and you want your member of Congress to represent you in that fight, you should call them.

Speaker 5 And by the way, if you think that all of this is insane and that we're doing more harm than good than having this conversation.

Speaker 3 So angry with us, then go call them. Call too.

Speaker 5 Yeah. But

Speaker 5 I really think it is like

Speaker 5 only Joe Biden can make the decision. Yes, but he's going to make that decision in the world as he finds it.
And I think it is incumbent upon all of us to remember that like

Speaker 5 we should act as if we have agency in this fight and remind our members of Congress that they may be right now worried about the fallback if Joe Biden is the nominee, but they should also worry about their voters who are watching and who care about what happens in this election and that none of us is going to forget what members of Congress did when all of them are privately wringing their hands and then telling reporters on background that think Joe Biden should step aside while putting out dumb statements that say, Joe Biden had our back, so we got to have his back, even though you don't believe a word of it.

Speaker 3 It's a very big coalition, a very broad coalition that defeated Donald Trump in 2020. People who are fans of AOC and Bernie Sanders all the way to Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney.
That's a big coalition.

Speaker 3 And all those people want Donald Trump to lose. And defeating Donald Trump is the number one most important priority.
And everyone shares that priority.

Speaker 3 But if that's our number one priority, then we have to be... strategic and smart about the best way to do it.

Speaker 3 You said this

Speaker 3 on the last pod, which is like loyalty.

Speaker 3 What is loyalty? Loyalty is for like personal relationships and friendships. Loyalty is not for politics.

Speaker 3 Loyalty, like, that's aside. Loyalty, identity, record.
It's about who can win. That's it.
That's the only thing that matters right now.

Speaker 4 I just, one thing I just want to say about this Morning Joe interview, it was a good idea to have done a week and a half ago. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 This is the kind of thing you do to kind of staunch the bleeding among elite opinion like the day after a debate that was that bad. And you know what?

Speaker 4 Joe Biden really, really cares about elite opinion. He watches Morning Joe.
He reads Tom Friedman. He reads the New York Times.

Speaker 3 Like that stuff stuff matters to him.

Speaker 4 He doesn't listen to this dumb bullshit that we're doing right now, but that's fine.

Speaker 3 That's okay. He's 81.
But, like, again,

Speaker 4 on the interview itself, like, it was not, like, there were times when Biden was like reading from Talking Points, and even that part wasn't coming out crisply.

Speaker 4 You know, Mika said to him, How can you ensure you won't have another night like you had at the debate? And his response was, Look at my career. I have not had many nights like that.

Speaker 4 And it's like, that's not how aging works. You know, so like, I just,

Speaker 4 his proof point is, like, watch me, you know, if someone underestimated neurologically, you know, I've been out campaigning, everything's fine.

Speaker 3 He's barely been campaigning.

Speaker 5 Can I also, this, this, the second piece of this, which is like, oh, this is causing harm. You're doing harm because Joe Biden's not going to go anywhere.
You're doing harm.

Speaker 5 I think like two points about this, because people, people have been really antagonizing the media about this.

Speaker 5 You're right. The Times, these op-ed pages, they are talking about Joe Biden in a way they didn't bother doing about Trump.

Speaker 5 That is because, A, they treat Democrats like protagonists because they believe that Democrats are subject to pressure and have like a fundamental respect for democracy and free inquiry.

Speaker 5 So yes, you're right. They believe that they will be taken seriously.
And B,

Speaker 5 they believe Joe Biden is decent, that Joe Biden is ultimately guided by decency, that this argument is worth having, that we're having this argument, even if it is ultimately up to Joe Biden, was we believe Joe Biden wants to do what's best for the country.

Speaker 5 And that I don't think it has anything to do with it.

Speaker 3 They're doing their job. They're covering a story.
That's right.

Speaker 4 Mental fitness of the president matters. It's not about decency.
It's not about both sidesism. Like, I see liberals out there being like, we need to go hard, the fucking media.

Speaker 4 They should be doing Project 2020. No, this is a story that should be covered.

Speaker 5 I'm talking about the op-eds calling for him to withdraw.

Speaker 5 The criticism, the idea that, oh, they're writing op-eds about Biden withdrawing, but they never called on Donald Trump to withdraw.

Speaker 5 I'm just, I think that there's a, that, that, like, that the, the media does focus on Democrats and treats Democrats like they have agency and responsibility in a way they don't do for Republicans.

Speaker 3 That's all. They fucked up royally in 2016.
They kicked Donald's. They have been kicking Donald Trump's ass this cycle.

Speaker 3 I mean, it was, we had non-stop coverage of the motorcade leaving Mar-a-Lago to the court. I mean, what are we talking about, right? Like, and also, why do we think they're doing this now?

Speaker 3 Because Joe Biden and his team took the biggest risk they could have possibly taken by asking for a debate in June when they could have waited and done one in the fall or got out of it altogether, maybe.

Speaker 3 And they took this big risk. And then in front of 15 million people, Joe Biden gave the worst debate performance maybe in presidential history.

Speaker 3 And like the news media is going to be like, one bad night, let's move on to Project 2025. That's fucking nuts.

Speaker 5 But this is the point, though. Let's say the media did that.
Let's say we all shut the fuck up and moved on and stopped talking, did whatever, did what the fucking internet

Speaker 5 Delaware crossers wanted us to do and just get on the boat and shut the fuck up. You think the right wing is going away?

Speaker 5 Do you think that the TikTok videos of Joe Biden looking too old that already it had a huge impact is going away?

Speaker 5 Do you have any idea what this fucking Republican convention is going to be like of the TV?

Speaker 3 Doctors parading in front of it. They've barely spent any money on their ads.

Speaker 3 The Trump campaign and the IRNC have barely spent their budget.

Speaker 5 One of the lessons of the last decade is you don't, the right-wing media is going to do what they're going to do. We need to talk about this now because that's coming, regardless of what we say now.

Speaker 5 Age will be the defining issue if Joe Biden is the nominee, even if we all fall in line, which we will do.

Speaker 4 You're yelling at like four Twitter users.

Speaker 3 Well, no, I'm not because.

Speaker 4 Having a nice conversation.

Speaker 3 You're right. But one did have a back right now.

Speaker 3 Unbelievable.

Speaker 3 One of the frames we obviously keep hearing from Biden is that he's the only candidate who can beat Donald Trump. Of course, the only person who can hold NATO together.

Speaker 3 The other most critical part of this election. That's it.
One person can hold NATO together.

Speaker 5 By the way, the other thing too is like, oh,

Speaker 5 it's somehow

Speaker 5 you're not being respectful of the voters. When Joe Biden tells Morning Joe and Mika that who else could do this job, slap in the face your vice president.

Speaker 3 Great segue. That was my next sentence.
Great.

Speaker 3 So it does

Speaker 3 matter. All of this raises some questions about his views and his campaign's views on the very qualified vice president he chose.
Kamala Harris.

Speaker 3 Most Democratic officials believe that if Biden does change his mind at this point and step aside, which again, running out of time, Harris as nominee would be the most likely possibility, if not the only possibility.

Speaker 3 Others have suggested various open convention scenarios. I would suggest Ezra Klein wrote a great piece about Jim Clyburn's sort of one-off comments last week.

Speaker 3 Every once in a while, Clyburn just says something else. It's like a quick comment.
You're like, whoa, that was kind of a big deal. At some point, Clyburn said that if

Speaker 3 Biden stepped aside, Democrats could hold a, quote, mini-primary.

Speaker 3 James Carville wrote in the New York Times today, he suggested suggested a series of town halls hosted by Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, where the two former presidents would apparently also choose the participants and candidates, possibly with the help of the country's Democratic governors.

Speaker 5 So here's how those this is like a draft. So basically,

Speaker 5 those are two-hour town halls.

Speaker 5 And after Barack Obama and Bill Clinton finish their opening remarks, each candidate will have between two and three minutes to speak. And it'll be an incredible event.

Speaker 3 It'll be an incredible event.

Speaker 5 We'll hear about energy policy from Clinton for about 2030. Can you imagine?

Speaker 3 And there's just a bench and it's like Whitmer and Shapiro and Kamala Harris. They're all just sitting there and like, is they going to stop yet?

Speaker 3 That's all the time we have.

Speaker 4 All the mini-primary proposals would benefit from less detail.

Speaker 3 Well, and then spell it out less. But here's the best one, then.

Speaker 3 A semaphore reported on a memo floating around from a few Democrats who've proposed a, quote, blitz primary that would involve weekly forums moderated by cultural icons like Michelle Obama, Oprah, and Taylor Swift.

Speaker 3 Sure. No bad ideas in a brainstorm.

Speaker 5 How good? Taylor Swiss was in Budapest getting a shiver. She doesn't really know why.
She's like, I feel like my name was mentioned in something I don't want to be involved in.

Speaker 3 It does seem like, as of this recording, at least we are quite far from a scenario where Biden steps down.

Speaker 3 But if he changes his mind, what are your thoughts on the pros and cons of either anointing Harris the nominee or holding some version of an open convention primary that does not involve Bill Clinton and Taylor Swift?

Speaker 4 I mean, I think the mini primary idea is a great one.

Speaker 4 I realize it could be chaotic, but I also think it would be really interesting and people would tune in and maybe it wouldn't just be like hardcore Democrats that watch the conventions for once.

Speaker 4 And I, you know, some people worry that it would get ugly.

Speaker 3 I kind of doubt that it would.

Speaker 4 There's not that much time. You're appealing to like 4,000 delegates who probably like all the candidates in the mini primary and they will get turned off if you're super mean.

Speaker 4 It would allow for some vetting of candidates' backgrounds in this compressed period of time. Not enough, but hopefully enough to like expose any real big problems.
Is it risky?

Speaker 4 Yes, but I think that candidates and parties benefit from competition and throwing punches and taking punches. Like think about Obama.

Speaker 4 He was a way better candidate after slugging it out with Hillary Clinton for months and months than he was before.

Speaker 4 And it was a very good thing for us that the Reverend Wright story came out early and not in October before the election. So

Speaker 4 the elephant in the room is obviously the vice president and sort of like what she is owed in this moment as next up if Biden were to resign as president.

Speaker 4 But I think like for her, the optics of competing and winning the nomination is really good. Even in a weird like ad hoc process, it's better than the party seeming to dictate an outcome.

Speaker 3 I don't think people will like that.

Speaker 3 I worry a lot about it seeming like the party dictates an outcome, especially after the party's nominee steps aside because of, you know, and then there's all these stories out there and has anyone been hiding age stuff?

Speaker 3 So already people are going to start feeling distrustful, right?

Speaker 3 And if you then, and I think this is about Kamala Harris, I think this if someone came out and said, here's our, here's our Governor Whitmer Josh Shapiro ticket.

Speaker 3 It's here for you and we're giving it to you, right? I'd feel the same way. Like, I don't think at this point that the party itself, senior leaders can just come out and say, here is the person.

Speaker 3 I think that Kamala Harris would be the overwhelming favorite in this scenario, but I think she would emerge as a stronger candidate in the general if, like Tommy said, there are a series of town halls, interviews, debates with some of the other potential candidates.

Speaker 3 And I think that...

Speaker 3 That would also sort of blunt a very easy line of attack from Trump and the Republicans that like the cabal got together that was propping up Joe Biden and then they just gave us this person.

Speaker 3 And like, you know what?

Speaker 3 Again, debating makes you stronger and the whole, everyone just assumes the chaos and division.

Speaker 3 If this happens, if Joe Biden steps aside, the Democratic Party will have taken the biggest gamble ever this close to the election where the stakes are total.

Speaker 3 And I think once a nominee is chosen, Talk about people getting in line. Everyone is going to be like on their best behavior.

Speaker 3 There are very few ideological fissures in the potential candidates that we could see at this point. We're not going to have like ideological divisions like we've had in the past.

Speaker 3 People are going to be like, I'm on board. You're already seeing like the Bernie Bros and the K-Hive and the Never Trumpers all get together.

Speaker 5 It's all raised up. And honestly, it's beautiful.

Speaker 3 It's beautiful.

Speaker 4 Think about how dumb the ideological divisions of 2020 were. It was like, how fast are we going to implement Medicare for all? And what fantasy reality are we going to have?

Speaker 3 Are we really fighting about?

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 those kind of conversations are never going to happen. So, yeah,

Speaker 5 I do think that obviously the best way Kamala Harris could be the nominee is to be the nominee after some kind of an open process. I am not,

Speaker 5 like, I think what you're saying makes sense.

Speaker 5 But if you told me that the way this shakes out is that the Monday after the Republican convention, Joe Biden calls a press conference and says, I've decided to step aside and I'm throwing my support behind my vice president.

Speaker 5 I always said I would pass the torch. Voters across the country voted for our ticket.
I'm going to respect the will of the voters.

Speaker 5 I would be 100% fine with it. And by the way, like it isn't people in a background choosing because the Democratic primaries unfolded and she was going to be on the ticket.

Speaker 5 So it's like, there's, there's, and there's an argument made that too, like, the money goes to her. So like that, that the, that the kind of she is the vice president.

Speaker 5 It is, it is, it is rightful that given the fact that there can't be a primary, the primary already took place and selected her as the backup.

Speaker 5 And if that is the way it goes, I will be completely happy with that.

Speaker 5 I am not persuaded that the risk of the mess that could happen in the weeks before the convention is better than that moment, which I think will be just just as interesting and exciting to the press for the three weeks before we get to the convention.

Speaker 3 I just start with the same principle that we're applying to this whole conversation about Biden, right? Which is winning is all that matters right now.

Speaker 3 Beating Donald Trump is the only thing that matters. And we have to put forward the candidate in the Democratic Party who has the very best chance of beating Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 Are we going to know who that candidate is with certainty? Absolutely not. You can never know for certain.
You're never going to have the data that gives certainty. But data can help.

Speaker 3 Polling can help. Interviews can help.
Debates can help. Like that can give delegates information that they wouldn't otherwise have.

Speaker 3 And I do think it would help to make at least an educated guess about what's going to happen.

Speaker 5 Again, I'm not saying this with any confidence whatsoever. Like I, I am, my, my concern with this whole idea is

Speaker 5 it may not be possible in that short span of time to get an amount of information big enough. Basically, what we're trying to figure out is: what are your liabilities? You know, are you our Jeb Bush?

Speaker 5 Are you our Ron DeSantis? Are you our Wes Clark?

Speaker 3 Whatever.

Speaker 5 And given that, I don't, I don't know that four weeks is enough time to get that. And Kamala Harris, like, you know, there are goofy clips of Kamala Harris.

Speaker 5 Like, we kind of know Kamala Harris's liabilities right now. We could think through what those are.
She has been vetted on the national stage. She's been attacked on the national stage.

Speaker 5 We know what they'll try with her. We know what they've said.
So I like,

Speaker 5 I am, I am.

Speaker 4 I mean, the the counterpoint to that is that her 2020 race went very badly. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 You know, so I mean, I'm not, I look, again, I would be thrilled if she were the nominee. I'm just saying, like, we should talk about the downsides.
Like, her polling is not great.

Speaker 4 Her disapproval is at 51% in the 538 average.

Speaker 4 You know, there's, you talk to people who do a lot of focus groups. They say swing voters don't like Joe Biden and they also don't like her.
She might get tagged with some of the policy

Speaker 5 comments.

Speaker 4 Gaza, immigration, inflation. She could get pulled into recriminations about whether she knew of this, you know, allegations of an effort to cover up about Joe Biden's age.

Speaker 4 I'm just saying, like, there are downside risks. I agree she is the most vetted because she has been the vice president.

Speaker 4 There's also benefits, which is a lot of smart people think that she would be able to use all of the Biden campaign's money and infrastructure.

Speaker 4 I don't totally get how the campaign finance system works, but it sounds like it would be more.

Speaker 3 plug-and-play.

Speaker 4 You know, women and black voters are the base of the Democratic Party. The hope would be that she would energize those voters.

Speaker 4 She's been very effective prosecuting the case on abortion, in the Dobbs opinion.

Speaker 3 So there's a lot of upsides to Kamala's. And also, she starts as the frontrunner in this process.

Speaker 3 And I think that in some ways that gives her a clean slate to say, yeah, you know, you saw these clips last couple of years, whatever. I'm going to prosecute the case against Donald Trump.

Speaker 3 She was at the Essence Fest. She was great.

Speaker 3 She was great in a very tough situation the night after the debate in those interviews, right?

Speaker 3 We saw her at moments in the 2020 campaign, which you're right did not go well, but like on the debate stage where she, you know, gave it to Joe Biden pretty good, like she, she definitely has the capacity.

Speaker 3 I think it would, like I said, I think it would benefit her to go through the process. Yeah,

Speaker 5 I think that we were all so shell-shocked from the debate itself that I feel like we saw her interview with, I can't remember if CNN or MSNBC. I think she did both right after.

Speaker 5 It was hard to see it outside of the context of Joe Biden, but going back and watching a clip of her talking about abortion and trying to make the case about Donald Trump, it was excellent.

Speaker 5 One other just point about this, too, is, look, again, an open process may be the best thing. I actually could be, I probably have a different opinion tomorrow.

Speaker 3 But also, like,

Speaker 5 you know, every day Joe Biden's out there, he's being like, no, no, I'm telling you, I still got my fastball. I'm like, throw it.
He's like, I'll throw it tomorrow.

Speaker 5 He's like, no, no, I'm still on my fastball. You'll see.
You'll see.

Speaker 5 And it's like another couple of weeks of Democrats talking amongst ourselves instead of one person out there day after day after day articulating the case against Donald Trump, which as Adam Schiff pointed out is excellent.

Speaker 5 Yeah.

Speaker 3 It should be worth it.

Speaker 4 It's 90% of the mini primary, though. It would be like 90% attacks on Trump, 10% about yourself and your bio and what you do.

Speaker 3 That's true. That's true.

Speaker 4 By the way, Hakeem Jeffries and AOC both are coming out in support of Biden as we've been recording this.

Speaker 4 Interesting. I'm trying to see where the party's going.

Speaker 5 Are they Biden is the nominee statements or are they full-throated? You know what I mean? There's like these categories of statements now. There's the like...

Speaker 4 Hakeem Jeffries says, I support President Biden and the Democratic ticket. My position has not changed.

Speaker 4 AOC is he's a nominee. I'm making sure that I support him, and I'm focused on making sure that we win in November.

Speaker 3 Yeah, those are still in the,

Speaker 3 I don't know, it's tough, some of these statements. I think everyone's just trying to figure it out.

Speaker 3 Well, we're going to find out more about what's going on in Congress because right after this, Lovett is going to talk to California Congressman Rocana.

Speaker 3 But before we do get to that conversation, guess what, guys? What?

Speaker 3 Democracy or Else is officially number one on the New York Times bestseller list, which means all of you who bought the book and helped it get there also contributed to Vote Save America.

Speaker 3 That's a lot of money to Vote Save America.

Speaker 3 And that means that a lot of campaigns, grassroots organizations that are going to help elect Democrats up and down the ticket and register voters in 2024 are going to get more money.

Speaker 5 So good for you guys. And even more importantly, for the rest of our lives, we get to say we're number one New York Times bestsellers.

Speaker 5 I know you are. I saw you try to get it.

Speaker 3 I'll just steer around it. Whatever.

Speaker 4 Thank you for enduring these housekeeping updates. If you didn't buy the book, if you did, thanks for buying the book as well.

Speaker 3 Also, good news, guys. The Democracy Rails tour is headed to the Orpheum Theater in Madison, Wisconsin on Friday, July 19th, day after Trump's speech at the Republican convention.

Speaker 3 We'll probably have some stuff to talk about. And on the 20th, Love It or Leave It will also be in Madison at the Barrymore Theater.

Speaker 3 It's been great to see all of you out there these last couple of weeks. You've been fantastic.
The Boston show is like one of my favorite shows, especially for like a bleak day

Speaker 3 after the debate. It was one of the most fun shows.

Speaker 5 It was really,

Speaker 5 we were exhausted. We had watched the debate the night before, and it really was one of the best live shows we've ever done.

Speaker 5 And I think like it was nice being with everybody when the news was so bleak because all we could do was gallus humor. It was nice.

Speaker 3 Head to cricket.com slash friends to grab tickets. And when we come back, Rokana.

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Speaker 5 So yeah, no, I turn on my phone. And the first thing I see is a message from you telling me that Trump was convicted.
By the way,

Speaker 5 you, like, whoever's sending texts for you has like hacked the mainframe.

Speaker 5 And I'm just going to tell you, I'm reporting, you've been reported as junk from so many different numbers and you're still in my fucking inbox.

Speaker 3 I don't know what to do. I can't get rid of you.
I am glad I had a chance to bring this up.

Speaker 3 So many texts.

Speaker 5 It's unbelievable. Yeah.
Yeah. Laugh all you want.

Speaker 5 Well, it's good to see you, Congressman. Thank you for taking the time.
I think we can jump in. Are we good? All right.
If you're ready, I'm ready.

Speaker 5 Joining us now needs no introduction it's congressman ro conas thank you so much for making the time there's a lot happening and it'd be very helpful to have your perspective so after joe biden's debate performance uh you uh uh posted rocky wasn't the most eloquent in speech but he was a fighter his character conveyed his eloquence our message biden's character is his eloquence and you know that rocky gets beaten half to death and loses right i do i i i grew up outside philadelphia so i watched too many Rocky movies.

Speaker 22 The Creed ones are even better.

Speaker 5 So jokes aside, I'm curious what your reaction was to the George Stephanopoulos interview, but when the American people are very clearly concerned, in part because of how Joe Biden is unable to convey his message, if your character is your eloquence, how do you dissuade people of their concerns about Joe Biden's age?

Speaker 22 Well, first of all, you acknowledge that the concerns are valid. You don't go on calling people bedwetters for raising concerns that many Americans feel.

Speaker 22 And by the way, it's not just rich donors, it's activists, it's grassroots folks, it's ordinary people in coffee shops. So this idea that we're going to

Speaker 22 attack our own supporters is not effective. The other thing you don't do is go to war with the press.
I mean, Napoleon once said that

Speaker 22 four hostile newspapers were a bigger threat than a thousand people with bayonets. And I know

Speaker 22 John recently has been complimentary to the Biden campaign team, but whoever made the decision to go to war with the New York Times is malpractice, should be fired.

Speaker 22 I mean, who goes to war with the New York Times? Go do an interview. Who goes to war with the Washington Post? Like, have the humility to engage the press.

Speaker 22 Don't go to war with the pod save guys either. Not a smart strategy.
So all of this, I think, is a correction that the Biden campaign needs, which is to say, let's have an honest conversation.

Speaker 22 I understand it. I am not as articulate as I used to be.
I have diminished in certain ways as anyone would when you're aging, but I still have the values. I still have the judgment.
I have the wisdom.

Speaker 22 And this is why I'm running. And let's make the contrast to Donald Trump.

Speaker 5 So President Biden sent a letter to you and your colleagues today, basically explaining his position.

Speaker 5 In that letter, he says, any weakening of resolve or lack of clarity about the task ahead only helps Trump and hurts us. It's time to come together and move forward as a unified party.

Speaker 5 Now, I saw that you posted the comments from former Attorney General Eric Holder, who said that it's actually appropriate for Democrats to be having this discussion.

Speaker 5 So I take it, based on what you're saying here and what you said there, that you disagree

Speaker 5 with that part of the letter.

Speaker 22 I disagree with the tone. I mean, I do think it's part important to unify, but you don't unify by suppressing conversation.
You don't unify by suppressing dissent.

Speaker 22 You unify by acknowledging people's concerns,

Speaker 22 being vulnerable and acknowledging the truth, and then offering a way forward. It's your job to inspire unity, not to demand it.

Speaker 22 And when you look at great leaders in our history, whether that's Abraham Lincoln through the force argument or Barack Obama, they didn't say, oh, come on, unify around me because I'm the nominee.

Speaker 22 They said, let me persuade you. Let me inspire you to unify.
And so I don't think actually it's going to unify the party by

Speaker 22 being over the top in demanding something.

Speaker 5 Did you see the George Stephen Abbles interview?

Speaker 22 I did.

Speaker 5 And you think that that performance is one that would help Joe Biden assuage people's concerns?

Speaker 22 I thought the Morning Joe interview was better towards that. I thought the Stephanopoulos interview, he didn't have any clear

Speaker 22 flubs, but I also thought there were answers that weren't that great that people have talked about. I mean, saying that I, you know, I'll just give it my try and I'll be okay.

Speaker 22 I know what he was trying to get at. You know, you do your duty, we can't control larger things in life, but it came off as he wasn't fully in the fight.
There were other answers that were meandering.

Speaker 22 And so it wasn't one of his best interviews. But I don't think that it was disqualifying, that interview.
And I think he's got to do more of it.

Speaker 5 Have you talked to Joe Biden directly since the debate? Have you heard from him about what happened?

Speaker 22 I have not. I have not tried to reach him.
And I came out pretty early on saying that it's his decision. He, you know, one part I did agree with on the letter is he won the votes.
We have a process.

Speaker 22 We have a primary process.

Speaker 22 He is the nominee unless he says otherwise. And I made that pretty clear to senior people around him.
So he's got their 218 people in our House caucus. There are other calls probably

Speaker 5 more worth his time. You're not the problem right now.

Speaker 5 So, you know, you, I have to say, I've been quoting you for a long time because of something you actually told me on Love It or Leave It about a year ago.

Speaker 5 Can we play that clip, please?

Speaker 23 So, yes, President Biden is old.

Speaker 23 Like, no one is going to, you can't have anyone assume the presidency, even Democratic politicians we've had, and not have something that you could say, well, I wish he was 65.

Speaker 24 Sure, I wish he was 65.

Speaker 23 But look at what he has achieved. He has extraordinary experience.
He has done a lot. He can win in the Midwest, and I think he deserves a second term.

Speaker 23 By the way, you know, all this polling, someone said, oh, there's a poll showing Nikki Haley up. You know, we didn't have President Dukakis.
We didn't have President Gary Hart.

Speaker 3 Like, the polling right now is kind of irrelevant.

Speaker 23 He has the humility to know that the party changed. He listened to young people.
He listened to Bernie. He listened to AOC.
He listened to Elizabeth Warren. He listened to the moderates, too.

Speaker 23 But he went where the median of the country was. And that takes a lot of actually wisdom to say, look, I'm not going to be the same person.
I'm going to listen to where the country is moving.

Speaker 5 So I wanted to play that for two reasons.

Speaker 5 One, you made the point that age was Joe Biden's biggest liability, and we know it. We know that is his biggest liability, and it's every candidate would have one.

Speaker 5 And the second was that one of Joe Biden's great strengths was that he knew how to listen, and he knew how to learn and change. And that was a really impressive part about his presidency.

Speaker 5 At what point do we decide based on the polling, at what point does Joe Biden decide based on what he's hearing that the time has come to listen to the people, the majority of voters,

Speaker 5 almost the full majority of Democrats now, almost majority of Democrats now that think he should step aside.

Speaker 5 At what point does Joe Biden need to show that kind of humility that made him such a good president in his first term?

Speaker 22 A couple of points. First, he should not deny the polls.
I mean, arguing that

Speaker 22 the New York Times poll or other polls are wrong and he's actually up, I think he should just acknowledge these four points, five points down and say, look, there are other candidates who have been down, and I'm going to come back.

Speaker 22 I mean, that's not an insurmountable margin. But denying the polls is not a great look.

Speaker 22 The question about whether to run is such a deeply

Speaker 22 personal decision for someone who's been the nominee, who's gotten millions of votes, and that's a decision he and his family and his close friends will make.

Speaker 22 I think he owes people the ability the opportunity to listen in terms of his platform, in terms of what he's going to do,

Speaker 22 in terms of listening to their concerns about

Speaker 22 what he needs to do to win the race. But I don't know if you can expect someone who's won the votes

Speaker 22 to say, okay,

Speaker 22 now that the polling shows that the majority are opposed to you running, that I'm just going to give up. I mean, I think that's asking too much of listening.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't know.

Speaker 5 I just, do you really think that if the voters of the Democratic Party saw the Joe Biden we saw at that debate, that he would be the nominee right now?

Speaker 5 Do you believe right now that the Democratic voters who voted in basically an unopposed-they won't, you don't. If they saw the Joe Biden at that debate, Joe Biden would not be the nominee.

Speaker 5 Do you agree with that?

Speaker 3 I agree with that.

Speaker 3 I agree with that. And so

Speaker 5 we're bound to what happened before, like, let's say Joe Biden, nothing has gone terribly wrong with his health.

Speaker 5 Let's hope that that's the case, but he's had an inexorable march of time, the inexorable effects of age, have now come to a point where people have these deep concerns that are far worse than they were two years ago.

Speaker 5 We are bound to what happened in basically an unopprozed primary, even though the voters today, if given another chance, would want something else?

Speaker 22 I think that the question is

Speaker 22 that you're going without any contest, without any polling. I mean, if it was something that was

Speaker 22 clearly, obviously disqualifying. And I guess my point of view here is that you have reasonable arguments

Speaker 22 on both sides. I don't think this is clear-cut.
Like, I don't think, you know, Joe Biden went and committed some criminal act where on our side it would be clear-cut. On the other side, it's not.

Speaker 22 I don't think this is a case where, God forbid, Joe Biden had a stroke that was incapacitating and where he couldn't recover.

Speaker 22 I think this is a case where you have a large chunk of the party that still believes that Joe Biden, because of the incumbency advantage, because of his connection with African-American voters, with the Midwest, because of his record, has

Speaker 22 a very good chance to win and is one of the best chances to win. Now, we can debate whether that's 30%, 25%, 40%,

Speaker 22 and what the other side is. But you can't,

Speaker 22 I don't think on that ambiguous a record, you can say, okay,

Speaker 22 you know, you just need to

Speaker 22 quit the race. I think what you can say is please consider this very seriously.
Please talk to your friends, your family, please consult outside folks.

Speaker 22 But ultimately, I think this is still a judgment that Biden himself has to make.

Speaker 22 I think he would do himself favors to recognize the ambiguity of it and that

Speaker 22 it's not a

Speaker 22 clear-cut decision. By the way, if it was a clear-cut decision, you would have people like Barack Obama and others coming out and saying that he shouldn't run.

Speaker 22 So I think that the fact that you've had so many people that the party respects

Speaker 5 being ambiguous about it uh suggests that there's real ambiguity does that is that what that suggests i mean tell me if this is wrong that behind the scenes members of congress even members of congress that are currently saying joe biden is my candidate and he had our back so i have his back they're full of right behind the scenes they're terrified and think he's going to lose is that right not not all of them on it honestly but some of them i'd say

Speaker 22 quite a few of them quite a few of them think that but they're two they're two camps some of them may think that and think uh it's still a bad look to

Speaker 22 take away the Democratic choice from a candidate who's won the primaries.

Speaker 22 I get that they were unopposed, but one of the reasons they were unopposed is not like some committee said don't run.

Speaker 22 It's that candidates at the time looked at Joe Biden's poll numbers and said he couldn't be beaten in a Democratic primary. And I think they were right.

Speaker 22 I don't think Joe Biden of a year and a half ago would have been beaten in a Democratic primary. And so there's a process, and some people are reluctant

Speaker 22 to undermine that process. Some folks genuinely think that he has a better chance than someone who had just come up for four months in a presidential campaign untested against a huge brand name.

Speaker 22 It's unclear to me that two of the great Democratic presidents, I disagree with some of their policies on some things, but I don't think either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama thrust into a general election campaign four months before a general election would necessarily have won.

Speaker 22 I mean, maybe they would have. I mean, maybe they would have given some great speech and done it, but it's not an easy thing.

Speaker 3 Yeah, but if it were,

Speaker 5 if Joe Biden decides not to run and he goes and throws his support behind Kamala Harris, I have every confidence that you personally will be one of the best and smartest advocates for Kamala Harris, making the absolute best case for why she could win, right?

Speaker 22 And I think she's absolutely qualified to be president. I think she is very warm in person.
Having just met her a couple of weeks ago, she was asking about my family.

Speaker 22 She's much more charming than the media gives her credit for. I would unambiguously, 1,000%

Speaker 22 support her.

Speaker 22 And I think she would have

Speaker 22 a reasonable chance to win.

Speaker 22 I don't think, but

Speaker 22 that judgment is something that President Biden and Kamala Harris together have earned the right

Speaker 22 to make. I mean, and I think they, you know, I guess my view is, well, let me ask, put the question back to you.
Do you think Biden is, why do you think he's staying in?

Speaker 22 I mean, do you think he doesn't think that he's the best candidate to beat Donald Trump, which is what he says?

Speaker 5 I don't know. I don't know.

Speaker 5 I think that there's something a little bit insulting towards Kamala Harris when he says to Morning Joe, who else could do this? Who else could hold NATO together?

Speaker 5 I think it's insulting to the many other Democrats waiting in the wings who you would be an incredible advocate for, we would be advocating for and knocking on doors full-throatedly, full, full-heartedly, if they were the nominee.

Speaker 5 I don't know Joe Biden's psychology right now. I don't know what it's like to, you know, he said to George Stephanopoulos, I didn't, you know, did you watch the debate again?

Speaker 5 He said, I don't think I did, which was a perplexing answer.

Speaker 5 I don't know what it's like to be 81 years old when you're not president, when you are president, when the stakes feel so high, but it's not really about him. Like, I don't, you know,

Speaker 5 I feel like it's incumbent upon all of us to advocate for what we think is going to put us in the best position to defeat Donald Trump. If that's Joe Biden, then he has to put these stories to rest.

Speaker 5 If Joe Biden called you and said, what do you think I should do, Roe? Would you tell him to stay in the race?

Speaker 22 I would say, first of all, Mr. President, it's your decision, but I would say

Speaker 22 I think one of your most endearing qualities is your humility.

Speaker 22 I think some of your recent interviews where you're attacking your own supporters, where you're calling anyone who questions you as an elite,

Speaker 22 where you're stifling dissent within the party is not a good look.

Speaker 22 I understand that you believe and you have been a great president and probably anyone who runs for president believes they're a person of destiny and only they can do it.

Speaker 22 But that also, I think, undermines your brand as someone who's a humble public servant. And I would say, you know, you need to show the American people you don't need this.

Speaker 22 You don't need another term for the presidency. Why do you need it at 81?

Speaker 22 But you're doing this because you deeply believe that you have as the incumbent and given your economic record and given your ability to win over people in deindustrialized parts of the country, the ability to win this race against Donald Trump.

Speaker 22 And I would talk about, instead of attacking your supporters on Morning Joe, I would say, you know,

Speaker 22 Joe Scarborough, you know what came out today? That of the deindustrialized counties in America that Donald Trump said he was going to turn around, we actually did.

Speaker 22 For the past three years, we've had more job creation there than we've had in the past 20 years. This is what I want to continue doing.
And I'd focus on that. And I'd say, Mr.

Speaker 22 President, get out there. If you want to run, get out there.

Speaker 22 And don't, you know, if you make mistakes, people understand that, but you got to look like you're fighting and trying and doing everything you can and do the editorial board interviews, do the town halls.

Speaker 22 That's, that's what I'd say.

Speaker 5 And then he says, and I'm sorry to keep putting you on the spot. Then he says, wow, that means a lot to me.
That means the world to me. But I'm just honestly not sure I'm the right person.

Speaker 5 Would you write, do you think it should be me or do you think I should step aside and pass the torch to my vice president? Like I said I would do when I first ran.

Speaker 22 Well, if he said that, I would tell him to pass the torch, but I don't think he'll say that.

Speaker 22 And the reason I would tell him to pass the torch is even when you run for Congress, if you don't think you're the right person and you're having self-doubts, you're not going to win the race.

Speaker 22 So if someone was saying, I'm thinking of running for president

Speaker 22 and I'm not sure, you know, I'd say, yeah, probably you shouldn't run. I mean, you've got to have a conviction of steel.

Speaker 3 This guy's good. But this guy's good.

Speaker 5 That's a good answer.

Speaker 22 You know, just stepping back a bit, you know,

Speaker 22 when I, when many of us worked for Barack Obama in 2008, we thought after Obama, there would be a generation of people like Hakeem Jeffries, that there were going to be young, new generation leaders, that this was

Speaker 22 this new era that was being ushered in. And in that sense, at least I and many were wrong.
I mean, after that, we had Hillary Clinton and then

Speaker 22 respect great public servant, but that wasn't going sort of forward in terms of a generational change. And then we had Joe Biden.
And I think we have to ask why.

Speaker 22 And part of the reason is that this country is grappling with something very difficult. We're becoming a cohesive multiracial democracy.
There's a lot of change, technology, economics.

Speaker 22 People want the familiar. They want also what is understandable.
And we got two old guys arguing about their golf handicaps. And half the country thinks they're totally out of touch.

Speaker 22 But some of the country thinks, you know, I understand and these folks are familiar. And

Speaker 22 that's the debate we're having as a country. But at some point, we're going to have generational change.

Speaker 22 But I guess what I would say is, let's have this debate in an open way, but, but it's not a cop-out when I'm saying it's, it's, there's, I don't think there's an obvious, truth, clear answer on either side.

Speaker 22 And I, and I, I, I criticize the president's team and him for squelching the dissent. But I also think people are like, well, Biden obviously can't win.
Let's remove him.

Speaker 22 I think that also is, that's a point of view, but I don't think it's, okay, this is clearly obvious that that should be the case.

Speaker 5 And right now, you don't have a preference between those two?

Speaker 5 Right now, you sitting there, you're not sure if Joe Biden should or shouldn't step aside. You don't have a preference?

Speaker 22 Me,

Speaker 22 my view, no, I do have a preference. I mean, my view would be

Speaker 22 first that

Speaker 22 he has earned the right to make the decision, and I trust him to make that decision with sufficient input.

Speaker 22 But I would be on the side that

Speaker 22 he can stay in, and we need a strong economic contrast message that we should be bold in the contrast with Donald Trump and have everyone around the country be a surrogate for making that message.

Speaker 22 Have people talking about Project 2025, have people talking about Trump's hollowing out the working class, have us focus on a few key bold economic policies, and I think the president can win. Now,

Speaker 22 do I think he's the underdog? Yes. Do I think that absent Michelle Obama coming in, that someone else, whether it's a Kamala Harris or a Whitmer or a a Newsome or a Shapiro,

Speaker 22 would start out with significantly higher odds than Joe Biden? I don't. This is just my own view.

Speaker 22 And so I guess if I could be convinced that, you know, you told me Michelle Obama is running and we all had a commitment, then I'd say, yeah, of course. It's a no-brainer.

Speaker 22 But I don't think that the alternative.

Speaker 22 I don't think that the alternative is worse.

Speaker 22 I certainly think Kamala Harris could win. I think Whitmer could win.
Gavin could win. I mean, I'm not,

Speaker 22 but I don't think it's significantly better if Joe Biden runs a good campaign. And I think we're capable of running a good campaign.

Speaker 5 You're saying you don't believe someone like Gretchen Whitmer, Gavin Newsome, Josh Sapiro, Wes Moore, Raphael Warnock, Kamala Harris, you don't believe that their ability to just be out there day after day from 7 a.m.

Speaker 5 to 9 p.m., day after day, you don't think that that is enough to overcome the liability of starting with someone new.

Speaker 5 And you don't think that's enough to overcome the age liability that Joe Biden brings? That's what I don't understand.

Speaker 22 I think they'd be better messengers than Joe Biden, all of the names that you mentioned. I think some would be spectacularly better as messengers.

Speaker 22 I don't think being a messenger is all that it takes to be president of the United States. I think there is a deep authenticity.
There's a trust you have to establish with the American people.

Speaker 22 You have to convey why you're doing it, what your vision is.

Speaker 22 And it's unclear to me that any of those folks, untested in four months, would be able to do it.

Speaker 22 I'm not saying they couldn't, but there's a reason that we had, look, unknown candidates or relatively unknown candidates can win.

Speaker 22 People like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, but they take two years to earn that trust. They don't just come in with four months.

Speaker 22 And there's almost something I think maybe it's people say we want the fresh, or maybe people will say, well, this Donald Trump guy, he's overcome convictions for two years and he's been at it and he's been fighting and he's, and now we're just going to hand the presidency to someone who's campaigned for three months.

Speaker 22 I don't know. I mean, I don't know how it will cut whether people think you got to earn people's votes.

Speaker 22 I realized that when I ran for Congress, I lost the first time, two years, and then I won 60-40 the next time. A lot of people said, you know, you stuck with it.

Speaker 22 We liked your grit. We liked the fact that you were willing to earn that vote.

Speaker 22 And I guess I don't know anyone who's come out of nowhere and won without that slog and without really earning it over a long primary process.

Speaker 5 What a time to be alive. You know?

Speaker 22 I think, look, I am hopeful about this time. And I...
And the reason I'm hopeful is because I view it as that we're on the cusp of doing something incredible in this country.

Speaker 22 You look at the freshman class of Congress, you look at people like Jasmine Crockett, Maxwell Frost, you look at the fact that, you know, now, I mean, I'm biased because I'm Indian American, but you've got six Indian Americans in Congress.

Speaker 22 John, when I was growing up, you couldn't meet, my family couldn't meet a staff member to a member of Congress. It's like we're growing more diverse, we're growing

Speaker 22 in spite of ourselves. We're becoming this cohesive, multiracial democracy.

Speaker 22 And so, if we have a moment of generation saying, you know, we want to go for the familiar, we're still unsure, you know, that we've got to win.

Speaker 22 But I am so hopeful about the next generation in this country.

Speaker 22 And I believe that what Biden should have said is if for some chance Donald Trump wins, I'm going to be the first one to continue the fight.

Speaker 22 I mean, Donald Trump, the one thing that drives me crazy, and I look, I understand Donald Trump is a threat to American institutions, Project 2025, voting rights, women's rights.

Speaker 22 But the one thing that drives me crazy is when we just sort of say, oh, Donald Trump wins, that's the end of American democracy. Give me me a break.
You think Abraham Lincoln thought like that?

Speaker 22 FDR thought like that? John Lewis thought like that? We're not going to lose democracy to a buffoonish billionaire.

Speaker 22 We have to have the conviction and the fight to continue to fight for what this country is going to be.

Speaker 5 Well, you know, we also could have an Indian American president,

Speaker 5 you know, if we play our cards right, right? It's sitting right there.

Speaker 22 I mean, you know, only if my texting program continues to annoy you, John.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 22 that's the key to this.

Speaker 3 Well, that's the key to the whole thing.

Speaker 5 Yes, listen, you, you're, you know, obviously.

Speaker 22 This is an Indian American conspiracy.

Speaker 22 We have so many people in tech at Google and the technology.

Speaker 5 Well, and the vice presidency.

Speaker 3 And the vice presidency. And the vice president.

Speaker 5 Congressman Connop, thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you

Speaker 5 for taking these questions.

Speaker 5 I think a lot of people feel a little bit, this has been a very, I think, upsetting.

Speaker 5 They understand the stakes. They are scared.
And they feel both that this is on somehow Joe Biden's decision, but also collectively collectively a decision that should belong to all of us.

Speaker 5 What do you say to people listening

Speaker 5 that are wondering what they should be doing right now?

Speaker 5 Do you think that if somebody believes Joe Biden should be the nominee or shouldn't be the nominee, that they should be calling their members of Congress?

Speaker 5 How do you think people should be responding to this rather than just being on their phones and they want to feel like they have agency?

Speaker 22 First of all, I say that I hear you and I think you're absolutely right.

Speaker 22 And where I think our party has failed is by making people feel unheard, making it feel like it's either you get behind the president or somehow you're not loyal or somehow you're not a good Democrat or somehow you're engaged in bedwedding or a circular firing squad.

Speaker 22 Where our party has failed is trying to deny the obvious, what people saw,

Speaker 22 or trying to pretend like Joe Biden is something that he's not. And I think we have to welcome the conversation.
We need to say it's very legitimate.

Speaker 22 And I don't think, okay, we're having this conversation for three, four weeks. I don't think that's like, okay, we can't win.
I think it's better that we air it out.

Speaker 22 I have full confidence, John, whether it's you or whoever is saying that we should have a different nominee, if Joe Biden is the nominee come August, that we'll all rally around him.

Speaker 22 And I don't think there's any problem having a conversation in the meantime.

Speaker 22 And I would encourage people to talk to their members of Congress, to be a voice on social media, to talk to people you may know at the White House.

Speaker 22 and

Speaker 22 to have your view. And I will say that if I did have an opportunity to talk to the the president, the biggest thing I would say is: you know, Mr.
President, politics is ultimately about persuasion.

Speaker 22 Let's be in the business of persuasion. Let's not just be employing the tactics of criticizing the media and calling people elites and rallying our base.

Speaker 22 That's not the best of Democratic politics.

Speaker 5 Congressman RoConna, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Speaker 5 Hope to talk to you soon.

Speaker 22 Thank you.

Speaker 3 Okay, before we go, we figured we should talk about the other guy in the race, Donald Trump. He must resign.
He should step down. Absolutely.
Just want to get on the record.

Speaker 3 He's been doing his best to stay out of the spotlight and let the Democratic inviting consume news cycle after news cycle, though apparently his discipline only goes so far because tonight he's going on Hannity.

Speaker 3 That should be fun. A few things have happened in Trump World, even without the candidate being out there.

Speaker 3 The Republican convention is next week. On Monday, apparently at Team Trump's urging, the RNC Platform Committee voted to remove a call for national limits on abortion, according to Politico.

Speaker 3 The final ratified platform is basically just one page of vague statements seemingly recycled from Trump's dump speech, like seal the border, stop migrant invasion, carry out the largest deportation in American history, end inflation is one.

Speaker 3 Just end inflation. That's it.
And then my favorite one was, unite our country by bringing it to new and record levels of success. That's like a, that went through the.

Speaker 3 That just went through the whole, that was a plank. That's a plank in the platform.

Speaker 5 What kind of process do you think this thing went through?

Speaker 3 this comes after trump decided seemingly out of the blue to distance himself from project 2025 in a post on truth social that reads i know nothing about project 2025 i have no idea who is behind it i disagree with some of the things they're saying and some of the things they are saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal anything they do i wish them luck but i have nothing to do with them he knows nothing The things that they're saying are bad, but he knows nothing.

Speaker 5 I don't know anything about it. I also hate it, but good luck.

Speaker 5 And what parts? The the parts you hate?

Speaker 3 I have no idea who's behind it, even though 16 of my former administration officials are behind it. Yes.

Speaker 5 I know everybody's been sharing the hot dog meme, all right? But this is really more of a, I can't believe there's gambling in this casino situation, honestly.

Speaker 3 It seems like they've realized that Project 2025 is getting a lot of attention and that it is terrifyingly unpopular. How do you think the Democrats should handle this?

Speaker 3 First of all, we get a vague, watered-down convention platform and Trump trying to distance himself.

Speaker 5 So I was, I was actually noticing before Trump put out this statement that we were starting to hear about Project 2025 from non-political sources.

Speaker 5 Like Taraji mentioned it at an award show, like Love It or Leave It.

Speaker 5 Love It or Leave It guests have been bringing it up.

Speaker 5 And what I, that, that like comedians have been bringing it up, like they're worried about, hey, you don't know about this, this thing, Project 2025, Project 2025.

Speaker 5 And I think we finally have what the right normally has, which is they have a secret conspiracy.

Speaker 3 Yes, exactly. It's fucking awesome.

Speaker 5 They have a secret plan to destroy the country. All these powerful figures have a secret plan and they're all working on it at their conferences.

Speaker 5 These powerful elites, a kind of Illuminati that's gathering in the deads of night in smoke-filled rooms to come up with a plan to destroy the country. And it's real.

Speaker 3 Yeah. It is real.
And I think that, like, look, Trump's going to try to walk away because he's got advisors being like, hey, man, you're on the path to victory here.

Speaker 3 And everyone's like, Trump hasn't, why hasn't the the media been talking about how Trump's been out of the spotlight for 10 days? He's been hitting balls.

Speaker 3 Yeah, of course he's out of the spotlight for 10 days. He's smart.

Speaker 5 Every time he finishes a round of golf, his poll numbers improve.

Speaker 3 Yeah, either he's gut smart, he's become smart, or they got him in a cage somewhere.

Speaker 3 They got like a shot collar on him. I don't think he's going to be able to do that.

Speaker 4 Like, he's got decent political instincts. He was watching this car trek and he couldn't believe his luck in that today.

Speaker 5 Step back. He's hanging out.

Speaker 3 And I think that's why they want to walk away. Even though Project 2025, Stephen Miller, part of it,

Speaker 3 Trump's current press secretary, she's in a video for it.

Speaker 3 Russ Vogt is like the architect. He was the head of OMB, the Office of Management and Budget under Trump, could be the next chief of staff.
Like, give me a fucking break.

Speaker 5 It's the Trump plan. It's the Trump plan.
This is what they will implement. The people that wrote this, all the advisors will be staffed throughout the administration.

Speaker 5 This is the Trump's denials are meaningless. This is their plan for next.
We should just be moving forward under the correct assumption that this is their plan for 2025.

Speaker 3 And it is definitely moving beyond the junkies to the normies.

Speaker 3 A friend who doesn't follow politics at all really and doesn't text me and be like, dude, have you heard about this 2025 thing? They're trying to ban porn. It's like, oh,

Speaker 3 now you're involved in the election. Now you're paying attention, huh?

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's the fucking

Speaker 3 porn. It's the whole barstool audience.

Speaker 3 The Joe Rogan.

Speaker 3 He's like, what the f? He's like, I think that Biden's kind of old, but like, the porn. It's going to be the porn.
So anyway, Project 2025.

Speaker 3 You know who should talk about it more?

Speaker 5 Joe Joe Biden. Joe Biden.

Speaker 3 Alright, thanks to Rokana for joining us today. We will be back with a show on Wednesday afternoon.
We'll talk to you then.

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Speaker 3 Plus, if you're as opinionated as we are, consider dropping us a review. Pod Save America is a a crooked media production.
Our show is produced by Olivia Martinez and David Toledo.

Speaker 3 Our associate producers are Saul Rubin and Farah Safari. Reed Sherlin is our executive producer.
The show is mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Speaker 3 Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer, with audio support from Kyle Seglund and Charlotte Landis. Writing support by Hallie Kiefer.
Madeleine Herringer is our head of news and programming.

Speaker 3 Matt DeGroat is our head of production. Andy Taft is our executive assistant.
Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Haley Jones, Mia Kelman, David Toles, Kirill Pelaviv, and Molly Lobel.

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