Age Against the Machine

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau.
I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Dan, it's good to see you.
Yeah, welcome back, Jon.

It's been a long time. I feel like that was the longest vacation I've ever taken.

I think it probably was, yeah.

Oof, I won't be doing that again.

Might be the last one for a long, long time after this podcast.

I sort of thought about it, yeah.

Well, look, I was sort of engaged when we were watching the Republican debate in that first week. I was doing the Discord.
I pulled Emily in to do the Discord as well. So that was a little bit of our vacation night, just watching the Republican debate and then the Trump-Tucker interview afterwards.
What a way you live. Yeah, I know, right? Anyway, it's good to be back.
There's lots going on. On today's show, we're going to talk about the uncomfortably close race between President Biden and his likeliest opponent, the guy who's facing 91 felony counts.
I'm also going to talk to Frank For about his brand new book, The Last Politician, which is the first real insider account of the Biden White House and a fascinating read about Biden himself. But first, Labor Day usually marks the unofficial start of the campaign season.

I know you guys spent the last few weeks talking about the Republican primary, which still seems to be frozen in place, despite four indictments for Donald Trump and one debate that he skipped. If you take all the polls that have come out since Milwaukee, early state and national, it looks like there's basically been no movement for our pal Ron DeSantis.
Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy have maybe gained a few points and Trump continues to lead the field by 30 to 40 points. This is after the mugshot, after four Proud Boys leaders were just sentenced to a combined 82 years in prison for January 6th.
After a judge just ruled that Trump is liable in E. Jean Carroll's second lawsuit against him.
And after we just learned that the IT guy who was charged in the Mar-a-Lago documents case has now flipped on Trump and is cooperating with Jack Smith. Did I miss anything else? Are we all caught up? That you have basically covered approximately three weeks of news right there, or related to Donald Trump.
Can I just give you

sort of an amazing stat? In mid-February of this year, Donald Trump led this before the first of

the four indictments came. Donald Trump led Ron DeSantis by 2.4 points in the 538 polling average.
After four indictments, everything you said, the lead was 40 points as of yesterday. So do we think that this is where the Republican primary stands until at least the second debate on September 27th? Probably beyond that, but I'm saying that seems like the first event that could potentially change the race, even a little.
No, it's not going to change the race. If Donald Trump does not participate, it is not going to change the race.
Dan, Dan, we're trying to get people to tune in for whatever coverage plan we have. Look, it's not often you get a close-up 90-minute look at potential vice presidents to Donald Trump.
So that's what you're doing there. Oh, my God.
Oh, my God. All right.
So there will be plenty of action in Congress over the next few weeks once they're back in session, though priorities like funding the government and emergency aid for disaster victims don't seem to be high on the list of the Trumpier Republicans in the House. Here's Florida's Matt Gaetz on what their plan is.
When we get back to Washington in the coming weeks, we have got to seize the initiative. That means forcing votes on impeachment.
And if Kevin McCarthy stands in our way, he may not have the job long. So let's hope that he works with us, not against us.
But we've got contingency plans in the event that he's not as productive. Did Joe Biden commit an impeachable offense while I was on vacation? What is going on there? I love this, like, we're going after Joe Biden, and if Kevin McCarthy doesn't let us, we're going after Kevin McCarthy too.
It's always poorly written Sopranos dialogue is how most of the MAG Republicans in the Trump era talk. You were pretty offline, Mr.
Offline, but you weren't so offline that you missed a crime. No, nothing happened.
You missed no impeachable offenses in your absence. You missed no high crimes, no low crimes, no medium-sized crimes.
There were no crimes in your absence. I mean, look, I haven't seen a ton of polling.
I don't think voters will appreciate Congress spending all their time on an impeachment inquiry in an election year over i don't again i don't know what the allegations of the impeachment inquiry would be except that hunter biden uh did some bad things and the republicans think that joe biden was involved but have so far after five years turned up absolutely no proof whatsoever that he was. So I don't know.
I don't know. I mean, it is on the list of dumb things that Kevin McCarthy has contemplated doing.
This might be the dumbest of them all. It is absolutely no purpose.
It is politically counterproductive in every single way I can possibly imagine. And he's basically galaxy brained himself into an absolute corner.
If it wasn't probably so bad for democracy and government and people's faith in the system and everything else, it would be quite amusing. Well, I was going to say, before his job was threatened, this would be Kevin McCarthy's job by Matt Gaetz, he was open to this impeachment inquiry before that.
Why do you think he wants to do this? Because he's a moron. And let me explain.
There's nothing beyond that. If you could take a Homer Simpson look into Kevin McCarthy's brain, here's what you would see.
Kevin McCarthy knows that the Freedom Caucus Republicans do not support the funding levels that he agreed to in the debt ceiling deal with Joe Biden.

Therefore, they're not going to vote to fund the government. They're not going to support what the Senate and Joe Biden work out.
So he has come up with a plan. Did he try to persuade them? No.
Did he try to strong arm them? No. Did he try to bribe them with pork barrel projects? No.
What he's decided his best idea is to float impeachment and then turn around and tell these Republicans that they have to support keeping the government open because if they shut down the government, then they're also going to shut down the impeachment inquiry that they so desperately want. There's a massive flaw in that plan.
The flaw in that plan is that the government does not entirely shut down when Congress does not shut down when the government shuts down because they have to be there to vote to reopen it. So then one person decides which is our essential personnel, essential services, who are the people who continue working during the shutdown.
I'm going to give you one guess who that person is. Who's that? Kevin McCarthy.
You knew else knows that? The Freedom Caucus Republicans who've already started pressuring Kevin McCarthy to deem an impeachment inquiry staff essential personnel if there's a shutdown. So he wanted to avoid a shutdown because he thought that was worse politics in impeachment, which is a real question there.
But now he's like to put in a situation where he could likely get both. So Politico reports that even though the Biden folks agree that an impeachment over nothing will backfire on Republicans with swing voters and probably most voters except Republicans, they're also worried about, quote, negative headlines and, quote, the potential for unexpected outcomes.
Do you agree? Do you have any concerns if they charge ahead on this impeachment inquiry? you hear what john fetterman said about it yesterday no he said on impeachment he said go ahead do it i dare you it would just be like a big circle jerk on the fringe right how great is that oh you know what that is maybe not for today that's a pod title one day i day. I know.
I thought about that. I thought about that.
That's why, yeah, we'll see. I think the most likely scenario is that if the Republicans impeach Joe Biden, his approval numbers will go up.
That's what happened with Trump. That's what happened with Bill Clinton.
And those were at least impeachments based on an actual finding of wrongdoing. If you just start an impeachment inquiry in search of wrongdoing, I think they're probably even better.
But that doesn't mean Joe Biden wants it. It is a huge distraction.
It takes up a ton of resources within the White House to deal with it. One of the reasons that McCarthy has tried to sell the impeachment inquiry to other Republicans is that gives them – that is the apex of their ability to investigate and get documents and witnesses from the White House.

Now we know from Trump's impeachment that that not as clear cut as it sounds,

since we didn't, most of the people didn't actually have to testify or give up documents,

but that all, you just don't want a bunch of MAGA Republicans rooting around in your emails.

It's a pain in the ass.

They don't want it.

They prefer not to do it.

So I completely understand that from just a,

we have to run the government and a reelection campaign at the same time. We don't need this additional burden on us.

Yeah, I also think it raises the chance that completely unfounded allegations and conspiracies get media coverage because it is within the context of an impeachment proceeding or hearing.

And, you know, and sort of that becomes more of a legitimate reason to cover allegations that probably have like no basis in fact whatsoever. And just having those allegations out there probably isn't something that the Biden people want or anyone wants, right? Yeah.
I mean, you can see the headlines that are like, Republicans say Biden guilty of bribery. Democrats say no evidence.
You decide. Yeah, I don't love that.

So like, I'm not I'm not quite in the like, go ahead, bring it on, do do an impeachment camp, because I just think it's like it would be better not to have it. But if they do go forward, I agree with everyone who says that it's not really going to help them that much.
And other people who don't think it's going to be that politically advantageous seem to be like Senate Republicans who went on the record yesterday with a bunch of reporters being like, I don't know why we would do this. I don't see any of the, I don't see any evidence, any allegations, even like dumb shit senators like Tommy Tuberville was like, I don't, we're really going to go through another trial.
Why would we do that? So it doesn't seem like there's a big appetite for it in the Senate among Senate Republicans who aren't exactly known to be a moderate bunch these days. Also, there are 19 House Republicans in districts that were won by Joe Biden.
It doesn't seem like that. Yeah, it doesn't seem clear that McCarthy would even have the votes for impeachment anyway, right? Yeah.
So just think of the ways this plays out. One, they jam through a partisan impeachment of Joe Biden based on nothing.
That seems bad for them. They launch an impeachment inquiry, never find enough evidence and never vote on it, which seems like that'd be a piece of useful information that Biden could tell voters when Republicans try to say he's corrupt, or they bring it to a vote and the vote fails because you have to get every single one of those 19 Republicans in Biden districts to vote for it, which seems like another thing.
It's hard to imagine a way in which this plays out well for McCarthy. It doesn't mean Biden wants it, doesn't mean it should happen, but he really hasn't thought this one through, is my take.
So one thing it is clear we've seen from some of the polls over the last few weeks is that the Biden campaign can't really afford a lot of negative headlines or unexpected outcomes. A new CNN poll shows Trump leading Biden 47 to 46 in a hypothetical matchup.
A new Wall Street journal poll finds the race tied at 46% each with 8% undecided. That's pretty much both of those polls are within a point or two of where all the high quality polls are at this point in the race.
Interestingly, when the Journal poll gave people the option to vote for third party candidates and they listed like Green Party candidate Cornel West and some Libertarian Party candidate that I've literally never heard of before and think might have been made up.

Only 3% of voters took the option for the third party candidates, and that left 17% undecided, which I thought was notable.

We can get to. Our old colleague, Jim Messina, who was Obama's campaign manager for the 2012 reelect, just gave a slide deck to Playbook in which he makes a data-driven case that you'd still rather be Biden than Trump.
And Jim also said to Playbook, quote, historically, we're fucking bedwetters. Democrats had their hearts deeply broken when Hillary lost and people didn't see that coming.
And so, you know, we continually believe every bad thing people say. What do you think about Messina's argument? I think that we all have to just know deep in our soul that this is going to be an incredibly close race that will be decided by a number of voters spread out over a handful of states that is smaller than the attendance at the last Taylor Swift concert.
Like, that's just how 2016 was. That's how 2020 was.
We should expect 2020 to be that way. We should mentally prepare ourselves for it.
We should volunteer. I know we're all stuck in 2020.
Yeah, that's how we should expect the 2024. That's where my head, that this is where it's never ending.
We are stuck in this point of view. One of the reasons why the electorate is so fucking grumpy in these polls, but we just have to prepare ourselves for that.
And it will be incredibly close. I agree with Jim that Joe Biden, under current conditions, and current conditions include a strengthening economy and Donald Trump not in prison, Joe Biden is a slight favorite in that close race.
And he's a slight favorite because incumbents usually win. Incumbents who are unopposed in primaries almost always win, Trump being a glaring exception to that rule.
The economy, although people are very sour about it, the economic indicators are consistent with incumbents who get reelected. We will have to see in this new post-pandemic environment whether that holds true, but that is a point in Biden's favor.
And the third reason is that Biden has many more paths to get to 270 than Trump. Trump has to flip a bunch of states that are moving demographically to become more blue or have voted for Democrats consistently over many years with the one glaring exception, another glaring exception being Trump 2016.
And so incredibly close, but Biden was probably the slightest of favorites in what is pretty damn close to a toss-up as right now. Yeah, here's my thing on the bedwetting.
And you know, this is really sensitive subject for us. It was really well, it's really kicked up today with the CNN poll.
And so there's like, there's people freaking out. And then there's like democratic strategists yelling at people for freaking out and saying, don't freak out.
And it's like, look, my view on this is the prospect of Donald Trump becoming president again should scare the shit out of all of us.

And however you want to cope with that, that's fine.

You can wet the bed.

You can not wet the bed.

You can get out of the bed at 4 a.m. every day because your mind is racing with thoughts about creeping authoritarianism like me.
That's what you call having to pee? Whatever coping mechanism you choose, I'd say just make sure you're spending more time and energy trying to help defeat Donald Trump than just worrying about him winning. and we will say this, you know, a million times between now and November of 2024.
But like the reason that we sort of got out of the prediction business is not because, you know, it's embarrassing to be right or wrong. It's because I predictions aren't that useful.
What's useful is figuring out how we can channel our energy into helping defeat Donald Trump and how to.

And the reason that we still talk about polls and stuff like that is to figure out how what the best way to persuade people who might be on the fence and haven't decided whether they're going to vote or who they're going to vote for yet.

And I think that's very useful, too.

But like, you know, if you're worried, then, yeah, you should be worried. It's like a worrying prospect that Donald Trump could win the presidency again.
And I don't want to like yell at people for being worried. I mean, you say this all the time.
Worry about everything. Panic about nothing.
The question is like, how can you direct your energy towards helping achieve the outcome we want, which is making sure that Donald Trump doesn't get back to the White House. There have been sort of three reactions to these polls over the last few days.
And I'm very glad you're back from vacation because like everyone has one friend that they ride the roller coaster with and you're my one friend I ride the polar coaster with where it's like, who's me most interested in the crosstabs on where Biden 2020 voters are on his approval rating, that's you.

And you were offline.

And that was unpleasant for me.

So I did this alone.

I will say on our text chain, me and Tommy were both in this wedding in Morocco.

And I could just look at our text chain.

And you send the Wall Street Journal poll.

And then you're sending parts of the Wall Street Journal poll.

And then you're sending crosstabs.

No one cares.

Just for my own mental health, I can't look at this right now.

I was giving you stuff to read on the plane home. I'll look at it when I get on the plane.
And I did. I read it on the plane home and it was not very pleasant.
But anyway, go ahead. Yeah, Tommy asked for TV shows to download and I sent you polling data to download.
So, but there's been like three reactions to these polls. One is the utter panic.
Holy shit. What is going on? Can Joe Biden win? What's wrong with this country? That's one.
Two is, well, the polls were really fucking wrong in 2022. So we should assume these are wrong too.
And the third is stop polling. It's way too early.
Stop talking about polls. It's way too early.
First one you addressed. Second one.
Yes, that is true. The polls were wrong in the wrong direction in 2022 and they were wrong in the other direction in 2024.
Sorry, goddammit. They were wrong.
Yes, it's true that they were too Republican in 2022, but they were also too Democratic in 2020 and 2016. We have no idea.
Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. There's no harm in preparing for the worst and hoping for the best.
The last thing is, you know who's doing a lot of polling right now? The Biden campaign, because it's very important to know where the race stands today so you can figure out how to get it where you want it to be by knowing who you have to talk to and what you have to say to them. And so there is a reason that we are having this conversation, even if it feels unpleasant to the people listening, but especially to us.
I think what most people who you talk to about this race, what they ask is like, okay, I get's going to be a close race you know because the electorate's polarized and basically this is what we've been dealing with since 2016 and by the way the last race between joe biden and donald trump was an extremely close race and you can talk about joe biden's popular vote victory to make yourself feel better but it still only came down to uh what was like 40 000 votes,000 votes across three states. Um, so that was close.
So obviously it's going to be close again, but then people will say, but Donald Trump is facing 91 felony counts. How can it still be this close the second time around? And he tried to, you know, uh, overturn the last election.
What the hell's going on? So why, why do we think it's, we just think that, do you think that it's just that polarization right now rules all? And that structural issue that we're facing is more salient than whatever Donald Trump has done? Do you think it's Biden? What do you think it is? Well, I think we do tend to conflate two things that get confused in these polls. There is the national popular vote, which Democrats have won overwhelmingly in the last two elections.
Right. And then there is how close it is in Electoral College because Electoral College disproportionately weights Republican-based voters because of how the college works.
what is yes it is true that the 2020 race was really close these polls show a close race 2024

is probably close. But what about these polls is the popular vote race is tied.
It was not tied in 2020. Biden won by more than 7 million votes.
And so the question is, why is the popular? And a tied popular vote race is something that'd be very consistent. Trump wins.
Trump wins, electoral college, almost certainly. And so why is it so close? And so while you, you know, while you were gone, and I was trying to occupy myself, I went in, I did this for message box.
And I went into the New York Times Siena poll that came out in early August to look at what the cross tab said and compared it to the Pew validator validated voter study of 2020, which is probably one of the two or three best pieces of data we have about who actually voted and who they voted for. And what I found is that the main reason this race is so close is that Joe Biden is underperforming with his 2020 voters right now.
So in that New York Times poll, Trump is getting 91% of the people who voted for him in 2020, and Biden's getting 87% of his voters. And 9% of people who voted for Biden in 2020 in this poll either claim they won't vote if the race between Biden and Trump or intend to vote for a candidate other than Biden or Trump.
And that's the difference right there. And now that that group is is disproportionately made up of younger voters, voters under the age of 45.
You know, interestingly enough, 16 percent of voters 30 to 44 are planning to vote for a third party candidate or not vote at all. Like that's a huge chunk of Biden's base.
The other group is non-white voters, particularly Black and Latino voters, are supporting Biden at much lower rates than they were in all the polls, not just in the New York Times poll, than they did in 2020. And that is the delta between where Biden wants to be and where he is right now.
Yeah, and particularly non-white, non-college educated, younger voters are a tough group for Biden. And Nate Cohn dug into this in a piece this week in the New York Times.

That you should steal yourself before you read. because it's still yourself before you read it but it's based on the same new york times sienna

poll that you um dug through and what's fascinating and and sort of terrifying is that biden and in

not just that poll but but other polls, Biden and Trump are both doing the same as they did in 2020 with white voters. And then for Biden, non-white voters who are college educated, he's still doing really well.
And non-white voters who are older, he's still doing the same. But it is younger non-white voters who are older he's still doing the same but it is younger non-white voters who are either and and look some of them are have said that they'll vote for trump this time uh there's there's a there's a portion that said that some as you said will say they're not going to vote and some will vote third party and i think that what's extra tough about this which i I know from the last season of the wilderness that I did is like these voters, these are not like voters who were super progressive and they're just like waiting for some organizer to knock on their door and tell them like Joe Biden is more progressive than you think.
And look at all the good things he's done and blah, blah, blah. That's not who these these voters are they actually tend to be more moderate uh even though they're young and non-white because and the reason they tend to be more moderate is all the young non-white voters and white voters who are very progressive they're already voting they're gonna vote for joe biden they're out there it's whatever it's the it's it's these voters who are disaffected from politics.
They do not consume politics like we do.

They do not consume the news as much as we do, which also makes them harder to reach for a campaign. So throwing up an ad on television is not necessarily like I think the best way to reach these voters.
They're not going to read a lot of the coverage of the race. And I think the real challenge for the Biden campaign is going to be figuring out how to reach these voters who are disaffected from politics in the first place, but did turn out to vote for Joe Biden in 2020.
Do you have any thoughts on how they do that? I mean, there's going to be a whole host of things. One is there is a huge gap of information about what voters think Biden has done, what he's actually done.
And you're going to have to close that gap to make people know that their vote in 2020 mattered and had made a difference so that they will vote again in 2024. And we're going to have to do a lot, I think, to undo – and this is very challenging.
It was challenging in 16, it was challenging in 20, it was challenging in 2024, is try to undermine this idea that Donald Trump is some sort of populist working class advocate. He's actually beating Biden in some polls on the measure of looks out for people like you or fights for you or looks out for the little guy or whatever, whatever – looks out for everyday people, whatever that measure is.

Here's a guy who flies on his private jet, passed the most egregious tax giveaway to

corporations and rich in the history of the country, and is part of a party once got Social

Security and Medicare, and he's treated as some sort of advocate for working class people,

and we got to change that. So every piece of available data says that Biden's two biggest challenges are, uh, what you just mentioned, uh, sort of his economic record and his age.
So let's start with age. Uh, The Journal poll has 73% of voters saying Biden's too old to run for president.
Last week's poll from the Associated Press had 77% of Americans agreeing with the statement that Biden is too old to effectively serve another term, a number which includes 69% of Democrats. Not nice.
Here's how Biden addressed the issue during his Labor Day event.

I tell you what, someone said, you know, that Biden, he's getting old, man.

I tell you what.

Well, guess what?

Guess what?

You know, the only thing that comes with age is a little bit of wisdom.

I've been doing this, Lauren, anybody.

And I guess what?

I'm going to continue to do with your help. What do you think about the with age comes wisdom argument? It's good.
He tried to turn age into wisdom and experience in 2020, both in the primary and the general. And the best political strategies take your weakness and turn them into a strength.
So it is the best of a menu of not great options to navigate this challenge that is very evident in the polls. I will say, though, there is one very prominent figure that disproves that theory that with age comes wisdom.
And that is the man that Joe Biden is likely to run against, Donald Trump. It's the only fly I see in that argument.
But I agree with you otherwise. Only 47% of voters in the Wall Street Journal polls say that Donald Trump is too old to run for president, even though he's only three years younger than Biden.
And Trump would also be the oldest president ever elected if he's elected again. Why do you think that is? Why do you think that Trump's age isn't as much of an issue for people? I think we should at least be honest with ourselves that there is a difference in people's minds between late 70s and 80.
Right. That is why things are priced at $9.99.
Right. That makes a difference.
It just it just does. We should acknowledge that and deal with that.
But that's not the main thing here, because Joe Biden may be older, but he's healthier. He's clearly more competent and of his faculties than Donald Trump, who claims to believe to his core a gazillion conspiracy theories that make no sense, says insane things.
If your uncle talked like Donald Trump talks, you would have a family meeting about how to deal with his healthcare. That is how it is.
But the issue here, I think there's two reasons why we don't hear about Trump's age. One is the press has decided that Biden's challenge is his age.
And we've created this sort of, they have created a flywheel here where Donald Trump and Republicans and right-wing media say Biden's too old. Press says, Republicans say Biden's too old.
Press then writes think piece that says, is Biden's age going to be a huge problem? Voters read that. Pollster asks voters if they're concerned about Biden's age.
Voters say yes. Press then writes story about increasing concerns about Biden's age.
And so it is taken off. And I think the concerns about Biden's age are legitimate.
People should have them. They should have them about Trump too.
But the way it's being covered in disgust, I think, is deeply irresponsible. When the press has done the right thing, what the press should do is they cover Biden every day.
They should see if he can do the job, if he's capable of doing the job. All of the reporting says yes.
They've talked about some minor adjustments he has made around like which steps, set of steps he uses. But there's been no suggestion, not from the reporters, not from the Republicans who meet with Joe Biden, not from world leaders, that he is not a man 100 percent on his game in these meetings.
And that's what the press should tell us. The press should not tell us that people are concerned.
The press should tell people whether they should be concerned or give them facts and information. And the story here is that Joe Biden can do the job at 80, not that people think that Joe Biden may not be able to do the job at 80.
I think it's that Trump doesn't seem old. He seems crazy.
And like Joe Biden's problem is not that voters think Trump is actually some spring chicken because voters don't like Trump because they think he's crazy. Like, I was watching the Tucker Carlson interview with Trump, and my first reaction was not that Trump is some old guy.
It's that he's, like, talking about the fucking Panama Canal and how the mosquito killed 35,000 people, and then he's talking about faucets and water falling. And I'm like, this guy is fucking nuts.
Right, but if Joe Biden talked like that, we would have a thousand news cycles about it, about it being related to his age. But I think what's happening with Biden is, it is very clear that when he has some fight in him, when he has some energy, like again, like he did during the State of the Union, like he's done during some speeches, when he's on the stump sometimes, then it doesn't come across as old.
Sometimes he's just very gentle and there's been a little more shuffling as he's gotten older. And sometimes the way he talks is a little quieter than he used to be, right? So people are not, I don't think we can say that people are are imagining it right no no no but but i think that's i i think it i think in some ways like it can't be dismissed because then voters think you're just like what are you talking about everything's the exact same and it's like well no it's not the exact same what you can say is the guy can really fucking do the job and he's still he's still completely with it and he can you know you know, and so like, I think that I think you have to acknowledge that that that you understand why people would think he's old at 80 years old for the presidency, but that the guy is still very much competent, very much able to serve and do the job.
It just is bizarre and inexplicable on paper why when the press writes about Joe Biden's announcement, Joe Biden announces a reelection to become the oldest president ever and does not say the same thing about Donald Trump. Like that just is that speaks to a sort of the culture of journalism and the both sides nature because they definitely talk a lot about Donald Trump's crimes.
Like that is a real. Well, that's what I was going to say.
But I think that sort of takes precedent over his age, right? If he had no crimes, if he didn't have 91 felony counts and he wasn't saying crazy shit every day, maybe you'd start focusing on Donald Trump's age, but there's a lot of other things that go ahead of his age. Guess what? They don't really print the news on paper anymore.
You're not limited by the number of pages. You can write both.
So the Biden campaign obviously understands this challenge and they're releasing a very interesting ad in the swing states. I think it's going up this weekend in swing states that is ostensibly about his trip to Ukraine, but I think is about addressing the age issue.
Let's listen. It was the first time in modern history, very significant moment than the world stage.
That an American president went into a war zone not... Listen.
and then took a nine and a half hour train to Kiev. He entered Ukraine under the cover of night.
And in the morning, Joe Biden walked shoulder to shoulder with our allies in the war-torn streets. That's the quiet strength of a true leader who doesn't back down to a dictator.
You host a wildly successful YouTube show called Political Experts React about ads. So please react.
It's a great ad for the reason you say, which is it. And I think this gets to the strategy behind addressing Biden's age, which is you have to show, not tell, and show him being active and engaged.
Because if you really think about it, and this is partially a result of the way the media has changed over the last few years. It's partially a result of the way Joe Biden has conducted the presidency.
But people who are not deeply engaged with political news never see Joe Biden. They never see him speak.
They never see an event. They're not watching the places where Joe Biden is covered.
And Donald Trump, because he's a lunatic, and this was not to his benefit most of the time, and Barack Obama, because of sort of the cultural figure he was in a very different media environment, is that people were always seeing Barack Obama and Donald Trump. And so if you don't see Joe Biden, and all you ever hear is that Joe Biden's really old, and maybe you see some edited clips from the RNC or some cherry pick footage that maybe is circulating on social media, and you know, he's 80 years old, you're going to think he's too old.
But if you say if you have a point of comparison with what the guy's actually doing, you can have a more nuanced take on the age issue. And I think this ad tries to get at that.
What else would you do if you're running the campaign to address that, to address the age issue? I think they've clearly done that here with a paid ad, and I'm sure there'll be more from a paid ad perspective. But how would you do in terms of where you put Biden, where you have him go, what you have him say, what you have him do, the type of events, right? Is there sort of a strategy or any creative ideas? Well, it's creative.
It seems like you're putting a lot of pressure on me. And I will say I read this question in the outline right before I went to bed and it kept me up for a while.
You're basically a huge part of both the paid and the earned communication strategy. The free social or traditional media is going to be getting Biden in front of people who do not normally see him.
That includes young voters and less engaged voters. And so there's going to be a lot of, I think, communications things where you're not a CNN town hall or the Sunday shows.
It's going to be a lot with influencers or interesting podcasts on video. or, you know SmartList, the podcast before the election last time, where people who will – what used to happen in the old

media world is that you would bump into politics as you were doing other things, either because it

was in your Facebook feed or your Twitter feed, because you were tuning into the news to find

out the sports or weather. That doesn't happen anymore.
And so you're going to have to go where

people who do not consume politics already are. So I think they will do that.
He did that podcast with Jay Shetty, I think, who's the mindfulness person with a very popular podcast. That's the sort of things I think you'll see more of.
I've been trying to think about the messaging of this, like how you, because a lot of us are going to be in the position of talking to our friends and family about Joe Biden, right? And the age is going to come up. So I tried to do, this would be my best take composed between one and two in the morning last night in my head.
The best kind of takes. That's right.
That's where all the good stuff happens. We'll find out because I didn't write it down.
We know Joe Biden can do the job because he's been doing the job. He became president in the middle of an unprecedented series of crises, including a pandemic and a historic recession.
While he was president, he also dealt with a global spike in inflation and a Russian invasion of Ukraine. He has been ably, competently navigating those crises for the last three years.

His policies help save the economy where we are now.

Unemployment is now at a historic low. The economy is growing again, and wages are going up, and costs are going down.
He has passed a series of historic pieces of legislation which helped make the economy more fair, dealt with climate change, launched a manufacturing renaissance in America with clean energy and well-paying jobs. He has passed legislation to help veterans deal with gun violence and rebuild Americans' roads and bridges.
Many of those were bipartisan pieces of legislation that he was able to pass because he had the experience to do so, even though this Republican Party is so radical that most of their members won't even admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. Joe Biden has been doing a hell of a job, and now we've got to give him the chance to finish the job because the last thing we want to do is undo all the progress of the last few years and go back to right where we were when Joe Biden took office with double digit unemployment in a country that was swirling in chaos.
The end. And if that doesn't work, the other guy tried to overturn the last election.
Yeah. Then you get to Trump.
But the question is, how do you answer the Biden question? No, I know. I know.
For sure. But it does speak to every time I think about this, I'm always like, is it easier?

Is it going to be easier to convince these voters who don't like Biden and don't like Trump or at least don't approve of Biden, don't approve of Trump? Is it going to be easier to convince them that and they've already and most of these people have already voted against Trump once in 2020. is it easier to convince them that actually they should like Joe Biden more than they do

because he did all these things even if they haven't personally felt the effects of all the wonderful accomplishments that you just listed? Or is it going to be easier to remind them that Donald Trump was not only a bad president, but could be a threat to democracy and everything we hold dear if he is returned to the White House. It's not going to be one message for every, you know, let me put it this way.
The prioritization of those messages, which both will be part of the campaign, is going to differ a little bit both at the juncture in the campaign in which you do them and who you're saying them to. But as we talked about earlier, we got a bunch of people who know everything there is to know about how bad Donald Trump is, who have not yet committing to Joe Biden.
I think a lot of people will come home naturally as the race engages, but we have work to do with people who don't like Donald Trump. And this gets right at the age, because I think one of the huge problems that Biden is facing is that voters don't know enough about what he has done.
And so they're unhappy about the economy. They don't know what he's done.
And they keep hearing he's really old. So you are tying all those things together.
One way to prove that he can do the job going forward is to show that he has been doing it this whole time, which people don't actually know. And I think that matters a lot.
It's not going to be, let's go get our voters back and then worry about the people in the middle as the campaign goes on. But I think this part of the Biden part of the messaging is the part we control and the part we should be doing right now, as opposed to sort of launching a bunch of attacks at Trump that probably do nothing more than strengthen him in the primary.
Well, in addition to the ad that we just ran, that's going to be going up this weekend, there's another ad that tries to get exactly at what you're talking about that they are going to air for the first time during the NFL season opener tonight. Let's listen.
They said millions would lose their jobs and the economy would collapse. But this president refused to let that happen.
Instead, he got to work, fixing supply chains, fighting corporate greed, passing laws to lower the cost of medicine, cut utility bills, and make us more energy independent. Today, inflation is down to 3%, unemployment the lowest in decades.
There's more to do, but President Biden is getting results that matter. I'm Joe Biden, and I approve this message.
So I always start with this premise whenever I hear an ad, which is if there's a political ad that a campaign has spent a bunch of money on, they have tested it, and they have found through that testing that it is effective. People don't, people usually, especially on the presidential level where they have more money than like a local congressional race, they don't usually spend a bunch of money on an ad that they have no idea whether it's effective or not so i assume this ad's effective i was wondering if like do people i guess do people know what fixing supply chains is do they know what it meant when he said he fought corporate greed like what's i'm just i'm sort of interested in i know you have to squeeze a lot in a 30 second ad but i'm wondering how much assumed knowledge is there.
I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, it's, this ad does not do the thing that, and you can't do this in all the ads.
The thing that we talked about, which is show Joe Biden being active. Like Joe Biden's gonna have to talk in a lot of these ads to address that concern.
Yeah, that was my first reaction. But there is gonna be a billion dollars in ads spent.
You have to do some things to lay a foundation. And part of laying the foundation is giving people information.
I am sure that I know corporate greed pulls through the roof is one of those things that shows up in all the ads. I am positive that fixing supply chains and the people don't really know what it means pulls very well.
Is there enough context in that ad? Maybe not. And this is one of the things we really try to guard against when I do the YouTube show on Political Experts Direct is these ads don't exist in a vacuum.
There's other ads happening. There's other communication happening.
There's digital stuff happening. And they're pretty finely tuned and targeted at certain groups of people.
So you assume that this is one piece of information they're getting. So you just view this ad as the beginning, middle, and end of the story.
It's not going to scratch any itches. But I think if it's part of a larger set of people.
So you assume that this is one piece of information they're getting. So you just view this ad as the beginning, middle and end of the story.
It's not going to scratch any itches. But I think if it's part of a larger set of communications around, you know, they're out there on Bidenomics talking about fixing the supply chain.
And so in that sense, you hope it probably that it works and effective. But it is there's it has a laundry list element to it that may turn off some voters.
So one last question about it. One thing this ad doesn't mention is Trump.
None of the Biden campaign ads have mentioned Trump so far. Biden hasn't really talked about him on the stump much.
Politico reports that there is, quote, considerable unease among Democrats about this. I know that you do not have that unease because I'm an avid reader of the message box and you wrote about it this morning.
Why do you think not talking about Trump is the right strategy for Biden at this point in the campaign? Yeah. People have project this forward and are like, is he never going to talk about Trump? Is he just so into his unity? Of course, he talked about Trump.
He talked about Trump all the time in 2020. They ran a ton of negative ads against Trump.
That's going to happen again. Supervisor ran negative ads against Trump.
He's going to talk about Trump. He's going to have to navigate the tricky dynamic around not commenting on the specifics of Trump's many, many criminal trials happening in the federal courts, but he's going to talk about Trump.
Right now, in this point, and there was a very good NBC News article sort of laying out Biden's thinking on this, and what they talked about is that they're trying to, they're following the same strategy that we used in 2012 during the Republican primary, is that we did not comment on, we are focused all of our anti-Republican energy on congressional Republicans. Biden is doing that with quote unquote MAGA Republicans.
But the reason to not talk about Trump right now is twofold. One, he's got a lot of work to do on his own with ads like the ones we talked about.
He's got to inform voters about him and rebuild up his image with his voters. And so that's priority number one.
And time and money are limited resources. And so that's our example.
The second reason is much more strategic. And that's why we never talked about Romney until he was the nominee.
Because if all of a sudden, Donald Trump is probably going to win this primary going away. But the best thing that can happen to Joe Biden is this becomes a protracted primary.
Maybe someone else wins Iowa. Maybe someone else wins New Hampshire.
Maybe this gets past Super Tuesday, where Donald Trump is now on federal trial for trying to overturn an election. And if Biden starts attacking Trump all the time right now, he's going to fast forward the election, he's going to elevate Trump, make it more likely that Trump wraps his things up by the end of the New Hampshire primary.
And so just strategically, the last thing you want to do is make it more likely that Trump wins the nomination running away. You want him to be stuck fighting with Ron DeSantis and, I don't know, Vivek or Nikki Haley, whoever else, as opposed to running the general election, why Biden is off taking advantage of that incumbent advantage.
So those are the two reasons that I'm totally fine with what he's doing. I totally agree.
You want to, obviously, a long, drawn-out primary for Joe Biden. I do wonder if it's even possible to further elevate the guy who commands more media attention than any other politician ever and is basically running as the Republican incumbent and up 30 to 40 points.
I just don't know if Joe Biden talking about Donald Trump or not has any effect on elevating him or not just because of who Donald Trump is and why and because he's such a unique figure. It's fair that it's probably pretty marginal, and it's definitely different than the dynamic that we face,

where Romney was not a well-known figure,

and that was a closer primary, obviously.

The other reason just is, if you think about it strategically,

and you look at all these polls,

voters are not walking around with a lack of negative information about Donald Trump.

That's not the problem.

The problem is not they all think that they're just like,

what indictments, or anything like that. The biggest problem is that they have a lack of positive information about Joe Biden.
So go fix that problem, which will give you more credibility when you engage in the attacks. It's a lot.
It is so early, despite this very long pod that we've talked to where we've talked about the 2024 election. It is really, really early in the general election.
It's 14 months away. Well, yeah.
And last thing I'll say on this is I think people get too hung up sometimes on whether he names Trump or how he talks about Trump, whatever else. I think what is important that he does soon is frames the race on his terms, frames the choice in the race on his terms.
Obama did that in 2011, right? before in de December of 2011, we gave that speech in Osawatomie, Kansas, where Obama basically lays out the choice in the election. And he doesn't mention Romney by name.
He sort of, he does talk about like the crowd in Washington and Republicans and their philosophy and stuff like that. But he did it in such a way that when Romney was the eventual nominee, you could basically just slot Romney's name in to that speech if you wanted, and the whole message of the speech would be the same.
And so I think that at some point, and of course, this was December of 2011 that Obama did this, but I think at some point in the fall, this fall, early winter, if I were the Biden folks, and they're probably going to plan this anyway, but I would sort of lay out a speech where, again, he doesn't have to mention Trump by name or he can, but I would lay out what they believe the choice should be in the election or at least how they want to frame the choice. Because I think getting the story right and the message is almost even more important than any individual piece of information you need to get out there about Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
Do you think that that story is probably pretty similar to the way the 2022 election messaging was around MAGA Republican extremism against sort of- I do. I do.
And I think that, and this is partly because I'm talking to Frank Foer about the book that he just wrote, but you really, you can fold all of the economic stuff in there too, because I think, you know, in his book, Ford lays out that like Biden's theory of the case is, you got to make sure that democracy delivers for people if you want people to stand up for democracy. And this allows him to talk about all the ways that democracy has delivered, that he's been, you know, the fights that he's picked so far.
And then you have the finish the job message. And that's both about sort of the economic progress you're making, but it's also about protecting democracy.
And that is at the core of this whole thing. Because again, if you just, you put aside all the polls and all the shit that we read, you just go talk to people like, what is the scary thing about Donald Trump becoming president again? It's that he almost tried to overturn democracy last time, right? Like this whole system with whatever issues you care about, whatever side of the issues you're on, like the guy tried to fuck up the whole system last time and we wouldn't have had like representative government anymore.
He's going to install himself in power forever. Like that is at the core of what this next election is going to be about.
And at some point've got to figure out how to get there as fast as possible to start wrapping people's heads around the fact that, like, those are the stakes in the 2024 elections. And it couldn't be higher.
All right. Before we go to break, a few quick housekeeping notes.
Falls just around the corner. And you know what that means? Pumpkin spice.
Oh, my goodness. Sweater weather.
More incredibly important elections for abortion rights. Okay, there we go.
In Virginia, we've got to maintain a majority in at least one chamber of the legislature to block the extreme anti-choice agenda. Meanwhile, Ohioans will be voting on whether to codify reproductive freedom in the state constitution.
Visit votesaveamerica.com to learn more and find out ways you can get involved. One more related item here.
Republicans in the Wisconsin General Assembly are threatening to impeach Justice Protus Sawitz if she doesn't let them keep their rigged, gerrymandered maps. Ben Wickler says they're launching a campaign to help stop this at defendjustice.com.
So if you're in Wisconsin, talk to your representatives. If you're not, check out the website and see how you can help.
We'll be talking more about this issue in the weeks to come on this podcast. Also, if you're looking for a smart, funny explainer on what in the absolute fuck is going on in British politics, Pod Save the UK is the podcast for you.
Each week, hosts Nish Kumar and Coco Khan break down the biggest news in the United Kingdom from the sex scandal at the BBC to the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Listen to new episodes of Pod Save the UK every Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

When we come back, I talk to Frank For about his brand new book on what makes Joe Biden tick.

Joining us today, the author of The Last Polit last politician the first real insider account of the biden presidency that's out this week frank for welcome to pod save america oh so great to be here all right so i'm curious about how you approach this book like how many interviews did you do over how long and did you try to get time with b himself? Right. So the book is kind of a tale of a subject just ballooning on me.
I started off intending to write a book about the first hundred days of the Biden presidency, which I knew was a trope and I knew was likely to be. But a useful trope.
It's a useful trope. But I got to the end of the first 100 days, and I totally did not have enough material to write a book.
And I think you know from being on the other side that at the beginning of an administration, you have these conversations with aides who are just trying to get their own footing. And they're super paranoid about being the one person to leak.
Everything is in process and people don't like talking about things as they're happening. And so the hundred days rolls around and Biden proposes the Build Back Better bill, which is a huge deal.
It's a huge amount of social spending. I thought, okay, this is a good excuse for my publisher to keep going.
And also an incredible story if he's able to jam this thing through in a 50-50 Senate. And then end of the year rolls around, Manchin pulls the plug on Build Back Better.
And it was like a dark, dark moment for the Biden presidency. And it felt like maybe a bummer note or an unfair note or a note that wouldn't hold up over time if I stopped it there.
And so my publisher said, all right, go to the end of year two. And really, the process of writing a book like this is you just got to keep showing up.
Patience is a virtue I do not necessarily have as a journalist. I want to hit my deadline if possible.
But I didn't have the material until things actually happened. And then the nature of media is that media gets so distracted.
Afghanistan happens, they run and chase the next story. And then as the book writer, you come in and you're able to have all these conversations with people who want to unburden themselves, who want to explain themselves for the sake of posterity.
And they want to claim credit for various things if they're victorious. And that's when the good stuff started to roll in for me.
Yeah, my co-host would have killed me if I spoke for this book. when I was in the White House I was like oh I'm talking to any book

fuckers in for me. Yeah, my, my, my co host would have killed me if I spoke for this book.
When I was in the White House, I was like, Oh, I'm talking to any book people. But yeah, but I feel like you, I mean, I would, I would argue you wrote a very favorable book about Biden's first two years.
Did you did you try to interview him? So I was able to talk to him twice off the record with other groups of columnists. And it's so interesting.
Like the Biden that comes across in public is so different than the guy who's sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. You know, I understand the impulse to edit him, to avoid the gaffes, the unintentional headlines, which would inevitably come if you sat him in front of reporters all day long or you had him conduct town halls endlessly.
But the guy who is there is like, yeah, he tells a lot of stories you've heard before. There's no doubt about that.
But then there are these other moments where he's explaining his deeper thinking and you think,, oh, the public really would benefit from hearing a lot of that. He's able to talk about grand strategy in the Indo-Pacific with all of this detail, this sense of how the pieces fit together.
People don't see that side of him, and they would benefit, I think, politically on some level if they could. I totally agree with this.
I've had the same experience. My family was at the White House in December of last year.
I was interviewing Ron Klain for Pod Save America. And when I came back from the interview, I went to Vinay Reddy's office, who's the speechwriter, Biden's chief speechwriter.
And my wife, my three-year-old and my in-laws were all in there with Joe Biden, who had stopped by the office because he recognized my mother-in-law from meeting her three years ago. And then he brought us up to the Oval and he's like telling us all these stories.
And it was classic Biden because on one hand, there were some long stories. But it's also you're like you get such a deeper insight into his thinking.
You get that he's sharp, right? Like which is everyone's concern. And also just like the kindness and warmth and generosity all come through as well.
But he could like he was like carrying on for an hour about everything. like all kinds of different details, you know? Yeah.
Those moments of grace, which I don't

do an especially great job of capturing in my book that are unique to Joe Biden, where he calls a

staff member up after their parent had died, or he remembers somebody like your mother-in-law.

That's part of his DNA. It's part of the way in which he is.
I describe him as the last politician. That's an inherent skill of a great politician and something that doesn't translate always in a mass media environment.
So you write at the beginning of the book that you started as a Biden skeptic. You said you viewed him as a bloviator who dangerously fetishized bipartisanship.
But, you know, and through the course of writing this book, your opinion changes. You say that not only has your respect for him grown, but you said it was hard to imagine any president doing much better under the circumstances.
What was it that changed your view about the president? Right. So in part, it was, I think, my understanding of what it means to be a politician changed over time, that there are all these things that seem so artificial or maybe cheesy about Joe Biden that I ended up coming to respect the wisdom of and that there was real technique behind the way that he maneuvers the legislative world, the way that he deals with foreign leaders.
There's Jonathan Alter, who'd written a book about Obama, kind of set me up for this at the beginning. His word of advice was that there's some, you know, the expression familiarity breeds contempt.
And he said, with Joe Biden, familiarity breeds respect. And I definitely found that to be true for myself as I journeyed.
So, you know, I completely share your assessment of Biden. You know, I'm always, I'm someone who's always loved Joe Biden as a person.
He wasn't my first choice in the Democratic primary. But now I think that given the constraints of what he's inherited and who he's had to deal with, like he's not getting nearly enough credit for what he's accomplished.
I also just spent the last segment talking with Dan about how most voters don't think he's doing a good job, don't think he's accomplished enough, don't want him to run again because they think he's too old. And that's not just Republicans.
That's a big chunk of independents and Democrats as well. What do you think is going on there? Like, why don't more voters have a view of Joe Biden's presidency that's similar to the story you tell in this book? There are a couple things that I could untangle there.
One is Matt Iglesias tweeted yesterday that part of what people are saying is that Joe Biden just doesn't make for a good television character. So, you know, it's he's omnipresent.
It's people say, well, Joe Biden should be out there more. And it's true in the way that we just discussed that it would be good to see him unplugged.
But he gives set piece speeches every day. And yet they never really managed to break through because he's reading off of a script.
And it's the age issue is so tied up, I think, in the diminishment of his presidency, that because of the way that he walks, because he doesn't speak with the same level of energy that he did before. There's just a sense that he hasn't been

an active president. I think he began with the theory of the case that he wanted to

lower the temperature in the country and to get people to have politics recede from the forefront

of everybody's mind because it dominated it in such a destructive way during the Trump era.

And he needed people to take the vaccine. And so he didn't want to overly politicize that.
But now we get in here and, you know, the other thing that I should say is also, they've been very reluctant to claim credit for things in a way that I guess I understand, but is ultimately self-destructive. So you take something like the fact that they saved the economy from collapse.
Well, inflation continued to persist. And even though unemployment remained crazily low, which was their goal all along, they didn't like to talk about their economic achievements because they thought they would never break through.
They didn't talk about the vaccine. The vaccine is one of the great successes in the history of government, like a beautifully designed program.
You could, within six months of them coming into office, you could walk into a CVS and get a shot that would save your life. Very, very complicated program, but COVID never really disappeared.
So, and they got burned on July 4th of that first year for trying to claim a little bit of credit.

So they just stopped claiming credit for returning life to normal.

And then you get around to this other stuff, the Inflation Reduction Act.

Well, it's a very un-Joe Biden-like name for a piece of transformational legislation.

As he's pointed out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But they've had a heart they've

just not hit the road and sold this thing despite the fact that we have all of this capital

investment that is pouring into uh clean energy into semiconductors the transition to clean energy

is going to happen much faster than anybody anticipated um but it's so interesting to me I feel like I'm having such deja vu because like,

obviously,

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I feel like I'm having such deja vu because obviously we had different circumstances, but it's similar in nature when Obama got into office and then there was a lot of criticism after the fact. And I even saw it in the context of lessons learned from the Obama administration and Biden staffers sort of saying this to reporters that like, oh, we didn't sell the Recovery Act well enough.
We didn't hit the road. We didn't market it good enough.
And we're going to it's not gonna be the same with the Inflation Reduction Act or the American Rescue Plan. And then sure enough, they have like run into the same set of roadblocks.
And I sort of wonder, as you were talking to all the different people close to Biden, like how much of the challenge of the last couple of years is like a structural challenge, like polarized electorate, fractured media environment. So it's hard to get your message out.
Declining faith in institutions is like sort of the backdrop of all of this. And how much is decisions made by Biden and his team that they either regret or mistakes they made or, oh, we should have done this differently and maybe it would have been better.
Like, did you get any sense of that from talking to people? Yeah. And I in your as you're talking, I could just see myself slipping into what the political scientist Brendan Ihan referred to as Green Lanternism.
It's like there's this sense that if only the president used their bully pulpit more effectively then things would be different but all the structural constraints that you're just describing are course correct and make it hard i also remember when the american rescue plan passed there was this grand strategy for going on the road and then there was there was a hate crime that happened in atlanta the next week and they they scra they scrapped their plans for going out and talking about it because they felt like it was more important to address those hate crimes. And then they never got back to that process of selling the American Rescue Plan or only got – they did it in a half-hearted sort of way.
And that's just the nature of the presidency as well, is that you ricochet from crisis to crisis. And even if you come in with these intentions about how you're going to market your agenda and correct for these mistakes that you witnessed the last time, you can only correct for so many of them when your hands are full with the next terrible thing you have to deal with.
We mentioned the age concerns. The people you spoke to for the book, what did they say about those concerns? They've worked with Biden closely.
Did you talk to anyone who had concerns themselves about his age or him slipping or anything like that? What was your take there? I think everybody acknowledges that he's changed over time, I bet the Joe Biden you saw in the White House, you would describe as not a different person, but having a different energy level than the Joe Biden that you see in public now. But nobody told me, man, that guy is really losing it.
He's not up to doing the job. I think Nikki Haley talks about the mental acuity test that she wants to apply to every president.
I would tell you, Biden would ace that test. I mean, the ways in which he's aged are physical.
And so he's not able to go out and stump for things maybe in the way that he once did. His schedule is not the same schedule that he would have had 20 years ago.
His stories, which always wandered a little bit, maybe wander a little bit more sometimes. But there's this flip side to the age thing, which is the wisdom, which I also think is real.
I you know, he hears all of this noise in the media about various things. And this is the thing that surprises me most about Joe Biden, is I thought of him as a weather vane, but he's not.
And so when the media comes down on him hard for Afghanistan, or maybe even when they're coming down on him hard on age right now, he doesn't freak out and start to veer in the other direction. The book's called The Last Politician.
You tell a story about how Biden set out to prove, I think you call it the eternal relevance of politics after the profession has fallen into disrepute, his profession. And you contrast that explicitly with both Trump and Obama, who you argue posed as anti-politicians and in very different ways benefited from the common sentiment that politicians were the problem, corrupt, unresponsive, lacking in necessary boldness.
I obviously found that interesting. Can you say more about how you define the differences between a politician like Biden and anti-politicians like Trump or Obama.
Yeah. So, I mean, to just go to the Obama part, because I mean, I remember what was so exciting about him in 2008 and like the real potential of Obamaism is that he had this very direct connection with voters, that it felt like he could have in an unmediated sort of way, unfiltered

through media. I mean, it's like the way in which he, it was very attractive, the way in which he would kind of roll his eyes at the idea of the professional politician.
I imagine there were times like his relationship to Joe Biden, which was complicated. There were times where he would even roll his eyes at Joe Biden because there is something, you know, Obama's strength and his appeal was his authenticity, that he was who he was.
He was this guy who came, you know, we ran a cover story in the New Republic called American Adam, that he was this guy who kind of descended. I remember that.
Yeah. And that's an extremely attractive archetype.
And Biden, the defects of the politician is that they just reek of artificiality, that you think that they're going to say one thing in public and then do another thing in private, that that's why people don't like politicians. Or the stories that get repeated over and over again.
There's a theatricality to the politician in authenticity. But what I came to respect over the course of time was that Biden was able to assess the political self-interest of other actors.
So whether it's a foreign leader, whether it's Macron, whether it's Bibi Netanyahu, whether it's Mitch McConnell or Kevin McCarthy, he's able to detach himself and say, okay, what's their political game here? What do they need in order to do their jobs effectively? And the empathy that he has allows him to understand the emotional baggage that the other person brings to the table. And I don't know if this is a fair contrast with Obama, but I feel like Obama, with his fierce intelligence and his ironic sensibility, would look at some of these other actors and just get frustrated with them in a way you know it's like he would get frustrated with bb netanyahu for bb netanyahu's bullshit he would get frustrated with um you know with a house republican for their bullshit i think that uh biden kind of is able to at least see himself in them enough to have maybe more patience in dealing with them, if that's fair.
No. So I asked the question not to like try to defend Obama or the administration.
I asked because I think I think it's a really important tension in politics, whereas like most Americans, most voters, if you ask them, they will say that like Washington's broken, that politicians are corrupt and stupid and blah, blah, blah. And so like there is a as to be a successful leader, you have to both channel the emotion that's out there in the country, which is very anti Washington, very anti establishment, very anti institution right now.
But if you're especially if you're a Democrat for Republicans, it's almost easier. But if you're a Democrat, you have to be the defender of institutions that aren't working very well for people or that people are pretty upset with.
And I think Obama always felt that tension as well. And I don't think it's an accident that by the end of his presidency, when you hear when you heard Obama talk about Joe Biden, Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi, he talks about the three of them with like such reverence.
And he had so much respect for them. And I think that respect was developed over time.
And I can remember like edits to speeches, where we would say, Oh, Washington's doing this and Washington's doing this because we had that muscle from the campaign from the away campaign. And he would say, you know what, I get some shit from this from, from people in Congress and then staffed by being like, I should say I should point out that it's actually Republicans.

It's not people in Washington. And so he even evolved a little bit over time.
So I think he learned that from Joe Biden and then Joe Biden sort of, you know, that's totally fascinating. I think that Biden in some ways needs to unlearn a little bit of that himself, that he's channeled Trump's populism and policy, that he's got this industrial policy that's reviving American manufacturing.
He's taking on the problem of monopoly in a way that's very, very robust. We've got this Google trial that's just about to begin.
He's got his merger guidelines. He's made unionism more acceptable in the country.
I think he's lent his prestige to that. And then he needs to turn that into the rhetoric of populism, which he's loath to do because it requires having an adversarial relationship with certain forces in American life.
And he's capable of doing that through policy. But his Labor Day speech last week, I think did a pretty effective job of foreshadowing what I think would be a good campaign strategy.
I'm a terrible political consultant. I agree with you because I think it solves a couple problems for him.
When he is fighting and energetic, it speaks to the age concerns and it also sort of speaks to a discontent in the electorate right and this like populist economic populist streak which like you say like his policy certainly reflects and i've heard him do like this to me the scranton joe is like the best kind of jo Joe, Joe Biden, when he's out there on the stump.

Yeah, yeah, totally.

And in that speech, he did a great job of connecting it to Donald Trump and describing Donald Trump as this phony Park Avenue guy who only talks about these things. But Joe Biden, the politician, is actually able to deliver for you.
So, you know, you talk about how his theory of the case is that, you know, democracy has to deliver for people in order for people to sort of want to protect democracy and stand up and protect democracy. So on the one hand, he proves this by and he proves the consensus is still possible by passing some real historic legislation in a very closely divided Congress, a lot of it bipartisan.
On the other, Republicans want to impeach him right now over absolutely nothing so that they can help the guy that's facing 91 felony counts come back to the White House. How do you square that circle when you're if you're Joe Bud? I think that he has his eye on the long term.
I've heard Aves describe this. So there was various moments at the beginning of the administration where Ron Klain or others were like, let's just take this straight to reconciliation.
Let's not pussyfoot around. We know that there are not enough Republican votes here to explore a compromise.
And Biden will say, no, no, no, no. You're probably right, but we need to model something here about how you should be go about getting something done.
We need to at least be seen as trying to forge some sort of bipartisan deal. I think with you take something like Dobbs, where he has very conflicted feelings about abortion on some level.

I think he understood ultimately the radicalism of the Dobbs decision. And he also understands that abortion is going to be maybe the issue that saves the Democratic Party in the next election, certainly did it in 2022.
But there was all this pressure to respond instantaneously, to go out to match Republican solutions with sweeping Democratic solutions. And his instinct was like, yo, let's back off here.
He doesn't say yo, so far as I know. Let's just back off here.
Let's let the Republicans hoist themselves on this. They're the ones responsible for this.
Let's not give them any unnecessary beefs with us. Let's not match their radicalism with our own radicalism, their anti-institutionalism with our own anti-institutionalism.
Let's let them be portrayed as the pure villains here. The book ends around the midterms, right, which was sort of a surprise victory for Democrats, though Biden himself always felt more confident in the outcome than most of the pundits.
But did you get any sense of how his team is looking at 2024? Partly because, you know, in the midterms, Biden was able to step back, not make it as much about him, let the sort of, you know, election denier candidates sort of screw themselves over. And we also had a lot of, you know, good Democratic candidates, right, that were well liked in their states.
And I wonder how they're looking at 2024 now and what they're thinking about as sort of the path to victory for him. I think it's kind of the same in that, so he was not there on the ballot in 2022, but his instinct is it always needs to be a referendum on them.
That Trump presents such a stark alternative. I think part of the reason why he feels compelled to run, I mean, there are probably all sorts of psychological reasons why he feels compelled to run.
But on a base political level, he feels like voters know that I am this safe alternative to Donald Trump. They know what they're getting with me.
And the choice becomes clear enough. And people may be wetting their beds right now about him, but that when the time comes, it's still going to be this stark alternative.
How would the assessment of Biden that you wrote in this book change if he loses to Trump in November? Or wouldmber or would it i think it does i mean i think that his legacy is now going to be defined by the 2024 elections that this is everything that he's he's done is um you know exist on its own but it was done in service of a theory of the case that politics and his agenda could show that democracy could deliver for its citizens in order to avert authoritarianism. But if authoritarianism is the end product of the Biden administration, then he was wrong.
Yeah. You made a little news when you said I meet the press that if Biden dropped out before November of 2024, it'd be a surprise to me, but it wouldn't be a total surprise to me.
Why wouldn't it be a total surprise? I would be shocked at this point.

You know, when I said that, I hadn't – I was relying on the fact that when he talked about running in the past, he always talked about fate and that there was this religious component to it and that he didn't know exactly what life would.

And I always assumed as an 80-year-old guy, that was an essential thing to append to any statement about that. But the more that I've thought about it and the more that I've encountered what's happening right now in the discourse.
It feels like if there's a succession

of polls that show him losing to Donald Trump, there's going to be a pretty massive Democratic

freakout. And I don't know what will happen in that sort of environment.

Yeah. I can't.
Yeah, no. Look, my view on this is the time for alternatives is sort of long past.

I agree. I'm not.
No, I know yeah it's just and and he seems like very intense and sort of like you know they got a whole campaign they're going it so it's like you know everyone's like let's we're doing this people we're doing this and we're gonna help them out well and also there's i think he's got a theory he hasn't really really explained it. But it's, it's, it's, it's a, I think, actually, maybe the strongest political case of them all, as opposed to kind of picking some untested candidate or letting there be an open democratic primary where who knows where that goes.
yeah no look I mean my my after after reading your book I sat down and I was like this is really the

story that they have to figure out how to tell because they have a good story and they have a good case. And I think that for a whole bunch of reasons, many of which are beyond their control because of the way that the media environment is and because we're used.
I think people got used to in Trump, a president who was like in their face every single day.

And so there is a lot of like, where is Biden? Why don't we hear from Biden? But like they have to find, I think, creative ways to sort of tell the story about the last two years and the next four years sort of in a way that you laid out. And I think the story is there.
It's just a question of like, can they get it out there? You know, I found that Biden had become so distant as an individual to most Americans over the course of his presidency. Maybe Americans knew him better in some ways before he became president.
And there are these parts of the Biden story that I tell that the right has seized on for their own purposes that reflect a guy who's flesh and blood. He's got a temper sometimes.
He doesn't like it when he makes a mistake and then beats himself up for it and then does the very human thing of blaming an aide for the mistake that he committed himself. He is a flesh and blood human being in the best sense, right? He makes mistakes, but he's also got this very, these honorably human characteristics that you've described.
And I think it's valuable for them to just restore him to being a character. Yeah.
No, I've said the same thing. It's like, I take a whole bunch of gaffes.
If it meant just like, also getting to see the other side of him, the more personal side of Joe Biden, who is just like a wonderful, kind, generous man. And when you let him out there to do whatever, sometimes you're going to get a few long stories and gaffes.
But I think that's worth it to just like make sure that people do know who he is and aren't so distant from him. Well, it's also, he has it, I thought this from the start and I thought he should just become America's grandfather, embrace the age, like, you know, be the wise person who actually instructs the country about certain things, very human things.
I thought at the beginning of COVID, he did a very good job of that when he had to fill in for Trump especially and talk about what it was like to not have Thanksgiving dinner that year. And then later when he was talking about what it would take to get back to normal, I thought, all right, here's a guy who's leaning into his age in order to instruct a younger nation.
And then over time, that's just retreated. Yeah, as is the case when you're president of the United States and sort of dealing with shit beyond your control every single day.
Yeah. Frank Ford, thank you so much for joining Pod Save America.
The book is The Last Politician. It's fantastic and a really, really great read on what makes Joe Biden tick, I thought.
So thanks for coming on. Thank you.
That's our show for today. Thanks to Frank Ford for joining us.
Everyone have a great weekend and we'll talk to to you next week. Bye everyone.
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