Overtime – Episode #606: Chris Cuomo, John McWhorter, Sam Stein

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Okay.

Okay, these are the questions.

Andrew Yang and a group of former Republican and Democratic officials announced their new centrist political party.

I think David Jolly is involved with that.

I saw their brief announcement of this and they said,

other third parties haven't worked.

Here's why ours will.

Do you think they can become a viable third party?

Who's that to?

That's to all of you, us.

You want to take it?

Well, the one thing that I'm

such a hot potato?

Jamel Bowie in the New York Times has a very skeptical piece about this, and it's all well taken, but I think that we also forget that a lot of these things are driven by personality and charisma, and there are only so many lessons you can take from 1850 because we have something called social media.

And so I think all bets are off at this point.

I think that the idea is valuable.

It's clearly urgent.

And I think that we need to see whether things could happen on the basis of unpredictables.

History can't teach us everything.

I'd just piggyback and add two things.

One is it requires a lot of money, okay?

And the other thing, to your point about personality, you need someone who's dynamic, who can cross-appeal.

So it could work.

And by work, I mean it could siphon off enough votes to affect the election.

If you had an extremely rich person with a dynamic personality who did it, but I don't know, you know, Michael Bloomberg could have done it, but he chose to run in the Democratic Party.

So there's probably a reason for that.

You need more of a personality than Michael Blue.

How dare you?

They've actually had personable people run before.

It's not that.

It's that when a third party starts doing well,

one of the other two parties steals

what made them popular and adopts it.

There were, you know, Ross Perot did pretty well.

And I think the Republicans stole his thunder a little bit, you know, on debt and stuff.

They, of course, didn't follow through.

They're the biggest debt hypocrites in the world.

But, you know, and we had other ones back, it wasn't

that.

Well, I think the problem on the left is that there's like this trauma lingering from Ralph Nader, right?

Like,

the idea that a third party would come in, siphon off a couple thousand votes, and you'd have a Florida 2,000 redux is, you know, panic fuel for a lot of progressives.

And so you're more likely, obviously, to get something in the centrist who would peel off moderate Republicans.

But Democrats are fearful of that because they need those people to leave the Republican Party and support them.

So there's a lot of incentives that work against.

But it is an interesting dynamic about how much shit people are full of.

Because it won't work.

Because, and

people are really, as Chris was saying, they are more in the middle.

And there is this hunger, this thirst for something that isn't.

And yet when push comes to shove and they get in the voting booth, I don't know if it's whether the attack ads work on them or they just think that that party will lose and they don't want to vote for a loser, but they don't follow up.

They don't follow on those convictions.

I think a lot of it is the, I think, I mean, political advertisement is, you know, geared around creating a whole culture of fear of the opposition.

I mean, that is, it's potent, it's targeted, and it's persuasive.

I do think, though, you know, the one sort of caveat is that like, you know, Joe Biden is not a radical.

I mean, he's not, he's just not.

And he was put forward as a Democratic nominee precisely because he bends it to the radical.

He has been, yes, and I think

that's part of what's been a problem for Ms.

President is that he's raised these expectations by saying, yeah, let's do all this, this $2 trillion bill exit.

Social media makes all this different, though, and I think that there's a possibility that social media could create a fearer, a united group of people constantly whipped up to stay together who were actually in this middle.

It would be a matter of branding, but maybe those forces that, for example, kept Perot as a marginal figure could actually make a difference this time because of what Twitter in particular is like.

It really creates a whole new world.

It would depend on the branding and the charisma.

But I can imagine that maybe it would be different this time because of these things in our pockets and the way it unites groups together.

It can create a new group, in other words.

Well, I think what would happen, my prediction, is you could have it like a sensible middle party, and

what would happen is it would force the Democrats to go go back to being the sensible middle party.

And they would, because they would see that's where, you know, Biden, I mean, Biden reminds me of some grandfather, and when AOC and the woke people come into his office,

he just goes along.

He doesn't really understand it.

It's like, Grandpa, can we have money to go play Fortnite?

And he's like,

I don't know what Fortnite is.

I don't know what TikTok is.

Just get out of my hair, you know.

And that's really,

okay.

Nearly one in three Americans say it may soon be necessary to take up arms against the government.

Pro or con.

Okay.

Is this an indicator that we're already in a cold civil war?

Well, I would say we already are, yes.

What does this tell us about the next presidential election?

How often were people asked about that particular thing before?

That's a genuine question.

Now you would be inclined to put that in a poll.

Were people asked in 1951, are you ready to take arms against the government?

I imagine many more people would have said yes then than we can know now.

What was their big beef against the government?

Imagine there would have been people who were very angry at, for example, still angry at Franklin D.

Roosevelt, still angry at inequality in the system.

There was a great deal of anger in 1951.

I mean,

the civil rights movement, right?

I mean, the 60s were

incredible anger, obviously, assassination.

There was a lot of talk before Kennedy got assassinated about that.

This is a common American thread.

Lunatic.

It's a very despicable American thread.

You know, obviously, we've never experienced a president sort of harness it to the degree that Trump has.

And I think that's what makes this kind of a unique moment, but it's been with us throughout our history, for sure.

Okay.

Why isn't Biden more aggressive on legalizing marijuana?

Yeah.

I mean,

why is that the one issue when the grandkids come in and say, grandpa, we have somebody to legalize marijuana?

No.

It's all about the way we phrase it with him.

Are you on the pot?

Yeah, that funky green stuff.

I wrote about this because this is crazy to me.

At a time when he's experiencing like a complete enthusiasm deficit on the left, here's an issue where it's like 80% of the country is like, yes, legalize this shit.

Just do it.

And he's like, we need to study it a little bit.

It's low-hanging.

Now, the actual reasons, the actual reasons, and I'm not saying I believe them, the actual reasons are that he has a history of addiction in his family.

And he actually believes

that marijuana has a gateway protection, which it doesn't, of course.

It's Hunter.

Yes, and that's, I don't, but I don't.

He thinks Hunter started on the pot.

It's a real belief that he has.

Right.

And I'm sure we did.

But so what?

We all start somewhere.

And of course.

I came out wrong.

That's not what I meant.

No, but I mean, beer is a gateway drug.

You know, if you're going to be Hunter Biden, it's not the marijuana.

You can't stop everyone voting for marijuana because one out of so many people is going to wind up that.

But it's like, and the other thing that I wanted to write about this is that it's not like Biden hasn't touched sort of socially progressive hot topics before.

I mean, he was the guy in 2012 who came out and said, let's do gay marriage.

And everyone's at the time, like, that is nuts.

What are you doing?

You're going to lose Ohio.

This is crazy.

He said, fuck it.

I'm going to do it.

Well, it was that was

not quite that intentional, is my recollection.

Well, everything's a little bit intentional.

He didn't go in there being like, you know what, maybe I'll just throw out that I support gay marriage.

Yeah, I think he did.

Really?

Yeah, he was talking about.

He was talking about somebody specific, and he was just doing what he does, riffs.

Well, madam.

And

he was just riffing.

I don't know.

And then the next day in the office, like,

well, did you do?

We're backing

marriage.

Although he has experience, he has an experience knowing that it doesn't backfire.

And he could do it with pop, but he doesn't.

So, Sam, is it really true that there are people from states all over the country?

This is a question.

States from all over the country, there's this groundswell to legalize marijuana and then hopefully go further, if you ask me.

And the president has actually said that he's not interested because of the family issues and his convictions.

He is, he is, our reporting is that he has conveyed this to his aides, that he is nervous about his own family's experience.

His current platform is decriminalization, which obviously is different than legalization.

It's a big problem.

And there's a lot of people in the party who really think legitimately that this could be one of those issues that's so low-hanging, could energize people.

If you just got it out of the way, we'd look back and be like, what were we doing?

And it's

a social revolution.

And by the way, it's already de facto in effect.

Of course.

How do I know this?

I used to travel this country so paranoid, I would put a little bit of marijuana.

I don't know, I don't know where.

No, not there, but close.

Close.

Under my nuts, really.

I swear to God, I told the story on Jimmy Kimmel one.

There was a little thing.

There was a little thing that

looked like half of a cigarette.

It was metal.

It was just a tube.

That's all you need to smoke through.

And I only needed like this much.

I took it one bud, put it in a Kleenex under my nuts.

And I was ready if they said, what is this?

What were we going to say?

I was going to say, it's not.

Meaning the pot.

And then if they caught me,

I said, it's not.

I had that ready.

That's how paranoid I was.

And you don't still do that just for shit.

No, and now,

and then there was a phase where I'd be like, oh, what states is it legal?

What can I, and I didn't even think about it.

Because even if it's a state where it's illegal, are they really going to make a thing about a thing under I don't care about it?

And I was like,

I just put it in my nuts because I like it.

All right.

Thank you, everybody.

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