Brian Schatz and Mona Charen: Democrats Don't Trust Happiness

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Speaker 16 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 3 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 11 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 3 One thing's for sure: the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close. Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 18 Because, of course, that's the nature of who we are as Americans.

Speaker 18 We

Speaker 18 have dreams. We can see what is possible, unburdened by what has been.
We have aspirations. We have ambitions.

Speaker 18 And the system that is a good system is one that supports that and allows people the opportunity to go where they can see and imagine themselves to be.

Speaker 19 That's what I'm talking about when I talk about an opportunity economy.

Speaker 18 We fight for a future where every senior can retire with dignity. And so we will continue to defend Social Security and Medicare and pensions.

Speaker 19 Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host, Tim Miller.
That was Kamala Harris yesterday at a Labor Day rally in Pittsburgh. We've got a doubleheader for you today.

Speaker 19 In a little bit, I'll be back with my colleague Mona Sharon to talk about her article, What Exactly Is It The Conservatives Are Trying to Conserve anymore?

Speaker 19 But first, I'm here with a man who is certainly unburdened by what has been, Senator Brian Schott, senior senator from Hawaii, member of the Caucasus leadership team. How you doing?

Speaker 19 Welcome to the Bullwork podcast.

Speaker 20 I'm doing great, Tim. Thanks for what you do.

Speaker 19 Hey, man. It's so good to have you.
You tweet like a normal person. Well, actually, that's not true.
You don't tweet like a normal person.

Speaker 19 You tweet like a fellow poster, an authentic poster who likes to put their real opinions on the internet rather than just, you know, anodyne talking points.

Speaker 19 And so I've always appreciated that about you as a fellow poster.

Speaker 20 Well, I do enjoy it. I'm trying to make sure that my Twitter account is not the first thing that people mention in my bio, but I do spend full time legislating and tweet on the side.

Speaker 20 But I do find it to be a pretty useful medium just for that reason, because if you can actually speak directly, from your own voice, that's pretty unusual in politics.

Speaker 19 I apologize for undermining that goal then. So what is your first line in your bio that you would have liked me to have led with, just so I can learn for future?

Speaker 20 One of the key authors of the Inflation Reduction Act and the chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee.

Speaker 20 And by the way, and I know we're going to get to this, we have done so much for people on Indian reservations, tribal members, Native Alaskans, Native Hawaiians over the last four years, more literally than has ever been done.

Speaker 20 in American history. And that's partly what's at stake this year.

Speaker 19 Let's just start there, you know, because I feel like I've been a little remiss in focusing on the Senate races just because the presidential campaign has been so insane the last two months with everything that's happened.

Speaker 19 You know, obviously it's going to be extremely tight, just going to set the scenes for people because of the mansion, you know, like, let's just be real, the Democrats are probably not going to win West Virginia.

Speaker 19 I don't know if you could admit that on the record.

Speaker 20 Correct.

Speaker 19 Okay, you can. All right, good.

Speaker 19 So that means that the Democrats need to win both Ohio and Montana are the most challenging ones, and then a bunch of other ones we can get to.

Speaker 19 Or if they lose one one of those, you have to pick up a race in Texas or Florida, which is going to be challenging. So it's an extremely challenging map.

Speaker 19 And Montana is like absolutely at the core of that with Senator John Tester.

Speaker 19 And over the weekend, there was a piece of audio that came out about the Republican Tim Sheehee going on about how Indians like to get drunk.

Speaker 19 I guess he was talking about going to the Crow Reservation and a great way to bond with Indians is drinking at 8 in the morning.

Speaker 19 And he talks about how Crow tribal members throw Coors lights cans at his head.

Speaker 19 So given that you have the experience of that committee, maybe talk about that specific issue and then the Montana race in general.

Speaker 20 Sure. I mean, I just know John so well, and he respects Montanans, tribal members, and non-tribal members so much that he just doesn't talk like that.

Speaker 20 He's a tough, tough dude, one of the toughest people in the United States Senate. But he's got that aspect of really respecting all of his constituents.

Speaker 20 And this is just disrespecting his constituents, not to mention, you know, a pretty long and sordid history of people from other parts of America coming onto reservation land and making a series of assumptions about the people who live on reservations and the people who are members of tribal nations.

Speaker 20 John's been chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee and done tons for his tribes and tribes across the country and Native Hawaiians.

Speaker 20 And I just think now this race, it was already important for the, you know, that the balance of the Senate, but now it has a lot to do with how we feel about the United States government's interactions with and relationship with tribal nations.

Speaker 20 I don't think Sheehi gets it. I mean, we already knew that, but it's beyond just sort of the normal run-of-the-mill not getting it.
This guy sounds like he's from 1850, not from 2024.

Speaker 19 As part of the leadership team, you know, looking at that Senate map, I often hear from listeners, they're like, you know, get lost.

Speaker 19 Like, which races should we focus on, you know, particularly ones that are not from battleground states? That's you and Hawaii.

Speaker 19 Like, where have you been kind of focusing your energies as you look at the map?

Speaker 19 Are there any Senate races that stand out to you as being particularly important or stark in the contrast between the candidates?

Speaker 20 Well, I guess what I would say is a couple of things.

Speaker 20 First, there are a couple of races that are likely to be tight and likely to tip the balance, but there are a bunch of races that are equally important.

Speaker 20 If you, as a volunteer or a donor, are trying to figure out where to put your resources, I would start in the Midwest, Bobby Casey,

Speaker 20 Tammy Baldwin, Alyssa Slotkin. Those are key.
If we don't win those, we just lose the Senate for sure. So those are all good races to get involved in.

Speaker 20 And then Jackie Rosen in Nevada, you know, there are some polls showing her way, way ahead. I don't think she even believes those polls quite yet.
It's going to come down to Clark County.

Speaker 20 It's going to come down to turnout in the Las Vegas Strip. And, you know, if Jackie does well, she will win by some number of tens of thousands of votes.
But it's very, very likely to be super tight.

Speaker 20 And I think the same is true for Ruben Gallego, even though Cary Lake is completely bonkers and often not in state.

Speaker 20 I still think this thing tightens to the point where we're waiting for Maricopa County to come in. And then Ruben is successful, but not by, you know, 14 points like some of these polls are showing.

Speaker 20 And then the final two I know you want to get to. Sherrod Brown's holding up really well in Ohio.
He's ahead, I'm not sure, four to six points. It depends on which poll you rely upon.

Speaker 20 And Sherrod has been able to survive a rightward shift in the state of Ohio. I think he will be able to do that again.
The other thing about Ohio is it's actually not as red as Montana.

Speaker 20 Montana will go somewhere between 15 and 25 points, likely for Donald Trump. And so, therefore, John Tester has to survive an absolute torrent.
He can.

Speaker 20 It's a small enough state where the interactions that he has personally with people can be the difference maker.

Speaker 20 And he's been able to transcend, you know, running under Barack Obama, running under under Donald Trump, running under Joseph Ravenette Biden.

Speaker 20 And he continues to survive because people know that his name is synonymous with Montana.

Speaker 20 The one thing I'd say is that there's kind of this, as we saw $500 million being raised for the Harris campaign and all the rest of it, there might be a sense among donors, regular folks, and say, well, you know, I already sent $1,000.

Speaker 20 What do they need with another $1,000? Let me tell you, they all need another $1,000. I am in conversations where we are making decisions about how to deploy resources.
And it is not a

Speaker 20 unconstrained environment.

Speaker 20 It is very much, we have a lot of money, but we do not have enough money because we also have to play offense in two of the biggest states in the union, in Texas and Florida.

Speaker 20 And to be really competitive, and we can be competitive, those are a couple of hundred million dollars each.

Speaker 20 And so the first thing we do is sort of secure the high ground, all of our incumbents, and especially the toughest of the incumbent races.

Speaker 20 But in order to have success, we have to do what we did in Georgia, which is we thought we were a bit of a long shot and then we ended up picking up two.

Speaker 20 So it always feels like it's a terrible Senate map. And for the last two cycles, we've been able to survive it and even build our majority.

Speaker 19 On the resource unconstrained thing, it sounds to me from my friends, the ones that still talk to me in the Republican world, that because it's resource constrained for them, they might be leaving Old Carey Lake out to dry.

Speaker 19 So we'll see how that turns out. That'd really be a shame.
But you kind of alluded to this. I'm interviewing Colin Allred later this week at the Texas Trib Fest.
and

Speaker 19 it is not a resource unconstrained environment. That's a very tough race.
Texas is a tough state that might be fool's gold.

Speaker 19 You know, the Sherrod Brown race is much more likely to be the one that determines whether the Democrats have a tie in the Senate or not.

Speaker 19 So how do you assess what to do about the Texas race and whether it's worth it just in the hopes that you don't have to see Ted Cruz every morning anymore?

Speaker 20 I mean, I guess the way I would answer the question is it depends how much money and how much time you have.

Speaker 20 If you have enough time to help us with these challenger races and you feel particularly strongly about either ted cruise or uh colin allred or uh debbie mucarcel powell and rick skin the regular people though can do whatever they want which feels good though i'm talking about you all you said you're in the meetings with the you know the the dsc and that crowd oh no you start with your incumbents You absolutely start with the incumbents.

Speaker 20 There are no scenarios where you abandon an incumbent in favor of a challenger, even if it's another state, even if the statistics, it's just a sort of article of faith in politics that we protect the caucus members.

Speaker 20 These are the folks that have given us the infrastructure bill, especially with John Tester and Sherrod Brown. You got an author of the PACT Act, which provides resources for burn pit victims.

Speaker 20 And in Sherrod Brown, he's the one that saved the big pensions in the industrial Midwest. So these guys deserve our support, and we will be with them all the way through until victory.

Speaker 19 All right, moving over to the presidential. The Kamala Harris thing has just been such a phenomenon over the last six weeks.

Speaker 19 And, you know, I think that a lot of people have been pleasantly surprised by just her performance, by the way that like her dynamism, kind of how she's handled a lot of this, her reputation.

Speaker 19 Let's just be honest, not just among like regular folks or pundits or whatever, like the whispered reputation in Washington among Democrats was that there were some concerns about whether she was going to be up for this.

Speaker 19 I mean, you got to know her when you were working together in the Senate. Have you been surprised by this? Did you kind of see the strength of her campaign coming?

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, I was not as surprised as others. Obviously, I don't think anybody could have reasonably predicted as good of a six weeks as we've had, right?

Speaker 20 A pretty flawlessly executed transition into a convention, into

Speaker 20 rallies and Tim Waltz, and all of it is going well, and yet it's still basically a statistical tie. But I do think there was a little chatter from the Washington kind of pundit class.

Speaker 20 Let's be honest, Tim, they are mostly white dudes of a certain age. And, you know, Kamala was in a tough spot.
She ran for president, and the first two states were Iowa and New Hampshire.

Speaker 20 So what would have been the conventional wisdom if the pundit class were a little bit more diverse and the first voting states were a little more diverse?

Speaker 20 And then maybe people would have seen her a bit differently.

Speaker 19 I guess I have to challenge you on that though, Senator. Like I don't think it's really that.
I mean, sure, obviously she deals with racism and misogyny. Absolutely, accepted.

Speaker 19 But like, you know, during the period between the debate and when she took over, it was a lot of the folks in the Congressional Black Caucus that were coming to Biden's defense and wanting to stick with Biden.

Speaker 19 In focus groups that my colleague Sarah Longwell did of black voters and black women voters, there were people that were concerned about her for legitimate reasons. So I don't know.

Speaker 19 I think that, some of this was some of her interviews initially or the 2019 campaign that didn't really find a lot of footing. I don't know that it's just that, right?

Speaker 19 I mean, I think that some of this was performance.

Speaker 20 No, it's not just that. I don't want to attribute it to that people wake up every morning and wring their hands and try to figure out how to have racist or misogynistic thoughts.

Speaker 20 What I am saying, though, is that people judge you on your last race. And I'll just give you my best example.
I ran for Congress, a little-known fact.

Speaker 20 And as my old friend, Governor Waihe used to say, that wasn't a loss. That was an experiment.
I came in sixth out of ten. I lost to a lot of my colleagues in the legislature.
It did not go well.

Speaker 20 And quite reasonably, the conventional wisdom was like, maybe he's not that good of a statewide or district-wide politics. And I think that Kamala was basically zero and one.

Speaker 20 And then going into this thing, and the only data point we had for how she would perform in an election, well, we had California, but that can be reasonably kind of calibrated to be a different kettle of fish.

Speaker 20 And then we had the Democratic primary for president, which objectively, on one level, electorally didn't go well.

Speaker 20 The other way to look at it is, well, she ended up vice president, so it went great for her. But I just think she is objectively now good at politics.
She united the coalition.

Speaker 20 She has essentially activated the left. The base is thrilled.
And she is explicitly making overtures to people in the middle, which is basically like hitting all the marks in every single way.

Speaker 20 And people are still stroking their chin saying, Yeah, but is she really good at this? And I'm thinking, yeah,

Speaker 20 I don't know. I just judge people's success based on their actual election results and how the campaign is going.

Speaker 20 You know, part of what's happening, I think, in politics is Democrats don't trust happiness. And so I saw some just absolutely insane screed on Twitter last night.
Yes, I was on Twitter last night.

Speaker 20 And someone was essentially like, it's all going to go to hell in October. We need to brace ourselves.

Speaker 20 And I'm thinking, yeah, I'm sure something crazy is going to happen in October, but part of the objective of the other side is to freak us out, right?

Speaker 20 And Kamala has been unflappable and she has set a tone for the grassroots to also be unflappable. So I'm pretty excited.
I also abide by the aphorism in politics, only the paranoid survive.

Speaker 20 But I'm trying to balance that with the idea that winning begets winning and optimism begets money and grassroots and volunteerism and good vibes, as they say.

Speaker 19 Somebody who's worked on some campaigns that finished sixth or worse in a primary. It's all right.

Speaker 19 You rebound from that. Is there anything from your, you got to know her, right?

Speaker 19 Is there anything you don't think people know about Kambala that you, you know, from your time working with her, either about issues or a character trait or any kind of story you have from being colleague?

Speaker 20 Yeah, she's pretty normal.

Speaker 20 I mean, look, the Senate is full of people who are really extraordinary in terms of their accomplishments, but it is often accompanied by a strange affect, either something that, you know, sort of comes over decades of being in power, or that, you know, sometimes those are two sides of the same coin, that you're extraordinarily talented, but like you're not a normal person.

Speaker 20 You are not a regular person. Kamala was pretty normal.
And I just remember being on a couple of text strings.

Speaker 20 And before you asked him, I have since deleted them many years ago with Booker and Kamala just sort of making sarcastic comments about what was going on in the caucus lunch and all the rest of it.

Speaker 20 But I found her to be, you know, one of the most normal people in the United States Senate Democratic Conference.

Speaker 20 I think I've benefited from the fact that I've found the only job where being normal makes you kind of like unusual. And I think she was a fellow traveler in that way.

Speaker 19 All right, Tim Apple. Let's release the texts.
I want to see them.

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Speaker 19 And Ricky, wear them, please.

Speaker 6 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 8 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 12 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 16 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 3 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 11 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 3 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close. Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 19 Speaking of normal or abnormal, I want to play an audio from JD Vance. Audio from JD Vance just keeps resurfacing.
The guy did so many podcasts. He's a gift that keeps on giving.

Speaker 19 I want to listen to it because I saw you, you comment on it the other day.

Speaker 24 And I think the gender inequity stuff is like, we need more of the medicine.

Speaker 24 Okay, clearly this value set has made me a miserable person who can't have kids because I already, you know, passed the biological period when it was possible.

Speaker 24 And I live in a 1,200 square foot apartment in New York and I pay $5,000 a month for it.

Speaker 19 But I'm really...

Speaker 24 better than these other people. What I'm going to do is project my like racial and gender sensitivities on the rest of them.

Speaker 24 And like the reason that our society is broken is because these people don't think the exact way that I think.

Speaker 24 Even though the way that I think has made me a miserable person, I just need to make more people think like that.

Speaker 24 So we're going to teach this in our schools, in our universities, even in our elementary schools, because once everybody agrees with me, then everything will finally

Speaker 24 come full circle and we'll have a happy, healthy society.

Speaker 19 I don't know if that's projection or insecurity. I noticed that you thought that was interesting is how fully formed his philosophy was.
That's what you said. Expand on that a little bit.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I mean, my sense is that he had a couple of really terrible interactions with people in New York when he was a Fancy Pants VC dude or a Fancy Pants new author.

Speaker 20 And I remember people dropped off his book, you know, at our Senate office. You got to read this, you got to understand what's happening, and all the rest of it.

Speaker 20 So I think he just sort of interacted with some people in New York City and didn't like it, and it hurt his feelings. And that's turned into a whole, you know, a way of looking at the world.

Speaker 20 But on a more serious note, it does seem like this guy is like 4chan in three dimensions I mean these are truly wacky ideas and I think increasingly in the United States Senate whether it's whether it's TED or it's JD or any of these other Ivy League educated folks they've clearly got big brains they've clearly they've got big educational attainment they are on paper smart and that their thought process is more like a 17 year old who's just being like told what to think and they're like pretty good memorizers and they're blank slates anyway and so they just say sure this is now what I think about the world.

Speaker 20 And so I think there's a really kind of dangerous vector here of these Ivy League educated people that really have borderline psychotic views of other people. And that's what this is.

Speaker 20 This is not about politics. This is like, why do you think people in New York are inherently unhappy and trying to impose that? Like everyone, everyone.

Speaker 20 Wherever you are, if you're in southern South Carolina, you're in Mississippi or you're in San Francisco, you're in New York, you're just a person trying to succeed and trying to maybe meet somebody and eventually start a family, make a little money, not get sick, have some fun.

Speaker 20 People are people. And this kind of ontology of there are these kinds of people and they all think this, and this is why my politics is X, is like the worst kind of divisiveness.

Speaker 20 And it's just weird because If you read that online, you would think it was a crank.

Speaker 19 This person.

Speaker 19 Like a 17-year-old boy, like you said, like a 17-year-old boy.

Speaker 20 Yeah, yeah, like a pretty smart 17-year-old boy. Tim, I'm just wondering how conservative and smart you were at 17.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I was going to say,

Speaker 19 I'm sorry, that's why I had to interject.

Speaker 19 There were a few familiar themes to my and Rand phase at all boys high school that I heard there, but not even quite as mean, though. But, you know, there's some echoes, maybe.

Speaker 20 Yeah, and that's the thing is, like, I can understand kind of exploring different things intellectually. This seems so personal to him.
Yeah.

Speaker 20 And that's why it's a little more creepy than just like, that's a weird public policy position.

Speaker 20 And the other thing that I think is extremely creepy is you have a 78-year-old man running for president of the United States who, you know, is going to be well into his 80s.

Speaker 20 So this guy's got a 50-50 chance of being, or a little bit, you know, less than that, but a pretty solid chance of being the leader of the free world.

Speaker 20 And so, you know, people say the VP choice doesn't matter. I think it is a little different when you have an elderly man running for president.

Speaker 20 And I think it is a little different when this person is like way, way, way outside of the mainstream.

Speaker 19 Yeah, I agree. And it seems miserable himself, honestly.

Speaker 19 I just, to me, I'm not a psychologist, but it feels like it is not a sign that you are fulfilled if you're spending so much time discussing the perceived misery of other people based on their biological clock and their wombs and all the things he's obsessed with talking about.

Speaker 19 We have to do a little bit on issues before I lose you. We were both on the YMBs for Harris call.
Congratulations to us.

Speaker 19 I got tickled. I was listening to your Ezra Klein interview when you were criticizing the community engagement process.
I was like, oh, man, this guy is one of us, it turns out.

Speaker 19 So just talk a little bit about the Harris plan on the 3 million new homes and what's some low-hanging fruit.

Speaker 19 Like, what are some things that people could actually do here around the issue of trying to take away some of the red tape around building affordable homes?

Speaker 20 Well, I know your podcast is sort of heterodox ideologically, but I'm going to make a very progressive pitch on yes in my backyard. And here's the thing.

Speaker 20 We all clearly agree that it is improper and dangerous to allow the noisiest, crankiest, most vigilant person to make a determination about what library books go into the public library.

Speaker 20 We all understand

Speaker 20 that community engagement can be hijacked by individuals with an agenda, either an economic or an ideological agenda.

Speaker 20 And it's an article of faith among progressives that we want to let librarians decide what goes into the library, with some exceptions for truly dangerous material that is already impermissible for young people.

Speaker 20 On the housing side, we've just decided to elevate so-called community engagement as the sine qua non around housing.

Speaker 20 If you don't care deeply about community engagement, then you don't care about the community.

Speaker 20 And look, I think there are ample opportunities at the state, county, and federal level for people to get involved.

Speaker 20 But all we're saying is there is a national shortage of housing, and the way to at least unlock some of the housing that we need is to simply make it easier to build housing.

Speaker 20 Certainly in the state of Hawaii, the same laws that protect our most precious spaces, culturally and environmentally, also stop the most obvious, logical, humane, and economical fourplex apartment buildings just to allow a nurse and a firefighter and an elderly person to like live anywhere near where they work and to not have to frankly move to the continental United States because land is cheaper.

Speaker 20 And so, look, I'm the chairman of the Transportation and HUD Committee, which means I do the appropriation, I do the money for affordable housing and for housing stock and all the rest of it.

Speaker 20 And we've been able to increase that dollar amount. Let me tell you something.

Speaker 20 There is not enough money to solve this problem unless we make it easier to build housing. One final thing on this, Tim, which is, I think, great.

Speaker 20 This actually shows that Kamala Harris is turning the page ideologically and generationally on a really important pain point for a lot of voters.

Speaker 20 It is the highest cost for most people, either rent or mortgage. And this is something we can actually do about it.
And it is an area where she is actually abandoning the Democratic Party's orthodoxy.

Speaker 20 And so for those moderates and those sort of pro-free market economy voters who are always nervous about voting for a Democrat, but don't like Donald Trump.

Speaker 20 This is an indicator that she's not just using the words around reaching out to center-left and center-right individuals, but she's putting some meat on the bones in terms of policy.

Speaker 20 So I'm thrilled, as you can tell.

Speaker 19 Since you called it out, it's the heterodox podcast. I have two, you know, whatever, moderate things to pick on you on, really quick.
One, but the $25,000 for first-time homebuyers.

Speaker 19 I'm sorry, you're busy. That's just going to make houses more expensive.
Come on, come on. That's Adam Smith.

Speaker 20 That's Adam smith senator we're going to give people more money when when it's already too expensive the supply and demand how does that work so i don't have any problem generally speaking with a subsidy for a first-time home buyer but i will agree with you that i think there are two strategies that are likely to be more successful and the first is to allow people to build the kind of housing that we say we want and that's the whole yimbe movement and the second is to the extent that we're going to provide federal resources resources, I would rather those resources go into recapitalizing the federal housing stock.

Speaker 20 Right now, there are old units that fall into such disrepair as to be unavailable. And so for, say, $50,000, we can keep something in the housing stock.

Speaker 20 And if it falls out of the housing stock, we've got to build a new unit, which may cost up to three, four, depends on the state, for $500,000 per unit.

Speaker 20 So I don't hate that idea, but I would not prioritize it as high as the campaign has.

Speaker 19 Smart. Okay.
Here's the last one, and I'll let you go. So you said at the top, the IRA, you want to be at the top of your, you know, your bio and your accomplishments.

Speaker 19 And there's a lot in there to like, even for, you know, for somebody like me.

Speaker 19 There's some progressive stuff that I didn't like as much, but most of it I thought was totally reasonable, especially the building and the development side of this.

Speaker 19 And that's where we get to the question. With the broadband and building some of the plants that have come along with this, there just have been delays.

Speaker 19 Like the red tape, you know, the rural broadband is is not happening, you know, at the at the speed you would have hoped it was, given how long it's been since the bill was passed.

Speaker 19 What's the hang up on that? Is there anything Congress can do to alleviate it?

Speaker 20 You're right. We passed a bunch of important bills and a lot of that money is going out pretty fast.

Speaker 20 It does depend on state and local and county approvals and development timelines and all the rest of it.

Speaker 20 So especially, I would say the chip stuff is working pretty fast and the solar and wind stuff is also working pretty fast, although we have to, as you know, do permitting reform for transmission.

Speaker 20 But on the broadband stuff, it has been painstakingly slow. I don't think there are any excuses to make.
I do think the Democratic Party should be the party of getting shit done.

Speaker 20 I do think the Democratic Party should be the party of building stuff. And we don't have to always defend the government.
We should defend the premise that the government is there to help.

Speaker 20 We should defend government expenditures. We should defend the public generally.
But if something is going too slow, we're allowed to admit that.

Speaker 20 it is not our job to defend every aspect of the civil service and the bureaucracy if things are not moving as fast as they can and i think there are a lot of people who agree with our objectives but literally in the end think that we're not going to be able to you know get it all through in reality and would rather have a party that promises nothing and delivers nothing we promise a lot we've delivered a lot but now we have to execute Speaking my language.

Speaker 19 Senator Brian Schott, thanks so much for coming on the Vulwork podcast. Let's do it again sometime.

Speaker 20 Thank you, Tim. Take care.

Speaker 19 Appreciate it. All right, up next, my colleague Mona Sharon.

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Speaker 19 And we're back. She's a policy editor at the Bulwark.
She hosts the Beg to Differ podcast, which comes out once a week, as well as a subscriber-only Just Between Us podcast.

Speaker 19 So you subscribe at thebulwark.com/slash free trial if you want to test it out. That's my pal, Mona Charon.
How are you doing, Mona?

Speaker 1 Hi. It's so good to be with you, Tim.
You've been doing such a great job with this podcast. Congratulations.
It's fantastic.

Speaker 19 I've been trying. I cuss too much.
Okay. And it's you and my father that I think about mostly.
My mother doesn't like the cussing either, but I don't know. It doesn't bother me for some reason.

Speaker 19 But you and my father, I just have sometimes on my shoulder. I'm like, did I really need to, you know, say that word right then? But sometimes I just can't help myself.

Speaker 1 I am fighting a lonely battle against profanity and I'm losing horribly.

Speaker 19 You are losing horribly. And I guess it's really not a downgrade from Charlie on that front.

Speaker 19 I mean, maybe, though, his curses were maybe a little more creative at times, I like to stick with the old standbys.

Speaker 19 You had an article last week that was titled, What Are We Conserving? that just, you know, had me standing up out of my chair and hooting and hollering. And it was sort of a commentary on this

Speaker 19 question about whether anti-Trump conservatives, like, what to do in the election.

Speaker 19 And David French had written an article about how he was going to vote for Biden because, in a way, he thinks that will help conservatism in the long run. And I care a little less about the

Speaker 19 pundit slap fighting parts of this than the bigger questions that you got to, which was kind of like the, what is the point of this? Like, why are we here? And how does that inform the decision?

Speaker 19 So, maybe just talk about that at the biggest picture.

Speaker 1 Right. Well, first of all, thank you.

Speaker 1 So, the arguments that I have seen tend to be along these lines.

Speaker 1 People say, well, you know, I understand that you don't like Trump, but if you vote for Kamala Harris or for Joe Biden, you are giving up on all of these important policy matters, whether it's school choice or, and they'll run through a list.

Speaker 1 So I approach it in two different ways.

Speaker 19 First of all, big picture.

Speaker 1 Actually, let me do the weeds first. Because even if you were talking about

Speaker 1 the particular issues, one of the things that has happened in the last 10 years, to me at least, is that seeing so many people on the right that I used to respect and trust and believe were acting in good faith and that when they presented arguments, you could rely on them as being accurate and true, at least as the facts, have shown themselves to be capable of this staggering mendacity and bad faith.

Speaker 1 And so it does cause you to look back and say, well, hang on now. I mean, there are certain issues where I know a lot and I, you know, don't rely on other people to guide my thinking.

Speaker 1 But there are many issues where I don't know. And so I rely on people who agree with me on, say, phonics education or anti-communism.

Speaker 19 This was my favorite line. Thank you.
I'm glad.

Speaker 1 You know, who agree with me on those things, right? And I'll think, well, they agree on this. So they must be right on Federal Reserve policy or something else.
And that has been shaken.

Speaker 1 And I no longer believe that the people who agreed with me on some issues are reliable. So that caused me to sort of reevaluate many assumptions that I had made about issues.

Speaker 1 And so when people say, well, you're not voting for the most conservative electable candidate, which was Bill Buckley's standard that he propagated many decades ago, you should always support the most conservative electable candidate.

Speaker 1 And I said in the piece, you know, I am not as sure as I used to be that the most conservative candidate is going to be one that is right on all matters. I've reevaluated some of my views.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's the first part. The second part is, and there's a third, but so the second part is, though, and this is the crux of the piece, is that

Speaker 1 when you decide who you're going to support in an election, especially one that features such a vile Cretan like Donald Trump, who is dangerous for the Republic, not just has the wrong views on things, which he does.

Speaker 1 It isn't about those policy preferences.

Speaker 1 It is, as conservatives, the main thing that we wish to conserve is the founding, is our constitutional system, is the republic as it was bequeathed to us, and we hope to bequeath it in turn to our children and grandchildren.

Speaker 1 And so I talked about 2020 when it looked for a few hot minutes like the choice was going to be Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 1 And I remember you wrote a really great piece at the time saying, people, you know,

Speaker 1 this is coming down the track. You know, this is happening.
Please get your act together. And they listened to you, thank God.

Speaker 1 But anyway, for a little while there, it did look like that might be the choice. And it's hard to think of a political figure that I think is more wrong on the left anyway than Bernie Sanders.

Speaker 1 But I said, I thought about it then.

Speaker 1 I would have voted for Sanders because as much as I think his policies are wrong and destructive, I think he would have abided by the law and would not attempt to rule as a dictator, would not attempt to overturn a free and fair election, et cetera.

Speaker 1 And so since I had already gone through all that in 2020 to say, can you vote for Harris? Of course. Harris is easy.
This is not a hard thing.

Speaker 1 It's a matter of preserving the constitutional republic and therefore it's not hard to say, yes, I will support Harris.

Speaker 19 So this is where like we'll get a a little bit nerdy and then get back into the issues, but I love this part in particular because it is kind of this uniquely American definition of conservatism.

Speaker 19 True. Right.
Because the American definition of conservatism has this liberal strain in it, small liberal, because of the founding, right?

Speaker 19 Like if the goal of American conservatism is to defend and preserve the fundamental principles of the founding, maybe not the actions of the founders, right?

Speaker 19 But like the principles that are laid out in the founding documents, there are a lot of those things that have these kind of classical liberal sort of values to them, which includes the rule of law, but also includes pluralism and various individual freedoms we have.

Speaker 19 And like conservatism as defined in most of the rest of the world is different, right? It's traditionalism, it's blood and soil.

Speaker 19 And so because of that unique element of American conservatism, you can kind of get into this definitional question, you know, that I think your article kind of teases out, right?

Speaker 19 Which is like, well, actually, maybe

Speaker 19 conservatism in the American context is more about that, like defending these classical liberal values rather than it is some like tick list of policy priorities that have you know developed over the course of 200 years.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think that American conservatism, rightly understood, is about conserving the founding, which is, after all, an enlightenment project that was all about individual rights and limited government and

Speaker 1 making sure that individuals can thrive to the maximum degree possible and with equality and respect and all of that.

Speaker 1 And those are not the conservative values, as you say, of Europe or other parts of the world where it's thrown and altar or blood and soil. It's a very different kind of thing.

Speaker 1 Now, there's some overlap, but there has been a huge debate in America since the rise of Trump, where with these Christian nationalists, for example, they are just, they are completely denying that conservatism has anything to do with small L liberalism.

Speaker 1 You know, they're saying, no, no, it's, it is about that the government should have the power to tell everybody how to live and that we are the right, we know what's right.

Speaker 1 And they're happy to throw out checks and balances and all that. They say, what has conservatism gotten for us?

Speaker 19 You know?

Speaker 19 If you want to get really nerdy on this, so after I read your article over the weekend, I was listening to the Know Your Enemy podcast. Those guys did.
Oh, yeah, I listened to them.

Speaker 19 Yeah, on Bozell and Buckley. And this does go back a little bit to that, right? Like their fight, actually.

Speaker 19 So this strain was there the whole time, which was Bozell was kind of pushing for like, no, the Goldwater libertarian thing is not actually conservatism.

Speaker 19 Like the government should push for, you know, traditional values and, you know, have its thumb on the scale and be more, be more active and involved. Exactly.

Speaker 19 And so then you get to the Trump side of this, right?

Speaker 19 Which is like, okay, so there are some people around Trump, like the Project 2025ists, who have like moved, who are trying to move away from kind of that classically liberal style of conservatism.

Speaker 19 And then you have Trump, who is like basically without ideology.

Speaker 1 Well, he doesn't have an ideology, but he definitely has a mood.

Speaker 1 And that mood is authoritarian and admiring of authoritarians, which I would have thought was the exact opposite of everything that conservatives were taught to revere.

Speaker 1 As I understood it when I was coming coming up, we were the people who were against authoritarianism. We were for freedom.
We were the Liberty Party.

Speaker 1 Reagan, in one of his great speeches, you know, described a Vietnamese boat person,

Speaker 1 you know, being helped aboard a U.S. ship and saying, hello, freedom man.

Speaker 1 And that was who we were. And I found that inspiring, and I still do.

Speaker 1 And in Trump, you have someone who not only doesn't understand any of that, but openly admires the world's dictators, thugs, and tyrants.

Speaker 1 So again, there, if you're a conservative, rightly understood, you should be allergic to that and say, yes, I prefer Harris on foreign policy. Not hard to say.

Speaker 19 The Vietnamese story reminds me, we talked about this brief with Bill yesterday, I think, but the

Speaker 19 J.D. Vance, right? So now Trump has spawned these imitators and these warped versions of Trumpism.

Speaker 19 JDU is out saying that, mocking the idea that we should help Afghanistan interpreters, you know, right? And saying that, oh, and so it's like a rejection of that American ideal.

Speaker 19 I do wonder what one of the things that kind of spurred this conversation, this sort of nerdy intra-Never Trump conversation was something that Steve Hayes wrote where he was critical of Harris saying that and called her a statist.

Speaker 19 And I kind of blanched at that. I was like, isn't Trump the statist, I guess?

Speaker 19 But being generous to his point of view, like, do you look at the Democrats and see any of the statist elements that you feel like conservatives should be allergic to?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 1 I mean, I really objected to Joe Biden, for example, doing that student loan forgiveness thing without legal authority, just as I objected to Obama changing immigration law with the stroke of a pen without going to Congress.

Speaker 1 Those kinds of things, how you do things is just as important, sometimes more important, than what you do, because the rule of law has to be paramount,

Speaker 1 which means the rule of the people in the end. And so, yes, I do find elements there that should be criticized, but I mean,

Speaker 1 the Trump people are the last ones to accuse anybody of statism. Now, Trump, what does he want to do? He wants to subsidize IVF for the whole country.
You know,

Speaker 1 do you know how much that would cost?

Speaker 19 Seems cheap. That seems affordable.
Wow.

Speaker 1 But, you know.

Speaker 19 I mean, eventually we know. The final form of Trump vansism would be to fund IVF, but only for straight people.
Well, I was going to say only for white people. Yeah, only for straight white people.

Speaker 19 We'll fund it for. That would be it.
But, you know, statism and, you know, racial identity politics put together. We had Pat Toomey today who was over on CNBC.

Speaker 19 And the short of it was that Joe Kernan, the kind of Trumpy host of Squawkbox, is just kind of like the inverse of us.

Speaker 19 He's apoplectic with Toomey that this is a binary choice and the capital gains rate might go up to X percent under Harris. And

Speaker 19 how could he not choose? I didn't think it was interesting. The Toomey case is basically that after January 6th, Trump disqualifies himself, so he has to be neutral.
I don't know.

Speaker 19 To me, that feels a little bit short. Like Toomey is not there, but I kind of wonder how you react to something like that.

Speaker 1 So I'm trying, Tim. I'm really trying to be happy with Republicans who say they won't vote for Trump because after all, that is worth a lot, right? If Trump voters

Speaker 19 don't show up.

Speaker 1 Yeah, if Republicans just don't show up because they're disgusted with Trump, but don't affirmatively vote for Harris.

Speaker 1 It's still good for Harris, but it's not as good as saying that you would support Harris. I was reading a New York Times piece about the Haley voters over the weekend, and you may have seen that.

Speaker 1 And one of them was just saying, and I think this probably speaks for a lot of them, that

Speaker 1 he doesn't like trump but i am a republican so i will vote for a republican he didn't say which it would be might write somebody in but that is so strong in people and you know the argument goes and i think some people have made this case well it's better to tell them to stay home because you're you can't get them over the hump of saying support harris so if they just stay home that's good enough and that may be the most you can expect what do you think i guess i i mean the Toomey thing, it was interesting, he's on CNBC and kind of getting the business on this.

Speaker 19 He voted to bar Donald Trump from becoming president again, right? Like he voted to convict him, which was a great vote. Thank goodness.

Speaker 19 I mean, if 11, 10 more people had made that vote, we wouldn't be here. So, good for Pat Toomey for that.

Speaker 19 But to me, it's like, and then Richard Burr said he's voting for Trump, who is also one of those people, and so is Cassidy.

Speaker 19 And I'm like, I just don't understand how you could have made that vote and then not just be for Harris.

Speaker 19 I mean, you can wear the hair shirts and be for Harris and say, I don't like that I'm for Harris, but you guys gave me no choice because I already have voted that this person should be disqualified from being the president again.

Speaker 19 It would be better for me if he was out there, if maybe if our colleague Sarah Longwell, who's launched a new, the Republican Voters Against Trump, has launched their new campaign today.

Speaker 19 You know, if he was out there in an ad saying, I can't vote for Trump in Pennsylvania. I was your former senator and I can't vote for Trump for this reason, that reason.

Speaker 19 Then I'd bless him. Then I would give him the Catholic blessing for it's okay, even if he doesn't say Harris.
But he's not really doing that, right? Like he's kind of just disappearing.

Speaker 19 So that's sort of, I don't know, how I assess it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I 100% agree.

Speaker 1 I think, you know, if we're fantasizing, I mean, it would be great if he would do an ad saying, I personally have, you know, was in the Capitol and I saw what Trump did, and I will accordingly be voting for Harris, even though I've never voted for a Democrat before in my life.

Speaker 1 But you may not be able to get there, but please, whatever you do, I'm not saying you have to vote for Harris, but just don't vote for Trump.

Speaker 19 That would be good. Vice President Harris should call him.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
They're colleagues. She should call him.
And they should try to make the push.

Speaker 19 Because he sounded, I don't know, he was pretty uncomfortable on CNBC. But anyway, we'll put the full thing in the show notes if people want to watch it.

Speaker 19 I wanted to get to Tim Walls, but you said one thing at the very beginning that piqued my interest. And so I have to follow up.

Speaker 19 And I thought this was a great point in the article that like we all have these kind of partisan shortcuts, right?

Speaker 19 It's like, oh, well, I agree with, you know, I don't know that much about this issue or that issue. I'm going to trust an expert or trust somebody that I look to,

Speaker 19 who I admire, whose ideology I admire, and say, okay, well, if they feel strongly about this, then I'll go along with it.

Speaker 19 But you kind of implied that because of that, you've now reconsidered various issues. Is there anything that comes to mind?

Speaker 19 Is there anything in particular that you feel like over the last eight years that's like not really related to Trump, but because of this rethinking, you've started to reassess?

Speaker 1 Well, you know, it was partly the Trump thing, but also just in general, because my concern about the national debt has been an ongoing thing for me. I was not in favor of the Trump tax cuts.

Speaker 1 I think we've had enough tax cuts. I was for them in the Reagan era.
I was for them when George W. did them.
But enough. You know, we have these huge deficits.
We're very undertaxed as a country.

Speaker 1 That is a very odd thing for a Republican to say. But honestly, compared to what Europeans pay, I've definitely become

Speaker 1 an apostate on taxes. I've always been a bit of an apostate apostate on guns.
I've always believed in gun control.

Speaker 1 But there are other things, like when it comes to social policies, where I have definitely changed. And this is because of the people that I

Speaker 1 heretofore would have trusted their judgment and no longer do. So, for example, I am now much more in favor of giving support to families with children, government support.

Speaker 1 I used to worry that this would cause too much dependency and that it would undermine the family and things like that.

Speaker 1 But I think the evidence has shown over the last number of years that the benefits are so dramatic. You know, if we got back to a two-parent norm for raising kids, that that would be best.

Speaker 1 But it's also the case that we're not there and there are all these millions of kids who are growing up in single-parent, poor homes. Let's help them.
So that has changed.

Speaker 19 So you're saying that like you know somebody may be like i don't know just pulling a name out of my hat bill bennett who wrote a book called the book of virtues

Speaker 19 then going fully in on donald trump maybe cause you just think i don't know maybe not all the virtues in the book of virtues were as virtuous as he had as i had thought that's a sad story i was very close to bill bennett and i loved him and his wife and It's just a very, very sad thing.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 he's one of the biggest disappointments because I do think he had a lot to contribute to society, and he would have been a very important voice if he had been anti-Trump.

Speaker 1 And for him to go all in, it was just crushing at the time. But I'm past all that.
I expect nothing of anybody anymore.

Speaker 19 I have no more room in my heart for hatred to these people. No more room.

Speaker 19 Okay, I want to close it Tim Walls.

Speaker 19 You know, some of us at the Bulwark were a little Tim Walls iffy, ranging from mildly hostile to mildly pro, I guess, was maybe the bulwark range of opinions on Tim Walls.

Speaker 19 And I was watching him on Labor Day yesterday, and I felt like the speech showed simultaneously all the reasons why he made some of us a little bit queasy and also why so many people are so excited about him and so Walls pilled.

Speaker 19 And so I want to play one clip from it. Let's listen.

Speaker 25 I saw last week the Wall Street Journal was trying to say because they did a story that apparently I am the poorest person to ever run for vice president.

Speaker 25 So then,

Speaker 25 but then they did another story that said, oh, he's actually richer than his statement says because he has, and I quote like this is an evil thing, a defined benefit pension plan.

Speaker 25 That is my wish for every American to have a defined benefit pension plan.

Speaker 19 He just just goes on to just kind of rip the rich. There's another good quote he's doing, making fun of Trump for trying to help his rich friends.

Speaker 19 I mean, it was a pure pro-labor, populist, every man kind of speech, which, you know, the Democrats have lost ground with some people in those, in that demo, right? The Obama Trump voter.

Speaker 19 So anyway, I was watching it and I thought simultaneously, I get it. I get why there's an ad value here, but also a defined benefit pension plan for every American.

Speaker 19 It's not exactly going to be on the Bulwark manifesto. So anyway, what are your thoughts on Tim Walz now a couple of weeks in?

Speaker 1 Well, okay, so let me go back to August when Tim Walls was first named as the VP

Speaker 1 and they did that Pennsylvania rally.

Speaker 1 And Josh Shapiro spoke first and he was the one we at the Bulwark. And it wasn't like we made a corporate decision.

Speaker 1 We're going to be for, you know, Shapiro, just like everybody agreed that he was the strongest.

Speaker 19 He was the most natural fits because of ideology and politics.

Speaker 1 True, that too.

Speaker 19 Yes, yes.

Speaker 1 And so I was disappointed when she named Walls instead of Shapiro. But then I was listening to the rally and I heard Shapiro's speech and it was good, but it was very politician-y sounding.

Speaker 1 You know, it sounded, you know, a lot. There is a little bit of like echoes of Obama that he's kind of imitating Obama's style a little bit.
Anyway, it was very good, but very politician-y.

Speaker 1 And then Tim Wolf gets up there, and he does have that everyman affect. And I thought to myself, maybe Kamala Harris is onto something.
That is,

Speaker 1 in this era, when nobody likes politicians, he may have something that is more appealing.

Speaker 19 I just thought it was on full effect.

Speaker 19 They were out for Labor Day yesterday, and I thought it was very telling. I mean, again, it's a more traditional Democratic campaign than like some of the Trumpy ones, but they are out on Labor Day.

Speaker 19 It's Walls is campaigning. She did two events.
We played a clip from it at the top. Trump and Vance were not.
They were on vacation yesterday. And I think that's telling.

Speaker 19 And that's that, you know, we just are hyper-focused here, obviously, on like the suburban, college-educated, former Republican swing voters, right, who are our friends and our people and the voters we're familiar with.

Speaker 19 But there is that other side of it, like the working-class voter that Trump took away from the Democrats. We'll see, but maybe they can claw back some percentage of that voter.

Speaker 1 Maybe. And the important thing is, though, there is one aspect of this.

Speaker 1 I don't know if you'll agree, but if I were advising the Harris Walls ticket, I would say, you know, definitely pitch to working class people, but not necessarily just to union people,

Speaker 1 because unions, especially in the private sector, have gone like they're only about 10% of people are in unions anymore.

Speaker 1 So it's really not a matter of unions, but it is a matter of pitching your message toward people who are not, you know, college educated, for example.

Speaker 19 Yeah, no, I totally agree. And that's definitely going to be true in those three key blue wall thing states.
All right, well, this is wonderful.

Speaker 19 Do you have, do you have a big to differ plan this week?

Speaker 1 Do we have a guest? So we do. We have Kim Whaley, who's going to come talk to us about the pardon power.
She wrote a whole book. I don't know how she turns out these books so fast.

Speaker 1 It's quite impressive. But anyway, so we're going to talk about the pardon power a little bit because, God forbid, it could be the case that Trump is re-elected.
So, we're going to do that.

Speaker 1 And just as soon as you and I hang up, I'm going to talk with our friend Will Salatin on Just Between Us, which is that little niche podcast that you can get if you subscribe to the bulwark every week.

Speaker 1 It's not always me and Will. It's sometimes me and AB, and sometimes me and JVL, and sometimes a mystery guest.
Maybe I'll even get you to come on sometime, Tim.

Speaker 19 I'm available. All I do is sit in this room with the Pinto Bean sign behind me.
So you just let me know. Mona, thank you.
Thank you for coming on.

Speaker 19 That's New York Times best-selling author, Mona Charon, if you didn't know. Thanks, Mona.
And

Speaker 19 we will be back tomorrow with another doubleheader. I think it's going to be delicious.
Two of my favorite Democrats, a former senator and a Biden administration official. It's going to be good.

Speaker 19 So come on back. We'll see you all then.
Peace. Temptation hides

Speaker 19 in the space between.

Speaker 19 Lord, help me find this desire for fire. fire

Speaker 19 Words can cleanse and purify

Speaker 19 or tear down a path of lies

Speaker 19 In your presence consequence I can't stop trembling

Speaker 19 For all of my virtue

Speaker 19 Why can I not hold the truth

Speaker 19 for all my good fortune

Speaker 19 I would chase chase my place with you.

Speaker 19 This path will lead us back,

Speaker 19 will lead us back to ruin

Speaker 19 for all of my virtue.

Speaker 19 Why can I not hold it true?

Speaker 19 I've fallen,

Speaker 19 I've fallen again.

Speaker 19 I've fallen,

Speaker 19 I've falling

Speaker 19 again.

Speaker 19 I'm falling.

Speaker 19 I've fallen

Speaker 19 again.

Speaker 19 I'm falling.

Speaker 19 The Bullard podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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