Matt Yglesias and Brian Beutler: The Left Hits Biden Harder than Trump

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovny, and Carise Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 10 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 7 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

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Speaker 14 Hello and welcome to the Bullard Podcast. Today's show, we have a pair of exennial bros with Substack newsletters.
Matt Iglesias, he's a contrarian center-left neoliberal and author of Slow Boring.

Speaker 14 Brian Boitler, he's a contrarian woke progressive and the author of Off Message. They co-host a new podcast called Politics,

Speaker 14 spelled with an X at the end to honor either Elon Musk or Latin X or Gen X. I'm not sure which.
Boys.

Speaker 15 Malcolm X.

Speaker 14 Malcolm X. Ugh, I should have had that.

Speaker 14 Welcome. I'm excited for this.
We're doing something special today. We're trying something new.
We're going to do a home and home where I'm going to quiz you guys about democratic stuff on this feed.

Speaker 14 And then you're going to turn the tables on me for the politics show, which will come out tomorrow at 6 a.m. So people can get a double dose of this kind of.

Speaker 14 I self-identify as an elder millennial. Are you Gen X self-identifying?

Speaker 15 I identify as, yeah, elder millennial. I'm 82, and I think the cutoff is 80.
So yeah, 81.

Speaker 14 I'm the, I'm the oldest millennial.

Speaker 15 But I don't want to like derail you here, but like in my mind, the elder millennial kind of is this, like, I feel like I have more in common with young Gen X people than with mainline millennials just because of technology mostly.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I don't know. I have Peter Pan syndrome, so I identify more with mid-millennials than Gen X people who I find sad.
But that's all about our personal, our personal mental issues, I think, mostly.

Speaker 14 Okay, let's do some work. We got the Michigan primary tonight.
Biden versus Dean Phillips after his star turn on the Bullwork podcast versus uncommitted.

Speaker 14 I think Dean versus uncommitted is going to be tight. Former U.S.

Speaker 14 rep and presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke said on Friday that Democratic voters should vote uncommitted to show they're unhappy with Joe Biden's handling of Israel. Rashida Tlaib agrees with him.

Speaker 14 Guys, what is your sense for what is happening in Michigan tonight? And do you think that people should be registering their unhappiness by voting for the ghost of Beto O'Rourke's candidacy?

Speaker 15 Who do you want to answer that question? Whoever. Go first.

Speaker 15 I think that at the end of the day, like what is going to matter vis-a-vis this issue is whether the war comes to an end or pauses or the United States through Joe Biden gets some distance from Benjamin Netanyahu and condemns what he's doing to some degree.

Speaker 15 And it's not really going to be about

Speaker 15 how people register their views about it in primaries. But to the extent that people want to like

Speaker 15 register their disapprovement, now is a much better time than, you know, six months from now or something like that. And so I kind of think it's no harm, no foul.

Speaker 15 And maybe to the extent that it like motivates Joe Biden to realize that there's a problem here politically for him and that there are more things that he could do to try to hold the coalition together on this one issue.

Speaker 15 Maybe it's for the best, but I honestly don't think it's that big of a factor.

Speaker 14 Okay, so that presumes something not in evidence, I don't think. Matt, Brian says that Joe Biden has a policy problem here.
Are we sure he does?

Speaker 14 RoConna said that he said we cannot win Michigan with the status quo policy. There was an anonymous person in Politico this morning saying that he can't win Michigan with the current policy.

Speaker 14 Meanwhile, I'm over here with the Never Trumpers going, all of these moderate Wall Street Journal Romney voting Republicans have been begging for Joe Biden to give them their sister soldier moment, and he's kind of done it here with regards to the Gaza protesters.

Speaker 14 And are we sure that it hurts him?

Speaker 14 I think this, to me, illustrates the kind of like pathological nature of current progressive politics, which is that there is this obsession with protesting Biden over Gaza, right?

Speaker 14 So like, progressive leaders, influencers have created a political problem for Joe Biden.

Speaker 14 And now they are spending all their time urging Joe Biden to address this political problem of their own creation by creating disagreement with Netanyahu.

Speaker 14 But you also know, I mean, I know people who are very passionate advocates for Palestinian rights. Some of them are like crazy people, whatever, but the really sensible, really sane ones.

Speaker 14 Like, what they want is an independent Palestinian state. And Bibi Netanyahu is not going to give them one.
And Joe Biden is not going to be able to deliver one.

Speaker 14 So Biden can do a lot to alienate pro-Israel voters by catering more to the views of Gaza protesters, but he's not going to satisfy people who like

Speaker 14 want a complete transformation of the Israel-Palestine conflict or of the long-standing American alliance with Israel. For progressives, this is just like a catastrophic issue to have in the news.

Speaker 14 And, you know, if I could pull strings, I would like try to get people to like do abortion rights protests in red states. Like that's a good issue for Biden.

Speaker 14 Anything you can do on Gaza like is bad for Biden. And I think if you vote for uncommitted, you are going to generate headlines about Gaza, and that is going to help Trump win.
Right.

Speaker 14 Like if you say anything on Twitter about Gaza, that's going to help Trump win. And like, it's fine.
If you want Trump to win, right? Like if you

Speaker 14 want to polarize support for Israel, the best way to accomplish that probably is for Trump to win. And like, great, but I think that would be bad.
I live in America and

Speaker 14 I want the United States of America to be well-governed, which means re-electing Joe Biden.

Speaker 15 I feel like that, like, Matt's the policy guy, but there is a policy issue here.

Speaker 15 And like, the reason there are lots of people in Michigan, or at least enough maybe to swing the state away from Joe Biden, who are upset about Joe Biden's position on Israel, is like the moral problem of what Israel's doing in Gaza.

Speaker 15 Like they don't like it and they don't like that Joe Biden at least appears to support it, right? Like and without, you know, completely upending how the U.S.

Speaker 15 government, how any other president probably would have related to Israel after October 7th, there are things that Joe Biden could say and do that would communicate to those people, I hear you and I agree, and it's just a thorny thing to unwind.

Speaker 15 And there's like been very little effort to do that. And I think it's achievable without like alienating some other large contingent of the Democrats.

Speaker 15 Like, there aren't a lot of Democrats anymore who think B.B. Netanyahu is some good guy.

Speaker 14 We have audio. Joe Biden did address this issue yesterday with an ice cream cone in hand.
Yes. Let's listen to that really quick.
Let's talk about that.

Speaker 5 Can you give us a sense of when you think that seat fire will start, officer?

Speaker 14 Well, I hope by the beginning of the weekend. I mean, the end of the weekend.
At least my national security advisor tells me that we're close. We're close.
It's not done yet.

Speaker 14 And my hope is by next Monday, we'll have a ceasefire.

Speaker 14 All right. So maybe it could have been better if he was not like, he was literally like about to bite the cone when he said this.

Speaker 14 There was a little bit of like a George Bush, like, let's watch me drive kind of flashback. I was getting kind of night sweats watching that element of it.
But the actual positioning, Matt,

Speaker 14 again, I think we should talk about the policy and what the moral policy and what the right policy is, but positioning-wise, isn't he in the right place?

Speaker 14 I mean, I think so. I mean, it depends what happens, right? Like, I mean, he wants to get a ceasefire, that would be good.
He's trying to do it, he's working on that.

Speaker 14 And I do think that, you know, this is a question where the politics is downstream of the like the reality, right? Not the position taking, but like what actually happens.

Speaker 14 If there is an end to active conflict that Netanyahu says, we won, right?

Speaker 14 Then Biden could say, and we got a ceasefire and we stood with Israel. And then it's not like everyone will be happy, but most people would be happy with that.
But, you know, it's challenging.

Speaker 14 I mean, I think an important thing that

Speaker 14 your perspective, Tim, and your audience can provide is like, I think that a lot of progressive-minded people don't believe that there is a constituency of people who think that Donald Trump is bad and who voted for Joe Biden, but who wish Joe Biden was more moderate on policy issues.

Speaker 14 But like, in fact, there are a lot of people who think that. I mean, it's not 100 million people, but it's not zero people.
And the biggest thing that disturbs me talking to Democrats is how little

Speaker 14 attention they pay to that question, right? Like, I hear people talking a lot about how do we motivate young progressives? What do we do about Michigan protesters?

Speaker 14 And I unfortunately don't hear a lot of people saying, like, how do we get people who voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 and then voted for us in 2020?

Speaker 14 How do we keep them inside the tent, inside the coalition? When I think if you just like look objectively, like that's the problem Biden is facing politically.

Speaker 14 Like he got some swing voters in 2020 and now he is losing them. Yeah.
This is where the tactical element of this, I think, comes into question.

Speaker 14 I'm interested in your view on this, Brian, because like objectively speaking, you know, I'm like probably not the best representative.

Speaker 14 You know, we had an intra-bull work fight the other month about what was happening in Gaza, and I'm on like the squishiest side. I just really disdain BB.

Speaker 14 I don't really think he has a plan.

Speaker 14 And I think that a lot of the, you know, actions have been pretty, there's been unnecessary carnage that has been happening in Gaza and attempts to achieve the stated effort of getting hostages out.

Speaker 14 So like, I have, you know, certain policy frustrations, but from a politics standpoint, there is a big constituency of people. You just look at the numbers, right?

Speaker 14 Like the number of people that are, you know, saying, oh, you know, glory to our martyrs versus the number of people that like generally support Israel, you know, in this fight, maybe not all the particulars.

Speaker 14 The preponderance of them is on the generally supporting Israel side. And a lot of those people overlap with the swing voters you're talking about.
Your Atlanta suburbs, you know, Romney Biden voters.

Speaker 14 And like my frustration, Brian, I'm interested in your take on this is that like it feels like Biden and his allies aren't even getting credit with those folks, folks, right?

Speaker 14 That he's in this sour spot where he's getting all this pressure from the progressive left and feels like he needs to cater to that.

Speaker 14 And so he's not getting credit for the thing that he should be like, hey, guys, you've been worried that I'm a puppet to the far left.

Speaker 14 And I've been demonstrating for four months now that I'm not actually a puppet to the far left. And if I was, my policy or my rhetoric on this would be very different.

Speaker 14 So how do you get out of that bind?

Speaker 15 A few things to untangle there, I think.

Speaker 15 One is that like, I don't think think it would be a good idea for Joe Biden to go to the camera and put his finger in the air and say, like, from the river to the sea, right? That would be a mistake.

Speaker 15 And he would lose a lot of okay.

Speaker 14 Stipulated. We have agreement.
We have three-person agreement on that. That would be bad.

Speaker 15 Also, it's not clear to me that, like, these, I want to call them like these like Trump realignment voters, these like suburban Atlanta voters who are just like repulsed by Donald Trump is where Joe Biden's really like the locus of his

Speaker 14 problems.

Speaker 15 Like what I see is that Joe Biden entered office. He had beaten Donald Trump, but not like vanquished him.

Speaker 15 And he kind of put together this plan to steal himself against the Trump revival or against, you know, the MAGA movement picking a new figurehead and having to kind of wage a similar campaign in 2024 all over again.

Speaker 15 And it was to like focus.

Speaker 15 all of his policy energy on revitalizing the industrial base in the Midwest to just get unemployment generally low, to be like a good steward of the economy, and then to be like normal, right?

Speaker 15 Like not ruffle feathers, just be kind of chill, tolerant, recede a bit, get out of people's faces.

Speaker 15 People were exhausted by Trump, and they would thank him for like relieving them of having to think about politics all the time. And that approach, I think, has not worked.

Speaker 15 And it's not clear to me that the reason why is that Joe Biden didn't volunteer here and there, that I also happen to support fracking, right?

Speaker 14 Or whatever else. All right, now you're speaking my language.
Right.

Speaker 15 Like, I just, I don't think that the like people who voted Obama, then Trump, then Biden are reverting to Trump because of single-issue style obsessions that Joe Biden has disappointed him on.

Speaker 15 Like they are just hearing constantly that Joe Biden is this doddering fool who caused inflation, who like maybe in some sense is responsible for the pandemic because their memories of that have gotten all fuzzy.

Speaker 15 And like the tactical solution for Biden, this problem is to build a time machine, go back to 2021 and adopt a more aggressive political strategy.

Speaker 15 But I kind of fear it's like water's too far under the bridge.

Speaker 14 So this is my question on the river to the sea crowd. So Federman's kind of done this.

Speaker 14 Couldn't a handful of Democrats who agree with his policy, I assume that there are some, you know, go out there and say, be agitating on this.

Speaker 14 Like, wow, look at the way that Joe Biden has stuck his finger in the eye of the campus left. Excuse me.
Like, wouldn't that help? Like, create news? Doesn't that speak to like your tactical demands?

Speaker 14 I know that doesn't speak to your policy priors, but like, doesn't that speak to kind of your tactical?

Speaker 15 I think that like to resolve the specific political problems that seemingly exist around Biden's positioning on Israel, I think you'd want like three basic things to break through to the public.

Speaker 15 One is that like Joe Biden is not some unique butcher in the like firmament of U.S. politics.

Speaker 15 Like you swap in basically any president, including Trump from the past 40 years, put him in office in 2023 on October 7th, and their policy would be very similar to Joe Biden.

Speaker 15 So he's not like this Kissingerian, like uniquely insensitive to the plight of the Palestinians.

Speaker 14 president, right? Okay. We didn't invade Iran in response to it, for example.
We didn't like invade a different country.

Speaker 15 I think that beyond that, you want two other things. One is you want people like Federman being surrogates for Biden's policy, like just out in the media at campaign rallies, wherever.

Speaker 15 And you also, like, I would have liked Bernie Sanders as like the most prominent Jewish politician in the country to come out.

Speaker 15 in a way that created space for Biden to break with Netanyahu and Netanyahu's policies without opening him to a sort of bad faith attack that he's like anti-Semitic or anti-Israel in some sense.

Speaker 15 And those pieces of surrogacy have just not really materialized in a way that I think is particularly helpful. But I don't necessarily think it's too late either, but it's just been uncoordinated.

Speaker 15 And so it's kind of this mess. And so I think that like for people who are dissatisfied with, and I don't actually think polls show that people are dissatisfied with Biden's Israel policy.

Speaker 15 He's like polling it last I checked, like 55, 60% on the issue. So it's not like some kind of epic disaster nationwide.
It just hasn't like that, hasn't lifted him to being a popular president.

Speaker 15 And to the extent that you could make like elements of his voting coalition like think more highly of his position, it would be like to pull those three levers.

Speaker 15 And I just don't, it hasn't really happened.

Speaker 14 To me, like this is a problem not of Biden or of anything Biden should do about the campus left or not or Netanyahu or Israel. It's a question of like,

Speaker 14 what do progressive-minded people

Speaker 14 want out of life? And you see it on Israel, but you see it on a broad swathe of issues that I think the left in America is like not that committed to defeating Donald Trump in 2024.

Speaker 14 They are very committed to their substantive policy agenda, which on some topics Biden is pursuing quite vigorously, and on some topics he isn't, in which case they dedicate all of their energy to attacking Biden, even while acknowledging that Trump is worse, right?

Speaker 14 Like climate change activists protest against Biden.

Speaker 14 Like Palestinian rights activists protest against Biden. But it's not like they're confused.
Well, Biden's the president.

Speaker 13 Like, he's the one who's in charge.

Speaker 14 But I mean, I'm saying that it's not a case of confusion. Like, I don't hear them replaying the Ralph Nader tweedle dee, twiddle dumb thing.

Speaker 14 Like, it is a tactical philosophy that, like, Biden is the president currently, that they have more leverage over Biden than they do over Trump.

Speaker 14 And so that is what they choose to do with their time, which is fine.

Speaker 14 I mean, everybody is entitled to do what they want with their time, but you should be honest is to say that a lot of the people who are most fired up. I think it's helped the never Trumper.

Speaker 14 media business model quite a bit because we're the most fired up about stopping Trump. That's what I mean.

Speaker 14 And this is where I always find, I feel like Brian executes this kind of straddle where, like, he, he wants to be with you, but then he also wants to be with the leftists.

Speaker 14 But, like, this was an argument that Democrats, I think, were really having a lot before COVID in 2019, where one view that I associated with Biden at that time was this kind of like narrow anti-Trumpism.

Speaker 14 Right. Like, we got to go with a guy who's going to beat Trump.
And then there was Elizabeth Warren, who she was talking about big structural change. Right.
And like, what was the point of that?

Speaker 14 The point of that was to say, we don't want to just like decapitate Donald Trump from leadership of the United States, put a sane person in there. We need big structural change.

Speaker 14 And Biden won the primary, but he did not win the argument. You know, like people continue to have this debate over and over again across a whole swathe of issues.

Speaker 14 It's like, are Democrats trying to transform the country in profound ways, or are they trying to not have Donald Trump be president? And Israel is a particularly tough version of that. Brian.

Speaker 15 Yeah, so because Israel is a tough version, I want to, I want to try and, because in general,

Speaker 15 on policy issues, particularly now with Congress divided, like For most questions, like policy is a second tier thing for me.

Speaker 15 And like the progressive groups have their objectives and Biden has his his campaign. And I'm just kind of like, whatever.
And like, my main thing is just beat the orange guy. Right.
Yeah. Right.

Speaker 15 And like, I agree with Matt when he points out that like it would be in the best interest of the climate and of the Democratic Party for climate activists to protest

Speaker 15 Republicans on abortion, right?

Speaker 14 Like totally agree with that.

Speaker 15 There is like a

Speaker 15 a sphere of issues where like the biggest moral questions of the day um, and the most urgent ones, where I kind of feel like

Speaker 15 you can't just apply this kind of raw strategic calculus without at least gesturing in the direction of what's happening, right? So, like, that's right.

Speaker 14 I respect that.

Speaker 15 And, like, I agree that like the left-wing pro-Palestine anti-Israel activists do a version of this that I think can be really toxic, right?

Speaker 15 Like, I have agreed with them across like every line of their critique about, like, Israel is pursuing a policy that's indistinguishable from ethnic cleansing. And Joe Biden's.

Speaker 14 Indistinguishable, maybe overstated.

Speaker 15 Well, I mean, if you add up what Bibi Netanyahu's plans for Gaza and the West Bank are, it starts to look a bit like that, right?

Speaker 15 Like the point I'm trying to make is that I conceded to all of this, right?

Speaker 15 And that Biden was becoming complicit with it in some way, and that this was like a moral problem, whatever the politics of it were.

Speaker 15 And like they all hate me because I won't stipulate that Joe Biden supports genocide, right? Or that this is a genocide that's happening right now.

Speaker 14 You haven't done any genocide, Joe TikToks. No, but, but, but, like,

Speaker 15 maybe here I'll do the straddle again.

Speaker 14 Like,

Speaker 15 25,000 Palestinians dead. Like, it's horrible, but I still wouldn't say, like, there's been a genocide in Gaza.
But, like, there is no limiting principle to what Bibi Netanyahu's doing.

Speaker 15 And at some point, the death count grows. And then these claims of genocide stop sounding to me like rhetoric and start being really hard to dispute.

Speaker 14 dispute.

Speaker 15 And that just tells me that this is like a very, very high stakes and profound moral issue.

Speaker 15 And so I feel like pointing at the people saying that and saying, you should be talking about abortion instead is like, don't lose your humanity over this thing, right?

Speaker 15 Like at the same time, like, if you give me a choice between like, tell them that and Trump wins, like, obviously I.

Speaker 14 Okay. We did, I think, 18 more minutes on the Gaza dispute than the Bulwark podcast audience is looking for, but I found that very

Speaker 17 Visita tu Los Macercano in East Arcas Avenue in Sunnyvale.

Speaker 1 Get ready for Malice, a twisted new drama starring Jack Whitehall, David DeCovney, and Carice Van Houten.

Speaker 6 Jack Whitehall plays Adam, a charming manny infiltrates the wealthy Tanner family with a hidden motive to destroy them.

Speaker 8 This edge-of-your-seat revenge thriller unravels a deliciously dark mystery in a world full of wealth, secrets, and betrayal.

Speaker 10 Malice will constantly keep you on your toes.

Speaker 1 Why is Adam after the Tanner family?

Speaker 6 What lengths will he go to?

Speaker 11 One thing's for sure, the past never stays buried, so keep your enemies close.

Speaker 1 Watch Malice, all episodes now streaming exclusively on Prime Video.

Speaker 14 Just closing a loop on Michigan really quick. Obama got 89% uncommitted 10.6 in 2012.
I had you guys handicap whether Joe Biden will best that this evening.

Speaker 15 Can you repeat the numbers Obama got?

Speaker 14 Obama was 89.10. Obama was 89.10.
There was 10.6 uncommitted in 2012. I bring this up because I'm kind of skeptical there'll be significantly more than 10.6.

Speaker 15 If the New Hampshire write in like ceasefire repeats itself, obviously Joe Biden's going to win with like over 90%.

Speaker 15 I think with Rashida and with Beto and like high-profile Dems like kind of encouraging this,

Speaker 15 I'll give Biden 82, 82%.

Speaker 15 Okay. I just picked that number out of my ass, but that's a good pick.

Speaker 14 Matt's going to set the expectations low at 69 so that he can just beat expectations because it's all about beating expectations.

Speaker 15 So we can all say nice, nice.

Speaker 14 I want to move on. I get you guys a thought experiment because I do think, I think we've kind of explored it a little bit in the concept of Gaza, but let's set that aside.

Speaker 14 I want to try to get into your ongoing disagreement between the two of you about what the best thing the Democratic Party could do to embedd itself, to embig in its vote share.

Speaker 14 So I'm giving you magic genie powers, each of you, and I'd like for you to tell me one thing that you would like to change that would do the most to help the Democrats increase their vote share and do the most to harm Donald Trump's chances of being an autocrat in nine months.

Speaker 14 Matt, why don't you go first? You know, I mean, I think it's really just a question of substantive, like read the 2012 platform and like try to go back. The 2012 Democratic platform?

Speaker 14 Democratic platform and like try to go back to Obama-style positions on climate and energy, on race, on immigration and crime. And like those were good positions, and they won.

Speaker 14 And Democrats moved left since then. And,

Speaker 14 you know, in a way, I think like Donald Trump is like a, like a bad politician, and he's corrupt and people don't like him.

Speaker 14 And Democrats have chosen to take advantage of that to move left on a number of topics, which I think is dangerous. And they should go back and beat him badly.

Speaker 14 So this is something that I struggle with, having not been part of the inter-Nessine fighting among the Democrats.

Speaker 14 I understand that the platform is probably more liberal in 2020 than 2012. But Joe Biden and Barack Obama, he's meaningfully moved the party left, in your opinion?

Speaker 14 And his political problems are about his policy positions and not the fact that Obama was just a better speaker and a better presenter of the same policy positions.

Speaker 14 I think the fact that Obama was a better speaker and a better politician helped get progressive-minded people on board with a platform that was more moderate than they would accept these days.

Speaker 14 You know, that like Obama talked about his all-of-the-above energy strategy. He talked about his like instinctive blood-boiling when he saw illegal immigration and stuff like that.

Speaker 14 And like, you can create a, I think, a false dichotomy around this, but like part of Obama being a good rhetorician is that he was able to make progressives feel good about him while also saying stuff that moderate-minded people agreed with.

Speaker 14 I mean, that's politics, right? I mean, we don't have in the Netherlands, I think they have 13 parties in parliament, so you can like slice the electorate really, really thinly.

Speaker 14 You're trying to get a majority in a country with 330 million people. You need a lot of people who don't agree with you about everything to vote for you.
That's the trick of politics.

Speaker 14 I think that the boringness of the platform is just a useful index to look at in that vein. Sure.
Okay, so you gave him one then. You've just been made the czar of the Obama White House.

Speaker 14 I hear that they read slow boring over there in the West Wing. And so maybe, so maybe.

Speaker 15 You just pulled a Trump and called Biden Obama.

Speaker 14 Did I do that? Man, how embarrassing. Yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah, you're seeing.

Speaker 14 Oh, my God. I am.
I have dementia. I actually think that that's more of a college dorm room behavior issue for me and not an age behavior.

Speaker 14 But one, one Biden issue, one issue that he could do right now that he could just embrace.

Speaker 14 And for people who haven't been paying attention for three years and they're tuning in in March of 2024 and they're like, wow, Joe Biden's been really tough on

Speaker 14 immigration, you know, which is a step they're taking, but I think they got to keep going down that path. Brian, do you have any response to that before you give your genie answer? Yeah, yeah, I do.

Speaker 15 Because, I mean, I was going to say. Biden has gone down the path of immigration.
And thus far, at least, it has not been a huge boon to his politics.

Speaker 15 And I think that if you look down like the issue positions Biden's taken, actually like just the issues where he's made progress, he's passed popular bills and they've had zero impact on his polling, right?

Speaker 15 Like, and I just don't think that this is a very like effective lever to pull if your goal is to become better liked.

Speaker 14 And like...

Speaker 15 If we were to go back to 2012, you'd like notice a few things. One is that there'd be 20 million more people uninsured, right?

Speaker 15 Because the Affordable Care Act provisions that expanded expanded insurance hadn't been factored in. And the climate emissions trajectory would be on the upswing.

Speaker 14 Also, gay rights, right? Like, I mean, we've had huge, you know, progress in gay rights is another example,

Speaker 14 which is good. These are all good things that the country's moved left on these issues.

Speaker 15 Yes, but that's the thing is that like, it's not an issue of Democratic leaders or Biden pulling the party to the left so much, in my view, as just like

Speaker 15 The process of mission fulfillment means that once you accomplish like one incremental step, you move on to the next one.

Speaker 15 And so you pass the Affordable Care Act, there's still 20 million people uninsured. Your agenda is going to reflect that by saying now it's time for a public option.

Speaker 15 If you don't pass a climate change bill under Obama, your next move is to say, fine, we're going to throw hundreds of billions of dollars into climate spending, right?

Speaker 15 And if you get marriage equality, there are going to be people left behind by the Aubergerfeld decision who say, well, we don't have equal rights yet yet.

Speaker 15 So that's where the Democratic Party is going to end up. And that's that's not progressive activists being stupid.
It's just the sweep of history and where we all like ended up in it.

Speaker 15 So I just don't think that Joe Biden could be like, and so in order to beat Trump, we're going to go back to more emissions. You know, like, it's not a good idea.

Speaker 15 And I know Matt thinks I'm like wrong about this and the like same magnitude I think he's wrong.

Speaker 14 You can tell I do actually engage in your guys's content that I'm just picking right at the scabs. I'm going right to the limits of your disagreement.

Speaker 15 Like I like Matt and I are doing modeling the thing that everyone in Washington talks about is like disagreeing without being disagreeable. We're the only people doing it.

Speaker 14 No, very disagreeable.

Speaker 15 But now I'm supposed to say, like, what I, what I think would help.

Speaker 15 Like, this won't surprise either of you, like, for a long time, I wanted Democrats to do a better job just remembering that politics in the U.S. is a zero-sum contest between the parties.
So, like,

Speaker 15 your job isn't just per se to be popular, but to build and maintain a margin between your party, the Democrats, and the GOP.

Speaker 15 And like one part of doing that might be around like policy and ethic, like be the kinder, gentler party, adopt a more popular agenda than the other party does.

Speaker 15 But like you should also place a lot of emphasis on the other half of the equation, which is like making the Republican Party less popular.

Speaker 15 This was like Mitch McConnell's big insight about how to deny Obama legislative victories. And ideally, he wanted wanted to beat him in 2012.
That part of it didn't work out.

Speaker 15 Be resolutely opposed to them, what they stand for, who their leaders are, how. So I think that they've neglected key aspects of this over the last

Speaker 15 mostly like five years since they took the house back in 2019.

Speaker 15 They seem to think that various incarnations of Mediscare tactics, like they're going to take your Medicare, they're going to take your Social Security, are enough to hurt the GOP.

Speaker 15 But it's like a much more target-rich environment than that, right? Like, if they had made Trump like two points less popular in 2020 by being more

Speaker 15 methodically anti-Trump, just like flood the zone with true shit about his corruption, right?

Speaker 15 Then Biden would have won in a landslide and we might have had like a substantially less turbulent three years, right?

Speaker 14 Can I chime in in violent agreement of both sides? Can we both be right of this? Can we moderate and also attack more?

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Speaker 14 Why haven't all two dozen of Trump's victims been brought through Congress? Why hasn't Jared Kushner been brought through Congress? You guys were both ranting about the Russia thing. Yes.

Speaker 14 Brian Shaq's like, why are we not going insane about the fact that there's a Russian spy dropping Oppo on on the president of the United States and the Republican Congress is the biggest megaphone.

Speaker 14 Like,

Speaker 14 where is it?

Speaker 15 Those are the storylines. Like,

Speaker 15 we are going to get to this in the second half, like me asking you about why Republicans have this instinct, right? Like, and Democrats don't.

Speaker 15 But, but, like, it's that kind of thing and like less buoying of the Republicans by talking about how we're going to find the reasonable and we're going to do bipartisanship with them.

Speaker 15 It's like, no, they are unacceptable. We are the like only safe harbor option.

Speaker 15 And then you might get your 56, 44 split that keeps the party like impossible to beat so long as Trump is the head of the GOP.

Speaker 14 So yeah, I mean, look, I just want to say that I think that the substance does come back into this. That's something that I remember very much, right?

Speaker 14 Is like when your colleague Bill Crystal started going really hard against Trump, he started attracting praise from a lot of Democrats because it was like Bill Crystal.

Speaker 14 He's saying Trump is bad, and I agree that Trump is bad. Then, if you said anything nice about Bill Crystal on the internet,

Speaker 14 leftists would start attacking you because it like it wasn't okay to agree with a defector from the Republican coalition unless he went through the sackcloth and ashes and, you know, renounced everything he had ever done in life, things like that.

Speaker 14 He's put on the hair shirt. But he has, which is great for us.

Speaker 15 He's basically moshing at a rage against the machine guns at this point.

Speaker 14 When John Kasich spoke at the 2020 Democratic convention, like people were upset. They were like, but Kasich, like, he's bad, right?

Speaker 14 And, you know, some people who I like have an organization called Welcome Pack, where they like try to get like ex-Republicans in, right? But part of that, yes, like I...

Speaker 14 absolutely agree, like Kushner, Russian spy, like there should be attack, attack, attack, attack on that kind of stuff.

Speaker 14 But part of that is you have to say, look, if you want to join us in this attack, like we are happy to have you on the team, not here is our hundred

Speaker 14 list of items that you have to all agree with to go come in. And this is where.
Putting the theses on your door. Right.
Yes. Have you put your pronouns in your Twitter bio yet?

Speaker 14 No, we do not accept you as part of the team. Right.

Speaker 14 And there's this, you know, a tendency toward really strident strident moralism on the left, where, you know, this is where like stuff about cancel culture, which gets like overdone in some ways, but where I think it's correct, is a tendency to say,

Speaker 14 like, we want to kick people out, right? That like people will say, I'm on your side, I'm against Trump, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 14 But then if you say one thing that is right of center, you're expelled. Are you sure you're not a little Twitter-brained on this? I mean, Liz Cheney is incredibly

Speaker 14 sainted on MSNBC right now. I'm pretty sure Liz Cheney could win a Democratic primary right now.

Speaker 14 Maybe I'm wrong about that, but in a certain context, in certain districts, certain states, like I don't, I don't know. I think you might be a little Twitter-brained.

Speaker 14 I think you're right about the notion that like Donald Trump has a better instinct on this than a lot on the left do, right?

Speaker 14 Like, if I came out today on this podcast and I said, you guys are woke libs, you are wrong, and Donald Trump has actually been right all along. And I put on a red hat.

Speaker 14 Like they would clip that and he would put it out on truth and he'd invite me to Mar-a-Lago and like all sins would be forgiven. So I do think that Dems could learn a little bit from that instinct.

Speaker 15 I actually agree with basically all this. The small distinction I would make is that there's a difference between like the water's warm.

Speaker 14 Praising converts and praising Susan Collins.

Speaker 15 Yeah. Like you don't need to concede to Susan Collins to become more popular in the country, I don't think.
Like you don't need to like adopt her policy prescription.

Speaker 15 Now, you don't need to say that she needs to become like a raging single-payer advocate in order for her to endorse, you know, that's kind of silly.

Speaker 15 And then, like, I agree that the silliness that if you like retweet Bill Crystal, that means you support the Iraq War. Like, that stuff is stupid.

Speaker 15 And it's like, many of the people who, well, one person who does that kind of thing will also appear on Tucker Carlson's show, but like, would never claim to support the white genocide or whatever.

Speaker 14 We can, we could do a two-minute hate on Glenn Greenwald on this podcast. This is a safe space for that.

Speaker 14 But, or we can move on.

Speaker 15 No, I have complicated thoughts here.

Speaker 15 The idea that Democrats should be open to validators and that the people saying John Kasich speaking at the Democratic convention is some sort of betrayal, that's stupid.

Speaker 15 They should be happy about it.

Speaker 15 And like, I think, if anything, Democrats should welcome validators who are less like, I'm going to go speak at the convention and endorse my buddy Joe Biden, and more people like Liz Cheney or something like that, or Chris Christie, who might be like, I'm not sure I can bring myself to endorse Joe Biden.

Speaker 15 And then in six months are like, it really pains me to do this, but for patriotic reasons, I'm going to vote for Joe Biden. And Republicans who are skeptical of Donald Trump should do it too.

Speaker 15 Like that's more effective to me than like bringing them to the convention and having like a big like kumbaya moment. And you can facilitate that by not conceding the policy to them.

Speaker 14 We're going to do more of this on your side. We all just can agree that we just have a moment of like, we need to attack harder.
Like the attacking is just, it's just very,

Speaker 14 it's unbelievable. Like the fact that the Donald Trump accusers are not household names is unbelievable.

Speaker 14 The corruption, the fact that people that he screwed over in business, just all of this is, it's kind of boggles the mind.

Speaker 14 It boggles the mind that there have been, I guess it was you, Matt, that wrote it this morning, 70 hours of Hunter Biden hearings and zero hours of Jared Kushner hearings, despite the fact that we have, we, I'm we in this case, in the anti-Trump case, that we have control of the Senate.

Speaker 14 Okay, a couple rapid fires before we move on to yours.

Speaker 14 Matt, you wrote in your 21 Thoughts on Biden's age, this is a kind of sub-thought, that Harris is less popular because she's viewed as more liberal.

Speaker 14 I don't think that's a fatal flaw of the idea of Harris's presidential nominee. It just goes to show that she should pivot to the center and revert to the more tough on crime, Kamala, the cop persona.

Speaker 14 I love that. This is a classic Iglesias take.
I love it because it's like, I'm not 100% sure you're even serious about it, but I think it's also right.

Speaker 14 And so, but is it even possible? Like, is it an imaginary thing? Like, do you think that's something that is even conceivable?

Speaker 14 Or does the moment that Kamala, you know, sees herself in a competition for the White House, does she revert to, you know, the kind of like leftist protest element?

Speaker 14 I just like actually think it makes more sense.

Speaker 14 I mean, I think her 2020 primary campaign got so messed up because it was like the worst possible historical moment for someone whose only job had been as a prosecutor to run in a Democratic primary.

Speaker 14 And it was bad timing for her. She didn't do well and then sort of like lost confidence in her persona.
But like she was a assistant district attorney. Then she was a district attorney.

Speaker 14 Then she was attorney general. She was like a pretty tough on crime moderate in all of those roles.

Speaker 14 She wrote a book about it and she should, you know, obviously politicians don't actually write their own books, but she should read what the book with her name on it says.

Speaker 14 Like, it's a good book, you know, and it just like says a lot of totally sane, normal things.

Speaker 14 And it aligns with like other, like, people should have health insurance, just like normal, progressive stuff. I think it's like, in some ways, easier than people make it out to be.

Speaker 14 Brian, is it possible for Kamala to revert to Kamala the cop or is that wish casting from the heart of the Niscanon Center?

Speaker 15 I think that, I mean, you remember the Echa Sketch. You were maybe involved in Mitt Romney's Etcha Sketch attempt, right?

Speaker 15 You have to be pretty deft to go from being like i'm kamal the cop to i'm kamala the avatar for the black lives matter wing of the democratic party to i'm kamala the cop again right and like i think nikki haley if she were to somehow get the nomination would experience the complications of her own i'm anti-trump now i'm in his cabinet now i'm anti-trump again right like people can smell that on politicians and i think it hurts them.

Speaker 15 I'm not saying that that would make it worse for her to revert to being Kamala the cop if she were to run for president.

Speaker 14 But the Nikki Haley thing, this asks me to another follow-up for you before I get to my final question for you, too.

Speaker 14 There is a fundamental asymmetry in the fact that, like, as we assess Biden and assess Kamala's chances, Haley has not suffered from that kind of flip-flopping that you're talking about.

Speaker 14 If you look at head-to-head polls, Haley is crushing Biden. There is no version of that on the Democratic side.
Why?

Speaker 15 Yeah, that was the thesis of.

Speaker 14 That's where you're going. I interrupted you to put a finer point on it.
Sort of.

Speaker 15 It's just the thesis of the piece that I wrote for Tuesday morning. I think Kamala Harris's main issue is less.

Speaker 15 I agree that people perceive her as more liberal, but I think that that's because she's a black woman from California, more than that, like people's deep familiarity with her policy agenda, which like you have to go back to her Senate votes.

Speaker 15 that nobody remembers to like actually ascertain why she she's coded as liberal in a legislative sense, right?

Speaker 15 And she's not going to be able to shake those things because they're integral to who she is, right?

Speaker 14 So the only way to have a Nikki Haley on the left is for it to be a white guy that has a southern accent and like, like,

Speaker 14 missing some fingers.

Speaker 14 We got to bring back John Edwards.

Speaker 14 The great hope.

Speaker 15 I think like the sad truth is that like somebody like Pritzker or Josh Shapiro, like a like a charismatic white guy is going to have like from a swing state is going to have less blocking and tackling to do than even like Gavin Newsome, very charismatic, very polished, very prepared to be president, but from California, everyone assumes that he's some kind of communist, right?

Speaker 15 And I think that that's like the issue.

Speaker 15 And so like Nikki Haley, I think polling well is a reflection of the fact that there are a lot of people voting Democratic right now who wish that they could be voting for a normal Republican, right?

Speaker 15 And they think of Haley right now, because she's running against Trump, as like a vessel for that.

Speaker 15 If she were to win, I think that the Biden campaign would have to retool very quickly, but they would run a campaign about how she was actually like a ride or die Trumper until like he did the you know and then we'd see whether this kind of like two-faced thing can actually work

Speaker 15 that's why I think that like if Kamala Harris were to become the nominee somehow she would just want to like focus on being like confident and charismatic and and like making people like her as a person and then they will incept themselves into thinking oh maybe she's more moderate than I thought she was and like in the like break glass in case emergency scenario, the reason that the people keep coming up with Shapiro, Whitmer, et cetera, is that they're like, they're from swing states.

Speaker 15 They're well-liked in their swing states already.

Speaker 15 You can tell that they're charismatic and confident in their political personas.

Speaker 15 And so it stands to reason that if magnified nationally, they would be well-liked and they wouldn't have the Biden-Harris baggage.

Speaker 15 And then like Nikki Haley, I think that they would be polling much better than Trump.

Speaker 14 Okay. We can do more of this on the politics podcast.
Finally, I want to get you guys canceled. Short one-sentence answer.

Speaker 14 You're here with the Never Trumpers. I want to know your most conservative coded position.
And Matt, I want to know why it's getting rid of the Jones Act.

Speaker 14 Brian, I know it's going to take you a minute to think about it, but Matt, you say you go first.

Speaker 14 You know, for me personally, I think

Speaker 14 stuff related to education policy. You have a Jebish education? Yeah.

Speaker 14 I do. I want Jeb.
I want W.

Speaker 14 I love all Bushes. I'm just laughing at Brian.
Like, Brian's looking everywhere.

Speaker 14 He's like, he's plunging the recesses of of his brain. He's like, do I have a single conservative position anywhere in here?

Speaker 14 Maybe your most conservative coded position is just your most Joe Biden-friendly position. Maybe he's as far right as you can go.

Speaker 14 I don't know.

Speaker 15 It's weird. I mean, I was going to make some joke about like court packing being conservative because as an originalist, like that's totally legit.

Speaker 15 So, so I think it depends how you define conservative. And I'm not trying to, I'm not.

Speaker 14 Classically liberal, your most Thatcherite-coded position.

Speaker 15 So in the conservative firmament, to the extent that there are any conservatives who understand that there needs to be some level of welfare support, right?

Speaker 15 Like, I think that there's a division between libertarians who say, like,

Speaker 15 no nanny state stuff. If you need to give people money, give them money.
And then there's a more like traditions-based conservative wing where it's like, that's bad.

Speaker 15 And if we're going to help people, it should be in this sort of like, make sure that they have a job. Like,

Speaker 15 okay. And I used to be

Speaker 15 like in the more libertarian camp, like universal basic income would be preferable to our patchwork quilt of blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 15 And over time, just like watching how people reacted to like the difference between some people getting Medicaid benefits and some people getting Obamacare subsidies.

Speaker 14 You become a dignity of work man.

Speaker 14 Kind of.

Speaker 15 I just think that like, I just, and it's not about like raw ideology, because as a matter of raw ideology, I remain pretty libertarian on this stuff.

Speaker 15 But just as far as like, you need society to cohere. And we're seeing what happens if it doesn't, right? It's really, things get really scary.

Speaker 15 And a more like, yeah, dignity of work style liberalism that concedes to conservative views about work and blah, blah, blah is probably better for just making people less angry at each other.

Speaker 15 And so I've moved in that direction like substantially over these.

Speaker 14 I'm glad I asked that. I'm sending Jeb the last eight minutes of this podcast because it just means like he could have been the uniter we all needed.
Okay, guys, I went over. I went over.

Speaker 14 I did 49 minutes. So you guys lose four minutes.
I'll see you in the politics podcast.

Speaker 14 All right. Thanks, guys.
That was a great conversation. Here's a little clip from the tables getting turned on me over on the politics podcast.
You can check that out on their feed on Wednesday.

Speaker 14 And I'll be back here in the host seat on the bulwark pod tomorrow. We'll do it all over again.
See you then.

Speaker 15 You had suggested to a client that like the people coming after you are funded by Soros. You can go after them for that, right? And there was blowback for that.

Speaker 15 And like, we're not here to say that you were like an anti-Semite for putting that in your strategy memo.

Speaker 15 You were a Republican and you're like, if you want to beat your opposition, savage them, right? Like, where did that come from?

Speaker 15 I want to know like how it is that Republicans just become imbued with this like reflexive go-for-the-throat thing because Democrats don't have that.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I mean, there literally is an RNC campaign school. I don't know that it still exists, but

Speaker 14 I both went to it and trained at it.

Speaker 14 But part of it, when it comes to the comms element element of this is just really putting into people's mind like a rapid response, always on offense kind of mindset.

Speaker 14 And really, I can't go back before Bush because that's before my time, but there is like just a direct line of, you know, Steve Schmidt, you know, who ends up doing Lincoln Project stuff and does Palin and all this, and he was.

Speaker 14 in charge of rapid response for Bush in 04 and like created like a little army underneath him that I really are schooled in being attack dogs, and like I am like two generations underneath that, but like that's what I was schooled in.

Speaker 14 Like, I did not go to political campaign school to be like, oh, how do you write flowery speeches?

Speaker 14 The Bull Earth Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

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