Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - 2024: DeSantis vs Polis? -- with Yuval Levin

Episode Date: December 19, 2022

Yuval Levin returns to the podcast. He's especially focused on whether we will have a replay of Trump vs Biden in 2024 or a new generation of leaders from both parties. Yuval discusses the promise of a number of these newer candidates and challenges they face. Yuval is the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He’s the editor-in-chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, and political thought. And he's authored numerous books, including “A Time To Build”, “The Fractured Republic”, and “The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left”. Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He earned his masters and PhD from the University of Chicago. Towards the end of our conversation, Yuval remembers Michael Gerson, former chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush and Washington Post columnist. To read Michael Gerson's Washington Post columns: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/michael-gerson/ To order his books - Heroic Conservatism: Why Republicans Need to Embrace America's Ideals (And Why They Deserve to Fail If They Don't): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/heroic-conservatism-michael-j-gerson/1008425020?ean=9780061349515 City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (with Peter Wehner): https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/city-of-man-michael-gerson/1100395408?ean=9781575679280 To read Yuval Levin's tribute to Michael Gerson: https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/remembering-my-friend-mike-gerson/

What we've had since the mid-1990s is two minority parties. The parties are stuck. They're stuck, each defining itself against the other. They're having a lot of trouble saying to the country, this is our vision of the future, and it should be yours too. It's not what they're saying to the country. They're saying to the country, don't vote for those other guys. They would push us over the abyss.

And the results for our politics have been very bad. They've meant that both parties have kind of forgotten how to govern. From time to time over the next few months, we'll be returning to further analysis of the 2022 midterm elections and what they tell us about the choices for both national parties heading into the 2024 presidential primaries. But rather than getting bogged down in a postmortem of the political tactics of 2022, I wanted to check in with Yuval Levin, who's been thinking about the longer-term trends that were revealed or confirmed by these most recent elections and how they should inform how we select our next president. Yuval's been on this podcast before, and he believes that our politics are now defined by what political analyst Ron Brownstein has called double negative elections, meaning the public is rejecting both Biden Democrats and Trump Republicans. These are fault lines that have been hardening throughout this

century. And according to Yuval, it's completely ahistorical. This is new for us, at least in modern times. Yuval currently wears three hats. At the American Enterprise Institute, he's the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies. He's the Editor-in-Chief of National Affairs, a quarterly journal of essays about domestic policy, political economy, and political thought, which I highly recommend. I'm a subscriber. And he's the author of numerous books, including A Time to Build, The Fractured Republic, and also The Great Debate, Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and The Birth of Right and Left. Yuval served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush.

He was also executive director of the President's Council on Bioethics. He earned his master's and Ph.D PhD from the University of Chicago. All this to say that Yuval is a pretty smart guy and a clear thinker and well worth a listen. Also, towards the end of our conversation, Yuval and I will spend a few minutes to remember our friend and former colleague from the George W. Bush administration, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. This is Call Me Back. And I'm pleased to welcome back to the podcast my friend Yuval Levin from the American Enterprise Institute, the editor-in-chief of National Affairs, a journal of public policy that I highly recommend. We will post the website address in our show notes and author most

recently, author of a number of books, most recently, Time to Build. Yuval, thanks for coming back. Thanks very much for having me. So Yuval, there's been a lot of post-2022 midterms punditry, kind of overanalyzing what happened in this congressional district and what happened in this state. And I'm guilty of having done some of what our friend Jonah Goldberg calls rank punditry with guests like Howard Wolfson and Mike Murphy. So I don't want to do rank punditry with you. That would be an injustice to use your time that way. I want to try to take a step back and pick your brain about larger trends going on and what the historical significance of them are and what they tell us about the sort of promise and peril of the next

few years of our politics. So I want to start by quoting from a piece you wrote, I think in National Review, where you say there was one long stretch from the mid-1950s until the mid-1990s when we had something more like two overlapping majority parties with Republicans winning seven of ten presidential races and Democrats controlling Congress nearly the entire time. So basically what you're saying is like from that period, mid-50s to the mid-90s, you had some parties, most of the time Republicans, who did better in presidential elections. And when they would win, they would win big, you know, six, seven, eight, nine points of the popular vote depending on the election year. And yet the Democrats in years that Republicans were winning presidential elections, often had massive majorities in Congress. So both parties could point to tremendous strength in different branches of our government. But it was clear that both parties had a real, a broad base in the country. So before we get to where we are now can you just explain

why that like how that was the norm for most of our country's history and why that was yeah i mean this is this is a way to think about the american party system so i i'm a recovering political scientist and i would say that the the in the United States, and it's distinct in this way from other democracies, and the reason really is the nature of our institutions, the pattern has been a two-party system almost always, with the exception of just a very brief period in the 19th century when the Whigs died out and the Republicans were born. We've generally had two parties, and we've generally had one of those two parties functioning as a majority, a clear majority party for a stretch, for a period. And what that means is that if you look in on our politics during a period like that, you'd find one

party that is working to manage a complicated coalition, a very broad majority coalition. Think of the FDR coalition, or before that of the very broad Republican coalition. Think of the FDR coalition or before that of the very broad Republican coalition from McKinley all the way through Hoover. And another party struggling to get itself to majority status. And so looking for ways to pick at that coalition, looking for ways to gain some wins while it's in the minority. And then after a while, you go through what's called a realignment, where for whatever reason, a result of some event or changes in ideological makeup of various parts of the country, the majority party loses out to the minority. And for some stretch of time, the party switch sides and the old minority becomes a majority, but for a while. And so

we went through a period of, for of for example if you think of the twentieth century republicans were the majority party clearly from the beginning of the twentieth century until nineteen thirty two they want all but to presidential election there there was only one democratic president that whole stretch they dominated congress for that entire time

and then the depression happens fdr comes in and democrats win five presidential races in a row and they control congress just about that entire period so republican presidential dominance at its peak then was hoover basically that's right it sort of came to an end um with with hoover and the depression republicans because they've been the governing party they took blame for the great depression and the democrats created a new majority coalition which lasted for quite some time which lasted from the early thirties until the the end of the nineteen forties beginning the fifties then you have as you said the beginning these two overlapping majority so the eisenhower coalition

was a presidential coalition it lasted for a long time americans trusted republicans to be president for most of the period from the nineteen fifties through the nineteen nineties we're always very impressed by the democratic presidents of the sixties so we talk a lot about about kennedy and johnson but they were actually exceptions and republicans generally won the presidency easily in that time. Richard Nixon won 49 states in the electoral college in 1972.

And yet, that entire time, the Democrats were winning congressional majorities. They held the House majority uninterrupted from 1952 to 92, and during that time, Republicans had the Senate only for six years out of those 40 years. And so you had two very durable majority parties. What we've had since then, since the mid-1990s, is the opposite, is two minority parties. We've not had either party function like a majority. Instead, both operate like a minority. So what does that mean? That means each party defines itself fundamentally in opposition to the other. It runs by saying, you don't want those guys to be in power, more than by saying, here's what we have to offer and why you should vote for us.

Each of them scares its voters about what a victory of the other would mean. And they're both stuck in this pattern so that they each think that they could lose power next time. And they're right, they could, which means they think in very short term ways. They think only to the next election. And every time they win, they think this is a new phase of American politics. Now we're going to be the majority forever. You know, Karl Rove said this in 2000. And then the Obama folks said this in 2008. But they're wrong. They lose power like the next midterm election is a disaster for them. And neither party has managed to establish itself as a meaningful governing majority. And the results for our politics have been very bad. They've meant that both parties have kind of forgotten how to govern and instead understand themselves in this very

precarious way that makes it hard for the system to function. So if you look at the last four presidential elections, all these presidencies, so Bush, George W. Bush administration you and I both served in, the Obama administration, President Trump, President Biden, you also can see this, what you're pointing to in their approval ratings. They always, these presidents always hovered around somewhere in the 40s in terms of their approval ratings. Sometimes they would break 50, but barely. And Trump, in fact, is the first president since, I think, Gallup has been recording, surveying for presidential approval that never even broke out of 40s, never got to north of 50. That also is a brand new phenomenon. Yeah, and it's a function of the same pattern, so that in a sense, you're living in the minority

all the time, and we've become used to it. So we think, well, the president, maybe he gets just a tiny majority on election day, and most of the time he's pretty unpopular. That's actually not normal at all. If you look at the stretch of American history, people generally feel pretty good about who they voted for during that person's presidency, and presidents tend to be pretty popular and get reelected. We've seen presidents get reelected in this century, but again, by scaring the country about the other party more than anything else, and neither party's been able to establish itself as a stable, durable majority. They both are just at 50% plus one when they win, just under when they lose. They always feel like if we just do the same thing next time, we're going to win.

And so they just do the same thing. And it's hard for them to get out of this pattern. And the last two presidential elections, Biden's win in 2020 and Trump's win in 2016, were like a mirror image of one another, right? I mean, they both basically won by a handful of votes in, you know, three or four states. Yeah, a few tens of thousands of voters in three states in both cases would have caused the election to go the other way. And so Trump barely won. And then again, described it as some new age, you know, a new era of populism. And then Biden barely won just about the same way. And we've also now had two congressional

elections that have worked that way. So in 2020, the Democrats won a very, very small congressional majority. They had a tied Senate and a five seat margin in the House, which is, which when you combine them is the narrowest congressional majority we've ever seen. And then we have an election and the same thing happens except Republicans have a five-seat majority in the House. Everybody tries to read a lot into this kind of election change and say, was it structural? Was it this issue or that issue?

Nine seats. Nine seats. My Republican friends remind me that it's nine seats that the democrats in in the in the current congress well but a nine seat majority means you can only lose five members right so what's that right right a nine seat majority actually means you only have five votes to lose right as nancy pelosi well knows and kevin mccarthy is about to learn and so you know basically we're stuck in the middle we're not justarization happens all the time in American politics, but we're actually deadlocked. So polarization means the parties hate each other.

Deadlock means we're at 50-50, and that is very unusual. Those two things do not necessarily go together, but we've lived with the combination of them splitting, you write, is basically over, or at least we haven't, this is in a way both cause and effect. So the era of ticket splitting doesn't have to be over. There are actually a lot of winnable voters in a lot of key states. And you see that particularly at the state level in governor's races as opposed to congressional races. So I live in the state of Maryland where for the last eight years we've had a governor who's a Republican, pretty conservative Republican in most ways. We have a very, very liberal democratic legislature at the same time you've seen that massachusetts you've seen that uh... in in uh... in in vermont it's very odd in one sense

but actually pretty normal that americans when they're asked who should be your governor and who should be your senator are capable of thinking in different ways about what the answer ought to be. It's just that the parties at the national level have not given them options that could really make for ticket splitting. And so I do think it's possible to see ticket splitting again, but the parties are not presenting themselves in a way that would enable that to happen at this point, because neither of them is really capable of seeing that it has been losing elections for the last 30 years that's actually what this period means is both parties are losing essentially every election you also wrote uh that in terms of the republican win in 2016

uh that that you hear you hear a number of republicans say you know yes trump was a suboptimal candidate in 2016, but only Trump could have won the presidency for the Republicans. You write, the implausible view that Trump exceed, the implausible view that Trump's exceedingly narrow win over Hillary Clinton in 2016 was the only way Republicans, was the only way any Republican could have beaten the most unpopular political figure in the 21st century. The bizarre notion that Republican setbacks in 2018 were a function of Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan not being Trumpy enough, the delusional claim that Trump didn't actually lose the presidency in 2020. Yeah, I mean, these are all ways that Republicans have persuaded

themselves that Trump is an electoral winner, even though he's cost them over and over and over, lots of elections. And I think 2016, I mean, look, Trump won because he was running against Hillary Clinton. And Hillary Clinton loses. I mean, that's what she does. She's an extremely unpopular politician. She could win in New York State, but you could write a history of the politics of the 21st century based on how unpopular Hillary Clinton is. She created Barack Obama. She created Bernie Sanders. She created Donald Trump. All because voters, at the end of the day, on Election Day, don't like Hillary Clinton. And the notion that, you know, a Marco Rubio or somebody else, anybody else, running in the Republican primary in 16 would not have beaten Hillary Clinton, I think is ridiculous. The result could have looked different. Maybe a Rubio type would

not have won Michigan, for example, but would have won Virginia. And it seems very likely to me that Republicans were going to win that election. I think most of them would have done better than Trump or would have had a better shot than Trump at a popular vote majority too. And the Republicans have got to get it out of their minds that they somehow depend on Trump for electoral success. Trump has not been an electoral winner for the party. Whatever you think of him, he has cost votes over and over, and he's continued to since he's left the presidency. And so I think Republicans have to see that even if they just want to be cynical and think, how do we win? They need to think past

Trump now. Okay, I want to come back to Trump, but first, I want to talk about Joe Biden, the Democrats. You describe Biden as, I think, the weakest president in the modern, in the progressive... What would you rate? You describe Joe Biden as... Yeah, basically, since the progressive era, I don't think we've had a weaker president. Since the progressive era, you say that Joe Biden's the weakest president. Yeah, I mean, in different ways, Trump and Biden have both been very, very weak presidents in very different ways. Trump really didn't operate as president. He didn't conceive of himself in the traditional mold of the office.

And so he had trouble doing the work of the president. But he was obviously a very dominant figure in our politics. Biden has been reticent to lead, to set priorities, and to administer the government. I'll put it this way. You pick any modern president, and you could tell me three or four things that that person really cared about. They were important to the president, and they happened because the president cared about them, including Trump. Trump obviously cared about immigration, about trade. It was not hard to say what his priorities were. It is very hard to say what Joe Biden's priorities are. And if it's hard for you and me to say it, it's also hard for the

people who work for him to say it. And one of the ways in which a president exercises real leadership is that his political appointees in the various departments know what he wants them to do. If he were in my job, if he were deputy secretary of transportation, I kind of know how he would make this decision. I don't think anybody can say that about Joe Biden, when it would have been pretty easy around, you know, about Obama or Bush. And that's a sign of weak leadership. He's not willing to set priorities. He's not willing to say this matters more than that. He wants to be at the center of his party coalition at a time when his party is in flux. And he has really not been an executive leader in the way that our presidents need to be. So couldn't the counter be that he was elected to be some kind of return to normalcy uh some kind of return to you know an antiquated notion of of a a functioning bipartisan

bipartisan functioning at least sometimes of washington and end to the craziness and the volatility of the trump years and that was basically what he ran on like you know i'm just gonna i'm gonna bring down the temperature i'm gonna bring down the volume. I'm going to try to get Washington working again. And he could make the argument, I think, that he's done some of that. If you look at the infrastructure bill, you look at the gun control bill, you look at the CHIPS Act. I mean, these were bipartisan accomplishments. He's, you know, other than some certain vitriolic speeches, He's basically tried to bring the temperature down. So wasn't that, couldn't he argue that's why he was elected and he's basically doing what he's elected to do? Right. So I think Biden certainly could say that he was elected to

not be Donald Trump. And he keeps that promise every day. He wakes up not being Donald Trump and goes to bed not being Donald Trump. And that's a lot of what voters wanted, especially swing voters who had voted for Trump and then voted for Biden because they didn't want and goes to bed not being Donald Trump. And that's a lot of what voters wanted, especially swing voters who had voted for Trump and then voted for Biden because they didn't want that anymore. But when you think about what's gotten done in his first two years, it's striking how little he has had to do with any of it. The president did not thrive. The kinds of bipartisan dealmaking that have happened have all happened in the Senate because the Senate is tied. And none of it was really driven by President Biden's priorities. The shape of the infrastructure bill is what it is in no way because that's what Joe Biden wanted or because that's what Joe Biden cared about.

So I'm not saying nothing of value has happened in these two years, but the president has been a very weak figure. Nobody stops and says, well, what is the president going to do if we do this? Nobody stops and says, is he going to veto this? There was never any chance that Joe Biden was going to veto anything in these two years, and he did not. And so he's never really had much leverage over any kind of policy process because it's never mattered to anybody what his own priorities were. So, you know, it's possible to be a passive president in this way and some good things can happen, but there's no denying that that's a weak mode of presidential leadership. And I think Biden has been a pretty weak president.

You wrote, I think, in the New York Times, if both parties refuse to learn from this election, meaning the 2022 midterms, that race, meaning you're now talking about 2024, the 2024 presidential race might be a rematch between an 81-year-old man and a 78-year-old who embody a set of options voters have now repeatedly rejected. So can you explain why, what that would look like? Honestly, I shudder to like visualize that. It boggles the mind. Well, it's so depressing. It's so depressing to think that this is the best we could do. Like this is not a country on the march, right? This is not a country whose, whose, you know, best years are looking forward rather than looking back when you, when you write it in that, in those kind of, in such stark terms.

Yeah, I mean, this to me is like the physical embodiment of that pattern that we talked about at the beginning, which is the parties are stuck. They're stuck, each defining itself against the other. They're having a lot of trouble saying to the country, this is our vision of the future, and it should be yours too. It's not what they're saying to the country. They're saying to the country, don't vote for those other guys. They would push us over the abyss. And in that sense, they're stuck in this argument that we've been having now for 30 years. It's in part a kind of generational stuckness too, right? These are, our leaders are very old right now. The president is over 80. You know, Nancy Pelosi is what, 82? Mitch McConnell's 81.

Yeah. And the interesting thing about that is that it's not that this generation has gotten its turn and we always give power to the elderly. This generation has held power for a long time. So Donald Trump and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who were presidents over a very long stretch of time, a quarter century, are exactly the same age. They were all born in the summer of 1946. And Clinton came in as a young man. He was in his 40s and it was a generational change. By the time Trump came in, you know, we were electing people in their late 70s. And of course, Biden's even older than that. He's three years older than they are. And we're stuck in a place where it doesn't seem like we know what a generational transition needs to look like and what a forward-looking, future-facing politics needs to look like.

I think both parties have some options in that regard. They have younger people to look to, but somehow they're just not quite ready to give up this fight they're in. I've pointed out on this podcast before and other conversations, that if you look at our presidents from 20 years ago, 25 years ago, presidents, vice presidents, you look at Clinton, Gore, Bush, those presidents who've been out of office for 20 plus years, in some cases longer, are today, today, younger than our President Biden and President Trump. That's an amazing, they've been out of office for a couple of decades, and they are still considerably younger than our current president and our last president.

Yeah, it's bizarre. And you know, the presidency is a hard job. I mean, I hope that I can be half as energetic as Joe Biden is at his age, but it is a hard job and it shows. brought in and scolded by, you know, senior officials in the White House that they should pipe down because, you know, Biden may very well run. If Biden really does run for re-election, by the end of his term, his second term, if he were to win, he would be closer to 90 years old than 80. I mean, just think about that for a moment. That is, you know, like it does boggle the mind. So then let's talk about alternatives, because on the one hand, I hear you. And then I look at the bench, the bench actually in both parties, which while I like some of the politicians on the Republican side, obviously more than the

Democratic side, there is a next gen, you know, a bench of possibilities for the next, you know, decade of politics, presidential politics, that are interesting. Obviously, DeSantis won by overwhelmingly 20 points. This idea that this was a setback for the red wave, well, it wasn't a setback for a red wave in certain parts of the country, right? DeSantis wins by 20 points. He wins overwhelmingly with suburban women. He wins in Miami-Dade County, which has typically been a Democratic bastion. He does well with Hispanic voters, even black voters relative to how Republican politicians have done statewide. So he had like – DeSantis had this extraordinary win.

Obviously, there's Glenn Youngkin. There's Tim from Virginia. There's Tim Scott from South Carolina. There's Nikki Haley, Mike Pompeo. Regardless of what one may think of each of these individuals, it's a pretty impressive group which Donald Trump is likely to be a candidate unless he pulls out, how do they, in light of all the history you're providing and all these challenges, are you encouraged? And if you are encouraged by them, what would you tell them to do next? I'm certainly encouraged by them. I think that bench, especially on the Republican side, although I'm inclined to be more impressed with Republicans, of course, than Democrats, but I think the bench on the Republican side does look very good. Younger people with real experience who are, I think, ready to think about the future and govern to apply conservative principles to a new set of circumstances and not just have exactly the same old argument. I would say a couple of things. The people who tend to drive transformative elections, real partisan realignments in our history, tend to be governors, governors running for president. Think about FDR or Reagan. In some ways, Bill Clinton was a kind of magical figure for the Democrats in a moment. They were losing everything.

George W. Bush. And there's a reason for that. Yeah. And Bush, it's easier to imagine a governor being president for voters. And governors also tend to be more effective presidents. They tend to actually drive change. And so while there are a lot of Republican senators I think well of, it seems to me that the greatest promise is among the governors. And there are some promising governors. DeSantis certainly

comes first and foremost to mind. I think Len Youngkin of Virginia is very impressive. Nikki Haley has been a governor. There are others to think about. And those younger governors who are, you know, they're in their 40s and 50s and yet are already proven executives are people who are going to be in a better place to talk about the future and to talk in practical terms about what they have to offer. They can point to real success and they're not stuck in the in the Washington conversation. The challenge for them is how to talk about the future and therefore talk past Trumpism. I think they're all going to face this, and in different ways they all confront this problem. There's no simple way to do it,

but it seems to me that having a record of your own and being able to say this is what I've done and here are the things I'd want to do does put you in a better place where you don't constantly have to answer uh... the one question over and over but clearly they're all struggling with this and including dissent is trying to figure out you know in a way if you step back and think what are they doing they're all

running to be trump's successor when instead they have to run against trump and that's a very different kind of challenge that none of them is quite organized themselves around what they're all doing at least the ones currently holding office is just doing Trump, and that's a very different kind of challenge that none of them has quite organized themselves around yet. What they're all doing, at least the ones currently holding office, is just doing their jobs. I mean, DeSantis was famously, the day after his landslide victory in November, was like

right back at work in the governor's office. Youngkin, I mean, they're just doing their jobs and swatting away questions about Trump. And they believe that's actually, you don't have to engage Trump. You don't have to respond to what Trump is doing or saying. You just have to do your job, at least for the next year or so. Yeah, at least for the next year or so. But at some point, if he's running and you're running against him, you do have to engage him. And I think a lot of Republicans in 2016 thought that you could avoid that, that he was just going to go away at some point, and you want to be the person who is in a position to win his voters, and so you ignore him until he goes away.

You know, maybe things would work out that way this time. We're not going to have a rerun of 2016, but I think it's unlikely. And they do have to think about, what do you say to voters about why it's time to move beyond Trump, and why they should move to you? That's an argument we haven't really seen yet. What about the argument that Trump is a loser in terms for Republicans on the ballot? I mean, as you pointed out, as is well known, Republicans in certain parts of the country did very well this cycle, no matter how conservative they were. But the one thing all those that did very well in not kind of hard, knee-jerk red states

was that they managed to have some separation from Trump, whether it was DeSantis, whether it was Brian Kemp in Georgia. These are, we can go on with Mike DeWine in Ohio. These Republicans ran on Republican republican governance competent governors of states and not being owned by trump yeah i mean i i think that's the argument that needs to be made but the funny thing is no one's really quite making that argument to voters at this point um everybody is sort of winking and nodding around it. People talk about candidate quality. What they're really talking about is Trump. And we have not seen somebody, maybe other than Chris

Christie, actually stand up and say, if we want to win, we have to build some distance from Trump. Whatever you think of Trump, however you voted, looking forward to the future to win elections, we can't be the Trump party in the way we have been. We haven't really seen a potential president stand up and say that yet. And I think it's true and somebody ought to say it. So now let's talk about the Democrats. One Democrat you are intrigued by, not for his policy positions or for ideological reasons, but just as sort of the Democrats model of what you're describing is Jared Polis, the governor of Colorado, who also, like DeSantis, won overwhelmingly in these midterms. I think he won something like 58% of the vote. The Republican got like high 30s or 40% of the vote. So it was quite crushing, his performance. What about him is interesting to you?

Well, I think there's a model there too that's similar, that a governor who is defined by how he does his work rather than by abstract views about divisive national issues, who's able to win in a big way in a generally competitive state. Colorado leans left, but it's a purple state. And to be able to pull that off basically means you're able to be practical and to persuade voters who may not agree with you about every issue that you're the best person for the job. That's really the way to build a broad coalition in a divided time, is to say this election is not about the big, broad questions of which party are you in. The question is, should I be president? And the answer to that can come from a person's record.

And it's especially easy for a governor to do that. I think Polis has managed to do that in a way that takes what people like about contemporary Democrats, which has to do kind of with his profile and personality and biography, but stays away from what people don't like about contemporary Democrats, their views about crime, about the role of government, the way that he managed through COVID as an example of how to govern in a complicated time. Somebody who's able to manage that complicated balance is somebody who can run as a Democrat for national office It often takes somebody who's very used to operating in an environment where not everybody agrees with them

This is true in general of how to be of how to build a broad coalition You have to be the guy who was the liberal in Arkansas. You have to be the guy who was the Republican in Hollywood these are the big winners in in our modern history and You know polis has a little bit of that profile. The Democrats have a thinner bench than Republicans by quite a bit. They have fewer governors like Polis who win big in competitive places. They also have the problem of the vice president, who is not an effective politician, but will be very hard to get around. And I don't see a world in which she doesn't run. If Biden doesn't run, I can't imagine she's not going to run. And I can't

imagine she won't be formidable. Yeah. I mean, she starts out, I think, with real strengths because she's the vice president and because, you know, she demographically fits kind of where Democrats want to be at this point. But she's just not a good politician. I mean, Kamala Harris, there's an interesting pattern in American history where vice presidents of presidents who themselves were vice president are often very, very bad at the basic politics of getting themselves advantage. So the closest analogy to Kamala Harris is probably Dan Quayle. Right. Dan Quayle was a decent senator senator it wasn't hard really to see why he was chosen but he he had no clear job he had no clear role and he just wasn't going to be

the successor it was never going to happen i think kamala harris is in a very similar place um and she doesn't have the skills to get herself out of it as someone who leans right, I mean, I do worry that if you think about, I mean, many of my Republican friends keep saying, oh, you know, Republicans are definitely going to win in 2024, and they feel very certain about it, assuming Trump is not the nominee. And I pointed out to them, it's probably because they just, as you've pointed out, they just, the Biden looks so feeble, so weak physically, and just in terms of his imprint on our politics. And, you know, people aren't really paying attention right now to the Democratic bench and some of these folks you've mentioned. So it's hard to imagine, given how strong the Republican bench is, that Republicans won't have

a relatively easy time. And as I pointed out to them, if you look at, you know, from basically, you know, you started Eisenhower, but let's just go past Eisenhower because I want to get past the 60s, which were basically a Democratic decade between Kennedy and Johnson. So if you start at 68, so you have Nixon, 68, 72. Then you have a brief, you know, interregnum period of 70 you know 76 carter so he carter governs from 77 to 81 and then back to reagan reagan bush so that's like a long stretch if you if you take out the four years you got nixon nixon ford char i should mention for nixon nixon ford this brief interregnum of interregnum of carter and then reagan reagan bush it's an incredibly

long stretch. And I say to my Democratic friends, what was happening during that time? Like friends who were involved in Democratic politics way back and they say every cycle we were trying to, you know, kind of unshackle from the legacy of like McGovern. And we were just defined by the hard left, McGovern 72. We were defined by the hard left of our party. And it took cycle after cycle after cycle of losing, you know, Mondale and then the caucus. And, like, we were all basically nominating, Democrats were saying, we, charismatic, centrist governor from Arkansas, Bill Clinton, that they finally said, look, we keep losing. And if we keep doing it this way, we're just going to keep nominating the Dukakis' and the Mondales, and we'll keep losing.

And we need this, like, fresh new model. But my only point is when you hear them talk about that, that took a long time. It took a long presidential election after presidential election of basically re-nominating the same version of, I'm picking on McGovern here, but that's just the easiest, you know, it was such a extreme ideological model for a presidential candidate, and they just kept redoing it. Do you worry we're they just kept redoing it do you worry we're going to keep redoing it even if it's not trump you know we're going to go through a period where we're going to keep nominating people even if even if they're not trump they're like a

version of what the democrats are dealing with with sure it wasn't mcgovern but it was versions of mcgovern and keep losing well i think that's possible but I also tend to think that Trump is sui generis in a way that McGovern wasn't. Trump doesn't exactly represent a faction of the Republican Party. What people don't like about him has a lot to do with him. It's his character, it's his behavior, and Republicans have a kind of structural advantage of the democrats that the the democrats activists their most engaged ideologically uh... forceful factions push the party away from the median voter and democrats have to constantly work to push aside their activists and say no we're actually

not for defunding the police or whatever it is at the moment on the republican side that, there are activists, there are very engaged, ideologically forceful people, but they actually tend to push the party toward the median voter on immigration, on trade, on things that a lot of Republican elites are not comfortable with and that a lot of members of Congress would rather not have to say. But in a funny way, those views are actually closer to the winnable voter, to that Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden voter that you have to win in the middle of the country. And so Republicans have more of an open door with the electorate now, not wide open,

but more of an open door. If they can nominate normal people, they're likely to win, not a landslide, but to win. Democrats have to work very hard to not just nominate normal people, they're likely to win. Not a landslide, but to win. Democrats have to work very hard to not just nominate normal people in temperamental terms, but to make it clear, as Joe Biden did, that they actually don't agree with the bulk of their party activists about some very important issues that matter to the American people. That's a bigger challenge than the one the Republicans have. If both parties nominate temperamentally normal people republicans win right now that's not always true but it's true right now um and that means that the job republicans have is a somewhat easier job in 24 doesn't mean they can do it clearly pushing trump aside has not been easy but i do

think that it's more doable okay I want to spend our last few minutes together completely switching gears and talk about our mutual friend, Michael Gerson, who recently passed away at the age of 58, who we both in different roles worked with in the George W. Bush administration. He was the chief speechwriter for President Bush. And after that, he had a short stint at the Council on Foreign Relations when he left the Bush administration and ultimately became a, I think it may be overlapping actually with his tour at the Council on Foreign Relations. He started as a columnist at the Washington Post. He was a twice weekly columnist at the Council on Foreign Relations. He started as a columnist at the Washington Post. He was a twice-weekly columnist at the Washington Post since 2007. And I didn't always agree with everything Mike wrote when he was in that role, but I was very often quite moved by his writing

on a whole range of topics, not only his analysis of politics and foreign policy issues, uh, and, and other issues. And, um, I read a lot after he died, uh, about, about him and about his life. I was particularly moved by, uh, your tribute to him that you wrote a national review. I shot you a note, um, reacting to it. Can you, can you talk a little bit about your experience with Mike, you know, how you got to know him in the Bush White House, what it was like working with him? Yeah, Mike was a really wonderful and special human being. I got to know him at – so I came to the White House at the end of the first term. I'd been at HHS for most of Bush's first term.

Went to the White House in 2004, and he was the chief speechwriter then. I was working in the Domestic Policy Council. And so at first, I knew him in a kind of indirect way. He would be the guy at meetings where when it seemed like something was decided and he had lost, he would stay behind and talk to the president. And then an hour later, it turned out actually he didn't lose and the president changed his mind and I lost. So at first I was pretty frustrated with Mike. But after the re-election, he kind of stepped back from speech writing and became a counselor to the president. He was still involved in speech writing, but he wasn't formally the chief speechwriter anymore. And he was in this kind of hard to define role of counselor to the president. And he asked me to staff him in that job. So along with what I was

already doing, he wanted me to sort of help him figure out a few key issues that he wanted to be involved in. And that gave me a window both into his priorities and concerns, but also just into Mike himself. And he was just a, I think the first and foremost thing to know about Mike is that he had a very deep Christian faith. He was a person of a very profound religious faith. and though I'm Jewish we had a lot in common and he he showed me how the kind of moral commitments that come from your religion can play a role in politics that is appropriate and constructive and powerful in ways that you that weren't obvious to you before spending time with him? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say he was a person who, while near power, thought about how to help people who had no power at all. That was always his priority and what mattered to him most. And he was just a person who constantly was reminding the rest of

the kind of White House operation to think about people who weren't in the room, to think about people who weren't getting heard. And that, it spoke to President Bush, first of all. I think there's a very strong element of that way of thinking in George W. Bush's mind, too. But it also, I think, really enriched and deepened a lot of policy conversations and ultimately improved a lot of outcomes. And getting to know Mike, you you know it's easy to be cynical in washington it's impossible to be cynical around my curse uh... he just meant what he said and he wanted you to mean what you said and was not interested

in uh... in cynical games you know to see how that can be effective in a White House, which is, after all, a political place, really taught me a lot. And I kept in touch with Mike after he left, and then after I left, I saw him quite a bit, you know, really every few weeks after he left the White House and when he moved to the Washington Post. And, you know, first and foremost, I mean, Mike was just an amazing writer and had a command of the kind of intersection of the English language

and the emotional vocabulary of a mature human being that's very unusual. I had some dealings with him on some of the presidential speeches around, when I was in Iraq, you know, working for the Pentagon when I was based in Iraq, we had to deal with him on some speeches President Bush was delivering on as it related to Iraq and the war on terror. So that's where I dealt with him. But I was obviously very familiar, even though I wasn't working with him at the time, these extraordinary speeches he crafted for President Bush around 9-11. I mean those were – that was really when he kind of came on the map, right? Absolutely. The National Cathedral speech, the joint session of Congress after 9-11.

He was incredibly good at finding what to say in those moments when you just don't know what to say. I mean, you're the president. It's the evening of 9-11. What in the world are you supposed to say? And Mike just had an incredible talent for knowing the answer to that question and what do you talk a little bit about his thinking once president trump was elected because that wound up well that wound up becoming a big focus of his writing in the washington post uh during the trump years where you really felt like he was breaking with what we think of as conservatism in the Trump era. Yeah, Mike had a very high view of what the presidency was and what public service in general was and of how much character mattered in politics.

And so he immediately reacted, know allergic lee to donald trump uh... and really thought that it was necessary to say how wrong he thought it all was uh... as intensely as possible to make it clear that this was not what this is not the only way to think about what the right could be this was not the only way to think about what a republican president ought to do. And so, yeah, he became an intense opponent of Trump. He stayed as conservative as he had been on the key issues that mattered to him most. But, you know, in the Trump era, he was definitely part of the loyal opposition week in and week out. And he thought it was

important to keep pressing those points to make it clear that there was a moral problem here. He wrote a number of columns about, not related to politics, that I was equally moved by, one of which you cite in your tribute to him. It was titled, Saying Goodbye to My Child, the Youngsterster which was about him taking his two he's survived by two sons and it was about him taking his older son to college for the first time which i think was about a decade ago and and he wrote what it means to take your you know for your kid your child to leave home i i highly recommend to our listeners that you read this piece i'll put it in the show notes but i just want to quote one sentence. I'm a

father of a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old. The 14-year-old is turning 15 in a few days, so I think about these things a lot, because the period from when he was born to now seems like a flash in the pan, and to think that his years left at home are a fraction of that period up to now, and that already seemed fast. And when Mike writes, parenthood offers, I'm quoting here, parenthood offers many lessons in patience and sacrifice, but ultimately it is a lesson in humility. The very best thing about your life is a short stage in someone else's story. I mean, that is such a, you know, it's exactly what Mike could do, which is to put to words this kind of vague sense that everybody in a certain sort of human

situation has. But, you know, I would never know how to describe that. And it's not sappy, not really. It's not uncomfortable. It's just true. You read it and you just think, wow, that is exactly why I have these mixed feelings. And, you know, it's just, it's, and my kids are 12 and 10, relatively far away from that moment, but I can absolutely understand exactly what he's saying. And it makes you think about your own parents and it makes you think about your children. And it's just a way to, you know, to put into words the human condition. And that really was always Mike's great strength as a writer. A friend of mine from business school, this guy, Yen, he, you know, my business school friends,

they tend to think about big ideas often through expressed through data and we were once a bunch of us were having dinner one night this is like last year and he we're talking about some of these issues that mike writes about and he and he said he put it he had some study that he shared with us that basically said something like 90 of the time you spend based on i don't know, some academic study, 90% of the time you spend with your child is between their age, 0 and 18. So you're about to pivot. And it's like drops falls off a cliff, right? You're about to pivot overnight

when your kid turns 18 or 19, whatever, this period that Mike writes about to that 10%, and that 10 is going to spread over the rest of your life um it's uh yeah and it makes you think about your parents because you know what you realize is in in that moment at least when i went through it when i was 18 or whatever i i just didn't think about my parents at all it didn't occur to me that this was hard for them totally yeah totally uh totally. And then I just want to cite one other column that Mike wrote, and then I'll let you go. He wrote a column on July 4th of 2022.

So when did he pass away? It was in, was it November? In November. Yeah. So he wrote this column just a few months ago while he was still sick. And it was a column about dog ownership. And it was basically saying, like, once you get a dog, always have a dog. Your dogs pass away.

They don't live long lives. But, like, it was this incredible tribute to dog ownership. I say this as an owner of two dogs. And he says, he wrote, when you try to instill discipline, they, the dogs, employ a thermonuclear cuteness that melts all intentions of firmness. But what other object can you bring into your home that makes you smile every time you see it? Jack, his dog, is a living, yipping, randomly peeing antidepressant. He improves the mental health of all who encounter him.

Why do we take in new dogs? Because their joy for living renews our own. I don't know anyone else who could put dog ownership in those terms. So I'm going to make my kids read that column. Anyways, I'll post some of his pieces in the show notes. Ival, thank you very much both for this conversation and the earlier conversation on our politics. I really appreciate it, as always, and I hope to have you back on soon. Thank you very much, Dan. I appreciate it. That's our show for today. We'll post some of Michael Gerson's columns in the show notes.

And if you want to keep up with Yuval Levin, you can find his work at AEI.org. That is the website for the American Enterprise Institute and his quarterly National Affairs, which is NationalAffairs.com. Call Me Back is produced by Alain Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.