Central Air - AIPAC Throwdown

Episode Date: April 8, 2026

On this week's show: Daniel Biss joins to discuss the changing way Democrats are relating to Israel. Daniel is the mayor of Evanston, Ill., and very likely soon to be a member of Congress representing Chicago’s north side and northern suburbs. He just won the Democratic nomination in a hugely expensive primary election — over $10 million was spent, much of it by AIPAC-linked groups dissatisfied with his positioning as a “progressive Zionist.”Plus: Medicare for All, a check in on the Iran war, and Gavin Newsom’s emergent strategy when fighting Republicans on the internet (calling them gay). Jamie Kirchick sits in for Ben who’s off this week.Sign up for updates from Central Air at www.centralairpodcast.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.centralairpodcast.com/subscribe

Welcome to Central Air, the show where the temperature is always just right. This is Josh Barrow. I'm here with Megan McArdle, columnist for The Washington Post. Megan, I really enjoyed the conversation we had about opera on Friday with Phil Chan. That was, I hope that our subscribers will go listen to it because it was one of my favorite lives that we've done. And I know that you may not think you care about opera, but it's about much more than that. It's about who we are as a people. Yeah, I mean, I like the opportunity to do these things that are a little bit offbeat for us. And, you know, of course, Timothy Chalame has brought opera centrally into the conversation, whether he wanted to or not.

And it was a really cool chat about Phil's an opera director. He produced a very modernized approach to Madame Butterfly in Boston and is going to be doing that with La Traviata, trying to make opera relevant to younger generations. I went and saw my own first opera last week, and so we had a really interesting chat about that. If you want to hear that conversation with me, Megan and Phil Chan, go to centralairpodcast.com. You can find it on our website there. You can sign up, become a subscriber, become a paying subscriber if you'd like to support the show. And that episode replay is available for paying subscribers. And then we'll be doing more of these live chats that are free if you join them when they are happening. So watch us on Twitter.

And we'll try to include announcements in our emails when these are upcoming. But some more of these conversations coming your way. Jamie Kerchick is also with us this week sitting in for Ben Dreyfus, who is off. Jamie is a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Jamie, are you an opera fan? I haven't been to many, but the ones I've gone to, I've really enjoyed, actually. And it's something I would like to do more. Okay.

Well, one of the things that we talked about briefly is apparently there will be a new home for opera in Washington, D.C., where Jamie lives for the next couple of years while the Trump Kennedy Center undergoes its much-needed renovations. And then also with us this week, we have Daniel Biss. Daniel's the mayor of Evanston, Illinois. He's the Democratic nominee for Congress in Illinois's ninth congressional district, which encompasses neighborhoods on the north side of Chicago and northern suburbs, including Evanston and Skokie. It's a strongly Democratic district. And last month, Daniel won a competitive primary election that drew over $10 million in outside spending, much of it from groups linked to APAC. And this is a conflict that we're seeing play out in competitive Democratic primaries all around the country. In New Jersey, for example, APAC driven attacks on former Congressman Tom Malinowski. who favors the imposition of certain conditions on military aid to Israel, ended up leading to the nomination of a candidate well to his left on Alila Maja, who will be the new congressman from New Jersey's 11th district. That drew a lot of national attention,

and there was a lot of national attention on Daniel's race. So I'm really glad that we were able to have him here to talk about that experience, going through that primary, now being the Democratic nominee. Daniel, part of what's interesting to me here, as we see this play out all over the country, is that, you know, there's a lot of activist energy on both sides, obviously around the Israel-Gaza conflict. But when you pull voters and ask them to rank the importance of issues to them in politics, Israel tends to come in close to the bottom of the

list. People are very concerned about the economy, especially inflation, immigration, crime, health care, all things that tend to rank pretty high. Israel tends to rank toward the bottom. And yet you've just gone through this primary. I mean, I assume you didn't run for Congress principally in order to make policy related to Israel. What was it like to end up in this primary that was so much all about Israel with all of the spending? Yeah, no, I mean, Israel ranks, I would say, barely above opera in the polling of your typical voter. Yeah, it was really weird, right? So quickly, a few things happened.

Number one, APAC and a variety of allied groups spent enormous amounts of money in this primary. And that just became what it was all about, partially because there it was, all that money, and partially because I had what I felt to be a strategic comparative of, hey, if you're going to overcome that amount of money, you've got to explain to people where it's coming from. And so my own campaign elevated the salience of the issue as much as humanly possible, and then that sort of became whatever it was talking about. It was a strange experience on many levels.

And I will say that if you just take a poll, it'll show there's a relatively small slice of voters on both quote sides, which is a language that makes me want to tear my hair out. But anyway, a small group of voters who are like, I'm pro-Israel and that's my thing, and a small group of voters who are like, I'm pro-Palestine and that's my thing. I will say that I think the issue winds up

having more salience than that makes it look like because I think for a certain type of progressive, being pro-Palestinian as a signifier of broader kind of alignment. And I think that played out on Election Day, by the way, where the candidate who was seen by some as being more pro-Palestine than me wound up doing very, very well and really swept the most progressive parts of Chicago, where even though if you ask those voters,

what's your top issue, they might not say Palestine, and the thing they say might be an issue where there was no daylight between us. I think her kind of coding as a super pro-Palestine person just made her the natural candidate to whom progressives wanted to gravitate. Yeah, I mean, so that election result, you won 29, 30% of the vote in this primary. Yeah. And so Kat Abugazale, who is an influencer, basically, in her mid-20s, finished a few points behind you. And then behind her, there was a state senator named Laura Fine, who was the, who was Apex's preferred candidate in this race.

Can you just, I mean, because it was so central, can you just describe for us a little bit, like, where you even are on Israel? Like, what puts you in this position where AAPS spent all this money against you? But then you have these anti-APEC groups. I mean, track A-PAC, this anti-A-A-A-A-P. back group, they have this graphic that has this, you know, kind of sinister image of you saying that you've received several hundred thousand dollars from the pro-Israel lobby. So it seems that whatever you were saying ended up with the tractors on both sides. I mean, I think if you want to be fully fair, you'd have to say that it's a sinister coloration of what is already a pretty

bad picture of me owing to my own sloppiness and getting a haircut on time. And so really, who's to blame? Yeah, so I don't really know where to start for your audience, because it's not like a foreign policy-driven podcast. But at a super high level, I call myself a progressive Zionist. I am driven on this issue by my commitment to the well-being and self-determination and human rights of all people. I believe in Israel's right to exist as a Jewish democratic state and to defend itself. I have a lot of really close ties to Israel. My mother is Israeli.

My grandparents survived the Holocaust and found a safe haven in Israel in 19. with her two-year-old daughter, my mother. I grew up spending summers there. So its existence means really a lot to me, and its conduct is abhorrent to me, both in Gaza over the course of the last few years, and more broadly in the expansion of settlements and the condoning of settler violence in the West Bank.

And so I'm certainly opposed to no-strings-attached-blank-checked military aid. I support the recognition of the Palestinian state, I take positions that are, I think, consistent with the broad values of human dignity and self-determination of all people. They're also in the broad mainstream of an American-Jewish opinion, but APEC has taken a very, very, very hard line and is really just aligning itself with Netanyahu and with Trump and with a very right-wing vision of what it means to support Israel. And, you know, I was presented early in the campaign with a choice of, like, fudge who you are, kind of say enough fuzzy words to get them off your back or just tell the truth about who you are and suffer the consequences. And I picked Colin B, and it all turned out great, but it was a pretty painful thing to go through. Jamie, I'm wondering what you make of, you know, what Dan sort of describes there, I think, is increasingly the, you know, the median democratic voter and increasingly median democratic politician viewpoint. And the polling has shifted sharply in a negative direction in terms of sentiment toward Israel, actually among all groups, but especially among Democrats over the last few years. It seems like, you know, these efforts by APAC ultimately just seem like they're pushing against a tide that's inevitable, that, you know, when,

given where voter sentiment is in the Democratic Party, it seems like politicians are going to have to be shifting in this direction within the party. Yeah, I think, you know, APEC is in a difficult position because their mission is to support a strong relationship between America and Israel. And that's regardless of who's in power in Israel and also regardless of who's in power in Washington. And, you know, as we know, over the past 25 years, the Israeli left has basically died. And Israel's becoming a more right-wing country. There was a poll that just came out showing that the most conservative demographic in Israel are people under the age of 22. So it is becoming a more conservative country. And this makes it, I think, difficult for American liberals and American Jews, too, who are going to start feeling more alienated, disenchanted with Israel.

And this is something that, you know, people talk a lot about in the Jewish community. I'm sure, you know, Daniel can agree with me on this. But I wouldn't necessarily say that, you know, APEC is taking a heart. line, you know, they don't take a position on settlements. They don't take a position on any of these sort of contentious issues within Israel. They just support, you know, a strong relationship. And that means mostly with Congress. So anything that Congress is doing with regard to relations with Israel, that's basically defense spending and the memorandum that comes up every couple of years. So they're basically in that position where they have to back whoever is in power.

Yeah, but I mean, and far be it from me to give them strategic advice here, but it used to be the philosophy of the kind of pro-Israel advocacy world that maintaining bipartisan support for the project was a core strategic objective. And basically, since Barack Obama was the president, since the Iran deal, since Bibi Netanyahu, chose to kind of try to insert. himself in partisan politics in America, they've been presented with a series of choices of do you continue trying to maintain a truly bipartisan set of relationships that allows you to be comfortable in the midpoint of the Democratic Party? Or do you try to sort of find some Democrats who are willing to play your game while being fundamentally a quasi-partisan organization? I don't think that choice was forced on them. I think they made it. a really, really bad choice, and they're now living with it.

Well, I would just say, you know, there's two sides of that question. Was it the Democrats who moved too far left, or was it the Israelis who moved too far right? And there, you know, people take different positions on that. You know, for the Israeli perspective, Netanyahu's perspective, and I'm not saying that I'm, you know, I'm not his spokesman. But what they would say was, you know, the Iran nuclear issue was an existential issue for Israel. The deal was unacceptable. and they had to marshal support against it.

If I recall at the time, a majority of Americans did oppose the deal. It was not a treaty. He didn't, President Obama didn't bring it to the Senate for ratification, which is why it was so easy for Donald Trump to revoke it. So I just think that this is an extremely difficult issue, and it's hard to pin the blame on one side or the other. But that's part of what drives me nuts about the politics of this, that, you know, ultimately, you know, Iran is an in the Middle East, the stakes of what happens in the Middle East are of primary importance to Israel and the Gulf States much more than they are to us. And so it just feels presumptuous to me the way that not just Israel, but also the Gulf States, jerk around our politics. And now, like, now I've talked the president into this war that, you know, that there's a, there's significantly more enthusiasm for in Israel and quite possibly in Saudi Arabia and the UAE, even though they don't talk as openly about it. serve their ultimate regional interests rather than ours. And it just seems to me like, you know, Israel is a client state of the United States and has been a very ungrateful client state for the last

couple of decades, inserting itself into American politics, you know, and as someone who is a Democrat who for whom this is not a top issue, I really resent the way that this has come in and affected my, you know, like in New Jersey, Anna Leila Maja is a very left-wing Congresswoman. I would have preferred someone closer ideologically to me. And the set of circumstances that led to her election there was about an issue that is not of really any importance to me and not really of great importance to New Jersey's 11th district. And so it just, it seems to me that if, you know, if Israel needs all of these things out of the United States, which it does, that they should be both, I think, as a prudential matter, to Daniel's point,

more assiduous about courting both political parties, but also just more broadly a little bit more grateful, given that the United States does not have the same stakes in the Middle East that they do, to the extent that they that they are leaning on us here, which they are, it just offends me to some extent as an American the way that they, you know, they were sort of beating up Barack Obama in our politics when it's ultimately who, how is this even their business to begin with? Well, I mean, it's obviously their business, right? It is obviously their business whether Iran gets a nuclear weapon. No, sure. Now, you can argue that prudentially they're not doing a good job of trying to address that. But saying why are they trying to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? No, no.

I mean, how are our politics their business? Well, to the extent that our politics determines whether Iran gets a nuclear weapon. Also, every country's politics are America's business. That's why we have CIA station chiefs and every capital around the world. This is not unusual. I mean, I quite agree with, I quite agree with you that Netanyahu got way to political with the Trump administration. And I agree with you on that.

But ethnic lobby is, I grew up in the ER ethnic lobby, right? Why were there 40,000 special visas for Irish people? Is it because this was critical to the security or the immigration needs of the United States? No, it is because Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the many, many Irish Americans in the United States wanted there to be 40,000 special visas. for Irish people.

That's always been, this has always been a major strain of American politics and particularly of democratic American politics. The retail ethnic politics saying like, how did this happen? I'm shocked, shocked to find gambling going on in here. No, no, I'm not shocked by it.

I'm just annoyed by it. The thing that, again, I'm not going to say anything that you guys don't all know, but I just think it's worth articulating vocally is this is the collision of two different phenomena, one of very long-standing phenomenon that Megan described, and the other, a very new phenomenon of issue-specific super PACs on issues that most voters don't really care much about at all, or even more, don't have any sympathy for the specific point of view of that super PAC,

coming in with amounts of money that are supposed to be able to just totally swamp and transform the entire election. And right, at this moment, though, might be changing. At this moment in America, it's basically APEC, crypto, and AI that have this, they've basically figured out, like, I don't live this kind of life, but there are various interests and sectors of the economy for which a quarter billion dollars is not that big a deal. And if you put a quarter billion dollars in a super PAC and plan to use it over the course of a single election cycle, you can not only completely unilaterally determine the outcome of some number, five or ten or twenty-five congressional races, but by virtue of having done that and demonstrated a willingness to do it in the future,

you can live, I won't say rent-free, but you can live for the rent of $2,000-50 million over the course of an election cycle in the head of every member of Congress and every candidate who are all operating under the assumption that if they say the wrong thing, a $10 million expenditure will end their career. And it's worrying. I mean, isn't it a little inspiring, though, how rarely it works? I mean, so in the supreme irony of my life as a libertarian columnist, my dad was a lobbyist. Now, he was a lobbyist for the heavy construction industry in the tri-state area of New York. And if there's going to be a lobby, like, we're going to be building roads and bridges.

You're going to have companies that do that. They're going to lobby the government. But that said, like, the thing that this actually taught me was an appreciation for how hard it is to move results with money. And I think that's only gotten more true. How many times have we seen super PACs go in and they're going to blow open some race and they don't end up winning in part because like, as happened with your race, right? You end up polarizing the race. You end up drawing attention to the fact that you're doing this. And in fact, lobbying money matters the most for tiny things no one cares about. And once the electorate is really polarized on an issue, like money buys you

an opportunity to talk to a congressman. It gets you the interview. But unless you can go in and be like, this is going to help you get reelected and or your constituents are really going to like this and or it's going to be really good for, you know, your area, you're not going to get the deal because it's too costly because, in fact, the electorate is going to reject it.

And I think, like, I'm not defending these super PACs. It's not great. It's not a great look for our politics. But, I mean, I think in a way, the less. and is, yeah, sure, if you're doing crypto, which, like, to a first approximation, no one except crypto companies cares about, you can probably get some results. If you're doing AI or Israel, it's a lot harder. And yes, you can throw the fear of God into people. It's going to be a pain in the butt. They don't want to go up against it. But at the end of the day, it's actually really hard

to win these races just by throwing money at things. And I think that's kind of oddly hopeful. I think that's, I think you make an extremely interesting point, too, though, which is that spending the money risks making it easier for the electric to polarize against you. Yeah. Again, I am not in favor of these super PACs going hog wild in races for a bunch of reasons. But I think the idea that, like, this is a successful strategy keeps getting tested by reality and rarely proving out. Well, but I think, as you noted, it depends on the issue. And I think that, you know, I think APEC has done a number of things that are blowing up in its face.

but I think the crypto spending has been extremely effective. And I think partly for a reason that you identify that like, you know, and it's my broad view on it is like I have a broadly negative view about cryptocurrency, which I think, you know, it facilitates crime and speculation and a variety of other things. And I would prefer to have more restrictive policies on it. But I do think that given the amount of money that crypto has spent, the juice is not worth the squeeze there. I mean, it's not worth, you know, losing a Senate race in Ohio. over crypto policy. But I think that's actually quite a dark reality that basically if your issue matters somewhat but doesn't matter enough to be worth fighting against, then sometimes you can buy the result. I am like basically with you and I don't think I really, I am still struggling to see

the use of crypto. But I also think that as a public policy matter, this ranks somewhere, I don't know, north of opera, maybe south of Israel, right? Like, it's just not actually probably south of of Israel. Definitely, south of Israel. It's just, I mean, I don't think it's great that people get scammed and that they lose and that people use this to gamble, which is functionally what it is for most of the people in it. I don't think that in the, like, it's going to meaningfully affect the larger economy, that it's going to leave countless millions of lives devastated in its wake. It's just a small issue. And again, while I am not defending the idea that you can buy these races, is that is the scale of issue where you can have real impact because of the electorate cares,

and maybe they shouldn't care about Israel, but they do, then it's really, really hard to make that difference. I'd like to hear from Daniel, you know, having gone through this experience, how does it affect how you're going to approach Israel once, you know, presumably you're going to be elected to Congress in this heavily Democratic district? Has it changed the way that you're going to be making policy on this? I don't know that it's changed my views, but I think it's changed my approach, right? So one thing that actually became a sort of second-tier big-ish issue in the campaign was the fact that I had met with APEC early on. And, you know, my reason for meeting with them was basically to try to avoid what wound up happening. I knew enough as a person who just launched a campaign to understand, like, listen,

These are people who are willing to spend close to $10 million in races where they have a strong view. And I knew they were never going to like me, but I thought, hey, maybe if I could talk to them, I can persuade them to stay out. You know, I sent an imposition paper and all that stuff. And that wound up being, first of all, kind of tactically pointless, but also it just became a vulnerability in the campaign because as I was then attacking what they were doing in the race, others could say, well, you just wish that was you and that's why you're attacking it, which was not true, but was an argument that people could make that sounded okay. So there's a long way of saying, you know, going forward, I just don't think that groups like that are reasonable partners to have discussions with. I think that it's a very important responsibility of a member of Congress to talk across difference and meet with people who don't agree with and to try to build bridges even when the gaps are pretty big. But I've sort of figured out if APEC are not the people with whom to do that. And, you know, On some of all, that's the shame because on an issue this polarized and this complicated, you want to try to have hard conversations across difference, but I just don't think this is an organization with whom that can be done productively.

Are there groups on the other side that you wouldn't meet with for the same reason? No. I mean, there may be groups that I disagree with strongly, but there's no groups that have demonstrated to me that they're not good faith actors in the same way. Can I ask about another policy area for once you're in Washington? Like many of your opponents in this primary, you ran as a supporter of Medicare for All. What does that mean policy-wise?

What would you, you know, if we have a Democratic-led government in 2029, what would you like to see the government do on health care? So at a high level, what the directional imperative there is simplify the health care system, right? So obviously there's a million details you might ask, but Medicare for all, you know, at a high level, we know what it means. It means a single-payer system where, you know, for example, you could just imagine decreasing the Medicare eligibility. age to zero, and that's Medicare for all. I was very straightforward during the campaign about the fact that that's not going to happen overnight, but one of the things that I said was if you believe in getting rid of the Byzantine system of multiple different payers and connection with employment and so forth, that helps inform what kind of incremental steps you would be enthusiastic about.

But for instance, decreasing the Medicare eligibility age from 65 to 55 or even 60, you know, which is a relatively modest step for Medicare for all, it would be just materially really important for a lot of people who are in many cases, you know, 62 years old and holding on to work that doesn't really make sense for them any longer because they just have no other way to make it to 65 with health care coverage. And I would hope it would build momentum for the basic idea that the system that we have, now, even though, you know, as many would point out, it's like, it's comfortable for a lot of people. It's inefficient. It's confusing. And it leaves a lot of cracks for people to fall into.

So healthcare spending is about 18% of GDP. About a third of that is already spending by the federal government. For example, on Medicare, health care for federal employees, et cetera. And then about another sixth of it is state and local government spending. VA also. Yes, VA is it? Yes. And so you have, you know, about nine percent of is the government already spending on health care, two-thirds of that being federal. Sorry, so the 3% is state and local? So for Medicaid and state and local employees? Yes, exactly. But so, you know, Medicare for all, obviously, there's, you know, different proposals with, you know, the most extreme versions of it involved not only that everyone's on the same plan, but that the plan pays for everything. There's no patient responsibility, et cetera. Obviously, if you had the literal Medicare program, that includes, you know, the member in Medicare pays for some fraction of their care.

But basically, we'd be talking about the federal government going from spending 6% of GDP on health care to a much larger number than that, you know, however you expand it. And we already have a federal budget deficit that's about 6% of GDP, which is probably four points higher than it reasonably should be. So basically, you know, if you want to have the federal government take on a much larger role in providing health care, you presumably need a new funding source for that, right? Like you would need, I mean, if you look to countries in Europe that have systems like this, generally they have substantial. value-added taxes, they have payroll taxes that are significantly higher than the United States. If you really wanted to go to the full Bernie Sanders vision where you have this program that not only covers everyone but covers all the cost, you need to something like double federal revenue in order to be able to do that. And I don't think Democrats have really made, you know, any kind of pitch about the idea that, you know, if we're going to have a much more active government, including taking on a much larger fraction of societal health care spending, that we need really new large taxes. I mean, at some point, doesn't that sale need to be

made. Yeah. And look, there's a, there's all sorts of technical answers that one could give. Like, for example, to the extent that you're replacing public sector costs borne by other units of government, you would imagine some mechanism for repurposing those revenues for that purpose. You could also say, you know, continuing down that path for just one hot second, right? There's plenty of employer side payments for health care that you could also imagine, you know, through some tax mechanism and repurposing. But I think your point is still taken. And, you know, I like many Democrats and many progressives have said a lot about fair taxation and taxation of the wealthy and instituting a wealth tax and instituting higher marginal tax rates on high incomes and, you know, doing away with

any number of tax loopholes from the carried interest loophole to the fact that financial transactions are untaxed. I'm anticipating a follow-up question. Well, yeah, I mean, you know, ultimately, you know, There's there's some amount, you know, a few points of GDP that you can get through higher taxes on high income people in corporations. Now, of course, Democrats also have a whole bunch of other ideas about how to use that. We have the large budget deficit to close. People want to paid leave benefit. They want to child care, et cetera. At some point, you know, if you want to get onto a, you know, a European type scale in terms of the size of the welfare state, including an even larger role in health care, especially given that health care is more expensive in the U.S. that is in these other countries, at some point, you need a broad-based tax there. Yeah, I think that we basically have a threefold problem in this country that has created a kind of an allergy toward the sorts of broad-based taxes that you're talking about. And I think it's important to sort of name all three parts. So first of all, there's a part that I think you would probably talk about a lot, which is the question of the tax value proposition. Do people feel that the value they're getting from the tax dollar they're paying is great enough? that they feel comfortable paying more, right?

It's always easier to ask someone else to pay higher taxes for a government service that you kind of want, but aren't really willing to pay for yourself, than to say, I'm prepared to pay more because that service is worth it to me. And I think that problem, there is a real problem there, right? There is a real question of how to make government more efficient, and I think that's a question that has somehow been cast aside

by every political coalition. But I also think there's a perception problem as well, right? And there's this famous book, Good Enough for Government Work, which essentially points out that the phrase good enough for government work was not ironic when it was coined because the political, the sort of cultural attitude was like, what could be of a higher standard than government work? And then over time, especially, you know, through the Nixon era and in the 70s, it became something that was turned into a sarcastic epithet. And that's part of a multi-generation project of kind of trashing government and, you know, both talking about government is hapless and inefficient, and then at least one political party is systematically

trying to make government more hapless and inefficient, particularly in the customer-facing aspects of it, which then just like feeds this cancer. So that's one sort of leg of the stool. I think one leg of the stool is just the intense amount of economic inequality in this country, right? You just have such unbelievable concentration of wealth. You have levels of wealth that are, you know, pretty much a historical, certainly a historical from compared with most of American history. And at a time that there's really genuine challenge, not just for people living in deep poverty, but for a lot more people than just that. And I think it creates a real instinctive hostility to the idea that broad-based taxation is even necessary. And then that feeds into, I think,

the third problem, which is maybe the most abstract and philosophical, but I think it's really, really important, which is just a sense of social cohesion. Are we a part of the same project? Is it my responsibility to pay for a benefit that I may personally not feel? Are we prepared as a society to do big, complicated communal things together? Or we are just kind of like stuck with an every man for himself attitude stuff. And I think if you add those three things up, number one, people think that government is kind of not that efficient and they don't really trust that their tax dollars going to be spent well. Two, they look around and they feel like that unbelievably wealthy person can truly foot the bill. Why should it be my job? And number three,

there's a sense of like, are we really all in it together after all? It creates a real allergy to broad-based taxes. And I think, I think we've got to solve, like, I hate to say this, but we have to solve all of those problems. Can I ask about another problem we have to solve if we're going to do Medicare for all? I came up as a journalist in the volcano fire. of Obamacare. And of course, one of the issues was how are you going to pay for this? The other issue was, what are you going to pay for this? And, you know, when you look at, you say, well, we could just drop the Medicare eligibility age. And there have been a variety of plans to do this. Often they say, why don't we just drop to 55? The answer is that that's a giant cut in hospital

and physician reimbursements, right? Private insurance pays about twice what Medicare does for hospital services. It pays about 40 to 50 percent more for physician services. It's an average. There are variations within the category. And so this amounts to, and one of the reasons that it proves so challenging to do things like this, and it always sort of gets bandied about and then dropped, is that the hospitals, right, there's a hospital in every congressional district.

And they are not going to take a 50 percent. cut to their rates. And the thing about this is that, you know, there's a difference between the marginal and the average cost. Government insurers can pay below market reimbursements because as long as it covers the marginal cost of covering an additional patient, and as long as private insurance is subsidizing your mortgage and your utilities and all of, and the equipment purchases and all of that stuff, it can make financial sense for a hospital. to take that marginal patient at a below average rate. But everyone can't go in at the marginal rate. Someone's got to cover the overhead. And so once you start doing this,

it's not just that you have to figure out how to pay for what we have. It's that you actually have to start figuring out how the government's going to pay for what the private insurance is currently covering. And I wonder if you've talked to the hospitals in your district or the doctors, about how they feel about that issue and how financially viable they would be if everything was Medicare and there were no more private insurance. So certainly when you talk to them about, imagine changing nothing except that everybody who's currently on some reimbursement other than Medicare winds up on Medicare, you know, with the exception of hospitals that are unbelievably Medicaid-focused, I think, you know, all of...

Those, like, public kind of quasi-charity hospitals. There are safety nets. Yeah, right. Yeah. You know, the rest of the hospitals would find that to be economically challenging. Now, have I sat down with, you know, hospital CFOs and said, like, okay, let's, let's figure out the breaking point of lower Medicare eligibility age at which, you know, Implementing that with no other changes would start to be untenable. No, I've not done that exercise.

I mean, let's also just acknowledge that the Medicaid changes that have been pushed forth recently are, again, varying from hospital hospital, depending on their Medicaid population. But in many cases, it's going to be really, really devastating. And I think it's also, you know, Josh, like, mentioned really quickly in passing without getting into this. We do spend a lot more per capita on health care than everybody else. And, you know, some of that is for good reason, probably. Some of that is for bad reason, probably. Some of that is for somewhere in between, probably. And I don't think just holding everything constant forever is the assumption that we ought

to be living with here. Oh, I mean, I think it's a huge challenge, right? But one of my fears is, of course, that the easiest thing to cut, because you do have a hospital in every district. What do you not have? Pharmaceutical or MedTech development? And so these things which are actually a relatively small portion of overall spending tend to take a very disproportionate burden of cuts, even though they're actually some of the highest value delivering, right? If you can get someone on a pharmaceutical as opposed to surgery, as opposed to long-term care or something else, I mean, that's a giant win for the health care system. But it's very hard for the

political system to think in those terms, right? everything ends up getting dictated by what's in people's districts with democracy. I'm not criticizing. It's just kind of the reality of it, all the pharmaceutical developments in a few districts. And so we've seen things, right, like the most favored nation, like the Biden initiative to force down the costs of the top used pharmaceuticals with what are effectively price controls, although they have changed the name to make them sound less like price controls. And that, too, is a kind of challenge for the system. I agree. It's really expensive. It's really inefficient.

There's a lot of holes. There's a lot of handoff problems. It's hard to do things like you see in other countries where they at least have a really good grip on, like, the life cycle of a patient. You don't have these perverse incentives where I would like to not treat this patient now because if they get sick in 40 years, that's not my problem. I mean, all of those things are absolutely true. But the perverse logic of those other systems is that they underinvest in a bunch of stuff, including R&D, which is almost entirely done in the U.S. market.

And I wonder if you've thought about that. Like, how do you protect the most important, to me, part of our system, which is innovating new treatments that are better than what we already have? Yeah, well, I'm a little bit thinking about. I've thought about this some, but I don't have, you know, fully formed answers. But I do think that one, a different way of asking your question is how much of global medical innovation should be paid for by the American health care consumer. And like, that's a fair question to ask, right? Absolutely. Right.

So the idea that. In an ideal world, much less than is actually happening. Right. Right. So, you know, like I'm not saying I'm going to go to Congress and try to do for pharmaceuticals what Donald Trump thought he was doing for defense spending with NATO. But there is a, the reality right now is perverse. And the reality is that genuinely that Americans with health problems are this massive subsidizer for all of global medical innovation. And that winds up being an access problem for a variety of Americans with different kinds of economic challenges.

And that just seems unacceptable to me. I mean, I think that's absolutely true. But I think the risk is that as when Donald Trump's adventures with NATO, that you don't get the result you want, which is that Europe steps up. You just get chaos and worse outcomes for everyone. Did it, before we let you go, I want to ask you about an Illinois specific matter. Because you mentioned earlier about the challenge with Medicare for all and convincing taxpayers that they're getting good value for money and should be willing to pay more in taxes.

In Illinois, a significant problem for this at both the state and local levels of government has been a chronic underfunding of public employee pension systems. It's a problem you see around the country, but it's a special. acute in Illinois. And so you have enormous fractions of budgets, you know, especially in Chicago and then also elsewhere in the state, devoted to basically making up that pension debt. It means people pay taxes and it goes to that rather than to, you know, services they're receiving. About 15 years ago, there was a reform in the state to reduce the generosity of pensions for newly hired employees to try to fight that. And the legislature has actually been taking steps

unwinding that. And I'm just wondering, you know, as a mayor who has to deal with this, This is a key part of your budget. Do you find yourself able to provide good value for money to taxpayers in the state when you have this huge pension debt overhang? I think we do. Yeah. I mean, and I would say, and I think some of my poke holes in this argument, but I would say that, you know, Evanston, where I'm the mayor, is one of the very few communities in the country where Kamala Harris in 2024 did slightly better than Joe Biden in 2020, which I think is in part a reflection. of people looking around and saying, hey, the Democrats who are running the place where I live are doing a good job in delivering services. And the problem was that for literally many

generations, Illinois politicians preferred not to put the amount of money in the pension systems that they knew they ought to have been putting in, or at least the actuaries they were paying to be ignored knew they ought to be putting in. And part of how that's, I mean, I think that's just manifestly true. It's also visible in Illinois because the one, pension system in Illinois that's well-funded and not a challenge to pay down this massive overhang debt is what's called the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund, which is the system that basically non-public safety municipal employees are in. So like the people who, you know, are in our planning department of the city of Evanston or the people who work for the parks and rec

entity in the park district in Wilmet, the neighboring community, for example. That system is well funded because on an annual basis, the actuary send a tab to the municipality that's in charge for funding them. And there's an enforcement mechanism to ensure that that amount of money actually gets paid. Obviously, the overhang of pension debt in Illinois is a real serious challenge for anybody running any state or municipal budget here, including me. But just to give a direct answer to the direct question, I do feel like we've been able to provide a high quality of public services. And I think our residents largely agree. Daniel, I want to congratulate you on your primary winner.

I want to thank you for joining us today to talk about your experience. Thanks for having me. Let's take a quick break. We'll be back with more central air. So we're in this sort of awkward position. We're recording this on Tuesday, around midday. This morning, the president tweeted, with regard to Iran, that a whole civilization will die tonight. And this is the deadline that the president had set for Iran to open the strait.

So I don't like, I don't know what bombs will have dropped by the time you're all listening to this. There are already some explosions Tuesday morning on Karg Island, that island in the, where most of the Iranian oil exports occur from and likely to be the focus of future American military activity. But so, Jamie, you know, for for a few weeks, Ben Dreyfus was like the resident Iran war enthusiast here on this show being like, you know, this like this looks like it's going okay. And then eventually you had to tap out and say, no, this does not look like it's. going okay. What's your level of enthusiasm here? Do you see a way to get from where we are today to, you know, the straits open and Iran is less of a regional and global threat, you know, maybe even freedom for the people of Iran, but we're not going to get greedy there? Yeah, I'm not an enthusiast for any war. I would say, I think in theory, this war had to happen

at some point that it's being led by someone like Donald Trump is not ideal, although by that that same token, would any other American president have waged it? I don't know. Absolutely, Iran has been degraded. Their military has been degraded. Their capacity to export terror, to project power through the region has been seriously harmed. Their entire command and control system for their military, their political leadership has been wiped out. And their nuclear program has been set back. All that is good for us and for our allies and for the free world. You know, what he's going to do today, I can't say. I don't know how much of this is bluster or how much of it contains a kernel or maybe more than a kernel of truth. He may be willing

to, you know, put in ground troops if that's what's necessary to open the straight. I think he might actually go through with that. And there's been talk of that for several weeks now. You know, as for democracy for the Iranian people, again, that's something that would be good for us, for our national interests. It would be good for the region. And it would be good for the Iranian people. I don't think it's obviously not at the top of the priorities for President Trump or his supporters. I think that they will be content with a sort of Venezuela-type scenario. Obviously, those two countries are completely different, and they represented different threats and problems to us.

But being able to deal with a leadership that is not revolutionary in the sense that it's basically trying to, you know, take over the Middle East through all of its proxy operations and export its revolution to destabilize. to destabilize its neighbors. I think that would be, that probably is where Trump could conclude that he had a victory. If there's a new leadership in place that basically obliges him that way. Well, so that would be nice. I don't think we see signs that that's in the cards. And the straight is still closed. The straight is still closed. But who knows what's going to happen today? Who knows what's going to happen? I have no idea what's going to happen today. Yeah, I mean, I assume that, you know, whatever has happened by the time people are listening to

not dispositive, that, you know, we're still going to be mired in this conflict a week from now in the way that we are right now and that we were a week ago. But all of the stuff about, you know, we've degraded their, you know, their missile and their nuclear capability, et cetera. That's true. But the thing is that it doesn't seem like they need that advanced a capability in order to close the strait. And the demands that they are making with regard to the Strait of Hormuz, they want to be able to toll it like it's a canal, you know, or like they like the little like little pissant Duke's did on the Rhine River before Germany was unified. And these ideas that, you know, of like a dollar per barrel tax essentially on stuff moving through the strait, that would

represent like a $100 billion annual revenue stream to Iran, which would seem to provide them with a lot of income that they could use to support those regional proxies and arm the Houthis, et cetera. They also benefit from the higher price of oil due to the due that has been caused by the conflict. I have trouble seeing my way toward that vision where what we have done here actually produces a better on-the-ground outcome because of that situation with the strait that the administration seems to have no plan for addressing. Not at the moment. It doesn't seem so. But maybe they'll take more extreme measures like imposing an oil blockade or trying to impose an oil blockade like they've done on Cuba.

There's obviously a lot more oil coming out of Iran than was going towards Cuba. Well, and that would be contrary to, I mean, the North Star for this administration has clearly been that they, you know, they want to keep the oil price down. If you try to blockade oil coming out of Iran rather than going into Cuba, that produces an even higher global oil price. Yeah, I mean, they might need to embrace the fact that oil prices are going to go up. And then maybe that has to be a component of this strategy. Voters aren't going to like that and the markets aren't going to like that. But the Trump administration needs to make the case that suffering through those higher oil prices is worth it. And obviously they haven't done that.

They haven't even attempted to do that. No. And I don't even know if they planned for it in advance. No, I mean, they clearly, for whatever reason, thought they just wouldn't close the straight, which I am baffled by. But, you know, there's also, one of the weird things in the run-up to this war, Megan, was that there was no public diplomacy effort. There was no effort to bring allies on board, or at least our European allies. And there was no effort to sell the American public on the idea that this war was necessary. And that's, you know, it's norm-breaking of the Trump administration do that.

But we're also seeing how that had negative consequences for them. I mean, you know, one of the benefits if you had a domestic political effort to convince people that this was a necessary war worth incurring expense for is that you would have had, you would have been better positioned to tell the American public that they were going to have to suffer through higher gasoline prices. And it would have given you more room to maneuver. the fact that they've telegraphed so clearly that they're unwilling to tolerate expensive oil strengthens the Iranians hand because the Iranians know that they won't be subjected to an oil blockade because it would, you know, that would make this specific situation worse for Donald Trump. They also weirdly did not refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which, I mean, we should have started doing in 2024 under Joe Biden, but especially if you thought that you were going to kick off a war in the Persian Gulf,

you should have filled the strategic petroleum reserve so that you would have some ability to buffer those higher oil product prices in the U.S. it would have strengthened them politically. It's just these people are fucking idiots. Yeah, I love two things, Josh. One, that you say this, like, you say my name like I was somehow and like had some responsibility for this, this crappy public, public committee. All I meant was that I wanted you to talk next. Fair enough.

But the other thing is that you use the word think. And I don't think there was a ton of that going on. I mean, look, I think that Donald Trump just thought this would be like Venezuela. But I also, to the extent that. thinks at all. One thing... Venezuela is run by gangsters with no, like, strong ideological viewpoint. I am not arguing that this was an intelligent belief. I am merely, like, rarely do I suggest that Donald Trump has intelligent and well-reasoned beliefs about the world. But I also, to some extent, yes, he is telegraphing that he doesn't like higher oil. I'm not sure how much he cares. He's not

running for office again. And I think this has been a recurrenting. theme, this is kind of the YOLO presidency. Rather than being a lame duck, he is freed by the fact that unlike most lame ducks, he doesn't care about his party. They're all terrified of him. They don't want him to get in and initiate a primary challenge against him or support one. And so, you know, what's the cost of Donald Trump? Okay, he'll lose in the midterms and Congress will get active and cut this off. But he's got six months in which he can basically yolo. And if he doesn't care whether his party loses the midterms, which he kind of doesn't, then he can just go do stuff and Americans will be mad about it. And what are they going to do? Write him a strongly worded letter.

I disagree with that. I think that he cares deeply about losing the midterms. And that's why this whole redistricting effort that was that was hatched inside the White House by James Blair, the political director there, was an effort to do an action to try to prevent the loss of the house. They thought it was important enough that they went and cracked heads and state houses all around the country and tried to get them to draw new maps, which is a very unusual thing. And not only did that effort not in the end work that well because the political backlash it backfire. Yeah. And they got, you know, they got California to draw a new map, et cetera. It says to me that he cares about a house that will investigate him that will surely impeach him again,

almost to me, and probably will impeach him over the war. I mean, you know, I'm like the, he's, he's handed them something that like the public will actually care deeply about and be angry about. He's endangered Republicans to the point where they might even lose control of the U.S. Senate and therefore lose his ability to get nominees confirmed to essentially anything. And at the same time that he's been just like flagrantly giving the middle finger to Democrats in every, including in like, you know, not approving disaster declarations in blue states, approving them in red states, but not in blue states. He has done nothing to try to get cooperation from these people or convince them to, you know, I mean, normally when you have a war like this, there's significant pressure for bipartisan support. Democrats tied themselves in knots in 2001, 2002, over how to respond to the Iraq war and it was a huge issue for John Kerry in that election. I see no political imperative whatsoever for any Democrat to lift one finger to finance or

otherwise support the American efforts in this war. Can I— Yeah, go ahead, Jamie. Say something that I rarely ever prefaced my statements with this phrase, in fairness to Donald Trump. I think there is a ceiling—I think there is a ceiling on how much support anyone. war led or initiated by Donald Trump would have received in this country. And if you have any sort of expectation that it would have been over 50 percent, you're diluted. There's just no way that

any foreign intervention launched by Donald Trump would gain more than half of the country, that any appreciable number of Democrats would support. Yeah, it's not 2001. But that was also one of the reasons not to launch the war. I mean, if you have put yourself in a weak political position, that's a separate issue. That's a separate issue. Yes. But it's, I, Democrats sometimes admire the way Donald Trump does politics. It's like, oh, why can't we be like that? We're actually going to talk in a moment about a more trivial version of this, about how people post on social media.

But like, you know, oh, he's unshackled in all of these ways. And wouldn't it be nice if we could be like that? But we're part of what we're seeing is by like saying, fuck you to everyone has actually boxed him in. He cannot build the coalitions. Yeah, certainly with the Europeans. Yeah. With the Europeans, then also domestically.

So I'm not sure that's true. I think it's boxed Republicans in, and I think we do actually have to draw a distinction between Donald Trump on the one hand and other people in his White House who have futures in politics they have to worry about and a party they have to worry about in a way that he does not. Is he actually more constrained than he would have been had he really paid attention to what Democrats thought? Had he said, no, I can't do this, it would be unpopular. had he attempted to build relationships with allies, maybe. I'm not sure that's true. And to be clear, not a defense of this war. I'm just saying if I am Donald Trump

and I just want to let my unchecked id ride wild across the geopolitical landscape, maybe this is from that stupid and reckless position the best you can do. But I think it's actually even less thought out than that. like I don't think he had any intention of launching this war until they did the raid in Venezuela. Uh-huh. And it worked really well.

It was like, oh, look, that was easy. And, you know, if you're a Republican, there's always people around you who are ready to invade Iran. And it's an urge that he resisted for five years as president. And he seemed, you know, one of what I thought was one of his few redeeming qualities was the way that he was sort of gun shy about this stuff and reluctant to get us into military commitments that was going to be difficult to get out of. But then he got arrogant. And very quickly, you know, again, like, you know, if you took a little more time and more deliberate about it, you would have had, you know, better like mine clearing capacity ready in the vicinity of the Strait of Hormuz. You would have refilled the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. There's all this stuff that if you were actually setting out to, you know, like, do, like that a war in Iran was going to be part of your legacy, you would have prepared better and would have been a little bit better position to wage the war.

I think this was fundamentally impulsive. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that, but back to unchecked id. Yes. Right? This is not. But I also think that there, one could argue that for U.S. presidents, the use of our fine, fine military men and women, it's a little like potato chips. You have one, and it goes down really, it tastes great.

And then the bag is just sitting there. and maybe for a little while you resist, but then you're like, man, that was so good. I got to have another. And you reach in until you are sitting there with an empty bag and crumbs all of your face and your shirt is stained with potato chip oil. And I think to some extent, everyone has gotten to that place, even Obama, right, with Libya. And with drawing a red line in Syria and being like, oh, I guess maybe I didn't mean that, right? is the temptation to use this incredible power.

And our military, it's maybe not as powerful as it should be, I might argue, that we've neglected it and let it run down in certain ways. But it's still so incredibly powerful, so incredibly capable. And you do it once, and it goes, if you do it once in a small way, as in like the raid to get bin Laden, it goes super well. You feel pretty great. and like, oh man, the bag's right there. Just one more.

And I think that we have seen that pattern with pretty much every president, more or less. It's very capable in a lot of dimensions. You know, I worry that, you know, that what is necessary to open the straight to oil trade is not something that the military is going to be able to do at a cost that looks remotely reasonable to Americans. Oh, I agree, but that's also true of Iraq, right? Afghanistan was going well. Okay. let's go do Iraq. That was fun. Everyone loves us. Let's do more. And I just think that that's, that impulse happens with every president. And with Donald Trump, who is pure impulse and has no impulse control, it happened in a stupider and more obvious way. But I think it is just a terrible temptation that everyone faces. Finally this week, I want to talk about an article that ran in the New York Times about Gavin.

Newsom that gets at a bone to pick that I have with Democrats in the way that they engage on social media lately. The headline is Newsom's new attack on political enemies, you're gay. And it's about a number of posts that Newsom has made on Twitter. And Newsom has built this combative image on Twitter as, you know, the like the Democrat who's ready to get down in the mud with Donald Trump. And so Benny Johnson, the like glorified right-wing internet troll, was on Fox News talking about Medicaid fraud in California. And Newsom responds to this with a post saying, we got a call from Grindr after this. And they said your team was one of their biggest users with regard to Benny Johnson.

And there are these rumors that Betty Johnson is a closet or homosexual. Milo Giannopoulos, for example, has accused him of that. And then also when Lindsay Graham was at Walt Disney World during the government shutdown and there were sort of amusing photos of this that TMZ got, Newsom posted about this and goes, divas still need vacation. Lindsay Graham also a lot of people think is gay. And then there was a spat between Gavin Newsom and Scott Bessent's when they were both in Davos earlier this year making cracks at each other.

Besant actually kind of started it saying that Gavin Newsom brought his knee pads for his meeting with Alex Soros. And then he also said he looked like a pend doll or something? Yeah, there was a specific kendall from the Barbie movie that sparkled pen or something. Yeah. And so then Newsom responded by basically saying, that Scott Besson flew across the ocean to star in the Real Housewives of Davos and can't stop talking about how hot he thinks California Governor Davos Daddy Newsom is. And so Besant, of course, openly gay.

Yeah, your gay insult is just not going to really do much against, like, is someone going to tell his husband? And so, you know, the Times writes about this. And, you know, it's like, you know, in general, it's disfavored to throw around your gay as an insult, I mean, generally, but especially among Democrats. and Barney Frank is quoted in the article saying that this is homophobic and he should stop saying it. And an aide to Gavin Newsom tells the New York Times something that I 100% believe is true. They say that these posts were written by gay staffers. And they also say that, you know, the justification for this post is they were, quote,

aimed at exposing the putrid behavior from the right wing through ridicule and mocking. And the sorts of comments about Lindsay Graham are things that I hear from gay guys all the time. And, you know, I'm not actually sure that. these posts are homophobic, I think that they are tacky and that the governor shouldn't be posting them, but like, essentially criticizing people for being in the closet, whether that's, you know, about hypocrisy or failure to self-actualized or whatever is, is a thing that gays throw around a lot. I don't think it necessarily entails a gut-level view that there's something wrong inherently with being gay. And so I don't think it's necessarily homophobic. But I also think it's a thing

that gay guys throw around a lot. It's, you know, generally straight people, try to exclude themselves from this conversation for good reason. It's kind of the internal business of the gays, whether Lindsay Graham is a closet or homosexual or not. And you have a lot of these straight politicians, straight Democratic politicians whose comms offices are full of gay guys who increasingly post in this manner on social media like they're doing inside jokes and talking to each other this way. And I've some examples that I've pulled that I think are obscure enough that I actually had to explain them to Megan and to Jamie. I mean, you know, one that's very easy to understand is. is Kamala Harris leaning into the Brat Summer thing and, you know, creating that lime green banner for Kamala HQ during the 2024 campaign? But you even have like Mark Warner, the, you know, the vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator from Virginia, posting about the tariffs, girl the tariffs with three question marks and then that's on top of a White Lotus meme. Like, this is not how straight people talk to each other. And the voice is very inauthentic. And, you know, as a gay man and as a gay Democrat, I'm just urging these offices that they actually need to be a little bit less gay in their communication strategy because it makes them sound off in some ways. And including here, you know, saying things that gays might say to each other that do plausibly sound homophobic coming out of the mouth of a straight man.

If you have Gavin Newsom, like maybe Gavin Newsom, who is definitely heterosexual, maybe some straight men could write tweets for him. It's more like gay face. It's like a non-gay person trying to sound gay. And I'm not offended by it. It's just very cringe. And it's like, reminds me of what kids would say 25 years ago to each other on the playground. Like, you're gay. That's so gay.

This is so gay. It's just lame. And it makes the people doing it look immature and unsurious. Yeah. You know, I probably should take myself out of this conversation as the straight person on this. But a couple things. Number one. we should not encourage anyone in the Trump administration to self-actualize.

Don't. Less self-actualization, please. But second of all, I'm actually struggling to imagine either of you saying, girl, is this something you guys do when you talk amongst yourselves? Gay people come in all shapes and sizes and flavors. And, I mean, it's a stereotype. Yeah, it doesn't really seem like, you said, like, this is something gay people. do with each other, but like, Josh, are those words you have ever said to anyone? I mean,

have I ever said these words? Yes. Like, you know, maybe in an ironic way. Okay. Back when I used to drink, I might have said it, but not since then. I don't think I've ever said, like, girl, you're looking smoking tonight. Well, I mean, that's the other thing. It's like, it's actually a gay appropriation of, like, of African American vernacular. Um, and, you know, so it's like a double appropriation. Right. By straight people. Yeah. And again, you know, like, I'm not sure one needs to be offended by that, just like I'm not sure one needs to be offended by Gavin Newsom insinuating that Benny Johnson is gay, which is quite possibly true. But it is, again, it's like, it's inauthentic. It's like the, you know, these are, Mark Warner's a white guy. And so girl, the tariff sounds inauthentic, whether that's supposed to be black or whether it's supposed to be gay or whether it's supposed to be a gay person trying to sound black. The whole thing is just like. Yeah, I also think there's an element of it. Like, it's just a fundamental mistake of. about what works for Trump.

Democrats have this idea that what they need is a Trumpian social media presence. And I actually think that his social media has been a net negative for him, right? The things that worked for him were actually moving to the center on stuff, like I basically agree with Matt Iglesias about this, is that the stuff that worked for him

was like moving to the center on Medicare. It was not trolling people endlessly. Now, it did work, I think, in the first campaign to the extent that it got people, it got him like a billion dollars worth of earned media. And that was valuable because the left freaked out about it. But no one's freaking out about Gavin Newsom's social media stuff. And maybe it mobilizes your primary base in the same way that it does for Donald Trump. But it just costs you in the general. What are you doing?

So I have, unfortunately, a theory of why the Newsom approach maybe is rat. even though I don't like it. And it doesn't specifically need to, but it doesn't specifically need to be gay, although like part of the like the like cutting gay wit is like an available mode for Democrats to be cutting. And so that's, you know, the, maybe that's why they're reaching for it. But Gavin Newsom wants to be the Democratic nominee for president. He's going to have to go through a Democratic primary.

The last competitive Democratic presidential primary involved this tremendous pressure for candidates to shift to the left, especially Kansas. candidates who were not part of the movement left to begin with, who are distrusted by progressive activists. And so you have this competition to, you know, say that you're going to decriminalize illegal entry and you want taxpayer-funded sex changes for immigration detainees and all this stuff. They went around making these promises. And it ended up causing huge political problems for Democrats, especially in the 2024 election. I mean, this is all what led to the day them add. Gavin Newsom is looking for a way to build that trust with angry Democratic-based voters who feel that Democrats are not fighting.

And he's doing it in a way that doesn't actually involve substantively shifting to the left on politics. He's saying, you know, I'm a fighter. I'm going to get down in the mud. And while it is embarrassing, it's maybe better than if he goes around and talks about why we need taxpayer-funded Medicaid for illegal immigrants. And so that's why he's doing it. But I think this is an error on the primary voters part in both parties. Oh, of course. I hate the public.

Like, you know, the, you know, this is the problem with democracy is our, you know, our fate is in the hands of these people. But. I don't hate them. I wish they would think things through more. That the stuff you like is almost definitionally, not the stuff that is going to make for good governance. The stuff that if you are a super hardcore partisan. Like, look, I'm a libertarian. I would love a candidate who just panders to me.

But the nice thing about libertarians is we're well aware. A candidate who pandered to us would just go down in flames in a general election. And the difference is that a lot of the primary voters in both parties actually don't seem to get that. No, yeah, they're terrible. I hate them. The other thing that I worry about here and just to argue against myself for a moment is, you know, know, I say I want more straight male communicators in democratic politics. The problem that could arise with that is that, you know, if you're like, if you're, if you're, if you're gay, maybe you're a Democrat because you're gay and then you have like, you know, are more likely to have a broadly normal set of, you know, perspectives on life and society and whatever.

Whereas if you're a straight man who goes to work as a Democratic communicator, it might be because you're some sort of ideological zealot. And so maybe you know not to say girl the tariffs, but there's some other thing that you're going to say that's going to alienate swing voters. And so maybe maybe that's even worse. You just mean demographically at this point in America, a straight man, a straight man who votes Democrat has to be. Not just who votes Democrat, someone who decides to, decides to work professionally as a democratic operative. He wears his hair and a bun. Right. He, you know, that sort of thing. Right.

Yeah. I'm actually going to defend the man bun. I think they're kind of cute. Oh, God. But don't look at me like that, Josh. What? You just defended the man bun. It's a hideous...

They're cute. What's wrong with a good man bun? Rats nest. Look, I wear a bun all the time. I'm wearing a bun right now. Well, first of all, you're a woman. And actually, that's part of the problem with the man bun. It's feminine.

Like, it's fine for women to be feminine. They're going to be masculine man buns. No. No, they can't. Look at the many Chinese emperors. who swept across the steps, killing as they went, very masculine, also wearing buns. Yeah, that's a little bit outside my cultural context. I'm not sure that I can relate to that. Yeah, I think you're being too narrow here, Josh.

But so, I don't know, do you like, Jamie, do you think, are we going to see Gavin Newsom ride this to the nomination? I'm increasingly worried that the answer to that is yes. You ride this or become the nominee? What are you exactly asking? No, I don't mean right specifically, like, calling Benny Johnson gay, but I mean the, like, this sort of in the mud image that he's built for himself. Oh, I don't think it hurts him. No. I mean, look, Trump showed that this kind of politicking can work. And I don't see it. If it works on the right, I don't see why it wouldn't work on the left. So, compromise. What if Josh Shapiro grew a man? What? Terrible. Well, it sends a signal.

That would help. To, yeah, maybe. He's still, the people who would like that will never get over the fact that he's Jewish. So I don't think there's really any hope. I don't think I've ever seen a religiously observant Jewish man with a man bun. Have you, Jamie?

No. No. The head coverings are often required, and the man bun may interfere with the head coverings. True, yes. Yeah. Yes. And the really Orthodox Jews tend to grow their hair,

you know, their side locks long, not putting them on top of their head. But I don't know, this, Jamie, this actually gets at, like, one of my theories of Josh Shapiro, who I would like to see as the nominee, is I think that for a general election, Josh Shapiro is kind of like exactly the right amount of Jewish for the American electorate. Like, I mean, he's... Joe Lieberman was, Josh, and Joe Lieberman was a really Orthodox Jew. And he won the popular vote.

So that was 25 years ago, and, you know, America was a more religious place then. But, you know, you were politically cognizant at the same time. I don't recall Joe Lieberman's being Jewish being a negative in that campaign. In fact, I think it was the opposite. I think after the Clinton years, part of the reason Al Gore chose him was because he wanted a man of moral rectitude and whatnot. And I think it says a lot about where we are as a country 25 years later that a guy like Josh Shapiro, who's less hawkish on Israel than Joe Lieberman was, who's less religiously

observant than Joe Lieberman was, in my opinion, does not have a chance at this nomination because he's a pro-Israel Jew. I think he will not win the nomination because of anti-Semitism. I'm sorry, I hate to say it, but I think it's the truth. I mean, I worry that he's not going to win the nomination because the Democratic base has a bunch of... They're two left, is what you're saying, in general, yeah. Well, no, actually. I think some of it is about being to the left, but I think some of it is about wanting this, like, Newsom style.

That he, like, he doesn't read, like, enough of a fighter in a way that is actually less ideologically coded than some people put it. And he's been really sort of aggressively attacking J.D. Vance, I think, partly. trying to address this so that he can be like this, like, leading critic of the vice president who is likely to be the nominee. And I think that's, that's clever on Shapiro's part as far as it goes. I don't, you know, I'm not entirely sure about, I mean, and this gets back to some of what we discussed with, with Mayor Biss. I think the salience of some of this stuff about Gaza is, is just oversold in the media, even in, even in the context of a Democratic primary. And so I'm not sure about like Judaism itself being a problem for him so much as that like the tone that Democrats

are looking for. It doesn't necessarily align with the tone that has gotten Josh Shapiro to a 60% approval rating in Pennsylvania. Now he's about to win a huge reelection victory and hopefully he can build on that and say that, you know, this I'm electable, elect me and will end this Republican nightmare. It didn't really work for Ronda Santos who would, you know, run a, who would want a stopping victory in 2022 in Florida. I think Shapiro is a more appealing candidate than DeSantis. But I also think, you know, to get back to what you were saying about Lieberman, I think the fact that Shapiro is religiously observant and, you know, keeps the Sabbath and, you know, large family with four children.

I actually think that that's relatable to a lot of people in Middle America in a way that I think remains an asset. I think that, you know, I think Americans like a candidate who looks serious about religion without being a religious fanatic. And so I actually think that that's, I think that that could, at least in a general, election be a very good fit. In a general, in a general election, in the Democratic primary, that stuff doesn't help him, Josh, I'm sorry. Well, unless he can fold it into an electability pitch, which he might be able to do after winning a big victory in his re-election this year, but we'll see. Well, I mean, I think if the electability pitch does undermine my final compromise, which is man bun, turban to cover the man bun. And a

Simitar. A simitar. Right? To show he's a fighter. Wait, so we've made him a Sikh now, or the we've made him... Yeah. I don't think the Sikhs had simitars. No, they have the, like, the Carpans. But I'm not sure how electable that would be in the general. Well, no, I think I don't think that would be true to him any more than the social media voice with, you know, Rosa DeLoro, the 83-year-old Democratic ranking member on the Appropriations Committee when Pam Bondi got fired. She made a post that actually, I don't think either of you will have. understand. But let me read this out to you. So Rosa DeLauro posts, she addresses Rita Ora. So I guess first of all, do you even know who Rita Oro is? No. No. Rita Ora is like a medium importance pop star who was maybe more important a few years ago than she is now. She's Australian or English or something. So anyway, she posts Rita Ora, yes, it's me, Rosa. Another is on the way. And I had, I didn't, I didn't understand this post either when I first read it. I had to ask a

Gen Z friend of mine to explain it to me. But there's this concept called the Kia asylum. And Kia, do you know who Kia is? It's a car. Not the car. No. Yeah. So Kia is a hip hop artist, most notably responsible for my neck, my back, which was a 2002 hit about all of the places that her sex partner should lick her, many of which are more explicit than her neck and her back. Oh, I was thinking this is, you know, like a middle-aged pop star who is just talking about it. Yeah. So I'm a new version of. Let me tell you, as a 53-year-old woman, my neck, my back, every morning.

That's basically what I sing as I get out of bed. But so anyway, like, you know, Kia did not become another, you know, Britney Spears or Celine Dion or Madonna-level pop star. And but she's still around and she still works. And there's this concept on the internet called the Kia. asylum where basically if you are someone who was more famous in the past than you are now, some pop star, you are trapped in the Kia asylum. And Rita ORA is another one of these, you know, middling pop stars who was stuck there. And sometimes they look out and they get to break out, like Sabrina Carpenter was in the Kia asylum, but isn't anymore. And Charlie X, CX is successful

enough that she gets to make jokes about whether she gets sent to the Kia asylum. But anyway, the point of this post from Rosalora, who I again emphasize is 83 years old. is that Pam Bondi has now been sent to the Kia asylum, which doesn't make sense to me for a few reasons, one of which is like the idea when you go to the Kia asylum is that you once were cool and you once had done like interesting work and now you're not anymore.

So is she saying that Pam Bondi used to be good? Which I don't think Democrats think. But so anyway, I wonder if they even explained this tweet to Rosa DeLauro before they sent it out from her account because I'm sure she has no idea what the Kia asylum is. Yeah, I have... You're both speechless. It's me.

I'm speechless. I'm still trying to make sense of what you said. So now because I have a podcast at the post, I'm having to work with our social media people more. Yeah. And they are much younger than I am. And like I spent a fair amount of time on social media. And they live in a world I do not understand and that I do not care to understand. I like, with all respect to our...

amazing social media team. I love you all guys. But I don't want them sending out stuff for me like that because what would what would I do with that? If someone asked me what I meant, what would I say? Like, I don't know. Ask the young people. I, you know, I challenge you, Megan. I want I want you to send a Kia asylum tweet this week. Okay. Maybe we can use it to promote the episode. For you, Josh. And it'll show your young fans how hip you are. Yeah, that's what people look at me. I mean, I am so hip, I have difficulty seeing over my pelvis. It's true.

To bring back an incredibly ancient reference that my fellow 50-year-old nerds will get. Okay, I think we can leave that there this week. Jamie, thank you for joining us. And Megan, good to see you. I'll see you next week. Nice for having it. See you next week. Central Air is created by me, Josh Barrow, and Sarah Fay.

We are a production of very serious media. Jennifer Swaddick mixed this episode. Our theme music is by Joshua Mosher. Thanks for listening. and stay cool out there.