Chapo Trap House - 326 - Beltway Garage: Infinity Candidates (6/25/19)

Episode Date: June 25, 2019

Virgil and Matt take a look under the candidates' hoods, check their polling oil, and preview the first of the democratic primary debates, while examining the whole fleet for lemons. Which make and model democrat will run like a champ and will perform like there's sugar in their gas tanks? Find out in todays wonkomotive extravaganza. For live coverage of the actual debates, check out twitch.tv/chapotraphouse

Your Blair was talking about how there's always a baby and and you said I'm and then she said I'm baby and we're like no Versals clearly baby. No, no, no Blair's right. She's baby your baby. Well, I'm baby in certain social contexts I can tell you guys all directly having just come off the tour all five chapos are indeed baby in different ways You guys you guys are all baby in different ways All right, if you mean I act like a baby and then I have tantrums. Yes, your baby I have tantrums that makes me baby, but I don't have I don't you don't need to like tend to me You don't need to like you don't need to burp me or or soothe bad You're like you're like a tomagotchi that we have to take care of on tour

I didn't have I had to like try to to pull you gently away from being too Aggressive with an old man in a taxi cab as you were going into a tantrum riff about him being a pedophile You are you are baby. I've literally slowly held your hand to get you to the the air BnB All right, that's a good point. I was I was doing the thing kids do in public when they're speaking too loudly about strangers Yeah, I've literally but he basically admitted to the me that he was a pedophile So I don't feel bad about it because he gave me the little wave. I'm not saying you're wrong I'm just saying you were baby about it. It's a correct baby though Because he turned to me and he gave me the frog one wave through the glass of the taxi cab

Implying that he was in fact a pedophile So it's pretty clear that within the context of the show the five of us are baby Outside of that in in different personal contexts, you know, it's it's variable Except for Chris, of course Chris is not baby in any way. This is a full. He's a man. Exactly. He's an adult He's a man in full as Tom Wolf would say whereas we are all short pants little piss ants You need to be kept in line. Well, Chris is a daddy and the rest of the baby. That's cannon and that's You know, that's what our contracts are As we say on this show over and over again

Listening to a podcast is not doing politics. Go ahead. Being a fan of something isn't politics Preach politics is posting about the presidential election Mm-hmm politics is having Facebook arguments with your stepmom. I'm right politics is tweeting personal invective at supporters of other Presidential candidates, you know it politics is getting into debates with horny guys in the comment section of a premium Instagram accounts Speak on it. That's all politics is that's what the show is about is just making that argument and trying to convert People to that reality and to everyone engaged in those activities the hard work of politics of political organizing We thank you for changing the world while listening to a podcast isn't doing politics Hosting one is the purest and most courageous political act

Absolutely. And so in that spirit of doing politics I think it's time to go back under the hood taste the dipstick of wankery with another visit to the Beltway garage We're here to tell you the state of the rich democratic nomination going into the first debates of the season Finally, this is the start of the race folks get fucking pumped and speaking of those debates the chapeau trap house elections unit will be providing full coverage before during and after both debates Wednesday and Thursday this week Tune in starting at 8 p.m. Eastern on twitch.tv slash chapeau trap house you will not want to miss that because these debates will be for us our first time experiencing some of these wonderful candidates I don't know what Tim Ryan sounds like I don't even know what he looks like honestly I mean, I don't know what my mother's voice sounds like because I pushed all that information out and replaced it with online bullshit But still I'm excited to make some new friends and some new memories

I mean I I if you put a gun to my head I might be able to pick all of the lower card white guys by name out of a lineup But it would be tough I know that Seth Molten is the one who looks like one of the Hatfields from the West Virginia feud era And I know that Eric Swalwell is the one who kind of looks like a 90s porn actor or one of the henchmen from the first leaf of the second leaf of the weapon If we were in like South Africans if we were in like a shitty escape room that's political themed in DC like the Mark Halperin escape room we would And then to the clues are all having to identify which candidate or which we probably we probably get out of there in a good 30 minutes Yeah between the two of us we could do it but a lot of these dudes are just like faceless men of bravos Well that's the thing we will get the full full view of these candidates for the first time and within a good 10 seconds of them speaking We will develop our permanent impressions of who they are

Absolutely you don't need any more time than that I mean this is where in 2015 Felix made the famous observation upon watching exactly five seconds of John Kasich at the Republican debates with me That he looks like he just woke up in his car And then he spent the next year and a half proving that correct by going to places, catching free meals and basically looking like he was on a journey to the Big Rock Candy Mountain We will also on our stream be identifying which candidates are reptiles I'm going to go over under 75% on that one Ooh I'm going to go over under 50 Yeah there he is, Swalwell

Oh Chris is showing us Swalwell making the soy face Yeah maybe that will be the image He looks like he's about to be murdered by Yoss Acklin in the South African Consulate in Lethal Weapon 2 Once again that is 8pm Eastern Wednesday Thursday twitch.tv slash Chapo Trap House Now before we get to the real candidates we have to introduce you to the ones who have nothing better to do but run for president So let's give a big Chapo welcome to candidates 22 through 25 Leaving off, build a bungalow, mayor of the number one greatest city in the world Yankees Mets, Giants, Jets, Knicks, Nats, Rangers Conduit for corruption

Which is probably why he's running honestly That's what you think? I mean it's the only thing, it's either he's just a delusional maniac, he's like Peter the Hermit Or his patronage networks have been too scrutinized in the city itself and this is a good way for him to build new ones outside of it through a presidential campaign that is now going to get larded with money from contractors and developers What are you saying? He takes the money, puts it in his campaign account and then he runs for another office because that's the only thing you can use that money for No, I think, I mean, not realistically, yes, I think, you know, your term limited in New York, except well, yeah, you're not so No, you are they didn't they bring it back and they brought it they brought it back, but I mean they took it away before they can do it Yeah, but do you really think they're bringing it back for the bungalow? I don't think so

So he's term limited here in this in as mayor and the thing is the poison chalice being mayor of New York is so fascinating It is honestly one of the most powerful executive positions in the West. You're a world leader. You are a world leader if you're mayor of New York And as Bloomberg always like to talk about how I have the sixth largest army in the world in the New York police department and you know it was hard every minute he ever said that But the front but the but the and so you are more powerful than the governor of I would say 30 or 40 states and like that. Yeah, at least 40 I'd say More powerful than any individual member of Congress. So you of course think white the sky's limit and yet because of the specific difficulties of trying to run this fucking city No mayor of New York has ever achieved higher office of any kind Senate governor president nothing never happened. Well, it's funny is when the bungalow ran for mayor he was the public advocate and he kind of came from behind as the Progressive guy, you know, he was he was how Jello Biafra viewed Jerry Brown. Yeah, yeah, and he's and he's fulfilled that fascist and I think he has said that that is why he's running now because he says hey People told me not to run because I was and he was when he started running for mayor he was at like 2% and he's like look at that. The thing is he was able to monopolize that progressive space and then actually just clear the

That's not there. There's no progressive space. It's all taken by if you know what you're talking about Bernie and if you are a the wooly headed Libb Elizabeth Warren that space is filled. He has nowhere to to to differentiate himself. So I mean if it's not graft, he's just a moron. I think he might have a chance if the bungalow brings teepee brings what brings teepee for his bungalow. Oh, he needs teepee for his bungalow. That's the kind of humor you could only hear here on number one patreon podcast chapeau trap house and something about Matt you're fun of saying is that no New York City mayor has As I just said, yes, it's it's a poison chalice. It's just you make too many enemies too many people already hate New York City and our suspicion your power is constrained by Albany. You don't really have that much power as mayor of New York, but everyone expects you to be the local Duke Look at all the people yelling at him to fix the subways even though the MTA is under the prerogative of the state government. Yeah. And as well. It's what John Lindsay called the second hardest job in the country which won him reelection because that is a good pitch. And let's not forget that John Lindsay also ran for president in 1972 and eight shit. Oh, well, I think Rudy Giuliani ran for president. How did that one go?

He also ate shit. Okay. Well, that's build a bungalow bucking bucking a trend. I made it into the base though. So we'll get to see him towering over everybody else on stage and trying and trying to put in a big boy and trying to put in calling his his new catchphrase of calling Trump Connell. Is that it? Oh, okay. No, he's calling him Connell Trump or something like he's a con artist. It's it's it's he's trying to make fetch happen and I gotta let you know bill. It's not he honestly might have had better luck threatening to secede from the union. Fernando Wood style Norman Mailer.

All right. That's enough about him moving on Steve Bullock, governor of Montana did not make the debates did not make the debates his pitches he won in a Trump state. Literally the entirety of his pitch. That is just how how how much the the specter of Trump has broken all traditions of propriety, all ideas of the cost benefit of trying to run for president. This motherfucker in the 11th hour decides, Oh, I can run for president with basically zero national name recognition and no national network on the argument that I am the only one who ran in a state that Trump won. And was able to win a statewide race. Well, I'm sure you remember this because from the 2000s, this media invention of a rocky mountain centrist with libertarian leanings, you know, that they were supposed to be the future of the Democratic Schweitzer. Right. He's basically the second incarnation of Brian Schweitzer without the stupid Bolo tie. So that's an improvement.

Right. The libertarian Dems, and it's basically like they do the same piddling bullshit that other centrist Dems do, but they're fine with guns and that's fascinating to people on the coast. Yeah, they feel like they've fucking split an atom or something. Yeah. I mean, the thing is, it's like people have really not embraced the fact that people really do see the state government and national government differently from a partisan perspective. Seth Bullock or Seth Bullock. Now, that would be cool. Seth Bullock was running for fucking. Who's Seth Bullock calling everybody a cocksucker and pistol-lipping them until they bought a farm. Wait, who's that? That's Timothy Oliphant from Deadwood. But now, if this Bullock, this way more lame Bullock, he's running, if he was running against Trump, he would get killed because people view presidency and national government as different than state government.

A lot of a lot of would be senators and congressmen who might have won in a statewide race are defeated in national races simply by the fact that Republicans can invoke the specter of people like Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi to scare people back into the political realm. Matt, he won in a Trump state. John Tester has a better fucking argument there because he wanted to go to fucking Washington and to caucus with Chuck Schumer. Is it his hand mangled from a farming accident? The testers is yes. He's got like two fingers or lofts wrong with his hands. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So then he's got a haircut you could set your watch to. Well, better argument from him, I think.

Now, if you're going to go with that argument, Tester running to go to Washington and caucus with guys like Schumer and Bernie Sanders, that's a better argument than a guy who's running to rule from what? What is it? Helena? What's the fucking? Yeah, Helena. Well, a tyranny from Helena. I did find this quote from an article from a right wing guy title quotation marks moderate Steve Bullock is an extremist and a coward too. Yeah. And I just I just like this line. Back in 2006, I dreamed about Governor Brian Schweitzer being elected president and showing off his new Browning handgun to the assembled leaders of Congress just before telling them he expected a balanced budget on his desk by the end of the year or I will literally murder you. I was dreaming about about Generalissimo Brian Schweitzer issuing a pronouncemento and then executing Harry Reid on the floor of the Senate. That's a very strong diggler vibes from that one. Yeah. By the way, if it was Brian Schweitzer who was running now against Daddy Trump, he would be saying the same thing about how he's an extremist. I don't need to be defeated. They always love Democrats when they don't run.

What's probably the guy with the wolf thing? I mean, that is one of the biggest issues and I don't know. I don't know the specific contours of it, but killing wolves is the number one issue in Montana. A few months ago, we were bantering about this in a car and I don't know if someone emailed us about wolves or something. No, it's the number one issue in Montana, which is why it's so hilarious that Bullock is running on the argument of I won in a statewide race in a state that Trump fucking one because you're talking about a state where the number one domestic issue is wolf murder. I don't know how that translates to a national campaign. Well, I like the idea of him saying, you know, what the Democrats have been losing what we need is Montana politics. Issue number one, wolves. Everyone is spending $300 million in campaign ads about the wolf issue.

We're doing nationwide the purge for wolves. One day a year, you could do anything you want to any wolf that you encounter. Just a soccer mom slamming closer SUV door and saying, you know, it's it's hard out there in this economy. It's hard with the cost of milk is going up, cost of gas is going up and wolves everywhere. Every time I try to pick up my little Cody from daycare, I have to fend them off with a torch. It's funny, because Trump would respond to that. He would take the bait and say, I'm the toughest. You don't you don't understand, folks, you wouldn't believe how tough I am on wolves. I see a wolf. They're gone. Bing, I see a wolf. Bang, boom, bang.

Wolves, bye bye. Wolves, you're done. You're done wolves. Moving on. Steve Bennett. Wait, right? Steve Bennett, another Steve. No, Michael Bennett. But whoops. Take it back. No, no, don't roll that.

No, roll that. Roll that. I have to roll it back. I guess you're indicating how interchangeable these motherfuckers are. Another Mountain State guy from a state that already has someone run for president, former, or I guess is. Michael Bennett, Senator from Colorado, which, as you know, sits atop the powerful dark magic layline that provides the catholic energy that powers John Hickenlooper's presidential ambitions and artificially extends his life. So why is Michael Bennett running when his dark lord is already running? This doesn't make sense. Why would you vote for Renfield when Dracula is also on the ballot?

It's stupid. I will say this about Bennett. I know very little about him. I heard him interviewed on NPR the other day, and he has an absolutely flat effect. Like he's like a dark hole of charisma. I'm stunned that he got elected anything about fucking dog murderer in his town. And good luck to him, I say. Whatever. That shit's boring.

Last one. Just join the race. Just join. And I knew you were excited for this one, Matt. This was a little Christmas present for you. Joe Sestak. Joe Sestak. Retired rear admiral, former congressman from Pennsylvania. He won in a deep red district during the 2006 wave.

And he fits the profile of a Rahm Emanuel candidate, you know, national security credentials moderate. But apparently he was dissuaded from running because the district was so red. He primaried Arlen Specter in 2010 who had switched to the Dems, giving them a filibuster proof majority. Then he got owned in the general by Tea Party Psycho Pat Toomey after running a dog shit campaign. Tried to come back for a rematch with Toomey in 2016, but lost the primary. We are still stuck with Pat Toomey. Yes. In a state Obama won twice by a huge margin.

Joe Sestak. He's given up trying to kill Marshall, Will and Holly in the land of lost. Trying to become president of the United States. He counts. Joe Sestak is a huge asshole. And this decision to run confirming that he's a deluded asshole as well. He was demoted in the Navy and miserable to a staff in Congress. The LA Times reported from his time in Congress. Sestak lost staff at a staggering rate during his first two years in office.

He went through nearly half a dozen press secretaries alone in the first year. Jesus. Chiefs of chiefs of staff came and went almost as fast. He asked aides to work six days a week, 12 plus hours a day. Staff's salaries among the lowest on Capitol Hill according to congressional records. No. See, that spot is filled. The horrible boss's spot is filled by Amy Two Targaryen. So sorry, buddy.

You are a day late in a dollar short on that one. There you go. That brings us to 25. One addendum. There's also a man named Wayne Messam running whom I pledge, we pledge to never discuss. No. Because that would cause Chernobyl levels of wankery to erupt. Yeah, we can't handle that kind of surge and walk levels.

I just want to say one thing about Wayne Messam is that he is a mayor. Miramar, Florida. Of Miramar, Florida, which is hilarious. And of course you might say, well, Mayor Pete, what about him? Yes. That's also absurd, honestly, on its own level. But the other thing I think is funny about that is that Wayne Messam is the mayor of a town, not only a smaller town, it's not one of the biggest cities even in Florida,

but it is a council manager city, which means the mayor essentially is just there to cut ribbons. He has no actual authority. So he doesn't even have the job that he claims he does. And he's running for president. Amazing. I give him points for Hutzpah. 25, now with Joe Sestak, who's nobody fucking blast from the past. I'm honestly at this point surprised there aren't more.

Not really when you see guys like Joe Sestak running in at this late date, you are wondering what the hell's keeping everybody. What's Al Gore doing? What's John Kerry doing? Yeah, what the fuck? Gary Hart is like the same age as Joe Biden. Dick Gephart is still alive. Everybody who ever ran for president and failed should be running right now. DeCoccus.

Carolyn Mosley Brown. Yeah. Al Sharpton. Dennis Kasinich. The fuck dude. Fuck Jesse Jackson. Jesse Jackson. Come on.

He came so close in 88. Yeah. Mondale's still alive. I guess everyone just said it's just easy to run for president, I guess. Well, I think what they've realized is that there's no downside. There's no downside. Yeah. You might get humiliated.

You might get tweaked on Chapo trap house. Yeah, exactly. This thing is that nothing will stick to anyone at this point. No one remembers anything a day after it happens. So you can run for president. You can either get some contacts, get a book deal, get on TV or radio or something. Be able to run for another office. You might get a fave star trophy.

If it fails miserably, no one will remember. It's totally risk-free. It's free real estate. Matt Christman, you flirted with a presidential bid earlier this year. Are you feeling any second thoughts? I'm not, actually, because what I said came to pass, which is that they changed the rules to make sure that what we were talking about wouldn't happen and that crank candidates and goof them up would not get on the stage.

The thing is that my reasoning about this was that they were promising 20 spots with the rules that they had at the time, which, by the way, they've already changed. Well, they changed it. No, no, no. It's just getting harder. Like you level up. Right. But I'm saying is that they've already...

For the first two debates, the rules are the same. Rules are the same as they announced. But still, those rules were only for the 20 candidates. After that, you weren't going to get on if they didn't decide you should be on. And that was, I always assumed there'd be more than 20. And earlier, you were saying, no, there's not going to be 20. I was wrong. I take the L on L.

And we're at 25 now, which means that if I was one of these jokers or anybody else tried to do a joke campaign, they would have been in the same position of being on the outside of that 20 looking in. So I do not... Well, they would have struck you by fiat, I think. Well, of course. And the thing is, the real thing that stopped me, honestly, is that if I didn't have a horse in the race, I would have done it anyway, probably.

But I don't want to be on the same stage as Bernie and take fucking attention away from him with dumb ass stunts. You don't want to be a stocking horse. I don't want to be doing dumb ass stunts when I think there is one candidate out there who could literally... Be the first socialist president of the United States. Whatever that might mean, whatever failures and limitations that has, I am very convinced that that is a prerequisite for the type of mass mobilization that is necessary for any

further change to occur. Any valence, anybody wants to talk, people want to talk about, oh, we shouldn't be doing electoralism, we should be doing union shit, we should be doing mutual aid, we should be doing horizontal organization. I agree with all that. But the precondition for any of that is getting more people on board than currently exist. A Sanders candidacy and a Sanders presidency are currently the only thing happening that has anything like a chance to make that happen.

And I didn't want to get in the way of that. And now knowing that there are 25 of these motherfuckers and there's no way in hell I would have been allowed on that stage anyway, even though I wanted to, I'm fully comfortable with my decision. Well, no, it's true. After three years of post-Bernie, post-Trump, it's like, okay, all the bets are called, show your hands. Who has compiled the best record in terms of a left tendency and so far, yeah, it has

been democratic socialism and their victories on the state and national level. Yeah. Okay. All right. Enough of that. Let's talk about the debates. When likely Dem primary voters are asked who they're considering, it really just comes down to seven candidates right now.

Sanders, Biden, Warren, O'Rourke, Harris, Booker, and Buttigieg. Maybe after the debates, someone else will jump up there. I mean, that seems likely, right? Buttigieg did it, but for now that's the race. Those are the only people in contention until someone else distinguishes themselves and joins those ranks. Before we get to the big, big stories, I just want to set the stage for what the race looks like going into the first debates.

At his high watermark in early May, Biden was pulling it around 40% nationally, according to real clear politics, unweighted rolling average. Now, six weeks later, he's a little above 30%. He's definitely taken a hit. Bernie started the race around 18% nationally, high teens, and that's about where he's still pulling now. State level, latest UGF pullout of Iowa, Bernie at 20, latest UGF pullout in New Hampshire, Bernie at 20.

Harris and Buttigieg, high single digits, O'Rourke and Booker in low single digits. The real story from the past couple of weeks has been Liz Warren's numbers going up nationally and in state by state polling. When this race started, she suffered from a weak campaign launch and the after effects of the DNA test debacle. I heard people saying she was then the water that her burn rate was too high. She was at about 5% then. Nationally now, depending on who you ask, she's in the low to mid teens and a lot of that

movement has been literally just the past two weeks. On the state level, there's not a lot of data to make strong conclusions, usually about like one poll per state, but I think it's safe to assert she's moved up and she's somewhere between being third place or tied with Bernie in the early states. That's where it's at right now. And we'll talk about Biden, Sanders, and Warren, but first, I know you want to talk about a couple of these other characters. Do we want to do it well first?

How about Beto O'Rourke's poll tax? I'm sorry, I'm sorry. How about Beto O'Rourke's war tax? The war tax! The war tax. Oh, God! Damn it. We got a war tax.

Okay. Beto O'Rourke proposed a national tax, a frankly regressive national tax, to pay for veterans' health care for any future wars that we start, which is already a slippery thing because we haven't declared war since, what, World War II? World War II. Yeah. That's it. So, accepting Afghanistan and the endless wars in a dozen or so countries that we don't

even know about. Yeah. But future potential wars. Which will not be declared because we don't do that anymore. I just wanted to bring this up briefly. I mean, I think Beto, we've seen that his moment is coming on. He fucked up badly. Well, he's still in contention.

People are still thinking about it. I guess. I'm very, very bearish on Beto. I am too. Honestly, at this point. I am too, but he's like doing better than Eric Swalwell. Well, yeah. But I mean, okay.

But I mean, that's not saying much. I honestly think at this point, even if he decided to cut bait and run for Senate, he would lose. I mean, he might have lost anyway, but he would lose even worse if you're like he's kind of shit all over. I don't think I don't think he would have won against Cornyn. I would be bearish about that too. Because I think I think that I think 2018 would have been the high water market.

I think he might be right about that, but either way, I think that his moment has passed. But his attempt now to gain to get back attention on the same day, by the way, that Bernice proposes a complete abolition of extant student loan debt, which is pretty hilarious. You've got one guy proposing a massive sweeping universal program, and one guy saying, Hey, what if we kind of do like a light Starship Troopers deal where the cowardly scumbag pussy families who won't send their troops to be their fucking children to be put into the Janissary Corps get I have to pay a jizya to for the jihad that we're waging against the rest of the world.

Do you remember the war makes you poor, Bill, in the late 2000s that was co-sponsored by I believe Charlie Rangel. Yes. I wanted to bring the draft back also. Yeah. He said that. And I want to say Alan Grayson was also a co-sponsor of this one. But I believe Alan Grayson got elected in 08.

And the jizya of it was what everyone was talking about during the Bush administration, that so we went to all these trillion-dollar wars, when there's a trillion-dollar war in Iraq, and with tax cuts, which was preposterous. There's no war tax. It's all on credit that we're prosecuting these wars. And their contention was that, you know, it's easier for people to swallow war if they think that there's absolutely no way that any of us have to pay for it. We have to sacrifice anything.

I remember a lot of criticism of Bush saying after 9-11 that, No, no, no, you should go out and shop. Yes. You should go out and shop. Don't worry about it. We'll have a good time. And I'll give you 200 bucks to start a war. And well, I mean, that worked.

And that started a goddamn war. And the contention was that, well, if there's an actual cost that you see when you're like, you know, sending your den, you know, punching numbers into your calculator, and you look at your fucking taxes and see war tax that people would just, you know, by their own self-interest become against the war that they can so flippantly and easily support. There would be an obvious cost. And what's perverse about this version of that is that it penalizes you for not sending your child into the maw of the global war, ceaseless imperial war on terror, which,

as I said, is very starship troopers. And I really only want to bring this up because it underlines the way it's such a perfect Democrat proposal. You can just imagine the room full of consultants sitting around with Beto trying to figure out a way to get momentum back because they must know that they have totally stalled out. And they know they need something, attention-grabbing, a proposal that's going to be different than everybody else is going to have. It's going to get people talking about them again.

And they decide, what are we going to do? And some genius that he's probably paying six figures says, hey, what about we say, if you're not sending your children to sacrifice, then you're going to have to pay for the care of the children who do. And they all just high-fived one another and got another $500 fucking platter of cold cuts to consume. But veterans health care, that's kind of a hidden cost of our defense hot defense funding. And it's one that we skimp on because the VA is actually like the NHS.

It's literally nationalized health care, VA doctors and hospitals are directly provided for with federal money. Well, then that part's interesting because the actual fucking costs are right there in the fucking defense budget, which is gargantuan, and veterans health care is a fraction of that. Well, I don't understand why we would separate veterans health care from, say, the obligation that I think exists to provide free health care for all people in the country. Because of the very fact that we feel at some level like veterans have earned something extra, by virtue of their sacrifice, they have earned not having to deal with copays

and shit like that. But then, of course, we skimp on the actual provision, and it makes things miserable for them. You have to buy a bunch of airplanes that are just flying guillotines. But I wanted to bring this up because it's such a perfect liberal proposal. Because the quintessence of contemporary liberalism is that you take the worst, most pathologically malevolent aspects of American life, the things that make everything else worse, the things that cascade outward, and just pulsate with malevolence.

In this case, the military industrial complex, which swallows so much of our GDP, so much of our treasures, obnoxious wonks like to talk about, in the service of these vague, endless, bloody, monstrous, imperial adventures, and that shape so much else, the reason everything else is shitty, the reason health care sucks, the reason our infrastructure is falling apart, and instead of challenging it, instead of saying this has to change, if anything else is going to change, we need to shut down these wars, we need to cut this monster in pieces. You reify it, you say, well, we're not going to fight this, so instead we're going to go with it.

And we're going to say, hey, we all love veterans, right? We all love the sacrifice that they make. Well, as part of that, you're going to be exempt, your family is going to be exempt from paying this tax to give you the fucking prosthetic limb after it gets blown off and held in the province, defending some pedophile warlord against the Taliban. We're going to accept the promises that brought us to this point and inevitably lead to this point. Exactly, and you are only guaranteeing that in the long run, even if it works, and even

if you get power, and even if you pass it, and even if some veterans get slightly better health care, slightly more advanced as prosthetic limbs, or more PTSD treatment, you're entrenching and guaranteeing that all the worst bedrock pathological institutions that we have to deal with are going to be strengthened and their malign influence deepened and prolonged. And as well, the fact that it's a regressive tax, it's a tax on everyone, unless they want to send their kid off to the frontier. Here's my proposal. Here's my counter offer.

I know it might be a little controversial. I think only veterans should have to pay this tax, and if you are a veteran, 90% marginal tax rate, and that money should go to podcasters. You know what? That's a bold vision, and I support it. And as well, if you did that, then the opposite would happen, and nobody would want to join the military knowing that it's now a material bad deal. It's like, oh, I'm going to watch my friend bleed out in front of me to buy Virgil Texas

Whippets. They're not going to do that. No, they won't. And the thing is, so then our military, I mean, it will necessarily constrict, and the only people who serve will be rich weirdos who want to hunt other humans for sport. Just total most dangerous game style. It'll be probably the kids of billionaires like White Coke will be there, and Don Jr., probably some like cosplaying 19th century types with like, you know, wearing safari outfits

and snifters of brandy and things like that. Well, see, the thing is, is that that would actually be incredibly peace-promoting because those people, as much as they want to kill folks, would not want to go in an active war zone where they might get killed. They're not signing up for that. So you would have to create sort of game preserves where they could shoot, you know, sort of like captive populations, and it would be awful, but it would keep the wars down because you wouldn't, you wouldn't send these people out to potentially get shot.

You're not going to send them into Tehran to get shredded by the fucking international revolution or the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. I think it's worth looking into and let's move on. Mayor Pete, you remember Mayor Pete? Yeah. God, remember Mayor Pete, remember his moment a few months ago when he was just climbing to the top? And not really to the top, but I mean, I was on a trajectory and then I like how indicative

he is of how fluid the race is that a guy comes from zero and he goes up and then, you know, goes down a little bit, but he's like, he's in contention. His name is out there now, even though he's just literally just a fucking mayor and climber. So Pete Buttigieg pulls around the high single digits nationally and he's in the running in Iowa, a neighboring state to his home state of Indiana. And as far as the crosstabs go, it's not a neighboring state. Wait. Oh shit, it's not.

Oh no. Illinois is between Indiana and Iowa. Oh God, no, I'm going to retake all of that. No, no, no. I can't. I can't have this on the record. I can't have this. There's so much compromise on these deleted files.

Henry, Henry, delete the tapes. All right. All right. Secret illicit live leak. Listen to Virgil Jackson's claim that Indiana and Iowa are neighboring states. Virgil, Texas, wrong state, crush video. All right. All right.

Pete Buttigieg pulls around the high single digits nationally and he's in the running in Iowa, another Midwestern state like his home state of Indiana. And as far as the crosstabs go, all of that support is from white liberals because his support among black primary voters is literally zero. If they counted all the gifts of black women shaking their head that white women post on Twitter as votes, it would be different, but they don't. So he's the mayor of South Bend, a city that is something like 40% black with staggering racial inequality.

And as near as I can tell, he hasn't done jack shit for that community except tear down their homes to build mustache-themed craft beer bars. So I think you have a pretty good image of what South Bend is like, what this community is like, what strains it's been under in the past few decades and what happens when you get a young, ambitious, neoliberal mayor who rolls up his sleeves and says, we're going to bring opportunity back, which is mostly just rolling out the red carpet for developers and gentrifiers. Last week, there was a police shooting in South Bend, or as they call it, a tactically

officer involved violence, adjacent death type scenario, a white police officer shot to death, 54-year-old African-American man named Eric Logan. There's no video of the shooting because the cop's body camera wasn't on. That must have been an oversight. Last year, Buttigieg himself tweeted, we're bringing the best national public safety policies to South Bend. Body worn cameras for the South Bend police will improve mutual trust and accountability between officers and the public.

And they did. Case closed. Eric Hoppe was also accused by his own fellow officers in court documents of making, quote, racist and discriminatory comments. So while all of his friends were at the Jim Clyburn fish fry in South Carolina, Mayor Pete had to go back to South Bend. And it's been a fucking disaster for him, quoting here from Wes Lowry in the Washington Post.

How is he handling it? Said Oliver Davis, the longest serving black member of the South Bend Common Council. Well, he talked to the media before the family. He skipped the family vigil full of black residents and then he gave a speech to the police. So how do you think that went over Pete? He did attend a protest, which went like this. Not good.

That's not good. That's not a good situation. No. And then he had a town hall. Yeah. Shortly after that. That was another disaster. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Michael Langford. You can bridge this gap and whatever else Winston who is biracial told the audience recounting

the time he tried to host a cook out for police officers a few years ago and we reached out and they said no, the hostility between but towards us in the black community that he was to serve doesn't just come from this incident, Matt Pierce again and same article, not long after in 2012, he pushed out the city's black police chief, Daryl Boykins over police officials making racist remarks. The crisis unleashed a flurry of litigation that resulted in financial settlements for the officers and for the former chief.

Boykin's removal, along with the fact that the recordings were never released, have been seen as a kind of original sin for Buttigieg's mayoralty among some black residents. Buttigieg, quote, had a chance to make a stand and didn't do it. He never stepped up and became the leader. Blue Casey, 23, an activist and recording artist,

said in an interview Saturday. Slaking. Oh, boy. You know what? This definitely sounds like a guy who's ready to jump from mayor of a town of 100,000 people to president of the United States. He went to Harvard, or no.

Did he? Was it Harvard? I don't remember. He was a scholar. He's a Rhodes scholar. What else do you fucking people need? He knows 5,000 languages. Just shut up and vote for him.

He was a naval intelligence guy. He ran some spreadsheets in Afghanistan. No, his resume is so good. I don't know what's wrong with you people. It's reasonable enough the idea that you're the mayor of a town of 100,000 people and you're running for president, but that you're a bad mayor?

Like that you are explicitly doing the things that I would say a majority of the people who are going to vote in this election hate. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing. It's like Bernie was a mayor of a small town, but he was a fucking awesome mayor. He ruled.

If he'd run for president after being mayor, I probably would have said, hell yeah. This motherfucker just turned the place into a fucking artisanal small plate eatery with armed racist psychotics keeping people away from the parking lots. And now he's running for president. I mean, those are his own constituents saying that.

I don't know how much play it's going to get among the, well, let's be honest here, older white liberals who make up 100% of his base. Well, that's the thing is that his base is completely contained within the professional managerial class that we all know and love who make up a good chunk of democratic primary electorate, but whose preferences are non-transferable to basically everyone else

in the country. There are candidates who have succeeded by being the darlings of that class, Barack Obama being one, but they were able to marry that with appeals to different parts of constituencies. They build a coalition. A coalition, exactly. Mayor Pete has no coalition.

He is just the PMC candidate. And that's enough to give him that surprisingly large percentage of polling numbers for a guy who's just a mayor of a small town, but it's not anything close to enough to get him beyond that. Well, that video, these videos are fucking brutal. And I am at least grateful that the fact that Mayor Pete's like bullshit media invention, all the attention

that he gets has at minimum brought natural attention to yet another fucking police shooting of a black man. I do think that it's the absolute acme of his entire emptiness, his essential facility that this motherfucker whose town is in the middle of this roiling controversy, this racially charged, violent moment is going to say, sorry guys, I have to leave. I have to go debate to be president of the United States.

Just the level of detachment and frankly delusion incumbent in that decision is breathtaking. Well, racial strife solved, job well done. I have to go to Miami and tell everyone my vision. Yeah. But one thing Mayor Pete did was take the heat off another candidate who some tension there with African-American voters, J.O. Biden.

Everyone is finally attacking Joe, literally everyone. Harris and Booker for his all work with segregationist comments, Warren and Sanders for being a centrist, even for being old as Better O'Rourke and Pete Buttigieg have insinuated. And that's a good indication that the race has finally begun and that Joe Biden, who again is polling at about above 30% nationally, is just an easy pin cushion

for everyone. When you have literally now 24 opponents, you're going to take on, you're in the poll position, you're going to take a lot of hits. And that's why I've never been worried about Joe Biden who was again polling last month at 40% as being this unstoppable fucking force. Because if voters don't like it if they perceive you

as being negative, it's a very tribalistic thing. They don't like it if you're attacking another candidate. It's why Bernie Sanders waited so long to attack Hillary Clinton. And it's why when in the 2004 Iowa caucus, Howard Dean and Dick Hubbard were leading until they just did mutually assured destruction on each other and just had a raft of negative ads against each other

that let John Kerry and John Edwards take the number one and two positions there. This time around, it's not a one-on-one race. You have very little lose by attacking Joe Biden if you're at 1% or less. And as well, you have cover for attacking Joe Biden if literally 23 other people are doing it. But the converse of that is that that means that Biden

in the poll position and attacked by everyone doesn't have to ever go negative, which means that that negative drag coefficient never attaches to him and buoys him further on because he gets to look like Mr. Sunshine, the happy warrior. But he absorbs all of the attacks. And the thing about attacks is, yeah,

there's a big chance they'll backfire, but it's often mutually assured destruction, but they work. That's why people do it. That's why candidates do it because they work. And again, it started out when he announced the race with his grotesque touchiness, which I know there's a small number of voters who are gonna vote in these primaries

who are being swayed by that. But then you have the segregationist comments, which are going to sway another small group of voters. The thing about Biden is he has been a creature of Washington since the 1970s. People fucking hate Washington. And he's literally been there, been friends with a lot of evil people,

supported a lot of evil legislation, written a lot of evil legislation. That's enough to piss off literally every strand of the Democratic coalition. With African-American voters, it's piling around with literal segregationists. And it's well the fact that he can't really, he's not conversant in the more sensitive ways

in which people talk now. With Latino voters, Asian-American voters, it's him being deployed to Central America to say, we're gonna fuck you up if you come here as a refugee. He's fucking voted for the Iraq war, which again sank Hillary Clinton in 2008. And the union voters, he has swaddled himself in the support

of one firefighters union. And all of his campaign events around Iowa, where it's like, you know those, the big unions endorsed Hillary early on in 2015, because they thought that's, you know, we need to sit at the table and she's gonna win. And that's the safe bet. But the union rank and file never liked her.

They never supported her for the same reasons that they're not gonna like Joe Biden. NAFTA, TPP, and he's unrepentant on all of it. He's incapable of apologizing. Those are the liabilities and they're serious. And once people actually start to pay attention to the race, which they're not doing right now, it's lunatics paying attention to the race,

lunatics like us. Once your normie voters start paying attention to the race and they have serious concerns, they're not gonna find anything to like in Joe Biden. I mean, see, that sounds good. That sounds true. But the problem is, is that we're already seeing that so far a lot of these attacks have not worked.

And yes, you've said nobody's really paying attention, but they're still getting polled and his numbers have not cratered the way that you would expect some after these parade of gaffes and accusations. And secondly, you're seeing the same deployment of these traditional establishment support that helped Bowie Clinton along in 2016 coming again.

We saw after the comments about segregationist, John Lewis, who came to Hillary Clinton's support in 2015 and 16 and said it famously about Bernie Sanders, I didn't see him at any protests, coming out and saying that there's nothing wrong with what Biden said about segregationists. You got Michael Eric Dyson saying that Biden has an existential blackness.

You're seeing the same circling of the wagons of thought leaders and establishment politicians around Biden that you saw in Clinton four years ago, which was enough to buoy her along despite her essential weakness and unpopularity among people. I'm seeing people paid to say those things who don't necessarily represent constituencies. Michael Eric Dyson doesn't have 10,000 voters

who are gonna do what he says, where it fucking matters where his endorsement goes. I mean, I just don't see, but the thing is that's, I don't know how you understand, explain Hillary's victory in 2016 without the idea that these paid people were enough of a bulwark under her to blunt the accusations of doing all the awful stuff that she did, crime bill, fucking Iraq war,

everything else, it worked. I mean, she fucking won. Those same forces are going to be deployed to Biden's benefit this time. And in addition to that, you have the essential fact that a lot of people really just wanna go back to the sense of normalcy and ease that they had with Obama being president, and the only person running

who is running explicitly with a connection to that time is his vice president, who many of these people voted for twice, Joe Biden. So it's three things there, and I wanna unpack each one. First off, there's not gonna be some tape of Joe Biden saying something so utterly unforgivable that comes out or doing something so utterly unforgivable that comes out. That sinks his candidacy.

It's death by a thousand little cuts. That's how I view it. And everyone has the knives out for him. The media has the knives out for him as well. Even if the Democratic establishment, even if the big donors are still with him right now, he actually has to perform. And he's gotta go through what are going to be

a series of tough debates that a lot of people are gonna be paying attention to. He's going to face a lot of attacks. And from what we've seen, he's a very shitty fucking way of doing politics that is not convincing to very many people. I mean, that's really, my contention is that this idea of Joe Biden as, oh, you know, oh, he's a scrappy Irish kid from Scranton, Pennsylvania.

He's the white people whisperer. He's the one who's gonna get the white working class back. I've only in my life ever heard that from fucking Beltway Insider fucking journalist from fucking John Halpern, Chris Saliza fucking types. And I think it's fucking bullshit. The only people who have any, who give Joe Biden any kind of credit for doing anything for them

are probably the voters of Delaware, the various NPCs whom we encountered driving through there, you know, who are, you know, they're just standing in their lawns constantly clipping and they all receive something like the Alaska Permanent Fund, but for all the fucking corporate banking money that flows in this state,

thanks to someone like Joe Biden. I'm just gonna say that all that argument about how he's a shitty campaigner and he doesn't have a natural constituency, that's all true of another person, Hillary motherfucking Clinton. She was the exact same predicament in 2016. She ran a racist campaign against Obama in 2008.

She ran the exact campaign that all the fucking woke libs accused Bernie of running in 2016. She did play the race card like a maniac. She talked about white working class people. She might, she was doing clan bakes basically at her rallies and then she was able to turn around and be the woke candidate in 2016 and it worked because she had the buy-in of the Democratic establishment.

Well, she had- Elected officials, elected officials in key states and it was enough. And my argument, like devil's advocate argument really, because honestly I've given up fucking trying to predict any of this stuff, is that Biden has largely that network now and that even with a fractured field,

it will give him the plurality. He has the network for now, but there's no firm allegiances. Sure, Joe Biden goes to New York and he sucks up money from fucking Wall Street and all of that shit. But that money only matters if you have a candidate that people want to fucking vote for.

Joe Bush had a shitload of money. He spent what, $200 million? Phil Graham had a shitload of money in 96. He was supposed to win the fucking nomination. Rudy Giuliani had a lot of money in 2008 and he spent what, like $5 million per delegate that he fucking got? Regarding Hillary Clinton, I mean,

I don't think 2016 has anything to do with this race. I mean, Bernie Sanders was running to prove a fucking point and it wasn't until late in the game that he thought, oh, maybe I can win this thing. Well, my main issue there is that Bernie, and an argument you've made and I agree with this, is that Bernie has the highest floor of any candidate. He has a solid 15% that is not going anywhere

no matter what. I agree with that. My concern, because his numbers have not moved up, you could argue that they've gone down a little bit, but honestly, it seems like it's just sort of fluctuating around that area. That might be both the floor and ceiling. It might be 15% because you can't argue that he's not known.

You can't argue that people haven't heard of him. He's now, after running for president and being so prominent in 2016, and having now been, as people like to point out, the most popular politician in Washington for the past three years, he is a known quantity and yet he's stuck at 15%. That makes me worry that that is just where he will be,

and 15%, even in a fractured race, is not enough to get the nomination. No, it's not, but keep this in mind, consistently Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden among the universe of probable democratic primary voters have the highest favorability ratings. They both poll, among general election voters, the highest against Donald Trump.

But I think by the end of this race, by the end of this year, before they start voting in Iowa and New Hampshire, that one candidate will go down and the other will be at minimum even. And that's Bernie Sanders is the latter and Joe Biden is the former, for the various reasons

that I've just laid out to you right now. Well, my issue with that is just that we have also, as we've talked about before, the second choice of Biden voters is largely Bernie and vice versa. And that obviously means that these people do not have ideological priors. Right, yeah.

So, but that also means that the arguments you've laid out about Biden's weaknesses are all ideological in nature. If these are not ideologically driven candidate voters, then how can we be assured that they're going to drift towards Bernie and not towards Biden if they're not ideologically motivated in the first place? Because they're not ideologically motivated right now

because nobody has the fucking time to sit down and compare the candidate's plans. But at a certain point, if you're somebody who's going to go out in fucking five degree weather in the middle of fucking winter in February in Iowa to go caucus from someone, you're probably going to want to do

a little bit of research. You probably think that, oh, I've got some kind of like, I'm doing this out of some general civic obligation. And that means by that point, they will have taken a look at things. The thing is, I can see how for most vast majority of these voters, they'll look at Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders

and see roughly the same person. But Joe Biden is so ideologically out of step with every single voter and proud of it too. Yes, unrepentant. That I don't, unless he makes this remarkable flip flop pivot, I think he's just going to continue to piss people off. But I want to talk about exactly who's supporting Joe Biden right now.

That's about 30% right now nationwide, little over 30% and leads in all of the early states and a decent lead in South Carolina. He has the support of a lot of black voters right now, who as you know, in 2007, were all in for Hillary Clinton until over the course of about two months, Barack Obama won their support when it looked like he had the chance to be the first black president

of the United States. That's an important thing. I don't think you can compare the level of support that Joe Biden has with black voters and the profundity of that support with the level of support that Hillary Clinton and the Clintons generally had. In 1992, black voters voted for Bill Clinton

by like 60% over his nearest competitor. The Clintons have cultivated those relationships for decades. And Bernie Sanders, who again, was not running to win and was not ready to build an operation in a place like South Carolina, was really just focused on New Hampshire and Iowa, had no hope of dislodging that support,

not like Barack Obama did with all the assists that he got. So with regards to Joe Biden, I mean, I think the question there is, do black voters stick with Joe Biden? Do or do these, for one, the segregationist stuff, and then maybe the crime bill stuff and all the various fucking things that he's done over his career,

do his opponents who have a lot of money as well and will be running a lot of ads and will want votes and probably want his goddamn votes because he's got the most votes, will they make a persuasive enough pitch to take that support from him? My contention is yes, because Joe Biden's real benefit is that

it's not that he's been great with the black community, his entire Senate career in fucking Delaware for 30 years and two failed presidential races, it's that he was Barack Obama's vice president, the first black, and then people voted for, when they were voting for the first black president to re-elect the first black president, they voted for him too.

And so it seems like he is a mature statesman and a friend. So some of the reporting out of Jim Clyburn's fish fry, they loved him there, so did they love Bernie Sanders too. Everyone else was fine, but they loved Joe Biden and I read a few news articles and again, these are just quoting a handful of people, none of whom under the age of 60, older African-American voters who say,

shrug off the segregationist stuff and as well think that, you know, Cory Booker's out of line for attacking him. I think that the media is kind of trying to draw up a controversy and the overarching point that I see, which I think is shared by older voters of every race is that we have to beat Donald Trump,

we live in a right-wing country, maybe we don't love Joe Biden's positions, maybe we're further to the left than he is, but, you know, our house is on fire and, you know, well, he's tested, he's won nationally twice. I think, and this is to your point, I think that is a compelling pitch

and it's really a matter for, you know, we all wanna take down Joe Biden, it's really a matter of destroying that by chipping away at that argument, which I think will happen. Well, we shall see. When it comes to, you know, whether or not people actually believe in,

people are sticking with their preferences right now, I don't think they are, but as you alluded to it earlier, 15%, that's Bernie Sanders nationwide, it's the only candidate with that kind of floor. Guy like Pete Buttigieg has no floor. He started at zero, he's at like 10 and your uncle likes him.

You, someone like Liz Warren starts at five, maybe she's at 15 now, but she could just as well go back to five or zero. But Bernie Sanders, you know, I saw a number out of Iowa that said, I think it was a press release from their campaign saying that the number of people who have either signed up to caucus for Bernie Sanders,

signed up to volunteer for him or donated for him in Iowa, is 15% of the total number of people who caucused overall in 2016 in Iowa. 15%, that's a big fucking deal that that many people are not just supporting him right or die, but they're willing to go out and volunteer for him. They're willing to go out and candidate for him,

they're willing to go out and have Facebook arguments with their aunts for him. Nobody is that right or die for Joe Biden, except for the fucking hedge fund Wall Street guys, where he was just in New York city to get their money from. Well, that was true of Hillary and she still won. A lot of people will write or die for Hillary, don't ignore that, don't ignore that.

I am out of the prediction business at this point. I should have been honestly after 2016 and certainly after touching the poop. I'm done predicting any political shit and I got to watch the view. Oh fuck, I was supposed to start today. God damn it, I forgot. Okay, well, one extra day of view for that.

Yeah, all right, I'll start tomorrow then. But I'm just gonna say, I think that Biden has about 25% chance to get the nomination. Bernie has about maybe 25, maybe 20, maybe 50, I don't know. And then the field has the rest. I don't know, I'm not predicting anything anymore. I'll put a big bet against Joe Biden, especially because Florida is his firewall.

That's gonna be on the whatever Super Tuesday comes after the four early states. And I don't think he's gonna do well in those early states. Maybe he can save his campaign in South Carolina, but I know a lot of candidates are gonna be contesting that one. I don't think he's gonna win Iowa. I don't think he's gonna win New Hampshire.

And I think that the donors are going to move to someone else and by the time he's in Florida, he'll be old news. That's like intention. All right, I'll say this. I mean, it's meaningless because there's so many contingencies, but if he wins South Carolina,

and certainly if he wins it comfortably, he's gonna get the nomination. That's reasonable, but we shall see. So there's no bet between Matt and Virgil today. I'm not doing that sharing. I'm not doing that sharing, Matt. I'm out of that game. All right.

I don't know what you fuck you people want to do, you weirdos. They love Matt humiliating himself. I'm done with it. Oh, you say that now. You say that now. By the way, I'm sitting here casually flipping a dime. Why don't you flip a dime?

It's the smallest coin. Yeah, it's impressive. Flip a quarter, you idiot. It's impressive. Moving on, again, as we said in our polling roundup, Liz Warren has been going up in the past month. And I'm told that you guys have opinions about that. I mean, the opinions are that she is a lib

and a stalking horse, and people should wise up and stop supporting her. When you say that, I mean, are you saying that, I mean, like I've seen the third way psychos say that they support her. Even though, I mean, you surely have to concede that her policies, some of them are very radical. Yeah.

Policies are such a small percentage of this. If you don't have a theory of change, your policies can fucking piss up a rope. Policies mean nothing if you don't have any program, any programmatic way to attach the, to attack, I'm sorry, the fundamental rot and reactionary nature of American political structure. And Bernie has a theory of change, where as Warren doesn't.

And by very virtue of that fact, all of her policies mean literally nothing. I'll cover you that Liz Warren doesn't have a theory of change. She has said it. She has no, her theory of change is my policies are so cool that people are gonna have to vote for them. She has said that explicitly.

People are like, they're not gonna be able to deny it. People are gonna vote for me. And then they're gonna be like, damn, those policies are so tight. You're gonna have to vote for them. Ridiculous. Get it out of here. Whoa.

Bernie is about building power outside of electoral political means as a pressure, as a, as a constituency that can operate outside of the political system, the way that Obama had the chance to do in 2008, but explicitly decided not to because he was at base in the illiberal. Bernie is trying to do the opposite of that. He's the only one who has a theory of change.

And that is what matters. That policy is completely secondary to that fact. Is Liz neoliberal? I mean, she loves capitalism and she's said that explicitly. And to me, at this point, if you're operating in a framework where you're explicitly trying to rescue capitalism, when we see it literally eating the earth in front of us, like a fucking battery acid,

that we don't have time for that shit. Ain't nobody got time for that. Well, I'm not a supporter of Liz Warren. I'm a supporter of Bernie Sanders as well. If I put a gun to my head, I would say Liz Warren would be a distant third choice for me. Well, you know, you know, we all know who number two is. But I do want to interrogate this thing.

Overpower. I do want to interrogate this thing you say about her being a stocking horse. And yes, I agree with you that it is very troubling that the fucking third way fucking types are so enthusiastic about supporting Liz Warren's campaign and you would say cynically. Well, not just the fucking third way.

It's really pulling a bait and switch. If anybody can remember a month ago, and I know that's hard because time is not a real thing anymore, but when during the Illinois Mar thing, one of the most noxious, quote unquote, progressives who is on the barricades, demanding Illinois Mar to apologize for all the horrible anti-semitism, too, she did,

was this sleazebag Max Berger, this Maxwell Berger, progressive who was saying, as a progressive, I could not finish the Max Berger. And therefore I had to pay for it. Oh, and Omar has proven herself. She has to show that she understands that all the damage she's doing in the Jewish community, this absolute fucking bad faith horseshit.

Guess whose campaign he just signed onto as head of progressive outreach? Elizabeth motherfucking Warren's. She is going to be the life raft for every fucking centrist scumbag who wants to go where the winds are going without burning the bridges they need to the establishment. Does that hurt Bernie Sanders? Because that seems to me better than the life raft

being Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. I would put it to you that it means nothing because I think a Warren presidency would be as much of a failure as any of the other ones. A Warren presidency would be another Obama, only instead of being sabotaged from within the way Obama was, it would just be sabotaged by just a complete failure to be able to deal with the inherent reactionary nature

of the political system that she would be inheriting. Well, I mean, I'm not going to argue that she doesn't have a point of point. You point out that's the same as with Bernie Sanders presidency. Absolutely, no. Like I said, no one's getting anything done if they become president. The question is whether that failure can build something

else. I feel like the only president whose failure can be built upon is Bernie's because he's going to be the only one talking about a ruling class, pointing out the malefactors within and without his party and creating a dissonance and a fracture that can be exploited. If Liz Warren gets in there, she's going to accomplish nothing, but she will not

make those arguments. She will not make that contrast. And as such, she will just go down as a Carter-like failure. Something you've been saying for a while is that Warren is eating at Bernie's support. Do you still agree with that? And some people are arguing that that's not true. I don't look at polls.

I make my head hurt. I don't know. It just seems to me that they're going after largely the same electoral chunk of the Democratic primary electorate. So I don't have any empirical thing to argue with that. It just seems to make sense. It just seems to be intuitive. But you look at some bowling data that says Warren voters,

their second choice, the plurality, or Biden. You look at Bernie Sanders voters, and the plurality say that their second choice are Joe Biden. It seems like a lot of it is driven right now just by name recognition. And frankly, a pitch, because you don't win a presidential race on policies. You win by the idea that you would plant in people's heads

of who you are. And in terms of Liz Warren, I mean, again, everyone wrote her off her dad back in December. She's not dead. I think she has been running an effective campaign. And I don't think it's necessarily insidious. Because I'm not actually sure she's going after the same voters as Bernie Sanders going after

because I know Bernie Sanders is trying to win Iowa, trying to win New Hampshire, and is well trying to, at minimum, staunch the bleeding in South Carolina among Southern Black voters. And I don't know if Liz Warren is going after those voters. Thank you for bringing South Carolina up. I just saw a poll out of South Carolina that saw Biden with a big lead, and saw Sanders and Warren

basically tied for second. And your beloved crosstabs, and god damn it, I hate looking at polling. So I did this for you fucking people, showed that Warren has leapfrogged Bernie to be the number one choice among 18 to 35s. And if that isn't Bernie's fucking constituency, tell me what it is.

Who the hell else is Bernie's base if not 18 to 35-year-olds? And if she is number one there, by definition, she is taking fucking voters away from Bernie. I'll leave it at that. I think that the race will come down to next year, and again, this is total future casting, Bernie versus Liz, and Liz gets the establishment mantle, versus a third or fourth joining their polypod.

I don't think it'll be Joe Biden. I think probably Kamala Harris makes the most sense, but someone else soaks up a substantial amount of the Biden support and the institutional support when Biden drops out. That is my guess. So you're saying in a race where it's Bernie versus Liz versus a third,

Bernie and Liz are not competing for the same voters. It depends on the voters. I mean, that's really it. Okay, but it's still within- In West Virginia in 2016, Bernie Sanders wins a big majority over Hillary Clinton. In 2008, West Virginia gives Hillary Clinton a huge victory over Barack Obama.

These are very fluid things. People are making up their minds for a variety of reasons, variety of things they like in candidates, variety of what they like from their pitch, from their pose, and as well from a variety of grievances. I don't think there's any voter in the Democratic Coalition who is not up for grabs for Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders,

except for like the hardcore of cranks. All right, but if it is a three-way race, do you really think there's any fucking math that shows either Warren or Bernie emerging victorious from that and not splitting the opposition to the establishment third candidate? It depends on who the establishment third candidate is. When the race in 2016 on the Republican side

was between Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and John Kasich, who was the establishment candidate then? I guess Cruz. And I think it's a substantial chance that we'd be in a fucking three-way race in the same way that we were going to Indiana and New York on the Republican side and that Liz Warren would be the compromise establishment candidate.

And I think that's totally possible. All right, so you're saying that Bernie is Trump in this analogy? I am, yes. Yes. But Trump had a relatively dominant poll position from shortly after he took the race, which Bernie does not have.

From shortly after what? From, he declared as candidate. No, he didn't. No, he didn't. It took a series of debates for him to get the poll position. But then he held it. And even then he lost. But then he held it hard and he held it unchallenged

for the rest of the campaign. Even then he lost the first race. Barely. Still lost. In a race that he had barely. Still lost at a time when everyone in the beltway was pissing their pants over, oh, Ted Cruz is too radical for the race.

Well, you know who he won. He won South Carolina. And honestly, I just don't see any world where Bernie won South Carolina. And that is such a pivot point in the primary that if Bernie doesn't win South Carolina, and I really don't see how it happens, I don't see any framework where he gets the kind of roll,

because yes, Trump lost Iowa, but then he won New Hampshire and South Carolina, and then rolled up a ton of fucking victories. I just, I could see a situation where Bernie wins Iowa, and then wins New Hampshire due to his position there, and his long-term connections. And then he gets his ass kicked in South Carolina, and then whoever beats him there

takes that momentum into it, and he takes that momentum forward, and Bernie is struggling to maintain relevance after that. Well, if you won Bernie Sanders to win the South Carolina primary, you know there's only one thing you can do. You can't give money to his campaign, volunteer, make phone calls on his behalf.

You need to go online and post mean-spirited things at total strangers. Absolutely, correct. That is how it's gonna happen. We're talking about praxis. You know where I stand, I keep hope alive, Bernie 2020, we will do all the harassment together.

Not me harassing wine moms, us harassing wine moms. You have my axe, Bernie. I think that about wraps it up. Sorry for the big debates, Matt. I am psyched. I mean, honestly, I think it's pretty funny. All the shit we've been talking about might be rendered obsolete in 48 hours.

It will be. That's the beauty of a presidential race. It doesn't fucking matter. Yeah, because this is all fluid. It's all hypothetical. It's all angels dancing on the head of the pin. Debates are actual news, actual grist that are gonna start moving treads on tires,

and we'll see what the result is. I literally have no idea. These debates are gonna do big numbers, and they're especially gonna do big numbers for the chapeau trap house elections unit. Yep. Twitch.tv slash chapeau trap house. Once again, 8 p.m. Eastern,

we are bringing you the debates. Bates, bates, bates. Tune in, folks. It's gonna be, as the kids say, lit. Do they say that anymore? I bet they don't. No, they don't say that. It's gonna be tubular.

Have we gone back to saying tubular? Till next time. Bye-bye. Bye.