MTracey podcast - What I got wrong in 2024: Audio/Video

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

Since I’ve now figured out how to capture full video/audio broadcasts on Substack, I’m sending this out as an incredible end-of-year gift. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.mtracey.net/subscribe

Sorry about that. Good to go. I should remember to check if my new microphone is muted before I begin. Is that good now? Can somebody confirm? Hopefully it is. All right, very good. So I did want to go through a couple of year-end agenda items,

even though I sort of find myself pedantically rejecting year-end lists and reminiscences sort of on principle. And when I say pedantically, it's because I have this hang-up over the month of December

being entirely excluded from the year-end list that people make. So if something happens that's noteworthy in like the second half of December, does it ever register on these year-end lists? Because people, especially in the media, they've made their year-end lists

before they leave for the holiday, which is like two weeks at the end of December. So we're in right now this sort of weird period of limbo or a void where if something notable happens, then it somehow never counts on these lists for major events in the year 2024 or in preceding years. And likewise, because I've been asked to make these lists at times, And I did one earlier this month.

And I'm not so pedantic that I would refuse to participate in the making of the list because, hey, we can't be 100% consistent in all our endeavors here. But likewise, I do find that if something, say, happened last January or February or even March, perhaps April, you'll kind of find that it's very much less likely to make it to these year end lists. because understandably people have a recency bias and because the whole kind of construct of devising events or divying up events into the range of one calendar year is a bit arbitrary. Now, I'm not so annoying or obnoxious that I'm going to chide anybody who wants to categorize

or sort things in accordance with the calendar year that they took place in. I'm just noting because I'm pedantic that in practice, what happens is the quote-unquote year for these purposes starts in maybe like April or May. And then the hot zone for when events that are most likely to be elevated into this pantheon of notable annual events, that really kicks into high gear in like September. and then you have this weird, like, no man's land period in the second half of December where nothing is eligible for the year-end list because they've already been made. So, anyway, maybe that's just a pointless hang-up I have.

I would freely acknowledge that. But I do so, you know, I'm now going to totally flout all of what I just said and bring up a, A little blurb that I wrote for Newsweek that was published like a week or two ago, week and a half ago. And so the prompt that was given, and I've done a bunch of these blurb things that Newsweek has people do, or has its contributors and writers do, including myself. And they wanted to give a moment that defined 2024.

Now, apparently Newsweek does a lot of these blurbs, because they do really well in terms of traffic. I don't know why exactly. I guess people enjoy these sorts of lists more than they enjoy regular articles for whatever reason. I don't know. Maybe it's because they're easier to read for certain people because they're in like truncated segments.

Like I wrote a blurb here. It's like a paragraph, right? So that's as much as they wanted. And I don't know. They seem to do well. So I've done a bunch of them. And so the moment. identified as the moment

to define 2024, which is like never phrasing that I would ever use earnestly. Like, it almost sounds like a lyric to a song. The moment that defined 2024. Like, I would never actually earnestly say that unless I was singing some

schmaltzy ballad. And even then I might be embarrassed. But because I'm more focused, I guess, you could say on the universe of potential political events. I chose Biden pulling out. I mean, that was a moment that I remember very vividly. I never

exactly where I was. I was driving home from the Republican convention. My companion in the seat told me about it. So we kind of pulled over to a rest stop and evaluate what was going on because it had

some impact, like, you know, I guess on like what our coverage plans might be So that was like, that was like a genuine moment that did stick out to me as, as notable. And I'll admit, and maybe I should have mentioned this in the things that I got quote unquote wrong, which I'll get to in a little bit. I didn't admit that for a while. I was a little bit more bearish on the odds of Biden withdrawing than a lot of people.

Because for one thing, as I said many times, including on streams here. Biden had already acquired all the requisite delegates. He needed in order to get the nomination. And there was no real precedent in modern history anyway for a presidential nominee who has acquired the requisite delegates. And Biden got like 99 plus percent of them to withdraw. And so it really would have had to been an unprecedented insider style putch, P-U-T-S-C-H, for Biden to, to, to, to, to, draw and sure enough that's what happened so i maybe i was a bit more surprised than i ought to have been um but and i think you know the full story of that whole episode probably needs to be better

elucidated and i'm sure will and due course a lot of that was driven by i think a totally unwarranted assumption in elite democratic circles donor circles certain media circles that camilla harris was obviously a better candidate then biden i know that seems like conventional wisdom to everyone, but I'm still not sold on that being the case. Because like it or not, like him or not, you know, whatever you want to say about Biden, he did at least demonstrate some proficiency in electoral politics with in particular his win in the 2020 Democratic primaries. And, you know, having muscled everybody out from a competitive primary in 2024 using his

incumbency advantage. That doesn't mean that he was the optimal candidate or the best of all possible candidates in these circumstances. But I did find it to be not to be taken as a given that Kamala Harris would automatically perform better than him just because she was younger, just because he had a terrible debate. Because I had a hunch that this impression of her being sprawled. upon the public or foisted upon the public

would engender suspicion as to her genesis as a candidate or her credibility as a candidate. Whereas with Biden, that wouldn't have been in the case, but the Democrats decided to forfeit their incumbency advantage,

which isn't always a strength or isn't always an advantage. Could be maybe sometimes a disadvantage, but is an advantage often enough that if I were advising the Democratic, which I'm not and don't care to be, I might have advised them to, even if the circumstances look somewhat dire, cling to the possibility that there could be an incumbency advantage. So anyway, I wrote, so Biden withdrawing was the moment that I picked here.

And I went and, and by the way, oh, I should have mentioned that you can watch this stream, If you're watching on X, you can watch it on YouTube. Just, it's, the channel is M Tracy. And they should also be on substack, but I'm still not able to, I don't think, send an automatic notification to people when I start my streams on substack. So I think you can go to mtracy.net, and it might be on there, but I haven't figured out the precise technical fix yet. So I'll have to do that soon.

Anyway, that's the moment that stands out to me. Again, it's kind of an arbitrary exercise because should necessarily be the case of something having to do with the 2024 presidential election is the most notable event or moment in 2024? Probably not. I mean, there could be some advances in science or in technology, in medicine, in any number of fields that I'm not as privy to that could far exceed the moment of Biden withdrawing is the moment that defines 2024. But I'm sort of immersed in, for better or worse, probably worse, this arena where my landscape that I gaze upon in terms of choosing events like this is going to be largely consisting of political oriented events.

Maybe that's superficial on my part probably is. but almost everybody else in that kind of consortium of people that Newsweek compiled to give their moment of 2024, named some political event. A lot of them obviously named the Trump assassination attempt and there were a couple of others. That's the one I picked.

Okay. So next on the list of year-end events, and you can all go to M-Tracy.comnet and find all this stuff if you're curious. I just posted my last thing. Earlier today, what I was wrong about. So this is, I think, a pretty useful exercise, as long as it's not entirely self-serving,

for people who have any kind of public-facing role to reflect on what they got wrong in the preceding year, that's a rare instance where I do think chronologizing things according to calendar year might be of some value, because like what other tangible sort of benchmark or milestone is there really available to go back and assess whether one was correct or incorrect about any number of things? And so I found one and here's what I say for my own purposes.

I should have maybe even done the Biden odds thing, which I got, be wronger than was, uh, than I would have liked. But here's the one that I picked for, uh, for today. And you can go to, uh, again, I'm Tracy. Onet and just, just read this little, uh,

short write up. I'm not going to leave it on the screen for too long. But it has to do with, again, a limited universe of things, political events. I mean, maybe if, maybe I should consider for 2025, expanding my horizon so that I can be right or wrong about a greater kind of multitude of potential things rather than the same sorts of political events that everybody else is obsessing over,

but I guess that's my lot in life. I was wrong in my intuitions about what calculation Trump would employ to pick a vice presidential nominee. And although I didn't really write a full-fledged article on this, I did a couple of tweets, I think, and I talked about it a couple of times with everybody's best friend or Richard Tenania. And he kind of pried out of me my ranking of who I thought Trump was most likely to pick. So a couple of streams we did probably in May and June. I went through and ranked my potential Trump vice presidential selections. And I had a slightly different calculation.

So I don't make full-fledged predictions on this, which some people find annoying. Some people think there's an evasion on my part. Some people think it's like me trying to skirt accountability or something. But I really do kind of have a principle diversion to making predictions. Or like more often what you'll see from pundits is they'll make statements of fact about something that's occurring or will occur. They don't even frame it as a prediction so much.

They kind of speak from this unearned position of authority, position of unearned authority. And they'll say, oh, this is obviously going to happen. And then when it doesn't happen, they really pay no reputational price. And I find that to be like an epistemically disastrous way of engaging in processing information and analyzing. things. And so I try not to do it, but at the same time, when I am trying to analyze events, I can develop intuitions that could prove to be flawed. And I think that's what happened with the Trump vice presidential selection. As I wrote my little item today, Amtracie.net, my intuition for what calculation Trump would employ was that he would do a

variation of what he did in 2016. In 2016, Trump picked Mike Pence, not because he had any kind of long-standing relationship with Mike Pence. I'm not sure they had ever even met until relatively late in the 2016 Republican primaries,

but because Trump having just secure the Republican nomination as an outsider, somebody without an established long-standing established base of support within the party, or institutional support within the party.

He was gradually accumulating institutional support, but it didn't predate his run, obviously. He had to shore up, which is a cliche that I don't really like. So that's why I'm using it with scare quotes. He had to shore up, like, his imperative, if you think back to that time in like early summer 2016, after having locked down the nomination, his imperative was to shore up the Republican coalition.

So there were elements of the Republican coalition that were already wedded to him at that point. Particularly, if you remember, the exit polls from that time, he was cleaning up with a couple of demographics. One demographic that he was cleaning up with was evangelicals, But in particular, Christian evangelicals, Christian conservatives who were not regular churchgoers. So it was, you know, self-identif, people who would identify with Christian conservative or Christian evangelicalism socially or culturally, but not the most pious Christian conservatives.

whereas if you broke it down by church attendants, Republican primary voters who attended church the most regularly were less likely to support Trump. So he needed to make inroads with elements of the Republican coalition. This is back in 2016 that were more kind of religiously devotional as opposed to just identifying with Christianity as kind of their cultural cohort. And that is a powerful segment of the Republican coalition.

Remember Ted Cruz won the Iowa caucus in 2016 on the strength of Cruz's appeals to this very demographic that Trump was lagging behind on. So then Trump picks Pence, who has been like a professional evangelical, conservative Republican activist for decades, got into, before he got to the House of Representatives, I think, in 1998 or 2000, if I'm not mistaken. Prior to that, he had been like a talk radio host, as you can kind of see with his vocal performance. It's very much conducive to the role of a talk radio host, who was like a social, like he was

mostly known, or he mostly emphasized in his talk radio oratories, his social conservatism, or his religious views as they intersected with politics. So in Trump picking Pence, it kind of, it did, I think, contribute to solidifying the Republican coalition to the extent that the elements of the coalition that were the weakestly committed to Trump or that were most weakly committed to Trump at that point got solidified. And then the political calculation paid dividends, at least insofar as Trump went on to win the 2016 election. So I thought there would be a version of that calculus employed in 2024.

So how would you employ that calculus? You would look at Trump's standing in May or June of 2024, assess which elements of the Republican coalition were maybe the most weakly committed to him. And then pick a vice presidential nominee who could most assist. in solidifying those elements of the coalition that were at that point weakly attached to him, but maybe needed an extra nudge to vote for him in 2024. And so what was the weakest segment of the Republican coalition in that, at that point in 2024? Well, it seemed like it was probably the demographic that effectively cost Trump the 2020 general election.

which is that it would have been affluent, suburban Republican-leaning voters who maybe you could have identified more with Nikki Haley, despite a lot of Democrats having voted for Nikki Hilly in the 2024 primaries. I would maybe more peg them as like the core constituency for Romney in 2012. who might be grudgingly vote for Trump, might sort of unenthusiastically vote for Trump and a small segment might not, but they could be reassured potentially with a vice presidential pick

in the same way that I do think the selection of Pence reassured certain wary Christian conservative voters in 2016. So I thought Trump if he were seeking to maximize his electoral chances, would pick somebody for vice president who appealed to somebody outside of his Ballywick.

Again, that's what he did with Pence? So somebody who could convey maybe a bit more of a stability impression, function as like a counter or a balance to Trump, appearing to some of these potential Republican voters as frenetic or overly disruptive because some voters want a disruptive president, others don't. I think the affluent suburban voters are less likely to crave instability, right? So they would want somebody who they would perceive as maybe contributing to Trump being able to make the impression that if you were to get back into office,

it would be more of a restoration of normalcy than of an introduction of chaos, right? And so who were those potential candidates? I actually should have mentioned this in the piece, but one of the late contenders who I thought would have served this function perfectly was Glenn Yonkin, the governor of Virginia. I think I said at the time,

if I was advising Trump, which I wasn't, but if I was and I was just trying to get him to do something that I thought best served his self-interest, I would have told him to pick Glenn Yonkin of Virginia as his vice presidential pick. Standard Republican exudes normalcy, exudes just kind of a stable approach to governance. This is just his perception.

It could differ in practice. might even expand the electoral map to some degree by making Virginia slightly more competitive. Or, you know, I might have even told Trump to pick Doug Bergam, who was stupidly, perhaps, the top of my list when I did them with Richard Dono in terms of who I thought Trump would pick. And people might even forget the name now.

I mean, Doug Bergman actually has been picked as Secretary of the Interior. And he's also been given a newly created seat or position on the National Security Council, which is the White House National Security apparatus in addition to serving as Secretary of the Interior. But I thought Bergam would be appealing to Trump in Bergam didn't really have his own autonomous. I mean, this could actually make him preferable to Yonken, which this would not apply to

what I'm about to say. Bergam didn't have his own really distinct political program. He's just kind of a businessman, successful businessman, which appealed to Trump, and a generic Republican governor in North Dakota, probably not somebody who you would have expected if he were to be vice president to be doing a lot of maneuvering or to be doing a lot of backbiting that to establish himself as like a political force on his own on his own right maybe that would have been differed slightly with with young him because

yon obviously would have gained a lot of political cachet had already been floated as a potential candidate in the 2024 primaries chose not to run probably a good decision. But I thought it would have been somebody in that mold, the Bergam-Yunkin mold, based on what I intuited would be the calculation that was at play. Now, that could have been one of the many calculations

that were being toyed with. And there was reporting that Trump's preference was Burgham, but then he was talked out of it by his son Don Jr. and others who favored Vance. And that won out. And so where I was wrong was the political calculation that would have been most prevailing on Trump for the vice presidential pick.

And then also my, what I think was probably wrong as well, was my initial reaction that I didn't think Vance added all that much politically to Trump in the same way that Vance that Pence did in 2016 or the Yonkin might have in

2024 in terms of expanding the coalition like who maybe I'm still right about this. I'm not sure. I'm sort of it's up in the air but like who did who did the selection of Vance entice to vote for Trump that might not that wouldn't have otherwise maybe there is some

voter out there who who fits this profile, but it's not quite as clear to me, as would have been the case if he had Trump picked Yonkin. But that said, I mean, Vance obviously did a very competent job campaigning. I mean, they won, right? So, you know, it still could be the case even though they won that Vance was less of a value added than some other selection might have been. But that's unprovable.

We can't run back the, the timeline to see if, you know, Trump would have won by like two more points if he had picked another vice presidential president's one. I mean, nominee, unlikely, but either way, not provable. So I do think I was wrong in some of the intuitions that guided my assessment of Trump's paper for vice president. So that's one area where I, I would,

concede some wrongness. I don't think it totally, like, threw off my entire assessment of the race necessarily, but that was one aspect of it that I think was a bit flawed. Now, what that might tell us about the forthcoming administration, I'm not sure. I do think it is more conceivable that Vance, very gingerly, very subtly would, you know, be using the vice presidency to kind of carve out a constituency for himself for a later presidential run.

It would be surprising if he didn't do that, which I think Trump could have foreseen as well. So apparently he doesn't mind if that's going on. But he could have picked people who, you know, wouldn't have the potential of like outshining him at a later time. it's like after the midterms like into 2027 like it's possible that advance if he's clearly gearing up for a presidential run could be

drawing attention from Trump or could be seen as a more significant political player than then Trump who would be ending would be heading toward a more lame-d-up phase and if Trump had picked somebody with no obvious future political aspirational aspirations

like a program perhaps. Then Trump could have maybe ensured that he would stay more consistently in the limelight. But he picks somebody who I think, you know, does have an incentive to do some maneuvering. Maybe even figure out, like, let's say something goes south two years from now in Trump's term. Trump, Vance is going to have an incentive to figure out how to distinguish himself from Trump, not repudiate Trump in all likelihood unless like something totally unforeseen happens. But draw some subtle distinctions and in a way the best enhances his electoral prospects.

Exactly what Cabo Harris was incapable of doing with Biden. So that's something that would advance. would want to avoid. And that could lead to certain internal tensions potentially. So anyway, I guess that's what I was wrong about. And what else? So I am going to, I am going to do an obituary of sorts or a piece on Jimmy Carter. It's just been doing some research today for it.

So I'll wait until that's out to do a full discussion of Jimmy Carter. Carter. I guess just in the interim, I would say that I'm not inclined to really valorize any president at this point unduly. But what's unusual about Jimmy Carter is that it's been so long since he's been president. He was president well before I was born. That it almost feels that you're not quite valorizing a president. I mean, he's been out of office for 43 years. So I don't feel as much hesitancy to, at least initially, point out some positives with Jimmy Carter as I would for maybe another president.

Maybe that's arbitrary. But the first thing that I pointed out, and a lot of people have pointed this out, but it was sort of freshly. relevant because just in the past 14 months, it's been brought up, or I brought it up, is Jimmy Carter's really uniquely breaking a lot of taboos as it relates to the conflict in the Middle East. You should go back and I'm going to include this in the

fourth coming article after the new year. But if you're not familiar with it, or you forgot it, never aware of it, she really could take a look at the reaction that he received to his publication of the 2006 book, Peace, Not Apartheid, or Palestine, colon, peace, not apartheid. Just using that term apartheid was hugely controversial. It caused mass resignations on his, among the board of his Carter Center. He got totally thrashed. and a lot of the media.

He was accused of anti-Semitism by the person who is currently still serving in the U.S. State Department as the chief envoy on anti-Semitism, Deborah Lipstadt, appointed by Biden for this phony position chief envoy of anti-Semitism

where you basically just travel around like, you know, the world hosting fake summits on how to combat anti-Semitism. usually by stifling speech, which Deborah Lipsda is definitely a fan of. But she, back when that book came out, 2006-2007, accused Carter of anti-Semitism.

And Carter was also, given the unique stature of a former president, able to engage in private diplomacy, sometimes with the official sanction of the incumbent president and sometimes not, that really also broke a lot of taboos, mostly for the better, I would say. Not entirely, in some select instances for the better. Like in 1994, there was an episode where he was invited to visit North Korea by then the

founder and leader of North Korea who was still in office and is still considered the eternal leader of North Korea, despite having been dead for 30 years, Kim Il-sung. And Carter accepted the invitation without first informing Bill Clinton or receiving Bill Clinton's authorization. And then when Carter went to North Korea and diffused what at that, at that, time was considered an extremely volatile situation in terms of potential war breaking out, it then created a whole controversy around Carter allegedly undermining Bill Clinton and blah, blah, blah.

And so there were frosty relations for a while between Bill Clinton and Carter because of his insistence on doing a lot of this private diplomacy. And it wasn't private diplomacy in service of any kind of self-enrichment for the most part. It wasn't, you know, just consorting with sleazy foreign officials for its own sake. In a lot of instances, it was in service of addressing intractable geopolitical problems that Carter was uniquely positioned to address because of again, the unique stature of the post-presidency and how that granted so much access to so many hotspots. So he went to Cuba for the first time of any ex-president in 2002.

I posted some photos yesterday of him at a baseball game with Vidal Castro. And then on the middle of least is when he was most against the grain. He negotiated with Hamas, which, you know, potentially could have gotten and prosecuted for violating U.S. sanctions or materials support to terrorist laws, given the designation of Hamas, he personally mediated and helped to broker a ceasefire in 2008 between Israel and Hamas

that according to Carter, Israel later violated, leading to the first major war in Gaza, which began in earnest in December of 2008 and then lasted for about a month and a half. But he initially Carter did preempted the onset of major hostilities by his own personal private diplomacy. So I think when that stuff gets emphasized, it's understandable and probably even justifiable because of how unusual it was for somebody in Carter's position to engage in these diplomatic exercises.

There's really no one that I'm aware of that is comparable to Carter in this regard, although Herbert Hoover, who has the second longest now post-presidential time span below Carter. So Herbert Hoover left office. in 1933, and then I believe he died in 62, 61, something like that. Let's see if I'm right. I'm going to say 61. Oh, I'm off, 64. Herbert Hoover actually did a lot of also very useful private diplomacy,

mostly around Europe. He was appointed to positions. around food provision in post-war Europe ravaged from World War II. And I recently the past maybe a year and a half, two years, read for the first time his memoirs, which are very, very insightful. So Hoover's the best analog I can think to of Carter in this regard in terms of the private diplomacy. Nixon would do some stuff like this, but not as taboo-breaking as Carter. particularly on Israel, Palestine, which Carter's really in a league of his own on that.

Yeah, so those are some initial thoughts on Carter. And I'll do a more thorough article or obituary or what have you. All right, I'm going to scroll through and see if anybody has said anything of interest in the comments. Let's see. do to do to do to do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do do little it's on topic. So everybody I guess enjoy the new year, although why do you need me need me to need me to? wish you would happen to a year it's kind of trite and uh we'll reconvene soon enough fairly well