Plain English with Derek Thompson - 2022 Is Off to a Terrible Start for Democrats

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Legendary journalist James Fallows joins to discuss the filibuster wars, Democrats’ Voting Rights Act, the political outlook for Joe Biden and the Democrats, and the media’s negativity bias (as exemplified, one might argue, in the headline to this very episode). Host: Derek Thompson Guest: James Fallows Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The press box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out the press box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome back to plain English. Today I want to talk about the drama on Capitol Hill this week, the Voting Rights Act, the filibuster of the Voting Rights Act, and the way it's all blown up in Democrats' faces.

I don't really care that much about the TikTok. What I care about is what this week tells us about the state of affairs in democracy, in politics, in the Democratic Party, in Joe Biden's presidency. But I don't think you're going to get the full flavor without a bit of background. So here is the story of the last week, as best as I understand it. For the last year, Democrats have been eager to pass a voting rights bill to counter a few things. I'll name three. Number one, to counter Trump's post-election nonsense. Two, to counter a new crop of state election officials

who seem eagerly open to operationalizing Trump's post-election nonsense. And three, to counter a disturbing number of states trying to reverse expanded voting access, like Georgia's bill, for example, to take away mail-in ballot boxes, which unnecessarily complicates the process of voting by mail. So the Democratic Party says, all right, let's fight back. Let's have a new voting rights act. But this week they failed.

They failed because Republicans, who are a minority in the Senate, blocked a vote through a filibuster. Defeating a filibuster requires a 60-person majority, and there are only 50 Democratic senators. But Democrats thought they might have a way around this. Senate Democratic leaders asked their members to vote to change the filibuster rules. And if that happened, if that vote went through, it would allow them to move forward on the Voting Rights Act with a simple majority, which they would have. But that effort also failed. It failed because two Democratic senators, Kirsten Cinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia, declined to join their party's plan to override the filibuster. Now, a filibuster, remember, is a procedure that prevents a vote,

and the Democrats failed to vote to change that procedure. So if you want to know, know how bizarre and just maybe how dismal the state of American democracy is right now, consider that a pro-voting party failed to vote on a vote to pass a law about voting. That is a true sentence. But the larger truth is that everything I just told you, everything about the last week doesn't really interest me. What fascinates me is the story around the last week. How did we get here?

How did an American democracy that's supposed to be the city on the hill become the world's greatest cluge, this pathetic traffic jam of meta-votes and votes about votes, about votes, well, it's become practically impossible to pass major legislation that actually fixes problems in this country outside of a terrible crisis. And to answer that question, we have the one and only James Fallows. Jim is a legend. He was a former speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He was my former colleague at the Atlantic.

He now writes the very, very good substack newsletter, breaking the news. And you're about to hear why he's so prolific. The man speaks in perfectly finished paragraphs. I cannot imagine anybody better to discuss the decline and fall of American democracy with. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Jim Fallows, welcome to the podcast. Derek, it is a great pleasure to join you.

in this venue. Jim, let's start with this bill the Democrats want to pass. It would make election day a federal holiday. It would create a mandatory period of early voting. It would make mail voting easier. It would restore voting rights to previously incarcerated people, convicted of felonies. What do you think are the most important parts of this bill? And what are the problems that they're trying to solve? I think the most important thing about this bill is essentially resetting a marker. for how we should think about the process of voting around the country. And I say resetting because in a way, this is the eternal story of American history from the start, where the Constitution was written, of course, huge categories of people,

including all women and all non-whites were excluded. The succeeding 100 plus years can be read as a ongoing struggle for who would be able to participate in the franchise. And I think the main way I see this bill is trying to undo what happened. in 2013, when the Supreme Court, in a notorious opinion that will go down the wrong way in history, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, essentially undid the many provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And so essentially, it is resetting the clock to say what the Congress passed with strong majorities in the 1960s and onwards should be restored to the process of voting. This is Shelby County v. Holder, the landmark decision from the U.S. Supreme Court on the Voting Rights Act, specifically on Section 5.

It states that certain states and local governments must obtain federal preclearance before implementing any changes to their voting laws or practices. That was Shelby v. Holder. There's another way that a lot of Democrats are talking about this bill, which is as a response to a series of state bills and state laws passed in the aftermath of 2020, and that election and Donald Trump's efforts to overturn that election, which a lot of people see as pulling us back toward the 1920s, pulling us back toward restrictions in voting that are reminiscent to some of the Jim Crow era. How do you feel about that argument and how it intersects with the Voting Rights Act as it's written? I think both those things are true, and they both both analyses get at ways in which this issue of voting has been central to American history and the way it's come to ahead right now. There is, as you very astutely noted, the part of the Shelby

County ruling, which essentially removed the presumption under the 165 laws, states that had historically discriminated against black voters in particular had to have overcome some burden of of proof and showing why they were changing their voting roles. This was the so-called pre-clearance provision. So there's that long-term challenge that this bill is trying to deal with. And then there's the immediate one in the aftermath of the 2020 election where you've had both increased efforts at the state level to make it harder for people to vote, especially people who are not naturally in the Republican constituency, but also very recently to potentially tamper with the vote. So I think that all of these things are part of what the Democrats were trying to do with this bill.

The long arc of history, the more recent arc of obstruction to people's voting, and the impending threat of tampering with the vote. Yeah. In the most recent arc of this history, it's not just that some states are rolling back voting access, like the infamous Georgia bill to make it harder than in 2020 to request a mail-in ballot or deliver mail-in ballot. The bigger fear for some, and Barton-Gellman wrote about this, the most recent Atlantic cover story, is that Republican state officials around the country seems so willing to embrace Trump's

lies about voting fraud and so eager to screw around with the results next time if it pleases him. I don't want to be hyperpartisan here, but I don't think we've ever really seen in decades a political party openly celebrate their plan to overturn an election if their side loses. Am I being alarmist here, or is this a genuine fear? So I think it's a genuine fear. And those of us in the civilian population watched in the time between election day of 2020 and January 6th of 2021 when the Electoral College was doing its work. And of course, the insurrection at the Capitol, we heard various rumors and rumblings from states around the country of mainly Republicans who are in control of state legislatures trying to say, well, we actually should be in charge of the counting. And we will determine. how our state's electoral votes will be, will be tallied. We know now through the work of Bart Gelman and the Atlantic, through things that are coming out from the January 6th committee commission from many other sources, how serious this was and how many Republican legislators in various states actually

signed their names to what they knew to be or what facts would say were bogus electoral certificates. They thought it was a stolen election away from Donald Trump, facts say otherwise. So I think it would be rash not to take these threats very, very seriously. And for the Democrats and for Americans to see how can we make the machinery of democracy keep functioning. I want to ask you a question about how you think about the urgency of this law, because I hear two different arguments that I have time for. From the Democrat side, I have lots of time for the argument that Trump has been and is

a unique threat, that Republicans are trying to politicize the electoral process. that there are clear efforts to roll back access to voting in states like Georgia, and that there are alarming number of red state bills that aren't just curtailing voting access, but seem to, as I said, empower state officials to scrub the record if they want to change the outcome. On the other hand, let me share an argument that I hear burbling up from some people who are in the center, maybe center right.

They say, yes, Republican legislatures are constricting voting access or trying to. They are passing or trying to pass voting. ID laws that would make it harder for many people, including minorities, to vote, they should not do that. That's bad. And it would be a crisis if we had clear evidence that these efforts were working. If we could see, for example, that voting access and voter turnout was falling. But it's not falling.

It's rising. There was record high turnout in 2020. According to the census, non-white turnout has clearly increased since 2008. And so, this argument goes, Democrats shouldn't necessarily prioritize voting rights the way they have more than other urgent issues like COVID or the economy or poverty or climate change. What do you say to that latter argument? So as you would guess or might infer, the first of the arguments is more compelling to me, that if there are what would be unprecedented in modern history, intentional threats to the very integrity of the process,

not simply making it harder to vote, which has happened, you know, that has a long and bad heritage in American history. As a side note, in the late 1960s, I was actually working on voter registration efforts in Alabama and Mississippi and Georgia because of all the different grandfather tests and all the other ways they had to keep black people from voting there. So there's a long history of that. There is not as clear a recent history of trying actually to falsify or distort or tamper with the results. So I think it is important to take that seriously. On the other hand, I'm part, it is true that there has been in response to the threat of some of these controls. There was a large turnout in 2020. The 2020 election,

of course, was not under the same rules that are being proposed in many of these states. You know, these rules are being proposed in response to 2020 and what happened in Georgia, etc. So I think I would say that it's worth taking this, the voting issues, very seriously, while also recognizing there are 10 other crises to deal with the same time. That's why being president is so hard. Turning to procedure. So the vast majority of Democrats want this bill to become a law, but they fail to pass it this week. What happened this week?

Give me your brief history of why Democrats came up short. So the brief history is the nightmare of the filibuster, which I think has, you know, in its name sounds semi-comic. its original meeting with a meeting was Caribbean pirates, but it's become quite a significant impediment to the functioning of American democracy in the long run. And I think that along with voting rights, I, if I were in control, I'd be taking changes in the filibuster very seriously. The reason is, I think the calculations have come out most recently. If you had, um, so of course, the center right now is 50-50 in its partisan divide. We have the 48 Democrats and two independent.

voting one way. You have the 50 Republicans voting as a block the other way, including on voting rights and all the rest. The tie-breaking vote, of course, is with the vice president, now a Democrat. And when the Senate was set up in the Constitution, the idea was a majority of senators could carry the day except for treaties and except for impeachment, except for certain cases. Over the last century and especially the last 20 years, this is a modern phenomenon. on. Essentially, everything is now filibustered. So if you don't have 60 votes, you cannot overcome the procedural hurdle as the quaint term goes. You can't break the filibuster. And so because two Democratic senators decided to, they wouldn't vote to change the filibuster rules, the measure died.

Jim, I imagine some people, when they think about the filibuster, say, why are we trying to ditch such an old an august procedure. Like, I saw Mr. Smith goes to Washington. I remember Jimmy Stewart's filibuster. And as a matter of fact, I'm not going to leave this body until I do get them said. President, will the senator yield?

The senator yields? No, sir, I'm afraid not. That movie was in black and white. This is an old, old procedure. Don't mess with it. But tell us about why the modern use of the filibuster is so a historical

and so new. So as a technical and historical matter as you know, the filibuster is not in the Constitution at all. The Constitution says how the Senate will have a certain few things, notably impeachment treaties and the constitutional amendments where it's a supermajority, and the rest is just a majority, which would be 5149 now or 50-50. So it's not in the Constitution. It was first used at all in the early 1830s and 1840s. It rose to prominence and notoriety in the Jim Crow era. of the late 1800s and the mid-20th century,

where I think, whereas the cinematic commemoration of this is Jimmy Stewart standing up for the common man and the filibuster in Mr. Smith goes to Washington, what I, as a dreaded boomer era person remember, is in the 1960s, the likes of Strom Thurmond and his segregationist from the South filibustering civil rights legislation. But it was notable because it was a real spectacle. They had to speak for hours on end. And because it was rare, you could count on one hand the number of filibusters per year, congressional session. The rules were changed in the 1970s in ways that were supposed to be reforms in two fashions. One was the threshold for Breckney and filibuster was taken from two-thirds, which would be 67 people down to 60 senators. And the idea was that the Senate could do a couple of things at once. It could have some measures that were being filibuster.

and then it could do other things too. So the whole Senate wasn't tied up. The problem with that is starting really in 2006, not that long ago, 16 years ago, when Mitch McConnell became the minority leader of the Senate, when he had a minority in the Senate and the Democrats regained a majority, McConnell began blocking everything. And essentially, every nomination, every piece of legislation, any routine thing required 60 votes to move ahead. And also it was the so-called silent filibuster or sleeping filibuster where you just had to crook your little finger and say, you know, that you are looking for cloture as opposed to doing anything. And so that has meant this enormous modern disruption where a majority of our senior legislative body cannot act in the interest of the majority or the majority of people they represent. There are modern arguments for the filibuster.

There are people who say, you know, the Senate is supposed to be the cooling soft. of democracy. We shouldn't have a tyranny of the majority. It should be hard to do big, important things. The filibuster stops some things from happening that I don't want to happen in the first place. How do you respond to those pro-filibuster arguments? So I think I call back on the augustness of Americans even older than me, for example, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison and John Jay, who were addressing this specific issue in the Federalist papers and then the Constitution because the nightmare that led to the drafting of the Constitution, as is rarely remembered now, was the Articles of Confederation. And the Articles of Confederation

was a failure because its central government was so weak. And its central government was so weak because it was a unicameral body required a supermajority. And that exact scenario is what in the Federalist papers, Madison and Hamilton and Jay were saying we have to get around. And so the balance they imagined was the executive branch and two houses of legislature and then the judiciary. But it wasn't paralysis in the Senate. And again, I think the evidence is crystal clear that they thought the Senate itself should be a majority body. And I think the clenching point here is the clause in the Constitution that says the vice president shall have no vote unless the Senate be, equally divided. That implies the idea that it can be equally divided, then you'd have to tip the balance one way or another. So I think that the, yes, there are such things as tyranny of the

majority, and yes, there are crucial minority rights to be, to be preserved at great costs. But the U.S. has fallen in the last 15 years into minority rule, which is what the Constitution was designed to avoid. It's become a situation where we can't do. anything big because the 60 vote threshold makes it practically impossible to pass almost any important legislation unless there is extraordinary and extraordinarily rare bipartisan agreement. So, for example, I look back to the early 2020 stimulus or relief bill, a really, really important piece of legislation that sent thousands of dollars to ordinary families in the

middle of a pandemic. That was fantastic, but it was only made possible by the fact that lots of Democrats. in a crisis agreed to sign on to a Republican-led agenda. And it's so rare that a crisis essentially shakes up the normal situation in American politics and creates a scenario where collective will overcomes the gravity of the filibuster. What about the hypocrisy argument? Whenever Democrats say we need to get rid of the filibuster, you can bet that within a Millessecond, Republicans will start tweeting that in 2020, Democrats passed or Democrats attempted

as many or more filibusters than in any other year of American history. So Democrats are using this tool and then the very next year suggesting that we should get rid of it. How do you feel about the hypocrisy argument? So I think the historical record is clear on two things. One is, it is beyond reasonable dispute that through most of its history, the filibuster has essentially been a tool of anti-black measures. It's been a tool for opposing civil rights measures. It was a tool during Jim Crow. That's been its main use over time. It also is beyond reasonable dispute that the recent arms race was fueled mainly by McConnell in 2016. And now both both sides, as we so much love saying, are using this destructive tool to magnify their effect.

But it's something where this was a race begun in recent times by McConnell and his Republicans, and it is to all of our detriment. Can I make one brief statistical point, which I think bears on everything we're discussing? So this is something that none of us can change, but it really affects the world we lived in. When the Constitution was drafted in 1787 or signed in 1787, as you well know, it was a whole fabric of compromises, the most notorious of which is the three-fifths of a man definition of people who were enslaved. One of the compromises was two votes, two senators per state, whether big states or small states. And a big state then was Virginia and a small state was Delaware. And Virginia had then 10,

times as many people as Delaware. Right now, California has 70 times as many people as Wyoming. And the number of the combination of the disproportion in state size and the recent rise of the filibuster means that in theory, senators representing 10, 15 percent of the population can obstruct something that senators representing 80 percent of the population are trying to do. That is convenient in a partisan way for some people now, it is destructive for any democracy in the long run. On the hypocrisy argument, John Chait, I thought made a pretty interesting point. We compared it to a manager in the American League who wants to eliminate the designated hitter rule. He said it would not be hypocritical to continue to use a designated hitter if in fact the rule remained in place.

And so similarly, it might be logically consistent to continue to use the filibuster while it exists when you're in the minority, but also insisting when you're in the majority that we should probably end this rule entirely precisely because it's not just being a cooling saucer in American democracy, it seems to be a cooling saucer in all progress. We can't pass any large legislation as long as the minority has rule over the majority. So if we decide that the filibuster must die, how does it die? How do we kill it? So, and that's a wonderful analogy, which I wish it occurred to me two minutes ago. I'm glad you brought it up also like the famous meme. You criticize society and yet you participated in society. Yes, exactly. So I think as a technical matter, of course, the rules of the Senate can be changed at any time by a majority of the Senate. So if the Democrats or.

Republicans had a super majority now or if the Democrats could even hold together their 50 vote block with independents, they could change the rule of the Senate. And they could say, well, there are carve-outs. Of course, they did that recently for to avoid the idiocy of the debt ceiling, which is a whole different topic we can get into. And there are times when in emergencies, legislatures can find ways to invent rules for that emergency. So operationally, it requires a voting majority of the Senate to change those rules. And that in turn requires, what turns on the senators who are elected, and that leads to get out the vote and have the votes be allowed and counted. So Democrats, in theory, control the Senate. Why couldn't they do this? Why couldn't they kill the

filibuster in exactly the way you just described? One could ask about the Republicans and why every single one of them refuse to support the Voting Rights Act, et cetera, et cetera, or the filibuster. But of course, there are two Democrats who are the center of attention. Joe mentioned of West Virginia and Carson Cinema of Arizona. I think that Joe mentions both, Joe Manchin's motivation is easier for the outside world to comprehend than Senator Sinemas, which is he is a Democrat from West Virginia, which in recent elections has been the second most Republican voting state in the union after Wyoming. So the fact that he is a Democrat at all there is something that could give him a pass. One of the points that Joe Biden made in his

speech in Arizona, which I liked better than most people did, was his saying that history will judge how people stand on these big issues and what do you stand for in the long run as holding a job that important. But at least mention you can say, well, he's from a Republican state. Cinema, it is unknown to me and it appears to be unknown to the sort of sentient, sentient world, what she is doing because she's from a state where she's plummeted in popularity. as she's taken these stands. She's never said what exactly she would take to have her song on with a member of the big Democratic bills. And her speech on the floor about why she believed in the Philbuster was, I won't say it was a tissue of falsehoods, but it was a tissue of just grotesque fantasy

of imagining this would be a reasoning way for the Senate to come together, which, again, no reasoning person can think anymore. There was a way in which this entire week was a kind of unfortunate microcosm for the first 12 months of the Biden presidency, which is the juxtaposition of enormous hopes dashed upon the rocks of reality. And I want to close with Biden. There was an NBC poll released just this week where they asked voters whether they thought Biden had done, quote, better than expected, worse than expected, or just about as you expected, end quote. And this is a poll they've done since the early 90s. Just 5% of respondents said that Biden had been better than they expected. That is the lowest of any president since they started asking the question of President

Bill Clinton in 1994. As for worse than expected, Biden got 36%. That is the highest since 1994. Jim, what is your big picture diagnosis of what's gone wrong here? It's a job that's being made even more difficult than it would necessarily, be by a lot of the habits of our colleagues in the press. One of these habits is, is taking the temperature every minute or every day of how he's doing, which is like seeing whether you have COVID by taking your temperature every, every five minutes or the trends of disease by, by minute, by minute readings. There is a history suggests to us that most of the things that affect a president are longer term larger than he can hear.

she will only can handle minute by minute day by day in the White House. And it is hard, it sort of goes against our nature in the press to recognize things that have not turned into the disasters they might have. You very well know, Derek, and I've written about the jobs quasi-miracle of the last, the post-pandemic period, the post-onset of pandemic period in the U.S. where two years ago there were headlines about layouts in the scale of the Great Depression. And now, of course, across the country, worker shortages are the main issue, which is a problem, but it's a better problem than the other one. Inflation is a problem, but a better problem than the other one.

So I think that Biden, his greatest, I mentioned one other thing about Biden. The turn in his approval rating seems to have coincided with his exit from Afghanistan, which I believe history will congratulate him for. He was, every president, what you, what I learned from seeing a president in action is that a president spends every minute of his waking life, making choices they're too difficult for anybody else to make. If it's a 51, 49 choice, somebody else will make it. You get only the 50.001 choices versus 49.999, where you're going to make somebody mad, do something wrong. Afghanistan was a choice that the previous series of presidents had avoided as by. Biden said. And the execution of that exit was worse than it could have been, but much less disastrous

than the first week or two of coverage suggested. And I think that that was a, that shifted the narrative of Biden, oh, a presidency in trouble, et cetera, et cetera. These administrations are longer than they seem. Bill Clinton was very unpopular at times. Jimmy Carter was very popular, you know, at a comparable time in his administration. So I don't know. what the future holds for Biden, but I think we in the press could do a better job of trying to show the world proportionately and in its full reality. I want to hold on your press criticism before we get back to the macro conditions, because you crystallized something for me that I had never quite put together. I have said many times,

and do strongly believe, that the press has a negativity bias. This is an old idea. It's not my idea. When it bleeds, it leads, has been said for decades before I was born. But I see this. You see it in audiences, too. Sometimes at the Atlantic or maybe a substack, you can test headlines and you can try out certain interpretations of reality with a neutral spin versus a negative spin and see that with the exact same story, with all the same paragraphs, you know, three times more people will click on the story that has a negative headline than a neutral headlines. The negativity bias exists both in the press and in the audience. But what also exists is what one could call like a pro-agency bias, a bias toward giving the president a kind of

super heroic power to be a hero or a villain. So for example, I've written and read extremely popular articles about how Biden could or, you know, be the next FDR, how something he had done was extremely promising. Those get a good number of clicks. They're positive, but they're deeply hopeful. On the other hand, of course, if people write something about how the Biden presidency is an utter failure, that is going to get an enormous number of hits. I'll tell you what doesn't get a large number of hits, and I know this because I wrote this article and approximately seven people read it. I wrote that, you know, we sometimes think of the presidency as the captain of a ship, and that metaphor might be even better than we think, because the captain

of a ship in a hurricane can't do shit. You can turn the wheel. this way and that, but fundamentally, you are the victim of a storm, not the author of your destiny, to a certain extent. No one read it. No one wants to hear about how the president is the direct object of the craziness of the world rather than the author of American destiny. And I guess I just wonder how you feel about the concept of an agency bias in American journalism. Yes, and speaking as one of your constituency who read and agreed with that piece. I'm glad to say, I was really glad to you wrote that. And there is, you know, our colleagues also refer to this, often refer to this as the green lantern myth that if the president would only do X, Y, or Z, suddenly he could solve all these things.

Our history is biased in this favor. We read about Lincoln and we read about FDR or read about FDR. Bill Clinton famously and notoriously said that the great presidents all had some kind of wartime crisis. They dealt with George W. Bush. There were all the ways in which he fully became president on 9-11 and the disaster's decision to invade Iraq. So I think there are parts of human nature that biases us all in this direction. But I think the press, because many of our colleagues' business is covering the president. and who's in and out in the White House. And this chief of staff doing well.

And is this person rising? Is this person wanting to, on the ends or on the outs? You want to think that those things really matter. And that as opposed to the semiconductor shortage worldwide, which actually is a huge supply chain factor, as you know, and that Biden couldn't do anything about tomorrow if he wanted to. And Teddy Roosevelt couldn't either. And even Abraham Lincoln couldn't either.

And so a president, I guess for sanity in that role, a president needs to balance the sense there are certain things where a national leader will be expected to speak up and say something and do something. That was one of many grotesque omissions on the part of the previous incumbent. But also a president is sort of a not an orchestra leader, but but the small town mayor's role, weirdly, is something. thing that a, well, I'll put it a different way. Dwight Eisenhower, who had been a heroic global commander in World War II, the largest armed force in the world's ever seen at that point, recognized as president he often could do more by doing less and trying to set the conditions for things to occur, but not being in the center of people's attention every minute. Yeah, you make a really interesting point, which is the great historical figures solve,

tractable problems. And it makes me wonder whether Biden's problems might be, at least partly intractable. I mean, the president alone, the executive branch alone, does not set global gas prices. The president alone has very limited control

over the month-to-month inflation rate. The president can say all sorts of wonderful, true things about American auto manufacturing, but cannot really set the dial for used car prices, which in many ways are dragging inflation up. Do you think that Biden might just be in a situation a little bit akin to Harry Truman

in this sort of crazy post-war period of the late 1940s when inflation went crazy as we were totally shifting the economy from making tanks to making station wagons? Is it possible that he's in a similar position where he just doesn't have in his arsenal the tools that solve the problems that Americans are currently paying attention to?

That is a very good point. And you can think of other comparisons, excuse me, with obvious differences among them with Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and the first George Bush. And in all those cases, each of those presidents did, with Harry Truman too, did very important, decisive things. But their political fate was often determined by things outside their direct control. And to take this back to where we began, the parts of these long-term trans- president really can address are in things like infrastructure bills and research spending and broadband and all these other educational programs, which our paralysis of governance has made all the harder to do now. Eisenhower could have his interstate highway program and his National Defense Education Act, but he didn't have a filibuster working against him in those days. Joe Biden calls you tonight. He says, Jim, you've watched presidency's rise and fall. You work with a one-term Democratic president who was beset by international conditions that he couldn't quite get a hold of, was set by maybe a similar sense of national malaise.

What should I do? What is the thing that I should say and what is the thing that I should do in executive policy that would give me the best chance to win in 2024 and Democrats the best chance to staunch the bleeding this November? I would hurriedly become a bear on America's prospect of calling me for advice because the implementation is hard and, you know, especially dealing with the Senate, he knows something about. I guess I would reinforce a crucial temperamental point. I think is part of Biden's nature and can buoy him up during the hard times he's having now, which is that people want two things from a president temperamental. in the long run. They want a sense of long-term confidence. You know, think of famously of FDR and think even of

Lincoln. And, you know, they want somebody who thinks there is, there is some way ahead that we can all aspire to. And I think that has come more naturally to Biden. And they want somebody who they think of as empathetic and can imagine their hardships. And so in different ways, different presidents have succeeded if they, the presence who have succeeded have conveyed those two things. And I think they're both more or less within Biden's nature. So I would say, let Joe be Joe. Okay, let Joe be Joe. Jim, thank you so, so much. Derek, it's an honor and pleasure. Thanks so much. Plain English with Derek Thompson. It's produced by Devin Manzi. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, and review us. New episode drops on Tuesday. Have a great weekend.