Pod Save America - “Podsgiving mailbag!”

Episode Date: November 21, 2018

Dan and Jon answer questions about the midterms, 2020, Never Trump Republicans, Iowa, the Senate, Fox News, the plutocracy, and our favorite Thanksgiving traditions. Then Doris Kearns Goodwin talks to Jon about her new book on presidential leadership.

Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Later in the episode, you'll hear my interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of the new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times. I spoke to Doris just before the election, and we've saved this interview just for you for Thanksgiving. Exciting stuff. Do you think Doris Kearns Goodwin is disappointed that Ron Chernow got the nod over her to speak at the White House Correspondents Center this year? I was just telling Lovett that he should write a comedy speech for Ron Chernow just to foil the best laid plans of the White House Correspondents Association.

Ron Chernow is a great writer and a great historian, but he doesn't scream fun Saturday night to me. Right, which is what they wanted, but I think we should just upend the whole thing and he should just tell a bunch of jokes. But first, we're going to do our annual Thanksgiving mailbag. This is now our tradition, Dan, that you and I do every Thanksgiving.

It's our second time, I guess, or third time? I feel like we might have done it in the Keepin' It 1600 days. Maybe. Yeah, I think that's right. But I can't quite remember. I've blocked out

most of those days. Right, me too. I'm aware we had a podcast. Not sure we said anything. We didn't make any predictions. Just wipe it from your mind, people. Okay. So let's dig into the mailbag here.

Thank you all, by the way, for submitting so many questions on Facebook, on Twitter, on Instagram, all over the place. We will start with Teresa Molina, who asks, how does John view 2018 through the lens of the wilderness? What mistakes did Dems repeat? What did they get right? Did they show evidence of learning lessons and taking a new direction? You've all heard this because we've talked about it a million times, but the wilderness is the series that I did on the history and future of the Democratic Party. Yeah, I thought that Democrats learned a lot of lessons since 2016. And, you

know, a lot of that lesson learning happened in the days and weeks after 2016. I think that we recruited some outstanding candidates in 2018, especially younger candidates, women, people of color, it was a more diverse field. They didn't come from the typical backgrounds of your normal candidates that we recruit often. That was one of the messages out of the wilderness. I think the party had very good message discipline, focusing on healthcare and pre-existing conditions. I think we learned how to be a big tent party. There were folks from, you know, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Joe Manchin that we ran. And, you know, there were some debates and fights that played out over the course of 2018, but nothing so bad as to really hurt the party in the fall. Um, I think we learned to focus more on down ballot races, investing in state parties,

sort of returning the center of power and the democratic party back to the grassroots. And, um, I think some candidates like Beto O'Rourke relied more on digital organizing and less on traditional media. So they thought that was good too. In the mistakes category, I don't know if we made any big mistakes, but I still think we probably need to be less afraid and more confident in our immigration messaging. I think we still need to be talking about a bolder economic agenda in 2020. And I'm sure you agree on this one, but I'd like to hear more from you on this. I still think we probably need a sharper media strategy, a way to figure out how to break through the clutter of the current media environment and get our message out directly to voters. What do you think, Dan? I mean, let's stipulate that the Democrats did a phenomenal job. We won races up and down the

ballot. We picked up more than 350 latest seats. We picked up governorships. We did a great job. We won races up and down the ballot. We picked up more than 350 latest seats. We picked up governorships. We did a great job. So the things I'm about to say are not raining on the parade that we should still be having from the election. It's more to point out the things we have to improve upon to win in 2020, because 2020 is going to be much harder, because you will be actually running against Trump. And the problem, it is Democrats, as you point out, did a great job with message discipline by focusing on healthcare and the Republican tax cut plan and ignoring Trump. It's just a lot harder to ignore Trump when you are running against Trump and when he is on the ballot. And presidential races drive everything in a presidential year, right? How our Democratic

nominee handles Trump is going to impact as perhaps as much as anything else, the things that drive gubernatorial races and Senate races and House races. So we really have to figure that piece out and improve upon it and do it creatively. We should also just recognize that we had a lot of things going in our direction here, right? We had the momentum. This was the first midterm of a presidential, which often goes well for us. And the question for the party is, knowing that, the party did a very, very good job. We did a great job recruiting candidates. We did a great job organizing. We did a great job funding candidates. We expanded the playing field. And the habit sometimes the Democratic Party is, when we're at bottom, we do a lot of things right. And

then once we get to a better position, we sort of relax. We stop investing in down ballot races. We return to some of our old habits. I think that's kind of what happened in 2016. And the hope is we're going to make sure that doesn't happen in 2020. And the two areas that I think we really need to focus on are coming up with new tools and new strategies that reflect the modern age of politics. We won despite this fact in 2018, but too many of our campaigns look just like the campaigns of 2016. Huge emphasis on television advertising, direct mail, not enough focus on digital advertising, digital organizing. And the candidates that you highlight, Beto, obviously,

has been talked about most, but there are others who did a really good job around digital communications, digital organizing. And we are going to have to build on that in 2020 if we want to have a chance to beat Trump. Because Trump, look, he got an assist from Jim Comey, he got assists from the Russians, he barely won. But he didn't do all the same things that presidential candidates typically do. He spent less money on TV. He spent a lot of money on digital. He did very clever experimentation on digital where they were testing dozens, if not hundreds of messages at a time and then doubling downs on the ones that were showing the most response. It's pretty clever things.

And we're going to have to up our game if we're going to defeat that, in part because Trump did that at a financial disadvantage last time. And in 2020, he's going to have a massive financial advantage because all of those billionaires who sat out 2016 because they thought Trump was going to lose now have their giant massive tax cut on the line. They're going to be pouring money into helping Trump. So he will have the ability to massively outspend the Democratic nominee. So we're going to have to be smarter and more efficient than we've ever been in the past. Yes. Yes, we will. Second question comes from Emerson Boettcher, who says, Wisconsin, let's talk about the Tammy Baldwin and Scott Walker voters. What's up with that? Tammy won by a reasonable margin and Scott lost such a tiny margin.

Who are those people in the middle? Do they just like incumbents? How do they view Tammy's job differently than Scott's? That is a great question that we're going to be forced basically to speculate on because unless you go back and do sort of a regression poll and talk to people who actually were those voters? You don't really know, but I will make some guesses. One is, it's a dwindling group, but there still are a group of people who go back and forth between parties in between elections, and are split-ticket voters, right? There is a reason that there are states with Democratic senators and Republican governors and Republican governors and Democratic senators, right? And so that does happen. It's fewer and fewer. I think what helped Tammy Baldwin is one, she is very progressive, but she ran everywhere in the state of Wisconsin,

campaigned hard in red areas, rural areas, exurban areas. But she also had the other reason that I think some of these voters might have been willing to support Walker, which I can't even fathom that because I think Scott Walker is terrible. So terrible he couldn't even beat Jeb Bush or Ben Carson in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. But the argument that you needed to check on Trump is why someone might consider voting for the Republican governor, but having a Democratic senator. That's interesting. I also think, you know, incumbency matters less and is mattering less with each cycle. But, you know, Tammy Baldwin was a more known quantity than Tony Evers, who won the governorship. So you could see some people because they recognize

Tammy Baldwin's, again, these are like, you know, sort of voters who are moderate, independent, maybe they don't vote very often, but they recognize Tammy Baldwin, they've seen her around, and maybe they don't know Tony Evers as much. So I do, incumbency probably matters a little bit too. And look, I mean, in situations like this, things other than partisanship and ideology matter to people sometimes. Candidate quality matters. You know, positions on various issues matter, or in terms of like what those candidates are talking about on the campaign trail. So like you said, we can't know for sure, but there are a few possible factors at play there. It's worth spending time trying to understand these voters, right? So you also have, in a similar situation, Ohio, where you have people who voted for Sherrod Brown for Senate

and Mike DeWine for governor. Right. And like understanding, same thing in some of these other states, right? And I mean, there are people who were DeSantis Nelson voters in Florida. There were 400,000 people in Texas who voted for Beto O'Rourke for Senate and Greg Abbott for governor. And the reason we need to understand these voters is in states, particularly in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, these are the voters that we need them to be in the Democratic column in 2020 if we want to win those states. So the fact that we lost some of those voters in 2016 was one of the major factors contributing to Democratic struggles

in traditionally blue Midwestern states. Yep. Okay, next question. Brendan Getzel on Instagram said, related to the developments with Tim Miller, definers, Facebook, etc. Where do you stand on the view of many, particularly on hard left Twitter, but also elsewhere, that accommodating never Trump Republicans in general is universally bad? First, we put out a statement this week on Tim Miller, who's no longer contributing to Crooked. And if you're interested, you guys can find that full statement on Crooked Media's Twitter feed. On the broader question, I do think it's valuable to hear from Never Trump Republicans, and here's why. We talk about Crooked Media, right? We are a media company in many ways, and we're sort of a political activism-based company in many ways. I don't believe in balance for the sake of balance,

like a regular media company might i don't think like oh we have five democrats and so we need five republicans to balance it out and you know you've all heard us uh shit all over the civility debate many times too so that's not a big deal from a political perspective from an activist perspective i believe that we do need Republicans voting Democrat in order to assemble a progressive governing majority, partly for some of the reasons we just talked about. Like the reason that Orange County is blue right now is not because a bunch of Democrats voted and a bunch of Republicans stayed home. It's because, yes, the counties in general became younger and more diverse and democrats turned out like they never have before all that happened all that's super important but a whole bunch of republicans who um are you know they believe in the republican party or at least what the

republican party used to be uh they're conservative by nature but they hate donald trump and they decided to vote for democrats. And by the way, we also won some voters in this last midterm election who voted for Trump in 2016 and then decided to come back to the Democratic Party in 2018 or vote for Democrats for the first time. So I believe that we need to persuade Republicans to vote Democrat. I don't think we should do that by changing our positions on issues, moderating, pursuing centrism, any of that garbage. But I do believe that if you have a few Republicans who are thinking about voting Democrat, and they can hear from another Republican who says, you know what, I didn't like Donald Trump, and I didn't

want to vote for him. And by the way, I think a lot of what my party stands for right now is garbage and it's changed. I think if you hear someone like that and you're a Republican who's not sure who you're voting for, you might be more likely to vote for a Democrat. And that to me is important. And that's why, you know, that's why in the first place we wanted to have Tim on this on, uh, to contribute a few times here and there. And again, we didn't have Tim on this to contribute a few times here and there. And again, we didn't have many Republicans at all. Tim was the only one. And it's not like he came on and talked about all of his conservative views that we disagree with.

But I think when people can hear from a Republican who says, I don't like Trump, I don't like what the Republican Party has become, and here's why. I think that helps Democrats build a progressive majority. I agree with that. I think the important word to focus on in that question is accommodate. Yeah. Right. Like there are some people out there in sort of democratic establishment world who have chosen to celebrate some of these never Trumpers, right? As if they are moral voices for American democracy, right? Like, let's recognize that Bill Kristol has been full of shit all of his life. And he just now happens to, like, he is to media coverage like what a moth is to a flame. It just happens that right now the best way for him to get media coverage is the shit on Donald Trump. I'm sure he doesn't

actually like Donald Trump, but it is useful to him to do that. I do not celebrate Bill Kristol. I do not. If Democrats take power, I don't think they should give Bill Kristol a job. He shouldn't get the Presidential Medal of Freedom. But I do think, to your point, that the hardest thing right now in political communications is to pierce information filter bubbles. There's a compelling message about Trump that you and I could say to the Calis game home, former President Barack Obama could say to them, to the Calis game home, and it wouldn't mean anything. It's immediately dismissed because it's like Obama hacks or Obama or the fake New York Times or whatever else. But

Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, that is an interesting title, or John McCain's former campaign manager. And so to the extent that we can take the messages that never Trumpers use and communicate them to soft Republican or independent voters as ways to break up parts of the Trump coalition so Democrats can have power, I'm all for that. And the second we have power and they come after us, we'll be back at battle. I don't want to have drinks with them. I don't want to hang out with them. I don't want to golf with them. But if they can help us win elections by using the things they are saying to persuade voters, then I am more than willing to do that. Yeah. And again, it's like, I come to this from a purely tactical political perspective here. If you can show me math that gets us a

democratic president, a democratic Senate and a democratic house with a hundred percent democratic voters or a democratic leaning independence. Great. Show me that map. Show me the math, show me the strategy. But what I've seen over the last couple years is that you need at least some, not many, a shrinking amount, frankly, but you need some Republicans and independent-leaning Republicans to join that coalition in order to have a working, governing, and progressive majority. And I'm interested in figuring out how to get to those voters without sacrificing any of our values or changing our position on any of the issues that we hold dear. I'm interested in that. And I think it's important, you know? The point that I am sympathetic to that undergirds some of this criticism is there is this sort of culture in Washington of, we're going to do battle on the campaign trail and you're going to try to destroy everything I believe in and take down a person I care about. But then afterwards, we're going to try to destroy everything I believe in and take down a person I care about.

But then afterwards, we're going to take off the gloves and we're going to go have a beer and then we're going to get corporate clients together. Right? Like that is bullshit and people have every right to think that's bullshit. Because if you can think about it that way, then your life is going so well that politics is just a game and you don't have any actual stake in what's happening. And this doesn't mean you have to punch the first Republican you see. But there is this sense of – it's just like you're playing pickup basketball and you're like jawing at each other or you get into an argument. And then when it's over, you just go have a beer. Politics is much more serious than that. And I am, I do understand the frustration that a lot of people,

particularly on the left, about sort of the cozy relationships between Democratic and Republican political operatives that are usually centered around making money together. Yeah, right. No, that makes sense. And, and, well, and I treat Republicans that I'm friends with and family with like, you know, you just don't talk about politics that much because you said politics is it is more serious. And so, you know, it's not fun to argue it all the time, but it's also not like you're going to just pretend that the differences don't exist and that they only exist in the public sphere, you know. Okay. Nicole Morris asks, how will the passage of Amendment 4 in Florida change the electorate? Are the now eligible voters likely Democrats or Republicans? Also, how likely are they to vote? Just for some context here, in 2016, more than 418,000 African Americans out of a voting

age population of more than 2.3 million, or 17.9% of the potential black voters in Florida had finished sentences but couldn't vote due to a felony record, according to the sentencing project. And Mark Meredith of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Morse at Yale and Harvard, they did some work on this and they wrote for Vox, had all ex-felons been eligible to vote in Florida in 2016, we estimate that this would have generated about 102,000 additional votes for Democrats and about 54,000 additional votes for Republicans, with about an additional 40,000 votes that could be cast on behalf of either party. So that adds up to about 48,000 votes on net for Democrats.

What do you think about this, Dan? Huge, you know, obviously, it's, first of all, it's one of the best things that happened on election night, just because it's the right thing to have happened. Whether these people who have been formally incarcerated vote Democrat or Republican, the fact that they have the right to vote now is just a good thing and it is the right thing to do. But beyond that, obviously, there are political implications. There are a lot of people running around saying, now that this amendment's passed, Florida is a blue state. And that is dangerously naive, in my view. Certainly, there is a slightly larger pool of potential Democratic voters than

newly potential Republican voters who are available. And Florida is a state that is deciding elections right now by less than a half of 1%. So everything can be decisive, right? And so if Democrats are successful in turning out this new population of potential Democratic voters at a rate that somewhat nears how well they're turning out other voters, then if that were the case now, then Andrew Gilliland would be governor and Bill Nelson would still be in the Senate. And so I think it matters. We need every little bit of help we can. It's going to take a lot of work to get these people registered and turned out. And it's going to take a lot of work to get these people registered and turned out. But this idea that it somehow is going to fundamentally change the direction of politics in Florida, I think, overstates the case.

Yeah. Although, as we saw with the margins that we saw on Tuesday, it won't change the overall direction of politics, but it certainly matters in close races. Yeah. Well, everything matters. If someone in Broward County could design a fucking ballot that made sense bill nelson would still be in the senate there's just it's not as if ballot design issues have never happened in florida before since ballot design issues are why george w bush became president there's just no excuse for that look so i know that each state runs their own you know election system but isn't there a way that like someone could introduce

or propose sort of like a universal ballot design for the whole country that's easy and simple that maybe states that like it can all adopt like isn't that something we can do i don't know there are federal recommendations on how you do this i am told um unfortunately uh broward county chose to do it in a very weird way and sadly uh the florida democratic party signed off on the ballot as is i believe so cool cool that's not great um okay mb holm o2 asks how do we prevent the democratic presidential field in 2020 from being like the republicans in 2016 or is there not an equivalent of Trump on the left to worry about? What do you think, Dan? There is not the equivalent of Trump on the left to worry about. I take a different view, I think. I think you and I probably take the same view, but a different view than a lot of people

in Democratic politics right now who are sort of panicking about the size of the field. And part of that is based on looking at the Republican process in 2016 that had a thousand candidates and led to Trump, and the Democratic process in 2016, which was a long and at times brutal primary that had bad feelings that lingered for a long time. I worry about everything. The new motto for Democrats is- Worry about everything. I don't tell people not to worry about anything anymore. I say, worry about everything, panic about nothing. And I don't worry about this too much because I think

a big field will engender the best debate that we as a party need to have on policy, message, and strategy. I do too. I also don't think there is an equivalent of Trump on the left that we have to worry about. I mean, Trump was also, one of the ways that Trump was unique is that even though he was sort of laughed off at the beginning by us, by many people in the early months of that campaign. He's also someone with, you know, almost universal name ID. Everyone knew who he was. He is a billionaire. So he started with a set of advantage, in addition to being a complete asshole, which he has turned out to be. He has kept that promise. You know, he was also a billionaire, or who knows how rich he is, who was famous. And so far, knock on wood,

we haven't had any truly asshole famous billionaires on the left, like Trump, who've decided to throw their hat in the ring. Maybe that changes. Maybe that changes. But for now, when you look at the field, you don't see any Trump-like figures with that kind of recognition. The completely ass-backwards way in which most people in politics view the 2016 Republican presidential primary is that this giant field of many, many candidates all qualified, the leading lights of the Republican Party, this giant field allowed this up-and-comer who come out of nowhere and win the election. That is horseshit. As you point out, Trump had 100% name ID. He was leading in the polls when he got in the race. And in public and private polling back in 2011, when he was on his birther crusade, he was leading the Republican primary then for the race he eventually decided

not to get into. So he has been a – someone in the Republican Party base has been interested in being their standard bearer for a very long time. And so the problem wasn't that there were a lot of Republicans running that allowed Trump to win. The problem is the Republicans running were terrible at running campaigns and therefore Trump was able to win. Amber Larson asks, why is Iowa so important? You've said it many times in the pod and I would love more information. Happy Thanksgiving, friends. Happy Thanksgiving to you, Amber.

Iowa is important because it is the first state that holds a primary contest. It is a caucus in Iowa. And traditionally, because it gets so much attention, because every candidate goes there and, you know, many of them visit all 99 counties. And they get to meet voters up close and the voters get to sort of, as Obama used to say, kick the tires a little bit on all the candidates. There's all this drama around the Iowa caucuses so that when whoever wins, and often the people who come in second, candidates who come in second as well, get this huge boost of momentum headed into the New Hampshire primary, which is usually the next contest. And also incredibly important. which is usually the next contest, and also incredibly important. So because there's so much media attention on Iowa and then New Hampshire,

the winners of those contests, especially in a crowded field, get enough attention, momentum, fundraising, all this kind of stuff, that as we start going on to all the other primary contests, it starts to usually winnow down the field of candidates. Although, you know, this could be changing. Do you think that's changing at all, Dan? No. The Democrat who has won the Iowa caucuses has become the nominee in every recent election other than 1992, when Iowa was non-competitive, because then Iowa Senator Tom Harkin was running for president, so all the candidates decided to take a pass on it. But Al Gore won, Barack Obama won, Hillary Clinton won, John Kerry won. All of those candidates went on to be the nominee. I think that will remain

true, although it's a little more complicated now because California has moved up in the presidential primary process. And that's a large chunk of delegates to any candidate who can win that by a decent margin. But the other thing about Iowa is it's a caucus, not a primary. And so you're not asking, you're not organizing to get someone to vote for you. You're organizing someone to go to a gym or a church or a community center on a weeknight where it is freezing fucking cold and usually snowing, and to stay in that gym for two to three hours and engage, not just to vote for you, but to engage in a public debate about who they're supporting until the delegates for that caucus site are allocated. It's a very complicated process. And because of that, it is therefore a gigantic test

of a campaign's ability to organize and run a real campaign. And so it does separate the wheat from the chaff when it comes to who's running a real campaign and who's running sort of a bullshit publicity ride. Yeah. And it also sort of, we knew in 2007, when we were like 15, 20 points behind Hillary in the national polls, that we still had a chance to win the nomination. Because if Obama could just focus on Iowa and win Iowa, then all these national polls showing him 10 points behind Hillary wouldn't matter as much because he would get so much momentum from winning Iowa that it would take care of the rest, which is exactly what happened.

That's true. So Iowa also gives candidates a chance who might not have the organization, the money, the endorsements of the frontrunner to really make a stand. Okay, John Fogerty asks, if Beto doesn't run in 2020, does he risk falling into the Chris Christie trap of losing momentum? Chris Christie. Yes, Beto. If you do not run for president, you will find yourself in just a few years fetching McDonald's for some person who does not like

you and is really publicly mean to you. So as you ponder the various paths your life could take in the coming months, consider the example of Chris Christie or- Time for some traffic in El Paso. ... consider the example of Marco Rubio, who chose not to run for president in 2012. And then he became such a national laughingstock that he lost his own home state to Donald Trump. And Marco Rubio could be last seen tweeting 68 times about how Democratic lawyers were trying to steal an election in Florida. Look what he's been reduced to now. But yeah, I mean, to be serious about this, I don't think Beto O'Rourke ever runs the risk of becoming Chris Christie. But I do think in all seriousness, there is a moment, there is a window for each candidate

to run for president. And I know that, at least I believe, that in 2008, Barack Obama really, at least when I got to the Senate in 2005, he genuinely didn't think he would run for president. In 2008, at least. And as he was trying to make that decision and figure out whether he did want to run 2008 as 2006, 2007 rolled around, you know, I think one of the pieces of advice he got was people are looking to you right now. You have a lot of popularity right now. And there is a moment, there's a window for you to run this election. And if you miss that window, it may not happen again. I 100% agree with that. And presidential campaigns are about a match between a person and the moment. And there are a lot of reasons to

believe that this could be Beto's moment. And the political landscape is filled with the carcasses of politicians who passed up a race because they didn't know when their moment was. And I think back a lot about something that Michelle Obama would tell undecided voters in Iowa. At the very end of the caucuses, at the end of every event, they would gather undecided caucus goers to meet with the soon-to-be First Lady of the United States. And a lot of these Iowans, they really liked Obama. They were fired up by him. They were inspired by him. But they didn't know if now was Obama's time. And they also really liked Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or other people running. And they'd say to Mrs. Obama, I want to vote for Barack for president one day.

And they'd say to Mrs. Obama, I want to vote for Barack for president one day, right? But maybe I can support Hillary now and then support Barack four or eight years from now. And Michelle would say to them that this is Barack's moment. It will not be the same four or eight years from now. We'll be four or eight years removed from our lives as very normal people. We will be four or eight years more part of some sort of political establishment that this is the moment for Barack. And the enthusiasm that you see for Beto O'Rourke that fueled his campaign that you see in the anticipation among a lot of people in the grassroots bottom line for president, there's no reason to believe that it will be there in four or eight years. And there's a lot of reason to believe it almost certainly won't be there in four or eight years. Yeah. Now I remember the speeches she would give that she'd say, we're normal now. We're still normal because we haven't lived in Washington for that long. And the longer you're in Washington, the less normal you become. And you know, Beto,

even though he's been a three-term congressman now, he still has that sort of normalcy that comes with not having spent a ton of time in Washington. Stacey Abrams has the same thing. Andrew Gillum has the same thing. A lot of the other candidates. So I think that is something to consider. Tom Changway Lynn asks, what can be done to take Mitch McConnell's seat in 2020? Our friend Mitch is up in 2020. What do we do? Well, a couple of things here. One, let's stipulate it's Kentucky, so this will be hard, no doubt. Super hard. But Kentucky in a presidential election year is different than Kentucky in a midterm year when McConnell won last. And in the time since McConnell last faced the ballot, he has become

the face of everything that is wrong in American politics. And if my imaginary but very well-funded super PAC were to become real, one of the things you would start doing is you would start advertising shortly in a two-year spread to try to inform the people of Kentucky about all the things that Mitch McConnell has done that hurt the people of Kentucky, whether it is the things he's done to sabotage the Affordable Care Act, which has worked very, very well in Kentucky, at least until Republicans got in charge of that state, the dramatic implications of the tax bill for working-class and middle- class Americans, the various scandals and corruptions that he has helped cover up, because he has this advantage that he is the leader of

a conservative state that is existing within both a local media bubble and a conservative media bubble that doesn't allow a lot of that information to get to him. So you'd want to start trying to soften him up now and start organizing now. There are pockets of unregistered voters in Kentucky that we could get. The state has never been organized in the modern political era by Democrats in any real aggressive way. And so it's something worth doing. And even if we were to try and fail, making Mitch McConnell sweat and having to focus on his own reelection instead of just his daily tasks of destroying America would be a benefit to the Republic. Looking at you, Amy McGrath, go for it. Okay, Tojo Mama 121.

You made it. Elijah made that up. I think Elijah just sent me this so I could just say this. It's Elijah's burner account. Given the difficulty that the Democrats have had in winning rural state Senate seats, is it feasible to win a majority in the Senate in 2020 without some drastic measures like turning the Dakotas into one? Novel, novel, novel suggestion. Or statehood for Puerto Rico? What do you think, Dan? It is possible to win the majority in 2020. We're going to have to have a lot of things go our way.

2020, we're going to have to have a lot of things go our way. And unfortunately for us, you know, it would have been easier had we been able to hang on to a couple more of those Democratic Senate seats, you know, particularly Florida and either Missouri or Indiana. That would just made the math easier. But yes, it's sort of drawn an insight straight in 2020 to do it. But even if we are- Just so people know, so we probably end up with Republicans will have 53 seats. Unless, of course, there's a chance we win Mississippi and then it's 52 seats. But let's say, for argument's sake, it's 53 seats that they have. If Democrats win the presidency in 2020, we need to flip three seats. Because then if it's tied, the vice president breaks the tie.

If we don't win the presidency, we need to flip four seats. If we don't win the presidency, we have bigger problems than flipping four seats. The targets in 2020, Colorado, that's probably the best target since it's a trending democratic state. Iowa, North Carolina, Maine, outside shots, Arizona, Georgia, Texas again. But we also have to hold on to Doug Jones' seat in Alabama, which would be really tricky. So that's sort of an overview of the map. Sorry, go ahead. And even if we were to sort of draw that insight straight and have a great 2020, which is possible, and the 2022 map is actually pretty good for us as well, because we left some critical Senate seats on the table in 2016, shockingly enough, in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where we had other problems.

shockingly enough, in states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where we had other problems. But there is a larger point here, which is demographic trends and population movement trends in this country make life hard for the Democrats in the long run in the Senate. As more young people move to urban areas in larger states, it just becomes hard to ever even sniff the 60 seats we briefly had at the beginning of the Obama presidency. And so the Senate is a huge problem for the Democrats over the long term. Any situation in which Wyoming has as much power as California or Idaho has as much power as New York, we're going to be in big trouble, which is why I have been an advocate for a while of making DC a state because I can fucking promise you

that if DC voted like Utah, Mitch McConnell would have made it a state the second Donald Trump won the presidency. And if the people of Puerto Rico- You got Michael Martinez here just cheering again. He texted me while we were talking. He said, last minute question for Dan from Michael in Los Angeles who lived in DC for a really long time. And then if the people of Puerto Rico were to choose statehood as a path

for Puerto Rico, then we should do that immediately as well. But in my mind, they should choose whether it is independent statehood or whatever path they want. It's not something that DC should figure out for Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico should figure it out. DC should execute it. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, the people of DC should figure this out by themselves. Last time we talked about this, by the way, we talked about this in the political context. Some people said to us, you know, it's not just to get democratic votes. Like there's people who live in both DC and Puerto Rico who just do not have the type of representation that other American citizens have. And that in its own right is critically

important to address aside from the political context. And my answer to that is yes, of course. And that's why, like you said, it's up to the people of the district of columbia and puerto rico to decide this for themselves you know but if they want to become uh states then they should become states yeah i'm trying to light a fire under the democratic party to do this because the moral k in substantive case for making dc a state has been around for a long fucking time and we haven't done anything yeah Yeah. So I'm trying a different tactic, but that is the exact right reason I say that as a off and on 20 year resident of Washington, DC. Tara Dunge asks, I live in Australia and here voting is mandatory. And we also have a preferential system and I'm interested on

people's thoughts for that type of system. I was talking to someone who was going to work for a recently elected Democrat. And they're asking me for what the like, what would be your boldest idea to improve democracy? And my answer was mandatory voting. I guess I haven't really thought too much about mandatory voting. guess i haven't really thought too much about mandatory voting like i love the idea that everyone's automatically registered and everyone gets a ballot in the mail so that it is the easiest thing possible i can't tell how i feel about going the extra step of forcing people to sort of exercise what is a right and a freedom where there's some responsibility attached um you know like i just i don't, I don't know.

I don't know how I feel about that. But I mean, I'm certainly for every single step to make voting as easy as humanly possible. National holiday, automatic voter registration for everyone 18 or older, you know, ballots that come in the mail so it's easier to vote, all that kind of stuff. I'm not sure about mandatory voting.

Well, let me ask you this question. Is it mandatory that you pay taxes? It is. It is. Is that your, in exchange for the benefits that you get for being a citizen of the United States, you're required to give a portion of your income to the federal and state and city governments of the United States, correct? Yes.

Yes, I am. and state and city governments in the United States, correct? Yes. Yes, I am. So it doesn't seem that crazy that we should ask you to once every two years or so to fill out a piece of paper that we mail to your house telling us your preferences for elected officials and policies in this country. Now, I think if you do this, the only way to do it is to ensure that there's a none of the above option because you shouldn't be forced to choose between three

candidates if you don't like three candidates or four candidates or two, whatever it is, right? Yeah. So you should be able to say none of the above or write someone in. But I think that there is a – I think there would be something very healthy for democracy if people believed that – if they had to engage in it, right? It was not a choice to engage in it. You actually had to do it. It wouldn't take very much time. And I haven't fully explored this issue.

I'd like to hear the counterarguments other than – Yeah. I can't even imagine. I'd like to hear what the counterarguments are other than just people screaming false flags and big government. What's the actual reason against it? And I think it is interesting. It has worked in Australia, as I understand it. Not perfectly, but it has worked. And I'd love to see a state experiment with it. And to do it, you have to allow there to be none of the above. And two, you have to make it as easy as humanly possible.

You can't force someone to take a day off work to do it. No, no, no. To find childcare for their children or whatever the reason that we make voting so fucking hard in this country. But if everyone could do it with a mail-in ballot – or this sounds crazy. I'd actually suggest that we get our heads around voting on the internet from your phone that should carry with you every day and put all kinds of terribly personal and compromising information into, but like make it super easy for people and to see what it would do for not just turnout, obviously, which would go up, but just sort of have people's engagement in their government writ large. Yeah. Okay. Well, tell us your thoughts on this i'd like to hear more you make good points dan hugh scully asks what policies

can democrats pursue to help tame the growing plutocracy and deal with the diminution of middle class careers available to american workers what does a 21st century new deal really look like 15 minimum wage job guarantee green new deal where you put people to work building energy efficient infrastructure, Medicare for all, universal skills and education program, debt-free college, breaking up monopolies, the monopolies of this day and age. What else you got, Dan? You answered that question better than every single, that is a version of the question we have asked almost every single Democratic politician who has been on the podcast. Well, let me tell you about the challenges of globalization.

How do you deal with the forces of automation and globalization that are undermining the middle class bargain in America? Then they just kind of go – My priority is the middle class. Give us some policies, guys. Give us some tangible policies. I want some ideas. All those things are right. I think this is what has to be a major centerpiece of the conversation around the Democratic presidential primary.

Let's have a debate about this. Let's have people put forward really creative ideas. will put forward really creative ideas. And frankly, in the run-up to the Democratic presidential primary, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand have all put forward some really interesting policy proposals around the economy and government reform that I think have moved the ball forward. And I hope we keep that process up until we have a standard bear. Yeah, no, for sure. They've done a great job, the people you mentioned, in putting forward new policies. And there's an episode of The Wilderness all about this, about big economic policies. And like, you know, the ones I just mentioned, they're all on sort of the bolder, the bigger, bolder side of the spectrum.

And I realize that as I just said that. But I do think, and like you said, you know, people can debate that and they can debate, can we afford this? Can we afford that? Does this really work? But I think that we should start from a place where we are thinking as big and bold as possible and then work from there as opposed to starting from a place where we're talking about piecemeal incremental stuff and worrying about whether we can get it passed. Let's think big first and then figure out how to get it done once we get power. Jeremy Levine asks, John Lovett talks all the time about Fox News as a propaganda apparatus.

What options do we have to actually combat Fox News? Is there a way to dismantle it, limit it somehow, or do we just have to continue to saturate the media market with our message? I have been curious about policy proposals to deal not with Fox News specifically, but to deal with corporate monopolies in media. And I don't know the answers to that, but I'm sort of trying to explore those because I'm very curious about the regulatory changes that have been made in the last two decades. And then how that has contributed to things like Sinclair being able to own large portions of American television markets and pump propaganda into them. So I'm very curious about that.

There's not a world in which Fox just disappears or there's nothing we can do to stop it. I'd probably put three things that we can be doing. First is I think we should continue to do what the folks at Sleeping Giants have been doing and put pressure on the corporations that advertise on Fox News. Right? So, you know, many of these corporations have made, they have statements promoting diversity and fighting racism and all of these things. And yet they are taking their dollars and they are spending them on what, you know, Love It would refer to as the white nationals variety hour in the evening. And I think that there could, there's some opportunity to get some of these corporations to feel pressure,

at least for doing that. So that's one. Two, Democrats have to come up with communication strategies to, you know, as this person said in the question, saturate those markets. Like I don't think there's a role in which Democrats can use Fox to reach Fox viewers, but we have to find ways to reach Fox viewers that go around Fox. And I think that is primarily going to be done through both digital advertising and using in a form of digital organizing where you build new tools to empower people to share content and messaging with people in their social networks, either in their contact list or on their Facebook feed or wherever else. So that we know that you're not going to pierce

the Fox News bubble by an ad from a Democrat necessarily, or video of Barack Obama speaking, or even something from the New York Times or CNN. You're going to do that by taking a piece of content and having it shared by a trusted member of their existing information bubble. And so there's a lot of really important work that I think is starting but needs to advance quickly about how we do that. Because as we've said before, Fox is the most insidious force in American politics in the last 20 years and is responsible for most of what is wrong in American politics because it has created this alternative propaganda apparatus that is trying to divide Americans around racial lines. Yeah. And look, we have to build up a progressive media ecosystem of our own. I love it would probably yell at me for saying this, but

more crooked media is out there. Like right now, it's us and and you know the young turks have been around for a long time and you've got some hosts on msnbc that's all i'll say it's not because it's certainly not the whole network you know uh chris hayes our version of fox news gave a show to hugh hewitt so it's like what the fuck are we right yeah we basically have like chris hayes and rachel maddow and i guess sometimes chris matthews Matthews and Lawrence O'Tonnell. And, you know, they all do great works. But again, even the purpose of their shows is not explicitly activist or partisan, right? So I would love more folks out there in the progressive media ecosystem.

Okay. D. Gerald asked, now that the midterms are over, how can people get, stay involved and work towards change in 2020? Obviously, everyone's going to be focused on the presidential campaign. And you know, you should get excited about that too. And figure out which candidate you support and go work for that candidate or volunteer for that candidate. But I just want people to remember, like, let's not make the mistake that we made all through the Obama years and focus only on the top of the ticket or focus too much on the top of the ticket and not remember that we have, you know, an entire House of Representatives up

for reelection again in two years. And we have the Senate races we just mentioned. And again, we have down ballot races, state legislatures, state houses to flip, secretary of state races in these states, which are hugely important. So there are so many campaigns and places to get involved. And there's also going to be issues to get involved around, ballot referendum. So there are no shortage of places to get involved. What do you think, Dan? Yeah, that is exactly right. We won an election, and that is awesome. And we probably saved American democracy from imploding on itself, because if Republicans had been able to keep power, who knows what the fuck would have happened. But let's not forget, Donald Trump

and Mitch McConnell are still going to spend every waking moment they have trying to fuck up America. And there are going to be big fights, just like there were in the first two years of the Trump presidency, to push back on the Muslim ban or to try to save DACA or to save the Affordable Care Act. I would pay some real money that we're going to have to do some real activism work to save the Mueller investigation in the coming months. Trump is going to try to undo protections for transgendered Americans. They are going to try to – just like, for example, Betsy DeVos just put in place new rules that make it harder for victim to sexual assault to come forward on college campuses. And so there are horrible things happening.

We're going to have to marshal the energy that we put behind the midterms to fight back on. And it is going to keep coming. And I know it's tiring. And everyone gets this week off. And then we had to get back to it next week with Mike Espy's election, the runoff in Georgia for the Secretary of State's race, where if John Barrow wins that race, the Democrat, think about that. It'll be instead of having someone like Brian Kemp running elections, putting in place Jim Crow era voter suppression policies, you would have a Democrat who was trying to expand the

vote to make it so that everyone has the right to vote. What a difference that would make in that state. That's the difference between winning and losing. That might have the potential to move Georgia very quickly into the purple column and give us a chance to win that or win that Senate seat. Well, there are going to be 100 battles that matter. And we had a very important win on Tuesday, last Tuesday, but we have a lot more work to do. There are going to be all kinds of places to get involved, both in elections in 2019, presidential campaigns in 2019, and activism to push back on Trump's policy atrocities in 2019. Absolutely. Alex Greenberg, had Hillary won in 2016, would there be a crooked media? What the hell would you all be doing these days? And secondly, would any of you ever work on

another campaign or White House? Great question. I don't know if there would be a Crooked Media. I hope there would be. I do know that I was getting tired of not being in politics. And so even before Trump won, I was thinking that I missed politics. I was spending all my time in my other job on Twitter, as I do today. And so I figured if I'm going to be on Twitter all day and paying attention to politics all day, I might as well make it a job. And for a long time, as you've heard on this podcast, all of us have had critiques of the way political media operates today. So we've always had that critique and always hoped that there would be some progressive alternative to the way the media, the political media operates. So maybe we would have,

but I don't know. And would any of you ever work in another campaign or the White House? Boy, I don't think so. I mean, it is just, I don't know what it would take, but I think right now I'm very happy here at Crooked Media and I think that we could play a helpful role to the next Democratic presidential candidate and all other Democratic candidates. So I think we play a good role, a helpful role from here. But I don't know. What do you think, Dan? This is a really hard question because this is sort of the ballgame for everything we care about is this 2020 election. And I generally think that campaigns are best served by hiring people who are up and coming and new and unburdened by the experiences of being in politics for a long time. greatly in 2008 that most of us were at the early stages of our career and we were the upstarts, not the establishment. And so I suspect that the best presidential campaigns in 2020 are the people

who are going to have the next David Plouffe, the next Alyssa Mastromonaco, the next Jon Favreau working for them and not the current Jon Favreau, either you or the Iron Man guy. But if there was ever a way in which more likely in the White House in a campaign could be helpful, if you found the right person that you believed in who you could make a true difference and fix this fucking mess that we are currently in, I think you got to at least think about it. Yeah. Yeah, I hear that. And it's tough because you never know now until actually the opportunity presents itself. Can I say one other thing about the Crooked Media question?

Sure. You point out that we have a critique of the media that we've had. Yes. My new thing for 2019 is going to be my critique of the critique of the media. Wow, meta. Yeah, it's very meta. But I've come around. I have a whole new view on this that we can discuss in a different pod. Okay, I'll take you up on that. I think I figured out that the best strategy for Democrats to win the White House is not to send as many tweets

at New York Times reporters as possible. I completely agree with that. I do. And look, this is like, you know, self-policing here. When I tweet at them, I do it as a subscriber, not as a disgruntled subscriber, not as a Democratic operative. If a Democratic candidate for president sat down with me and was like, what advice on media would you give me? I'd be like, ignore all the bullshit. Like, stay off Twitter. all the bullshit like stay off twitter

get your staff to stay off twitter like don't worry about these fucking daily crises that disappear after a couple hours and the fighting that's going on in washington and this like just i mean we talked about this um last episode when we talked about sort of like a candidate who can command a media ecosystem that is separate from Donald Trump's, but it's not just separate from Donald Trump's, it's sort of separate from the sort of political media landscape that we have, ecosystem that we have right now. Like you've somehow got to get outside of that and get your message directly to voters by meeting them, by talking to them through different social media

platforms. Like there just has to be a way to avoid the freak show as we talked about last week. Okay. Mary Jane Pfeiffer. Any relationship? How do you spell it? It's yeah. Yeah. Here it is. It's P-H-I-F-E-R. So no. It's a much simpler way of doing it yeah that is that is a much more pumpkin or pecan pie stuffing or dressing best table game to play after the meal go stuffing pumpkin pie and what's a table game i guess just a game that you play after thanksgiving what's your favorite game to play after thanksgiving we we watch football okay i don't know who plays is that a thing people do like is my family just been have i've been deprived my whole life? Yeah. Oh yeah. We always play games.

What do you play? So the best game to play now that I am married to Emily is salad bowl, which Emily taught us. It's Emily's family tradition. Everyone can go look it up, but you write words on little pieces of paper. You put them in a bowl. There's three rounds.

The first round, you get people to guess by giving all kinds of verbal clues that aren't the word the second round is charades and the third round is password so you only can say one word to get people to guess the word it's it's a lot of fun and i like even know that was a thing that people played games i guess yeah you know family's weird stuffing for me for sure stuffing's like my favorite side dish and um pecan pie big fan of that all right last one carl miner please just run through like 10 really positive things that we can be thankful for this year so much yuck yes carl there has been a lot of yuck but things to be thankful for we saved obamacare many states expanded Medicaid. The Democrats won the House. We won seven governorships.

Turnout among young people was up. And the margin among young people and people all the way up to 40 swung hugely Democratic. Amendment 4 passed in Florida, so 1.5 million people who were formerly incarcerated have the right to vote. What else? A lot of the candidates who won, friends of the pod, especially people who were all the firsts, Sharice Davids, Lucy McBath, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Abby Finkenhauer, Chrissy Houlihan, Katie Porter, Minimum Wage passed in Missouri, the Beto Abrams and Gillum campaigns. Dan, what else? What am I missing? I will say, talking about Friends of the Pod, I was walking, I was in Miami doing a book event with our friend Ben Rhodes yesterday.

And I was walking through the hotel on Sunday morning and I looked up at the TV and I saw Chrissy Houlihan being interviewed by Jake Tapper on the Sunday shows. And I felt like a real moment of pride. I was like, that's our friend Chrissy. And she won and she's going to Congress and now she's on the Sunday shows. It's really cool. And just to end on this, like, I'm also incredibly grateful to all of you, you know, in the diciest moments of this election, when my anxiety was high, which it often is, because I worry about everything, though I do panic about nothing. Whenever I'd be annoyed by something on Twitter or some poll or worried about this or that or Trump, every time people who listened to this podcast tweeted at us, sent us pictures of themselves knocking on doors, organizing, telling us that

they were going out to, you know, knock on doors for the first time, make phone calls, you know, it lifted my spirits. And I know that for a lot of friends of the pod, they've made friends with other friends of the pod. So I'm very grateful for this community of people who tell us when we're wrong, push us to do better, and have decided to participate in politics. You've all made an incredible difference this year, and you should be very proud of that and very thankful. So that's how I learned. You saved America, at least for the time being. And you should be very proud of that and very thankful. So that's how I learned. You saved America, at least for the time being. And that would not have happened without all

people who listened to our podcast, who got involved for the first time, who knocked doors, who ran for office. We're very lucky. And people sometimes say to us, Pod Save America helps, keeps us sane. And I always point that it's actually a two-way street because being able to talk about politics with all of you keeps us sane too. That is absolutely correct. All right, Dan, when we come back, you will hear my interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin. On the pod today, we have Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of a new book, Leadership in Turbulent Times. My good friend, it's good to see you. I'm so glad to see you again. Hooray!

I know! We used to hang out in the Obama White House days. Long, long ago days, it seems. In the good old days. In the good old days. So, this book you wrote is about leadership. It draws from the stories of four men you've gotten to know really well over the years. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, the president you once worked for. What drew you to their stories? And what were the kind of questions you were most interested in exploring with this book?

Well, first of all, they are the guys I knew the best. I do call them my guys sometimes because I've lived with them for so many years. And I realized that normally I moved from one president to another, and I'd have to move all of the books from the previous guy out of the room. And I felt like I was somehow betraying an old boyfriend. So instead of finding some new character to live with for 10 years, I figured, what if I just look at my guys through the lens of leadership? And I've always been interested in leadership. Even when I was in graduate school, we'd sit around at night sounding very nerdy, asking questions. Where

does ambition come from? How do you recognize yourself as a leader? Does the leader's inborn qualities or do you make yourself a leader? So I figured I'll just look at them that way, study them again, and bring them all together so I didn't have to remove anyone from my room. Well, and so what are some lessons you took from sort of examining all of their leadership styles? What are some sort of common attributes of leaders? Well, I think as I say them, they may cast a light on today, even though there's not a word about the current administration in the book. the absence of these kind of qualities I think may be noted. For one, humility, the ability to acknowledge errors and learn from mistakes.

Most important, empathy, you know, the understanding of other people's point of view and the ability to understand the feelings that they have. And then resilience. They all went through really hard adversity and somehow came out stronger on the other end. There's a great quote from Ernest Hemingway, everyone is broken by life, but afterwards some are stronger in the broken places. They all were able to control their negative emotions. They were all able to keep their word to the people.

They all were able to relax and find time to think and replenish their energies. And they had the courage of their convictions. So that's a group of family resemblance of traits. Well, so I heard you just talk about leadership, either being born as a leader or, you know, leadership being made. You're obviously in the maid camp. Yes, I'm definitely in the maid camp. Teddy Roosevelt. And you think it's adversity that sort of shaped that? Adversity helps it. But I mean, I think you have born with certain qualities. I mean, Lincoln was born with empathy. I mean, even as a little kid, he would worry when his friends were putting hot coals on turtles to make them wriggle, and he'd go and tell them that's wrong. Teddy Roosevelt was born with

curiosity and a photographic memory. FDR is born with this optimistic temperament, and LBJ just has unbounded energy. And yet, most of the qualities you develop is just through hard work. And that's what teddy said there's two kinds of success somebody who has a talent that no one else can equal a poet for example but most of it is when you take ordinary qualities you develop them to an extraordinary degree through hard work so you mentioned that the context of what we're going through today obviously shaped uh your thinking when you're writing this book. How is it that someone without all of these qualities ends up becoming president and leading a country of 300 plus million people?

I think what happened, it reminds me in some ways of what happened at the turn of the 20th century when we had the Gilded Age, because the Industrial Revolution then had shaken up the economy, much as the tech revolution and globalization have today. There was a first time a gap between the rich and the poor. Immigrants were coming in. New inventions were there. So a lot of people felt that country was moving too fast in new ways. And that was replicated in this last few years.

The rural areas feeling cut off from the cities. And somehow candidate Trump provided a story for those people that made them feel that he would restore perhaps an earlier America and manage somehow, as we know, maybe how is the question we don't know, to become a spokesman for them enough to win the electoral college. Have we seen, are there any presidents in your view that come close to Trump? Not really, to be honest. I mean, I think it's not just that he didn't have presidential or political experience. It's that he wasn't a leader beforehand. So none of these developed qualities, I mean, he wasn't leading a big company where he had to have a team that you figured out

how to make the team strong and go toward a common purpose. You know, I mean, he wasn't leading a big company where he had to have a team that you figured out how to make the team strong and go toward a common purpose. You know, I mean, it's interesting. There was recently an historian's poll on the worst presidents. And always in that poll, James Buchanan was at the bottom. And sort of rightfully so, because in the 1850s, he helped to exacerbate the divisions in the 1850s that led to the Civil War. But in this last poll, Mr. Trump was at the bottom. So the story I read in the paper was that the Buchanan family was celebrating they're no longer at the bottom. That is quite a victory. Well, I mean, one thing I always wonder as we're

sort of going through this period is what is uniquely bad that's happening right now? And what is something that may seem awful right now, but really in history we've seen things like this before? Oh, that's a really good question. I mean, I think what is uniquely bad is that there's no shared political truth now. And we have had it happen before. In the 1850s, you read your partisan newspaper and you'd read alternative facts if you were a Democrat or Republican. But that didn't end up so well in the Civil War.

But now we've got alternative facts. We've got half-truths. We've got assertions that are repeated three times as if they were true. And there's just a sense of people living in silos even more than before, I think, that they look at one another as the other. You know, that they look at one another as the other. I mean, Teddy Roosevelt said the way democracy would founder was if people of different races, classes, and sections began to see each other as the other without common interests as Americans. And it's a square deal for the rich and the poor, you know, a progressive person, a, you know, capitalist and the wage worker. And now those divisions are just being exacerbated. Has there been a time in history where we sort of walked up to the precipice with those divisions and then sort of pulled back and sort of healed those divisions. I mean, obviously, the most divisive time in the country's history

was the Civil War. But beyond that, are there periods you can think of? Well, you know, when you think about the 1920s, there was a lot of division about what to do about the Depression. I mean, there was a sense that government shouldn't be involved at all in healing the people who didn't have jobs or changing the economic structure. And somehow Franklin Roosevelt was able to come in and gather bipartisan support in that first hundred days for a lot of the systemic changes in the economy that took place. Or you think about the divisions in the late 50s and early 60s about civil rights and how divided the country was on what to do about the civil rights movement. And yet when LBJ gets in and the Civil Rights Act passed and the Voting Rights Act passed, and it seemed like some of those racial divisions had been healed. So we have to look back at those

times. That's part of the argument in my book. And we went through a lot worse times before, depression, civil war, World War II, but somehow we had leaders there. But most importantly, Civil War, World War II. But somehow we had leaders there. But most importantly, what we had were citizens who were active so that the anti-slavery movement was the foundation for Lincoln. He said, they call me a liberator. It's the anti-slavery people that did it all. It was the progressive movement that was there even before Teddy Roosevelt, people having settlement houses, citizens getting active to help with the immigrants who are coming in from abroad. And that progressive movement underlay FDR. and of course, the civil rights movement underlay Lyndon Johnson. So the answer is what you guys are talking about, activism on citizens. That's

what's always been there underneath. And then you channel a leader that can direct those forces, and that's when you get social justice. That's fascinating. I was just about to ask, you know, there's sort of this long-running debate about how much leadership and individual leadership matters versus movements. Ben Rhodes, my former colleague, when he just wrote his book, he said that he and Obama sort of had this running debate sometimes. And Obama would say that the movements matter more. And Ben was trying to say, well, no, it's leadership, which is funny for the president to take this out of the movements. But what do you think about what happened with Lyndon Johnson and civil rights. Without Selma demonstrations, without what the civil rights movement was doing, there wouldn't have been that momentum. But then you needed Lyndon Johnson uniquely placed there in the Congress to be able to mobilize every senator, every congressman by force, by charm, by will to vote for that and vote for civil rights at the same time earlier. You told Obama once that the greatest gift your father ever gave you was his optimism.

earlier. You told Obama once that the greatest gift your father ever gave you was his optimism. What makes you optimistic today in these turbulent times? I mean, I still feel that we've seen these worst moments before, and history can tell us that. It's not just hope, that somehow something rose up among the citizenry to get through the Civil War. I mean, by the end of the Civil War, when Lincoln was still there before he died, he was already talking about reconciliation. He was able to imagine a different country where the North and South would be different. And you think about how we felt during the early days of the Depression. People are taking their money out of banks. Banks are collapsing. People don't have jobs. There's hungry people in the streets. And somehow that leadership was able to mobilize the resources of the country to not make the people feel it was their fault that this has happened, but it was the system's fault.

So I think what makes me optimistic is if we've seen these times before, if you just go back and look at history, history can really be a momentous tool right now, I think, for us. And we are a country that somehow rises to challenges. This is a huge challenge right now. I think it's as big a crisis as I've seen in my lifetime. Our whole political culture is so unhealthy right now. And there are answers to it. That's what we've got to figure out what the answers are. We're going to have targets for what we do? What kind of qualities do you think are required in the next leader to take this country through this moment of great economic and cultural transformation? Probably the most important quality right now is for them,

whoever the leader is, to be able, or the leaders that rise, to understand other people's point of view. I mean, and to be able to not see it as something against a group of people, but to be able to figure out how can we make the people who now are against progressive movements to realize that it's in their interest to move forward rather than to go backward. And the interesting thing about Teddy Roosevelt, for example, is that he understood that. He developed empathy not as a child. He came from a very privileged background. And when he first got into the state legislature,

he sort of had a swelled head. As he admitted, he was arrogant, and he was pounding the desk against his opponents. And he didn't go into politics to help other people. He conceded. He went in for the adventure of it. But once he got in, when he saw the tenements, when he went into the cigar factories, when he saw child labor, it began to develop in him this fellow feeling, and he wanted to do something. I mean, in some ways, I think he'd be an ideal leader to take on Mr. Trump today because he could be the center of attention, just like Trump.

People would follow him wherever he went. They said about him that he wanted to be the baby at the baptism and the bride at the wedding and the corpse at the funeral. But he also could master the Twitter world today because he had all those short sayings, speak softly and carry a big stick and don't hit until you have to and then hit hard. He would be able to immediately translate thought into immediate tweets. there'd be thought behind it. How do you think Democrats should sort of handle the situation where the country is obviously divided? As you said, the next leader needs to be able to understand other people's point of view. And yet, we're facing a party in the Republican Party that is not a healthy party, that is a party that has sort of given into the basic instincts of sort of the worst instincts of people around the country. And I always think to myself, okay, I still hope that we can reach Republican voters and dependent voters out there even without giving up anything with our base. Yet, Republican politicians, I have very little

hope for. I don't think that, you know, I don't think they're representing anyone well. How do you think the Democrats handle this, you know, need to be bold and show leadership, but at the same time, heal the division in the country? It seems like it's a tough- I think what the Democrats have to do is to provide a story. They need a narrative so that it's not just arguing about healthcare. Then I think the next challenge is how do we expand that base? Because the Republicans are not expanding their base right now. That's the one thing that's, I think, a hopeful thing.

I mean, in fact, Trump doesn't go to any place that he didn't already win. He's not trying to do that, where Teddy Roosevelt went around the country on a train, and he would be talking to the states he lost as well as the states he won. And Lincoln is meeting ordinary people every day in the White House and just hearing their stories. So eventually we have to hear all those stories, but we have to have a narrative for what it is that we want to take the country to, an inclusive, different kind of country than we're experiencing right now.

Yeah, no, I mean, it doesn't seem like we're getting anyone who's going to the MAGA rallies, but it does seem like most people in this country aren't voters. Most people don't pay as close attention to politics. And you think to yourself, what kind of a leader could stand up and, you know, tell a story about the country that sort of brings in people who don't usually vote? I mean, that's the key. And it means that you have to have a fiery personality, I think. You have somebody who believes so passionately. It can't be just somebody who is just quoting what the policies are that we need. They have to tell us that America is moving in deal with mobility, why it is that inequities really undo the whole promise of America. We need those larger themes underneath that really people will respond to. And they have to become citizens rather than spectators. They can't let the country be taken from them right now. Right. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the book is Leadership in Turbulent Times.

Everyone go buy it. It's a fascinating book, as all your books are. Thank you for joining us on Pod Save i am so glad thank you you're welcome all right dan thanks doris kearns goodwin for joining us thanks to all of you for your questions happy thanksgiving go play your game or watch some football. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Bye.