Pod Save America - “Rudy likes club drugs.” (LIVE from Las Vegas!)

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

The President admits to using the powers of his office to target Joe Biden and his son by pressuring the Ukrainian government to fabricate a scandal, and the Des Moines Register poll shows Elizabeth Warren leading the Democratic field for the first time. Then former UN Ambassador Samantha Power talks to Jon F. and Tommy about her life as a journalist, activist, and public servant. Subscribe to America Dissected with Abdul El Sayed: apple.co/americadissectedVolunteer for Voter Registration Day: votesaveamerica.com/volunteerDonate to Fair Fight 2020: votesaveamerica.com/fairfight

Welcome to Pod Save America. This episode is our show at the Life is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas that we did Sunday night. And right after that, you're going to hear an interview that Tommy and I did with Samantha Power, who just wrote a new book, Education of an Idealist. And that's it. Look, it's that perfect mix of EDM, politics, and a genocide expert. Yeah, as you know, we did open for Post Malone on Sunday um with a show about politics and now we want you to hear it what's funny is we're recording this before we left and by the time you've heard this we'll know if how much money i lost guys we have some big news big news crooked media is introducing our newest podcast america dissected with abdul el

saeed what is really up with anti-vaxxers? Why does goop have such a massive appeal? Because I love it. And who does our healthcare system really care for? In America Dissected, host Abdul El-Said talks about the forces beyond the headlines that shape the issues that matter for our health, the ways we're failing science, the ways the government is failing us, and what we can do to get it all back on track. And he does it by breaking down these stories in a way that's fascinating and entertaining. He goes inside the health care system and explores some of the most surprising and interesting

facets of what makes our system not work and what makes our system work. And it's riveting. I know. I listened to the goop episode, which is just so entertaining. And I learned a ton. Yeah, it's smart. And it's not the conclusion he draws is not obvious. I think the point is you're just not supposed to put all your jade eggs in one basket.

America Dissected is a 10-part series that explores what we're up against in our healthcare system and how we've solved problems like this before through rigorous science and competent government working hand in glove getting it done. Here's some of the topics that you're going to hear about on this podcast. Antivaxxers, the cult of wellness, the high cost of prescription drugs, the Flint water crisis, the opioid epidemic, antibiotic resistance and superbugs, and the healthcare system. Listen to the

trailer and subscribe to America Dissected with Abdul El-Sayed now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. It premieres on September 30th, so subscribe now. Isn't this exciting? It's a cut above the other pots. Also, National Voter Registration Day is Tuesday, September 24th. So subscribe now. Isn't this exciting? It's a cut above the other pots. Also, National Voter Registration Day is Tuesday, September 24th.

Which is good because there are elections happening in 2019, as in November 5th. Consider this your reminder to make sure you're registered to vote if there's an election near you. It also means we're almost a year away from the most important presidential election since the last presidential election. That feels soon. To beat Trump at the ballot box, we've got to outwork him and out-organize him. And that starts with registering people to vote. We're partnering with Headcount to hold voter registration drives across the country for the next week. So guys, get involved.

2020 is basically already here. So make sure everyone in your life is ready for it by registering them to vote. Sign up to volunteer at votesaveamerica.com slash volunteer votesaveamerica.com slash volunteer. Enjoy the show. What's up, Vegas? I have never seen so many rolling friends of the pod in my entire life. People at home can't hear it, but a lot of you are licking each other's faces.

Yikes. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Jon Lovett. I'm Tommy Vitor. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. Thank you for joining us here at the Life is Beautiful Festival on this lovely Sunday afternoon. Quick housekeeping note before we get into the news. We have now raised $690,000 for Fair Fight 2020, which is Stacey Abrams' effort to fight voter suppression.

So, as many of you know, we are looking to raise a million dollars by November 5th. So we need everyone to donate, help out. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash fair fight, and let's help stop voter suppression. How many of you have no idea what the fuck this is? That guy.

Thank you for your honesty. Yeah. Yes. We are in the EDM tent for those who are listening at home. So people have taken the wrong route. All right, let's get to the news. We know you all came here for a lively discussion about impeachment, so here it goes.

That is correct. That is correct. This morning, the President of the United States admitted to reporters that he used the powers of his office to target a political opponent and his family. Trump said that he did in fact talk to the President of Ukraine about Joe Biden and his son Hunter during a phone call that is now part of a whistleblower complaint against Trump that his administration has been illegally withholding from Congress. Multiple outlets have now confirmed that sources within the administration that the president and Rudy Giuliani have been pressuring the Ukrainian government for months to basically fabricate a scandal about the Bidens based on Hunter's business dealings in that country. Dan, why does the latest scandal rise to the level of impeachment? And why does this feel bigger or at least more clear cut than some of the other Trump scandals around Russia and Mueller and all that stuff?

Well, let's be very specific about what Trump did, what he admitted to doing to the world today, which is the president of the United States used the power of the presidency to pressure a foreign nation in desperate need of foreign aid to conduct an investigation into Trump's political opponent. That's not good, right? That is not good. That would be the highest crime of the high crimes ever committed by a U.S. president. Yeah, that really makes Nixon look like child's play right there. Somewhere Nixon's rolling around in graves being like, what?

I was robbed. Why didn't I think of that? Says Nixon. Tommy, what is Trump's defense here and what's his overall strategy with this story? So there's the Trump strategy, which is sort of the Rudy Giuliani strategy. So Rudy knows a few things. One, you can't go on TV until you've had three martinis. That's rule number one for Rudy Giuliani strategy. So Rudy knows a few things. One, you can't go on TV until you've had three martinis. That's rule number one for Rudy Giuliani. Two, you can say literally whatever

the fuck you want. You can make up anything about your political opponents and the press will cover it as part of a both sides discussion until 40% of the country thinks that Joe Biden is guilty of something that he never actually did. And three, the Democrats will do nothing about it. We'll talk about that later. So they're just trying to muddy the waters. I mean, Trump understands better than most politicians do that you win by going on offense at all times. So if you're worried about being accused of colluding with a foreign power or being accused of corrupt, he's going to accuse his opponent of doing the exact same thing, even though it's completely baseless,

because he just wants to muddy the waters until he gets through an election. Yeah, no. And also and can you also just explain to everyone, since this involves Ukraine, like what? withholding U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine, or potentially withholding U.S. foreign aid to Ukraine, unless they dug up dirt on his political opponent. Right, and he's basically holding them ransom. So, I mean, the thing to remember is that Ukraine was invaded by the Russians in 2014, both the Crimean Peninsula and eastern Ukraine. And so the Russians still hold, like, a bunch of their territory.

The fighting's happening today. So this brand-new president, this guy was just just elected he's desperately trying to get a meeting with trump to talk about the ways the u.s can support the ukrainian government and he learned that trump canceled a meeting with him he was supposed to fly to poland to meet with the new president zelensky and he canceled it ostensibly to cover the monitor the hurricane that was happening at the time from the golf course He just fucking played golf. And then they learned that this big aid package, $250 million of military aid, has been frozen.

And they have no idea why. Usually Republicans and Democrats support this aid. So these guys just got invaded. They know that Trump has this weird relationship with Putin. And they're trying to figure out, are we just getting cut loose here and thrown to the wolves? Is Trump going to tell his buddy, do what you want if we don't dig up all this dirt on Biden? So they're in a terrible position

in a really dangerous neighborhood dealing with fucking Rudy Giuliani threatening them every other day. And Trump's bullshit. One amendment to what you said that's really important is Trump is not actually asking them to dig up dirt. He's asking them to manufacture dirt. Because Trump's lesson from 2016 is if he can lord an investigation over his opponent, then he can make it seem like we're both corrupt. It's the you're a puppet strategy from the debate where Hillary Clinton does her long speech

about how Trump is in the thrall of Putin and Trump just yells, you're a puppet. You're corrupt. Yeah, it's important because if the Ukrainians really wanted to play ball here and give Trump what he wants, like, and there was something there, they could maybe do that. But from the Ukrainians' perspective, they're like, we don't have anything on him.

So, and Trump's like, no, I need something on him. And they're like, I don't know, what do you want us to make some shit up? And he's like, yes, of course. Make something. Oh, I'm sorry. I was not being clear. I'm Donald Trump. Make it up.

It doesn't have to be true. I just need something. I just need something. I need some insinuations. All I know is that Joe Biden's son once had some business dealings in Ukraine. That's enough for me. That'll work. That's enough.

Love it. So I want to talk about how the media is handling this and how the media should handle this. There was a Politico headline this weekend that read already why Trump's Ukraine scandal could backfire on Biden. And there was a couple of these other stories in other outlets as well. How should the media handle this completely debunked allegation about the Biden family? And how should the Biden campaign handle it, too? Yeah, I mean, it's this strange fact of how politics is covered entirely through the lens of how the politics is being covered. The reason the story will reflect poorly on Joe Biden is that there will be stories looking at whether or not the story is reflecting poorly on Joe Biden. If Donald Trump is insinuating something that never happened, even though there are many stories pointing out that that never happened, there will still be enough coverage about the fact that if it did

happen or if there's some truth to it at all, it would hurt Joe Biden. Therefore, I will tell you the politics, despite the fact that it's not true, which is covered in another section of this newspaper, are still hurting Joe Biden because not enough people are hearing about how the story isn't true because all the coverage is what I'm saying about how even the story not being true doesn't matter because the coverage is of the scandal happening. It's the Uriboros. It's the Uriboros. Yes. That's why they're here. That's why they've I just got more applause at this festival than Lil Wayne. You mean our next guest?

You mean our next guest? I'll tell you another thing. The Democrats need to stop acting like Lil Wayne. They need to show up. It was just sitting there. It was just sitting there. Dan, is this going to be a repeat of 2016 with the media? It sure as hell seems that way.

Dan, is this going to be a repeat of 2016 with the media? It sure as hell seems that way. This really is an exact repeat of most of the allegations of the Clinton administration. Because to be very clear how we got here, Peter Schweitzer, who is a Republican operative who wrote the original book, Clinton Cash, which became the foundation for a lot of the stories about Clinton, wrote a book about corruption in politics, but specifically about Joe Biden and Hunter Biden. The New York Times, stenographers of record, wrote a story about that. Then Giuliani leaped onto it and now we're having a conversation about it. And so we are very much headed that way. And I think it's important for Democrats to take some lessons here from what happened in 2016. One of them is we can't trust the media to solve this problem for itself. Like all the coverage dynamic that Lovett's talking about is a tremendous admission of impotency from the media.

They're saying, we know what's not true, but we are not powerful or credible enough to tell people that. Therefore, this is a problem. And they're worried about balance always. Like if this is going to be a huge Trump scandal, there has to be something on the Democrat side that's wrong. And I think the problem for Democrats, and this is true in how they how the media treats Biden.

And it's also true in how Democrats are awaiting the media to take down Trump. Is it the Democratic Party? Too many of us believe in the media's own mythology of itself. We are simply waiting for this idea that two ink stainedstained wretches who look a little bit like Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman can take down a president but that is that there is there is no silver bullet or smoking gun coming in the New York Times or Washington Post is going to change the political dynamic the only question is what are Democrats going to do with the information in those papers to convince voters to change their opinion and we should and we should say too that is correct but since you brought up Woodward and Bernstein, like the reporting, I mean, we know all this not because, you know, the administration released the whistleblower complaint.

We know this because reporters from The Washington Post and then The New York Times, The Wall Street as always, the incredible reporting of many journalists on a scandal like this is then, you know, balanced with some fucking Yahoo in the analysis section of the paper writing about how this is also maybe bad for Democrats. Yeah, I mean, the frustrating thing is that I think by any objective measure, the fact of a president calling a foreign country and holding ransom taxpayer dollars, military aid until they manufacture some dirt on a political opponent. That is a bigger deal, a bigger story than anything Joe or Hunter Biden could have done. Yes. Even though there is no evidence that they did anything and like that waiting, we've not gotten that waiting part right. It is. It's like five crimes in one. I mean, it's like not joking around.

The president committed multiple crimes. It is the largest abuse of power. As we said, it makes everything Nixon did pale in comparison. But because we are so fucking broken in the brain because of Trump, we're treating it like just a normal Trump scandal. Yeah. And I think it's also I mean, in Democrats, we have to do this as we continue to push the story and talk about it more and hopefully impeach him, which we'll get to. But it is trying to make people understand why this is such a scary abuse of power. Like today it's Joe Biden's son, but if we have a president who's going to use the powers of his office, the vast powers of the presidency,

with all the resources he has, the money, the power, everything else, to go after anyone he doesn't like, anyone who's disloyal to him, anyone who disagrees with him. He can target any American anywhere with the powers of the federal government just if he doesn't like you if it's for his own political gain. That's what's at stake here. I'd also, yes, and I'd also add, you know, this isn't now a congressional investigation or journalistic investigation into what happened in a previous election. Did Trump solicit help in 2016 from the Russians? What happened in the Trump Tower meeting in the election that already transpired?

This is ongoing. He is seeking the interference right now. He is still inside the bank. And he is. I thought that would do better. He practiced it a couple times. I tested it backstage. I thought it would do better.

You know what? I don't want it. I don't want it now. I don't want it now. Right. I mean, Trump made this phone call to the Ukrainian president the day after Robert Mueller testified. call to the Ukrainian president the day after Robert Mueller testified. He gives so little shit what the media or the Democratic Party or anyone's going to say about his corruption that he was like, yeah, let's keep this thing going. Let's run it back. Corruption V2. Well, you get

away with one collusion. You might as well try another. Yeah, I just sort of gave him the idea. It's like, oh, right. That's what I did. Oh, that was good. I'll do that again. Yeah, no, he I mean, well, now this gets to our next topic, impeachment, because Trump basically has decided that because he got away with encouraging and accepting foreign assistance in the last election and no one did anything about it and he wasn't impeached, he can do it for the next election. If he can't do it with Russia, he'll find Ukraine. He'll do whatever country wants to help. Whatever entity, country, rich person, scumbag wants to help him win the election, he will seek that help. It doesn't matter because no one did anything about the last time. Yeah, he's assembling a suicide squad. Right.

So thankfully the push for impeachment has intensified over the weekend among the Democratic presidential candidates, among some members of Congress, certain podcasters who are angry online. So Adam Schiff, Congressman Adam Schiff, who... Yeah. Yeah, we like him. Adam Schiff has never been cheered at a music festival like this. This is a first for Congressman Schiff, and I'm sure he's going to be very pleased. Adam Schiff, who hasn'm sure he's going to be very pleased.

Adam Schiff, who hasn't yet come out for impeachment, said today, Sunday, that this may well have crossed the Rubicon. So Adam Schiff is getting closer. Even Nancy Pelosi released a statement this morning that said Trump's refusal to let Congress see the whistleblower complaint will take the investigation into a whole new stage. So, like, not super great, but better than where she's been.

You should comment, you should mention how she signed off the letter. Yeah, she signed off yours in patriotism. What did she sign off? Thank you for your patriotism. Thank you for your patriotism, Nancy Pelosi. Little patronizing. I don't. Dan, do you think we're finally going to see impeachment over this?

Do you think we've finally moved into a new territory here? We don't make predictions John But I will say if we are not going to open impeachment proceedings over this crime then there is literally nothing that will be an impeachable

offense You can create excuses for yourself to not look into the Russia investigation and create excuses around obstruction of justice, because those are hard. Obstruction of justice is a hard crime to prove in a court of law. But if you cannot do it over the president of the United States using the power of his office to push a foreign

country to investigate his opponent like that is abuse of power that is the whole reason we have impeachment yeah I mean and he fucking admitted it on live television it's not a secret there was the admission right yeah and you're starting to see like some Republicans like Mitt Romney was like if that is this is true it is very troubling he fucking admitted admit turn on the television buddy um but yeah you know dan you and i went through like various uh stages of grief regarding impeachment and sort of questioning the need to do it and the politics like what we have learned is that the failure to respond to trump means he will just continue to act with reckless abandon to to be corrupt with impunity.

And he thinks he's invincible. And, like, what are we doing? How can you possibly argue against punching back, like, doing fucking something to slow this down? Yeah. I mean, to me, this is very simple where the Democrats need to go from here, right? Like, they don't have—obviously, you can't impeach him just based on the news reports themselves. There is a whistleblower complaint that was deemed urgent and credible by a Trump appointee, by the inspector general that Donald Trump appointed. So Democrats tomorrow should go out and say, we demand the full whistleblower complaint

immediately. We will give you one day, two days, three days, whatever. You do not hand that over. We will start impeachment proceedings the next day, and we will impeach this president for obstructing Congress. It's not that hard here. This is not something where we wait for litigation, we wait for the courts, we wait for months and months. The longer we delay, the more a whole bunch of other stories will fill the media cycle

and we'll all be on to the fucking next thing. For one week, everyone needs to pay attention for this one thing for one fucking week and go out there and say we demand the whistleblower complaint right now and then we're fucking impeaching his ass after that yeah i mean you know the moral case for impeaching donald trump is clear it has been clear for a long time. The political case is the one that has not been successfully made to a lot of Democrats, in part because there's a lot of Democrats who refuse to make that case. There's this chicken and egg problem.

Oh, the American people don't support impeachment, so we're not going to talk about it. But they won't support impeachment until you talk about it. And what that has led to is a situation in which Trump's crimes, exposed by Mueller, exposed by journalists over the past three years. Exposed by Trump? Exposed by Trump himself via tweet and press conference and speaking in front of moving helicopter blades because nothing can be good, nothing. And has kind of added up to a list of impeachable offenses,

and yet because it's all old news, it hasn't galvanized people. So this could be it. This could be it. This does feel different, and feeling different is important because we're not just making a legal case, we're making a political case. And so what John is saying is both legal and political. It has to feel like a spark has been lit, and otherwise we will miss it. Everybody knew about the Russia collusion allegations and the investigation in Mali. The country was well educated on that. No one, not a single voter, like one

tenth of a percent of voters know about this latest story and what's happening. In the Democratic Party, it's incumbent upon us to make sure that all of them know about it before this election. Party, it's incumbent upon us to make sure that all of them know about it before this election. Yeah. And I think like the political case is is so clear at this point because there's this worry that because impeachment's not popular, the risk of impeaching Donald Trump without the Senate removing him is too great for the fact that impeachment's not that popular yet. But also, John, like impeachment is unpopular in the context of the Mueller probe, right? It's a whole different thing. No. So what I was going to say is I want to find the voter out there who, this is the voter.

You know, I was going to vote Democrat in 2020, but then the House went ahead and impeached the president for using the power of his office to target a political, to pressure a foreign government into targeting a political opponent. So I'm sorry, I can't do it anymore.

What, you know, impeaching him for doing that, for abusing his office and pushing Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden's son. That really did it for me. I can't vote Democrat anymore. There's no who the fuck is that person? There's no voter like that. Lou Dobbs. No one. I mean, two points on the politics. The first one is we have to understand what successful politics on this means. There is not going to be a situation where an impeachment hearing, a revelation, a smoking gun fundamentally changes how the electorate views

this. There is going to be 40% of voters who are going to be with Trump no matter what. Absolutely. So this is about moving people on the margins. Are there a handful of voters who, if exposed to the information that would come out in an impeachment hearing, will be less likely to Trump than that is a political success? That is what's going to happen. Also, not to be a total fucking nerd, but the stakes of this decision, this policy decision, are actually a pretty big deal. It's not like Trump was like, hey, I want you to book a bunch of rooms in one of my hotels in a sort of mundane corruption.

one of my hotels and sort of mundane corruption. He's making decisions to benefit his political future about giving $250 million in weapons to a country that is at war with Russia on a very low grade. And he's like, that's playing with some fucking fire. Yeah. He's, he's jeopardizing us national security for his own political gain.

That's what it, which he's done many times in the past. But here's the thing, like you were saying, like, could it happen? Might we be there? Like, we don't know. We do. We all have agency here, right? Like there is, there is a list of democratic house members who are still on the

fence, who have not come out in favor of impeachment or opposed it. Nancy Pelosi still has a lot of control over this herself. She's, you know, been against it so far, but hopefully she's wavering too now, but we don't have to just sit around call your member of congress there's uh there you can go there's lists everywhere of all the outlets have them of who is uh who's for impeachment who's not who's still on the fence call every member of congress who's still wavering flood nancy pelosi's office with calls if you believe that this is important and you know maybe we can actually get this done so i think the other point on the politics here that I think is important is Trump's election did something

to America. It awoke a generation of activists. Yeah, you know what it did? We're talking about politics at an EDM festival. That's what it did. I used to... Weird shit has happened, Dan. That is exactly right. There were people who thought they could sit

out politics and no longer think that. And they got involved and they worked their asses off in 2018. And they marched, they protested, they knocked doors, they voted. And the question for the Democratic Party has been, will it be a worthy vessel for that righteous anger? And the answer right now is no. It is no on impeachment. It's no on taking up an assault weapons ban.

They have to understand the better politics for Democrats is not always which persuadable voters are going to get or which people are going to get to take off their MAGA hats. It's are you going to excite and inspire new voters? Are you going to get activists? And there is no question in my mind, as tricky as the

politics are, that that is the better political path here, is one that's going to make people inspired to fight for Democrats, not the opposite. Excellent. All right. On that note, it's time for a game. Now it's time for OK Stop. We'll roll a clip and we can say OK Stop at any point to comment. It's fitting that we're doing this in an EDM tent because it seems like Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York and current spokesman for divorce

has been on has been on club drugs during 100% of his TV appearances on behalf of Donald Trump. During a recent four minute interview with Chuck Todd in fact, Rudy drank five bottles of water.

During a recent four-minute interview with Chuck Todd, in fact, Rudy drank five bottles of water. Anyway, Rudy had a meltdown on CNN because Trump was caught soliciting foreign interference in an election again. Let's roll the clip. Did you ask the Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden? No, actually I didn't. I asked the Ukraine to investigate the allegations that there was interference in the election of 2016 by the Ukrainians for the benefit of Hillary Clinton, for which there already is a court finding. You never asked anything about Hunter Biden. You never asked anything about Joe Biden. The only thing I asked about Joe Biden is to get to the bottom of how it was that Lutsenko, who was appointed, dismissed the case against Antac. So you did ask Ukraine to look into Joe Biden?

Of course I did. No, you son of a bitch, Chris Cuomo. Ask again. Yeah. Yeah, within three seconds. You know, I still haven't watched this whole clip yet, but I thought it came, like, much later in the interview that he did.

That was the fastest reversal in the history of cable television. Rudy always looks like he just surprised himself. He did. That was the fastest reversal in the history of cable television. Rudy always looks like he just surprised himself. Look at it. Oh no, what have I done? He drank from the wrong chalice. But you didn't.

No, I didn't ask him to look into Joe Biden. I asked him to look into the allegations that related to my client, which tangentially involved Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme.

Not unlike what he did. Okay, stop. I didn't ask involved Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme. Not unlike what he did in... Okay, stop. I didn't ask about Joe Biden. I asked about my client, which was tangentially involved with Joe Biden in a massive bribery scheme. Relatedly, Chris Cuomo cannot believe what good luck he has right now. He's got this look on his face. He's like, oh, man, I got him, didn't I?

And I didn't even really do anything. right now. He's got this look on his face like, oh man, I got him, didn't I? And I didn't even really do anything. I stumbled my way into being Woodward and Bernstein here. Ina, you explain to me how the kid got $1.5 billion

from China when Joe Biden was selling his... Okay, stop. A little coaching. Yeah, life coach. This is the... There's a point in every Chris Cuomo clip where he says something like that,

where it's this sort of like... It's like Walter Cronkite, but like 10% towards cold, you know? Does that make sense? Just like a little off. Whatever. I am very careful about what I say. You asked Ukraine to look at Joe Biden.

You said no. Then you went on to say that you did. Okay, stop. Chris Cuomo gets what happened. It does, like, in all seriousness, it does speak to sort of where the journalists miss this, which it's not the admission of the crime. It's getting caught lying about the crime, right?

So he's immediately gone to the gotcha instead of what he got him for. Yeah, he could have just been like, all right, so you just admitted what I asked, which was that you did ask them to look into Joe Biden. Next question. We're going to move on. I'm no Cuomo stan, but I feel like he's allowed to be surprised

that Rudy is self-incriminated on live TV. Don't say you're not a Cuomo stan. We know. You follow him on Instagram. You're always like it. You follow his workouts. Deadlifts and thirst traps for days, people. Check that shit out.

A lot of Tommy Vitor heart emojis beneath the Chris Cuomo Instagrams. I comment on all of them first. You want to distort what I'm saying. I don't want to distort. Because you're totally biased. I'm not biased. You are, Chris. Why would I have you on if I were biased, knowing

that we're going to have this kind of conversation? Because it is sad to watch what happened to me. Okay, stop. Do you think Rudy has a coffin that he naps in on the CNN set between hits? This is really, we're reaching the productive part of the interview now.

Sorry, go ahead. You're biased. No, I'm not biased. No, I'm just, it's, roll it. Sad, watch what happened to me. I'm a sellout. You are a sellout. You are telling me that I'm a sellout.

These are crimes of major... Okay, stop. What does a sellout mean in this context? I don't know. It's like we quickly went from admission of a crime to why everyone hates cable television. Yeah. Like in like a minute.

Just like that. A lot of rubber and glue stuff happening. Yeah, exactly. Okay. And that's okay. Stop. Back to you, John. Thanks, John. Alright, let's talk about 2020 and the Democratic primary.

Yeah, it's happening. 17 Democratic candidates spent Saturday at Iowa's famous Steak Fry, which wrapped up just as the results of the latest Des Moines Register poll were released. As you all know, we frequently tell everyone not to obsess over polls, but we make a very big exception for the Des Moines Register.

We are hypocrites. Yeah, no. We will do this all the time, but the Des Moines Register poll is historically one of the most accurate polls ever. So it is actually very important. So today's poll shows Elizabeth Warren leading in Iowa with 22%. That's interesting.

That's interesting. Is it? I thought that the EDM tent would have a bigger Yang component. We haven't said his name yet. We got one. We've got a couple sad de Blasio stans here too. Elizabeth Warren's at 22%. Biden's at 20%.

Bernie Sanders at 11%. Pete Buttigieg at 9%. Kamala Harris at 6%, with the other candidates at 3% and below. The poll also found that only 20% of caucus goers have completely made up their mind about the candidate they're supporting. Dan, plenty of numbers to dig into here. Aside from the horse race numbers that I just mentioned, what are the big headlines out of this poll for you? I mean, obviously the biggest headline is Elizabeth Warren is now in the lead in the most important...

It's like a fucking Warren rally here. Elizabeth Warren being in the lead in the most important primary is a huge headline. The other headlines you point out I think are important is this race is still very fluid. Most people have not made a final decision about who they're supporting and are very open to a wide range of candidates. interesting that the candidates who have spent the most money on TV in the last few weeks, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, and Kamala Harris, have gone down or stayed the same in the polls. I think that's an interesting... It's interesting, though, what that says about how the people of Iowa are consuming the information around the race. Yeah. Tommy, what were your big takeaways here? I mean, obviously, it's good news for Warren. And it seems like she's not just lurching

ahead because of some sort of, you know, little surge, but it's this methodical building that I would be excited about if I were her team. Though, you know, 88% of her supporters said they might consider somebody else, which is just speaks of the fluidity of the race. I also think, you know, it's a big deal. Like we should pause on that because we should talk about some challenges that Elizabeth Warren faces here, even though I know people in the crowd have a big deal. We should pause on that because we should talk about some challenges that Elizabeth Warren faces here, even though I know people in the crowd have a certain feeling. 88% is a lot.

I mean, you've worked in Iowa for a long time. We're in almost October, late September. It seems like it's a big number of people who are still making up their minds. Yeah, it's wide open. I mean, look, in October of 2007, Barack Obama was in third place in Iowa. He won. In October of 2015, Hillary was up 7 percent on Bernie and they basically tied. So there's a lot of room for the numbers to move around here. But, you know, like that number for Warren would worry me a little bit.

Biden lost support generally, but his supporters are a little more committed than Warren's. But they're less enthusiastic. So enthusiasm does count for something. Yeah. Enthusiasm does count for something in Iowa because like that means you're more likely to volunteer or, you know, get out there and do stuff for. The other person, like there's other notable headlines. I thought it's a tough pull for Bernie, a tough pull for Mayor Pete. But those are definitely like, you know, there is a chance that this thing's going to move around a lot. Yeah, we should talk about Bernie a little bit in this poll, because I was a little surprised by how much Bernie had dropped between this poll and the

last poll. He's 37% unfavorable rating, which is one of the highest unfavorables of any of the top contenders. This stat was very interesting, too. They polled of people who caucused for Sanders in 2016. Elizabeth Warren is leading among those people who were Sanders supporters by 35 to 20 something. But which is very that was surprising to me, too. Yeah, I do think it. I think that there was we talked about this on the on the podcast a few times when the race was just beginning, which was there was this question around Bernie Sanders, which was what share of his vote in 2016 was a truly pro Bernie vote and how much of it was an anti Hillary vote. And it turns out there was a substantial portion of it that was an anti Hillary vote.

That doesn't mean there's not a substantial constituency for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, but I do think that's revealing. And the other facet of this too is, you know, if Elizabeth Warren is now going to be in the lead in Iowa, do you think that comes with scrutiny? And I do think that scrutiny is ultimately good. The truth is, we've seen it in the debates. There hasn't been a concerted effort to bring Elizabeth Warren down from other Democrats. She's sort of had a good, smooth run for a while. And we're putting these people through their paces. We've seen Joe Biden face a lot of scrutiny, and some of it he's handled well, a lot of it he's handled poorly. and some of it he's handled well, a lot of it he's handled poorly. We've seen that happen to Mayor Pete, to other candidates. We've certainly seen it happen to Beto right out of the box.

And so I think it's important as we're kind of running these candidates through their paces that now Elizabeth Warren will get, I think, some front runner treatment and we'll see how much this holds. I do think Warren's rise is obviously most is due most almost entirely to her strategy and the power of her candidacy. But it does speak to the strategic error of the other campaigns, right? So for the last few months, Biden and Bernie fight each other. Biden and Kamala Harris fight each other. And no one has been willing to go after Elizabeth Warren. It's in part because I think they're a little bit scared of it. I think it's because she's been the most popular.

It's the hardest to go after her. But now those campaigns are reaping what they're sowing because they've given her a clear path for six months to build a very strong base of support among particularly college-educated white voters. And that has come out of, very clearly come out of Bernie's base of support and has come out of Mayor Pete's support who went from,

he dropped five points in a poll as his name recognition went up and he was on TV. And we haven't seen the crosstabs to the appropriate degree, but it's pretty safe to assume most of those votes went to Elizabeth Warren. So the Pete thing is really interesting to me because they did favorability ratings. Elizabeth Warren has the highest favorability rating of anyone in the field at like 71%. And then the number two with the highest favorability rating

is Pete Buttigieg with 69%. Nice. I was hoping you'd get that. And yet despite him having a 69% approval rating among Iowa caucus goers, second highest in the field, he's only at 9% among support.

And like you said, it's down five points from the last poll. What do you think that's all about? I mean, I think this could cut both ways for them. They just hired 30 more staffers. They just opened 20 offices. They've been on TV running pretty significant ad buys since early September. So I would be nervous that I'm not able to gain traction and gain supporters. But the favorability thing is important in a state like Iowa, where there is a scenario where you go into your caucus

location. The person you really wanted to caucus for isn't viable because of the way caucuses work. So you have to go to a second choice. And Mayor Pete is well positioned to be that second choice. So you have to go to a second choice and Mayor Pete is well positioned to be that second choice Now the thing that's clear from the poll generally is that all Iowa voters care about is electability Whatever that means they just want someone who could be Trump They don't really care as much about differences on issues They just want to win and so I think I would be if I were sitting in literally every campaign office Thinking about what is my best electability argument and how am I going to make it every single day I'm in Iowa for the next several months. Yeah. And look again, because, you know, electability has been as a marker for

success has been criticized widely. But, you know, in this poll, they ask people to define electability a bunch of different ways. Some people define electability as the candidate who can excite the most new voters. Some people say, you know, how can we get more Trump voters over? So there's many different ways to define electability. But again, having a case about why you are best positioned to beat Donald Trump, whether you're Elizabeth Warren, whether you're Joe Biden, whether you're Pete Buttigieg or anyone else, seems very important to voters who, you know, prioritize beating Donald Trump more than almost anything else in poll after poll after poll. I would bet within Elizabeth Warren's headquarters, they were unhappy with that poll. I think they very much would have preferred it to be Biden 24,

Warren 21. Because momentum is everything in politics and you want to peak late. And so now Elizabeth Warren is going to be determined by many in the media as the front runner. I don't know whether that's accurate or not because winning Iowa is not necessarily enough to win the nomination, but now it's going to come with more scrutiny. So her campaign's got a few challenges ahead. How are they going to do with that scrutiny? Because all the other candidates are going to come after her in some way, shape, or form. The media is going to be tougher with her. As Lovett pointed out, she's been running with a wind at her back for six months. So now what's going to happen next?

The second thing is, what is their strategy for keeping that momentum going for the next many months? Because you have to get from October to February before anyone casts it out. It is a long time, especially in the Trump era where every day feels like a year. And then the third thing is, I still think the biggest hole in her candidacy is she often runs like Donald Trump was never elected. Her campaign is about, accurately, corruption in our political and economic system that predated Trump. But there is something very unique about this moment, about the specific threat we are in right now that is evident in what we're learning about Ukraine. now that is evident in what we're learning about Ukraine. And I think it will be a proxy for the electability conversation about Elizabeth Warren will be, what is her story about Trump, this

moment, and how we get out of it? And I think that is the next turn of the wheel for a campaign. Yeah. I mean, to your point, Dan, Obama never led in a public poll in Iowa until New Year's Eve 2007, and the caucuses were on the third, right? So that's when you want to pee. And those four days were fucking hard to get through. Yeah, we were scared shitless. Things were great at the Hillary Clinton campaign at the time. The other side of the ledger for Warren is, like, I spent some time with her team in Iowa, and they are fucking fired up and committed and building a really sophisticated organization

to capture that enthusiasm and translate it to votes. The other, I thought, notable number in the poll was Kamala Harris sort of remained flat. And that's not a good result, but it was actually better than I expected because she hadn't been to the state of Iowa in 37 days. And in some ways, like she's got the most, like the best political athlete in the field at times when she's at her best. And I wonder if she just said she's fucking moving to Iowa. She was caught on camera saying that. And so is that kind of thing work? What's the history of candidates moving to Iowa?

Well, literally moving does not work well. Chris Dodd moved there and enrolled his kid in school and it didn't end well. But if she does, you got to get make all new friends. So your dad cannot win. Like, I think a delegate. Yeah, that's not ideal. But like, So your dad cannot win. Like, I think a delegate. Yeah, that's not ideal. But like, look, we'll see. Like, she's a competitor.

She could, you know, I don't think her story in this race is over. No, I do think I mean, she lost a point between this poll and the last poll. And her unfavorable ratings went up a little bit, too, which was which was weird to me. But I do think like Kamala moving to Iowa and spending all her time in Iowa meeting voters, look, I think it's a good bet. Well, one consistent thing in this poll for Kamala Harris, for Julian Castro, for some of the people that made the more high profile attacks on another candidate, in this case, Joe Biden, their unfavorability rating went up. So there is a cost to you

for making these attacks. By the way, and that's not just like people attacking Joe Biden in the history of democratic politics in Iowa. It is consistent that when you are the one who starts going after another candidate, it ends up boosting your unfavorability rating. It happens all the time, everywhere. You know, it's interesting, just to Dan's point, I was just thinking about it, that there is this question of like, what is her case against Trumpism itself? Not the economic and, you know, political corruption that led to Trump, but against what Trump represents. And one of the ways I think she's tried to kind of address that is by being first to the gate. She was very, she quickly responded to the Ukrainian scandal by saying

that Congress must impeach, and if they fail to do so, they're complicit, a very big word to use. But there is something even beyond that in addressing the kind of pain and cultural rot and toxic politics that allowed someone like Trump to rise that is missing, that goes even deeper than just having a kind of... She has a policy answer for Trump now, right? He should be impeached, we should take that seriously. But she doesn't speak to that deeper pain and cultural problems that would allow someone like that to get to the presidency,

and it is missing, and it is important. One thing is, one other development from this weekend is Cory Booker's campaign sent out a memo saying that if he did not raise a certain amount of money by September 30th, the end of the next FEC filing period, he won't be able to continue in the race. And so asked for as many donations as possible. Dan, do you think that's the kind of, like, have candidates done that before? Is that the kind of thing that works? I mean, the way the Booker campaign did it was unique. I think it's the first time any presidential candidate has ever done this.

Just been honest about it. Just being completely honest, being very transparent about the money problems, and putting sort of a deadline to it. I have almost no concerns that he's not going to make that number. I think he's going to raise more than that. I think the challenge for, and I think the timing is very notable. They needed to get that missive out before the Des Moines Register poll, which showed Booker at one? No, he's at three. He did gain two points. But not in the conversation, right? So they had to get it out before then. I think they will raise the 1.7 million. I think the question is what comes after that? You have sort of painted a mural of desperation in your campaign headquarters. And how do you how do you sort of

emerge from that? I think is a real fundamental question for his campaign. Yeah, look, I mean, I think the one thing to take from this poll, aside from the number that said that so many voters haven't made up their minds, is the vast majority of Democratic caucus goers right now are not with either Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. And so where do those caucus goers go? Who do they? And so is there room for another candidate to sort of break into that top tier? Or is there room, you know, for Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden to sort of capture the support that other candidates currently have? I mean, this is a very important point that Tommy hinted at, which is you have to get 15% to get delegates. And if you don't get to 50%, someone else can get your support. And so

there is a large number. It's not like someone is going to, these candidates are running at three and two, are going to get zero delegates and their support is going to accrue to someone else. And the question is who? I also think it's somewhere to put this in perspective of the larger nomination fight, which is we have this in perspective of the larger nomination fight, which is we have this tendency, because of the experience of the last few elections, to believe that whoever wins Iowa becomes the nominee, because Kerry won Iowa, became the nominee.

Obama won Iowa, became the nominee. Hillary won Iowa, became the nominee. And we shouldn't assume that is going to happen here. Iowa is less and less representative of the larger Democratic Party and the Democratic primary electorate where you get delegates than ever has been before. And so... We're here in Nevada. Well, right. This is a very important point. So...

You matter. Like Obama winning Iowa unlocked a lot of the map for him because there was a huge, there was a large amount of African-American voters around the country who went from Hillary to Obama because now they believe, because Obama won very white Iowa, they believed he was therefore electable. It is not evident that some candidate other than Joe Biden winning in Iowa is going to have a similar effect right away. And this thing is going to move very fast because within a month of Iowa, most of the country is going to have voted in the Democratic primary. And so it's just, Iowa is important, but we also have to look at what is these candidates' paths

to the delegates come after Iowa. And that's the challenge of the Kamala Harris. If you move to Iowa, that means you're not in any of these other states, and the biggest chunk of delegates comes from our home-stated California, where she's not going to be. Yeah, at some point you're just betting on momentum. All right, when we come back, we'll have another game. And we're back!

Las Vegas. It's where America comes together. Whether you're a middle-aged golfer who wants to cheat on your wife with a woman, or a middle-aged golfer who wants to cheat on your wife with a man. Whether you're a bachelorette who is going to go crazy,

which means strip club, or a bachelorette who is going to go crazy, which means get drunk, start texting ex-boyfriends, and Instagram a picture of yourself making out with a guy from Provo with the hashtag sorry not sorry and wake up to 17 missed calls from your mother.

Very specific. Very specific. But Las Vegas is also in the middle of a desert. Not a lot of people know that. Over the last few decades, no American city has faced more dramatic effects from climate change than Las Vegas. What are you cheering? The desiccation of your city?

No city shows more clearly why we need to act. So let's play What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, mainly because you will most likely die here of heat stroke. I will be playing with my boys. Didn't mean to sound like that. Okay. Shut up. Shut up. This game is Price is Right style.

I'll ask you each a question, and you'll have to guess the answer without going over. Are you ready? Yes. Ready. Question one. Lake Mead supplies water to Las Vegas. Recently, because of rising temperatures, Lake Mead lost

a lot of water in a single year. Without going over, how much water did Lake Mead lose? But please put your answer in terms of Red Bull cans. How many Red Bull cans of water did Lake Mead lose in a single year? In a year? A million.

A million Red Bull cans. Tommy? 200 million. 200 million Red Bull cans. 200 million in one. Just kidding. That's bullshit. No, that's a good move, Dan. I love that move. Alright, 200 million in one. Fuck. Dan, you move. All right, $200 million and one. Fuck.

Dan, you've gotten it right. It was 5.12 trillion cans of Red Bull. 400 billion gallons of water in a single year. Come on, Favreau. I have no fucking idea. Any sense of proportion there. I don't know. I don't know how big Lake Mead is. Do you know how big a Red Bull can is?

I do know that. I don't know how big Lake Mead is. It's a start. Yeah. Question two. Las Vegas is now 5.76 degrees hotter than it was in 1970. In fact, it's getting so hot that before the end of the century, Las Vegas is on track to have 96 days over 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

96 days. How many more days is that than Kim Kardashian was married to Chris Humphries? No, start with someone else. I don't know. You're right. You're right. You're right. You're right.

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Fuck that. Dan, you're up. 90 days. 90 days.

The crowd can help. It's Price is Right. Don't forget to have your pet spayed or neutered. 50 days. 50 days. John? $1. So smart. John, you got it. Fuck. 24 more days.

It'll be hotter in this city for basically a month longer than those two were married. Next question. I thought they were going to make it. Of those 96 super hot days, 60 will reach temperatures above 105 degrees. Without going over, how many tenures of Anthony Scaramucci is that? Wait, say it again.

Yeah, say it again. How many days, how many 105 degree days will there be in terms of Scaramucci's? Okay. A triple mooch. A triple mooch. Three mooches. Five mooches. Five mooches.

How many were there in the last year? There were 60. Eight mooches. The correct answer is six mooches. Fuck. I know it says 10, but he was there for 10 days. 11, he says. 11 days.

Come on, Travis. Jesus, Travis. How was your massage? Unbelievable, right? Whatever. The stakes are very low. Who was right? Dan got it.

Does one of us get a parachute gift card? No. Bonus question. Of the 60 days that will be above 105, a certain number will be off the charts, meaning our current heat index has no way of measuring how hot it is. Exciting, as you fan yourselves in the EDM tent. Yeah.

You guys don't care. How many days do you think that is? And please answer in the number of Carly Fiorina vice presidential bids. How many days will be off the charts hot expressed in the units of Fiorina vice presidential bids. How many days will be off the charts hot expressed in the units of Fiorinas? I'm going to go with 50. 50? Tommy, you go. 12.

12? 6. You're all over. You're all over. That's good news. It will be seven full days of off the charts heat, which is one. What are you talking about?

Where are you pointing? Dan said six. He said six Fiorinas. It's seven days, one Fiorina. Fuck all of you. Thank you, people. What is you? What is a Fiorina? You raise the hand when the teacher says see you tomorrow and you point out it's fucking Friday? I'm with the crowd.

Yeah. Crowd. Crowd. I welcome it. I welcome it. Well, guess what? That's our game. Dan, you won.

Parachute gift card coming your way. Oh, exciting. parachute gift card coming your way exciting well we are uh absolutely thrilled to have in the studio our friend our former colleague samantha power she is the author of the fantastic new book, The Education of an Idealist Memoir. And thanks for being here. It's great to have you in LA. I could not be happier. This was when I was in the dungeon writing, Pod Save America one day. It will be done and I will be with my friends on Pod Save America. Let me take a break from this book so I can listen to my friends yell about politics. Be really emotional about politics because that's really helpful.

Can we start at the beginning of the book? Because, I mean, look, I love this book for a million reasons. I feel like I learned about your time at the UN because we weren't working together anymore. It brought me back to the campaign and the fun times, the less fun times in the White House. But I was really amazed at what you did in Kosovo and Sudan as a journalist.

And I don't really get it. And I was hoping you would explain how this works. So you are like 22. You forge a fucking letter for the organization you work with so that someone will let you go to a war zone so you can document atrocities without actually having a job. You just say, hey, I'm a stringer, kind of. I'd cover the women's volleyball team in college. You're forgetting that really important detail. Is that crazy to do something like that and not have an organization like the AP or the New York Times behind you if something goes south?

Well, to the degree that it was crazy, there were a lot of people doing it. There was something about this kind of post-Cold War moment. The wall had fallen. The Soviet Union had collapsed. There was all this hope for the international order. And then suddenly there was this war in the heart of Europe where men and women were getting rounded up because they were Muslim or if they were in some other part of the War, maybe we can be part of a world order where this kind of thing doesn't happen. And so a lot of young people not knowing what else to do. I mean, I should say, first, I went around Washington and tried to get a job at an NGO. You know, I thought maybe I can help the refugees who are flowing into other parts of Europe or even to the United States. And, you know, I didn't have skills for that either. And I had been a journalist in college, granted, a sports journalist. And as it happened, I was in the same building,

the little think tank where I was interning after college was in the same building as U.S. News and World Report. So I got a kind of orange light to go over where the editor said, no problem. Like, I don't think you should go because it's risky. And have you talked to your parents? But if you go, I'll take your collect phone calls. You remember those? Right, right. Where you reverse the charges. And I was like, yeah, free phone calls. And then I realized I needed, as you note, I needed a credential. And I knew that this guy didn't want me enough where he was going to take responsibility for me. So the other part of the little think tank I was working is it was affiliated with an academic journal, which subsequently became the Foreign Policy Magazine we know today, which is a newsie journal or whatever, internet site and magazine. But back then it was very academic, but it was also my office, my little cubicle or whatever was down the hall from the editor's office. And when the cleaning crew departed one night, and I really

thought about it, and I also thought, should I include this in the book when we're in an ethically challenged period in our political life? Nice that someone still thinks about that stuff. Yeah, sure. It's very quaint. Sort of the theme of the book, actually. Good people thinking about ethics while today everyone's just like, fuck it. But still, it wasn't the most ethical thing in the world to do. But I did take the stationer and I did really want to get over there. And I wanted to be a part of telling a story in the hopes that someone would read the story and do something about this horror show that was unfolding.

How scared were you on a daily basis? Because in the book, you talk about your parents being very concerned. You talk about sort of your colleagues back in the U S being concerned, but you sort of say at one point you're like numb to, you know, bullets whizzing by your head every day, all that kind of stuff. Like,

how does that, how does that happen? How do you become numb to that? Roger Cohen almost drove us off the side of a mountain onto a well-mined area. That story. And we nearly blew up and died, but we made it. That was terrifying. We did, luckily.

I mean, you are a bit of a boiling frog. And at the beginning, and I think I write this book in a way to try to reach people at the different stages of their careers as well, where they're thinking, do I take a risk? Maybe not that kind of risk, but do I take a professional risk? Do I leave my job? Do I go do this or that? And the risks loom really large at the beginning. And then you sort of acclimatize for good or bad. I mean, in a war zone, it's probably not in your interest to acclimatize too much. But I mentioned earlier that there were so many other young people who were gravitating toward this crisis. And in a way, I mean, the world just looks so simple in retrospect now from where it is today, because there was kind of one big war in Europe that got everybody's focus. It was on the front page of the New York Times and Washington Post all the time. You could make a living as a freelancer.

answer. And so when I got there, you know, my one of my best friends to this day, Laura Pitter, was the stringer for Time magazine. And she's like, Come on, you know, you can do it. Time's given me an armored car, you know, hop in and and but I moved initially to Zagreb because it was peaceful and it had been through its war. And then I just gradually started going to the peaceful parts of Bosnia and then slightly more dangerous parts. And then once I felt a little more comfortable and had senior people who were willing to look out for me a little bit, like Roger, then I went to Sarajevo. And that's when it was really scary. And the bigger issue was really initially I felt we could do some good

and people really wanted us to be there. We were kind of ambassadors for our country, small a. But by 1995, after a couple of years there, people started to get really brokenhearted and just they basically gave up. And they thought that nothing that we wrote was going to achieve anything. So then you had that weird cost benefit where you're thinking, okay, it's getting more dangerous. I'm in the epicenter of the conflict and it's not clear it's doing any good. And that's why I try to describe my thought process. I started to feel voyeuristic going in and sort of forcing people to

relive what had just happened to their loved ones while having no faith myself that the President of the United States was going to do anything. So you talk about when you first met Obama. So it's like right when he gets to the Senate, you have dinner with him. And by the end of the dinner, you on the way out of the restaurant, you basically just offer yourself up as a full time employee of his. What was it that a sort of got you interested in entering the political arena and B, got you so excited about him, particularly that you sort of took the risk and asked him to work for him? Yeah, well, he had reached out or Alyssa, friend of the pod, part of the pod. Alyssa, his scheduler then had reached out to say, Barack Obama's just read your book. He'd like to meet the next time you're in Washington. And it was very clear. It was like, when you're already here, you know, like don't make a special trip. So of course I'm, you know,

Delta, Barack Obama wants to, you know, we'll meet with me if I'm in town. I happen to be in town next week. And so Alyssa set up the meeting and then I don't tell this story actually in the book, but then Barack, right. I don't know what to, what do you refer to him in the past tense? I know. Then Senator Obama. I now say Obama a lot more, which is weird. You do? Okay. I know that's weird.

There you go. So Obama, you can, and now that I know him much better, he must have just read the book or looked at the book and said, I'd like to meet with her someday. And then when he saw it on his schedule, he was like, who the fuck set this up? Like, why am I, like, I want to go home and watch sports center work to you that's what he says most about most things on his schedule and most people on his schedule i walk in what the fuck am i saying hi to this person now and i walk in and the body language was just i'm like um

you know we can cancel like and he's he said we're not gonna have time you know, we can cancel. And he said, we're not going to have time, you know, to really probe the depths of foreign policy and how we can create a smart, tough, humane new way of doing business around the world. But I'm hoping over the next 20, 30 minutes, we're at like a steak restaurant thinking, okay, not ordering a drink, not ordering an appetizer, and speaking even more quickly than usual. But then, and this happens with him, of course, because he is so much the product of his curiosities and so fundamentally sincere when he gets into a conversation. So four hours later, the dinner's winding down, and we get up, and then I think, oh, gosh, this is a real opportunity to do something more

than just be an academic or an activist on the outside. You know, maybe this conversation can be the beginning of something more. And so, yes, I volunteered to work in his office. And you ask why? I mean, you know, I think I felt, even from the time I was a war correspondent, that I was practicing sort of bank shot advocacy. You know, I was kind of throwing something out there, whether an article from Sarajevo where a playground massacre had occurred, and I wanted to convey the pain of those families to people back in America, or on the sidelines of why we should recognize the Armenian genocide, writing a column for Time magazine, and I was dependent on someone powerful, someone in power at least, to pick up my cause and then do something about it within the system. And so my objective through all of the different incarnations I've had as a journalist

or as an activist or as a teacher in the government or as a diplomat, the objective has largely been the same, but it's been about, this is sort of the education of an idealist, is trying to figure out what's the best place to prosecute those ideals, taking away the inefficiency of the middleman in a way. But then I got to the Senate. It was a blast. And I met you guys in the Senate office, and I thought, oh. Well, that was going to be my follow-up because it's clear from the book that you really enjoyed the campaign, your time on the Obama campaign. I loved the campaign.

And really didn't enjoy the time in the Senate office. And I mean, I feel like we had it a bit easier in the Senate office than you did after reading the book, for sure. But I sort of felt the same way, too. Like I had the 08 campaign is like the holy grail of this, like, wonderful moment. And, you know, the Senate office, when you're sitting in the Senate, it's a little bit of a drag for a couple of years. It felt a little small. It's 99th in seniority.

I'm sure other people, other senators have more interesting times. I was spending my days pitching the Peoria Journal Star about some LIHEAP funding, which is assistance for low-income people who need housing. Right? You're like, it feels a little small ball at times, especially someone who had been on the global stage like you. I don't know that I've so much been on the global stage, but I think there was this real disconnect, which is what you're alluding to, between his star power disconnect, which is what you're alluding to, between his star power and what we were able to do for anybody. And I think particularly because I didn't know Congress and didn't know the executive branch all that well at that point either, although at least I'd interviewed hundreds of

people in the executive branch for the book I'd written. But I think I went there thinking this is going to be a big shift from being on the outside, that I wasn't on the inside, certainly wouldn't want to have been on the inside of the Bush administration. But that from that perch, given who Obama was, but also given the checks and balances in our democracy, as naive as that sounds, I thought we'd be able to do things. And whatever frustration one experienced on the domestic side in being the minority and being a junior senator in foreign policy, especially where the executive branch is so dominant, where the Republicans really weren't willing to exercise accountability. I mean, now it looks like they were profiles encouraged compared to the current Republican Party. But it just was kind of a lot like being an advocate on the outside. And the idea that Barack Obama, who had so much to offer, who had a vision, who was very careful, even though he'd opposed the war in Iraq, to try, I write about this in the book, to try to think

through how we draw down. But then fundamentally, the disadvantage of being an outsider trying to figure that out, you know, yes, you're talking to commanders, but as a Democratic senator, you know, and so I felt in a way we were like a not very impactful NGO. Yeah. That moment in the book where you're at the Foreign Relations Committee hearing with him and he like passes you a note or something, you think it's going to be something like substantive and big. And he's just like, I'm sorry to bring you here that you have to see this. A bunch of senators just blabbing on about nothing, doing nothing. But that's how he felt most of those committee hearings were. It was not a great gig.

It was. And, you know, he would hate of all things. And as many of us do. But, I mean, just his temperament in particular. Just the posturing, you know, the idea that you're there under the Constitution to hold accountable, you know, that you're the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I mean, which had been such a prestigious committee, and that you're there fundamentally to get your points across. and it's just a, it's like a pulpit and you're just, I mean, what he said in that scene in the book, you know, or the scene in life, which is reprised in the book,

was just, you know, watch the senators pretend to be asking questions and pretend to be curious about what the answers are, watch the witness, who happened to be the Secretary of State at the time, pretend to be responsive to the questions, but basically just give us the same talking points she'd have given us, irrespective of what question we asked.

And I mean, I don't mean, that's probably the most, I don't want to say disillusion, but the darkest policy part of the book, or at least the part where you're like, where is the impact? And now we see, of course, why controlling the House really matters and how you can block initiatives. And we actually see members of Congress, again, if the Republicans would occupy their constitutional role, would be in a much better place. But needless to say, but you see the impact and it aggregates over time. And so, again, I think with the benefit of hindsight, I look at my youthful self and, you know, the imaging or the imagining I had before I got there about all that we would do. And in a way, I sort of set myself up to be disappointed. But at the same time, I think it was a preview of how much less functional the Congress would become over time.

And I think why fundamentally Senator Obama, despite at that first dinner, which I write about in the book, you know, me saying to him, hey, I know you just got here, but any chance you might run for president? And he'd be like, what? What kind of? And he believes it at the time. What kind of asshole would run for president? He really thought it was crazy. would run for president. How presumptuous would that be to have just gotten here to barely figured out like where the restrooms are and then to announce like, no way. And then, but I think in experiencing himself that gap between his star power and what he could do, you know, and then

looking at the field and thinking that there were risks that, that, uh, the Democrat wouldn't win. I think he felt, you know, all things considered, this is my time. One thing I love about the book, this is not a question, it's an aside, is it's like I never really felt totally comfortable with Obama. And it seems like you did what I do, which was remember in great detail every dumb thing I ever said to him or every time he was annoyed at me. And I also loved how fucking boring your anxiety dreams are while you're waiting to see if you're getting a job at the White House. You're like, oh, I lost my keys and I ran over a woman on the way to the Hillary Clinton meeting. It's like, I don't know.

I just, it was nice to hear that you felt that way too. I don't think my anxiety dreams were boring. They were very exciting. I mean, to give a flavor to fellow Red Sox fans, you know, it was not a coincidence that one of my anxiety dreams, first of all, involved your former boss, Robert Gibbs, who I found completely terrifying and still do. So funny. So the fact that Gibbs was in my dream was not something I anticipated. And also that the venue for one of my anxiety dreams was Yankee Stadium.

Oh, yeah. And at that point, we're all waiting. Will Barack Obama run for president? Will he not? that the venue for one of my anxiety dreams was Yankee Stadium. And at that point, we're all waiting. Will Barack Obama run for president? Will he not? And in the dream, I've convinced Obama that he needs a break from the action, needs to take in Red Sox-Yankees. It's a beautiful sunny day. The Red Sox are crushing the Yankees. All the details are right in the dream. And then Gibbs calls and says,

we tonight are going to have the mother of all fundraisers. And if we raise the money, I think we will. I mean, and it's going to be amazing, but you've got to be there and you're going to meet a lot of people and you're going to raise a ton of money, he says to Obama. He says, then we're going to announce. If we don't, we're not going to run for president. And so Obama like cups his hand over the phone. He's like, you'll get me there on time. Right. I'm like, yeah, boss, you know, you're going to be president. This is amazing. And this is back again, where there was actual suspense about whether he would run. And then, um, of course we'd leave the game and I escort him, you know, and it's so vivid and, you know, the overpass near Yankee stadium and this and that. And the

next thing I look around, I'm like, wait, we're not on the subway. We're on Amtrak. And so I go up to the conductor. I'm like, we're going to Manhattan, right? He's like, no, Albany, ma'am, Albany. You know, is there a stop on the way? He's like, Albany, ma'am, Albany. And so we're going to miss the fundraiser because of me. But this is, of course, a preview of my screw up on the campaign.

Well, let's go to that dark moment. Because your campaign, there were highs and there were lows on the campaign, right? I mean, there's this amazing story of, you know, you meet your future husband in Iowa, and you go up out canvassing with the most, the biggest collectin of brainpower ever to hit doors in Iowa. You cast Sunstein, Austin Goolsbee. And Austin Goolsbee. And that ended perfectly. I'd love for you to tell that story. But then you also had this... You said in an off-the-record setting

that Hillary Clinton, after she had... I believe it was after she'd suggested, it seemed like that you stay in the race because RFK was assassinated and you never know what's going to happen, right? Wasn't that the... It was more about his faith than whether he was a Muslim, as far as you know. Yeah, yeah, right. As far as I know, he's a Christian. Oh, boy. Right. As far as you know. Yeah, yeah, right.

As far as I know, he's Christian. Right, as far as I know, he's Christian. Yeah, anyway, there's so many things. Yeah, it was an ugly period. You said she's a monster. And in hindsight, you were frustrated. It was a bitter campaign. Sometimes her campaign would do monstrous things.

Doesn't it seem like the dumbest controversy? We never did anything wrong. We were assholes too. Like, doesn't it seem like the dumbest controversy? We never did. We were assholes, too. Like, doesn't it seem like the dumbest controversy ever in hindsight? I mean, compared to using the Oval Office to pillage the country and, you know, encouraging a foreign government to hack the computers of Americans and so forth. It does seem quite, quite mild. It does seem quite, quite mild. But at the same time, you know, I did think Obama was trying to run a campaign in a different way. And certainly I, as a human rights professor and advocate who in the book as well, emphasizes individual dignity and just to be, you know, in effect, just part of the hate, especially that Hillary got.

Stop with the self-flagellation. No, I know, but I do feel bad. You know what the oppo I was peddling said when I was, you know, with my computer and journalists? When you're in that moment, though, it is fucking... Well, you know. I've been there, too. I've been there, too.

And when it happens, you... It's like no one on the outside who's criticizing you fully understands how much you're punishing yourself and how miserable you are and you also you wrote about this like great phenomenon where when these things happen you believe that everyone else in the world is thinking about it talking about it and it and it is something that's sort of in you in your head a lot of the time you know like it seems bigger to you obviously than it does to everyone else because it's your life that's going through it.

But it's fucking miserable. And being married to somebody who knows behavioral science, you know, Cass would translate the spotlight effect where you think that the spotlight is shining down on you. No, I mean, we had Cass. I actually cut it short was in fact leading the newspapers all around the world. I was in Ireland when it happened, certainly across Europe, this was a big story because the campaign, and this also seems quite quaint, but every little back and forth between the two campaigns as it got tighter as toward the end and it dragged on was newsy and so i did have the experience of um knowing i'd done something bad a lot of people saying to me including obama you'll be fine you know we'll ride this out no problem and then it

just got bigger and bigger and bigger so cast is like oh it's the spotlight effect and you know you're exaggerating i'm like that's bullshit. I'm everywhere. Look at the newspapers. Thanks for trying. Yeah, exactly, Mr. Rational Actor on this earth. And we had just started dating. We hadn't been dating that long. And when finally I got back to America from Ireland, and the fact that I'd suffered this scandal

and against completely self-inflicted, but in Ireland where everybody was so proud and my family was coming out and ever since I'd left as a child I just wanted you know not just to be the yank cousin coming back but but for them to feel that kind of pride and then it's and you know I had just had a drink with Bono and it was like life was good I was Icarus you know and then just but we get back uh to America and a few days later, Elliot Spitzer is caught up in his own, I suppose, much more. Yeah, much worse.

Much worse. Yeah, much worse. And, but the call girl with whom he was involved, the straw that broke the camel's back in the investigation was there was a photo of her on the front page of the New York Times just after the scandal had broken. And I went to my stoop and I was finally beginning to think about reading the newspaper again because the attention to my thing had faded. And there she was on the front sort of also explaining that she was a good person. But the pull quote they had in the New York Times was, I am not a monster, exclamation mark. Oh my God, yeah.

And I just started bawling. I'm like, I've changed the way we talk. Everybody's. And so then Cass is like, that's not true. That's not true. There's the independent variable and the dependent variable. And we have to do, you know, we've really got to study this in order to know before your thing, you know, how much was this word in use in the lexicon and how much after. And so he actually did this before and after study, but it was impossible because the use of Monster and the coverage of my transgression was so intense,

we needed to wait a decent interval in order to do a proper study, which we've yet to do. And it reminds me- The book makes me love Cass all over again. I know, I know. So you sort of write this, but how did your apology to Hillary Clinton go? Oh, well, first, how did it come about? Because I had tried to reach out to her and tried to

reach her when we were still in the thick of the campaign. And again, when we pretty much, thanks to Plouffe, knew that we were going to win, but that we had to go through an awful lot of further primaries and votes and so forth to get the requisite number of delegates. And so I'd wanted to talk to her. And it's one thing to send a letter, but just to, so she knew that this, I'd lost my temper, but those weren't my considered feelings about her. And I mean, I'd even been chastised by a couple of people on the campaign for, in the interviews, always saying Hillary Clinton would make a great president and then pivoting to why I

thought Obama was the right person for the moment. And so anyway, it didn't come about in the campaign. And then finally, Obama sealed the nomination. And I really wanted to come back to the campaign thing. And of course, there were people like I'm sure people we know and respect enormously who prosecuted the campaign for Obama and who are responsible for the strategy that helped the candidate win the overall election. But there was a concern that if I came back, that the divisions in the primary, which did grow a little bit or in certain quarters, that those would be exacerbated. And so there was one group of people who wanted me to come back of whom you guys were part of that group. And I think there was another very vocal and very influential part that didn't. But the only thing I could do, I can only control what I can control, was to try to at least ensure that Hillary herself would not object in any real way.

And so, but I didn't know how I could get to her and it was proving hard. And then meanwhile, Cass had proposed after a very short time of dating. I was becoming dependent on him in this period of having no job and wandering around, hoping one day I could be able to go back to the campaign. And so my normal immune system to screw up my relationships had shut down. And so I embraced the best decision of my life and married him. And at the wedding, Richard Holbrook put to use his seasoned negotiating skills, or at least the prospect of them, and said, how would you like it if I broker a meeting between you and Hillary Clinton? And that was the toughest negotiation he ever did. Yeah, well, I don't know, the Taliban. But anyway, so he set it up and I met with Hillary and you asked how the meeting went. It was proper. I mean, I think she really was stung by not just what I had done, but the perception that we who had the same values and the same baseline agenda, that it had gotten ugly. And I think she was disappointed, of course, that amid, you know, all of the expectations that she would have won the nomination, you know, that this insurgent had come along.

And I think she, whatever. So she wasn't yet the kind of reconciliation that became much thicker when we all got a chance to work together, I think hadn't yet taken hold. But she was very good and she accepted the apology. And so I scrambled, you know scrambled out of her office and I called or I emailed Obama and he called me back and I said, you know, we've had our reconciliation meeting. I think I'm good. If you're ready to take me out of the penalty box, I think it's okay to do that. And he's like, wait, what? You had a meeting? How did that? And I said, Richard Holbrook gave it to me as a wedding gift. He's like, don't most people get toasters? What the hell kind of wedding gift is that? But eventually.

Oh, it's such a good story. Eventually I was back on. Yeah, well, yeah. It was a tough campaign. One tension in the book that I think goes throughout it is you're this outsider, this advocate that goes into the system to try to affect change and what tensions there may or may not be there. And there's a great anecdote in the book that we really enjoyed because we were part of it was this murder board we did for you when someone is nominated for a position, you get a bunch of people together and you ask them the most obnoxious, most difficult questions that you can think of in preparation for a future Senate hearing. And not to brag, but I thought of the most douchey, hackish, stupid questions possible. And then Marco Rubio asked it verbatim. So patting my back.

You were in the mind of Marco Rubio. patting my back you were in the yeah you were in the mind of Marco Rubio somehow it's a very uh it's a frat party uh and not a very fun one but um I remember that session and I remember we were in this like weird like trailer in the middle of the state department but I also I remember feeling like relieved when it was over that I got to leave that thing because it was clear that you were not happy and I felt a little bit like we were crushing your soul by making you do a dance and play a game with the senate and it's not like you changed your beliefs but you had to especially it was especially you too because you know because like there's a lot a lot of like seasoned people that tommy and i helped in that period who are going to become

ambassadors something like ask them tough questions but they had been around politics for a while. And you're this like pure person, activist, you know, not going to play by the game of politics and just like give these bullshit answers. You're going to say the truth, even if the truth is complex and nuanced. And we're like,

no nuance, no complexity. Stop thinking. That was such a tutorial. And again, part of the, part of the education. It's funny because the stories we're telling are, Stop thinking. campaigns or, and it's the opposite story. I mean, I end up at the end of my story, or even to this day, more idealistic, or at least more upbeat about the possibility for individuals to come together and to make change. But that was a dark chapter, because I did, I had written more than a

million words, said, Lord knows how many as an advocate, and as someone who hadn't thought I was ever going to end up in a position of getting confirmed by the Senate and having never pulled punches. And so suddenly, you know, I knew that the Senate staffers, particularly on the Republican side, just had stacks of my writings highlighting the most, you know, sort of ill conceived or convoluted or just or just different perspectives. And then you all, my friends, you know, are coming together and what Cass would do alongside Tommy's abusive form of questioning. But Cass knows that when people put an S at the end of my last name, it just drives me batshit.

I remember being mad that he beat me to that one. Oh, you knew it too. And he'd be like, he was playing Rand Paul. And he's like, Miss Powers, aren't you going to be, when you get to the UN, aren't you just going to be for some big treaty? Some big, some big, huge treaty? Don't know what treaty. Like whatever, a big old treaty, Miss Powers. And I'm like, it's power, Senator Paul.

It's power. You know, and I couldn't even in the murder board resist. But and I hated the I still hate the idea that, you know, answer the question you wish you were asked, rather than the question you were asked. them. And so I didn't want to do that. So I tell the story in the book of the sort of comedy of this, but also getting to a place where I hope I've remained, which is not doing the Washington thing of just pivoting to some other cliche, but finding a way to answer with something that is, as I put it in the book, also true. So the thing I want to say is true, and I shouldn't say, perhaps, but there may be something that's also true that I can with sincerity we need to be held accountable. things or I don't believe we need to be held accountable. And I said, but I still believe that we have to be held accountable when we torture and when we do other things. And that to pretend as if history hasn't happened is a mistake for our interests. And so I got to the

place where, you know, all of you were just saying, you just, you know, I wanted to talk about Clinton's apology after the Rwandan genocide and, you know, what we need to do about Guantanamo and torture. And And my whole team sort of had their head in their hands and they're like, we're just trying to get through the day. This is not on the level. They just want to hear themselves speak. And so I decided, well, what is also true? I love this country. But you know what's funny? I love this country. When I was reading that part, it's evidence of how much the politics has shifted, partly because of Trump, partly because of everything else, that if I was advising you today, I would say to go into that hearing and say, yes, we should apologize because we did torture people. We have fucked things up around the world.

And I think you could. And I think with the politics of the Democratic Party at this point, with sort of what Trump has done to the media and offense and all that kind of stuff, I think you'd probably get through. Right. Maybe. I don't know the extent to which the hypocrisy on the Republican side would be such. It would all be if we had the votes. If we had the votes, yeah. If we had the votes, I'd get through anyway.

It doesn't matter about persuading anyone anymore. Yeah. That's a sad thing. If we had the bodies, we would be able to get you through with that. But what I didn't want to do is renounce that idea. Right. But I also, you know, part of the challenge, as you know, with those hearings is you also don't want to create distance between you and the president. And you get questions from left field about your views on things.

I'm like, oh, shit, what does Obama think about this? I mean, I don't want then to force him to be answering for something that, you know, he's trying to move away from. And, again, I have the specter of Robert Gibbs in my mind. Don't screw up. Did you fuck us up? Yeah, right. away from. And again, I have the specter of Robert Gibbs in my mind, don't screw up. How'd you fuck us up? Yeah, right. So, and I try to show that in the book, what it's like to be part of a team and yet to have a set

of views where you can express them internally. But if you lose a debate, you then are in a position where you have to defend the administration as a whole. And for me, it was just amazing that there was a president with whom I was aligned so often. And I think on balance, that then made it easier, not easy at all, but possible then to be put in that position by Tommy and others in the communications team to go out and defend something that I might have argued against internally. But that was the hardest part of the insider outsider switch. So we've talked about a few of the darker times, but as you said, you came out of this still an idealist. At what point in the White House or when you were at the UN, did you start feeling like, you know what, despite all the bureaucracy,

despite all the constraints, despite all the setbacks. And I feel like I'm making a difference. And I feel like this is where I should be. Probably on the issue of Iraqi refugees, when we're in the White House, and you know, you just you learn that you can either sort of nurse your bruises and bitch about access or lack of access and be like, Tommy's in the meeting. I'm not in the meeting. Oh, the NSC days. And then you talk to Tommy and Tommy's like, that was the stupidest meeting. It was such a waste of time. Like, why was I even there? And again, Richard Holbrook, the late Richard Holbrook,

at one point said to me, just go where people aren't, go where they ain't, hit it where they ain't. And it turned out that with the backing of President Obama on a refugee policy agenda, with the fact that we were drawing down from Iraq, we could really significantly increase the number of Iraqis that we vetted to come into this country, meeting a campaign promise, meeting our responsibility, having gone up and gone into Iraq and sort of ripped everything up. And we could do so in a way that in communities in this country actually revitalized economies, like in Buffalo, New York, where there's a huge influx of refugees over the course of the last decade. And so it would have this knock on economic effects, which of course

you don't hear about anymore. And as these communities are crying out for the refugee program to be revitalized because they're losing that influx of vitality. And I just thought, you know, everybody else is focused on how we draw down and what do we do about Afghanistan and do we surge? And yet here is a discrete small issue area. And you know, there are a dozen examples like this, but where, you know, a lot of officials in the Defense Department and in the U.S. government as a whole really want to do something for people they know. You know, there was all of this also human lived experience. There were these friendships with translators and people who'd risked their lives on behalf of the United States who weren't getting into the country before. And so, and what was great is I could just see the machinery of the U.S. government kind of crank

up because this White House signal was sent that this mattered to the president. And President Obama himself wouldn't have had the bandwidth, you know, to drive this. And all he wanted was updates on how it was going. But, you know, I think that was where I thought, okay, it just doesn't matter what meetings you're in. It matters what you're able to achieve on a given day and the coalitions you can build across government. But I also had to learn the lingo. I mean, and I tell the story of...

The lingo. Exactly. We've all been purging ourselves for the last two and a half years to try to recover our ability to speak the English language. But it was like when I came to America as a nine-year-old, I would, you know, be in front of the mirror and I was trying to drop my Irish accent. I was trying to learn ERA and RBIs and baseball lingo and the Pittsburgh slang and all

the rest. And while I didn't stand in front of the mirror, mercifully, none of us had the time for that. But I did, you you know i did feel like to succeed you had to at least understand the currency and there were these crazy i mean all the gendered lingo you know hey in these negotiations we got to go in open kimonos it is excuse me so many of so many of the same pregnant what well and i was five months pregnant so i heard myself say hey we't be half pregnant. We got to decide one way or the other. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I'm more than half pregnant. It does seem like it might be one of the fundamental political challenges of our time and into the future as climate change causes mass migrations and there's more places like Syria where there's going to be refugees. How do we begin to change the politics around this issue, not only in the United States, but all over the world?

Because we like to think, oh, we have Donald Trump as a problem, but this is an issue for so many countries and it's sort of just getting at the political challenges in so many different countries. Well, I'd say a couple of things. I mean, first, 70 million displaced people today, 70 million. I mean that when we left 66 million, think, our last year in 2016. So it's not like we had cracked the code on this, but just gives you a sense of how many people are in motion and desperate as we would be, you know, on behalf of our families, if it's conflict or if it's political persecution or if it's criminal violence of the kind you see in Central America, what would it be like not to be able to know if you could take care of your kids? What would it be like to have an aging parent who's just a sitting duck in an apartment building that's under siege in Aleppo? What would that be? You would try to leave. You would just, the right to life, the desire to just be safe would override all else. And unfortunately, as you note,

it's become so political. I gave an example earlier of the, I think, basically the empirical, thick empirical record of what in this country the economic effects of refugee inflows have been. And I tried that when I was ambassador as well as this was becoming more and more caught up. And it caught me off guard, I must say, just how toxic the question of refugees became. You know, it started with Syrian refugees, and every Syrian refugee is a terrorist, Donald Trump is saying. But then it has kind of bled into the question of refugees generally. But the facts are completely on the side of what refugees have done for this country and for so many other countries. I mean, think of what, especially to get to the United States, imagine just how resourceful and dynamic an individual who has made it here is. And this is why, I don't know if you know Hamdi, the CEO of Chobani. I mean, he just describes,

you know, he's sort of looking around. He's like, I have this, because I'm hiring refugees and immigrants and people who've just scrapped and scraped to get here, I have the most dynamic workforce of anyone I know in the field. And it's not a coincidence that I'm then coming to, my brand is now dominant. I'm, you know, I have this team of people who just want to be here, want to contribute, want to send money back to their families. So unfortunately, one of the part of my education again is on the importance of figuring out a way to transcend fear. So whether it's on Ebola or on ISIS and the conflation of a whole religion with terrorism, I mean, the craziness

of what is propagated now from the highest office in the land and on refugees and whether it's in the realm of security, which Trump has done, but also the account of Trump's xenophobia is rooted in the idea that immigrants and refugees are coming to take your job. So even if it's not fear of a physical kind, and it really is, all the evidence shows that's not the case. Of course, it's a complex set of factors that are causing jobs to leave and automation to come in and so forth. But what is hard is in the balkanized political environment, but also the echo chamber media environment, is how do you get those facts in there? You know, and, and, you know, there've been studies that show how Trump, and I write about this in the book, you know, how Trump used Ebola, uh, which was his first, you know, really taking ownership of a fear platform.

Yeah. You have him tweeting 50 times. You know, a zillion times. And, and he's, you know, he's already famous in quotes, which is all he's ever wanted to be. And he's already got his real estate stuff and his reality TV. But suddenly he sees like, wait, the more fear I'm generating, the more are on our side. I think what I found on the Iraqi refugee front, but also later on other refugee issues, is our military ended up being a wonderful spokesperson on behalf of this. And I mean, across the board, this isn't just General Mattis, the favorite general these days to quote on different things, but just across the board because of how many refugees and immigrants are in the ranks of our soldiers, how diverse that is, but then also because our soldiers had had the experience, again, of relying on Iraqi translators and others and just saying, not only

are these people not a threat, these people defuse threats against me and I wouldn't be here necessarily. I do think that's the turn because even when the media does cover this, I think it's so often that we treat, even if we're sympathetic, we treat refugees as victims. And so all everyone ever knows is that they are victims of something. And social services. Why Hamdi's story is so inspiring and stories about the troops and translators and stuff like that is because you see how resourceful they are and also how they're just like me and you. Like you said, like if I was in a house that was getting bombed with my children i would do anything right to run away from that you know it's tough though yeah it's a uh no and it's and it's beyond it's one of those beyond

donald trump problems are we admiring the problem where we might be i mean wasn't it the funnest at the white house where you'd say something you thought was very brilliant and then the chair of the meeting would say meanwhile back at the problem the problem. Well, yeah, poor Barack Obama would convene a National Security Council meeting, and he would ask all his very accomplished, very important, seasoned advisors what to do. And they said, Mr. President, this is a devil of a problem. On the one hand, on the other hand, I don't know. It's like, thanks. Give me a fucking decision memo.

Yeah. Completely. You have a great anecdote where Marty Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the president says, look, I don't expect us to come to a solution today to, I think it was a Syria crisis. And Marty Dempsey says, won't disappoint you there, sir. That was really funny. One last thing, though, just on flight and refugees generally is we are totally under investing globally and, of of course in the United States now, but in diplomacy. And so one of the reasons that you're seeing more and more refugees is, as you note, climate change and the fact that people can't live in the places they once were able to live in.

So those are climate refugees, but also climate, the resources dry up and you get scarce resources and you get conflict that grows out of a fight over those resources. That's more conflict that we're seeing. But the other reason where there's at least scope, I mean, climate change, we just have to deal with independent of all of this, but also because of all this, but where there is scope for improvement is conflicts are lasting longer. They are not being resolved. That's partly because more and more countries are getting into the action, you know, as bad as the Cold War was and those proxy wars. Now you have these multifaceted wars with the Saudis and the Turks and the Qataris.

And so it is maybe harder to make deals when you have so many actors around the table. But I wish I could say we were getting caught trying. getting caught trying. I mean, if you look at the systematic underinvestment in our diplomatic corps over many, many years, the fact that we have almost more people in military marching bands in this country than we have in our foreign service acting as diplomats, and yet, how do conflicts end? Diplomats roll up their sleeves, invest the time, do the legwork, try to play with incentives and disincentives. And then if conflicts, if you could shorten the duration, at least, of a conflict, then people begin to go home. All they want to do is go home. That's the other aspect of it, right? It's not

like they're like, oh, great, a free ticket to somewhere else. Their lives are there. Their families are there. Their grandparents and great-grandparents are buried there. Most refugees want to go home. And we need to do more at the UN level among all countries. a personal way to try to make it more relatable for young people was, as you know, the morning after a Democrat takes office, whenever that is, hopefully in January 2021, if not before. But at the moment that happens, it's going to be a summons basically to our country and to our young people to get back involved in public service and to be part of rebuilding these institutions. Last question for me, and then you guys have a lot of foreign policy to talk for the world is, how do you do that? Because I've spoken places, when I talk to young people, you hear a lot of maybe the best way to make changes from outside the government, because it's so broken. And it's the cause of so many disappointments. And I want to make a change,

I should be an activist, but I don't know if public service is for me. You're someone who started off as an activist, started off as a critic. What can you tell young people about why it's worth it to participate in public service? Well, again, that's kind of what my book is all about is all the things you can do from many different quarters. And for me, it was a big adjustment and initially much harder to do it from within. But then when you actually see the institutions of government working on behalf of people, when you see domestically people's health care, people getting health care who'd never had it and suddenly being free of that worry, when you see Barack Obama confronted with potentially a million people dying in West Africa of Ebola and suddenly start seeing cases in Europe and in the United States.

And him saying, you know, I don't care that from a global coalition, send US military and US health workers into the eye of the epidemic, and end it, supporting above all the work of the local people who are on the front lines in West Africa. But when you see that kind of impact, I tell the story of, you know, being very distraught, as we all are now, and certainly even were in the tail end of the Obama administration, but about the human rights recession around the world, which is part of what's, you know, again, contributing to the despair that so many people feel. And I was so overwhelmed. It's like, geez, freedom declining everywhere, including in established democracies. And this is even before

Donald Trump. And, you know, but what can I do? I'm a member of the president's cabinet, but I have that feeling of like, what can one person do? And we project the stories of these amazing women in China, Ethiopia, Uzbekistan, you know, wherever they've been arrested, and often they're investigating corruption, or they're just speaking their minds or in China, they were speaking up against sexual harassment, I mean, and then got jailed for that. And we just decided, let's just take a small slice of this huge problem of the human rights recession. And we actually managed to do something in a bipartisan way with the U.S. Senate because we were profiling 20 women. There were 20

U.S. female senators at the time, Republican and Democrat. They threw their weight behind this campaign. We were, of course, only supplementing the work of the lawyers and the families of these amazing women. And it took us time, but we got 16 of the 20 women freed, or 16 of the 20 women were freed. And I think we played a contributory role to that. And, you know, the gratification, the sense of sort of exhilaration, actually, on the part of the junior members of my team, you know, the young diplomats, because it's so in government, you it's so rare that you feel close proximity to something so concrete that that works. And yet, my book is full of stories where we do make a difference at a time when people are very skeptical that government can. But I think I think, yes, we have to learn from the invasion

of Iraq. And we God knows, we're to have so much recovery to do after Trump has destroyed our alliances and cozied up to abusive regimes and so forth. But we have to also remember that for all of our, all of the mistakes we've made, from which we have to learn, but that we, the United States, can be a force for good, and the individuals who comprise our institutions, it's who those individuals are who will dictate whether we are a force for good or for ill. And so, you know, I really, it's who those individuals are who will dictate whether we are a force for good or for ill. And so, you know, I really, it's like your show, you have found a way to speak to younger people. And one of the messages is we need more and we need better, right? We need more people activated and we need more rigor and more sophistication in the way all

of us do our business. And, and, you know, that's why I've tried to write a book that, that again, appeals to young people and shows the sense of purpose and meaning you can have and the actual impact you can have. If you're willing to be self-critical, not ideological necessarily, but, but just rooted in problem solving. Well, you have written a funny, brilliant, honest, and very hopeful book. And so everyone, please. Buy it.

Please go buy it. The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power. Don't you dare go to the library. We like libraries. We're pro-library. But also buy the book. You buy this book. You can read it in the library if you want.

Do you want more books like this? Buy the book and donate it to a library. Thanks, Sam. Thank you want more books like this? Buy the book and donate it to a library. Thanks, Sam. Thank you guys so much. Pod Save America is a product of Crooked Media. The senior producer is Michael Martinez. Our assistant producer is Jordan Waller. It's mixed and edited by Andrew Chadwick.

Kyle Segwin is our sound engineer. Thanks to Carolyn Reston, Tanya Somanator, and Katie Long for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Narmel Cohnian, Yale Freed, and Milo Kim, who film and upload these episodes as a video every week.