Pod Save America - “The Do Something Democrats.”

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

Democrats are on the verge of voting to impeach Donald Trump and to approve his trade deal, Bernie Sanders is underestimated, Joe Biden contemplates serving one term, and Pete Buttigieg releases his McKinsey clients. Then Mike Isaac of the New York Times talks to Dan about Uber, Facebook, and tech industry culture.

Hey guys, Tommy Vitor here. I'm hosting a new podcast called World Corrupt with my friend Roger Bennett from the Men in Blazers podcast. Soccer is a game that has often been called the world's most important, least important thing. Yet November's World Cup will force fans to confront and grapple with the complexities of the tournament. It was awarded via corruption and built with atrocious labor practices that have left a reported 6,500 migrant workers dead. Each week on World Corrupt, Roger and I will explore what it means to be a fan and responsible citizen of the world while watching the world's most popular sporting event. New episodes of World Corrupt drop each Saturday in the Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On the pod today, we'll talk about the articles of impeachment the House is about to vote on,

the trade deal that the House is also about to vote on, and all the latest polls and developments in the Democratic primary. Then you'll hear Dan's interview with New York Times technology reporter Mike Isaac about Facebook and Uber. Two quick housekeeping notes. The fourth episode of Pod Save America on the ground in Iowa is out. Tommy takes you behind the scenes as the campaigns prepare for one of the biggest nights of the primary season and will consider proposals to change the caucuses it's great it's fantastic i finished this episode last night and i

was uh i was actually sad that we're gonna have to wait until mid to mid to late january for the final episode of the series it's really it's really great um also please donate to fair fight we are only three hundred thousand dollars away from reaching our two million dollar goal to get teams on the ground fighting voter suppression in 20 battleground states uh everyone should know i just saw stacy abrams the other night and she told a big room full of people how incredibly grateful she is to all the pod save america listeners for donating so let's make her proud. And we're close to the goal. Let's get there. Go to votesaveamerica.com slash fair fight to chip in.

That was sort of a humble brag on your part. It was, but it was really nice that she said that. And she told all these people to donate. And she's like, all the Pod Save America listeners have been really ponying up. And it's been really great to see everyone donate. So really, it's a humble brag on behalf of all of our listeners. However you want to square the circle for yourself, that's fine. I would also be remiss. I'm a big deal.

Yeah, you are a big deal, which is a real merch opportunity t-shirt. I would be remiss in the conversation around Fair Fight if I didn't mention, and this will be my Christmas present to you, John. This will be the last time in the calendar year 2019 that I pitched my book. But on Trumping America out February 18th, I will donate a portion of the proceeds of any and all books, hardcover, ebook, audio book to Fair Fight, which when we have those numbers, we will dump them into the jelly bean jar that signifies math at the Kirkian Media Headquarters. And I have motivation here. I worked really hard on this book.

And I want people to read it. But also, I am in a competitive battle with my publisher, who has told me approximately 1,000 times that I will not pre-sell as many books as I sold last time. Because second books are harder, which makes no sense to me. But as of right now, he's kind of right. And it's going to be very hard for me to admit I was wrong. So I'm counting on people to help me win the small internal battle that has outsized importance in my life. I thought you were going to say you were in a competition with Don Jr. and Triggered. Well, if there are any...

I guess Crooked Media should buy up 100,000 of your books now. You know, here's the thing. They put that little dagger by the bulk purchases on the New York Times list, and I would not... I don't want that dagger. That dagger is for suckers. It means you're a fucking loser.

Yeah. All right, Dan. It's all happening. Today, the House Judiciary Committee is voting to approve two articles of impeachment against Donald Trump, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. The articles say that by pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden, quote, President Trump abused the powers of the presidency by ignoring and injuring national security and other vital national interests to obtain an improper personal political benefit. He has also betrayed the nation by abusing his high office to enlist a foreign power in corrupting democratic elections. Sounds bad. On obstruction, the article reads as follows.

In the history of the republic, no president has ever ordered the complete defiance of an impeachment inquiry. The history of the republic, Dan, not Andrew Johnson, not Bill Clinton, impeachment may include a bribery charge and an obstruction charge related to the Mueller investigation. Are the two articles the Democrats ultimately chose the right ones? Are they broad enough to fully capture Trump's corruption? What do you think? Well, look, I think we can fly spec this to death and say, why is it worded this way? Why don't you know, why isn't the word bribery included or extortion or Mueller or whatever crimes Trump committed between waking up this morning and us eating breakfast on the West Coast?

But I do think it's worth taking a step back and appreciating the fact that for a long time, those of us on this podcast, a lot of activists out there were pretty skeptical that the Democrats would have either the willingness or the ability to execute on impeaching President Trump, to make the public case, conduct the hearings, lay out the evidence, and marshal the votes to do it. And that is what they are doing. And so I think it's important. There can be good-faced arguments about legal from

fake attorneys on Twitter about what was the right thing, what was the wrong thing. Even real attorneys, I guess. Some real ones, too. Yeah, between the right and wrong thing to do here. But the Democrats in the House who were elected last year did what they were supposed to do, did what we wanted them to do. And we don't need to be part of the never good enough brigade complaining about this. I think we should be happy about the result. Not happy on the side of the country. We should be, I think, happy that the Democrats did the right thing with some pretty tough political wins. Because we can talk a little bit about this as we go forward.

But this is not an easy decision within the caucuses, even if it seems on the substance and the most obvious decision in terms of constitutionality, legal responsibility, etc. But it wasn't easy and they're doing the right thing. And they have executed to this point pretty close to flawlessly, I think. Yeah. I mean, look, obviously we have been calling for the Democrats to take up impeachment for some time. You know, I was pushing it even before the the Ukraine scheme. And as someone who once again, another humble brag, it's quite a day for you. Well, I don't know if it's a humble brag because who look where we are right now no i'm actually putting myself out there as you know but what i was about to say is as someone

who was proposing that like having gone through the last three weeks i don't know that more articles of impeachment would have any kind of practical effect on anything, to tell you the truth. I know that it would satisfy, you know, a crew of people who believe that we should have them. I, of course, believe that Trump has committed more impeachable offenses and more crimes than are outlined in the articles. But I just, I just don't know what it would do, right? Like, we, I keep thinking we have to work back from the final outcome here, which is that Trump is going to be acquitted in the Senate, right? He's going to be. There's no, like, at this point, I don't know if any Republicans will cross over. But at most, you know, I saw, I think I saw some Democratic senator,

I think it was Richard Blumenthal, was on MSNBC last night and was like, I could guess maybe five to ten Republicans would cross over and vote. I mean, that is wildly optimistic to me. Godspeed if they do. I'd love that, but I don't know. So I just don't know what it does, right? Except say, then you have to go into, you have to get back into the Mueller report, get into that whole thing. If you add the emoluments, you have to do that. I mean, there's just if bribery, there's going to be issues with that. Like, I think that the reason that Pelosi did this is she's trying to figure out how many votes she can get.

And I think she would rather get more Democrats on board voting for impeachment than have more articles and fewer Democrats. It seems to me the political effect of having more Democrats is greater than the political effect of having more articles, because I think the ultimate goal here is to sort of move public opinion or at least lay out the case to the public about Trump's corruption and criminality. or at least lay out the case to the public about Trump's corruption and criminality. And I think we've seen over the last couple of weeks how difficult that is. Like you said, Adam Schiff pulled off a nearly flawless set of hearings, and it didn't really move public opinion anywhere. And so, in fact, you know, public opinion on this spiked in support of impeachment when the news broke about Ukraine and they first announced an inquiry. It was up around 50 percent. It's now at like, you know, 47 percent support, 44 percent oppose. So it's narrowed a little bit, but it's pretty stable. And, you know, Democrats are all

for it. Republicans are all against it. Independents are split. And that's where we are. And that's where the country is. And I just I don't know what three or four or five more weeks of hearings on another topic are going back to Mueller or other charges is actually going to do. I don't know how that breaks through. And I think I think it's a consequence of the information environment you're in. I mean, you said this on Twitter the other day that you thought that there was some people were being a bit naive about the information environment that this is taking place in. What did you mean by that? Well, what I meant by that is ultimately what Democrats are still relying on is to tell their message to the media and then have the media tell the message to voters. And it presumes a level of fairness in the media. It presumes a level of fairness within the algorithms of Facebook,

which carries the news to people. It has a sort of naivete about how the other side weaponizes information to their benefit, right? And I think you see this in the fact that there is currently no substantial outside game of super PACs or party committees or anything else who is trying to drive the information that is unveiled in this hearing and put it in front of the voters who are most persuadable, right? You have the American Action Network, which is a Republican super PAC, which is spending a lot of money in tradition, but I think it's primarily traditional television advertising in a bunch of the districts that Trump won that now have Democrats. And I think that has some, you know, that has some value, but ultimately the only,

and I think this is not just about impeachment. It's about every element of, of democratic party communications is that we have what I call a last mile problem. We spend all this time thinking about what the message is and all this time thinking about which reporters to tell that message to. And we spend almost no time thinking about how to get the message from the politician's mouth or from the hearing room into the mind of the voters we care most about. And a truly sophisticated, well-funded effort here would have been taking the moments in the hearing, the key pieces of information, and spending real money, targeted voters in those swing districts, or nationally, if it was an effort designed to take down Trump, to drive the information home, to cut through the noise, because the media doesn't

have the reach or the capacity to tell the specific story with the repetition and volume that is needed to break through the noise in our media environment generally, not even counting the fact that Trump is throwing up distractions left and right. Yeah, because even though Schiff's hearings were flawless, and even though, you know, pizzazz aside, I would say that the media has covered impeachment, you know, better than I expected. Let's give them that. Even when they cover it well, they still do, you know, Democrats have laid out all this evidence, Republicans say it's not true, you know, and you still end up with this. One side is saying this.

One side is saying the other thing. The whole thing is devolving into a partisan brawl, right? Like it's just and I don't think it's any one reporter's fault. It's sort of the it's a systemic issue with the way the media covers politics that Republicans have figured out how to game. And for some reason, Democrats cannot. It's not even possible. It is not possible. All the cultural financial incentives of media in the Facebook age push in the wrong direction. But even if every single article or TV segment written or done about this was fucking flawless, right? Did not

devolve into both sides bullshit, just was here are the facts, was explicitly called Trump out when he was lying or Jim Jordan out when they were lying, laid out the facts. Even then, it would not be sufficient because the reach of objective, mainstream journalism in the digital age is not sufficient to get to people, right? What matters is what is showing up in their social media feeds. What matters is the tilt of the direction on Facebook, primarily, but also Twitter, Instagram, the other things. And that requires something more than depending on the New York Times do it. Daily Wire and all these other right-wing sites have been weaponizing information for a long time. Democrats have been unwilling and unable to think about information,

think about how we weaponize information, not in a negative way, but how we get it to people. And that is still, like, this is a broader conversation about how the presidential campaign is going to be conducted, about just the state of American democracy. But I think what is happening in this impeachment inquiry is an example of missed opportunities on the Democratic behalf in an increased risk profile because the Republicans have the money and the willingness to do things Democrats will not. Yep. Yep. So in terms of the Democratic support in the House, a few members of Congress and staff told the Washington Post that up to six or even more Democrats might vote against impeachment. Apparently, there's a group of 10 who've been talking about censure instead of impeachment. That includes Josh Gottheimer, New Jersey, Kurt Schrader of Oregon, Anthony Brindisi of New York and Ben McAdams of Utah. Dan, what are the possible reasons for doing this? This infuriates me because, look, if a Democratic member does

not want to vote for impeachment, that is their call. I think they are wrong. I think they are wrong on the substance, they are wrong on morality, and I think they're ultimately wrong on the politics. But that is their call. But what infuriates me about this censure conversation is it is an idea specifically designed by a small handful of Democrats to fuck over their colleagues. They know impeachment's going to pass. They know there is zero chance of censure. There is zero Republicans are going to support censure. Zero. It is not a viable alternative to impeachment. But by floating it, they get to position themselves as more reasonable than their colleagues. And the problem is a lot of their colleagues who are doing the right thing,

the brave thing, are also in very Republican districts. But now- I think that's important too, because I think you hear, oh, this is all about the frontline Democrats. They're not courageous enough. There are a ton of Democrats in Trump districts who've already said that they're going to vote for impeachment or who are going to end up voting for impeachment. And it is an incredibly hard vote and good for them for doing that. And it is not all of them. It's just a handful here. This is one of those examples that speaks to something we've talked about before, which is that centrism is an identity, not an ideology. And so this is that set of Democrats led by Josh

Gottheimer, who was the leader of this wing of democratic politics, where your goal is not to adopt a set of moderate policies because you believe sincerely that those moderate policies are better than progressive policies. You're constantly trying to position yourself off of the polar ends of both parties, regardless of how right or left it is at any one moment. And so I think it's a pretty gross disloyal tactic to sort of polish your own apple at the expense of your colleagues. And I think it's really shitty. I was going to say, this is not about being ideologically moderate, right? There's nothing about impeachment that has to do with ideology one way or the other. This isn't like

saying you're against Medicare for all, or that you hate the deficits or whatever. This is about the President of the United States saying, I get to bully foreign countries into destroying my political opponents. I get to bully foreign countries into rigging elections. And when I get caught, I get to ignore Congress and I get to ignore the law. And like if you're worried that you can't do a better job than Sean Hannity of explaining that to your constituents, then you will never be an effective leader for people. You won't. And like, look, if Trump does this again, and he succeeds, and he gets worse,

and you didn't try to stop it, you are going to have to live with that for the rest of your life. If you are a Democratic member of Congress, and you just don't think he did it, if you looked at all that evidence, and you just don't think he did it, if you looked at all that evidence and you just think he's innocent, that he didn't actually call for an investigation of his political opponent, that he didn't actually just ignore an equal branch of government and just said, fuck you to the separation of powers and decided that he's above the law if you didn't think that's true then yeah that that's fine vote for it but like i know josh gotheimer i worked with josh gotheimer he was a staffer on the carry campaign he fucking knows trump did it he's not doing this you know like and maybe you know look maybe they'll all end up voting for impeachment great wonderful but that makes it

worse that actually makes it worse that's what i'm saying like i know that Josh knows that Donald Trump did this and is guilty of it. I know it. I know it. And it's just like, to play these games, it's like, you're afraid. And look, I get the fear. I don't quite get the fear in Godhamer's district because it's not super conservative. It's on the line. Like if you're Kendra Horn, right, a new member elected from Oklahoma in a very, very, very conservative district. I get it. I get she must go home and have all these Trump voters who she needs to win. She only won because a bunch of Trump voters voted for her and she needs these Trump voters to win and they're furious at her. And I get how hard that must be. But again, it's like that's the job. And basically what you're saying is, you know, Fox News is scary and they have control over my constituents. And so I just can't do anything about it. And I'm just going to have to wait and, you know, be able to maybe compromise once in

a while and get a little thing here and a little thing there. And that's that. I don't know. I think that's, I think that's pretty tough. It, we can get off this topic in a second, but it really has gotten under my skin today. But it just stands in stark contrast to the group of... There is obviously a group of Democratic members of Congress who rode a wave into office, and they are in districts that under no normal circumstance a Democrat should have. Kendra Horn is your perfect example of that.

And it's going to be a huge fight, even under the most ideal political circumstances, to hold on to those districts for time. In 2010, we were trying to pass the Affordable Care Act. There was a huge group of people like that because the Democrats had won a huge house wave in 2006 and then an even bigger house wave in 2008 and had just huge members of people who were in these deeply red districts. And many of them were faced with this choice. Do you vote for the Affordable Care Act, which they all agreed with was the right thing to

do, but it would come at great political risk and in some cases be almost certain to eliminate whatever chances they had of keeping their district. And there was a whole group of them who did the right vote. And the reasons they told Barack Obama they did was because you come here to do the right thing. Let the political chips fall where they may. People like Tom Perriello and Betsy Markey and a whole bunch of other ones who lost their seats. And they're people that Barack Obama just has so much respect and affection for because they did that. This is one of those moments, right, where you know there was political risk in your position just by getting out of bed in the morning. So are you going to do the right thing or the wrong thing?

Yeah. And it's like, I get it. No one came to Congress because they wanted to take this vote. But we didn't do this. We weren't the ones who fucking bullied a foreign government into trying to destroy our our political opponent donald trump did this and now you have to respond to it that's that's the truth um so one thing we know is that you know even if there's a few defections democrats will have the votes to impeach so let's talk about what the senate trial might look like uh mitch mcconnell said it won't start until mid-january at the earliest and there are now

reports that mcconnell wants to keep the trial short and, quote, drama-free and may even not allow witnesses on either side to testify. Trump, on the other hand, wants to mount a full defense, the White House says. And that includes witnesses like Hunter Biden, Joe Biden, Adam Schiff, the whistleblower, the deep state, you know, probably Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, right? The whole fucking gang. So he wants all the crazy right-wing conspiracy theories on display in a trial. McConnell doesn't seem, at least at this stage, to want that. And so do other Senate Republicans, you know, outside of the Lindsey Graham crazy squad, seem to feel the same way. Why do you think that is? Well, if there is a question about witnesses, you are raising the possibility that Mick Mulvaney,

John Bolton, a bunch of other people who know a lot of information will be forced to testify. And that is of great risk. There's a whole set of facts on the table. They have been delivered by a whole set of witnesses. But the Republicans are savvy enough to know that the president's chief of staff or the president's disgruntled and very mustachioed former national security advisor would be blockbuster witnesses. The amount of attention that would get. Blockbuster witnesses, right? The amount of attention that would get. If they don't perjure themselves, they will say things that are very damaging to the president, not necessarily things that I think would cause the Republicans to remove him from office because they are the Republicans and that are up for reelection, like Cory Gardner and Susan Collins and Martha McSally, to name a few, in a very uncomfortable position. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, they're scared.

They're scared of more evidence and testimony coming out because they know he did it. That's why they don't. Apparently, I think Politico reported that Mitch McConnell said in a closed door meeting with Senate Republicans that calling witnesses would be mutually assured destruction. So that, yeah, they would call, you know, Hunter Biden and all this and the whistleblower and all this kind of shit. But then if if if like you said, if Bolton or Mulvaney or anyone else had to testify, it would look really bad for Trump. You said if Bolton or Mulvaney or anyone else had to testify, it would look really bad for Trump. So I think, you know, it's funny about all this. You know, Brian Boitler was talking about the timeline because he was saying, you know, we should have a longer timeline and impeachment instead of a shorter one. And he said it's not actually possible that Pelosi's impeachment timeline is good for Democrats and also good for Trump. Someone's wrong. I don't know that I agree with that because I think the problem for both sides is the politics are unknown, you know.

And I think from Mitch McConnell's perspective, it's like, you know, this could be good for us if it if it drags on and people get sick of it and see just a bunch of fighting in Washington and everything. But it also could be bad for us if a lot of evidence comes out. And so I'm not willing to take that gamble. And I think the Democrats are worried about taking the gamble for a long impeachment as well. I think the reason that both sides might end up agreeing to sort of the same short trial is precisely because the politics of impeachment are so unknown. I think we also have thought about the politics of impeachment in the wrong way. The election day 2020 is, I recognize it's 11 months from now,

but in the time amounts of the Trump era, it's a thousand years, right? We point out all the time that it was just about two and a half months ago that Trump used a Sharpie to alter a weather map. Remember we were going to buy Greenland? Yes, we were going to buy Greenland. I totally forgot about that.

I was looking at that really interesting morning consult. Yes, I was going to buy Greenland. Yes, we were going to buy. Like, I totally forgot about that. I mean, like I was looking at really interesting morning consult. Yes. Data visualization about what stories broke through. And I really kind of forgot the government shut down for six weeks. I mean, we've podcasted a lot about that and it had fallen out of my brain. And so, you know, there's just so many stories that don't break through or that people forget about. And I agree. I think that like the most likely outcome for impeachment is that it's not going to have a significant effect either way by the time we get to November.

Well, I think I was I have a slightly different view, which is the politics have already played out in the favor of Democrats, which is the period of time where Trump would have had the best ability to strengthen his political position heading into 2020 would have been the fall and winter of 2019, where Democrats would have been dominating the news, fighting over Medicare for all, transparency, everything else, having these debates that would get a ton of attention, would spark divisions within the party. And Trump had the opportunity, theoretically at least, to be presidential, to tout the economic strength under his watch, talk about accomplishments, just be a president above

a very messy democratic process. That was the exact period of time in which Barack Obama went from an approval rating of around 40 to 49 between Labor Day and Christmas of 2011. And Trump is going to get to Christmas with the same ratings had all along. So there is a massive opportunity cost for Trump that came out of both the fact that he committed crimes that led to his impeachment and his reaction to that impeachment. And so the politics have already played out in favor of Democrats. that impeachment. And so that like the politics have already played out in favor of Democrats.

Well, speaking of that, I mean, since we know the outcome in advance will be acquittal, how should Democrats prosecute the case in the Senate? And what should the party in general do to sort of shape the most favorable coverage and favorable politics possible, knowing that he will be acquitted, he will claim victory. The media will say it has riled up his base and got them excited, just like they did after the Kavanaugh hearings. Did Democrats make a mistake doing this? Are the politics bad? I mean, we all know what the headlines are going to be after the Senate trial. We've known this for a year and have talked about it for a year. It's the same as what was going to happen when we knew the Mueller report was going to come out, when Mueller was going to testify, like when Kavanaugh ended up being confirmed. You just know in advance how the media is going to treat this. So now that we know this in advance, what do you think Democrats can do to sort of maximize the coverage here? Well, it's going to depend a little bit on what sort of trial McConnell allows, right? If you were to allow something resembling a real trial, then I think the key is to find blockbuster witnesses like Bolton and Mulvaney and others. But if that is not an option, or I guess under

both scenarios, I think the primary political imperatives are twofold. One, conduct yourself with the seriousness of purpose that Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler have done. Don't get dragged into all the Lindsey Graham bullshit. Be serious. Respect the gravity of the moment. I think that's important. Second is this moment is even more about holding accountable the vulnerable incumbent Republican senators for their acquiescence to a wave of criminality and corruption. So we should use the opportunity both in the media, in paid media, on the ground with our candidates to hold Susan Collins accountable for her potential acquittal of Trump, hold Martha McSally accountable for her potential acquittal of Trump, Cory Gardner, and all the rest. And so I think this is not entirely about,

once we get to the Senate, Trump's re-election or defeat. It's about how can we help ensure that voters know about what the incumbent Republican senators did at this moment in time? I would also say that as you're just from a messaging standpoint, I think the Democrats should make sure that they make the argument that I do agree with people who say this should be made bigger is that, and I don't know necessarily that we need more articles for this, but I think you should make the argument that this is part of a pattern. And it's not just about some foreign policy thing in Ukraine, which seems very distant to a lot of people, but you have to make it about why what Trump did was so dangerous and why it is part of a pattern. You know, I saw this. This barely made the news this week.

But on Wednesday, I believe the president had to pay a court order two million dollars in damages because he used money from his charity foundation for personal and political purposes. Sound familiar, right? This is like what he's getting impe charity foundation for personal and political purposes. Sound familiar, right? This is like what he's getting impeached over to personal and political purposes, doing something for personal and political purposes. And he was forced to shut down his charity. And he actually is not allowed to operate another charity ever again in New York without supervision. Like this would be. Could you imagine?

supervision. Like this would be, could you imagine, could you imagine if that story came out about Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders or Pete Buttigieg, what would be happening right now? And like, I don't think you need to add a bunch of articles of impeachment to make this case. I just think that when the, whoever the house managers are, who are the prosecutors in the Senate trial should talk about all of the other corruption and all of the other criminality in Trump's orbit to make the point that this isn't just some one-off. This is part of a larger pattern, and this man is unfit for office and has violated his oath for a host of reasons. And you don't need extra articles to say that. You just need to say it.

You need to make the case. Yeah, it's the pattern of bad behavior strategy. Yes. I also think, and a couple people have made this point, like it's sort of time for the activism to start kicking up here. You know, like we've done very, very well with marches and rallies and town halls, whether it's the Women's March, whether it was, you know, to protect the ACA, all kinds of things. There's been very little activism around impeachment. I would encourage everyone to go to impeach.org. There's going to be rallies all over the country the night before the final House vote on impeachment. We don't have a date yet,

but you can go to the website and sign up and see where there's a rally near you. There's a ton of organizations that are behind this from MoveOn to Stand Up America, a whole bunch of great organizations and Divisible. And so I do think that we need to show a little public pressure here to show that this is important because otherwise it's just going to seem like an inside Washington thing. And I think there needs to be a sort of groundswell here to show how much it matters. Yeah. And to the extent like if you have a Republican member of Congress or you live in a state with a Republican senator, call them and let them know your feelings. And if you are in a district with or a state with a Democrat who's doing the right thing, call them and thank them because that helps, too. Yeah, because the other side is, you know, calling all the time, all of these offices saying that they hate impeachment. And, you know, these Congress people, they're human.

When they get reports from their staff that calls, you know, against impeachment are like eight to one, you know, against impeachment versus for impeachment, that's going to make a difference, you know. And so the calls really do matter. And the RNC is spending money on a vendor that calls up Republican voters and say – basically with an auto call that says press one to be connected to your member of Congress to explain – to vent your frustration at impeachment or whatever else. And they are spending – they're astroturfing this. And we don't have a similar effort nor should we, but we do have the grassroots activism to push back on that. So it's important.

Okay, we got to move on because on the same day that Democrats announced the articles of impeachment, they also announced a deal with Donald Trump on a new trade agreement between the U.S., Mexico, and Canada known as the USMCA. The trade deal improves on NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement. In the negotiations, Democrats won big concessions on stronger labor and environmental protections, and they got rid of a provision that was seen as a giveaway to the drug companies. So Democrats are claiming victory. But Trump is already saying that he negotiated the biggest and best trade agreement in the history of the world, which has led some people, some people on this podcast even, to wonder why did Democrats give him this win? Dan, what do you think?

Well, I have very, very strong views on this. You do. I do. You do. Well, I have very, very strong views on this. You do. I do. You do. But I will make what I think is the best case for why the Democrats did this.

Okay. I will stipulate that while some Democrats – a lot of Democrats in the House are more moderate on trade than a lot of our base and some of us, this is not a case of Nancy Pelosi being a, quote unquote, corporate shill, right? I think the dispute here is about politics, and I think it's a good faith disagreement. But the argument that I think has led the House Democrats to do this is they promised that they would be able to, quote, walk and chew gum when it came to investigating and impeaching Trump. They could legislate and investigate. And this is something that this is a accomplishment that their members who support this can take home to many of whom are in swing and red districts to say, yes, we impeached Trump. We thought it was the right thing to do, but it wasn't the only thing we did. We also approved this trade deal that would do X, Y, and Z.

That's one. Two, the AFL-CIO and Labor were for this, and they're obviously a very important constituent of the Democratic Party, and it's pretty hard to buck them. And the third is the substance of the deal met the test the Democrats put forward, right? They had a set of things they demanded, and somehow the Republicans' search for the Trump administration got to that point. And so that's why they did it. I still think this was a pretty large, unforced political error, but we can talk about that. Sure. So why don't you talk about that? Talk about why you think it was still a bad idea. Well, I think even if the substance of this deal is fine, it is not as

good a deal as a potential Democratic president would negotiate 18 months from now. If you had President Warren or Sanders or Biden or Buttigieg, wherever they fall on the ideological spectrum, they would negotiate a better deal for workers than Trump would. This is the best deal or a sufficient deal that Trump can negotiate, but it's not the same thing as a deal a Democrat would negotiate. And even in... Do you think there would be even stronger labor protection, even stronger environmental protection. And even though it is, and Pelosi said this too, and it's just true, they're much stronger labor environmental protections than we currently have in NAFTA. I think that they're around,

they're similar to basically what the Obama administration had negotiated in a different trade agreement, a different part of the world, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, but it's sort of in line with some of the stuff that we got in that. But the Overton window on Democratic trade policy has moved to the left since then. That is true. That is true. Yep. And so that's one. Two is, we know from our own crooked media polling that one of the most devastating arguments against Trump is that he ran as someone who was going to fix NAFTA. And he has since then worked with Pharma and Wall Street to pass a

NAFTA 2.0 that puts corporations over workers. That is a devastating argument. The other problem Trump has is that there is a very effective argument that Democrats have that all of his tweeting is fighting with everyone has costs. And the cost is the only single thing he has accomplished legislatively is the most ineffective and unpopular tax cut in American history. him a win. We've nullified one of our most important arguments. We have given him a win, and it is a win that will help him specifically in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, the three states that he absolutely has to win to get to 270. And so for all of those reasons, I don't think this is decisive. I'm not saying Democrats are going to lose from this. I think in doing this, we've made it easier for Donald Trump to be reelected. And we should not do those things. That's my bold political strategy is that things that help Donald Trump win Wisconsin should not be on our to-do list.

It's pretty simple. I mean, look, I think I would say on balance, it was – I think I agree with you that it's a bad idea. But I've been going back and forth on this because I'm trying to think of the alternative here. So the alternative would have been for Pelosi to say, I guess she could have said from the outset, we're just not negotiating with you on this trade agreement at all. So then Donald Trump goes to Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and all those other states during the election. And he says, I have the best trade agreement ever. It is a substantively good trade agreement. He talks like that, but it's a great trade.

It's a great trade agreement. And it would be bringing back jobs to your state right now. But Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, because they don't like me, have said absolutely not. They're not going to work on this with me at all. You send me a Republican Congress. You send me back to the White House. I'll pass this trade agreement. All these jobs will come back. There's also the risk that if the AFL-CIO decided to play along or endorse this trade agreement, then we would have been really fucked. Because then there's Trump plus the biggest union in the country saying the trade agreement's good and the Democrats saying they don't want to play ball.

And so that wouldn't have been good. And now the question is the attack that you just read, which you wrote for our poll and which is quite devastating. You know, in the end, the farmer provision comes out, the sort of like pro wall street provisions come out so it's not as much of it it's not as accurate an attack now i guess you could say the pharma provision only came out because democrats negotiated and pressured right for it to come out and so if democrats never played ball in the first place then you would have had a worse trade agreement with a bunch of giveaways to pharma that democrats could have just campaigned against and railed

against for the next year, which is why I keep going back and forth on this. I guess I can kind of see it both ways, but I think Trump's now going to say, I negotiated the best trade deal in history and vote for me and aren't I great. If we had not played ball, he would have said, I negotiated the best trade deal in history and it could be reality right now if only the democrats would agree with me but he's so but here's the thing this i i agree that this was that this is a difficult path to get to but he already has a list of a gazillion things that are almost entirely bullshit that he will say democrats refuse to do he has almost nothing he can say that he did. He has zero bipartisan accomplishments until now. We gave him a bipartisan accomplishment that is of, I think, questionable substantive

value, especially compared to what could be achieved with a Democratic president, which we like to believe is very possible right around the corner here. And it is a bipartisan accomplishment that is not some esoteric change to the calculation of pension funds or something like that. It is something that allows him to therefore weaponize the information in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. It specifically helps Wisconsin dairy farmers. Another attack we tested, which was also particularly devastating to Trump, was the effects of his trade policies on Wisconsin dairy farmers. And the substantive benefits of this. If this was a thing where it was like, this was a fix for ACA or something where the substantive benefits were going to kick in and help everyone tomorrow, then I think you have to do the right thing.

But trade is a slow process for these trade agreements to be ratified and then all of the benefits to accrue. We know this because Obama passed some trade agreements, and we would want to do press events on them. Well, this is another reason I think in the end, it might not matter that much at all. I mean, the federal government's own estimate is that this this trade agreement would create 176,000 jobs after six years. The economy created 266,000 jobs last month. So it is like very, very small effect here. I don't know that it'll be a big deal either way. Look, a bunch of members, Democrats in swing districts, wanted this for themselves because they campaigned on saying, I'm going to hold Trump accountable and I'm also going to get things done in Washington. And voting to impeach Trump is holding him accountable and voting for a trade agreement is getting stuff done. And there's a lot of reports that these Democrats would have voted for this anyway, whether Pelosi decided to play ball and negotiate or not. And she would have just lost a bunch of Democrats potentially. So I think you

can see from the perspective of the House Democrat in a tough red district why they would do this. It is clearly not helpful on the presidential level, as you point out. I do think that the Democratic nominee or the Democratic candidates can be free to be against it. And I think Democrats in Congress and on the presidential campaign trail can go say, yeah, we helped get a better trade agreement, but this guy's fucking up the economy or endangering the economy with his awful trade war. You know, like I think right now, now that this has already happened, I think what Democrats really have to do is almost double down on their attacks on him on the trade war, particularly because now they've helped pass this trade agreement. And I think you can probably do both there.

Yes. Last point on this, which is I understand the political logic that these members in swing districts or red districts want an accomplishment to take home. The only thing I will say is history is relatively clear that the driving, the primary question in whether they're going to get to return office or not is not their own record. It is the strength of the Democrats at the top of the ticket. If we have a strong Democratic nominee who wins, many of these people will get to return. If Trump wins, the close races almost always tend to tip in the direction of the party that wins the White House. That's what happened in 12. That's what happened in 8.

That's what happened in 16. And so things that help Trump hurt you, even if you're in a Trump district. Yep, I would definitely agree with that. All right, let's talk about the state of the primary. 538 has the national polling average at Biden 26, Bernie 17, Warren 15, Pete 9.5. Iowa has Pete in first, Biden in second, Sanders in third, Warren in fourth. In New Hampshire, it's Pete in first, Bernie second, Sanders in third, Warren in fourth. In New Hampshire, it's Pete in first, Bernie second, Biden third, Warren fourth. Nevada and South Carolina are Biden first, Bernie second. And the same goes for California and Texas, two big, big Super Tuesday states. So what do you make of all

this, Dan? Pete's got leads in Iowa and New Hampshire, small leads, but leads, bigger lead in Iowa. But when you get beyond those two, those first two states, everywhere else, the other two first primary states and the rest of the Super Tuesday map looks like it's Biden in first and Bernie in second. What do you think? When you really step back, does it look more like a potentially a two-person race here or what? I don't know that it's a two-person race, but I think it's fair to say that Biden is in an extremely strong position right now. Now, underperforming in Iowa and New Hampshire could change that position. We just don't know. But Biden's dominating lead with African-American voters and his strength in all parts of the country makes him the favorite for the nomination. And I think Bernie Sanders is, as of this moment

in time, very clearly the candidate not named Joe Biden with the best chance of winning the nomination. He is strong in all of the early primary states. He is the candidate, I think, who at least even though everyone is trailing Biden significantly with African-American voters, Bernie Sanders has high name ID and more support than the rest of the candidates. He's in second place with that group in South Carolina and nationally. He does very well with Latino voters according to the limited amount of polling we have. And so he has a broad-based coalition that gives him the chance to gain strength that could be applied nationally with early state wins. And so I think he is strengthened by running a very good campaign, having an incredibly consistent message, I think, being just exuding the nebulous characteristic of

authenticity. But he's like Bernie is Bernie, and you've never seen anything different. And I think that can be quite appealing to a lot of people. But he has also been drafting off of the attention on Elizabeth Warren. Bernie is actually in the position that Warren was a few months ago. Remember when we talked about how Warren was getting strength in these polls and the Biden campaign and Kamala Harris's campaign were attacking each other. The Kamala Harris campaign and the Bernie Sanders campaign were attacking each other and Biden and Bernie attacking each other.

And we were sort of saying, I don't understand why everyone is not attacking Elizabeth Warren, or at least drawing contrast with her because she was the person gaining strength. All of the attention on Warren has allowed Bernie Sanders to strengthen without the glare of the spotlight. It is possible with a debate coming that that could change, but we will see. Well, I was going to say, so now, you know, Biden's, you know, been front runner. And so he's had attacks leveled at him.

And now Warren was, you know, front runner and she had attacks leveled at her that that that clearly hurt a bit. Pete Buttigieg is, you know, front runner in Iowa right now. And he's plenty of attacks on him that we'll talk about in a bit. I wonder if Bernie has benefited from the fact that he hasn't been in the top spot yet, but he's been sort of hovering at the second spot or the third spot. And so no one has an incentive to actually go after him yet and i also think he's benefiting from the media has sort of underestimated him i don't i don't i mean you know the bernie campaign complains about this all the time but i i think they have uh a lot to complain about actually i think it's legitimate

like you see headlines all the time that's like b Biden in first and Warren slips to third, and they just literally don't mention that Bernie Sanders is in second. And I think there's some truth to the fact that the... I don't know why exactly the press doesn't take him as seriously as a potential nominee, but I think it's helping his campaign a bit. Well, I think the Bernie Sanders campaign is right that they are being ignored for some set of reasons. I think they are wrong to be telling the press to cover him more. Like what they are doing is working.

He doesn't need attention to raise money. He has a massive online fundraising base that gives him money regardless of what the press says about him. So just like keep your head down, draft off the attention on Buttigieg and Warren and the others. So just keep your head down, draft off the attention on Buttigieg and Warren and the others, and just keep doing what you're doing because it's working. Press attention, if you're Bernie Sanders, is not a necessary component to success.

Yeah. One more thing on Biden here before we go on. So Ryan Lizza reported in Politico this week that the former vice president has been, quote, signaling to aides that he would serve only a single term if he's elected, though he's unlikely to actually make a public one term pledge. His campaign then went on the record to deny this rumor, saying this isn't a conversation our campaign is having and not something Biden is thinking about. In October, though, when the Associated Press asked Biden this question directly, he said, quote, watch me and you'll see. It doesn't mean I would run a second term. I'm not going to make that judgment at this moment.

What's going on here? Do you think this would be a good idea, bad idea? Is it crazy? Is it not? What do you think? I would be very surprised if this is something that Biden did, just knowing him as we do over the years. I would be surprised by it. I don't know whether it's a good idea or a bad idea. I know that in 2008, we saw polling on this

because there was a lot of rumors or discussion that John McCain might consider this path, that he would say he was going to be a one-term president, which is sort of amazing given how much younger he was then than yeah uh any of these any of these people exactly yeah trump sanders biden yeah he would basically be in people to judge his generational cohort in this race um and he he would be the one uh telling with the okay boomer memes um but but that polling showed it was a terrible idea. Voters hated it. It was a sign of – like persuaded – like voters who oppose a candidate or were considering the candidate thought it was a sign of tremendous weakness. Voters who supported the candidate thought it was a – that you would be basically handing over political power.

Why would you put a – why would you give up the benefits of incumbency? I don't know whether that dynamic has changed. It is possible it has because just a lot has changed in the Trump era. A lot of Biden's political appeal to a lot of people is a return to normalcy, right? Which I'm not saying is possible, but people want that, right? which I'm not saying is possible, but people want that, right? And so it could work, a message that said, look, I didn't want to run. I was retired. If I was going to run, I was going to run in 2016, and tragedies in my life prevented that. But I felt compelled to do this because this is the most important election in history, and if we don't defeat Trump, then we're going to go past the point of no return as a country. And so I'm going to run, I'm going to come in for four years, I'm going to appoint a young, exciting member of the next generation, like a Stacey Abrams or Kamala

Harris or someone like that, who can take over after four years. But I'm going to get elected, I'm going to spend those four years not trying to get reelected or thinking about polls and fundraising, but just doing the right thing to fix all the things Trump did. I'd be interested to see that play itself out in some political research. So who knows? Yeah, you can see the argument against it, which is what you said. It's like, talk about hanging a lantern on your problems, you know. I'm really old and that's why I'm not going to run for a second term. Sort of highlights it. But I can see the argument in favor.

I mean, like imagine if tomorrow and some people were saying not just the vice president, but the whole cabinet. If Joe Biden announces Stacey Abrams is going to be his running mate and And he announces some potential cabinet members, and they're all members of sort of the young progressive generation of the Democratic Party. He said, this is the team. I'm going to be basically a caretaker president. We're going to try to elect as many Democrats as possible in 2020. And what I'm going to do with the Democratic majority the first couple of years is I'm going to pass a couple

of really big pieces of legislation, which even Democratic presidents who serve two terms usually pass the most legislation in the first couple of years is I'm going to pass a couple of really big pieces of legislation, which even Democratic presidents who serve two terms usually pass the most legislation in the first term anyway, because they end up losing seats in the midterm. And the second term is tougher, right? Because they have divided government. And so you start going to that. And then, you know, does it does that unite the party a little bit more? Does that sort of help him with progressives and young people a little bit more? Do people start getting more excited to see that ticket to see that potential cabinet i don't know you know it's it's one of those things like like you said it could just be a bunch of uh crazy

consultants sitting in a room dreaming up ideas that are actually horrible when you pull them which happens a lot but um i don't know that that would be the that would be the argument for it yeah um and and what you get from that, from electing Joe Biden then is still, you know, the significant or potentially significant number of people out there who think he is, who see him for some reason as a more electable Democrat. I think it was Alex Seitzwald on Twitter who said that if you say brokered convention and one term pledge three times, it summons a giant Aaron Sorkin, which I think, which is like this, like this is a, this is the problem of West wing plot lines becoming political strategy.

Yep. That is, that is, that is the, uh, the most, the very obvious problem there. I do think the Biden campaign position, which is, yeah, maybe he's thinking about it, wink, wink, but he's never going to say it out loud. I don't know what that gets you. That is a decision to live in the worst of all worlds. Right. If you're going to go bold, go bold, man. Go do it and take it for a spin, but don't just live in this world of anonymous quotes to fucking Ryan Lizza. I don't think that's helping. Well, to be fair, that was an anonymous quote about the position. The on the record quote is that this is not under consideration. And I'm

sure it's under consideration by some people, but. It's indicative of another problem with the Biden campaign is he's got a close group of aides who's going on the record and saying things. And then he's got a bunch of like, you know, a whole bunch of really helpful advisors that are going and saying very un-fucking-helpful things to Ryan Liz and to other journalists pretending that they speak for the Biden campaign. So not helpful when you're on a campaign like that. I'll tell you that. That is for sure. All right. Finally, let's talk about Mayor Pete.

Last episode, we talked about him calling on his old consulting firm, McKinsey, to release him from his NDA so he could talk about his clients. Now they have. And it turns out that in his two and a half years there, he worked for nine clients, including a Canadian supermarket chain, the Department of Defense, the U.S. Postal Service, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan, where he says he spent three months as part of a team analyzing overhead expenditures like rent utilities and travel costs i i literally just fell asleep reading that sentence um because because of this work some folks on the left are blaming him for the insurance company laying off 10 of its workforce two years after pete finished his consulting gig with them and are now calling him soulless, heartless, and Pete Romney.

I don't know, man. What do you think of this one? Well, I think voters should know who his clients were, and he should talk about them, just as I think voters should know who Elizabeth Warren's consulting clients were, or who other people... More information is better for voters to make what is a very tough and important decision about who takes on Trump. I think generally what the decisions that humans make at the age of 24, what they do with their lives, where they're going to work, should be discounted in some way, right? They're not irrelevant, but people change over time. And the problem for Pete is decisions he made when he was 24 were 13 years ago. So it's one thing if Bernie Sanders or

Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden or even Kamala Harris and others had, they had gone in the private sector or worked on Wall Street or something for a few years and they were 24 and then dedicated the rest of their life to public service, it is a data point that they chose to work on Wall Street at some point, but it has to be taken in the larger context of all the life decisions they've made. And Pete's decision does stand for someone who has modeled himself publicly on Barack Obama and sort of specifically pitched himself as Barack Obama 2.0, which I find to be a particularly bold decision. But that does stand in stark contrast to Barack Obama's decision to go be a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago at a similar point in his life. McKinsey is a very

specific life choice. Yeah, of course. Look, I just want people to be sort of specific and honest in their descriptions of candidates. That's all. And if you want to, you're right, if you want to say there's some people who chose this after college and Pete decided to choose McKinsey. You all know what McKinsey is. He also chose to go serve in Afghanistan. He chose to serve as mayor of his town, right? So say that. And like you said, McKinsey is a data point for who Pete is. And you can look at the clients he worked on, stuff like that. Going from that to calling him Pete Romney, let's just be clear about what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital,

since we all look back at it and talk about it a lot these days. about what Mitt Romney did at Bain Capital, since we all look back at it and talk about it a lot these days. Mitt Romney made decisions to buy companies, lay off their workers, outsource their jobs, extract a bunch of profit, and then let them go bankrupt. He was a corporate raider.

That's what he did at Bain Capital. That's why we talked about it. We didn't talk about Mitt Romney at Bain because Barack Obama was running against someone who worked in the private sector. We weren't mad that Mitt Romney went and made money and worked at a consulting firm. We wanted to highlight the fact that he was a fucking corporate raider who just outsourced jobs and caused bankruptcies everywhere he went. And that life experience informed the specific economic policies that he put forward that were incredibly pro corporation right which by the way were probably at the end of the day even more devastating to

his candidacy than his work at bain i think people misremember this but probably the worst political decision that mitt romney made was not necessarily his years at bain it was picking fucking paul ryan as his running mate the author of a a budget that decimated Medicare and screwed people over. That's what voters were really pissed about. And proposing a tax cut that would raise taxes on the middle class to give giant tax cuts to people like Mitt Romney who made tens of millions of dollars being corporate raiders. being corporate raiders. Yeah, and look, I get that you and I have been there on primary campaigns when you just, we look back now at some of the things that our campaign said about Hillary Clinton, that Hillary Clinton said about us, and it's like, oh God, I can't believe we went that far.

That seemed a little silly at the time. And I think that is where this campaign is sort of going. And look, both campaigns, Buttigieg's campaign and Elizabeth Warren's campaign and everyone else's campaign, Sanders, whatever else, they're free to make whatever attacks you want to make. Like, fine. But just from your own political standpoint, and I should say this to supporters of these campaigns mainly because the campaigns themselves, I think, are acting pretty – I think they're acting much nicer to each other even than we did with Hillary Clinton campaign right now. So I should just say that. But the supporters of the campaign on Twitter, which is unfortunately a bigger deal now than it ever was before, I would just say like, think about whether you are helping or hurting your candidate by the attacks you make on other candidates and other campaigns. Because there is plenty to criticize Pete Buttigieg about.

But the idea that a three-month stint at Blue Cross Blue Shield, where you're creating spreadsheets about overhead travel costs, led to the company laying off 10% of its workforce two years later after you left. I mean, no one's going to believe that. You know what I'm saying? No one is going to believe that. There is, I think, an interesting component to this. I think the Pete Romney nickname is relatively absurd. But what is interesting, I think, and the thing that would make me nervous in the Buttigieg campaign is turning this into an argument against Pete's electability, right? Yeah. Even if the argument is on its face absurd, that somehow because he did this, he can't win Michigan, as Rashida Tlaib said, like Romney couldn't win Michigan. I think that is just an illogical point. But Pete – a lot of Pete's recent success, right, which I think has plateaued nationally at least, is based on the idea that he is more electable than Sanders and Warren.

And that is an incredibly specious case. Incredibly. I've always thought this. It is based in this very theoretical idea that has been true historically, that has been famously put forward by our friend David Oxelrod, which is voters want the remedy, not the replica. And Pete Buttigieg, as Axe would say, based on his intellect and his age and his decision to join the military, et cetera, makes him a strong contrast to Trump or a big contrast to Trump. So he's very different. But ultimately, he has no history of winning the votes you need to win, right? He's the mayor of a small college town in Indiana. or the most opposite of Donald Trump.

I think Pete's argument is temperamentally, right? He's the most opposite of Donald Trump. But look, I think this brings up, the electability thing brings up an interesting point, which is I think none of the four front runners right now, Biden, Bernie, Warren, or Pete, have an electability case to be made that's based in I've won votes in some red or purple state, and that's why I should be president,

which is very interesting. And so all of their cases for electability are going to be different. And that's and this is this is my point on electability the whole time, because we've had this debate where either people say electability is good and right or electability is bad and fake, you know, and the truth is electability is just it's hard to know what makes someone electable or not. That's the problem with electability is that it's vague. But because voters care so much about who's going to be the candidate that can beat Donald Trump, it is your job as a candidate in the campaign to make your own case on electability

and to say why you're the best person to take on Donald Trump. That is an important argument to make, and it's going to be different for different candidates. And you're right. I don't think Pete's case can't be, I'm going to win the Midwest, because you're right, he won a small college. That is his case. That is his case, right.

Well, at the LJ, he started to make a different case, which is, imagine someone like me on the stage next to Donald Trump. I am so temperamentally different from this man. And that's his case. I think Elizabeth Warren's case, which she is actually making today is, you know, she said, I'm building a grassroots movement of Democrats, independents and Republicans united in the belief that we can clean up the corruption in DC. That's our path to beat Donald Trump will beat the most corrupt president in history by campaigning on the most aggressive anti-corruption platform since

Watergate. That is like one of the first times I've heard Elizabeth Warren make an electability argument. She's saying you want to put the least corrupt person or the person who's fighting corruption the most on stage next to the guy who's the most corrupt president we've ever had for the best contrast. That's an electability case. It's a good case, you know. And so I think as we're getting closer to Iowa and New Hampshire in these primaries, you're going to hear people trying to make the case of why they're the best person to be on that stage next to Trump and why politically they're the ones who can beat him. strength thus far is from this cohort of very politically engaged college-educated whites who thus far in this campaign have been incredibly electability sensitive, right? They all flocked to Kamala Harris when it's- And fickle, fickle group. Right. Flocked to Kamala Harris for a brief moment, ran away quickly, went to Warren.

We were like two New York Times articles about Elizabeth Warren's selectability concerns over Medicare for all, which I think are also specious, and they all flocked to Mayor Pete. And so like Bernie and Biden, to go back to them, have sustained this because their bases are – their coalitions are broader and therefore less susceptible to this sort of movement. And so Pete has to watch his electability flank, if you will, much as some of these other candidates have had to do. Yeah, that's right. Okay. When we come back, we'll have Dan's interview with the New York Times' Mike Isaac. Now pleased to be joined by New York Times technology reporter and the author of Super Pumped, The Battle for Uber, Mike Isaac. Mike, welcome to Pod Save America. Hey, thanks for having me.

Before we get to the story of Uber, which remains in the news seemingly every day, I want to talk to you about another company that you cover very closely, Facebook. Yeah. Facebook. Yeah. You reported, I think it was a few weeks ago, maybe about that Facebook was considering possibly changing their very controversial ad policy where they would say they would not fact check ads from politicians. And I wanted to ask one, if you had any update on whether that still is still in consideration. Sure. So, you know, to recap their whole, they're in this like, and I think it's Facebook, but all the internet companies are in this like,

what do we do on how we handle politicians doing digital advertising? You know, are we going to fact check them or not? And Facebook in particular has been interesting because Zuckerberg, this comes pretty much straight from Zuckerberg. He believes that they should not be fact checking them. Right. So that's they have not. And he's pretty much not going to budge on on that. So if if Trump or or Warren or whoever wants to run a misleading or

blatantly false ad, they're they're able to do that. But the this has been contentious inside because the employees themselves at Facebook are like, whoa, we're not cool with this, right? We've been building systems to kind of deal with misinformation for a while. And the fact that Facebook is probably the most finely tuned ad targeting machine in history makes misinformation that much easier to spread. So the latest I've heard is they are sort of mulling, well, you know, we're not going to change the fact-checking policy, but we might deal with limiting the audience size, right? So instead of down to like a hundred people talking to a hundred people, maybe they bump it up to 1,000 people or something. So some limits on it, but still not willing to really go super far.

So the change would be on the capacity to micro-target? Yeah, that's correct. And I think that's one of the biggest bones of contention inside of the company right now. And you say this comes directly from Zuckerberg himself. What is driving this? Because I sort of see like he gave this speech at Georgetown University where he sort of laid out this policy and defended it, which was controversial. A host of reasons, including the idea that he started Facebook to oppose the Iraq war, which Aaron Sorkin and others would disagree with. Well, that was crazy. I don't know why he said that. I mean, clearly it's not true, right? Yeah. I mean, and, but it also in that he made defensive free speech be the argument for not fact-checking, but there is this inherent contradiction in Facebook wrapping itself around

freedom of speech, which is there's all sorts of content that they decide that they won't take down, but they will penalize and show to fewer people within the algorithm. So what's the underlying Zuckerberg's underlying motivation to the extent you can figure it out and how they square the circle on these free speech contradictions. Yeah. And I think there's a, there's a lot going on for one. It's, it's probably letting them off the hook. And I have to watch this and when rewrite stories, to say they are completely free

speech and really sort of stand for it completely because they do take down stuff across the world every day, and depending on which country they're in and the laws in certain countries does require them to do that, but then also make a lot of kind of arbitrary decisions and there's whispers of, you know, maybe governments lean on them in some places where they kind of quietly take stuff down. So I don't think it's for the credit they get and sometimes the press gives them for being like free speech warriors. I don't think that's wholly true. Right. And, um, but the other part of this is I think for a very long time, they just, they had policies, um, that weren't really put to the test in any meaningful way. Right. And, and so now they're in this position where, well, maybe, um, you know, we've uncovered like how easily misinformation spreads and now we have to sort of grapple with what we are and aren't allowing on here. We don't want to be in that position. They kind of want to kick that can down the road and are actually in a weird place now where they're inviting regulation to have guidelines around this. Actually, I think Zuckerberg is actually saying we want to be regulated in at least some ways. So that would help them a little bit, but like, you know, they

also have a lot of double standards on how they treat it, right? So these disinformation campaigns from bad foreign actors, they sort of well publicized their takedowns, whether it's like Iran or China or Russia. But you probably saw recently the Daily Wire thing where they basically have a astroturfing campaign where a lot of fake accounts are pushing people to the Daily Wire's Facebook page, which is clearly against their rules. But Facebook is sort of making up reasons why they're allowing it, right? Which I think is probably, you know, total BS. But so, like, I think they're figuring out these policies in real time and don't really have good answers around a lot of this stuff.

And this is sort of putting more pressure on them to figure it out. But I don't know what that's going to even look like. The Daily Wire thing is sort of an example of how, I don't know whether it's Facebook's strategy has changed or the perception of its strategy has changed, which is a lot of progressives, myself included, believes that if instead of Daily Wire, it was running these astros, and Daily Wire being Ben Shapiro's site, for those who assiduously avoid that, you may listen to us. He is a person in the world. But instead of Ben Shapiro doing that, it was crooked media and Ponce of America. A lot of progressives believe that Facebook would take that down and put out a press release about it. Less of a like the way we used to think about Silicon Valley and more of a traditional huge company that views its best interest lying in Republican control of Washington.

Right. Yep. Do you think there's anything to that? So, look, I think Zuckerberg in particular, and this is from people like around him, is is very like he has liberal views that he pretty much espouses, you know, privately, but sometimes in public. But I think he's just hypersensitive to D.C. thinking that they're just this liberal network that are going to sort of enforce their to conservatives a lot of the time. And so the Ben Shapiro thing is kind of like perfect example of that. And he has denied on the record, you know, in interviews I've done in the past saying that we sort of cater conservatives. But I really do think that the folks in the policy team in D.C. have kind of laid out the situation being like, look, the state of play is conservatives have attacked Facebook with like a knowingly bad faith argument that that that they're being censored on on social networks, which there there's no proof of. Right. But it seems to be working. So we have to like essentially go out of our way not to to give them ammo to make us look like we're censoring a lot of these networks. And so I don't think it's I think that the I'd be very curious to see what the next test case is around astroturfing or just sort of really like completely blatant misuse of the site and which which side of the aisle that belongs to and what Facebook does in that situation. But it almost is like the worst case scenario for them to. Bush and famously sat behind Brett Kavanaugh at his hearings, understanding that they are longtime personal friends. That's right. The woman whose name I can't remember who's always quoted about why certain ads go up or down is- Katie Harbaugh? Yeah, who is a former aide to Rudy Giuliani, among other people.

Yeah, who is a former aide to Rudy Giuliani, among other people. And I'd like I know that's I know a lot of people work in the policy world and they're not only Republican, but it does feel like a little bit like the leadership is. And then you have this situation where Facebook sponsors the Federalist Society dinner celebrating Brett Kavanaugh. Now, every company in Washington throws its money around both ways. I'm sure that we can find if it was it may not be social acceptable anymore, but Facebook to sponsor some sort of progressive dinner. as I understand it, about Joel Kaplan being at that hearing with Brett Kavanaugh. So how does something like that happen in what is theoretically an incredibly successful, well-run company? Because they did back off, right? I think they removed themselves from that. That's right. So it's really funny you said the SciShow Bob thing because a Facebook employee was telling me that's an internal example that they frequently use just sort of when they're grumbling to themselves. But the Kavanaugh stuff has been very interesting because if you remember

back during the confirmation hearing, I mean, obviously there was a lot going on, but that was probably one of the most contentious periods of internal strife for this company in the 15 years it's been around. Like people were viscerally upset and just sort of like saying, look, it looks like we're endorsing someone who a lot of women inside of the company and men like just believed was lying or at least, you know, didn't believe his version of what happened.

And so that came up again. And I think what happened, and I don't know how widely this got reported, but what I heard was Facebook tried to make the distinction that they were sponsoring, they were sending money for the Federalist Society, but not for Brett Kavanaugh, even though he was like, what, the keynote speaker or least by employees internally, it sort of kicked things up over again. And there's still a real hangover around that moment in time. And I think this is actually a story I sort of perceive how they should act, how the company should behave. And then maybe a kind of resentment from the folks in D.C. who are saying essentially you don't get how our world works. Right. And you and to your point, like you sort of have to play nice with everyone if you're going to operate in this environment or else we're just going to be screwed or we're going to be just on the outs with one party and we can't have that. I think there's a real connection in a lot of ways between what Facebook's going through now, what Uber has gone through, and in at least some way the Silicon Valley culture that leads to both of them. And I cannot recommend your book

enough. It is a, it's an amazing read. It's, it's just, it's like the reporting details you have are amazing. It tells a really compelling story. Um, and it, but I think it also tells a broader story about business and Silicon Valley in particular. And so I want to at least start with how different is Uber today from Uber in the Travis era? Yeah, totally. I think I'm glad you got that out of it because, you know, it's an Uber book, but I like to say it's like not really just about Uber, right? Like I think it's about what a lot of tech companies are going through at this particular moment in time. But, you know, back in the Travis Kalanick era, it was just sort of marked by, you know, bad behavior and a sort of disregard for how women were treated internally and how just employees registered complaints and

reckless sort of disregard for rules in general, right? Whether it was inside or outside of the company. And so now, look, they brought in this professional CEO. He's kind of like, they call him the dad of Silicon Valley, kind of boring, kind of like, you know, he was a CFO for a very long time under Barry Diller at IAC and went to run Expedia. So I think boring is probably like fine, I guess, you know, and there they have so much PTSD around being in the news for, you know, a year straight and if not longer around how bad Uber was. I think employees are kind of scared to act in the same ways that they might have like five or 10 years ago. So that has changed.

But now they're in like this weird, it's weird. There's like a meme going around of like maybe some of them miss the fire that this crazy founder had. Or like maybe, you know, if you bring in a professional CEO, you don't have that same attractiveness or spark that some companies out. Even as Uber was known as a bad

culture, it was known as a bad culture, but phenomenal success. Maybe one of the most successful stories in Silicon Valley since Google or Facebook, this huge company, this massive valuation that was going to mint a gazillion billionaires. And now the much anticipated IPO happened. The public markets have been particularly cruel to Uber. Is there a connection between how Uber viewed itself, right? Where they were grow at all costs, it was the gold standard of where to work in Silicon Valley in terms of, like, they were beating out Facebook and Google for a top engineering talent. People were leaving wherever they were if they could get a chance to get some of those RSUs at Uber. But now it feels very different.

And that even though it's by any definition still a growing, if not profitable company, the perception is very different, right? It's a cautionary tale of Silicon Valley excess, I think. I think that's right. I think there's a lot of different things going on right now that Uber kind of marked the change of how people view what is a successful tech company. Right. Like you I mean, you've seen and this is not a novel thought, like just the idea of profitability is now important to people again. You know, like it's weird to say that. But I mean, I think for the past 20 years, this story has been very founders of companies have been very successful in telling Wall Street and telling investors, look, you don't have to

worry about profits. You know, you just have to worry about growth and getting more bodies and vehicles or eyeballs in the sites or whatever. And and a few companies have proved that was a correct, you know, methodology. Facebook, once it finally turned on its advertising now sort of mints money. Google as well. I mean, their ad machine is just sort of nonstop sort of growing. But I think, look, I think software, pure software based advertising businesses are really different than, you know, ride sharing, where you have to spend enormous amounts of money to make it in a market. And when your product is largely like a commodity, right, like you probably have very little brand loyalty to an Uber versus a Lyft versus a whatever ride sharing service in any country. And there's no loyalty on the driver's side either. It makes it hard to create what's called like this network effect in the industry where like once you get big enough, more people keep joining it and it kind of like the success snowball. So I think there's a lot working against Uber right now in terms of how people view its success, how the street views its success, how people thought they were going to become millionaires because the stock was going to soar. But a lot of that value was captured before the company ever went to the public markets, right? Like, you know, I remember when they were saying, this is $120 billion company, you know, and we're going to blow this IPO out of the water.

And now I think we're just crashing back down to earth. Uber is, I think, the most extreme example of, even more extreme than WeWork, I guess, but one of the most extreme examples of the growth at all costs mentality that has driven Silicon Valley since forever, I guess, where the idea is because profitability is not important, all that matters is what is your year over year or quarter over quarter growth? And that obviously in the case of Facebook, it led to a whole bunch of things that were sort of ended up being loopholes that could then be exploited in the context of the election. In Uber, that led to all the problems in the culture and who was rewarded for what behavior

and what was ignored and what was penalized but like as you said i took your book to be a lesson be about silicon valley more broadly do you see any like introspection in the intact more broadly about this view that growth is the most important thing. Even short-term growth is more important than long-term success. I think, you know, it was really funny as someone like warned me, they're like, you wrote the book as a cautionary tale, but hopefully you didn't write it as like an instruction manual for a lot of people. Right. And I don't know, I think I've, I sort of flipped back and forth. Like on the one hand, Travis and a lot of the people at the top are billionaires, right, or have made like very large amounts of money. And Travis is still accepted in polite society.

He attends the Met Gala. He's building another company right now and getting people to work for him. So like I don't know exactly what penalties he's paid. So, like, I want to build an ethical tech company, right? Like, I want to do this right. And the whole reason I'm interested in technology is because I do believe it can help the world. And we should be thinking about that from the very beginning. And I think that's, that's hopeful, right? Like, I think that's a nice thing. Do you think that is a more

sincere view? You think people sincerely believe that, that it's a reaction to, uh, cause every company, whether you are right, you know, Facebook or you're some very esoteric SAS company, you have a change the world recruiting pitch, right? And investor pitch. But do you think that there's been a change? Maybe it's generational with millennials and Gen Z that people or a reaction to what's happening in tech that there are people trying to do this right now? Yeah. No, I do.

I totally take your point. I do think like people who are building the next Juicero or like fucking pizza robot think they're changing the world. But I also think people kind of rationalize their worldview to suit their lifestyle a lot of the time. Right., look at how how how even employees inside of Google now are like the younger generations of folks inside. I think Google, Facebook, Amazon are pushing back in really meaningful ways that management is not used to or not prepared for. And I feel like that feels different, right? That was, for a while, it was, okay, Zuckerberg or Larry Page or whoever kind of knows best, and I'm drinking the Kool-Aid because I feel like we're doing the right thing, and fearless leader knows all. And I don't think, I think, like, they don't necessarily give the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Or at least there's a growing number of people who don't give the benefit of the doubt. to categorize most of their gig workers as employees, therefore giving them access to a whole set of different benefits and job security. How big a threat does Uber view this to its business? I mean, I really think it's existential, right? You can credit whether you support the model or don't support the model. I think Uber popularized, support the model or don't support the model. I think Uber popularized, even though it had existed for a while, you know, and how writers work, how nail salons work, whoever, like Uber made popular the idea of a contract gig worker and a zillion different Ubers for X have popped up in the meantime. And it's now, whether you like it or not, a form of employment or non-employment that is very present and now

being used to inspire all these other companies. I think it's existential to all these businesses, particularly because the whole business model of Uber is shoving as many costs as possible off onto the people that drive for them, right? So they're liable for their own health insurance. They're liable for dealing with their car and repairs over time. They don't have a lot of worker protections that for many years were fought to sort of put into place. And you can argue the interesting thing about this, though, is there are I talked to just as many people who are angry about not having those protections versus people who are like, look, I don't want to be an employee and I actually do prefer this model. So it's not as clean to me as one or both sides might make it. But I still think it's the form of work is here and we're going to continue going through permutations to figure out what it should look like ultimately, whether they change it to add more protections. It does feel like this is about to, at least in California, become an epic battle because these companies are putting together what I think is about a $100 million effort to put a

initiative on the ballot in 2020 to try to overturn this law. You have Ubers just asserting the law didn't apply to them, which was very Trumpian in my view. Producers just asserting the law didn't apply to them, which was very Trumpian in my view. That's like, this is a funny thing that that strategy seems to be adopted by a lot more folks now, right? Like even Warner Brothers the other day. I saw that. Did you see that? Yes.

It was just there like, no, we don't care. And we're, you know, we don't care how we, you know, portray women journalists. We're just going to do it. Right. It's a weird strategy that seems to be working. Yeah. Which is a broader, a broader conversation. It's is a broader conversation about the state of American media. Mike Isaac, thank you so much for joining us on Pod Save America. Please check out his book, Super Pumped, The Battle for Uber. It is a phenomenal read. Well, thanks for having me. It would make a

great holiday gift for everyone. I was going to say perfect for the tree. That's right. Excellent. Mike, thanks so much. Thanks for having me, man. All right. Excellent. Mike, thanks so much. Thanks for having me, man. Thanks to Mike Isaac for joining us today, and we'll see you next week. Bye, everyone.

Bye. Bye. 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 Seglin 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.