The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - A "Monster" and a "Communist" --- Really? -- This Week's Race Next Door (#10) with Bruce Anderson

Episode Date: October 8, 2020

The podcast within a podcast with Bruce Anderson and me deconstructing the Veep Debate.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here once again with the Bridge Daily. It's Thursday of week 30. Last night, well, it was the vice presidential debate, and so the race next door is coming up in just a minute. A minute or maybe even less than a minute. But I want to start by just doing a kind of tag to last night's podcast, which was a lot about a lot of different things, but including some stuff about masks and what banks in particular should do

about customers who refuse to wear masks in the bank, which seems to be a much greater problem than a lot of people thought. However, it's a minority problem, but a minority in a bank or anywhere else can cause huge problems. But I found this survey interesting that came out in the last day, and it's from National Geographic. And that survey found that most Americans, regardless of their backgrounds and political beliefs, have changed their minds about mask wearing, with 92% of 2,200 Americans polled saying they wear a face mask when leaving their home. 74% of them saying they always wear a face mask. Now, those are pretty big numbers.

And if they're true, if they're real, and if there's any indication that that's similar north of the border here in Canada, those are the kind of numbers that can head towards a flattening of the curve. Right? So good for them if those 2,200 people actually represent the population of the United States in some way. But it shows that they've changed their mind over, it doesn't really say how long, but clearly since the last time they'd polled,

with 92% of them saying they wear a face mask when they leave home, 74% of them saying they always wear a face mask. Now, maybe they just did the poll on the streets of New York where face mask wearing has been really good for some time now. But maybe they're representative of the country at large, and if they have, those are pretty encouraging numbers. All right, as promised, we're going to get to the face next door. We'll get the right music here.

And you know what? Music starts this. Here it is. Ah, yes, Hail to the Chief. Now, of course, that only gets played for the president. Last night was the vice presidential debate. But you have to look at those two people on the stage, Kamala Harris and Mike Pence, and think, you know,

one day one of these two could be president. And if they are, they'll get a hail to the chief when they enter a room. But anyway, we use it to signal that Bruce Anderson joins us, once again from Ottawa. And he's with us, the chairman of Abacus Data and one of the country's leading researchers when it comes to numbers and polls and surveys. And Bruce, as always, good to have you with us. Great to talk to you, Peter. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about last night, because, I don't know, my

sense of that debate, I watched it all, as I know you did, and there were some interesting moments in it, but at the end of the day, you go, well, really, did anything really change here tonight? Did Pence gain votes or lose votes? I don't think either. Did Kamala Harris lose votes? I don't think so. Gain votes? Maybe she might have gained some in the undecided, that small undecided group in terms of women, because there are a lot of women upset about the way Pence kind of interrupted her and stretched out his answers beyond what the rules had said. But I don't know, over all my senses, probably not a lot happened there, which would be a disappointment to Republicans who were looking forward to this being a turning point,

and one person in particular, and that, of course, is Donald Trump. Now, Trump tweeted in the middle of the debate last night exactly what we predicted he would do. Oh, Mike Pence is such a great vice president. He's just winning this debate, you know, big time. I don't think that's what he believed. I think he's mad that the debate went the way it did go. And you can tell this morning because he went on Fox Business Network,

the business network of Fox. And, you know, the words he used to describe Kamala Harris show just how scared he is of her and how scared he is of the situation right now on every front that he's facing. But, you know, he called her a monster, really? U.S. Senator, he called her a monster. And he called her a communist.

Now, I'm not sure if he's ever looked up the definition of communist, but to suggest that it applies to Kamala Harris is a bit of a stretch. Anyway, my assumption watching that, unless he's totally strung out on steroids, which is also possible if you listen to the doctors who are commenting, um, unless that's the case, uh, his use of the language and description of her should be an embarrassment to every American and certainly to every American Republican who should be standing up and saying something, but we won't hold our breath on that.

However, I've gone on long enough, sir. It's your time to weigh in and tell me how wrong I am. No, actually, I agree with a lot of that. I do think it's so typical of Donald Trump. If something looks like it might go right for him for an hour or two, he finds a way to turn it into garbage. And calling Kamala Harris a monster after, you know, most people might have thought Pence did better than Trump did last night, but they also appeared to think that Kamala Harris

did a pretty good job. Calling her a monster just makes it so clear that either he's scared of her or he doesn't kind of understand human nature and human beings the same way that the rest of us do. So every day of this campaign, it seems, has been a case of Trump making his own situation worse, and I think today is no different. I got to say, you know, there's an awful lot of anecdotal information out there. I saw some focus groups immediately after the debate last night. The only hard data I saw was a 609-person interview by CNN, which they reported on air not long after the debate had ended.

And I felt like because I looked at that debate myself and saw, well, you know, Pence was better than Trump. And we all kind of knew he would be because that's a very, very low bar. But so he was better than Trump. But did that mean that he won the debate? And I think you put your finger on something really, really important here, Peter, which is that men and women probably watch that debate with very different or significantly different reactions. And certainly that's what the data that CNN put out showed, that overall, among the 600 or so people that were interviewed, 59% thought that Harris won, 41% thought that Pence won, which to me is a pretty clear victory for the Trump campaign needed something much, much better than that to reverse the trajectory

that's showing up in the polling and in the fundraising, frankly, every single day right now. But then I looked this morning also at the differences in reaction in that sample of 600 people between men and women, and men were kind of 50-50 Pence-Harris. In fact, I think she was kind of two points ahead of him, which is margin of error stuff. But women were 69% Harris won. That's a massive, massive 20-point gap. And what we know from the polling, especially in the swing states, is that more than anything else, what's gone wrong for the Trump campaign in the last several weeks, Peter, has been the defection of female voters that supported Trump in 2016 and are going the other way right now. So to have a bad night with women,

especially if women were looking at Pence and going, you know what, I don't like the interruptions. I don't like him talking over her time. I don't like that this kind of looks too familiar to me from bad meetings or bad social situations I've been in. They didn't need that. And the last thing I'll say about the data is that, you know, not surprisingly, more than 90% of Republican voters thought that Pence won, and more than 90% of Democratic voters thought that Harris won. But what did the independents think? And it was 63-31 in that CNN poll, thought that she did better. So, you know, I think

everybody who's kind of so invested in following these things personally, with a debate like that, as opposed to the one last week, which was pretty clear cut. Last night, you kind of take a step back and say, I don't, you know, I don't want my own personal feelings to kind of invade this too much. What does the data show? And I think the data is saying it was a pretty good night for the Democrats. The only thing I'll add to that is the views of 609 people out of a country of 330 million have never been analyzed so much and so well, as we just heard in these last couple of minutes. It's a small poll. It's a small sample.

And the margin of error, I think, was five or six percentage points, one way or the other. But still, of that group, there's certainly a pattern was established within within that group but from that but let's move on the other the other thing i would say because i think we both agree that we've seen a significant shift on the part of uh women towards against the republican party women who may well have voted for donald trump last time we've seen a significant shift in the last, pretty much the last month, because it went from, you know, kind of six to eight points to now it's in, you know, regularly in double digits across the board, even Rasmussen,

the polling company that seems to have been in the Trump pocket for years, has showing a double digit gap between the Republican, between Trump and Biden. The other area where that slippage has been occurring, and it's critical, especially in a state like Florida, is older people who have been shifting away from Trump because of COVID, because of, you know, the health plans, and the question of what kind of health coverage they would get if Trump went ahead with his killing of Obamacare, and just the overall appearance of Trump in the debate last week and everything that's happened to him since. But that shift of older people, and not just in florida combined

with the women i mean it's awfully hard to figure out a scenario where they can come back unless something dramatic really dramatic happens to make everybody forget all the things we've witnessed in the last month well i, I agree with that. And if I can, just on that poll, I'm with you that 600 cases isn't the world's largest poll. I guess I kind of look at it from the standpoint of it's better than my own one opinion or the 10 people that Frank Luntz interviewed on a focus group. It's the only data I've seen.

And I see a lot of other kind of individual analysis, including one Canadian columnist today saying she was condescending and Pence was courtly, which I thought, well, that doesn debate that was interesting to me, and it was true about last week's debate as well, is that in 2016, Donald Trump campaigned on I'm going to make America great again. And we're four years later. And last night and last week's debate was about how messed up the country is, not how much greater it is four years later. And that has been the story of this campaign. And unless, as long as it's discussion, the ballot question is how messed up is the country? I don't see a way that Trump can turn this around. And if he was going to turn it around, you're absolutely right, Peter, he'd have to be going in the other direction with seniors and with women. And I think the pandemic and his response to it, which is really this, I'm strong and I beat this because I'm strong and people who lose to this disease are weak. I don't think women like hearing that. I don't think old people like hearing that.

I don't think people who don't have access to the world's best medical facilities and a helicopter to take them there like hearing that. I think there's a lot of people who are fearful about the economy, who are fearful about the pandemic, and who think he just doesn't get them. And I think that the pandemic has really driven home that point and the way that he's talked about it and his personal experience with it has kind of reinforced the distance between seniors and women on the one hand and Trump, Pence on the other. still includes debates, because there's supposed to be a second debate next week between the two presidential candidates, but it appears now that's not going to happen, although Trump changes his mind all the time. He's up and down like a toilet seat. It's really quite something in terms of his strategic moves. And he's said today, because the

debate commission wanted to quite reasonably do it uh virtually because one of the candidates has a virus that has no cure to it that being donald trump and the other candidate is virus free as far as we can tell and so putting them in the same room together even with a little bit of plexiglass between them, didn't seem to make a lot of sense. So they determined today that it would be a virtual debate, which Biden accepted, Trump has rejected. Says, no, I won't do that. So as of this moment, there's no second debate, which to me is bizarre because that plays into Biden's favor. I mean, if I was Biden, I'd be trying to find a way that we didn't have to do another debate because he's ahead on debate points.

And if you can do it without looking like you're a chicken, then that's the thing to do. And right now, he doesn't look like he's a chicken. Trump looks like he's the chicken. Sorry, go ahead, Peter.eter no i i mean that's basically what i say we we have these two things intersecting now the debates and his health and all the questions about his health that are raised because nobody knows a lot of different things including when it's most likely he got this where he got got it, who he spread it to, if in fact he spread it to anyone. It's looking like he could have been the main spreader.

It's unclear whenever he was being tested before last week. I mean, the assumption had always been that he was being tested, you know, like every day, every time somebody, you know, every time he went out or every time he was in an event where there were other people around. But it's now starting to look like there were huge gaps in between when and when he wasn't tested. I still think that the first time they shoved that thing up his nose,

he said, you're not going to do that again. And he's probably just taken the test that there's a lot of questions about their accuracy. However, I don't know that. That's just my assumption. What I do know is that there's no debate now, and there are all these questions about his health. Yeah, no, look, I think if he said, hey, Peter, can I come over to your house and talk to you at dinner tonight? You'd want to know there's an independent test

that I can look at. You wouldn't just take his word for it. I'm fine. And so I don't think he's got any chance whatsoever of dictating the terms of this debate, unless there's some sort of medical panel that independently looks at his situation and says, it's okay. And I don't think he's going to submit to that because of all the reasons that you talked about. And then some. Look, I kind of think, you know, steroids are getting great publicity during the last several days. People are attributing all of his crazy political choices to the effect of steroids. And I'm kind of going, well, maybe it's the steroids, but maybe he just always made really rotten political decisions. And they're now happening in real time more rapidly than ever

with larger consequences than ever. And he's freaking out his campaign team. A couple of days ago, he announced that there was not going to be any more stimulus help for people who were losing benefits for businesses that were on the risk of going out of business, because he couldn't come to some agreement with the Democrats. And so he was saying, we're walking away from the table. And as we saw, the stock markets tanked and people were really kind of mystified on the Republican side as to why that was a sensible political play. And of course, within, I think it was maybe 12 or 15 hours, he reversed his position. The stock market went back up and Republicans had at least something to say that sounded better than we got nothing for you. And so when I think about that episode in the context of what's going on today about the debate, virtual, not virtual, the one thing I think we know is that Donald Trump needs a TV show about him. He needs a TV show that he thinks 80 million people will watch. And if he

doesn't have a debate, he's not going to have that. He doesn't have the money, he's running out of money, and he's running out of days. I don't think he can get more money, or at least the kind of money that he would need to counteract the kind of money that the Biden campaign is accumulating right now. And he can't make any more days. And so that's the dynamic for him, and the notion that he would not have a debate unless it was on his terms doesn't seem to me very likely at all. You know, I've been thinking about the money issue,

because there, as we've pointed out a number of times, there's no doubt they got a money problem they blew a billion dollars uh on campaign well who knows what it was on it there are a lot of questions where they spent all that money that had been raised uh for the trump campaign but they blew a billion of it before we even got to labor day uh and there's you know there are legitimate questions about the way some of that money was spent. What surprises me is that there have been no question raised, or at least nobody's linked last week's, you know, the Bedminster event in New Jersey on Thursday night, which happened after Trump was aware that there was a problem within his group,

within the White House cluster, because Hope Hicks had already tested positive, and who knows, you know, some people are suggesting Trump had already tested positive by then. That hasn't been confirmed in any event. But it was clear there was a problem within the White House staffing group. And since then, people have dropped like flies. I can't even keep track of the latest numbers, 28 or 30 of them,

more than New Zealand, Vietnam, and Taiwan put together. But here's the thing. If they knew that last Thursday and they still went ahead with what was a fundraising event in Bedminster with a bunch of, uh, you know, uh, deep pocketed Republican,

uh, donators, you got to say to yourself, if they went ahead with that, knowing what they knew, they must be awfully desperate for money, but they still went there to raise cash. And if that is true, it's outrageous.

Anyway, the money thing is a big problem for them, and why he'd walk away from free airtime, even if it's virtual, is beyond me. I also don't believe that'll last. I think by the time we get around to next week, if he's able to stand, if the steroids are still kicking in for him, then I bet you something will happen on the debate front. But I could be wrong on the weekend.

Yeah, you know, Peter, they do say in a lot of scenarios, follow the money, right? And I'm kind of hearing that the Trump campaign has pulled its advertising out of Michigan, it's because they're trying to conserve money for places where they really need it. I saw that Pence is going into Florida to the villages, and that suggests that they're worried about that. So, you know, in the dying days of any campaign, it's always instructive to look at whether campaigns are going to places that will increase their prior results or to try to save the furniture. And there's no question what's going on right now. And there's very few days left for the Trump campaign to reverse that trajectory. Excellent point. And if we remember four years ago, that's exactly what we were missing that was going on. The Clinton people were not going into the Rust Belt states because I think they thought they had them locked up. The Trump people went in there a lot in the final few days

because they knew they didn't need much. They just needed a little bit to tip the balance that would have the impact in the electoral college. So this issue, and it's just as true here in Canada, as you well know, of watching where the leaders go in the last few days of a campaign can tell you an awful lot. I mean, you know, there's still four weeks to go here, which is a long time in politics, as we know. But when you look at the kind of geography of what's going on right now, there seems to be, you know, a sweep in the making if nothing changes dramatically in the final four weeks.

When you start talking about the possibility of Florida, when you start talking about the possibility of Texas for the Democrats here, that they're grabbing back those Rust Belt states that they lost last time around, this is getting like, these are starting to add up to big numbers for the Democrats. But, you know, one thing, I don't know what that one thing is, short of a war, you know, or a cure. Now, Trump, of course, last night claimed he's got the cure.

It's Regeneron, the stuff he was taking, along with the steroids over the last four days, that he, through the blessing of God, he said, had helped determine that there was a cure. Now, nobody agrees with him on the research and science side or the medical side on that, but that's what he's saying. His big hope is, of course, for a cure, for a vaccine to pop up in the next four weeks and everybody have the ability to get it, one assumes shortly thereafter. And once again, I know Democrats are petrified of saying anything like, we've got this in the bag because of what happened last time around. But when you look at it in a cold, hard way,

and you look at these numbers that are coming out kind of universally from all the different polling and research organizations, you got to go, man, I don't know what it would take to shift things around. But in four weeks, I assume there could be something. Well, there could be something. I think that the evidence to me is piling up that the Republican strategy is going to have more to do with the courts and suppression tactics than persuasion by the politicians on the top of the ticket. And that's a worrying thing because we do know that one of the things that's happened in the U.S. is that courts are really populated. Judgeships are really populated by partisans. And that partisan advantage that the Republicans have has been used to create some dynamics that will make it hard for people to vote.

We saw a situation develop, I think it was in South Carolina earlier this week, which I think from the standpoint of how Canadians feel about the way our elections run, whatever frustrations we have, if we saw the same kind of things happening here, we would be legitimately horrified and it would not be allowed to stand. But these things happen every day in so many different parts of America. And it's a part of their system And it's a part of their system, and it's a part of their system that's gone really pretty, pretty badly, I think it's fair to say. And it's why they're having this kind of fight last night about what will you do to the Supreme Court, Democrats, if you win? Will you enlarge the Supreme Court? We're now entering a completely different phase, I think, of politics and hyper-partisanship

where the two parties are saying the system is so broken, we're going to break it more if we win in order to try to make sure that we don't lose future elections. And so there's a genie out of the bottle there that I don't know how it gets put back in. But this is really quite unprecedented, some of what we're seeing. Well, you know, Pence was, as did Trump last week, desperately trying to get the Biden-Harris group to answer that question, would you enlarge the Supreme Court in an attempt to keep it from, you know, tipping over forever onto the hard right conservative side in its decision making? You know, if I was a democratic strategist, I'd say, let's find a way not to go down that rabbit hole,

because that's exactly where they want you to go. Now, it's either flat out say no, which I think is probably the right answer because it's a never-ending spiral. You know, expand the court. The Democrats expand the court, and then the Republicans come back in at some point later, and they expand it again.

I mean, that's crazy. It just, like, goes on forever. But I think it's legitimate probably to say that there's a, there are a lot of our institutions that may need some updating on the way they operate, and we're going to examine them, but there's no commitment here to do anything like that. You know, in a normal election campaign, you might have said, being able to say, well, you know, we're going to re-look at the at this whole issue of, you know, age in terms of the Supreme Court, because it's an appointment for life. And, you know, maybe 75 is

where the cutoff should be, which sounds like a reasonable proposal to put out, except the only problem is Joe Biden is already, whatever he is, 77 or or 78 it'd be a little hard for a president who's over the 75 limit to start saying he's going to knock out uh appointments uh that are that are at 75 that are younger than him yeah yeah no I think that's right Peter I think that the whole question of um what these two competitors are selling comes down on some days to Joe Biden is saying, I can unify the country. And there's a lot of Americans who think even if they're Republican voters and they're not sure they want a Democratic administration, they're pretty sure that they need a more unified country. And on the other hand, you've got Donald Trump hollering at the top of his lungs, she's a monster and a communist and basically preaching division. And in some ways, if you step back from these two individuals, so you say, what's really at stake here is whether people are going to vote for an argument for unification of the country, or whether they're

just going to take that kind of all of the kind of emotion that's been building up for the last four years of this administration, and frankly, even in the period of time leading up to that, and kind of say, you know what, I'm more happy expressing my fear, anger, frustration with the people who don't agree with me. And so let's have another four years of division. And that, you know, I mean, to me, we can look at that from a Canadian standpoint, and having studied Canadian opinion for 35 years, we would never vote in large numbers for division. It's just not what we do. Even though we occasionally toy with ideas that sound like we could be more divided, if that was on our ballot in the same way that it is down there, I don't think there's any chance that we'd be seeing anything even as close to what they're seeing there.

One last question. And I found this interesting in the different data that I've been looking at in the various research surveys and polls. Because for the last year, when it's been head-to-head Trump and Biden, if there's one area that Biden's never done well on versus Trump, it's the economy. Trump has won that hands down over and over and over again. Pretty much the way he's won it against any number of different competitors for the last four years. He's always won in this perception that he's some kind of genius on the economy,

although it's hard to find where that exactly what that's based on. But nevertheless, he's won that until just the last week when Biden is starting to move ahead of Trump in the one area, the one area where Trump had an advantage up until this week. He's running behind on everything, every other major issue. And now he's behind, not by much, but he is behind Biden on the economy. What does that tell you? Yeah, I think that people have become accustomed to thinking that if you really only care about the economy, then you're going to be better off with Republicans unless you're really kind of towards the low end of the income scale, in which case you're going to be a lot worse off with them. So in a way, it's a, you know, it's a Republican argument that draws a line and says, we're not going to be for the poor. We're going to be for the people who have a

little bit of money, or at least believe that they can have more money in the future. And certainly for people who are invested in the stock market, which is a bigger proportion of Americans than it is of Canadians, but it's far from everybody. It's one reason why Trump has been so determined to make the barometer of how's the economy doing, how's the stock market doing. And because the way that people consume information about the economy is really kind of, there's two ways. One is that how does it feel around me in the business that I'm working in or the business that I'm kind of buying from? What do I see on the ground? Is that getting better? Is it getting worse? So that's one way that people relate to it.

The other is they turn on the news and they see these indicators of stock market movement. And since the worst of the pandemic trough, they've seen significant improvements over that period of time, which has held up Trump's argument about the economy and Republican and Trump is we started to see some analysts. I think there was a Goldman Sachs analyst who came out with an analysis the other day that said a Biden victory would create more stability and effectively be welcomed in the stock market. In other words, that investors were pricing in and relatively happily pricing in a democratic victory, in part because they were saying it's too chaotic with Trump. His economic policy seems too much a function of his whims, too unpredictable in terms of his priorities. He says he's doing this with China, but do we really know? He's back and forth on things like NAFTA. And so I think that his chaotic style has kind of overwhelmed the sense that he's a Republican and he's for economic growth and for the business community. And it's not so much that Biden is presenting a more compelling alternative,

but Biden is looking more like America as you would kind of maybe want it to be, which is a little bit less chaotic and more stable and more predictable. Okay, we're going to shut her down for this week on the race next door. But one of the things I'd kind of like to get at, and maybe next week we can start it, assuming something else crazy doesn't happen in the next week, which is assuming a lot. But usually what happens in a campaign when it starts to become on that party or that leader. What are they actually promising?

Are they realistic? Have we done a hard enough check on who these people are and what they would do if they were suddenly given the reins of power. All the focus has been so far, because he likes it that way, on Trump. But one assumes that at some point in these final few weeks, there is going to be a shift on focus and people are going to start, certainly journalists, are going to start taking a hard look at Biden, his policies, and what it might do to the country. That, on the economic front, I think Moody's as well had something like that in terms of analyzing the Biden promises on the economy.

There's going to be more of that, one assumes, coming out, which may or may not work in the favor of Biden and the Democrats. But we'll have to watch out for that and see whether there's any oxygen applied in that area of the discussion. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And you raised this earlier, Peter, and I've been thinking about it while we've been talking, which is that Trump is basically saying we are within 10 minutes of a cure for this pandemic. And if he's right, and or if people believe that that's going to happen, I've been thinking through, so what does that do to public opinion? Does it make people say, ah, you know what, if we're going to have a solution to the pandemic,

the economy is going to be good, therefore I can afford to keep Trump, or I should reward Trump? Or does it make them say, there's not very much risk in electing Democrats, and it would feel like a better choice because of unity and less chaos. And so I actually think that you can tell by the way I put that, that I kind of think there's a little bit more risk for Trump in saying, it's okay to vote me out because there's going to be a cure, and that's going to be good for the economy, and it's going to vote me out because there's going to be a cure and that's going to be good for the economy and it's going to solve the pandemic if some portion of people believe that it may make them more inclined to put an x beside the democrat rather than the republican in this particular

very very weird instance all right you know i, I was wondering 24 hours ago, whether we could figure out enough to talk about coming out of a vice presidential debate. Well, it seems like that wasn't that hard to do after all. Listen, Bruce, thanks very much as always for your analysis and your thoughts on the race next door. Thank you. Peter, lots of fun to talk to you again this week. All right. And a closing thought before we leave you for this day, uh, keep in mind tomorrow is the, uh, weekend special. So your, your thoughts and your letters and your comments, don't be shy, send them along.

But one thing here before we go, because I got a kick out of this. As you know, from the beginning of this, you know, over the last 30 weeks, more than a few times I've talked to you about making sure you're writing stuff down. Keep a diary. Keep a family diary because future generations are going to want to read about what it was like during all this, how you handled it. People say there wasn't enough written 100 years ago through the 1819 flu that had a tremendous number of fatalities. But people just wanted to sort of leave it

in a hurry, not talk about it. And not enough was written down. Well, families, you know, and many of you have written to me and said, you're doing that. Here's a suggestion from the New York Times, which I thought was pretty neat. You can add this to your collection. The New York Times suggests that people should start writing down all the things they cooked in lockdown. Bruce is a big cook.

I tell you, I've been lucky enough to have some of the great meals that he and Nancy have cooked over years. But anyway, write down all the things you've cooked in the lockdown, noting that it would be great to look back later on at all the dishes that either became standbys, became unusual extravagances, became a triumph, or became a disaster. This could become sort of the thing to preserve, a piece of personal history, something to help remind us all of the joys and frustrations of this extraordinary and difficult time.

So that idea from the New York Times, you might want to consider that, especially if you've been cooking some interesting things over the last six or seven months that you might want to hand down, or that you've cooked some things that have been a total disaster. You might want to mention that one as well. All right.

That's it for the podcast within a podcast for this week 30. Tomorrow, once again, the weekend special. And so if you've got some thoughts, send them along. And don't take too long in doing that, because usually the cutoff time is around noon on Friday for me to consider what we're going to put in.

So do that. Until then, I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks for listening. We'll talk to you again in 24 hours.