The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Can She Actually Do It?

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

With just over two months to go, Kamala Harris may be positioned to win the US presidency, but can Donald Trump ever be counted out? Keith Boag joins us again for his second US election special of the summer as Democrats meet in convention in Chicago. Lots to discuss about this remarkable summer in American politics.   

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from our second summer special on the U.S. election. That's coming right up. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You know, it's been a fantastic summer hiatus for the bridge, but we have popped in occasionally. We had a good talk, a summer special good talk at the end of July. There'll be another one next week as we approach the end of August. So that's a week from Friday. Chantel and Bruce will be here. Today, though, is our second summer special on the U.S. election with our good friend Keith Boak, who's been with us for most of the year off and on to touch base on what has been a remarkable year in U.S. politics. And it is no less remarkable this week as the Democrats meet in Chicago.

So we'll get to Keith in a second. Just a reminder, Keith Bogue was the former Washington correspondent for the CBC, former chief political correspondent for the CBC in Canada, good friend of mine. He's been also posted in different parts of the world. But he's always had this particular interest and fascination with U.S. politics. So he's a student of U.S. politics. And it's always good to get his take on things

because his take is often a little bit different than you'll find from the normal parade of U.S. political analysts, especially those who are born and raised and trained in the U.S. So having Keith along for this ride has been of particular interest to us. We last talked to him at the Republican Convention. Now the Democrats are meeting. And the landscape is very different than it was then. I hope you've been having a great summer. I've had the opportunity to travel a bit around the country.

I was out in BC a couple of weeks ago for a fantastic fishing trip north of Vancouver, about an hour's flight north of Vancouver. And it was just a fantastic trip. Really, really enjoyed it. I'm heading tomorrow out to Newfoundland. So both ends, or to the eastern and the western end of the country. I haven't been north this summer, which as many of you know, I have a passion for the Arctic.

I haven't had that opportunity this summer, so I'll have to wait, I guess, until next year. But out to Newfoundland tomorrow for the Woody Point Writers Festival. And I'm really looking to go on there. You're flying to Deer Lake. I've never been to that part of Newfoundland before, so it's a great opportunity for me. Looking forward to that, obviously.

Got a couple of books of my own to talk about, but more interestingly, I get to talk to other authors, including right away, my friend, former guest on the program, Rick Mercer. Rick and I will be having a chat in front of a live audience at the Woody Point Writers Festival. Looking forward to that. Okay, the topic at hand, the U.S. election. And our guest, once again, is my good friend

and somebody who you clearly like, because you've written lots about him, to me. And that, of course, is Keith Bogue. So let's get the conversation underway right now. Well, I don't think anybody would doubt that the last month has been almost unbelievable in terms of what's happened in U.S. politics. I think we all know what's happened in that month with the soaring status of the Democratic Party and especially Kamala Harris.

But I'm still a little puzzled as to why it's happened and also what it says about the American people, the American electorate at this moment. So I'd love your thoughts on that to get us started. Why did it happen? You know, it had been talked about for months. That doesn't mean that it wasn't an absolute and utter surprise when it happened, because the thing is so rare. politics that are very unusual for that country. In Canada, we have a history of trying what I call the old switcheroo, which is to change the leader of the party before you head into the election. And it has some history of success, but a lot of history of failure.

At least we used to. Yeah. Who knows what will happen this time, but sorry. But it doesn't happen in the United States. And so they're novices at it. And, you know, for a first outing or a novice outing, man, they did it very well. You know, I'm, I've no doubt that it was really dirty work behind the scenes. Some of that came out in public when we saw Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker Emeritus, for instance,

publicly saying that she would support Joe Biden in whatever decision he made after he'd already made his decision. In other words, she wasn't accepting that. But by and large, a lot of what happened happened behind the scenes. And it happened because there was a recognition, not just that Joe Biden might not be up to it as evidenced by the debate he had with Donald Trump, but that the public knew this now and that the public was feeling like it had been gaslighted and distrustful. And none of this was going to be a winning combination. And so if there wasn't a winning combination available with Joe Biden, then I think the ruthless political decision became easier to make. It became clearer that he was a liability and that made it easier for those who wanted to get him out to muster their courage and do it the surprising thing is the way in which joe biden handled it dropping a tweet tweet on a sunday afternoon uh announcing his departure but then in a real stroke of of kind of macular

billion manipulation he drops another tweet an hour later saying he's supporting Kamala Harris. And what that does, obviously, is give her a huge boost. But it also forecloses on options that people like Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer may have thought were preferable, such as having a broker convention, such as having a real competition between a slate of candidates. All of that went by the board. It was so he had anointed his successor. And then amazingly, she comes out of the starting blocks like she'd known all along this was going to happen and is totally ready for it.

Now, we have no evidence of that yet. But one day when that story is told, it's going to be one interesting story because obviously there was coordination between Harris and Biden at some point. How late was it? When did she start preparing to be was it? When did she start preparing to be the nominee? What did she know that no one else knew? And how did she act? And

who, you know, was such a tight, it never leaked, it was so tightly held. But anyway, I'm running off there. It is a fascinating thing that will be studied for some time. But I'm again, most astonished by how successful it has been, because at least outwardly, it looks smooth. And over the last three or four weeks, we've seen that it's had an impact on the polls and apparently has turned the race around. It's an astonishing thing. You know, on your point about, you know, history will tell us at some point what exactly happened in those few days i mean at the time i thought this this is like too perfect for it not to have been in somebody's book over the last few weeks that they planned this out they knew that this would drop at this point

this would drop at that point it just seemed like too perfect but that you know that's the kind of cynical conspiratorial me talking but you're right time will tell history will tell us somebody will write a book on this at some point and uh i mean i don't think you're being too cynical to ask when did when did kamala harris know uh what joe biden knew when did she begin to prepare herself O'Hara's know what Joe Biden knew? When did she begin to prepare herself? Because I doubt very much that it was Sunday afternoon, an hour after the first Biden tweet. Yeah, neither do I. You know, when you look at the,

when you take the frame of that whole week from the saturday night before which was the assassination attempt right and then the whole week of the republican convention and this and that and the jd vance pick and all of that there were just things were lined up and then boom this happens it was like too perfect for me. But anyway, we digress. Well, you know who didn't see it coming? The guy who picked J.D. Vance as his running mate, thinking that the race was in the bag and that he didn't need to balance the ticket.

He needed somebody who would be a reflection of his own self. And that has turned out, at this stage anyway, to appear to be a really serious mistake on Trump's part. Doubling down on MAGA, putting Vance on the ticket, looks like exactly the wrong answer to the new question posed by the Democratic ballot, by the Democratic ticket. You know, the Sunday morning shows this weekend have been, at least some of them, have talked about where was Trump's biggest mistake. And I found, you know, the former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, interesting in his assessment that the big mistake was doing the debate when they did it in June.

That Trump should never have done that. There was only one person who could end up really losing that debate and changing the impact of what might happen through the election campaign, and that was Biden. And Trump fell for it. I don't know whether history sees a change if Biden had somehow come out smoking in that thing it would have been

it would have been different I'm sure there are Biden supporters who will say that was his big mistake because it gave the party time to do what they did exactly and I guess that's the point Christy was making if there's something was going to go wrong you gave them way too much time.

If the first debate had been in September, they never would have had time to do anything. Yeah. I guess I would just push back against Chris Christie a little bit, at least in the sense that if he thinks he can figure it out, why couldn't everybody else? Well, Joe Biden certainly didn't figure it out, right? Like it wasn't as clear then and everybody has 2020

hindsight but sure that was the effect of it and and you know it's not uh whether whether trump should have known better is debatable was it a mistake obviously it was okay let me go back to my first question you touched on it a bit but not enough, though. Well, it's this issue about what have we learned about the American people in this past month? Because, you know, a lot of us were constantly saying, you know, when are the Americans going to wake up to Trump? He had this lead, you know, a significant lead. Sure, there were problems with Biden, but still, Trump was Trump, and he was a convicted felon, and he was all the whole list of other things that fall on the negative side for him.

But is it just that Harris is a new face and there's a new energy? I mean, what is it that has touched the American people in such a way that, listen, this race isn't over yet by any stretch of the imagination, but it's different. It's changed considerably as we've addressed. What does it say about Americans that it has? that they didn't like their choice, right? There is this category of voters, which we, I think, first recognized perhaps, or at least be recognized in 2016 with Trump versus Hillary Clinton. And that's what they call the double haters, the ones who don't like either of these people.

And that, of course, was good news for independent candidates. I think if you look now, first of all, there good news for independent candidates. I think if you look now, there's first of all, hardly any public discussion of of Kennedy, Robert Kennedy Jr. Other than negative stuff, there is also and you may have seen this, too. There was also this polling analysis, and I can't remember who was responsible for it. But what it said essentially was that Harris is polling like a generic Democrat. And the next sentence was, before you think that's an insult, it's actually a very good thing when you consider that what it tells us is that people aren't really looking at the ticket as though it's the Harris ticket yet. They're looking at it as though it is a fresh Democratic ticket that's opposed to Donald Trump.

So that may be a little bit of a key to suggesting that maybe the fever is starting to break. Maybe people really have had enough of Donald Trump. Now they will get to know Kamala Harris better, and that is a risk. But it also is a risk that comes with rewards. If she does well at the convention this week, and we have no reason to believe that she won't, because everything she has done so far has been exceeding the expectations that we had been led to have about her. But it still seems very strong that the idea is that she's not Donald Trump and that is some and she's not Joe Biden and that whoever else he is, that's that gives her an advantage right out of the box. So, I mean, I think if this is a traditional convention week,

she'll get a bounce. And if she gets a bounce, I would imagine she becomes the indisputable front runner in this race. That leads to interesting questions, too. It's very rare when a wave swings for it to swing back, as you know. I can remember only one in Canadian politics, which was 1988. I'm not sure about U.S. politics. I can't really think of one where the tide has swung one way and then swung all the other way back. 88 was, it's not a good comparison, but 88 was, you know, Dukakis had a lead. I was thinking 88 in Canada.

Yeah, no, no, no, I know. Oh, I'm sorry. I know you're talking about. Dukakis had a lead. Yeah. He lost the lead and that was the end of that. And it was a significant lead he had in the summer of 88. You're right, obviously, about Turner and Mulroney,

and that was the whole free trade thing. But Dukakis had a lead, and he lost it. Now, he lost it because there was a tremendous, not in a flattering way, I use that word, but a tremendous pouring out of the ad campaign against John Kerry, the whole Swiftbolt thing against Kerry. In 2004 now. Sorry, that was 2004.

Jeez, you're getting my dates mixed up. But Dukakis was a member. They made fun of him with the helmet on the tank and all that stuff. Anyway, his campaign fell apart. But once again, I'm digressing. It's an age. What I couldn't remember was

whether there had been a point where Senior had been leading and lost it to Dukakis who led through the summer and then lost in the fall. Yeah, no, once he lost that summer lead, he was gone. So if Trump's going to win, he's going to have to do something that we can't remember the last time we saw it, which is to lead strongly enough for him to believe he was a sure bet

and could pick whoever he wanted for his ticket, then to lose that lead and then to get it back again. Very tricky stuff. It's going to make for an exciting fall. But I would really like someone to let me know what the precedent for being able to do that two-way swing is in the United States. Exactly. Well, first of all, they got to get through this week. And on the one hand, they are incredibly well scripted, the Harris campaign, at least so far. In that past month, they could not have expected things to have gone better.

But they were organized, which leads to the – how did they suddenly become so well organized? But anyway, they were extremely well organized. So this week one assumes on paper they know exactly what they want each night and what they think they can get out of each night of the week. The question will be, what are these protests going to do that are going to impact the convention in some fashion on the streets of Chicago.

And as far as the Democrats are concerned, hopefully not inside the arena. But you never know with these things. And when these things, as we saw in 68, get out of hand, it can have a huge impact on a campaign. So that's one thing. The next thing will be, and this is what i want to talk about a little bit because i want to know where you're at on this um there's the the criticism that harris is facing so far with the you know there have been a few policy things that have

been criticized but the main criticism has been from the Republicans and from some members of the media. She's not talking to anybody. She's not giving interviews. She doesn't do a news conference. It's kind of ironic watching Trump. I mean, he does a news conference, but basically nobody gets to ask questions,

and those who do don't get the answers. He only does interviews with Fox or some of the other right-wing fans of his. But they're going after her on that issue. She said, I'll do an interview before the end of the month. I want to get through the convention first. News conference, another thing. Those two things, you know, do present potential pitfalls. You can give a bad answer. You could stumble.

You could look like you don't know what you're talking about. Some of these things don't seem to bother Trump, but it could bother her. Should she do them? Should, you know, if she's ahead, one poll this weekend showed that she was up, what, six points on the national survey. Should you do an interview? Should you do a news conference? Could you get through the rest of the campaign without doing either?

So I think right now the demand is mainly from the chattering class, mostly journalists and politicians who believe that she's obliged to do this. I don't see any evidence that there's a public demand for it. And I think that most fair-minded people would say that if she wants to wait until after the convention before she does either an interview or a news conference, that sounds fair enough to me. She only just got the job in the last couple of weeks. She's still settling in. She has lots of reasonable excuses to present i understand why uh she might be cautious because the thing that has damaged her most has been the interview that she did about the border which is going to be played and replayed by republicans when she said she hadn't been to the border and you know she hadn't

been to europe either like what's the big deal? It wasn't a good moment. She knows it, and it's made her shy. But it's also part of the job for she to become president, to do these things. And she needs to prove to herself and the party that she can do it. And, you know, I don't see why she can't. But she shouldn't do it just because the media is clamoring for it. She should stick to her plan, I think.

And her plan is to make sure she's good and ready before she presents herself for that. And she may need more time than others because of how things have unfolded to this point. But if it gets to the point where the question why she hasn't done it is getting in the way of everything else she wants to do that she has to do. And that's often the case in politics, that sometimes when you don't want to answer a question, or you don't want to address an issue, that thing becomes a barricade in front of you. And you can't get across the message that you want to get across, you can't talk about what you want to talk about because you can never get past this question. And we've seen it, Peter, over and over again, that there's kind of a countdown clock on that,

how long did this last? And it can't last long. It just can't because at some point, you have to get your message out. And if that means that you have to give a little on something you're uncomfortable with, just give it, get on with it, do your best. You know, I wrote over the weekend in my newsletter remembering that sometimes it's the question you're not expecting,

although you probably should expect, that traps you. I recall the great Ted Kennedy, Roger Mudd interview from whenever that was, 79, I think, where Kennedy looked like he was going to be a lock to knock Jimmy Carter out of the incumbency box in the Democratic Party for presidential nomination. And Mudd started the interview with, why do you want to be president? And he couldn't answer it he had no answer and that was it it was like game over so uh you can imagine before she ever sits down for an

interview uh she's going to be um prepped just like they are prepped for debates on all the possible questions that could come up and hopefully hopefully she'll be prepped on that one as well um i don't know the uh i i go back and forth on this question you know you and i have done interviews with uh candidates for you know everything from prime minister to town councillor over our years in the business and have felt felt in the moment that they were incredibly important. And today, maybe it's my old age thing. I'm just wondering if things have changed in terms of the electorate's view as to what's important, what they want to see, what they want to hear,

and how they want to hear and see those things during an election campaign from these people who want the top jobs. You know, does an interview really give you the kind of information that you want to know, that you need to know, before you make that decision, if you're truly undecided? I think there's also the fact of the interview itself that, you know, there is a belief that the public wants to see you being held to account. That it's not simply they want to hear the answers you give to the questions.

They want to know that you believe you have an obligation to be held to account by their representatives, whether that be the media or whether it be other politicians. But I think from a political standpoint, you're suggesting that we may have got past the point where this is necessary to voters to understand what the candidate is about. And that must be true, simply because there are so many other ways for the candidates to make contact with the voting public without going through us. So many unmediated ways available to them that we couldn't even have dreamed of in the 1980s and 1990s. And so it seems not at all unusual to me that they might look at that and say, this actually works for me a lot better than talking to you guys, so why am I bothering? And, you know, the arguments I made may not appear very strong to anybody but me

in the face of the heat of a campaign. Where's her Achilles heel? Actually, think about that for a minute. I'm going to take a quick break. But let's talk about that because this is a good week to think about that because we're going to see a lot of her in very staged presentations over the week. And it'll be interesting to see how she performs during that and how people react to it.

But let me take a quick break. We'll be right back. And welcome back. You're listening to our summer special, our second one, with Keith Bogue talking about the U.S. election situation. A month ago, we talked to Keith just before the Republican convention began in Milwaukee. Today, of course, the Democrats meet in Chicago for a few days to officially nominate Kamala Harris as the presidential candidate for their party.

You're listening on Sirius XM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform. All right, so the question was, where is her Achilles heel, assuming she has one? Right. So the apparent Achilles heel, I would say, is still in her failure to manage the most important assignment that Joe Biden gave to her, which was the border crisis. I mean, there is a belief among some in Washington that he gave her that because it's a tough file, and he knew she probably wouldn't be able to outshine him in her handling of it, that it was a kind of way to keep her in check.

Nevertheless, she didn't handle it. She didn't solve the problem, for sure, that's obvious. But she also, as we've already talked about, she didn't handle it very well in the interview that she did about it, which suddenly became like the most important interview of her vice presidency and the one that still hangs around her neck now. So that's one thing. The other thing, the Achilles heels that she might have, I use plural there, may or may not be, but they are the things that were revealed, I think, when she ran for president in 2020 and was seen as a front runner next to Joe Biden at

the outset and then never even made it to a primary challenge. She was out in 2019. Right. And one of the things that got her out of it was a New York Times piece about the turmoil in her campaign and how she was not focused on what she wanted to be. She had that Ted Kennedy problem and that she kept changing her mind about which strategy she felt would be good for her. Those things are not good recommendations in their own right. But that story itself has so many sources from her campaign on the record saying

she's a terrible candidate that I wondered, and I still wonder, whether she has a problem attracting loyalty. And I hope I'm wrong about that. But it's something that has always, you know, in the last couple of years, when people have talked about whether Joe Biden should be challenged and whether, you know, one of the challengers or the heir apparent should be Kamala Harris, that was one of the things that I would repeatedly bring up was that she indicated that she might have a problem here in her organizational skills and in her ability to attract loyalty from the people she depends on to help her succeed. So far, she has both of those things after the first month.

Yes. But one thing goes wrong and you look to see how. So far, the most common analysis of her performance is that she's exceeded expectations. She's not the person I thought she was from all kinds of people. Right. So I guess that's a good thing. It's not harmful. But I think it tells you that the concerns about her came from a from an honest place, a sincere feeling and not just made up stuff. You know, I certainly would be on that list of people who didn't expect her to be as

good as she has been anywhere near it. As good as she has been in the last three or four weeks. Aside from the immigration issue, is there any way of judging how she was as a vice president? I mean, vice presidents usually sort of don't really hear or see a lot of them unless they're representing the president of a funeral or something like that. Well, I mean, I think we know that she had a good relationship with the president, and that's not always the case for the vice president. I think she was respected and trusted, and that's not always the case with a vice president. She wasn't Dick Cheney, whom people likened to the real president when George W. Bush was in the Oval Office.

And she wasn't Lyndon Johnson either, who was more or less excluded and ridiculed, made fun of by the Kennedys when they were in the Oval Office. She was neither one of those nor the other, but she wasn't. But she was someone who was, I think, in a position to earn respect in that office and did. And that's not true. That wasn't Spiro Agnew's experience, for instance. It's funny when you hear Trump go after her and her role as vice president, how she did in that role. When you consider the guy he had as vice president,

he tried to have killed. So it's kind of bizarre watching him go after her. But isn't the thing about Trump that's so interesting is that he's completely flat footed. He has had a month now to react to this and he just not has not found his rhythm. He hasn't even been able to come up with a nasty nickname for her. Nothing is working for him. His zingers aren't landing. He's not funny about her. He makes mistakes about her. He looks foolish. And that's, you know, whether you like

Trump or not, he does have campaign skills. He did have an ability to label somebody with a catchy kind of insult or a slur that was, you know, kind of maybe a little bit true. In this case, completely flat-footed. What's happened to him, do you think? Is it just that he's well he's aged he's had a horrible couple of years in the courts yeah um and i guess all of those things take a toll those are the things that i was going to list right off the top you know i mean getting old is something that everybody has to deal with but the pace that he's been at in terms of trying to juggle all the legal cases against him, a very various nature, sexual assault, fraud, criminal indictment for election tampering. And then the ones that he still only has to worry about, you know, the document theft and the and the insurrection cases against him. I mean, that's a lot to have going on in your head

when you're trying to run for the presidency of the United States. Well, at times it seems like that's all he's got going on in his head because he's not talking about the issues, or at least for the most part he's not. They're trying to push him towards talking about the issues, especially the economy. But it always seems to circle back to those issues that you just mentioned, that that's what's on his mind.

Yeah, I mean, I think that, like, those are all default switches for him, right? Maybe he doesn't have the capacity to devote time to understanding what the issues are and understanding his own position on the issues, and that when he's in front of a microphone and a camera, that is such a safe space for him, right? That goes way back to his career in television. But it's such a safe space to him and he knows or he believes he knows what the standard of success is in that role,

keep the light on, keep people talking about me, that's not going to win him the election. And even if it helped him in 2016, it's not 2016 anymore. And he hasn't adjusted to any of that reality it would see. We're told that he has very good people around him this time, and that his campaign team is better than it was in 2020 and certainly better than it was in 2016. But that's only good so far it takes you. If he is truly unmanageable, then he's unmanageable.

And having a great campaign team around him is not going to make as much difference as it would with maybe any other candidate. You know, you talked a little while ago, it's an interesting point, about loyalty and where the loyalty is for Kamala Harris. And, you know, we'll find that out fairly quickly if something starts to go wrong. But I also found interesting, again, on this past weekend, on the Sunday morning shows shows i was watching um lindsey graham and he was almost pleading with some of some republicans uh including himself to get out there and campaign for trump um implying clearly that they weren't at the moment. You know, the Marco Rubio's, you know, he ran through a list of them.

That's interesting because there's always been this sort of kind of nagging doubt that a lot of Republicans just want him gone. And the only way they can get him gone is for him to lose. The letter. So for him to lose. The letter. So let him, exactly. When he's floundering, let him flounder. I don't know whether that's what's going on now or not, but it's quite something to watch him go from extreme confidence, which he had five weeks ago, to a guy who looks totally lost now.

And he's not packing them in like he used to and crowds and none of that's happening. Yeah. I mean, some of the stuff I saw on social media this morning about his, his rally last night looked pathetic. Now I, you know, I don't know how much I can trust those sources, uh, but I don't see a lot of pushback against it either. You also see that in August, they're coming out heavy on the negative ads against Kamala Harris. And it's about the border and it's about people crossing, you know, illegal immigrants who commit crimes, murders, assaults and so on. It's the heavy, heavy stuff that, you know, the Harris team has to be prepared for.

But I kind of got the feeling that it's an indication that they cannot wait now, that this is slipping away for them. They cannot wait till after Labor Day, you know, to saturate the market. They got to go now with the heaviest stuff they got. I mean, we'll see. But the polls are telling us that they have every reason to be in a kind of panic mode now.

And there are enough of those polls to be somewhat trusted, trusting in them, and to think that their own data, their own surveys, their own surveys, their own research is painting an even more granular picture that's not even that pretty. Just got a couple of minutes left, so give us that snapshot of where this race will be decided. We have that kind of blue wall in the northern United States, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and then you have the Sun Belt, kind of blue wall in the in the northern united states michigan wisconsin

pennsylvania and then you have the sunbelt georgia arizona nevada there's another one in there somewhere one or two in there north carolina i think north carolina North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona become part of a path this weekend. So is that where it'll be decided? So because things are changing too fast, I don't think we can say that yet. I forget who was on just a couple of days ago. And it was a Republican or a former Republican strategist. And he was saying, it's too early.

I'm trying to remember the other state. One of them was Florida. It's too early to look at Florida, but maybe in two weeks. I mean, wow. Like if Florida was really in play in two weeks, that's a disaster scenario for Republicans. That takes, you know, that, that gives them so many more paths. So the other part of me is that I try not to get too hopeful about any of this because I feel like I've been burned before.

But I think I may have mentioned to you in our last chat that I was at a conference in Toronto where David Atzerodt was explaining after half an hour of the election to Canadians. And the only thing I remember from that is, do not count on Donald Trump to defeat himself. And I think that's the kind of mindset that people should be in. This still has every possibility to be a very tight race that's sided by tens of thousands of votes,

not hundreds of thousands of votes in a handful of battleground states and i think the way to make sure that you do your best is to treat it that way you know there's only two ways to run they say unopposed or frightened run frightened that's um that's very good advice uh that's very good advice. Uh, that's very good advice for anyone running in any election, but it's especially so, uh, especially so right now.

And, uh, in this one, um, as always, Keith has been, uh, it's been a treat,

uh, as I mentioned earlier, uh, before you joined us, uh, Keith is also doing, uh, a weekly column now with, uhley in David's air quotes website.

And that weekly column is about the U.S. election race and politics. So obviously Hurley was listening to the bridge on earlier this year. I have no one to thank for that but you. Yeah, I know. David's a good man. Thank you for that, Peter. Yeah, Aircoats Media. Yeah, David's a good man and has been a good friend of both of ours for many years.

Okay. Thanks, Keith, for doing this. And we'll talk to you again during the fall because there's certainly going to be a lot of in points on this election before we get to the November election date. Good to talk to you. Good to talk to you, Peter. Thank you. Look forward to our next chat. Keith Bogue talking with us about the U.S. election.

That's the second of the two U.S. election specials with Keith that we were holding this summer. While the bridge is on hiatus, we still have a total of four shows. Two with Keith. We've already had one special Good Talk at the end of July. And then next week, a week from Friday, so that would be August 30th, we'll have the second of our summer specials with Chantelle Hebert and Bruce Anderson, a summer special Good Talk.

That's August 30th, Friday, a week from this Friday. Hope you'll join us for that one. And then we're back on September it's the Tuesday after Labor Day. So September 3rd we're back with our regular

start up once again every day except Wednesdays which is a repeat best off. But Tuesday September 3rd we'll be back with Guess Who? That's right. Dr. Janice Stein from the Munk School.

I guess if I had a dollar for every time somebody asked me, either asked me in person or wrote to me over the summer, where's Janice? Got to hear from Janice. I need to understand what's going on. Well, Janice, like us here at the bridge, Janice has been on a bit of a hiatus, but not really. She's working. You know, she got asked to come back to the Munk School, where she's a founding director,

to help plot the future for the Munk School, the near future. And that's what she's been doing. So she's been busy over the summer, but also taking a bit of a break as well. But there is so much to talk about in the areas of expertise that Janice Stein has. For the past year, a little more than a year, she's been guiding us through the situation in the Middle East as a result of October 7th. And the situation in Ukraine as a result of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So we'll bring both of those stories up to date on September 3rd and try and make a sense of where we are on that, because that story keeps changing.

Changes every week, it seems. And the guidance that Janice has provided us over the last while here at the bridge has been incalculable. So we're looking forward to having a new chat with Janice about the situation in those two areas, but anything else that comes up as well. That's going to do it for today for this special U.S. election edition of The Bridge. Hope you've enjoyed it. I'm Peter Mansbridge. Thanks so much for listening.

We'll talk to you again a week from Friday on our final summer special of the summer. And that, of course, is Good Talk with Sean Telleber and Bruce Anderson. Take care until then. Enjoy these last days of summer. Bye for now.