The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Race Next Door (#11) With Bruce Anderson - So Is It Really All Over Or Are We Missing Something?

Episode Date: October 14, 2020

Our most popular weekday podcast as Bruce and I try to make sense of the race next door. Lots to chew on here.

Yes, there it is. Hail to the Chief. You know what that means? It means Bruce Anderson joins us from Ottawa for our weekly look at what's going on in the race next door. Good day to you, Bruce. Hey, Peter. Just 20 days to go.

This is really getting exciting. 20 days. It's, uh, in some ways that just seems like tomorrow and other ways it could be a long time. And that's actually how I wouldn't mind starting today because last week, I think both you and I, we, we tried to put the caveat in every once in a while about, you know, race isn't over until it's over and all those Yogi Berra things. But there's no doubt that we were both suggesting that it's pretty well over. That the lead's significant and substantial in certain areas for Joe Biden.

And in spite of everything else that Donald Trump was trying nothing seemed to be working and I sensed over the weekend watching the the Sunday shows and reading some of the columns in American papers that that tone was starting to take over a lot of coverage people saying you know it's it's pretty much done and even had Republicans not elected Republicans but you know, it's pretty much done. And he even had Republicans, not elected Republicans, but, you know, the Republican-backed rumors, suggesting sometimes anonymously the same thing. Which brings me to today and a column in the New York Times by Thomas Edsel, who kind of writes on politics once a week for the Times.

He's based in Washington. He lives in Washington. He writes about politics and demographics and inequality. And people tend to give Thomas Edsel a listen to when he talks. And the headline on his piece today is, Biden is not out of the woods. In other words, this isn't over. And there are things that perhaps some of us are overlooking. So I want to get your sense on this, Bruce, because his main argument, and it's, you know, it's a lengthy column, and it's well worth pulling up

if you have access to the New York Times. His main argument is that people have not been paying attention to what's happening on the voter registration front, which traditionally has been a strong suit for Republicans for any number of different reasons, and we know some of them, but for any number of different reasons, Republicans seem to do better on the registration front for new voters than the Democrats. And he sort of goes through a number of key states where the numbers are overwhelmingly in favor of Republicans in terms of voter registration. So he's saying, be careful. Be careful about what you're assuming based on data you've seen so far. That this could, in fact, make a real difference. That quietly, Republican organizers

have been doing what they needed to do in certain states, key states, key battleground states, that could make a difference. So, what do you make of that? Yeah, well, look, I think the, um, I guess I think that it's normal and a good thing that there are going to be people who are going to write the contrarian point of view against the mountain of evidence that this is not going the Republicans way. And certainly I think by calling attention to things like voter suppression techniques and voter registration, it's reasonable. You can use those

two themes to fashion an argument that it's not all over. And I may live to regret in 21 or 30 days what I'm about to say. Just a minute. Wait a minute. Wait a second. I want to make sure I've got all the quarters. You can eat this tape, Peter, and use it against me. Okay, Lindsay, whatever you say, buddy.

All right. Okay, shoot the puck. I've been consuming poles for 35 years. And this last month or two, I've been consuming polls like my dog Theo eats cheese. He can never stop eating cheese if there's more of it to have. This morning, there were 25 polls on the New York Times website. And I went through them diligently like I do every morning. This is my version of Pope scrolling. I think our listeners by now know where I come down on how this one should end in an ideal world. And all of these polls were

indicating pretty good news for the Biden campaign. But, you know, you pointed out before, Peter, you're right to point it out. And everybody should take a look at the record of polling and whether it's been as accurate as people expected it to be. And if not, what's been responsible for that. But here's what I see when I kind of challenge myself on that. One, maybe the most important thing is the Republican campaign looks like it's falling apart.

It's running out of money. It doesn't look like it has any kind of coherent message from one day to the next. It looks as though it's not raising money with online donations, which is typically the kind of thing where you go, if they are really super organized and they were doing all kinds of the right things, they wouldn't be losing the financial rates as badly as they're losing it. And I can't help but look at the chaos that seems to be at the heart of the Trump campaign. And I was listening to, you know, one of my favorite podcasts is David Axelrod and Mike Murphy. I think it's called Hacks on Tap for anybody who really wants to kind of immerse in it. Would that be more favorite than this one? No, it's below this one, for sure.

But, you know, when I listen to Mike Murphy, a longtime Republican strategist, talk about what he hears when he talks to his friends who are in the Trump campaign. It doesn't sound like an organization that is secretly going about the business of winning the election that way. And I guess the last thing I will say is that I saw a poll yesterday. It was a state poll, but a good sample size that showed over the last month and a half, the number of people who said I've already voted went from 1%. Two weeks later, it was 10%. Yesterday, it was 20%. A lot of people are voting. And in that particular poll, I think it was Michigan, might have been Wisconsin, but those votes were breaking with an eight-point

advantage for Biden, and it was a swing state. So that's kind of how I look at the massive data, but I think the contrarian argument is always good to hear. It's kind of like waking up in the morning, and if you're following the stock market, you're always going to find that person say, we're just about to fall off a cliff. And, you know, we probably need to hear that from time to time, but maybe we're not just about to fall off a cliff. You know, to pick up on the Mike Murphy point, you always know when you get close to a campaign, when, you know, the campaign ends,

you always know when people in one of the campaigns begins kind of finger pointing as to what their problem was. You know, the problem was this issue, or the problem was that guy. Or, you know, when that starts early, you know, they're all, you know, they're racing for the lifeboats and they're trying to paint themselves into a better picture with whoever it is they're talking to. Now, that kind of happened a little bit last time with Trump in the final week where people thought he was going to lose. I think he thought he was going to lose.

Now, he didn't in the end, obviously, as we know, which begs two questions. First of all, in that wonderful opening you just gave, you never really took on this issue of voter registration. You just don't think it's as big a deal as that column is making it out to be? I mean, you kind of talked about it, but you didn't really address it. Is it something that— I kind of need to see harder math about it. I mean, I was talking to former Ambassador Bruce Heyman the other day, who, as you know, I think is actively involved in a program to register American voters who are living outside

of the United States so that more of them vote this time. He's the American, former American ambassador to Canada. That's right. And he and his wife have been doing a lot of work in that area. And I kind of believe that it and say, I don't think this campaign is running very well. And I do think the Biden campaign is doing a lot of this kind of block and tackling very well. But I could be wrong about that. I think the other thing that from registration to voting, there still is the question of motivation. And okay, you can get somebody to register who maybe wasn't registered before. But again, I remember hearing Mike Murphy talk about how many people are there who weren't registered before

who are going to sign up for Team Trump this year? What's the motivation for that? How many of those people are there? And when I think about the traditional GOP voter base, especially older people, every single poll tells us now that older people are wandering away in droves from the Trump campaign, that he has totally alienated them with his handling of the pandemic. I don't know if you saw this, Peter, but he retweeted this kind of, you know, weirdly jury-rigged kind of ad this morning,

which stuck Joe Biden's head on the body of a resident of an Old Folks home and said, Biden for resident. And it was so insulting, I think, to the average person, whether they're in a long-term care facility or they've got parents in it. They're just looking at their point. Trump's effort to make fun of Biden for being old is obnoxious to a lot of those people who typically would vote Republican. So I think there's a big motivation challenge for Republicans. And when I look at numbers that say 25% love Trump, 45% hate Trump, those are the numbers I'm seeing. I don't see too

many people winning elections when 45% strongly disapprove of them, strongly dislike them. Okay. That's a good argument. The second one, you know, the second one. Thank you. I like winning those. Yeah. Well, I didn't say you won the argument.

I said it was a good argument. I'm still trying to figure out what you were hearing on the stock market when you woke up this morning. How many were saying you're going off the cliff? No, here's the... There's somebody always saying that. There's somebody always, yeah. No, here's the other issue. I mean, obviously, there's a lot of nervousness around because this is four years ago.

It looked like Trump was going to lose, and he didn't. And there are questions about the polls. Some of them unfairly, I think, because some pollsters got criticized because Trump won and they had suggested that the numbers were in favor of Clinton. Well, in fact, they were, right? She won by 3 million votes. But nevertheless, the question comes up, what is fundamentally different this time from last time? If you're worried, if you're a Biden supporter,

or you just can't stand Trump, what's fundamentally different this time than last time when he pulled it out of the fire at the end and won the race? I mean, there's, of course, the fundamental difference that last time he was basically running on her record because he didn't have one. This time, no matter what he says, the issue is about his record. And that's a fundamental difference.

But beyond that, what's different this time from last time? If you could name one thing, what would it be? He's thinking. Well, I'm not going to play. I can see he's deep in thought. You know, he's going through all his notes. I've got a 1A and a 1B. He's trying to come up with the answer here. A 1A and a 1B.

I've got a 1A and a 1B. Okay. I can't pick one thing. I can pick a 1A and 1B. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We've got four years now, and American voters have four years to have taken the measure of this guy that they only knew as a kind of a cartoon character, a reality TV huckster who was kind of almost entertaining in his willingness to crash through norms of behavior and kind of play the fool. And, you know, I think on some level, some people were just kind of so entertained by it,

they didn't stop to think about, well, could he actually do some real damage? And they sort of comforted themselves with the notion that while nobody would actually act like that when they get into the White House, they'd be surrounded by all this infrastructure and human sensibility that would say, hey, just a second, slow your roll. Now you need to study up on the issues and all that kind of thing. I mean, that never happened. It never happened. And I read two days ago that Trump is about to announce a nuclear arms deal with Putin between now and 20 days from now, which nobody's heard of anything before. And I'm sure we'll not hear of any more in the future either. So Trump and the four years of experience with him is one thing, maybe the biggest thing.

But I think the other thing clearly was that a lot of voters just felt that they could afford not to have Hillary Clinton. And she didn't motivate them. Maybe they didn't dislike her. But they were just kind of bored with the Clinton campaign and the kind of the Democratic sense of we're owed this one and we're especially owed it relative to Donald Trump. And I don't think Biden is is applying this that way at all. But I also think it's pretty obvious that people are doing the risk calculation of Trump this time rather than the risk calculation of Clinton the last time. What do you think? If you were covering this from a journalistic standpoint, Peter, and you had one question to ask or one piece of advice, you never really gave advice in all those years that you were a journalist. But I've talked to people now that we've started doing this,

and they say, hey, ask Peter his opinion on X or Y or Z. So I'm going to do that to you a little bit more today and maybe a little bit more next week too. But what would you say to Donald Trump to turn this around beyond, you know, get your people to go out and register more voters? What would you tell him to do differently? And do you think there's any chance that he'd listen to that? Yeah, well, there's two big questions. I don't think he'd listen. I mean, any of the relatively thoughtful people that he put around him when he first got in there are long gone.

And so he's just got a bunch of sycophants and, well, you know what other words can be used to describe them surrounding him. So they're not offering anything challenging to him in terms of what he could do. So if it was me, and if I assumed that he might listen to me, I'd probably start with what I suggested I'd write on this podcast about a month ago um and it may be too late now with 20 days to go it probably is too late I don't know but he needs a rebirth he needs to be out and he had the perfect opportunity when he came out of that hospital I still don't't know, and I still, I don't want to sound like a conspiracy nut, but I still don't know what the heck happened in that hospital.

I don't know what happened when he went in. I don't know when he tested positive. I don't know how he tested positive. I don't know the last time he tested negative. And they never tell us any of the answers to those questions. But back to your question and my answer, which is the moment he came out of that hospital, he could have gone in front of those cameras or his camera

or held his cell phone up with a mask on and said, I was wrong. I've treated this poorly and now I know just how poorly I treated it. And I can identify with the hundreds of thousands of people who have either died or suffered because of this disease. And you are going to see a radical change in both me and the way my government approaches this immediately. Now, it's a hail Mary.

It's a long shot. Probably wouldn't have made a difference, but it might have made a difference with some of the people that you've talked about in both this week and last week. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. I think that's absolutely right, that the polling is showing that they're about tied or Trump still has a tiny advantage on handling the economy. But the pandemic has become the more important issue in terms of how many voters are thinking about it. And Biden has a giant lead on that. And it's not because Trump didn't have all of the tools at his disposal to treat it differently.

It's because he didn't want to. And he chose not to. And he chose, even after months of evidence that he was doing it the wrong way politically, and from the standpoint of how many people were dying, that he still wasn't going to do that. He was, cause I don't think I was wrong. We're saying anything that sounded like that, even though, you know, you and I, well, you anyway, you're wrong a lot. I'm wrong.

Sometimes he's wrong every day about something. I'm only ever wrong about the Leafs. But they've made some great acquisitions in this free agency, and everything's going to change this year with the Leafs. Yeah, okay. I should warn everybody that we had a little dropout in your audio there for a moment, so we missed some of your incredibly well put forward thoughts, but only for a couple of seconds.

Now, listen, anytime you want to challenge me with a question, you just go right ahead because obviously I have all the answers all the time. Let me move it to another topic. Because, you know, aside from this bizarre tour that Trump is on, what are they calling it, the infection tour 2020, where he's going somewhere every night and popping up in a, you know,

beside his airplane at the hangar. They, I love it. They say, Donald Trump went to, you know, Akron, Ohio today. He didn't go to Akron, Ohio. He went to a hangar at the airport outside Akron, Ohio. He got off the plane. He spoke to a group of people. And then he got back on the plane and back to washington i mean that was it um and he made a lot of bizarre good for the acroners yes made a lot of uh you know bizarre comments uh in his speech but aside from that and whatever value that is for them it seemed that

republicans especially senate republicans were stacking their hopes this week, not on the infection tour 2020, but on their Supreme Court justice nominee, Ms. Barrett, who was in front of the Senate all, has been all week. And, you know, performed not badly under some, you know, intense questioning. But nevertheless, that was their grand hope because this is a person who they believe, believes in everything they believe, and will deliver for conservative voters the kind of key new justice on the court

that can swing a lot of decisions in conservative favor. Now, does it do anything to the presidential race? I guess that's the question. Does this actually benefit Trump or is it really for the benefit of people like, you know, Lindsey Graham and some of the other senators who appear to be in very, either in tight races or losing their races to Democrats? What's your take here? Well, it feels to me like this is not something that's going to benefit Trump. It's not something that's going to benefit the down-ticket Republican candidates. It is something that's designed to benefit the Republican Party for the long term. It's almost as though they've said, look, we know that voters don't want us to pick a justice now that is too close to the election. Polls have been clear that half of

Republican voters are saying, no, no, it should be left until after the election and whoever is elected president should decide. So they're doing it in spite of the fact that it's negative in terms of the short term motivation of their supporters and further alienation of people who want to vote for Joe Biden. So why are they doing it? They're doing it almost because they kind of know that they're going to lose this election. They're probably going to lose the Senate, or at least there's a good chance that they're going to lose the Senate. And so their hope for policy in America that fits their value system is through the Supreme Court, which I was watching some of the hearings yesterday, Peter, and I couldn't help but look at it from a Canadian standpoint and say,

our system is so different. And we're kind of humble about our system. We don't really know that much about it. We don't think it functions perfectly, but we don't see these kind of problems where political parties, for their own declared and obvious partisan reasons, are saying, let's stack the Supreme Court with people who have an ideological position that is close to ours, even if it's not the one of the majority of people. And on the Affordable Care Act and on abortion rights, the Republicans are putting on the bench somebody who is out of sync with the majority of American public opinion, not just Democrats, but the majority of American public opinion. So that seems so political and kind of anti-democratic. And then the last thing I'll say is that watching these hearings, it's just a phony theatrical thing where she obviously has these opinions. She's written about these subjects before. And senator after senator asks her, can you explain to us what your thinking is on whether people should be worried about their health benefits?

Can you explain your opinion on whether you think the Constitution as originally written is essentially what we should understand it to be today, even though it allowed for slavery, even though it didn't confer a lot of rights on women that we now sort of take for granted. And she just wouldn't answer any of those questions. And I think that that, you know, was a further evidence of the decline of the American democratic system, the system that so many people love to rhetorically talk up in America and say it's the most perfectly designed constitution ever. And whatever small problems we've had with it, we've amended away. But I'm looking at it now, and I'm going, we've seen four years of one guy that so many people who were knowledgeable about issues said doesn't know what he's doing, is doing so many of the wrong things, is harming our country, harming our economy, harming our relationship with the rest of the world.

But we can't do anything about it or we won't do anything about it. we've got the spectacle of using the court as a further kind of breakwater for some of those rather more kind of far-right values, I would say, at least in terms of the base of the Republican Party. So it's quite worrying to see. I would only, I'm not going to disagree with you on any of that. All I would say is that it's not like she's the first person to walk in to that senate judiciary committee and use those same answers um right other uh conservatives have the last two uh who were appointed to the supreme court but liberals before her appointed by democratic presidents have used those same answers to avoid potentially, not embarrassing, but a situation where it would be clear

that they had already made up their mind on how they were going to vote on some of these key issues, as opposed to the answer they give, which is, yes, I have a personal opinion. There's no question about that. However, I'm here to sit in judgment of the arguments that are presented before the court, and that is what I will do. I could be persuaded one way or the other based on the value of these various arguments that are presented.

That's what a justice is supposed to do. Now, in saying that, she's not saying anything different than any number of other people who were placed in nomination of the court, including the notorious RBG, who used some of those same kind of answers when she was presented there. So when I say I think she's done,

she's held herself quite well, very well actually, in this process, that's basing it on the traditions of those people in nomination from the past who've come from presidents of both parties. She hasn't, at least in what I watched, fallen into some huge trap somewhere that could either cost her the nomination or cost the party its support of her. No, I agree with you.

There's nothing I think that she could do that would cost her the nomination at this point because the Republicans need to nominate somebody before the results of the election are kind of a fact. I don't know if I think she's handled herself that well. I think that she has definitely followed the training that said answer every question in such an innocuous way that nobody can ever really come at you. And if that's the standard of success, and I take your point that that has been the standards of success in the past, then she's passed that test. If there's a higher test of when she had the opportunity to make it sound like she was really committed to the idea of understanding different perspectives and taking them into account. I don't think she was particularly effective at that. I thought that she had a kind of a, she was a bit icy on some of those points where senators tried to get into the

humanistic aspects of this. And so I feel like if there were those voters who were out there, and I think this is what the Democratic senators were trying to do. They were trying to say, there's a lack of empathy here. This is somebody who has a religious kind of orientation towards everything. And it's actually going to ask you, Peter, in all of your... So that was all just a preamble to another question. Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm thinking as I'm watching the hearings that God is really kind of the most present

but unspoken reality of that discussion, right? That the idea that her views on a lot of the issues that she would rule on are very much guided by her faith. And she doesn't want to say that very much. And the Democrats, for their own political reasons, don't really want to attack that very much, because they both want to kind of maintain this quasi silence on the role of faith. And again, that's another major difference really between Canada and the United States. We have people of faith in this country, but we never really see faith come into the conversation in the same way, or even sort of sit just on the margins of it in a very obvious kind of way.

And I was like, I was thinking, have you ever interviewed a politician where you've asked them direct questions about their faith and how that would affect the way that they govern? Do you ever, do we ever look at our Supreme court and say how many Catholics are there on it? Which is a conversation that we've been hearing in the U.S. What's your experience on that? Well, I can't recall, you know, flashing back through my mind, I cannot recall ever asking somebody running in the political arena

about their faith. I just don't remember it ever coming up. And I certainly don't recall. I mean, let's face it. It was only in the last, whatever it's been, 15 or 20 years, that there was even a public interview process for Supreme Court justice nominations. I mean, the prime minister of the day, both conservative and

liberal, used to make the decision on who they wanted on the court, and that was it. You know, people would sort of talk about their background a little bit, and away they went. Now there actually is a committee hearing based on that. I mean, it's nothing like the American system, but at least there is a point at which some key questions are asked of the new nominations. But I don't recall anything about religion ever playing a role. I found it, like you did, fascinating yesterday to see how much of a role that does play, both spoken and unspoken. Ted Cruz, who I'm not necessarily a fan of, the senator from Texas who's not up for

re-election right now, he's in the off-cycle year on his election, but he made a really point, at which I certainly had no knowledge of, about the number of times scriptures from the Bible are written on the walls of the Supreme Court building. It's all over the place. It's on columns. It's on walls. It's inside the courts, outside the court. A lot of reminders.

Do you remember what it says on their coin? E pluribus unum. Doesn't it say, in God we trust? I think it says, in God we trust, right? That's one of the things. Yeah, no, look, I sort of remember the only time it may have come up in Canada might have been Stockwell Day. There was a discussion about creationism and that sort of entered the conversation a little bit.

But anyway, yeah, we'll be interested to see how today's events go with that confirmation hearing. And then we'll be back on to kind of the rest of the campaign, I guess. What else are you thinking about? What do you see as being the critical markers in the next several days? Well, I guess if there is another debate, I mean, tomorrow night there are two town halls. You know, it was supposed to be the second presidential debate. And we know what happened there.

Trump chickened out of it, and the thing got canceled. So Biden took a town hall from one of the commercial networks. I think it was ABC. And so Trump has negotiated himself a town hall against the Biden town hall on NBC. And he had to agree to all kinds of protocols, including testing, independent testing done on him, which will be the first time, I guess, we actually, although I don't know whether they're going to put the results out

or how they're going to handle this, but obviously if he tests positive, there won't be a debate or it won't be a town hall, but it's expected that he'll test negative as he claims he's been for quite some time now um anyway the that'll be an interesting night because you know what'll happen i mean in terms of ratings trump will win that he'll probably win it quite easily. And he will try to claim that that means something. That's the real rating. Who are people really want to watch? Where in fact, let's face it, if you've got a choice between

a nice peaceful lake scene or a train wreck, what are most people going to watch? They're going to watch the train wreck. And that's what will happen tomorrow night. And it'll mean whatever it means. I mean, Biden may get in trouble in his town hall. Trump may get in trouble if there's such a thing as trouble for Trump.

It'll be what it is, but it'll be one of those markers. Then there's a question of will there be a third and final debate, or which in fact in this case now would be the second debate. So that's another marker. I don't think markets are a marker here, up or down.

I think most markets have probably already discounted the Biden victory, not discounted in the sense of dismissing it, they've already factored it in. So I don't think that'll be any kind of factor. I think if something odd happens on the international stage, you know, if North Korea tests one of those apparent new long-range ICBMs they had on parade the other day, that might be a factor.

Or it might have just been a hollow piece of metal tubing that they painted up to look like an ICBM. Russia may do something because they desperately want Trump. I'm surprised they haven't shoveled all kinds of cash over to help a campaign that was in serious trouble. So I think you can find 20 days is 20 days. Lots of things can happen during that period. If they can happen and have an impact, it becomes a different thing.

But let me back up to money. You touched on it earlier. And before we leave, you know, you warned us a couple of weeks ago about following the money. And, you know, what are your thoughts on the impact money is having on driving these last 20 days? Well, I think it's incredible. from Canadian politics, where a lot of people aren't aware of just how little you can spend an election, relatively speaking, in Canada, and how much you can spend in the United States. I'm kind of fond of saying that the election that resulted in Donald Trump becoming president

came at the end of a $5 or $6 billion betting program, and that's who they picked. And you kind of go, well, that's the worst betting program in the history of civilization to result in that. But when I look at the numbers now, I was looking at something this morning that caught my attention about Biden's fundraising success. And really two things jumped out. One is that a year ago, just about a year ago, Biden was raising $24,000 a day, $24,000 a day. Right now, he's raising $24,000 every two minutes. That's like this podcast. The money is just pouring in. It's just pouring in and we're not even doing advertising.

So the scale of the financial advantage for Biden right now is unprecedented. And this piece in the New York Times today really kind of laid it out that the ability of the Biden campaign to push money into places like Georgia and Florida, and essentially, to use the vernacular of US campaigners, to enlarge their map, to basically look at winning places that they didn't think they had a chance to win before, because the polls show some potential, but also because they have so much money that they may as well spread it around to some of these places because they're putting all kinds of money into the places that they

know they want to stay ahead. So I think it's a fascinating part of this story because the $24,000 a day starting point was really about Biden's campaign was having trouble catching fire. You remember that he was almost written off until he won that South Carolina primary. And then kind of magically, he started to come back to life. And the biggest trigger recently for his fundraising success, I think it kind of doubled his daily take, was the selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate. And the numbers have just been kind of going crazy since then, which is partly as we get closer to the election. But, you know, I think the experts in this are also saying the Democrats built a machine designed to raise money in $5 increments, and the Republicans have not done that. The Republicans have fallen far, far behind in that

arms race of technology and digital fundraising. And I heard somebody put it this way, that every time anywhere a Democrat gets mad about anything, they hit the send $5 button. Anytime anywhere a Republican gets mad about something, they write a Facebook post. And if that's true or even partly true, that explains a lot about the financial advantage of the Democrats right this moment. All right.

We've, we've gone on longer than usual, but it's been riveting every second of it. I know that you want to rush off and listen to Mike Murphy and David Axelroth again, and we wouldn't want to hold you back from that. Give my dog some cheese. Give your dog some cheese. There's a natural question to ask about what a steady diet of cheese to a dog has done, but I won't ask it on this podcast.

Healthy. But I will say this about David Axelrod because I met him a couple of times. I met him in the White House when I was interviewing Obama in 2009. And I met him last year for a much longer period of time because we shared a stage in London, Ontario, where the two of us and his wife discussed issues surrounding certain health issues. It was a hospital fundraiser. And David and I talked politics as well. And he was wonderful, a really nice guy, a very smart guy. You know, he's a former journalist who then became close to Obama

and helped him along with David Plouffe and others to his election victories in both 08 and 12. But nice man. election victories in both 08 and 12. But nice man. And, you know, he's probably desperate to get on this podcast, so maybe we should get him to join us at some point. Yeah, it'd be great, eh? All right. Listen, Bruce, thank you so much.

20 days, which means, well, I think we're going to have enough grist for this mill to keep us going not only up until the election, but after it as well, because who knows what the landscape's going to look like after that. You know, I still see if Trump loses, I'm not sure I want to be around for the two months after he loses before he actually has to give up the presidency because anything's possible during that period of time. Anyway, thank you for this. It's been great, as always, to talk to you

and get your take on things. We're going to close out. We've had a number of letters on The Race Next Door with people, but I don't want to leave the impression that we've been inundated with this topic, but there have been a couple of letters that have said, hey, I love Hail to the Chief. I love that marching music.

So why don't you, instead of just teasing us with a little bit, why don't you play it all? I mean, it's only about a minute long. But we decided today, today's the day to play all of hail to the chief as we sign off on yet another race next door. Thanks Bruce. We'll talk to you later, Peter. ¶¶ © BF-WATCH TV 2021