The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - The Race Next Door -- Our First Kick At The Can

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

Bruce Anderson joins the podcast for what we hope will be a weekly look at the "race next door", starting on this the day Kamala Harris officially becomes the Joe Biden pick for Vice Presidential nominee.

and hello there peter mansbridge here with the latest episode of the bridge daily and we're pretty excited around here day two of week 22. And as we told you yesterday, this is going to be the first episode of The Race Next Door. Sort of a podcast within a podcast. The Race Next Door is going to focus, obviously, on something that's happening next door. And that's the race in the United States for President of the United States.

And today is our first episode, co-hosted with Bruce Anderson, Chair of Abacus Data. So we're going to look at a number of topics. We're going to try and do this weekly through the election campaign, right through until early November when the Americans make their decision on who the next president of the United States should be. And each week we'll take one kind of area that we think is worth exploring from next door, looking at the U.S. from Canada and how we kind of see different things play out. Anyway, the first episode of the podcast within a podcast

will be coming in a couple of moments, but I wanted to touch on the day's COVID-19 news first. You know, I think we've all, ever since this pandemic hit, when we realized the serious nature of it in March, way back in March, 22 weeks ago, ever since then we've been hoping that there would one day be a vaccine. But we're realistic on this.

We know that in the past, vaccines have taken years to develop. Sometimes many years. And the most optimistic look at this one was that it would take 12 to 18 months. And if you start that clock at roughly November or December of last year, which is when the first indications were coming out of China, Wuhan, that we were dealing with a virus that could be extremely damaging to the world if it wasn't contained. Well, it wasn't contained, and it has been damaging. And we all know the enormous total of those who have died as a result of COVID-19 and the ever-expanding total of those who have suffered from COVID-19.

So a vaccine, we were told, was possible, but under the most optimistic of scenarios, 12 to 18 months. So that would place it end of this year at the earliest. And even then, there were the issues surrounding how it would be produced and distributed and who would get it first and all that. Well, here we are in August. So we're at the kind of eight or nine month timetable. And today, someone no less than Vladimir Putin, President of Russia,

called in the cameras and said, we have a vaccine. And we're going to start using it. And in fact, my daughter, said Putin, has used it. She's been given her initial dosage. So what are we to make of this? Well, I think we could say that there are a lot of people, a lot of researchers and scientists who have been working day and night on this are very skeptical for a number of reasons.

One, very fast, eight or nine months. Two, according to the Russians, they're only at phase one of this vaccine development, which is a long way from full-scale testing, declarations of safety. But that's where they are. They say they're in phase one, and bingo, it's good, it's working, and we're going to start giving it to everybody.

Well, look, we all know there's been a race around the world to be the first to say that they have developed the vaccine, but most of the countries in the world are operating together, operating jointly with other countries, operating jointly with different drug companies. But Russia, a country who we should remind ourselves, went for months without saying they had any, more than a handful of cases.

Then suddenly they had an enormous number of cases. So obviously we've got to be careful with this. We will wait to hear what all the scientists have to say. But at this point, people are skeptical. And for good reason. You know, we keep kind of falling prey to a sense that we're progressing very quickly. I mean, even New Zealand, which is one of the countries in the world that has done better than almost anybody on dealing with this.

Two days ago, had this big news conference, lots of smiles and back-slapping going on, announcing that they'd gone 100 days without any community spread of COVID-19. And then suddenly today, two days later, they've had to announce, oh, my gosh, we actually have a problem now in Auckland. We have at least four cases, and we can't figure out how they got it.

And they've gone into lockdown in Auckland while they try to determine exactly what happened. We saw all the talk about how great BC has done. And they have done great. And focus on the main

health officer, Bonnie Henry, Dr. Bonnie Henry, glowing articles in the New York Times about her. And suddenly they've been dealing in these last couple of weeks with increased numbers. Alberta dealing with increased numbers. Ontario dropping numbers. Today the number, although it's kind of weird because there was some kind of math issue

in fixing a past problem. But anyway, their number of new cases today for Ontario was 33. Well, you've got to go back to the absolute earliest days of the pandemic to see a number like that. Two weeks ago, it was over 200 so what are we supposed to make from the 33 well probably we shouldn't make too much of anything right now we're a long way from beating and defeating this virus. So we keep our focus. We keep our focus on washing our hands,

wearing a mask, being socially distant. You know the run. You know all 20 of them after yesterday's podcast. Wasn't that great? I've never seen the numbers for this podcast go up as fast as they went up yesterday. People love that story. And I'm glad they did. Anyway, okay, I've babbled long enough.

As promised, the race next door, the podcast within a podcast. And it's going to start right now. Well, here we go. The race next door. And we even have our own music. That tune. You know it, of course. It's Hail to the Chief.

And it's usually played by, you know, the U.S. Marine Band or some military band whenever the President of the United States walks in the room. So think next January 20th, inauguration day. It's going to be one of two people, the president. It'll either be Donald Trump, who's used to hearing hail to the chief, or it'll be Joe Biden, who hasn't heard it for him before, but he might hear it for the first time on that day if he ends up winning the election. Now, in both cases, there'll be somebody standing beside them of an official nature, and that is, of course, the Vice President. If it's Trump, it's almost certain to once again be Mike Pence. And if it's Joe Biden, we now know that it will be Kamala Harris, the current senator from California,

who is his vice presidential pick. And those two are very different, Pence and Harris. Pence has been, in his defense, like many a vice president before him, has been kind of a toady, but he's given the description of a toady a whole new definition because he is such, you know, basically a suck up to Trump whenever he gets that opportunity. Now, I think Harris will always be loyal to Joe Biden. I don't think there's any question about that, but I don't think we'll ever call her a toady. But let's see. We're not there yet. There's an election to run, and over the next couple of months, the race next door is going to take a look at that situation, the election campaign, from Canadian eyes. And that obviously is why we call it the race next door. We're watching them. So today, because it was the day that Kamala Harris

was picked, we're going to focus on the issue of the vice presidency and just how important it really is. Before we get there, let me introduce once again to you Bruce Anderson, who's the chairman of Abacus Data, who's been with us on the podcast a number of times before. But he is going to co-host this little podcast within a podcast over the next couple of months. And Bruce, why don't you get us started by giving a sense of the lay of the land as we enter really the hardcore part of this election campaign, two conventions in the next couple of weeks, and then right into it post-Labor Day, into the campaign. Give us a lay of the land of where we are, what we should be considering right now.

Yeah, you bet, Peter, and thanks for the introduction. I've been looking forward to getting together with you on this project, this mini-project. You and I love following elections, and there's a lot of people, ourselves included, who've been really looking forward to the day when America will get to choose its next president or president for the next four years. So now it's really afoot. I like to think about this election as being kind of a, you can make it as large a subject as you want, or you can really kind of

distill it down to the number of moving parts that are going to be critical. And I think just to remind our listeners, in the last election campaign that Donald Trump won, there were 126 million votes cast in the United States, roughly. The difference between Trump's outcome and Hillary Clinton's cap was 3 million. Now, it was to her favor in the sense that she got more of the total vote, but it's still a very narrow margin when you think about that. 126 million votes and only 3 million separating those two candidates. As we know, and probably all of our listeners know, the U.S. uses an electoral college system. The difference between the number of electoral college votes that Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton's total was 77. Now, the last number I'll put on the table just to bear in mind is if Florida and Pennsylvania alone, just those two states, switched from the Trump column to the Biden column in this election campaign, that would be

more than enough to tilt the election in favor of the Democrats. And those two states each had a margin of 1% separating Trump and Clinton. So very, very close margins in a number of critical states with large populations. So everything that these candidates do from here on in has the potential to have an effect as people start to pay more attention. Right now that we know that Mr. Biden is ahead, in some cases by significant margins. But in the last couple of weeks, I think it's fair to say that the gap has been narrowing a little tiny bit. And Mr. Trump has certainly been looking for every opportunity he can to take a run at Joe Biden's campaign,

and the selection of a VP candidate will give him an opportunity to do that. Whether he does something successful with it or not, I guess we'll see. And, you know, we've always got to keep in mind, as Harold Wilson, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, said, a week in politics is a long time. Well, a couple of months in politics is a long time. Things can change. Issues can come up.

World events can come up, all which can impact a U.S. election. So that's why the Democrats are being very careful. They know they have the lead right now, but they're being careful in assuming anything because things can change. As you said, a number of key decisions having to be made on both sides. And Biden's first really big decision he made today, and that was the choice of Kamala Harris as his vice presidential pick. Now, you know, I've watched these things like you have for many years now, and there's always a lot of hype from the media about the vice presidential pick and how important or not important it really is.

We've seen in the past it can play a major role. Think back a couple years ago when John McCain was running for the Republicans. He picked Sarah Palin. That didn't turn out well, and she became an issue throughout the couple of months that followed her pick. And some would argue that it had part of the reason why McCain lost to Barack Obama. They go back even further than that, 1972, for those of us who were around back then, the pick of George McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee against Richard Nixon in 72, he picked Tom Eagleton, who was a Democratic senator from Missouri.

And that turned out to be a disaster. McGovern had kind of been wishy-washy on making a decision on who to pick, and he actually had a number of potential vice presidents turn him down to even run in that role. But he ended up picking Eagleton with not very much of a vet done on him, and as it turned out, Eagleton had kept private the fact that he had been hospitalized a couple of times for depression.

When that came out a couple of weeks after he was nominated as the vice president, all hell broke loose, and eventually McGovern had to ask him to step down from the ticket, and he ended up in trivia. Sergeant Shriver was the person who was eventually picked, but it didn't really matter because they lost the election overwhelmingly to Richard Nixon. That didn't work out. One that did work out was a good smart pick by John Kennedy when he picked his rival Lyndon Johnson in 1960, mainly because Lyndon Johnson helped deliver the South in a state like Texas to John Kennedy. So that was a good one. But many other times, many other vice presidential

picks are kind of forgotten after the first couple of days. I mean, how many people can name even Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick from a couple of years ago? Now, I know the people who listen to our podcast are smart, and so I'm sure they all knew who that was. But anyway, the question becomes, and I throw it to you, Bruce, for your thoughts on it. How important is this pick in the grand scheme of things? Or is it kind of a two or three day wonder that we won't be talking about by next week? Well, I think it's incredibly important. I do think it may be more important than many of these picks in the past.

And I'll tell you why I think that's right. First of all, Joe Biden's age is one factor. There's no question that this is a situation that I don't know if it's unprecedented, but I can't remember a situation where people were more aware of the fact that the person at the top of the ticket was likely to choose to be a one term president. And so the person at the top of the ticket was likely to choose to be a one-term president. And so the person at the bottom of the ticket is usually presumed to be in the best position to follow as the presidential candidate for the Democrats in 2024. So people will want to know, is she the right pick, if that's the consideration. And I do think that on that basis, Biden probably picked the best person that he could have in the sense that it stresses confidence. She's youthful, but she's experienced. And I think that if people are looking for somebody who's got that battle

testing experience as well, she went through a pretty extensive vet, the trials and tribulations of a candidate field that was really quite large this time. So people had a chance to kind of take a look at her, to put pressure on her, to see how she responded. And she in turn showed that she was pretty good at rattling Joe Biden and making noise in that campaign. So I think she was quite strong from that standpoint. I think there's a couple of other reasons why she's a bit of a

standout choice in the sense of will likely have an impact, and it remains to be seen how well she'll campaign. But obviously, as a person of color, in a time when America and many parts of the rest of the world are going through a very serious discussion about race is a very deliberate choice, a very kind of in-your-face choice, if you like, by Joe Biden. He's not looking to dodge that issue. He's looking to prosecute that issue. And I think the choice of Kamala Harris really says that very pointedly. And I guess, obviously, I look at the demographics and there's been a lot of polling that said that Trump has been losing suburban voters. And so picking a woman as well as his running mate is going to tend to a very positive signal, I think, to a lot of those voters as well. So I think it's a pretty important pick. And I think he picked the person that he thought would be indicative of competency on the part of his campaign, and also part of a unification effort that I think he's been undertaking, which

has been quite successful. He's done a good job of making sure that the Biden, or sorry, that the Bernie Sanders team has not been on the field working against him in any way, and making it clear that he's talking a lot with Elizabeth Warren, too. You know, I buy into all your arguments, and perhaps the one I think I buy into the most is the first one you gave, which is this issue of age. I mean, Biden, I think, is the oldest person to run and the first, you know, first time running as the nominee of his party. He's going to be 78 when the election actually happens, which is going to put him in his early 80s, 82, 83, by the time the next race is held in 2024. And he hasn't come right out and said that he wouldn't run more than just one term,

but I think it's safe to assume that some people think he would decide not to, and therefore that issue of who the vice president is plays perhaps more importantly than it has certainly at any time in our lifetimes. And it becomes, you know, it becomes one of the issues that a lot of Americans are going to have to think about in terms of not only this term, in terms of the presidency, but the next one, and who could be the next president of the United States if, in fact, Joe Biden wins this time around. Anyway, moving on from there, you know, I mentioned the, you know, Kennedy-Johnson, the importance of geographic positioning.

Johnson was able to help Kennedy in the South and especially in Texas. In terms of Kamala Harris, probably a little less geographic than anything else. I mean, the Democrats are going to win California, her home state anyway. So is geography just not play a role this time? Well, I think geography does play a role on the first level in terms of the swing states. I think that it's fair to say that the two campaigns are using almost all of their resources to make sure that they're winning the test in those six or seven states that everybody considers to be swing states.

Beyond that, I think you're absolutely right. The geography of Kamala Harris being from California, that's squarely in the Democrats' camp. They're not going to be worried too much about losing it. They're probably not going to spend much money there, and you're probably not going to see the top of the ticket or the VP nominee in that state very much. But I do think that this is also going to be a very different campaign from another standpoint. And it remains to be seen how they're going to use the two candidates to motivate voters, especially to use mail-in ballots. I think we can see already that the Republicans, or at least Donald Trump, is trying to do everything he can to say

mail-in ballot, mail-in voting, that's a terrible idea, because he thinks that that will probably work to his favor. There are also lots of pieces of evidence of effort to suppress voter turnout by making it more difficult for people in certain areas of the country to vote. And so in turn, I think the Democrats are likely to put up a pretty significant effort to try to get more and more people to use that mail-in option. I was reading a statistic the other day that said 75% of Americans have the ability to use a mail-in ballot this election, at least as of right now. So we don't quite know how that's going to turn out. But we do imagine, I think it's fair to imagine that Kamala Harris is going to be part of the online advertising onslaught, part of that sound and energy that the Democrats are

looking for and that Joe Biden hasn't had on every occasion. And we do know that she can light it up a little bit and she can use strong language and strong imagery to get a point across. And that is one of those things that I think they're going to be counting on. And I think they'll be looking at her to do a fair bit of that in swing states, especially perhaps with women and people of color, but not only with those audiences. Well, she has a lot of great reviews coming into, well, day one of her positioning as the vice presidential nominee.

And you're quite right. She's shown in her performances, especially in Senate committee hearings. You know, it's hard to forget that the session, well, a couple of them, one with Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court hearings, and one with Bill Barr, the Minister of Justice, where she went after him with a degree of vigor, which would suggest to me that if I was Mike Pence, I would be getting ready right now for whatever the vice presidential debate is, because she's going to be tough. Now, as I said, it's day one of her nomination as the vice president, candidate for the Democratic Party, and on day one, people say a lot of nice things about you.

It doesn't take long for the attacks to start, and what they call oppo research on the part of the Republican Party. They'll have been spending because harris has been the you know the front runner they will have been spending weeks and months prepping for this moment and whatever they may or may not have they're going to be throwing out there into the conversation and we'll see how she does handling all that. So the next few days, few weeks are going to be fascinating to watch in terms of the Democrats' vice presidential pick. Yeah, just on that, Peter, can I just add one last thing?

Sure. I've seen in a number of campaigns that, you know, if you have a male-centric candidate or a campaign that's very male in its kind of orientation, and they're put in a situation where they're competing against a female, it's very easy to look as though you're being dismissive of a woman opponent because she's a woman. And if I were going to look for a real risk here for Donald Trump or Mike Pence, it's they have to be really careful about how they criticize her because she's a woman, because she's a person of color, but more importantly, because she's a hugely confident person.

She's very knowledgeable about the issues. So I think you're right that they're going to be looking for all kinds of ways to try to undermine her credibility, just as they have with Joe Biden. But so far, this campaign has looked like it's a campaign about Donald Trump. And I think that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to want to do everything in their power to make it continue to be that way. Good note to leave on this first edition of the race next door. And we want to hear what you think in terms of, you know, what other issues you'd like to see Bruce and I come up with over these next couple of months. We have some, we've talked about some of the things we want to do. But we want to hear from you as well. And remember, what we're trying to do, and it's hard at times

because we automatically go into the sort of political analysis close up right away. But what we're trying to do is look at it from a different perspective. It is the race next door. So we're watching from afar in a sense, but pretty close as well. But we're not there. We're not in there. We don't have a horse in the race next door. So we're watching from afar in a sense, but pretty close as well, but we're not there. We're not in there. We don't have a horse in the race, so to speak, but it is a race we're watching very closely.

So try to think of it in those perspectives when you send in whatever ideas you may have for us to discuss, and we'll absolutely consider them. Send them to themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com, themansbridgepodcast at gmail.com. Now, I should answer the question that I asked early on in this podcast, knowing full well that all of the Bridge Daily listeners

would know the answer, which was, who was Hillary Clinton's vice presidential pick four years ago? Okay. Tick, tock, tick, tock. I know. I know. Okay. Give me the answer.

Tim Kaine. Tim Kaine is right. And he was a senator or a congressman? Senator. He was a senator. a congressman? Senator. He was a senator. From which state? Maryland? No, Virginia.

Finally, I found one area where you didn't have the right answer. He was an interesting guy, too, because he ended up running. He lost, as you know, the clinton kane ticket lost but he kept his senate seat because his time his term in the senate wasn't up with that election senators are elected for six years so it's an odd uh system where some are up in the presidential election year, some aren't. Kamala Harris's Senate seat is not up this year. So no matter what happens in this election, if Biden loses to Trump, Harris keeps her seat. If Biden wins, she becomes vice president,

and I think the way it works is the governor of California would then appoint the senator to sit in her her place and because the governor is a democrat it will stay in the democratic fold what do you make of that a little bit of poli sci in the middle of our our discussion listen bruce good to talk to you and we'll talk again next week and now we have that like catchy theme music that we want to play again. We just love it. So there you go. With the music of Hail to the Chief.

Our first podcast within a podcast, the race next door. Hope you enjoyed it. There are many more to come. And as I said, don't be shy about sending in your ideas for what Bruce and I can discuss. We'd love to hear from you. The Mansbridge podcast at gmail.com. Okay. That's it for the Bridge Daily for this day.

As we always say, we'll be back in 24 hours. Thank you.