The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats’ Campaigns to Defeat Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere

Episode Date: June 15, 2021

Battle for the Soul: Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump by Edward-Isaac Dovere An award-winning political journalist for The Atlantic tells the inside story of how the embattled Democratic party, seeking a direction for its future during the Trump years, successfully regained the White House. The 2020 presidential campaign was a defining moment for America. As Donald Trump and his nativist populism cowed the Republican Party into submission, many Democrats—haunted by Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss in 2016, which led to a four-year-long identity crisis—were convinced he would be unbeatable. Their party and the country, it seemed, might never recover. How, then, did Democrats manage to win the presidency, especially after the longest primary race and the biggest field ever? How did they keep themselves united through an internal struggle between newly empowered progressives and establishment forces—playing out against a pandemic, an economic crisis, and a new racial reckoning? Edward-Isaac Dovere’s Battle for the Soul is the searing, fly-on-the-wall account of the Democrats’ journey through recalibration and rebirth. Dovere traces this process from the early days in the wilderness of the post-Obama era, though the jockeying of potential candidates, to the backroom battles and exhausting campaigns, to the unlikely triumph of the man few expected to win, and through the inauguration and insurrection at the Capitol. Dovere draws on years of on-the-ground reporting and contemporaneous conversations with the key players—whether in Pete Buttigieg’s hotel suite in Des Moines an hour before he won the Iowa caucuses or Joe Biden’s first-ever interview in the Oval Office—as well as aides, advisors, and voters. With unparalleled access and an insider’s command of the campaign, Battle for the Soul offers a compelling look at the policies, politics, people and the often absurd process of running for president. This fresh and timely story brings you on the trail, into the private rooms and along to eavesdrop on critical conversations. You will never see campaigns or this turning point in our history the same way again.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. Thechrisvossshow.com.

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and uh see we're reading reviewing over there all the groups you know on facebook linkedin twitter instagram oh my gosh they just never seem to stop all the different links that we have there today we have the most amazing journalist on the show he's an award-winning political journalist for the atlantic he has written an amazing book that just came out May 25th, 2021, called Battle for the Soul, Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump. His name is Edward Isaac Dover, and he's going to be joining us in the show to talk about the essence of his book and some of the details and stuff that will make you just want to go out and buy like 10 copies of this just buy 10 give them away to friends and this episode is brought to you by a sponsor ifi-audio.com and their micro idst signature

it's a top of the range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two brown burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now. I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound eradicate noise distortion and hiss from your listening experience check out their new incredible lineup of dax and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com so he is a staff writer for the atlantic and its lead political correspondent he has covered Democratic politics for 15 years, beginning in his native New York City

and carrying him through the Obama White House and then across 29 states during the 2020 election cycle. His reporting has won the White House Correspondent Association's Merriman Smith Award for Excellence in the Society of professional journalists daniel pearl award for investigative reporting among other awards he also attended john hopkins university and the university of chicago hey how you doing there isaac it's wonderful to have on the show hi chris thanks for having me that that intro was great i just have to take issue with one part where you promised people that i would be beautiful because that's not going to be

i don't want to disappoint your listeners. Speaking for myself, you, of course. Thank you. Thank you. I'd like to thank God, my mom. No, I'm just kidding. Yeah, I think my audience at this point after almost 800 episodes knows what they're in for when they click on the YouTube channel.

But most people tell me they listen on the YouTube channel. So there's that. But it's wonderful to have you on the show, Isaac. Take in, give us your plugs for people who want to find you on the interwebs. I can't handle much more than Twitter myself. So that's just at Isaac Dober, pretty easy. And then, as you said, the book's called Battle for the Soul. It's all over the place at your bookstores on Amazon.

I hope everybody gets it. If everybody gets 10 copies, like you said, that'd be great. There's a lot in there. 10 or 20, go for 20. Just buy the whole stock. There you go. What motivated you to want to write this book? You've written other books before. I haven't. This is my first book. Oh, this is your first book?

Yeah. Listen, what happened is I'm a reporter covering politics. I had been at Hillary Clinton's party, such as it was on election night 2016, obviously didn't turn out to be much of a party. It wasn't quite of a party. No. What it really in some ways comes back to is I left the Javits Center in New York where that party was at about 10 o'clock at night when it was clear that she had lost and that Donald Trump was going to win. And as I was getting a taxi to go back to my hotel and grab my bag and actually take a train back in the middle of the night to DC, I started emailing people who worked for Obama in the White House. And the email that I sent was just subject line, do you have a plan? And there was nothing else in the email. And I only got one of those returned to me. And the response was, nope. And it was representative, I think,

of what I ended up tracing in the book of just how flabbergasted and flummoxed Democrats were about what happened when Trump won. And they were on the, at first it was just shock. How could he have won? It didn't make any sense. I think that was the way it felt to a lot of people. Democratic leaders, Donald Trump himself was surprised that he won, a was just shock. How could he have won? It didn't make any sense. I think that was the way it felt to a lot of people. Democratic leaders, Donald Trump himself was surprised that

he won. A lot of people. And then it led to this reconsideration among a lot of Democrats of what they had done wrong over the years to get into that position so that Donald Trump was able to win, so that Hillary Clinton, whom they thought was absolutely unbeatable by the time that election day rolled around in November 2016, that she lost. And then it started to be a sort of reinvigoration of what the Democratic Party was. That's a long process. And the Women's March the day after Trump's inauguration, big piece of it. But there are a lot of things that started slowly coming together. Then when it became clear to me, Chris, that there were going to be this many candidates running,

as did, I thought it, by the way, it was going to be about 16 Democratic candidates running, and it topped out at 26. So I was short of it. But only 26, 26 that got as far as you can see back there, I've got buttons from all the primary campaigns, because I just thought it was crazy how many buttons there were. And the stories of these people, they were interesting characters. They were representing different things that were going on in politics. The more left wing politics, more moderate politics, things about racial identity, all sorts of things that were caught up there, generational questions. And I started writing the book in 2018.

You go back and you look at the proposal that I sold to a publisher in 2018. It says this is going to be the craziest election ever, probably the most important election in American history. I, of course, didn't know the pandemic was going to be part of it. I didn't know that any of the stuff that was set off by George Floyd was going to be part of it. And I think when you actually look at it now and take stock of these four years, it was an absolutely defining period for the Democratic Party. I think for American politics, I think it tells you about what the Democratic Party is now that they have going forward, what Biden's presidency is, which is so different from what it was. And for Republicans, it's a document of what it is that you're up

against if you're a Republican thinking into next year and beyond of what this party is now the title of your soul or the title of your book uh battle for the soul i imagine that's in reference to what biden always says the battle for the soul of the country is that correct that he's the one who helped get that phrase into the uh lexicon here but i think that it's not what he was talking about when he originally said it was Charlottesville and that there's a battle for the soul of the nation is what he said. And that is a big part of what was going on, this America figuring out what it is. But it's really, there are a lot of battles and a lot of souls being fought over here. What is the Democratic Party? What is America? What do we think about the democratic process? What do we think about racial progress and identity in America?

All of these things that were going on. Is America fundamentally more center left place than it was just because Democrats had a good year in November? Is it a more centrist place? Is it a more center right place? And that was obscured perhaps by the fact that there was such a movement against Trump among a lot of Democrats. These are all things that were swirling. And again, I was hoping that it would be a good book full of lots of things clashing and running into each other. It ended up being full of so much more than I anticipated. You've been making quite

the headlines with the book too. There was the infamous, let's start from the beginning. I think you document about how, what that first night was like for the Clintons, Podesta, Obama. And to my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, because I think I I'm not sure I had this nailed down. But Obama had largely left the Democratic Party broke at the end of his term. And Hillary Clinton just stood in and funded it and basically declared herself the candidate. It's a little bit more complicated than that, but you're right that Obama put thing, it left the Democratic Party, the sort of structure of the Democratic Party in really bad shape, the Democratic National D.N.C. And that was what some people who worked for him called, to me, benign neglect is the phrase that was used. He just didn't see party politics as

the most interesting and important thing for him to be doing as president. Now, what that meant is that by the time that Hillary Clinton comes in, she, of course, is hoping to be elected president. And she and her husband were always more party people. They were invested in that way. And so there was this thinking that they had that the DNC would be important. And they started to really move in hard to take over. That's normal for what happens in a campaign. But I remember one time being in the Clinton campaign office doing some reporting around this time in 2016, early summer or spring. And there was a bumper sticker that was up that said, this is the Democratic National Committee headquarter.

But they wanted to invest in doing that. And what happens again in election 2016, and there are, as you point out, these stories that begin the book of Barack Obama and Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton, all watching Trump win and try to understand it. That I told both because I think they're interesting and tell us a lot about these characters themselves, but also because they reflect what was going on

for a lot of people. It's thinking, what is this? What does this mean? What does this mean for Democrats? What does this mean for the country? Yeah. I'm like, are we all racist now? What the hell just happened?

I don't know. Do you, this, I don't think you cover this in the book, but do you feel if she would have went to the three states, the blue collar states, Wisconsin, maybe just once as SNL told the joke? Yeah. Look, she lost by narrow margins. I think that if she'd gone to Wisconsin just once,

probably does that change things? That's hard to say. But what I think that was representative of is a misread. And I get into some of this in the book at the beginning. Book is much more focused on what happened afterwards. But it's a misread of what was going on in American politics at that point. You know, she also

didn't go to Michigan all that much, although she went more to Michigan than she went to Wisconsin. And she lost Michigan. She lost it by 10,704 votes. Would two more trips to Michigan have changed that? I think it's harder to say that than to say if they had a very different sense of how to approach the campaign, that might have worked. So there's some salacious stuff that you've, that's come out of your book. One of them is Jill Biden being very, not what I expect out of Jill Biden, but she is a woman who's defending her man. But do you tell the story about the infamous, the infamous scene at the debate stage where Kamala Harris goes after Joe Biden and her response. Yeah, that's the first debate that they face each other, and it's in June of

2019. And everybody who was paying any attention to the campaign knows what happened there. She went after him for his record on busing, beat him up pretty hard, had a line that, you know, one of the things that I have in the book is the conversations that were going on behind the scenes about a lot of points, but at this point where her

team was trying to figure out how do you attack him, but not call him a racist. And so they landed on saying that she would say, I know you're not a racist, but, and that but did not go over well as salving the whole thing for the Biden folks. Biden himself was really pissed about what happened. He turns to Pete Buttigieg at the commercial break,

and he says, I don't know what your cursing rules are in podcasts, but he turns over and he says, that was some effing BS. And quoting people here. And Buttigieg is standing there and he doesn't really know Biden that well. That boy is shocked by it. And then a couple of days later, Jill Biden is on a call with supporters. And she, look, she is very committed to her husband, very dependent. She's also, I think she wears these elegant dresses. She's the first lady. She's a very elegant woman. But at her core, she's this Philly girl who is really like a tough lady. There's a story she tells all the time of, not usually in public, but of a time where there was a bully in the neighborhood. And she goes to the bully's door after the bully's been

picking on her sisters and the bully opens the door and she just clocks the bully in the face and walks away. So that's who Jill Biden is. But when this call happens after the debate, she's talking to people and she's just, they're so mad in the Biden world. And she says, stand up there

and call him a racist with the work that he's done and the life that he's led. Go fuck yourself. And it's just like an exasperation. Of course, like they've gotten over it since then. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting, too.

How did they do you talk about in the book about how they sorted that all out? Or is that just politics? And that's it. No, it was not. This was a cut that was deeper than politics. Right. It was not, this was a cut that was deeper than politics, right? Among the reasons why it was deeper is because Kamala Harris was friends with Beau Biden, Joe Biden's son, who's the beloved late son. They worked together when he was attorney general and she was attorney.

He was attorney general in Delaware and she was attorney general in California, working on the big mortgage settlement that happened about 10 years ago. And it's not to say that they were like best buddies going back to when they were kids together. They came to know each other professionally and built a friendship that went beyond it. But the Biden, Biden's feelings about Harris were that she was his son's friend. Doug Emhoff, Harris's husband, has a message that he has saved on his phone still of when Biden called to congratulate them on getting engaged. And so it felt very personal to the Biden folks.

And even as Biden moved on himself, his advisor, Anita Dunn, said to me at one point that he's the only Irishman who doesn't carry a grudge. A lot of other people around Biden continue to be very upset by this. And Biden himself around this time last year, when he's starting to think about a running mate seriously, his concern is, is this going to stand in the way of building the close relationship that I want to have with my vice president? That would be like the relationship that I had with Barack Obama when he was president, I was vice president. And he's stressing about this, not because he's still mad, but because he thinks it's going to stop that from happening. And among the people that he talks to is Barack Obama, who says to him, hey, Joe, listen, you called me unqualified to be president, and we got over it. And also, if you remember, Joe, at the beginning, we weren't actually getting along that well. The first year that Obama was president, they were fighting at the White House. Oh, really? Yeah, there was a lot of stuff going on behind the

scenes between Obama and Biden. It's not what it evolved into being where it's this close personal family, their wives are friends, Biden's grandkids are friends with Obama's kids, you know, the generational difference there. And Obama says, look, you have to make the decision that's going to help you win. And that's issue number one. And if you feel like she can help you win, and hey, there's good reason to believe that Obama was saying, then you should look at it and say, we can build that relationship over time. But his basic point was, it doesn't matter if you think she'd be good to have lunch with if you're not president and vice president. Job number one for them was defeating Donald Trump. Yeah. It's, it's interesting to me. Like I was like, yeah, she's not getting the vice president position now. And no one was sure because she dealt him a heavy blow the next morning. She had like millions and millions of dollars that she

raised off of it. And you're just kind of, maybe she's a body blow puncher. Maybe that's what you need to go up against Donald Trump is someone who can go body blows with him, whatever. One of my favorite parts of the book, because I've spent the last five or six years, I don't know how long it is. It's all blending together now. Just wondering truly what President Obama thought of Donald Trump, truly, not where he came out of the rose garden. He's, we zig and we zag, and I'm not trying to do an Obama impression, but tell us a little bit about that because I think those words are just beautifully choice. There are a lot of moments in the book that give you a sense of who these people are when the cameras are not on them.

I think that's really important, right? These politicians have a prepared image that they put forward. And I tried to tell you a little bit more about who they are. That goes for all of them. But with Obama, the sense that he, it was very deliberate. He wanted to not be picking a fight with Trump all the time. He thought that Trump would love that and that it would distract from other things going on. And it gave people this idea that Obama just didn't care, that he was detached. It was gone, not paying attention.

And look, he was making a lot of money and he was giving speeches and doing a lot of things that were detached from the day-to-day of politics. But he was consuming what was going on just like everybody else was. And in a different way, because he was the president.

He knows a lot more about what could go right and go wrong in the presidency. He was very upset by what Trump's doing. And yes, there are a lot of curses that I tracked him down saying. And look, Chris, let me just be clear to you. As a reporter, it's always good because, you know, people love reading about politicians cursing.

But the reality of it is that it gives you a window in as a reporter, because when someone is cursing all the time, you know that that's not what they want you to know. And there's a moment where Obama's watching the reports that Trump is calling foreign leaders without aides on the phone, and it's having the Russian ambassador into the Oval Office. I think a lot of people, wherever your party affiliation was like, what exactly is going on with that? It's weird. Now, Obama looks at that and he says, that corrupt motherfucker. And he also is being pushed by people all the time who want to get a rise out of him, see what he really thinks. And they say, come on, come on. And he'll say stuff like,

I didn't think it would be this bad. And they say, come on, a little bit more. What do you mean? I didn't think we'd have a racist, sexist pig. And so you see that. And what I think is also important is because nobody was under the impression that Obama was a Trump voter in 2016 or in 2020. But you see just how concerned he was and just how worried he was about what was going on in the country and just how angry he was. And I think that's important to capture. There's a line that's not from him, but from one of his close aides, a guy named Ben Rhodes, that is even talking about how towards the end of the term, before Trump is formally sworn in, but he's already won during the transition, that Obama is starting to think maybe the country is even more racist than I thought it was. And Ben Rhodes said to me that Obama was like Jackie

Robinson, that he always knew that the people were there in the stands heckling him, but he tried to ignore it, but then he couldn't ignore it anymore. And I think that's really powerful. Obama going through this process of being like, oh, huh, huh. And getting more and more upset and more and more angry about it. Yeah. Plus Trump made it very personal to take apart anything that had Obama's hand or legacy attached to it. He was basically unwinding his whole presidency or trying to. Yeah. I think you're right to say that was in some ways one of the defining ethoses of the Trump presidency. And the Obama people were so concerned about how deep this could go that when he was setting up his foundation, they had a lawyer sitting in on every meeting, Chris, because they just want to make sure if Trump decides to deploy the Department of Justice just to try to screw with us,

that we have everything bad and nailed down so much. That's how worried they were about every planning meeting of any significance to build a nonprofit foundation. They had a lawyer sitting there. OK, how's it going to work? How's it going to work? They're really concerned about what's going on. That's extraordinary. I figured he tried to, President Obama tried to paint this image of he's out windsurfing and stuff. And you people like me kind of felt abandoned because we're like, hey, man, you left us alone with the evil babysitter. And he's crazy, man.

And it might be snorting some Adderall. I'm not sure. I remember, I think it was uh michelle obama made some comments or something to the fact that they worked so hard to not be number one the first black president and then have all these scandals and people could go i think she said this in in a better form of words but basically people could go hey look here's what happened you let the first black president and see now there's all these scandals and And so they worked really hard. Maybe Obama said that, but they worked really hard to make sure that they were ethical. They had a solid ethics team in there. They did everything as much as they could

above board, or at least that was the intent. And they didn't have a scandal. Chris, you are, you're hitting on something important here, which is that this was a concern of Obama's on a number of different levels. He wanted to make sure that not only was he the first black president, but it was important to get reelected because he thought if not, then people will say, okay, like it didn't work with the black guy, that any scandal would be amplified because it was the, would have been the black president. So they were very careful about this stuff when he was in the white house. And then for this all to go against him the way that did, and you talk about Michelle Obama, there's a moment toward the end of the book that I know

that who wasn't on the campaign trail at all last year was Michelle Obama. She gave that speech at the convention that was really searing and powerful and then didn't appear again at all. Why not? It turns out, as I report in the book, she was too depressed about what was going on in the country. And she actually couldn't, she was taking it so hard that she couldn't get herself to go and campaign. Now, if she had gone to campaign in a spot like Georgia, would that have made a difference? Probably, because especially you see how slim that margin was there. She is a powerful surrogate and has always been helpful in getting Democrats to turn it out of the vote. And again, I think it tells you a little bit about her and how a lot of people like her

were proselytizing, but also her herself, that she was just so down and out about what was going on. We were all kind of ground down, just seeing everything. But yeah, I would be really angry if I was Obama and Obama's people. You work so hard to run a perfect record, not have anyone go to prison. You do all this stuff in the name of okay doing what's right being a good president and running a good administration and then these guys just get in and they're just like i remember was it rachel maddow had that wall and they would fire every couple days and it was just like a rotating wheel let me ask you this does do you think from your research and following this from 2018 do you think that Trump most likely would have won if it hadn't been for COVID?

The what ifs are harder here, but I'll just give you one set of ideas to think about here. There are two sets of focus groups done for the Obama Trump voters, those people who voted for Obama in 2008 and 2012, and then for Trump in 2016. A lot of people look at that and they say, how could that be? How could you vote for Barack Obama and Donald Trump? And one of the people who was concerned about that was Barack Obama, who in 2016, after the election, sends a couple of people on his team to Iowa to go do focus groups of Iowa Trump, Obama Trump voters. And what the reaction they get back is the people saying to them, we voted for them for the same reason that we sent Obama hoping he could do things. And he and

Washington stopped it from happening. And now we just need somebody to really like break through and do it. It's this outsider idea. And it's so striking to a lot of the people who worked for Obama when they bring that data to Obama in the end, he says, no, I get it. I understand what they're saying. Fast forward at the fall of last year, a couple of weeks before the election, there are another set of focus groups done of Obama Trump voters, this time with the subset of them being people who were on the fence, whether they're going to go with Trump or Biden. And they asked them, okay, what do you make of Donald Trump? And the response was, I don't like him. But remember, these are people who voted for him in 16.

I don't like him, but he seems like he knows what's going on with the economy. And it's not his fault what happened with the pandemic. And he's probably the person who can help get the economy back in shape once we get through the pandemic. But I don't think he can get us out of the pandemic. And they looked at Biden and they said, he's a good man. I don't think he can get us out of the pandemic. And they looked at Biden and they said, he's a good man. I don't think he knows what to do with the economy. I'm a little freaked out about what's going on with defund the police and some of the other things

that are going on on the left of the party, but he seems like he can get us out of the pandemic. And those voters broke more for Biden than for Trump. Biden obviously won by 7 million votes, but if you change a total combined 77,000 votes in just four states, Trump wins the electoral college. And so it was important to have that. And so your question was, did the pandemic change things? Certainly for some voters, it changed things. And I think that it may have changed things for a lot of voters.

Yeah. It was something where people, what's that old line about if people's pockets are full and the trains run on time? I think that's a fascist reference, but there is some, it's not irony in that, but at least where we're headed. It's still, at one point we talked to the people about having Bob Wilber in the show.

And I guess in his book, Rage, that Trump had mysteriously told him a couple of times, you'll know who I am in the second term. I really, on one hand, I want to know what the fuck he meant by that. On the other hand, I probably don't, but I think we saw the lead up to that. I would just, I think people like to think that there's like the loose name. I remember Chris Rock did an interview with Mark Maron that was like right before Obama was reelected. And he was like, oh, when he gets reelected, we're going to see what all and it's pretty much there wasn't a massive difference to the Obama second term of the first. With Trump, it may have been because Trump was so much about getting rid of any of the guardrails

around him. And that last guardrail was, can you be reelected in this environment? And so what a reelected Trump would have been given how liberated he felt when he was acquitted of the first impeachment, it probably would have had more, it probably would have been more of Trump being a full on Trump. Yeah, revenge of the Trump. What else haven't we covered any tidbits you want to tease out on your book? Like there's a lot in here that goes to the relationship between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren that I think is really essential to folks understanding what happened in the Democratic Party and how it is that at a time when progressives were surging, it seemed, and when there was a lot of support for progressive ideas, that you had two candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and neither of them came all that close to winning the nomination. Obviously, Sanders came much closer. But when you look at delegate

count in the end, his campaign, there was this week in between the Nevada caucuses and the South Carolina primary, it was like, oh, he's going to be the nominee. And then it snaps and the book traces what happened there, what the actual things are that got in the way. There's some conspiracy theories of the establishment lined up against him. I got to tell you, I was covering it in real time as it happened. The establishment, to the extent that there is an establishment, is just confused about what to do. And I have text messages on my phone from people saying, that's it, Bernie Sanders is the nominee. That's the end of it. And as you see that story, how that all unfurls, I think you get a lot of what, again, what these people are, learning what the more relaxed moments for

Pete Buttigieg and Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and all of them, you know, for Biden and Warren and everybody in the race, basically, because the way that I was reporting it is that I had said to all the campaigns, look, I'm working on this book. It's going to come out in the spring of 2021. Give me access to things that I promise you I won't report until then. And that gives this vividness and freshness to what was going on. That's brilliant, dude. Yeah. I'm grateful for the people who participated in that. It's one of the things that I think made it so that you could get some of the splashier moments in there, like what happened between Harris and Biden. See, I was wondering how you got these quotes. That's brilliant. Yeah. I like that. And I think that what happened was that you see this all come together. And Chris, I'll tell you, the book, we knew we were going to be moving really quickly on it. I was turning in chunks of chapters to my book editor. And the last chunk, the final chunk was supposed to be in on January 4th, the morning of January 4th. So Monday morning. And I said to my editor, and I said,

look, here's everything except the final chapter. Here's why. We've got these races in Georgia tomorrow, these two Senate races. I don't know what's going to happen. We're going to have to address it. We've got the certification of the vote on Wednesday. It's probably going to be a lot of drama and political theater, but we have to address it. And then I had been in conversation with the Biden team about having an interview with him, maybe the first week in January. Obviously by January 6th, the plans changed. I was in Wilmington actually with Biden when the riot was happening. He was coming out. He had this idea that he was, because he also thought it was going to be theater, even though there was worry about some of the things that could happen. And so he was going to give a speech on small business

investment. It was very boring speech on purpose. And so I was going to just write about how he gives this boring speech in this moment. Obviously, my plans changed, as everybody's did. And I was supposed to drive back to Washington from Wilmington. It's about a two hour drive. I thought it would be no problem. But they put a curfew in effect. And I didn't think I could get home. So I stayed overnight in Wilmington and went back to the speech that Biden gave the next day. And as didn't think I could get home. So I stayed overnight in Wilmington and went back to the speech that Biden gave the next day. And as I'm getting to that speech, my book editor sends me an email and he says, so we're going to push everything back. We've got to sort this out. And so- That's good timing though.

Yeah. So the last 50 pages of the book are about the riot, these vivid stories from people, Cory Booker on the floor of the Senate, thinking he's going to have to actually have a fistfight with these rioters to protect the older senators, things like that, and then builds into the inauguration. And then I did end up having what was Biden's first interview as president that we had, we did on February 2. So it was a really rushed way of going about this. But then you see Biden reflecting on what it was that got him to this point. He says to me things like, I'm the most progressive person who's ever been president, makes a point of that, but also talks about what he thinks Democrats got wrong about politics leading into 2016, and gets very emotional talking about his son and the connection that he feels to

his son. And again, I think there are parts of the book where I say you can't understand Joe Biden without understanding his relationship to Beau Biden. You can't understand him that understanding his relationship to Hunter Biden. And I try to spell some of that out and tell people again, where, what this part, this is a history of what happened, right? It ended on February 2nd, the action of the book, but it's okay. So this is what you got now. This is how it came to be. This is how it came to be that Joe Manchin can have a 50-50 Senate. That depends on him, what he's going to say about the filibuster, right? This is what happens when Joe Biden has to decide, hey, how left is he going to go when it comes to an infrastructure deal?

It's crazy, man. At least we got that Georgia thing fixed and semi-fixed and we don't have a majority. I don't know, man. It's going to be, it's weird, but it's also great not to wake up every morning going with your hair on fire when you look at your phone being gaslit and you're just like, what the fuck is going on? Anybody who had half a brain could see what was going on. It was just unbridled, unfettered capitalism at its extreme. I don't even think there's a better word for it than capitalism.

It was robber baron shit. It was there was a line that Michael Bennett, the senator from Colorado, who is who ran for president briefly. Most people don't remember it. But he said at one point in the summer of 2019, if I'm president, then I promise you, you won't have to think about who the president is for two weeks. And that that would have been true about Bennett if he had somehow won. But that's pretty much true about Biden. Whereas as a reporter covering politics the last couple of years, we would have different news cycles each hour. Right. I think the craziest thing could have come out of the White House or the presidency. And then and then it was done. Then it was on to the next one by 3 p.m. And then another one by 5. It was an intensity that I think you see Biden has a very strategic approach to trying

to tamp down. And whether that leads to him getting done more of what he wants to get done, that's the big question ahead of him now. Yeah. The biggest controversy has been the dogs biting Secret Service agents or something along those lines. And that they said that they would get a cat. And so far, no cat has been the dogs biting Secret Service agents or something along those lines. And that they said that they would get a cat. And so far, no cat has been acquired. This is a scandal of dynamic proportion. I hope the Fox News covers this. This is up there with the tan suit that President Obama wore.

This is definitely, yeah. Do you think, do you document in your book, you talk about Sanders, but I guess you probably break down how seminal that moment was with Jim Clyburn and the South Carolina endorsement. Yeah, like the Clyburn endorsement was massive and changed the race entirely. But one of the things that I get into is you have to remember how bad the shape was that Biden's campaign was in by the time that he got to South Carolina. He had come in fourth in Iowa. I remember I had an article that referred to him coming in a distant fourth and somebody on Biden's campaign was in by the time that he got to South Carolina. He had come in fourth in Iowa.

I remember I had an article that referred to him coming in a distant fourth and somebody on Biden's campaigns. Oh, he wasn't that far back from Elizabeth Warren, who was in third place. And I said, no, distant isn't distant from third. It's distant from first. And then he comes in fifth in New Hampshire. Right. And there's this his campaign rushes him to South Carolina on the day of the New Hampshire primary. He feels like it's already over. He goes to Nevada. He's talking to, he comes in second, but a distant second in Nevada. I think he's by 20 points or so behind Bernie Sanders.

Seems like he's running away from it with the race. And Biden has to be talked into it by his aides that second place in Nevada by 20, back by 20 points is a good result. But it's enough to convince Clyburn to be there and be there super strong for Biden. And but Clyburn, I talked to him a bunch for the book. And he said to me, he didn't expect that his endorsement would be as effective as it was. It had this reverberating effect through South Carolina. And then Biden wins South Carolina primary with 50% of the vote. And remember the speed at which this happens. It's that South Carolina, Nevada was, South Carolina

was the following Saturday. And then three days later is Super Tuesday. That's the chapter in the book about that is called 72 Hours That Changed History. Because it really, from Saturday to, I was there in Columbia, South Carolina, when he came out and gave his acceptance speech after winning. It's the first time that Joe Biden had won a primary in his life. And it was a big moment, obviously. And he comes out and he's excited about it. And then they start thinking, OK, this is going to be good.

But Super Tuesday is not going to be that good. And then very quickly, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg drop out. They both endorse him. Beto O'Rourke endorses him. There's this collapse of the Mike Bloomberg campaign. If you like seeing what goes wrong with the campaign, then plug in for the chapter about Mike Bloomberg, which is called A Billion Dollars for Samoa.

That's the only primary that he won, despite literally spending a billion dollars. And it all comes together, probably. Or maybe even more, and then it has left over for another aisle. And then it comes together. Probably. Or maybe even more than it had left over for another aisle. And then it comes together for Biden. They're standing at a Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles place in L.A. campaigning. It's right before the pandemic hit on Super Tuesday. It's four

o'clock in the afternoon in L.A. And the polls close in Massachusetts at seven at that moment. And within a couple of minutes, they call Massachusetts Elizabeth Warren's home state for Biden. And they don't even know that this is going to happen. It's shocking. So they're like, and they're trying to put things together. But again, there were so many things that went into this. Jesse Jackson wanted to endorse Bernie Sanders before the South Carolina primary. That could have changed it.

You see the story of how he didn't do it because Elizabeth Warren was in the race and he didn't want to choose between them. Al Sharpton said to Bernie Sanders, I'm ready to endorse you before South Carolina. He said it to Sanders' face. And then he heard that Clyburn was going to endorse and then he backed off. Wow. You see these stories of how all of it comes together. And all of a sudden, Joe Biden, he's the nominee, basically, by Super Tuesday. There was still a fight for a couple of weeks. But by that point, the air and I was talking to Bernie Sanders people after Super Tuesday

and the feeling they had was like really just as if they've been holding the nomination in their hands. And then it turned to sand. Just gone. Yeah. One final question for you. It seems like the coronavirus was actually pretty good to Joe Biden because he couldn't be out making gaffes as Joe Biden does. President Biden,

I should say now, he couldn't be out making mistakes. And it really focused everyone to look at, okay, Joe's like this calm guy in a basement somewhere doing the right thing. And he's not doing stupid stuff that everyone's always pointing fingers at him. And meanwhile, we got Madman running around looking like a batshit crazy dude. How instrumental do you feel that was? I think it was for all the reasons that you pointed out and for another big one too, which is that he never would have drawn almost certainly rally crowds the same size as Trump. And that would have inevitably been part of it. Is there enough enthusiasm there for Biden? How does it compare to Trump? And I covered him all over the campaign trail in the primary and the rallies were never that big. And I went to the final Biden rally

that ever happened before coronavirus. It was March 9th in Detroit in a high school gym. One of the things that you can see an old tweet for me from that night, they were squirting hand sanitizer. People, they were on either side of the door. They're just saying these giant bottles of hand sanitizer, hand sanitizer, hand sanitizer. And I tweeted the video of it because, admittedly, I thought this was crazy. And of course, within three days, I was buying cans of soup myself. Totally. Right.

And that was, even that rally, which is the rally where he was endorsed by Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker all that night. Even that was not like a really big rally. It was a couple hundred people there. And so it does, it focuses people. I think it covered up some of the weaknesses and it's maybe weaknesses in quotes politically, like speaking to a rally is not necessarily the shows that you're ready to be present, but does so show something about enthusiasm. And it pushes things forward so that I think that you see people just thinking about the 2020 race in really stark terms about what kind of future they wanted for America. And look, one of the things that I think everybody needs to consider here is that Joe Biden got the most votes in the history of the planet.

Right. Eighty one million votes. Donald Trump got the second most votes in the history of the planet. Seventy four million. And like I said, there are some states that were really much closer than the Biden team had been expecting and hoping. But there's also the fact that in the closing chapters of the book, a consideration of what does this mean for the Democratic Party? What kind of coalition can they build going forward? And what does it look like when Donald Trump's not there? Because Donald Trump is clearly the best motivator for voting in the history of humankind. Whatever else you want to say about him, that is true. Yeah, he got out the vote.

So, yeah, it just kind of reminded me of a rope-a-dope where Biden was just in the basement and Trump is going nuts dealing with him. And he didn't have any material to work with. Biden had gone out and done more appearances. He tripped or something or said some sort of flummox that President Biden was known to do. He doesn't do it so much anymore. So he's gotten better. Maybe he's just staying on script. Yeah. I mean, they've kept him from having too many loose moments. Look, another thing that was going on for the Biden folks, and again, into the summit book is that they were desperate to make sure he didn't catch COVID. That became mission number one, that they knew that would be really debilitating for him politically, separate from the health, which obviously would have been dangerous to Trump did not approach it that way. And I think that if Trump hadn't caught COVID, maybe things look a little different from him. But that was a moment for a lot of people where they were like, whoa, if he can't even keep himself from getting COVID, how's he going to keep me safe? That was a seminal moment. And I think a lot of people, some people will come to it, but this is brilliant. This is extraordinary in how they built this thing. And like you said, there were so many people that are running. I was just like,

is there anybody who's not running? I think my dog was in the race at one point. One of my dogs. He had strong support in South Carolina. There was some feeling for your dog. Yeah, there was. And so, but yeah, I was like, I didn't know you were running as a campaign. What's going on now?

Why are there signs in the yard? And so more, more, more dog treats for whatever America. Anyway, it's been wonderful to have you on the show, Isaac. And thank you for spending the time with us. Give us your plugs so that people can look you up on the interwebs. So again, the most important one is Battle for the Soul.

Hope you'll order it from Amazon or your local bookstore or wherever you get your books. And there is a lot in there. We covered a lot of things, Chris. There are, it's like maybe 2% of what's in the book. And you can follow me on Twitter

for more about the book and other things that I'm doing and other articles that I'm writing for my day job at the Atlantic at Isaac Dovere. That's I-S-A-A-C-D-O-V-E-R-E. There you go. Guys, check it out. Thank you very much for being on the show with us, Isaac, and sharing your knowledge and insight. Thanks for having me. It really was a great conversation. Thank you. Thanks, Manas, for tuning in. Be sure to pick up Battle for the Soul Inside the Democrats' Campaigns to Defeat Trump by Edward Isaac Dover. And pick that pick up.

Just came out in May 25th, 2021. Be sure to go to YouTube.com forward slash Chris Foss at the bell notification button. Refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, and all that good stuff. Go to Goodreads.com forward slash Chris Foss. Also go to all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Be good to each other, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.