The Daily Beast Podcast - JD Vance Is the New Sarah Palin

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, Chief Creative and Content Officer of the Daily Beast Joanna Coles stops by to talk about JD Vance and the weird ways that men are hijacking a woman’s moment in this election season. Plus! Anat Shenker-Osorio, host of the political podcast Words to Win By, joins the show to discuss how Democrat’s messaging has changed since the arrival of Kamala Harris. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

Joanna Coles, the chief creative and content officer of The Daily Beast stops by to talk about the weird way that men are sort of hijacking a woman's moment in this election season, as well as the stark dichotomy between the two vice presidential candidates. Then we'll talk to Anat Shankar Osario, host of the podcast Words to Win by. They'll talk about how Democratic messaging has changed ever since the announcement of the Harris Walls ticket. But first, let's have some fun. So, Danielle, every once in a while we like to kick off an episode of the new abnormal with some good news. And we don't like to do it too often because it means we can't yell and curse, which we love to do. This is one of those times where I think we need to do it. And there was a big announcement on Thursday.

the Biden administration, sorry, the Biden Harris administration, we have to start saying that now, has reached a deal with drug companies to make 10 drugs. I mean, this is the first 10 of what is planned to be many more, to make these drugs lower cost for millions of Americans. This is Americans who are on Medicare. And this is such good news. And, you know, it's a bunch of drugs, a bunch of diabetes drugs, heart drugs. arthritis medications, blood clot stuff. It's just, it's good, important drugs. And as the administration says, these 10 drugs are among those with the highest total spending in Medicare Part D. If these new negotiated prices had been available last year in 2023, Medicare would have saved $6 billion.

So this is great. This is amazing. And this is, I guess, maybe not as important as, well, definitely not as important as the fact that millions of Americans will get access to lower cost drugs, but it's also really, really bad for Donald Trump. You know, and that's what I was going to say. I mean, it's really bad for Donald Trump and the Republicans because this has been one of their major talking points and a point in Project 2025 about getting rid of Medicare and gutting this program. And there are ways in which they refuse to do, refuse to vote on that would continue to lower

prescription drug costs for Americans. And why is that? Because they are in bed with big. pharma. And so if Americans are in a situation where they are paying less for prescription drugs, that means that Republicans are not getting as much money from the, from big pharma. Right. Like that's the circle jerk that we're that we're constantly in. And so, you know, when they have these talking points about, you know, the economy and needing to get rid of social safety nets and all of these things, we know that it's bullshit. We know that it's driven by Greek.

on their part and knowing that if they continue to scratch the back of big pharma, then their pockets get full. That's how it works. So this right here, it is right on time for a wonderful talking point on the campaign trail for Kamala Harris. 100%. And before we move on, I just want to point out that this is just the latest of various things that the Biden-Harris administration has done to lower medical costs, capping insulin at $35 a month.

which they did that started last year. People enrolled in Medicare Part D don't have to pay a 5% copay when they're in the catastrophic phase of their benefit. There's a whole bunch of things that this administration has been doing. All of these are things that the quote unquote populists on the right, like J.D. Vance, are not in favor of. So to just be able to point out over and over again, the real savings that this administration has worked to gain for Americans, as opposed to the Trump Vance Project 2025 plans to cut taxes for billionaires, et cetera. It's such a great way to show, you know, the stark difference between the two parties. Yeah.

And it's going to be a wonderful, wonderful point to continue to hammer home. Who cares about you and your family and your drug costs? Who cares about putting more money back in your pockets and taking money away from Big Pharma, who are notably price gougers to benefit themselves? And it's going to be Democratic. And this is, like I said, it's a message that is right on time. So speaking of messages, Donald Trump is not getting the message from Republicans right now who are becoming increasingly vocal on his inability to focus, which end, you know, to hammer

in points that are on substance. And Andy, I am so confused about who they think that Donald Trump has been. for the past nine years, that all of a sudden this man is a font of knowledge and is a policy wonk that is going to deliver substance on the campaign trail. This is not what Donald Trump is known for. But, you know, I need to read this quote that's in the Washington Post by one of his longtime advisors, Peter Navarro, who has said this recently, quote, when Trump attacks Vice President Kamala Harris personally, rather than on policy, Harris' support among swing voters rises, particularly among women.

Yeah, because you have nothing else to go after them with, and so you say things like Camilla, or you write Kamala, or you talk about the fact that you think she's stupid or undeserving. And guess what? Women across this country, notably black women and brown women, but women in general across this country have all heard this before. There's not a woman in the workplace that hasn't been told that they are less, that they need to perform better, that they are not as accomplished as their male counterparts. And so all this is doing, all Donald Trump is doing is reinforcing the reason why he is not the candidate for them because he thinks very little of women and then couple that with his,

you know, woman hating, in-cell-sounding, misogynist vice president. And it's almost as if, as Hillary Clinton said, do they realize women can vote in this election? Or are they thinking that they've already rolled in the 19th century? Yeah. And look, it's great to see Peter Navarro now out of jail as more than one former Trump advisor has found themselves. He's basically joining the crowd. And Aaron Blake and the Washington Post points out, you know, it's Kelly Ann Conway, Nikki Haley, even Vivek, you know, Kevin McCarthy, Sean Hannity, Megan Kelly, all of these people suddenly want Trump to, as you said, to be someone that he never has been. And it never bothered them that he hasn't been this guy. But now suddenly it does. The idea that Trump is

going to give some sort of major policy speech. That would be an interesting world to live in, but it's not this one. I can't even picture what that would look like, especially now that he is very, very clearly sundowning. That's something that is getting worse, it feels like, by the week. But he absolutely cannot focus on policy because ultimately he only cares about policy to the point where it affects him personally and his rich friends. And beyond that, he He doesn't really care, and that's why he can cloak himself in, you know, evangelical language and Christian nationalist language and cloak himself in a bunch of other things that probably aren't who he is, because ultimately who he is deep inside is nobody. He's an empty vessel for anything

beyond narcissism. So the idea that he's going to come out and give these speeches, and look, someone can write him these speeches, and I suppose he could read them, they're going to sound awful, and he's going to look and sound bored because he's going to. He will be bored, and they're going to do absolutely nothing to help him. Even if he did this, because I agree, it would be probably helpful to him to stop the personal attacks and the racist attacks and the sexist attacks on Kamala Harris. But even if he did, I don't think that that's going to suddenly make him a good candidate, because he really is without that.

He's just a boring old man badly reading a teleprompter. David Jolly actually said, he's a list. listless candidate. Yeah. And I said that like boring, listless like just he is the old angry, like crumpled man that is just standing and wagging a finger at this young, vibrant woman of color and saying all of these things. And it's just, it's falling around him. Like no one is listening. And every time that he does it, I mean, his, you know, his supporters are 100% right. But I feel like when was the last time we ever heard that Donald Trump took advice from anyone other than himself? Like those people are literally there as empty suits just to say, yeah, boss, good job boss,

your brilliant boss, never heard anything so genius boss. Like that's their role. You know, who actually advises him, you know, that he listens to, that he'll say, oh yeah, let me be discipline now. I mean, the man is 78 friggin' years old, and we're still waiting for him to go through adolescence and grow up. And they think that somehow for 82 days, Donald Trump is going to look like a button-down, you know, policy-wank version of himself? Has everybody been here on Earth one with us? I don't think so. No, and I would like to say, as someone who is close to Kamala Harris' his age. I would like to thank you for referring to her as young. You're welcome, Andy. That really meant a lot to me. Look, he can't do it. He won't do it. He doesn't want to do it.

That's it. His idea of being president is getting up there and doing what he's been doing. It's going to rallies. It's calling, as he did earlier this week in North Carolina. It's calling Harris crazy, calling her stupid, calling her a lunatic, saying she's not smart. That's his idea of a good time. And talking about an economic policy or talking about getting into nitty gritty on, as we talked about earlier, on how you would negotiate lower drug prices for people and what that would mean, he could not care less about that. It would not be humanly possible for him to give even the slightest crap about that. So they're asking him and they're wanting him to be someone that he's not and that he can't be. For eight, nine years, they've been perfectly fine with him as who he's. He is and it's a little rich that they're waking up now and being like, oh, God, he's not good.

Shocker, he's not good at this. It's just wild to me that this campaign did not make plans for a possible pivot. And here we are nearly a month in and they really have found nothing that is landing on the Harris Wall's ticket. And that to me just says, what a lack of a matter. imagination they really have, their inability to be nimble and kind of move with the moment. That's not who these people are. And I think that Donald Trump is showing that more and more every day. And that's why I think we're going to hear more and more of his quote unquote, you know,

advisors and confidants start to have, you know, their whispers gain volume. But Danielle, don't you think that none of this matters if Kamala Harris won't sit down and do an interview with the New York times? Yeah, it's so weird. I wish that she would, you know, stop talking to the American people, stop energizing crowds of thousands and thousands of people and instead sit down with the media class that has done nothing to lift up the Biden administration, has done nothing to lift her up and make time for them. Why doesn't she make space for them, Andy? It really is very rude and selfish of her. This is becoming a thing, as they say. I know some journalists have taken to Twitter to complain that the vice president hasn't sat down for a one-on-one interview since Joe Biden dropped

out, and she became the presumptive nominee. And Margaret Sullivan, a person who I have a lot of respect for. She wrote a piece for The Guardian a couple days ago saying Kamala Harris must speak to the press, and she laid out her case for why. And I find the whole thing, completely unpersuasive. She's out there. She's doing rallies. And I would have more sympathy for this view if the press had acquitted themselves even 50% better over the past eight years. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I picture, you know, they're all sitting there saying, oh, we, we have, she has to sit down with us. We need to talk about policy. Policy, or you want her to sit there and have you ask questions like, Donald Trump says you're not really black. Mm-hmm. Because

That's what we're going to get. That to me is where I'm just like, y'all can complain all you want. And you might have had a case if you'd been a lot better at your jobs for the past eight years. I think that what the Harris Wall's campaign is showing is that surprise, surprise, they don't need the media. They don't need corporate media to do anything for them. That by going, bypassing the media who, again, has never, like this whole premise that somehow there is a quote unquote liberal media is a lie that was spun by Republicans and conservatives, which are the ones that are sitting in most of these sea suites of these newsrooms. Don't we have some

news of hacked emails of Donald Trump that haven't arrived on anyone's front page? But when it was Hillary Clinton, we couldn't stop the coverage from happening. And so I think that they have seen the pattern of behavior and kind of the devolving of the fourth estate over the last decade and are saying, we're just going to go direct to consumer. We're going to go direct to voter and get our messages out the way that we know that they need to get out. What's going to happen is that the media in this frame in politics are not going to have the same kind of poll that they've had in election and campaign pass. And I think that the stories that will come out won't be really based in anything except for their own grievance. Yeah. And look, I think it's fair to say that it is Donald Trump who sort of led the way on this

and showed in 2016 that you don't have to sit down with the media to win a presidential election. And, you know, look, it's the Etsy model. It's putting your own stuff out there directly for people to buy. It's even in journalism. It's the newsletter model. It's people saying, hey, I don't need to work in an office at the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to get my word out. I can put it out there myself directly to people who want to hear it. And that is pretty much what they're doing right now. And look, it's working. And I think that's the bottom line is it's working.

And as long as it's working, there is absolutely no reason why she needs to sit down with a Soulsburger or anyone, like that to get her message out because she's getting it out just fine. I think that this is going to be a narrative that continues. And, you know, I saw this on social media and I, you know, and I highly agree. They're like, give the first sit-down interview to a black media outlet, ones that were denied access to the first presidential debate. That became a really big story. So sit down with one of those outlets as opposed to the quote-unquote.

legacy ones that haven't served you, haven't served politics, haven't served democracy in the past decade. I think that they're going to laugh their way all to the polls. They're going to continue with their rallies. They're going to continue with their amazing snarky communications team that is doing the absolute most and going viral all the time without the help of legacy media. And I'm just saying more power to you. Look, I will say there is obviously there is one media outlet that Kamala Harris should be sitting down with, yes. It's definitely us and it's definitely Daily Beast. It is very clearly the new abnormal and the fact that she is ducking us.

Speaks volumes. And I say that despite the fact that we have not asked her to be on. But still, I think it's clear what's going on here. And I do find that incredibly shameful. And I'm probably voting for Kennedy. Oh, my God. Yeah. Joining us now is Joanna Cole.

She's the chief creative and content officer of the Daily Beast. And we're doing kind of a special thing here today. Both Danielle and I will be in on this conversation. Joanna, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, I'm thrilled to be here. I've been listening to you guys for a long time, so I'm excited to crash the party. Wonderful.

We're delighted to be crashed. Let's talk about there was a really, really interesting piece that Jill Falapovich wrote for The Daily Beast this week. And it has the headline, Why did an election with a very modern woman become all about white guys? It's a really interesting concept because we're sitting here with a black and South Asian woman now as the Democratic presidential nominee. But as Jill points out in her piece, there's a lot of talk still about white men. Joanna, what do you make of this?

Well, I think it's fascinating that the immediate conversation once caught basically secured the nomination was okay, well, who's the white guy that's going to somehow counter the disadvantage that she is a black Indian woman? First of all, the assumption was that it had to be a man and it had to be a white man, otherwise it was unwinnable. So where does the notion come from that two highly competent women couldn't do this? Because we've had two men since time immemorial. And then the obsession about finding the right white guy to offset any anxieties because she's, she is a woman and because she is of color. It's just an extraordinary debate that we're still having in 2024. One of the things that we have seen, I guess one of the pushbacks around the vice president

has been that she hadn't been until recently very prominent in the administration. We did not see a lot of her. And do you think that one of the reasons is, okay, Joe Biden creates history again by nominating this vice president, but then there was a fear that people would see her and say she's a heartbeat away from the office. So do you think that, again, in the choice of the white man needing to be behind this woman, that it was motivated by fear? I think that Joe Biden is a consummate politician who spent all his life slowly climbing up the presidential totem pole. And once he'd got to the top, he didn't want anybody or anyone, anything to knock him off.

And so why on earth would you give visibility? to someone who very well might succeed you. And I don't think he necessarily thought she would succeed him, actually. I'm not sure that he anticipated doing as badly the debate as he did, and this all suddenly imploding around him. But I'm sure there was a deliberate reason why they kept her out of the public eye because it was very possible that just had an unsuccessful campaign, that they knew she could be actually very attractive to people,

she has turned out to be. The other thing I find really fascinating is how many white men have said to me, I got to hand it to Kamala, you know, she's a big surprise. This is hugely surprising to all of us that she is this successful. We never anticipated it. And again, it goes to the constant underestimation of women in public life, women to run companies, and the fact they have to try harder and they have to be better. That's undoubtedly true. But I would also say, I think in fairness, that a lot of that is probably coming out of how she did in the 2020 primaries where she was, you know, let's say not anywhere near as impressive as she appears to be now. And look, it's a totally different situation. And in many ways, it may actually be, you know, more suited to her to run in a general election

than it was in a Democratic primary where she was trying to sort of differentiate herself from Biden at the time and trying to come across as more progressive. She had trouble finding a lane in 2020, and I think that led to a lot of her not maybe looking as comfortable as she absolutely 100% seems to be now. Yes, and also she's been sitting at Biden's right hand in the White House. And if, as indeed it now appears, he was certainly had periods of incoherence as we saw during the debate, she may well have looked at him and thought, I can do this. I can absolutely do this. Whereas when you see it from the outside to your point about the primaries, which I think is a really good one, she might be better suited running at this point for president than she was

then. She may well have had real insight into, oh, this is something I can do, and I know how to surround myself with people who can also do it better than I can in the various, you know, administrations and the various jobs that aren't necessarily her strength. So I think she's probably got much more insight into the job, probably has an understanding of the bits she can do well and the bits that she brings in people to make up for her own weaknesses. They always say if you're a good chief executive, you hire to your weaknesses. And I think that's probably what she's trying to figure out how she could do. As a person that is a veteran in media, and particularly around covering women, how do you see how things have differed in the way that, for instance, the white

men that said to you, you know, we're surprised that she is, you know, that she's prepared in doing as well versus what people were saying about Hillary Clinton, who had reached this press, as well. What do you think that the differentiator is in kind of the acceptance that we are seeing around Kamala to a certain extent versus what we saw with Hillary Clinton in 2016? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And we've spent a lot of time thinking about this at the beast. And one of the things I would say is never underestimate how fast voter or the consumer in America gets bored. And we knew every aspect of Hillary Clinton. It felt so familiar. And what's exciting And I think what the public are responding to, and you see, I mean, you know, Frank Luntz said in the Beast today that he'd never seen this in his entire political career of polling.

He'd never seen such extraordinary energy in the last 30 days as Kamala and Tim Walts have created that they're new. They're completely new. And we are a consumer culture. We are taught to get new things, buy new things that if you're depressed, whatever, if you want to celebrate, if you want to commiserate, you buy something new. will make everything better. It's how our engine as a country works. And I think they're new and she's new. And Hillary was incredibly familiar.

And I always felt actually as a feminist, I was troubled by the idea that the first female president would have been married to a previous president. I felt that was a problem. It feels dynastic. That's not what America's supposed to be about. And the person feels like she has a much less problematic background from that point of view.

And I will say, a very fun piece by Gabby Allen, who is one of the writers on V about how she is now approaching 60 and she feels like she's falling apart and, you know, she should wear a weighted death every time she goes out because her whole system is beginning to collapse at this point. And oh my God, a toenail just fell off and my hips aren't working. And suddenly along comes this 59-year-old woman who's fabulous and fresh and sexy and appealing and energetic and, you know, we're used to these old. guys and suddenly she feels like this breath of fresh air. So it's exciting. She's exciting.

And Waltz is exciting. And who knew we would find a white hair, 60 year old man to be youthful, but 60 is the near 40. And we get used to a couple of, you know, eight year olds. I know Trump is 78, but he, too old guys. He tracks older. No, for sure. For sure. He certainly tracks something. And Joanna, to piggyback on what you said about Kamala being new, while Biden was running, it was, you know, one of the rare occasions when both parties' nominees had already been president. So it really wasn't new. Either guy that you were going to vote for had already done the job. So like you said, this is now something fresh and new. Let's talk about

Tim Walls and the white guys that Jill mentioned in our column and that we've been talking about because, you know, there's obviously a clear difference between Tim Walls and J.D. Vance. And as Danielle always says, you know, she always says, hashtag not all white men. And I think this is one of those perfect examples where we're seeing stories coming out about Tim Walz. There's one in The Daily Beast where Nora Ebrahim interviewed a former student of Tim Walz. And the headline is that this former student is saying Tim Walz doesn't know he saved my life. And at the same time, we've got, you know, J.D. Vant suggests caring about abortion rights isn't normal. And, you know, someone dug up advanced speech from 2020.

Amazon funded Black Lives Matters, so riots would destroy rival retailers. So, you know, yes, they're both white dudes, but there couldn't be a more stark difference between the two of them. Yeah, I love Danielle's not all white men. I like to say I'm very critical of the privilege of white men, but I'm happy to say I love white men. I even gave birth to two white men. So there you go, that's how much I like them. there is a lot of difference between J.D. Bance and what I find interesting, and actually Jill pointed this out in her piece, Waltz's Camo hat, has become the kind of runaway piece

of merch for the Democrats, which is really fascinating. And obviously, their answer, and it's an even more heartland mid-America answer to the red Maga Cap that you see. And interestingly, the Madam President cap is not selling at all. Nobody's buying the Madam President cap, which is a bit disappointing. But where to begin with J.D. Vance, the Sarah Palin of this campaign. And I loved his comments that menopausal women were only good for looking after children. Because I longing to have grandchildren and I'm dying to look after them and I will help my children as much as I can. But the idea that the only function of a post-menopausal woman is to do that. In fact, it turns out that karma is post-menopausal and she thinks that post-menopausal women should be running for president. So I think

that shuts him down. It's very interesting. I think the juxtaposition between what our ideas of masculinity are, right? Because for nine years, under Trumpism, we've been force fed, this idea of toxic masculinity, this very in-cell type of, as, you know, Tim Walse has said, this he-man, woman-hating image. And so here comes Tim Walz, who not only is football coach, gun owner, he is what, quote-unquote, is this man's man, but is not intimidated by women. And as a matter of fact, it's proud to be standing behind the first black woman, an Indian woman, to be nominated to the Democratic ticket. How do you think that the image plays with men that are still 50% of the vote?

Do you think that this kind of pull with the camo hat and the gun toting and the Midwestern political dad, is that going to get, particularly? particularly white men back over to the Democratic side of the fence? Great question. I do think the football coach, gun-toting, camo-wearing, Tim Walts is a very appealing character. And he's obviously, that one should never say this, but he appears to have a very stable marriage.

She's got great things to say about IVF because they struggle to have children and, you know, with their kids. That was a battle, which I'm sure quite a lot of men are, many of this and are equally outraged about the restrictions on IVF and birth control, because men don't want to have unwanted children either. I'm always struck in America about how the abortion is framed around it being a woman's issue because it's a man's issue too. Men don't want to pay childcare for babies that they didn't want to bring into the world.

I think his interest in the extraordinary overturning of Reviot versus Wade is also very appealing to men. I think J.D. Vance's sort of punitive attitudes towards women, which when we write about it, garneres an enormous amount of traffic and interest, is really a problem for the Republican Party. He's an extraordinary choice for ZP, a man who's really had a very itinerant career. And if he actually gets into the White House, that will be his four years will be the longest job he will ever have held, actually, interestingly. He's a strange character for them to have selected, and I think he's going to cost them with white men, actually. And as our news editor refers to it, he's been an entire back catalogue of podcasts. What was he doing for the last four years? He appears to have done nothing but do odd fringe podcasts, which are now coming back to haunt the Republican Party.

Yeah, it's starting to feel like maybe when your vetting process is basically Don Jr. saying, this guy's cool. Like, maybe that's a mistake. Maybe. I wonder if he'll be lealogy is the only book that Don Jr. has read, and that's why he likes him. I have a feeling. You know how Trump has two books that he's read,

the Bible and the art of the deal, which I think he read after his ghost wrote it for him? I think he'll be the allergy might be the one book that John Jr. got through. I'm pretty sure he did that via audio, but no shade. No shade. No shade on my part. No shade on my part. I'm going to guess he saw the movie. That's a good point.

But Joanna, you raised a really good point. And I think Jill Falapovich made a similar point in her article that, you know, that Walls is really, and what the Democrats are doing is framing abortion and reproductive rights as yes, obviously, they're women's rights that obviously affect women. But they really do affect the whole country. And that is such a great message for the Democratic Party. And it really is like when you say, you know, women's rights are human rights or when you say trans rights. or human rights, that's exactly what you're getting at, I think, when you say things like that, and it feels like that's a little bit what they're doing here. And I know that Wals saw a tweet from Kamala H.Q last night, which is where Vance was clipped saying on the Laura Ingram show on Fox News,

that he doesn't buy that suburban women are worried about abortion and that he thinks suburban women care about, quote unquote, normal things. Tim Wals replied saying, it's pretty normal to respect a woman's right to make her own damn health care decisions. I cannot love that anymore. Yeah, it's a great point. And I think that men and women, you know, who've got kids, so suburban parents don't want their kids having unwanted babies. I mean, it's just not what anybody wants their children to get into a situation where you have an unwanted pregnancy going on. It's expensive, it's bad for everybody's career. And I understand that JD is a situation. supporter of families. And I do think that families are under pressure financially. I really get that.

And I think childcare and the lack of universal childcare in America is a catastrophe. It's a catastrophe for working parents, particularly working women. But I think the framing of the abortion debate couldn't be more important. And Waltz happens to be a very good person because he's been through his own IVF experiences too. And that's another thing which really impact people wanting to have children. I mean, we've made it so difficult for people to have children where America's wrestling with a really historically no birth rate. So I understand the pressure that families are under. And having a baby, it's the most important economic decision any couple or any woman will

ever make. So allowing more freedom in that decision is great. And traditionally, it was the Republicans position, right? Keep the government out of the bed and keep out of my house minimum government. this is such an overreach, I think most people find it really peculiar for the Republicans to have this position other than the evangelical or religious positioning. Joanne, I want to ask you this, because as we are seeing these two vice presidential candidates be put up against one another, and we see the Republicans really struggling

to find a way to have an attack that actually is landing, that they're doing all types of digging to figure out how to temper the momentum that the Harris Walls campaign has. There are stories, you know, circulating with regard to a DUI that Tim Walls had roughly, I think it was 25 years ago. What do you make of this type of digging? And do you think that these type of attacks, given the fact that you're running a Republican candidate that has 34 felonies, that has an adjudicated sexual offender, that is, you know, a grifter. How do you make that this kind of attack is going to land? I think the DUI arrest of

Tim Walts is a really good story about him that makes him feel relatable. And again, I think it appeals to white guys actually. And there's no reason why it should only appeal to white guys. I think it probably appeals to everybody because we all know somebody who's had a DUI. It was a fairly extreme one. He was doing 95 miles an hour and that 55 miles zone. So that's pretty. fast, especially 25 years ago, because half the plan, I don't think he was striving at Tesla. It's pretty easy to get a test. They're up to that speed, but I don't think it was as easy back then. And by all accounts, Michael Daly, one of the best beast reporters, most experienced reporters,

tracked down the cop who actually arrested him 25 years ago. He's returned that, but he remembered the evening. And Walt's totally caught to it, totally said that he was over the limit. He failed the various tests. And by all accounts, it was actually a sort of come to Jesus moment. So him, he stopped drinking. He went to the school he was teaching at and said, listen, I'm not a role model.

I can't pitch the football team anymore. I need to take a break from that. He wanted to resign his job. They didn't let him. But then he and his wife actually moved and what I took to be a sort of trash start. It was only when he was campaigning, actually, to go into Congress, that his campaign then spun it in a different point and said, oh, he was sort of dead.

from all his military service and all those shooting of guns and he was in the artillery and actually he didn't hear the cop car. And that was actually not the story that came out of the original arrest, all of which seemed fairly straightforward. He was drunk driving. He got caught. He cops to it and changed his life actually as a result of it. But somehow the political spin when he ran for office was perhaps the most disturbing thing and is sort of very emblematic of what happens when people come in and try and manage your image for you. And of course, nowadays, much harder to do that because everything is so much more transparent. But the sort of spinning of, oh, he didn't hear the car, that's why he kept on driving. It was clearly unfortunate. Yeah, for sure. And look, I don't know

how much a DUI that happened, what, 29 years ago, I think? In terms of what voters think, I don't know that it'll matter much. But I do agree with you, Joanna, that, you know, he seems to have handled everything perfectly right up until, as you said, he decided to run for office. And then whether it was someone around him or he himself decided, no, we need to reframe what happened there. And that's odd to me. And honestly, it's troubling. But compared to everything that's happened on the other side, I can't worry about it that much. I think it would be nice if he came out and said, look, what I said at the time when it happened is correct. what I said some years later when I was first running for Congress, I shouldn't have done that.

That was totally wrong. Look, say I got bad advice. That's fine. Because absent that, I think there was no story. Right. I mean, again, it's contextual, isn't it? When you compare it to the Billy Bush tape where you basically have an older male celebrity advising a younger male celebrity that no one's going to do anything if you grab them because they're famous, that's much more disturbing to me than hearing someone got picked up for a,

DUI. I mean, it's interesting to me that Walsh doesn't drink anymore and Trump doesn't drink. Can you imagine what Trump would be like if he drunk tweez? No, actually, I couldn't imagine what that would look like. Maybe he would seem sane. Maybe it has the opposite of that. Maybe he needs to start drinking. Maybe he needs to start drinking. And it would do it, it bode us all well. Joanna, we want to thank you so much for making the time to join us here on the new abnormal and run through what is going to be. the next exciting 82 days, I think, that we have as we head into the election. So we look forward to being in conversation with you again. Thanks for having me. It's great to crash the party.

I'm excited to come back. Folks, I am so excited to welcome back to the new abnormal. It's been some time. Anat Shanker Asario, who is the host of words to win by, is a researcher, a message maker, a campaign advisor, is an all-around. badass when it comes to how do Democrats and progressives communicate? And I don't remember the last time we spoke, but I do know that I was probably in the midst of an existential downward spiral, wondering how Democrats were ever going to get their footing

in this presidential campaign. Then lo and behold, an odds three and a half weeks ago, seismic shift, our worlds were turned upside down with Biden stepping aside and basically endorsing nominating Vice President Kamala Harris, who within 24 hours secured the nomination and has been on a role since. So I just want to get your reactions to the shift. And it's not just a shift in people. It's a shift in energy and it's a shift in messaging. What do you make of where we are right now? Yeah. So I think that Patty LaBelle told us where we are right now, which is that we've got a new attitude. And it turns out, and I know this is a shocker, it's certainly a shocker for everyone inside the Beltway. If you want people to come to

your party, you should throw a better party. People like to have a good time. And when you're having a good time, people want to be around a good time. And even though in issue-based polling, where we ask folks, what is your top issue when we list a bunch of options for them? Having a good time is generally not one of them. And I don't think they would pick it if it were. Our basic makeup is that we would like our present to be a good time and we'd like our future to be a better time. And that's just a pretty fundamental human desire. There's a reason why if you go to a comedy show and the person is bombing, you feel physically uncomfortable. We don't like to see people uncomfortable because it makes us uncomfortable, and we like to see people who look happy and in command and in control,

and like they are where they're supposed to be. And so what we are seeing, both in the make-believe world of, you know, the activist social media bubbles of various kinds, but also among real people, actual voters, to whom I at least get to subject myself on a weekly basis, that that shift is palpable. And that shift is palpable. And I want to be clear. That doesn't mean that, you know, we woke up in the morning and we don't live in the United States of America. We still do, unfortunately, vis-a-vis kind of entrenched voter attitudes. So the partisans are still going to partisan.

The people who doesn't matter if it was a ham and cheese sandwich or a breakfast croissant, if it was labeled D, they were going to vote for it. And vice versa on the Republican side, that's still true. None of that's going to change. it's really two things. It's the group of people that we were arguing over in the middle who are deciding not so much between, in that instance, Trump and Biden, but rather between Biden, stay at home, skip the top of the ticket, potentially RFK. That group of people have moved from, I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm just going to hold my nose, I'm very conflicted, I might just not vote toward Harris. And the disaffected Dems, who have historically voted Democratic, and we're, you know, probably grudgingly going to come home, but at least not saying that to us yet in polling, they are now

happily singing as our choir. What that means is that the message, the enthusiasm, the excitement, all of which is infectious in the good way, is just spreading much more because when you have a song the choir wants to sing, it's just a lot easier. Yeah. Everything that you said is so right. And I think that even for myself, honestly, I think I forgot, Anna, how much joy actually matters in politics, but in our lives.

I think that because we had become so consumed with the Trump darkness, with the humorlessness, with the anger, with the grievance, that even myself who likes to believe that I can help educate people to how they make the best decisions about their lives and their families, selling fascism wasn't going to be it. Selling people that if you don't vote, the fascists are coming, the fascists are coming, wasn't hitting home in the way that now we see Kamala Harris, and Tim Walls coming down the steps at a Detroit hangar to freedom by Beyonce and thousands of people screaming their names, that the first thing that Tim Wall said in Philadelphia

at his unveiling was, thank you for bringing the joy back. Like, we can fight in this way where we can be joy-centered. The fight for freedom doesn't have to be this stark heavy what Biden was offering this, we're fighting for the soul of the nation. It feels like a just unimaginable, cumbersome task at hand. And so I want you to talk a bit more about the joy aspect and like our desire as voters, not even our desire, but our need to want to vote for something as opposed to against something. Absolutely. So full disclosure, I have a piece coming out. So I've been thinking a lot about this in Rolling Stone this weekend about the politics of joy. Amazing. So there's actually two elements to it. There's the one that we've already started covering, which is the, you know, if you want people to come to your cause, be attractive and how important it is in any context to draw people towards you to be magnetic, to be a person who is kind of bringing others in and to be having a good time because people want to be around a good time. That is.

true not just electorally. It's true in the issue space. And this is something that has tripped up the left, not just in the U.S. So it's not just a phenomenon of the Trump darkness. It is our default instinct in all cases. It's what I like to call, boy, have I got a problem for you? And it turns out people got 99 problems and they don't want yours. They don't want it to get to the Titanic. They know how that story ends. Yes. And so what they do is they simply focus on the things in their life that they feel that they can more directly impact. Their church, their neighborhood, their kids' school. It's not that people withdraw entirely

from any kind of social commitments, much to the contrary. It's that people decide that this realm, this politics realm, is all about negativity, it's all about fighting, it's all about darkness, and anyway, it doesn't really matter,

nothing ever changes. And so here is where I'm going to put my energy. I'm going to do it over here. And if you're trying to get people to commit to your thing, whether that be your candidate, whether that be your issue, whether that be your strike.

I mean, not for nothing, did the labor movement tell us bread and roses, bread and roses, not for nothing did, you know, Tony K. Bambera tell us that the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible. You have to actually make the beautiful tomorrow

seem like a tangible thing. I mean, the I have a dream speech was not the, I have a complaint, nor was it the I have a multi-bulleted list of policy proposals, which isn't to say that there aren't things to complain about and there aren't bad things to know. And that brings me to the second piece, which is that perhaps counterintuitively, this politics of joy, this politics of magnetism. And I use the word magnetism deliberately because a magnet has a polarity.

It draws people in, but it also repels. And that's not incidental to its power. When you draw people in, when you have a polarity, you're also going to repel people. That's how magnets work. And you have to not just be comfortable with that. You have to understand that it's a feature. So in the second bucket of why it is extraordinarily important to be having a good time, and this is going to seem counterintuitive, is actually precisely within the realm of fighting

authoritarian. There is a long and storied history of how we successfully defeat. authoritarian forces. Think about, for example, Bugs Bunny and Charlie Chaplin, taking the piss out of Hitler, of all people. Think about the Othpour student youth movement that brought down Slobodan Milosevic at extraordinary peril for those of you who have seen the Gail Garcia-Bernal, fictionalization of the true story of the campaign in Chile, the movie's called No, to bring down Pinochet's rule. I mean, watch their ads. They are, late 80s glory, their emblem was a rainbow, and their slogan was, Chile, lalegria,

yaviena, happiness is coming. And in the midst of true dictatorship, I'm talking about disappearances, I'm talking about torture, I'm talking about people having to make an extraordinary risk to their own lives to actually go and vote, which thank God is not our situation, at least not in most cases and most places yet here. They had to be able to sell people. on two things. One, that this dangerous thing we need you to do actually has a chance of paying off. And number two, that this strong man is invincible. Because what the authoritarian thrives off of is fear. And what he reviles is ridicule. And so being able to ridicule to cut him, I keep saying him because that's what it's been in these cases. Yeah. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's,

just accuracy in reporting. Right, right. To be able to cut him down to size in order for the population to feel that you could actually get rid of him. And so it's actually in these cases in which you are fighting fascism where you have to make it clear, yes, this is absolutely going to be detrimental, at the very least, to speak euphemistically to your life. And this is a peon, this is a bully, this is a schoolyard brat, and we're going to take him down. To that point, I want to read you just a piece of a media advisory that I'm certain that you've seen that came out from Kamala HQ. And that social media account is on threads.

It's on Twitter. It's on truth social. And yeah, which I think I'm just like hats off. But this is what it reads about an upcoming appearance of Donald Trump. It says, today, Donald Trump. to ramble incoherently and spread dangerous lies in public, but at different home. Then it goes on to say venue, not a battleground state. Then it says preview, and this is what they write.

Not so fresh off of NABJ, Florida, and Twitter glitches, Donald Trump intends to deliver another self-obsessed rant full of his own personal grievances to distract from his toxic Project 2025 agenda, unpopular running mate, and increasing detachment from reality of the voters who will decide this election. These remarks will not be artificial intelligence, but they certainly will lack intelligence. Banning abortion, raising costs on families, confusing basic facts, cutting Social Security and Medicare, blocking border security, and publicly unstable, unfit and unwell will not help his struggling campaign for president. tune in for the same old thing.

There is something so breathtaking about the way that this social media account has been able to do exactly what it is that you just spoke about, which is for the last several months, we have been living, I think, in a place of fear of the possibility, or rather what the mainstream media has. has told us the inevitability of a Donald Trump presidency. And the fear had been gripping and choking every bit of hopefulness out of us. This campaign comes in three and a half weeks ago, Anot, and now they're like, he's a joke. And they're weird. And they're creepy. And they have found this way. Even my mother said this the other day.

I was terrified, living in a place of terror, and now I look at Donald Trump and J.D. Vance, and I think that they are a joke. Talk to us about, like, this statement that I just read and the ability to turn something that had been keeping people up at night in a state of panic to now where people are looking and laughing at them. There are so many things that I can say about this. It's like, all the thoughts want to be competing trains and there's only one track, which is my mouth. So this fear thing, the number of times that I go out and I'm giving trainings or I'm doing presentations on messaging testing and, you know, what works, what doesn't, I routinely get asked, why are you telling us not to use fear?

Why are you telling us not to use fear? The right wing uses fear all the time. Seems to work really great for them. And what I say to people is you have to understand that their task is to, you know, keep their base engaged and enraged in order to convert the conflicted toward a destructive, anti-social, individualistic view of the world that is all, you know, domination and hierarchy and exploitation and supremacy. Our task is to keep our base engaged in order to convert the conflicted toward a pro-social, pro-integration, pro-justice. You're doing two different tasks

on two different populations. Now, fear among left-wing people, people who are inherently ideologically progressive, among activists, it works. And so it confuses us because we are all engaged in what I like to call me search, which is where you take an end of one yourself and you're like, this sounds good to me. However, you are two times removed from the target audience because you are neither conflicted, you're not swing, nor are you not activated. And so fear-based messaging has a freeze response.

It evokes a freeze response. It evokes fight out of some people, like I said, that I'm not claiming 100% of people do any one thing. But for a vast swath of people who should be out here with us, they're basically like, you know what, if the world is ending anyway, I mean, look at climate change messaging. This is like the synquanon of this example. when people feel like something is just too overwhelming or too big or too horrible or to whatever, it's like, what am I going to do with that? There's nothing I can do. So what you have to do is in the realm of

negative emotion because a campaign story, an overarching narrative is made out of positive emotions. It's made out of joy. It's made out of attractiveness. It's made out of excitement and all of that that we discussed. It's also made out of negative emotions toward the opposition. but that shift has to be away from fear toward defiance. And part of defiance is, like I said before, making the opposition seem small and beatable. And what we know, again, to go back to like the giant literature of scholarship on defeating authoritarian forces, the ultimate aim of an authoritarian movement is to erode a people's will to resist. It is to lull them, trick them, disinformation them into thinking that they have no power, that all power has already been seized.

Everything is just sort of, this is how it is. It's the only possible universe. And so if you can erode a people's will to resist, then that's the ultimate victory because you don't have to keep fighting them, right? You don't have to keep spending money and time and power. And you can just rule. And so what that press release is a brilliant example of is essentially, you know, it's the scene in the Wizard of Oz where they pull away the curtain and they say the great and

powerful Oz is actually a scared, pathetic little man. And that's really all that's going on here. And what I've said, you know, from the get-go, I probably said it to you the last time we talked is how dare we cower before these people? These people couldn't even do a press release at the four seasons. These people can't even spell things correctly. These people make up words and are jumbled and are kind of, you know, barely able to compete on dancing with the stars once they get kicked off of the administration. Like, how dare we cower before these people? We are so much stronger, so much more caring, so much more vivacious, so much more interesting, so much more funny than they are. And I think that that's really what the campaign is exposing. And at the risk of going on and on, I don't know if you want to go in this direction, but there's tons to say about why the selection of, of Governor Tim Walls has been just absolutely essential to making this very clear.

Well, fortunately, we will have to leave it there today. But, you know, I always appreciate having you on because it's like the clarity that you speak with. And finally, it's like, dare I say, maybe Kamala HQ has been listening to you for the past, you know, like just said, let me go check out what she has going on. Because she seems to know because the results definitely seem out of your playbook, which is one that everyone should be reading. So thank you for making time for the new abnormal. And I will have to have you back again so we can dig in more to where we are and where we're headed. Yeah, my pleasure. And, you know, it's nice for the new abnormal to occasionally be delightful.

I love it. Danielle Moody. Andy Levy. Danielle? Mm-hmm. I would like you, and this is a request, not an order, obviously. Obviously. But I would like you to tell our listeners who you're a fuck that guy is to close out this week.

He hasn't been on the list in a while. He's been kind of quiet, if you will, but still doing a significant amount of harm to the state of Texas. And that is the one and only Texas Governor Greg Abbott. Apparently, he has doubled down, Andy, according to NBC News, double down on his computer. commitment to send buses full of migrants to blue cities, you know, to continue with the stunt that they're still in litigation for their treatment of migrants as if they are, I don't know, boxes of cereal or products and not actual people. But funny enough, he can't seem to fill those buses anymore because unlike the rhetoric that continues to come out of Republicans,

guess what is down? The number of migrants that have been crossing the border is down. So you know, we continue to hear from Donald Trump about this crisis and this invasion that is happening. Well, according to a staff attorney for Legal Aid Society of New York, they now come, migrants, much less frequently the buses, because they don't have enough people to cross the border to fill up a bus. roughly 117,000 migrants were stopped in May down from a record 300,000 in December.

In June, the number dropped even further to about 84,000. The lowest monthly total since President Joe Biden took office in 2021. So I guess, oh, it seems like maybe they are good on the border. And I don't know, maybe Abbott will end up doing what Donald Trump does at his rallies, which is just pay a bunch of people to sit on the buses and take the ride so that he can continue with his photo ops and having his name in lights. So for that very good reason, fuck that guy into infinity always. Greg Abbott.

Yeah. Fuck Greg Abbott. The only thing I'll say is I'm not sure how happy I am. I know this goes against democratic strategy on immigration, which is to be Republican light. But I don't love that we've made it harder for migrants. to come here. But that's just me. And regardless of that, yeah, fuck Greg Abbott and fuck the Republican talking point that we have a crisis at the border. A hundred percent. Andy, how are you going to shock and awe us as we close up this week with your fuck that guy? I don't know if we've done this guy yet

because mainly I think our attitude towards him has been one of conscious ignoring might be a good phrase. But it's RFK Jr. And this is more because it's just kind of hilarious. He apparently approached Kamala Harris and requested a meeting in which he would agree to endorse her if she gave him a cabinet job. And the Harris campaign did the equivalent, I guess, of, I was going to say they did the equivalent of replying LOL, no. But they didn't even do that. But they didn't even do that. they did, like, I think the greater equivalent would be is basically they muted him and just didn't reply at all. And so I, and he is very, very upset about them. And he told the New York Times that his campaign had reached out repeatedly through the highest level intermediaries, only to be told

they have no interest in talking with me. And I think that's just beautiful. I couldn't love them more for doing this and for not doing what a lot of politicians would do in that situation, which is agree to a meeting, if nothing else, because he does not deserve a meeting with the vice president of the United States. He does not deserve a meeting with the kindergarten teacher on meet the parents night. This is fresh off of the revelation that he put a dead bear in Central Park. He is not someone who needs to be taken seriously as a politician. He is not someone whose beliefs need to be taken seriously because they're inane. So this is a fuck that guy to RFK, but it's also a love letter to the Harris campaign. He's just so unimportant. Yeah, exactly.

What is the word I want to say? Irrelevant. Why? And so kudos to them. Fuck that guy. Election Day can't come soon enough because I don't want to hear his name again. Like ever. So fuck that guy. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at

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