The Dispatch Podcast - Biden at One Year

Episode Date: January 19, 2022

A year ago, almost to the day, Joe Biden was sworn in as president of the United States. The gang looks back at a year full of shifts to progressive policies from Biden. Is he living up to his promise of restoring normalcy in America? Plus, Gallup says 2021 saw the greatest shift in party preferences for as long as Gallup has been around. What does that mean for the country and our politics? Finally, are we on the brink of World War III with Russia threatening to go into Ukraine?   Show Notes: -How Biden’s first year became a tale of two presidencies | POLITICO -Sen. Jim DeMint on what type of Republicans he preferred -Sen. Brian Schatz on the filibuster (from November 2017) -U.S. Political Party Preferences Shifted Greatly During 2021 | Gallup -The Sweep from May 4 on campaign fundraising -David Ignatius’ page on The Washington Post website Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined by Steve Hayes, Jonah Goldberg, and David French. Quite the lineup today. Biden's inauguration one year later, what we've learned about the first year of his presidency and new Gallup numbers showing the largest swing in party identification since Gallup started measuring in 1991. And lastly, of course, Russia's continued aggression on the Ukrainian border and how it is likely to resolve. Let's dive right in. Steve, we're one year, exactly, into the Biden presidency. He ran. He won the nomination on being the more centrist candidate, on bipartisanship, on finding common ground, his inauguration speech touted it over and over again. And yet, for the last six months at least, we've seen him take the opposite tact, really talking to his base, the left, as the party shifts further and further to the left, why the change? Yeah, it's a good question.

I mean, I think if you look back on this first year, you can only describe it as disappointing and difficult for Joe Biden. And I think the reason he's had so much difficulty or among the reasons he said so much difficulty are the decisions that he himself has made the way that he's handled problems that have been presented to him. Look, I think the shorthand of this, we're starting to see kind of the gelling

of conventional wisdom inside the Beltway conventional wisdom that Biden ran against Bernie Sanders. He was the moderate and he's just become not a moderate in office. and like all cliches, I think there's some truth to that. I think, however, if you look back at the campaign in greater detail, it's a little more complicated than that, but it does not absolve Joe Biden. If you look at the way that Biden ran, it's true that particularly at the end of the fight to win the Democratic nomination, he was facing Bernie Sanders, and he did present himself as a contrast to Bernie Sanders and his sort of quasi-socialism. It was interesting to look back at that, there were Democratic establishment types at the time who thought a Bernie Sanders nomination was inevitable, who started to get pretty comfortable sort of embracing and amplifying Sanders' arguments, Sanders' socialist arguments. But then Joe Biden reemerges, he wins the nomination by contrasting himself with Bernie Sanders. It's important to remember, though, that

even Joe Biden ran to the left of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to the left of Barack Obama in 2012 and in 2008. So the Democratic Party as a whole had shifted left, particularly if you look at the rhetoric deployed during these presidential campaigns. So on the one hand, Biden said, yes, I'm going to be a centrist. I'm not going to be like Bernie Sanders. But he also had a very, I would say aggressive, progressive policy agenda. What happened when he came into office, I think, is having made all of these promises that he would be a contrast to Donald Trump as he finished the general election campaign, Biden sort of governed the way that he said he would govern on policy, specifically, on policy.

And when people saw that he was governing as a progressive, Democrats rallied, and the base demanded more and more and more and more. And rather than just say, hey, we pass this huge COVID relief bill, we've gotten these sort of medium range things done. This has been a pretty successful year. You've seen this, you know, disarray inside the Democratic Party and Joe Biden having a very difficult time coordinating or making arguments. I will say, just a final point, I think the Afghanistan withdrawal, we had lots of discussions here. This was a big part the national debate at the time, you know, and I think the conventional wisdom more or less was Afghanistan won't really matter because people don't care about places like Afghanistan.

I think Afghanistan matters a lot. If you look at the steeper decline in Biden's approval rating, it starts with Afghanistan. And I think it has more to do with the sense that the American people don't like to lose wars than it does any particular regard for Afghanistan. but it's been a it's been a difficult year and i think biden has handled it poorly jona i just want to read sections of the inaugural address here um to overcome these challenges to restore the soul and to secure the future of america requires more than words it requires that most elusive of things in a democracy unity unity skipping ahead just a couple lines here uh today on this january day, my whole soul is in this, bringing America together, uniting our people and uniting our nation.

I ask every American to join me in this cause, uniting to fight the common foes we face. Anger, resentment, hatred, extremism, lawlessness, violence, disease, joblessness, hopelessness, with unity, we can do great things, important things. We can write wrongs. We can put people to work in good jobs. We can teach our children in safe schools. We can overcome this deadly virus. It goes on from there. I am still confused, despite Steve's best efforts. When I see that, and I understand, you know, speechwriters write speeches, but with an inaugural address, a president has so much input in what he's saying. This isn't someone simply parroting something they thought sounded good in focus groups. And then fast forward a year,

And Mitt Romney says they never picked up the phone to ask what voting rights legislation he would be able to support, what his problems were with the Freedom to Vote Act as it was, or the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, as it was nothing. And you have then, Joe Biden deliver this speech that is so partisan, so vitriolic. And then his reaction to the criticism is like, damn right. You know, I'm going to keep doing this. I am at a bit of a loss for the pivot. And then you have the White House coming out and saying they're going to hit a reset and try over again. Their whole shtick was that they were going to ignore the loudest voices in their party. Unlike some of the primary campaigns that crashed and burned, including his vice presidents,

Kamala Harris' campaign sort of famous for being a Twitter reactionary campaign, not Joe Biden's. And then six months into his presidency, they're like, let's ditch the strategy for the way that we won and go on this totally different route of partisanship. And in the meantime, for instance, this week, they're touting that they're going to distribute 400 million in 95 masks to Americans at, quote, convenient locations. and the website to order four free COVID tests per household launches officially today, and those tests will be shipped out in late January, arrive in early February. Why wasn't that the first thing he did when he was in office? Why in the world is that part of a reset, a year into your presidency when you've lost all altitude? Jonah.

So, I feel a little bit like Rodney Dangerfield taking. his oral final exam and back to school where it's one question in 17 parts but let's, my, my explanation for,

so let's put it this way. When historians look back on this year, there's one thing that will come shining through more than almost anything else, which is that collectively and individually, the people on this podcast, we're right about a great many things before the conventional wisdom caught up to us. And last night, Reuters dropped a story saying that, you know, had this, one reporter

called this interesting new tidbit about how the Biden team didn't think they were going to have control of the Senate after they got elected. They assumed that the Republicans would have the Senate, and they geared their counsel's office at the DOJ to be equipped to deal with investigations because they assume that's what the first two years would be looking like with Senate hearings up their butts. And I was making that point on the remnant, A.B. Stoddard, I quoted her in a column making this argument that one of the things that led the Biden administration astray was they were caught flat-footed by the fact that they actually won the Senate, and then

they allowed John Meacham, who's going to have a lot and some other historians to spin them up saying this is your moment for your new, new deal, based upon zero political wisdom whatsoever. But there's another thing that a lot of us has been saying, I've heard David say, I've said it. I think Steve has said it. You know, the misunderstanding about Biden, he was never a moderate or a centrist. He was a centrist within the, with it between the goalposts of the Democratic Party. And so when there were a lot of Sam Nuns and and even Strom Thurman types or, you know, whatever, he triangulated between the left and the right of the Democratic Party. And then there's the fact that, you know, as Sarah and a bunch of us been saying for a while, the David Shore thing is real. The Democratic Party is the party that has actually moved much further to its extreme than the Republican Party has

in terms of policy over the last 10 years. and so Joe Biden has as the Democratic Party moved leftward he moved leftward too because he was always triangulating through the center to be a centrist within the confines of the party and I think that explains I mean there's other things I think a basic incompetence explains a lot I think the um the the David Shorian explanation about how the young ins um have taken over the place. When I say the place, I mean the Democratic Party, I mean the White House, I mean the media, the media sources that the White House and the Democrats respond to is very young, white, woke, pajama boy Twitter. And they take their cues from that stuff

way too much. And I think that's where, and so that's sort of fascinating, I'm the thing about writing about this, the fascinating thing to me is we all recall Jim DeMint had that, it's sometimes it's quoted a little hysterically, but Jim, Jim, DeMint had this famous line that has been paraphrased as he'd rather have 30 real conservative senators than 60, than a majority with a bunch of rhinos in it. And that's incredibly stupid, right? I mean, that idea that you would want the other party to have a veto-proof supermajority, but we happy few Ted Cruzians and Jim DeMinters can sing our St. Crispin's Day songs as we get wiped out as, you know, time and time again is incredibly stupid logic. And we haven't actually

seen Democrats say the equivalent, but they're doing the equivalent right now. Emily's list is preparing to abandon Kristen Cinema. You have Democrats basically saying they would rather have 48 loyal, real left-wing Democrats than have 51. Um, um, Democrats that they actually have to negotiate with. And this gets to my last point, which is I just think part of the problem is that Biden's a very weak politician. He's a very manipulable and suggestible politician. Reports are that he listens to his grandkids way too much about what like the right policy is.

And in the face of the deep and entrenched perverse incentive structure that both parties are in, where they act like they have super majorities, but they only appeal to a hyper-constrained base, he is incapable of seeing beyond that and doing what is in his own self-interest, which would be to pick sister-soldier fights once every 10 days, throw some people under the bus. If they want to start over, you know, one of the things the media requires historically for a new messaging and a fresh start is the press corps demands human ritual sacrifice. And so someone needs to be blamed and fired so that they can then say, we're bringing in David Gergen or whatever, which is what Bill Clinton did. But he doesn't

have the strength or will to do it. I don't think he can see it. And so I think the rest of his presidency is going to be pretty bad too. So David, the White House saying it's a four-year term, not a one-year term. Calm down everyone. But currently, the Senate is debating getting rid of the filibuster. And look, I actually, I'm not so tied up on the sacred nature of the filibuster. You and I have talked about this some before. I see the benefits of having it. I also see the benefits of getting rid of it. But looking back at a tweet from Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii from November 17th of 2017 making the rounds. 60 votes easier to get than 51.

Ignoring the other party creates rushed garbage legislation. When you do 60, it's a compromise. A lot of factual statements in there. And I want to be very clear. There is so much hypocrisy when it comes to the filibuster. Plenty to go around. Heaping servings for every one of all parties. Congratulations.

You get hypocrisy. and you get hypocrisy. But one of the enduring legacies of the Biden presidency that Biden wants is to get rid of the filibuster on his watch from his White House pushing it. And it's like the core thing that creates forces bipartisan compromise in the Senate. I don't know. Is a presidential term really four years or is it one year? And is this the one year?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, you know, I keep going back and I'm addicted to finding historical parallels, which is probably a bad thing, because, you know, we know history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Who is it that said that? And I keep wondering. The comments section will be so filled telling you, who said that? And they will tell me with extreme joy. But, you know, I remember if you're in, if you're in the Biden White House, you're thinking, I'm hoping this is, you know, 1982 and not 1979. And, you know, in 1982,

Reagan was on the ropes. I mean, he was on the ropes. There was inflation. He was about to get walloped in the midterms. And, but, but he had put into motion policies and a change of tone and a direction of leadership that ended up bearing abundant fruit

by 1983, 1984. But I feel more like this is a 1979-ish kind of presidency. And by that I mean the combination of the sort of malaise about what the home front has become and the sharp turn that he has taken from, I'm going to unite this country, I'm going to restore the soul of this nation, to Jim Crow 2.0, Jefferson Davis, the kind of seeming like total inability to deal with the senators in his own caucus who are balking and there seems to be no plan to deal with them beyond wait a minute the Twitter shaming didn't work circling the houseboat with kayaks didn't work following cinema into the bathroom doesn't

work what do you do with these people um so there just seems to be a there just seems to be real drift a turn towards bitterness and nastiness and I think one of the the things that really, really hurt Carter so much was a sense that he just wasn't in control. And, you know, the one thing, you know, Jonah said something about Biden not being terribly strong. And I agree with that, except he was very strong at one point in the summer. And it was the worst thing to be strong about, which was, I'm leaving Afghanistan come hell or high water. And whatever disaster I see unfolding in front of my eyes is not going to sway me from this. And I agree. I just, I agree. It's a good point, but I actually would argue that that

is part of his weakness is that he has a chip on his shoulder about losing a fight in the Obama administration. He has a theory of reality that comes from his insecure, intellectual insecurity. And that was his way of like saying, no, no, no, no, I'm right. I win this argument. And it turned out he didn't win the argument because he handled it terribly. Yeah, I was just about to say that this felt a lot like I'm going to do what, Barack Obama couldn't do. But, you know, the fact of the matter is, in Barack Obama, when he made a big mistake in pulling out of Iraq, and there for a moment in 2014 and moving into 2015, it looked as if you might have the helicopter on the roof of the Baghdad embassy, he reversed course, and he initiated

an offensive against ISIS. And so, you know, in that way, his predecessor, his Democratic predecessor, was able to read and react to events, even a way that went contrary to his initial inclinations and saved us from a really horrific, even more horrific than ISIS and Iraq was, a truly historically horrific disaster in Iraq. So the problem that I have, and you see this again and again with these sort of reset arguments,

is at the end of the day, Joe Biden is still Joe Biden. And you're not going to re-becky, boot Joe Biden. Can I ask a question on that point? Yeah. You think he's not Joe Biden? Are you sure he's Joe Biden?

I'm not sure he's always sure whether he's Joe Biden. I don't, I didn't mean to step on you. I just, the piece I read in the post explaining what this new messaging strategy is going to be takes it as like a given. Like the White House comm shop has decided that Biden's problem has been that he's seem too much like a senator and not enough like a president and it's how it feels to me like

this is people in the bunker still telling themselves a story that makes them feel good rather than reflects reality i haven't thought i mean like to sarah's point about not calling mitt romney a senator would have called mitt romney yeah right i mean he's been terrible at working the senate right and so like this idea that like if if you're going to have a new message but it's based, it's predicated on a misdiagnosis of what it's supposed to be the cure for, it doesn't auger well for where it's going to go. I mean, does anybody think he's acted like a senator? That's the question I have.

No, and that is one of the places where the way that he's acted directly contradicts what he promised to do. And I think ultimately, I mean, I think both of you made a number of good points. And I think Sarah's point in her question to you, Jonah, was exactly. Right. It's also the case that when you tell people that you're going to return the country to a pre-pandemic, pre-Trump, normal functioning of government, and that you alone have the experience to do that because you'd brokered deals in the Senate, you can deal with Republicans, you can work in a bipartisan fashion, and then you don't do it. And in somewhat, you know,

not only did he not provide this unity that he promised in his inaugural, as you point out, Jonah, I mean, he's calling people who disagree with him on policy matters would be segregationists and attempting to pass New Deal style spending packages. I mean, that is, he's a fool if he thought that there would be unity for those things. And, you know, I think at sort of the bottom line at the end of a year is if you come and say you're going to be the person who can return us to normal after four or five tumultuous political years, and you not only fail, but you add to the tumult, you should expect to have some upgrade. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love

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and thousands of families already applying through Ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's ETHOS.com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. Well, let's actually use that as a segue and talk a little bit about these Gallup numbers. So last year, at the time of Biden's inauguration, Democrats enjoyed a nine-point advantage when you ask people what party they identify with, Republican or Democrat. Fast forward a year, Republicans enjoy a five-point advantage on that same question. And just to give you some historical perspective, Gallup started asking this question in 1991.

Now, a year ago, that was the largest margin for Democrats that they had ever recorded. Today, it's the second largest margin for Republicans that they've recorded. The only one that beat it is 1995 as Newt Gingrich and the contract with America took over. And the swing is the largest they've ever recorded. So a year into Biden's presidency, more people have stopped saying, that they're Democrats and started saying they're Republicans than any time in the last 30 years. There's a few ways to look at this. I want to present you guys with the three hypotheses that Nate Silver came up with and that I expanded on and expounded on in the sweep and see which one

you like. Hypothesis 1. Polling's been pretty terrible lately. Party ID is something closer to people's religion. They don't change it lightly slash ever in their lifetimes, you know, the best predictor of what party you belong to is generally what part of your parents belong to. And so if we're seeing the largest swing in 30 years, Occam's Razor, the data just isn't very good. We have so few people responding to surveys. Option number two. Actually, party ID isn't religion. It's more like brand loyalty, Coke versus Pepsi. You don't change lightly, but you do change sometimes if you find a roach in your Coke and then the news media covers it extensively for six months, you're going to switch to Pepsi and you're not going back

to Coke anytime soon. And so under this hypothesis, yeah, the Biden presidency has been so such a turnoff, so much incompetence or lack of bipartisanship or if it's Steve, it's Afghanistan that you've stopped identifying yourself as a Democrat and started identifying yourself as a Republican. Hypothesis three, and I'm sorry, Caleb, legendary producer, Caleb. Party ID is more like being a Dallas Cowboys fan. It's a little fair weather, and it's really just a proxy for something else, whether the Dallas Cowboys won. So there were a lot more people who identified as Dallas Cowboys fans last week than this week,

and you know what, next year they'll identify again as Dallas Cowboys fan. the reason that we're seeing then such a big swing and more transients in parties, you know, maybe it's because of the parties moving to more extremes. Maybe people just feel less attached to that party identifier as they actually weirdly become more partisan in a lot of ways. And those social media conversations take hold. The great sort is happening. Large party realignment happening.

Okay. So those are your three doors that you get to walk through. David, which door do you pick? I'm picking kind of a modified three in the sense that what you're talking about what I think you're seeing is an awful lot of people who feel pretty unattached and then what happens is they move in a direction get bitterly disappointed and don't know really where else to go other than the other direction and and I think what we're when you know when I've talked to a lot of smart progressives, and I have never in my life seen more pessimism from

partisans about the prospects for their party than I have seen from some of the really smart progressive voices that I've talked to who just feel like their party is lost. Like none of the optimism after 2012, very short-lived optimism after 2020. and the reason why they feel, and when I say lost, I don't mean lost for good, I mean kind of wandering and trying to find its way, is that the source of the despair is that they feel as if there is a path that they can see that they can take that is a more moderate ideological path. They just don't see how they can get the party to take that path in much the same way that a lot of Republicans say, well, we can see a path where we can really have real

prospects to, this is a real opportunity to defeat the Democrats, not just in 2022 and 24. And the biggest obstacle is sort of this deeply embedded Trumpism, but we don't have a plan for getting past that. On the left, you see a lot of people who say, well, we can see a path, but this really, this really extreme leftism that keeps rearing its head again and again and again and derailing Biden and the debacle of build back better and we're still living with the overhang of the debacle of defund the police and we can't seem to get past that and we can't we don't have a plan for getting past that and so you just there's been a lot of despair in essence that wait we know parts of the democratic base are radicalizing and we don't have a plan to deal with that

We don't know exactly how to deal with that, although we know we have to. And it seems it's both parties have sort of a, whereas with the Democrats, it's often an ideological problem, this stampeding ideological problem. With Republicans, it's the ideologies is very up in the air, but it's the Trumpism problem. And they just don't have a plan for dealing with this. And just like there's an atmosphere of intimidation on the right when you cross Trump, there's this atmosphere of intimidation on the left when you cross the far left. And I think there's one of the things that you're seeing are people lurching from one unsatisfactory party to another unsatisfactory party. And that feels to me more like the door three option.

So Jonah, we don't have a parliamentary system. It's almost weirder to me that party ID was ever particularly stable and that it wasn't always just a reflection of the president's approval numbers. And it's, but for the historical trends, I would have a very easy answer to this, which is, yeah, when Donald Trump was president, people didn't like it. And so they left the Republican Party. And when Joe Biden has a disappointing first year in his presidency, people don't like it. It pushes them back to the Republican Party. This is just a ping pong between people not liking the party and power similar to what we're about to see in the midterm elections when most likely Republicans will take back the House and the Senate. But then historically, we do have something more like a parliamentary system when it comes to party identification.

People do generally stick with, you know, the one that brought them. How do you make sense of the change? Yeah. So I, first of all, in good Clintonian fashion, I'm going to reject the false choice of having to pick just one door. And I listen closely. He was third way and I gave you a third way.

Well, the thing is fair. And at some point, I will bore you to tears with the actual history of third way going back through, as a phrase, going back through fascist Italy. But it seems to me all three scenarios that Nate Silver laid out as you described them,

probably have some merit. It's a little bit of a polling issue. It's a little bit of a Dallas Cowboys thing. It's a little bit of a screwing up the brand thing. I think like the larger dynamic, I think you're got to like David's right. And this is what I was getting at about the perverse incentive structure of both parties.

Is, you know, we have both parties run at the presidential level as if we live in a parliamentary system. They say, if you elect me, you know, and we saw, I must have written that column 10 times about the Democratic primary is where everybody got up and said, day one, you elect me, we're going to ban the gun. We're going to confiscate the guns. We're going to ban this. We're going to, you know,

stop that. Elizabeth Warren would say flatly unconstitutional things would get done on day one of her presidency, which would be possible if we elected her prime minister. I mean, it's still not necessarily politically likely, but it's at least theoretically possible. And so I think that part of the problem is, is that both parties run wildly over-promising what they can do and fail. And so you get this sort of, you know, this thing where everybody runs the other side of the boat and, you know, or the other side of the seesaw and you see the other party go up when one side goes down. And the amazing thing to me, I mean, I truly am gobsmacked on a regular. basis and the only reason I don't write a column about it every single day is because I just end up

repeating myself. The way in which both parties are incentivized to be a minority party is just amazing. Like if the Democrats simply were responsive to the median Democratic voter who's way to the right of everybody who watches MSNBC, you know, the or even the, median Southern African-American voter, they would be closer to the middle of American politics. And similarly, you know, we saw with Glenn Yonkin that if you can come across as a normal person, a lot of people who voted for Biden will vote for Republicans. And to get the institutional pressures, both I think largely because of the primary stuff, but also because of the garbage media echo chamber, creates these incredibly perverseas.

incentives to hug the 20% of your party that is the most crazy. And we see this like almost daily with Ted Cruz, right? We know, we like, we have Ted Cruz who basically goes prostrate in front of Tucker Carlson saying, thank you, sir, may I have another, and is now fundraising off of conspiracy theories about January 6th because he can't, he's terrified of getting away from the base. Most Republicans, the median Republican voter, is really not that engaged in crazy conspiracy theories about January 6. This is something that the people high on their own farts and Trump world are obsessed with. But it ends up being the messaging of the entire party. And neither party can accept that neither of them have supermajorities at their back and that

and that the median, the middle of the road voter actually hates the most prominent ideas and faces of both parties. And when one of those faces is in power, normals run away from it. And this is why we can't have nice things, because this is the dynamic that defines our politics. So, Steve, before I let you answer, I just want to give Jonah the reason that you missed, which is my very complicated reason, but I think it is 100% right. I'm convinced that when you pass bipartisan campaign reform act, campaign finance act, sorry, in 2002, BICRA, that the low limits on federal fundraising created an incentive to do small dollar fundraising. And now small dollar fundraising is in the Venn diagram, a 98% overlap with every TV hit

that you do, everything that you say publicly. and that's the only way you can raise money. Whereas Virginia, which you noted, Glenn Yonkin, what's the big difference? Ah, Virginia doesn't have limits on fundraising. Now, Glenn Yonkin can self-fund, of course, but Glenn Yonkin, if he weren't incredibly wealthy, could also just call 10 very wealthy friends fund his whole campaign and not have to worry about small dollar donations at all. And he doesn't then have to pitch to that 20%, well, it's really more like 7%, who are even, amenable to potentially giving small dollar money to a candidate. And that's the actual problem.

If we followed the Texas, Pennsylvania, Virginia model of no limit campaigns, those people aren't corrupt, right? Virginia hasn't had a big problem. Texas, nor New York's had big problems. But the whole thing we've tried to solve with Bikra wasn't a problem that needed solving. It was a, it looked like a problem. I agree that entirely. I just lumped that in with a perverse incentive structure of the way the parties are in

our politics. But it's a big part of it. I agree entirely. So not to be assignment editor here on the podcast live. I think that would be a great sweep series on the distorting effects of low dollar fundraising. I've had numerous conversations with senators in particular, but also House members over the past. I'd say two to three months where this has been sort of my central thesis. It isn't part of the real problem, this low-dollar fundraising, because it's a song and dance.

I mean, everybody does it. On the left, you go on MSNBC, you make an outrageous statement, you put up your, you mail your list right afterwards, touting this outrageous statement that you've made, and bring in a bunch of money because the other side is bad and evil, and they're going to take power if people don't give. the same thing happens on Fox. I mean, Lindsay Graham used to go on Sean Hannity's show and literally send people to his website. I mean, he would say his website on air and send people. And Sean would let him, right? I mean, this is part of my point about the media dysfunctional media echo chamber stuff, right? Correct. Yeah, because it's all, it's all partisan in the old school understanding of partisan. But it's both partisan and performative. You have this. being sort of one of the ways that you can ensure that you're raising a ton of money. And this goes to, you know, look at Marjorie Taylor Green. The most outrageous, silly, foolish, um, moronic member of the, of the house. I'm, I talked right over you and I don't want to know what you said. Yeah. You don't. You really don't. You look at the ability of people like that to spread their message and then raise money off of it. It's all stunts. Like, it's one stunt after

another after another in order to raise money. In one sense, this isn't really new. I mean, this is what direct mail was 30 years ago, right? I mean, it was sort of lowest common denominator political communication. You'd send things to people for your nonprofit or, you know, political committee to raise money, send actual, you know, snail mail letters to raise a bunch of money. It cost a ton of money, but you'd make more on it. Now, the costs are so low. You just send an email to your list and you gin people up and make them feel that they're losing their country, so they give you money. This happens all the time, and the distorting effect, I think, is very profound. So I would love Sarah for you to spend a little time going back to those campaign finance changes, but also

talking to people who are living them today. I had a conversation with three moderate Republican senators, moderate to conservative, Republican senators within the past couple months. And we spent some time on this. And every one of them said, it's hard to overstate how distorting this is. And how many of their colleagues are building their fundraising strategies around this. Well, my May 4th, 2021 sweep does cover this, though I will say that whereas Jonah finds really actually important and creative ways to make the same point differently, and it hits me differently when he does it, and I see how effective it is, somehow I have not learned that

lesson at all. So I take your point, Steve, that, yeah, you're right. Thank you, assignment editor. But a real, like a real deep dive, honestly, would be great. I mean, I just would be fantastic. All I'm hearing right now is you're telling me I need to pass on the five, one-time, five-times match opportunity to turn my $20 into $100 to stop the Satan demon people. And I don't know how to feel about that. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side.

So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply. Learn more at amex.ca.org. All right. Last topic. Steve, walk us through the latest that we know that's happening with Russia and their demands to NATO.

Yeah, it's, things are heating up. I mean, we've been saying that now for several weeks, several months, as the Russian troop build up, somewhere around 100,000 troops on Ukraine's border. The rhetoric has been heating up, but it feels like, certainly if you believe, the leaks coming out of the Biden administration, and to a certain extent, the public statements coming out of the Biden administration, I mean, Jen Saki, the White House press secretary, said the other day that a Russian invasion of Ukraine could happen at any time. And I think that's right. I think that's a reflection of what the intelligence is telling us, particularly as we've seen additional

Russian troop movements over the past week. And the Russians seeming to prepare a pretext for the invasion and talking about it more openly. Look, I think this is just very, very worrisome. You have Secretary of State Anthony Blinken meeting the Ukrainian president yesterday. He's going to meet Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Friday in some last ditch attempt to put this off. the Russians, of course, are putting out statements saying it's crazy to think that they would ever invade Ukraine, that these are routine exercises that they're conducting with 100,000 people right on the border. I think, you know, it doesn't, it's a perilous moment. I think an invasion is far, far more likely than not. And I think the downstream consequences are significant as

David wrote about in his newsletter yesterday. David? Yeah, you know, I think this is a really dangerous moment because I feel like what we're beginning to see is how momentum for war happens in the sense that as it's more publicly known and, you know, part of the reality is that it's very hard to hide a troop build up these days in the era of satellite reconnaissance. And as it gets more publicly known that Russia is building up a force that's sufficient probably to overwhelm the Ukrainian army in relatively short order, that they're poised

in offensive positions, that this does not look remotely like an exercise, that shuttle diplomacy is taking place. And we've seen shuttle diplomacy take place before in the run up to war. I remember the shuttle diplomacy as the British task force. sailed down to the Falkland Islands, that this momentum looks to build. And the question is, what is the off-ramp for Vladimir Putin at this point? And, you know, what's interesting to me, you know, it seems to me one of the more, it seems to me one of the more no-brainer moves on the part of the, not just the United States, because the United States is not the only player here.

I mean, you have powers in Europe as well to do what they can short of war to deter Vladimir Putin. But what's also very interesting to me is the extent to which there is an obvious campaign in the United States of America to not just argue that we shouldn't defend Ukraine. Okay, fair enough. I don't know that there's a strong movement within the government or outside of the government to send American troops to defend Ukraine. but a very strong argument being mounted on Fox News by Tucker, being mounted by Glenn Greenwald and others online, that we should have real sympathy, real sympathy for Russia in this situation, and that we should have real hostility and suspicion towards NATO, and also that we should engage in this kind of elaborate moral equivalence of sort of how would we feel if Mexico was very Russia sympathetic on our border or very sympathetic to China on our border, this elaborate dance that's not just don't fight for Ukraine. Fair enough, that's not really a mainstream argument right now, but is actually have sympathy for Russia. And I think it's the combination

of these two things. One is an actual potentially imminent invasion of Ukraine, which has, and I'd refer folks to my newsletter has real potential to create problems that would spill over beyond the war itself, and the war itself stands to be a humanitarian nightmare and disaster. But also this attempt to shift American public opinion in a way that further divides this country and serves Vladimir Putin's interests to a T, just to a T. And that piece of it right there, that piece of it, desempathized with Russia piece to me is one of the more puzzling developments in our public discourse. I can, as I said, again, I can completely get the idea that we should argue that you don't deploy troops to Ukraine.

Got it. But this idea that we should feel actively sympathetic for Vladimir Putin is ominous all on its own. like I agree with David about this I mean like the Glenn like I think Tucker comes to his cynicism and dishonesty on this honestly but I've never been able to you know I I don't want to make some sort of old cuy bono kind of argument or anything of that but I've never been it's it's it's sort of like remember Steve was it Stephen Cohen the Russia expert who was married to Katrina Vandenhovel, who could always be counted on on taking Russia's side in almost any debate, even, you know, back when it was the Soviet Union, and then when it became

this sort of rightist authoritarian regime, and you're like, something else is going on there. And I don't have any evidence or anything. I don't want to, like, you know, besmirch anybody. But when it comes to people like Greenwald and Cohen, I always think, wow, if Russia isn't somehow paying them to say these things. It is amazing how they do it pro bono so consistently. But on the broader point, I do think, you know, I'm sort of torn. I think that on the one hand, the Biden administration deserves a lot of blame for getting

us into this mess in the first place because I don't think absent the Afghan withdrawal that Putin thought would have thought he could get away with doing what he's this shakedown routine. Maybe not, but it did send a very bad situation. signal to a lot of places. On the other hand, I have to say I'm a little pleasantly surprised that Wendy Sherman and Blinken and Biden haven't caved to some of Putin's demands, which I think if you cave to a bunch of them, like the promise that Ukraine will never be in NATO or any of that kind of stuff, would spell the end of NATO. And certainly if you agreed that you couldn't have arms or resources or or drills or whatever with anybody who joined NATO after

1997 that would be the end of NATO and it would be kind of amazing if Biden had agreed to those things because then you would say Afghanistan was a relatively minor foreign policy screw up compared to destroying the most successful military alliance in Western history. And so, you know, there's still three years left. But it sounds like the bottom administration understands the stakes in that regard. At the same time, I think that the willingness to do some of these negotiations without Ukraine at the table has been pretty shameful and dishonorable. and it's been playing into Putin's interests just, you know, on those merits because if you're, Putin wants to be a regional superpower, a great power like of your, where they

have spheres of influence and merely sitting down across the table about whether or not Ukraine can or should be invaded or annexed or whatever without Ukraine at the table, sends that message that only the great powers need to sit around the table and figure this stuff out and the Russians are our great are moral and global equivalent and will you know will like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt at Yalta will figure out what all the little countries get or don't get and I think that was a bad decision by the Biden administration and I think they've realize that and they're pulling back from it. But I just don't get the sense of urgency that we should have about this. Because if a couple bad decisions on this, and you could have not only

a hot war in Europe, you could see NATO come apart at the seams. And I shuddered to think how like Trump, who hates NATO to begin with, would exploit that kind of climate for political gain and how badly Biden would handle the politics of it. So I'm very worried about this. I just don't know what the path out is. Can I just add? I mean, I think the Biden administration's public diplomacy, public rhetoric on this has been bad. We talked earlier on this podcast about some reporting from David Ignatius that behind the scenes, they seem to be giving Russia, in effect, a green light to do this. We didn't get a lot of detail about what those signals they were sending behind the scenes might have been.

But I think if you just assess their public rhetoric, it's been pretty bad. You look at the administration saying things like, we want to provide them with a diplomatic off-ramp. It's literally recycled from 2014 in the Obama administration. Vladimir Putin doesn't want a diplomatic off-ramp. He's speeding by. He doesn't care about your diplomatic off-ramp. He's not looking for diplomacy and concessions, it appears. And if he were saying that isn't going to get him to accept any of those concessions

that you might be prepared to make. I'm not sure I agree with that. I mean, I don't think Putin necessarily wants to annex Ukraine. As we talked about here before, I think it could actually be a disaster for Putin if he tries. But what he wants to do is he wants to say to NATO, and to Ukraine and Eastern Europe, pretty nice country you got there, be ashamed of something happened to it, and shake down the West, which it sees as weak and disunited for four diplomatic concessions, like saying Ukraine can never belong to NATO. The problem is that the diplomatic

concessions that Russia wants are just so unbelievably unreasonable and non-starters that it leaves us in this limbo. I don't think, I mean, look, neither one of us knows. I don't think that that's what Putin ultimately wants. I don't think that Putin ultimately would be happy with some concessions or some, you know, some words from the United States to the effect that Ukraine won't be invited into NATO. I think he would then find another pretext for invading Ukraine. I mean, you know, one thing about this, Ukraine as a quagmire argument, which a lot of folks are making, that one of the main deterrence against Putin doing this is, yeah, maybe his military can overwhelm the Ukrainian military in a matter of days, maybe, maybe. But then he's going to face this sort of

grinding insurgency. Here's what I wonder. I've talked to some folks who are, you know, who have been following the Russia intervention in Syria pretty closely. And if you remember, when Russia intervened in Syria, Obama was pretty confident to say Syria just sort of bought itself a mess. I mean, Russia just bought itself a mess. It was, intervening into what was a grinding civil war was going to be a quagmire. And what ended up happening in part through just sheer unbelievable brutality, Russia decisively tipped the balance of power. It wasn't a quagmire for them. It was a win for them. Ultimately, in their own narrative, their own narrative says they even drove the United States out of northern Syria. I remember some of the

the shots of the celebratory Russian mercenaries in American bases after Trump ordered the retreat removal from northern Syria. And I think Russia has developed an enormous amount of confidence in the last few years in the capability of its military to not just sweep away Ukraine, but to be so thoroughly dominant that they could defend. defeat any follow-on insurgency. And one thing that Russia did has been explained to me in some interesting detail is they cycled through battlefield commanders in Syria relatively fast compared to us to give their officers, to make sure as many officers got meaningful combat experiences they could. And so all of this is telling me that they've been gearing up. They've

been gearing up strategically and have developed a lot more confidence, even than they had in 2014 with the Little Green Men operation. And so that's one of the reasons why I think that there's a combination of forces leading to this moment that it becomes day by day increasingly difficult for Putin to back down from. And it would not surprise me if there was an annexation of a significant part of Ukraine, followed by an agreement to cease hostilities only on the condition that whatever remained of Ukraine was a rump satellite state of Russia. Hey, Sarah, one quick question for you, since you are, um, look, we know your foreign policy position is very Bismarckian. As Bismarck said, of the Balkans, they're not the worth

of life of a single Pomeradian grenadier. That's your view of Ukraine. We all know that, but Well, a single Pomeranian. Release the Pomeranians. No, but so like just one quick political question. When Republicans go to war, when I say when Republicans are president and we go to war, the argument instantaneously is this is a wag the dog thing to bolster his polls or war for oil or whatever. But usually it's this, you know, this is a way to change the topic. change of the discussion from domestic political problems and get the country to rally around

the president kind of thing. I don't know. That was clearly what was said about Clinton, though, as well. It was said about Clinton. And there's a good argument there. I mean, there was a whole movie, wag the dog. What does? Well, yeah, but that sort of gets to my question, right?

I mean, there are parts of the left that'll say it about anything, right, and everything. But the question I have is, I'm not saying that Biden would intervene. I don't think Biden wants to intervene in Ukraine. I think he's actually pretty much, you know, he's got very strong anti-war sentiments in him. But what happens if there is a shooting war in Ukraine and America, either through NATO or whatever, gets involved in it? What are the politics for Biden on that? I agree with you that that's not going to happen. So it's a bit of a weird hypothetical in that sense just because of who Biden is.

But yeah, I think if in three weeks, that's what happens right after the White House said they were going to hit a reset, there's going to be plenty of people with blue checkmarks next to their name, adding, you know, two plus two in their minds, at least, of like, aha, the reset was moving things over into the foreign policy realm, particularly after the Afghanistan debacle, but also to move away from COVID, et cetera. To your point, which I think you're insinuating at least, I don't think it will necessarily be. accurate. Again, that's like the last thing I see Joe Biden doing. So if Joe Biden does it, I do not think it will be because he thinks it's a great political pivot. There will be so many other factors going into that. But yeah, I don't know. Hey, I want to finish on one last topic. So the part owner of the Warriors billionaire Chammoth Palihapatia was in an interview and said that he didn't care about the Uyghurs. In fact, he said, nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs, okay? You bring it up because you really care, and I think it's nice that you

care. The rest of us don't care. I'm telling you a very hard, ugly truth. Of all the things that I care about, yes, it is below my line. My question to each of you is, in the modern era, if you had filled in any other word other than the Uyghurs, I think this would have been a much bigger story across the media spectrum. But even so, we're talking about genocide here. His cleanup statement, by the way, said something to the effect of, I care about all human rights violations happening in China and the United States, sort of implying that we also have concentration camps and genocide going on. Will he be? part owner of the Warriors

next week, David? Yes. Jonah? Yes. Yeah. And I agree with you. If you'd subbed in Pomeranians instead of Uyghurs, there would probably have been more outrage. Steve? Yeah, I mean, I think that

what he did was express in a blunt and not careful way, the basic position of the NBA leadership, as we've seen over the better part of year. Oh, the warriors disavowed them and the NBA made some sounds too. But I mean, talk about columns I've written a million times. Just don't talk to me about this never again crap from people. You know, the stuff we've seen in North Korea, the stuff we've seen in plenty of places over the last

20 years proves that a lot of people like saying the words never again and saying that was the lesson of the Holocaust. They don't actually mean it. Or is it just that Americans, as I've said, like they don't vote on foreign policy. I don't care about foreign policy. I think actually is kind of the wrong verb there, but they don't vote on foreign policy. They're not paying a lot of attention because if you do,

there are so many horrible things going on in the world that you can be overwhelmed. And there's plenty of things here that are wrong that we should fix, and therefore we should focus on the things at home that we should fix and not drive ourselves crazy in heartbreak about the things going on in the world

that we can't fix. Yeah, that's fine. I mean, I'm not saying it's fine, but it's, but there's an obligation to tell the truth, to simply bear witness to what is happening and acknowledge that the blood, the blood and the blood money that you're taking

in a lot of these kinds of situations. And that gets swept under the rug. And instead, people kowtow, which is the proper use of the word kowtow, given its history, kowtow to China and minimize the horror of what's going on. I mean, what was it,

John Sina, who in... John Sina, who apologized. In Cantonese or in Chinese, in Ted Kruzian fashion over offending people about the Uyghurs. It's grotesque. It's more like grotesque.

The least you can do is tell the truth about what's happening. The part that I think gets to me, David, is the money. It's one thing to say that my sort of steel man version of the argument, which is there are horrific things

going on around the world and I cannot invest my soul in all of them or I can't get out of bed. But it's a different one when you say I can't invest my soul in it because I have millions of dollars at stake and that's simply more important than even recognizing that it's happening. That's, you hit the nail on the head, Sarah, and this is what really gets me. Okay, it's one thing if you are, you know, John the car salesman in Franklin, Tennessee, you can care with all your heart about the Uyghurs. There's not much you can do.

When you are a part owner of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that has deep business relationships, a part-owner of a team that's part of a multi-billion-dollar enterprise that has cultivated deep relationships with China, you know what? Those kinds of corporations, the NBA, Apple, others, you know, they can do a heck of a lot more than John the car salesman to signal. that genocide is unacceptable, and then what just really gets me is these same entities turn around and cast themselves as moral leaders here in the United States for various kinds of reform. I don't want to hear about it. I don't want to hear about it so long as you're investing in the PRC

while there's a genocide going on. By some estimates, there's up two million people in concentration camps. the efforts to do to engage in forced sterilization and forced abortion of Uyghurs are such that the birth rate of Uyghurs has plummeted far below the already low birth rate of of other Chinese citizens i mean we're talking about an attempt to essentially exterminate an entire culture and and population here and look i mean you know that i have had have my critiques about issues that are going on here at home. But the difference in scale here is just unimaginably vast. And also, you combine that with the fact that these multi-billion dollar corporations actually have a capacity of registering dissent in a meaningful way. And they don't. It's

disgusting. Also, just like, one quick point. What's the point of having FU money if you can't actually like denounce genocide? I mean, I like, this guy's a billionaire. And he's like, like, I would like to think that there's a lot of things I'm currently not denouncing because it's not worth the hassle. I would start denouncing regularly if I had a billion dollars. I just want to put it out there. I think he actually believes it. I don't, I'm not saying all those other companies, but like I, I don't know. You watch the video.

Like, I think he believes it, Steve. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, I guess the other great irony in this is that he runs a company and has made him a lot of money called social capital. Indeed. there we go there we go outstanding moral um i don't know i would be tempted to say poser i don't know what his actual beliefs are so that's a little unfair but he makes great um he makes a great show of his virtue signaling in many many other respects and yet uh was willing to say something as callous as he said in this case uh and make

false equivalence between the United States and China, which is profoundly grotesque. Right. You know. And his cleanup statement did not clean things up. I won't say it made it worse, but it didn't make it better. Well, on that note, thank you all for listening. We look forward to seeing what our members thought in the comments section on the website. You can join the comment section, going to the dispatch.com.

It's a lively group, mostly criticizing. David, Jonah, and Steve because of my own perfection. We'll see you again next week. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, you're writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings everything together in one place. With Squarespace's cutting-edge design tools, you can launch a website that looks sharp from day one.

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