The Dispatch Podcast - Blagojevich Set Free

Episode Date: February 19, 2020

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss the president's latest commutations including that of the former governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich, and the upcoming Nevada caucuses in the Democratic primary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgir, and joining me as always, Jonah Goldberg, Steve Hayes, and David French coming at us from Atchison, Kansas for some reason. Today, we are talking about the 11 grants of clemency from the president that were announced yesterday, and a little preview of the Nevada caucuses. The debate is tonight, and Bloomberg is coming to the stage. A little on media bias as well, and where a report. are falling on all of this. That's coming up. Let's dive in. I want to start with a little more lead-in today because the story surrounding the president's grants of clemency yesterday, uh, it deserves a little bit.

little more lead-in. So I've put these into four categories, and I'm going to roughly outline them for you guys, my four categories. The first is the Angela Stanton category. This is a woman who was part of a car thief ring, nonviolent as best I can tell. Her petition was supported by Alveda King. There were several other women like her in yesterday's clemency grants. To start with, there were 11 clemency grants yesterday. Let's put those aside for this conversation. whether they're deserving or not without diving into a record is maybe hard to say, but I think that's well within any presidential prerogative to say that this person deserves a full pardon. The second category, Michael Milken, Bernie Carrick, I'm sort of putting them kind of in the same category.

Both of their petitions, interestingly, were supported by Rudy Giuliani. And the reason I'm putting them together is because they had already served their time. they had then shown rehabilitation afterwards they were giving back to their communities michael milken in particular had become actually quite famous for his philanthropic work uh you know so category two is different than category one but still probably not that unusual for presidential pardons category three uh paul poge is my poster child for this category I'm not totally sure I'm pronouncing that last name correctly. He is a construction company owner who pled guilty to underpaying his taxes by about half a million dollars.

For that, he received three years probation. Starting just last year, actually, his son and daughter-in-law started donating hundreds of thousands of dollars in direct and in-kind contributions to the Trump Victory Fund. They've posted pictures on Instagram with them, with Trump's children, and he also was on this list yesterday. Not unprecedented. I do want to talk to you guys about Mark Rich and some of the comparisons there. But that's definitely category three for me. And then category four is Blagojevich, which I want to spend the most amount of time on,

and just to get readers up to where we all are. Yes, sorry, listeners, my bad. Rob Blagojevich was the governor of Illinois. There, including Blagojevich, four of the previous nine governors had gone to jail when Blagojevich was convicted at that point. He, there were three main categories that he was charged with. One was selling Barack Obama's Senate seat. That's the one that sort of becomes the most famous. this is the quote

that you have probably heard before and I will not use all the words, but I've got this thing and it's effing golden. It's an effing valuable thing. You don't just give it away for nothing. If I don't get what I want, I'll just take the Senate seat myself. But less known was that he also

attempted to get money out of the president of a children's hospital in exchange for a Medicaid rate increase for pediatric specialists. And same with a horse racing executive in exchange for the quote, timely signing of a bill that benefited the horse racing industry. That quote, by the way, is from his defense attorneys, which is sort of fun and interesting.

Okay, so he is found guilty on 17 counts. He receives 14 years from the judge. This goes up and down the appellate track. The Supreme Court rejects his appeal. The Trump administration's Department of Justice. objected to his appeal and asked the Supreme Court not to take it, saying even if there is some lack of clarity in the law after Bob McDonald's case out of Virginia, this ain't the case to resolve it in because it's so clear-cut what was going on. He had served eight of his years

and received a commutation, not a pardon from the president yesterday. Interesting article from Politico, from a reporter who had previously worked at the Sun Times, who had covered the trial in grainy detail, saying that she was less surprised, that many people thought that 14 years was too long, you know, for those who want to sort of read the other side of how that trial might have gone or seemed unfair to some people, I thought that was an interesting read. So, laying all that groundwork, and thank you all for bearing with me. David, I wanted to start with you from the legal side, going to category three. This is my Paul Pogue donor category, the, you know, in the least charitable way, buying the pardon. Right. Unprecedented, Mark Rich. Talk a little bit about how you

think this fits into the history of presidential pardons. So I did a little bit of brushing up on the Mark Rich pardon scandal. And there's this consistent pattern when you go and you look back at the Clinton years. And that pattern is it was so much worse than you even remembered. So if you're going to compare, say, the Mark Rich pardon to this one, it's like comparing, I don't know, the Michael Jordan of corrupt pardons with, you know, a random starter on an NBA team. You know, so that there's, so Mark Rich, let's just, let's just not even like a James Hardin. Like you're straight. No, we're not even talking, this might be the Clint Capella of pardons. So the Michael Jordan part of pardons versus the Clint Capella of pardons. And so Mark Rich, if you guys remember these facts,

he was indicted on 65 counts that would have collectively led to a sentence if he'd been convicted on all of them of more than 300 years. It was the biggest tax evasion case at that time in U.S. history. And one aspect of the charges against him was that he had, traded with the enemy with Iran during the Iran hostage crisis. He never went to court. He fled to Switzerland, was never held accountable for his crimes in any way, shape, or form. And then Denise Rich, his ex-wife, gave $450,000 to the Clinton Library Foundation during Clinton's time and office, gave $100,000 to Hillary,

Senate campaign, all told, gave about a million dollars. And then he's pardoned. This is, this is probably the worst, or I think this is the worst presidential pardon, certainly of my adult lifetime. So if this is, if that's the, if that's the worst, I think what, what Trump did was similar in kind with this, with the POG pardon, but not similar in magnitude. They're both offensive for similar reasons, but one of them was far graver in its magnitude than the other. Well, let me follow up with this, though. Do you think that but for Mark Rich, Trump wouldn't have pardoned someone like Pogue? Or do you think that Mark Rich is irrelevant? It's just an interesting anecdote from the past. Yeah, I think it's an interesting anecdote from the past. And it's, you know, it's a useful anecdote for Democrats who would react and say, oh, my goodness, you know, our part.

party would never. You know, our presidents would never. And you can wave the Mark Rich flag in front of their faces. But the bottom line is Trump, Trump's going to do what Trump's going to do. It's not like he's sitting around studying historical precedents of the presidency and following them. I mean, this is, this was something that, you know, I think that he's fascinated with the pardon power because it's one of the few constitutional powers that's his. He can do it. He doesn't have any oversight. He doesn't have any accountability. Nobody can overrule this. This is this awesome power that he has. I think he's fascinated by the pardon power. I think that he loves flattery and I think he dispenses pardons in response to money and flattery on occasion. And I think it's just basically

that simple. So Jonah, there's something that these categories tend to have in common. and that's a to follow exactly on what david just said there's a media component to it a flattery component to it so shortly after his supreme court appeal was rejected rob loyovitch's wife was on fox news on several shows actually but one of the quotes that stood out to me was i thought he was treated um sorry uh i see that the same people that did this to my family the same people that secretly taped us and twisted the facts and perverted the the law that ended up my husband in jail, these same people are trying to do the same thing they did to my husband just on a much greater scale, meaning they're trying to do this to

President Trump. And President Trump, a few months later, when he said he was thinking very seriously about commuting the remainder of the Senate, said, I thought he, Rod Blagojevich, I thought was treated unbelievably unfairly. He was given close to 18 years in prison, and a lot of people thought it was unfair, like a lot of other things. And it was the same gang, the Comey gang and all these sleaze bags that did it, which sounds pretty like one-to-one. Is this a playbook at this point? All right.

So for much of the opening monologue and conversation with David, I wanted to do a whole, bless your heart, you know, lick at you naive, sweet, delicate flowers treating this like this is a serious issue of public policy and the president weighed these individual cases in some serious way. I think none of that happened. I think this, the stuff from Blago's wife is more dispositive. Trump is obsessed with creating a narrative that makes it seem like he's been witch hunt, right? Unfairly persecuted by these bad people. And I think David's point about all of the, about him being susceptible to flattery and he loves the pardon power is all true.

The two factors that I think haven't been mentioned is one, and I don't know that this was Trump's intent, but it's kind of like betting that the sun will rise. Trump has this unbelievable gift of making his most ardent defenders look like ass clowns. And so we just got through impeachment, right? just got through and everybody about quid pro quo corruption right and uh yeah i mean and and all of these people lindsay graham and you know and and jim jordan and not to mention everybody who goes on tv to defend them they all said with unbelievably shockingly straight faces the kinds of straight faces that you think would invite a divine lightning bolt um saying uh this was all because of

the president's passionate commitment to fight corruption, that he's a corruption fighter. And he is, I mean, you actually had, what does that guy, Jared, saying, and I think actually, Dershowitz at some point said it too, became this other talking point that literally Trump would be impeachable if he didn't pursue corruption like this, right? And it doesn't matter because he's so committed to fighting corruption wherever he sees it.

And then what's all of these people, buy in to this incandescently untrue explanation, he goes and giz out pardons like it's like tetracycline at the clinic. And including to Blago, who is, is fairly or not, is the poster boy of corruption in the United States politics today. Fairly. Yeah, right. It makes all of these people look like fools. And he does this almost every single time people invest on a narrative line because he wants to make it clear that the only way to support Trump is to support Trump, not an argument about what Trump is doing, not an ideological thing. The only other thing that hasn't come up is I think this is all preparatory to giving Stone and Manafort

pardons. And he's done this before where he sprinkles absolutely defensible pardons with absolutely indefensible pardons. And he says, how could you say I'm doing this for political reasons? Look at, you know, this person I'm, I pardoned who deserves it, and it muddies the water and it sends the signal. And so I think this is all laying the groundwork for that. This is softening the battlefield, as it were, for him to give out pardons to these guys. And that is not to say that David and you were wrong about how much he likes the pardon powder and all the rest. I will say one last point. I remember the Mark Rich stuff vividly. I was like fighting about that, you know, my anti-Clinton credentials, I will take a backseat to nobody on. And I was

talking to my wife about it this morning. And one of the things I remember most vividly was how, I mean, the Mark Rich thing happened almost like literally as Clinton was heading out the door. He was, you know, the election was over for most of that scandal. And a lot of people thought that was going to be a career-ending thing for Eric Holder at the time. And I remember that E.J. Dion and all the MSNBC crowd and all the Washington Post op-ed people, this was the issue that they blew their top about with Clinton. For eight years, they defended almost everything he did is either overreaction from the right or totally unfair from the right. And then it was this. And I remember E.J. Deere and wrote a column about it, and I think I got into an argument with him

about it. It says, you know, conservatives are saying that liberals are making a big deal out of this because it's just a way to prove that they weren't reflexively pro-Clinton all along. That's not true. We really believe that this thing is different. But as David notes, it wasn't different. It was so consistent with the Clinton administration, which was unbelievably corrupt from the firing of the travel office in the first months of the administration all the way through. But this was this thing that all the gitchie-goo liberals who defended Clinton on everything, including his adultery, could say, oh, of course I'm in part. Of course, I'm objective.

I call him like I see him. Look, I criticize this Mark Rich thing. I just, you know, it just wasn't until this that Clinton really did anything that was worthy of criticism. So, Steve, I know a little bit about how you feel about this. I want to read you a quote that Blagojevich gave to a local outlet before boarding his plane last night. I've made a whole bunch of mistakes, but I didn't break any laws. I crossed no lines. And the thing I talked about doing, the things I talked about doing,

were legal. This was routine politics. And the ones who did it are the ones who broke the laws and the ones who, frankly, should meet and face some accountability. Shortly after, when they asked him whether he was a Republican or Democrat, he said, I'm a Trumpocrat now. So zero remorse. I think that counts as zero recognition of the reality of his crimes. and I think strong evidence as to why he never should have had his sentence commuted. Let me start by just cleaning up a couple of things. The president said that this is what the Comey gang did. Comey was not in office.

He was out of government. No, he was out of government. He had left in the Deputy Attorney General role in 2005. He came back two years after Blagojevich's conviction in 2013. The line that you can draw, such as... as it is, is that Pat Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney, had worked with Comey in SD&Y in 2002-2003. Again, this conviction was in 2011. Yeah, so it's misleading for the president to suggest that this was somehow the result of James

Comey. And, of course, Pat Fitzgerald famously went after Scooter Libby and others in the Bush administration. So the president's suggesting that this is somehow political and this is somehow James Comey is silly. The president also said, I don't know him of Blagojevich, when they're her. have there's tape of the president speaking warmly of Blagoje, which who had appeared on the celebrity apprentice in between his indictment and going to jail. So some basic fact checking there.

I think Jonah and David both make very good points. In the 24 hours plus since this has happened, I think you've seen two different conversations take place. I think it was very useful for you to walk through these, this wave of commutations or pardons, the way that you did, because some are legitimate, some are, I think, clearly not. There has been a reaction on the left, the president's critics, and including some of the media,

who have reacted not by pointing specifically to the Blagojevich commutation, but have reacted more broadly to the presidential pardon power and claiming somehow that this is further evidence that Donald Trump is eroding the rule of law. Now, I think there's a lot of evidence. Can I read our audience? So Eric Lipton of the New York Times, a well-regarded investigative reporter knows the law. This is not, he didn't fall off a turn-up truck.

In 2014, tweeted, big day for executive actions from DOJ just now. President Obama grants commutations and pardons, clemency to 20, eight commutations, 12 pardons. that's 2014, yesterday, a moment that live in history and deserves to be remembered. President Trump is now both the executive and judicial branch, Rod Blagojevich, Michael Milken, Bernie Carrick, and others. That goes to the pardon power, which absolutely is not usurping the judicial power. At all. At all. No, at all.

And there's a clear double standard, not just from Eric Lipton, but from others whose analyses I read over the past 24 hours of that. Their objection is to the presidential pardon power because a Republican is using it. They loved it when President Obama did. They don't like it now. So I think that's sort of a level-setting effort on our part. The broader point, I think, the point where I think Trump defenders, Trump supporters are struggling is they are not making the distinctions that you made between good pardons and bad pardons. Their argument is in effect, because that the president actually has pardon power, all pardons are somehow justifiable. And you've seen this in the president's defenders, you know, some of whom literally were condemning Rod Blagojevich for public corruption several years ago and are now celebrating his departure from prison.

I think to me, Blagojevich's original sentence is too little. I think we should make examples of officials who engage in this kind of public corruption. And let's emphasize that this is indisputable. A lot of it was on tape what he tried to do, not just with selling the Senate seat, but with these other extortion attempts. I think we should be doubling and tripling these sentences precisely because it's important to set an example. and precisely because of the potential deterrent effect for others. What I think the president has done with Blagojevich in particular is sort of vindicate the sense that people have,

and I think this isn't accidental, that everybody does it. Everybody does it. And this goes to Jonah's point about Manafort and Stone. So when the president pardons Manafort and Stone, he can point back to Blagojevich and say, look, he was unfairly singled out. This is somebody who shouldn't have gotten the sense that he'd gotten.

He's served his time. Therefore, when I do it to my own people, it's somehow rationalist. Or when Mike Pence does it for him. I can't. I can't. I want to underline that because I think undermining institutions is nothing new. I think many administrations have tried to undermine institutions that are counter to their interests. But when Blagojevich says this was routine politics and nobody is, you know, screaming in

their hands to push back, I absolutely think it feeds into this. Everyone does it idea that is incredibly damaging to all the institutions. Yes, totally agree. Look, I'm as skeptical of government generally as pretty much anybody alive. But it's simply not the case that everybody does the things that Blagojevic was caught on tape doing. It's not the case that everybody does what Paul Manafort did. It's not the case that everybody does what Roder Stone has done. These are exceptions. They deserve to be treated exceptions as exceptions and I think as examples because it's it does erode trust in the broad the broad sort of minimal trust in government that we all have to have in order to make this thing work. Jonah the Illinois delegation Darren LaHood, Adam Kinsinger,

John Shimkus, Rodney Davis, Mike Boast, the Republican congressional delegation actually did come out with a statement. Blagojevich is the face of public corruption in Illinois. Not once has he shown any remorse for his clear and documented record of egregious crimes that undermined the trust placed in him by voters. They put out their statement, the end, but there's not a whole lot else we're hearing from elected Republicans at this point. Does this feel like another case if I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue? A little bit, and I understand why the Illinois politicians felt the need to do this, because what is... in that statement is true, right?

I mean, he is the face of public corruption. He's a joke. You go to Chicago and you talk about Blagojevich. It's like always an applause line to make jokes about how corrupt he was. And, you know, and just as a point of fact, you're right about the ratio. Four out of nine? Four out of nine. But it was, it used to be four out of eight.

And so they're due, right? I mean, they've been, they are, they're, the regression to the mean of one out of two should be happening any time now. Yeah, look, I mean, I think that this is, it's kind of funny. And I know that liberals hate comparisons of Trump to Obama, but one of the things that Obama tried to do, Obama was very bad about helping the Democratic Party. Remember, he took his campaign operation, which was what, organizing for action or organizing for America? Yeah. And it turned into organizing for action, right? and it became he tried to create a parallel party structure that was loyal only to him outside of the DNC

outside of the DNC and I don't think it was particularly successful but there were DNC people were pretty pissed off about it because it was taking resources and and energy away from the party and over eight years they lost about a thousand seats at the state level but I would just say it was successful for Obama yes it was it wasn't successful for Democrats I mean think about their data program that they had going in 2012 that just put everything to share My point isn't about how it worked well for his re-election. I'm talking about after he was elected, he did not say, okay, now let's help the party. He was still like, let's help me. And Trump is doing that on a psychological level in an interesting way, much less as an organizational level. But he's, you know, the Belgoyevich line where says I'm a Trump publican or Trump a Democrat.

Trumpocrat. That's really what Trump is interested in. And I wasn't just kidding when I talked about how there's a method to the madness of turning his defenders into fools. If you can't stay true to an ideological or an intellectual, consistent message or program, and you demand absolute loyalty from people, the only safe harbor. is the cult of personality argument. The only safe harbor where you're not going to be called inconsistent or hypocritical is just to simply say, I believe in President Trump. I believe in his judgment and his instincts.

And I think there's something in his lizard brain that says, I don't like it when people go out there and they defend what I'm doing by defending an idea. He likes it when they go out there and just defend him. And so he will saw off the plank of the idea and see whether or not people jump back and defend the man rather than some coherent program. And he does that, he's doing this with the pardons and the corruption stuff, but he's done this

on foreign policy stuff. He wants the answer to the question to always be because I believe in Trump. Not because I believe in America First, not because I believe in nationalism, not because I believe in the Republican Party. It has to be in Trump. We trust in everything.

And he veers that way all the time. So, David, it wasn't necessarily planning, on going this direction but i think jonas teed it up so nicely last night the washington post broke a story that bill bar was considering resigning if the president wouldn't stop tweeting about department of justice and department of justice cases it if that were to happen it goes a little against jonas point um that would be an example of someone saying like no this is ideological for me and i'm not just going to go along to get along the department of justice spokesperson put out a statement saying he has not threatened to resign, which is different than what the Washington

Post actually reported, but, you know, been there. So I take her point. I've put out a lot of has not resigned yet statements, myself. How do you square this with Jonah's point? Well, at first, with Barr, I mean, I'll believe it when I see it. But at the same time, this would not be unprecedented in his administration. I mean, we had the Mattis resignation. We had the longstanding tension with General Kelly. We've had, there have been instances in his administration where at least a few people have said enough. But what's interesting about that is Mattis doesn't face Republican primary voters. Barr isn't facing Republican primary voters. I think there's a different their end of career. Right. There's a different calculus here. And I think that the,

if I'm putting on the hat of I am a Republican lawmaker, Trump has so successfully built up a cult following amongst core Republican base voters in jurisdiction after jurisdiction. I mean, this is something people are talking about the box Susan Collins is in in Maine, is that hardcore Trump supporters could block, could end her career in theory, even though Maine is much more of a moderate-leaning Republican electorate in many ways. And so I think what you have is amongst the elected officials. There is this sort of feeling of dread that has sunk in with an awful lot of people that says, if I'm going to break with Trump, I need to consider and understand the fact that I'm ending my career and that all of the plans that I have made for all

of the good that I want to do in my career as a lawmaker, which I hope extends far beyond the Trump administration, will end and I will be replaced if there is a Republican replacement by somebody who's worse than me. And I think that there is that dynamic as settled in because is there is such a dedication to Trump and the base. And one of the things that's fascinating to me that's really cuts against this thesis that I've heard from a lot of people that I really genuinely respect, that there's this sort of huge, reluctant Trump world out there, is if the reluctant Trump world is so big, especially in the Republican primary electorate, why in state after state after state, when you have a Republican running for an office, they are putting front and center before they put life, before they put liberty, before they put

national security. They are putting Trump. Even if they don't intend to govern in a Trumpy way, I mean, governor of Florida, what was his ad? He had his kid building Trump's wall out of blocks in the primary, and then he becomes governor, and he is not governing as a trumpist. You had a primary ad for Senate in Alabama just recently, ragging on Jeff Sessions. Why? Because Trump didn't like him, ragging on Tommy Tuberville because he was fired from being a football coach. And what was the first thing that the Alabama candidate said, I vote with Trump 97% of the time. That was the first thing out of his mouth before everything else. And when I talked to my progressive friends and they say, why don't these guys stand up?

And I said, here's the reality. Here's the reality as these people believe that they have a role to play in Washington. They're going to have a role to play in Washington after Trump has gone. And if they break with him, it's over for them, and somebody worse will replace them. That's the mental calculus. And I like the way Jonah says it. It's a reason. It's not a justification.

So there's a difference between a reason and a justification. but there's the reason, and I think that reason is very real. Yeah, or the way I put it is there's a difference between an explanation and an excuse, right? I can describe the behavior without excusing it. I love that you guys keep teeing up my next question, because Steve, I was thinking about this, and you and I have some of these conversations. We talk to Republican elected officials, certainly in the last several months, many times. And what I hear is they do.

stand up to Trump from time to time on on specific issues and each time they they a have to pick their fights for sure but be they become increasingly isolated they they end up on an island and I guess what for me is interesting is that so much of what this president has done maybe similar to Obama to Jonah's point has been through executive action there's not a whole lot of legislative stuff that will survive past his presidency so it's a lot of long-term pain I would argue, for what amounts to actually not much even short-term gain, big asteris, aside from judges. So the short-term gain, that was a perfect way of framing that. The short-term game for, I think, many of these individual politicians is not ideological.

So you're pointing to judges. That's your argument. That's not the short-term game for them. The short-term game for them is being in Congress, sticking around. And I will say one of the things that I'm... I've learned in the past five years is the extent, I mean, of course, we all understand that elected officials hold very prominently on their priority list sticking around, being reelected. The system is set up by the way in fairness to them, especially on the House side.

You're up every two years. That's no time at all. No, completely. And we know, I mean, the time that they spend fundraising and all these things. It's a huge priority probably for many of them. It's the top priority. I guess I hadn't appreciated how many of them held it as the single priority. And that, to me, has been interesting.

I mean, there's an inside-out phenomenon taking place. But when you talk to them, did they actually acknowledge that it's the single priority? I mean, they would never, I think, say it that way. But you can't help but be struck by how different the things are that they say to you, than they're saying at a press conference or then they're saying to their constituents and speeches. I mean, it is, I think people, it's hard to communicate this,

but I think people underappreciate the extent to which somebody will say something in private, provide an analysis and her assessment of Trump in private to other members of Congress, say, one night and then literally the next day go out and give a press conference and make exactly the yaki's opposite, not just point, but argument, like full argument against what they had said they believe in

private. And that is happening a lot. I think David's point about the extent to which elected officials understand that because of the base enthusiasm for Trump, they have to run as sort of super Trumpers, that can't be overstated. I mean, there was this primary in Wisconsin that we've covered a little bit here at the dispatch. And Reger has written a couple of things. things about that race for us. And there were two candidates. One was sort of a traditional Scott Walker, limited government conservative. And the other was respected military veteran, double amputee, incredible personal courage, personal story. And I've been following this race closely because I'm from Wisconsin. I love cheese. It's an interesting race.

I love badgers. I love cheese. What's not to be you for? but you followed them on Twitter or you went and looked at their public statements or watched their videos on their on their website and it got to the point it was hilarious I mean these guys every single tweet not every single but 95 percent of their tweets or their videos they put out or something talked about Donald Trump you know please elect me so I can go and support Donald Trump and Washington and sometimes borderline absurd you know just like Donald Trump I woke up this morning and you're just like, what? I too am a carbon-based light board with bipedal locomotion. While we go back to one point that Steve made, which I think is really important, Steve and I have talked about this a bunch, is this thing about how much politicians want to get elected, right? Which I think we all took for granted. We all thought that was true, right?

We all talked about how politicians want to get reelected. I don't think what's changed is the desire to get reelected. What is really fascinating is, to me at least, because I'm sort of obsessed with party structure these days, is that all you have to do is, it's a perfect example of how if you change institutional incentives, you have a change in results, right? So forever people, you know, I was at National Review for 21 years. We always complained about squishy Republican, just rhino republic, all that kind of stuff. You know, but it turned out that in the pre-polarized landscape, you had to placate the base in the primaries, and then to actually get reelected, you had to win over a certain amount of the center. The pivot. Yeah, it was always the pivot.

And Obama was the first presidential candidate to successfully not pivot. And I think that was underappreciated that it wasn't just about him. It said something important about the political landscape. So what's changed isn't that politicians will not get to reelected. They've always wanted to get reelected. And so when Bill Rusher used to tell young National Review staffers, look, politicians will always disappoint you. The background of that was the pivot, was this idea that they're always going to sort of sell you out a little bit to get reelected. what's changed now is that because of polarization and red state blue state stuff and all in the self-sort

is that the motivation to get reelected now causes you to behave in a way that doesn't get you primaried because the only way you're going to lose your seat in a lot of these places is if you have a primary challenger who is more to it used to be prior to Trump more to your right right that was the worry that the tea party people and the heritage action people will come for you if you go squishy now it's if you're insufficiently Trumpy, right? If you don't fully love his musk, then you're going to get primaried. But it's the same dynamic. It's just the slight change in the institutional incentive structure from needing to tack to the center to win re-election to needing to hug the base produces almost all of this stuff.

Well, and this is what I've found so interesting. And when I talk to my students, I describe it as like we're moving to base elections. instead of win over the independence elections. But to our conversation last week, it's a bit misleading because actually what I think has happened is that the parties themselves are realigning. And so it's not that there aren't these undecided middle voters. Describing them as middle voters is no longer accurate

because the parties are shifting around them. And so they don't just fall literally in between the ideologies of the two parties. They fall on the scattergram. And so the way that you, hungry, hungry hippo, You all know that's my favorite analogy, like clomp up some of these voters is just different to Jonah's point. And it's going to be far more personality-based as Obama's election was, as Trump's election was. And speaking of elections.

So tonight is the Nevada debate. You will note the pronunciation, David. And Bloomberg is going to be on stage for the first time. How will we tell if the podium's normal height? Oh, sorry. Oh, no. rude so i want to rejall the 538 averages

in the national polling has Sanders at 25% Biden at 16.7 Bloomberg at 16.1 Warren at 11.7 Buddha judge at 10.5 Klobuchar at 5.6

the point being Sanders way out ahead in that if you look at their they're running some great models on on these things and one uh you know in 80% of simulations Sanders is you know basically ahead in every state and we're not in the media talking about how this is a one person race really everyone is still very in this 2016 mindset like well this could happen and this could happen but at this point it is narrowing down now

Last night, Sanders said that he was not going to release additional medical records. That's causing some heartburn even among the Democratic Twitterati. He's 78. He suffered a heart attack in October. That being said, he has released two letters from cardiologists and another doctor, the congressional doctor, I believe. So I think it's three letters in total. But says he will not be releasing, quote, full medical records when asked, he said, I don't think we will know.

On the flip side, we have Bloomberg, who has yet to be on a debate stage, has yet to really answer a lot of the questions about his record. There's been these opo dumps that we've talked about. But the one that I think is sticking the most and is most salient are the sexual harassment allegations. You know, CNN had a very long, detailed history of some of these. I'm just going to point to one very small part of the complaint that for some reason I found telling. So this is 1993-95 time frame.

This idea, by the way, that somehow sexual harassment was just so rampant and accepted in the mid-90s, I don't think is quite right. But according to her complaint, Bloomberg so frequently said the words, quote, I'd F that in a second, in reference to women in the office, that it was shortened to, quote, in a second. Bloomberg also uttered comments like, quote, that's a great piece of, but in the presence of colleagues, she said, I mean, it just goes, I mean, that's not the most egregious.

It's just the most telling because he said it so much he had to shorten the harassment to say it quicker. So, David, I'll start with you. The debate tonight. What's a win? What you look? looking for. How's this going? Well, so I'll answer the how's it going first. I think there's two things happening at once here that I do agree that there is a little bit of an

underestimation of the extent to which Bernie is sort of thoroughly and comprehensively now a frontrunner, in part because he's not actually polling in absolute numbers very highly. And his New Hampshire 2020 performance was very anemic compared to his New Hampshire 2016 performance, where he gathered in not just the Bernie folks, but also the anti-Hillary folks. But one thing that I think is being underestimated in all of these comparisons between the Democrats of 2020 and the Republicans of 2016 is that unlike Donald Trump, who was able to win-or-take-all primaries with 30-35 percent of the vote and amass this giant delegate lead. Bernie, if he keeps bumping around and winning pluralities between 25 and 35% of the vote,

under Democratic Delegate allocation rules, is going to have between 25 and 35% of the delegates. He's not going to have the winner take-all scenario. And that could lead to a situation where Bernie rolls into a primary with 30, 35% of the total delegates, a plurality of the vote, and a huge amount of, concern that he's not the best guy to take on Donald Trump and an equally huge amount of concern that if you deny him the nomination with his plurality, that his guys will, his folks will stay home. So I think there is a difference with 2016 in the delegate allocation rules that's

really important in the comparison between Republicans and Democrats and just sort of leave that there. As far as the debate goes, I'm looking for two things. One was Amy Klobush, very strong performance in the debate immediately preceding the New Hampshire primary. Was that an aberration? Can she continue it to build some momentum? I believe very intrigued to see that. And the other one is, you know, this is about as conventional wisdom, banal punditry as you can possibly imagine. But hey, I want to see Mike Bloomberg on the stage and I want to see him answer these questions. And I want to see him answer these questions about harassment. I've read the same report, Sarah, and wow, wow.

And part of you says, well, if he's running against anybody but Donald Trump, who has his own, like, series of wows from years past that, you know, I can easily see Democrats saying, well, our bully billionaire isn't as bad as their bully billionaire, but still there's a huge segment of the Democratic electorate that is not interested in a bully billionaire, period. period. So this is... And could be very demoralizing. Very demoralizing. The gender gap on their side is toward women.

And so to suppress that turnout would be a bad move if you're just a political scientist looking at these numbers. And I could see some of the Bernie bros developing a never mic movement. It's hard for me to see the Democrats developing a never Bernie largely in any way, shape, or form. but the core, core, Bernie voter, if there was a single human being with a D label by their name, who's most calculated to alienate them completely, it seems to be Mike, stop and frisk, Bloomberg. And that's definitely the setup for tonight's debate is Bernie the Revolutionary versus Bloomberg, the plutocrat buying the election that all of the candidates are at this point setting up. Steve, I want to talk a little bit about the media coverage up to this.

point. Sam Donaldson, renowned Sam Donaldson, endorsed Mike Bloomberg. There's been a lot of hand-wringing over whether journalists, even when they're retired, even afterwards, should endorse candidates and whether that undermines the idea that Sam Donaldson this whole time was actually in the tank for various candidates and just didn't say it publicly. And it comes at a time where journalism is suffering from a credibility gap with a lot of consumers. What do you make of the endorsement, right, wrong, indifferent? I mean, did anybody who followed Sam Donaldson's career closely think that he was not sympathetic to liberals? I mean, Mike Bloomberg is sort of a, I mean, he governed as a centrist.

Right, he didn't endorse Bernie Sanders. One time, one time, now Democrat, although I would just point out for accuracy sake, he is running as a leftist today. He is not running as a centrist. people should, I think, come to grips with that. People continue to describe them as a centrist. Look on the broader question, you know, my view, all of this stuff is that journalists are better off being as open as they possibly can about where they come down on this stuff. So, you know, in 2016, I wrote a piece about, I don't like to write about myself a lot,

but I wrote a piece about how I was approaching this, what I was going to do with my vote. People can make their decisions about how to evaluate the information I provide them on that basis if they think that's a really important thing. The obvious conclusion, we didn't need this 2016 or 2020 presidential race to come to it is that the media skew heavily, overwhelmingly to the left. I think that was certainly true over the course of the past several decades. It's as true now as it's ever been. And I think it would be a mistake to overlook how important that was to the rise of Donald Trump. You remember you go back and look at the Republican primaries in 2012. Newt Gingrich ran as much against the media as he ran against other Republicans. And he did well when he did that.

It was only when Mitt Romney came in and thumped him later that he stemmed that Gingrich rise. And it was predictable. We'd watch the debate. And in every single debate, Gingrich would turn at some point and take on a moderator and people would love it. And he saw his polls increase again and again and again. I think there is, again, to a much greater extent than I appreciated this deep skepticism among conservatives of the mainstream media. And I say that, I think I've mentioned this before, I say that as somebody who gave my first forensics club speech in high school about media. bias in 1988. So I believe this for a long time, but I think it's a much bigger factor in shaping how

Republicans think than I appreciated before. Two quick responses to that, if I may. One, I'm not sure it's worse than it's ever been, and I'll get to that in a second. But two. Institutional trust. Oh, that's worse than it's ever been. I don't mean that the actual thing being asserted is worse. Yeah, my point is, is I'm not sure that the media is more liberal today than it was, say, 15 years ago.

I get to that a second, but like when the Obama administration, Obama administration hired an enormous number of former journalists. And I always loved how all of these journalists was Jake Carney and, you know, the woman who covered health care for the Washington Post, Linda Douglas, you can go through this huge list of them. if you had said to them six months before they got the job well of course you're a liberal so you would say how dare you sir i'm an objective journalist my politics don't enter into this and then it just turns out that they almost all take jobs in democratic administrations and it turns out lo and behold they are pretty serviceable democratic hacks and i don't mean that the hack in a negative connotation necessarily the best possible kind of hack yeah They're party people, and they take to being party people really easily. I had a friend who dated a prominent democratic activist who had worked in the Clinton administration. And my friend was a major conservative journalist. And he said, you know, even though he lived in journalists, he'd been working as a conservative journalist for over 20 years,

it wasn't until he dated a democratic activist that he met reporters from the New York. Times and the Washington Post because they all date each other and they're in the same social circles. They're in the same social milieu. They take the same cues from each other. You can go, you know, Tim Russert, you can go down a long list of people who were Democratic staffers and then move seamlessly into mainstream journalism. George Stephanov was Tim Russert. It's enormously a long list. And then there's a handful of people on the right who have done it. And I'm not, I don't condemn that. And you've gone in and out of this world. a bit, Sarah. But so I think this idea that mainstream journalism wasn't liberal, you know,

and wasn't obviously liberal for a very long time is kind of ridiculous and has always been ridiculous. But I'm not sure it's worse than it's ever been. I mean, a lot of your colleagues from the Weekly Standard got picked up at mainstream outlets that wouldn't have happened 20 years ago. For decades, National Review used to complain about how the New Republic and Mother Jones and Washington Monthly were these farm teams for the New York Times and Time Magazine and Newsweek. And you never, you would never dream of hiring someone from National Review. And I remember John Podoritz, my friend, John Padourts, wrote, you know, when he interviewed at Newsweek, they kept asking him whether he could keep his ideology in check. And he was like, have you ever asked someone from the New Republic that question?

And they're like, well, no, it never occurred to us, right? And at National Review, for a while, we had a pretty great Washington office run by Eliana Johnson and before that by Bob Costa. Those people could go into mainstream journalism in a way that when mainstream journalism was much more powerful and much bigger and commanded American politics with much more authority, they couldn't. So I think part of the problem that we have with mainstream journalism today isn't that it's liberal. It's that it's so fractured that the source. smaller institutions are trying to do fan service for a much smaller slice of the pie because they just need sticky eyeballs and sticky listeners rather than back in the old days where like CBS, which had 40% of the market, could tell people what they thought they needed to hear.

David? Yeah, I think, I'm glad Jonah brought up Eliana and Bob Costa at the end. And I do think there's an interesting parallel here between media bias and campus free speech. And so hang with me for a minute. I'm going to actually link these two things. Both of these things have been a problem for a really long time, a really long time. I remember when mainstream journalists used to deny that there was some sort of mainstream media bias, which is something that they're less likely to do now.

I remember back in the days when academics would deny that there is an overwhelming progressive bias in the academy, just, which sounds insane. And what I think is interesting is in these really cultural hot button areas, media bias, like campus, progressivism and free speech. In both circumstances, the problem has eased slightly in the ways that Jonah just described in ways I described in my newsletter yesterday about there are fewer speech codes or lots of legal victories. People are objectively more free than they were 20 years ago.

The problem has eased slightly, but the awareness of the problem has so thoroughly permeated the conservative population that the awareness and the sense of urgency about it is higher in many ways than it's been in the past. And so you're actually looking at a problem that still exist, but is maybe even slightly better than it was 20 years ago, better off than it was 20 years ago, but the awareness is so much more pervasive on the right. And I think one of the reasons for that is social media is Twitter allows through the phenomenon that we've talked about before and I've talked about on Jonah's podcast of nutpicking

where you can sort of take the worst of your opponent's team, so to speak, and make it emblematic of the whole, has created an environment in which I think an awful lot of conservatives, they don't actually read the mainstream media anymore. They read what conservative critics say about the mainstream media through this process of nutpicking. And that's not to say that the mainstream media has got it all squared away. It does not. But most conservatives I talk to out in the world, it's not like they're reading the New York Times. It's not like they're reading the Washington Post. They're reading what people are saying. Conservatives are saying about the New York Times. They're reading what conservatives are saying about the Washington Post. And that's a very

different thing that gives you a different picture. And again, that's not to say they're in good shape. New York Times and Washington Post are in good shape, but it's to say that it's a different picture. And I think that's the interesting problem that's been created for a lot of journalists who are equally frustrated by a Sam Donaldson, you know, Jim Acosta potentially, that they get to be cherry picked out and used as this they are the mainstream media when in fact there's tons of reporters who are working every day to just try to tell the stories the best they can and to your point like that's um this is very broad brush painting going on okay i want to do lightning round and here it is we've talked about media issues on left versus right but within the left

who's been getting the short shrift? Last night, NBC put out general election matchups of each Democrat versus Trump, and they left Warren out of the poll. Warren had beaten Biden in Biden and Klobuchar in Iowa. She beat Biden in New Hampshire, and they just didn't include her. I think the Sanders team would say that they haven't gotten credit for the wins they've had. they're running ahead in every state and no one seems to be treating them like the definitive front rudder. Biden is still running ahead in these head-to-head matchups, et cetera, et cetera.

So lightning round, Jonah, we'll start with you. Who has the most to complain about their coverage on the Democratic side? Hmm. I don't think Warren. I mean, this is an agree. The thing you mentioned is an egregious example, but I think one of the reasons why she ran the pretty disastrous campaign that she did was that she believed her press clippings way too much, and she didn't get the kind of scrutiny that actually would have helped her earlier on calibrate

her messaging. I think you could make a case for Sanders a little bit, certainly from 2016. Everyone's pretty rough on Bloomberg right now, I got to say. And I know this is a lightning round, but I didn't get to talk about Bloomberg. All I want to say from the previous discussion is, while I think it's unlikely, conventional wisdom is that Bloomberg's going to do very badly tonight. My prediction is that if he does very well, he will be the Democratic nominee. Whoa.

That is a lightning round. Bomb. Okay. Steve, who's getting short shrift? I mean, I think Bloomberg is getting a lot of attention, but mostly because of Apo that other people have. I mean, he's new on the scene. I also think he's getting a lot of attention and crowding out. I mean, what's amazing to me is the lack of a bounce

that we saw for Klobuchar and Buttigieg. I mean, there's a national poll that saw Buttigieg losing eight, eight points, despite the fact that he's overperformed, I think, expectations in both Iowa and Pudadjid might have gotten the worst. I mean, it's, he's just been sort of drowned out by the omnipresence of Bloomberg. And I think Bloomberg, look, a lot of the people making decisions at the major networks and the major publications, New York Times and elsewhere, no Bloomberg personally from his time in New York. And that matters. They pay a lot of attention to him. For better words for him. for better words for him. I mean, I think you could probably make the argument that Sanders has not

gotten the respect that he deserves given his performance in 2016 and given the level of support that he has. But the person who benefits from that the most by far as Sanders, because his record should be more heavily scrutinized than it's been. The stuff that we're seeing about him with his apologia for the Soviet Union and, you know, Latin American dictators, that's coming almost exclusively from APO, a lot of it from the right, some of it from now from his fellow Democrats. But he has skated. I mean, where has been the coverage of the radicals that Bernie Sanders has as surrogates? I mean, he has people who have made grossly anti-Semitic comments. Again and again and again, where is that coverage?

That should be a front page above the fold story in the New York Times. If it's happened, I've missed it. What about Michael Moore? Michael Moore's doing opening routines for Bernie Sanders in Iowa. Does he remember the stuff that Michael Moore said in Fahrenheit 9-11? I mean, half of it was just bullshit. Like, it's just half made up and exaggerated. I worked so hard.

Incoherent mess. Yeah, I know. I don't curse the whole. I had so many on. But he's gotten no scrutiny for that. And I do think a lot of that, to relate this directly back to our earlier discussion, a lot of that is because if you are a journalist and you live on the center left, Bernie Sanders is a little bit left, but he doesn't seem that crazy to you,

whereas somebody like Ted Cruz on the right or even, to some extent, Marco Rubio, if you look back at the coverage. Yeah. Yeah, they look at them and say, wow, I don't know anybody who believes that stuff. Steve did even mention that Bernie Sanders in 1917 went to Russia with Trump? John Reed and shot cul-offs. All right. Y'all are the worst at lightning rounds ever. David, all the way from Atchison, Kansas.

All the way. Finish us out here. All the way from Atchison, Kansas. For who had a reason to complain for about the first six to seven months of all of this race and buildup, it was everyone not named Elizabeth Warren. She was far and away, the media darling. And who has most reason to complain right now? I'm going to say probably Amy Klobuchar. I would say Mayor Pete, but Mayor Pete had a awful lot of media love for a really long time. But Amy Klobuchar was quite a story coming out of New Hampshire. And it's just been swallowed by the greater story of Mike Bloomberg. But I would say that the real story of most of the coverage is exactly what Jonah said, was this infatuation with Elizabeth Warren that

led her to drink her own Kool-Aid and led to a lot of the stumbles that have wounded her campaign right now. You're all wrong. It is absolutely far and away Bernie Sanders, who, if I were working on that campaign, I would have sent a full blast letter to every editor-in-chief of every major newspaper and president of every network, laying out the case for why we are now the definitive front rudder, and we expect the coverage of that, the time at the debates to reflect that, and the fact that it isn't is a bias to the centrist to this mean and the biases that they have, and that if we don't see changes, we will be making that the center point of our campaign.

We'll have a government takeover of the media once I'm elected. When we seize the radios, they should have to light you up against the wall. Thanks, as always, for listening. please consider rating us on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're getting your podcast from. Not only does it help us get better, but it helps others find the podcast. Thanks, and have a great week.