The Dispatch Podcast - Coronavirus and the Return to Normalcy

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Is the Biden administration bungling their Covid-19 and vaccine messaging? As Steve put it to Jonah, “It’s awfully cynical of you to suggest that what they’re doing is withholding information because they want to pass their emergency relief bill, and you’re absolutely right to be that cynical.” Also up for discussion: why Xavier Becerra should have been the Biden nominee to have gotten the Neera Tanden treatment instead of Neera Tanden, U.S. relations with Iran and why Republicans who are not Trump loyalists cannot simply turn into Democrats. Show Notes: -The Case Against Xavier Becerra - The Dispatch’s David French -Audacity: How Barack Obama Defied His Critics and Created a Legacy That Will Prevail - Jonathan Chait -What about Joe? - Bill Kristol Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to our regular Wednesday podcast being released on a Thursday. This week was super fun because we had that interview with Mitt Romney, so we switched around our podcast. But now we're back. First up, we're going to talk about COVID messaging, then how the Biden cabinet nominations and confirmations are going, some discussion over the new administration's dealings with Iran. And finally, a take on whether third party makes sense for Republicans, maybe not but what about just joining the Democratic Party, say some? Let's dive right in.

David, COVID messaging. What are you thinking? Yeah, it needs work. It definitely needs work. over the, you know, early part of the week, um, a lot of folks erupted when Fauci, Dr. Fauci was talking about the progress of the vaccine and was indicating that even

when the vaccine is widely used, it's, uh, widely available that we're going to continue to need to avoid things like movie theaters. We're going to need to avoid indoor dining and caused a lot of anger. And, and, you know, my position is basically this. One is, this is, if you're trying to get, because there's a significant percentage of Americans who still don't want to take the vaccine

and a disturbingly and stubbornly high percentage of Americans who don't want to take the vaccine. And if you're afraid of the vaccine, which is what a lot of people are, and you're being told that, you know, a lot of the things you like, you still won't be able to have, I feel like this is exactly the wrong way to speak to people who are wavering.

And number two, I don't think that he's right about this. I mean, ultimately this isn't his call, correct? I mean, we're talking about what governors and mayors decide to do in their own jurisdictions. Fauci isn't going to make this call. And so then if he's not going to make this call, then number three, shouldn't the Biden administration be out there saying, no, no, no, no. all hands. This is what we need to be saying about the vaccine, that the vaccine is not just the ticket to health, which is number one most important. But number two, it is the ticket back to normal life. It is a way, it is the path through to normal life. It's safe, it's healthy,

and it's a path to normal life, all hands on deck. Am I wrong about this, Steve? No, I think you're right. I mean, I'm a little bit torn because on the one hand, you don't want public health officials to not say what they're thinking about these things. And if what people like Anthony Fauci think they're doing is providing, you know, some heads up that it's not the case that the second you get the shot, everybody can go back and live a normal life. On the one hand, I don't have a problem with them being that honest. It's really just a priority. It's about prioritizing how they're conveying information and what they're emphasizing at this point. The most important thing right now is getting people to get the vaccine.

It's clear. There's nothing there's anything else is a distant, distant second. So all of the messaging, particularly from the White House and the administration more broadly, has to emphasize that. And, you know, I think the, on the one here, I think the Biden administration deserves some credit for, you know, what appears to be a push to step up the production of the vaccines, incentivizing the producers of the vaccines, and generally increasing the pace, even if they've taken credit for things that they probably don't

deserve credit for, different discussion. But I'm less concerned with them tutting or, or and themselves on the back about the increased pace than I am with them using that bully pulpit to convey those messages. Get the vaccine. Here's why it's safe. Here's why, you know, if you have moral questions about life, here's why that shouldn't be a problem. Here's what you can prevent by doing this. Here's what life will look like if 95% of Americans get the vaccine. Making those arguments and making them not as sort of side arguments, but at the center of the messaging is absolutely crucially and it's, and it's mind-boggling that they're not doing it. Jonah, do you think that I am, am I being, am I interfering with, am I advocating interfering

with Fauci's intellectual freedom to use his epidemiological expertise to caution Americans appropriately? Well, we all know that you've a long history of wanting to cancel public figures for saying improper things. Look, I'm a little off the page with Steve on this. I'm more on your page on this. I think the way Fauci's handled this has been objectively bad at this point in the last 10 days or so. And I think that, and I talked about this for a bit with our our friend and so much more, Chris Starwalt on my podcast yesterday, but earlier this week. But, you know, the way Israel is selling the vaccine and his messaging the vaccine is take the vaccine, and that way you get to go back to life as normal.

And that is a much better message. Whatever caveats Fauci has about, whether that's the more accurate message or not, it is just a much better message politically. it is a much better message to get people to take the vaccine. Moreover, at some point, if I'm vaccinated and my loved ones are vaccinated, and the only people left in any large statistically significant number are people who refuse to get the vaccine, my attitude is going to be pretty close to screw you if you expect me not to eat out anymore

and not to go to movie theaters anymore because you refuse to take a vaccine. And the messaging alone on saying, after you've gotten both shots, can you then hug your grandkids? And for Fauci and those guys, the signal that you can't or maybe no is just a terrible bad message. And I suspect that some of this,

I mean, take Fauci out for a second because I don't want to impugn his motives. I think some of this has to do with just trying to get this COVID relief bill passed. And this is a classic Obama administration, don't let a crisis go to waste kind of thing. And if they could get it passed in toto tomorrow, they might all of a sudden take a different,

tone about a lot of this stuff. But I think one of the things that Fauci and a lot of these people do not appreciate is that what public health officials say now seems to have much more force of law and power behind it than it normally would. And the fact is, is that the CDC and the NIH and all these people, they say all sorts of stuff all the time. And like good Americans and the metric system, we ignore that crap. But we're in the middle of a pandemic, and so we pay attention to it, and we think that somehow it will have binding force going forward, because it feels like it has binding force now. And I just think that the second people start getting vaccinated, the idea that you're going to be listening as attentively to what Anthony Fauci or anybody else

says about how you should live your life, that is going to hit, that is going to have a rapidly decaying half-life for large swaths of the American people. And frankly, it should. But this administration wants it both ways. They want to claim that they're going. I just wrote my column about this. They want to claim that we're going back to normal, but they define going back to normal almost entirely as not being like Donald Trump.

And the problem is that for most normal Americans, whether they love hate or love Trump or hated Trump, the way we think about back to normal now is getting past the pandemic. And they are just painfully ill-prepared to answer those questions, honestly. they finally got Biden to answer it sort of in that CNN town hall. And it was like pulling a tooth to get him to say by Christmas, maybe. And I just think that's bad politics. It's bad messaging. And I don't think it is true.

Well, I do think, can I let me, can I just follow up on Jones point? I mean, it's, it's awfully cynical of you to suggest that what they're doing is withholding information because they want to pass their emergency relief bill. And you're absolutely right to be that cynical. I mean, I do think that that's part of it. look, it would be a huge conflict if they did what I think they should do, which is make this, you know, this, this, this vaccine messaging, the center of everything they're saying on COVID. And at the same time, be going to Congress and saying, we absolutely need

$1.9 trillion, otherwise we won't get past this. Like, those are not just intention. They are a direct contradiction with one another. And the reality is they want them both. And And I think they want to accelerate the process on the COVID relief bill. They've made very clear that they're not interested in much Republican input on it. You've now had the moderate Republicans who went to the administration, I think, in good faith, to have discussions about just how big that ought to be and what needs to be in it. Taking a step back, you've had Mitt Romney blast the COVID relief package and the pages of the Wall Street Journal, saying, in effect, this is a series of boondoggles.

This is a pretty grim start for the Biden administration on this stuff when everything was teed up for this to be a massive, massive win. Now, maybe it will be. Maybe it's the case that people are vaccinated and everybody's going to outdoor barbecues and life gets back to normal in July and we don't remember much of this process stuff. But I think in Washington, the number of Republicans who were willing to work with the Biden administration in good faith, I think is diminished in the last six weeks. I disagree in the sense that I don't think it's even intention to have a coherent messaging hole that includes the vaccine is our number one priority. Folks, here's how you're going to get it. Here's when you're going to get it. We can't give you an exact date. We can't

tell you exactly where. But here's how it's going. Here's all the statistics. By the way, The first shot, painless. That second shot, you should plan to stay home from work or to, you know, work from bed for about 24 hours afterwards. We're going to just saturate you on the Today Show, on Good Morning America, on the view with information about the vaccine, just constantly, as much as we possibly have. At the same time, part of returning to normal, it wasn't just public health that was affected by this. It was the economy as well. And that's why we're pushing Congress to pass this emergency relief bill so that we can get the economy back to where it was as well. Two things at once, folks. We got to get every person vaccinated and

we got to get the economy back up and running. That's how we're going to return to normal. And this is all my administration's doing. We literally care about nothing else right now. But to Jonah's point... And that's why we just signed the transgender executive order. But to Jonah's point, they aren't doing... that. They're not even close. And I think your explanation is interesting that it's because they actually define return to normalcy different. They've defined it as a return to normalcy vis-a-vis the last administration instead of vis-a-vis my kids aren't in school. But I'm not, they're not stupid. So I guess I'm confused because that would be pretty dumb to me.

And I, but I cannot come up with an explanation for why the messaging at the the White House press briefing is getting bogged down in these other areas. Why there's not, you know, why Anthony Fauci isn't standing there doing 10 minutes at the podium every other day or anyone else for that matter. Like have, it should just be public health expert economist, public health expert economist. You want to make the minimum wage part of this discussion. I think you could. You know, there's other topics that you could bring in. But this is weird. They seem caught really flat. footed. And I'm surprised because they had, they, they were pretty confident they were going to

win. Their transition team was working since the summer all through the fall. They were able to hit the ground running. It's not like the pandemic snuck up on them. The vaccines had already been rolling out in December. Huh? Why? Why you so bad at this? I have a parcel explanation on this. And this is what I wrote my column about is, I think they have three normalcies at work. And you can only pick two. One is the back to normal as defined as not being Trump anymore, which the left likes, independence like, country seems to be good with. The other one is the back to normal of no more pandemic. And the other, the third one, which is the real problem, is the back to normal of the status quo ante of the Obama administration, which sees the executive branch as the main

driver of social change in this country. They now view the Obama administration as as more of a missed opportunity not to go even bigger. And you can't have the back to normal of the pandemic and back to normal of not Trump and back to normal of using the executive branch to swing for the fences Obama style or Obama Plus without running into political problems. And the expectations of the base, it's sort of like the base said, we will hold our nose and vote for Biden on this electoral theory of back to normal, being good to get them elected because the country is sick of Trump. But once in there, we want the policies that we were talking about in the primaries, where it was a competition, it was the woke-a-thon, you know, primary until South Carolina,

and that's what they're looking for. And I think those are the things in tension, is you got a lot of Obama retreads in there, looking to make up for lost time, looking to please the MSNBC and Blue Checkmark crowd on Twitter, and they think they can use this crisis as an opportunity to do that when that's not what the average voter is looking for from them. Also, can I just make a plug for my constant call for competence? It's hard. It's hard to do big, complicated things. It's hard. And dealing with a pandemic is a big complicated thing. For one thing, you're also not in addition to trying to distribute massive amounts of vaccine, get consistent health messaging out on a virus that's evolving and changing as

we speak, you're also herding 50 cats of various sizes, which are the, the governors and the governments of each one of the 50 states, who have the primary legal authority over the conditions under which people live in this pandemic. This is hard stuff. And, you know, Sarah, as you're saying, they're not even getting some of the easier part of the hard stuff right, some of that consistent messaging. But this is a problem we have been having for a long time in this country,

is this extreme difficulty in this very large, very complicated country that we're seeing with the government, accomplishing really anything terribly effectively with some notable exceptions, for example, that, you know, incentivizing the creation of the vaccine, but when you're talking about the creation of the vaccine, that's a few people doing work when it comes to distributing the vaccine. A few highly, overly competent people, let's acknowledge,

like miracle worker people. And we should all know their names, and the fact that we don't says more about our society. Yeah, I mean, they're the Neil Armstrong of vaccine-making. and, like, we should have statues to them everywhere. The tip of our spear is really still very, very sharp. It's the rest of the government mass that has been having persistent problems.

One might say that that is one of the foundational beliefs of conservatism, David. One might. Next topic. The Biden administration has now confirmed nine cabinet-level posts, almost all with a very bipartisan vote except for Homeland Security Secretary that was not totally party line but close to it. But we're running into some problems now. You have on the one hand, Nira Tandon, who was nominated for the Office of Management and Budget OMB. And you have

Javier Bacera, who is nominated for Health and Human Services. They're running into different Republican buzz saws. And I think that's what fascinates me about this topic. So Joe Manchin came out and said that he would not support Niro Tannen's nomination, which is you know, the worst possible thing you can hear as a Biden nominee

right now because that means you now have to get a Republican or you've got to convince Joe Manchin. And Kristen Sinema hasn't even said how she's going to vote. It's just bad news bears. Then this morning they announced that they had

canceled the hearing that they were holding today. The White House has said that they are not yet pulling her nomination, but I mean, it's, you know, it's not looking good. Now, the complaints about Tandon really are about her Twitter feed, frankly. She had a very partisan Twitter feed where she attacked individual senators. And as it turns out, words have consequences and tweets have consequences, and the senators don't like being attacked by name, by near a tandem. So then some, but maybe many on the left, said that the reason was because, and really tagging this directly at Joe Manchin's feet, is because she's a woman of color, that if she had been a white man, this wouldn't have happened. And the way you know that is that all of these white men

through time Joe Manchin has voted for or some of these other folks have voted for, but they're not willing to vote for near a tandem. And then the other side points out, yes, but they didn't attack individual senators. They were just partisan hacks. Um, so then you have Javier Bacera. Javier Bacera has not run a, you know, mean girl Twitter feed, I will fully acknowledge, but he has been probably one of the most partisan government officials in the country. He was the Attorney General of California. He sued the Trump administration, I believe just over a hundred times. Most of the nationwide injunctions that we talked about originated with a lawsuit from Javier Becerra. He was in the extreme, even for California Democrats in terms of some of his

beliefs. And I mean, again, just a wildly partisan person, a Democrat loyalist through and through. And his nomination is running into problems, but it feels more substantive than the Tandon issues. It feels like, you know, well, gosh, he's been nominated for health and human services, but he actually doesn't have a lot of health care experience. He was in Congress for 10 years. But then he was Attorney General, and we're just not sure he's the right guy for the job. Plus, he is, you know, he is in favor of partial birth abortion. That's, that's, that's for me to vote for. I'm trying to marry these two with anything except that senators have too thin a skin, and it shouldn't matter. Either someone is too partisan or they're not. Whether they

tweeted about you personally should not matter. And two, this congressional privilege that cabinet members get, where if you served in the House from 1993 to 2017, you're kind of immune and they, because they know you. And they think of you as someone they have things in common with. And so you get a pass on some of this. I'm not saying that Joe Manchin is a racist or a sexist. I think that's politically stupid to say that to Joe Manchin, but also not accurate. But I think you have to come up with a reason that these two nominations are being treated

so differently. Jonah, why are they being treated differently? So I largely agree with you. But I have an explanation, whether it's persuasive or not, we'll just let history decide. And again, I talked about this a bit with Starwalt as well on my podcast, and one listener responded about how Chris was the pineapple and the go-go juice, which I still don't know what that means. But I think, you know, David was just talking about how people aren't, you know, the competence is

difficult. And I think that this is, and we before that, we were talking about on the Romney podcast about the dominance of the sort of the Matt Gates, Twitter, virtual, own the libs kind of politics taking over Congress. I think that this is an illustrative point on both things. The reason, I don't think it's racist and sexist to oppose Neurotan, I think that is something that the losing side is telling themselves to console themselves with and to message their failure. But near Tandon is like, I mean, the best argument against her being at OMB is that she has very few qualifications to be at OMB, but that actually matters very little because basically the OMB director just does what the president wants anyway. Now, Chris makes

the point, which I think is a good one. The OMB director is also supposed to negotiate with members of Congress to figure out budget stuff, and maybe she's not ideal for that. But that's up to Joe Biden. I agree entirely. I agree entirely. I think what it says about our dysfunctional politics is that if you piss people off on Twitter and you are a Twitter phenomenon, that is given more substance than actual substance.

And I think it was really interesting in the last week or so. We've all of a sudden seen a bunch of serious conservatives. particularly pro-life conservatives, saying, holy crap, why have we wasted all of this time talking about near a Tandon when Javier Bacera is coming down the pike? And Javier Bucera is the guy who beat the crap out of a bunch of nuns. And it shows you the perils of this form of politics on the right, where serious conservatives get distracted by this BS Twitter Beltway stuff,

because that's where all the shiny things are. And it turned out that it gave cover for a very long time to someone who should be more controversial, who is more inimical to conservative interests, particularly pro-life interests, and who I would argue in some ways is a nastier figure substantively than Neeratandan is. I mean, Neartanin has sharp elbowed on Twitter, you know, who am I to throw the first stone in such regards? But Becerra's got kind of a vicious partisan, deeply ideological streak to. him and a record to him and conservatives should have taken dead aim at him from the beginning and then oh by the way if we can take out tandon too okay i guess that's nice it's always nice to have gravy with the meal but uh it shows you how this the distorting effects of own the libs culture screws up the prioritization of important ideological contexts david david oh jonah you said it so well um this is so backwards

i mean this is so backwards i mean in fact there's an actual case aside from the Twitter feed, that in many ways near a Tandon is kind of what you, the best you could hope for out of a Democratic OMB, because this is a person who is loathed on the left. Yes, the fact that Bernie Sanders hates her might have endeared her to some Republicans, but it's like they didn't notice. But he hates her for the same reasons that Republicans are opposing her, right? Because she's a sharp elbow thrower. I don't think it's as much on ideological or philosophical.

I mean, she's a Clinton person, so is theoretically more centrist than Bernie is, but everybody is more centrist than Bernie is. Well, but she is absolutely not, you know, she is not the kind of nominee that if your argument about Biden is that voting for Biden is really voting for Bernie and the squad. Like that's Bernie and the squad don't nominate near Tandon. I mean, she in these Democratic Party civil wars, she has been a, a frontline warrior. online against the far left the Democratic Party. So if you're concerned is the Biden administration

being far left, it's not near a Tandon, it's Javier Bicera. And I wrote about at length the case against Javier Bicera, this was, and it just gets, you know, it got lost because it was in the middle

of the election contest and everything. But the case against him, look, let's just be specific. He defended a California law that forced pro-livening pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for free and low-cost abortions. That was a constitutional violation.

He went to the Supreme Court. He lost. He has committed another constitutional violation. He has defied the Trump administration, HHS, Office of Civil Rights, to force churches to provide abortion coverage. I'll say that again. To force churches to provide abortion coverage. And I haven't even gotten to the Little Sisters of the Poor and his incredible,

aggressive effort to coerce them into violating their consciences. These are actual substantive constitutional violations that have been zealously committed by Javier Bacera. And look, I get it. Biden is going to appoint a pro-choice cabinet member. But it's one thing to be pro-choice. It's another thing entirely to force churches to cover abortions, to force pro-life pregnancy centers to advertise for abortion. And then I haven't even gotten to this incredible selective prosecution of pro-life activists who did undercover work against Planned Parenthood. I mean, the record here is substantive and it's voluminous

and it's so much more serious than near Tandon's sharp elbows. Steve, am I, I wonder whether I am too quick to dismiss the sexism issue because of the comfort issue that I was talking about. Maybe it's not just that Bcerra was in Congress for, you know, 15 years. Maybe there's a comfort issue as well because he's a guy. And so when he does really partisan ideological stuff, they see themselves more in that and less so in near a tandon. Maybe it's sort of that old, oh, we're going to get an explicit rating.

But, you know, she's a bitch. You know, it's the Hillary Clinton problem. or is gender have nothing to do with it? What in your mind is the best evidence that this has anything to do with race or sex? What's the best argument you've heard from any of her defenders? That other people have gone through, like Rick Grinnell, Joe Manchin, I think, voted for. Okay. But that's not evidence that this has anything to do with race.

or sex about near a tandon. It's evidence that West Virginia went for Donald Trump. I like 40 points. I mean, there are so many other reasons to explain that. I mean, you know, having been following this debate pretty carefully, I keep waiting for somebody to offer evidence that that's the case. It feels to me instead like a smear of people who might be voting for a wide variety of reasons.

and I think the people who are making that smear ought to stand up and offer some evidence to support it. It's just too easy otherwise. So if Joe Manchin votes for Becerra and doesn't vote for Tandon, what do you think are the reasons? There could be 50 reasons that he might do that. He might have objections to the way that Tandon

has thrown sharp elbows on Twitter thinking that she would be bad for the kind of comedy that he, has made one of his top priorities in the new administration saying, I want to be able to work with Republicans, I want to be able to talk to Republicans, I'd like to be able to work on a bipartisan basis with Republicans, and she makes that much, much more difficult. I mean, Manchin hasn't exactly been secretive about the fact that that's a top priority for him.

But then how do you explain Bacera, someone who's more ideological, further to the left, less likely to be able to work with Republicans? Tandon was the one who was, you know, Mrs. Electability, and threw the progressive left onto the bus every chance she got. Sure. I mean, on the one hand, the answer is that's what Republicans are telling him, right? So Joe Manchin

has a place to go with that argument. I mean, I think that the arguments against Bessarav and David, when did you write about this? This was in November, right? And we had... December, December 11th. Yeah, we had... I'd say nobody should be surprised

that these two nominations are the two most contentious. And while I agree that Republicans haven't taken the time to offer the kind of point-by-point case against Javier Bucera that they ought to have to this point, I don't think it's necessarily reasonable to then conclude that that's because they don't like people like near a tandem.

I guess I just would like evidence to support that claim rather than have the people who are making it just kind of lob it out there and hope that it sticks. Those are serious charges, right? I mean, that's not a small thing. I think that my frustration is this idea, to Jonah's point, that Twitter is now more important than policy. And Javier Pesera's policies are so much more clear than Neurotandans, and yet she is

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good clarity. I mean, it's always good to have clarity, but this is not the direction. I think many people on the center, right, we're hoping the administration would go. You remember back in in the Obama administration, in order to have negotiations about the Iran nuclear deal, the administration was explicit and public and almost ostentatious about its approach to those conversations. They were, quote, unquote, decoupling the nuclear talks from everything else about Iran. So, yes, Iran was supporting terrorists. Yes, Iran was responsible for killing Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, Iran is destabilizing the region. Yes, Iran is fighting proxy wars. Iran is a troublemaker and a rogue state for all of these reasons, but we are going to

talk to them. We're going to basically ignore the nature of the regime in order to have these talks about nuclear policy, nuclear development, nuclear weapons development. I thought it was a foolish strategy at the time. I don't think you can ever divorce the nature of the regime from these kind of conversations. But that's what the Obama administration did. Coming into a Biden administration. Joe Biden made very clear that he wanted to reenter the nuclear talks. Fair enough. He campaigned on it, and he said it, he believes it. But there was a sense, in part because there are some more hawkish people around Joe Biden, that he might take a more realistic view of Iran as he entered these talks and use the fact, for instance, that Iran is doing these

things, either is leverage in the talks or as a way to further punish Iran for all of its bad behavior. We had an attack in Erbil two weeks ago that U.S. officials are privately attributing to an Iranian-backed militia. U.S. officials have made clear going back in the Trump administration and currently in the Biden administration that they will hold Iran-backed militias responsible in much the same way they would hold Iran responsible for these kinds of attacks. You've had Jake Sullivan, President Biden's National Security Advisor on the Sunday shows, talk about the utter outrage of Iran detaining, capturing and detaining U.S. citizens or dual citizens, basically for reasons of using them as negotiating chips or leverage. You've had subsequent attacks. It was an attack,

a rocket attack in the green zone in the past couple days that officials again believe is likely the handiwork of Iranian-back militias. There has not been an actual attribution on that or on the Erbil attack, at least publicly. And then you had the Biden administration say, let's sit down. We want to have these conversations. We want to talk. Let's get back to the table to talk about how we can find a way back to the nuclear deal. There have also been, I should say, as an aside, there's been additional evidence that Iran was developing nuclear weapons going back 20 years in ways that they didn't declare and that they are further in breach of the terms of the agreement now.

Is this, David, evidence that the Obama administration is just going to return to not only the deal itself, but the way of looking at Iran that prevailed during the Obama administration? I, okay, I'm going to be slightly optimistic and say I don't think so, but I do have some, at least a little bit of concrete reasons for that slight optimism. One is, you know, the Biden administration has said repeatedly

they're not going to do sanctions relief until Iran stops enriching uranium. So this is not something where, the Biden administration seems to be coming in and sort of handing out goodies unconditionally as a misguided gesture of goodwill. I also think that if you're going to, if you're going to define a thorny and difficult foreign policy issue and problem, this would be it. This would be it. Because there's so many, there's a couple of things going on here. I think from the Iranian perspective also, Is it, have they learned in essence, and this is something that I don't think we have fully absorbed in our own strategic thinking, have they basically learned that there is no such thing as an actual deal to be made with the United States of America, that whatever, that any deal lasts only so long as the current administration, and that if there is a change in administration, there's going to be a change in the deal.

unilaterally. And so that makes me wonder just from their strategic perspective, don't they just go for the bomb? Now, I mean, do they maybe here and there enter into some sort of interim agreement or wave their hands like they're going into an agreement? But if they don't believe there is a deal to be made here, it seems to me that they continue to do what they were trying to do during the Trump administration, which seems to be trying to accelerate their capacity to achieve a nuclear to achieve, you know, nuclear weapons capability in spite of sanctions. And then if the Biden administration comes in here, what if I'm in Iranian, if I'm in the inner sanctum in Iran, I'm saying, well, maybe we can grab something from a Democratic administration. We couldn't grab from a

Republican administration, but how do we know that we can make a deal with the United States of America? And so at that point, all of the incentives align for Iran to grab whatever it can from whatever administration, but just go ahead and pursue its own self-interest, period, end of discussion. And we're in a box at that point, because the reality is we don't want Iran to have a bomb, and the American people do not want a military confrontation with Iran. that's where we are. Steve, I have a question for you on this topic. So the Department of Justice usually has a norm that it doesn't just flip-flop court

positions based on a change in administration. There are some exceptions to that over time, but few and far between until recently. And now a new administration comes in and the Department of Justice's positions in court and not just, you know, are we for this person or against them. But I mean how they read the Constitution, legal stuff, swings wildly in the last four years and certainly when the Trump administration came in. I think that is bad, even if you like one of the two swings. As in you liked when the Trump administration flipped on some of these.

I still think that overall you'll be happier if the Department of Justice has a norm that it doesn't do that to flip back when the Biden administration comes in. I wonder whether you feel that way from a foreign policy standpoint that actually the original sin here was getting out of the Iran deal when the Trump administration came in and that it would be better for U.S. foreign policy if we maintained that norm of not wildly changing our foreign policy based on the politics of the current administration.

I'm not sure that the norm prevails as much in foreign policy as it might in a legal context, because certainly you saw the Obama administration reverse a number of steps that the Bush administration had done with respect to Iraq and with respect to troop levels and what have you. I guess the question is where you place your emphasis. Is the emphasis on continuity or is the emphasis on the substance of the deal? And I think it would, I think it would be foolish for an administration like Donald Trump's administration. If the candidate, if his advisors believed that the 2015 version of the Iran nuclear deal was ill-conceived that the cash giveaways to Iran were not only potentially harmful to U.S. interests, but directly contrary to U.S.

interests and that the deal itself strengthened the hand of the Iranian regime and put it, to David's point, on a path to nuclear breakout capability, just a slower path, while giving them, I would say giving them money, defenders of the deal would say giving them access to their own money. I think if you think that there's a deal in place that jeopardizes U.S. national security, you have not only a right but an obligation to step away from it. I think the question I have picking up on both your question on the concerns that David raises is if you look at these early moves by the Biden administration, and David's right that they haven't yet, I would say, yet preemptively offered to lift the sanctions and have

indicated that they might not be willing to. They have preemptively lifted some of the restrictions on travel for U.S. diplomats inside the United States. And otherwise sent signals, I think, that we don't much care if they're attacking our positions in Iraq, that we don't, we're not going to raise these things and that those kinds of provocative and aggressive measures won't derail the talks. Doesn't that just send a message to Iran that they can get away with pretty much anything? Because the administration is so determined. to get back into the deal at almost any cost, Sarah? I think we move on to Jonas' topic.

Actually, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me, let me in defense of Sarah's position, yeah, uh, very quickly. I think Sarah, it's weird because I was going to make a very similar point the one Sarah made. I just wasn't going to use the justice department as my prism for it. Um, you know, one of the thing, one of the things that really annoys me about, admittedly, it's low on the list of all the things that went bad in the Bush era, but

the phrase regime change went from, you know, the word regime went from describing the system of government, the enduring continuity of government of a nation, and came to define just simply an administration.

Right? So people would run, you know, John Kerry ran on regime change in America, which would mean overthrowing the constitutional order, not voting out George W. Bush, right? And I think Sarah makes a good point about the problem where if you have, and it ties into the stuff that Mitt Romney was saying to Sarah

in that interview this week, where he said, if you just, if you got rid of his argument was if you got rid of the filibuster, basically you'd have government policy zigzagging between, as he put it, between the two guardrails going all one way and then all another way,

whatever one party gets into power. And I think he makes an interesting point about that. We get debated another day. It's a similar dilemma here where I think Steve is right that the merits of getting out of the Iran deal

were sufficient to getting out of the Iran deal. But on the Paris Accord thing, which actually was a fairly meaningless accord, contrary to both Fox News and MSMB, you see, there is an interest in a certain continuity of principle and policy when it comes to foreign policy that requires, you know, regards administrations to hold their nose a little

bit and defend what the previous administration did. And one of the reasons why we don't talk about this very much is because it turned out that historically there was a lot more continuity in American foreign policy than partisans like to admit. And I think, though, that this is an example of how that's going out the window, that the problem with foreign policy is now mirroring the problem of domestic policy, and that it is this zigzagging between the guardrails. And the added dynamic here, I think, and you and David follow the Iran stuff far better, far more closely than I do. But as a general proposition, it seems to me that as I was talking about earlier, a big chunk of the Biden administration simply wants to pick up where the Obama administration left off. It's almost as if, remember when Jonathan Chate's book came out about how Barack Obama was the most consequential president in, you know, decades.

and he was, the whole premise of the book was assuming Hillary was going to win, who would then be able to codify the executive orders of the Obama administration and make them permanent in some way. And without being able to do that, Trump basically dismantled huge swaths of the Obama legacy. And I think there are a lot of people in the Biden administration, starting with Biden himself, who want to protect and restore Obama's place in history by restoring all the stuff. And the Iran deal is at the top of that list. And the problem is, is that you can't do foreign policy while looking in a rearview mirror that starts four years ago. And the facts on the ground on the Middle East have changed dramatically, the relationship vis-a-vis Israel, Saudi Arabia's

reforms, whatever you want to say of them. Things have changed dramatically on the ground and saying, oh, we're just going to pick up where the Obama administration left off is, like the mayor of Hiroshima saying, oh, we're just going to pick up where we were prior to, you know, the start of World War II. There's just a lot of, there's just a different landscape all over the place. Yeah, just one quick, quick point in closing. I mean, part of the reason I think we got as abused on the Iran deal as we did in the original iteration was because the Obama administration made very clear that this was the top priority of the second term. That was it, period. Ben Rhodes said this. He announced it and said, in effect, if Obamacare was the legacy on domestic policy of the

first term, the Iran deal is going to be the legacy of the second term. You go into that with that as a public declaration and then sit down with Iran, they know that you're willing to do virtually anything to have the deal and that the deal itself became more important than what the deal was meant to accomplish. And my concern now is particularly in the aftermath, I mean, Look, we don't know. We don't have publicly reportable intelligence about exactly what regime figures knew about these attacks that were reportedly conducted by Iranian proxies. But whether or not they had foreknowledge or they ordered them or in any way directed them, we know that they're paying careful attention to our reaction to them. And they see attacks on U.S. facilities, U.S. interests, allied interests, and then see on the front page of the New York Times sort of on background attribution to Iran and Iranback militias. And then a shrug of the shoulders. The signal to the Iranian regime is we are so, we are equally determined to restore the deal today.

as we were to create the deal in the first place. And it kills U.S.S. leverage and, you know, not to mention all of the bad messages it sends to people who want to do us harm. All right, Jonah, last topic for your remnants. The choices have often been phrased as try to reform the Republican Party, burn down the Republican Party, start a third party, but is there another way? Uh, no. No, let's stipulate particularly for Steve.

I mean, he can, he can, we're running short on time, but I, uh, I'm friends with Bill Crystal. I like Bill Crystal. Um, and Steve has Beryl history of Bill Crystal and David, you know, he was almost, Bill Crystal was almost David's Mark Hannah in the 2016 presidential race. So just stipulate all that. This is said with love and all of. rest. Bill is floated, and then there have been some other pieces over at the bulwark floating

this idea that basically anti-Trump Republicans become sort of the moderate Republican wing of the Democratic Party. And I want to write more about this in the G-file. I don't know today or Friday, but I think there's just some deep, deep flaws in it. And I suspect that one of the things that is driving this idea is the hope of sort of replaying the role of neo-conservatives in the 1970s who, you know, moved into the Republican Party from the Democratic Party. And I think one of the problems with that is that the neo-consertors like Gene Kirkpatrick and William Bennett and those kind of people who moved into the party in the 1970s, they were single issue foreign policy people. There is no single issue here that provides some coherence

to these people. But the broader objection that I have, and I'm curious what you guys think, is, and I realize I'm increasingly alone, maybe not in this conversation, but in the broader world out there, of my frustration with people who just seamlessly take their partisan activist hat and they're, from one of a better word, intellectual hat, and interchange them as if there's no conflict between the two of them. And in Bill's defense, Bill Crystal has always done that. He's always been a party player and an intellectual. But the job of an intellectual is, not to be grandiose about it, is to tell the truth and provide analysis. And you can say, I hope this happens or I hope that

happens, but not to be a mobilizer of partisan forces and play popular front kind of politics. And I don't know who this, who these calls to Republicans to move into the Democratic Party are aimed at. If they're aimed at me, they fall completely flat because I can, I just don't care about those kinds of tactical considerations. But moreover, as a matter of analysis, I just don't think it would work. I don't think, and I think for it to work, you would have to do precisely what my criticism of the pro-Trump people is, is jettison all of your philosophical commitments in order to be a good team player.

And that's what the pro-Trump people did, and I'm angry at them for doing that in the Republican Party. But if Bill Crystal, who's been a pro-lifer and a champion of constitutionalism for all his life, says, in the effort of being relevant in the Democratic Party, I get to give up on that stuff, that's just as bad. And that's my biggest problem with it. And I'll go to you first, David.

you know, am I, am I overreading this? No, I don't, I don't think so. I mean, look, I, the way I look at it is, and I'm about to pay tribute to some of our libertarian listeners, I kind of draw some inspiration from the libertarian approach to American politics, because they've never had a party. I mean, they have the libertarian party, but they've never had. And they do party. and yeah there's long been a confusion between libertarian and libertine but that's a that's a longer

conversation but there is they've never had a party but they've always punched above their weight and influence and one of the ways that they've punched above their weight and influence is if you they will work with you if you will work with them regardless of the party affiliation and so if there are particular ideas that you believe are good and right and true and you want to see those ideas advanced in American society, I think one of the things a lot of conservatives are learning is that you don't really have a party right now. But the fact that you don't really have a party doesn't mean your ideas aren't good. And they're not worth advancing. It just means that you're going to have to get creative and how you're going to advance

them. And I take some inspiration from some of the stuff that's happened at state levels, for example, you know, one of the more interesting, and this actually radiated up to one of the few functional moments in Congress and the administration, and that was prison reform. Prison reform is an idea that has long been advocated on the left. Libertarians have taken up the banner, and so have a lot of conservatives, and why did it happen? It happened because people stuck to an idea and were willing to work with anyone who was willing to work with them on that idea. And I really think, at least for now anyway, for conservatives who sort of have a more traditional limited government, constitutional conservative view of the role of the state,

that's going to be your path. It's going to be a path centered around ideas and not party affiliation and party affiliation is far less important than does somebody agree with you on an idea. And I think there's some hope there to actually get some stuff done. And I, and I think, And one of the reasons why I think there's hope is because I've seen it work at other levels of government. So at the political level, though, Jonah, you have to sort of divide this into two. And I think you're only talking about one part. You just haven't labeled it. You are talking about the intellectual elites within a party who provide the policies for candidates, run campaigns, that sort of actual party.

operative level. But of course, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Republicans are going to vote for the Democratic Party. And so I wonder whether, I don't think that's what Crystal was referring to, but I wonder whether as more and more of those Republicans just naturally, they don't necessarily even change their party registration, though some may. But when given a choice between two candidates, they're going to end up now voting for the Democratic candidate. And they had previously voted for, you know, maybe Gore, Bush, Obama, Romney, Romney, you know, like they were more likely to vote Republican, and now they're just more likely to vote Democrat. If that is the case and the Democratic Party ends up having a constituency of former Republicans,

whether they like it or not, I guess my pushback to you would be, well, then shouldn't there be someone speaking for those people within the party? mechanism as a whole. Yes. No, look, I mean, look, and part of my problems is a way that Bill, in very much Bill Kristolian fashion, floated this argument as just a bunch of, I'm just asking questions without any programmatic substance about, like, how this would happen or how it would work. But, yeah, I very much want more Joe Mansions in the Democratic Party. And I would very much want more, you know, if prior to the current troubles, you know, I've been arguing for a long time that you want more rhino-squish, you know, East Coast Republicans in the Republican Party

if that's what is necessary to be the majority party. And one of the points of the conservative movement, which has been completely friggin forgotten by a lot of conservatives, including a lot probably who never knew it, is that the point of the conservative takeover of the Republican Party wasn't just to make the Republican Party conservative. It was to move the center of gravity of American politics rightward. And the problem is that the dogs were so successful in catching the car, it turns out they didn't know how to drive. And they didn't know how to bring over people from the center to the Republican Party.

And I think that if you can have, if the idea is to mount a movement to have Republicans go into the Democratic Party, to pull the Democratic Party rightward, great show me how that's going to work but you know i had a very hard time believing that there are large numbers of republicans out there because as you put it people are going to have this choice between voting republican and democrat and they're going to vote democrat now and before they voted republican a lot of them are just not going to vote period or but what they're really not going to do is start calling themselves democrats and part of my frustration as of that sort of intellectual elite you were talking about, is that for four years, I had to put

up with people, so did Steve, so did, so David, so you had a slightly different circumstance, of people telling me that because I was against Trump, that meant I was a liberal all along. And now the solution to this problem is to say, we are still so anti-Trump that even though he is no longer president, the solution is to actually join the Biden administration. The Biden, the administration of Javier Bissera, and support those policies out of popular front partisan loyalty to own the Trumpists. And that's just something I am personally not interested in at all. But, I mean, Steve, I know you were passionate about owning the Trumpists. So, I mean, is that the way you're going to go? Yeah, I mean, look, I like Jonah, I'm long, long time friends

with Bill Crystal. He was a great mentor to me, did things out of public eyesight. I will forever be grateful to him for, and I think he's exceptionally handsome. But I'm on Team Jonah here. And for me, it was easy for me to understand why people who, you know, have views that Bill has would want to ally with Joe Biden if you saw Donald Trump as sort of a threat to the republic. You know, you make a short-term alliance because you think this guy's bad and you want I'm out. Okay, now he's out. And it seems to me the fight then reverts back to inside the Republican Party rather than inside the Democratic Party. But the thing that I have the biggest difficulty getting beyond is, are the kinds of policies that we just spent 15 minutes talking about

with respect to Iran. You know, I mean, the Iran deal was bad. I thought the Iran deal was bad in 2015. You know, a lot of conservatives thought the Iran deal was bad in 2015. You know, Allying with Joe Biden trying to advance his agenda means, you know, I suppose you could make an argument that it means improving things like the Iran deal and giving advice if you're listened to. But ultimately, I think it means acquiescing in those kinds of policies. And you look at what the $1.9 trillion in COVID relief spending slash stimulus, that's problematic to me. You look at what we have all been told over the past week is coming down the pike with a

multi-trillion dollar infrastructure spending bill. These are the kind of things that, you know, honestly, first drew me to these debates and to journalism and to the conservative movement was to oppose stuff like this. So it doesn't make a ton of sense for me to think that you just throw in with these guys. Now, as Jonah said, Bill, you know, he floated there. this in a short and sort of puckish piece. And what imagines he'll develop these ideas. And I'll be very interested to see where he takes him.

And with that, today when we are taping this is Wednesday the 24th, which in my household means only one thing. McDonald's is rolling out its new crispy chicken sandwich. My update, Steve, my boss, will be coming. shortly. The rest of my day will be spent on chicken sandwiches. Thank you all for listening. We will see you again next week. And of course, look out for my chicken sandwich reviews update. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime.

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