The Dispatch Podcast - Incompetence

Episode Date: February 5, 2020

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David take on what went wrong in Iowa and the future of the caucus, the president's third State of the Union address, and the end of the impeachment trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to The Dispatch Podcast. I'm Sarah Isger, your host, joined by Jonah Goldberg, David French, and Steve Hayes. Thank you for listening and subscribe at Apple, Google Play, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast or The Dispatch.com. Today, we've got the Iowa caucus debacle, state of the union, and the final vote on impeachment. Let's dive right in Jonah, Iowa. We are two days out of the Iowa caucuses. It is Wednesday afternoon, as we are sitting here in this room, and we have only 71% of the precincts reporting. I mean, this is a silly question to ask in some ways,

but how big of a disaster is this? I think it's such a big disaster. You could almost see it from space. It's, first of all, I am delighted, and I'm sure we'll get to this, but I am delighted that this is the death knell of the Iowa caucuses because I've been running for 20 years of the Iowa caucuses suck and are big piles of sucky-suckiness. Oh, Jonah, you're taunting me.

Triggered. And when people say this is what democracy looks like, it's not actually what democracy looks like, as I wrote in our little back-and-forth thing. Because democracy is actually about the secret ballot and being able to vote your conscience. It's not about a whole bunch of extremely polite Midwesterners browbeating you into changing your position to go with the herd. But anyway. This is a New Yorker talking about what democracy looks like. Dripping with condescension if he says, polite Midwesterners, God forbid.

I'm on brand. And so anyway, other people can have. I mean, David wrote a very good piece about the incompetence of all this and all that. I just want to make one point. It is outrageous that they are now, they are still just selectively releasing the stuff. They already took the hit for screwing this up. They will never live around how badly they screwed this up.

But to be releasing it in drips and drabs in drabs, when first of all, it's now been longer than it would take just to have done a hand count, right? So it just raises all sorts of suspicions, but to release it and drips and drab so that what if Buttigieg is now not the frontrunner? Or what if all of a sudden, Klobuchar comes by, it is compounding the problem. Once they screwed it up, they should have waited until they had everything and say, this is reliable, check our math. It's ridiculous.

And it's also why we shouldn't be using apps in frigging politics. Everything should be on paper. I like the purple thumbs from Iraq. I think that works, too. I've been having Orca flashbacks to 2012 Romney where there was an attempted appage that went horribly, horribly wrong. Weren't those Orca modules just like empty, like Calico football things and didn't do anything at all? I can't even, I can't begin to tell you without a 10-minute word vomit. David, you did write this great piece on competence involved.

But bear with me here because I think because it's Wednesday afternoon, there is some change. that we may not get to 100%, I mean, I don't understand what is taking this long. They're refusing to explain what's taking this long, which I am not a conspiracy theorist about this. I agree that there are paper counts of everything, but something has gone extra wrong compared to what we were told about a coding error in the act. The exciting thing is they may sail right past 100%, which would be awesome too. So, confidence, David.

Yeah, you know, I think if you're trying to run with, against a president has a good economy, but one of his chief flaws is that he's nonstop drama, kind of a madcap sort of administration. He's got sort of this clown car diplomacy going on that got him impeached. And so you're wanting to come in and say, here we are the adults in the room. And we're going to come in and it's going to be the no drama, high competence alternative to Trump, and this is how you kick it off? I mean, this is amazing. And look, there's a long history. And I wrote about this briefly in my piece, even in Iowa. I mean, to this day, the 2012 Iowa GOP caucus is a thing to behold to think about. It was one winner on

election night. It was another winner a week or two later. And then they said, well, maybe we can't ever really know who won. And then they held a state convention. And it seemed like Ron Paul got most of the delegates anyway, and the thing was he finished third. And so I think one of the consequences here, this is one of those things that can break through out of the political hobbyist world because it is just so weird. Right, this makes the late night shows. This makes everything. Exactly.

Like the, yeah, it bleeds into regular people's lives. Exactly. Like the Obamacare website. Right. Yeah. You know, 90% of the stuff that gets Twitter outraged doesn't bleed any way. This is just so weird and inexplicable and so madcap and so strange. I would be shocked if it's not on S&L, maybe for two weeks.

So, Steve, part of why it's happening this way is because they made it so complicated in an effort to perfect the Iowa caucus system. That's why, and we don't need to get into what all of these things mean, because frankly, at this point, since we don't even have a number, turned out it didn't really matter. but there's first alignments, second alignments, that doesn't actually then exactly match the delegate count because they were then weighted by how heavily democratic each precinct and district was. A lot of this in sort of a side conversation was being blamed on the Bernie campaign because after 2016, they wanted changes to ensure that the Iowa caucus was more fair to a progressive movement-style candidate. Given where we are now, he came in first or second. We're not really sure. But as of today, he's in second for the delegate count that matters. You know, did

their team kind of get hoisted by their own partard by making it too complicated and then by making rules that it turned out they even didn't win by? Yeah, to a certain extent, I think that's right. Although I have to say, I think the Bernie team and the Bernie Bros were going to complain no matter what, right? I mean, that's sort of what they do. Their role in the Democratic alignment is to be sort of the perma victims. And they're playing that very well right now. I think the most outrageous thing, in addition to what Jonah said, in addition to what David said, is the attempt by Bernie partisans and also Trump partisans to suggest that there's some big conspiracy at work here to somehow fix the caucuses. I mean, this is a process that is conducted

out in the open where individuals literally stand and are counted by who they're supported. You're right, exactly. They move to the point where they're counted as groups. They do it in front of dozens of witnesses, sometimes hundreds of witnesses. You have hundreds of journalists raid throughout the state taking notes on what's happened there. You have television networks recording a chunk of it in many of the 1600 caucuses across the state. If there were ever a kind of election that would be impossible to mess with, this is the one. And yet you have people like Brad Parscale Trump's campaign manager, Donald Trump Jr., Lindsey Graham, on the Democratic side, Elon Omar, lots of Bernie surrogates suggesting that this is somehow fixed. It's so freaking

irresponsible to do and say that. There may come a point where we find out that a contest somewhere is actually fixed, and then we'll want to be able to train our fresh outrage and analysis on that particular set of circumstances. By saying that something is fixed every time there's a screw-up, no matter how colossal, and this was an unbelievably huge screw-up, but to pretend that it was somehow fixed, diminishes the problem when something actually is fixed. But there's a difference between fixing the numbers, which I agree would be close to impossible at this point. There's certainly no evidence of it versus fixing the process of how this is, to Jonah's point, being dribbled out, this, you know, 62 percent. Now we're at 71 percent. We're two days

out. At some point, we're like, we're going to have moved on. New Hampshire will have happened. And so the winner, you know, the conspiracy theory, quote unquote, that this helps Biden. Yeah. I mean, look, nothing helps Biden. this point. He's got 15%, he's a former vice president with the greatest name ID. He should have had the most money, and he's collapsing. That's the reality. I think people are saying that this is a big help to Biden. Maybe it doesn't give the boost to the other potential leading candidates as much as they would have happened. It's hard to see how this is something that's great for Biden. I do think the process after the screw up is, as Jonah says, is disastrous. I mean, the idea

that you would you would go out and release partial results. When they said that yesterday, I was up at Fox headquarters in New York, and we got word that they were going to release some of the results, or the majority of the results, I think, was the initial statement from the Iowa Democratic Party. And we all sort of looked at each other like, what do you mean? Some of them. You're really some of the results. And then come to find out that it was 62%. So you don't even, so you're, let's say you're Pete Buttigieg and you're flying to New Hampshire. You get on the ground in New Hampshire and your campaign then has to go say what to New Hampshire voters like how do you campaign we just came off of a tremendous something in Iowa can I just say that there was a gift to

the public there though because one of the few times Twitter was amusing was the 62% the way through Titanic and Jack and Rose are fine 62% way through the Super Bowl and the Niners are on the way You know, as a former comm staffer, there are just parts of me that still experience, like, actual empathetic pain watching. That press conference was one of them. Like, the lighting was poor. The setup was terrible. The fact that they didn't know how to call on reporters. Like, David, just to your point, the incompetence is so much further and widespread.

Like, we care about the vote. That is clearly the thing they should be most competent at. They were not competent at any of this. And it can get so bad. And this is something I said in my newsletter. It can get so bad that the human mind starts to think that malice is the more likely alternative. I mean, and I use the Jeffrey Epstein comparison. Here's the single most important prisoner in the federal system.

And nobody was paying attention to him. And it breaks your brain. It almost approaches, and David will correct me on my pronunciation, Theodicy, the question of how can evil exist if there's a god right when there's a hurricane or an earthquake you're like how could god let this happen for the democrats it is almost like that right and um the tim miller our friend tim miller writing it over the bulwark he made this point about how buddhajid was robbed and the this is tim who's gay this is his phrasing not mine i don't know like you say the gays but he says how buddhajudge and the gays were robbed because buddhudhage arguably at

But if these numbers hold up, your Titanic statistic point, well taken, at the very least, Buttigieg was number two and had a huge night and could have spun it as a huge deal. In Midwestern Iowa. In Midwestern Iowa. It would have been a big, big deal and could have raised tons of money on it. Someone was saying somewhere that Pappy Cannon one said that winning Iowa is worth $100 million in advertising and fundraising. Not this year.

Not this year. Totally rubbed. And you think also about these poor, slubby, patchouly-soaked kids in flannel who've been sleeping in basement cots for a year for the big payoff of this night. No, that's the part that actually, like in all seriousness, is heartbreaking is the people who gave up months and years potentially of their lives for these candidates to then through just sheer incompetence have that moment taken away from them I think is incredibly unfair to especially the junior staff on all of these campaigns.

And if I were a senior Buttigieg staffer right now, I would only be speaking in four-letter words. I mean, for this whole week. Well, and what happened to the honorable resignation? Oh. You know, I, I, people of Iowa and the United States of America, the enterprise that I was responsible for failed miserably. Therefore, I resign. I resign. And I don't like to quote my own tweets, but we should have culturally appropriated more from Japan.

Because if this had happened in Japan, first of all, there would be a lineup of responsible officials in suits, bowing and openly weeping and begging for forgiveness. And if we really taken as much Japanese culture as we deserve, some of them would willingly and voluntarily cut off their own fingers as penance for what they did. I mean, it can't be exaggerated how stupid and bad this grew up. Can I do one last point of outrage here? It's not just bad because it failed. It's bad because it failed, and a bunch of people beforehand were saying it would fail.

So you have, I mean, there was an NPR story on January 14th laying out some of these problems. You had precinct captains calling into the state party saying, we're not able to get this thing to work. How are we going to do this? They had problems on the day of the caucuses with their two. step verification process just to get into the thing people couldn't even get into it this is this is a predictable disaster only a quarter of the precinct captains had even downloaded the app on election day so there the idea that the backup didn't work it actually wasn't the backup it was the 75% that didn't work also the because they tried to do it in two months no major tech firm would

agree to build something in that short of time for the very purpose that you can't test it on the back end. And third, because of all of that, it wasn't on the Apple store. So in order for people to download it, they had to bypass their own phone's security system in a way that when it was explained to me, me, the youngest person in this room, well, mine is Caleb, Caleb's younger, could not possibly understand what they were talking about. So there was no possible way that this was going to get off the ground, but it's one of those things that when the inertia starts moving who's really going to be the person to say stop. So let's look forward. Jonas says that the Iowa caucus is dead, full stop. He also is advocating for a national primary system,

which I have gone. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, sorry. No, no. I think national primaries is an awful idea. Oh, okay. Then you just want a different state to have. I want to rotate. Okay. Rotate around. Well, I don't want to get rid of primaries entirely. But if you're going to have them, we should rotate them two states, a time around the country. One. one rural, one urban, different population mixes. Interesting. You want the smoke-filled room back. I want party conventions and smoke-filled rooms.

Okay. Like, you know, the kind of secret smoke-filled room that created the United States Constitution. Can you imagine infighting, though, that would result, that would lead up to those decisions and the lobbying and the potential for corruption? I'm quite a leninist in this. The worst, the better. Heightened the contradictions. But our democracy cannot function with too overly democracy. democratize political priorities. Thriving institutions need to be undemocratic in a democracy.

And I'll defend that. Come fight me. Okay. My quick take on this is that in fact Iowa, I'm happy to switch it around to some other states, but it needs to be a state that is able to travel around the entire state, a low-cost media market, and a fairly set political, you know, conglomerate of some kind of. kind because to Steve, your point exactly on Biden not performing well, even though we had the high name idea and even though we had the money, the reason is because it was Iowa, you were running in a closed circuit course. And so other candidates had a real chance. If we had gone straight to California, which is what Bloomberg is doing this year, what Giuliani tried to do

in 2008, there's a huge cost in that it's money and name ID only. I would just add to your list of criteria, beautiful lakes, four seasons, craft beer, and cheese curds. And that would be sort of the perfect primary state if only we could come up with the place that would do that.

No, I mean, this was why I've been a defender of the Iowa caucuses for a long time. I mean, it's proximity to Wisconsin. That's a big part of it. Part of it. No question. I admit my biases here. This is about transparency.

No, but I liked the fact that the Midwest had this sort of serious representation in our process. My concern... And the coast gets so much representation in every other part of the process. When a hurricane hits Houston, nobody really cares. But if a hurricane hits the East Coast and the news stations are affected, it shuts down everything and it's on cable news forever. There was a shooting in downtown Seattle about two weeks ago. And I was sort of, you know, in and out of following the news, but I had a conversation with one of our board members who was talking about it. And 24 hours passed, and I hadn't

heard that it took place. Can you imagine if that had happened in New York or Washington or Miami? I mean, anywhere. Well, I can say the words, the Great Nashville Flood. And nobody, nobody knows what is what I'm talking about. And I remember flying in to Nashville. Our house on a hill. I was in Boston visiting friends when that flood occurred. I remember flying into Nashville, we all got out of our seats because we're coming into Nashville airport and we're clustered along the windows. And you see a third of downtown Nashville underwater. People died. It was horrible. And it just, it was like it never occurred. And if there's a big thunderstorm in Washington, it's like national news. That's basically. Flurries in the nation's capital today.

No, but let me make a serious point about Iowa or something like Iowa. The other major benefit to Iowa someplace like it is that it forces one-to-one interaction. It's retail politics. It is retail politics in the best meaning of that term. And Iowans take it seriously. I understand the pushback on that that it's roughly 15% when both parties, you know, in 2016 was about 15% of Iowans. That's still pretty high to show up to multiple.

coffee shops to meet candidates one-on-one, shake their hand, ask them a question, get an answer. And I, you know, some people will argue that retail is dead and doesn't matter anymore. I don't think that's a good thing. No, that's totally wrong. It would be horrible outcome for the country if that were the case, because then politicians would be answering questions only from people, most of them again from the coasts, who imagine what voters in places like Iowa actually think. It's totally instructive to go to places like Iowa and have those conversations. So can I, I like the, I'm mostly with Joan on the smoke-filled room, but I'm, I know it'll never happen. So I like, I like the idea of take the first four and rotate them.

Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina. Nevada. And rotate them. They're from distinctly different parts of the country. They have distinctly different demographics. It would be a different campaign if Nevada went first. It would be a different campaign in some ways if South Carolina went first. I'm totally for that.

But what I'm absolutely for is getting rid of this ludicrously complex system that it's not just that Iowa is a caucus state and it's 99% or white, 95% wide or whatever the statistic is, it's a problem. What on earth is this system that they have? It's only on the Democratic side. The Republican side doesn't have the 15% threshold, which causes these trickling effects. And I do think that I was gotten a bit of a bad reputation because it was so newly complicated this year that people think that's just how the caucus has always worked. That is not true. All right. So with David's partial endorsement of my correctness aside, most of the arguments that, first of all, I can't believe no one has pointed out that caucus and Caucasian have the same roots.

Woke Jonah is my favorite Jonah. Yes, but that being aside, the case that, part of Steve's point about Iowa's, Midwesterners are good, they're, you know. It's why we have an electoral college, for instance, Joan. Yeah, no, look, I get all that. I like the electoral college. I'm in favor of the electoral college. The electoral college is one of these things that was invented in a smoke-filled room. It was great.

But the part of the problem is. of having it in the same place every four years, particularly Iowa, is the distortion of American public policy based upon the fact that they grow a lot of corn there. And if at least you rotated it, you would create some oxygen. I mean, it would be interesting to see politicians start pandering to the gaming industry if it moved it to Nevada. But if you rotated it, you don't, like, how many, honest question, because you live in this world and Steve you've been reporting on this world much more than I have. How many political

consultants do you know that are from Iowa or are creatures of Iowa? Those same happens in New Hampshire. There's an exact same thing happens in New Hampshire. You have these people, journalists. You have a benefit from being born in a political hacks come up through Iowa, New Hampshire, and they have outsized influence over American politics, over party politics, and if you least move it around the cronyism is subdued a little bit. But you could have, I mean, if you're an enterprising recent college graduate who wants to get ahead in political journalism, go and do an internship at the Des Moines Register.

I mean, I think people can get around that. The other question, I think, is a more serious point that you make, but I still object to it. I mean, it's... Ethanol is very bad, and we wouldn't have ethanol without the... Absolutely correct. So is the problem the system, or is the problem our leaders? Why don't we have...

Why don't we have leaders that go to Iowa and say, you know what? Yeah, ethanol is bad. This is horrible. It distorts the system. Which happened in 2016. It didn't happen enough. I mean, I actually think one of the reasons that Scott Walker tanked after he climbed to the head of the Republican pack unexpectedly early was because he had been this guy who built this reputation in Wisconsin as being this bold leader, willing to say things to make people mad, willing to take on these established, you know, sacred cows.

And then goes to Iowa and suddenly becomes for ethanol. and not take on any of the things you did. All right, New Hampshire debate is Friday. New Hampshire primary is Tuesday. What are you looking for, Jonah? I'm looking to see if this is the end of Biden's campaign. I think Biden is at a point where, you know, as a lot of people pointed out, Iowa reminded people that he has always been a bad presidential candidate in the past.

I was much more bullish on Biden this time around than I had been in the past. But if he has two significant losses in a row, it becomes very difficult from to raise money. It becomes very difficult for him to be his biggest argument is electability. So I think that's the most interesting thing coming out. He's got the South Carolina firewall, though. That seems to be eroding already. A little. Because the whole people want to back the inevitable winner.

And if you don't look inevitable anymore, you don't look like a winner anymore. And so I think it's really used to the test for Biden. If he comes out of this, it'll be seen as the, if he comes out of New Hampshire in first or a very close second or something like that, you could see him spinning it the way Clinton did in 92 as the comeback kid. And Biden is good at that kind of messaging. So this could be the end of Biden. That's what I'd be looking for. David. I'm wondering if this is the beginning of Mayor Pete.

Well, he's had a beginning. But a real beginning of him is a. IMID nationally is still incredibly low. It's very low. High in Iowa, decently high in New Hampshire, but yeah, so I think it's fair to call at the beginning. Yeah, I would say, is this something real? And I agree with, I think was Jonah earlier saying that Mayor Pete really is taken a real hit by the Iowa incompetence. It's hurt him so much. So we'll have to see if he can overcome that Iowa incompetence and get some real momentum going outside out of new hampshire and look i know the primaries start to head a little bit disproportionately south after this i mean south carolina

of obviously looming but one of the things you know there's a lot of talk about black voters and mayor pete black voters in biden and bernie and one thing that we've seen from the relatively recent past is black voters in the south tend to be pretty pragmatic and the the the there is more pragmatism that is driving them to Biden so far and less devotion. Sure, they appreciate his role in the Obama administration, but there's not that devotion. It's more pragmatism. And if there is a view that there is a pragmatic path for Mayor Pete, maybe you're going to start to see some uptick there.

But if you don't see uptick with Mayor Pete with black voters, he's a flash in the pan. So I think he's got to finish top two in New Hampshire. And then he's got to show something in Nevada. And if he does, you know, then he could be a real contender. Because the one thing that I think he has going for him when the Democrats are talking about sort of putting together that demographic and geographic jigsaw puzzle is it's almost like he was created in a lab to hold on to some of these moderate suburban voters that went to the Democrats in 2018. and it almost seems like Bernie might be created in a lab to lose some of those moderate suburban voters. The most important number to me out of Iowa was the turnout number, which we still don't actually fully have. But the second most important number was there was a disproportionate number of women voting in the Iowa caucus,

and they disproportionately went for Pete Buttigieg. Interesting. And there will be a gender gap in 2020, a big one where women will be the majority of Democratic voters. And so to find a candidate that can turn out even more. women and actually increase that gender gap is a good thing for the Democratic Party. Steve, what you're looking for? I think Buttigieg can do worse than the top two and still survive and maybe thrive after New Hampshire.

I mean, you think that both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders should have some built-in advantages in New Hampshire. If Buttigieg came in third to those two, I think he'd be okay. I think we have seen some of this erosion of the Biden firewall beyond New Hampshire. If you look at New Hampshire right now, New Hampshire traditionally has played this role of reviving, fading, fading campaigns, right? So it could happen again. We saw it happen to Hillary Clinton in 2008 after Barack Obama won Iowa. We saw it happen to John McCain, whose campaign was left for dead, and then he rose and eventually got the nomination.

So if there's a moment, this would be a moment. The problem for Biden in some respects is he started as we approached Iowa to shift his chips to the Iowa pile. and move them out of New Hampshire and other places. And we saw the results of that. If you look beyond Iowa to what his firewall was supposed to have been in South Carolina, he started out and he had half of Democrats supporting him. And we knew that that number was going to come down. But there's a poll out just a couple days ago in the Post and Courier

that found that Biden's lead to Bernie Sanders is now five points, 25 to 20. That's fatal. I mean, if Joe Biden doesn't win South Carolina and win South Carolina, and win South Carolina decisively, he's done. This is where I get on my polling high horse, where we have so many polls in Iowa and New Hampshire compared to South Carolina. The poll before that was from January 4th through 7th,

which just shows you we're getting like one a month. And normally you would really rely on polling averages. You can't do that in South Carolina right now. So I don't know what to make of what's going on in South Carolina. And we have to mention, before we leave this political discussion, We have to mention Mike Bloomberg, who in some ways could be, I mean, that's been my view for the first few weeks and months of this. Yeah, we do. I mean, this is somebody who's spending an insane amount of money. He just said he was going to double what he was spending. He's

hiring 800 million people to work on his campaign. I've heard rumors of staffers from other campaigns being offered, like, you know, 25-year-old staffers on other campaigns being offered you know, ungodly sums of money to switch teams. And a car. Yeah, I mean, like anything, firstborn. Well, I mean, it's not, first of all, he is sort of omnipresent. Like, it's hard. If you spend any time online, Mike Bloomberg is in your face.

And he's at top 9%. Yeah, my kids who, you know, who watch a fair amount of YouTube stuff when they're allowed to watch TV because we're ogres, my son now twice has come up to me and said, Mike Bloomberg sounds like a pretty good guy. How old is your son? 12 years old. He can't vote. He can't vote. He can't vote.

He can't vote. He can't vote. He can't vote. It's probably not the case. A lot of undecided Democrats are watching mountain bike videos, but he's everywhere. So that's not nothing. Well, and you know, the thing is he has this gamble that he's going to skip the first few primaries. Well, one of the primary, well, the first caucus kind of skipped itself.

That's right. And so he's had this unexpected gift. which he was sharp enough, obviously, to perceive and is radically ramping up his spending, and he's going to be on the debate stage. So you'll see him actually lock horns with the other candidates for the first time. So, I mean, I went from saying, what on earth about his candidacy to, if I squint and I kind of look around a corner, I can imagine it? Nope. Okay. But this is a good transition because the person who wins the Democratic nomination, we will need to think of the possibility of them giving the next state of the union or will it again be Donald Trump giving the next state of the union.

So last night was state of the union, best and worst moments, not hot taking moments, as I know you guys won't give, but truly what are you judging a success by and therefore the worst moments too? Joan, I'm starting with you. You started with me before. Well, I was going to start with David, but he kept mispronouncing Nevada so many times that I couldn't. Sometimes it's fun to hang back and listen to the ways in what your colleagues are wrong before you comment. All right, so in the pregame conversation today, we talked about how some people think that it gives you a traffic boost if you use profanity. because the explicit, the warning, explicit language warning is an enticement for some low character people out there, apparently.

I am going to try very hard not to cynically curse here. My heart moves for the family that's reunited. I have nothing but, you know, best hopes for Rush Limbaugh that he gets through this bout of cancer and all of that. I think the little girl getting a scholarship deserves to get her scholarship. Yes, yes. All of these things are wonderful. All these things are full of my heart. What is the metric for success?

I was disgusted by the state of the union. I thought it was a horror show. I thought I could see the future of our politics descending another rung into the Stygian abyss. It was essentially an infomercial or an episode of Ellen or Oprah. is further descending into reality show culture. I have not liked the State of the Union for a very long time. Of the many, many reasons I despise Woodrow Wilson, high on the list is the fact that he was the one who introduced

reintroduced this idea that had been dormant for so long of speaking in person for the State of the Union. I like the old practice of writing a nice letter. And so many presidents, Ronald Reagan, you know, what has two thumbs and loves Ronald Reagan? This guy, and I'm pointing my thumbs towards me. But Ronald Reagan started this thing with having guests in the gallery. It has gotten wildly out of control. And so, yes, I think the speech was politically effective. I think it did what he needed to do. I think that while I have enormous problems with the

hypocrisy of people condemning Nancy Pelosi for being improper towards Donald Trump, as if like, who have no problem with the impropriety coming from Donald Trump. But as spectacle, I mean, it was, first of all, why wasn't the hero dog who killed Baghdadi brought in? Oh, for sure. And also, I mean, at some point, I kind of felt like we were going to have them bring in a tribute with the captured general of the galls and chains. Red and Circus. It gives people ideas. So I really didn't like it.

not Jonah's thing. David, how did you go into with your metric of success and then where did it sit? It's hard for me to adequately express my loathing for the state of the union address in general. Okay, we've got two. We don't like this formats. I, you know, and I think where it really tipped over for me was Bill Clinton. And, you know, Bill Clinton was performative in many ways that foreshadow Donald Trump, who can forget, what was it, that he had the sort of WDE style march through the corridors before the 2000 Democratic, the convention. I agree with basically every syllable that Jonah just said. I'm watching this and I'm thinking this is spectacle. It is reality television. It's also not conservatism.

Right. So that's the second part of this. There are some elements of this that there are some elements that were conservative, but by and large, what you're looking at was sort of an old school, working class, blue collar, democratic state of the union kind of address that has, it's like one part that and two parts, you know, our future president, Duane Elizondo, Mountain Dew, Herbert Camacho, which is apparently our inevitable future just happening sooner than we thought. Steve, I guess I, you know, our television has moved to reality television. So some of their complaints are a little bit like I miss Seinfeld to me, but... They're older than we are. We've made that clear, right? But David brings up a very interesting point, one that I know you've been marinating on, which is the shift in the definition of what it means to be a Republican.

Yeah. And if Donald Trump is the head of republicanism, he defines that now. Correct. And he defined it quite differently last night. Very differently. And this is not the first state of the union in which he's done that. You go back and you look at the first state of the union. It was actually not technically a state of the union,

but the address that he gave to Congress shortly after being sworn in. There was no mention of debt and deficits. There was, again, last night, no mention of debt and deficits. $23 trillion in national debt right now. We're pushing a trillion-dollar annual deficits. No discussion of that. I mean, there's virtually no discussion of limited government at all. And that is this sort of lightning strike moment.

We are entering this campaign, this campaign season, with neither political party making a sort of coherent, extended case for limited government anymore. I mean, a lot of what the president talked about last night was expanding government in many different ways. We might agree. We might disagree with the ways in which he wants to. expand government. I mostly disagree with them. But that's what this was substantively. And that's, that strikes me as a big moment. On the merits of the state of the union itself, I guess I don't, I don't really have the kind of deep, passionate, strong feelings that David and Jonah do. Totally fair points. I mean, we are living in Neil Postman's America, for sure. But.

But so is our entertainment. So is our television. Yeah. I wish, I guess I wish that we We weren't combining that as much as we are, but that, you know, then I start to sound like a fuddy-duddy like these guys are. I like the idea of a president speaking directly to the American public more. Like, I think we could have used that more. We could have used that a lot more during the Obama administration. President Obama gave very few speeches about the war in Afghanistan. We were at war in Afghanistan. We should have heard from the commander-in-chief about that.

I like hearing directly from the president. I agree with them on sort of where this is headed. So, I mean, let me just take your argument, Sarah, to its more illogical conclusion. Hunger Games. Well, I mean, Hunger Games. I was just going to say, why couldn't the president have a couple dancing sharks on either side of him? Again, stop with the recommendations. I recently rewatched Left Shark in an interview with Left Shark, and that was one of my favorite moments of the last 20 years, Jonah.

Yeah, but look, I'm as I've become a crotchety old man, not as old as David. I love math because I never will be the oldest day of it. But I'm more and more passionate about people in institutions staying in their lanes. It's partly you've all lived in rubbing off on me. And the encroachment of entertainment culture. I did write a book called Suicide of the West that delved quite deeply into this. Now out in paperback. But the encroachment of entertainment into politics is like a tale as old as time.

In 1968, Joe McGinnis, Selling of the President is all about Nixon using this new-fangled idea of television to read voters. Well, okay, but, but, but not all forms of entertainment are the same. Ah, yes, back in the day when we didn't want women reading fiction books because it would rock their brains. Not all forms of entertainment and pageantry are the same. And so there is such a thing as importing, using the tactics and tools of entertainment to import dignity, to import gravity. And those things actually still have a market in the United States. It's not all reality television. We call this the platinum age of television for a reason that is not exactly related to keeping up with the Kardashians.

Unless I come across as an elitist, I think I'm the only person in this podcast who has tried out to be in Survivor. And so I didn't get it. I didn't get it. Oh, thanks for clarifying. Can't imagine why I didn't. I was teaching at Cornell Law School at the time. You should see my audition video. It's on VHS.

man. It's great. That will be for members-only content that we're charged for. Or at least the dispatch Christmas part. But there's always been a crass element of pop culture. There's always been a more highbrow element of pop culture. These things have always existed side by side. And I think it's a problem when the most powerful person in the world, becomes, deviates towards the crass, goes low rather than high. I think that's a problem. I think it'd be a problem now and it would be a problem in 1968. The Republicans have always struggled to keep up with Democrats in this regard. I mean, it has been the case, you know, Bill Clinton and Arsenio Hall. They've used pop culture in a much more effective way than Republicans have over the years. And by the way, exactly what these two said

about, you know, 2020 today is exactly what would have been, was said. It was. About Clinton, boxer and briefs. Absolutely. And that was bad too. It was bad. Shrug. But it's ironic that the people are most enthusiastic about the president's speech last night and sort of the performative elements of it are the same people who were so outraged at Barack Obama talking to the woman in the bathtub with fruit loops, which I thought was outrageous, and his appearance on Between Two Ferns and things like that. Obama did this pretty effectively, and now Republicans are doing it, sort of maybe taking it another two or three steps. Between Two Ferns was genius. I do, too. I think it was, Republicans had to do some of it.

Health care.gov. And, yeah, if anything, I thought they're ahead of where Republicans should definitely be. Okay. Time place. Two quick points. As Yuval likes to say, not enough people are asking, how should I behave based upon the institution I'm in and the job that I have? And there's one thing to say the politics needs to be more entertaining, and I'm open to that, depending on the circumstance. but when we as voter participation goes down as people have trust in

institutions less trying to reach them where they are yeah I have no problem trying to reach voters where they are my point is is that there's a lot of good social science literature on this is that when people start focusing on politics as if it's a form of entertainment well yes they bring in different moral categories and so when you watch a movie you're perfectly happy to watch the hero unfavorable barely beat someone up, torture somebody, do all sorts of terrible things because they're the hero. When you start treating politicians as if it's a tale of good guys versus bad guys, you give yourself a permission structure to allow for, first of all, turning the other into an abstraction

that whatever happens to them is worthwhile. And you degrade the politics. And I just, you know, lack of voter participation to me is people always get the causality there wrong. You know, they want to start by, you know, getting more people to vote. Voting should be the end product of active citizenship. It should not be the gateway drug to it. I don't disagree with that. But I think when we're talking about this entertainment aspect, I agree with you on this point that going back to 1972, I was just rereading Boys on the Bus about covering the

Great book. Great book. And they bemoan that when politics starts becoming entertaining, the media covers it for its entertainment value. And so it is judged, just like we are judging, on whether it was or was not entertaining. That is the metric of success. And I agree that that is a problem. I guess there's, but there's a spectrum for me of before it gets to pure policy.

marginal tax rates where it is difficult for people to tune in for that. But David, really quick, and I think maybe we'll have a side advisory opinions podcast on this, the realignment of the two parties is happening. And to Steve's point, there's now a group of people who are not being talked to, the limited government deficit, spending, free trade media. Federalists? Yeah, crowd. Will Democrats or Republicans? try to recapture that and hit that equilibrium as we've seen happen in the past, or are we going have such a tectonic realignment shift that we don't know what the two parties will look like because lots of people are left out of the two parties in terms of who they try to reach?

I think for right now, temporarily, there is a way in which negative polarization renders people like me and Steve and others at scale irrelevant. Because what ends up happening is all you have to do, is nominate somebody that you can say as better as the lesser evil and then just be browbeaten. Yes, the libertarians have been experiencing this for some time. Yeah, for days, for weeks, for months. Binary choice, binary choice. I know this isn't what you want in a party. I know that this guy doesn't advance your values. I know that he's saying all kinds of things that you disagree with, but the other side is worse. And that's a very effective short-term tactic. It doesn't create a whole lot of love and loyalty.

It creates an awful lot of sort of bitterness and depression. But that is a very effective short-term tactic. What Republicans and Republicans use it very effectively in 2016, very effectively. And if they think that Democrats can't use it effectively in 2020, if Bernie is the nominee, when you're going to have a lot of reluctant Democrats, that it will then be told all of those same things, binary choice. Or do you want Bernie or do you want Trump? But that's not, I don't think that that's sustainable over a long period of time, because over a long period of time, what you're going to have are millions of people are either going to have to just give it up and get with that more populist, nationalist, big government crowd, or they're going to say, no, I'm tired of voting for people I do not like. I'm tired of it.

I'm not going to do it anymore. And that can break things sometimes in unpredictable ways. And what we've seen is then you create a third party Ross Perrault-ish type candidacy that does just well enough that one of the two parties will snatch up that mantle to grab those voters. Or the populist nationalist guy loses and we don't have a record in this country of like really doubling down on losing strategies and people, there's a renaissance. Oh, wow, look, limited government could have some appeal again. Okay, last topic. Today is almost certainly the last day of the impeachment trial with the final vote. And so here we are. We've gone through this whole process from start to finish today. Do we have closing thoughts? Was it a mistake, for instance, for Pelosi to move forward with this whole thing, Steve? Wait, hold on. I just want to add some news. Oh, now Jonah wants to go first.

No, I want some news because I don't know, unlike you who's actually doing your job, I was looking at my phone. Mitt Romney has voted to convict. and remove. Good for him. But we should at least introduce that into the conversation. Yes, we should. Okay, that's all. But by all means, go to Steve. Yeah, so Nancy Pelosi was reluctant to do this for a long time, and she was sort of forced into it or pushed into it, I would say, both by the sort of groundswell of her base, but also by the facts of what happened here. And I think the facts, as we've said before, the facts here are bad for the president. did what he is accused of doing. You're now seeing Republicans in the Senate split on whether that matters at all. You're seeing them split on whether what he did was wrong. If he did what he

was accused of doing, whether that matters. And if he did what he was accused of what he was doing and it matters, whether that was impeachable. And I think Mitt Romney is likely to be a very lonely voice on that. You've had a growing number, but still not the majority of, you're the Republican conference in the Senate, I think, making sort of the argument that Jonah had said, which was, of course he did it, make the argument, if you want to make a practical argument, make the argument that he did it and it wasn't impeachable. But you have, I think, a good number. It'll probably end up being the majority if I had to guess. And we're sort of doing some reporting on this right now, saying in effect that what the president did wasn't wrong. And that's a bad place,

I think for the Republican Party to end up. I think it's a bad place for the country to end up because the president did what he did. And he tried to use his power, abuse his power, in order to coerce a foreign government to meddle in our politics. It's wrong.

We should say it's wrong. We shouldn't qualify it. And it's sad that more Republicans aren't willing to say that. And from a political standpoint, you go back six months and let Nancy Pelosi play this all over again. Fracturing the Republican side,

it sounds like, was a smart political move in your opinion. Yeah, I mean, It ends up, I don't think, hurting her that much, which I guess is contrary to conventionalism. There were things that Democrats could have done to do this better, for sure. I was having conversations two months ago with Republican office holders in Congress who, serious people, who are saying, I'm thinking about how I'm going to have to tell my constituents that I voted to impeach or that I voted to convict. and there was a moment before Democrats decided that they weren't going to walk down the legal path

and try to compel testimony from John Bolton and others, where I think you could have had that. Now, I'm not suggesting that there's a straight line and I can tell you exactly how that would have played out. Maybe it's the case that it would have taken nine months and it renders the whole thing, sort of a side issue anyway. But I think there was an opportunity for Democrats to have done this better to have not given into the partisan inclinations of Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler. and some others who ran the thing to have used Justin Amash as one of the impeachment managers to make a case to Republicans and basically say to Republicans, hey, I'm seeing this pretty clearly. There are consequences for my career, but shouldn't you see it the same way I do? David, this leads right into my next question. So we just saw that Mitt Romney voted to impeach

or to remove the president from office. At the same time, a poll came out today showing that for the first time Trump's approval in Utah is over 50 percent. Was there ever a world in which Trump was removed from office? Not under these facts. I don't think so under these facts. I think there might have been a world in which may be a majority of Republicans, I mean, a majority of the Senate voted to convict, not a majority of Republican senators, a majority of the Senate voted to convict, potentially, possibly there was that world.

But short of two thirds. Well, short of two thirds on these facts. And I think, but what we're getting to is a life principle that I think applies here. Vice often leaves virtue with few good options. And so if you look at what Trump did here, what Trump did here was he distorted American diplomacy in support of a conspiracy theory and support of a vindictive vendetta and for his own personal gain, not in a side theater of international relations like, say, to get a hotel and coast. but in a central area of strategic value in involving a shooting war between an ally and arguably our chief geopolitical foe. That is extraordinarily serious. And he did it in a timetable where this was all going to come out during an election season. So you can play out all the different

scenarios. What if they tried to subpoena? What if they got on the rocket docket to the top to the Supreme Court as quickly as they possibly could? And then what your subpoenaing, you're hearing from John Bolton in September after a presidential debate, are Republicans going to be more malleable or less malleable then? I mean, and so you have, you had essentially Donald Trump's actions at this point in time put those who rightly believed, in my view, that it was impeachable, in a terrible dilemma, in a terrible box. And so I think we can war game, all day long, is there a slightly better or worse way that Nancy Pelosi could have done it? I don't know. I don't know that there really was. No matter what course she took, she was going to be

just savaged. Because if you wait and you subpoena and you go through all of this, what are you going to hear constantly? Oh, she's just trying to make this the October surprise is John Bolton's testimony. Or, I mean, that would be relentless. But what you have is a bad faith operator in the presidency with a whole host of bad faith operating unconditional defenders in conservative media and the effect of that, of that one-two punch, frankly on people, friends and neighbors that I know who don't get the full picture, they don't have sort of the full picture of media incoming media diet, has been really distressing. And I hold those people responsible for that. Jonah, part of, here's a pet theory for you, part of what removed Nixon from office, I mean, I know he voluntarily resigned, but why that was building was because it was backward facing for an election, that he had rigged his own re-election, and that because this was before the election, and to David's, maybe the overall point of this podcast about incompetence, didn't really ever kind of work the way it intended to, that that, that, that,

that's why the Nixon removal was more effective than this was. Yeah. And it also explains that, sorry, the Clinton non-removal as well, because it wasn't really about rigging his reelection. It was this, you know, obstruction and lying is bad, but it wasn't, didn't go to the heart of how he got there. Right. The abuse of power thing was a harder case to make for, I think, illegitimate reasons,

but for obvious political reasons with Clinton. Not to harp back to my point about parties need to be undemocratic, but one of the reasons why Nixon will resign is because the party said, get the hell out of here, and the parties actually had juice back then, and Nixon was like, well, damn, I've lost Goldwater, I'm screwed, and he left for the good of the party, because the party mattered. if you had the same situation if Richard Nixon was a little trumpier and had Twitter and Fox News at the time it's not obvious to me that he would have stepped down or if just the party structure had been as weak as it is today back then

I agree largely with Steve and David about this in retrospect it now just seems bizarre to me that they rushed the impeachment thing because you could have had just simply Benghazi style hearing that, and I don't mean that in the cynical way that, what's his face, Kevin McCarthy talked about them, you know, which to this day I thought was outrageous.

I mean, like, legitimately, there was something to look into, work your process through the courts. If you were going to hold on to it, and particularly if you knew, if you went down the path that they did go down, you weren't going to remove him from office anyway. Why not just make it interminable? Make it interminable. Bleed him daily with bad headlines, and there would be lots of bad headlines. But you raise something that I really find appalling is this argument now, if you take the Trump legal team seriously, if you take Cipollone seriously, which is a heavy lift sometimes, you just simply can't impeach a president in his first term, because that would negate the election. It would take him off the ballot. It would remove the opportunity of the voters to decide. It would be the greatest example of election tampering in the history of humanity. And that means that basically impeachment is only for lame duck presidents, which is idiotic. And a constitutional.

Right, right. Totally not in the Constitution. Well, you know, and that's another thing about this impeachment is what has been injected into the political bloodstream right now are a series of arguments that elevate the, that put the imperial presidency on steroids. Including, and look, you know, as much as Dershowitz tried to bob and weave on Twitter and elsewhere, after he made his argument in the Senate floor, at the end of the day, his argument was in fact that as long as his abuse of power is not criminal, if it's motivated by the desire to enhance his own reelection prospects and he believes his own reelection is better for the country, which every candidate in the history of the U.S. believes their election or re-election

is better for the country, then that's not impeachable. That's just flat out not impeachable. The total identity of the personal interest and the national interest in the head of the president and any non-criminal act taken in furtherance of that is not impeachable. And this is something that, again, was injected in the political bloodstream, went far and wide. And here's the thing that's particularly pernicious about it. It feeds so directly into the negative polarization that is. corrupting politics in this country, which is, look, I know I'm terrible and imperfect, but that other guy is the worst. And it just puts that, that just, it really enhances that. It makes it worse. And it was one of the worst consequences of this impeachment. I was at dinner with a former Senate staffer. And he thought that that argument was smarter than we gave it credit for for one reason that it was directed at Susan Collins at all, people who often have to make political

decisions because they believe their re-election is in the interest of the Senate, et cetera, because they're in these swinging, moderity places. I was not wholly convinced by it, but I thought it was one of the more interesting arguments. It certainly gets into the way that a lot of them were thinking. My re-election is in a public interest. No, because I think, you know, people who are you know, setting aside sort of the core, hardcore, most ardent Trump supporters, the two-thirds of the elected congressional Republicans who have some problems with him, let's say, this is what they wrestle with, you know, okay, I don't agree with him on this, but I'm not going to run out there and contradict him because then he might tweet at me and then I might lose and then the country's

worse off. So in that sense, in that sense, that's a pretty smart, your Senate friend I'm not done. Since you call it effective, I'm going to be re-triggered. And I'm not, I'm not done ranting about this because what was even worse, what was bad enough was the substance of the argument. What was even worse was the example that he used is he took us back to the civil war and the releasing of troops to go vote in Indiana in the civil war. Okay. One of the biggest problems we have again in this era of negative polarization is the flight 93ing of everything. You're talking about the impeachment of Trump. and his strong arming of Zelensky in the context and justifying by reference to the civil freaking war. And that's a problem. That is a problem. And I had some folks write me after I wrote about the Dershowitz argument. And they said, well, what's wrong with the analogy? I mean, wasn't it better that Lincoln win than McClellan in 1864? And I said, I'm not even going to engage that. It was the civil war. Don't use a civil war analogy. not half a million dead Americans on the battlefield right now. It's a category error, but it feeds

into this sense of existential threat that people are walking, especially base voters are walking around with all the time. And with that, we will wrap on our new political truism to add to the former one, which is never use Hitler. Our second one for David French, never use the civil war as your analogy. Thank you so much for joining us today and for listening. Please rate us on iTunes. It not only helps us and your feedback, but it also helps others find this podcast. And we'll see you again next week.