The Dispatch Podcast - It's Kamala Harris

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

On Tuesday, Joe Biden tapped Kamala Harris as his running mate. But let’s be honest—we all saw this coming. As we wrote in The Morning Dispatch today, “D.C. conventional wisdom had Sen. Kamala Harris pegged as Joe Biden’s likeliest choice for months.” Despite Harris’ numerous attacks on Biden over his busing record and relationship with segregationist senators —not to mention her dicey criminal record as a prosecutor in California—she checks a lot of boxes. She’s a senator in one of the country’s biggest states, she’s the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants, and she has experience running her own presidential campaign (albeit a failed one). “When she was running for president, it was pretty obvious she didn’t know what she was running for,” David says on today’s episode. “But now as a good lawyer she sort of has a client, and the client is the guy at the top of the ticket and the Democratic platform, and that will unleash some of her better skills.” Today, Declan joins The Dispatch Podcast for some punditry on what Biden’s VP pick means for the future of the Democratic Party, a deep dive into foreign election meddling, and a much-needed update on the status of sports during the pandemic. Show Notes: -The New York Times’ front page spread of Kamala Harris, Trump’s tweet this morning about suburban housewives, and the DNI Report about election meddling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to the dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined this week by Steve Hayes, David French, and Declan Garvey, our staff reporter who runs the morning dispatch for those of you who subscribe to our morning newsletter. And if you don't, you should. All right, this podcast is brought to you by the dispatch. Visit the dispatch.com to see our full slate of newsletters and podcasts. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast so you never miss an episode. And we'll hear a little later from our sponsors, ExpressVPN, and the Bradley Foundation. So what's up today? Well, we've got to talk about the vice presidential pick Senator Kamala Harris. Lots to dive into there. We'll do a little on the DNI report on foreign election meddling

from China, Iran, and Russia, of course. The Bella Russian election and we'll end with a little college sports. Let's dive in. First topic, no surprise. Steve, lead us off. Yeah, so the big news is Kamala Harris, as Joe Biden's running mate, as we wrote in the morning dispatch on Wednesday morning. This was one time when the conventional wisdom was actually right. Talk to people in Washington, D.C., talked to Democratic insiders. They all thought that despite some early skirmishes between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris when she was a candidate

for president, that she would likely emerge as his running mate, somebody who made too much sense given her experience as a prosecutor, her experience in law enforcement in California, her ability to be elected, the fact that she had been scrutinized at a national level, the fact that she is black, the fact that she's a woman, which was one of the things that Biden said early, was going to define his pick, that Kamala Harris was really somebody who was kind of the obvious pick in retrospect, looking back. I guess I would start the conversation by just pointing out some of the coverage. I think the coverage has been very, very interesting, bordering on celebratory by most of the ostensibly mainstream reporters who are covering politics and covering the race.

There was a New York Times front page spread, three different stories, historic choice, felt very, very friendly to Harris. And the contrast, which we also included in the morning dispatch this morning, was a very small bottom right corner article about Mike Pence when he was chosen as Donald Trump's running back, running me back in 2016. You know, I think that the Times and others have portrayed her as something of a pragmatic moderate, which I don't think quite captures where she comes from ideologically. I don't think she is the screaming Bernie Sanders style socialist that the Trump campaign and its supporters have portrayed her to be either. In some ways, I mean, her voting record is very

liberal, but in some ways she defies those kind of easy ideological categories. But I do think from the perspective of a conservative, there are a lot of things to be worried about with this pick. She has, just to pick a few off the bat, she has embraced the Green New Deal. She said if Republicans won't work with Democrats. She said this when she was campaigning for president, if Republicans won't work with Democrats to pass the Green New Deal that she would be open to throwing over the filibuster in order to do that. She said she was open to expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court. She signaled in her campaign that she was eager to sign executive orders on gun control and basically takes a, I think, a rather anti-constitutional

approach to many issues of governance. And is someone who I think will end up likely being a pretty solid liberal warrior for a Joe Biden who is already running, I would say, as a fairly liberal by historical perspectives candidate for the Democrats. Do you all think that I'm crazy about that, or does that make some sense? Do you think she's going to be a liberal? Do you think she's a progressive in the sort of old school mode, or is she the pragmatic moderate that the New York Times would have us believe? David?

I think she tries to find where the Democratic Party is and tries to jump there with both feet. And I think that that was a big problem actually with her vice, with her presidential campaign is you could see her flailing early on because she was trying to figure out, is the party really with Medicare for all or is it not?

I mean, if we look back on her presidential campaign, a lot of it was marked by this unbelievable uncertainty about her own health plan. It got her really off to a wrong foot. So I think that the way I thought about this pick was mainstream Democrat picks mainstream Democrat, bottom line. And that she has not necessarily demonstrated that she's an ideological leader. She's more of an ideological follower. And she's going to go where the party goes. And that where that is is very much

left on social issues. I mean, she rather notoriously said of a Catholic, a Catholic judicial nominee that, you know, are you going to quit the Knights of Columbus if you're going to be confirmed to the bench?

So there's there's, it's definite that she's socially progressive. Now, the interesting thing to me is what does this do to the law and order argument about Joe Biden? it seems to me that a lot of the criticism of Kamala Harris in the primary was

that she was kind of the equivalent of a law and order Democrat. You know, there was this meme Kamala as a cop. Biden even at one point in the debates attacked her from the left on law and order issues. It seems to me that if you're running the architect of one of the most draconian crime bills in modern American history plus a person known as a tough California cop together that the sort of

Trump defund the police American carnage, no law and order message is going to lose some of its vitality there. And it seems like the only constituency really for whom Kamala is an ominous pick is social conservatives

and I don't see any evidence that Biden thought his path to the White House ran through social conservatives anyway. So it struck me as kind of a safe pick. It struck me as a nothing that's going to rock the boat on the campaign that much one way or the other, to be honest. And I think it's going to actually play to her strengths a little bit. When she was running for president, it was pretty obvious she didn't know what she was running for. But now she kind of has, as a good lawyer. She sort of has a client, and the client is the guy at the top of the ticket and the

Democratic platform. And that will unleash some of her better skills, which you can sometimes, you've sometimes seen on display in Senate hearings. Declan, let's get you in here. Yeah. It's, we, for the morning dispatch today, we got some polling from Georgetown University. They sent it our way. And Kamala, I was actually surprised to see that she has a, a plus seven net favorability rating right now that was actually underwater last year while she was actively running. But kind of since she's receded from the limelight a bit, that has trended back up. I'm sure it will as kind of attacks and she gets defined on the national stage. Once again, that will change. But you saw that her approval rating was highest

with women compared to men, was highest with black voters compared to Hispanic. and white voters, and then highest with upper class compared to working class and lower class voters. And I think, I mean, that's pretty telling of what, as David said, you know, he doesn't, Joe Biden doesn't see social conservatives as his path to the White House. He does see women, suburban women, and black voters as his coalition. And she definitely is a play to all three of those things. And, you know, we, we ran through last week that we had an edition of TMD where we ran through, I think, 11 of the potential nominees for vice president. And, you know, a lot of our readers were very opinionated on one or the other or a handful. And it seems that, you know,

Kamala Harris checked the most boxes for Biden. And from doing a little bit of the little bit, bit of reporting yesterday and talking to people on the hill. The biggest one that Harris filled that some of these other candidates didn't was just the stability and the known quantity that Harris brought that some of these other candidates didn't in that, you know, Susan Rice had never run for office and had never, you know, been on a campaign trail and had to interact with voters and things like that. Tammy Duckworth is still very, very new to the Senate. and, you know, didn't run for president herself, has never undergone that serious vetting. And so Kamala is, in many ways, she unites the Democratic Party that, you know, there's going to be the vocal Bernie fringe that is not a fan of her and particularly from the perspective of that law and order message that David referenced.

But for the most part, she's a unity pick among the Democrats and a safe pick for Biden in terms of being a known quantity. And, you know, they're, in theory, won't be too many surprises with her as she kind of takes to the campaign trail, the last stretch here. So I think again and again, we've seen reporters, pundits, basically expecting the Democratic Party to look like the Republican Party did in 2016 and expecting that to spin out. And then time and again, it's been close. There's been moments, but that hasn't happened. You have the Bernie wing of the party that looked like it was poised for a takeover and everyone predicts. sort of a 2016 repeat on the Democratic side. But if we were to like make that analogy, and David, I'm curious if you agree, like, I think this is the Jeb Bush Marco Rubio ticket.

I totally agree with that. Totally. I mean, this is mainstream and mainstream Democrat. And yeah, I mean, conservatives are right to say, well, Kamala is left of the, say, the typical mainstream Democrat, but that's because the Democratic Party is more left. That's right. Jeb and Marco were to the right of George W. Bush. Right. But that was because the party had moved right. And I just think that the reasons that people don't like Harris are the reasons why she'll be an incredibly effective campaigner, in my view.

But also, you know, the worst laid fears or perhaps hopes of the Trump campaign, that you would have this super far left-wing person to allow them to build this narrative around Biden. You know, I've seen some of their hits today where they're trying to say that, like, basically, Harris is running Biden. That's just a tough sell to make with this. And I know they're going to try to make it. And, you know, it'll be effective with some of their base. But it would have been so much more effective with a, even a Susan Rice, but certainly Elizabeth Warren. And so what you get with Harris is someone who's going to be running for president from the moment she takes office if she wins.

And so she's not going to do crazy, wacky things as vice president because she wants to be president. So she's going to do the things that a vice president does when they want to be president. She's going to own an issue that is, you know, popular with the American people and that she can say that she led on for eight years. You know, again, will that be on the left side of things? Of course it will be. It's a Democratic ticket. It's the Democratic Party. But I think the Trump campaign, for all their blood,

about how pleased they are with the Harris pick is deflated today because this was their their worst option in terms of building a narrative around Biden when nothing has really stuck yet. And I think you saw that a little bit in the immediate reaction yesterday from the White House and the Trump campaign and that, you know, obviously he, they had an ad out immediately characterizing Harris as phony as a flip-flopper, et cetera. But then when when asked about you know, her candidacy in a press conference later in the day. The first thing that Trump turned to was fracking, her position on fracking. And then when he was on Sean Hannity's show later in the day, you could see Hannity kept trying to prod Trump to talk about Harris, to criticize Harris, to explain how left wing and how dangerous she is. And Trump kept changing the subject. He went on a couple minute. diatribe on windmills, and he just wasn't interested in talking about Harris. And so we'll see, I mean, obviously, she will be defined over the coming days, weeks, and months. But

yesterday, as an early indication, showed just how difficult that might be. So Steve, let me jump in. Yeah, go ahead, Sarah. Yeah. Well, I wanted to ask you what you thought of how there's this weird little nugget out there that Trump donated to Harris. And not way, way back in the day, like fairly recently, 2011, you know, how will that factor in in your mind to the Trump campaign's ability to attack her, but also Harris took money from Trump, you know, back when he was doing the birther stuff with Obama. So it, like, kind of cuts both ways. Yeah.

And for that reason, I think it probably ends up the end of neutralizing one another, right? I mean, we've seen Trump donate to many, many other Democrats in the past and it not really have much effect on what arguments he makes or what arguments his supporters make on his behalf. I suspect that that'll be the case here, although I do think you'll see Democrats as they try to portray Harris and by connection Biden as these sort of Bernie Sanders lights, they will say, you know, Donald Trump donated to Kamala Harris. I do think, let me push back though a little bit on sort of where Biden and Harris fit in the sort of, if, if we're looking at this as an ideological spectrum, I think you're both right that they are

in today's Democratic Party, mainstream Democrats. But today's Democratic Party is far to the left of where the Democratic Party was eight years ago. I mean, I would say four years ago, eight years ago, 12 years ago. And that, while I don't think that, that I do think it'll be hard to sell her and Joe Biden as Bernie Sanders wannabes, it remains. true that that Biden, you know, had, has had these, these negotiations and sort of this, this deal with the Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, even though Sanders really isn't a Democrat. And if you look at what they're proposing policy by policy, it's true that it's not as radical as it could be. That doesn't mean that it's centrist. And I think that's an important distinction

to make. I mean, just some of the things that I mentioned that Kamala Harris has championed, these are radical proposal. The Green New Deal is a radical proposal. A watered down Green New Deal is a radical proposal. Changing the number of justices on the Supreme Court is a radical proposal. Implementing new gun control measures by executive order would be a radical undertaking. Now, Donald Trump, of course, has done a lot of this. Barack Obama had his pen and phone. So we've seen both in terms of process and in terms of outcomes, this shift in the way that we're governed. But I do think it's notable that while they may be mainstream in today's Democratic Party, if this were 20 years ago, they would be seen as lefty fringe candidates in the Democratic Party. No, I think that's right.

I mean, you know, I definitely think that's right. I do think, though, however, if you look at the dynamics of modern American politics, I think the American public has moved a bit to the left in the Trump era. I also think that she's left in a way that is sort of most offensive, say, to the evangelical voters in Trump's base, where the one thing where we know, like she's really solidly for abortion rights, She seems to have little, you know, given very little thought to religious liberty. Obviously, if she became president, her judicial nominees would be pretty far to the left. But when it comes to the voters who gave the Democrats the House, these suburban voters,

a lot of these guys now we know are not hardcore social conservatives. They're concerned, if the polling is any indication, when it comes to things they're really concerned about race relations and the pandemic, I don't think there's anything about Kamala Harris that would give them pause on that. And from that standpoint, you know, it feels like one of the potential long-lasting effects of the Trump presidency could well be turning some of these suburbs, if not blue, blue, you know, maybe light blue or I don't know, is the right thing sort of purplish blue? That's not light blue.

But it seems to me that if you're talking about, is this pick going to alienate the voters that Biden needs according to the concerns that so far, as best we know from the polling that they've expressed, then I think the answer there is no. Even though I think, Steve, you're absolutely right, that the Biden-Harris platform is going to be well to the left of the Hillary platform in 2016 and to the left of Obama in 2012 and the left of Obama in 2008.

And wouldn't it be ironic if that, if sort of the way into a more progressive mainstream came as a result of sort of a counter reaction to a president in Trump who was not terribly ideological. So it's not like the shift to the left is happening, would happen, is happening because Donald Trump represents this sort of hard right ideological, you know, in the old school ideological sense, president. It's a cultural shift and a further divide between, you know, I mean, I hesitate to even call it the cultural right, but between this sort of, as Dave, has talked about kind of authoritarian, illiberal right in making the illiberal left perhaps more palatable to the suburban voters that David's talking about. I mean, that, that does seem likely

to me. You know, there's one quick thing. There's a, he's temperamentally very extreme. And so when people experience a person who's temperamentally extreme, even if sort of ideologically, he's more moderate in many ways. They say to themselves, he's extreme. And it was interesting when you looked at the flip side of, say, Trump, Pete Buttigieg was temperamentally very moderate. But it would make me pull my hair out what's left of it when people would say Pete Buttigieg is moderate.

No, Pete Buttigieg was not moderate at all. He was temperamentally moderate. And so you sort of experienced him as moderate, but ideologically, he was very left. And in the Republican Party, Dick, Dick Cheney was, sort of the antithesis of Trump in that way, because he came up moderate temperamentally and had worked for so many moderates as he cut his teeth in national politics, working first for the Nixon administration, then for Gerald Ford. He became seen as a moderate. And then when he was

elected in his own right to Congress in 1978 and carved out a voting record, by the time he was chosen as George W. Bush's running mate, there was the sense that Dick Cheney was, you know, conservative, but still pretty moderate. And then the immediate aftermath of that pick, when people went back and looked at his voting record, I think people were surprised to a certain extent to learn that Dick Cheney actually was very conservative. And Cheney sort of, when I interviewed him about this, he took great joy in the fact that everybody had seen him for all these years as a moderate when he had compiled really one of the most conservative voting records in Congress over that stretch.

So, Declan, I have a theory for you. The fun part about having Declan on this podcast is that normally I just text Declan all day my weird theories to get his feedback. And now I just get to like ask you in person and like, you know, we need to actually talk. Yeah. So here's my theory. The president tweeted this morning, the suburban housewife, that was in quotes for some reason, the suburban housewife will be voting for me.

They want safety and are thrilled that I ended the long-running program where low-income housing would invade their neighborhood. Biden would reinstall it in a bigger form with Corey Booker in charge. Setting aside several problematic aspects of that tweet, perhaps. Here's my theory. They're going to actually, for the most part, they're going to try to brand Harris, and they're going to try to continue with the theme

that the Biden-Harris ticket is this wildly left, wing ticket. But what they're actually going to pivot to a little bit here is other cabinet members that Biden, quote unquote, will put in his cabinet. And you're going to see him saying Cory Booker's going to be in the cabinet and he's, you know, a lunatic and AOC is going to be in the cabinet and basically using other foils because Harris is not going to be effective. Thoughts, feelings. I think that's exactly right. And I, you know, I saw a little bit of back and forth yesterday that before the Biden campaign made the announcement of Harris, one of the spokespeople came out and said, it's kind of funny that the Trump campaign is already painting our pick as a left-wing

radical before they even know who it is. And I mean, that's true. No matter who the, you know, no matter who Biden ended up picking, there was going to be a very similar campaign from the Trump campaign. And, and, you know, you know, no matter who Biden ended up picking, there was going to be a very similar campaign from the Trump campaign. And you've kind of seen that play out in the way that Biden himself being the nominee. You know, Trump is still running a, he's a radical left candidate as if it was Bernie Sanders as the nominee, as if it was Elizabeth Warren as the nominee. You know, it's harder to make that argument for Biden. And I think that's why you see that Biden's winning by eight and a half points in the polls.

But it hasn't really changed the Trump campaign's message, the fact that Bernie lost the lost the nomination. And so I think you can kind of see in our hyper-nationalized politics where a lot of voters know a lot of these people that ran for president, didn't win, and will inevitably be in a Biden administration that you can make them the boogey men and boogie woman rather than Harris. I mean, they'll still try with Harris, but it will be more effective to voters to hear about what Elizabeth Warren is going to do to the banking industry or to school choice than it, or it'll be more effective to, you know, as you mentioned, Cory Booker on housing policy or Pete Buttigieg and his plans to add nine members to the

Supreme Court, et cetera. And so you'll kind of get this mishmash of, you know, 15 to 20 different different people that will be part of a Biden administration. We'll see if that has the effect of, you know, getting voters back into the Trump camp or so diluting the message that they're trying to run that it ends up kind of being a wash. But I definitely think that they will try. Let's take a quick break and hear from our sponsor, ExpressVPN. You've had a time you search for something online you wouldn't want others to know about. And I know most of you are probably thinking, why not just use incognito mode?

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last a few days ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence put out a statement on election interference that included three countries' intentions towards our election. It said China prefers that Trump loses, Russia prefers that Trump wins, and Iran prefers Trump to lose.

It was like a little sandwich. And this got a lot of reactions, not surprisingly. Interestingly, Senate Intelligence Committee was like, thank you for being specific about what these countries want.

Pelosi and Schiff put out a joint statement saying that while it was a better an improvement on the last statement, that it still treats three actors of differing intent

and capability as equal threats to our democratic elections. But then David and Bordino, the NSA lead on the Joint Election Security Task Force was U.S.

cyber command said, quote, Russia, China, Iran, they all have intent, and they all do activities that they think are advancing their best interests. I don't think I would say one is scarier than the other per se. Steve, I'm curious whether you agree with his statement. The problem, I think, that the intel community is dealing with right now is determining intent. It's very hard to determine. We're much better at assessing capabilities of our adversaries. particularly in this space, intent is much more subjective. We could conceivably intercept communications that make intent clear, but you can never really be sure that those communications were not intended to be intercepted. So they could be sort of deceptive by intent to confuse

things further. I think that's a big challenge. The basics, as I understand, in them is that the United States is confident that Russia will attempt to meddle and that Russia will be pretty brazen about it, pretty open about it. They want people to know that they're giving fits to this global superpower and that they can potentially affect the outcome of our elections with their meddling. China is much more eager to play a sort of behind-the-scenes role with vastly superior capabilities to those of Russia. I think there have been some worrisome reporting in Intel channels about exactly what China could do, given its capabilities, or given what we think China's capabilities are,

relative to what we think they will do, because China, the theory goes, the reasoning goes, China does not want to sort of blow up the U.S. elections so much as it wants to make things more difficult. China needs our markets. China would like to see a diminished United States, but not one that collapses immediately because of the effects that that would have on Chinese economy, China's trade, China's the sort of balance of global superpowers. I don't take, I will say, I don't take great comfort in our assessment that China does. does not have the same intent or is unlikely to be as aggressive as Russia. If we think China is potentially in some of our election systems now, and I think we do believe that, I think our

intelligence community does believe that, that should be tremendously unnerving to our government leaders and to the public at large. This, it strikes me, is one of the most significant stories and the kind of thing that, you know, you see this report, the unclassified version of this report put out publicly, I think it's so that the intelligence community can say to people, both to warn them prospectively, but also to say, hey, we are doing everything we can to monitor to this, and we are briefing policymakers so that they understand what the risks are. It's not the job of the intel community to lay out the specific responses to these things. That's the job of policymakers. But we're making very clear that these potential threats exist, that they're not

imagined, and that it would behoove policymakers to actually do something to address these threats. What we can't determine yet is what policymakers are doing, because as you say, Sarah, you have political interests here in the United States with the polarization that we see every single day, not wanting to work together to protect our elections with different adversaries potentially or allegedly wanting different outcomes. You have different political parties and different political interests working crosswise in protecting our own elections. And I think that is a real sad state of affairs. It's one of the ways in which polarization could lead to pretty dramatic negative consequences if it's not addressed.

David, am I the only one who doesn't care who these countries want to win? They should stay the hell out of our system? You know, it's funny. I felt like we were watching sort of like the tyrant's endorsements rolling in. Right. I frankly, what I don't care about is who China wants to win, who Russia wants to win. What I do care about is what will China or Russia do to do to. further stoke the incredible amount of distrust and negative polarization in this country.

You know, if you look back on 2016, the Russian disruption operation in our election has to be one of the most cost-effective disruption operations in intelligence history. I mean, what, about $100,000 worth of Jesus, arm wrestling Satan memes, a couple of spearfishing hacks, and Americans are at each other's. with a big chunk of Americans believing either the memes or the combination of the memes or the hacks resulted in an illegitimate election outcome. I mean, this is stunningly cost-effective work from Russia, and I feel like we're more vulnerable rather than less vulnerable in 2020 in a very key respect, and that we're more vulnerable to seeing, to hating each other over Russia, even than we

were in 2016, which is very, very dangerous. And the only other thing I have to say, because I'm re-watching the Americans right now, one of the great shows in television history, the real losers here are Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, because they had to, in the 1980s, go to the United States of America, pretend to be American, leave a trail of bodies in their wake, undertake these incredibly dangerous intel operations for marginal benefit. When if they were, you know, a alive now in their prime now, they could just be sitting back at their homes in Moscow making memes. Oh, David. David, David, going with the television, the Americans, for those who have not watched it. Was that FX? What was it? That was FX, but you can see it now. It's on Amazon

Prime, and it's so... It is amazing, by the way, just like a little side cul-de-sac for David and I, that the Americans, they did so, like, talk about my curling metaphor. There was so much sweeping for like no benefit. Oh, yeah. There's a whole subplot where they, they'd like leave all these bodies on the floor to send in bad information to the Soviet Navy. And yeah, anyway, well, we digress.

Hey, I watch the American, just so that I can register this moment, mark this moment as the, somebody who's not up on popular culture, doesn't watch movies, doesn't really watch TV, the same way that you all consume it. I watched the Americans. I agree entirely. It was fantastic. Oh, my God. You guys, Steve's been body snatched. There's an alien on our podcast.

This is how we would know. We always said this is how we would tell. The moment has come. Okay, Declan, thoughts on the DNI report? Yeah. I'm actually reporting out a piece on this right now. I've talked to a bunch of experts in disinformation, social media campaigns, things like that. And I mean, they're worried. It's the one of the biggest takeaways that have gotten is just how far we've come from 2016 in that, one, we're aware that it's happening at a kind of a broader scale. And two, that the tech companies that were basically exploited Facebook, Twitter, you know, et cetera, in 2016 now have, you know, much more robust mechanisms in place to catch this stuff. flag it, delete it, or mark it as otherwise. But it's not perfect. And what a lot of these people are saying is that, you know, you don't necessarily need a, you know, a guy in Russia to

pretend to be a Kansas, you know, 55-year-old woman posting about XYZ things. You can just find, you know, existing divisions within America and amplify those and find ways to take a legitimate person's post or a legitimate American post about the election and somebody who's on a fringe or who believes in, you know, various conspiracy theories or, you know, very out-there views and just amplify and promote already existing American sentiment and make others believe that that is more prevalent and more widespread than it actually is. And that's something that I think they did a little bit with in 2016, but something that, you know, we're only making it easier for them in the years since in kind of the way that we talk about our politics, talk

about each other, talk about, you know, the divides in this country. And so, you know, I ask some of these experts what, like, worst case scenario could look like. And, And they talked about a video could pop up on November 3rd showing, you know, somebody stuffing a mailbox with fraudulent ballots or things like that. And then, you know, a network of foreign actors could amplify that video enough to the point where Trump sees it and Trump retweets it and Trump has a comment on it. and now half the country is out there thinking that there's fraudulent balloting going on. And then if you actually go back and do a reverse search on the video or something like that, it's happened five years ago in like the country of Kosovo or something like that. But the message will already be out of the bottle.

It'll be too late to do anything about. And so, you know, that's what people are worried about. And that's, you know, a legitimate fear. And to Steve's point, you know, Russia has these. interests in destabilizing our democracy and eroding trust in each other, our trust is already at all-time lows. And so they don't have to do too much to push it over the edge. But it could be, you know, in many ways, the straws that break the camels back. All right, David, let's move on to Europe's last dictator, a little Russia adjacent, if you will. Yeah. So, you know, I'm very

curious. There's so much going on in the United States of America right now. I mean, This is a, you know, we're in the middle of a pandemic. We're in the middle of a recession. We are confronting incredible negative polarization. But you know what? Stuff doesn't stop happening in the rest of the world. And I'm very curious. I've been watching the developments in Belarus with real interest.

It looks like part of the internet is being shut down there after its leader, Alexander Lukashenko, one with, I should, listeners, you can't see my air quotes, won his election with 80% of the vote. The opposition candidate has fled the country. And why does this matter? Well, this is a, in essence, strategically it's a buffer state. It's between Poland and Russia. Not that big. It's about nine million people. Vladimir Putin has proposed to Belarus, not so much a, um, a, swallowing of Belarus, but a kind of a tighter political union. So he obviously sees Belarus as very much the stability and alliance with Belarus is very much in Russia's national

interests. And it's chaos there right now. It's absolute chaos. Trump administration is trying to encourage real democracy there. I'm not so sure that Vladimir Putin wants real democracy there. And I just wanted to raise this as, you know, an ominous development. in Eastern Europe. And one that I'm very curious to see what Putin does. This is very much in Russia's sphere of influence. It's a dangerous location because of its proximity to one of our major new NATO allies in Poland. And I'm literally at a loss as to what will happen next. And Steve, you know, I'm sure you've been following this as well. But I just wanted to flag it as a topic a conversation that this is a, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is an, a volatile situation.

Steve? It is. You're right. It's been very interesting to watch, um, inside the Trump administration, um, attempts to come to a consensus position, um, on, on the election. I mean, the, the, the, it was pretty apparent in the days before the election last Sunday. that Lukashenko was likely, he was certainly likely to be threatened. I think most people watching closely would have said he was likely to lose.

There had been this groundswell of support first for the spouse boyfriend of the eventual opposition candidate, Svetlana Tikanovkaya, and then in favor of her. And she really became sort of the personification of. this support of this movement, part due to difficult on-again-off-again relations with Russia, part due to challenges to the Belarusian economy, in part due to the woeful mishandling of the coronavirus, all of these things have sort of added up to great frustration with the Lukashenko regime. And then as many people predicted, Lukashenko seems to have stepped in and pretty solid evidence that this election is a fraud, including precincts with turnout over 100% of voters. We have a good piece on the website by Stephen Nix of the International Republican Institute laying out some of this.

And talking in particular about what the American response ought to be. There's been sort of a muted response, I would say, from the Trump administration. You had Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State, speak out earlier this week suggesting that there shouldn't be these kinds of questions surrounding this election. You had a statement from Kaylee McEnany expressing concern about the results, but you haven't seen the kind of forceful denunciation or condemnation of the kinds of meddling that have been widely reported. And I think that's a mistake. I think the United States should be outspoken, should stand up for our principles and values, even potentially at the cost of driving Lukashenko further into Vladimir Putin's hands or making a deal. They're not buddies, but making some kind of a deal or looking to Putin as sort of a protector. I think it's important to rally the international community against these kinds of authoritarian moves. And we'd be smart to make a much stronger statement and to work with allies to potentially stand up to Lukashiko. Declan, the morning dispatch covered that this morning. This is your baby. You know, I don't have too much to add to what David and Steve said. I know it may look like

I'm a Belarusian political expert, but not quite. But I will just say, you know, we covered this on Wednesday and then Tuesday we covered what's happening in Lebanon and in the wake of the massive explosion in the downtown of Beirut last week. And it's just an important reminder that as convoluted and as hyperpartisan and as scary, sometimes our politics can be, there are a lot of things happening around the world, kind of untethered to what's happening here at home, and it's important to keep an eye on and to keep the people that are being affected by that in our thoughts. And, you know, it's a big world out there, and it's a scary one increasingly. And a quick break to hear from our sponsor, the Bradley Foundation. Making

sense of current events during this extraordinary time can be trying. Conceived in Liberty, the Bradley Speaker series is a new video series that offers meaningful perspectives through engaging 15-minute interviews. Visit Bradley F. d.org slash liberty to watch their most recent episode featuring renowned scholar Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence and Director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University, George is a 2005 winner of the Bradley Prize and a member of the Bradley Foundation's Board of Directors. In this episode, he makes the case against judging historical figures by present standards and for telling the truth about America's

history, protecting the integrity of the institutions of civil society and being more understanding of those who have perspectives different from our own. That's Bradley with an L-E-Y at the end, F-D-N.org slash Liberty to watch the video. New episodes debut weekly, so go back often and subscribe to their YouTube channel to be notified whenever a new one is posted. Okay, well, you guys have all passed the marshmallow test for this podcast because we have saved the most contentious, important topic for last. And that is Declan's topic. As a Northwestern alum, I don't even really get to say go-cats this semester. I mean, that doesn't make it any different than most semesters, if we're honest about it. Oh, hush, Dave. Steve is the worst. Pat Fitzgerald has turned that program around.

No, I, you know, the last time I was on the dispatch podcast, it was to talk about my experience being young. So I'm glad I get to bring in this other aspect of my identity. which is sports. And so, you know, college football is in the news this week yesterday because the Big 10 and the PAC 12 decided officially to postpone all fall sports until at least the spring, most notably football. And so, you know, we have 40% of the Power 5 conferences. There will be no football this fall.

You know, the Big 12 ACC and SEC, as I'm sure David will point out. soon after are continuing with their with their season and actually the the SEC commissioner put out a pretty hilarious statement yesterday after the the big 10 made its decision saying I look forward to learning more about the factors that led the big 10 in pack 12 leadership to take these actions it's kind of a very polite very um David's warming up to to speak right now but you know so that there's definitely divide within the college football community on this issue of whether it is safe due to the coronavirus to play these games.

And it's become a political issue as well as things are wont to do. Ben Sasse, the senator from Nebraska and former university president, wrote a letter to Big Ten presidents and chancellors earlier this week, requesting that they do continue on with the season. President Trump has kind of thrown his weight behind the growing movement from. players that are being led by Trevor Lawrence, the quarterback from Clemson, and about hashtag we want to play. And so there is going to be kind of this fight playing out over the next coming weeks of what sports will look like. Obviously, we've seen baseball and basketball

return. The NFL is still slated to, and hockey has returned as well. I got flack for neglecting hockey and TMD. And the NFL is still planning to return, but, you know, there was a brawl in an A's Astros game over the weekend after a player got hit by a pitch. And everybody on Twitter was screaming about how this brawl is in violation of the coronavirus safety protocols that people are getting too close, that people are going to be spreading it to each other. And I tweeted out, like, guys, have you ever seen a game of football?

That's essentially what this is. And so it will be interesting to see, I mean, NFL is going to go ahead. There's too much money for it not to. But I think we get to a point. There's been two outbreaks across baseball thus far. And that's a sport that you are pretty socially distant. But I think we start the NFL season. We see, you know, breakouts pretty regularly.

And it'll be interesting to see kind of how these organizations, that have kind of chosen to plow ahead will look in the coming weeks and the decisions that they'll have to make. But my question to, oh, go ahead. No, go ahead, Declan. My question to the panel is which conferences are right in how to manage this dilemma going forward. David's sitting in SEC country. But David, my favorite meme on this was the Jerry McGuire scene where Jerry's walking out of the office and they have Jerry as the Big Ten and Renee Zellweger as the Pact 12 and he's like, who's coming with me? And Renee Zellweger's like, yeah, Pac-12, coming with the Big Ten. And then the boss, the evil boss is the SEC up in the like the second

floor and he just like with disgust walks away. You are that evil boss, David. No, no, no, no, no. The better meme is the one of Mill Gibson in full war paint and Braveheart and going, saying, hold, hold in the face of the onrushing cavalry charge. And that's the SEC. That's the SEC. Look, let's just deal in, we're fact-based journalism and analysis. So as of right now, it is just simply a fact that the core of college football is entirely intact as far as the season goes. If you look back at the last 15 years.

of college football championships. Fourteen, the leagues representing 14 of the last 15 titleists are still playing. So we're going to have a legitimate national champion. We would have a legitimate national champion if only the SEC West played this year. So as far as I'm concerned,

college football is rolling forward and the minor leagues are dropping off. which is fine. It's like, I don't think AAA ball is playing in professional baseball right now, right?

Yeah, so I think the, I would say this. I mean, look, we're struggling with how to handle this thing. We don't know. And there is an error

on the side of caution approach, excuse me, and an error on the side of normal life. And I think the SEC schools are located, they're obviously located in red states that have opened sooner, have taken a different approach from some of the blue

states, and this reflects that. And so my kids, for example, are going to the University of Tennessee this fall. Most of their classes are going to be online. I can imagine taking, easily imagine, taking a bubbling approach to the players where their classes are 100% online, where you take measures to essentially quarantine them off from the rest of the student body. So there are ways to play sports safely as the NBA is demonstrated. I mean, the NBA so far has pulled off its approach flawlessly. There have been zero positive coronavirus cases since they restarted play. And NBA basketball, they are very physically in each other's faces.

So what are the resources available to essentially bubble off these players while still providing them in education? I just have to say it feels possible. But the record of American competence across institutions in recent years does not give me an enormous amount of confidence. But let me just say I'm cautiously hopeful, cautiously hopeful. Steve, I mean, we have seen young people die of this. It is less statistically likely than someone who's older for sure. but, you know, 24-year-olds who are former high school football players in great shape have died.

And one, you know, statistical data algorithm said that of the 13,000 college football players, the likelihood was that three would die from the virus if they continued to play. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, I think those are exactly the kinds of analyses that you have to balance as you make these decisions. I was interested to hear Scott Gottlieb, the former FDA commissioner now at the American Enterprise Institute, talking about this. He was asked about it, and he said, on the one hand, he didn't want to be in the business of second-guessing the decision of the Big Ten and others. On the other hand, he seemed to second-guess the decision of the Big Ten and others, saying that he thinks it was probably possible to take these precautionary steps that David mentions and have them. complete or at least begin a season having, you know, extra precautions and maybe these bubbles

that you're talking about, although I think that would be difficult and some of the travel really complicates matters. But he seemed to think that it would have been possible to give it a shot. And his understanding was that the reason that the decisions were made as they were was because it would have drawn resources from other parts of these schools' efforts to educate students in the middle of a pandemic. And that, you can imagine, would have been a massive, beyond the sort of public health questions, a massive PR challenge for some of the Big Ten schools that already are criticized for placing too much emphasis on football and too little emphasis on education. I will just say, as a CODA, I'm surprised to see David fully embrace this cultural performative bravado, you know, with the, after all of his arguments about masks and, you know, the tough guy routines that we've seen and his trenchant criticism of that for David to now really flip and fully embrace this, this SEC, you know, football.

all-cost mentality. I find it rather than shopping. No, no, no, no, no. Football was bubbling. Football with bubbling. And I think it can work. The NBA has shown us the way the bubbling approach can work. And I'd also say the MLB is traveling. They had the major problem early with the Marlins. You can always say major problem in Marlins in the same sentence, but they had the major problem. I think it served as a wake-up call for a lot of these players. You have a lot more control over college football players and you have over professional baseball players as a rule these schools have the resources to bubble i mean they are rich especially the scc schools are absolutely rich with resources they have the resources to bubble i say they can play safely i hope

that let me say i hope they can play safely is within is within their capacity to play safely i okay declin last word to you i i hate to be the the the Debbie Downer on this conversation, and I hope that I'm wrong. But, you know, with the MLB in particular, that's, I think they've increased their rosters to 30 players this time around because of, you know, what we're talking about. But even after that first major disaster with the Marlins, a week later, there was a second major disaster with the Cardinals in St. Louis. And so they haven't played in a week and a half for two weeks now at this point. And then just yesterday. yesterday, two Cleveland Indians players had to be sent home from the team because they got caught going out to bars in Chicago when they were playing the White Sox. And so these are, you know, these are professional athletes that are getting paid, you know, single to double digit millions of dollars this year to basically stay in this bubble. And there are 30 of them.

And then there are, you know, on a college football team, there's 80 to 100, sometimes more than 100 and they're not getting paid anything. And so the incentive, I mean, Trevor Lawrence in his widely circulated, you know, comments about this, he's talking about players will want to be safe and take the precautions for their teammates and for their teams. And I think for, you know, Clemson, which has a legitimate shot at a national title, there's definitely something to that. But if you're, you know, playing at some

you know, school, like Kansas State or something like that, not any, nothing, nothing wrong with Kansas State, but, you know, you're not competing for a national title. If you're, you know, the third string kicker, are you going to want to bubble for an entire, you know, six months to, you know, maintain that position and maintain that? And so I hope that, I hope that I'm wrong and that this can work, but, you know, we'll, we'll see how it plays itself out. Okay. Last question. question to the guys, what was your main high school sport and what position did you play? I'm going to assume Steve actually was the actual athlete, so we're going to start with Declan. Well, it depends if you, my high school counted marching band as a varsity sport in terms of...

That's not what I thought. In terms of getting a gym exemption. So I was on the drum line, which is the cool part of marching band. Thank you very much. okay so you were the cool kid of the not cool kids sure and then i and then i ran track a couple years too but i was not very good at that um so yeah that's that was my high school experience in a nutshell david so sarah i was a person ahead of my time unfortunately so i tried out dungeons and dragons wasn't a varsity sport in your high school no it was not it was not so i was not so i it out for the basketball team. And my problem was that I was an outside shooting guard before the introduction of the three-point shot. That's how old I am. So had the three-point

shot existed, I would have been a valued member of the team. As it was, I was kicked to the curb and could not make the high school football team. But I did make the high school tennis team and played in the state tournament my senior year. So there you go. My record in my senior year in high school was 17 and 2 as the sixth seed

for the mighty powerhouse Scott County Cardinals where I made it into the first round of the state tournament and was promptly disposed of. But where I did better even than tennis was the high school academic team, Sarah.

Not surprising. How many people were in your graduating class, David? 245 or so. Okay. Declan, yours? 666, which was fun to hear at graduation. Yeah, we started with around 700. All right, Steve, I'm counting on you here.

I appreciate the question, which allows me to go into full Uncle Rico mode. If coach should only put me in at the end of the state championship. No, I played soccer all through high school. I was either a center halfback or a center midfielder or right midfielder. So you were destined to like Spanish wines, even from a young age. Probably true. I loved soccer. I grew up playing soccer.

That's one of the reasons I have my bad needs. But my real dilemma was I also played competitive volleyball, both indoor six-man volleyball and then outdoor. two-man volleyball, sometimes four, and the soccer and volleyball seasons were the same season, both fall sports. So I stuck with soccer through my entire high school career, and looking back on it now, probably should have switched to volleyball my junior year. But I had a great time in soccer. All my friends were soccer. We made it to the, my senior year, we made it to the, I believe we made it to the semi-finals, maybe the quarterfinals of the state championship, I scored a goal and it was called back because the referee who had a horrible angle said I used my hand to knock the ball down

when, in fact, I used the shoulder. Not that I'm still holding grudges about this at all, but if you look at the video, and I will be happy to post this on the dispatch website, I'll be in the show notes, listeners. I'll put the video on the website, and you will see very The video is definitely on PHS. Very, yes, it was definitely on PHS. So, Steve, I have a question for you. What was your signature goal celebration? Like, did you rip off your shirt and slide into the corner?

Did you, like, lift your leg on the corner, like some soccer stars have. Did you have a cell phone hidden back in the day? Like, like, T.O. Was that the T.O. Celebration. Yeah. I didn't, I mean, to be honest, I didn't score a ton of goals in soccer. I scored some.

I scored more my freshman in JV year than I did when I was moved up to varsity. But I tried to, you know, to live by the old motto, look like you've been there before. So mine was always, I always tried to be sort of understated. Hmm. Interesting. And how many people were in your graduating class? I think we were about 500, something like that, the Wauwatosa East Red Raiders, now just the Wauwatosa East Raiders. I think we're 500.

How old were you when Top Gun came out? I'm curious about that volleyball scene's influence on your life. Yeah, no, I was playing competitive volleyball before then, and that was an interesting moment because everybody then wanted to play volleyball, of course. But we were playing competitive volleyball well before then. I must have been, that must have been my senior or senior year. And we would play, the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee had night courts that were lit up with competitive games, really competitive games from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee had a men's team. And so we would go down and play two-man sort of tournaments to see how long you could hold

the court for hours and hours on end against those guys from UWM and from the neighboring school. So it was pretty competitive well before Top Gun. But then you had, you know, everybody wanted to do it. So there's a, there's videotape out there, Sarah, of my peak exploits in the academic team. They were, they were on WLAX TV in Lexington, Kentucky. They had a, they had a quiz show called In the Know. And it was a tournament broadcast on Saturday mornings of high school, the high school quiz teams. Listeners, I have really good news for you. I am not going to let any of the guys put up video of anything that they did in high school.

The funny thing, though, if you see the highlight reels, which of course are all over YouTube with millions of views, I'm sitting next to the person who was my, had just previously been my high school girlfriend who had just broken up with me. and every time I correctly answer a question you see my eyes dart over to her like see what you're missing you've got to find that video that's perfect all right listeners

I of course was the president of the orchestra in the viola section and have the varsity patch to prove it ditto Declan so thanks for listening we will see you again next week i am not allowing any commentary on that and uh thanks again

You know,