The Dispatch Podcast - Joe's Super Tuesday

Episode Date: March 4, 2020

Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David have a lot to discuss after Joe Biden's campaign roared back to life with a number of big wins on Super Tuesday. Sarah also gets the guy's thoughts on the latest with coronavirus and the Afghanistan peace deal. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined as always by David French, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. So much to talk about with Super Tuesday last night. And all of the results turn out what's going to happen next. Coronavirus and the Afghanistan peace deal with the Taliban, Steve Hayes, gives us his full thoughts and the latest reporting. Let's dive right in. Lots to talk about today after Super Tuesday last night, which really lived up to its name, I guess. You know, a brokered convention seems less likely this morning after Bloomberg has dropped out and endorsed Biden. We need to talk about turnout. We need to talk about who turned out. And what it just says about campaigns moving forward.

I mean, just a lot to jump into. Jonah, any opening thoughts on Super Tuesday? How super was your Tuesday? I think Super Tuesday doesn't really capture it. I think we have to go back to the original German and God, Uber Dionstag. Jonah's been on fire today, guys. I just want you to know this is going to be Jonah hot. Yeah, and it's not on fire in the sense that I ate a lot of spicy Jamaican beef patties.

from the 7-11. I thought, look, I actually am kind of killing myself because I was mocked, derided, scorned by civilized society for arguing that Biden had a chance that I thought he was going to do better than people thought. And I stuck to my guns for a while, and then I gave up. Yep.

And I caved to the small minds of conventional wisdom just because he was sounding like the night nurse forgot to give him his meds again. and he did badly in like four contests or three contests. I just assumed that meant I was wrong when it turned out he was like the coiled sea snake waiting to strike at his moment. And so now I honestly think I'm willing to go back to my original thing. I think he is the prohibitive favorite to be the Democratic nominee, which means, you know, this time tomorrow he's going to be found wandering in the snow in his nightgown.

But no, I think it was a big, huge night. I feel almost sorry for Bernie Sanders, and as for Elizabeth Warren, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh at her predicament. Steve, expectations, we in Campaign World talk about the whole point of a campaign, basically, until the very last day is just to exceed expectations. In a primary, that is the only game. Last night was that on steroids. If we had gone in with no expectations to Super Tuesday or back up, we'd started, you know, fast forwarded from June 1st to Super Tuesday, Bernie winning California by a healthy margin. Bernie coming up real close to Biden in Texas would look really different. But because Biden actually dipped so, you know, below the pulse of living campaigns, Biden's ability to exceed expectations.

yesterday is what is really the story. I think that's right. And I would add to that the fundamentals of the campaigns, right, the campaigns themselves. I mean, Bernie has a ton of money. He has infrastructure. He's organized. He'd been on the air in these states. He'd been on the air with Spanish language appeals in some states more than Biden was on the air with regular ads, with English language ads. So, and Biden had virtually nothing. I mean, he wasn't organized in these States. He was up very little. He took advantage of these last minute endorsements, went on the air a little bit in Minnesota to try to use the Amy Klobuchar endorsement. But he just didn't have much. What he did have was a panicked establishment. That's the difference. Everybody was looking for an alternative to Bernie.

And I think you can make an argument that the first couple contests was the sort of democratic rank and file in the imperfect system that was set up for them trying to find that alternative and looking around and let's be honest joe biden has not looked good i mean it's a really to me it's a really sort of amazing moment because they're pushing all their chips in and i hate the overuse of establishment but let's just say mainstream democrats are pushing all their chips in on a guy whose performances in the debates have, I would argue, not only not been good, but been really in some ways disconcerting. And they're now saying he's our guy to take on Donald Trump. I think that has to make universe. The other thing I would say is I think an underappreciated moment in this whole

process was the Bernie Sanders interview on 60 minutes, right at the time when he's cresting in this entire timeline, in this narrative. And he looks like he might be really a frontrunner. I mean, everybody was calling him a frontrunner. We were calling him a frontrunner in the morning dispatch and elsewhere. And he gives this interview where he, you know, sort of makes excuses or tries to get, to talk around the horrors of Fidel Castro, Cuba. And I think that had to be a wake-up call that probably should have come a lot earlier

to a lot of these Democrats. they say, okay, we really can't have this guy. The problem wasn't what Bernie Sanders said in the 1980s or what he used to believe. The problem is Bernie Sanders today, and he's still defending us defending that stuff today, and we can't abide that. And we can't win with it. And also, I think it was a lot more visceral than policy conversations. Policy conversations are a little pie in the sky. He won't get it done.

You know, David's pointed this out, who we'll talk to next. But that for a lot of people, I think, wasn't positive. policy. That was sort of where your heart is. Yeah. Yeah. So David, just to fill in some numbers on what Steve said, Joe Biden had one field office in Virginia. He was outspent 7 to 1 by Sanders and 100 to 1 by Bloomberg in the Super Tuesday states. And here we are saying he's the frontrunner. Combine that with 2016 and the much lower amount that Trump spent and the organizations that he didn't have. a bunch of states. Is campaigning dead? Wow, that's a big question to answer. And then you look at those numbers and you compare them. I'm looking at the raw vote total right now. So the up to the minute, as we record this podcast, raw vote total, says that Biden has 4.4,465,000 votes last night and Bernie Sanders 3,636. That's almost a million vote gap. It's approaching a million vote gap. I mean, look, you know, I think the easier answer is because I do think campaigning matters

in the sense that there were some traditional elements of the South Carolina campaign that really came in big for Biden, including a very, very key endorsement that's old school. gathering your endorsements at the right time and deploying up at the right time. And so he ran a very good campaign in South Carolina. And then, you know, when you have this absolute flood the zone media environment where without you lifting a finger, a moment can go viral, can penetrate rapidly through the political classes. And as it penetrates through the political classes, it filters down through friends and neighbors.

I want to go back to what Steve said, and I think that this 60 Minutes interview was important for a couple of reasons. I mean, first, 60 Minutes invited Bernie Sanders to give an interview, and guess what, Bernie Sanders showed up, like full Bernie. This is a guy who was not going to bend. This is a guy who's not going to signal any, the slightest fig leaf of moderation. He's going to be himself, whether you want to just call that arrogance or you want to call it, hey, this is a 78-year-old guy who is who he is, and he has been the same guy for decade after decade. Whatever it was, it sent a clear signal, I think, to the Democratic establishment, to Democrats generally, that you're going to have to, you know, in for a penny, in for a pound with Bernie Sanders.

And Donald Trump kind of broadcast that same message as well to the Republicans. you're either all in or you're all out. But this is this was after only three primary and caucus contests that Bernie was broadcasting this. There were still options. Black voters had not yet weighed in. And when I look at Super Tuesday, I think this is where the theory of the Biden case became the reality. And the theory was there's one dude in this race who can unite the moderate suburban voter who gave us the House in 2018 and can bring out African-American voters in a scale that Hillary Clinton never could. And that one person is Joe Biden. But until now, the reality of Joe Biden was, is he up for this? Is he up for this? And I do think that there's a, the, when Bloomberg

came on to the debate stage, as much as Biden had struggled, and, you know, he was always better sort of in the first half of these debates and then began to fade by the second half. and he always had one or two or three head scratching moments where there was just pure word salad on the stage. He never face planted like Michael Bloomberg. So here comes the moderate alternative, someone auditioning for the not Bernie role, comes into the national stage in the first unscripted moment aside from his flood of commercials. And he just absolutely faceplants. And Biden never had anything like that. So I think the combination of the Bloomberg face plant, the Bernie interview, the huge South Carolina route, and when all of those things kind of come together, it was a

perfect storm. And so, yeah, I would say, does campaigning matter? It doesn't matter as much as a perfect storm. And that's what Biden enjoyed in the, you know, 72 hours, one week to 72 hours before Super Tuesday. Yeah, just one quick thing on that. I agree with all of that, but it is worth, since I mocked myself for going into the conventional wisdom to just point out how much conventional wisdom has actually been wrong. We've been saying particularly sort of liberal mainstream media kind of Beltway stuff

has been money buys elections. Bloomberg didn't buy an election. And it's not just Bloomberg's money. It's Tom Steyer's money, right? He spent $200 million and got almost nothing in South Carolina. Bernie Sanders has a lot of money, and he took it on the chin. He had a lot of ads up. Biden didn't have any.

People said endorsements don't matter. Endorsements mattered a lot. People said debates don't matter. Debates mattered a lot. This was almost like a resurgence of normal politics coming back in a certain way. And don't forget Biden's incredibly high name ID. And high name ID is hugely important, I think, as well. And so I agree that that Biden could still blow it.

But the only exception to this I would say is that I, and I tweeted about this last night, if Bloomberg has spent 0.001% of the money he spent on ads actually getting the best team possible to prepare for those debates, I think the things would have been. I think there was an enormous amount of goodwill towards Bloomberg that he was going to be the savior. and then he showed up and he was the guy behind the curtain and not Oz. And if he had handled those debates better and had a commanding presence, which maybe he just can't do. I was going to say, isn't maybe the problem, Mike Bloomberg?

It might be. It might be. The way that he present, he was so petty and sort of disturbed that anyone would question his views or his right to be on stage or anything. There was this sort of, I'm a. above all this sense that he gave out. And maybe you can practice that out of him, but maybe it's just him.

It might be, but it might also be a function of the fact that, like, Bloomberg is unmanageable about the stuff about himself, right? Which is not uncommon for high ego, high successful CEO candidate types. Particularly short ones. I'm not kidding. There's a Napoleon thing. Well, there's sort of this idea they come at it with, you know,

I'm worth $60 billion, how much of you made? Why am I listening to you? Right, right, right. So I don't think that it wasn't that he surrounded himself with good people to prepare him for the debate. I don't know that. I think it's that he didn't listen to people who tried to prepare him for the debate or didn't want to prepare at all. Or he was unpreparable for the debate or something like that. No, I agree.

I just don't know. But I just think there was a moment there where Bloomberg's plan wasn't as crazy as everyone's going to call it in retrospect. So, Jonah, I've been wanting, I've been very curious about your thoughts on early voting. And now that we have some actual data, so let's just take California, for example, 80% of Sanders voters in California said they picked their candidate before the final stretch. Now, that includes early voters. It also includes people who voted on Election Day, but it just decided before that. Of the voters there who picked their candidate in the last three days,

Biden actually won California if, you know, only the last three days had counted. Early vote. There were millions of ballots mailed in an early vote in Texas, in California. Do you think that primary early voting should be shrunk? I think it should be all but eliminated. Look, I'm a voting crank and have been for a very long time. I kind of feel a little bit like what's his name? Who's the crazy meth head actor who was in Independence? Independence Day.

I mean, if he's not really a meth head actor, you're better off not saying his name. Oh, I think I'm safe on this one. It'll come to me in a second, or we'll get flooded with him. Oh, Busey. Gary Buse. No, not Gary Buse. But that's a good guess. I thought that was pretty good if Jonah's going Methhead.

Anyway, he's the guy who lives in the trailer park in Independence Day, and he got probed like 20 years earlier by the aliens, and he's been trying to tell everybody. The character's a meth head. No, and the actor, too, really? I'm trying to save him here. Sorry, lawyers. The alien, and he's like, you don't understand. The aliens are coming back, they're coming back, whatever. I kind of feel like that about all sorts of things about voting.

Voting should be harder in this country. People were waiting seven hours in line last night, Joan. Look, I mean, well, I would be fine with reforms like making voting over a weekend, a two-day thing, that kind of stuff. But having voting, particularly in primaries, up to 45 days out, is insane. What if we found out that Joe Biden had a dead hooker or a live boy in the trunk of his car? What if we found out that, oh, I don't know, Bernie Sanders was a craven lickspiddle of Castro in the Soviet Union? There are all sorts of things that you need to have all of the facts with you. What if you were a strategic voter and you just wanted to stop, you know, Biden or stop Bernie?

and then, but you saw you thought at the time when you voted that Warren was the best person to do that, and now that looks really stupid. But moreover, when you, on a more philosophical level, when you say that we should make it easier to vote by expanding these windows of the voting eligibility or like lowering the voting age to 16, like some people in California want to do, what you're really saying is you want to scoop up more voters who are not engaged in civics. They're not engaged in politics that otherwise couldn't be bothered

unless you made it sufficiently easy to do it, which whichever political affiliation or ideological school you subscribe to means it's a matter of math that the quality of the average voter will go down. They will be less informed, and that creates an opportunity for more demagogues, more panderers,

more celebrities to get into politics that take advantage of low, voters. As a matter of philosophy, the politics are impossible. But as a matter of philosophy, if we required every person who voted to first take the same test that immigrants have to take to become a U.S. citizen, it would not bother me one bit. If you don't know what the three branches of government are, if you don't know what the significance of 1776 or 1789 are, if you don't know what Congress does, maybe just sit this one out a few plays until you do your homework. So no surprise that Jonah had strong feelings about anything that I ask him about.

Steve, thoughts on early vote? Yeah, I mean, I don't like early voting as a general rule. I do think that we're better off making voting easier for people who are eligible. I saw the report about the voter who stood in line for seven hours. Yeah, that disgusted me. No, that's bad. I agree. That's bad.

I mean, it is appalling. Like, that should never, ever have. happen. And that will require opening up some additional voting locations. Republicans have fought against this. It's not good that Republicans have fought against us. I agree with you that all that. Making voting on Election Day easier, I'm entirely in favor. Yeah. And I even by the general argument about making it a holiday, making Election Day a national holiday. So people aren't obligated to. Right. Because those lines happen late after work. They tend not to have a line at one in two p.m. Right. You know, my father voted in, um, in, um, in Harris.

Harris County. And he was fine at lunch. The line was happening at APF. Right. But having said all that, I also think Democrats are crazy to want to expand voting the way that some of them do. It's totally fine. And I think proper to ask people to furnish an ID to prove that they're eligible to vote as they did not do forever in Wisconsin where I grew up. You could just show up, tell people, who you were, you got checked off. Yeah, I mean, it was, it was hard to believe until I actually voted that that was the process. You literally could go up, give them a name, and then vote. That's improper, too. I mean, I think there's so much common sense missing from the debate about voting in eligibility and voter ID. It's time to bring some back.

so david moving on to what the voting group looked like yesterday turnout massive i mean we've talked about the lines but uh in loudon county which is near us here in dc median income is above $135,000 turnout doubled mecklenburg county near near you near charlotte north Carolina, jumped 25%. And then you have Biden, who did very well, given those numbers, with moderates and conservatives, voters older than 45, African Americans. In some of the states, he enjoyed a distinct advantage among women, college graduates, and those who attended church at least once a month. In other words, exactly the constituency the Democrats need to win in November. I mean, you know, right. I mean, that's part of my question is that Super Tuesday is known as a Southern primary.

We did not include Michigan, Pennsylvania, or Wisconsin yesterday, but those numbers could lead one to make some guesses about what's going to happen in those Midwestern states. Right. I mean, the theory for Bernie has always been that he's going to mobilize a new class of voter as basically every last person who knows anything on Twitter has been pointing out for, weeks now, there's zero evidence that that's taking place. He does have a hardcore base that loves him. But the evidence right now that exists of any sort of expanding turnout, as Biden noted in his victory speech last night, is for Joe Biden. It's this combination of, can you keep these purple districts in reddish districts, suburban districts that flip blue in 2018, can you keep them blue? And can you make up for some of the lost African-American turnout from 2016 by increasing turnout? Now, the South won't matter, of course, in 2020, but increasing

turnout in some of the cities, say, for example, that turnout flagged in 2016. And then you're looking at a very, very, very formidable candidacy. And, you know, that is, that is, at, you know, You know, as I said earlier, this is where the theory of Biden became the reality of Biden. And then the question I have going forward, because we're now going to be narrowing down, Bloomberg's out, Elizabeth Warren is reassessing, it's going to be this one-on-one. Can Biden maintain, can Biden keep the theory as reality, or will, you know, his gaffes, the fact that he really does seem to have lost a few miles per hour on his fastball, will that matter over time? I continue to be a little bit stumped by this phenomenon I see all

over the place where really hardcore Trump supporters are just sort of dunking on every one of Biden's gaffs as if their own guy isn't a gaff machine, sometimes even in quite crucial circumstances where he will say things about coronavirus, that as they come out of his mouth, you're thinking, I don't even know what he just said. I don't even know what this really means. So, you know, in a head-to-head with Trump, I don't know how much Biden gaffs will matter, but how much will they matter as this thing wears on? And the reality of Biden continues to sort of cause people to have some doubts. But as of right now, this coalition that he's assembled, the thing that Democrats have to be encouraged about is the coalition he's assembled is one that's proven to work.

It's, whereas the Bernie coalition has not been proven to work. All of this youth vote hype, I mean, we've all been through this countless times. I've been through it more than anyone on this podcast by, what, a few months? You are old. I am. And this youth vote hype, it never really materializes. So there's sort of this faith-based argument that Bernie is making, whereas by Biden can say, look, look at this coalition. I just built on Super Tuesday. This coalition just so

happens to work. We've seen it work in 2018. It can work in a few more months. And it feels like he's just sort of got to hang in there as a candidate as a person and hang in there long enough to make it happen. So the southern states thing, I want to take one issue with that, that the southern states don't matter because you can't win the electoral college votes from those states. But you can force the Republican Party to spend money in those states. And look at Georgia, look at Alabama, who both have massive Senate races going on there that Republicans need to win. And then look at Texas pulling up close. If you can force them to spend a lot of money in those states, that's less money to spend in Pennsylvania. Jonah, sorry. You're not. No, no, no, I'm moderators prerogative.

No, just on the point about the GAF thing, on our really wise and, I must say, attractive listeners, to be prepared for just the mother of all what-aboutist spectacles that we are gearing up for. I saw a glimpse of it. It was horrible. Eric Trump was on Fox last night, and he was just running through a litany, all absolutely correct, almost all, absolutely correct, of Gaffs, malapropisms, and strange statements and gaffs or whatever

that Joe Biden has done and made it sound like these were something that should be extremely concerning. And I'd be open to that argument if his own father, the President of the United States, didn't create word salads like he was using one of those old salad spinner things without the lid on and just spews random, you know, ephagic statements and declarative statements with semicolars strewn about like some horrible grammatical bus accident.

So it is going to be, people are going to point out things about the other candidate. And it's going to start in the primary where everyone's going to say, well, your candidate is really old. And the fact is that will be true. But everybody's candidate is going to be really old. It's a bunch of old white men. If Bill Clinton got into the race right now, he'd be the youngest man in the race. It's just going to be incredibly frustrating to have everybody making accusations at the other side that apply with equal force to their own side.

So, Steve, I want you to have the last word. I want to look forward a little bit on not just the Democratic Party in 2020, but beyond. There's two theories of the case here. That's what's been playing out between Biden and Sanders. Fairfax County, where I live, 61% of residents have a college. diploma. Biden won nearly half of those. Minnesota, Dakota County, Biden 43%, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Like these college white suburban voters are really coming home to the Democratic Party that used to be certainly after 9-11, the security mom argument. That was

where elections were won and lost. That's Biden's now claim for why he's going to win this election. You're from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan. I think there's a good case to be made there for 2020. But Sanders in California, the Latino vote now is the largest minority block vote. It makes up about 30% of the vote in California, for instance, about 13% nationally at this point. Sanders won half of that group in California. Yeah. Doubling Bidens when among that group. The youth vote. Sanders won about 60% in Colorado and California of voters under 30. Voters who feel like they're falling behind financially. He won 40% of those voters in Texas and Minnesota. Are these the voters of the future that Democrats need to make? And what are they

going to do if they just, you know, annoyed some Sanders voters? Yeah, I mean, that's a very good question. I'll deal first with Hispanic voters. I mean, there were differences in how Hispanic voters performed across the country, right? I mean, Sanders dominated Biden with Hispanic voters in California, did it less well with Hispanic voters in Texas. And we've seen... Biden or Bernie? Bernie. Bernie.

Did I say Biden? Sorry. Bernie dominated Biden with Hispanic voters in California, did less well. with Hispanic voters in Texas, and I think would likely do considerably less well with voters in Florida, given all of the things that Bernie has said and done. So I don't think there are necessarily broad conclusions to be drawn about those two leading Democrats and Hispanic voters. But more broadly, this cleavage that exists in the Republican Party and has gotten the focus of the media for years also exists in the Democratic Party.

I mean, there is this sort of, you know, and the shorthand is, you know, working class or populist base versus establishment. And while that's oversimplified for reasons we could spend hours on, it's not wrong. It's not wrong. And what I think will be interesting to see play out on the Democratic side is until Bernie emerged in 2016, you think back to when. Barack Obama chose Joe Biden, one of Biden's real hallmarks was that he was the guy who could speak to these working class voters that Bernie now really owns. I mean, he is, he is dominating there.

So it'll be interesting to see if Biden pulls some of those away from Bernie because he can, you know, he can go back and he can tell his Scranton story and his Pennsylvania story. And that's, I think that's an open question. The other question I have, obviously, the looming over all of this is Barack Obama. What does Barack Obama do? Does he wait until potentially if there's a fight at the convention, if Bernie

emerges victorious, does Barack Obama wait to weigh in and try to bring these parts of the Democratic Party together as sort of the senior statesman? Or does he get in sooner rather than later? And to me, it's been very interesting that

Obama has not given much of an endorsement at all to Biden, even sort of the kind of whisper endorsement that you might expect Obama to give. Sanders is playing with fire on this a little bit. He put on an ad today that included Obama's voiceover. I think it was a 30-second ad. It was all Obama, praising Bernie Sanders. And the ad, if you're just watching the ad and you don't know, looks like this is an Obama endorsement for Sanders, which I think has to. to get Obama to respond. Obama has to say, I'm not endorsing.

You saw Bloomberg do something similar with Obama. I think Obama has to say this is not. Two small pieces of pushback. One, maybe it was Nate Cohen or some other bespectical cephologist who's on Twitter. Nate Silver and Nate Cohen. Yeah, I get I get I'm very confused. It's like the Kagan's in foreign policy.

I just, you know, he floated. He floated the possibility. It wasn't like a strong argument. He just said it's a possibility that a big chunk of the white working class voters who turned out for Bernie in 2016 to vote against Hillary subsequently became Trump voters. And they're not coming back to the Democrats. And I think you can overstate that claim because there were only, what, about seven million Obama Trump voters to begin with? But that's something to think about. Yeah.

And it would explain some of the low turnout that Bernie has had that doesn't fit with his theory of the electorate. It was that those white working class voters have moved status right rather than status left. And the other thing is I kind of think that, first of all, Biden's better off that Obama hasn't endorsed him. If he had endorsed him, everyone would say the only thing that kept him afloat was the Obama endorsement. Now that he had this Super Tuesday win, if Obama endorses him now, it doesn't. doesn't look like I'm here to rescue the guy. It's more of a, I'm here to anoint the guy. But also, I do think, someone was making this point that Susan Rice and a lot of these people who started going out saying things about Biden, those people

don't do that stuff unless Obama sort of winks at it in some way. So I mean, I think there may have been some whisper endorsement stuff going on. David, parting thoughts on Super Tuesday? Well, can I just say bringing up a race that we haven't really talked about yet. It is always a good day when Roy Moore loses again. And Roy Moore lost again in the Alabama Senate primary. And it reminds me, it reminded me that they finished in the teens, which I hear he likes. Oh my gosh. It just reminded me in 2017. You already used it up for this one. I hope you don't have any more coming. In 2017, I can remember this argument that he, it was absolutely necessary. to vote for Roy Moore, and Roy Moore seems a whole lot less necessary today. And also, it just

earlier today, Trump tweets direct insults against Jeff Sessions. And it just reminded me once again, you know, if, and was it Jonah who was talking about that we're just going to have this festival of what aboutism? Just remind you once again that the president is just a truly undisciplined, erratic, vindictive person. And when that is a standard bearer for the GOP, and that standard bearer has sort of enjoyed this like, oh, this is all baked in. It's not news anymore when he says something strange or when he tweets something vindictive and weird. It's just not news anymore. It doesn't matter. It's going to be interesting to see the people who've sort of condescendingly said, oh, it's all baked in, confronting a candidate on the other side for whom a lot of that stuff is also

just baked in for him also. It's not news anymore when Biden has a gaffe. And you're going to have like the Eric Trump, as Joan was talking about, standing up and jumping up and down and saying, look, look, look, look, and you'll have that going in both directions. But it is kind of interesting to imagine that we're going to have a race where the partisans on both sides are going to be pointing at behavior that their own candidate is certainly when it comes to the lack of discipline and speech and the gaffs. What was it the phrase that Biden used when he was a little upset at somebody? Dog-faced pony soldier?

So we're going to have like the dog-faced pony soldier on the one's hand. We're going to have the petty nicknames on Twitter on the other. It's let me just say Washington, Madison, and Jefferson weep. Oh, please. They called each other pretty bad names too. They were clever. Were they? So to put a bow on this, but also to transition over, so Biden currently holds about 45% of the delegate share.

You need 50% plus one that's 1991 delegates heading in. That's what everyone's going to be looking for now. He had a good night last night, but he's got to keep that momentum going with Bloomberg and probably Warren out of the race. He has to put Sanders to bed. in order not to have a contested convention, not having a nominee until July would be a disaster for the Democrats, I think. Part, though, we've talked about the politics

of voters coming home to Biden and all the reasons that they may not have liked Bernie. But there's one topic we didn't discuss of why those voters deciding in the last three days or so overwhelmingly went to Biden. And that's coronavirus. There's a real argument that as people are watching the news getting increasingly panicked about what they're seeing, and the economy is potentially taking

a hit. The S&P cut U.S. growth forecast again as the virus continues to spread, that voters went for safety rather than revolution. Steve, the economy, coronavirus. Yeah, that's a good point. I mean, you've seen Sanders' proponents, Sanders supporters and proponents of Medicare for all straining, I think, to make an argument that coronavirus would solve all our problems with or that Medicare for All would solve all our problems with coronavirus, and it just doesn't, it's not a very persuasive argument. I think that's right. I think as you look at risks, both in this case, medical and economic, and you've had, you know, major assessors of the U.S. economy downgrade the outlook for the rest of the year. Bernie looks increasingly unlikely.

And, you know, Trump the other day at one of his rallies said he was coming off another really bad day for the Dow and the S&P. And at the rally said, well, you know, I think this maybe, yeah, maybe there's something having to do with the coronavirus. But really, this is people are terrified because of the debate last night, which Bernie Sanders did really well. And, you know, the president was exaggerating. But I don't think he was entirely wrong. I think, you know, there was some of that, as we talked about a little earlier, it went from being sort of theoretical that Bernie Sanders could be the nominee to this moment where everybody kind of looked around and said, oh, my gosh, like, it's more likely than not that he's going to be the nominee barring some intervention or what have you. So I do think the sort of insanity of the, I don't want to call it the news cycle, but this moment generally has people looking at. to somebody like a Biden.

And there is sort of, you know, the big question, I think, both throughout the Democratic primary and then looking forward to the general election is, what role does just exhaustion play in all of this, whether you're talking about political news specifically or whether you're talking about coronavirus, whether you're talking about, you know, all of these worries, foreign policy, chaos, China, North Korea. I think there, there, we could look back. on these moments and say that the supposition in your question was exactly right, that people were saying, boy, stuff seems to be spirited out of control right now, and I would prefer something

a little more stable. David, Anthony Fauci, I thought, had just a very interesting statement. I was surprised you made it publicly, but it summarizes a lot of, I think, where folks are on coronavirus who are working on this in the government. And he said, you should never destroy your own credibility. And you also don't want to go to war with the president. You have doctors, you have CDC, trying to get their hands around whether this is hysteria, a real health crisis yet, or simply a potential health crisis that hasn't hit yet, all while the White House, of course, is dealing in an election year and a president who wants to weigh in, a vice president. president who's running the response, giving regular briefings off camera at this point and trying to

get information, I think, out there. But then what Fauci said holds some weight. You should never destroy your own credibility and you also don't want to go to war with the president. Yeah, that was an interesting, a very interesting comment. And it kind of touches on some other reporting that we've seen that there is a real struggle between saying, okay, look, to try to contain or eradicate this virus, though containment seems more likely than eradication, to try to contain or eradicate this virus, you've got to take a long view, or certainly a medium-term view to a long view, whereas the president is really focused on things like short-term swings in the stock market, is really focused down on specific news cycles, and that's not helpful.

when fashioning a medium-term to long-term strategy that's going to be indispensable in combating this thing. And look, if you fashion a good medium-to-long-term strategy, the ultimate outcome politically, if the strategy is good and the strategy is effective, that ultimate outcome will swamp in a positive sense that sort of the wild swings of the moment. So this is where you really have to do something that a lot of people have kind of scorned over the last few years. You're going to have to rely on experts, some of these deep state folks that nobody's ever heard of before, who spend their lives toiling away in jobs that are not glamorous. And then all of a sudden, a crisis occurs. And this is their moment. And this is the moment when all of that expertise comes into play. And, you know,

where you actually hope that your institutions are maybe more competent than recent performances would indicate. And so this is a moment where you're really hoping that these institutions can come through. And Trump is a little bit helpless in some ways. I mean, you can't tweet this virus into submission. You can't tweet a vaccine into existence. You can't really bully the spread of a virus one way or the other. I mean, this thing has a course and a method in a way that it will spread that is dictated by science and dictated by laws of nature that are very far out of Trump's hands. And so we're having to do two things at once. We're having to invest in enormous amount of trust in institutions we no longer trust. And number two, we're having to hope that a

president who is singularly focused on daily and sometimes hourly swings of news and even of the stock market can fashion and stick to a credible medium-term or long-term strategy that may be adverse to his immediate interests. And we'll just have to see if that is going to be possible. but that tension that you just heard expressed is not the kind of tension that you want our civil servants, or not the kind of pressure we want our civil servants to be under as they're meeting this challenge. So, Jonah, David's right that you can't tweet at a virus that won't be effective in containing the virus. You can. But you can tweet at the Federal Reserve.

You can use your bully pulpit to help consumer confidence in the economy. the economic hit of coronavirus could by far outweigh the health hit from coronavirus. Now, it could be reverse, but certainly there's discussion at the White House about how to contain this if it's not a true pandemic, but only an economic concern. If the economy does take a hit politically looking at November, how bad is it for them? Yeah. So obviously it's bad if the economy is bad for, it's bad for Trump if the economy is bad. But this is one of the few ways the economy could tank where Trump would actually have a legitimate excuse that it wasn't his fault. But do people care if you have an excuse? I think they, let's put it this way. If the market just tanked on its own from fears about inflation because of hyper spending and all that kind of. kind of stuff where it was just directly obviously linked to Trump's policies, they would care more than if some mysterious virus that comes from either a military Chinese lab or bat guano

on the other side of the planet made a bunch of people sick, right? I mean, he has that kind of excuse, which I think mitigates the blame. At the same time, the general sense of chaos is bad for Trump and economic chaos in particular is bad for Trump. And I think that think that one of the things that Trump really struggles with is he reassures no one who isn't already in his column. And, you know, this is one of the things that, like, you know, me and David have been writing out for a very long time, that, you know, Trump is the first president in American history, or at least modern American history. I don't know how Andrew Jackson behaved, to not even bother to pretend to be the president of the whole country.

And, look, Obama was more partisan than I think people realized. The left thinks that Bush was more partisan than a lot of people on the right thought he was. But they, when push came to shove, they spoke at the highest level as if they were presidents of the entire country. Trump doesn't do that, and this sort of not my president attitude is kind of, have baked into the electorate. And so when Trump does these things and he reassures people, he's not reassuring anybody except to already convert it. And when people like Mick Mulvaney, like he said at CPAC, said, oh, you know, the only reason the media is covering this is because,

you know, they want to use this to get Trump. That's crazy. And the problem with it is also, it's not only just it's dumb on the merits. I'm not saying that the media isn't trying to use coronavirus to get Trump, but the idea that they're covering this just because, because of the Trump angle is nuts. And but one of the reasons why that's a really bad idea is that it telegraphs pretty baldly that the White House sees the coronavirus more as a political crisis than as a public health crisis.

And that erodes trust as well. And there's a really disturbing, I mean, if people still read newspapers, there's a really disturbing transcript essentially or read out of Trump's meeting with the pharmaceutical CEOs. And it sounds like there's a certain kind of New York bullying. I mean, I'm sure it exists elsewhere,

but that I associate with a certain kind of wheeler dealer like real estate guy where you just keep needling people to say something just to get you to stop needling them, and then you hold them accountable to it. So say what you want. Right, yeah. So you can get it to me in two months, but you're saying it's two months.

I'm not really saying two months, but two months is possible. That's what you're saying. Two months, theoretically is possible. Okay, so it's two months, right? that kind of thing. Yep. And this gets to David's point about how the science isn't going to let you, like just because you browbeat some CEO, get you in two months what's going to take 10 months to do.

And as, as Dr. Fauci repeatedly tried to make clear. Yeah. Very gently. Very gently. Yes. And I just, that does not inspire confidence as a management thing. So whether the coronavirus ends up destroying the Trump presidency, harming the Trump presidency, or being a blip on the road.

or a bump on the road of the Trump presidency, all depends on how it plays out on its own. Trump has almost no say and how it's going to play out for him, I think. Steve, last topic, but I want to make sure we save some real time for this. I want to talk about Afghanistan and the Taliban peace deal.

I have thoughts. I know you do. But I guess for me, someone who's always been more about domestic policy in general and, you know, goes home to her, her cats and husband and cook some broccoli and chicken. 9-11 was 20 years ago. We have people voting who weren't alive on 9-11.

Why should we care about the Taliban deal? Well, we should care primarily because this is the worst, almost the worst case scenario, this deal. You know, the headline we gave it over a piece that we published earlier this week was that it was an exit deal, not a peace deal. And I think actually on further consideration and watching the events of the last couple days and watching the administration continue to try to spin this, it's more like a surrender that elevates the Taliban. And I don't say that, I don't say that lightly. It is an atrocious, atrocious deal that's going to cause problems in not only in Afghanistan, but I think throughout the region, in part because it elevates the Taliban

and in part because of what it says about America's role. I mean, if you look at the deal and just look first at the concessions, full and complete troop withdrawal within 14 months, U.S. sanctions on the Taliban lifted, the United States has obligated itself to go argue on behalf of the Taliban at the United Nations to have those sanctions. lifted as well. We have raised the possibility of reconstruction help for a post-settlement. Afghan government, which would undoubtedly include the Taliban, maybe in fact led by the Taliban. So U.S. taxpayer dollars could be going to the Taliban, to a Taliban government. And of course, we've agreed to, on behalf of the current elected Afghan government, released 5,000 Taliban prisoners,

ranging from low-level fighters to senior operatives. Those are some massive. massive concessions right off the bat. And they contradict what we were hearing from top U.S. officials just as recently as a couple weeks ago. Defense Secretary Mark Esper said this is literally February 15th, two weeks ago. Nobody right now is calling for the complete removal of U.S. and coalition forces. U.S. forces will remain there as long as necessary to support our Afghan partners. The agreement itself, the language in the agreement says the United States, its allies, and the coalition will complete withdrawal of all remaining forces in Afghanistan within the remaining nine and a half months. So did Esper not

know? Is he putting a lot of emphasis on the nobody right now is talking about complete withdrawal? Did he mean that in the literal sense, like right when he was speaking? I mean, that's a disaster to have that kind of separation between the senior U.S. defense official and the deal that emerges, especially because we knew the outlines of this deal before. The other problem, I mean, there are many other problems with the deal. But one of the big ones is how it treats the relationship between the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It's important to understand that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are sort of inextricably linked, intertwined in a way, in a leadership fashion. You have, Iman al-Zawahiri, the head of al-Qaeda who has sworn Bayat to the, an oath of loyalty to the head

of the Taliban. They are partners, have been partners, fight alongside one another. The Taliban provided safe haven for al-Qaeda before the 9-11 attacks has continued to work alongside al-Qaeda ever since. In September, Mike Pompeo, after President Trump canceled the visit of Taliban leaders to Camp David, where he was going to have a dramatic peace deal, Mike Pompeo said that the United States had won, quote, a commitment from the Taliban that said they would break from al-Qaeda publicly and permanently. That's not in the agreement. Doesn't exist in the agreement. Pompeo continues to claim that it's in the agreement. He said basically the same thing on Sunday in an appearance on Face the Nation. And then he went further. And it's important, I think,

to quote him because the words really matter here. Pompeo said that a senior Taliban official that he had talked to promised that the Taliban, quote, would work alongside of us. meaning the United States, to destroy, deny resources, and have al-Qaeda depart from that place. So the Secretary of State is claiming that the Taliban is going to effectively switch sides, that they are no longer not going to support al-Qaeda, which they have now for two decades plus, but they are suddenly going to fight alongside the United States to expel al-Qaeda, their jihadist brothers. They share Shura Council leaders suddenly.

But the Taliban never agreed to do this in the actual deal itself. So it's a phony claim. It's a phony promise. The problems with the current Afghan government date back to the talks themselves. These were bilateral talks between the United States and the Taliban. The current elected Afghan government, our ally, was not included in the talks. So when we made, the United States made a commitment on their behalf to release these 5,000 Taliban prisoners, a condition-based promise, but a promise nonetheless, Ashr Afghani, the president of Afghanistan, said the next day, we didn't agree to that. We're a sovereign country. We're not releasing these 5,000 Taliban detainees as we head into trying to put the country together by accommodating the Taliban in some way. And that is why you're not seeing any real ceasefire right now. Ashrafgani is saying we're not releasing the prisoners. The Taliban said, you told us we could release the prisoners. So we're going to keep attacking you. Now, the Taliban actually, formally wasn't required to take part in a ceasefire as part of the deal at all. In fact, the seven days that preceded the signing were only a, quote, reduction of violence period that didn't actually, I mean, violence was reduced. It wasn't eliminated. And so you've had very predictably the Taliban taking up arms and conducting attacks.

on Afghans around the entire country. And you had a tweet, or you had a tweet from the head of the spokesman for the U.S. forces in Afghanistan saying on March 3rd alone, the Taliban conducted 43 attacks on checkpoints in Helmand Province. 43 attacks on March 3rd alone. Final point, and I'm sorry for going on so long. March 3rd, the day that those 43 attacks in that. one province took place. Also happens to be the day that President Trump held a telephone call

with one of the leaders of the Taliban. And in that call, as the president reported later, he said, I spoke to the leader of the Taliban today. We had a good conversation. We have agreed there is no violence. Don't want violence. And he said, the relationship is very good that I have with the Mala. We just got owned by the Taliban. It ought to be embarrassing and it certainly will have major repercussions for U.S. security in the future. David? Hard to improve on what Steve just said there. Look, this was, there's a difference between retreat and peace. And as much as you hear phrases like endless war, you don't end a war by essentially fleeing in the face of your enemy and reinforcing your enemy's strength. You know, so, so for example, the 5,000 soldiers, just to put that

in, or fighters from high level to low level, that we would be releasing back to the Taliban, that's about basically a brigade's worth of fighters being released within commitments to release all the rest of the prisoners. In many ways, this is. is worse than America just pulling up stakes and leaving. It's much worse than that because we're pulling up stakes and leaving and then promising to strengthen the Taliban. And look, I sometimes feel as if people are stuck in the war of seven, eight years ago or nine years ago. This, our combat involvement had it's been cycling down for a while. American casualties have been decreasing for a while. Total American deployments in Afghanistan are very sustainable. They represent a very

small fraction of our combat power. Same with our deployments in Iraq and Syria. Very small fractions of our combat power. They do not materially diminish our ability to confront threats from China or North Korea or Russia. Again, these are small deployments. These are sustainable deployments and they happen to be keeping in place and serving as a firewall against a collapse of allied governments that would lead to the creation of terrorist safe havens. And one of the things I saw apologists for the Trump administration saying on Twitter that just blew my mind was this idea that we, well, we don't have any national interests at stake in Afghanistan. What are you talking about? This is the nation that harbored the terrorists who struck us on our home soil

worse than we'd been struck since Pearl Harbor, worse than any American city had been struck since 1814 when the British burned the nation's capital. And to say we have no national interest when we're fighting the same enemy is really remarkable. Look, there has been a lot of frustration about the conduct of this war. I have heard it from men and women in uniform. It's interesting. There's a little bit of a, there's a difference. I served in the surge in Iraq in 0708. I have friends who served in Obama's surge in Afghanistan. And the morale difference between the two groups of soldiers, at least in my experience, is pretty interesting. The surge in Iraq was from a military standpoint phenomenally successful. We were able to diminish violence in Iraq. We were

able to diminish al-Qaeda to almost nothingness, something that we kind of forgot after the rise of ISIS, the Obama withdrawal and the rise of ISIS. But we were succeeding. We operated under different rules of engagement. We had different tactics. A lot of veterans of the Afghan war, particularly of Obama's surge, are much more frustrated by their experience. They experienced different rules of engagement. They fought a different enemy, an enemy that had safe havens that we couldn't really touch, say, in Pakistan. It was a different, it was a different kind of surge, and there was a much higher level of frustration. So you will hear veterans of the Afghan war express a high degree of frustration, many of them about their experience on the ground that was related to

the tactics and the constraints that were placed on them on the ground, as well as their background frustration with Afghan culture and the Afghan society itself. But that part of the war is not the present reality anymore. The present reality is we have much more of a counter-terror force that is also serving as a firewall against significant defeat being inflicted upon our ally. It's a sustainable involvement. It's a sustainable deployment. And it prevents our terrorist enemies from establishing a safe haven. And the idea that we would flee from that and reinforce our enemy at the exact same time is to me unconscionable. And I just refuse to take anyone seriously anymore when I hear them use the term endless war. I just don't take that seriously because unless both sides are

laying down their weapons, it is not the end of the war. I'm sorry. That's just the case. And I think we'll leave it at that today. Thank you so much for joining us and listening. Please subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you're getting your podcast and become a member at the dispatch.com. Have a great week.