The Dispatch Podcast - Our Afghan Interpreters Need More From Us

Episode Date: June 2, 2021

Last week this podcast talked about Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko scrambling a military jet to force down a Ryanair flight carrying a dissident journalist. Now, as more reporting reveals how involved Russian President Vladimir Putin was, Steve asks whether President Biden should be holding a summit with Putin in a few weeks. Also in the foreign policy vein, Jonah laments the fact that translators who have been helping the U.S. military in the Middle East aren’t able to get the help they need to remain safe. Plus, check out the discussion on the merits of ranked-choice voting and Ezra Klein’s interview with President Barack Obama. Show Notes: -Putin summit announcement -Biden floats sending Iran money after 9/11 -Interpreters may be left behind -How does ranked-choice voting work? -TMD on New York City mayor’s race -Ezra Klien interviews Barack Obama -Obama’s ‘guns, religion’ line -Then She Asked Me About Benghazi - Ben Rhodes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by David French, Steve Hayes, and Jonah Goldberg. Lots to discuss today. We're going to start with the Biden-Pooten summit, the move about Afghan interpreters coming back to the United States, whether ranked choice voting is the future, and Ezra Klein's interview with President Obama. Let's dive in, Steve, Biden and Putin are set to have their first in-person meeting? They are. June 16th, the White House confirmed this last week. Last week on this podcast, we talked about the brazen state hijacking of Orion Air flight conducted so that the authorities. regime in Belarus could detain a prominent political opponent as he flew over Belarusian airspace. And at the time we had that discussion, details of Russian involvement were hard to confirm, but there were many signs that Vladimir Putin and his regime at least approved

this unprecedented move. We've learned a lot in the week since. Prominent Russian politicians have publicly backed Belarus. Russian state media has also done so. Putin met with Belarus. Russian strongmen, Alexander Lukashenko, in his boat for a photo op, a show of solidarity, downplayed the flight diversion and kidnapping, sort of made a mockery saying, wow, this happened with Libyan leaders and nobody cared about it then. When EU countries banned flights over Belarusian airspace, Russia retaliated by blocking Air France and Lufthansa flights temporarily when they tried to avoid Belarusian airspace. So those are the recent developments, and let me just take a moment and put this into

broader context, which I think makes it more troubling. And I want to focus here on Vladimir Putin and Russia rather than Lukashenko and Belarus specifically. Putin, it seems pretty clear, has been engaged in increasingly provocative and aggressive behavior toward the U.S. and the West. Twice in the past two weeks, we've seen crippling cyber attacks on U.S. infrastructure, first a pipeline, now with a meat processing company. We know that those attacks originated with hackers in Russia.

We don't know whether Putin had foreknowledge. We don't know whether he had any role in directing them. We don't know if his intelligence services were involved. But he's aware, as we've discussed here, of what Russia-based hackers are doing. And he allows him to do it. Those attacks come on top of the solar winds hack, a devastating sort of worst-case scenario attack that we attributed to Russia's SVR intelligence service. There was an NPR investigation that looked at this and found that Russia had successfully compromised roughly 100 companies, up to a dozen

government agencies, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Treasury, Energy, Department of Defense. And you have this broader campaign from Russia to consolidate power and really exert its influence because they had its influence in Belarus and other places. So despite all of this, despite this context, in the aftermath of the kidnapping, the Biden administration announces this summit between Putin and Biden, says it's to restore the predictability and stability to the U.S. Russia relationship. My question, at least my first question, is a simple one. Should we be meeting with Putin in this context? David? No. Look, I mean, summit meetings in some ways feel like a Cold War relic when a lot of times these things

were part of a necessary process of maintaining a minimal level of communication and sometimes, ideally perhaps some level of agreement between two great powers that were to greater or lesser degrees on the brink of war for 45 years, and that they were necessary. In this instance, I think one of the things that we're seeing is that the summit meeting has become an occasion for lesser powers to kind of upjump themselves on the world stage by meeting with the U.S. president. you know, the egregious example was Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump. And one of the objectives of Russian policy, one of the objectives of, you know, Russian foreign policy, military policy,

is to try to kind of recreate and impose through kind of sheer force and aggression, this traditional great power status for the Russian nation. And when we do these summit meetings, we just kind of help it. We're helping create the impression and create the reality that we see Russia as a peer power that we are getting Putin exactly, we're giving him in many ways exactly what he wants.

And there's no real penalty, especially when you combine it with waving the Nord Stream sanctions. There's no real penalty for recent aggression. And so, no, I don't meet with them. It seems to me to be a very low cost on our end, yet an action with some consequences on Putin's end. It's an action we can take to show that there's something we're going to do about recent aggression,

but instead meeting, I think, just plays right into his hands. So beyond the international implications, there are domestic political implications for Putin. who's able to use these summits or a summit like this, particularly in the aftermath of his sort of deliberate eye-poking in the U.S. to say, yeah, I'm big man on campus. I can do what I want. Are we just, you know, crazy hawks, Sarah looking to pick fights with Putin,

where we should actually just sit across the table and work all this out? I'm very torn on this. I mean, remember last week I was ready. to nuke Belarus. So I have got that going for me in my Hawk credentialing. On the one hand, I think you have a lot of Americans. I haven't seen a lot of polling on this actually, and I'm not sure I would trust any polling that I did see because if you get something, you know, that's pretty far down the level of stuff people pay attention to, I don't necessarily trust how they answer these questions. But what percentage of Americans believe that Putin is behind various things affecting

their life in terms of cyber attacks? I'd be curious if they think the Chinese are stealing intellectual property from our universities or the Iranians. That is a way that these things affect our lives in a real way. And let me back up, if Americans understood what Putin was doing and what the GRU was doing in terms of cyber attacks, I think the question about summits becomes more interesting if the Biden administration thinks that it's just Putin wanting attention. Like, what do you want to please tell your government to stop doing this and maybe we'll stop doing it to you and we can each back off a little with some mutually assured cyber attacks?

But I don't think that that has really soaked in to the American zeitgeist yet. And I think it does. I think it just gives Putin a ton of attention. I think that it elevates him to the world power that he wants to be and that his country should not be considered. China is the adversary at this point. And I just don't see the Biden administration doing nearly enough on China. But Russia is the thing that a lot of Americans sort of think of as an adversary because

we had two decades of movies where they were the bad guys, I guess. And so that's still getting, I think, proportionally way more attention than it should. Jonah, does it matter what the American public thinks about Russia? I mean, isn't this really about Joe Biden and whether he's, in effect, giving them a pass? The concern I think you hear from, well, people like me, is the Biden, the Biden administration increasingly seems as if it's seeing the reality it wants rather than reality. And, you know, after having called Vladimir Putin a killer earlier this spring, Biden

sort of downplayed the potential Russian hand in the colonial pipeline hack, as David mentioned, you had the waiving of sanctions on Nord Stream. at the time that Vladimir Putin is sending signals to us that he wants to provoke and confront, we're sending signals to him that, yeah, we're not really that concerned with your provocations and confrontations. Yeah, I mean, how to put this, I think from the known facts, I agree with you pretty much entirely. Okay, good. Let's go to the next topic. But the problem is, is that this is a problem with a lot of foreign policy topics. is we don't know what's going on behind the scenes.

And it's conceivable, I'm not saying likely, but it's conceivable that there are strings attached to this meeting that we don't know about and also the lifting of those Nord Stream sanctions, that Biden got something out of that. It's also very possible he got nothing out of that. Remember, there was this amazing story. 10, 15 years ago, about after the 9-11 attacks, when Biden was in the Senate, he got his whole staff together and they had a meeting. And he said, you know what we need to do? We need to do right

now. We need to send Iran $150 million. And everyone in the room was sort of like, oh, that Joe, and just hoping that like he would move on and forget he said it. And he did. But he has these kind of weird instincts sometimes where he thinks it's brilliant to capitulate really prematurely for no apparent reason and that somehow will buy goodwill. And I think this is one of the basic problems we've got with American foreign policy in general and democratic foreign policy in particular is there is this assumption that our leaders know what's in other countries' best interests better than those countries themselves. And they might in some objective matter,

like I think if we had a seminar and say, okay, because like everybody on this podcast would say, it's in Russia's interest to be a liberal democracy that protects human rights and grows its economy and non-disfunctional kleptocratic ways. But I would have a very hard time convincing Vladimir Putin of that. And in fact, there's rich history of people who've tried to persuade him of that being sent to prison for 10 years.

So the idea that Joe Biden or anybody in the Biden administration is going to go and meet with Putin and say, hey, you know, this really isn't in your interest. You shouldn't be behaving this way. It's going to be utterly meaningless and, in fact, counterproductive unless it's combined with a rolled up newspaper that smacks Putin on the nose in a significant and painful way. There's no country in the world of major countries that is less responsive to rhetoric and more responsive to actual actions. And maybe Biden's got some plan.

Maybe he's actually doing things on the ground. Maybe he's threatening things and it's plausible. Maybe it's some weird carrot and stick thing and we don't know what the stick is. But on the surface, I just think that I think the summit's a dumb. dumb idea. I think it's one of these things where you get bureaucratic inertia that thinks, okay, we've got to get a summit. That's what presidents do is they have summits with our major adversaries and let's get it on the calendar and then let's come up with the rationalizations for it afterwards. And that's what it feels like to me. Yeah, I mean, that was one of my main

criticisms of Obama foreign policy is that the ends of diplomacy seemed to be diplomacy itself. So that was the goal, was to engage in diplomacy rather than trying to extract concessions or protect American interests or project American power. And I worry that that's what's happening here again. I mean, going back to what we discussed last week on the Russian incursions into the Ukraine and into Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula, the entire time this was happening, the Russian troops rolling in and you had the Obama administration continuing to. offer Russians an off-ramp.

Well, they didn't want an off-ramp. They never wanted an off-ramp. That wasn't the goal. And we kept talking about it as if they would do what we would want to do. But Vladimir Putin's made very clear that he favors aggression, that he's looking to expand. He's consolidating power domestically. If you look at the things that he did really over 2020 to protect his own personal power, to make sure that Putinism outlasts Putin in Russia itself.

When you look at the constitutional changes that he brought about to consolidate his power and expand it internally, this is somebody who's playing a long game. And it seems to me, again, some of this, Jonah, I think you make a good point. Some of this is maybe unfair because we're not seeing what's happening behind the scenes. On the other hand, neither is the rest of the world necessarily. So they're judging what's happening on the surface, too. And what we're seeing on the surface looks like the U.S. kind of cowtowing to Russian aggression while Putin gets more and more provocative.

I mean, think about this. I mean, if you go back, so there was an ineffective response utterly to Crimea, of course. And then, you know, there were Trump defenders who were saying, well, Trump, whatever has rhetoric towards Putin was tougher. well, you know, there was also the spectacle of, do you remember the Russian contractors and Russian military, Russian soldiers who were strolling through this American base in Syria, that there was still American stuff there because we left so quickly in response to the, you know, the Trump leave now order. I mean, there's just been this consistent at Putin pushes,

Putin pushes, and this is a country with a GDP less than Canada, less than Italy. Now, it punches above its weight because it spends a lot more money as a percentage of that GDP on defense, but it pushes and it pushes and we yield and we yield and then we grant summits. And I'm with Jonah. If there's something that we don't know, you know, I'll eat crow on this, but from everything based on what we know, it appears that we're giving Putin exactly what he wants. All right, Jenna. Let's talk about Afghanistan.

Yeah, so this is not normally, you know, Afghanistan is not normally my Ballywick. But I'm so disgusted by what appears to be happening in slow motion right before our eyes, which is the, it looks like we're not going to hit the deadlines to get the, to get the interpreters, the translators that have worked with American troops and Western NGOs generally out of Afghanistan before we do our bug out by September 11. And I have my, I've done some calling around trying to figure out why this is so difficult.

it seems like there is no like cynical political thing here it's it's bureaucratic screw ups it's the difficulty of the actual vetting process um and it is the lack of political will um across several administrations now to actually put someone in there who can get the job done and regardless it It seems to me like this will be a spectacularly horrible black mark on American honor and a dastardly thing to do. So I guess I'll start with David since he's actually worked with some of these people and saw some of these people when he was in Iraq. Because we had the same problem with Iraqi translators when ISIS started to take over there. How do you see it? Like, I mean, is there, is there another way to see it other than a just a grotesque dereliction of American moral responsibility to not be able to get this done and done properly?

It's really hard to see it any other way, to be honest. I mean, but this is something that we have been dealing with for years. When I was in Iraq during the surge, one of the things that, you know, a sort of side issue that I would work on is that, you know, when we would, when we would, when we would, would withdraw from areas that were already, so we would someone just pull back from an area that had become peaceful, that it had been pacified. But that didn't mean that, you know, a translator's family or a translator who is living in that area wasn't suddenly much more vulnerable than they were when they were traveling with us and living with us. And I would have officers would come in and talk to me so desperate to make sure that a translator was either removed from the country or

put in a safer part of Iraq, that they would say, look, I don't care, I will, they will live with me. They will live with me so that, and, you know, if, before, while we're doing all the security checks, I mean, that, that was the level of desperation that you would have from American soldiers who'd worked side by side with these guys for days, weeks, months. It's, you know, look, I'll move him into my house. If you, if you're wondering where he's going to live, I'll move him into my house just get him out of here and and you know because there's on so many levels this is this it feels like a betrayal on so many levels because you're asking people to take a mortal risk while you're with them while you're with them a lot of guys who kind of have this sort of basic

trust that our country's going to do the right thing will reassure them the whole time you're going to be fine we're going to take care of you you're going to be fine we're going to be fine We're going to, you know, they may be making promises that, you know, they can't keep or they're sort of naive and thinking everything's going to be, you know, all of these promises are going to be kept. But a lot of guys are kind of induced to work with us under the assumption that we're going to take care of them. We're going to take care of their families. We're going to take care of them. And they've laid it on the line in a very concrete way. And we just can't even do our work. You know, you can't even do the job without them. And so I, to me, it's.

It's just one of these utterly inexplicable things, especially, you know, when contrasted with the U.K. is doing a better job than we are on expediting this process, and it's honestly not that difficult to process. I don't understand why it's not that many people. It's not that difficult to process. And it's inexplicable to me that if it's a bureaucratic snafu that we can't clear through the red tape, and if it's not a bureaucratic snafu, somebody needs to be held accountable for this. Yeah, so I talked to

someone who served in Afghanistan and was part of the work in intelligence, whatnot. And he was a matter of fact about it. He said, look, part of the problem is that

some of the terrorist attacks from, you know, what is it called, green on blue, green on, whatever it is. Yeah. Yeah. Some of those attacks

came from embedded Taliban, people who signed up as interpreters to get close to people, and then they killed Americans. And you can understand why the idea of importing some terrorists, the political risks there are just so much greater

than the political benefits in terms of the CYA involved. And I get that. At the same time, like I went back and I listened to a whole bunch of NPR reports about this while I was walking the dogs at 5 o'clock this morning. And because they've been covering this problem

for like seven, you know, years. And it seems to me that if you are on record with a sworn affidavit from a U.S. military officer that who testifies that he personally witnessed this translator kill several Taliban saving American lives, the odds that that guy is an embed of the Taliban are pretty low. And yet, it's heartbreaking. Some of the people who did exactly that have been murdered by the Taliban, because

the Taliban is taking names. So, I mean, see, I want to ask Sarah about the domestic politics about all this kind of stuff. But, you know, Steve, we had this problem. We did something similar, not identical, but similar in Vietnam. And culturally, it had a half-life of... political bitterness in America and among allies. I had an Australian friend who would turn red with rage

any time you mentioned Henry Kissinger because he was a surgeon in Vietnam and a lot of his friends were murdered when we pulled out. And, but you also, I mean, the people said back then, this will ruin our credibility and it'll be harder to get people to work with us the next time. We didn't have this problem when we worked with people in Afghanistan And as a matter of real politic, is it a problem beyond just the national honor part and the moral obligation?

I mean, what are the actual real world consequences of it? Yeah, I think it is. I mean, I'm not sure that I buy the fact that it wasn't a challenge getting some people to sign up with us. We just were able to give them a ton of money initially or to overcome some of the reservations that they might have had. But I think there are potentially real consequences. both in terms of what it says about the United States

and our commitment to helping people who help us, and also in terms of what happens when we leave them behind and some of them die. I mean, some of them will die. Right now, these are people who have worked alongside the U.S. Native forces, in some cases for years, who have had Taliban targets on their backs and on the backs of their families, in some cases for years.

They know this. They can't go to tribal meetings because they're marked by the Taliban. They don't want to bring risk or danger to others that they associate with. And part of the bargain that they made when they signed up was a practical one. I mean, let's assume they wanted to help and they didn't like the Taliban. They were worried about the Taliban taking over again. But part of it was, you know, I'm going to help the Americans, so the Americans prevail. And now we're leaving and we're in effect saying to them, suck it, you're on your own.

Can you imagine anything that we could do that would so more bad will throughout the company than to take these people who are our allies and who risk their lives for us on a daily basis and to leave them stranded? People will pay attention to that. You're potentially taking huge advocates for the United States, for America, for Western-style democracy and abandoning them to the Taliban, and other people will watch this, both internally in Afghanistan and beyond. You know, we did do this in Iraq. I think it did have these kinds of consequences. We did this with people who assisted in the pursuit of Osama bin Laden,

left them out to dry when Pakistani courts went after them. This is something that Americans should be embarrassed about. And it is a bureaucratic problem. The challenge, I'd say it's a bureaucratic problem in sort of the, just a rank description of it. But it's primarily a problem of leadership. These bureaucratic problems only exist in so far as you don't have people willing to make this a priority. If Joe Biden said tomorrow, I'm making this a huge priority, it would be solved. We could get people to do this. We can get people to process the pay. paperwork. And the idea that these SIVs, these particular kinds of visas, the people who have applied for them or been accepted for them are security risks is just not borne out by the numbers.

It's like one in 70,000 who have been approved was later found to have terrorist ties. So I don't think it's a particular security risk because, as David says, these people have been working alongside our troops. We've done the vetting. The vetting's already taken place. We don't need to double triple vet them now. They've done it. They passed the first vetting, and then they served alongside our folks on the ground in Afghanistan. So this is a leadership problem. And if we want to be taken seriously, I think that Joe Biden needs to step up and say, we're going to solve this problem. We're not going to let it languish. We're not going to back burner it as we have for the previous two administrations. So, Sarah, I mean, I agree it's partly a huge bureaucratic problem.

but um the what are the politics of this i mean will a mayor i mean you are famously your desire to turn um belarus into glass notwithstanding um you are famously a proponent of saying that foreign policy doesn't much matter in domestic politics it is i would argue from the people i've talked to the way i found it more than likely that there will be major bloodletting in Afghanistan and people who worked with us and their families will be murdered as well as other civil society actors and whatnot. Taliban has lists.

They're like the Khmer Rouge. They're going to go in and they're going to kill people. How do the politics of that rate compared to the politics of thinking that one in 70,000 of the people you try to bring in turns out to be a terrorist and blows something up. I mean, what, what, what is the incentive structure that says to Joe Biden,

that's just not worth making this a priority? So first of all, I agree with Steve that this is a leadership problem, but I disagree with him that it, you have to have Joe Biden. I don't think you have to have Joe Biden at all. I think if you had bureaucrats within the state department who prioritized it, It would help, yeah. Within a bureaucracy, you can, a political within the State Department could hit the gas pedal on this by saying that this is important to their boss, right? Let me give a domestic political example, though, where, no, I don't think anyone is voting on this issue.

But imagine the other direction turning it into a positive and you're Tom Cotton and you campaign on the fact that you got these guys back that America, needs to have a reputation on the world stage as the biggest, baddest, you know, coolest kid. It doesn't mean we're the world's police. We don't go into countries, but we keep our word. And he goes around in campaigns with some of the folks he brought back. I don't think this takes a lot of political will. I think it takes a very little amount of political will. And if Tom Cotton says, you know, his vote for anything, I don't think it's a lot of political will, I don't think it has to be January 6th commission or even infrastructure. But his vote in exchange for getting these 70,000 people, that could be enough. And it could be a good issue for a Tom Cotton.

And I'm shocked that we're not seeing more members of Congress raise their hands and say, this is what I want. I mean, log rolling is dead. We've talked about that. This is an example we're log rolling, make log rolling great again, folks. You could do it. And, you know, it's interesting also your point about the CYA stuff. It is very obvious that that is what's holding up the process. It's, it's Willie Horton-esque. All it takes is one, and then it doesn't matter what good you did. No one will care. There's no good story. There's only the bad story. what's interesting about that is that in addition to the numbers game, which again, that's not how anecdotes work. All it takes is one anecdote, and you undo all the good numbers. But A, the Republican

party has a problem when it just says no to all immigration. This is another good example. The Republican Party could say, yeah, this is merit-based immigration. You want to talk about how merit-based immigration is going to work? Here's example number one of merit-based immigration. you put your ass on the line for American troops, you've got merit. It's not all just going to be PhDs because I think that actually is, like, I think there are people who are like, well, okay, but like, really, we're just going to, that's not quite what we want. Like, no, this is an example of non-foreign PhD wage rising immigrants that are clearly merit-based to come to the country. So A, good talking point for Republicans.

On the CYA issue, though, you know, there have been several anecdotes, David, I think you've seen these as well, where we arrest a terrorist overseas, detain a terrorist overseas, and their first question is, do I get to go to the United States now? As in, and not in a bad way, like, in a good way. So even if the numbers are one out of 70,000 that have, quote, ties to terrorism, I actually think the number who, if they were brought over here with their families and given the opportunity to start again in a country where there's 27 types of cereal just on the top shelf of the first aisle, I think that number who would actually seek to harm America is much, much lower. maybe I'm being naive about that. I'm curious what David thinks.

But overall domestic politics, I think it's a great opportunity for a candidate who wants to run with some ties to the military to burnish their cred and underline their view of what America should be on the world stage

and be a great talking point for those who favor merit-based immigration and explain what that is to the American people in ways that I think the middle of the political country would really get on board with. I will say I did see an ad just this morning

for the first time that had both Republican and Democratic congressmen who had served in Afghanistan or Iraq touting this issue is a bipartisan thing. Our friend Meyer, can't remember his first name, Michigan.

Peter Meyer. Peter Meyer. Crow, who was, you know, from the Democrats and a guy from Florida were in it. It was a pretty effective ad. just it feels it feels like there's just a lot of sand going through the hourglass right now and get to the state department get to the white house like the ad is good i'm a this is not like instead of the ad but like now you got to start working the phones yeah and look there's no completely risk-free course of action here so if you're going to say um you know what we what we're trying to do is

make absolutely 100 million percent sure that nobody who has terrorist intentions is going to come to the United States, well, you also have to realize that if you're pursuing that as a course of action, and then you're leaving all these people behind because you're wanting a risk-free, completely risk-free immigration scenario, you're going to be hurting America in other ways by demonstrating to people in the future, don't work with America, don't help us. Or radicalizing people there. Yeah, exactly. You're signing your death warrant if you work with America.

That has risks. That has real risks. Well, also, the process for these SIVs is supposed to be six months or something like that. And the average time now is beyond, I believe, three years. Three years. And it seems to me one could also have just the simple process of bureaucratic triage where you just expedite the obviously okay cases and clear some of the backlog and then work on the tougher cases. And you could even come up with the system and know it's expensive to bring people in their whole family.

families here and come up with a system where if you're not, if you haven't gotten final clearance, there's some kind of monitoring, but just get you out of a place where people are planning on murdering you and your family, even if you have to be in a third country for a little while. It just seems like a minimal requirement to help these people. And it just, it's so rare, I'm actually ashamed for my country. And this is one of these moments where I just find it so appalling. And we should point out that this is, there is an increasing level of, urgency for this. I mean, we are, you know, four months away from the full September withdrawal, and there's abundant reporting, including very good reporting from our own Tom Jocelyn and his

colleague at the Foundation for Defense of Democracy's Bill Rogio in their Long War journal, reporting about what the Taliban has prepared to do in anticipation of the U.S. withdrawal surrounding certain cities, extending its sphere of influence beyond sort of lots of the rural outposts that it had. And taking up more territory. There was a sort of a jarring report from a reporter I follow for Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, who covers Afghanistan, lives in Afghanistan. This is his bead. And he said, it's all happening in the open. Like the Taliban is, they're not, you know, being clever about this. They're actively setting. up to take over and putting targets on the backs of people who have worked with the Americans

in a broad sense. He's not talking about this particular issue, but in a broad sense, they are targeting people who have worked with the Americans because they understand that that's the fastest way for them to consolidate power once the Americans and our allies are gone. This, I think, becomes even more urgent in that context. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious. That kind of

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dispatch application times may vary rates may vary all right let's move on to rank choice voting so the new york mayor's race is in two weeks it's the democratic primary which is the new york mayor's race for the most part this time around and they are using rank choice voting for the first time this will be the largest u.s. population to ever use rank choice voting Maine and alaska adopted it recently but not that many people live there. And so my question to each of you is, is ranked choice voting the future? And what are the downsides, if any, of ranked choice voting?

And just let me explain real quick, rank choice voting. So this is where David runs on a platform of Aquaman is the best movie. And Steve and Jonah run on a platform of Aquaman is the worst movie. Well, Steve, in fairness, runs on a platform of what is Aquaman. What is a movie? And so what happens is David would only get his ceiling is 30% of the vote, but David... That feels high. Let's be it. But in a regular primary, David probably wins that primary.

But in ranked choice voting, most people would put Jonah first, and Steve second, or Steve first and Jonah second, and David third. And what happens is you have these little mini runoffs. And so, in the first round, the person with the fewest amount of votes is knocked off, in this case, Steve. And then it's a head to head between David and Jonah with all of Steve's second choice voters, in this case, they all went with Jonah, coming over to Jonah's side, and all of a sudden, David gets swamped.

So that's right choice voting. works really well in primaries in particular where there's a huge crowded field. But what in theory would happen in general elections is you would get more third party candidates and you wouldn't have people making the binary choice. You're throwing away your vote, et cetera. All right. With that explanation of what range choice voting is, Jonah, good, bad, and different. I am going to say good with an asterisk insofar as I like these kinds of experiments.

Obviously, part of my asteris, part of my footnote to that asterisk. would be if we can't get rid of primaries altogether. But this is better. I'm convinced that this is better than the way we do primaries now. I'd rather governments not run primaries or rather parties run primaries. But this makes a lot of sense to me. When you start looking at like the, you start gaming it out,

you know, there's a reason why vanilla is the, is on net the most popular flavor of ice cream in America, even though it's basically nobody's first choice for favorite ice cream. It's the least objectionable flavor of ice cream, which is why at weddings and bar mitzvahs and whatever, they serve a lot of vanilla ice cream because they know, you know, there may be a lot of people out there who prefer rum raisin,

but they'll all eat vanilla. I think we could use some more vanilla in our politics. And if the, if this creates an incentive structure for more reasonable, moderate candidates to have more more oxygen in primaries than I'm in favor of it. I could see a world where that part, that aspect of it becomes a problem because then you don't have people who are willing to swing for the fences on tough issues in some ways. But we'll see how that goes. But for right now, it's better than the alternative.

And I'm actually really, as a former New Yorker, you know, born and raised, I'm kind of glad that New York City is doing this, in part because New York City has incredibly corrupt local election laws that are an incumbent protection racket. And I don't know that this shatters all of that, but it shakes it up enough that it's interesting. And if I had to make my prediction, I think Yang ends up doing quite well. Steve, does this solve all of our problems? All of them. We're done if we can just get ranked choice voted.

The chicken wings will be reformed. The wings will be back. Perfect. No, I actually will keep my answer brief because I agree with literally every word that Jonah said there, and that does not happen very often. The only thing I'll add is, you know, Sarah, I don't know if you remember our conversation, this is probably more than a year ago now with Joe Trippy, prominent. Democratic strategist.

And in that conversation, we made reference to an earlier interview that I had done with Trippy at the vice presidential debate in 2016, the debate between Tim Cain and Mike Pence, in which Trippy said, if you look at what has happened here in the Republican primary, this is the way that everyone will run elections now. Pick an issue or a couple of issues that get sort of red hot, support from a small sliver of the base of each party and run on that so that you prevail because you just have to do better than all of these other people. And, you know, obviously pointed to Trump in Iowa and focusing on immigration and a couple other issues that have,

don't have, you know, Trump's plans would be fair to say don't have broad support but have passionate support in the people who are in favor of some of them, at least the way that he ran his campaign at the beginning. So Trippi said, this is how everybody's going to run from now on. And I think it's fair to suggest that he was right about that. And we were a very, you know, a couple of primaries, really a South Carolina away from him being correct on the presidential level with Bernie Sanders. And if this has the effect of diminishing the likelihood of this kind of politics moving forward, I think it's very much worth the experiment for all the reasons that Jonah articulated. So, David, I was feeling pretty good about ranked choice voting.

I had three examples for why I thought it was great in the sweep. One, it was going to make polling irrelevant because it's very hard to poll. people in terms of their second, third, fourth, fifth choices. And so all the polls are only asking who people's first choice candidates are. And then, so that only tells you really who's going to make it into those last two or three runoff slots. And then also, a lot of people don't rank candidates past first or second. And so it's really, really hard to poll the non-ranking people. So polling becomes less, it does become less predictive, but also less controlling over who the quote-unquote frontrunners are. Second, name ID becomes less important. You look at Trump, and I think part of what

really gave Trump that leg up at the beginning was name ID. And I ran this like nice little numbers ranked choice voting experiment in the first three primaries, assuming that Cruz and Rubio and Kasick and Bush voters largely would have ranked each other in some order and then Carson and Christy voters largely would have ranked Trump pretty high. Trump doesn't win any of the first three primaries. And then, of course, he would win Nevada

the fourth primary, but that's assuming, of course, that it didn't make any difference what happened in the first three primaries, which is not how primaries work. And three, I was like, this would, of course, lower partisanship, per Jonah's point,

because these candidates have an incentive not to light each other on a fire by moving to the most extremes of their party. And then I was feeling pretty good about myself after I wrote all this. And I was like, ha, you know, Maine has been doing this for a little while. I wonder if anyone has done any research on it.

And lo and behold, this great graduate researcher at MIT, PhD candidate, has. He did a bunch of regression analysis. And what he found, rank choice voting produced significantly lower levels of voter confidence, voter satisfaction, and ease of use.

Voting for non-major party candidates did increase by five points, not enough to make any difference, and one of the main claims that it will make campaigns more civil, oh, didn't happen at all. Negative spending increased significantly in Maine following the implementation of ranked choice voting,

and the 2018 campaign was even more negative than impaired districts around the country. what am I missing here, David? Why is everything I think should happen not happening in Maine? I said, so I read your sweep on that and I looked at that paper and I have to say

I just would like to see a greater sample size and a longer sample period. It's those damn Maine people, isn't it? And their lobster rolls. Well, you know, you're not going to want to extrapolate for America

based on a brief sample of Maine. I think that's a pretty safe statement to say. Also, you know, this is new. And so anytime you have something new and you overlay something really new over onto an, you know, a consultant industry, a, you know, a campaign world that has been operating under the old for a long time,

there's going to be a period of sort of flailing around as people sort of figure this out. So I think it needs some time. I think it needs some space outside of Maine. So I think this New York experiment is fantastic. Look, I'm not one of these people who says, okay, if we do X or Y tweak to the way we select candidates or draw up districts that we're going to solve our problems.

But I am someone who thinks that anything that we can do that sort of forecloses this increasing, sense that 20% of America can run America. So if you're a motivated 20%, which puts you at, say, 40% of one party, you're going to win a multi-candidate primary, then you get to go all binary choice on everything. And so you can actually sort of have a viable, if you're the engaged 20% of America on one side, you've got a pretty compelling argument that because you're committed, because everyone else is fragmented and because you can go ahead and get to the binary choice

after the primaries, you've got a pretty good argument that you've got a path to consistently win. And there's no incentive to moderate, to compromise in any way. In fact, there's a disincentive because it might dilute your passion, the passion of your 20%. And so anything that gets us out of this notion where 20% of Americans who are most committed to a particular issue, think that they can run the whole country, I'm for that. I'm for trying that. So I'm very interested to see what happens. I think one of the biggest barriers here is just that people don't quite understand it and they have to do it for a cycle or two before they get it. And I think the same thing with campaign strategists. They have to run campaigns like this for a cycle or two or

three before they really get it. So let's hold off on the studies to make on making any definitive conclusions. Jonah, before we move to the next topic, I just want you to know that nothing can replace the Carter Baker Commission in my heart in the number one slot, but that ranked choice voting in the New York City mayor's Democratic primary in 2021 is moving up to number two real fast right now. I'm very, very excited. I think it's great. And I completely agree with David. I mean, like, it takes a while to break in people to a new system. And of course, for a little while, it's going to be like when Homer Simpson's watching Prairie Home Companion

on his TV by accident, and he starts smashing the TV, he's saying stupid TV, be more funny, right? There are going to be people who like, stupid election system, do what I want you to do. And it's going to create some churn for a little while. But I think this is, it's definitely worth trying because the certain, the current

situation is not good. With MX Platinum, access to exclusive MX pre-sale Tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Presale tickets for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Turns and conditions apply.

Learn more at mx.ca. slash Y Annex. All right, David, speaking of elections, campaign strategy, et cetera, shall we take a walk back to 2008? Yeah, let's do it. So I was listening to Ezra Klein interview Barack Obama and there was a point at which, you know, as events move on and, you know, with the rise of Trump, there's a lot of, I think, quite appropriate soul searching about how we got there and maybe a reappraisal of how you approach the Obama administration. And I got to a point like right at the very beginning of this interview where I thought. Am I crazy or did I, did I misread, was I kind of such a partisan Republican that I just misread Obama?

And so I'm going to ask you guys that. Am I crazy? Did I just misread Obama? And let me, let me begin with this question or let me set the stage. So, Ezra Klein begins by saying, he's in a Q&A with Obama. And he says, I think normal way most of us think about persuasion is you're trying to win an argument. And he says to Obama, you seem to approach it with this first step of making yourself a person that the other person will feel able to listen to, which means sympathizing with their argument, sanding off some of the edges of your own. Tell me what you think about that.

And here's Obama. That's interesting. I forget whether it's Clarence Darrow or Abraham Lincoln or some apocryphal figure in the past, who said the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person's argument. better than they can. For me, what that meant was I had to understand their worldview. He goes on and he says, in this strategy, says, it presumes that none of us have a monopoly on truth. It admits doubt in terms of our own perspectives. But if you practice it long enough, at least for me, it actually allows you to not always persuade others, but at least to have some solid ground that you can stand on. You can with confidence say, I know what I think, I know what I

believe, gives me more convention rather than less. In other words, The impression here is you're admitting doubt, you're understanding your opposition. And Jonah, I don't remember that much from the Obama administration. In fact, one of the things that I remember is, and maybe I'm, again, this is, am I crazy, an enormous amount of sort of arrogance towards the opposition. He was an anonymous source within the administration during, in talking about Obama. He has a real problem with what I call the assignment of bad faith. He regards everyone in the other side at this point of being a bunch of bloodthirsty no-nothings from a different era who play by the old book.

Was I missing the magnanimous Obama? Yeah, no, look, I missed this movie too. And, and I've revisited, you know, what I got wrong and what I got right about that whole period. I think I down, I underestimated the role that race played and some of this stuff. And I, I was certainly too dismissive. I know it was never a birther guy, but I also never thought that the birther thing was that big a deal for most of the time. And I got that wrong. So I'm totally open to saying, you know, I was in the wrong place during the Obama years.

I cannot get from that what I think is a good faith position on my part can I cannot get to where Obama is in that interview because from the out I mean he was legendary about that I've talked to congressional leaders about this where he would sort of like I was talking about the foreign policy thing before he would talk to Republican leaders and explain to them what was in their interest their political self-interest

and then explain to them why they should completely why it was in their interest to completely capitulate to what Obama wanted to do and it would drive Republicans crazy and he

was a master of creating he wasn't quite as good as Bill Clinton as it was but of creating these sort of false choices and these false narratives I mean, the one that I've probably spilled the most ink over was the second, in the second inaugural address, you know, where, first of all, he had this line that he loved to use all the time about if, you know, about the pull yourself up by your, what was it, the, he would discard, he would, he would scorn, keep scorn on the, pull yourself up by your own bootstrap saying, and, and you would say, you know, like basically, you know, like basically, you. if you remember the opportunity,

if you believed in the Opportunity Society, you were on your own and all these kinds of things where he was mischaracterizing what conservatives believe. And his grand philosophical vision, you can tell much of the stuff I've memory hold because I just don't want to dwell on Obama anymore. But his grand philosophical vision in the second inaugural was that there are only two relevant creatures,

there are only two relevant agents in American politics? There's the federal government and the individual. That was the whole life of Julia thing. And if you, and there was no civil society. There's no mediating institutions. There was no role for religion. There was no role for these things. It was the government and the individual.

And he described conservatives' positions as essentially radical, Randian, you know, objectivism, often, which just wasn't true and didn't really speak to people. And I just, I think that he, more than, almost any politician in our lifetime with obviously Donald Trump accepted really didn't understand. Actually, I'll take that back. Donald Trump, I think, in his heart of hearts, understands why a lot of people don't like him, which is why he often has these tells where he'll say things like, I have the best words, and nobody knows more about something than I do, because

he's actually revealing his insecurities. Obama truly did not understand what people, why anybody would have a problem with him other than reasons of bad faith know-nothingism or racism and i think it's one of the things that really poisoned our politics um during his presidency because it drove people crazy so sarah um you know assuming obama's telling the truth about his understanding of his own persuasion style do you square the circle here by saying you know in in the interview he says for me what i meant was that i had to understand their worldview and I couldn't expect them to understand mine if I wasn't extending myself to understand theirs and he talks about being able to make the other person's argument better than

they can't they can themselves it's do you square the circle by saying he thought he understood acted under the presumption that he understood and did not understand or because this is this is I feel I think there is something that that Jonah had on is you often during the Obama years, you felt like he was trying to explain. He was explaining you to you and not getting it quite right. So let's use the most famous example of him trying to explain the other side and explain their motivations. They get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antithope to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustration.

that was him trying to give the argument for the other side. Right. And I think what struck me in the interview, and I don't know how to even throw in the number of caveats that I want here, which is I think Barack Obama is the most talented politician of my lifetime. I think he beats Bill Clinton because Bill Clinton didn't have to run in 2008 as a black guy, like just very, very different. Bill Clinton could just be charismatic.

Aw, Shucks, and that was enough. Barack Obama was playing 3D chess, and he is masterful. However, this was an incredibly partisan interview. And I was surprised because post-presidency Barack Obama, in my, I guess, sort of superficial version of it, has been not nonpartisan by any means, but sort of beyond it, above it, moving past it. And this was kind of revisiting some pretty partisan stuff.

You know, they're talking about how basically the Senate is a gerrymandered thing because Wyoming gets once, you know, two senators the same as California. And he says, now the good news is I also think that that has made the Democratic Party more empathetic, more thoughtful, wiser by necessity. We have to think about a broader array of interests in people, and that's my vision for how America ultimately works best and perfects its union. We don't have the luxury, we Democrats, don't have the luxury of just consigning a group of people to say, you're not real Americans. We can't do that. But it does make our job harder when it comes to just trying to get a bill passed or trying to win an

election. What? I feel like the last two years has very much, last four years, has very much been Democrats saying that Trump voters aren't real Americans, they don't need to be talked to at all so much as yelled at and or taken out of polite society. Maybe they're right, but say that. Don't say that it's made you a more empathetic party. I do not think that that, I think that paragraph, like, I found it truly bewildering. And maybe in 2008, I would have been like, well, he has a point. But in 2021, that only works if you're talking about a very certain type of urban American who already belongs to the Democratic Party. And then Ezra, in fairness to Ezra, pushes back and says in 2012, you won non-college whites, making less than $27,000 a year. Donald Trump then won them by more than 20 points.

He kept them in 2020. What advice do you have to Democrats to bring educational polarization back down? And his answer was, Joe Biden's great at this. What? That's like pundit talk. Joe Biden just lost them. Huh? So, yeah, I thought it was, I thought he missed an opportunity here to, like, be a post president.

He doesn't need to win elections. The Democrats don't need him to win elections right now in that way. They need him to be, they need him to gaslight us in a different way and actually be way, way less partisan. pretend that that's who he was the whole time. But this is, this was weird. Steve, I know you have thoughts on this and also a Ben Rhodes piece in the Atlantic. I do. Just to address the comments from Jonah and Sarah first, I guess my, my big answer is it depends, right? I mean, I think we've seen from Barack Obama the kind of partisan language that Sarah points to, when she invokes his clinging to religion and guns.

But the context for that matters, right? That was a fundraiser in San Francisco. Obama was speaking to true believers and did that, I think, a lot when he was speaking to true believers. Also, if you're going to bring up context of that, it's also worth remembering that was his explanation for why Hillary was beating him in Pennsylvania.

so the sky god boomstick clutching meanderthals he was talking about were voting for Hillary over him in a primary and then she and bill Clinton proceeded to make that an issue for a long time Hillary trying to defend these bitter clingers so I think you know certainly Barack Obama I think he's engaged in in a certain amount of revisionist history and that's one example having said that you know one of the things that he did particularly well. I traveled, I covered the 2008 campaign a ton. I was out on the road. I went to a lot of his speeches and a lot of his rallies. And one of the things that he did so effectively and so frequently that I, at one point I wrote about it as I called it his rhetorical gimmick

was the proverbial nod to the people who disagree with him, acknowledging, sort of validating their viewpoint before going on to either disagree with those. or as often as not create a straw man about it. And this example, there's an example I just was looking this up while we were talking about it from Iowa. He gave a speech at Cornell College and took some questions and answers. In December of 2015,

and a student asked Obama about guns. And Obama anticipating the Heller ruling says there's this Supreme Court case that's going to be decided. I taught constitutional law for 10 years. I've got my opinion. My opinion is that the Second Amendment is probably, it is an individual right, not just a right of the militia, which put them at odds with some Democrats who were making the opposite point. It went on to really identify, you know, I like hunters. I think people should be able to do

this, et cetera, et cetera. And then came this turn, which was, but you know, you're seeing school kids shot on the playgrounds of Chicago public schools. And we've got to end that. And the way to end that is all this regulation. But he did that all the time, particularly as he moved from the primary to the general election, where he would sort of give a nod to the opposing view and then either disagree with it directly or, as I said, in many cases, just create a straw man. We saw this during his presidency too. I mean, in particular, the arguments over entitlement reform and the the cases that he made against Paul Ryan, where, you know, he would sit across the table from Paul Ryan.

This is true of Obamacare, too, sort of nod his head and acknowledge that Ryan comes to these arguments with good face, that he actually has ideas, that they're concrete, serious policy proposals. And then he would, in effect, say, but he really wants to kill all the old people. And you're just, there was this dissonance there that you're like, that's not what he's actually saying. I do think you're seeing this,

you're seeing parts of this revisionism, throughout the Obama project. And David, as you mentioned, there's a piece from Ben Rhodes, one of Obama's Deputy National Security Advisor, had a hand in a lot of his speeches, really helped craft the president's message. And Rhodes writes this piece in the Atlantic about working on his memoir. And he goes to a bed and breakfast in West Virginia so that he can have some peace and quiet and write his memoir. And as it happens, the woman who owns the bed and breakfast comes down, talks to him about, you know, Rhodes says vaguely that he's involved in politics, she comes down and starts to, you know, offer a bunch of conspiracy theories per Rhodes telling

and was a Trump voter and really liked Trump and was sort of taken in by what Rhodes described as the right-wing media complex. Rhodes then goes on to describe a disagreement that they had about Benghazi, sort of his perfect attack. And, I mean, perfect response and says, says, you know, she really just didn't get it. And as Rhodes described it, said, you know, the whole thing was just a tragic attack that sometimes happens in this world, a situation in which people did their best and it wasn't good enough. What if, I said to her, the people working in government were not lying, but just trying their best. What if they were people just like us conveying what they believed to be true? That had, in fact, been the essential

finding of the many investigations that had taken place. And I read this, and it's all about how we have to have shared facts and a shared grasp of reality, and this Trumpy woman in West Virginia didn't have any grasp of reality. And I read Ben Rhodes' description, and look, let's take him at his word. Let's say that this is what, you know, he is now, he now believes to be the reality. It's total nonsense. That is not, in fact, what happened. You know, Ben Rhodes wrote the memo saying that we have to blame it on a video.

He was the one who helped prep Susan Rice for her five Sunday morning shows in which she peddled a story that was total nonsense. Hillary Clinton wrote a note to her daughter and said, this was an al-Qaeda attack and then told the rest of the world that it wasn't an al-Qaeda attack. I mean, for one thing after another, after another, where they're just selling things that weren't true? Now, it's definitely the case that a lot of people on the right took those basic facts and took the Obama administration's misleading on Benghazi and whipped it into a conspiracy far beyond what it actually was. But that doesn't mean that, you know, Ben Rhodes is now sort of has a unique handle

on the truth as he tells these stories. And I think what we're seeing both in the Obama interview with Ezra Klein and this Ben Rhodes piece is sort of convenient revisionism, where they understand that there is a broad sentiment, including among some conservatives and Republicans, that Trump has created this alternative universe, that right-wing media has contributed to it. Certainly that's something that we talk about a lot. It's a big concern of mine. But that doesn't mean that they then have the monopoly on the truth. And I think that's been something that sort of underlies a lot of the arguments you're seeing here from Obama and from Roads.

And unfortunately, is an assumption that many in the media take to their reporting on contemporaneous events and Joe Biden. All right. With that, we're going to call it a week. Thank you, guys. We'll do it again next week. And thank you listeners. Please rate us on Apple Podcasts or any of your podcast platforms.

We appreciate it. It helps other people find it. And check out the dispatch.com anytime. Steve has been working on the same Afghanistan piece for how long do you think it's been, Steve? Has it been 18 months? It's coming. It's coming. So you don't want to miss that when it does finally make it.

But in the meantime, Jonah, David, they have great newsletters, subscribe to them. Mine is pretty mediocre, but Chris Steyerwalt makes it great. So you can subscribe to that one, too. We'll see you next week. Taiwan's a country. This episode. Squarespace. Squarespace is the platform that helps you create a polished professional home online. Whether you're building a site for your business, your writing, or a new project, Squarespace brings

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