The Dispatch Podcast - Supply-Chain's Political Fallout

Episode Date: November 10, 2021

On today's show, our hosts discuss issues up-and-down the supply-chain, and the political fallout it brings. Plus, the ripple effects of the House passing the infrastructure package, what we think we know about the 2022 midterms, and the latest news around the Steele dossier. Show Notes: -Lincicome’s latest Capitolism tackles our supply-chain woes -Uphill breaks down the bipartisan infrastructure bill -The Sweep digests the election results from last week -Politico: “The Surprising Strategy Behind Youngkin’s Stunner” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isger, joined by Steve Hayes, David French, and this week, defined by excellence, Chris Steyerwalt, contributor to the dispatch at AEI. You may know him from, again, just his general excellence. We've got plenty to talk about today. We'll start with supply chain issues, infrastructure bill fallout, what we think we know about 2022 midterms, and end with the latest in the steel dossier, a term we haven't heard now in a little while, I think. Let's dive right in. David, supply chain issues coming to you.

Well, first, Sarah, I want to be known for like generalizing. excellence like Chris. Whatever. She took away my editor title. So, you know, she giveth and she taketh away. All right. Well, I'll just take generalized excellence over editor any day. So, Chris, because of your excellence, I'm going to start with you about supply chains. This is one of those issues that you feel like, as far as its importance, you don't even have to preface it with anything. You don't have to begin with anything because this is one of these

universal experiences that people are going through right now where in unpredictable areas, sometimes in areas that are really important to them, they just literally cannot get the goods that they want. They just can't get them. It's incredibly frustrating to people. You've got the holidays coming up and there's no real assurance that people are going to be able to enjoy the holidays the way they traditionally have. And any dive into it demonstrates that it's almost impossibly complicated, that a bottleneck here has ramifications, five steps down the line, and then just when that is eased up, another bottleneck happens and another one and another one, if you're Joe Biden, A, from a political standpoint, is this job one? And B, can he really

fix it? I read with interest about how the brownouts in China, intended to help the country lower its carbon emission targets, have contributed to this. This is definitely a butterfly effect thing. You have all of this stuff going on. Then you have things that are not supply chain qua supply chain that factor into this. We saw today as we're recording this the highest increase in inflation in decades. from the month of October this year over 2020. Now, of course, in 2020, prices were artificially depressed because of the pandemic, but it was not artificially high when I paid $3.85 a gallon for gasoline.

If it cost me $50 to fill up my Volkswagen, that's not a good thing. So Biden is confronting a political problem that isn't just about the supply chain. It's about a bunch of interlocking problems that have to do with labor shortages and high prices and fuel availability and all of these things. If you're Biden, I don't think you can solve it, but what you can do is shift the blame. Make sure that the blame is resting someplace that's not on you. For Biden, supply chain is a better problem to have than inflation,

because if the focus is on inflation, big spending is part of it, and presidents get blame for inflation, and that's worse. So if I'm Biden, I like people talking about the supply chain more than I do them talking about inflation. fascinating. I can understand, I mean, I understand because inflation is also a universal experience that people are enduring along with supply chain. I'm interested in if Sarah agrees with that, are you, would you be, if you're Joe Biden, I want to talk more about supply chain than inflation. And, well, I'll save part three of this for Steve. But I'm very interested, Sarah, about your thoughts on, on, on, you know, for Joe Biden's supply chain or inflation, a worse problem? Well, politically, I want to look at it from a slightly different lens,

which is from the voters' perspective, are they correct to hold Joe Biden accountable for it? And from Joe Biden's perspective, is any of this within his control? Now, that doesn't mean that you don't talk about things that aren't within your control, but it's definitely a factor you want to consider as you pick what to focus on.

So, for instance, look at the infrastructure bill very much within his control, whether it passes, where that money goes, how quickly the money can get out and stuff. You know, I'm not saying he snaps his fingers and a bridge goes up, but that pretty, you know, easy stuff within the realm of a presidency. On the far other extreme is inflation. Something economists aren't even very good at predicting when it will happen, let alone what is the specific cause. And that puts Biden in a particularly bad spot when it comes to inflation. There's always, you know, predictions, well, if you, you know, flush the system with cash,

like perhaps his build back better agenda, as Joe Manchin has predicted, that would exacerbate inflation. But in some ways, economists were stunned slash wrong that we weren't having inflation for so many years in the past decade-ish or two, that it wasn't higher than it was. So inflation is particularly tough in terms of the control issue. The supply chain issues for me are somewhere in the middle. You know, people are blaming this on all sorts of stuff. I think that Steyerwalt's explanation was probably best. And it's just everything. It's everything all at once. And so fixing one thing doesn't help it. The payments that were being made, for instance, to up unemployment payments. those have stopped, and I saw, for instance, Secretary Buttigieg on Morning Joe saying,

well, those stopped and the supply chain issues are still here, so see, those weren't the cause of it. No, no, no. That's not how cause and effect works. Just because you stop something and the problem doesn't get fixed right away, you still would have to answer whether there are long-term effects from the thing you were doing. And in this case, when you look at the savings that Americans have built up, that is part of the whole formula here. Americans built up more savings. They're actually now trying to spend that, which is creating the higher demand,

which is then exacerbating the supply chain issues that would probably be there anyway. Which gets back to, is this within Joe Biden's control? Is this Joe Biden's fault? I think the supply chain stuff is actually the hardest, because some of it is within his control, some of it is his fault in a sort of a looser sense of fault here.

I think that it will be very hard, going into Thanksgiving and Christmas if Americans can't get turkey and their gas prices are huge and they're being told that it's not real. The New York Times had that headline that this is all psychological, the psychological effects of inflation.

And then today we find out that no, actually, real wages have gone down 1.6%. That's just going to be tough if Joe Biden doesn't make this his number one. issue. So, Steve, I imagine some listeners are jumping up and down and going, why are you separating supply chain and inflation? Because they're completely linked.

If you, the supply chain means that we have decreased of supplies of things that we want that we increase demand, decreased supply. Price goes up. Price goes up. Except that the reverse isn't true. If you fix the supply chain issues, I am not at all convinced that inflation will certainly not going to go down, but I'm not convinced it'll even stop. Right, but there is a very strong argument that decreased supply is leading to increased

demand, which is a contributing factor to inflation. For example, as, you know, there's a, Derek Thompson has a great piece in the Atlantic about container costs, just the cost of sending a container have elevated, in some cases, by 10x. So you have an enormous increase in and container costs. And so I guess the question to you, Steve, is on a more practical matter, what concretely, what can the president of the United States do?

Because he can't move chip production from Taiwan with a snap of his fingers. He can't move iPhone production with the snap of his fingers. He can't provide 70,000 new truckers with the snap of his fingers. What can the president concretely do, not immediately, but over the next six months, nine months to ease these supply chain issues or

is it going to start to untangle itself? Yeah, I mean, I think the short and direct answer to your question is very little. And this is one of the reasons I think that the Biden administration is in some political peril here. You know, if nobody's written better about this than our own Scott Linscombe in his capitalism newsletter where he looks, takes up a very long look at supply chains and supply chain issues and what's causing them today and says, look, this is an accumulation of months and years worth of bad policy, in effect, exacerbated by sort of the natural disruptions that we saw related to the pandemic. So when you have a problem that is years or decades in the making, you can't flip a switch and solve it. We've seen the Biden administration

try to do this. And in a sort of in a strange way, I'm somewhat sympathetic. They want to project that they're doing something about the supply chain. So you've had executive orders going back to February. You've had press briefings where they talk about the supply chain. You have Joe Biden saying, I mean, there are news stories just within the past couple of weeks. Biden administration moves to fix supply chain bottlenecks in the New York Times. I think what they're doing is, is sort of tinkering around the margins of the problem. They are not going to be able to fix the supply chain issues, full stop. But by continuing to talk about how they're trying,

I think they're sort of perversely giving people creating expectations that they can. And then when they can't, people are going to look at the White House and say, hey, you've been talking about this for more than a year and suggested that you could fix this. Where are the fixes? So I think that's the sort of problem number one. And problem number two, and it's closely related, David, I think relates to inflation. You have almost the reverse dynamic on inflation, where the Biden administration, going back to the early spring, had sort of shrugged its shoulders at inflation and warnings about coming

inflation and people who tied this massive increase in spending to risks of even higher inflation famously, or at least famously in sort of D.C. policy world, getting in fights with Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, a Democrat, who said, hey, this is going to be a problem, people in the White House press briefing after press briefing, speech after speech, was saying, eh, we're not really that worried about it. We think this is transitory. We'll move beyond it. We'll solve these other pandemic-related problems, and all will be well.

So they're in this situation where they've created expectations that they can fix supply chain problems, and they look like they've been dismissive of inflation problems. And the thing that people feel when they go to the grocery, the thing that I feel when I go to Nix to get my meat down in Southern Maryland, it's way more expensive. Like, we feel this every day. It's Chris loading his car with obviously premium gas. It's meat price. No, no, no, no, no, no. When you have a Bentley, I think they call for that kind of fancy gas. But this is the stuff that people feel. You look at energy costs, you look at heating costs, you look at the cost of everyday items.

And this is a problem, I think a big political problem for the Biden administration. Then you layer on top of all of that. And we'll talk about this in greater depth in a moment. Their insistence that the solution to the problem is vastly more federal spending feels like a disconnect. Well, and it's also worth pointing out here. The supply chain problem will be solved. It will be solved because markets are awesome. And people will, a lot of people are going to get rich, figuring out how to get people goods quickly. The labor shortages are being solved right now. And both of those things add to inflation, right? Because the wages are going to go up. These

things are going to go up. The only way to deal with inflation, and this is what I'm sure, Steve, the White House was afraid of throughout the whole thing. There's a federal reserve, there's a Federal Reserve slot coming open. Jerome Powell is up for reappointment to. If the White House is start signaling that they're worried about inflation, what's the Fed going to do? The Fed is going to do the only thing that we have the only tool, Paul Volker, Peace Be upon him, taught us that there's only one thing that we can do, and that is we can jack up interest rates. And when you jack up interest rates, it has really deleterious effects on hiring and all these other things. So I guess this is what I was trying to say, the first go around, I think the hope for the Biden

administration is that rising wages, rising costs and all of these things that are coming in to ameliorate supply chain kinds of problems will get us over the hump before Jerome Powell and company put the brakes on and start jacking up interest rates. Well, you know, we've got a situation where there are untold billions of dollars to be made in the private sector sorting this problem out. There are massive incentives to sort this problem out, just massive. And then the Biden administration, an external force to the market in an atmosphere of inflation is wanting to pump trillions of dollars more into the system.

And this is why, I mean, we don't need to preview too much. There is a smart argument for intensity against this build back better. initiative that's wrong time guys exactly exactly the wrong time for this there's a there's a word i think for there's a prudent way to to urge caution and patience i think is a better word on the supply chain but inflation adding trillions of new spending that's deeply concerning I, again, I just think that even if, I think Chris is absolutely right, the supply chain issues will get worked out. They'll get worked out by offering higher wages until people take jobs again as truck drivers or are less likely to leave jobs as truck drivers is actually some of what's going on here. And everything else, by the way, service industry. I mean, it's called a supply chain for a reason. But, okay, so now they make higher wages. So their ability to demand goods goes up. Once that demand goes up, the price is. of the good goes up. And that's why fixing the supply chain issues won't even stop inflation, certainly not in the near term. And so the supply chain issues will last longer than

we think, because the labor issues are going to last longer than we think. And both of those are going to contribute to inflation lasting longer than both the labor issues and the supply chain issues. And that's how Joe Biden starts looking a lot like Jimmy Carter, circa 2023. 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 financial strain on top of everything else is why life insurance indeed matters. Ethos is an

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Application times may vary, rates may vary. All right. Next topic. Chris, we're heading to you. We want to talk about the infrastructure deal. This is a bipartisan infrastructure package. It passed, but there's been some fallout. Well, I mean, our terrible Congress and our awful parties have seldom been so obviously

terrible and awful as they. have been in the past week, where I just, I want to frame it this way, which is, so you had, you have today people giving death threats to Fred Upton of Michigan for being one of the 13 Republicans who voted for this bipartisan legislation, and you have, I would, I won't say credible, but people in positions of authority saying that the Republicans who voted for this legislation should be stripped of their committee assignments as a punishment for voting for this legislation. On the other side, you have all of the members of the squad who voted against this legislation. And what's funny here, what's funny here is, there are a handful of

Republicans. Now, I don't know if I would have voted for this legislation if I was in Congress, but then again, I would only ever be in Congress for one term because I would vote against everything and be horrible. But suffice it to say that outside of a handful of weirdos like me, this is legislation that had Donald Trump proposed it. And when he did propose it at twice the cost, when he proposed it at double the cost, that these phonies who are now calling for the gibbeting of the 13 members who voted for it would have sold their mothers to vote for it if it was Donald Trump's glorious infrastructure plan. And obviously the right normal thing to do when I say the old days, I mean the old days of

10 years ago was to say, well, I disagree with my colleagues who voted for this. We are going to unite to oppose. We're all opposed to this chaotic mess of a junk drawer of legislation. that is this social welfare, fake infrastructure bill. But no, that's not what they're doing. The Republican, because this is where the clicks and the likes are. And then on the Democratic side, you have the squad voting against this legislation to punish Democrats.

This is legislation that they want, they want the bill, their constituents want the bill. It's overwhelmingly popular, but they voted against it to punish Democrats for not voting for bills in the order that they want, which, of course, by the way, just and we'll get to this a little bit, but is incredibly self-defeating for the progressives. So, Sarah, I'll start with you. How much is Terry McAuliffe like, geez, guys, you couldn't have passed this dumb infrastructure bill a week earlier so that I could have had it to run on and talk about dredging out the ports and building new roads in Northern Virginia?

Yeah, look, the truth is that it would not have helped Terry McAuliffe the week before. They needed it in August, you know, they needed the house to move. on it after the Senate moved on it instead of Nancy Pelosi for I mean I guess we know the reasons they're not inexplicable but they're politically inexplicable deciding to sit on it then setting deadlines in September that she couldn't meet if this had been passed in September I think it would have helped Terry McColliffe a little and a little is actually all he needed right it's not like Glenn Yonkin blew him out of the water but it's not the infrastructure bill, right? It's, it's this whole narrative of the Democrats having control of all three

houses, the White House being the other house I'm referring to here, and just the gang who can't shoot straight and they're fighting amongst each other. They don't even know what they want half the time. You know, why would you want these people in power? Well, I don't, but that's not up to me. Steve, the, we know that the Republican Party is in a very weird, a deeply weird place. But I,

even I was surprised at the potency of the loathing around this vote. Did it surprise you? Or is this just how things are now? yeah i would say it didn't surprise me much um and perhaps that's because i have such low expectations so i most definitely would not have voted for this on substantive policy grounds i don't think we can be spending this kind of money and i think in many respects it's irresponsible to do so

even if there are even if we can there's sort of cross partisan cross ideological um agreement on certain infrastructure needs, this is not the package to do it. And I think, and I'm sympathetic to the people who say that this paves the way to this broader spending package. The reaction, though, among Republicans, I think you have to put this in the broader context. I mean, there are now serious discussions about taking committee assignments away from the 13 Republicans in the House who voted for this. Politico reported that these were sort of rank and file discussions. believe those discussions have made their way to Republican leadership, but that there are actual conversations about potentially doing this. You have to look at this against the backdrop of

what conversations are not taking place. You had just within the past 48 hours, Representative Paul Gosar, who's one of the Republicans, fringe Republicans who had a role, some role in planning January 6th, that is fairly unrepentant about what he did and what he argues. He attended and spoke at a pretty openly white nationalist conference a few months ago and received no real punishment for having done so. He regularly retweets and amplifies Nick Fuentes, who is a white nationalist alt-right provocateur, really, really bad behavior. You have Marjorie Taylor Green who does a lot of the same things and says things on the regular that are demonstrably untrue meant to provoke. You have many

Republicans in the House Republican conference. Madison, Madison Cawthorne saying he would go primary all of them. Right, right. And has, and, you know, within the past months said something about, you know, the need for revolution, if I'm not mistaken, hinting at political violence. I mean, you have a bunch of Republicans who should be on the political fringes, shouldn't really be involved in politics, and instead are able to make the kinds of arguments they make. I mean, arguments is too, is too generous a word, to say the kind of provocative BS that they say, and there are zero consequences, absolutely none. To say nothing of the fact that you have, you know, many rank and file Republicans who are still to this day,

continuing to promote the view, the demonstrably untrue view, that the election was actually stolen from Donald Trump. They parrot the kinds of silly arguments that Donald Trump says. All that by way of background, you have people who have genuine policy differences. I don't agree with them on the policy who cast a vote the way that they did because they believed that this bill would be good. You have, they may have, there may have been strategic calculations in there as well. They are, there's talk of kicking them out of the party, taking them off of committee assignments. On the other hand, you have radicals and freaks and, and rank and file Republicans who are saying things that we know are not true, who are promoted. The National Republican Congressional Committee

this week had Donald Trump speak to its, its annual fundraising gala, one of it, one of its fundraising dinners, in which Donald Trump said the insurrection was on November 3rd, not on January 6th. I mean, this is unbelievably provocative language, and nobody cares, but you have some moderates in the party who vote what they can consider to be the wrong way on an infrastructure bill, and end their careers is the call. It really is just outrageous. And, of course, voting for this anger coming from people who, again, would have voted for the same legislation at twice the cost if it was for Donald Trump. And so that's why they're

phony, they're goofballs. Okay. So David, to Steve's point about what Trump is saying about those things, I look at Kevin McCarthy as sort of the, he's the last emperor of the old Republican regime, right? He is the last in the line. I'm not getting into Dune. I have not seen Dune. I'm going to have to go see Dune with my 13-year-old, and I accept this as my fate. But that in, we'll call it House Gingrich, McCarthy is the last of his line from the 94 Revolution. And his strategy seems to be, yes, Paul Gossar and Marjorie Taylor Green and all these people, yep, it's awful. It's rotten, stipulated, but we've got to go along with it because we're going to win. We're about to win.

Here it comes if you were to apply the same shift in the national electorate as the average one we saw between Virginia and New Jersey. It would result in the Republicans gaining more than 30 seats in the House. They'd have 240 some odd seats in the House. how dangerous is it for this is a talk talk about a uh a stilted uh have you stopped beating your wife yet um the how dangerous is it for a republican party that that can win doing the wrong stuff well it's extremely dangerous and it's completely unnecessary it's dangerous and even and what makes it even more sort of venal in my mind is that they don't have to do the stuff to win.

Like, if you're, if you take action against Paul Gossar, is that district going blue? I mean, really, is that district going blue? If you're decisive against Marjorie Taylor Green, is that district going blue? I mean, and that's one of the things that's frustrating here. Look, you should do the right thing even when it's hard. Absolutely, no question. Taking action against Marjorie Taylor Green as a caucus, not just the overall house, but as a caucus, taking action against Gossar,

taking actions when Cawthorne has this violent fantasies. All of these things, you should do the right thing even when it's hard. They don't really actually have political risk in doing the right thing with some of these nuts and cranks in the GOP. They're just that weak. Like, they're just that week. And so... But isn't there a political risk that comes from angering,

the Trump, right? That if you hurt Trump's favorites, then Trump will be unhappy and come hurt you. I mean, there's maybe some risk here, but there's a real question when we're going into the midterms when the fundamentals that the Democrats are facing are so bad. They're so bad that the idea that Trump can come to the rescue of Marjorie Taylor Green and it's going to materially impact the fundamentals that he could come to the rescue of Paul Gosar or Cawthorne and materially impact the fundamentals or Bobert? I don't, I just really don't think that's the case. I think where he might have more of an impact is if he's weighing into a very specific close Georgia Senate race. That's where. Ohio, Pennsylvania, yep, statewide contest. Right. That's where he's

going to have an impact. But I think as far as can you do the right, can you muster up, the one tiny ounce of courage to, and it's not even, you're not even going to make Fox that angry if you take on Gosar. It's more like O-A-N. It's more like O-A-N is too much for you now. You can't stand up to those guys. That's the thing that's really frustrating and infuriating. And then the problem you're going to have just wargaming this out is let's say that the Republicans do take the house as they're expected to take it's expected i mean it's not inevitable but it's expected then how will that be seen it will be seen as a vindication of this exact approach which is incredibly destructive on its own terms unnecessary just in pure pragmatic terms

and and that's where we'll be and that's one of my big big concerns about 2022 is you could have a repudiation of the Democrats, which in many ways the Democrats have deserved some repudiation after Afghanistan and the mess of this build back better and other things. You can have a repudiation of the Democrats. But how do you repudiate the Democrats without vindicating this party, this other party? And that's the catch 22 we're in. And by the way, what we saw from 2018 to 2020. We might see again from 2022 to 2024, which is taking the wrong signals. And as you say, David, it's a very real possibility that just as Democratic socialists thought that they were having their moment rolling out of 2018, that the populist nationalists in the Republican

Party, if they take back the House, will say, see, it works. Put up more anime videos of killing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. More. Right. Right. Exactly. All right. Chris, I'm coming right back you in this next topic. What's the most surprising thing you've learned, looking at the voting data that we now have a week out from the 2021 elections? Just how right I was. I just, I meditate on it. Sometimes I'll just look at the cross tabs and just say like, oh, so good. No, no, no, no, no, No, no, no. Here's what surprises me. So, you know, we saw an electorate in Virginia in 2017 that looked very much like a quadrennial electorate. It was 67% white, I think, maybe even 63% white in 2017. The Virginia electorate in the gubernatorial election is usually

73, 75% white. And this year was not the anomaly in Virginia. 2017 was the anomaly in Virginia. That was what was weird. You know, there's a high, high correlation between income and education and voting proclivity. The richer you are and better educated you are, the higher propensity of voter you're likely to be. And these are elections for employed, educated people, essentially, right? And you don't go vote. You don't go vote in an election that you don't think matters to you. And for a lot of working class folks and for a lot of, and that, of course, in Virginia

includes a lot of black and Hispanic voters, who cares, right? Which of these rich? I love the fact that Glenn Yonkin and Terry McCullough live like five miles apart on the rich side of Fairfax County. One lives in Great Falls and another lives in McLean. And I can definitely see how a lightly attached Democrat in Virginia would say, I don't really care. I don't really care what happens here. And I don't need to get going. So the big thing I learned was how anomalous Trump was in Virginia and the consequences of Trump in 2017 and 2018. David, what have you come away from 2021, thinking about, as you think about 2022?

Yeah, you know, one of the things I'm, when I, what I came around came, came away from was that 2020 doesn't really matter to most voters in 2021. That there's a lot of people who are trying to look back and see what it means about, okay, what do the Republicans still think about stop the steel? What do where what's the Trump hangover, et cetera, et cetera, when the reality is a lot of voters are just sort of what is going on right now that I'm concerned about and that I want to deal with. And it seemed as if, you know, with Terry McAuliffe running, he seemed to have two big swings and misses here. Swing and miss number one was this, I'm going to make this race about Trump when Trump's not in the White House and Trump wasn't on the ballot and Trump never came to Virginia, making the race about Trump was backward. looking. Then the other big swing and a miss that he had, which I think has really interesting implications going forward, was then making the race about the threat to abortion rights. He spent a pile of money trying to make this threat about, make the case that this race was about a threat

to abortion rights. And unlike a lot of races before it, he actually has a point. If the, if, if the Supreme Court overturns road, then this would be a governor who had to have the ability to to sign restrictive legislation into a law to a scale not seen in almost 50 years. And he's, how was that a swing and a miss? Only 8% of people who went to the polls listed abortion is their number one issue. And six, almost 60% of those said they were pro-life. It cut for the pro-life position. So two huge swings and misses.

It seems to me, you know, a lot of us who are in the sort of the pundit class of Americans are spending a lot of time litigating a year ago. And there are a lot of good reasons to litigate a year ago. There's a lot of good reasons to hold people accountable, for example, for what happened on January 6th. But in the meantime, regular folks move on, and they decide races based on the choices in front of them and the issues in front of them that are impacting their lives in the moment.

And it seems like McCallup just totally whiffed on making that case. So, Steve, the two things for me, me were turnout, which was high, real, real high. And I think we'll be spending more time in the next year. If I was a Republican operative still, I would be thinking really almost exclusively about the turnout question, far more than anything else that we saw that was specific to New Jersey or Virginia or Long Island. What did that? And also just that while everyone seems quite bullish on the House. I am too. I am far less bullish on the Senate. And Steve, I was wondering where you are on the Senate races at this point. And if you think this wave that we saw in 2021 predicts

a wave like that in the Senate. So starting with your last point, I think, you know, as we've said on this podcast before and on this podcast today, the landscape. the environment, the map, whatever you want to call it, is very positive for Republicans to take the House in 2022. Certainly, I think the issue environment and President Biden's continued struggles in virtually every issue. If you go down issue by issue by issue, and we know how much, Sarah, you love issue polling. But if you look at issue by issue, I've already been rage tweeting about it today, Steve. Joe Biden is struggling. That's good. Put it in a piece. Do it in do another bonus newsletter. Don't waste it on Twitter.

The, you know, he's in trouble, right? I mean, and, and, you know, the, the, the comment phrases, you know, a day is a lifetime in politics, a month is a lifetime in politics, a year as a lifetime in politics. That certainly applies. And things can, can turn around. But right now, I think looking at the map and looking at the issue environment, Joe Biden's in a lot of trouble as it relates to the House. On the Senate side, I think it's complicated. in part because of issues that we saw play out in the Virginia race in particular. Candidates really matter. And you look at the kinds of candidates that are fighting for Republican nominations in key states.

And I'm thinking here of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Georgia, and elsewhere. Dr. Oz is getting in, Steve. Don't worry. Dr. Oz jumping in Pennsylvania, it's going to be fine. I'm not sure he's the problem solver in that case. You know, there are, I think there are real problems with that Republicans face, the National Republican Senator Rick Scott of Florida. These are candidates that are, that could do very well in a Republican primary and could do very poorly in a general election.

I think that's the challenge for Republicans in the Senate. But on Virginia specifically, I mean, there's a fascinating interview that we've kicked around in the office a little bit by Ryan Lizza of Politico with Jeffro and Christina Davison talking about what they did to win. So you have all of the speculation, what happened? How did this go? How did you go from Joe Biden winning Virginia by 10 points to Glenn Yonkin winning by two points? and Ryan Lizzo went and asked them. And they sort of walked through very specifically what they've done. And I think, Sarah, it corresponds with a lot of your thinking about what was likely to win in Virginia.

But, you know, their argument was we ignored all the chatter. We didn't pay attention to what was being said on Fox News. We didn't chase the clicks and the outrage on, you know, kind of the craziest of the critical race theory, you know, challenge. you know, challenges or problems. And he did. And Terry McAuliffe did. So they spoke to the concerns of voters. An interesting footnote on that.

Terry McAuliffe was more underwater with voters than Joe Biden. And you'll notice that when Afghanistan started happening, Delta started happening, and Joe Biden was getting these body blows in national news every day. The Yonin message didn't change, which is, you know, again, look at those numbers. They were following the data that they had, which was actually, no, Terry McAuliffe is the bigger target, don't get distracted, even by a good, easy, low-hanging fruit

distraction. So a very disciplined campaign as well, I think. Very. And look, I think, and they admit this in this interview, and we'll put the link to the interview in the show notes. The broader political environment did matter. I mean, it matters, right? I mean, Joe Biden not doing well, not being popular, that matters. And I think particularly, as we've said again here on this podcast before, the fact that Joe Biden ran saying he would return the country to normalcy and that, you know, all would be sort of stable and well again after four years of chaos under Donald Trump and has utterly failed to do that. That really matters. I think that says to voters, Democrats can make all these promises, but they have trouble delivering them. But the bigger

issue, it seems pretty clear, was that they were talking about the things that voters were talking about. And in particular, suburban voters were talking about. They were talking about education, not just critical race theory and the kind of things that excites people on Twitter, but this whole, you know, last 18 months of failures by the public schools and the inability of parents to feel heard and to shape the way that their kids are being educated. You had the gaffe from Terry McAffe in a debate, I believe it was in late September, where he says, in effect, you know, we're not going to, parents don't choose what kids are taught or shouldn't choose what kids are taught.

And David had a very good newsletter explaining why, in some respects, as a descriptive matter, Terry McCullough wasn't that off. But it was not the message that parents wanted to hear. And crucially, it was the, it was, it played into exactly the message that the Youngkin campaign had been pushing at that point for five months. So this was not a new thing. The Youngkin campaign didn't have to seize on that, suddenly turn it into something and make an issue of it. This was what they had been saying for months. They'd been saying Terry McCallough is a Washington, D.C. political boss. He cares about big picture politics.

He cares about, you know, he's happy to add layers of government in between you and the way that your life unfolds. And he'll do it again if you elect him. And then he said that. And they could point to it and say, see, this is what we were talking about. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lot. lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets

for future events subject to availability and varied by race. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more at mx.c.com.com. All right, Steve, well, we're coming right back to you because you've got the last topic, which is explaining the steel dossier to all of us. Yeah, first I want to just take listeners a little

bit behind the scenes here and just express my disappointment in our group overall here. Each of us participating in this conversation, the the producer, Caleb Barker, you know, we talk a lot about not going for cheap clicks, not going for the easy things that excite people, not trying to bring people in just by talking about things that will outrage them.

And, you know, obviously we failed with our story selection in this. This is clearly a clickbait play. We're just trying to boost our numbers by first doing supply chain, then infrastructure, then a week old campaign and then a five-year-old story that people haven't been focused on. Hey, I wanted to talk about the Getty wedding and you guys laughed at me.

Fair. Okay. So, yes, the opposite is true. We issued clickbait in favor of talking about these things because we think they're interesting. So I do want to talk about the Steele dossier and contrary to my suggestion just a moment go there actually was news about about all of this.

The Justice Department issued a 39-page indictment of Igor Dyshenko, who was a former Brookings Institution scholar, Russian analyst, who apparently played a role and perhaps not an insignificant role in furnishing information to Christopher Steele, the former British spy who put together the steel dossier for a group of Washington, what should we call them, Apo Research Investigative Intelligence types called Fusion GPS, former journalists who helped put the steel dossier together. I don't want to spend much time here giving hot takes

and going back and forth about our opinion about these things. I'd like to actually try to explain this. And I know Sarah and David, you talked about this a little bit on advisory opinions, but let me ask some basic questions about what's going on here. And then, Chris, I want to turn to you for sort of what it all means and whether it should change what we're thinking. David, can you tell us why this is in the news and what this indictment is all about? Yeah, so basically those who remember the Steele dossier, which is this document of opposition research that was put together to kind of sort of maybe kind of look like an intelligence report.

What this indictment is about is about one of the sources that Christopher Steele that the author of the Steele dossier relied upon. And it was a man, a Russian national named Igor Denchinko, and he collected, according to the indictment, there's really two key paragraphs in the indictment as part of putting together the steel dossier, paragraph A to the indictment says that UK person one, that steel, relied primarily on U.S.-based Russian national Igor Denchinko to collect the information that ultimately formed the core of the allegations found in the, quote, company reports. So Dan Chinko was providing information to steal. Number 10. So that's paragraph 8, paragraph 10. Dan Chinko stated falsely that he'd never communicated with a particular U.S.-based individual who is a longtime participant in the Democratic Party politics, an executive at a U.S. public relations firm.

In other words, Danchinko lied to the FBI about what he did in this process. So this is a straight up, this dude lied to the FBI. kind of indictment. So you had a operation of the Hillary Clinton campaign, which was this generation of this opposition research, Dan Chinko was one of the individuals who collected the information, and then he went and he lied to the FBI about what he did. It's really pretty simple and straightforward. Sarah, what, I mean, this hasn't been in the news. People haven't been paying attention to it for quite a while. And John Durham, who was tapped by former Attorney General Barr to look into this carefully, has been taking his time doing

these investigations and has now rolled out a couple of different indictments. Both of the people he's indicted have had ties broadly to Clinton world. So can we, now conclude that the FBI and the so-called deep state was manipulated by the Clinton campaign? Or is that racing ahead of the evidence that we currently have in the public domain? I don't think it's racing ahead, but I do think it is getting ahead of where I am, at least. So, obviously, disclosure, I worked at the Department of Justice from 2017 through the beginning of 2019. I was there for all of the Mueller investigation. The Durham report, we expect, to critique the beginnings of the Russia investigation that turned

into the Mueller investigation, the actions of the FBI, and potentially the investigators as well. I found it very annoying during my time at the Department of Justice inside to see people try to grasped tea leaves out of the air and tell me what was going to be in the Mueller report. From both sides, by the way, every side just said that everything that they saw validated what they wanted to be in the Mueller report. And so when I say that it's not running ahead, look, we have these indictments. Mueller had indictments. He had 12 GRU officers that were indicted for hacking, Russian intelligence officers. And again, people started to say, see,

Aha, the Trump campaign was working with these Russian intelligence officers, but there was no connection to any American with these GRU officers. We have these indictments from the Durham team. They are mentioning, well, the first one, of course, was someone pretty directly connected to the Clinton campaign, an attorney. This one is indicting someone for lying about their connections to someone who was involved in the Clinton campaign. So yes, I expect we are going to read quite a bit about the Clinton campaign's role in the creation of the steel dossier when the Durham report comes out. Beyond that, though, I think we should wait for the Durham report. I know it's a very dispatchy take to make. But I just don't see any reason to not wait for the guy who has spent his like whole work day for two years doing this. Like let's let him tell us, you know, what he's.

he's found, and then we can pull it apart. I do think it's worth noting the Russia investigation predated the Steele dossier. And so I don't think, for instance, that anything we've seen in these indictments is, aha, the investigation was predicated on a lie. Second thing worth noting that I see in these indictments, right, they're not being indicted for the Steele dossier being false. you're indicted for lying to the FBI. It doesn't mean that the steel dossier is true. In fact, there are things in the indictment in which the, you know, Durham is basically saying

that there are parts of the steel dossier that were fabricated. But I do think it's actually pretty important to separate what the indictment is for versus what we are gleaning from it. And just the overall importance of the steel dossier is part of what we expect to see in the Durham report. Again, we know it's not what that the investigation predated it, but we also know that it was used in a FISA application, for instance. And so I don't think that it will be, oh, well, the steel dossier was total crap, but also it didn't matter. At the same time, I don't think we're going to see, but for the steel dossier, there would

not have been a Russia investigation. So all reasons to look forward to Durham's report and to not make guesses as to what's in it. Yeah. So you won't be surprised that I heartily endorse that position. And we're fine to wait. Let's wait until we have more facts. I guess my question to you, Chris, would be that's all well and good. It's probably the right course and was the right course really going back several years, but I would argue that that's not necessarily what we saw, particularly from the mainstream media, right? We saw them seizing on, you know, elements of the steel dossier, to be sure, and other, yeah, and other parts of other allegations, we'll say, about Donald Trump, as they crafted this narrative that Donald Trump was, you know, an active

was being actively manipulated by Russian intelligence. Now, let me preface my question by saying, there were clearly lots of questions in the public domain, in my view, that gave rise to concerns about that, generally speaking. But giving rise to concerns or a smattering of data points is very different than we know because of, these investigations that have happened that Donald Trump, X, Y, and Z. And it seems to me that many in the mainstream media are guilty of the latter. Am I misremembering this?

No, no, no, no, no, no. It was, it was dumb. It was supernova dumb. And it was motivated reasoning in the same way that now right media will say, it's all a phony Russia scam. It's all Trump was right. It was all set up because this one Russian has been indicted. It's all fake. But I guess a couple of things. One, which you just stayed for the record, these shady dirtbag outfits that are political intelligence outfits that are kind of spies, but kind of people who do opposition research, have become a really unhealthy part of our process. And, you know, at the new dispatch offices, which I will point out are right down the hall from the sulfur association. And I didn't even know sulfur had an association. And I just want to credit

them for keeping it tight. Big sulfur is keeping it under the radar. But here in the, in the canyons of K Street and down in this part of town, there's a lot of people doing what these folks do, which is sweeping together some oppo research talking to a guy and then passing it on. In this case, it ended up being used in a warrant. And I'm sure this is not the only time. that it has been used in a warrant. So people should be aware of that. And I think this is part of making them aware of that. But the other thing, and David, I say this with real love.

Lawyers ruin everything. Sarah's a lawyer, too. I know, but you're practicing. But you're doing it. You're engaged. Wait, I'm the one with an active bar license. David's not. Oh, mine is active.

Mine is active. I didn't mean. I didn't mean to get into a barrister showdown here. Oh, you got it. You got it, though. Okay, exactly. That's where I am. This is because I got his title wrong, y'all.

No, no, no, no, no. I just didn't. I did not know that you were practicing, Sarah. Here's the thing. Donald Trump's campaign tried to collude with Russian assets. We know it. They said it. They lied about it.

It's a fact. They had a meeting at Trump Tower with senior campaign folks. intentionally to try to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. It's a fact. It happened. Donald Trump went to Helsinki with Vladimir Putin and engaged in, I would say, the most pitiful conduct I have ever seen a U.S. president engage in abroad. It was a heinous display of Donald Trump sucking up to Vladimir Putin in a very, very public way. So we know the facts about Donald Trump being gross and seemingly.

compromised or there's something icky about Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. But what we believe now is that lawyers or the criminal justice system will produce dispositive answers on these questions. And we went through this with Hillary Clinton in her emails in 2016. Well, we'll just, when the lawyers come back and you're like, wait, did you put a secret server in your toilet room? Is that what you do? Well, yeah, but we'll wait until there's no smoking gun here. So we have allowed the criminal justice system to take the place of normal moral reasoning

and to say something is wrong with Donald Trump and Russia. I don't know exactly what it is. I will never know. Maybe he just has a big crush on Vladimir Putin. I don't know what the problem is. But we know about Donald Trump's problems. So there is a problem here. The criminal justice system can do things.

But it cannot reason for us morally. And it cannot reach the conclusions that we want, that we need to reach on our own as citizens. And what the media coverage has done was play too heavily into that. The Mueller report, these investigations, I mean, the whole thing, this FBI was just terrible, right? Struck and what's his name, the guy who got charged for leaking? Who is the guy that got charged for leaking? Who is the number two at the FBI who got charged for leaking? Andy McCabe?

McCabe, and of course to say nothing of Jim Comey, the second worst FBI director in history. So there was this lionization glorification of these people as if somehow what they were going to come back with would be absolutely dispositive and we would finally know. And now, of course, Wright Media is going to do that with Durham, who, though he has an awesome goatee, they will treat as here will finally have proof about the Russia collusion hoax and all that stuff and it's just we need to be better at moral reasoning and not just rely on the criminal justice system to tell us what to think.

Can I say one additional thing since all I've gotten to say about this issue so far is who this guy was and that he lied is that the steel dossier and this is something I said in AO and I know that there's not 100% unity and overlap in the two podcast. So I just want the still. I just, because

Jonah's not here, I'll just point out that it's a niche legal podcast since he's not here. I'll say it for him. Flagship. Flagship. Flagship. I was literally speaking that last week, I was at a speech and someone yelled out host of the flagship podcast as I was getting, getting off the stage. So anyway, here in my view, here's what the steel dossier did, just in a partisan sense that was so malignant in the public in the public role here on the one hand it provided what a lot of democrats thought was a roadmap for what muller was going to prove so here's the here's the story of donald trump and the clandestine this and the scandalous that and here's what muller's

aiming towards and then for on the right it was well if you don't prove the dossier then there's not a scandal. And the reality was that there was a scandal. It was a substantial scandal. Chris, as you just pointed out, there was, you know, senior Trump officials, Don Jr., Manafort, Jared Kushner met with a Russian lawyer with the intention expressed in writing to get information from, that was derived from a Russian government effort to help Donald Trump. That was the intention of the meeting. You had Paul Manafort, providing. confidential polling data to a Russian agent. I mean, these things actually happen,

but a lot of people, because the Steele dossier was not proven by the Mueller report, view the whole thing, it's a hoax. The whole thing was an engineered political, you know, a political hit. That document is one of the more malignant single documents that we've seen put into the public square. And I'm still, and I got on my heart,

hobby horse about BuzzFeed doing it. I'm still ticked that BuzzFeed did it. I mean, they put APO research into the public square even after they said, we've not been able to verify it. And then one of the ways they justified it was by saying, well, we need you to make up your own mind. How am I supposed to do that as a reader? Oh, I'm going to go to Prague and try to talk to my sources to see if Cohen met under a bridge somewhere. Are you kidding me? And so you had this thing vomited into the public square was a roadmap for the left and oddly enough a roadmap for the right and and when the react when the facts didn't match the roadmap it was people people didn't know how to most of us didn't know how to you know really interpret it all but the right knew how to

interpret it as a hoax and the left knew how to interpret it as some sort of gigantic letdown when the facts that were the facts were really bad all by themselves. All right, with that, we're going to call it a day, a week. Thank you all for joining us, and thanks you at home for your fabulous listening. You also define generalized excellence. We appreciate you so much. Definitely rate it on, rate this podcast on wherever you're listening. And we will see you again next time.

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