The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, May 30

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

President Trump responded to special counsel Robert Mueller's statement and the team discusses the politics surrounding calls for impeachment proceedings. The Democratic National Committee released new rules for getting on stage for the debates in September. This episode: political correspondent Scott Detrow, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, political editor Domenico Montanaro and political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben. Email the show at [e-mail]. Find and support your local public radio station at npr.org/stations.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Deborah Davis from Cedar City, Utah, and I am on my way to Washington, D.C. to see my niece, Clara, compete in the Scripps National Spelling Bee. This podcast was recorded at 210 Eastern on Thursday, May 30th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. Keep up with all the political coverage at NPR.org, the NPR One app, or your local radio station. All right, here's the S-H-O-W. I would get that right in the first round. Good job. Oh, show.

It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics. I get to go second. Yeah. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. I get to go second. All right. All right. So yesterday we had a podcast all about Robert Mueller appearing like the Lorax and making a statement for the first time. The Lorax. At the end of the Lorax when he's like in seclusion and doesn't come out anymore.

I speak for the tree. Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. He's a reclusive figure. I got that. So we talked about Robert Mueller. We talked about what could come next on impeachment. But it's an important conversation. So I think we're going to keep talking about that a little more

big picture today. As I mentioned, Mueller made his grand pronouncement that he was wrapping up things and saying basically, Congress, deal with it. If we had had confidence that the president clearly did not commit a crime, we would have said so. We did not, however, make a determination as to whether the president did commit a crime. This morning, President Trump responded. He is here standing like he often does in front of the whirring blades of a loud helicopter. I can't imagine the courts allowing it. I've never gone into it. I never thought that would even be possible to be using that word.

To me, it's a dirty word, the word impeach. It's a dirty, filthy, disgusting word. And it had nothing to do with me. So I don't think so because there was no crime. You know, it's high crimes and not with or or. It's high crimes and misdemeanors. There was no high crime and there was no misdemeanor. So how do you impeach based on that? So, Mara, here's the thing I was wondering from you. Some days it seems like all

President Trump wants to do is just have a big political fight over this. And then there are other days where he seems like, of course, I don't want to be impeached. Like, what do you think Donald Trump wants from all of this? Well, he certainly does not want to be impeached, even though his advisors will tell you that if he is impeached, they think that they can turn that to their advantage because he won't be removed from office and he can claim victory in that fight. was just a raw kind of Donald Trump's id rant on the South Lawn. Because yesterday, after Mueller spoke, he had been in his Twitter feed relatively restrained. He was talking about insufficient evidence. He didn't go on an attack against Mueller. But today he did. And it was curious, he said, I can't imagine the courts allowing this. The courts have absolutely nothing to do with impeachment. And he's really angry. What's interesting is a lot of Republicans think Bob Mueller did him a huge favor. Mueller was so much of a stickler for the rules that he

allowed the rules to tie his investigation up into knots and not come to a conclusion about whether the president committed obstruction or not. And instead of just running with that, declaring victory and moving on, the president can't seem to get over this. But there's really one reason why he came out and reacted the way he did is because he saw Bob Mueller on TV. Right. I mean, like without him being on television, just this being in a written report for as much as that will set the hair on fire of a lot of people who like to read books and say, hey, these people should read this stuff. The fact of the matter is people don't. Right. And when you put something that concisely to basically summarize all of those points in one place, rather than having to make people read 400 pages of it

and putting your face and your words spoken behind it on camera, it's going to make people read 400 pages of it and putting your face and your words spoken behind it on camera, it's going to make a bigger political impact, especially for this president. And that's the great irony of this, because if Donald Trump knows any one thing, it's the power of television and secondarily social media. And there was Robert Mueller begging people to read the 448 page report. But the reason why Mueller made an impact yesterday was because he was on television. Although speaking of things Robert Mueller was begging people to do, I mean, he also gets at a really important thing that came out of this report that is not obstruction of justice,

and that is, yeah, foreign country interfered in our elections. This is a thing to worry about. I feel like a thing that is going to be forgotten in all of the discussion of this that perhaps already is like all of the discussion is about is the guy going to be impeached or not? Holy crap, you guys, Russia interfered in our elections. And I hope that's a thing. And he closed his remarks begging the American people to pay attention to exactly right. I mean, he underlined that as the thing. And President Trump even picked up on that and started saying Russia, Russia, Russia, like it was Marsha, Marsha, Marsha from the Brady Bunch and he was just like, you know, nothing happened. They didn't try to get me elected

when literally Robert Mueller yesterday said that Russia was trying not to get Hillary Clinton elected. Wait a second, Domenico. He tweeted, I had nothing to do with Russia helping me to get elected. For the very first time, he acknowledged that and then of course today he backtracked and said, Russia didn't get me elected, I got me elected.

That was a pretty amazing tweet. The other thing that Robert Mueller talked about yesterday, and many people read interpretations into the understated way he said it, was that I did my work. Of course, Congress can take a look at this as well if it wants to. We have talked at length about the tension within the House Democratic Caucus about what to do.

Domenico, have you seen the underlying foundation shift at all when it comes to what House Democratic leaders think needs to happen next? No, not at all. And that's because Nancy Pelosi has been out front of this. She presumably read the report or at least formulated her opinions around that. Now, look, she's under a lot of pressure, under more pressure than she was before Bob Mueller spoke out in public. But there are two paths here. There are two tracks. You have presidential candidates, some of them being much more forward leaning when it comes to impeachment. But that's because they're trying to win over an activist base. The people who in Congress are saying that you have to start impeachment proceedings are these almost 40 fairly liberal Democrats who would suffer no consequences back in their districts.

In fact, their constituents want impeachment proceedings to happen. Nancy Pelosi, on the other hand, is very keen to try to keep the majority. And she knows that by doing that, the way to do that is to protect those moderate candidates who came into office, who he's done it at a certain amount of political risk to himself. He's going to get primary. The president's probably going to weigh in in the primary. There isn't a single Democrat who's called for impeachment that is taking a political risk because, as Domenico just said, most of them, all of them, come from very liberal districts. So you're talking about somebody in a swing district or? Yeah, I'm talking about somebody who would take a political risk, whose district is not, you know, 85 percent Democratic, like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's district, where their constituents clearly want impeachment. And what Nancy Pelosi is saying, even though yesterday made her job harder, no doubt about it, made the calls for impeachment a little louder, but the underlying politics have not changed, which is, if you can't,

as she said, change the minds of the country. So far, a majority of people don't want impeachment, can't change the minds of the Republican Senate, who would need to remove the president after he was impeached in the House. You shouldn't do it because the underlying politics of impeachment are the minute you open an impeachment proceedings that does not end in the removal of the president. You have handed Donald Trump a huge victory. That's my big question here is, is that a foregone conclusion? If House Democrats do do impeachment proceedings, is it that it's all risk, no reward for them? I mean, I think that the red line is opening a formal impeachment hearing. You can investigate the president as they are doing. You can investigate him for obstruction, all the stuff in the Mueller report. You can investigate him for all his business dealings. There are a lot of things that you can do. But the minute you open an impeachment hearing, you've set up a process where either it's it's necessarily that the president has no potential black mark. Obviously, he'd be upset about the fact that they impeached him in the House and he would go down in history as one of only a few people to be impeached. Right. That is something he doesn't want on his resume. Medica was saying earlier, is that an impeachment proceeding would create a lot more TV moments.

It would create... But so would investigations. Nancy Pelosi wants to legislate also, and she believes that impeachment hearings would create the only TV moments. In other words, everything else would grind to a halt. There's a lot of ways to wound a president with oversight short of opening formal impeachment hearings. And I do think it's true that when you talk to people who ran campaigns last year during the midterms

and when you talk to people running presidential campaigns right now, they do think that even though Donald Trump excites Democratic voters or, you know, opposing Donald Trump excites Democratic voters, that the more they talk about him and the less they talk about their own ideas and their own proposals, specifically health care, the more they hurt themselves. I think that that factors into things here as well. I think the last thing I want to ask everybody, because, you know, we're going to keep having different forms of this conversation, is what do you think, if anything, could change the

fundamentals that we're talking about here that could lead to increased momentum for some sort of impeachment proceeding or could lead to a really just dropping of this and moving on. Mara, you said Democrats in risky districts. Like what are a couple other things? If more Republicans join Justin Amash, if something came out of these hearings about Trump's tax returns or his business dealing, some new piece of information, or if we had a recession and his approval ratings went into the 30s and Republicans started seeing him as a hindrance, not a help, then the whole political equation changes. But right now, I think voters want to make the decision for themselves about whether or not a president should remain in office.

Impeachment is a political proceeding. What I find really curious is all these Democrats who say, well, sure, it might be bad politics, but we have to do our constitutional duty. No, impeachment is a political process. It was designed that way by our founders. It's not something separate from politics. There's an election coming up and voters will get to decide whether Donald Trump stays in office or not. When you look at the polling on it, our poll last month from Marist showed that 53 percent of people said that Democrats should not begin impeachment proceedings. Thirty nine percent said they should. Seventy percent of Democrats said they should. Ninety one percent of Republicans said they should not.

And 51 percent of independents said they should not also. I can't underestimate how much the Bill Clinton impeachment proceedings form the House leadership's analysis of this situation. It is different. Bill Clinton had already been reelected. He had a good economy, just like Trump. He was, of course, much, much more popular going into impeachment. I think he was in the 60s. But he came out of impeachment at 73 percent approval rating because voters looked at this process and said this is a partisan exercise. All right. We're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk debates. They're coming up

and there's some new rules for them. Support for this podcast and the following message come from SimpliSafe Home Security, who believes fear has no place in a place like home. That's why they made a completely wireless home security system that can be self-installed in under an hour with no long-term contracts. SimpliSafe's sensors are built to protect every point of access to your home. More than 3 million people have already protected their home with SimpliSafe. Get free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee at simplisafe.com slash NPR politics. Support also comes from the American Beverage Association.

America's beverage companies are working together to support families as they reduce the sugar in their diets. Coke, Dr. Pepper, and Pepsi are providing more great tasting options with less sugar or no sugar at all. Smaller portion sizes, clear calorie labels, and reminders to think balance. More choices, smaller portions, less sugar. Learn more about how they're working together at balanceus.org. Mitch McConnell has become a champion for conservatives. But back in the day, he once got support from groups like labor unions. I've marked it down as one of the worst things I've done in my life.

So you thought about it over the years. Oh, I still think about it every time I see his face. Mitch McConnell, a new series from Embedded. Subscribe now. All right. We are back in less than a month. The first debates of the presidential campaign. Domenico, why is this such a big deal? Well, you know, we're entering a new phase in the presidential election. I mean, really, this was sort of a getting to know you phase. These candidates need to see how much money

they could raise. Can they sustain something long term? Now we're going to get to a place where they're having to argue about all those ideas. You know, some of them have been putting forward policy prescriptions and white papers and the like. You know. Now they're all going to be standing next to each other. And how do they measure up with each other? This is going to be the first opportunity for a lot of Democratic primary voters and independents, for that matter, at home watching to size up these candidates for the first time. Does it matter beyond – I guess this is another TV moment like we were talking about with Mueller. Does it matter beyond just the image of the back and forth between candidates? Well, I mean, they can't say stupid stuff, right?

I mean, like there's always the possibility that you have a breakout moment for a candidate, right? Where they're able to turn a conversation or make a great point or do it with a piece of humor or, you know, smirk or smile in a way. Or forget the department you want to eliminate or do something really off base like that. I mean, just think about any path, any recent past presidential election. The big moments you remember are things like that. Rick Perry forgetting the name of the department he wants to get rid of or which he now runs. Yeah, very true.

Irony of ironies. Or, I mean, think about that moment in one of the Republicans 2016 debates where Marco Rubio kept repeating this line over and over. It was something to the effect of President Obama knows exactly what he's doing. And Chris Christie called him out for it and really made it look like Marco Rubio couldn't do anything other than repeat the same talking points over and over. He had done well in Iowa and it looked like Marco Rubio is on a tear. And that was it. The bottom fell out. He did terribly in New Hampshire.

He never recovered. But like how many opportunities are there for those breakout moments when there are nine other people on the stage? Yeah, I think that's really hard. I also think that we're in a very strange moment in the Democratic primary. I think you've got a normal-sized field embedded in this huge crowd of candidates who are polling at 1% or 2%. In other words, there are five major candidates, and that's a normal-sized Democratic field. And I think that they are

going to start emerging, not necessarily after the first debate, but probably after the second one, and then certainly after Iowa. I think the multitudes of candidates will start to kind of fade away. The one thing that I am curious about when you have this many people on a stage is how much that incentivizes maybe bombastic or big, bigness from the candidates. I mean, if you are Andrew Yang, or if you're John Hickenlooper, maybe a lesser known candidate, and you don't have a lot of name recognition, how much does this raise the stakes for you that you decide, all right, I'm going to go out there and say something crazy, or I'm going to say something real loud, just so people remember me? Oh, I think there's a big incentive to do that. The other

thing I'm wondering is, do they all think it's in their interest to gang up on Biden? Oh, sure. Right. Well, that's the one thing is normally a first debate is sort of an introduction. Everybody's really nice to each other. But given how long Biden has led in the polls and by the margin he has, there are a lot of people itching to take the gloves off when it comes to the former vice president. We were talking about some of the lesser known candidates. Let's talk about the qualification rules, because that was in the news this week as well. Some of the candidates who don't have as high poll numbers and don't have as much money raised actually are trying to scramble to qualify for the debates. Danielle, can you walk us through what candidates need to do to qualify

for the debates that are coming up in the next few months? Yes. So for the summer debates, what you have is they need to meet one of two benchmarks. They need to either get 1% across three national or early state polls, or they need to get 65,000 unique donors, and those donors need to be across 20 states. And that has been something that the DNC has been criticized for by, frankly, some of the candidates struggling to meet those numbers. New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, you know, pretty shockingly to a lot of people, given her success fundraising for her Senate races over the years, was having a hard time getting to that 65,000 donor total and was saying, you know, why is it the number of donors? Why isn't it, you know, success? Have you won a statewide race before? Things like that.

Sure. Well, I mean, part of it is that, you know, they want to show grassroots support. So having 65,000 donors across 20 states, having 200 donors within each of those states shows that you have a broad network of qualifications and people who are interested in you running. Now, the DNC has severely changed those standards for the fall debates, which we can talk more about that would severely winnow the field at this point. It's almost like a like a new video game level and they're making it harder. Why did they do that? That is a great question. I interviewed DNC Chairman Tom Perez yesterday about that.

And he didn't give a direct answer to that, despite the fact I asked several times. But he said, we made it clear from the beginning that we were, over time, going to make it tougher. And what they're doing is they're doubling those figures. You need 2% of the polls, 130,000 donors, and you need to do both next time. So the goal is to have a smaller number of people on stage. He argues that the goal is to incentivize fundraising, incentivize grassroots supports. And he insists, I still think we're going to need two nights in the fall. I still think double digit candidates are going to qualify. But, you know, there's a real argument that this could drastically cut down the number of people on the stage.

It does strike me, though, that the DNC is in a tough position from 2016, right? Because after 2016, a lot of people, particularly Sanders voters, thought that the DNC, you know, they saw that's not fair. You have for the second time in a row a candidate saying, hey, you're not being fair about the debates, which I'm sure makes people like Tom Perez very uncomfortable. Well, wait a minute. What? Bernie Sanders doesn't feel the same way this time? Well, Bernie Sanders is doing just fine in terms of both polling and fundraising. And interestingly, you've seen a lot of his supporters on the Internet say, this is great that the DNC is doing this. Sounds kind of hypocritical. Mara just made the emoji of the guy with his finger. Yeah, I mean, there's an argument that for Sanders to be able to break through,

it's more important for him to have a smaller stage than it is Biden, for example, because you've got so many candidates who are espousing progressive views that for him to be able to stand out on that or go toe to toe with someone like Elizabeth Warren, he needs that field to be smaller. Right. Well, not only that, it depends on who he's on the stage with. Right. Because, Scott, I think you were telling me Tom Perez says it's going to be random. Right. So here is the approach. They will take the top eight candidates in the polls and they will divide them in half for the first night, for the second night. And then the remaining 12, 6 and 6. They are desperately trying to avoid what the Republicans did in 2016, where you had the varsity and the children's table.

Yeah, whichever children's table better. You're probably thinking, wait a second, there's more than 20 candidates. Yes, there are. If 20 candidates meet all these criteria, they will go into a tie breaking type system, looking at higher polling numbers and higher fundraising numbers to get the 20 people who make it on stage. And before these debates, you're going to start to have a lot of events where all the candidates are in the same place, if not on the same stage at the same time. I'm going to be covering a lot of them. Then to California tomorrow for the state party convention where 14 different candidates are speaking. The week after that, I'll be in Iowa where a similar number of candidates will all

be speaking. We have entered the season of back to back to back to back to back to back to back to back speeches at party dinners. Those seem like important states. They do. California and Iowa. Huh. And one other thing that's been happening is a lot of policy announcements. Woo!

I'm excited. What are the big trends that we're seeing in all of the white papers and medium posts? And I guess it's really just those two things. So as far as trends, I mean, it's hard for me to get trends. Let me just get at a couple of the things that candidates have put out this week and then we can zoom out. So, for example, this week, Beto O'Rourke put out an immigration proposal. This is his second major proposal of the campaign. And it's also the second major immigration proposal out there after Julian Castro.

And the things that are in it, one big part is he says, you know, I would use executive action immediately to roll back a bunch of Trump administration policies. Also, he would create a path to citizenship for 11 million people in the country who are here illegally. And on top of that, he would ramp up border security, he says, hire more Customs and Border Patrol agents. And he would also increase resources to help the backlog go faster. So what Beto O'Rourke seems to be saying here is to highlight, first of all, hey, guys, I'm from a border district and I care about this and I know a lot about this. So, I mean, when you ask about trends, this kind of gets at one trend, which is candidates are using policies to differentiate themselves. They are also using their policies to tell us who they are. And one thing Beto O'Rourke is telling us is, yeah, I know about immigration. This is where I'm from. Listen to me. I have a question about candidates and their plans. In 2016, Hillary Clinton was ridiculed for having the five-point plan for everything. And it was like, oh, she's droning on and on, and nobody cares about this. Now, Elizabeth Warren, I have a plan for that, is one of her slogans, is being celebrated because she's a thought leader and is coming up with all of these substantive plans to deal with income inequality and all sorts of other issues affecting middle class people. And she's being applauded for it. And you could even argue that she's making up a little ground in the polls because of it. Mara, welcome to the conversation that Danielle and I have on a regular basis at our desk. I think the biggest difference here

is that all of Elizabeth Warren's plans keep pointing in the same direction of the big theme of her campaign, that she's fighting for people who have not had the system work for them, who have been struggling, who need a helping hand from the government. That is like the big overarching message

of Elizabeth Warren's campaign and career. And I think each one of these plans, I'm going to break up Amazon, you know. They're big. They certainly are bigger than Hillary Clinton's plan. I think it's just much different than what Hillary Clinton was doing, which is saying, like, I have proposals for everything and here's how I would govern. And here's 700 plans scattered across different areas. Right. I mean, yeah, to put Elizabeth Warren's whole thing in short, it's unrigged the economy, right? It puts her in a similar lane with Bernie Sanders, whose campaign told The Washington Post's Jeff Stein this week that he's putting out a plan to let workers put people on corporate boards and to have corporations set aside stocks to make

workers shareholders and pay out dividends to them, which would be a huge change from the way things operate now, right? I mean, I think one more thing that is happening right now is that Elizabeth Warren now versus Hillary Clinton in 2016, Hillary Clinton in 2016 was coming off of President Barack Obama. A lot of people saw her as being a potential continuation of him, whereas Elizabeth Warren would potentially run against President Donald Trump, who is not a policy heavyweight. And so I think she is the locus for a lot of the pent up. Oh, we want someone smart who has thought about things for those voters on the Democratic side. She is sort of the person they are directing their energy at.

And she I think a smart thing she has done is pick up on that. That's where her whole I have a plan for that thing is coming from, because she knows people like there are certain people on the Democratic side who feel starved for that. With these candidates putting out these big, high level policy ideas, I mean, they're communicating more than the policies. They are saying, hey, here is a priority of mine, like federal work with the environment and immigration, Julian Castro with immigration. He's also talked about education. Kamala Harris with the gender pay gap, all of that. You have candidates at least trying to say this thing is my jam, so to speak, like it is not that person's, it's mine. And the next challenge they will all have is to talk about all of these policies in the 22 seconds

of the time that they are allotted to speak on a 10 person stage. That's not something to overlook. There's a reason why you do this, right? You put out these white papers, you talk about them a bunch on the campaign trail and what everybody on the campaign trail, all the reporters should listen for and what people at home should listen for is how they're narrowing that down to that potential soundbite. What's the thing they keep sort of saying over and over again? How have they massaged it and filtered it down to be understandable for people? All right. We're going to take a quick break. Come back with Can't Let It Go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Google. Veteran Mitch Hoyt founded Skinny Sticks Maple Syrup, and he's showing that small businesses can do big things.

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crafted from recycled water bottles. Plus, Rothy's always come with free shipping and free returns and exchanges. Find out why BuzzFeed called them their forever shoes at rothys.com slash weekly. After James Reed was murdered in 1965, there was a national outcry. But back at the scene of the crime in Selma, Alabama, many people responded differently. So what happened then? And what could justice look like all these years later? NPR's new podcast, White Lies, is seeking answers. Listen and subscribe now. We are back and we will end the show in a very

surprising twist by talking about that one thing we just can't let go, politics or otherwise. Nobody saw this coming. Domenico, you are up first. What can't you let go? What I can't let go of is Cory Booker this week deciding that he's gonna heavily lean into dad jokes what he decided to do with these dad jokes was do a video while he's in a you know vehicle in iowa and the campaign gave him one minute to tell as many dad jokes as he could here's some of that what's the dad's favorite drink? Pop. What is a hundred rabbits in a line going backwards, a receding hairline? What is, why did Tigger and Eeyore have their heads in the toilet? They were looking for poo. That's not a dad joke. He really liked that one. I love that one. All right, Christmas,

Christmas jokes. What do you call a cat on a beach during Christmas? Sandy Claws. I would get out of the RV at this point, even if it was moving. Just leap and roll, staffers. He's not even the only one. Governor Bullock of Montana was busting out dad jokes on the day he got into the race. Is it just an attempt to filibuster? I mean, it could be.

It's a relatability play. Relatability. Well, okay, so we're going to do our own dad joke off here. Oh, wait. I didn't. Scott was not prepared for this. So I'm going to just try to roll off as many as I can, apparently, as Barbara, our producer, has prepared for us.

So are you going to start the timer? We got the countdown right here. Okay. Three, two, one. Okay, I just got two cupcakes for my brother. Wow, that was a good swap. Wait, what? Get it?

No. Yeah, the brother says he got two cupcakes for my brother. Oh, okay, okay, okay. That was a good swap. Okay, I fell off a 30-foot ladder yesterday. So the other guy says, wow, are you okay? And then the other guy says, yeah, it was only the second rung. That's good.

Knock, knock. Who's there? Radio. Radio who? Radio not. Here I come. Knock, knock. Who's there?

Old lady. Old lady who? Wow, you can yodel. Old lady who? Waiter, the soup is awful. Who made it? Oh, I'm sorry. It's been a minute. We all had a hand in it. God! I have to give a credit

to the book called Crack Yourself Up Jokes for Kids by Sandy Silverthorne because none of these were mine. This was a book that my mom gave to my son over Memorial Day weekend that he was reading off and cracking himself up over. So he's right at the right age to think these are funny.

So good for me. He's nine years old. Thank you, Jack. Mara. Okay. My can't let it go this week has to do with the tornadoes that are ravaging the Midwest. In particular, a weatherman for Dayton, Ohio TV stations WKEF and WRGT had had enough and he lashed out at viewers on Sunday night because he was getting a lot of complaints. The station had interrupted the Bachelorette to report on these tornadoes that had rolled into the area.

I was just taking social media. We have viewers complaining already. Just go back to the show. No, we're not going back to the show, folks. This is a dangerous situation, okay? It's nice. Think about this as your neighborhood. I'm sick and tired of people complaining about this. Our job here is to keep people safe, and that is what we're going to do. I'm sick and tired, and I'm not going to take it anymore. Look, that guy is a hero. He's a weatherman who is telling people how to save their lives. He gets my props. Good for him. Danielle, what can you not let go? All right. I'm bad at whistling, but I forgot to ask for a music cue, so.

Nope, can't do it. That was supposed to be the X-Files theme. I can't whistle. All right. So we have another installment of UFO news for Cligs. This is from Helene Cooper, Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Keen at The New York Times with a story about Navy pilots seeing unidentified flying objects in his airplane. And he was saying that they were seeing these unidentified flying objects out there for longer than you would expect them to be. They were moving in ways you wouldn't expect an aircraft to move. And that not just he has seen it, other people in the Navy have seen them as well. Look, this is a topic that in the newsroom gets me about as passionate as that weatherman a few minutes ago. I mean, these are very official people being written about by a prestigious journalistic outlet. Like, how much more serious of, like, reporting

do you need to think, oh, wow, maybe they're onto something? Well, it is balanced reporting. It is balanced reporting because... It doesn't say that they definitely saw aliens. No, no, no. I know. It says like no one in the Defense Department is saying the objects were extraterrestrial. Of course they would say that.

And experts emphasize that earthly explanations can generally be found for such incidents, which just goes to show you that the cigarette smoking man has gotten to them as well. I don't know if you guys remember this, but when Obama first got into the White House, he said publicly that he was going to find out what was going on at Roswell, and he wanted to go check it out. Remember that? And there was never a briefing, so they may have gotten to him

too. Totally, yeah. No, I mean, listen, Elizabeth Warren has a plan for everything. I'm just waiting for her Area 51 plan to come out, because then I want to report on that. Well, it's very interesting, and they had even more articles on this. I think it was back in December. So this is part of an ongoing series of very interesting stuff.

All right. Aliens among us. And for my can't let it go. I want to talk about somebody who you do never hear on this podcast. You hear her name mentioned in the credits once in a while, but you would not be hearing this podcast right now if it were not for her. And that is Beth Donovan, our main editor on The Washington Desk. She is someone who willed this podcast into existence,

grew it into what it is now, is someone who always had a new idea for something we could try and change differently. And on top of that, if you are listening to this podcast, you are well aware that the news has come at a constant minute by minute barrage over the last few years that has never stopped. Throughout all of that, Beth has led the NPR politics team day in and day out with her enthusiasm and good humor and creativity. She is leaving the politics team to go do other work at NPR. We are going to miss her tremendously. And we just want to say thank you very much, Beth, for everything you've done for us. She's been a visionary editor, an incredibly supportive boss, and just a joy to work with. So we're sad she's leaving, but we're happy she's not leaving

the building. We are going to miss her terribly. All right, that is a wrap for today. We'll be back in your feed as soon as there is political news you need to know about. Our candidate interview series is continuing. And in your feeds this week, we have an interview with New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand. And to keep up with all the other news happening, you can follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Just search for NPR Politics. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover politics. I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent.

I'm Domenico Montanaro, political editor. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.