The NPR Politics Podcast - Weekly Roundup: Thursday, October 25

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

The list of prominent people, eight and counting, who were sent suspicious packages reads like a Trump enemies list, but at a rally yesterday Trump toned down the criticism. How long will that last? And healthcare remains a top issue in the elections, but how it's being talked about has dramatically shifted since 2016. This episode: Congressional correspondent Scott Detrow, national political correspondent Mara Liasson, national security editor Phil Ewing, White House correspondent Scott Horsley, 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 Erin Buddy calling from Portland, Oregon, where I just dropped my ballot in the mailbox. This podcast was recorded at 506 Eastern on Thursday, October 25th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this. All right, here's the show. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast here with our weekly roundup. More suspected pipe bombs were discovered today, this time addressed to former Vice President Joe Biden and actor Robert De Niro. The story continues to have huge political implications. We're also going to talk about health care. It remains the top issue on Democrats' minds. And in the closing weeks of the campaign, Republicans have been pushing back hard. We'll talk about that. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress.

I'm Phil Ewing, national security editor. And I'm Mara Liason, national political correspondent. So, Phil, in our podcast yesterday, we were talking about six packages. We knew that they'd been sent to former President Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, former CIA Director John Brennan through CNN, Congresswoman Maxine Waters, former Attorney General Eric Holder, and Democratic donor George Soros. There are new details as of this morning. That's right. Now we have 10 total suspicious packages against eight total targets. So those

six that you just mentioned, plus the former Vice President Joe Biden and the actor Robert De Niro, our listeners will remember him from Raging Bull and Analyze This and the Fockers movies and so forth and so on. Taxi Driver feels on point for this story. Taxi Driver was also a movie that De Niro was in. And a big Trump critic. A very big critic of Trump. More to the point, yes. More to the point, a profane Trump critic.

That is so. Those suspicious packages were discovered on Thursday morning in Delaware at mail facilities there and outside a building in Tribeca in New York City used by De Niro's companies. You know, it's a really interesting story. The guy who found this package that was addressed to De Niro received it and then later saw on TV some of these pictures of the ones that arrived at CNN on Wednesday, and he recognized the one as being similar to the one that he had received earlier. And that's what put him on his guard. He was able to use his contacts with the NYPD to call the bomb squad. Phil, are all of these packages similar or we haven't heard that much about the Maxine Waters packages. Are they also same manila envelope, same kind of address

format? According to investigators, that's one thing that has unified all these devices. They found the first couple of ones. The first one went to George Soros' house outside of New York City. And it was this manila bubble wrap envelope. It had typewritten addresses, a typewritten return address to Debbie Wasserman Schultz's office down in Florida. She's the former chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee and a number of postage stamps on them. Our Miles Parks was talking to former investigators and specialists today who said one of the signs actually of a potential suspicious device in the mail

is having too much postage because alleged bombers think, I don't want the postman to hold this up. I'm going to put more postage on this than it needs. And some of these have been canceled, indicating they traveled through the mail systems. And some of them have not, suggesting they might have been delivered by a courier or hand delivered. But yes, we understand that all of them look alike, which is helping investigators. And given the fact that these packages did not explode, I assume there's a lot of immediate leads for the FBI, you know, tracking information, things like that, security at any sort of post office they may have been dropped off at.

Do we know what they're looking at? Have they found, have they figured out anything in the last 24 hours? What they figured out, they are not saying. So there have been a couple of briefings. Our correspondents, our colleagues Ryan Lucas and Kerry Johnson and Miles Parks have been doing a lot of reporting on this. But investigators are not tipping their hand very much about where this stands. One thing we do know is the package that went on Monday to George Soros' residence was protectively destroyed by a bomb squad there,

and so investigators have been able to take material from that containment unit they use and begin to analyze it since they now have versions of the devices before the explosion and after the explosion, and that can help them conclude some things about what it contains. One of the things that we know for sure is that powder that has been in some of these things is not biological. So if there were concerns that this might be another installment of the anthrax attacks from 2001, that is not the case. So Phil, do investigators think this is all of it, or do they think there might be more packages out there? The FBI has been saying all along they cannot rule out the idea that there may be more of these moving through the mail.

You know, you've seen over the past week that these kind of have been arriving in tranches as, you know, the way a package will go from the local post office to the depot facility to a truck to another one and then eventually be delivered. So we may get another day or more worth of these arrivals or discoveries. And they've also said that they haven't found any since the three that were found Thursday morning. So no one knows right now what that adds up to, except that they're not prepared to say that this discovery phase is complete at this point. So let's shift gears a little bit. When we taped yesterday, we mentioned that President Trump was on his way to a campaign event in Wisconsin. And the big question was, how would he handle this, given how divisive he usually is at these events? You know, what would he say, given that these alleged pipe bombs have all been sent to people that he regularly criticizes at rallies like this? So let's take a listen to how President

Trump started out the rally. We want all sides to come together in peace and harmony. We can do it. A few minutes later, though. The language of moral condemnation and destructive routine. These are arguments and disagreements that have to stop. No one should carelessly compare political opponents to historical villains, which is done often. It's done all the time. Got to stop. Mara, he seems to be pointing out something. He doesn't like being called Hitler. Who would? Who would? So moral condemnation is bad and somehow connected maybe to these attacks. But he went on to show, as he often does, that he's very aware of his performance and his behavior. He's a guy who likes to read the stage directions.

So it's always very meta. The Democrats are for higher taxes, more regulation, and more top-down government control. So he went into his usual riff about how Democrats are socialists, but he wanted the audience to understand that he was really dialing it back because of this incident. And by the way, do you see how nice I'm behaving tonight? This is like, have you ever seen this? We're all behaving very well. And hopefully we can keep it that way, right? That reminds me of the final weeks of 2016

when he was very on script for several days in a row, no controversies. And at one point he said on stage, Steady, Donald. Keep it together, Donald. Be cool, Donald. And then a little bit after that, he did what he often does, though the tones were a little more muted, and that was cast blame on the media. The media also has a responsibility to set a civil tone and to stop the endless hostility and constant negative and

oftentimes false attacks and stories have to do. And then this morning on Twitter, he criticized the media in much more blunt terms as he has he usually does. So curious what both of you think happens over the next few days, because President Trump clearly thinks the best way to energize Republican voters is to go after Democrats hard. Really hard. And he was depriving himself of what he considers to be his most effective tools in that rally last night. You know, he seemed to be suggesting that the media brought these attacks on themselves because they are negative about him. He seemed to be saying it was their fault. When he says they also have a responsibility, what I thought of, oh, in addition to who?

He certainly doesn't want to take responsibility for himself. But I think the big question for me is what does he do going forward? He clearly has decided that it's important to dial it back. And does he feel that that is going to hurt his effort to get his base energized in the 10 days he's got left? Is he going to chafe at that? We don't know. A lot of this depends on where this story goes, because in some of these cases in the past, the FBI has arrested somebody very quickly. In fact, we are Ryan Lucas covered a package bombing case where the FBI got the guy within 24 hours. If we have a suspect like this and this kind of closes up and goes away, depending on the outcome of that story, Trump could go back to his old form because this could

be resolved. But if that person is political in one direction or another, clearly that's going to affect the way the president, the way Democrats respond. Or if this goes away because it takes the FBI years to catch somebody, that could also affect the way the rest of this campaign runs. You know, it took them years to catch the Unabomber. It took them years to try to investigate the anthrax attacks in 2001. And if this story drops out of the news, not because it's resolved, but because it goes into a quiet period of investigation, that will inform the way the president, Democrats and everyone else in the United States conducts themselves ahead of these elections. Right. And it also matters, are we going to have more pipe bombs and who are they going to be addressed to? All of the recipients of these packages share something in common. They're all targets of the president.

They've been critical of him. This seems to be a real act of political partisan terrorism. A lot of this is out of President Trump's control, out of any other politician's control. And when you talk about how could this affect the midterms, it's hard to tell. But we know one way is that this is two days in a row now where all of the news coverage focused on this event and it didn't focus on the caravan or many other things. Scott is exactly right about this story taking everything over. That's a really good point. It also took over the fact that financial markets did a total nosedive on Wednesday. The big indices, the Dow Jones, the S&P 500, erased all of their gains in the year 2018. Now, does that matter to most people in the real economy?

Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it doesn't. But the shorthand that Americans use to identify the health of the economy in the United States are those headline level indices. And with those out of the news, the argument that might be happening between the political partisans who are running for these November midterm elections about Trump's claims about the economy has been taken away because we're talking about the tone and the rhetoric. And should we cool things off and whose fault is it, which means that is helpful to the president. It means his economic message can continue to be an economic message in a way that it might not otherwise been able to have. Yeah, although his economic message has already faded way into the background

because he chose the culture war issues as the thing that was going to work for him, immigration, race. And he really hasn't been relying on the economy as much. He tried to revive the idea of the tax cuts because the original ones got very unpopular with this idea that we're going to have a new 10% middle class tax cut. He's also been pushing back on Democratic criticisms of Republican attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act. And that is something that we are going to talk about next with Scott Horsley and Daniel Kurtzleben. But before we end this conversation, Phil, anything else we should be looking for in the coming days when it comes to the investigation? The short answer is more of the suspicious packages. If this turns into a long-term story,

that's going to be potentially problematic from a political perspective. And the other big, important thing here is none of these have gone off. These have not injured or killed anyone. Ideally, that will continue to be the case. But if this turns from a story that no one knows about whether or not it's a hoax into something that actually has taken a human life or injured somebody, that's also going to change the conversation about the political tone in the United States in a very big way. All right, Phil Ewing and Mara Lison, thanks to both of you. Thank you. We're going to take a quick break and we will be right back

with Danielle and Scott to talk healthcare. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Walmart. Risa Pittman is store manager of a Walmart that uses a mobile robot called Bossa Nova to scan its shelves for missing, mislabeled, and out-of-stock items. It's been a partnership with Associates and Technology. A lot of Associates are really excited to be part of this team because we're able to test the latest technology in retail in Walmart. To learn more about the future of tech at Walmart and to see a video of the bossa nova scanner in action visit walmarttoday.com slash technology support also comes from ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire ZipRecruiter's powerful matching technology finds the right people for you and actively invites them to apply

that's why ZipRecruiter is rated number one by employers in the U.S. based on hiring sites with over a thousand reviews on Trustpilot. And right now, listeners can try ZipRecruiter for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash weekly. Olympic gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar abused hundreds of women and girls for more than 20 years before he was caught. Hear how a team of women brought down a serial sexual predator. Believed, a new podcast for Michigan Radio and NPR. And we are back and we've got Danielle Kurtzleben and Scott Horsley here. Hey, guys. Hey. Hi. So let's take a few minutes here to talk about health care,

because all year we've been talking about how Democrats see health care as their best issue with voters, which is so striking because from 2010 on after Obamacare passed, Democrats were really on defense when it came to health care and they lost a lot of seats because of it. Now things have turned in a lot of different ways. Democrats talk a lot about health care. They think it's working. And Republicans seem to think so as well, because Republicans have really played a lot of defense on health care lately, specifically when it comes to whether or not they voted to repeal, get rid of pre-existing condition coverage. So let's start with this. How are people feeling about the state of health care right now?

I would say concerned, bare minimum. But if you're a Democrat, you're much more worried. I mean, one thing we do know, I can tell you from both being on the trail and from polling data, is that both Republicans and Democrats are worried about the health care system, worried about access, worried about costs. But Democrats are much more worried. And this is reflected in what voters tell you, and it's reflected in ads. Democrats have just been running more health care ads throughout the entire midterm cycle than Republicans have. I'm determined to fight for affordable, accessible health care, not take it away.

Like 300,000 North Dakotans, Denise has a pre-existing condition that used to mean no health insurance. Now the threat is Patrick Morrissey's lawsuit to take away health care from people with pre-existing conditions. And what Democrats are targeting is the assault that Republicans have waged over the last two years on the Affordable Care Act. Republicans, of course, campaigned saying they wanted to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. They weren't able to do that, thanks to John McCain's thumbs down in the Senate. But the Trump administration has been steadily whittling away at the Affordable Care Act for the last going on two years. And it's worth pausing for a moment and walking through all the different ways the Trump administration and Republicans of Congress have tried to undermine the Affordable Care Act or have tried to replace the Affordable Care Act because a lot of the ads

come down to you voted to do this and Republicans are responding, no, I didn't. So let's start with actions taken by the Trump administration. Scott, what are some of the biggest things that President Trump has done on his own to affect the Affordable Care Act? They have offered up a variety of alternative insurance plans, mostly sort of skimpier plans that would be cheaper and might appeal to younger, healthier people, but could also have the effect of raising prices for older, sicker people. They have done away with the marketing budget to try to encourage enrollment in the Affordable Care Act's health care marketplaces. They have ended subsidies for insurance companies, which has had the effect of driving up premiums on the ACA marketplaces. And then Congress, as part of their tax overhaul, did away with the tax penalty for people who don't have insurance. So all this has sort of been an attack on the ACA insurance

marketplace, which, despite all that, has proven to be pretty resilient. Sign-ups have stayed pretty level since before the Trump administration came in. And the most recent census data says we still have about 91% of the American public covered by health insurance. Danielle, of course, most of 2017 was focused on Republican attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare. They ultimately failed. But what should we know about what was in those bills, how the House bill that passed and how the Senate bill that didn't pass because of John McCain would have changed Obamacare. One of the biggest things that's most salient in this election cycle is what those bills would have done to pre-existing conditions. This is what Democrats are attacking Republicans on in so many of these ads, saying that Representative so-and-so

voted for the Obamacare repeal and replace bill. That bill would have done away with your protections for pre-existing conditions. And Scott, Republicans running for reelection are defending themselves from these attacks in an interesting way, basically saying, how dare you insinuate I don't care about people with pre-existing conditions. That's right. But it's interesting when Republicans were on the attack, going after the Affordable Care Act, promising to repeal Obamacare. And Democrats were largely staying quiet. They knew that the Affordable Care Act wasn't terribly popular at that point. Now we have voters saying, well, they might not love Obamacare writ large. They do like various provisions of it. And you've got Democrats running

about half their ads defending those provisions, putting the GOP on the defensive. When you look at television ads, when you compare pro-Democrat to pro-Republican that were put out this year, pro-Democratic ads, yes, like Scott said, more than half of them have been about health care. This is according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks these things. Here's how emboldened Democrats feel this year. That's compared to from 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016. In those years, roughly 7 to 10 percent of Democratic ads are about health care. Democrats did not want to touch health care during that time. Now this year, they are all about it. At the same time, we have a group of Republican attorneys general who have gone to court in Texas to try to strike down the Affordable Care Act. Two of those state attorneys general happen to be running for Senate, one in Missouri

and one in West Virginia. Josh Hawley, the Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, has been running ads saying, oh, I definitely would protect people with pre-existing medical conditions, even though he's gone to court to unwind exactly that protection in the Affordable Care Act. Earlier this year, we learned our oldest has a rare chronic disease, pre-existing condition. We know what that's like. I'm Josh Hawley. I support forcing insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions. So what is at the basis of all of this focus on health care? I mean, do people care more about health care now than they did two years ago or four years ago? One is that Obamacare is somewhat

more popular now than it was back during a lot of the Obama administration. If you look at polling data from, say, 2014 and 2015, Obamacare was generally seen net unfavorably, more people seeing it unfavorably than favorably. That flipped right around the time that Donald Trump took office. Right around January 2017, you started seeing people about evenly split or more likely than not to see it favorably. And is there a partisan breakdown in that? Is it more Democrat or Republican support? I mean, Democrats definitely do support Obamacare more than Republicans, absolutely. But when you look at individual provisions, like, for example, pre-existing conditions like we've been talking about, those sorts of things are very popular. Things like

that, protecting people up until they're 26, letting them stay on their parents' insurance, people love those. The problem is when you look at the individual mandate, which is sort of the glue that helped keep Obamacare together, that is something that's unpopular. And so that was at the core of a lot of Republican attacks on Obamacare during that whole time. But Scott, something you always pointed out when we talked about this during repeal efforts is that those two things have to go with each other to work, right? If you're going to make insurance companies cover all the stuff that's expensive, you need to make people buy insurance. That's the economic argument, even if the political argument would be, let's keep all the popular stuff and get rid of the stuff that people don't like.

So we're talking about this with less than two weeks to go before the midterms. As much as we can predict the future, what would it mean if the House is in Democratic control versus Republican control when it comes to bills being passed that deal with health care? If Democrats were to win, say, the House and Republicans were to keep control of the Senate, then Democrats would at least be able to prevent the Republicans from making another run at repealing the Affordable Care Act. They might also be able to use their oversight powers to discourage the administration from chipping away at the Affordable Care Act, although the White House would still have considerable leverage to make administrative changes in the law. Now, Democrats, some Democrats on the left, have been calling to go further than the Affordable Care Act and pass something like Medicare for All, which Bernie Sanders has championed. If they were to control just one chamber, of course, they wouldn't be able to do that, but they might be able to make some noise about it. This is where I want to jump in and also point out what Republicans are saying about health care this year, which is it's not just playing defense.

It's not just pushing back on Democratic ads. I mean, one third of Republican ads are about health care this year, which is it's not just playing defense. It's not just pushing back on Democratic ads. I mean, one third of Republican ads are about health care. It's less than Democrats, but it's still sizable. And what they're doing, aside from playing defense, is also attacking Democrats on Medicare for all, saying, you know, my opponent so-and-so is just too liberal. She wants to, or he wants to, take away your Medicare as you know it, take away your health care as you know it. If you like your employer sponsored health care, so and so is going to get rid of it if they vote for Medicare for all. And you can see that shaping the health care discussion not just this year, but for years to come as more Democrats back that. There's a lot of fear mongering going on there. We saw, for example, the president wrote an op eded for USA Today, was widely criticized for factual inaccuracies.

In fact, USA Today itself had to run a fact check the following day. But it has long been a successful gambit for either party to play on the fears of Medicare recipients that the other party might try to go after your Medicare, in particular because older people are very regular voters. And if Republicans keep control, can we expect more attempts to repeal Obamacare? Or do you think the current climate, the way this is played politically, this cycle would keep them from trying to do that? I mean, you can certainly imagine that there would be more attempts. But then again, I mean, there's also, given how fearful so many Americans have been about health care during this cycle, especially about things like pre-existing conditions, I wonder, and I'm just guessing here because who knows, I wonder if they might be a bit

ginger about the specific provisions they might be attacking, like pre-existing conditions. I think there are definitely some Republican activists who will want to finish the job now that John McCain has been replaced in the Senate by a more reliable vote for the Republican agenda. But Danielle is right. There will also certainly be some wariness given the backlash they've gotten already. And if Republicans gain some seats in the Senate, three Republicans wouldn't be able to stop a repeal effort like they did this year. All right. We're going to take a quick break.

And when we come back, can't let it go. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Grow with Google. Digital skills are becoming more and more important in today's economy. That's why Grow with Google is providing free online training and tools to help Americans learn the skills they need to succeed.

Learn more about Grow with Google and get started by visiting google.com slash grow. Support also comes from ExxonMobil. Over the next five years, ExxonMobil plans to invest $50 billion in the U.S. economy. That kind of investment will not only create jobs in energy, but also help support millions of U.S. jobs in other industries, too. Find out more about ExxonMobil's planned investments at energyfactor.com. ExxonMobil. Energy lives here. Election Day is just a few weeks away, and some are saying it could be a year of the woman. We're talking to Democrat Stacey Abrams and Republican Elizabeth Hang, two women trying

to excite their parties in 2018. That's next time on It's Been a Minute from NPR. And we are back and we're going to end the show like we do every single week by talking about the one thing we cannot let go of, politics or otherwise. Danielle, you are up first. All right. I want to talk about a poll. I know, but I promise it will be interesting, or at least it's interesting to me. And that's all that matters. Can't let it go is off the rails already. Everybody strap it. All right. So this is a new study from a few political scientists at Georgetown. It is about the institutions in America that people have trust in. Oh, snap. Yes. So we've talked on this podcast before about how Americans trust in

government and all sorts of other things is declining. So what these people did was they gave Americans a big long list of 20 different institutions, military, business, religion, banks, et cetera. So they did this and they said, OK, Democrats, Republicans rank these to say who you trust most and who you trust least. All right. So from one to 20, one being they trust them the most to 20 being they trust them the least. Where do you think, for example, Democrats might put colleges and universities? Pretty high. Yeah. One, two. Two. Number two. Yeah. Very good. I mean, so these follow along partisan lines kind of, you know, for similarly Republicans. Where do you think they put military? One.

Yes, they put military at one. But here's what's interesting. I saw people on Twitter freaking out about this. Amazon among Democrats. Where do you think they put it? Ooh, Alexa, where do they put Amazon? Ten. Seventeen. One. One. Oh, so it's OK. Likewise, where do you think Republicans thought this was some sort of like trick question? No, no, no, no, no, no, no trick. Where do you think Republicans put Amazon? Probably lower because of Jeff Bezos. They put it at three. I'll just give that to you.

Wow. So is it is like Amazon the highest, you know, if you cross the board is Amazon like the most trusted institution in America right now? Amazon in the military, I suppose, because Amazon is one for Democrats, three for Republicans. The military is one for Republicans, three for Democrats. But I got to say, like, that's surprising. And that's the takeaway that everybody on Twitter was freaking out about. But looking at this, I thought to myself, wait a minute, like, it's kind of apples and oranges, right? Like, if I say I trust Amazon more than the federal government. Like Amazon has one job and it's sending me my giant thing of trash bags in two days. At least in my life that's its job.

As opposed to the government, which I expect to, you know, do complex business regulations and administer health care for elderly America. All of that, you know, it's like, yes, here's my coffee cup. I trust my coffee cup more than the federal government. And that's not a knock on the federal government. Secure the border with one click. Oh, my God. Not making Jack Ryan remix for us. So anyway.

Come on, federal government. No, it is. It is interesting to me how like Facebook has taken a big hit. Right. But like all the big tech companies have just as much personal information about you. Amazon maybe even more so, but it seems like we're cool with Amazon having it. We're okay with Google having it, but we have second thoughts about Facebook. Well, because Amazon sends you your giant bag of trash bags and Facebook uses it to send the digital equivalent of a giant bag of trash.

Facebook, 17 for Democrats and 19 for Republicans. Yeah, I guess 17 for Amazon. Seeing inane updates from people you went to high school with, I guess, is just a thing that people don't love anymore. Scott Horsley, you are number one on my most trusted people on the NPR politics desk. Hey! Hey, the Scots have to stick together, Danielle. That's fair. Well, My Can't Let It Go is also poll adjacent, and it comes from a tweet from Ezra Klein over at Vox.

He was writing about the uncertainty associated with various pre-election polls and how forecasters like Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight have been warning people not to put too much stock in those forecasts, a lesson you'd think we would have all learned pretty well back in 2016. Silver has been stressing that if polls are off by just two or 3%, one way or the other, which is within the margin of error, it could have huge consequences for control of the House and the Senate. And he was just urging people not to put too much weight on those forecasts. So here's what Ezra Klein wrote. I've come to think election forecasts are like Q-tips. You buy Q-tips and the box is covered in warnings to keep them out of your ears, but the whole industry is based on people jamming them in their ears. Now, I don't know a whole lot about polling uncertainty, but I do know Q-tips. And what this reminded me of was a segment that our friends over at Planet Money did a while back with a writer from Ezra's old Wonk Blog outfit

who had documented what may be the most widely ignored warning of all time. Take a listen. Roberto Ferdman is a reporter for Wonk Blog at the Washington Post. He does not use Q-tips anymore until I asked him to. Okay, you have Q-tips with you? I do. Let's put them inside the ear canal. Oh my god. It's like a laser. It feels so good. So if this podcast

is not enough oral stimulation for you, check out episode 683 of Planet Money. Putting a Q-tip in your ear is one of the most relaxing things you can do. It's so relaxing. What? Yes.

I see it as a necessity. The comments of Scott Detrow are not representative of National Public Radio or its underwriters. Do go on. No, no, no. I've said too much, apparently. I want to pick your brain. No, it's just like somebody who's reading those 538 polls to stroke their political nerve endings. You're going against the documented warnings right there on the box.

I've said too much. Oh, my God. Okay, Scott, other than your Q-tip, what can't you let go of this week? Okay, my can't let it go is actually perpetual for the last month. I have spent a lot of time thinking about it and contemplating it and making me very happy. And that is the Philadelphia Flyers' new mascot, Gritty. I love Gritty. I love everything about Gritty.

I've loved Gritty from day one. If you somehow don't know Gritty, he is the new mascot unveiled by the Flyers who seem to take a page from their cousins across town. Well, not across town, down the parking lot, the Philadelphia Phillies, who have the Philly Fanatic, who's this lovable Muppet-looking guy who kind of wiggles his torso and shoots hot dogs at people, and he's great. Doesn't he have kind of a megaphone-ish sort of apparatus for a mouth? His nose, yeah. Yeah, the nose, yeah.

So Gritty looks like that, but like, I don't know the polite way to say it. He has a crazy beard he has googly eyes he looks like he's coming to kill you and in fact within a day of Gritty's rollout to the world he threatened to kill the mascot of the Pittsburgh Penguins he fell on his butt

like four or five times the first time he was on the ice and he has just gone uphill from there I love Gritty several other people on our desk love Gritty. And, in fact, my fellow congressional reporter, Kelsey Snell, was in southern New Jersey in the Philadelphia suburbs for a story last week and took time out of her reporting to try and find some sort of Gritty gear

or a Gritty bobblehead or something to put on our desk. And here's the thing. Gritty has caught the world by storm, so much so that the Flyers did not have merchandise ready oh call amazon what do you trust more gritty or amazon oh gritty okay yeah yeah i like it okay that is all of the things we cannot let go of this week we'll actually be back in your feeds tomorrow to break down a brand new poll that npr will have out scott horsley points out we should probably take it with a little bit of a grain of salt, but our last few polls have been pretty interesting. Between now and then, you can head to npr.org slash politics newsletter to subscribe to our

newsletter. It comes out every Saturday morning. It catches you up on the best stories and analysis from the week. I'm Scott Detrow. I cover Congress. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben, political reporter. And I'm Scott Horsley. I cover the White House. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.