The Press Box - A Campaign "Misquote," the Sports Doc Crisis, and Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin on the GOP Debate

Episode Date: August 24, 2023

Bryan is back with Weekend Headlines to review a misquote from Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, then discuss sports docs' equivalence to memoir and Tucker Carlson’s biography (0:48). Later, Bryan is joined by Semafor's Washington bureau chief, Benjy Sarlin, to react to the first GOP debate. They discuss candidates’ approach to Ron DeSantis, talk through Nikki Haley’s and Mike Pence’s campaigns, touch on a Trump-less debate, and then predict who may win Iowa and who may drop out before then (7:10). Host: Bryan Curtis Guest: Benjy Sarlin Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, everyone. This is Craig Horlebeck from the Ringer Fantasy Football Show. Join me, Danny Hifitz and Danny Kelly every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to help you win your draft, win your league, and most importantly, avoid that last place punishment. Follow the Ringer Fantasy Football Show on Spotify. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to Press Box Final Edition. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Erica Servantes. In five minutes, we're going to bring on Semaphors Benji Sarland, who was in Milwaukee last night to cover the first G. GOP debate. Benjik is a super, super smart campaign observer. Well, I've known for a very long time.

You're going to want to hear his takes about last night's events. But first, Ryan Williams isn't walking through that door. Let's do weekend headlines. I was misquoted. I mean, taken out of context. Vivek Ramoswamy was arguably the winner of last night's debate, at least if winner is code for the candidate who got attacked the most by other Republicans. Ramoswami had.

kind of a tough week. Before the debate, the Atlantic quoted him wondering aloud about 9-11 conspiracy theories. Now, on such a damaging story, Ramoswamy's first move was to throw out a familiar political chestnut. I was misquoted. That's not exactly what I told the guy, he told semiphor. Now, this podcast is based on the idea that reporters are fallible. They don't screw up. We don't have a show. But when you see a presidential candidate, especially one whose mind wanders over so many subjects, claim he was misquoted, what do you think the cousin Sal odds would be that he actually was? In this case, the Atlantic released the transcript and audio. Ramoswami was not misquoted. He was wondering a lot about 9-11 conspiracies. At that point, Ramoswami fell back to a second

defense beloved by political candidates. Okay. I would. wasn't misquoted, but my quotes were taken out of context, badly out of context, as his campaign put it. Now, in theory, being taken out of context offers a little more room for debate. If you ever look at interview transcripts, most subjects tend to talk in stream of consciousness rather than in tidy answers. And I know when I'm looking at an enticing quote buried in that transcript, I always ask myself, is this fair? But going back to the instant replay, the Atlantic audio shows that in fact it was a fair quotation. Don't worry, though. Ramaswami's campaign had one last move, which was to insist that the Atlantic release even more of the transcript and audio from the

interview, presumably so this small controversy can turn into a comparative literature course. This is where you realize that though journalists screw up quotes all the time and are probably screwing up quotes right now. For politicians, most of the time, I was taken out of context as code for I said something stupid. Headline 2.

Johnny Football and the State of the Sports Doc. I guess this counts as a confession, but I didn't totally hate the Netflix Johnny Football documentary that a lot of Twitter seems to hate. Johnny Football is a doc about Johnny Mansell that's part of Netflix's

untold series. Now, did Mansell take any responsibility in the dock for bombing out with the Cleveland Browns? No, he really didn't. Did the dock grapple with the instance when Mansell was charged with assaulting his girlfriend, later dropped in an agreement with prosecutors? No, it didn't. But when we all flipped on the last dance during COVID, it became pretty clear that the best way to think of these things, these movies,

is not as quote-unquote documentaries. It's as an athlete's memoirs. As you can probably guess, I've been consuming athlete memoirs since I was a kid. They used to just be books, and in book form, they were almost exactly like this. They were full of extremely compelling stuff,

like the Netflix show has about Mansell's time in Aggie Land, Texas A&M, when he was reinventing the program and winning a Heisman and making banks selling his autograph. Tell me the stuff with him and his childhood friend and Consulieri Uncle Nate isn't watchable as hell. But when it comes to stuff that didn't make an athlete look legendary,

athlete memoirs would mention it. They kind of had to, but they'd take a big pass on dealing with it. And the admissions of wrongdoing by the athlete were pretty weasily if they existed at all. And that's when even young Brian realized that though memoirs contain stuff that almost no journalists could Yet, they weren't journalism. They were as untrustworthy as they were interesting. So when we're complaining about the Netflix Florida Docks Swamp Kings or the Steph Curry thing that I haven't been able to bring myself to watch yet,

think of them this way. They're not documentaries. They're authorized memoirs, often extremely authorized ones. Set your expectations accordingly. Headline three, Tucker Carlson pulls a Johnny football. There's a book that's coming out about Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality. It's by political writer Jason Zangeryl. Now, full disclosure, Jason happens to be an old pal.

He was an editor at the New Republic when I got my very first gig in journalism there. And somewhere I still have the notebook that I was scribbling in at my desk in Austin when Jason told me over the phone that I would be making $300 a week. So I'm excited to read Jason's book, which promises to see Tucker, Carlson in all his facets. But I noticed that, interestingly, there's another Tucker Carlson book that came out first. It's by Chadwick Moore, and Carlson cooperated with it. I think you can call this type of book the preemptive biography.

There's a book coming out about me, and I may not like some of the stuff that's going to be in the book, so I'm going to make myself available to another potentially friendlier author. whose book is going to be the first one to market. Now, this move reminded me, and as it turns out, Brian Stelter, too, of Roger Ailes, the former Fox News Chief. He cooperated with a friendly biography when Gabe Sherman started sniffing around for his book, The Loudest Voice in the Room. There's only one problem with this strategy. And that's that having a nicer story about you out there doesn't suppress people's appetites for the full story.

It's hard to imagine a member of Resistance Twitter saying, eh, I bought a Tucker Carlson biography last year. What do I need another one for? If you see a preemptive biography at your local bookstore, I have one piece of advice. Wait for the second one. That's weekend headlines. Live from Milwaukee, where he was covering the GOP debate,

let us bring in Benji Sarland. He is the Washington Bureau Chief for Semaphore. He and I met during the two, 2008 presidential election when we worked for the Daily Beast. And Benji made a name for himself when he cold called John McCain's aunt and quoted her saying that McCain was toast. That's my kind of shoe leather reporting. Benji, welcome to the press box. Hey, Brian. It's got a beer. Can you believe this is the fifth presidential election cycle since we've known each other? Yeah, it's pretty wild. I was thinking, you know, so, Brian, you were my editor then.

And a lot of your value was explaining to like the 22-year-old reporters like me that, hey, you know this thing in the news going on right now has some parallel to like something that happened in the Clinton administration when you were, you know, playing Mortal Kombat or whatever. You should call up this person, this person, and this person. And it's funny now that I'm an editor. That's my job now to be like the, you know, you kids are too young to remember it. But John McCain, you know, it's funny. You're the old Jack Germant character now on the campaign trail. I love that. All right. So let's do some behind the scenes first before we dive into the debate itself. For political reporters who were actually at FISA Forum, the house that Janus built last night,

how did you watch the debate? So to give an idea of how debates typically work here, you have hundreds of reporters, but almost none of them are in the actual room with the candidates watching the event. There's what's called there's a large media filing center normally. And usually either in a separate room or in this case right next to it is the famous spin room, which is where, you know, the candidates themselves, but usually quote-unquote surrogates come out and say how great they did right after the debate. Everyone streams out. They have their holding up signs, you know, volunteers for each campaign. And everyone goes and gets their fill of spin and then returns to write their story. And it's pretty, you know, chaotic.

You know, reporters are pre-writing their story, you know, before the debate even ends. and then they have to run in to get as many quotes as possible. And people are often trying to sometimes bank quotes for unrelated stories, as long as they have every campaign manager out, for example. So that is the main reporter experience of covering it in person. You are in a separate room with a bunch of screens, and then a bunch of people, you know, mostly lying to you. What's the value of the spin zone in 2023?

Because it seems weird, doesn't it, to say, let's go to the lying room where everybody's going to tell us this different story about how their candidates did tonight? Well, one thing that's changed a bit from, and this was really a 2012 change, was social media changed how the spin game works a lot. So there was a famous debate there, which was Obama's first one with Romney, which did not go very well for Obama. But the way it worked in real time, which had really not happened in a prior debate, was that

people started freaking out within the first 10 minutes on Twitter that, like, oh, my God, like Romney is killing him. This is the biggest disaster that ever happened. I mean, in retrospect, you watch it, and it's like Obama just kind of has a listless debate. It's not like there was like some catastrophic moment, and he recovered in the polls, you know, after a week or two. But it built up into this frenzy and, you know, to the point that everyone can't wait to hear what they're even saying in the spin room. How are you going to explain this terrible debate? So I think there is one value of the spin room now is you are responding to so much social media consensus.

though I think that might be a changing a little as, you know, X kind of, kind of rots a bit. I don't think it was as influential in this debate. But it definitely still has value and also you can get some of those quotes and some of that spin into the next day coverage a bit. You know, people will say, you know, say, oh, you know, it looks like so-and-so had a lousy debate. But if you talk to their campaign manager, which I just did, they said that was their strategy all along. They were trying to win over voters who would sympathize with them, you know, blowing it on stage. And now they have this broad, sympathetic audience that can do that, you know, likes how they froze up and forgot their core campaign platform and that answer. You know, so there is value to getting that into the day two coverage.

Right. Tim Scott's campaign manager said he likes, he's appealing to viewers out in there who like candidates who disappear on stage in the midst of it. That's a perfect example. You know, I was talking to Tim Scott's campaign manager after. the event and his senior advisors were out there talking to our reporters. And their pitch, and it is true, they telegraphed this heading in. This wasn't a new thing that they came up with afterwards, was, yeah, Tim Scott wants to be above the fray. He wants to be the adult. He's not the guy who shouts at people. He's the guy who talks to people. And maybe that, maybe he got less, the way his campaign manager put it, maybe he got less speaking time, but he also got less shouting time. And that turns off voters. So you see how that filters into the coverage a bit, even though there's, because

there's going to be a lot of headlines about, yeah, Tim Scott disappeared. There's value to them in getting their side of it. You tweeted last night that it was a fascinating debate that did not conform to early expectations. How so? So there were a couple of expectations around this debate that I think got subverted. One is that for months and months and months. The assumption was this was going to be the big make or break Ron DeSantis debate. Everyone's going to go after Ron DeSantis, the consensus second place contender,

and everyone's going to try to tear him down, and that's what this is going to be. And certainly that's what Ron DeSantis was prepared for, his campaign and his Super PAC put out memos, basically anticipating this. And then what happened is nobody attacked Ronn's. So that was one big thing. It turned out Vivek Ramoswamy, who was sort of peeking at the exact right time where he's been moving up in the polls, but also only just now starting to get real scrutiny, you know, from other campaigns.

He became the big target. some of this was, you know, strategy. He's now the rising name you have to contend with. Some of this is that they just clearly, clearly, clearly hate Vivek Ramoswami. I think that just came through overwhelmingly. And the one other big surprise was, I'd say, the lack of Trump. In fact, the moderators themselves have been talking about how they were going to use video clips of Trump and have you respond to them. That didn't end up happening.

They didn't talk about them at all for the first hour. and the candidates didn't seem eager to do so either. So it ended up being both less DeSantis and less Trump than I think many people expected. I wanted to ask you about Ramoswamy because watching the debate, it did feel like there were two reasons to attack. One, that his poll numbers have been relatively strong. And two, that just about everyone on stage, including kind of amazingly, Mike Pence, thinks he's an asshole. And that Mike Pence attack was way more personal than I ever heard Mike Pence. Pence be on stage before, including with Kamala Harris. Yeah, you usually don't associate Mike Pence

with being, you know, the brutal attack dog, you know, making like, you know, sarcastic, dismissive comments. It's like, no, no, no, he's, you know, well, you know, I'm just Mike Pence and I'm very earnest and I can't be quiet. You know, it's like it's not his normal mode. But yeah, he took it personally. And when you watch a stage, you can see it a bit, right? Except for Tim Scott, who's a longtime senator, every candidate has been a governor. They are a current or former governor And, you know, in every case, you know, mostly a popular and successful one, Christie obviously ended up leaving office extremely unpopular in New Jersey. But, you know, he was a major figure over there. He won a resounding reelection. These are people who have had the responsibility of having to, you know, govern, you know, one of the hardest jobs in America and also appeal to a broad statewide audience and deal with voters, you know, outside one Twitter niche.

And I think on both, on both counts, they just freaking loathe Rama Swamp. They see this guy who's, you know, just turned 38 who has no government experience. He's a rich guy who doesn't seem like, it doesn't seem to have given a lot of thought to a lot of his positions. They seem to be kind of coming up on the fly or implausible. But also most importantly, they assume, I think totally and sincerely is calling them all bought and paid for career politicians, you know, just showed up. And it's like, you know, oh, Mike Pence, you're controlled by your super PAC and you're like, none of you can be trusted, you know, all, which is a rational, you know, way to run. It's what Trump did to them the previous time. It makes sense.

But it's obviously rubbing them the wrong way, to put it mildly. You mentioned DeSantis, who nobody attacked. He came in very programmed, very ready to reject the premise of the moderator's questions. What did you make of his night overall? So there wasn't some disastrous moment or clip that's going to follow DeSantis for the most part, I think. Him dodging on a six-week federal abortion ban is something Demiore. Democrats are saving, but then also DeSantis has to be the nominee for that to matter. And, you know, we'll see how that goes.

But I thought in general, he was pretty solid. He came out very energetic, very prepared. He didn't stumble around too much. He didn't get caught. Everyone's always looking for the awkward DeSantis moment where he's getting sweaty. He stumbles on his words. He says something surprise unexpectedly. It never really came.

But on the other hand, he mostly stuck to these kind of prepared lines, like you said, that are familiar from his stump speech, which so far has not been especially helpful to him in the polls. You know, he's still trying to figure out who he is. And I think he struggled a little bit not being the center of attention. I think they really were prepared for that. I mean, his campaign manager afterwards just straight up said they were surprised that he was not being attacked.

They had obviously not anticipated this. And that made it a little tough for him. I think the core problem with DeSantis here is that he still has not figured out his brand. I think a lot of the questions he was dodging on in this debate, for example, are things like, you know, abortion, January 6th. Those are tough topics for the entire field. You know, we saw Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, for example, stumbled around abortion a lot early in their runs, too. But they used these last six months to eventually get to a place where at the debate, they had pretty confident answers. Like, they knew where they stood.

And I think through road testing, you know, on the campaign, they got in a better sense of what their core pitches to voters. You know, Nikki Haley was selling this like, you know, I'm a relatable woman who knows how to govern and, you know, knows how to speak to voters in the middle. And it's like, you know, agree with her or disagree with her. That really came through. Tim Scott, you know, not necessarily the greatest performance, but you get the idea. I'm the likable guy above the fray. Everyone agrees, you know, with me. I have this nice biography, you know, give me a look.

Everyone's figured out these kind of these kind of lanes. DeSantis, it's not clear what it is yet. We saw him attacking the moderator, but to what end? It was like on some simple question about climate change that was mostly unobjectionable. It's like it doesn't seem like there's still a core rationale for his candidacy. And that's really deadly in presidential politics. Yeah, he was trying to sidestep the question about January 6th. And Brett Baer said, by the way, Donald Trump is leading you by 30 or 40 points.

Yeah, never something you want to hear from a moderator. But yeah, but it was silly too then, right? Because, you know, he's acting all indignant about the Trump questions. But also they went a freaking hour without bringing up Trump. And so it also seemed like the situation they prep for where Trump dominates the debate, he was a little thrown by that not happening. You know, it's not like they were weird, illegitimate questions about Trump. They were like the most obvious low-hanging fruit.

Hey, this guy's been indicted and also he did January 6th. Like, what do you think of those two things? They were out of left field, I'd say. Nikki Haley had something of a Heisman moment last night when she went at Ramoswamy and said he had no foreign policy experience. What kind of campaign is she trying to run? So Haley's, on one level, it's a very electability-focused campaign. And, you know, you can argue with this.

You know, Nikki Haley won in a very conservative state, especially at the time she was running it. But she's someone who has some bipartisan appeal. She famously took down the Confederate flag in South Carolina after the Emmanuel Church shooting. She doesn't talk about it a ton, you know, on the truth. but that was definitely her big moment on the national stage and it had, you know, a lot of praise from both parties. She's, it's very funny. It's very much like a 2015 style Democratic campaign where it's, you know, about, you know,

women are showing that they can do it and we're not going to, you know, take it from the boys club anymore, except it's a little weird in a Republican primary in 2023 where there's been, you know, a kind of lot of backlash to so-called identity politics and, you know, the big trend has been these kind of like extremely masculine, misogynist like media figures and political figures like Trump rising and getting traction that way. She's offering a different path. The pitch is, look, what if we, that was fun for a while. What if we tried this other route here where we say, hey, independent women in the suburbs, I am a relatable person who doesn't sound too crazy and conservatives. I still look at my policy record. It's still quite conservative, but at least I can speak both

languages. It was funny. I could see that Margaret Thatcher quote from her coming like a hundred miles away last night. And sure enough, when we got the pre-prepared talking points, here it came. Mike Pence has been written off by just about everybody because of the simple problem that he did not help Trump steal the 2020 election. Does last night point to a different path for him, electorally speaking, that might not have been apparent before? I don't think so. I do think it was notable. So one was, Mike Pence gave, I think, I think he surprised a lot of people with how strong a performance that is. I mean, like, a lot of the debate, a lot of what he was arguing over was experience. And I think that debate was a reminder that's like, oh, yeah, this guy has been in

multiple vice presidential debates. He was a longtime congressman. He was a governor. Like, this is a guy who's been around. He knows politics. He knows presidential politics. He knows policy. I think he was able to maybe get another look, like a little reminder, like, hey, I'm more than just that guy who defied Trump. January 6th. That said, yeah, it's fatal. It's just like there's no evidence so far that it isn't completely fatal. And, you know, candidates like DeSantis might complain on stage. Like, why are you asking us about this January 6th? No one cares about that. He had some line like, we should be focused on January 20, 2025 instead. It did not land very well, I don't think. But you look at Pence

and you put the lie to that. It is very important. Like Mike Pence's unfavorable numbers until relatively recently were the worst in the field consistently. And there was only one possible reason for that. I mean, he was literally Trump's vice president. They had the same record. He's someone who was picked as Trump's vice president because he had no enemies in the conservative movement whatsoever. He was seen as, you know, relatively acceptable to everyone. What happened was he certified the election and became one of the most unpopular people in the party overnight. And for that reason, I'm not sure he has, I think there's a ceiling on his potential. But it is. an important campaign in that, again, getting to the idea that people figured out their core

candidacy, it wasn't a given that Mike Pence was going to run as, look, I am the true constitutional conservative who stood up for what's right on January 6th. That is not how he was talking the first year after January 6 even. He was really, you could have seen a version where he came out and ran and said, that's not the focus of my campaign. I'm here to talk about taxes. But to, you know, Mike Pence, he decided like, the only way to get around this is through it. Like, you just have to deal with it directly. And it is interesting that he's forced the rest of the field to respond to him that way. Was there a substantive answer on policy from any candidate that surprised you last night? I don't know about surprise. Our own Dave Weigel had a great debate preview the other day about

what the candidates have actually been running on. And one of the things that he mentioned was that you might be surprised that the candidates have like moved pretty far right in a lot of issues and mostly agree on a lot of things. So, you know, certainly on things. So, you know, certainly on things. like immigration, you didn't see a lot of difference when they were talking, even though in the 2016 cycle, that was one of the most divisive issues. They've all mostly moved towards Trump at this point. But abortion, I thought, was the most interesting set of exchanges. That's a case where the party's position is still very in flux. All they know is that what they've been trying is really not working right now. I mean, we've just had race after race after race, even after the

midterms, in which they've been, have a race that's seen as a ballot initiative that's as a referendum on abortion. They pour money in. They put out their best message and they just get absolutely killed on election day. And nobody has come up with a good answer for this. And I thought it was interesting seeing how distinct the approaches were with the different campaigns. So Nikki Haley's approach, for example, the electability one, was, you know, one of my colleagues mentioned it was almost similar to some of the Medicare for all debates in 2020 with Democrats, which is basically like, yeah, our goal is to end abortion. But since a sweeping national ban, is never going to happen, let's not talk about it. It just divides people and gets, it's a conversation

that we know loses us votes. Why don't we talk about something else or propose something else that polls better and that there's more consensus on, which for them is usually this idea of these kind of extreme late-term abortion scenarios. So that was interesting rhetorically, even if a position is mostly not that different. But then you saw Tim Scott and Mike Pence, who in Scott's case, had really waffled on this at first, commit fully to, no, we are going national abortion ban. 15 weeks is the absolute minimum we would go there. And we need to say it clearly. And we need to say we're 100% pro-life.

And if we go out and show that we mean business, people will come around and respect that. Very different approach. And then you have these candidates caught in the middle. I mean, the biggest one of DeSantis, who could not clearly say whether the six-week ban he passed in Florida would be something you would try to impose on the nation writ large. And the other candidates, you know, it was like Doug Bergam,

who, you know, good for him. He had his Willis Reed moment, that we're all glad that I was very happy to see him in person, you know, hanging out. He was like holding court after the debate too. He seemed to be in good shape. He said, leave it to the states. That was a very clear position, too. So this is a rare area where there's no Republican consensus yet.

The only consensus is that it isn't working. And there are several policy options available that do differentiate yourselves from each other. Listeners should know that Benji is a Knicks fan, so the Willis Reed reference coming from a place in the heart. So, Brian, my first political event I ever went to was Bill Bradley's presidential campaign. He held a rally at Madison Square Garden, and Willis Reed came out. They recreated the moments, walked out. It's like, and now for the Knicks, Willis Reed.

It was pretty amazing. So there may be a connection between these two scenarios. Alas for the Bradley campaign didn't quite turn out the same way. You tweeted last night that everyone in the political press corps was read, with their Donald Trump was the real winner story. Does that not look like the right take on Thursday morning? So this is, call this my hot take because this is highly contested. There definitely were stories today saying Donald Trump is the real winner of this to me.

So let me give you my pitch for why that might not be the case. Now, the reason everyone was ready to say it was he has this huge lead. All he has to do is play, prevent defense. And even better than that, the expectation, you know, heading into the debate, which was somewhat true was that they're going to be fighting amongst each other too. So it's like even better for Trump is that you just have these people battling for crumbs while you walk away with, you know, the whole loaf of bread and don't even have to worry about them. But here's the reason Donald Trump is at least a little vulnerable. Like when you hear the best possible case for why he might lose

from the other campaigns, from outside strategists, from pollsters, from focus groups, it's that there is still some contingent of Republican voters who, and our reporters have heard this, they've seen it in focus groups, pollsters all say the same thing on this, who say, well, I love Trump, but I'm just still a little ambivalent about him. I'm still not quite sure. I'm still a little worried about whether he can win again, you know, so soft Trump supporters, basically. And, you know, this may be an exaggerated phenomenon, but it is a thing that exists. and to the extent they exist, they'll probably make up their mind very late in the race. We've certainly seen the past, you know, Brian, we're talking about the five elections we've

covered. You know, Iowa voters make up their mind in like the last two weeks. There's like huge swings in the polls routinely. And that's a state that has not been great for Trump in the past. You know, he lost it in 2016, even as he went on to just steamroll his way to to the nomination, right? So here's why I think it might, with that theory in mind, why it might be a little tough for Trump. The candidates all did pretty well. You know, like we said, there was no real loser. They did not look like a bunch of ill-prepared amateurs to me. Like the headline coming out of this debate was not amateur hour, which is another headline that could have happened. It was these look like a bunch of people with real experience who have figured out, you know, how to give the best version of their

message for the most part. And they got a bunch of applause lines with the audience. And this was the first time a national audience really got to see what a post-Trump Republican Party might look like. And very importantly, imagine a bunch of these people on stage with Joe Biden, who all looked pretty credible in a debate, if you ask me, if Trump really is weak in that regard, where there's some people just not quite sure about him supporting him, but waiting to see if there's something else on the horizon, I think they saw some options on the horizon. And I would not assume that's risk-free for Trump versus if he was there and the obvious center of attention and jousting with everyone. That's interesting. So just even if it was characterized as a B-teen kind of a

being on stage, not making a fatal mistake or a huge mistake, just gives them some stature in a possible race against Trump. He's given them just a little toehold, this little foot in the door there. Now, to be clear, Trump is still the overwhelming favorite here. No one clip this podcast and put it on whatever, you know, don't aggregate this. Whatever the politics equivalent is of those sports podcasts and say like,

Benji says Trump's going to like, going to lose for sure. It's like, no, no, no, he's the overwhelming favorite. But to the extent he has a weakness, yes, I think it reinforces that. The first question asked by the Fox moderator, Brett Barron, Martha McCallum, was about why do you think Rich men of Richmond is such a hit? Got to be one of the weirdest debate openers I have ever seen in my life. How do you think they did last night?

I'm going to be honest, not great. I mean, it was a really difficult task. That was a bizarre question that I noticed didn't even make it into many write-ups because people weren't quite sure what to do with it. There was also an incredibly long lead-up to it. It was like six minutes. With live clip. Yeah, and I love it.

It was like your gradual, very long clip of the song, too. And it's like, I love the gradual realization in the room that the question is going to be about Richmond, North of Richmond. It's like, where are they going with this? It didn't produce very interesting answers I don't thought. But the bigger issue for them was that they were handed an extremely difficult task, which is Republicans have been trained at this point to absolutely freaking hate debate moderators. And this kind of mythology has built up over several cycles that the debate moderators are all out to make Republicans look bad and ask about whatever question is most divisive and whichever question the Democrats want to ask about. And they won't talk about the real issues or celebrate our candidates. And so they had an audience that was clearly primed for that and it was booing and cheering, you know, on that level.

Right. But they also really got steamrolled a lot. I mean, I think the assumption was that without Trump, it would be fairly easy to control the candidates. You know, these are all, you know, normal, respectable politicians who've been to debates before. They didn't seem to know what to do when a DeSantis say was just constantly slapping them down. They had trouble with what was very predictable, you know, the audience booing, you know, anyone saying anything bad about Trump. I thought there was this funny moment where Brett Bayer basically had to, like, beg the crowd, let's get through this together during a Chris Christie answer, which kind of, you know, it was kind of a representative. moment. And I will say the one other thing, I've worked on a lot of debates. They take a lot of work.

A lot of the moderating is in the question writing. You have to, it's not so much just being able to slap the candidates and say like, no, no, no, but let's pin you down. What did you say? And they did try a little bit. It's that if you construct a question well, even a non-answer is going to be very revealing if you make it a yes or no. So they had some strange opportunities to do that and it ended up very beandering. So the first abortion question was just like, they start asking about the six-week ban, and then the question isn't,

do you support the state six-week ban? It was like, what do you say to suburban voters? He was like, huh? Yeah, you're going to lose control if that's the question. You know, similarly, the big hand-raise moment was very weird. I thought asking about whether you'd support Trump if he was convicted was, everyone was expecting the question was, would you do the same thing as Mike Pence,

which they started coming around to later, but like I thought that might have been. more revealing. And as it turns out, there was confusion over the hand raised question and whether Chris Christie even was doing it. So I do think there was some kind of like, sloppy question writing. I think because partly they were worried about seeming like they were trying to pin candidates down and trying to, you know, make them look bad, they maybe let them off a little easy and let them beander a bit. Couldn't agree more. This felt like an instance when the moderators knew the topic and the topics were more or less right.

abortion, Jan 6, a lot of policy, et cetera, et cetera, but did not know the question to ask about that top. I think that's a good way to put it. I mean, on paper, yes, nothing was surprising there. You know, it's all, the most surprising one was climate change, which was, you know, it was interesting. They got a young conservative there, and, you know, polls show and young Republicans are more concerned about this issue.

And it was funny that that's the moment that DeSantis picked to be like, how dare you, sir? You know, it was kind of funny. And that quickly got out of control. he was talking about, you know, the president in Maui or, you know, completely unrelated, unrelated topics. You know, that one didn't, didn't work very well for the most part. But that was the only topic that really felt like, oh, surprising, you know. Yeah, too, that was putting it in the mouth of a young conservative who could say,

my generation actually cares about this was an interesting way to go, even if it didn't get much of an answer. By the way, very, very dissentist, by the way, right? To see this young man volunteering, you know, you get nervously getting up on the big stage. and his immediate response is like, how dare you? It's like a lot of other, yes, a lot of other politicians would go like, first of all, we should commend this young man and like, let me tell you about what I did in the Everglades. It was very, very interesting choice. As a performer, he is going to have to get over that programmed quality.

I mean, I think he said send Biden back to the basement three times last night. They were asking him, I think about the Mexican cartels. And he answered darn right. I will do that in terms of using the U.S. military. It just is something about it that feels like I learned my lines, and now I'm delivering my lines in exactly the order that my super PAC or strategy group, whatever that was, don't me to deliver them in. Yeah, which to be fair is what virtually every campaign does.

What often separates them is who's better at it, you know, who can make it come off as more authentic, who doesn't get tripped up if there's follow-ups, you know, it's, but it has been a struggle, this kind of like act natural be like, you know, when it was at the Iowa State Fair, the Trump campaign troll, him with a banner on an airplane that said, be likeable, Ron? You know, it's like, but I will say it is very difficult when you are a candidate facing that level of scrutiny where literally every interaction has a bunch of reporters watching it. And you've been pegged as the awkward candidate.

Everything gets seen through that lens, whether fair or not. It's a very difficult position to be in. Mitt Romney was in it in 2012. Once they managed to establish that like Mitt Romney, kind of weird, suddenly every answer he gave was, you know, was immediately judged on what, was that a weird one? Can we throw that onto the pile of clips? You know, it's a very tough spot to be in when you're pigeonholed there. Two very quick ones for you before you go. The candidate who isn't Trump, you can now most imagine winning Iowa is?

Tim Scott still. I don't think based on this debate. I just have been impressed so far. He has a strategy that's often worked in the past in Iowa, which is, is you kind of hold your, you run it, you're solidly conservative. You have some, you know, credentials with the, with the activist there. And your ads are just like, you know what I love going to church and the Bible. You know, it's like, why can't we get back to those old days? Like, that's an approach that's worked in the past. Like Mike Hugg would be basically won that way.

Rick Santorum, too. Yep. And Tim Scott, his ads, his message has been very much in that vein. So I could see him taking off last minute there if he can stay in the, the race. He has a ton of money, which is the other thing. He can afford to stick around. He has some big donors who like him, who I'm sure have been encouraged by his recent movement in the polls and probably will keep donating as a result. If he can still be hanging around, you know, in December when they can make the big advertising push, he's the one I would be most worried about if I were Trump. But on the

other hand, I don't think Trump would be very worried if Scott won Iowa. You do not get that can't, Trump has not said a negative word about Scott very deliberately. I think they would love it. if he moved into second place. If he ended up the final challenger, they do not seem very intimidated by him. He still, Scott still has to get past the suspicion. He's running for vice president in the first place

because he also won't attack Trump. So he's one of the most interesting kind of wildcard candidates here. All right. Last one. The candidates you can now imagine dropping out of the race before we even get to Iowa is. Are we saying the one I imagine most? Because the one I would say is the hottest take is like, yeah, DeSantis really, it's a question whether he makes it tie away, I think.

You think so? Still? Yes. Still. So the candidate who this reminds me of a bit is Kamala Harris, which is Kamala Harris is someone who I was at all her early events in 2020. And she was a great speaker. She was hailed as the next big thing. She was drawing huge crowds, huge crowds at the beginning.

There was all this energy around her. In her case, she was actually pretty good in debate. She had a big early debate moment with Joe Biden that got her a new look and a bump in the polls. And all this energy around her. And then the problem was it became apparent pretty quickly. There was not a core rationale for her campaign at all. Like, they just did not, she did not understand what she was about. She was trying to run to the left at first, but it didn't really make sense because she didn't have a lot of background in progressive policy and progressive circles.

and by far her most core attribute was that she was a prosecutor, but they were very worried about running on that because Democrats were suspicious of cops. You ended up with a muddle. And once it became clear, she no longer, the electability candidate was no longer looking electable. Donors fled. She dropped in the polls and she did not make it to Iowa, though she did make it to the vice presidency. I mean, it's hard to call it, you know, a loss exactly. But that that was the case. So DeSantis, similar deal. The whole point of DeSantis is not that he's some super-like. guy. He does have a somewhat passionate following, but a lot of it is that he's been anointed as the guy who gets rid of Trump. This is the next big thing. He gets us past Trump and he moves us to some new era of conservative governance that's like what he's doing in Florida.

Okay, if he no longer looks like he gets rid of Trump, things start collapse and he hasn't figured out some other rationale for his candidacy that everyone can agree on and has a passionate following, donors can flee real quickly. And that's a big, bloated, expensive campaign that's already had to reboot itself. If you start losing donor support and he really starts moving into third, fourth, fifth place in the polls, other people start getting attention,

he could be out in a couple of months. These debates are really make a break for him every time. I like it. I like it. Benji Sarlane. You can check him out at Semaphore. He's the savvy veteran now of the political scene, telling all the kids about what the Rick Perry campaign was really like. Safe Travels Home. Thank you for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian.

That's the press box. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic. As always, by Erica Servantes. Okay, a few weeks ago, I didn't get a chance to thank you. I had asked somewhat shamelessly for listeners to retweet the podcast or share the podcast, and many of you did, which warmed my heart. But now I'm going to be like an editor who watches his reporter write a good story and

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