The Press Box - How to Write a Campaign Book With The Atlantic’s Edward-Isaac Dovere

Episode Date: June 14, 2021

Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker are joined by Atlantic writer Edward-Isaac Dovere to talk about his book ‘Battle for the Soul.’ They discuss Dovere’s decision to write a campaign book (10:28) and the challenges that arose during the writing process (22:52) before brainstorming campaign-book power rankings (33:40). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Hosts: Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker Guest: Edward-Isaac Dovere Associate Producer: Erika Cervantes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ringer's Dave Hill takes you on a journey into the underground lives and careers of six professional gamblers. This eight-part podcast is a unique look into the gambling world that you don't want to miss. Check out gamblers on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. David, I want to start the show today by pointing out a choice bit of the Yashar Ali profile in L.A. magazine that we didn't talk about last one. Okay. The author Peter Kiefer asked Ali who else he could contact him. to talk about it to write this profile. Oh, right.

And Ali Kiefer wrote, quote, replied by sending a spreadsheet listing the personal emails and cell phone numbers of more than 40 bold-faced names, including Busy Phillips, Mandy Moore, Kristen Davis, Pierce Morgan. Kiefer winds up talking to Jake Tapper and Maggie Haberman. In a magazine profile, those kinds of interviews have a name. Just like there's a journalism name for the nut graph or the kicker. Mm-hmm. Those interviews are called secondaries.

Right. As in secondary interviews. So can we spend a moment talking about the art of the secondary here at the top of the podcast? Absolutely we can. But one quick note about the piece you just mentioned. The one thing I didn't get to ask, it was actually in my notes, was about that list. because I desperately wanted to know as I was reading it how quickly that Excel spreadsheet came

was returned to him, right? I mean, it's like, do you have any other people you can interview? If it's like a day or two later, the Excel spreadsheet arrived in my inbox is very different than 30 seconds later a fully prepared Excel spreadsheet arrived in my inbox, right? Yeah, I just have a friend list that is shareable with anybody who contacts me.

Yeah, well, anyway, let's talk about secondaries. Let's talk about secondaries because these often pop up when somebody is doing a celebrity profile. So I'm interviewing the celebrity and then I'm also going to interview other famous people who are going to talk to me about the celebrity. So a couple years ago when Stephen Roderick profiled Ringo Starr for Rolling Stone, he also got Paul McCartney to talk to him. So you have Ringo in the profile, but you also have Paul in the profile talking about Ringo. I looked up the New Yorker's tad friend. He did a profile of Ben Stiller in 2012. So he gets Ben Stiller, but he also gets Robert Downey Jr. and Will Ferro and Owen Wilson and Judd Apatow, etc.

In the high flying days of magazines, every profile was kind of like an Ocean's 11 movie. He had the whole lineup of people. And as I was thinking about this last night, it was, it's almost, the secondary is almost like a double flex. First, there's a flex on behalf. half of the writer of the profile. You know what? Hey, look, you know,

not only am I going to quote multiple famous people in this article. I'm just kind of going to slide one in, just one single quote. So if I did a Steve Carell profile, I'll just be like, yeah, you know, he showed up every day with the weirdest grin on his face,

said John Cresensky. And then I'll never mention John Cresensky again. Right. I just, I won't, and I won't even say like I called John Cresensky to get some information. I'll just slide it in there. Mm-hmm.

Like I was calling an academic or somebody who was very available on the phone. And of course, as you know, if you are writing the magazine profile, it is almost certain that the only reason John Crosinski or other secondary is calling you back is because the person you're writing about asks them to call you. Exactly. Yeah. But you don't have to tell the reader that, right? So that's flex number one. Flex number two comes from this Peter Kiefer article. The celebrity is kind of doing a little bit of.

a flex there to say look at all the people I can have call you on my behalf and testify to my comic or actorly or whatever it is qualities to you the magazine. Right. So we're going to, so I'm going to

do this. Like if I was writing a profile of David Shoemaker, the wrestling writer, it'd be one thing. So we should call Brian Curtis. That's easy. He's easy to get on the phone. It's just, yeah, you should call the rock. I heard he's, uh, he likes my work a lot. You should you should call Ben Stiller. I think he's a big fan of mine.

And here's his number, right? I'll send him a note to tell him you'll be calling. It's just an amazing thing. And I think it's like one of those, it very much feels like a product of another age of magazine writing. Yeah. Which is why I think this one stuck out to me so much, because how many people are, A, going to even produce those for the magazine now in this, you know, less powerful media era we live in? But what also a magazine is just going to be running those quote after quote after quote? Well, yes. I mean, this one actually felt pretty particular in a way that I wonder if it'll change the game a little bit when it comes to secondaries, right? Because like it's easy. It's like like the secondary list is sort of reminds me of the book blurb list, right? When you're putting out of when you're writing a book, your publisher's like even sometimes even with the proposal, you submit a list of 20 successful writers that you know who might be willing to give you blurbs for.

your book when it comes out, right? Now, whether or not they come through with it, obviously, there's a lot of, you know, life, life gets in the way and whatever else, but, you know, there's sort of, you're sort of on the record saying, these are my friends or coworkers or, you know, business associates, et cetera. But when you write a blur, you know, there's a certain expectation, you write the blurb and it's not like you have to give interviews about the book. It's not like you have to go to bat for the book in public at any other point down the line, right? And I think a lot of people probably agree to be secondaries thinking it's going to be a book blurb and then in the odd and then sometimes there's a story like this one in which you're actually

interrogated as to how you know the person and you realize along the way probably that this isn't a glowing profile of up to which you're just like you know lending a voice in harmony or something you know this is actually like some sort of investigation um that you're not prepared to be a part of so i what i it is this is this is definitely a different sort of setup i'm glad that you brought it up but yeah i mean it's just not it we're we are in a different world now but for a lot of different reasons. Yeah. So there's like the normal standard secondary, which is like Robert Downey Jr. But then there's the kind of fraught secondary. If you're calling up Robert Dought Jr. and being like, hey, do you really think Ben Stiller's funny? Because I don't. And I'm going to

tell the world that he's not funny. And I'm going to ask you some tough questions about how you're really friends with him. Like, do you even know Ben Stiller? I know the Tropic Thunder thing, but did you even meet before that? It's funny because it just feels like such a a layup of a of a magazine device but in this case it becomes kind of an interesting device as you say

it's for investigation how do you know this guy what do you think of this guy's reporting techniques can I tell you my best ever secondary which you may remember you yourself have acquired yeah yeah tell me writing for the ringer about the sportscaster Jim Gray

longtime veteran of network television, ESPN, et cetera. One of Jim Gray's friends, longtime friends, is Jack Nicholson. So I'm doing my usual writing about the sportscasters, writing about the sports media thing,

and in the course of this profile, at a pre-appointed time, my phone rings one day, and it's Jack. It's really Jack. And he's happy to talk about his friendship with Jim Gray. And I did, the flex thing

I'm talking about. I didn't tell our boss, Sean Fennessey at all that that had happened. I just sort of turned in the piece. And there's a, you know, comma, end quote, said Jack Nicholson in the story. Oh, man, did I feel good? Let me tell you. Second, the secondary can really make a writer's day.

Coming up on today's show, David, the Atlantic's, Edward Isaac DeVier stops by to talk about his 2020 campaign book, Battle for the Soul. How do you write a campaign book and hope all your scoops? last when you're competing with the best political writers in the world. All that and more in the press box. A part of the Ringer podcast network. Hello Media Consumers, Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here along with Erica Servantes. David, we got a real political writer on the show today. Edward Isaac DeVier writes for the Atlantic.

He has just published this new book called Battle for the Soul inside the Democrats' campaigns to defeat Trump. I have a lot of questions. But you and I, I think today may take a break on the political questions that we often consider on this podcast. And maybe sort of push him a little bit into the, how do you write a campaign book in 2021? Yes, please. Because to me, I'm always amazed at how much juice the campaign book still has as a genre. I feel it was declared dead like in 1996 when Michael Lewis.

wrote one that was kind of funny, but was really just about like all the big marginal figures in that presidential race. I'm like, man, if Michael Lewis is, you know, just, just rung out by this format, who, what hope is there for anybody? But it kind of keeps, keeps on keeping on. I know just personally, I want to read them. Oh, yeah. Because there are like the big details that get all the, you know, aggregated everywhere.

And then there's those little choice little things that are just wonderful and you remember forever, a few of which we can get into with Isaac here. So let us talk about campaign books and how one writes one. And by the way, when one writes one, if you're a full-time political reporter for the Atlantic, here is Edward Isaac DeVier. All right, Isaac, let's start here. When did you decide to write a campaign book and when did you get a contract to write a campaign book? I had been toying with different ways of writing about what the Democrats were going to be going through in the Trump years, starting from very soon after Trump won, and certainly by February or March of 2017. And it went back and forth, went back and forth. And then it was in the spring of 2018,

around March, when it occurred to me that there would be a lot of candidates running and that they would be interesting people and also representative of the different shards of the Democratic Party. You'd have the progressives with Warren and Sanders. You'd have the traditionalists with Biden. You'd have a lot of female candidates, a generational argument made by a Budajjad, and at that point, it wasn't clear a better of work would run. But that sort of thing, black candidates, Latino candidates, all the stuff going on. And so there was a proposal that we kind of recalibrated in the spring of 2018. It sold in July of 2018. And the proposal said, this is going to be the craziest, election in American history and maybe the most important in American history. And obviously, I did not know then all of what 2020 would hold. But the proposal turned out to be true. I was going to say, a line in a proposal that actually turns out to be true. This is an occasion. It's, and it was the first time that I'd written a book proposal. So I wasn't aware that you're supposed to puff it up into things that are not true. I do believe that even, if not for the pandemic,

if not for George Floyd dying and everything that set off, if not for Ruth Bader Ginsburg dying six weeks before the election, all these things, it still would have been the most important election in American history. It still would have been the craziest election in American history with everything that was going there. But things, it's like spinal tap. It was at 10 and it went not just to 11, but far beyond that. You say this is your first book proposal, but obviously there have been many, many campaign books that preceded it. I don't think I need to ask you what made this campaign.

campaign cycle unique because you alluded to it in your last answer. And I think, you know, you can only say Donald Trump so many times. But what, what, what was the unique challenge, do you think, of covering this, of writing this book? What challenges were different than, than maybe in cycles past would have been? In the last 15 years, political reporting is all kinds of reporting, but especially political reporting, has become so in the minute and, and people feel, and often with good reason, like they're getting a lot of the story as it's happening at most a week later. And so the challenge was to figure out how to take people behind the stories that they were seeing in enough of a way that they would feel like they were getting a lot of fresh things, which I think, I hope I did. And to do it in a way that didn't get too small, that didn't get into like, oh, this person whom you've never heard of had a fight with.

with that person, that stuff doesn't really matter, but get at these bigger issues. And there were so many things, really to a degree that surprised me when I was working on it, where I would retrace the steps of something that had happened or have people months after the fact tell me the stories that they wouldn't be, they wouldn't have been ready to tell in the moment that were surprising, that were saying things that I was like, how did I miss that? How did that happen and I didn't know it and nobody knew it. And so I don't think that that's knocking other reporters necessarily. It's that as these things are playing out, the campaigns, the candidates have really good reason to keep it secret. And then if you let a little bit of time pass and you keep

working and working over people, you can crack open a lot of things that you never would have really realized we're there. So give us an example of that from the book, a story that seemed like it was one thing in the moment, and then months later, after you badgered these people by text and by phone, it turned out to be something else. And sometimes in person, even during the pandemic, there were a couple of in person, not as much as I am used to in doing reporting. One of the, there were a lot of stories like that, but one that I think was pretty apparent to people, just because it seems so out in the open, was what happened over Medicare for All and tracking back this story of how,

Bernie Sanders in 2017 was operating on two parallel tracks. First of all, he believes in Medicare for All. He wanted it to happen when he introduced the bill in the Senate. It was with the intention of getting serious about the ideas that he talked about on the campaign trail. But also finding this completely parallel track of the political intentions behind it, a way of making other candidates essentially have to subsume themselves to him. on a major, major policy fight so that when it came time for the 2020 race, if Sanders ran, which a lot of people around him thought he would, that he would have a level of ownership over the rest of the field, that they would be able to, that he would be able to say,

oh, yes, this big idea that you're all signing on to, that's actually my idea. And nobody is going to be as pure about it as I am. And that would give him a big political advantage. That's something, honestly, that didn't become clear in the reporting to me. until last summer, the summer of 2020, how that had gone. But there were many aspects of the story like that, of what happens in the book like that, I should say, many stories like that. But that one where it just, we were watching Medicare for All play out in front of us on the debates.

Literally every debate was at least 20 or 30 minutes in the primaries about Medicare for All. and it was like a revelation after I started to see the report after people who were involved talked to me about what those negotiations had been where I was like, oh, like it was like the matrix kind of like you could see the numbers, right, all of a sudden. And for something that big to have not been obvious to me or again to other people who were many of them very skilled and watching it very intensely, it's amazing to me. And just to drill down on that, we saw, Dave and I were covering this on the, when we're covering the debates on this show, we saw Elizabeth Warren being in this awkward position, the debates of saying, I endorse everything that guy says about health care. We saw Kamala Harris going, I think I endorse him, but I don't quite know what I'm endorsing here. But what you're saying, and you report in the book, is that Bernie actually throws down this marker kind of anticipating that this is going to be the thing that I'm going to be the brand name health care plan here. And I'm going to be. force my potential hypothetical opponents to take the Bernie brand health care plan before the campaign

even starts. And the relationship with Warren in that is really important, right? Because in 2017, he knows he needs to get Warren to sign on to give him the credibility with the Democratic world at large, which he knew he didn't have. He had his supporters who were behind him. But to have this become the big thing that was there. And I was at the press conference ultimately when Medicare for was announced in 2017. And I remember looking around and thinking like, there are a lot of senators here. And a lot of people who I think maybe are going to run for president, like Corey Booker's here, Kamala Harris is here, Kirsten Jullabry. Okay. And seeing how that all played out. But that Sanders, it was in, he knew in the sort of weaker spot with progressives and with the Democratic

world writ large and needed Warren to give him the credibility by signing on to Medicare for all for him to get that idea advanced. And then it becomes the big idea that more than anything else was discussed in the Democratic primary debates. And in some ways, more than anything else was discussed in the Democratic primary, even though, as we all know, there was a whole hell of a lot going on in the country. And there was no way, I think importantly, to think about it, there was no way that Medicare for All was ever going to happen in any kind of short-term way. Maybe years from now, politics will change so much that we can actually have a discussion of whether people want to pass Medicare for a lot, but the votes are nowhere near there. And yet it was

still this big thing because of what Sanders did. When you talk about the sort of realization of what Sanders was doing, I'm sure there's many other instances of those sorts of realizations as you write the book. How much of that is going on in real time on the ground as you're reporting and how much is that like kind of been reporting since the campaign ended? I don't know what the percentages were, but what happened was as I was getting ready to bring the proposal to publishers to see if they would buy it, and then more so after they bought it, I went to each of the campaigns and said, and at that point, there were prospective campaigns, but you could pretty much tell who was going to be running. And I said, look, I'm going to work on this book, and it's going to come out in 2021. It's all set. And I want you guys to be involved in it. I want to be able to have a freshness of the reporting to it that you can only get

if you give me under what we all call embargo, right? And you can have reporting and conversations that were put. I had a different notebook. I had a different tape recorder. The candidates, some of them would make fun of me. They would say, like, which tape recorder is this going on? And I'd say, okay, this is the book tape recorder. Sometimes in the middle of an interview, I would say, okay, that was good.

for right now for this article that I'm working on, can we switch over and I would reach into my bag and take it out? That presented a challenge to me. For them, it was about trusting me and for me it was about living up to the trust and not letting things that sometimes I knew were happening seep into the conversation or the articles that I was doing in the moment. So a good example of that and that definitely would have been spicy at the time was, I have a scene in the book that's from the meeting in which Kamala Harris decides in the summer of 2018 that she's going to run for president. And there is a conversation at the end of the meeting where they, it's a moot court and the argument presented for her to run and the argument presented against her to run.

And her brother-in-law, Tony West, who was the number three in the Justice Department for Obama, takes the don't-run argument. And he goes really hard after her and criticizes her intensely for her record as a prosecutor and says, you've sold out black people, you put black people in prison and you betrayed what you should be standing for as a progressive. of I knew about that conversation by three or four months after it happened, maybe even sooner than that. And I knew it would be great for a book. I'm glad it's in the book. But I also, of course, knew as a reporter that that would have been really interesting to cover in the middle of when Harris was getting attacked pretty heavily for that. And the way that she sort of dismisses the attack in the meeting and she says, yeah, I lock some motherfuckers up, right? Like to have that be her response would have, I'm sure that article would have been well read at the time.

But I couldn't use it then because the way that had been told to me was you can't report this until after this is all done. And if I had broken that trust, then first of all, the person who told me to me initially and the people who confirmed it for me, never would have said anything else to me again. And, you know, the campaign world is a pretty small world. It would have become pretty apparent to people that I was doing that. And so I would often say to them, you know, my business model is dependent on me, not screwing this up and not screwing up with you or with anyone else because then there wouldn't have been as much in the book as there is. I want to talk about two complications of that whole idea of holding some things for the book and then putting some things in the Atlantic. To me, number one is, and this is just the most, the most base journalistic level, aren't you freaked out?

that somebody at the New York Times or somewhere else is going to learn about that moment with Harris, and you're going to get online in the morning, and it's going to be in the paper, it's going to be a spicy lead that you would have imagined writing, and you're going to lose it. Terrified constantly. And there were a couple of moments that ended up like that. I won't tell you which ones. But I've also been on the other side of it a couple of years ago, and I won't tell you which one this was. There was something that I knew some people, I knew someone who was.

writing a book and and I was working on something that was tangentially related, but one of the same people was one, who told me this really good story. And I happened to be talking to this person who was writing the book and I said, oh, you'll never believe this. I'm going to have this to be at the front of the story that I write. And I laid out what it was and this person looked at me with the, and we were working for the same news organization, with this look of like, you asshole. And I said, what's the matter? The person said to me, well, we had that ready to go.

And because it was a collegial thing, we figured out how to make it work. But I ended up using it much sooner than when the book would have come out. And, you know, that's, it's a competitive world, right? And I think that probably there are other campaign books that are underway that will come out in a couple months. Probably there are some things that showed up in this book that would have been in those books and may still be in those books. But, you know, you hope as a journalist always that there are people cursing you out for screwing up their plans, whether it's competitors or the politicians we cover. There are no Marquess of Queensberry rules and political journalism.

You just got to do it. All right, so that's one complication. Number two complication is your phone rings. And oh, it's Jeffrey Goldberg from the Atlantic. Hey, you know, I know you're getting great stuff for this book you're writing, but we want some of these, you know, amazing, spicy scoops to be in the Atlantic. And that's an age-old problem. It's with sports writers when they're doing the season inside with the team book.

It's everybody. So how do you make sure you're getting enough in one bucket, enough in the other bucket? Well, you hopefully have buckets that are full of both kinds of things. And when I was, the contract for the book was signed in the summer of 2018. I moved over to the Atlantic in September of 2018. Those things are not unrelated. There was a conversation about the fact that I would be working on this book when I would be covering the campaign for the Atlantic. And everybody went into it, eyes open.

there were, of course, a couple of moments when there was some tension over this. For example, the book ends with an interview with Joe Biden that I conducted on February 2nd. It was the first interview that Joe Biden did as president. The interview was done on the condition that it be used for the book and not be used right away. Of course, the Atlantic, as any news organization would, would love to have the first interview with the President of the United States. And in the end, the story, I turned part of the interview into a story that ran on the day it published. So the Atlantic had it first, but of course didn't have it exclusively. It was in the book. Those are the sorts of things that we had to

negotiate along the way. And then there would be occasional conversations. I tried to, for the sake of not putting my editors at the Atlantic in uncomfortable spots. I tried to not tell them about things that I only had because of the reporting for the book. But there was one occasion, in particular, something about related to the riot that I knew I couldn't use until the book came out. And the other words, like, why not? Sounds so good. But there were also things that then were enabled for the Atlantic because I was doing the reporting for the book. So also around the riot, in the book, there's a long, longish, not so long, but an extended story about Lisa Blunt Rochester, the Congresswoman from Delaware, who on the day of the riot is there in the

House chamber and she has to be evacuated and ends up taking her member pin off because she's worried that the rioters are going to come kill members of Congress, but she doesn't want to put it away because she's also worried that an unidentified black woman in the Capitol might not be protected, so she decides to hold it in her hand. And then a video ended up leaking of her in the secure location where members of Congress were telling people to put their masks on, right? Because of course, this was still at the very height of COVID. And I spoke to her for the book. And then it was so raw and so vital in the moment that I said to her press secretary, would you be okay with me taking some of this and putting it in an article for the Atlantic,

which happened. So it was a back and forth constantly in that way. Is there, and just a drill down on that. Is there or would there be? like a third bucket for something that you felt so morally obligated to find a way to get out there? Or just at least to go back to the campaign and say, please, I know this was on tape recorder B, but this is something I think that America deserves to know. Is that ever a thing that happens? Yeah. And I think that it didn't come up with me in that way.

But if we remember Bob Woodward's last book, sorry. If you remember, Bob Woodward's last book, he had the one that came out in September, he had tape of Donald Trump saying that he knew COVID was worse than what he said at the time. And that conversation between Woodward and Trump happened contemporaneously sometime in the spring of 2020. And Woodward sat on it until September of 2020 when the book came out, making the argument that that was how he had agreed to do the book and that needed to be for the book and everything. that one is hard. I don't know what I would have done myself presented with that situation, because that's a matter of life and death. I had matters of political intrigue and importance, but nothing that was vital in that way, in that, like, people could die because of this. I don't know what I would have done if that had come up.

You know, if Joe Biden had said to me in an embargoed interview or something that he was actually going to find some way to accelerate vaccine production or something. Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out what the parallel of the Woodward moment would be. I think you would have to go and push for it and make the argument because if you go into an interview with an agreement and you want to violate that agreement, you have to or get a argument. permission to violate the agreement. You have to make a pretty good case. Again, I think if Woodward had wanted to, he would have had the case to make whether the Trump folks would have been okay with it as a different question, and whether he would have chosen to violate it anyway. That's a question for him. So, yeah, I don't know. I guess I wish that there had been life or death matters in the same way that had been presented that way. There were things like, you know,

And the book, when Trump goes into the hospital, I knew in the moment from other reporting that I was doing for the book that they thought Trump might die, right? That that was a real consideration on the Biden team. And that in fact, when some of the people woke up that morning when he had announced in the middle of the night that he was, that he had COVID, that and they just saw the news alerts and how many emails there were, they thought that he had been shot or something. like that. That, I guess, is getting closer to what you're talking about, David, right? But in the end, that didn't feel to me like I had to force it in quite the same way. All right. More from Edward Isaac Devere in a second, David, but let us take a moment to do the overworked Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod

where they are always, always gratefully received. David, did you catch any of the Westminster Dog Show? over the weekend. No. It was big in the car. You know, difficult. You don't have a hard time with the Westminster Dog Show

after preempting Monday Night Raw all those years. I forgot that that was a that was kind of a traumatic event in your formative years. No wrestling because we got the dogs. A whip it named Bourbon. David made the final group there,

but was beaten in the end by a pickanese. The whipit was beaten by the pickanese. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write whip it good, but whip it not good enough. Thanks to our good friend Mitch Carr for that one. A tweet from the Washington Post, David, coronavirus infections are dropping where people are vaccinated, rising where they are not,

post analysis finds. The Washington Post has done an analysis finding that infections are dropping when people are vaccinated, but rising when people are not vaccinated. it was an overworked Twitter joke, right? Okay, so I guess the whole vaccine thing is for real. Thanks to Kyle A. Madsen for that one. It was kind of one of those where it was just like, oh, I got you.

Thank you. And finally, President Joe Biden made his first international trip last week to attend the G7 summit. Uh-huh. Did you see this picture on Twitter? This picture of Biden and Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel. They were all kind of standing on little. raised platforms. Yeah.

But here is a weird part. It's the G7, but there are actually nine world leaders in the picture due to membership in the G7. It was an overwork Twitter joke to write, wait. Did the G7 actually do the Big Ten thing at some point? Just have more members. Thank you to Matthew Zitland for that one.

If you enjoyed a picture of Boris Johnson, congrats. You made the overwork Twitter joke of the week. All right. More with the Atlantic's Edward Isaac DeVier. Isaac as students of the campaign book genre, David and I were putting together some campaign book scoop power rankings. The particular kinds of scoops that come out in your book and other books that just like Twitter on fire for a few days and get aggregated everywhere and all that kind of stuff.

So help us out and maybe use some examples from your book as we piece these together. All right, power ranking, this is, I don't know, this isn't the five slot maybe. the one-on-one private meeting between famous politicians. I feel I love that little scooplet from campaign books. You have one in here. I believe it's December 2018, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren having this summit in Elizabeth Warren's apartment. Tell us what happens in that meeting. Well, this is a tricky moment for the two of them because they had both sort of assumed that the other one wasn't going to run and that they were and each would be the progressive candidate in the field.

and then we're reaching the conclusion that, oh, no, we're both going to run, and neither of us is blinking. And so, like, this is, to your point, Brian, this dinner had been reported a little bit at the time. And I, this wasn't something that I knew of right away and then had to hold on to. But I did recreate it in much more of a way. So they go in and they have this conversation. and it became very awkward between two people who already have an awkward relationship, between two awkward people who have an awkward relationship. So it was like several layers of awkward multiplied on top of each other.

And it became important, I think, in telling the story of what happened between them, because first of all, this is the conversation. that later gets revealed to be when Warren at least heard Sanders saying a woman can't run, it can't work, that, of course, that would have been great for me to pop out only in the book, but it came out in the reporting from one of my competitors at CNN along the way. And to Sanders, it became this weird moment for him of thinking, like, I don't know what Elizabeth is really talking about here. I'm just going to keep going and do what I'm doing.

And so that, you know, I think with a lot of these conversations and how to get them to happen, politicians, especially high profile, big name politicians like these two or others in the book, often walk out of private conversations and will give a readout to close aids and say, this is what we talked about. And they do that protectively so that if something comes up, and another version is, rather, that the aid can know what's going on and try to correct the record. But what that also means is that more than just two people know about these conversations, and thankfully for me, those can leak.

Can I just remind you of one detail from that meeting, too, is that Bernie Sanders thought Elizabeth Warren had cooked lasagna for him? Yes. And you report, and I assume exclusively in this book, that, in fact, Elizabeth Warren had ordered lasagna from a, quote, medium-grade Italian restaurant. That's true. I don't know that the Italian restaurant that was in question, I would like being referred to as medium grade,

but there are, of course, much more substantive details in the book, but it is funny that when Sanders walked away from this, like everybody that told the story to do is, oh, yeah, Elizabeth cooked lasagna, and it got to the point that, the Warren people thought this was so weird.

She doesn't cook, really. She's not someone who cooks and that she would cook for it. I actually saw the receipt for the dinner at the point. So I know for sure that she didn't cook. Wow, this is a trust but verified moment right here. You saw the receipt to the medium-grade Italian restaurant. Because it was in the Sanders mythology of what had happened, again,

is that Warren had cooked for him. And like that that was, that he had thought that that was nice. And the Warren mythology of it was like they were obviously much more frustrated about what happened in the meeting. and part of it was like, why are they saying Elizabeth cooked? That's crazy. And I was like, are you sure? There's no way she put, is it that she like had the lasagna in the oven?

Is that what could have been confusing there? I mean, these are the questions you have to ask in doing the reporting. And finally, it was like, no, here's the receipt. Also, I guess as it goes to power rankings, there's a lot of big names that are in the book that are maybe not the names that people would expect. back to here, and I don't mean like crazy names, but in terms of these, you know, the power rankings of how you decide who gets in and who gets out, it's sort of a flex to have a look inside of Team Obama in the middle of this, and you have some serious Obama intel in here, but also names like, well, AOC, when you have her kind of struggling about whether or not to endorse Bernie Sanders,

and then deep breath, George Clooney comes in off the top rope at one point in the book. Well, you talk a little bit about those big names, but how you decide when to weave in the sort of background players that are actually bigger deals than the foreground players? Well, with Obama, I think this is a story about the Democratic Party in these four years. And part of what that is is that Trump was reacting to Obama. And part of what that was is the Democratic Party was trying to figure out what it was, if not Barack Obama's party. And so he was an obvious player in all of this to me. And given that Joe Biden ended up being the nominee, that's Obama's vice president, he becomes an even more central piece of it, right?

And so structurally it made sense. And then what I also saw was that Obama was reflecting in a really pretty direct way where the party was at different points. things. And so you see his initial reaction to Trump winning is shock, but thinking like, hey, let's see what happens here. Maybe we'll be able to work it out. That's where a lot of Democrats were. By the time of Trump's inauguration, he's really turned off about what's going on. Again, where a lot of Democrats were. A couple months into it, now Trump's running as president, and Obama gets more and more on edge. And again, that reflects how Democrats were all the way

through to last fall as Obama was on the campaign trail and hitting Trump really hard, just ripping into him. That, you know, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, of moments in the book that touch on celebrities. Lady Gaga makes more appearances in this book than I think most people would assume in the campaign book. The

Clooney thing actually came about because of telling the Obama story. Because as I dug in and saw what I thought what was obviously a pretty important moment of the leadership and the

grassroots coming together over the march for our lives. And I knew that Obama had been, from reporting had been doing, that Obama had been involved behind the scenes and then starting to see how that happened. And it was Clooney calling him and that that brings Clooney into it. It wasn't that I was like, let me tell a George Clooney story, right? That was not the intention. It was tell the Obama story, but that Clooney was central to this story in the end. And I think it brings, it's sort of the forerunner for what happened in a lot of 2020 when a celebrity culture and culture overall became completely sucked into this election.

And when it fell to a lot of people, like basically take away Scott Beaux and John Voight and James Woods and like everybody else in Hollywood is against Donald Trump. Clooney is there early out in doing that. But there's also that really, I think, really important conversation that Clooney has with Obama about getting involved in the March for Our Lives where Obama says, I'm full on radioactive right now. That's Obama saying that to Clooney, that's a moment that's important, not because he says this to George Clooney, but because of his sense of himself in politics. All right.

One more category of scoop or scooplet is the big moment that happens during the campaign and then giving the story of what actually happens, Sato Voce, am I saying that right, after it happened? So we all remember Kamala Harris attacking Joe Biden, that very, very, first Democratic debate over busing. You report on the conversations from Biden, from his wife, Jill Biden. Tell us what happened after that. Well, like, it's what happened before and what happened after that, right? You look at that moment and think this is a pretty clearly incredible, incredible and incredibly important moment to the campaign. And that night of the debate, I was in Miami,

and I did a little conversation with people who worked on the campaigns about it then, and there's some reporting from just being there and seeing how it played out that's in the book. But, of course, they're not ready to talk about anything other than the adrenaline-pumped moment of it. After the fact of starting a couple weeks later and certainly a couple months later, I had reserved that in my notes and said, come back to this, come back, and then I would have one conversation with someone. I got one part of the story, and then I got another conversation slowly, slowly pulled it out.

I knew that it would be something that was in the book in a way that mattered. I do remember after watching, after the announcement that Harris was going to be the running mate last August, I said to my wife, well, I guess that's going to be a whole chapter now. And then it became a bigger reporting task to go over and over it and talk to as many people as I could. And so then it became like, okay, well, how did that moment get to be? I wanted to know about the debate prep.

It was clear that Harris had prepared for it, but what did that look at those conversations like? That's important because then you see how they landed on saying, I know you are not a racist, which is the line. that really lit Biden up. And in July of 2019, about three weeks after that debate, I was one of the reporters standing around Joe Biden in Dearborn, Michigan, where he'd come out of this restaurant, where he'd met with some leaders, and all the reporters were standing there waiting to ask questions. He asked a couple of questions, and I asked him a question that aggravated him,

as I tended to do. And I said to him something, there had been a poll that showed that it was a CBS poll and it showed that people, even though they liked Biden, they were more convinced that Warren and Harris would fight more. And I said to Biden, why do you think that that is the way that people are responding? And he said, and he just started teeing off on the debate and about saying, and he was like, oh, well, maybe it's because someone, you know, she said to me, oh, you're not a racist. Huh, that's a nice thing to say, you're not a racist. I could see the anger. You know, his face was like seven inches away from me. It was pre-COVID, no face masks, anything.

And I could see it there. And that in a reporter's curiosity, sets off the, well, what else is going on? If that's the level of anger that I can see, then there must be much more behind the scenes. So then I started tracking it back over with people. And then you see that what happens is that the night of the debate when they're going into the commercial break after Harris makes the attack, that Biden is so flustered and furious in the moment that he turns to Pete Buttigieg, and he doesn't know, and he says, well, that was some fucking bullshit. And then there was a phone call that Jill Biden had where she says, you know, to call him

a racist with all the work that he's done, go fuck yourself, right? Like those are moments that, you know, reporters always love getting curses because they're juicy and they light up the internet. But I think in addition to that, more importantly than that, you can see that these are the unvarnished thoughts that these folks are having. And I'll tell you, there was some other shards of that story that as I was putting together, the book, didn't quite make it. But they all in, those are that, you know, you kind of hone to get the best material and the best version of the story. And, and they were all telling me the same thing, which is that people were really, really mad about that.

Now, I know that fact checking in the book world is different than it is sometimes in newspapers and magazines, but how exactly do you go about fact? Does one go about fact checking, Jill Biden saying, go fuck yourself? Like, is, do you call Biden's representative and ask her if she indeed said that? You have to, you know, the, everything that happened as reported in the book was checked with multiple people. And so I have been deliberately not getting deep into what the process looked like. But I am confident of the reporting. And I think if you look at the response that Jill Biden had, first, her office response was something like there will be, I'm going to not do it complete justice, but it was something like there will be many books that are written about the campaign that have moments in them. Some will be true.

Some will not. Our policy will not be to comment on any of them, which is, of course, what we call a non-denial, right? And then a couple days after that story broke, Jill Biden was at. an event and a reporter called out to her and said, what about you saying that to the vice president? And she said herself something like, oh, that was two years ago. Everybody's moved on, right? Which again, it's not. No, I didn't say that.

So just to pivot a little bit to the nuts and bolts aspect of this, because as Brian knows, I mean, as Brian said before, we're, we're, you know, connoisseurs slash nerds on the, on the subject. So Biden wins the election, and I know there's going to be a bumpy road. Let's put a pin in that for one second. But after election night, what is your first call with your book editor like at that point? Like, what is the turnaround time in your head? And then what are the subsequent conversations once Trump starts disputing the election and obviously straight on up to, you know, the insurrection at the Capitol? So it was election night and then it was sort of election week, right? leading up to that Saturday. So I did not, from the Tuesday night through the Saturday, and I think there was one sort of check-in email with my book editor, but it wasn't that extensive because we were all just sort of waiting for everything to play out. The book, I will tell you,

was due on January 4th. We had always had a sense that we were going to have a fast turnaround and that there would need to be a fast turnaround. Obviously, there are a lot of competitor books. There would be competing articles. I had made the argument in July of 2018 when deciding about the contract that I said, look, I covered the Obama to Trump transition. That was pretty crazy. I think you want to give me time, at least a little bit, to cover the Trump to whatever

transition or the Trump into his sales. second inauguration time and what would be going on in the aftermath. And my publisher, Viking, agreed. They said, great, how about January 4th? I said, okay. And then we were going to probably jam a couple pages about the inauguration in once everything had been edited. And then I was, through December, turning in chunks of like five chapters at a time to my editor. And the morning of January 4th, I sent him the final chunk, except for the last chapter. And I said to him, look, I've got to hold back on this, I think, till the end of the week, because, number one, there are the Senate races in Georgia tomorrow. Let's see what happens, but we're going to need to

account for it. Obviously, in the original conception of this book in 2018, we didn't know that there would be two Senate races in Georgia that were deciding the majority of the Senate on the day after the deadline. And then I said, Wednesday is going to be the certification of the vote. It'll be probably a lot of theatrics, but we have to account for whatever happens with it, not in any way anticipating the riot. And number three, the interview that I had with Biden that ended up being at the beginning of February, there had been some discussion of it being the first week in January. And so I said, let's see what happens of the course this week. My editor said, that's fine. I've got enough to edit here and just give me that chapter

by Friday afternoon. Great. Okay. So then the Senate race has happened. And the day of the riot, that Wednesday morning, I drove from D.C. up to Wilmington thinking, let me just cover the story of what happens here through Biden's eyes. He was supposed to give this counter-programming, super boring speech about small business reinvestment. And so I was going to write about that and have it be whatever. And we're sitting in the hold room, the room right before we come into the room where he would be speaking as the riot begins. And so all the reporters are around, you know, like 10, 12 reporters and we're all like, are you watching, which you're on the CNN live feed? Who's on that?

And we're like, okay, it's crazy. Biden comes out and speaks, obviously, a lot later than he was planning to and gives a very somber speech that day. There was a curfew that was put in place in D.C. And I thought I wouldn't be able to get home. So at about 6 o'clock at night, I decided not to drive home, got a hotel room, stayed over in Wilmington, went back to Biden speaking the next day. And as I'm walking into the room, my book editor had sent me an email that said, yeah, we're not going to make the, we can't do this on the schedule we thought, which was to put the book out probably around the 100 days mark at the end of April.

And he said, you're going to have to write through it. We're going to push everything back a couple of weeks. And so the last 50 pages of the book were not on the proposal. They weren't on the outline. They weren't conceived of until after the book was supposed to be done. But then it's a chapter that is about the riot and the election questioning getting as intense as it did and all of the legal strategy that the Biden team had accounted for thinking that Trump would challenge the election, all those things going on. And then there's this chapter that is then not just a couple pages jammed in about the inauguration, but a full scene of the inauguration and how completely crazy that was to not have a crowd because of COVID, to not have. even a full slate of people who could be there because of officials and dignitaries because of

the fences that were up and the military that was walking around. And then it ends with this Biden interview that it should be said, probably in some other conception of the book or way that this would have worked, I would have taken an interview with the president and scattered parts of it through the book and said, oh, this is what it. But I literally couldn't do it because the rest of the book was already like it closing in this way. And so logistically, it couldn't work out. Structurally, there is something nice that the book is sort of like the long tale of how the hell it ended up that Joe Biden is in the Oval Office. And then the last 15, 20 pages of the book are Joe Biden in the Oval Office reflecting all of it. All right, Isaac, we're going to go let you be a political reporter.

but I got one more for you. Did the experience of writing a campaign book convince you, hey, I'm going to be Teddy White, 2021 here. Coming back every four years, I'm going to have something ready, or are you thinking never again? That was a one-off. I'm going to write a nice,

stately, slow-paced book about something else next time. I'm a journalist. I don't know that stately slow-paced is where my future is. I'm not sure what the next book will be. I did enjoy the process of this a lot and learned not only a lot about what was going on, but a lot about what the process of doing this all was. It changed some of my approach to political journalism overall to thinking, like, what am I missing in the moment? And how do I get that more?

And how do you sketch out these characters even better so that people connect with them? So, yeah, I'm not sure that I'm saying Battle for the Soul Part 2 is coming in. you know, pre-order now for spring 2025. But I would assume that there will probably be future book projects for me. And political journalism is what I do. So the chances that it will relate to politics in a more immediate way than, you know, like you're not going to see out of me a history of Teddy Roosevelt or something like that. You'll probably see it more about what's happening now.

David, I just want to point out when you ask politicians, if they're going to run for president in a couple years, they say something like that. That's not a denial. It's not a denial. Keep all my options open. I just want to be a career of public service. I think I can help people.

That's exactly the kind of thing they say. I need to talk it over with my family and my agent and my editor. Have a meeting. We got you. All right. Edward Isaac DeVier, the book is Battle for the Soul inside the Democrats campaign to defeat Trump out right now. Thank you so much for coming on the president.

box. Thanks for having me. All right, Brian and David back. I'm still thinking about the receipt for the Italian food. Yeah, I mean, listen, when you do these books, especially when it's like the book exists, and it's a reported book, you've got to find the right title for it. And so there's definitely numerous in-house email chains where they're trying to pick the right book for it. I just, I picked the right title for the book because you're just pulling all these little pieces of snippets of speeches and of various things.

What will, what evokes the whole content to the book? I hope that medium grade lasagna made the list at some point. Do you think it was in one of those long subtitles? It was like Biden, comma, Trump, comma, medium grade lasagna in the battle for the White House? Yes, that's it. I'm sure. We're just because you had to have one funny thing in the list. I suspect that actually happened.

All right. It's time for David Shoemaker. Guess is the strained pun headline. All right. Friday's headline about an alcohol-drenched Vincent Van Gogh exhibit was Will Absinth Make the Art Grow Fonder. Truly one of the more strained puns in this segment. Today's headline, David, comes from Dr. McFunkin' Pants. It's from the Boston Herald.

Did you see the story about the humpback whale and the lobster diver? No. Oh, we didn't see this. A lobster diver, Michael Packard, was swimming in the waters near Provincetown, Massachusetts. He's like 45 feet below the surface. He later says, I felt this huge bump and everything went dark. And then I realized, oh my God, I'm in the whale's mouth. I'm in a whale's mouth and he's trying to swallow me.

The diver was actually semi-swallowed by the humpback whale. Okay. He was then spit out by the humpback whale, as he said in a Facebook post. I was in the closed mouth for about 30 to 40 seconds before he rose to the surface and spit me out. I am very bruised up, but have no broken bones. Okay. Humpback whale swallows lobster diver. Humpback whale spits out lobster diver.

What was the Boston Herald strained pun headline? Immediately I'm thinking of Jonah and Joe. and the whale, but the spitting back out thing, now I think it's going to be like a regurgitation pun. So I don't really know. There's kind of two references, I think, for any whale headline. There's Jonah, you son of a preacher, man, you. And then there's Pinocchio?

No, come on. Okay, that's kind of borrowed, right? But there's, there's. What's the other whale? Famous novel about a whale that you and I certainly have not read. Oh, Moby Dick. Yeah, yeah. Sorry, who was it?

Lobster. Mo. Moby. Moby. Remember, he's spitting the lobster. Moby. Remember, this is the Boston Herald. We just want to set the aesthetics here.

Schick. Moby. Moby. I know it's going to be so obvious. What is it? I have no idea. Oh, that lobster man tastes terrible. Moby, ick.

Oh. gosh. Moby, Ick. That's really taking us a long way. The premise of their headline was that the man tasted bad. Is there a colon in there? Is it like Moby colon ick? That would be, I might like that a little bit. That's actually pretty good.

Yeah, it was like, I think the lobster man did not taste like the krill or plankton, the humpback whale was expected to eat. That's the comic idea here. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Production Magic by Erica Servantes. We are back, Friday with perhaps another press box postgame interview. And more lukewarm takes about the media. See that, David.

See you later, Brian.