The Press Box - The Debate and the Democratic Panic With Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin. Plus, Jeff Greenfield Revisits Four Presidential Campaigns.

Episode Date: June 28, 2024

On the Final Edition, Bryan has a jam-packed show following the presidential debate. First, he welcomes Semafor's Benjy Sarlin for a recap. They discuss: The worst part of the night for Joe Biden (1:08) The timing of the debate (10:35) The history of incumbent presidents who've lost their first debates (15:31) Ben’s opinion on whether or not Biden will be the Democratic nominee on election day (26:06) What stood out about Donald Trump (31:04) Anderson Cooper’s interview with Vice President Kamala Harris (39:19) Then, he welcomes longtime CNN and ABC News political analyst Jeff Greenfield, who takes us back down memory lane as he revisits four presidential campaigns that he's covered in his career. How Trump has changed everything he thought about campaigns (50:39). Biden's run for president in 1988 and its collapse (54:12). Television's importance to presidential campaigns in the '80s (56:43) Behind the scenes of the race between George H. W. Bush and the Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis in 1988 (61:35) Bill Clinton's decision not to do an interview with Howard Stern interview, and Biden's decision to go through with it (70:46) CNN's coverage of the 2000 election (76:17) Observations from the Al Gore and George W. Bush campaigns (79:40). Revisiting the night Florida was called for Al Gore and then recalled (84:12) Covering the 2008 election and how campaigns were thinking about television in the age of social media (88:17) What stands out about the Democratic primary campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (91:39) Host: Bryan Curtis Guests: Benjy Sarlin and Jeff Greenfield Producer: Brian H. Waters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Bill Simmons. I am thrilled to announce our newest YouTube channel. It's called Ringer movies. If you're a fan of our movie coverage here at The Ringer, then you're in luck because every episode of the rewatchables and the big picture, now on YouTube. Like Bill said, Ringer movies will feature full episodes of my show, The Big Picture, the Rewatchables, as well as special live episodes, deep dives into movie history and a bunch of other fun stuff featuring other movie-loving Ringer personalities. Search Ringer movies on YouTube and experience the joy. Chris Ryan impersonating Wayne Jenkins on camera. Hello, media consumers. Welcome to a special debate edition of the press box. Brian Curtis of the Ringer here, along with producer Brian Waters. Coming up in just a moment, long time CNN and ABC News political analyst Jeff Greenfield.

We'll revisit four presidential campaigns he covered, a real treat for us political junkies. But first, for the lowdown on last night's debate, when the old guy did not have it. Let us bring on Benji Sarlan the Washington, Bureau Chief of Simafore. Benji, what was the worst part of the night for Joe Biden? I would say we started getting panicked text messages from Democrats almost from the first minute. I mean, it was like the second he opened his mouth and you heard the raspy voice and

you saw him coughing. There were jitters. You know, people like, ooh, this is bad. But the first moment that really like set off the panic was when he got caught in this kind of rambling answer about his record where he said, we finally beat Medicare at the end of the answer, which he seemed to be meant to say,

like, we finally beat COVID, but he was mixing it up with, I think we finally passed prescription drug benefits for Medicare, which is one of like the accomplishments that the White House wants to tout the most. At that point, it was really just open season.

I mean, like the kind of quotes, I'm just reading some of the things in our story today that were being texted to us. it's bad, it's awful. My non-political friends who just began tracking the election are concerned about Biden after watching this. If it gets Biden not to run, then it was very good. Otherwise, it was bad. These were all from senior Democrats, you know, veterans of campaigns, you know, people involved in electing Democrats. These are not the folks you expect to be piling on like that. And this is all like pretty much within the first 20, 30 minutes.

The we beat Medicare line obviously stuck out. Though you and I have seen Biden trail all. at the end of answers like that, including in the 2020 debates against Donald Trump, it's when we got to the second section of the debate about abortion and for reasons that will never be clear. He somehow pivots in the middle of an answer about abortion when he should be just dropping anvils on Donald Trump's head and pivots to immigration. The one thing Donald Trump wants to talk about more than anything and would pivot to all night. And that was the moment where I was like, oh, wow, he is not just like, we're not just talking about theater criticism here. We're not talking about raspy voice and, you know, he looks a little older and, and all that stuff.

We're talking about he is unable to prosecute the case against Donald Trump on issues where he should be able to do it. Yeah, you nailed the concern there. That's what our reporter Dave Weigel was at the debate. He also named that at his personal, like that was the low point, he thought. And I want to get more specific. It's not just that he pivoted to immigration. It's that he started talking about women who've been murder. by illegal immigrants. Like the thing that Donald Trump wants to talk about most in the world, and we've been covering this,

has been actively telegraphing that he was going to bring up at the debate all week. Like this is one of his favorite topics. It's absolutely bizarre, even within the topic of immigration, to start turning to this. It was just like some strange kind of like stream of consciousness. But you get to the real thing here. I mean,

I think that one thing that has kept Democrats from having this freak out before is that, you know, Biden's had concerns about his age before, and the same thing has happened for four years straight. He has a big high-profile event like this, and he comes out feistyer than they feared. You know, it's not like he's amazing, but he clears the bar. And then everyone stops panicking for a couple of months until the next reason they have to get nervous, right? Like, everyone talks about the state of the union. That's what happened there. The common thread to a lot of those times where he's come together is that Biden has seemed his most energetic and least old when he's prosecuting the case against Trump, when he's angry, when he's fired up, when he's talking

about look at this terrible incompetent person, look at this guy who's a threat to democracy, look at this guy who's going to take away your right to choose. And what that answer encapsulated was this was a debate where these areas where Biden should be most comfortable, that should be alley-oops that he should have been for four years, you know, like talking into a mirror about like, I can't wait to say this to Donald Trump's face. They just fell flat on their face over and over again. He seemed unable to make the most basic al-a-oops that we know we've seen him do a million times already. And that, I think, is when the real panic started setting in, given the stakes of this. There was some talk after the debate that maybe he was over-prepared, that he was too eager to get

into the weeds of policy and try to explain why Trump was wrong rather than making, as you say, that simple, outraged case. Hey, remember this guy? Remember January 6th? Remember that he just got convicted of 34 felonies a few weeks ago? Do you think that was the problem for Biden last night? No. I mean, that just seems like absurd cope. I don't even know what to what to say about it. I saw that spin too. But like none of this is like there was no topic this debate. Like we've talked about how prior debates, for example, sometimes they throw like a completely out of left field question or on like a policy issue where they haven't been brief or just a strange framing of a question. Like this was just like this was things that he and other Democrats have been talking about

for four years or even before 2020. You know, they date back, you know, to during Trump's presidency. This is a guy they've been attacking since 2015, you know, as a presidential candidate. there's just no explanation really for not being able to comfortably attack him when you've been giving interviews when you've been giving rally speeches it's like people talk about like oh i never see biden like that's not true like biden that has done interviews he does some kind of public event every day he looks creaky he does not look like this and he's gotten plenty of zingers on his own but like the inability to move on his feet and what seemed like i mean he did seem sick is part of the issue here.

I mean, like, I'm surprised. They started leaking that kind of late in the debate, but it did look clearly true. It was about 50 minutes in when we started getting those tweets that Joe Biden had a cold. Yeah, which, I mean, literally, like I said,

the first minute when he was like coughing and raspy people were saying. It's like done like that sounds crazy. But it would be one thing. Look, I think the debate Democrats were hoping to spin was, yeah, you know, does Biden sound like a little quieter and hoarser than he used to like,

yeah, sure. But if you look at the substance of what he said, like the choice is clear here. He didn't let them do that. The problem was like what he could not survive here was sounding a little old and also sounding incoherent. And that's just an untenable combination. If you can't make the arguments against Trump, what are you doing in the debate and what are you doing in the presidential election, something I'll get to here in just a moment. You're totally right about the topics. You know, we'll talk about Jake Tapper and Dana Bash in detail, but this was a list of here are some things that America

is interested in. There weren't a lot of creative questions here. There weren't really a lot of tough follow-ups or sort of weird angles they were coming at. It was like, here we go. The economy, abortion, democracy, let's just run down the list. He seemed weirdly unprepared. He also took a lot of bait, I thought, from Donald Trump. Maybe most notoriously that we were getting into golf scores late in the debate.

But it's just like Donald Trump says something and then I have to respond to the specifics of what he said rather than just trying to make my point. And again, it's so weird to take debate, too, because like it's not like Biden hasn't given answers on this question. you think Biden's never gotten a question about, am I too old before he's been answering that question for like a decade straight, basically, and having various answers for it. I mean, it's just,

it's not like there's not go-toes we have into the point that they're a talking point. Like, yeah, like I'm old, old enough to know what I'm doing. You know, like that's the kind of thing he said before. Or like,

you know, this is the question about who's competent. He got into that a little, but then he just would go onto these kind of like, into these strange rabbit holes of like you said, like rambling with Trump also rambling. about their golf handicaps. Like I mentioned

David Weigel is writing up. You should definitely subscribe to his newsletter, Americana. It's about to hit inboxes now with his take on the debate. He said a reporter behind him who had been quiet the entire debate when the two of them started going off

on golf handicaps, just moaned. Jesus Christ. And he was like, so he writes that I knew that was what they thought was the low moment. Yeah,

I mean, that was just an insane moment in any case. But like, even when he would say, like, you know, Trump would say, well, all legal scholars think that Roe should have been, you know, overturned and abortion law should have gone back to the states. You don't need to respond to the specific point about legal scholars. You can just make your points about abortion. There were other times when he said, no, no, no, historians actually think Donald Trump is the worst president of all time, not me, right? Again, why are we arguing about historians and what they think about presidential power rankings rather than making it? Yeah, and it's not like this is a complicated formula. You know, Biden's been in debates.

some capacity for 50 freaking years. Like, this is not like some guy who just showed up to his first debate. Famously, he in some ways, like, saved Obama's bacon after his own poor debate performance in 2012 by just like taking Paul Ryan to the woodshed, being really aggressive, being the one who is baiting their opponents and being the one who's forcing them to respond. Like, these are things Biden's trained in. But to your point about, like, getting caught, yeah, there's a formula for that. You can give a quick response to what's in front of you.

And then you pivot to what you. you want to talk about. And he just cannot seem to complete this basic pick and roll combination here of like the bread and butter of presidential debates, which we know he has done. He has as much experience on the debate stage as anybody. Thank you for introducing the mandatory basketball metaphor into a ringer podcast. I appreciate it. There will be more, Brian. There will be more. In terms of the timing of this debate, so early in the cycle and the specific rules of this debate, no audience. Mikes are muted so the candidates don't have a lot of cross talk.

This is the debate that Team Biden wanted. These are the terms that they asked for. How did you think those rules and that timing played out last night? To give a bit of the background here, as you mentioned, this was an unusual debate in that. It was the first one in decades where both candidates agreed to pull out of the commission on presidential debates, recommended debates. normally you have this independent commission.

You know, it's not sacrosanct. It's still a relatively new institution. But, you know, normally you rely on this institution to set up a bunch of debates for you with kind of like previously agreed rules and everyone just takes their lead. This time, both Biden and Trump decided they were fed up with that commission and went their own route. And in doing so, you know, a lot of people were arguing even on the Republican side that Trump maybe made a mistake, you know, seating to Biden what they seem to want on all these

rules to be like, oh, you're taking the crowd out of it. You know, you're muting him, which was so humiliating for Trump in 2020 after he had this kind of wild debate, you know, where he was interrupting Biden and it did not go very well for him. You know, he was seen as too aggressive. But the way it worked out, I mean, some Democrats were at least speculating that the lack of crowd might have hurt Biden, you know, like unlike the state of the union where he was like fired up, he was just speaking into this strange, empty, freezing room and did not seem to have that energy. In fact, one of the oddities of this debate was, you know, he immediately showed up to address supporters right after the debate.

And he sounded about twice as loud and energetic. And this was after he just went through a 90-minute debate. So it's at least possible. But again, like, this is just basic cope here. I mean, this is like a 50-year veteran of politics. not be thrown by variables as simple as this? No, no. And again, they thought the specific conditions of this debate would put the focus on Trump, would remind voters, we are running against Donald Trump. This is not just a referendum on do you like Joe Biden as president. This is that

this guy is going to be back in the White House. It had the weird effect of saying, remember this guy is in the White House. Pay attention to his answers, which you will hear uninterrupted because Donald Trump will not be able to jump in on. So there was even more focus, if anything, on Joe Biden and his stamina and his age. Yeah. And to get back to that first debate, which was probably Trump's worst debate, it was interesting. To this point, I don't think there has ever been a debate that Trump won on points, you know, where like the flash poll comes in and it says Trump win and the pundits are all saying like, oh, his opponent's really going to struggle with this. He's pretty much lost every debate he's been.

And that includes the Hillary Clinton ones, right? But the worst one was his first debate with Biden in 2020, where it was like you said, the one thing that Republicans wanted was for Trump to make this election a referendum on Biden then. He didn't want to make it a referendum on his leadership in the middle of this pandemic that had completely disrupted American life and a referendum on his character where he's just like never been popular. And there's even people who vote for him, at least some minority, express, you know, significant concerns about his temperament. And what he did was, you know, no one even remembers for the most part what Biden said in that debate. It's not like Biden had some spectacular performance there either or was like some incredible exemplar of like, you know, energy and wits. And, you know, his most famous line was just telling Trump to shut up at one point. Which, you know, worked pretty well.

But what Trump did there was put all the focus on him. And, you know, a lot of people assume this would go the same way, right? That like Trump cannot help but make things a referendum on himself and that he would just do it again. and he would, you know, never mind the issues with Mike rules, he would just find a way to Mike about, make it about himself. And look, Trump had a lot of Trumpy moments, but he did dial it back just enough that the story was just not Trump out of this debate. Like it was the focus was squarely on Biden throughout and that just didn't really change during the debater in the commentary afterwards. I agree that we have a low bar for Trump dialing it back, which is basically he didn't make too many faces when they were in the split screen. And he didn't try to interrupt too much, which we would have been able to hear in any case.

Yeah. And like the things he said that were like egregiously offensive or lies are like ones that, you know, CNN's Daniel Dale has been fact checking since like, you know, 2017 or something and not like a new one. It was like it was like it was just the Trump you're used to, you know, no more or no less. Manchurian candidate leaving Afghanistan is like the most embarrassing moment in the history of the country, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What did you make of the debate within the political media about Biden's age and whether that should be aggressively covered by reporters in light of what happened last night? So this is a really interesting question. So the thing about this debate that makes it different from other bad presidential debates. And by the way, there's a history of incumbent presidents blowing it in their first debate. Like this is actually the norm.

you're not used to being in this space. Should we list them off here? Obama in 2012 against Romney. You mentioned Biden having to come in against Paul Wright and kind of Paul Ryan and kind of write the ship. George Debbie Bush maybe in 2004 against John Kerry. What am I leaving out here? Reagan, first debate against Mondale was, by the way,

guess what the big concern was there for Reagan, who by the way was significantly younger than Biden. He was an agent statement, right? And then it was the next debate, I'm pretty sure it was the next debate where he said, I won't let my opponent's, you know, youth, my opponent's youth against them, right? That was his comeback from this panic over his first debate, where he seemed kind of listless. So that's not uncommon, right?

You're not used to having to defend your record in such an antagonistic way. You've been busy focus on the presidency. You know, you just have total contempt for your opponent who is like no record to be held accountable for at this point. It happens. The difference here is that Biden's bad performance is, you may meet with the media, is basically being treated as a scandal, right? Which is like you have people basically saying like, well, like, this was all in front of us. Was there a cover up?

Like, who knows what when? Like, when did you realize Biden was like a creaky old man? And I think that's a complex conversation. I understand why people would treat it that way, both for Biden, but also for the press. But I think it gets to an interesting kind of nuanced conversation on this, which is it is not like the press has ignored Biden's age. It's the first thing that comes up in every freaking. write-up of this race and has for like two years straight it gets pulled over and over again Biden used to like make fun of the New York Times for having so many freaking stories about his age

it's not like this was some like taboo topic exactly but I will say in terms of the reporting as like the idea the press was not going we need to get the inside story on Biden's age and find out what's happening is not true what is true is that they were not that smoking gun of like this guy is just not competent and someone else is running the country. That is just not what reporting has said, period. Right. Like I'll give you the example. Like the Wall Street Journal had this epic story about how like behind door, closed doors,

Biden's kind of diminished or slipping. And they got a lot of heat for it. And they were claiming vindication today. But I got to say, there's a reason that story didn't take off that much. I mean, I read through it. They talked to dozens of people. And like the anecdotes they got were mostly just kind of like, eh. It's like mostly what you see from public in Biden.

It's like, oh, he like misremembers a name or like something every so up. It wasn't like. And then similarly like our, we interviewed, you know, Evan Osnows, who's like Biden's biographer. He was talking about, he was pretty shocked. He was on the news yesterday after Biden's performance saying like, wow, he's like really become diminished. But when he was reporting on his presidency early on, you know, someone who was

getting unparalleled access to inside his meetings to what was going on, the take was like, look, Biden's the one making these decisions. This isn't some guy who's just like a sleep at the wheel. Like everything you've been seeing, managing these complicated foreign policy crisis, domestic legislation, there's no sign it's been someone else. He's been the key figure in a record that, by the way, very few Democrats of strong criticism of his record. Like, that's something where, like, one of the reasons he was not easily ousted is that they largely agreed with him on most areas. obviously Israel Gaza has been more contentious. So there was not some smoking gun going on behind the scenes of like staffers leaking that like,

oh my God, you wouldn't believe what's going on. It's secretly Kamala Harris doing everything. Or oh my God, like Joe Biden is just like fell over in the middle of like a cabinet meeting. You know, bear in mind he was talking to Republicans all the time too. And there wasn't a lot coming out of that until that Wall Street Journal story, which was mostly citing Mike Johnson and Kevin McCarthy. you know, with, again, not extremely wild stories that they were coming to the table with. So I think what you were seeing is like, what you see is what you get.

The age criticism was mostly what you were seeing in plain sight. And it's a question of just how much you rated its political importance, how much you thought it affected his ability to be president. What you thought was, if you're a Democratic pundit, what you thought should be done about it. And it's not like they didn't have conversations before about why they should or should not renominate Biden, right? They just every time concluded, we obviously should do it. Like, the alternative seemed worse and that we still feel confident enough we can pull this off. So I think the media question is a bit complicated, but like we'll see what comes out. Maybe now people reveal that like, you know, Biden had this extremely tight ship and things were much worse than people realized.

I wouldn't shock me at all if there's a flood of new things, but it had not come out yet. There was not some incredible story the press was sitting on. Believe me, they all were asking about this. When I saw Evan Ostos on CNN last night, I was like, wait, you sat with Joe Biden in the Oval Office this year. So your shock that Joe Biden had a terrible night and that something is, you know, the Joe Biden has slowed down immensely. Like, this has happened in a couple of months since you sat with him in the Oval Office. Was that just such a different environment that you got a completely different Joe Biden? Exactly. And by the way, go read those. interviews. Like Biden's done some long interviews recently. It did Time Magazine. And like,

what you saw there was usually something like normal kind of like Biden slash old man mistakes. Like you said, it sometimes gets confusing because Biden was known for gaffs before all this. But like the kind of things you'd see from Trump too, right? Like accidentally saying Putin when you mean she or something. But making mostly coherent, recognizable points that from someone who seems to be briefed on what they're talking about and is in the room making these decisions. like go back and read his time interview. You'll see like stumbles, but this doesn't seem like this debate. You know, this is far worse than anything we've seen before. The thing I don't want to get too hung up on media coverage of Biden's age here,

but the dynamic, I guess, that I'm thinking about maybe just because I hear from this, is not that the media was sitting on a story and was ignoring Biden's age, is that the media was covering it too much, right? That they were overdoing it when they should have been writing about Trump and democracy, right? That's what I hear in press box Twitter mentions, when we raise this topic on the show. And my response was always like, this seems like a question you should ask about every president,

including the former president right now who's seeking the job. The Democrats did not really have this debate out loud, as you mentioned, because they didn't have a primary and they quickly got behind Biden and supported his reelect, especially after the midterm results in 2022. And team Biden, despite that Time magazine interview, despite Evan Osnos, has not put their guy in front of the media very much. Right?

They prefer to do it on the smartless podcast. or whatever it is. So there was at least some questions here to be asked. And to me, and I saw people like Emma Tucker who published that Wall Street Journal article, a Stead Herndon of the Times, Julian Castro taking victory laps last night on Twitter saying, I told you so. I told you we should have been asking these questions more, either as a party or as a meeting. Yeah, it's an interesting arc to these questions. So one thing to bear mind is that the attack on Biden is that he's been old forever. Like one weird thing in 2020, every Trump ad, every Republican ad was also trying to show like photos, like footage of like a glassy-eyed, confused Biden. He's in the basement. He's going to drop

dead. Basement Biden. That was like the whole line then. And so he's been dealing with this the whole time. And what's happened every time is that he's had some big high profile event that made it go away. So he did well in those debates we mentioned. He did well at the DNC with this weird, you know, COVID-DNC. And then you mentioned the time when you really had to make the decision, do I run again? And if you're a Democrat, do I like seriously risk my career to either run against Biden or publicly say we need to like we need to not run Biden and pressure him to step aside? They had this unexpectedly great midterms, which made it very hard for them to, you know, attack him, but also like calm nerves, like genuinely calm nerves. It's like, oh, I guess Trump

is still radioactive and even Biden with low approval ratings is like a winning hand. And then he gave a strong state of the union that year in 2023. And then things kind of went away for a while. You know, the primaries were he didn't draw any big challenger. And then there was kind of a renewed conversation around this when he basically had the nomination wrapped up. And one of the triggers for this was media related. It was when he skipped a Super Bowl interview.

That was CBS. Which, yes, which struck a lot of that set off alarm bells, I feel like, for a lot of like, pundits basically you were saying like look like it's not like you're up in the polls and don't play prevent defense like why would you turn down this opportunity to speak to people you know about your record and go on offense against trump in front of the largest you know one of the in a fragmented media one of the only places where you have this huge stage to yourself you know what's going on here and then that was followed by near the her report too where they're requested this you know huge panic in the news then too about uh special

you know, concluding that Biden had memory issues in their conversation, basically, and, like, seemed forgetful. And, you know, there were panics around those. But once again, what did Biden do? He rolled out. He did a couple interviews, and he did another strong state of the union. And they kind of went away. So it was always this game of whackamol. What happened here? This is the first time where he had one of those panics building, and the plane just blew up on the runway. And so what you're seeing is, like, years of suppressed stuff that was ready to go off if this had happened at any of these earlier points, but never did. Because Biden always, like you said, it wasn't the highest bar, but Biden always cleared it,

you know, like fairly easily. And then people would, you know, tell themselves, you could say rationalize themselves if you want, but I think pretty earnestly often, you know, say, I guess this is okay. You know, I guess he's in better shape than I thought, or I guess the public doesn't care as much as I thought, you know, I guess we're in politically better shape than I thought. This is the, you would have seen this earlier if at any of those previous moments, this had happened. Do you think Joe Biden is definitely going to be the Democratic nominee on Election Day?

I don't know. Like, I'll tell you what I've been telling my staff. I mean, I'm running a team of reporters right now, which is like the pep talk I gave him this morning is, you know, semaphore, we're not even two years old. There has not been a single real moment in the last couple of years where there was anything different about this election cycle. We've known what it is this whole time. It's these two candidates. we know who they are very well. The voters know who they are.

They don't seem especially excited about this race. They've had relatively similar opinions, this whole last year and a half about both of them in polls. Nothing has really changed too much in the world of possibilities, right? Suddenly, I have no idea what's going to happen today or tomorrow. The universe of possibilities has just expanded to literally anything can happen. You know, it's July 4th weekend. I'm sure Biden's going to be hanging out with his family.

Who the hell knows what that conversation looks like? Who the hell knows what his conversation looks like with donors or with Barack Obama? I mean, like we don't really have a blueprint for what happens when you have this panic going off. Now, we have some parallels of like previous presidents who've kind of faced freakouts of their own. We can draw on as like kind of imperfect examples and I can get into those a bit. But yeah, anyone saying they know what's going to happen, ignore it. Like you're already seeing quotes from like, you know, unnamed campaign advisor, you know, or even just like, you know,

prominent governors like Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or from Kamala Harris being like, yeah, of course we support Biden 100%. You know, he's in it. He'll be at the next debate. Only Biden can answer that question, right? We're in a stage where no one speaks for him. Like the only person knows what's going to happen next is Biden. And I'm not sure he knows yet what that is. It's so funny because you've been doing this a long time. And me too. and the political pundit, wet dream has always been, it's going to be an open convention.

We're going to get news out of those smoke-filled rooms. We're going to do it like Walter Lipman, baby. We're going to put on our fedora with a little press card on it. Here we go. It's always raised. It never happens. I still feel like it is somewhat unlikely to happen, maybe for reasons that we can't quite discern here on June 28th.

But this is as close as we, we've ever been in our lifet times to that pundit dream of an open convention yeah it's it's wild that like this is this was a question that was really at the fringes you know until now which was there were some democratic commentators and there were folks who were kind of like more um i would what would you call like center left independence or something who don't mind pissing people off so like nate silver basically had been throwing out this open convention idea for a while and is now i'm I'm sure, taking a wild victory lap, basically arguing, like, you should use this debate as the test. And you should be glad that it's in June because you still have the option open.

And, like, this was, like, largely pilloried. Like, this is so silly. You've built an entire campaign apparatus that's raising money. The whole party is built around this. You would have to either run Kamala Harris, who Democrats are not feeling great about, or introduce someone totally new with, like, you know, 10% the name recognition to the entire American public in no, time and get an apparatus around them. It seems ridiculous. And yet, yeah, like, if I got the text alert during this call that, like, Biden has convened family to discuss, like, whether there's a way

forward, I wouldn't be shocked, would you? If I got the text message that, like, you know, Jamie Harrison, the DNC leader is meeting with people frantically to go over the rules, like, in just in case, would you be shocked? Maybe this soon, maybe this soon, but in the next couple of weeks, I don't think that's out. Again, as much as this is always the golden dream of the Punditocracy, we are now at least within the realm of possibility. And I was interested, you and I both know, Joe Biden has very normy media tastes. He may go on podcasts, but he does not listen to podcasts. So when I see Joe Scarborough raising this idea on Morning Joe, a host that Joe Biden watches religiously, Nick Christoff writing that column last night in the New York Times,

Van Jones on CNN last night saying, I love Joe Biden. I work for Joe Biden, but those are the kind of things that are interesting to me. We got to talk about Donald Trump's performance a little bit too, obscured in many ways last night by Biden's performance, but had some just unbelievable things about it. His secret plan to end the war in Ukraine that he said he would implement before he takes office, very Nixonian in a way, another secret plan to get Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich home. Apparently

a way that doesn't involve handing Keev to the Russians. We had H2O. What stood out to you about Trump last night? I mean, all of this was pretty familiar if you've been following him. But of course, that was the whole point of this debate, right? Like a whole slice of the American public has not been watching his rallies or certainly not reading his truth social posts, you know, on some obscure, you know, social media outlet that only Trump fans follow.

They haven't been exposed to this stuff as much. And one thing I think we did see, and, like, Democrats have been, like, to the extent they've been comforting themselves in this, they've been pointing this out. And we were hearing this from Democrats behind the scenes. You were seeing this in some of the focus groups that media panels held. People still don't like this stuff, it feels like. Like, you know, it's, you saw some of the, we were hearing that Democrats were saying that, you know, when they had focus groups, people were turning their dials negative when Trump would attack Biden or make, like, outlandish accusations. you know, or get into wild personal attacks. Like, that hasn't really changed, I don't think, even though I think, like, you know, grading

on a curve, this is one of Trump's more restrained performances, honestly. But, yeah, he was just himself, you know, a fact check nightmare. He'll say anything about his opponent. He'll raise strange questions about policy that, you know, raise more questions than they answer. You know, all of this was par for the course. Like the Evan Gershkovich thing, he's been going on for a while. And like, you know one interpretation of this very strange thing of he'll be released, but only after the election and only if I'm elected is like, I mean, what is the message you're sending to Vladimir Putin when you say that?

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. It's pretty crazy, right? I mean, like the implication, if you're putting two and two together here is not good if you don't want to be charitable to Trump, that he just is very invested in this man's health and well-being. You know, it's, it's disturbing stuff, but it's stuff he's been saying for months. Donald Trump and his spokespeople had attacked the moderators before the debate even began. I believe fake Tapper was a term of art that he was using on the trail, which is a strain pun even for us here at the press box. How did you think Jake Tapper and Dana Bash did last night? I thought they did well.

I thought it was very straightforward. They didn't make themselves the story. I don't think anyone coming out of this. Of course they were going to get preemptively bashed and Trump is going to do the usual ref working. That's part for the course. But the big thing when you're a moderator is you don't want to come out being the story. And like, needless to say, no one came out of this being like, the story is Jake Tapper. It's like this was, this was, they gave the room for the candidates to define this debate.

It was interesting because I felt that they felt very small last night. And maybe that was by design. Maybe that was the way the debate was structured. There were a lot of times when it would have been interesting to have a follow up on a particular topic. and they were always kind of pivoting to a slightly different question about the same thing. I think there was a part where Joe Biden challenged Trump to denounce the January 6 rioters. And he was like, and then Jake Tapper was like, actually, let me ask Donald Trump something completely different or something like slightly related about using prosecutions for political retribution. Right.

Like there was, it didn't have a ton of flow like that. Again, I think that was probably part of the design of the debate. The fact checking thing is interesting when it comes back. again because, you know, if you put Donald Trump on your air and you don't have moderators or your television host pushing back, you kind of wind up back with the Caitlin Collins Donald Trump town hall, which is that Donald Trump is going to tell tons of lies on your air and you have to do the break glass and bring out Daniel Dale strategy in the post game show to actually explain to viewers what was not true. But this is what happens when you put Donald Trump on

television. Yeah, I don't think there's an alternative there too. Like the, idea of like live fact-checking Trump, and by the way, also Biden, but like, you know, Trump, much more, of course. It's just not feasible. You would just be an eternal back and forth immediately. Like, either you're doing a debate with Donald Trump or you're just not. Like, that's just, I don't think there was any way to make that work except, like you said, to have robust after the fact fact-checking, which I think media outlets have gotten used to at this point. I mean, like everyone was publishing fact checks on the major sites I saw. Like you said, CNN had at Daniel Dale, it took a while to get to it because the postgame conversation on CNN,

literally like within seconds of an ending, was about whether Biden would drop out. So like that was the immediate turn. You know, they weren't going through like their standard by the numbers, you know, let's go through the facts of each candidate. And for a night that was supposed to remind people that CNN was good. This was the CNN idea, right? We went out and got this first ever or first in a very long time proprietary debate. This is our debate.

our moderators, our production around it. I thought the postgame bloodletting was really, really good. You know, starting with John King saying there was deep, wide and very aggressive panic across the Democratic Party, going to Abby Phillip and David Aldaxelrod, who sort of confirmed that, and then going to Van Jones. As he said, I love Joe Biden, but we've got to think about something else here. I thought that whole sequence after the debate was very, very well done. And really, in a way, was if CNN's trying to,

to remind people like, here's what we can do, right? Here's what we can do when we are thrown a new story that maybe we didn't expect. I thought they did a really nice job with it. Yeah, I thought it was riveting. And they got the most out of their contributors there. I mean, obviously, you just had the extremely compelling image of the people who were brought on to be the Democratic spin, essentially, going so against type and throwing out any kind of talking point was just, I mean, it felt like watching history is what it did.

So I think CNN kind of nailed the moment there, to be honest. Yes. And interestingly, the two of their normal hosts, Abby, Philip and Caitlin Collins were panelists last night effectively. They were opinionators. And when I was watching them, I'm like, oh, so the mistake was to try to turn these people in the Chris Licked era into BBC style hosts. They're very, very good at analysis at jumping on a story like that. And whatever they're doing in primetime on CNN should be more like this, you know, however you want to do it if it's left, right center, whatever it is. it should be more like this.

They sort of accidentally figured out what they should do in prime time last night, which I thought was interesting. Also, Benji, it actually justified the nine person postgame panel. Like, everybody had something to say, you know? The Democrats, as you said, who were there for a reason, the Republicans who were there for everybody had something to add. Yeah.

Brian, are we going back to basketball metaphors here? Let's do it. Yeah, they had a full playoff rotation there. Everyone was a star in their role. They gave them a full 48 minutes of quality play. But yeah, I was like everyone was there for a reason. They all had something to contribute. I mean, obviously they were all riffing on the same topic.

But like, it was hard to look away. Now, I will say, you know, if you flipped over to MSNBC, scene wasn't that different. No, it was not. Like, this was not a case of like so often after these debates. I think what everyone was expecting after this debate is like, you know, two Americas, the usual Fox News will just be playing like, you know, isolated clips of Biden like staring into the distance.

MSNBC will be playing trips of, you know, clips of Trump acting crazy, CNN will be doing like a fact check and like, you know, no, like the conversation was the same pretty much across every network, you know. They had on the NBC side, you had Chuck Todd playing the kind of John King role of like, you know, I'm the guy who's seen it all and I'm telling you this is crazy. And you had folks like Nicole Wallace, you know, and Claire McCaskill in probably one of the wildest clips of the night, you know, who's, you know, these are folks who you are, used to being just completely, you know, down the line partisans. You know, she even said that,

like, she wishes her job was to be a debate surrogate so she could just essentially lie about what happened. But because she was in a journalist role, she said, no, I'm going to give it to you straight. Like, this is a crisis. Like, you wouldn't believe what I'm hearing. It was an incredible segment. So kudos to CNN, but like, yeah, everyone was handed this insane story. And I think they were all well positioned to capture it. Speaking of riveting TV, how about Anderson Cooper's interview with Kamala Harris? Yeah, it was intense. And like, you know, Tapper was, I believe, partially interviewing as well, I think, during that. It was, Harris did, I think, pretty well, given the circumstances.

I know, again, like low bar. But basically, they were peppering from the start. Like, you know, we know what we saw. Tell us what just happened. You know, like justify what just happened. And I think a question from Cooper was the president we saw on stage tonight, is that how he is every day? It was a very, very tough interview. I mean, there's not many non-Trump president.

or vice presidents who have gotten an interview like that, especially a live television, which is pretty amazing. And you heard even Harris admit twice during that interview that Biden got off to a slow start, which is, again, something of an understatement and beyond obvious. She used the word obviously at one point. Obviously he got off to a slow start. It was like, how many times do you hear somebody in the administration say that minutes after a debate ended with their guy on live television? So this also mirrored what was happening at the debate. You know, so there's the spin room after this where the people come out to speak on behalf of the campaigns. They bring out the air listers. And one of this, a lot of people were comparing this to

Obama's first debate against Romney, which he whiffed, which is the Republicans came out, like, high-fiving and hugging and being like, come, talk to us. We got so much to say. And the Democrats took a long time before anyone even came out, because you have to agree what your talking points even are. And like the Kamala interview was so compelling because it was someone being brought on where they just had not prepared for this scenario. Like they she could say a couple of things, but she was going off the map for the most part. And I think that produced really compelling television just from an interview perspective. A few odds and ends for you. The pregame show on CNN was four hours long. It felt very sporty down to the title debate night in America.

I was waiting for Mike Toriko and Crits Collinsworth to do a walk on. We also had the very funny quiron on CNN that read like this soon colon CNN's historic presidential debate. We thought ESPN had the worst quiron of the day with the Cowboys, Lakers, and Yankees under pressure to win a title. But congratulations to CNN for jumping in there. I obviously saw this too, but Aaron Burnett had Gavin Newsom on before the debate. Speaking of people that were in the spin room and her. first question was, do you think the candidates should shake hands at the beginning of the debate? To which Newsom responded, I think we've run out of punditry if that's the first question.

And I said that this Benji, you'll appreciate this as somebody who runs a team of reporters. There's this whole funny thing CNN was trying to do with it. We have fresh reporting, new reporting from inside the Biden and Trump campaigns before the debate. Okay, we're going to bring you the latest on their thinking. This was kind of their woge bomb segment where we want to give you something minutes before the debate that's new. But there was nothing new. It was like, I've talked to people in Biden world. And they think that Joe Biden thinks that he is going to reassure America that he is vigorous and up to the job tonight.

And they missed the one thing that would have been a woge bomb, which is that Joe Biden is sick. Yeah. And one of the things people are complaining about, I mean, again, there's only so much difference you can make. One thing Democrats were bringing up that seems crazy is that they did not pre-spanation. in that he was sick. Like, if you know that's the case, why would you not lay the groundwork in that four hour run up being like, hey, Biden's got a cold. Like, he's reassuring people. Like, he's going to go through the debate anyway. That's his commitment to the people. But, you know, his voice isn't going to be what you think. Yeah. Or even have Biden come out and say like, hey, I have a cold.

I sound bad tonight, but my ideas are good, whatever, you know, whatever line you want to give him to come out. That would have helped. But like, honestly, you want that way before. Like, you want it so that the moderators are bringing it up the, you know, like, Mr. President, we're sorry. get well soon. We understand you have a cult. Like, you know, you want it just to be digested in the press before. But yeah, that the one thing that was news did not break. I will say, you know, our reporters talked to Gavin Newsom before the debate. And by coincidence, what was the question they were asking about? You know, are you hoping that with Biden's performance, they'll stop the right, we'll stop spreading all these rumors that you're going to come in and be the emergency nominee.

And his answer was like, yes, absolutely 100%. We're never going to hear. again. So that really set up a nice frame when he had to come out later. He came out to the spin room. He was one of those people who was designated and was just immediately peppered from all sides by reporters asking him exactly that. Like is there going to be an open convention? Are you going to be potentially the nominee? This is why Wigel and Shelby Calcutter pros. This is a much better question than should they shake hands at the beginning of the debate. The other thing I heard on the pregame show from Scott Jennings, who worked for George W. Bush, one of the conservative guys on the CNN panel was him predicting.

that there was not going to be another Biden-Trump debate after last night. He said this before the debate began. And we don't have Benji the capability to bring cousin Sal in on another window here during our conversation. But that was the bet if somebody had made one before the debate last night that would have been the smart bet because it could pay off in several ways, right? Trump doesn't want a debate on September 10th, which might be the case. Biden doesn't want a debate on September 10th, which might be the case.

Or Biden isn't the nominee on September 10th. Yeah, and if you parlayed all of them, you could be looking at something crazy right now. You know, it's exactly. But yeah, it was interesting that people were, I mean, like a common response after the debate, too, was like, well, obviously that's the last one. I don't think that's true. I mean, like, I think if Biden does stay, he will obviously freaking have to do the next debate because the only thing that could get him to move past this one would be to have closer to the election a do-over where he nails it. Like, that's the only way we just mentioned the prior president. presidents who've whiffed a debate, and this one was much more dangerous than those ones.

Like, they all, they all recovered the same way. They did well in the next debates. Like, that's, that's the formula, except for Bush, you kind of didn't have any good debates, but still survive. Still survive. You know, but that's, that's the formula for getting back on track. And so, I mean, the question now is, again, they just have to resolve, is he still the nominee? And if he can, not only that, get the party to believe that he's still the nominee and stop panicking. and say, okay, we all had our little panic.

I feel reassured now. We're all behind Biden. And then we can get into the question of whether he's even around for another debate. But like at this point, yeah, it's like far down the list. And at his insistence, the next debate is not in a couple of weeks, but in two and a half months. So there's a long time before you get to do what you call the do over. If Biden does stay in the race, let's end here. What do the next few weeks look like?

What does he try to do to reassure not just people in the party, but both? voters that he's up to the job of being president, that they should vote for him in November, maybe I should say. Well, he's holding a rally with Harris today in North Carolina. I mean, he just has to be out there is the big thing. And looking like this was a strange outlier where he was like had the flu or something. That's just as a starting point. Like, you can't be basement Biden here.

Now, I'm going to end this with the best case for things turning around for Biden. There is a recent parallel of something happens. and a party is seriously openly talking about dumping their nominee. And that was the Access Hollywood tape where a whole bunch of Republicans at the highest levels, publicly and privately, were saying Trump should drop out.

And some of them were withdrawing their endorsements of them, which is something no one's done with Biden. People who are some of his closest allies now in the Senate, you know, like Lindsey Graham, Mike Lee, all these people, were openly putting out stage, saying they are voting for someone else in the general election, which is crazy, right?

Everyone assumed that should have been the end of him, even if he stayed in the race. And yet, what happened? Country polarized along predictable lines. Didn't seem to really change votes. People moved on to a new problem for the other nominee in a while. And that was it. He ended up winning. So to the extent that Biden might do okay here, it's worth mentioning that there's two

conversations going on. One is swing voters looking, is Biden up for this job? Can he actually be president? But the immediate panic that Biden is dealing with is a meta-conversation. Democrats being upset that they think Biden can't win. Yes. And you don't vote for the other side because you're upset that your nominee is not doing a good job. That's not the thing that gets you to switch sides. So you could see a horrifying dem panic. You might see Democrats in polls say like 80% wish they won a new nominee or something crazy like that. But that doesn't mean those people are going to change their voting behavior. They're all just worried about some other hypothetical person who might have totally different views, might not even be plugged into this political

conversation much, might be easily swayed over the next five months by something else. They're worrying about what they will do. And that's at least a separate conversation. You're disappointing a lot of political reporters, Benji, right now. I mean, I think a tear just rolled down Jonathan Martin's cheek that there's not going to be an open convention. that scenario. I'm not saying it. I know. You're just, you're just scheming it out. All right, Benji Sarling. Don't aggregate me, Brian. Don't aggregate me. Okay. Thank you. Spoken like a true ringer podcast. Benji Sarland, read him at Semaphore. Read his reporters at Semaphore. They will be fielding panic texts for the next several weeks,

if not much. Benji, thanks for coming on the press box. Thank you, Brian. All right. Let's move from the campaign. We are grinding our way through to stories from campaigns passed. This last Friday, I hopped in the car, and I drove up to Santa Barbara California, where I recorded a long interview with Jeff Greenfield. Jeff Greenfield was a political analyst and reporter for CBS and ABC in the last glory days of network news. He went from ABC to CNN. There, Jeff Greenfield did everything. He covered conventions. He moderated debates. He was in the studio on election night. What I was enjoyed about Greenfield, and you'll hear me tell him this, was that in the straight-aero world of TV

news, he came off as a guy who genuinely loved politics. He was smart. He was wised up, which is slightly different than smart. Greenfield was funny. He had a reference to seemingly every campaign right there at his fingertips. What I wanted to do here was ask Greenfield about four presidential elections that he covered, 1988, 1992, and finally 2008, when Barack Obama got elected. You're hear a lot of stories about politics, of course, but you'll also hear Greenfield's thoughts on how the boys on the bus and the boys in the TV studio shaped coverage of those elections. I hope you enjoy this one. Here's a walk down the campaign trail with Jeff Greenfield. All right, Jeff, we are talking six days before Joe Biden and Donald Trump debate. Does this campaign remind you of any that you've

covered before? Not really. I think ever since the arrival, of Trump, everything that I thought I understood about the patterns of political campaigns has been just tossed butt over tea kettle. I sometimes say I felt like the pilot who'd been flying for like 40 years, and one day I take off in the control tower says, oh, we've just learned the law of gravity has been suspended. There's nothing that I thought would affect the 2016 campaign actually happened the way I thought it would.

In this case, the very fact that you've got a president running against a former president, having not been around in 1892, when Grover Cleveland unseated Benjamin Harrison, who had unseated him, so there's almost nothing to go by. The only thing that you can say that is consistent is there are still, for all the weird uniqueness of the two candidates. It still comes down to some real issues. You know, the discontent with inflation, the concern about immigration, the concern about the character, particularly of one of the two candidates, that's familiar. But how it plays out, I mean, look, the fact that we're going to have a debate at the end of June on a cable network with commercials in the general election debate, we've never had anything like that.

debates are on all the networks. And so they're just the fact that we're having a debate before Biden or Trump or formerly the nominees of the party, mean that that we once again, for the third consecutive election, are living in a time when you can throw out almost all the rules that I once understood to be governing presidential campaigns. One thing we've heard about this campaign over and over is the public doesn't like either candidate. they don't like the campaign itself. They're tuning out of the campaign. Does that strike you as notable, or is that something you've heard many, many times before? Well, I think it's the third straight election when neither candidate was particularly popular.

It was certainly true in 2020, but more true today. But it's interesting that even with that, there's still, unless you count Robert Kennedy, which I don't, you would think with two hugely unpopular candidates, this would be a time when a really potent independent campaign would have power. And yet from everything we've seen so far, Robert Kennedy Jr.'s campaign is sliding steadily into almost single digit. So that's another thing you have to scratch your head about. The other thing I'd mentioned is back in 2020,

with two very unpopular president, individual candidates, the turnout was very high. It's one of the higher turnouts in history. So I don't know whether that's negative polarization driving turnout, whether or not we're going to see that happen again this year. I don't know how to do the future. But we should take a lesson from 2020 that dislike candidates don't necessarily lead to low turnout elections. I wanted to revisit four presidential campaigns with you that you covered, starting in 1980. which was George H. W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis in the general, you were working for ABC News and writing a syndicated column.

88 was the first time Joe Biden ran for president. What did you make of candidate Biden in 88? Well, it was also a year in which two potentially powerful candidates on the Democratic side never made it to 1988. Joe Biden's campaign collapsed with a series of charges of plagiarizing, borrowing Robert Kennedy's speech, borrowing a speech from the British. labor candidate. So that was one guy who stepped aside very early. The other obviously was Gary Hart, who right after he announced in 1987, the Miami Herald said, what were you doing with that young woman down at your home? And he never made it out of 1987.

This is not politically significant, but it is significant in another way. Joe Biden probably would not have survived had he not dropped out of the the race because shortly after he dropped out, he was discovered that he had aneurysm and had very serious surgery done and had he been pushing himself on the campaign trail as an active candidate. I don't know that he would have made it through that year. But I think one of the things about Biden that again is so head scratching is in 87, he never made it out of that campaign.

in 2008 trying to run in the year of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. He never made it out of either Iowa, New Hampshire. And if you remember, in the first part of 2020, he was almost a pitiable figure. He came in fourth or fifth in Iowa, New Hampshire. He had no money, had no crowds. So the one thing you have to say about Joe Biden is he's a survivor. But I don't take much out of what happened to him in 88 because, as I say, he came and went in a flash.

This was a comparatively powerful period for the television networks. How do the campaigns regard the networks, circa 1988? Oh, they thought that they were absolutely essential to their success. You're absolutely right. the cable television was a bit player at best. The networks dominated the viewership. So things like television advertising at the network level was critical. There was no Twitter, there was no Instagram, there was no TikTok, none of that.

There was virtually no social media. So television was kind of the be-all and end-all of campaigns. And it's one of the ways that you can measure it is, if you look at the more significant events of 1988, for instance, George H.W. Bush's acceptance speech, which is a very significant speech. He was able to define himself not as a kind of lap dog to Rick and but as his own guy. You know, you're on in prime time at 9 o'clock at night, Eastern time. It's probably more people are watching you than any other moment. So that's one key event, all on television. Second word.

where the debates, particularly when Dukakis managed to get himself not only on the unpopular position of the death penalty, but kind of described the hypothetical rape and murder of his wife in almost clinical terms was not a help. And then on the more, I guess you would say, anecdotal or trivial side, that picture of Michael Dukakis riding around in a tank with a helmet that made him look like snooping. was one of those moments that may be exaggerated. But it's memorable. Yeah, and creates this indelible image that follows him around for the rest of the campaign,

not the rest of his life. You were doing something very cool in the fall of 88. You anchored a Monday night political edition of Nightline that came on 30 minutes after the end of Monday night football. What were you trying to do with that show? I was trying to take steps back. I was trying to, I was trying to dismiss very, early on the half hour. All right, here's the latest poll. Here's the latest headline. But now let's talk about whatever it is that we can step in the, you know, it's been 35 years,

so my memory is a little hazy. But I do remember trying to show, for instance, the impact of visual media. You know, what were people seeing that would define one of the other candidates in a very powerful term? So we were trying to talk about, stuff that wasn't who's ahead who's behind also you know you make a very important point the show was on after monday night football which on the east coast pushed it a little later you know i was on kind of around uh you know post midnight symphony symphonies or your your nightly prayer or whatever uh-huh um it was still a great opportunity and i you know i enjoyed it i would um i was just trying to take that at times since we had the leisure and to kind of try to talk differently

about politics. Try to take a step, as I said, a step back. You had a quote to Newsday at the time. You said, this is like being paid to watch baseball. Yeah. I'll tell you what that. I understand why I said that. I got into, I came to politics through baseball. That is in 1952 as a nine-year-old. I was in my grandfather's country cottage listening to the Yankee game on radio. We didn't even have TV up there. And one day my mom said, I need the radio. You can't listen to the Yankees. Why not?

Well, I'm listening to the Republican Convention, which should have to be one of the most bizarre, pure six brawls of the convention ever. And I got hooked at Nage. I didn't know what exactly it was, but I thought, this is cool. So what I meant was I'd become a political junkie at an indecently. early age. And now to be put on nightline to anchor Monday night to talk about something that I would have talked about, you know, with friends, with whatever, was a kick. In fact, most of the work that I've regarded in the same way. That's what I always enjoyed about your TV careers, because you're

working in a period of network news where a lot of correspondents are very just-the-facts. This is their delivery, maybe a little bit oracular at times. And you, at least on my television screen, projected as a political junkie. Yeah, well, for one thing, I, you know, I didn't have a trench coat. The idea of the jet-jawed, you know, hyper-studly correspondent that Gary Trudeau used to parody is so brilliant. That's never me. So the only thing that I could do is to talk like we are, as we are. My mother was an industry. And say, look, here's what I think is interesting. And do it in a kind of conversational one because the Olympian anchor God was just not in my DNA.

What were your memories of your behind-the-scenes interactions with the Bush and Dukakis campaigns in 88? I had very little. Because I was an anchor analyst, I had very little. I had very little direct contact with these campaigns. The only thing that struck me was the degree to which Bush was able to recover in New Hampshire from a real beatdown in Iowa and find his footing enough to become the Republican Canada, to become the heir to Reagan. But I, you know, I very rarely spend a lot of time in my entire political career

interacting with the operatives. I felt that you could actually, it may sound odd, you could actually learn more about the candidate by watching his or her public appearances. What are they saying in their speeches? What are their ads telling us? And then, and we'll talk about this later, I often found it much more useful to go someplace where the candidate wasn't and try to do some reporting about the underlying terrain than to follow a candidate around and listen to the same speech six times. One more extraordinary moment of television from 88.

Two weeks before election day, Michael Dukakis goes on Nightline on ABC. and does a 90-minute live interview with Ted Cople. Cople asks him about 19 versions of the question, you're losing, don't you realize you're losing? Why are you responding to Bush's attacks like that? What do you remember about that encounter? I actually remember a different thing that ABC News did because very shortly before the election,

with great fanfare, announced the most extensive polling that had ever done, showing that Bush was going to swamp to caucus. and there was a lot of pushback that this was in effect using numbers to almost to call the race a week before it happened. Now, it happened that the polling was pretty accurate. But I think the other part, if I go back to your question, one of the things about Dukakis was that he, I think, never quite understood what do you have to be as a presidential candidate? The more dramatic example for me is that after the nomination,

he went back and spent two or three days a week governing Massachusetts and, you know, opening highway exits. I mean, you're the Democratic nominee for president, and you don't seem to understand that that takes precedence over the normal business of governing statecraft. It's very much like what I seem to remember is that his answer to Kaepa were like that debate answer on the death penalty. It's very kind of wrote. Yes.

You know, very much unemotional, very much, well, you know, I don't know Bernie on the death penalty. I'm not for it because here are the numbers. Yeah. There's a story that one of his aides came in at the first commercial pregan said, get mad. And he did not get mad. but it happened. Ducaucus didn't get mad very often. True. 1992, our second election, George H.W. Bush versus Bill Clinton versus Rossboro in the general election. You're still at ABC News. In that campaign, Clinton went on the Phil Donahue show.

He went on the Arsenio Hall show and played the saxophone. He went on MTV and he went on Don Imus's radio show. And he went on 60 Minutes. And he went on 60 Minutes, very famously, with Hillary. What did you make of that media strategy? Well, this was a really good indication of how the media terrain was already changing. That you didn't confine yourself to interviews with Walter Cronkite or Dan Rather or Tom Broke or whoever, that you expanded greatly what had been done in previous campaigns. I need to take a diversion here. Candidates have always been kind of interested in where else they might go. So after his nomination in 1960, Jack Kennedy went on Jack Park at Tonight Show, who was supine,

who was just, you know, the ultimate, oh, I can't believe you're here. This is so many. By 1968, Richard Nixon had gone on laughing famously to try to say, see, I'm not this guy that was born with a two-piece suit in a briefcase. Humphrey went on Dinah Shore. So these things had happened. But the degree to which, particularly Clinton, again, a baby, you know, he was in his mid-40s, grew up in a very different television environment than, say, his opponent who was at least almost 25 years older than he was, had the kind of confidence to go on Ossineo Hall and first appear, playing a saxophone.

But then sitting down with Asinio Hall and talking serious issues, was a really interesting blend of how a smart media kind of campaign. My memory of Clinton on Phil Donahue was that he and Jerry Brown were invited. And Phil Donahue did something I thought was pretty cool. He brought the two of them out and said,

okay, guys, it's yours. And left. Let them, he let them actually strage their own debate. Again, two guys who were particularly in Clinton's case, younger, more confident with the medium and therefore able to roll with it a little bit.

The other thing about 92 is, I mean, as the 88 campaign was to me not one of the more interesting campaigns of us in, but 92 had everything. Clinton on the verge of dropping out, the Jennifer Flowers accusation, the draft issue, you know, was he trying to evade the draft, him calling himself the comeback kid, and most interestingly, given what we're living through now. So in this time of relative, relative civility in politics, when dissatisfaction was far less

than it is now, an independent candidate for president gets 19% of the vote. Yeah. you know if ross proe had not had not shown signs of some rather strange sets of beliefs somebody was trying to disrupt his daughter's wedding or something who knows how he might have done you know that that that was an indication that that the discontent with things as they are apparently he's always been there at some level. And when in Ross Perrault's case, two things made all the difference for him. One, he had enough money to compete.

He could put on just as much TV as Clinton and Bush. And second, because of his poll standing, he was in the debate. The only third party candidate to be in a three-way general election debate. And, you know, because of our sense, system, he didn't get a single electoral vote, but for an independent candidate with a rather twitchy character, to get almost one in five votes at a time of relative calm, that to me is by far the most interesting story of the 92 campaign. Because of his money, he buys these big 30-minute chunks of airtime. Well, that was the part that absolutely delighted me. I grew up in the first

days of TV when a lot of times you'd see like a shampoo company would buy a 30 minute ad 30 minute time and they would talk about the joys of lanolin and it was kind of weird Rostro's sitting there with essentially

a pointer and cardboard drawings of graphs and he's doing this for 30 minutes and he's being very blunt he's raising the gas tax issue he goes and here's a part you're not not going to like. And he got, as I said, except for Teddy Roosevelt, it's the best of

performance any third party or independent candidate has ever had. It's amazing. When I was looking back at this, I saw you quoted in 1992 explaining that Bill Clinton would go on the Don Ima show, but he would not go on the Howard Stern show because that was too crass in 1992. Now we've lived long enough to see Joe Biden go on the Howard Stern show. Well, we've also seen Howard Stern um grow in office yeah you know is that the term we're looking for he had a great interview with Hillary Clinton a couple of years ago when when Howard Stern does Joe Biden or Hillary Clinton it's not the Howard Stern of 1992 you know spanking lesbians or whatever he is into it's a it's a it's a different breed of cat um but i also think um going on Don Imus who at the time was a

really significant figure because he was so transgressive, not compared to Howard Stern, but compared to most regular straight political interviews, that it was a way of reaching an audience that would otherwise not listen to you. That's really the key to this whole development that we're talking about, whether it's Arsenio or Howard Stern or Donahue's. These are places where people are not going because they care about politics. You noticed a lot of criticism in 92 about the distorting effect. People said TV had on campaigns, which seems somewhat quaint now. Peter Jennings, who worked with you at ABC, said, we're aware that a lot of you were turned

off by the political process and that many of you put at least some of the blame on us. What was the criticism of TV during that period? Well, a lot of it is pretty consistent. One of it is the sheer superficiality. of what's covered. If you're getting your news from a 30-minute newscast when a piece about a candidate will be two and a half minutes long,

you're not going to hear the candidate. There was either in this year or before, a graduate student did a study that showed that the average length of a sound bite between 1968 and I think 88 had gone from about 45 seconds to 10 seconds. Wow. Now, don't trust me on those exact numbers,

But it's pretty, that's the, that's the rough area so that you didn't hear these people. You know, this is a broader criticism of network news that it's often said was if they covered Moses getting the Ten Commandments, they would have time to report the two biggest. So that was a large part of it. And the other one is a perennial and usually active thing. What's covered is process, not what these candidates stand for. which was only exempt, you know, back in 88, that release of that ABC poll, that whole news was Bush is going to blow this thing right open, not should he, not what's he stand for, not what's different.

And I think that that was what I think Peter Jennings was talking about. What were election nights like at ABC News? Well, remember, it depends which ones. you know, in 88 and 92, it was pretty much clear what was going to happen. So, in fact, I actually did a piece for the Times op-ed page where I talked about how the networks do a nudge, nudge, wink, wink. They won't release the exit polls, but they'll say, this could be shaping up for a very tough night for President Bush. Just to give the viewer a little bit, but they will never say the numbers they're looking at. got there were all kinds of issues about when they should report exit polls and stuff.

So there was not, there was not the drama of what it was probably like, well, in 1960 or 1968 or 1976, when it really wasn't clear who was going to be president for hours and hours and hours. We have to wait until we see the votes. This is the first date and we're really going to get. In 1996, Mississippi came in at 5 o'clock in the morning, and that put Carter over the top. Whereas, if you think about it, we had a string of decisive elections, 80, 84, 88, 98, 92, 96, five straight elections when there was no drama at all.

In fact, in 1996, I've often argued that is the single most inconsequential campaign of my lifetime. It was boring. It didn't matter. there were no Supreme Court nominees for the next four years. It was like, you know, so five straight elections, there was a kind of routine. What am we going to call this race? And so I remember very clearly in 92 when New Jersey came in for Clinton,

which was a foregone conclusion. You know, it was worth pointing out that New Jersey had gone, Republican in the past five elections. And this was a really interesting flip of the most suburban state in America that it showed Clinton had succeeded in his in his basic strategy. So you could, there were times to make that point clear. But in terms of, gee, I wonder, I wonder how this state's going to come in. Not until 2000. All right. So you've walked us right up there. 2000, George W. Bush versus Al Gore in the general election. You're now working at CNN. The former marginal cable network now, not so marginal. How did political campaigns regard CNN in those years?

I think that, well, because it was a 24-hour newscast, they certainly didn't regard it as any less significant than the broadcast news, particularly because people who were interested in politics tended to gravitate to CNN. Fox was just beginning to flex its muscles, and there was no MSNBC at the time. So, You know, the candidates and the campaigns were very, they were listening to us. They would call with their complaints, but they regarded CNN as a real significant player. Do they call you directly? What I see, I'm trying to remember, yeah, I think once or twice if they had a small complaint,

or they wanted to make a point about where, where there's, what their strategy was. A couple of things you did that year. to moderate debates both during the Republican and Democratic primaries. How did you find that experience? I liked it, obviously. Who did I manage to really tick off? Alan Keyes, the perennial candidate. But more important, George W. Bush corrected me. I had stated something about his educational policies, and it was not 100% right, and he was right to do that. But I also remember during the Bradley Gore debate up at the Apollo Theater, trying to raise the issue with Al Gore about he's against school choice, but his kids go to private school, which is, by the way, one of the besetting facts about

95% of Washington-based liberals. School choice will rob us, the public says, where do you send your kids? Well, the public schools of my name wrote a terrible. Uh-huh. There you go. Anyway, so that's what I remember. It's an interesting experience. You also anchored CNN's convention coverage with Judy Woodruff and Bernie Shaw that year. The networks interestingly said, look, nobody's watching conventions anymore. So we're going to scale our coverage way back. The scaling started actually in 1984. 1980 was the last year of gavel-to-gaville coverage, my first year.

And gradually they kept shrinking, not CNN, but the broadcast networks, I think at one point, and it may have been after this, Each of the networks skipped one night, particularly like a Tuesday night. There was nothing going on. The roll call used to be the most dramatic part of a convention when people actually had in their newspapers for scorekeeping. What's going to happen on the second ballot? Where are the shifts coming? The only point of the roll call is that the states get to talk about, you know, Minnesota, the land of 10,000 lakes. So, yeah, there was a drastic.

scaling back on the networks. Which is a huge opportunity for CNN. Because now you say if you're a political junkie, like Jeff Greenfield, this is the place you want to watch. Sure. Get your news. Sure. Because we take it seriously.

We're going to show you more of it. Yeah. What are your memories of like of the Gore and Bush campaigns? Were your observations of them? I remember Bush in New Hampshire. who was kind of like trying to find his footing. You may remember that it wound up with McCain. Actually, let me stop there, because those campaigns pale in comparison to the most memorable campaign of 2000,

which was John McCain, just kicking out the jam, saying, you know, I'm going to do this grassroots. I'm going to do every town hall I can. and on my bus, everything's on the record. Right. And he was absolutely a free spirit. He would insult the press, I mean, with great humor, he would say whatever he wanted to say, and it blew the place apart. By the time of the New Hampshire primary, network executives were trying to wedge their way in

to get a ride on the bus because it was like an e-ticket for the old Disneyland. It was the coolest thing in the world. So that's the most, as a campaign, that's the most memorable because campaigns, particularly general election campaigns, in my view, they have long since ceased to be worth covering. They are so mechanical. They are so controlled by the campaigns. They are so rigid that you don't get anything spontaneous out of them. Whereas in the McCain campaign, you know, it was just wide open.

Town meetings, ask me whatever you want. I think the most, one of the more memorable things about the 2000 campaign was it was always close. And the conventional notion was that Bush might win the popular vote but lose the electoral vote. And in fact, I did learn, it's in Bocomond, that there was a very concerted notion on the part of the Bush campaign that if that happened, they would attempt to deny the legitimacy of the campaign. They were prepared to go on TV and say, you know, this is crazy. This is undemocratic. Some of these electors ought to flip. And of course, what happened was the reverse.

Yes. Which was in and of itself, I think something that at least surprised an awful lot of people who had no understand this. We hadn't had a popular vote winner lose since Grover, Cleveland in 1888. But there's something else about that. I may be jumping. But the first thing I should tell you was on election night when we went on the air, because we knew it was going to be close. I said to the audience, folks, if you ever wanted to have one of those election nights,

where you have to stay up real late to find out who the winners, I think we may just be doing this. Who knew? What a call. 37 days was not what I had in mind. That 37-day election overtime took place. place at a time when the country was at peace, it was prosperous, and the divisions were nothing like what we have now. And in the last sentence or two of my book, I said, God help us, if we

have a contested election at a time when there's much more distrust, it's a much more unhappy electorate, you know, I fear for what would happen. Well, 20 years later, yeah, there we were. Yeah. It's always interesting to me how winning campaigns look like geniuses or are turned into geniuses after the fact that losers are turned into idiots because you remember late in 2000, Bush went to California at the campaign, a state he couldn't win and didn't need to win in any case. He took some time off on the trail late in the campaign and then he wins. I did an e-book. I do a lot of alternate histories. In fact, I can't find the e-book because it doesn't exist anymore.

But the e-book was when Gore beat Bush. And one of the consequences of what you're describing is that Carl Rove is driven out of the Republican Party. He's considered a complete idiot because it. He mismanaged this campaign. That's what would have happened had Gore won. So you make this declaration early on election night and then election night begins to unfold. Florida's called for Al Gore initially and what's happening behind the scenes at CNN. Well, I mean, that's where the title of one of my books comes from because we've called Gore for, we call Florida,

for Gore. And I say, oh, you know, every once in a while, we have to eat pro. Sometimes these predictions don't come true. And at that moment, Bernie Shaw says, news, news, we are retracting our call. And I say, oh, waiter, one order of crow. And pro cost said at the time, when it, when it happened again, they called for Bush. And then they retract that. He said, we don't have, we don't have egg on our face. We have omelets all over our suits, something like that. I remember on air interviewing somebody from Florida as Gore began to close the gap. So election official.

And in the middle of the interview, somebody down there in Catherine Harris's office almost literally pulled them off the air. I said, are you still there? Are you still there? Hello? I said, I guess they don't want to talk to us anymore. That's so funny. It was a wild, a definitely a wild rod. And it was a feeling at CNN that we've screwed up because we've misled the public in that moment?

Is there panic? Like, what's the general feeling in the room? Well, I think, first of all, we've shared that with every other network. You're not alone. Right. If this had been our call alone. Yeah, but it's a combination of what the hell's going on here? How have we managed now to get this wrong twice?

But beyond that, well, who the hell's won? Who's the president? You know, that's not what any of us. We knew it was going to be a close election, but to be on air in real time trying to decipher what the heck is going on here. I mean, I later in the book, you know, learn why the original call was wrong. just based on wrong numbers about the algorithm or something. And in the second case, it was that, you know,

the physical reporting of votes and places was off. Just off. You know, look, if you're 100 million people who voted in a presidential election in a normal year, somewhere between a million and two million of those votes are going to be screwed up. But it doesn't matter. It hasn't matter. And again, go back to 2000, five straight elections when there was never any doubt about who was going to win.

Well, I guess I'm wrong about that. The Reagan landslide in 80 was a bit of a surprise. And there's a period of television soul searching that goes on after 2000? Oh, it's not just 2000. There's the branding of garments and the putting on the hair shirts after every election. There used to be a, I don't know if it still happens, but Harvard, used to summon the campaign managers for a two-day gathering to go over the campaign. And there's always a bit of soul searching.

I mean, think about 2016. Sure. You want to talk about getting the race wrong. And I understand it. You know, I wrote a whole bunch of columns in 2015, 16. One or two of words said, you know, I can't imagine Trump could win this. This guy's different. This guy has some kind of appeal we're missing.

And a lot of stuff about Hillary Clinton's weaknesses as a candidate. But I never had the guts to say, you know what? Even though even on the last days before the election, I kept thinking, this doesn't feel about it. I kept calling Democrats saying, you're really confident about this? I never had the guts. They just flat out. I'd say, I think this thing could go with Trump.

And they were confident. Were they pointing at data? Oh, we got data. We got this. We got that. We got this thing won. Yes. The women are going to elect Biden.

Clinton is no way that, yeah. Yeah. And they messed up. All right. One more campaign for you, Jeff. 2008, Barack Obama versus John McCain. You're at CBS News now, again at CBS News because you'd worked there before. The world's changed a lot, not just with cable news, but the Internet by 2008.

So how were campaigns thinking of TV by that point? At 2008, it was still a major, if not the major concern of campaigns. But if you look at what Barack Obama's folks did in terms of how they raised money and how they organized the meetups and what they did with this tool, McCain, as far back as 2000, had used the Internet as a very effective fundraising mechanism. What the Obama campaign did, you can find this in the Victory Lab, a really good book about the use of the Internet. They built all kinds of tools around the Internet, how they canvassed during the primary, how they got people to maintain active participation, how they permitted a lot of autonomy. that the internet made possible. So the people could actually organize themselves for everything from getting out the vote operations to canvassing.

So it wasn't that it wasn't a TV was now irrelevant at all. But it was a situation where it was in the process of being supplemented, if not supplanted by this other now emerging tool. Two mediums essentially running on parallel tracks are running in different form. You wrote a column in Yahoo many years after this saying you stopped voting in elections after 1996. What was your thinking there?

I just thought that, look, it was symbolic in a way. I'm saying if I'm covering this campaign, this is one less thing that I need to think about. that I obviously have opinions. If journalists want to vote, that's fine. I just felt it was just, it's another version of, for instance, the rule that when I worked at any of these networks, you were absolutely forbidden to take part in any political effort,

to march, to give money, that was a great excuse. You give money argument? Gee, I'd love to, but I can't. So that you have these rules in place. to try to shield reporters from the notion that you're on one side. I think it was a New York Times Supreme Court reporter who got in a little trouble because she marched in a pro-choice parade or demonstration.

It's not as though this reporter had no opinion about the issue. But I do think it was just the way of saying, you know, don't walk around the campaign button. Just one more step. But it's certainly not anything that I feel. is required for the journalist. 2008 was not a close election.

George Bush was very unpopular. The Great Recession was, we were in the midst of it or at the beginning of it. What stands out about the way that campaign was run to you? Are we talking about general election? Well, let's start with the Democratic primary, because that was probably the most exciting part of that entire campaign. Yeah. I'm not the world's greatest predictor, having written a book years ago, predicting how John Lindsay would be elected president.

But one thing I said, I vividly remember this, having dinner in Des Moines at the 801 Grand, the Stakehouse where everybody, it's like everybody comes to Ricks. Uh-huh. Yeah. The gossip block of Des Moines. Right. And talking to one of my colleagues at CBS, a black colleague who was just basically skeptical that this country was ever going to.

to do this. And I said, well, look, this is one thing that I convinced him. If Barack Obama can win here, there were fewer blacks than in the NBA, you know, the first thing that's going to happen is the division among blacks between Clinton and Obama will go away like that. And the second thing is, if he can, demonstrating that is there's no question now about whether or not this guy is a full-fledged contender. And so that, I hate the Iowa caucus, by the way, despise them. They're undemocratic. They reduce turnout. They're awful.

But unlike in the Republican Party, Iowa has made three Democrats the nominee, Jimmy Carter. John Kerry and Barack Obama. And to me, when you look at what unfolded, you know, Iowa was absolutely critical. Here's the other thing about the primary campaign. It was way, way closer than people remember. Now, Obama, you know, he's this mythic figure, 10 million vote plurality.

Go back and look at how close the Clinton-Obama campaign won. he won that nomination because of one factor. His campaign, unlike the Clinton campaign, understood that you could win more delegates from small states by winning big than winning big states marginally. Clinton won most of the big states. But somehow her campaign confused the primary process with the general election.

You don't get all the delegates anymore if you win California. The way the Democrats do it, it's very proportional. So at the risk of being too inside baseball here, you know, Obama netted more delegates from Kansas and Idaho than Clinton did out of like Ohio. So that's the part of that campaign that will be forever missed because of the mythology. This happens, by the way, in campaigns. People still believe that Ross Pro cost George Bush the election in 92. The exit polls and in-depth state-by-state studies show that the parole vote would have split almost evenly between Clinton and Bush.

But you can't get people to believe it. It's hopeless. It's just forget it. Okay, I don't want to have this argument. It's settled history. It's settled wrong history. It's settled to settle history that has been settled wrongly. The Obama team got a lot of credit in the moment for how smartly they navigated the primary. When do we see the rise of the celebrity campaign manager in presidential elections? Is that 92 with Carville and Stephanopoulos? Does it predate that? I actually think it started with Teddy White's making of the president in 1960.

Not in the sense that these people became television celebrities, but if you read that book for the first time, regular people, unlike political pros, knew who Ted Sorensen wants, let's say. They knew who Larry O'Brien was. Certainly knew who Bobby Kennedy was as the campaign manager. But I do think that the, I want to think the search, if you go back to the book, The Selling of the President in 1968, Joe McGinnis' book, which took you behind the scenes at a different way, Roger Ailes became a notable figure. and certainly in 92, not just the campaign, but the subsequent movie,

The War Room, made Stephanopouls and Carville stars. These larger than life characters. So if anything changed, we just don't have to wait for the book. That process is already happening during the campaign because on television more, they're being talked about more, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's interesting because I don't know that people are at all aware of, say, Susie Wilds.

very little. Now she's clearly, from what I understand, the brains of the Trump campaign, not only the brains, but the non-ma, she's not really maga. She's much more grounded in reality. But I think she, she wisely has taken to heart. I think it's Franklin Roosevelt's line that staffers should have a passion for anonymity. and that's not exactly the case anywhere you can become a star you know you can tweet you can do all kinds of things right during the campaign MSNBC is Nicole Wallace they have Jen Cuske they have yeah these operatives who who and former office holders even who become stars Susie wiles who was Pat Summerall's daughter a fact that blows my mind every time I hear it she had like one Politico profile that was very in depth and then I believe she talked for. And that's, that's been about the extent of that. That field goal he kicked in the snow in 1958, get the giants in the NFL playoff and his championship. And that wasn't on TV.

It was a blackout back then. So I was listening to it on radio. Nobody knows how long that field goal was. It was too snowy. All right. When we corresponded, you said, wait a second. I'm going to come on a ringer podcast. I'm not going to talk about sports. Don't we want to talk about sports, to which I agree with the notion? You went to your first Yankee game in 1940. I did what do you remember about that oh man well first thing I remember is something that Billy Crystal channeled in one of in city slickers my dad and I go into the ballpark never been we're walking past a park with baseball fields I said dad is that where they play and he left said no no see that big gray concrete building

that's Yankee Stadium's they play indoors we walk in we walk out of the of the back of the stadium into the sunlight and then there is the green diamond and the blue skies. This is something that's city slickers of Philly Crystal. And that's it. I was hooked. The final score of that game was 20 to 2. The Yankees beat the St. Louis Browns.

I actually looked this game up or somebody when I mentioned it in a tweet sent it to me. At least two of the Yankee catchers were beaned. Joe DiMascio hit a ground rule, bases loaded, double into the left field bleachers. And my dad kept saying to me, this is not, this is really not the way this game usually goes. I thought about that the other day because the Yankees lost a game 17 to 5. But anyway, I was hooked and, you know, the stadium's been a part of my life, son's life, dad's life, my friend's lives.

It's a, it's a, I am still one of those people and my age probably explains it, for whom baseball is still the sport. And the Yankees won how many consecutive championships? Five. In your first years of watching the sport. Yeah, I started watching in 49. They won in 49, 50, 51, 52, 53. So you knew nothing but happiness.

No, I mean, I didn't know what the hell happened in 54. I mean, by then I was old enough. You know, the Yankees had a great year, but the Indians just had a better year. In fact, a bunch of friends and I went to the opening day, like, 1952. were three. This shows you what New York was like then. We were nine years old and we went by ourselves. And also it shows you that opening day, you could actually get general admission to walk up and get plenty of good seats to low ill. And they were, you know, they were hosting the World Series banner and I don't know, I don't can't remember if Manil was rookie at the year

the previous year. It was like, it was like rooting for, I understand why people back then said rooting for the Yankees was like rooting for U.S. Steel. But you know, U.S. are stealing so hot anymore and the Yankees haven't won since 2009. I believe that line is credited both Redsmith and Jim Murray, oddly enough. You also wrote me and said you witnessed the first Ali Frazier fight. Tell me your memories of that. That was the single most exciting event I've ever witnessed in my life. The buildup was, you know, Ali had been stripped of his championship. the Supreme Court ultimately said you had a right to an exemption

he sort of worked his way back I actually went to the lead-up fight I think he beat Oscar Bonavenda somebody like that but anyway so you got these two undefeated chance and because my one-time boss Dave Garth had political clout

was able to get tickets for several and we all went together and when the two fighters came to the center of the ring, there was this feral noise. I don't know how to describe it. It's beyond cheering. It was just this overwhelming sense of theater. Two people died that night of heart attacks in the garden.

Unbelievable. And yeah, you know, I've been to conventions and inaugural, and I saw Mandela's first speech as a free man. in South Africa. And these are pretty, but the sheer power of that event was pretty, well, obviously, unforgettable. Yeah. That's amazing. Where were you sitting? Pretty decent seats, not ringside, but, you know, close enough. Medium New York power broker seats. No, I think that's, I think that's right. Yeah. Jeff Greenfield, it's so much fun to talk to you. Thank you so much for coming on the press box.

Okay. Thank you. That is the press box. I'm Brian Curtis, but aren't you magic. As always, by Brian Waters. Thank you, Brian. All right, I am working on the July lineup of press box guests hosts, but I can reveal one. Next week, we're going to talk some more politics with Tim Miller. He is the host of the Bullwark podcast.

You see him on MSNBC. Tim has covered everything from politics to Clay Travis, which means he has pretty much covered the water from. Cannot wait to talk to Tim Miller next week. Then on Monday our old pal David Shoemaker returns to this podcast with more lukewarm takes about the media. Happy debate and have a great week.