The Press Box - Tweet Your Way Into the White House. Plus, BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer.

Episode Date: December 3, 2020

Neera Tanden was nominated to be Joe Biden’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, which led Bryan Curtis and David Shoemaker to discuss whether or not you can tweet your way into or out of the White House (3:25). Then, Listener Mail, where they answer the question, “Which three people would reassure you the most if they got vaccinated on live TV?” (26:45) Then, BuzzFeed’s Ruby Cramer joins to discuss what it was like covering the 2020 presidential campaign (43:00). Plus, the Overworked Twitter Joke of the Week and David Shoemaker Guesses the Strained-Pun Headline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

David, the film studio Warner Brothers is going to take all the movies they would have released in 2021, and they're going to release them on HBO Max, the streaming service, in addition to theaters. Of all the upcoming Warner Brothers films, which one are you most excited about watching with your family? Okay, I'm looking at this list right now. The Many Saints of Newark is the Sopranos prequel. What else do we have? Dune. What else?

Suicide Squad, the John Sina edition. Oh, man. Godzilla versus King Kong. And Space Jam 2. What am I missing here? Am I going to watch any of these? Oh, Matrix 4. Matrix 4.

Okay. I'm not seeing a whole lot that I'm eager to watch in any venue so far. I'm going to be honest. I got to be honest, too. I watched Dune, or I tried to watch the original Dune the other night, trying in vain to get hyped for this Dune. And, well, I had a good night's sleep. I can say that much.

I'm going to try again. I'll try again tonight. I don't know. I don't know. I mean, do you have an answer? Well, I'm sad to have miss. I have young kids like you do, and I'm sad to kind of have missed the theater-going era.

because right before the pandemic I took them to see Call of the Wild and by took them to see I mean showed up in a theater with tons of snacks hidden away in a bag so I could just feed them so they wouldn't get bored

during the movie it was incredibly fun yeah we had three seats together and they're crawling all over me and enjoying the movie and they still talk about the movie and now we can't go to the movies anymore

yeah that seemed like a cool family thing to do I think movies will still have their place I think that you know there's a, the theater, sorry, will still have their place. I think that people like you and me will still line up to see the event movies

in the theater, you know, an opening weekend, superheroes and space operas and whatever else. I think that as far as going out, I mean, taking your kids, I mean, listen, the kids aren't going to care about seeing something immediately, especially if it's available at home, but they probably will care about, like, hanging out with their parents or, you know, or dad and getting a lap full of popcorn and twizzlers and soda. I mean, that's always going to be

there, right? Yeah. And that's what parenting is, is forcing your kids to be into your obsessions. I don't know what the, there's no higher calling. I think that it's over. You know, maybe you won't be going to see the call of the wilds of the cinematic world in theaters anymore. But I think you can still drag your kid to see, you know, Star Wars 12 or whatever. Coming up on today's show, show, can you tweet your way into a job in the Biden administration? We'll answer your listener, mail plus BuzzFeed reporter Ruby Kramer. All that more on the press box, a part of the ringer podcast network. Hello, media consumers. Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker here.

David, I am fascinated by the story of Nira Tandon, who was nominated last week to be Joe Biden's director of the Office of Management and Budget. Tannen is very typical of the nominees we've seen put forward by Biden so far. She currently heads the think tank, the Center for American Progress. She's a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter and official. But last week, Tandon came under fire partly because of her tweets, tweets attacking people to the left of her. And though there is a lot of bad faith here, tweets attacking people to the right of her.

And it brings us to a very 2020 politics Twitter kind of question. can you tweet your way into or out of a job in the Biden administration? I'm fascinated by this as well. This is one of those things where, I mean, I guess in the spectrum of, well, people that we work with, I consider myself fairly detached from social media just before, as a point of reference, just before we started recording today, I opened up Twitter to make sure I wasn't missing some incredible news, and I spent about 10 minutes piecing together what all the tweets about movie theaters meant. And it's sort of an exercise where I don't actually, I will deliberately

not try to figure out the answer by going to the source. I see if I can suss it out. I had a similar experience when Nira Tandon was nominated. I did have the reaction. It was like, that's the name of a person I recognized from Twitter. I'm not sure if it's someone I recognize if I follow them or just someone I hear about on Twitter a lot. But the conversation online was immediately the sort of meta-conversation. Not, I missed, maybe I don't follow enough people who were actually outraged about this pick. I was only seeing people who were doing commentary on this hypothetical outrage. And then, of course, the Republican outrage that was, like you said, largely in bad faith, followed.

I saw that sort of happened in real time. but I was just sort of confused. I just sort of couldn't quite figure out what the stakes were when it came to near attend and having a job in the Biden administration. It reminded me a little of that national conversation we had more than a decade ago about how millennials would have trouble getting jobs because there would be pictures on Facebook of them partying and their old crotchety employers would look at those and get freaked out or something. did that never happen that had to happen right it might have it must have happened once because we we had enough think pieces about it but the near a tandon thing had a similar thing because i saw people like i think it was matthew glaci some other people playing like whew oh wow so so all these kind of rude tweets don't disqualify me from getting a job is that we move the window near a tandon can get a very big job in the biden administration what does that say about me but, you know, maybe the window already moved with Donald Trump, right? Because surely he raised the bar on what counts as a disqualifying tweet for any job you could possibly have.

Well, it's always a fine. I mean, let's separate politics. I mean, let's forget about politics for a second. Let's say you're hiring for a, you know, a job as a writer or an editor at a place like The Ringer. I mean, honest, this is, I'm not privy to a lot of these discussions or whatever, but certainly there is a degree to which you can be too, I don't even know if opinionated is the right word. Too much of a, you can be too extreme on Twitter to get a job, right?

I mean, you kind of disqualify yourself preemptively or otherwise. But I think that people give a lot of leeway. And again, separate from the political sphere, people will give a lot of leeway to someone who they think is just sort of misguided online. Uh, you know, something, someone who they might get, they have the impression that like, you know, a friendly conversation will cure the situation, right? And maybe we'll have to delete some tweets, uh, prior to the announcement. Um, but yeah, I mean, I think that, I think that rather than, you know, bad, whatever,

bad acting on social media becoming a disqualifier for certain jobs as was the fear 10 years ago, be it tweets or photos or whatever else, I think it's more of an indicator of negligence, right? That if, like, if you look at someone, rather than saying Chris Almeida has a point of view that, I'm not saying this because Chris is raising his hand to speak right now. Like, Chris Almeida has a point of view that I don't, I can't abide by here.

It's more like if Chris Amato was stupid enough to leave all those tweets up, then like I'm not going to risk working with this guy, right? Am I, am I feeling? What do you want to say, Chris? Well, I mean, part of this is all directional, right? Like, I feel like if Nera Tandon's crazy tweets were all about Joe Biden, then it might be a problem. But as like to my knowledge, none of them are. And I'm not sure how concerned Joe Biden is with her crazy tweets about Bernie Sanders or Mitch McConnell or, you know, random Rose Twitter egg.

Totally. And of course, part of the Twitter conversation is the lead up to this inevitable showdown between Biden and the left. That we all know is coming. They got buried to some extent because of the need to defeat Donald Trump. But Neeratannan is a person that the left was going to have issues with no matter how she acted on Twitter. This story came up back in 2008. This is from the New York Times. Fayez Shakir, who was then a journalist later a Bernie Sanders official, asked candidate Hillary Clinton a question.

about the Iraq war and Tandon either punched him according to one person in the room or pushed him after asking that question depending on who you believe and and a big part of this is he was a journalist at think progress which when near a Tandon was his boss right right like so that's that's a little not a typical workplace interaction perhaps but as the time Times notes, a lot of the Tandon stuff was manifested on Twitter. She tweeted to a pollster who was aligned with Bernie Sanders in 2018. You will not do to other Dems in 2020 what you did to Hillary in 2016. An army will rise up against this BS. Tweek Jill Stein on Twitter, which is probably fairly popular. Tandon also got into a whole back and forth about Hillary last year. And Hannah Gais, who is from the Southern Poverty Law Center, had to tweet at one point,

Nira, you're responding to a graduate student on Twitter at 1.40 a.m., which means you are very, very online. It is funny, David, how this also sort of channels with this whole idea about Joe Biden and Lefty Twitter generally. He has made it a point since the very beginning of his presidential campaign to just ignore anything that happens on Lefty Twitter. If they're mad at him, he just shrugs and goes, okay, I'm just going to do what I was going to do anyway. So, lefty Twitter being mad at Neurotan and vice versa, he's like, I'm just going to nominate her to this job like I was before. Well, I mean, and I think that it shows, I guess the limits.

I mean, this isn't the only way that's, that is evidence for this, but it shows the limits of the power of lefty Twitter or Twitter in general, right? I mean, I think a lot of this whole thing boils down to or could or can feasibly boil down to. Joe Biden's not reading these tweets. And unless it's something, unless it's something that rises to the level of, you know, someone going to him and saying, there's a problematic tweet that I think you need to see before you make this decision. And one would assume that would have to reach some sort of extreme, then like, it's really, there really is this sort of plausible deniability of like, well, I'm not looking at that. And she seems to be, she seems to be gainfully employed.

So what she does on Twitter is not really any, you know, it doesn't really bother me, right? I mean, couldn't, isn't that just sort of, when it's sort of Biden can can use the old guy defense. And it's probably true, you know, it's just, I just don't know about that. Why should I care? Well, it's a little bit of people noted the irony, too, of, you know, whenever the reporters would go up to Republicans in the halls of Congress, is that what is your reaction to Donald Trump's latest tweet? And they would have totally the same answer. I haven't seen Twitter today. I don't pay attention to Twitter.

It's like, well, that's how he is speaking to the country. Speaking of Republicans, David, near Tandon has also done battle with them on Twitter. This was a good rundown from Jim Newell and Slate. Tandon, quote, love the nickname Moscow Mitch when it applied to the Senate Majority Leader in 2019, a quote Voldemort whom she accused of, quote, fiddling while the markets burn.

She's described Maine Senator Susan Collins, a key swing vote on confirmations as, quote, the worst. Also, when Brett Kavanaugh was going to, coming for the Supreme Court, she labeled Collins, quote, the chief advocate for Judge Kavanaugh, offering a pathetically bad faith argument as cover for President Trump's vicious attacks on survivors of sexual assault. Oh, by the way, unless the Democrats win both of those Senate seats in Georgia,

Nira Tannen is going to need the vote of at least one or more Republicans to be confirmed for this job. So in terms of actual tangible... consequences of those tweets, I guess that might be somewhere on the list. I love the, I just want to spend one second on just the reciting the phrase the worst,

sort of without idiom, that this is free of context. It does sound bad when I, you're just like, well, according to, you know, David Jumeager's tweets,

Ryan Curtis is the worst, like literally the worst. He's just the worst thing, you know? Yeah, she was going to need, she's going to need some Republicans. And this gives

I mean, obviously, it does not need, we don't need to waste any breath saying. There's nothing that she's done on Twitter, even if taken, even if everything's taken literally or at face value or in the worst possible light that arises to the level of regular Donald Trump tweet. And the idea that anything she said on Twitter would be disqualifying to one of the Republican Congress people who is, who is just deflected or gone to bat for Trump time and time again is inane, right? But it's an interesting sort of case study in how artful this pivot is going to be for the Republican Party, right?

How are we going to recast everything that we've been doing for the past four years? How are we going to do a 180, but make it seem like we are people of principle? Yeah, and let us take a moment to just enjoy some of the quotes we've already seen from Republican senators about Nira Tandon's tweets. directly to your point. Susan Collins of Maine says to a pooler I did not know her much about her but I've heard she's a very prolific user of

Twitter dot dot dot I really don't have anything further to say. That is the extent she knows about her as a prolific user of Twitter. This is John Cornyn, Republican Senator from Texas. I think in light of her competitive and insulting comments about many members of the Senate, mainly

on our side of the aisle, that it creates certainly a problematic path. maybe his, meaning Biden's worst nominee so far. So wait, David, John Cornyn literally thinks she is the worst. Where does a prolific user of Twitter rank on just, on statements of fact about modern media usage, but ranked by insult, the level of insult, right? If I was just like, oh, man, Brian Curtis, well, how to say this, he spends a lot of time on Facebook.

All right? Like, presumably that's a worse insult than Twitter, right? Or if I was just like, Chris Omeda listens

to a lot of podcasts. Let me just leave it there. All right? I mean, when is, he's a prolific user of Twitter. Like,

is that, is that like a six on a one to 10 scale of implicit insult? I don't really know. Only in politics, would that truly be an insult in 2020?

Yeah. Yeah. Unless it's directly tied to someone not doing what they should be doing. Erica Servantes is wasting a lot of time on Twitch. She's been a lot of time on Twitter and not getting her job done. That's not true, by the way. Yeah. And on its own, it's a, it's a purely sort of, it's a jab more, it was more effective in the political sphere. Yeah. In Slate Jim Newell,

uh, it offers the preview of what we're going to get in the confirmation hearings where the Republican senator is going to have the blow up of the tweet that looks like the check you get for winning a golf tournament. Probably on an easel. or something. It's like, do you care to comment, Ms. Tandon, about this mean tweet where you called Mitch McConnell Voldemort? We're just going to read it right here. I happen to have it right here and ask you, can we put another tweet up where you called Susan Collins the worst? Could we show that to the chamber? That's going to be something. I can't wait. They should do that. I mean, doesn't, I think that that's sort of the point here, right? that like when you parse these things out,

and especially if you show them in context on giant blown up tweets, it loses all of its sting, right? I mean, it's like, it's, it's one thing to be like, she tweets mean things and she says, you kind of, you can bullet point to things and make them sound sort of bad,

but when you actually see the tweets, you force to recognize that these are tweets and nobody, nobody is going to get that, worked up about calling anyone the worst, especially when they're in the midst of doing something that you really disagree with. I do think the Trump part of this is really interesting, because there is going forward going to be these ways that Trump has permanently changed politics. Some senses Trump is going to be sui generis. He's going to go away. And what was quote unquote normal before him is going to

come back. But there's other ways, I think, and I don't, I don't even think it's crazy to think Twitter usage is is one of these, given just the weird way that politicians now perform on Twitter, that that's no longer going to be such a big deal. Do we think that's nuts that Trump just shifted the window on that a little bit, even if you don't tweet as crazily and nastily as Donald Trump does? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I didn't, I don't think, not to the extent that anything, you know, the worst examples of what he said are now acceptable, but I think just generally it's taken I mean, I actually think it's probably a pretty healthy correction, right? I mean, that we don't have to take everything so literally just because we're talking politics,

just because it's being repeated by an anchor or, you know, a reporter. If that's as far as it goes, I think there's certainly a healthy place that it could get to. But I, but it's not just Trump, right? I mean, Trump is sort of as, as much as he should not get a pass. he is sort of singular in a lot of ways, but there, but there are, I've been a lot of other politicians who have tried to be Trumpy on,

online and those people should still be policed, you know, in the past, but, but, I mean, police maybe is the wrong word, but I don't think we should just be,

you can't just roll your eyes when someone incites violence because of political reasons or, or, or, spreads falsehoods or anything else, you know? I mean, I think that we should,

we should, we should be on top of that, but just in terms of, you know, decorum. I mean, I'm not sure that I'm not, I, I think there is a positive spin. Yeah, I mean, I don't even know if it's positive or negative. I just think, yes, you're right. Like Trump level tweets should not be forgivable. But this whole idea that because you said something and you said it online, that, you know, sits in your resume or you're, you know, in quite the same way in politics,

I think that's probably changed. I do also think there's this point, and I'm totally setting up Almeida for one more go with this. Do we think the Republican bad faith embrace of Nira Tandon's tweets has obscured the actual critique there is to be made about Nera Tandon? Well, thank you for asking. Yeah, I mean, Nira Tandon is, I mean, she just kind of sucks in a lot of ways. I mean, she is very much like the embodiment of the like center corporate Democrat like swamp creature, right? Like she does like she runs a think tank that is like very much in, you know, funded by other governments, funded by all the big tech firms, funded by, you know, big banks, funded by big pharma. Like she has connections to all that is reasonably unapologetic about it.

is like pretty clearly you know everything she's doing is kind of Hillary centric and not really so ideological right I think the quote from her mom in like a Times piece two years ago was like she's loyal to Hillary because Hillary made her

and you know everything kind of stems from that right and so then you add on to that like the reason that she was trending at first was because you know lefty Twitter was angry because most of Biden's picks are going to be something like this, right? They're going to be relatively, you know, conventional Democrats with a lot of time in Washington, a lot of time in a lot of the organizations that leftists don't like. But when you add on top of that that she's just been personally insulting you and all of your friends for the last few years

are going to get mad about it, right? And when the nominee is, you know, It's not, you know, when we were talking about, oh, like, who are the Republicans going to get mad about in Joe Biden's cabinet? You were thinking, oh, what if they make Bernie Labor Secretary or Elizabeth Warren Treasury Secretary? And they're getting angry about this? Like, this would be like maybe the least objectionable person they were ever going to get from Joe Biden. Like, how much closer are you going to get to an actual Republican in this position? She hates Medicare for all. Like, you should love that, right?

Well, I guess that's an interesting question. And so let's spin that out. I mean, it is an interesting question. I guess in terms of what it means for what the, for sort of the Republican opposition moving forward. Separating out the bad faith commentary from the right. I mean, no one's actually offended by anything that she tweets or even if they are that there's no one would actually make it honest case that it's disqualifying. What is this is a signal that that they're willing to fight that it doesn't that they're going to they're they are, they are. going that they can that that they can stop a nomination or anything else if they just decide to is that what this brine what do you think is that is this just a is that is that all this is that is that all this is i think nomination fights are every tool at hand because if you can stop a new president's nominee for any reason you sort of damage the president a little bit right you tie it up we've seen we've seen examples of this right with stuff outside of politics and some weird thing and like you know you you you you you you've got

up the gears of the administration, even if it's somebody, as Chris says, that you ideologically probably have less of a problem with than just about anybody else on earth. So, yeah, I mean, I think that's what it is. And if it's tweets, it's tweets. And if it's some business deal, it's business deal. And you just, you just go with what you got. That's how these things work. I mean, it's also just kind of, that's all that they have left now, right? Like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz mostly just want to be like angry talk radio guys. And, you know, they're not going to really. have much of substance. So, like, this is what you would talk about on your radio show. Yeah. Please don't leave Josh Hawley out of that equation too. Don't deny him. His part in the bad

faith effort of Republicans at this time. All right, let's do the overwork Twitter joke of the week where we celebrate a gag that was so obvious that all of media Twitter made it at exactly the same time. Send your nominees to at the press box pod where they are always gratefully received. David, after a mishap while playing with his German Sherman Shepherd Major, Joe Biden suffered hairline fractures in his right foot, and he is wearing a walking boot. It was an overworked Twitter joke to write. Actually, it wasn't major. It was the ass kicking he gave Trump.

Thanks to Eben Anderson. This is a great example of what I call resistance dad humor. I saw this actually made by George Takai on Twitter. So that's that particular strain of, we got Trump. I don't have any reason to believe that story is not true, but it did occur to me when it came out that just like, if you introduce, if you broke your foot in some other embarrassing way,

a great cover for almost anything is I hurt myself, I broke my foot playing with my dog, because everybody loves dogs, everybody loves the idea that you're playing with your dog, and the overwork jokes are so easy that no one's going to waste any time trying to get to the bottom of it. They're just like, it's a, it sounds ridiculous, to hurt yourself playing with your dog.

So it couldn't possibly be anything worse than that, right? It's just, it's brilliant. It also, it's like I see dog Twitter all the time, right? Oh, look at this good boy. Look at this good boy. You're playing right to those people. Leftists or not. David, a tweet from the New York Post,

quote, trailer explodes outside Florida Walmart after Black Friday opening. Trailer explodes outside Florida Walmart. It was an overword Twitter joke to write. So was it a boy or a girl because of all those gender reveals? Thanks to John Gatz for that one. And finally, David, a big political story this week. Scott Atlas, Trump's controversial and underqualified coronavirus advisor, has left his position.

It was an overword Twitter joke to write, Atlas shoved. Atlas shoved. We would have also accepted Scott Atlas is quitting to spend more time with the virus. Thanks to a whole bunch of you who I'll thank on Twitter. If you've been holding on to those Ayn Rand puns for weeks, congrats. You made the overworked Twitter joke of the week. All right, David, time for the notebook dump. And let us do a little listener mail. I would first like to clean up something from last week's podcast. I said I bought a Boisenberry pie for Thanksgiving.

And I said that Bois and Berries were a Northwest U.S. thing. A bunch of people wrote it and said, actually, Brian, Boys and Berries are from Orange County. When you live, in my defense, I was thinking of Huckleberries. Huckleberries. But anyway, the pie was really, really good. Two-lister mail. Chad Orzel, David, directs us to this question that Dan Dresner, you know Dan Dresner, posed on Twitter. Name the three people who, if they got the coronavirus vaccine on live TV, would reassure you the most.

And I think the way Dresner means this is we're trying to convince the U.S. population right now to take this vaccine, if in fact it is as safe as we are led to blame. So we're trying to dissuade the skeptics, the vaccine skeptics. We're trying to get everybody on board. So who are the three people we need to do that? These are Dresner's picks just to get us started. Barack Obama Sean Hannity and Dolly Parton Yeah, that's the whole

the whole spectrum there It's pretty good, right? I like Dolly Parton I I don't know I think I would go I don't know I mean I think maybe I mean

the Barack Obama I mean, Sean Hannity feels a little bit on the nose. Barack Obama, maybe more so, but I don't know. He's too powerful. I feel like they could do it. Like, if there really were reason to be concerned, and I'm coming from a place where, like, I didn't get the question because I,

it would not really occur to me to be concerned about it. But I feel like if I'm going to be concerned, I'd probably be concerned that Barack Obama could somehow fake his injection if the whole point was just to get America to line up, right? I mean, I don't know. So, I go a little bit less. powerful, I think, is my point. Maybe, you know, LeBron James, although he might be able to, you know, his body could probably process a poisonous injection better than anybody else in the world. He'd be

back on the court in 15 minutes. But yeah. We are not saying, incidentally, listeners, that this is a poisonous injection. I want David to get lumped in with a dial. I'm just saying if it's supposed to make it's confident, you know, okay. I don't know. I don't know. Do you have any suggestions? What if Donald Trump gave the vaccine to Sean Hannity on the air? Oh, yeah. That's a good one. I mean, I think that kind of matters too, right? Can you see, like, Hannity taking off his sports coat and kind of rolling up the sleeves of his designer dress shirt and then Trump just plunges the needle in to his arm?

That's what they should do. It should be some double-blind thing where we get people that we, that represent an ideological spectrum and then have them bring people to inject. unbeknownst to the injectees, right? Like, it's going to be a random or a surprise person who gets shot by these people that we choose. I think that that's totally frightening, totally like Philip K. Dickian and exactly what I want to see on television.

Dolly Parton is so ingenious because Dolly Parton is one of the most universally beloved people on planet Earth. And she helped fund one of the coronavirus vaccines. And she was involved in the, this. So she should also just get to go first anyway. Like you, you right to the front of the line. All, by the way, all true country music superstars, not those fake people we see on these holiday specials, but the true country music superstar, you're in the first wave. We need

to protect our national treasures. This one, David, is from Eric Espig. Who is Joe Biden's first sit-down interview with after the inauguration? So Jake Tapper would have been a candidate here, but he's actually got Biden and Kamala Harris tonight. Tom Friedman, probably been another one on this list. He has Joe Biden already. Yeah, I saw that. So who do we see with like the White House sit down?

I mean, listen, there's certainly an argument for, you know, go kind of to do like a base interview first and then go big, you know, go broader immediately after that, right? Just to sort of like wink at your base by doing like Maddow on night one. the next morning on the Today Show or something. But I don't think there's any way. Biden's going to do that.

Yeah, he doesn't do winking at the base. No, not at all. I mean, who would be the best? I mean, I feel like we say Savannah Guthrie's name a lot on this show. She certainly established yourself on that, you know, during the campaign as that person. And has that spot. I mean, who would be that. That's kind of where my money is.

I feel like it's going to be a, I feel like, I feel like, I feel like, I'm, I'm, feeling morning show too. I mean, maybe it's Savannah Guthrie, you know, on Dateline or an NBC News special or something like that. But, um, I mean, what better way to say like, we're, we're, you know, jumping in feet first. We're already

working at this than to like do a morning show interview with Savannah Guthrie or like George Stephanopoulos on like day one of your new administration. Eric Espeg actually had a second question. Former Donald Trump lawyer, Sidney Powell, has threatened to release the crackin of

lawsuits to steal the election. And Eric asked, is there a Biden monster to counter the Kraken released by Republicans? Who is it? And what kind of monster is she slash he? Wait, is there another mythical monster

that the Democrats can release? Yes. Yes. Do we just want to list mythical monsters? I would love the Biden. You know this world better than I do, I think. Like the Manticore? No, that's not. If we want to go, okay, if we want to go illiterate, I mean, if we

if we want to, if we want to go with alliteration, I think it's either the Biden, wait, I have to regress into my teenage self. The first thing that came to mind was the Biden ballrog, although I think, is that the flaming thing from, from Lord of the Rings?

In the politest possible way, I'm going to tell you, I have no fucking idea. No, the, the, that, the, that, The answer is if I'm remembering it correctly would be the basilisk. I don't know what it is, but I remember it being scary

in Dungeons and Dragon. Oh, it was a Harry Potter too, I think. The Biden Basilisk is my final answer. Okay. Release the Basilisk, says Mark Elias,

whoever is representing the Democrats in these elections. This is from sports radio listener with the election over. How is your media diet changed? Ooh. I got to be honest. Post election, I've watched a lot more Fox News.

I've watched just some very occasional O-A-N, one American, I don't even know how you're supposed to talk about it. God bless you. And, you know, I found myself watching CNN and MSNBC in, like, very deliberate pieces. But, I mean, overall, I would say a lot less news viewing, but more relatively and just more in general, like right-wing conservative news, because I think the most interesting thing is how they're sort of spinning it

or handling it, reality being it. It has been so fun to withdraw a little bit from that world because I feel you and I have just been locked onto the political story of the day for a year and a half now. And I cannot tell you how fun it was this Monday morning to get up and read Peter King's column early in the morning. Oh my gosh. Something I really just haven't done in a long time.

And I was like, this feels so good. And yeah, we'll pay attention to the Biden nomination. Yeah, we'll still do stories about that and certainly media stories, but man, it feels good. I know it's my job as an NBA fan in the modern world, and you've written about this, to care more about free agency than the actual games. But the degree to which I care, I've cared more about the NBA in his last few weeks of free agency than I was when they were playing because it was going on at the same time as the campaign is pretty significant. I can just see a NBA news item and exhale. You know, just like I can, I can take it in

a little bit. I can actually spend a second thinking like, oh, I might have to do art for this piece. What will I do and not just have it all feel like sort of a minor piece of an avalanche? One other thing, though, about being able to take a step back. And I know Trump was out there being nutty today. But the degree to which he's been absent has played a huge role in this too, right? I mean, I said, when they announced that they started announcing

like how many, how many vaccines states are going to get over the past day or two. And they said something about the, with the hundreds of thousands that are going to be in New York by the middle of the month. I mean, just, it's shocking. I got to be honest.

My first reaction was like, if this had happened, a month ago or two months ago, Trump would probably have been reelected. But also, I think that part of what allowed me to feel that was that Trump's silence over the past several weeks has allowed me to forget how traumatic his presidency has been. Right?

I mean, we've said over and over again, just stop tweeting or like, just act like a president or act like whatever. I mean, just get out of your own way. And now he's out of his own way because he's like too embarrassed or shy or sad or whatever to really be in the public eye more. But I mean, honestly, it takes 72 hours

and I've, and the fear that the anxiety starts to drip away. It's unbelievable how effective it really would have been for him. You can see now just to stop. So, so weird. That absence is so, so weird. You're right. It is this kind of like after the fact experiment of what if Trump had been Trump, but just hadn't tweeted?

Because as we noted the other day, while he has been silent, he is trying to steal the election. It's in a way he is doing something absolutely crazy and undemocratic. He's just not being as loud and noisy in his normal way. And it's just, it is really, really weird. David, we got this from Bob Abyschola. We talk a lot about books on this pod. And I wanted to throw this one to you.

How often do celebrity blurb reviewers actually read the book? They're blurbing. Oh no Wait Is this a question Is this like what do we what do we think or are they asking for insight Well either way I guess I mean my my first reaction is

Most of the time Or I'm not going to say most of the time My first my gut reaction is You can often tell if you just Read between the lines a little bit right I mean a lot of times those celebrity reviews, celebrity blurbs, will not actually comment on the book, right? It's like if you sent, if Brian, if you wrote a book and got a blurb from me, I would probably, you know, I would probably

have read the book and be commenting on the book, but if you got a blurb from like President Barack Obama or, you know, someone else, it would probably be like, Brian Curtis is one of the great minds of his generation, right? It doesn't actually reference what's in the book. It doesn't, It doesn't make, but I do think there's a degree to which you can find out that way because, especially in this day and age, anybody in their right mind would be reluctant to sign off on something that they haven't read, right? I mean, it's, and so you'd want to be really clear about that. Now, having said that, I have first-hand experience on more than one occasion in dealing with very high-profile political figures, offices in negotiating book blurbs. that, oh, the author and the political figure are close or sympathetico, whoever's agreed to provide a blurb, and you know that you're just dealing with speechwriters or like top lieutenants in getting this blurb onto the book.

But, you know, politics is a little bit different because there's not a huge distance, there's not a bunch of distinction between a major political figure and their right-hand people, right? I mean, it's not like nothing that they say isn't really. written by those people. You know, I mean, there's very, there's, you know, it's not like that some mortal sin. Um, this is all a very long way to say. I think that, you know, I think that the people who get the most flack for over blurbing, Stephen King's a good example. Actually, I think

Stephen King reads every single thing that he believes. He might actually pull it off. I think that when you see a lot of people, you're taught, you're often talking about people who are just, you know, reading robots. Like they get, I mean, they, they, they, they, they, they're probably effusive about a lot of the things they read wherever they read it. It's mostly they've read it and they're being relatively honest about it. But you know, there's a lot of vagaries

out there. There's a lot of nobody can nobody can think about modern politics like Brian Curtis. Yeah, David Chewaker. Those are the ones that make me suspicious where it's about the person more than the book.

And of course it could be a person you like who has written a book that is just okay. So you're sort of way of around it is to just praise the person. I just suspect with celebrity blurbing, there's a lot of flipping that goes on. You have flipped the pages of the book. You have read maybe the first chapter. You've read what you think is the kind of thesis of the book so that you can talk about it,

right? So you can do it, which by the way is a lot of, as a lot of, is a way a lot of people read books. People do not, you know, typically read books page one to the end, right? They flip around, they try it out, they sample it. I bet there's a lot of that in blurb. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I do think that we're in it, whatever the answer was a year ago, there's probably a different

answer now because I think that there's a much higher price to pay for being attached to something that ends up being problematic in whatever way. This is from Sean Devine. We'll end here. After arriving home from a post- Thanksgiving road trip last night, I had a plate of delicious leftover mashed potatoes with. gravy. I was awoken at 2 a.m. by a strained pun thought loop as a sitcom punchline and I blame you, the old side still has it. We really infected people's minds that you would eat mashed potatoes and

then wake up and think the old side still has it. And I hope he had that kind of shit eating grin on his face, Sean, when he thought this like we do whenever we think we had a really good line. And then And of course, nobody thinks it was good except us, you know, that big pat yourself on the bag thing. We need to have something. Who wrote that in? Sean Devine. Sean Devine, we need to send him something. We need to have a thing that we can send the Sean Devines of the world.

If we can get like a tote bag made. I mean, honestly, Erica, we only need like six of them. So it's not like it's going to be a big expenditure. We should talk to somebody about someone who wakes up thinking about us deserve something, just to apologize. Our interview, David, is with one of our favorite political writers. Ruby Kramer of BuzzFeed does such interesting political stories and political profiles. We got into all kinds of things, and I really encourage you to listen to this one all the way to the end.

It's a great interview. Here's Ruby Kramer. All right, Ruby Kramer is one of our favorites. She's a political reporter at BuzzFeed, who has covered everything from Bernie for president to Hillary for president to Anthony Weiner for mayor and also some non-disastrous things too. She's here to talk about the 2020 campaign and some of her recent stories.

Thanks for coming on the press box, Ruby. Thank you so much. I was not expecting to hear the words, Anthony Weiner today. Well, that's amazing. You were on the campaign plane with Bernie Sanders this year

and Hillary Clinton four years ago. How would you describe the experience of being a reporter on one of those planes, for weeks and months on end? Well, they were both very different experiences in terms of living on planes. In 2016, I just have to say,

I literally gave up my apartment, put all my stuff in storage, boxed up everything, was effectively homeless and living in a hotel in Westchester, New York, for four months. So I, like, really went overboard there. Like, I just think,

I did the campaign trail thing, 110% and I loved it. I mean, it was, it's, you know, that was a dream. I was, I got as lucky as any person can get. And got to cover that whole thing, start to finish. But by the end, I was just like completely burnt out. And then this campaign was just, can we even call it a full campaign? I don't know.

But I was, like you said, I was doing the Bernie thing. everything seemed to be going full speed ahead. And then I remember the day of the Michigan primary, we got, and the whole thing got shut down. That was the first day that state started going into a form of lockdown and campaigning in person. As we know, it sort of went away.

This is in March. This is in March of this year, yeah. And you slowly see COVID going from something we're figuring out and is somewhere in the United States to, oh, wow, this is going to shut down American society. Yeah, it's kind of insane how little we really understood what was happening. Because I remember we were literally doing all of the things that public health officials said do not do. Like, we were, one, gathering in rooms with hundreds of, like, with tens of thousands of people. Two, talking to strangers.

That's literally our job as reporters. Three, traveling. We traveled everywhere in the weeks. before Super Tuesday. I think we were like in seven states in one, you know, 48 hour period one day, including like every, every hot spot you could find. We were there. We were in California. We were in Seattle. It was like the idea that we did this and no one said stop was so insane in retrospect. It was it, I mean, it was, it was, it was, we were really, we were really lucky no one got COVID truly. And it was before the days of like contract tracing. So you know, who,

knows if someone at one of those rallies ended up getting sick. But I mean, it was it's, it's almost a joke what we were doing in that like two, three week period. Do you remember when it became the number one issue on the campaign? Do you remember when like the story sort of flipped? It's like, oh, wait, this is now kind of about COVID as much as it's about anything else? It was weird actually because it all happened at once. And when I say it, it, I mean the end of the primary, the end of in-person campaigning, Bernie coming to grips with the fact that he was not going to be the nominee, that his path was effectively non-existent.

And also the fact that the campaign was over, like physically we could not travel. It literally, that I remember it hitting in this really strange way, literally all on the same day, as I was, you know, like up until 5 a.m. trying to file a story. And it was just, you know, it was really bizarre how it kind of all got conflated. And I thought a lot as I do about, you know, what, like how Bernie Sanders was processing that. Like, was it mixed up in his mind too? And I can't imagine a world in which it wasn't just because of what had happened. And also, I think for him, and I don't know if you want to get into this, how quickly he, how quickly his sort of chances at actually becoming the nominee went from like significant to zero in a week. And that was sort of this like absolutely bewildering series of events in which Pete Buttigieg drops out. Amy Klobuchar drops out.

People are flying to Dallas to endorse Biden, like literally redirecting planes in the air. People are tracking flights to like try to figure out who's going to endorse you. And it was over. You know, so I think the whole thing was really just this insane turn of events. And it was kind of like kind of messed with your head a little bit. It was a little crazy making. So you come off the road as a reporter and then what is the next campaign event you actually cover in person? The next campaign event I covered in person was a trip to Wilmington, Delaware in August to cover the virtual Democratic National Convention.

at which Joe Biden accepted a nomination, basically via Zoom. So this is March to August. You were off the road. So this is March to August. This is early March to late August. Yes. So how many months is that for? Yeah.

We're not good at math, but April, May, June, July, five months. Five months. Thank you. So, yeah, that was five months. No. And there was not a lot going on in those five months. I've been asking a lot of people about. about this, but what do you lose when you're not at rallies on a plane with a candidate at all times?

It's funny. I've thought a lot about this. And I think the question is a little disturbing to me, because it's such a hard thing to describe, and it makes you realize how much of our American election system and the way that we cover it as this sort of like two-year-long absolute circus slash horse race slash competition slash like play by play, you know, all the sports metaphors you want, is kind of this just really hard to describe construct almost that like when there's no one around to like see it happening, like does it really exist? I don't know. I mean, this is like what I thought about in my like five months alone in New York City. But but I think there's a sense in which, you know, the whole spectacle of it is sort of there for, who is it there for? Like, what are all these events

are they for the people who come out to attend them? Like, are they for the cable news outlets that, you know, cover them live and like need literally like so much, like think about how much material CNN and MSNBC need to just literally fill a day? Like, are they for voters who are making up their mind, like, were there undecided voters in 2020? Like, I don't, these are questions I just, I think they're totally open. But I think in terms of the actual quality of what's missing, like, I hope that I don't sound like I think the whole process of campaign reporting is like not worthwhile because I actually desperately miss it and think it's like the most important part of the job,

because otherwise what you are kind of left with is like polls and, like the worst of the horse race stuff which is just terrible and makes you kind of want to like sink into a hole and never come out. But I think the best example I can give of what's missing is that week that I was talking about where everyone was dropping out

and we were on the road with Bernie and you could see him losing but like it was happening so fast that you were kind of like a pace or two behind. Like you could see what was happening but not really. And I remember the day that we, the day after Amy and Pete had dropped out

I think was also the day that Harry Reid endorsed Biden. And it was just clear at that point that, okay, Biden had one South Carolina by a huge margin. All these people were lining up behind him. And Bernie Sanders was never going to be able to survive a two-person race on Super Tuesday. And we landed in Utah at Salt Lake City to do a rally. And I remember getting off the bus and kind of having this all sink in. And the Harry Reid news had just hit. And this really mattered because Harry Reid was someone who a lot of Bernie Staffords had worked for and they cared a lot about him.

And I got off the bus and I saw one of Bernie's very senior, senior people just shaking, physically shaking from like anxiety, sadness, nerves, kind of like not being, like I could see he was just and he, I tried to actually go up to him and he just. And it was just kind of this like really visceral. moment where I was like, oh my God, they're real, like, it is, I'm literally watching someone process like the end of this campaign. And so I think you miss that. Like, I think that's the kind of thing that you miss. And I don't know if there's a word for that, but I know it has to do with the human element of what's involved here. And I think that is the most important element of campaign coverage. You mentioned this to New York Times. You said, I don't know what Joe Biden's days are like. What that looks like feels like sounds like. And even in all the after action pieces I read about

the campaign. I feel I still don't know. And I know that's maybe a combination of the discretion of the Biden team. But we just didn't see him for so long that I don't really feel I have a sense of this. Let's talk about champ and major. Those two giant, like, this is to my point, I think. This is very important. We know Joe Biden is in a boot, a walking boot, because he was, quote, playing with his dog Major, who is a absolutely giant German Shepherd, like Champ, his other dog, also a giant German Shepherd. And like, whatever, they got in the, they were playing and Biden, like, fractured his part of his ankle or something like that.

I want to know what happened. Like, I want the play by play of, like, how was Biden playing with Major? Who went after who? Like, how, what was, like, I want the granular TikTok of this, like, play date between, I want to know what went down between Biden and Major. And I'm not saying like we should be living in the house with Biden and see every move and like see him getting up for breakfast. I just want that sense of like, who are these people?

What are their lives like? And I'm sorry, I think if a candidate ends up in a walking boot. Like I kind of want to know a little bit more. I don't mean it. And like he's hiding something about his health way. I just want to know what his like, I just want to know more. And I agree with you. I still feel like I don't really know how that campaign worked in the most fundamental way you could possibly ever know how any campaign works, which is knowing what's going on with the candidate and how he feels about XYZ.

Totally. And without him just standing at a rally 10 times a week, even if those are made for cable news, TV events, you just literally can't see Joe Biden. Right. And it's funny, I was reading that. He just gave his first interview to Thomas Friedman, which was like all about the very important policy things and stuff like that. But in the column, I think there's this line that's like, you know, I did ask him one personal question. And it's like, okay, why is it bad to ask personal questions? Is it, is that what's being implied here? Like, I know that there are very substantial things that need to be addressed and that they will affect the lives of millions of people. And we need, you know, we need to understand where our foreign policy is headed and all that. But like, I maybe ask Biden three personal questions. Like maybe ask four too. Like I'm sure you could keep him on the phone. Like he's not like he's not going to keep talking. You know what I'm saying? Totally. I will trade two globalism questions for two questions about how Joe Biden actually feels and process the events of 2020 as a person. In fact, I'll trade pretty much all the

globalism questions. Throw one in, I guess. Thank you. I don't know if this works as an analogy, but so you and I sometimes get assigned pieces to do, and the subject will not talk to us. So we have to do what's called a write-around. And, you know, a write-around is interesting, right? Because you don't have the immediate tools of journalism in front of you, but sometimes that makes you work even harder.

It makes you more clever because you're pressed into doing, you know, just doing things you wouldn't maybe normally do if you got an interview. I feel like the whole 2020 campaign in a way is a real. right around. And so we didn't have the raw tools, but in a way, everybody was very clever, right? They had to write something. They couldn't just go to the boss and say, sorry, I don't have anything this month. And, you know, in a way, maybe we all, I won't say, we, you guys all got pressed into service and in different ways and came up with interesting stuff. Yeah, I think that's so true about the write around. It's funny. I know there's this whole, you know, debate around access and

what it means to have access to a politician versus like this concept of access journalism, which is felt to be inherently bad in the eyes of some people. I think that whole debate is such a trap and such a kind of like insidious reduction of what we try to do as journalists. But I do think that in the, you know, in the absence of an actual campaign, for a while, there were just not stories being written. I mean, and of course, you know, there was more important story out there. The presidential election was not the most important story this year, which is kind of a remarkable fact. It was COVID.

It was, you know, the 250,000 plus people who have died. It was the state's handling of that. And so it felt like for a while, like there was no campaign at all. And I don't think that had to do with Joe Biden. his basement, I just think that it had to do with the reality of what was happening. I think that for me, at least, I ended up doing stories that I never thought that I would. I mean, the Herman Kane incident where he passed away after attending a Tulsa rally, the Tulsa rally, I'm sorry, where President Trump kind of insisted on doing that first rally as sort of a big reset.

And, you know, fewer than fewer people showed up than he had anticipated and was sort of a big mess and blah, you know, and we know the rest. But like the footnote of that was that someone, Herman Gane, a person, a person who was a frontrunner in his party in a very important part of his party literally died. And the only thing that people cared about was the fact that, you know, his Twitter account was still tweeting from beyond the grave. And I just found that. I was like that was something I was so drawn to because it felt to me to epitomize so much of what was happening. That was kind of unreal and kind of grotesque about this election because it was not like, that wasn't a campaign story. But it had to do with the election in President Trump. and it had to do with us.

And, you know, I found that to be sort of like a very unusual window that, of obviously, of course, you know, we would have never gotten in another year. I mean, that's a simple way of putting it. But I hope that makes a little bit of sense. Yeah. I want to ask you about that story. She wrote that with Rosie Gray. People don't remember Herman Kane.

He's with this very successful business executive. He runs her president in 2012 and has some success. success is this outsider candidate. He goes, as you mentioned, to this infamous Trump Tulsa rally on June 20th. And then what happens? And so, first, let me say, yes, Rosie is incredible. And I wish she were here with me to talk about this because we had a lot of fun working on it. Well, fun's on the right word.

But it was nice to work with her again. So he goes to the Tulsa rally. He comes home. The next Sunday is Father's. day. He sees his daughter, Melanie, she drops off a gift. She goes home. Herman Kane comes to work the next Monday where he works in his small office outside Atlanta with his daughter, Melanie, filming this daily Herman Kane show that's hosted basically on Facebook. And by Friday, they are both feeling really sick, not a fever, just really out of it, like kind of almost

with symptoms that they don't really recognize, but again, they didn't have a fever, so it wasn't like necessarily the textbook situation that you would have expected and known to think COVID. By, I think by that weekend, they were so concerned that they both went to get tested. And waiting in line to get tested, Herman Kane was like basically two weak to stand, passed out in the parking lot by the car, paramedics rushed to the scene and he ended up in the hospital. And what was really sad about the entire story and we were really lucky to be able to actually speak to Melanie, which was not easy initially because she understandably was very wary of talking to anyone about this, was that he was in the hospital for three weeks, for most of

which time he was on a ventilator. And what I didn't realize, which is very common, is that the hospital didn't let the family come at all. And so he was there completely alone. And it was only when things were so bad that he was about to pass away that the hospital allowed the family to come. And by the time they already, you know, by the time they got there, he was already gone pretty much. So it was a very sad story. And a couple of things you guys established in this piece is one is we don't know whether Herman Kane contracted COVID at this rally in Tulsa or not. Is that correct? That's correct. The family does not know the family has said you know he was wearing a mask for part of you know for for

most of the time that he was at the rally but he did remove it for photos and there you can see photos where he's posing he has the mask pulled down underneath his chin as if for the posing of the photo um Melanie his daughter basically said listen I get why people are upset I get that people want to you know made fun of him for not wearing a mask and blah, blah, blah. He should have worn a mask the entire time. But the fact is, we just don't know where he got this. He had been traveling quite a bit in the lead up to the Tulsa Rally.

What was interesting about Kane and the way his story got sort of reduced, like, you know, was shrunk down and sort of like distorted in this fun house mirror of political journalism, is that he was not a COVID skeptic at all. he was constantly talking in that daily Facebook show I mentioned about wiping down surfaces and wearing masks and keeping social distance. And he kept saying CDC guidelines, CDC guidelines every episode he would open with a reminder about the guidelines. And his wife, Gloria, had a preexisting condition.

So she was really concerned the entire time about COVID. So this was a family that was attuned to it and aware of it and followed CDC guidelines for the most part from what we understand. But then he dies and everybody on Twitter jumps in because it's this sort of, you know, they see it as this political allegory and this statement about Donald Trump and about denialism and Republicans and all that stuff. And even Trump, you quote in this saying, unfortunately he passed away from a thing called the China virus. So even Trump is politicizing it in his own very sort of particular way. Yeah, exactly. Another note you guys said that thought was so interesting is in what way did Herman Kane anticipate?

part of the appeal, do you think, or the campaign of Donald Trump? I think that he was a person who could feel the restraints of our idea of what we think a politician could be, thought those restraints in that mold was absolutely ridiculous, and he wasn't going to do it. And he wanted to talk the way he was going to talk. He wanted to campaign the way that he was going to campaign. and I think he really enjoyed messing with people's expectations and bucking the political orthodoxy. And I think for him the story, and I don't know, you know,

who knows if it played out exactly this way, but we know that his self-identification as a Republican in the way that he would explain it to people, was it originated when someone, he heard someone coming out of a restaurant and saying, I've never seen a black Republican in my life or something like that. And Hermann heard this remark from a stranger,

like kind of just like passing by. He was like, you've never seen one? Like, okay. And like, register the next day. And again, you know, who knows what actually played out? But I think that tells you something about what his idea of what he enjoyed so much about, where he saw his place in politics.

And I think Donald Trump kind of followed that in a lot of ways. You quote Kane saying he was a leader, not a reader, like a reader of policy, which would really be a Donald Trump motto all the way down to the daily briefing that he gets. Yes. Yes, right. There are definitely some bad and in some cases insidious things about this for sure. I want to ask about your dad, Richard Ben Kramer. He wrote What It Takes, an amazing book about the 1988 presidential campaign that you listeners have seen every single political reporter tweet about and not just this year.

But it had particular resonance this year because one of the portraits in that book is of a 44-year-old Joe Biden who was running his very first of three presidential campaigns. You tweeted, my dad who wrote beautifully, more beautifully about, Joe Biden, the candidate of the man that anyone has or will, I really wish he had been able to see tonight. That was back when Biden was declared the winner. What do you think your dad would have made of Biden's 2020 campaign having seen him at that moment in time? I think my dad would have been delighted and just amused by this entire thing. I think that he would have found, I think that he would have been thinking back to,

the 1988 brain aneurism that Biden had that almost killed him. And he spent nine hours on the operating table. And this is a scene in the book that is just detailed with like insane granular detail. Like basically my dad was not only in the hospital with Biden, which he wasn't. He was like inside Biden's brain while the surgeon is like digging around. So, but by. and woke up from that surgery and, you know, not only lived, but had no brain damage. And it was, the first thing that he felt in that moment was that he understood why he had done so poorly in the

1988 campaign, a thing that had sort of confounded and upset him and, you know, put him down in the dumps. And if he had been still campaigning that February 1988 on the campaign trail, if he had been in New Hampshire, he would not have come home to have that surgery. He would not have been in a position to be at Walter Reed and he would have died. And he woke up and that was the first thing that he thought of. Now I know why I lost the campaign. And this is a person who, you know, believes in fate, believes in destiny. And I think that my dad would have been thinking back to that

because I think that he in the book lays out this, I don't know, it almost it presage this sort of strange twists and turns and you know kind of tragedy-filled path that Joe Biden took to become president at 77 at this time of totally, that is totally unprecedented in ways that we could have never imagined like four years ago

and I think he just would have been delighted for him. I mean, he loved Joe Biden. And he may know he loved all of them, all of the characters and what it takes. and there was nothing wrong with that. I mean, he never, he, I remember growing up, and they were basically like characters in my life too. So I was, I was very, I was unexpectedly emotional that night

because I was really wishing that. I felt, I felt, I was upset that I was seeing it, and he was not. When you say characters in life, you mean your dad talking about them or how so? Yeah, I, um, we, He, you know, by the time I was born, he had already, what it takes was already done. And he was working on his biography of Joe DiMaggio. So I actually remember kind of growing up more with those characters and him reading me passages

from the drafts that he was working on about like Marilyn Monroe and DiMaggio and San Francisco and all that stuff. But it's, it was like as if I was just kind of like born into this household where Gary Hart and Bush and all these people were just like people I, they weren't people I knew, but they were people I felt like I knew. We had two cats named Bopster and Poppy, Bopster after Bob Dole, Poppy after H.W. And Bopster was the smart one in the house.

And Poppy was a little bit stupid. And this was never, yeah. You know, it was just, it was just part of, it was part of my life. And it was, it's funny because, you know, I think about all those characters. and I think about how my dad talked about Gary Hart, who he really liked,

and George W. Bush was a great source of his. But of all the sort of people that I was aware of, Biden was different because he was less of a character that I was aware of or someone, you know, who had a pet named after. He was an active, he felt to be an active part of my dad's life. And, you know, I would hear things that be, you know, he would call about his plans or an idea or something.

There was always, but it just, it wasn't like he was a character to me that was sort of part of a book that was on a shelf. He was still like living his life and had this whole career ahead of him. And I was kind of aware that my dad had helped shape not just the public understanding of Biden, but Biden's understanding of himself. And I always felt that they had seen something in each other and felt seen by each other and were similar in certain ways that always really interested me. And when Biden ran again in 2019, I was like, oh, man, I don't know if I didn't handle this. It was just going to. But yeah, I've been muddling my way through a lot of thoughts about that. You led me right to my next question because I was wondering, did your dad's, did you see your dad's portrait of Biden become part of Joe Biden's self portrait that he was offering to voters on the stump?

I did. Yeah, I did. It's funny. I think for the, first of all, I just want to make really clear, I'm like immensely proud that my dad is such an important figure in political journalism. It has meant something to so many journalists, met something to the people that he wrote about. I really, I'm like, it's something I'm insanely proud of, but it's always, been something that I have been really private about because I'm, you know, very aware of the fact

that I'm trying to be my own writer, find my own voice. And I spent, I think, the first, you know, like 10 years of my, like, adult career trying to, trying to figure out who I was. And I sort of as a rule, would never bring up my father. I would never talk about what it takes. I was sort of very aware when, you know, after he died, that all these other journalists were paying tribute to him. And I thought that was lovely, but there was also a part of me that felt like I couldn't do that same thing because I was just still sort of, I don't know, I felt really, obviously felt conflicted by it, but I also felt really unsure of how to talk about it in public. So when Biden ran again and what it takes was always cited.

and read aloud on TV. And Biden has talked to certain interviews, interviewers about it. He spoke with Evan Osnos about it in The New Yorker and one of the profiles that he did. It was always this weird mix for me because I felt like here was this thing that everyone was talking about.

And some people were actually talking with Biden about it and I'd never spoke about it. So when I tweeted that tweet on election night or what was the night that Joe Biden was declared victory, I felt like I was very happy to be able to say, like, I really wish my dad had been able to see this. And sorry, that didn't answer your question, but I'm very aware of the ways in which the book has shaped everyone's understanding of Biden and including my own. And I'm, I think that what Biden said in an interview or sorry, my dad, said once in an interview that Biden once said to him after reading the book, is that how

people see me? And I think that was a really humble statement question. And I think it's a, it's a question that we can all relate to because, you know, your perception of self is something that you kind of like can sometimes really be blind. You know, I don't know, you can really, it's a thing that is always changing and that you are always kind of working through. And I think politicians have to do that on a public stage. And I found, like I said, that question to be a really humble one and a really interesting one. So awesome. You can read Ruby Kramer's political stories at BuzzFeed. She's at Ruby Kramer on Twitter. And she's so nice to be here and talk about all this stuff. Thanks for coming on the press box, Ruby. Thank you so much. All right. It's time for David Schuemaker. Guess is the strange.

pun headline. Woo-hoo. Monday's headline about military lawyers was Jag of all trades master of none. Today's headline comes from Big T.

It's from the New York Post. David, if you want to go see the famous tree at Rockefeller Center this year, there are a number of coronavirus related restrictions. You've got to fight through. You've got to sign up online

to see the tree. They only let so many people see the tree at one time. And apparently there's a time limit upon which you can see the tree. Okay. Now the post not surprisingly sees this as an infringement on freedom. And more to the point, not in the Christmas spirit. What was the New York Post's strained pun headline? This is very strained.

You said it's a, wait, what was the last thing you said? You said it's a... Not in the Christmas spirit. So if we were looking for phrases that would be against the Christmas spirit, we would say? Bah humbug? Okay. Freeze right there. Now how can you pun that up for me?

I love when you walk me and walk me through these things. Bah This is a tree-related word. Not Baw humbug, bud. Bow, bow, bow. You got it.

Bow humbug. It is the word you might not think about it on a daily basis, unless you are singing your children to sleep. He is David Shoemaker. I'm Brian Curtis. Research by Chris Almeida, production magic by Erica Servantes. On Monday, David,

Michael Smith is going to be here. Michael Smith used to work for ESPN. Now has a new show over on Peacock Brother from another. sure to be an interesting conversation. We should also take a moment to thank all the people who have tweeted at us over the last couple of days. Because Spotify did this thing where you can pick which podcast or it shows you which podcast you listen to the most of. Dude, you will never believe how many hours are listeners who do not have a collective name have spent listening to the press box. I am talking dozens.

I am talking over a hundred hours in some cases. of press box listenership and I tried to write all of them back that I could I said almost exactly what you said a minute ago if we had swag I would give it to them

if we had anything I would give it to them but I think a collective thank you for me and David for listening to this pod as much as you have that is that was that was very that was incredibly flattering

and almost like stunning to see all this tweet all right back Monday with more lukewarm takes about to be you that, David. See you later, Brian.