The Ricochet Podcast - An Enema Election

Episode Date: August 23, 2024

The Democratic National Convention Dance Party has come to a close. Now that they’ve had time to overcome the disappointment that Beyonce didn’t show, Steve, James, and Rob are left wondering: can the left pull off the continuity/new path forward message they’ve settled on?Plus, with Rob back, we’re treated to a story about his attempt to win the ’92 election with the help of Murphy Brown and Rush Limbaugh; along with a few tips on making it out of the Amazon fully intact.

I want to scope out sites for the Trump Hotel for after we buy Greenland from Denmark. Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Stephen Hayward, myself, James Lilacs, and who's back from Peru? Why, that'd be Rob Long. So let's have ourselves a podcast. It doesn't help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown,

a character who supposedly epitomizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing the child alone and calling it just another lifestyle choice. on the national stage, with our governor being the veep and the speech, and here to discuss the rest of the convention, perhaps, and more interestingly, what the rest of the campaign might bring, is Stephen Hayward in California, and Rob Long, back from pilgrimage to Machu Picchu, or Picho, or Machu Grande. It was not even Machu Picchu, it was the Amazon, actually. The Amazon he went to.

Yeah, he didn't get to the mountains. Well, hold on a second, I thought you went to Peru. You were telling me there's Amazon in Peru? There's Amazon everywhere. James, the Amazon is a very long river. That's all I could tell you. Well, at the end of the podcast, we'll tell what Rob learned, in addition to the various tropical diseases that he picked up,

Teddy Roosevelt style. But for now, let's get to the meat of the gist, the pith, the marrow of the matter. You guys watched or didn't, or read read the commentary or saw the snippets. Takeaways. Stephen. I actually watched an awful lot of the convention. I usually don't.

I knew you would. Yeah, I find them kind of tedious and wrote and all the rest of that. I thought, again, just sort of analytically, they had a pretty good convention. I thought nights two and three were better than the last night. They had more energy to them and laid out more ideas. I thought Harrison, her speech was not bad. I mean, how do we judge her? We judge her on whether she's going to start cackling or go off script and say something crazy.

But she delivered it well, and I thought there were three interesting takeaways from it. One is she, after doing a lot of biography, which kind of bored me, but I understand that's now the mode for these people. She did say three things that were interesting. One is she built up to a crescendo where on abortion, now she mischaracterized Trump and Republicans, but that's par for the course. But she said, they have lost their minds. And she said that loudly and forcefully, and the audience went nuts. And I thought that sort of landed a blow, even though it's a low blow. She said, Trump is an unserious person, but it would be serious to put him back in the White House.

I thought that was a good line, again, from what works in partisan rhetoric. Because I actually think Trump comes across as unserious, I mean, for all the reasons that Rob and other critics have talked about forever. But I think he is actually a pretty serious person in ways that deeply threaten the establishment. If I can stop you right there, how can he be simultaneously unserious and an authoritarian threat that will demolish democracy? Exactly.

Exactly. You know, that's right. Your third point. The third point is she took on the Israelrael question which i thought she'd simply avoid she said israel has a right to exist uh and she said in the active voice and will support them in other words uh nobody mentioned israel in the whole convention up to that point with the partial exception of the the hostage family that appeared on the third night to say we want our hostage family members out. And I think the fear was that there was going to be a demonstration or booing

from the floor of the convention. And instead, they weren't going to boo Kamala Harris. But then she said, we want to have a ceasefire and get the hostages out of Gaza. And so she tried to give a bone to the pro-Hamas Democrats. But I was surprised she went there at all. And I suppose to say, we should say good for her. Rob? Yeah, I mean, I think a couple things are happening. One, I think that there's, here's just a secular view of this convention, right? This convention shows a new way of doing these conventions, right? So we had a 2020, we had no conventions basically and they're all weird and they're kind of crazy like those conventions were bananas like remember

biden in the cars or um i don't know who's a don jr's new wife screaming whatever her name was like just crazy stuff this one these two conventions were traditional but i think that the democrats have reinvented it in a way that's really interesting. For one thing, everyone in the news was talking about how all these things went on too long, they went on too long, they went on too long. But they didn't really, because 20 million people watched it last night, but those are 20 million

people, except for Steve, who are, this is fan service. They want to see their guy speak. The rest of it's going to be split up and chopped up and sent out in sound bites and video bites across social media for the next month you know basically this is a content farm for them in a way that no convention before now has really been so that's sort of interesting and i think that's going to be probably the way these things are going to go from now on even if even if she's unsuccessful, even if she doesn't win, it felt like, okay, this is a new way of looking

at these events. Even things like the roll call, right, the DNC roll call, which people loved or hated or whatever they thought. The point of the roll call is that that little roll call snippet, which used to be, I mean, it was one of my favorite parts of all these conventions, you know, the guy in the funny hat saying, Idaho,

the potato state, all that stuff. Now it's going to be split up and it can be targeted facebook tiktok instagram however you want to target it to people who live in that area it's a boost it's a local booster pride thing and i guarantee you in 2028 we're going to see both these parties do this if both these parties exist in 2028 i hope they don't but if they do um whoever's having a convention this will be the convention so i think that's like the secular thing is like okay we've seen some new stuff the second thing i think is new here is that um for better for worse um there was no primary, Democratic primary, effectively. And if you're a donor to these things, or you're a strategist to these things,

you're wondering why we spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars running primaries that start, you know, the 2028 presidential primary is going to start in january of 2025 basically right and these things start so soon why do we we may not need to do that um this was a pretty good convention it didn't look like they threw it together it didn't look like they put it all together at the last minute it looked like this thing had been planned it looked like there was a plan behind it which i mean i don't know that would be surprising for the democratic party right you have to have an actual organized convention but so i mean so that those are my secular takeaways that i think that we're looking at a new way of doing these things and um and then

my more political pundit takeaway is that is essentially the message that in a crazy way kamala harris is getting away with. Change versus more of the same. And change versus more of the same is a winning American political argument. Mostly. Except she's on two sides of that argument. She's supposed to be the beauty of it. Right. I mean, you mentioned, Rob, that, gosh, this looks like it was planned. One little detail that I found amusing is that the Democratic platform in several places referred to Joe Biden's second term.

They didn't go back and edit that. Right. To reflect the updated news. One other detail that I'm sure James noticed, they made a big deal about having mobile clinics outside the convention hall to provide abortions and vasectomies. And they were apparently fully booked. I am wondering how soon, maybe the next convention four years from now, Democrats will also offer, and I'm not entirely joking here, assisted suicide vans. It seems to me that's the next logical step in the sort of Democrats' ethos about these things. Only if you are able to cast your vote before you go in. Correct. So they can extend the voting cast your vote before you go in.

So they can extend the voting period where you can get that in. I mean, I think they'll have those outside the Republican convention. Well, I was looking at what Barack Obama was saying, looking at it, not listening to it. He's a good speaker. And everybody loves him and has a great swelling of the breast when he speaks. But it was very, it's the rhetoric is not surprising. It's normal. But one of our commentators, contributors at Ricochet, Dr. Bastiat, was noting

that, quoting actually Scott Johnson, so this is going back like three different levels, said that Barack Obama said we have a broader idea of freedom than the right. So we're casting the Democrats now as the party of freedom, liberation, right? We believe in the freedom to provide for your family if you're willing to work hard. Okay. And the right does not, apparently so, since he's making the distinction. The freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water. Well, well, well, well, well. I mean, if you want to be one of those guys, you can say, actually, these are not rights.

They're not rights, you know, because it's not in the Constitution. It's not a right. It's a good thing. But the left often conflates good things with rights. If something is good, then it ought to be a right. But the way these things are phrased is typical, and they get away with it all the time, and I suppose the right does in its own way, too. But to say that, well, we believe in the freedom to drink clean water and breathe clean air, when actually sometimes how this manifests itself in the last 20, 30 years is saying,

we're going to make an incremental diminution of the amount of particulates in the air here, and it will have virtually no impact whatsoever on public health, but it will cost billions of dollars in compliance. But we're going to do it because we're the EPA, and we've solved all the big things. Now we're just cleaning up the little ones. And since we're pre-Chevron, we can do what we want. And if you object to any of those things, you are objecting to the very notion of clean air and clean water, and you want to pitch this country back to a place when arsenic is pumped into the rivers, which is set on fire, and great smokestacks belch out asbestos

to blanket the country. And that's just, I mean, it's just, it's banal is what it is. It's absolutely banal. We believe in the true freedom in how we worship, what our family looks like, how many kids we have. Yeah, the other side is really going hammer and tongs about your inability to worship.

It all comes down to what Waltz was saying. Waltz pounding the table and saying in Minnesota, we say, mind your own damn business. When it comes to shaping correct thought in the 21st century, which party actually is more interested in invasive techniques to get you to believe a certain set of ideas or be cast out of polite society? Yeah. Well, I don't know what to grab hold of there, James. There was a whole lot. It was a cornucopia of... I'll just shut up. I'll shut up. All right. And well, two quick comments and then a question for Rob. I think we've got him back. He been having some time i was talking and he just figured i can skip this part so i i always say uh that the ep and

there's data for this but the one sentence summary is the epa specializes in billion dollar solutions to million dollar problems that's been that way at the beginning but then the question of rights i mean this is something that i spend hours and even weeks with students trying to make them understand. And I mean, there's a lot to go through, but one razor, like say Hayward's razor, if you want to use it, is something is a right if it requires nothing from the government. You know, don't infringe on your free speech. Don't infringe on your right to own a gun. Obey due process. If a right requires the government to transfer resources from you and me to a third party, that's not a right. We're confusing ends and means, protecting our rights are the ends of government. Things like healthcare education, those are good things, but those are means to an

end. But that confusion is deliberate, as you point out. One question for you, Rob. One last thing on the convention. We kept hearing all night that Beyonce was going to show up. Yeah. And she didn't. I'm wondering if this was a bait and switch by the Democrats to keep people watching. But I thought, when I heard that she might come, I thought, that's a terrible idea. Because she's such a megastar that no matter how good Kamala was, Beyonce's appearance would be the headline and would overshadow Kamala.

So I never thought she was going to show up. Isn't it? I mean, I'm asking you as a show business person, wasn't the Beyonce idea really a bad idea? Oh, terrible idea if she showed up. My God, that'd be the worst. But also, I mean, I think it'd be bad for Beyonce. I always say the same thing. Look, I mean,

at best, Kamala Harris, just say everything, you know, she seems pretty lucky. She's on a roll, so let's just give her the luck of the dice here. and she's got eight years of you know the white house eight so we're talking about 2032 2033 when she leaves i know that seems like a long long way away but it's really not right beyonce beyonce is here for a long time. Beyonce's got a much longer span that she can be part of for a while.

So why would she get that close to to a candidate like that? That's always the mistake. I mean, I think that's partly the conundrum that Fox News finds itself in. They got very close to a specific candidate. And, you know, even at the best, this candidate had eight years at most of relevancy. This guy managed to make 12 years, maybe, at best. But, you know, you don't want to do that. You're in it for the long term. So, you know, I understand why they may want an appearance with Beyonce. And they may want the Taylor Swift Beyonce endorsement.

And they may want the Taylor Swift Beyonce endorsement and they may get it um but I don't think I don't think it's it's a good idea and especially when everyone's whoever's watching it no there are 20 million people watching it last night and their real question was can I it's a casting issue right I gotta cast this person as the president do I want to hear this noise for four years and you don't want any other noise there you want that you want to be a really clear clear argument and also like if your Beyonce's like I don't know like it's you use the Dolly Parton question it's like I got millions and millions and millions of fans some of them are gonna vote for Trump so I'm gonna go for Kamala, why would I want to make them make a choice? Well, that was Michael Jordan's famous line.

He said, I want to sell shoes to Republicans, too, when Democrats would try and get him on the sidelines. Right. Right. What I thought was interesting was that, and maybe you guys talked about this when I was trying to reconnect, but there was a period there where I had to remind myself that Donald Trump is not the current president of the United States. Like, there was a lot of time where I thought, wait a minute.

Like, I think they even slipped up and said, you know, the past four years, something like that. They're running against Trump in a way that I mean, maybe it'll work. But I did have to. I mean, even I was watching the go. Oh, yeah, wait, wait, Biden's president. Biden is the great ghost. He's disappeared. It's almost as if the past four years, you're not voting on the past four years. That is, if they get away with it, really smart. The past four years have been great, right? Yeah, they're asking for a mulligan is what's really happening right now. Yeah. We are promising continuity, the best kind of continuity, the kind that comes with an absolute clean break.

I mean, right. So, yes. So, I mean, yeah, she's in a difficult position. I mean, she can talk about the perilous stage that the country is in and how she's going to fix it, but you can't really do that because then you look at who's been there. So you point to the boogeyman who's going to come destroy the precious freedom and the experiment that we have is i can't remember the particular

words of the poet laureate who came out and had a word salad about that but as usual everything is on the line and it's the most consequential election of our lifetime etc etc etc when you start to get into some of the policy details that she has uh signed on to though a they're irrelevant because this is a vibe election. Hot brat summer and all that joy. You know, that's basically it. People want to go into the booth dancing and come out thinking they've performed a historical event. You find things like what I loved was the, and Stephen, perhaps you know the particulars on this better than I do, the tax on unrealized capital gains. Now, if you want to make somebody's eyes glaze over, talk about that.

And if you want to make somebody angry on the left, you defend the person with an awful lot of money from having to pay unrealized capital gains. Somebody once said that the problem with Americans is that they vote as though one day they're going to be rich. And I don't think that's a good way to characterize it. I think it's twofold. It's one, there's an essential sense, there's three, there's fairness. Is this a fair thing to do to somebody simply because they make more money than me? Everybody who believes in progressive income tax, you know, would say yes, because they believe in laws that affect people differently based on how much property you have, which is another issue. Two, you have the idea that just because it starts

out with the billionaires up there, experience has told us that, you know, some of these things, some of these powers the government grant itself, they do tend to trickle down, shall we say, until eventually everybody is under the same yoke. And then the third point about these things would be that I forget what it was, having said the first two points. So maybe if you could grapple with those. Oh, just the economic consequences of what this means. I mean, it's absolutely ludicrous to say to somebody, we're going to tax you on money that does not exist, that hasn't been made, that's just floating out there theoretically. And it just goes to show that, you know, we had here in the city of Minneapolis, they're proposing an 8% property tax increase.

And a lot of people are looking around and saying, okay, well, I guess I'll do my share, but what do you guys cut from the budget then? You didn't. Yeah. Nothing. There wasn't a single thing you could touch. The idea that we are all just self-healing pinatas that every year we heal and fill ourselves with candy again so they can take a bigger bat and a bigger chunk. Anyway, so do you think that, I mean, I don't think this is a campaign issue at all. It's illustrative to me. It's revelatory, but it's not going to mean anything. Well, you know, I've remained convinced that there isn't a mass appetite for a majority of voters for class warfare the way the progressive left has played it for generations now. In other words, I think people are for

fairness, but I think most people are for fairness the way you and I would understand it. Consistent treatment, you know, not special favoritism. And not equity, which is the enforced equal outcome. So if you go back to, you know, if you go all the way back to 1972, and you remember George McGovern was running on not only his demo grant, $1,000 a person handout, but he also ran explicitly on 99% inheritance tax rate. He wanted, he called it confiscatory taxation. He actually used that phrase. He got to the California primary, and Rob will know what's coming here. McGovern did best in the Democratic primary in Beverly Hills and Bel Air, and he got crushed by Hubert Humphrey,

who now looks kind of reactionary. He got crushed in Long Beach and La Habra and the working class parts of LA. Real places, right. Real places. Because all those people, you said the phrase, James, is that a lot of voters, they may not be rich, but they like to think that someday they will be, or at the very least, they want to be able to pass along their house to their kids. Yes, that's a big one. And no one, I mean, so the left says, last point, the left says, or Harris says, well, this will only be on the richest people, people who are billionaires or all the rest. No one trusts them about this.

I mean, I think we understand that this is always a foot in the door, and the voracious greed of the left for our money will always make them extend the reach of those taxes down to everybody, because that's how it works. Yeah, I mean, look, that's where the money is. I mean, what's strange to me, of course, is that there is so much bizarre economic theory running around in the campaigns in general that no one's focusing on it. As Steve said, this should be a big issue. But I also feel like 10% tariffs across the board should should be big issues. It makes me uncomfortable as an economic conservative that there's no economic conservative, or the closest one, is arguing for a trade war. I mean, these are things that have to be worked out, and it'd be nice if, you know, look, it'd be nice if Milton Friedman was around to maybe do some teaching. Yes. Because, look, I mean, I shouldn't say this because this is just a weird year and everything, all predictions are weird. But it does feel to me like whoever wins in November, this is pretty close to an issue free campaign. And I think that was a mistake of the Trump campaign.

As I was talking to some friends last night, there was that moment, and I say this again, I probably said it too much, so you can just tell me to shut up, but I think his team, and I think his supporters, misread the uh the disastrous debate with

um biden as a debate about how bad biden was which is true but i don't think they really fully grasped how good trump was in that debate he was so good in that debate that if you were watching and I said, I watched it with a bunch of left-wing public radio people, and they were kept turning to me saying, that was a good answer, right? That was a good answer.

And a couple of them said, that was a really good answer on abortion he gave. And it was a good answer on abortion. And it was a good answer on, and then he was passionate about crime. Whoever that person is has gone, probably will not come back. You don't know that. You know, maybe not. I mean, we don't know that.

What I'm saying is that what they really thought was this is not going to be this is going to be an easy issue campaign because it's going to be one is two issues, maybe three if you need to. But one is Biden's old can't handle it. Crime and and immigration. Biden's old can't handle it. Crime and immigration. And I think crime and immigration for them were like, yeah, if we have to get to it, we can get to it. But really, it's going to be all about how this old man can't make it. And unfortunately for them, there's no more old man. So they're scrambling for a bunch of things. And I don't understand why a week before Labor Day they're still doing it.

These are actually, you know, this is not amateur hour for the Trump campaign. These are not, they're not, this is not the 2016 team. These are people who've got some road on them and know what they're doing. And it doesn't feel like a winning campaign to me. Well, you know, we'll see. We have another debate coming up. And it's going to be interesting because Harris has postulated, Harris has posed herself now as being somebody who's going to be tough on immigration and tough on crime.

And that brings up this question. I'm going to let each of you think of this for a second. Let's say that the Democratic Party has realized that this is where the national mood is shifting. We're not about flooding the cities with endless number of fake asylum seekers and that even though you know the crime rates committed by a you know recent oh hell just say you know people who are here illegally that the crime rates may be the same as everybody else but yeah there's these low to high profile cases and they're really bad and makes everything look bad so we got to do something about that and we do have to get a handle on crime in the cities we got to drop the whole acab stuff that's 2020 never happened we're going to retool because that's a path to electoral success and keeping power, placating people by these issues. in favor of the guy who probably will have no power and influence when he gets in, or not as

much as somebody who sweeps in with the wind in their sails like Harris. Think about that for a second. When I say wind in your sails, I mean, of course, the breath of the sky. The breath from your lungs may be difficult to muster sometimes in the morning you get up. But you know what? Get up in the morning, grab your lumen, breathe into it, learn. Now, that may just sound like a very strange thing to do. What do I mean by that? Well, Lumen, Lumen, it's the world's first handheld metabolic coach. It's a device that measures your metabolism through your breath. And on the app, see, you've got this Lumen device. You've got the app. They're connected. They talk to each other. The app tells you if you're burning fat or carbs, and it gives you a tailored guidance to improve your nutrition, your workouts, your sleep, and even your stress management.

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Or to put it another way, is it okay to just kind of relax about a Harris presidency? Because it might not be that bad. Maybe they might do these things. Yeah, I mean, the case for that, James, is this is an election where you win by losing. And again, a quick historical analogy, you know, Bill Clinton winning in 92 turned out to be good for Republicans. It cleared away Bush and sort of the staleness and led to the Republican takeover of Congress that then was kind of enduring, right? And you've got a balanced budget and, of course staleness and led to the republican takeover of congress that then was kind

of enduring right and you got a balanced budget and of course clinton to the center uh oh and by the way i think that even if trump loses it's likely in my mind republicans will take the senate perhaps narrowly but i think they're going to take the senate and then we have gridlock and as i always like to say gridlock gridlock yes yeah gridlock is the next best thing to have in constitutional government uh and you know they can block crazy judges and all the rest of that like to say good luck good luck yes yeah good luck is the next best thing to have in constitutional government uh and you know they can block crazy judge and all the rest of that um i i that's a totally cogent view i have a lot of trump skeptic friends who are think that i disagree i think winning is always better than losing and even though you can take off all the defects of trump

personally and the fact he'd be a lame duck right away, I still think it's important that he's there to steady our foreign policy, where I think he's much stronger than Harris and the Democrats. Appoint good judges. Boy, the Biden judges are really awful, and Harris's will be just as bad, and Republicans could block some, of course, but still, that's important business. And this isn't entirely a a joke but we've got that wonderful project 2025 sitting there on the shelf ready to rock and roll with right i've never heard of that i have no idea what you're talking about seven pages of how to build camps for the people i'm going to put away right all right rob i know that you think that uh winning by losing is preposterous, but Stephen makes a good point.

Well, I mean, look, it's always hard. People construct these incredibly complicated houses of cards from, well, then you'll get this, and then that will happen, and this will happen. Who knows? I mean, I think there's a lesson in the past eight years. It's really who knows. The electorate has entered, I think eight years ago, a period of extreme volatility. And so a lot of the old things that we think are just natural aren't,

um, I don't really know. I don't, I don't, I think you have to, this is one of the things you have to sort of balance what you, what you think she's can really legitimately accomplish, what he can really legitimately accomplish and decide whether,

you know, the Venn diagram of those things and i know she loves venn diagram where that points you um i don't i i don't really know it does seem to me that um i just and i've said this for a while that the parties themselves even after this pretty good solid dnc which they did a good job but they seem out of gas to me and they seem like they're looking for a direction and the irony is is that um you know the direction for the democrats is so obvious to win because in american politics a conservative democrat especially conservative southern democrat is unstoppable that is americans just general idea who the president

should be um and they seem absolutely unable to do that because, of course, as conservatives, the Democrat has a lot of really, really, really, really awful and objectionable ideas like low taxes and probably pro-life and a lot of other things you can't have. That's all hate, Rob. That's hate.

So someone's going to have to sort it out, right? And someone's going to have to break this logjam. Here's a horrible analogy that i i i i'm sorry if you're eating stop eating because here's my analogy that there was a period before you know when it was trumpy biden there was this horrible kind of sense of like, I don't know, like that something isn't working, you know. And everybody said the same thing, really. Every pollster said the same thing. It was like, really, if any one of these parties replaced the name on their top with anybody else, almost anybody else, there would be an enormous unleashing of energy behind the new candidate.

And, you know, Democrats somehow kind of did and kind of didn't do. They did a half-assed job as they usually do with these stuff, these things. But it really does feel, I think, in terms of the political energy, this kind of like the country, political, the politics of the country took a laxative. And rid of some stuff and kind of unblocked itself. I mean, I know. I'm sorry. I apologize for that. But I actually think it's the right context for these two candidates in this year, by the way. But it does feel like there's – it does feel like a different thing so i suspect that um if look if she is capable of convincing 51

you know 270 whatever electoral votes that um she's a moderate democrat a moderate law and order democrat who's going to secure the border um it is one of the great political feats in american politics i think well i have a name for i named the name for the episode of this podcast It is one of the great political feats in American politics. Well, I have a name for the name for the name for the episode of this podcast is going to be gentle overnight action. Well, I'm not gentle. I was going to say, James, that the prospect of Kamala as president is more like an animal election than a laxative election. I'm sorry, Rob. No, it's fine.

That's fine. Like, remember, it's a different time i just want to say for the viewers that for the listeners at home when i when i started describing that analogy the look on steve's face well i was very i was very afraid rob i know you're great uh look uh just to pick one part there yes they're playing up that she was a prosecutor but of course course, this is in a backdrop of where there's this backlash going on against the sort of Soros progressive prosecutors. San Francisco threw out Chesa Boudin. The L.A. voters are going to throw out George Gascon. And, you know, it'll be a neat trick if she can disassociate herself from that kind of prosecutor

that I think a lot of people have figured out. I mean, we'll see. Maybe she'll pull it off, but it's going to be a neat trick if she does. And I think you're counting on the shortness of the calendar. I don't think you could sustain this if this was, say, February, and she was the frontrunner and had to go all the way through the primaries in the summer and into the fall. So it may work, but it shouldn't, on metaphysical grounds at least yeah and also i think in the past the the the that profile of a democrat um their chat their task was when they were scooping up um the primary votes was to act like they weren't that person yeah you know you think about bill clinton even barack obama you know he had to be very liberal and then he ran, he ran people voted for him. He got 53% of the popular vote because he seemed reasonable.

Nobody expected Che Guevara in the White House, like we got, by the way. And that was a pretty good trick, but I think for her it's going to be, I can't imagine there's no bigger trick. That's going to be the biggest trick. I can't think of a candidate, if she succeeds, I can't think of a candidate

that lucky it's extraordinary it really is especially when you consider that for the last four years she's been regarded as a sort of intellectual novelty and the the spontaneous speeches uh this this these strange statements of the obvious compounded by a rephrasing of the statement of the obvious indicates somebody who is just uh not exactly i mean not imbued with that with with that that firing brain that is that is eager to get out there and and and talk spontaneously about these issues there's that doesn't seem to be a lot of wonkery there but i am curious since we're casting about fictional things how do you think she would have done if desantis was the public i mean everybody was saying the question

we need to revitalize our camp the the gop side by getting desantis in there how do you think it would look if it was harris versus desantis desantis desantis i'm sorry yeah using my wife's name instead of the governor of Florida. Yeah. Oh, I think it would be completely different because he is really good at boring in on the issues and going on the attack in ways that Trump is a little weak

and inconsistent, right? And I think he would make it impossible for her to repair behind her generalities and joy and all the rest of that. I think so, but that would also be seen as very unfair because this isn't supposed to be about these things. This is supposed to be generalities and joy and all the rest of that. That would also be seen as very unfair, because this isn't supposed to be about these things. This is supposed to be about change and joy and a historic change.

But I'm saying, if you had any other, I mean, the problem isn't, I mean, I'm not speaking, it's not Trump-specific, it's just that Trump is an old name. He's an old man. He's an old name. Old news. New hope and change works. That's what Reagan ran on He's an old name. Old news. New hope and change works. That's what Reagan ran on.

And it actually works. The change can be from the right as well as from the left. And DeSantis, Nikki Haley, I think, would be way ahead just because she's new and different. And people seem to want, they didn't, they don't like the choices they were given. And the Democrats kind of reheated some leftovers and are now calling it turkey tetrazzini but you know what it is and they're kind of like oh okay this is new and new and changey new and changey and people seem to be you know right now the momentum is they seem to be responding to that and what i think the trump campaign has to hope is that that that they take a big deep look at all

of this and then at the end of september uh recalibration which usually happens although i don't know what usually happens is not really a phrase you want to use in 2024, that they're going to get their they're going to get the momentum back. That could happen. But. In American politics, it's change versus more of the same is a very winning argument the idea that the sitting vice president is making that it's kind of crazy but listen uh terry branstead the governor of iowa right iowa that's right yeah he uh when he he ran his sweeping statewide and won it handily on change. And when he ran his re-elect, this is true, his motto was, re-elect change.

So it can't happen. I remember in 92, when Bill, I was at the convention then, and one of the buttons that was being handed out showed a frazzled-looking, abstract woman, or the cat, probably,

in a box of wine. And the phrase, the button said, worried about everything? Vote Democrat. Which is interesting. And there were interviews, you always had the word change mantra would appear in every single man-on-the-street interview that you had. And, of course, the man-on-the-street interview

since the convention was being held at Madison Square Garden, because it's the people who were pouring out of the subways below in the streets. And they'd always say the same thing. Well, you know the convention was being held at madison square garden this is to people who were pouring out of the subways below in the streets and they'd always say the same thing well you know change i think it's now think back gentlemen to 1992 i know you were both there which apparently was a dystopian hellscape the likes of which america had never experienced before we were the worst economy since the great depression um nothing worked anymore i remember our newspaper uh the, where I worked at the time, the Newhouse Bureau in Washington, D.C., commissioned a series on finding out what exactly in America does still work. Things that sound very common today, but in 1992, when we cast our eyes back, we do not

think it was that bad, really. It really wasn't. It was a slight pause in the greatest increase in wealth and prosperity in human history. I know it. It was like a breath-catching. It was like, well, okay, now we've got to put all that stuff in. And people acted like, oh, my God, the recession of 1991. That was just devastating.

People are living and selling apples on the streets. Give me a break. Yeah. Well, there was a, you'll remember this, James, I think, maybe you do too, Rob, there was a huge bestseller around that time. It was the Barlet and Steele book, America, What Went Wrong. And it was,

and Bill Clinton would hold that book up. That book was terrible. I mean, it was superficial, wrong, inaccurate, but it was a huge bestseller, and part of the failure there was the Bush campaign never had its own narrative to fight back on it. They kept crossing their fingers and hoping for better news in time, and it didn't come. But look, I will give you this prediction about where we're going from here.

We can do counterfactual for the past, but I think regardless of who wins, Joe Biden's reputation is going to circle the drain and go down the drain over the next three, four years. First of all, I mean, if Trump wins, Democrats are going to be mad that Biden didn't step aside a year and a half ago and let him have a campaign to nominate a stronger person who would have won. And if Harris wins, I think she'll do poorly, but I think even if Harris wins and runs in lots of trouble, as I expect will happen, everyone's going to be mad at Biden for not dropping out. Democrats for sticking them with somebody who's really not a very good president. Republicans who might have nominated a younger candidate if it was an open Democratic field. So you might have had DeSantis versus, I don't know, not Josh Shapiro, but you could name a number of people. And we would have had that race that Rob has talked about with younger, different people.

And you'd still have all the basic polarized uh politics we have but it would be different than what we have now which is partly personality driven yeah i think it's probably true i i also feel like um if she wins you know it seems like you know maybe it's 51 52 to 48 percent that she's going to win just say she wins like what do you do when you're the president you you you every problem have, you blame on your predecessor. It's going to be nonstop from that administration. Boy, you guys have no idea how horrible. Well, I'm here.

I have all this mess to clean up. The biggest trash mouth you're going to get about the Biden administration is going to be from the Harris administration. And, you know, I mean, all those people running around before saying listen i love joe biden i love joe biden they ain't nobody loved joe biden right if they loved joe biden he would have been um if they loved joe biden he would have run for president in 2016 and won they loved joe biden he would have been the nominee before. Nobody loved him. He was a Paul. His transmutation into the gentle,

wise hero, for those of us who've been seeing him back in the days when he had fewer follicles, is amusing. Well, you're right. The tell-all books are going to be great, and they're going to be written by the same people who are writing stories about how Republicans are being mean, saying that biden is not at his mental

peak it'll be an instant flip and the advances will be good and they'll all be interviewed by the same can i tell a quick campaign story about how sometimes you can you get in the weeds in a campaign and you kind of forget that it's that these this these are title issues sometimes that really the small things and i tell the story in the most the recent issue the new issue of commentary but i'll tell i don't think i've told it on the story but 1992 uh if you're ancient if you're i know you don't even have to be as ancient and as old as steve but if you're just simply you know still spry like me but you have a memory uh one of the biggest shows on tv then was murphy

brown and murphy brown the character played by candace bergen had a in the show had a baby out of wedlock she was sort of her first kid she was older it was a lot of things whatever um and dan quayle was giving a speech dan quayle was the vice president united states just so we remember who that was uh and he was giving a speech which now if you read it now seems the most anodyne kind of milk toasty speech ever it's like uh it's like if you took all of the you you painted everything jd vance says in pastels but he was right he said the problem in america our cultural problem is um kids growing up without father and it's the breakup of the family he was right then daniel moynihan was right 20 years before when he said it it's still right it's the breakup of the family he was right then daniel moynihan was right 20 years before when he said it it's still right it's still exactly the it's the one thing we need to fix

and the one thing we can't fix because the liberal progressive um control over all of our dialogue he was right he said and he he referenced he referenced murphy brown it's like well you know this tv show murphy brown this character's having a child out of wedlock. It's mocking the importance of fathers. Pandemonium. The Murphy Brown people were all pro-Democrat, all liberal. And they said, okay, this happened in, you know, he gave the speech in May. So that Murphy Brown was on hiatus. They were preparing for the fall season, which was going to be the election fall, 92. And they were preparing Murphy Brown's response was this weird thing where the a sitcom character was going to

Respond to the sitting vice president in real time basically And they did up they did the the episode and the script was under wraps. It was like no one Read it they had that they you had to sign an NDA to see watch the show and they burned all the scripts like nobody Was under nobody knew what she was going to say until they aired it. Except somehow, one day, someone gave me a copy

of this embargoed script. Because you can't keep a secret in Hollywood, right? And I'm like, what am I going to do with this? Well, it turns out I had a lot of friends in the Bush campaign so I just FedExed it to them. I said, here, just a little preview. And then i said to my assistant who was um on the right at the time a very staunch republican um i said you know what let's send one of these to rush so we fedexed it to rush and the next day rush gets it and he starts to show and he says

I got this thing I know it's a trap I know it's not real I don't know who sent it to me I've never heard of this guy this is not real it's the Murphy Brown thing and a friend of mine who is in fact I'm staying I'm a house guest

of theirs right now she knows Rush she calls him up on the air. When he's on the air, she says, look, I don't know who sent this to you, but if it's this guy, it's real. And he starts reading the script. And I thought, I have just re-elected the President of the United States. I have just done this incredible sneaky political uh and i'm like i couldn't believe how great i am and it had zero effect on the outcome of that election uh i you know i i don't know what the original script was but i think they they missed an opportunity for Candace Bergen to give birth to Charlie McCarthy.

Talk about splinters. I have two footnotes to that story, which you may have heard, Rob. One is, apparently, I heard this from Bill Kristol, who, remember, was Quayle's chief of staff. They said they're on the plane flying out to L.A. to give the speech, and Quayle points to that line and says, you know, maybe I should take out this line about Murphy Brown. And Crystal says he told him, no, I'm sure no one will pay any attention to it. But then, more significantly, to your broader point, I think it was two or three years later, the Atlantic Monthly did a cover story called Dan Quayle was right. And it said, what you just said is actually, I don't remember if it was Nick Lehman or some sort of center liberal establishment figure

said actually Quayle was right. Of course, he was out of office by then, so it was costless. But still, he was vindicated about it. We're always right down the road. It turns out there are communists in the government. It turns out that Dan Quayle was right. Turns out it was morning in America, but they'll admit that

that was the case then. Now it's completely different, and that's why we have to upend the Etch-a-Sketch, give it a good shake, and start with year zero. All right, guys, a couple more things before we go here. One of them is, I know, Stephen, you wanted to say something about RFK. One of the more, could have been, if he'd gotten a little bit more oxygen,

one of the more unique and peculiar political candidates of this, very much a 2024 guy. You know, you don't have things like leaving a bear in the park on the list of things that you expect Kennedy progeny to say, or maybe you do. I don't know. Is he going to vote for, is he going to elect, or he's going to throw his hat in the Trump campaign, or what? Well, it sounds like it. I had someone in the Kennedy campaign, who I don't know but is legit, reach out to me here yesterday. So there's a reader, it turns out, and he's one of these conservatives who doesn't like Trump, and so he's friends with Kennedy. Anyway, between the time we're now recording and when listeners hear this later today or tonight,

Kennedy is going to drop out. It's supposed to be two o'clock Eastern. And the person I talked to doesn't have intimate knowledge on whether there's a firm deal to have a cabinet post or something like that. But that's the speculation. I'll just say this much. You know, Trump has been really trying to court Kennedy, going back to when Trump called him up after the shooting in Pennsylvania. And the polling data seems to suggest that Kennedy dropping out will help Trump. Right now, the polls are dead even, but in a lot of the battleground states, Kennedy's still on the ballot. He is polling at 2-3%, and Trump gets the lion's share of that, at least according to the polling detail, but it's all pretty volatile.

But in a 50-50 election, which, Rob, is where the polls are right now, it's a coin flip. It could make the difference. So this is an interesting moment in a year which has seen so many crazy things, right? So we'll just have to see what happens with this. Yeah, I mean, we're now at the small ethnic populations of the important states, right? So the fact that there's 300,000 Jews in Pennsylvania matters. The fact that, and that's one of the Israel things. That's what that Israel thing was about.

So you start to see how, basically, you're seeing the wires happen in a way that, you know, I think Trump tweeted yesterday. You know, I've always loved that Governor Brian Kemp. He thanks him for his partnership, I think. It's like, you know, you're starting to see it all kind of unravel with these two guys scramble for little votes here and there. They go spelunking. Record scratch, different topic, culture. Phil Donahue, dead.

Rob, you're the television guy. Influential beyond imagining. Thinking man's Jerry Springer. Mainstay, we never expected to go away. What? What's the legacy of Phil Donahue? You know, I think there used to be an ad in Chicago. No, I mean, it was in Cleveland, even, when he started in Cleveland. He started in Cleveland, then moved to Chicago.

Daytime guy in Cleveland. And the ad was, for the show, the line was, have your second cup of coffee with Phil Donahue. Entirely directed at women who were at home. And the idea was, your first cup of coffee

is in the morning with your husband and your kids, and they go off, and then you're going to have time for your second cup of coffee. the house is empty and you have it with Phil Donahue. And I think he was one of the first people in television knows but he treated that audience um as a as a as a gold mine i mean you know the the housewife at stay-at-home mom audience was sort of like the happy homemaker kind of thing it was all kind of nothing and game shows and dramas and he said i don't know maybe not game shows and daytime dramas for for an. Maybe salacious content or even political content or like current events content or whatever it was. I think he was the first guy to do that. And pretty amazing, actually. Quite an accomplishment.

I mean, I found him incredibly irritating. And also, especially near the end when he was simply pro-Soviet. He was one of those guys, while we were winning the Cold War, while Reagan was winning the Cold War, was simply pro-Soviet, he was just, he was one of those guys while we were winning the Cold War, while Reagan was winning the Cold War, was saying, let's not win this Cold War. Let's give up. And do you know why? Because he had a close, personal, warm relationship with who?

Vladimir Postner. That's the guy. Ever met Vladimir Postner? Oh, I met him and was on TV with him once for an hour and a half in L.A. in 1988. Yeah. He was arm wrestling with him. Yeah, you too. 88, I think, was when I interviewed him, too, when he was making one of his sweeps.

Yeah. He was in his leather jacket and his Merle Burrows and his Jack Daniels and the rest of them. That bread. Anyway, anyway. So, yes. I mean, he was. But he's an interesting character. I mean, the story of Vladimir Posner is interesting interesting this westernized face that they that they put out to us but yeah

i mean i think phil was just enamored with the fact that um that we would actually you know that the soviet union would somehow be a liberal place that abounded with with vladimir posner's after all they'd already had yurin tropov who as we know liked to listen to benny goodman and yeah right so i mean all we had to do to get past past this Reagan-esque fear-mongering and show them that, actually, like Sting, we believe that the Russians love their children, too, and hand-holding would result in the rest of an absolute, utter delusion and a sign of an unserious, easily swayed mind. I know. But enough of that. We're going to wreck it scratch again, because before we go, we'd like to find out what Rob actually did in the Amazon, aside from probably get a bunch of parasites, which will manifest themselves in a few weeks. Yeah, slowly. You can see, you can't really see anymore, but I did have a bunch of splinters in this hand from everything, everything in the Amazon that's really horrible and scary is tiny. You can barely see it.

You know in Africa, you're like, you know, that's a lion. That lion's going to eat me. That elephant will step on my foot. That giraffe is going to knock me over. In the Amazon, everything's small and like a little bug and a little caterpillar and a tiny little leaf-cutting ant and little stickers on a tree that you can barely see. So I was there with a bunch of people, and pretty much everybody had one encounter with a biting, stinging insect or some GI tract issue. That said, it was really, really fun, and I would go back in a second, and I was, every minute of it, I was sort of saying prayers of gratitude to Dow Chemical for inventing all sorts of like sure toxic cancer causing insecticides.

But boy, do they work. I got to tell you, DEET, my friend. Yeah. You got to hand it to DEET. Well, we're DEET free here now, which is why we're all slapping and scratching. I heard that there is an Amazon, something that lives in the water, that is known for swimming up to you. Yeah. And then deploying barbs so that it cannot be pulled out. Amazon, something that lives in the water, that is known for swimming up the urethra

and then deploying barbs so that it cannot be pulled out. And I'm wondering exactly how something like that evolves, or is just proof of a malicious spirit inventing it on the spot. Because, I mean, if that's really what you need to do to reproduce, swim up the urethra and deploy your barbs, it seems there's a limited opportunity for that. But apparently they just abound in the Amazon. don't really want to swim yeah in the amazon there's piranhas there so one of our party got bit by a piranha um you don't and you definitely don't want to like um uh relax in the amazon in any meaningful way because you know you're you're feeding the the fish and

some of those fish are they call they call that the toothpick fish by the way that's the nickname for the candiru and it does exactly what you say it opens up like an umbrella after swimming inside you oh and there was no way to get it out you need to remove the appendage but you would go you not worth everything everything there is trying to kill you but yet you would go back because the lush everything there could kill you everything there there is trying to kill you, but yet you would go back because of the lush everything there could kill you. Everything there is just trying to live. That's the thing.

It just, it doesn't really has no, it doesn't, they didn't know me. I mean, if they know me, maybe they, maybe those bugs would be trying to kill me, but they don't really know me. They're just like, I'm just like, oh, I can, can I eat that? I'm going to eat that. I'm, you know, the, the natural world, especially down there is just all about hunger. But can I just change the subject briefly? Yes.

I mean, I know we're coming near the end because I do want to, do want to make one plug because I had this sort of great experience last night. I met this guy who was the former Secretary of Commerce under Trump, Wilbur Ross. Oh, yeah. Fascinating guy. So sometimes I know we've been spending our time trashing old people like the candidates, former candidates. Candidates and former candidates are too old, too old, too old. and then you meet a guy who's old and you think that guy could be president united states i would vote for that guy to be president united states he told these great stories wonderful story because he worked for trump but he also he had he goes back with trump

goes back all the way because he's a bankruptcy guy and he was he was one of the people leading the bankruptcy negotiations for trump's casino in at City. That was his first encounter with Trump. And the story's riveting. And he's written a book. The book is called Risks and Returns. And I'm telling you, if you're interested in good stories well told by a non-polemical, non-partisan, smart guy, and they're good stories stories and he writes really well. Wilbur Ross, Risks and Returns. Tell me

you said there's this podcast thing you know about that would be happy to have him for a guest. Tell me you said that. Yeah, you know what? I didn't because this is the reason why this guy is so rich and successful is because he said to everybody, hey, I'm giving you a copy of this book but make sure your friends buy four because i need he's got that he's got a

chart in his head of what he needs to be to be on the new york times bestseller list i mean i think the book was released right after labor day so you could pre-order it that's what you need to do pre-order it but um you know you're talking about a guy who's been in business for a long long time and is very very smart but also really gentle and fun. And the book is like, it's really great. It's a really great memoir of a great American. He needs to do some publicity because otherwise people don't know about it. So let's have him on the show.

Yeah, you're totally right. He would be great. I mean, it would be like me not saying, I got a Substack up now with my column now running there, but I'm not going to tell you about it. You can find out for yourself. I mean, it probably is James Lylex at Substack up now with my column now running there, but I'm not going to tell you about it. You can find out for yourself. I mean, it probably is jameslilix.substack.com. jameslilix.substack.com. But, you know, maybe yes, maybe no. I do know, however, that Apple would love to hear your reviews about this podcast.

Five stars. Five stars. Five stars. Don't be like one of those people who gives 4.7 because you didn't like this or didn't like that. Five stars. Just give us the whole raft there, baby. I would also tell you that if you want to improve your metabolic health, find out what you need to eat in the course of the day and actually have the pleasure of a really well-designed scientific instrument, you would go to Lumen and you would support us if you support them and support yourself and your metabolic health, of course, and you get 15% off.

That's great. You would also be wise to just be glad that Rob is back among us, that he survived, and happy that Stephen could join us as well. Right. And beyond that, gentlemen, it's been a great hour. It's been a pleasure to talk to all of you. Have a great weekend, and we'll see everybody in the comments at Ricochet 4.0.

Next week Labor Day.