The Ricochet Podcast - New York City Meet-Up

Episode Date: October 17, 2013

Here’s the audio from our Ricochet Meet-up at Galway Pub in mid-town Manhattan. Rob Long hosts John Podhoretz, Ann Coulter (buy her new book Never Trust a Liberal Over Three-Especially a Republican) Tommy DeSeno, and of course, our beloved Ricochet members. Special thanks to Ricochet member Dick From Brooklyn for the location scouting, PJS for the name tags, and everyone else for attending. Source

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Visit thrombosis.ie. You guys are in for a show. As someone who drinks constantly. Anne can tell you that I rarely drink. Well, I would like to welcome everybody here to the, I think it's actually officially our second Ricochet meetup in New York City. But it's the first one officially where we've done everything. We have a lot of people here in the room,

for those of you listening at home on the podcast. But they're listening at home on the podcast. It's not live. Thank you all for coming. There are a lot of New Yorkers here who are like pre-depressed about Mayor de Blasio. So we'll get into that a little later. We are here at Galway Pub on 36th and 5th and Madison, if you're listening at home. We've got a lot of Ricochet members here.

Very thrilled. John Podoritz, New Yorker, is to my left. And in the center, as always, a centrist. A centrist. A moderate centrist. Ann Coulter. I am, of course, on the right. Now, Ann has a new book,

so we're going to plug that book. It's out today. I think we need, for the listeners, course on the right now anne has a new book so we're going to plug that book today yeah i think we need i think we need for the for the listeners i think we actually need to make this more explicit this is john podhoritz over here rob long uh the founder of ricochet and in between us the uh author pundit sagacious person and general miscreant, Ann Coulter. Thank you. You're welcome.

And Ann has a book. Out today. Out today. To explain why we're having an Ann Coulter sandwich, this is Ann Coulter's book. It's out today. We're taking orders. We're taking orders today. Never trust a liberal over three, especially a Republican.

Now, I take that as a personal insult. As usual. But there she is looking sort of smashing and intimidating on the cover. So, Ann, today's pub date. Yeah. So what have you done today? Where have you been?

I've been up very early. That's all I remember right now. I always start the night before on Hannity. And it's a fun book. It's a lot of my greatest hits from the last 10 years because I so hated politics After the last election, I and all my most political friends just stopped watching political news. No Fox, no talk radio. I started watching Gossip Girl and Revenge, Home and Garden TV, Turner Classic Movies. So this is a fun book that covers everything under the sun. But I started with my thought was for Republicans, which is I'm thinking we should start thinking about winning elections as opposed to being purist and proving points. And gosh, I wish we hadn't run Christine O'Donnell

and Richard Murdoch and Todd Akin and Sharon Engel in the Senate right now. Think of how this fight would look. If you had told me when I met Ann Coulter 25 years ago that I would be calling her a rhino, I would have told you that you were insane. But these are the days that we live in. Losing isn't working out for us.

We never would have gotten Obamacare. I mean, we've blown, like, I count a dozen Senate elections in the last three election cycles. Why on earth is Liz Cheney running against conservative Republican Mike Enzi? Why are we wasting time and money on this? They're pulling a Kennedy family move. Oh, did you know Liz just turned 30?

Yes, thanks for keeping the Senate seat warm for us. Why are we spending time and money to replace someone good like that? It's not like we have some huge buffer, a cushion in the Senate, a cushion in the House. We have to win elections. Democrats do not lose close elections. We lose them all. Well, that's really cheering. Thanks very much.

Thanks for coming. So wait a minute. Say something cheerful to these people. They're looking at Mayor de Blasio in a few weeks. Well, that's going to suck. I'm very sorry for you. I mean, I am correct that he spent his honeymoon in Cuba. In Cuba. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He went to Nicaragua.

Nicaragua had fair elections. Yeah, he was sowing his wild oats in Nicaragua. He went with the lesbian wife to Cuba. And I'm not kidding when I say that. No.

That is a literal description of his, I mean, you know, because one should not, in fact, label people or all the labels.

She labeled herself. Right. So, and it's a, I mean, you could say it's a wonderful love story because there she was in this giant man, came and swept her off her feet,

took her to Cuba, and they will soon, it looks like, be the first family of New York City busily charging charter schools rent because God forbid that a charter school educating public school children shouldn't have to pay ruinous rent to be in a disgusting hundred-year-old new york city building being managed by the school construction authority with mold in the walls and nothing has

been painted for 20 years they should pay rent because, because that's what Bill de Blasio wants them to do. Now, how many people here live in Manhattan? It looks like about half live in Manhattan. How many in Brooklyn? Okay, well, I'm sorry for the four of you, but the one good thing about, I'm always looking for the silver

lining, sorry, the one good thing about the de Blasio victory is all the hipsters in Brooklyn who vote for him are about to face the Dinkins crime wave. I'm sorry for you guys because you're here. We had a shooting in my neighborhood last night. There hasn't been a shooting there in like a year, so it's really fantastic.

That's 88th and Amsterdam for all of you. New York, a really wonderful experience to have a nice shooting there in like a year, so it's really fantastic. That's 88th in Amsterdam for all of you. New York, really a wonderful experience to have a nice shooting there just a week after bikers are smashing the helmets of family men in their SUVs just up and down the road that I drive on.

It's really a wonderful time to be a New Yorker. I'm sure we're all very happy about it. As we speak, in fact, there is a debate going on between Bill de Blasio and his opponent, Joe Loda. Joe Loda, who is a pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, liberal Republican, and the entirety of the debate

was de Blasio saying, you and your tea party friends, you're just playing out of the tea party playbook. All right, Anne, is the tea party a liability? Sometimes it is. By and large, I think it's been great energy, but it needs to be directed. As I just mentioned, some of the races that were lost,

one would say by tea partiers and wanting to be purists. Some were lost by consultants. Why did consultants persuade John Racy to run four times statewide in the state of West Virginia? Oh, I remember now because he has an enormous bank account. Same thing with Linda McMahon in Connecticut. Consultants are hurting our party. I think in the presidential election, you have people running who should not be running for ego gratification to get a TV show.

We have to concentrate on winning. And you asked for good news. The good news is, I think Republicans are just being magnificent right now. I'm so proud of Mike Lee and Ted Cruz. And for once, we have bright, articulate Republicans. That is so rare. It is so rare. And you have Cruz over there. I don't know if you've been following this closely. That is so rare. It is so rare. And you have Cruz over there. I don't know if you've been following this closely. Cruz is over whipping the House Republicans. The House Republicans have been absolutely magnificent. I mean, if they

compromise today and say, okay, fine, we're raising the debt ceiling, we'll run that last 17% of the government that's so important. I think we have won so much in the last three weeks. It shows Republicans are willing to fight and it reminds people that as soon as we do

win those Senate seats again, we're repealing Obamacare. We're not just living with it this time. I see a disjunction between the two points that you were making. No, totally, a complete disjunction because what is going on, I think, in Washington right now

is an example of a party blowing its shot at making an electability case for itself with people who are not already on its team. And I think... No, I totally disagree. Obamacare is incredibly... Well, you may disagree, and you may disagree. No, but I disagree. Obamacare is incredibly... Well, you may disagree, and you may disagree. No, but I'm not saying this...

I agree. I'm not saying this out of conservative purism. I'm not insisting on some crazy... Obamacare is incredibly unpopular. I'm generally against the government shutdowns because it's always overspending. Spending, oh, Americans say they're against spending, but then you say, oh, should we cut your

Social Security? No, no. So cutting it over something like spending or shutting the government down over spending, Obamacare is hated. Well, actually more than hated now. I mean, part of the incredible good news the past few weeks has been

the horrible disaster of the rollout of Obamacare. I mean, that has been a gift from God. The only thing that has made me genuinely laugh, I mean, I wouldn't say this, but even if there had been some horrible tragedy the day before Obamacare rolled out, I think I would have forgotten about the horrible tragedy. I think I'd be too busy laughing at the denial-of-service attack.

I'm not proud of that. I'm just being honest here. We're among friends. These are all members. I can speak freely amongst them. I do think that the best thing that I have seen in the last week, even as Anne and I disagree over the impact of the government shutdown and its effect on the Republican Party and what is being shown, which I think is a bad display of governance. commentators, my chief example being Ezra Klein, the 29 year old wonk of

the Washington Post who once said the Constitution is really hard to understand because it's over 100 years old. Ezra Klein, the wonk, has somehow found

the news of the horror of the rollout of healthcare.gov has somehow made him stand in his freeze, in his paces, and write, this is a disaster. How could this happen? How could they let it happen? All right, so here's my question. And what did we say? What did we all say?

For four years, what did we say? What did we all say? For four years, what did we say? You want the DMV to run your healthcare? Zai gazunt, as we say in Yiddish. Is that what you want? And here it is. DMVs don't run this badly anymore. I love the California DMV website. It's fantastic.

It's really good. You go to the DMV, you can download forms, you can fill them out. You can get the forms at the AAA office now in California. You can go to the DMV. It's awesome. You want the DMV to run health care. You should be so lucky. That's what you want.

That's what's happened. They give an eye exam there already, so they're already into your health, as it were. Exactly. Voter, voter, and the DMV and health care. Don't tell the Democrats this. They'll do it. They've already done it. That's what I think.

So I have a question. Now, just a prediction. And then we want to traditionally at a Ricochet meetup podcast, we invite a few people up to talk very briefly. media, what day or what moment do you think will be the first articles like the swallows in San Capistrano saying, you know, they fixed all that website stuff. It's actually a bumpy start, but it's wonderful. When do you think that's going to happen? In a week, two weeks, a month? I'm impressed enough that it took the New York Times two weeks to notice the problem of the rollouts.

Whoa, breaking news on the New York Times. I mean, seriously? From what I gather, the difficulties and problems with this website are colossal and incredibly complicated. And the problem is, as anyone who has dealt with website development, as those of us unfortunate enough to have to do this have, is that you build a platform. The platform is corrupted at its base, and the only real way to fix it is to extirpate it and build anew.

It's like the foundation is rotted. But nobody ever does that. Nobody ever says, okay, start anew because, of course, someone spent two years doing what you've done and you don't want to say, well, I just wasted $600 million

on nothing. So they will attempt to jury rig this and they will not be able to. There's a fantastic piece I have to tell you by Avik Roy, a healthcare expert in Forbes. And Ricochet contributor. Excuse me, and Ricochet contributor, Avik Roy, Twitter at Avik, in which he says that the key to understanding the difficulty and the problems, the technical problems with the website are that it was designed with the intention of hiding the degree to which healthcare costs were

going to rise. So that even though what it's supposed to do is be transparent about the numbers and all the alternate plans, there were all sorts of fail-safes put in to make sure that you couldn't, in fact, compare what you have to what you were going to get. And that as a result of this, they have put in tripwires all over the place that have made the site unworkable. Hey, where's Dick Adams? Dick Adams.

All right. Ricochet. Could you come over here a minute? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got him. Ricochet member. He's here. He builds these things for a living. And he's very good. He builds the big ones. So here, have a seat. Did he build Ricochet? Welcome Richard Adams. Richard Adams the big ones. So here, have a seat. Did he build Ricochet? Welcome, Richard Adams. Richard Adams.

Wow. In addition to that, he made this whole evening possible. He organized it for us, so he deserves a big hand from all of us. And everyone has to buy him a drink. Also known as Dick from Brooklyn. Dick from Brooklyn. Dick from Brooklyn, ladies and gentlemen. So while you're here, let me ask you a question.

Yes. Is there any way those guys down there are going to fix that website? Absolutely not. And with regard to the rumors of any denial of service attacks, you're welcome. No, it's a hopeless cause. It'll take months. You guys both reminded me of an important conspiracy theory I need to tell the room.

Remember when Bill Clinton, well, was caught dead to rights molesting Monica? You guys remember that. Wait, what? And then he gives his... Nobody tells me anything. He had that totally embarrassing moment, which this room remembers.

It depends. I want the definition of is, is. And the stories before that leaked were Clinton turns bright red in the face. He storms out of the room. They built our hopes up that it was going to be so much worse. And it just occurred to me,

listening to you talk, because you're right. I've been reading about this in the liberal press. The New York Times has been assuring us this cannot be fixed. I suspect that they're overdoing it so that when they fix it in three weeks, they can say,

oh, it's fabulous. We got it right back up and running in three weeks. Do we have an expert here? I don't know. But you're going on what they're saying about it. That's true. I don't have any first-hand experience with it. And it would be a marvelous strategy. And it could be, ideally,

it could be a strategy to justify single-payer eventually. Why not? Oh, yeah, they want it to fail. This is so impossible to manage. Yeah, yeah. That is true. The entire Obamacare system is designed... To fail.

To fail. Look, the remarkable thing about all of this is that when a lot of people in this room hate, and I think you're wrong to hate it, but nonetheless, the Medicare prescription, the Medicare prescription drug benefit, Medicare Part D, when it went online in 2004, there were

technological problems with it, and it was delayed for four months. When it came online, it worked perfectly, and a program that was controversial, that in fact something like 50% of the public was opposed to, was 80% popular after three weeks because everybody understood how it worked.

It worked fine. You got your card. You went to your drugstore. Everybody understood how it worked. I think it's too clever by half. I wish they were this good to imagine that they... Liberals are good. They're good at many

things. Being sneaky, lying, manipulative. They're very good at winning elections. As it turns out, they're not very good at running anything. Someone says the prices are high. Right. Yes.

So what one of the people in the room is saying is that the prices will be double the existing premiums. And there is where Dick from Brooklyn's conspiracy theory comes in. Because this is the ultimate question. If you want single payer, if ultimately your goal is single payer, don't you want Obamacare to be excessively expensive because the bet is you have to say this isn't workable because in fact it is costing individual people too much money

let the government take it over and the interesting thing about single payer is if they had gone the single payer route which they couldn't have because they didn't have votes in the Senate but single payer is completely there was no constitutional question. You pass a law. It says everybody in the country is on the health care system.

There's no constitutional question about whether or not it's a tax or a mandate. You're making people buy insurance or not buy insurance. They're not buying it, right? They're just getting it. It's a gift. Now, granted, the constitutional questions are reasonably settled. They're reasonably settled. But ultimately, that is the question, is are we going down this path?

And where I disagree with Anne about Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and the handling of this is making a stand at this moment that is ineffectual and ultimately will be ineffectual because they can't let this go much longer, I think muddies the waters and makes the case for 2014 and 2016 possibly more difficult. However, what it does do in my view is make it much more possible for a governor to be the presidential nominee.

But before we get into that, let's thank Dick from Brooklyn. Dick from Brooklyn! Let's buy him a drink. Thank you very much. Come on, buy Dick from Brooklyn a drink. And also, I should say, your Ricochet member, he's been really helpful with us in our imminent launch of 2.0. Ricochet 2.0.

Yeah, our CEO is over there squinting at me like, shh. He's squinting. But it's coming. And also, is PJS here? PJS? Patty! Ricochet member is responsible for all of these

name tags. Thank you very much. Patty, the name tag queen, has joined us at the podium. So, Patty, where are you from? I live in Wilton, Connecticut. Where's that again? How well do you know Connecticut? has joined us at the podium. So, Patty, where are you from? I live in Wilton, Connecticut. Wilton, Connecticut. Where's that again? How well do you know Connecticut?

Pretty well. Okay. Do you know Norwalk? Ann's from Connecticut. It's directly north of Norwalk. North of Norwalk. Okay, wow. Okay. I also used to live in this neighborhood.

In this neighborhood, really? 33rd and Lex, yeah. 33rd and Lex. Yeah. So, you've been a Ricochet member since the 30th? The home of National Review Magazine, by the way. Yeah, I'm a charter member of Ricochet. Charter member of Ricochet, so thank you for coming.

My pleasure. Now, so you only live in the area. You're not a New Yorker. Not anymore, no. Who's going to be your – is there a Senate – no, no. Chris Murphy's a senator. No, that was blown by consultants. Dick Blumenthal's a senator.

Dick Blumenthal's a senator. Because we ran Linda McMahon twice. We could have gotten Rob Simmons. Chris Murphy's a senator. Dick Blumenthal's a senator. Dick Blumenthal's a senator. Because we ran Linda McMahon twice. We could have gotten Bob Simmons. We could have gotten a lot of Republicans. But consultants saw that, oh, Linda McMahon has a second bank account. Let's fleece her again. And tells you the truth.

Yeah. And I mean, I hate to say it because I support people like, I mean, I don't support. But I am grateful to people like John Racy and Linda McMahon. They're wealthy people. They don't need to waste their time running for office, but political consultants lied to them and told them, you have a shot to win Connecticut. You have a shot to

win West Virginia. When they were great, I mean, West Virginia, we could have won two Senate races. The consultants blew because they wanted the deep-pocketed candidates. And the fact that we don't know these consultants' names shows that Republicans are not capable of punishing the people who hurt our party.

Exactly. Hurrah. Hurrah. I didn't get a hurrah from that guy. There you go. Well, thank you, Patty, for the name tags. My pleasure. A PTA mom with an empty nest.

Oh, no, a PTA mom with an... Got to do something with my printer and my hot laminator, you know. Print the hot laminator. No, no, no, the little table signs were on the hot laminator. And so everyone here, you all said to buy a Patty drink, too. Patty gets a drink. And I'm a super cheap date. Now what Ann

does not know, is my guess, is the extent to which the Glop Culture podcast, missing the guh, meaning Jonah, is obsessed with popular culture. And I am stunned to hear that Ann has been sitting home watching

Gossip Girl and Revenge because, again, when we knew each other when we were kids in Washington, Anne did not have a television. That's true. Anne did not have a television. That's true. She considered it junk, tawdry, culturally destructive, and here she is. Again, again, personal insults in my direction.

And now she can tell us all about Serena Van Woodsen. Oh, I had to hear two hours of Breaking Bad from her. Last week I wrote about Breaking Bad and I thought my readers would be annoyed with me. Do I have to write about the shutdown? And no, the reader seemed quite favorably

disposed. Don't you understand all anybody cares about is TV? That's all they care about. Nobody cares about anything else. We call it culture, but it's really TV. And it's something else we're losing. Not really fighting very much, except for my pal. Yeah, I'm putting on smut.

Is that a question? We have a question. It's easy to get distracted by the current events in Washington, but? Because we're distracted by Washington, we are not paying attention to foreign policy in Syria, Iran, China. What's going on? Syria, what? Anne, what do you think? I think it's best just to forget about foreign policy when a Democrat's in the White House because anything he does is going to harm us, as Obama has shown. I mean, we're still living with the effects of Jimmy Carter.

It's bad enough having them wreck domestic policy. Don't let them wreck foreign policy either. Just concentrate on socializing America. Well, that's hard enough. Let's focus on destroying the entrepreneurial risk spirit of Americans and just do that. And not creating more Muslim fanatics around the world. That's for your third term.

Yes. Well, let us quickly discuss what happened in Syria. Wait, John, are you capable of quickly discussing that? I don't think that's true. 100,000 people get killed in the Syrian civil war. Barack Obama, a little worried that he's going to look to light on foreign policy, says in summer of 2012, Syria gets chemical weapons that crosses the red line, crosses the red line.

So what happens? August 21st, 2013, Syria crosses the red line, uses chemical weapons against its own people, fires them into Great Neck. That is the analogy for New York. He's living in Damascus. He fires them into

Great Neck, a neighborhood just 12 miles away. Anybody here from Great Neck? Anybody from Great Neck? Wilton. Wilton, Connecticut. Patty's home. Fires them to Wilton, Connecticut. Kills 1,400 people. The red line is crossed. Obama, silent for four days. Then nothing happens. They need to study. Those were nice four days though, weren't they? When he was silent. He did some golfing. They need to make sure that they use chemical weapons.

They have to make sure, totally sure. It takes a week. They're sure it's going to happen. So Obama says, John Kerry says, it's screaming, the evidence is screaming in our face. We have to act, otherwise we're like Munich, horrible. Barack Obama, two days later, gets up and he says, I'm going to act, but first I'm going to make Congress tell me to act. I'm not going to act unless Congress says I'm going to act, but I can act, but I'm not going to, but Congress has to.

So you spend a week debating this. Nobody told going to act unless Congress says I'm going to act. But I can act, but I'm not going to. But Congress has to. So you spend a week debating this. Nobody told them to act. No one in America said you need to go to war or fire missiles at Syria if you cross the red line. You said it. So now we're supposed to say American credibility is on the line when you're saying it's our responsibility to tell you to act? Just act or don't act. But isn't it weird? Doesn't it make you feel strange that that was three weeks ago or four weeks

ago, Edward? It's kind of a hazy memory. Like, really? That happened? I don't really remember that. Like, oh yeah, I remember that. The idea that the president said something was really important and then said it wasn't important and said it might be important and then basically said forget about it.

And we all, oh, yeah, forget about it. We didn't just say forget about it. What's happened now is because Syria, on behalf of Russia, has agreed somehow to go into a process in which it may or may not get rid of its chemical weapons, the Syrian victory in the civil war in which it has killed 75,000 people is now assured because we're not going to do anything. The UN's not going to do anything.

And what's more, on Friday, the Nobel Prize Committee gives its Nobel Award to the committee that hasn't even yet started, hasn't even started to disarm Syria. It's a putative, it is a futuristic, forward-looking Nobel Peace Prize praising the UN group that hasn't even started doing its work. I wish I could get a futuristic, forward-looking Nobel Peace Prize. Praising the UN group that hasn't even started doing this work yet. I wish I could get a futuristic paycheck.

Because they just gave Assad the Nobel Peace Prize. Anne. Effectively, the UN gave Assad the Nobel Peace Prize. On your point that isn't that weird, it was just four weeks ago, this makes my point that we would not have spent the last three weeks talking about Obamacare but for Ted Cruz, Mike Lee. Think of what has been in the news since November 6th. We tried to push Benghazi ferociously. I mean, every right-wing news outlet pushed it for two weeks. That kind of faded away. There was, of course, the gun stuff. There was amnesty. We absolutely would not be talking about

Obamacare. People would get complacent. They think this is just going to be like all the other great society programs. And the Department of Education, which Ronald Reagan swore, you know, he ran on getting rid of the Department of Education. No, this is just going to be another crap-ass, rotten federal program that Republicans are just going to say, oh, well, we lost. This reminds Republicans, proves to Republicans, this is number one on our agenda. And maybe we don't have the votes now. I think we could have used a little more help from our conservative media spending more of their time attacking

Cruz and Lee than attacking Obamacare. Yet and still... I don't think we spent enough time attacking Cruz and Lee. That's what I think. We didn't spend enough time attacking Cruz and Lee. Only because of those two guys has that been all we've been talking about and new things coming out about Obama wait a minute

much of what we've talked about for the last two and a half weeks has been the shutdown which is their fault which is their fault oh it's a great oh it's great that's why 76% of the American people disapprove of the GOP as of this week. No, of course it doesn't matter. It's great. Nothing could be better. No, that's a phony poll.

It's not a phony poll. Four polls say the same thing. It's not a phony poll. No, the one that you're citing is the Gallup poll. And it's not that I disbelieve polls, but Gallup tells you right there in the poll, this is a poll of all adults. Any pollster will tell you. Among all adults, it's, you know, half of them can't name the vice president. In the collection, that's irrelevant. We need likely voters. And in the collection of recent polls, it's been stunning, especially compared to the 1995 shutdown. I think Republicans have played it right. We have Mike Lee and Ted Cruz rather than Newt Gingrich. We have some of our own conservative media now. And third, it's over Obamacare. It's not

general spending. And if you add up a lot of these polls recently, it's about 50-50. And that's with, quote, our media attacking our guys. So, show of hands, who here thinks shutdown, good idea? Okay. Who here thinks

shutdown, disaster? So it's like two-thirds great thing. I don't know, 60-40 looks like to me. And by the way, I'm not saying... Well, you are all New York City rhinos. Rhino. Yeah, you know, tri-state area rhinos there. I'm not saying they have to continue it. I think they have accomplished so much right now. If they completely said, okay, we tried, we're crying uncle, please vote for us for the Senate next time and we'll get it done, America. We have accomplished

so much right now, they don't have to keep it going. Can I add one person to the mix here? Ricochet contributor Tommy DeSanto right there. He's coming. Tommy DeSanto! Ricochet contributor Tommy DeSanto right there. Tommy DeSanto! Ricochet contributor Tommy DeSanto. Thank you, everybody. Tommy's just a contributor.

He didn't do anything to get us here. So you don't have to buy him a drink? That's why it's empty. Make him buy you a drink. I did want to say something about the question because I actually... I do live in New Jersey. Well, I meant the previous question about, you know,

why are we not paying attention to Syria and we're paying attention to things like the shutdown. I think they're actually related because our president, I think, is waiting to solve the shutdown problem as he did with Syria. He's waiting for Vladimir Putin to present some sort of solution to get him out of it. And I just think it's sad. I mean, we've always had, you know, very rugged

presidents to go against the Russian presidents. And I look now, every time near the getter, I'm waiting for Ashton Kutcher to jump out and tell Obama he's being punked and let him off the hook. You know, one guy's hunting bear, the other guy's riding around in a girl's bicycle helmet. It's just disappointing to me. You can't really top that, I don't think. I did want to agree with Ann

and disagree with you. I think what's happening with the Republicans is we've... It's the dress. I think we've reached... What what you don't like my dress i think it's very tasteful thank you very much i think we've reached the point finally where we've decided that ideology is more important than elections and it's going to cost us for a while but if we're ever going to fix the country i I mean, they keep raising the debt ceiling. When I was a kid, I remember hearing, you know, people talk about how frightening it was that government

was talking about finances in terms of billions. Now we're heading towards raising it to 20 trillion. The next number starts with a Q. I'm not even sure I can pronounce it. If I do, they might actually do it. But I think at some point, you know, right now they're saying let's take the sequester cuts, which were supposed to be absolutely untouchable, and put them back on to get rid of them. When's it going to end? At some point, ideology for a while has to trump winning elections so we could save the country at some point. Wait, but all I care about is winning elections. No, you can't.

Otherwise, we're just going to keep raising the debt and get to the quadrillion debt number. Listen, wouldn't you prefer Mike Castle to Christine O'Donnell right now? Wouldn't you prefer Richard Lugar to whomever the Democrat is? You know, I... Why we could haveugar to whomever the Democrat is? You know, why we could have control of the Senate? You're out of your mind! Now, hold on. There are, here is

the problem. There is a confusion, a constant confusion, which is actually the outgrowth of the success of the Reagan years and the Reagan ideology of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. The conservative movement pushes conservative ideas. It is not supposed to be part of a partisan system.

It is about ideas. It is about forwarding those ideas. The Republican Party is a political vehicle for the winning of elections by a faction. Now, this is what's important. Conservatism can be pure in the sense that you don't want people coming in saying that what it means to be conservative,

let's say, is abortion on demand, for example, or deficit spending, as far as the eye can see. The Republican Party does not have the luxury of purifying itself and narrowing its audience. It needs 50% plus one in every race, right? Or, you know, if there's a third party, a little less. And the problem is that there is a confusion between making sure that conservatism remains,

you know, a consistent ideological philosophy with the Republican Party's need to reach out to people who do not think the way we think, do not perceive things the way we perceive them, and don't live the way we live. And that confusion is very dangerous now. That's a good point, and it's even worse than that because the arm of our movement, the Republican Party itself, that is supposed to be concerned with winning elections, oh no, they're filling their own boat.

Like I said with McMahon and John Racy and the idiots from the Republican Senatorial Committee who hired a Philadelphia ad firm for ads in West Virginia. And then it leaks to the press they requested hickey actors. Racy's poll numbers fell overnight.

Why don't we know the names of these guys? Why don't we know whose brother-in-law works at that Philadelphia ad firm? So many of these consultants, and if you know consultants, and I'm sure you do, and you do, and they talk to you, it's all about making money for them. They don't care about winning. That is what the party needs to be concerned with. Instead, they're lining their own pockets. Now, the other problem with the parties, I think a lot of people here feel very disaffected with John McCain. Here's the real reason to feel disaffected with John McCain.

The real reason to feel disaffected with John McCain is McCain-Feingold, the campaign final law of 2002, which weakened the central party so severely that there is no – That's a rhino for everyone. Yes! It's not me. It's that guy. That guy. For once, can we just get that clear? Because the K-final weakened the centralized power

of both the Republican and the Democratic parties, giving rise to super PACs, super committees, all of these forces that a lot of people here may like because they like the notion that they're not giving money to some behemoth in Washington. But as a result of this, including the sort of reform that we all believe in, like ending earmarks, the virtue of earmarks in Washington is that you can cut them off. You can discipline politicians by cutting them off.

You can, if you have most of the money as the central party, you can say, oh, are you stepping off the reservation? Are you going to talk about that? Are you hiring the wrong consultant? We're just going to cut the spigot off. Good luck to you. Congratulations. I think campaign finance reform is even worse than you're describing.

It has also led to these deep-pocketed candidates who can fund their own campaigns. It has led to sociopaths and narcissists because they have to spend all their days raising money. If you read about Ronald Reagan when he was first running, it was only because he had his kitchen cabinet saying, we're going to fund your campaign, we're going to make you governor. Under today's campaign finance regime, Ronald Reagan would not run. So that's how much it's hurt us, which brings me to another point I wanted to mention. Why on earth would Republicans be calling Mitch McConnell a rhino? He was the Ted Cruz on campaign finance report.

He stood alone. He was attacked by the media. And I talk to these people throwing, who's been a fantastic Republican leader? Compare him to Trent Lott, Bob Dole, James Baker. It's a tough job. It was under Mitch McConnell, but not one single Republican voted for Obamacare. And I'm telling you, you listen to talk radio, and they throw Mitch McConnell in and, oh, let's run this nut tea party candidate who took a $100,000 grant from the government. Not just that.

Ann was a constitutional lawyer. Mitch McConnell said that McCain-Feingold was largely unconstitutional. And three times since its passage, the Supreme Court has found its provisions unconstitutional. It is a destructive, awful piece of legislation. And McConnell was right and its weakness the weakening of it unfortunately because it wasn't repealed the way we should have obamacare repealed its weaknesses um have now only been compounded by the system that is built up to deal with its flaws yes so that was a great thing he did and what's more he took a lot of crap for it. Yes, he did. Nobody said he was right.

Everybody was afraid of it. Everybody was like, because of Enron. Remember, what happened was Enron. Because of Enron, we needed campaign finance reform. Because Enron gave Bush a little money. Yeah, Enron. Enron. Because Enron.

Enron. Now, I would like to say, before we go, that I've said this over and over again, usually on a pre-roll before the podcast, that Ricochet, everyone here is a Ricochet member. If you're listening to this, you are either a Ricochet member or you listen without being a member. And so, we would like, yes,

thank you. We would like you to join, if you're listening to this right now, somewhere, free riders, right? We would like you to join Ricochet at Ricochet.com. And two things. Anne just grabbed me and said, to remind me. There are two things you have to do now. You have to join Ricochet,

and you have to buy Anne's book. You have to buy Anne's book. But the book is called A Never Trusting Liberal Over Three, Especially a Republican, which I take as a personal insult but I would like to say I would ask Tommy

one question now you're meeting Ricochet members for the first time how do you feel about being a contributor how do you feel about the community basically I'm asking you to remind people to join you know before Ricochet I was a regular contributor at foxnews.com,

and I had a column up there that was getting printed about once a week. And, you know, that's a very widely read website around the world. And then these guys came to me and said, you know, we're going to have this startup called Ricochet. We'd like you to come. And I said, well, there's a good career move. Let me go to a startup. But I've loved it ever since. I've been writing for about three years. I love the idea that it's

the only website out there where when a columnist posts a column and you comment, the columnist talks back and you get to debate and the idea of Ricochet is you bounce ideas off one another and we have a member feed where the members who join have columns

and I love to hang out there and comment there because some of the best columns are coming from the members themselves and they elevate them to the front page. There's just no other website around that's like it and I really love being here and I want to thank you for the opportunity to do it, Rob. We want to thank you and thank you. If you're listening, please join. That's right. Way in the back, Fred Cole. Is that Fred Cole?

Fred is often a defender of certain rhino squishes like me, so thank you. I was going to ask, because I saw Fred here, how many people here say, I'm a conservative? That's everybody. Whoa, Ron, Ron, conservative. No, no. So how many people here say I'm not a conservative.

I'm a libertarian. Oh, you're a conservative. I thought you were talking about Rod. Okay. No, no. I mean – First of all, okay. Let me ask again.

How many people here describe themselves as conservative? Okay, that would be almost everybody. So how many people here describe themselves as libertarian? About 25%. But some are both. How many people say both? Shut up, Rob. We're both. Stop making – all right. So is there a way to figure out how to get the libertarians to vote Republican? I'm a little ticked off.

The libertarians do vote Republican. Just asking questions here. No, no, no, no. I'm sorry. You guys screwed up a Colorado election. You're about to screw up the Virginia election. The Libertarian candidate in Virginia with that great Ken Cuccinelli running against total sleazebag Terry McAuliffe. The Libertarian candidate is bringing in like nine percentage points,

exactly what Cuccinelli is behind McAuliffe by. If you guys screw up that election, I'm holding each four of you responsible personally. She means it, too. Yes, I do. She'll hunt you down. A fair point. That's a fair point.

But, you know, I get a sense in New York City and maybe just because, you know, I get a sense of something that I want to see that it's a little bit more like, you know, a little more libertarian, right? I mean, that's what I say when I'm attacked. I think that's a myth that you rhinos promote.

I go to a church in New York that's like a mega church in the city of darkness here. Tim Keller brings in 600 to 1,000 people four times every Sunday. I am the oldest person there. Where is this church? Hunter College. A few churches on the west side. This is in Manhattan. Most of the churches are empty because they're all saying, I'm okay, you're okay.

But there are a lot of social conservatives in New York. It's just that we're overwhelmed by the Bill de Blasio voters who are all going to be mugged, raped, and murdered. De Blasio is only 40 points. Don't you go statulating with your Republican hysteria. All right, but don't you feel – It's only one vote that counts. The one where he's going to be 20 points.

But if I'm not here, if I'm listening to this and I don't live in New York City and I'm not on one of the coasts, I look at New York City as the – New York City, Los Angeles where I live as the great Satan. We're responsible for everything bad that happens in the culture. We're responsible for the bizarre leftward drift. I know I am. All right. I'm not arguing. I am definitely.

You're exactly right. Oh, it's great. Aren't you sweet? It's pretty good. Yeah, exactly right. It's a smutty little thing. Oh, aren't you sweet? It's pretty good. Yeah, but it's got its own thing. I will now, I want to make the case, I want to make the case for New York City against the evils of the, you know, from the, which is this. If you want to know, and this is one of the tragedies about what's going to happen here.

If you want to understand what happened in the reformation of the United States, and there has been something of a reformation of the United States from the 90s to now. We have a suspension of the divorce rate, a reduction in the abortion rate, and, of course, the colossal drop in the crime rate. Crime rate being meaning social order, sense of community, return of normal life to people who were denied it and that. Large amounts of that come directly from New York City. 50% of the national crime drop over the last 20 years is the result solely of the crime drop in New York City. Think about what that means.

What that means is, and that was Rudy Giuliani followed solely on fumes and entropy by Michael Bloomberg, but that was an assertion of the most conceivable conservative point of view, which is the streets belong, the homes belong to people. Society was built, Hobbes's point, the great 17th century philosopher, society was built to protect people from lives that are nasty, brutish, and short. All of that had gone away in New York City, which had become a place entirely of menace. That going away changed the way that Americans feel about the streets they live in and the society they live in. That is something that New York did. Now, New York didn't do it. Good policy did it.

That's the danger, which is, of course, good policy is pretty easy to reverse. Yes, quickly. Very quickly. Very quickly, which is, you know, right now we had a decision in New York City in July where a federal judge said that the policy that allows cops to stop and frisk people on the streets looking for illegal weapons, that that was unconstitutional and needed to be changed. And what that says to police is don't be so aggressive. Don't be so – don't be, stay in your cars. You don't want to get, and then, and the, and Bill de Blasio, the new mayor, is a guy who believes in this and hates the cops and doesn't like aggressive policing. So it's going to be, don't stick your neck out because your mayor's

not going to support you. Your police chief's not going to support you. They're going to hang you out to dry. Rudy Giuliani stood up to Al Sharpton and a lot of these guys who would say, I want that cop prosecuted. I want a special prosecutor. I want someone to take him down. And they would say, that guy was on the streets protecting himself, defending his own life against a marauding horde

and I am not turning them over to your mob so that I can get a good headline in the New York Times. And the danger that we face now is there will be no such counter-incentive. There's no, you know, and that's a real horror show. We have an M. York cop right here.

Oh, God bless you. An MTA cop. It's very late for Ann Coulter, who got up very early Which I never do. To sell her book. I will remind you, it's Never Trust a Liberal Over Three, especially Republican by Ann Coulter,

author of nine New York Times bestsellers. This is going to be number ten, clearly. Well, I don't know with no book sales here tonight. Well, so if you're listening and you're not a member of Ricochet, please join Ricochet and buy Ann's book. If you're listening and you are a member of Ricochet, please join Ricochet and buy Anne's book. If you're listening and you are a member of Ricochet, please buy Anne's book. If you're here, you're a member, so buy Anne's book.

Basically, buy Anne's book. There are links on Amazon. There are links on Amazon. Thank you. I promised that we were going to plot against Jonah Goldberg, who is not here. Yes. So we need to...

So... So, no, you should certainly buy his book. But I think what you really, really need to do is everybody needs to send him emails explaining why Deep Space Nine was the best Star Trek series. Which is a joke I don't understand.

I don't even care if you don't believe it. I don't believe it. We're going even care if you don't believe it. We're going to torment him with this. It doesn't matter because it's true. John and I will go on. We're going to go on for a few more moments, but we want to say goodnight to Anne because I know she's about to fall off her stool.

Thank you very much, Anne. Thank you. And of course, the book is Never Trust a Liberal Over Three, especially a Republican by Ann Coulter, author of nine New York Times bestsellers. Now ten. She's going to take this book because, of course, every author knows no free books for anyone.

Never a free book. Never. Only $16 on Amazon. It's on sale. $16 on Amazon. $16. And the link, go through the link. And he'll get it signed. Go through the link. Never. $16 on Amazon. $16. And the link, go through the link. Go through the link. Yeah. Ricochet. Good night to Anne. And so we'll just do it.

We have a few more minutes. We should do some Q&A. We have a queue right there. There's one right here. Joshua Einstein. So I just want to say I joined today after being a free writer. Oh, there we go. Very proud to join. Because you had a guilty look, I want to say I joined today after being a free writer. Oh, there we go. Very proud to join.

Because you had a guilty look, I had to say. Yes. But I'm a Jersey boy, and we have two elections coming up, one tomorrow. I'm really sorry to hear that. One next month. So I'd be remiss. One good, one bad. Yeah.

Well, the question is which one's which. Yeah. But I'd be remiss if I didn't ask, when it comes to what was talked about before, touching on both a potential presidential candidate coming out of a governorship and when it comes to the intra-party violence that we see, what's better in your perspective, having a winner from our team or having a winning team? Because in our governor, who I will definitely vote for, we have somebody that

has expanded his margins and increased his popularity in Democratic traditional voters in the African-American community, in the Jewish community, in Hispanic voters, in urban voters, in older voters. That's just terrible. But when we look at whether or not he's busted his hump to try to get Republicans in the state senate and the state assembly, whether it's right now or it's two years ago, there's much less of that. And when we look at the Senate campaign, whether or not he's willing to spend some of his popularity points to try to help the Senate candidate in what has turned out to be a closer race than it should have been. I'm glad it is. We don't see that. Yeah, I'll say that.

I mean, it would be nice to imagine a politician in a blue state, a Republican governor in a blue state, spending political capital to help sort of down ticket, down ballot names. Find me one. That would be great. I don't think there are that. There aren't those people. They just don't want to use their political capital that way. So I kind of forgive him.

I mean, I sort of feel like with Chris Christie, all of our complaints about him from the right reflect this kind of cognitive problem that we have on the right, which is that we keep forgetting that we lost, and that we lost twice. In a popular vote, the people voted for the most liberal candidate who has run since McGovern. And we lost that. And we say, well, no, we ran the wrong guy, all that stuff. Everybody's got an excuse for losing. We lost it. Meaning the American people voted against us, so we had to win them back. And we keep saying, we've got to take the country back. No, no, we have to win it back. It's much harder. And so a guy who runs successfully in a blue state, to me, is somebody who we shouldn't be cavilling at. We should be learning from. Now, my personal choice, although I do like Chris Christie, my personal choice is Scott Walker.

So here you have a guy in a very, very blue state who fought the public sector unions, fought back a recall, unlike Chris Christie. He actually had a recall, and he won. And I want to know, whatever that guy is drinking, I want to buy a case of it for every Republican in the country. Whoever ran his recall campaign, I want that guy to be running the RNC next year. First of all, I think that you are doing – I'm remarkably impressed with Scott Walker.

But remember, Wisconsin is a state that John Kerry won by 5,000 votes whereas New Jersey is a state that Democrats win by 18 or 19% nationally in these races and I think the key to understanding it is clear that Christie is not a politician who

is all that interested in as you say, broadening and helping the Republican Party in his state, and that there are some questions about whether or not he sort of took it for the team in the right way during the Romney campaign and all of that. But the simple fact of the matter is you only have certain choices in elections. You can only choose between the people who run. And it's like 2012.

Go back to 2011 and 2012. Tell me in that field who could have done better than Romney. You don't like Romney. Everyone hates Romney. Romney's terrible. He was a terrible candidate. Nobody would have done better than Romney in that field of eight. A lot of us who thought Romney was not going to be a good candidate were pushing, were begging, were looking, even as late as January of 2012, to push Christie in, push somebody else in.

Jeb Bush could come out of nowhere. Something could happen. There's always that article. A broker convention? You know, Republicans never have that. None of it could happen. But in the end, there were nine people, and Christy was the only conceivable nominee. You think Romney made the 47% mistake? Imagine what Rick Santorum would have said off mic.

I'm sorry. Whether you like him or not, and he's an impressive person in many ways, though he lost his race before that by 19 points. So I don't really think that's a very good example of somebody you want to go to win. Again, as Rob says, political parties are vehicles for

winning elections, and what they do is they hew, as it's now divided, they hew fundamentally now ideologically. So the Republicans are the right of center party, the Democrats are the left of center., and the Democrats are left of center. It used to be that there were regional differences, regional variations.

Most liberal people in the Northeast were Republicans in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s because they didn't like the Democratic Party's stance on segregation. So those kind of divides, they don't exist anymore. Basically, there's been an ideological sort. If you want right-of-center politics, if you want right-of-center policies broadly defined, you have no choice.

There is no other vehicle. There is no other modality. So I don't think that conservatives should trim their sails in any way, shape, or form. But they shouldn't imagine that the elected politicians who have to win can be their tribunes, can be their you know, Jim DeMint left politics to go to Heritage. Jim DeMint was a politician who left politics to run

a think tank and an action mouthpiece because politics was too restricting for him. That's what you need to understand. Politics was a discipline for him that he no longer had. I would say that I always – I think we have time for a few more questions. I would say that my argument is always that if you look at – when you lose, the question is, okay, who won and how did they win? And I always look at the Democratic Party, which has been winning ideologically since 1964.

Whether they won the White House or they lost the White House, they kept control of the Congress for a long time, and they drove the country left, either at a fast pace when they had the presidency or a slow pace when they didn't, but they kept moving it left. And the reason they did that, the way they did that was they got really big. So they got super big, So they got super big and they had conservative up until 1985. Until 1990 you had conservative Democrats, you had liberal Democrats, you had crackpot Democrats, you had crooks, you had city, urban gangsters. You had a whole panoply, like a complete spectrum of people who were Democrats and that actually helped the activists in their party. So if you are, I still think if you're a conservative activist, your best bet is to become a little conservative activist cell in a very large national party.

And I think our party, unfortunately, seems to be getting smaller, not larger. It's looking more like the Green Party. The Green Party is a very respectable party in a lot of ways. We know exactly what it stands for. It stands for a very specific number of things, but it has no power. So what would you rather be? Would you rather be the Democratic Party or the Green Party? I'd 1973 on the heels of his landslide defeat and said, you know, we're eventually going to have socialized medicine in this country. He would say, no, no, it's too conservative. We have it. We have it now.

And I think you have to like – the way you win is you learn from the winners. Whether you like them or you don't, you learn. What do they do? And can we do that ourselves in our own way? That's kind of my theory. Right there. We have one right in the center there. Oh, yeah.

Good luck. They're kind of hot mics here. Wait a minute. Who are you? I'm Jim Berrettini. Screen name? Bag of Donuts. Bag of Donuts? Yeah, Bag of Donuts. I love our dignified screen names, don't you? I'm Jim Berrettini. Screen name? Bag of Donuts. Bag of Donuts?

Yeah, Bag of Donuts. I love our dignified screen names, don't you? I have started a low-carb diet since then. Which is good because somewhere here in the room we have the paleo diet. Yeah, we do. We have a, yeah. Paleo guy. Okay, anyway, go ahead.

So I feel like the ghost of de Blasio and Cory Booker is sort of hanging over like a pall of this. Ghosts? They're not ghosts. So the specter. Oh, the specter, right. The specter is probably a better word. Christmas future.

Yeah. Yeah, very good. But I think one of the things that I feel is unless we're moving forward, we're moving backwards. So if we're looking at possible contenders for those sorts of slots, there's no one – if you look at Loda, there's no one who's pushing any sort of a positive vision forward. And on a local basis, it's hard to see what that would be. Are you a New Yorker? I'm now a New Jerseyan, but I've been a New Yorker for like 15 years.

That means you're not a New Yorker. True. Right. True, but I still have a little sentimental connection. Yeah, just dotting the I's here. Yeah, that's right. That's right. I got two.

So I guess my question is, what is that issue that's going to draw us in on a local level that will really – I mean, one of the things that's occurring to me is possibly education. I mean, I'm a homeschooler, and it seems to me that one of the things that... Wait, I'm a homeschooler. You homeschool your kids, or you were homeschooled? No, I homeschool my kids. My wife and I homeschool. And it seems to me that one of the things that, on a local level, that we're always fighting are those sorts of issues, sort of restrictions that are placed on us. And I don't think people, I don't think homeschoolers look at that as a political issue. They don't see it as a Republican versus a Democrat.

They see it as a way of maintaining a way of life that's important to them. And I guess my question is, is there some kind of an issue like that locally that has a kind of a valence, a kind of a pull to people that makes sense. Look, Republicans, in Rob's reckoning, let's say, Republicans do well when there are big national or local questions having to do with fundamental issues. And when the issues are smaller and largely dedicated to questions of governance, they do worse. So one of the things about New York and the victory of de Blasio, as I'm talking about this with you, is it's – look, a Democrat – this is New York City. There is a five-to-one Democratic registration advantage. A Democrat has not been mayor of – has not won the mayoralty of New York City since 1989. That is 24 years.

No, not nominally. The person on the Democratic line has not won the mayoralty for 24 years. Why did that happen? Because the city went into terrible decline, and a guy won, and then he did really well and he won again, and then just before the next election, when it was likely that the Democrat would win, 9-11 happened, raising another security issue,

and a Republican won instead of the Democrat in 2001. And then the Republican was deemed to have done a good enough job to win in 2005, and then he spent $150 million as a non-Democrat then an independent to win in 2009. It has been 24

years. Remember, just think about what that means. In big issues, New York was a city ripped by big issues. Is anybody old enough here to remember, who here is old enough to remember Dinkins' New York? You are not. How old are you?

I'm 26 and I... Oh, give me a break. Oh, go away. Oh, give me a break. Scramola, buddy. Every person over 50 in this room should kick his ass. I was born in Washington Heights, and I remember the no radio sign on my mom's car. Okay, fair enough. The no radio sign was a very good example of this. People in the country don't know.

Everybody in New York who had a car on the streets, the car was broken into, and the radio pulled out and stolen. Everybody. I had it happen twice. I wasn't even living here. I would come up for the weekend. That was a true story. You didn't even have a radio. No, then people would have no radio in the car.

You'd pull the radio out, whatever. Anyway, the key thing is those are big issues. Just as in 1980 there were big issues, as in 2004 there were big issues. Okay, so New Yorkers. I read in the paper when I was... I've been here for about a week, and I saw that children marched across the Williamsburg Bridge or something to support – what was it?

Charter schools. To support charter schools. Right. Now, this is why I hate the liberal media because if they were marching for anything quasi-liberal, it would have been a six-act play in the media. Exactly. for anything quasi-liberal. It would have been a six-act play in the media. And these kids were marching for charter schools and that bastard, de Blasio, and I can say that because I'm a founder of Ricochet and I can break the rules

anytime I want to. Because this is not a democracy. It's a military dictatorship. By the way, you should know that Rob has allowed three pretty bad curse words per episode on Sullivan & Sons. Oh, yeah, yeah. Three pretty bad ones.

That's right. Actually, not pretty bad ones. Bad ones. Three okay bad ones. Yeah. The pretty bad ones I'm allowed on FX, which I'm really excited about. The new network. My potty mouth.

All right, next question. We have time for two more. Yes. Oh, sorry. Hi. It's Deirdre. What's your screen name? I'm AD. I actually suggested. Hi. It's Deirdre. What's your screen name? I'm AD.

I actually suggested this place. Really? Thank you. Galway Pub on 36th Street from Deirdre. I know you hate us whenever we say, oh, the media, the media. But I just spent the weekend with a family member who works for the government, the federal government down in Maryland, and of course I'm kind of complaining about the shutdown and everything

and being furloughed even though they're going to get paid. But my question is, like, I would tell her things, like, that things that were happening, like, this is the shutdown, like, with the cutoff at Mount Rushmore. How they shut things like that down and stuff like that. The overlook that allowed you

to see Mount Rushmore from the highway the park police closed. The National Highway Patrol closed down the overlook. Shall not agree. Just kind of petty things. She's like, that. Shall not agree. Right. Yeah, just like kind of petty things. And she's like, oh, well, that's just not true. Oh, that, like, she just didn't believe me.

You know, and so how do you write? Well, because she reads the news. Yeah, but here, Sidra, you wouldn't have known this yourself 20 years ago. That's the thing that people have to remember is we grew up in a world where there were three newspapers and three television networks. And the diversity of opinion, we now have started to take it for granted. It is astonishing how much more diversity of opinion there is, how much more diversity of views there is. It is so much better. Now, it's more frustrating in part because you do know these things, and then you know, as Rob was pointing out,

that there is still a certain degree of high censorship that goes on, such that 2,000 kids are marching across the Brooklyn Bridge, and unlike when 2,000 disgusting, slimy, homeless people walked across the Brooklyn Bridge during Occupy Wall Street, they didn't cover it, right? So that happens, and it drives you crazy, but you wouldn't have known about it in the first place, and it wouldn't have happened, what's more. So don't think de Blasio doesn't know that it happened. Don't think that it doesn't scare him to know that there is a public force like this. And speaking, by the way, about education,

that question was asked previously. You know, one of the interesting demographic trends here that we saw in 2012 that has, is the Republican Party is becoming the party of marriage and kids and family, and the Democratic Party is becoming the party of singletons and never-marrieds or single parents or that sort of thing. And as this goes on 10 or 15 years from now, you cannot draw a straight line to the effect of that because it means we will care about education and people like us will care about education and they won't. They have – the only reason that they care about education now, given their electorate,

is that they have the teachers' unions that they represent. And, you know, for years, education reform has been stymied by the fact that the people – when you ask people in a poll whether they're in favor of charter schools or school choice, they always say yes. And then when they voted in the voting booth, they would always vote status quo because most of them preferred what they had, and they were scared of what this unknown future would be of reform. But as the years go by and there are more kids in more charter schools and there are more parents with more school choice, that argument becomes easier to make.

And of course you have generations of people who will have been trained in these schools, who will have gone to these schools, know themselves as they progress to adulthood. And I think it's the same for homeschoolers. I mean, homeschooling, that's the same thing for homeschoolers. Not to be deterministic, but I mean, if you have more kids than less kids, fewer kids, right now the youth know, 60-40 to the left between 20 and 30. That will not be the case 15 years from now, because the left, they're not having kids. I don't mean this in a negative way or being hostile. They're not having kids. That is a fact. Or if they are having kids, even worse, they're having kids out of wedlock. They're having kids as single mothers. They're not having as many.

It is a very, very serious issue, and this is why you can't draw straight lines in politics. You don't know what's going to happen, and you also don't know what's going to happen a year from now. One of the heartening pieces of detail, despite the fact that Rob and I hate what's going on with the

shutdown and everything is, right now, according to all the polls, the Democratic advantage in the generic ballot, that is, will you vote for a Democrat or Republican in the next election, is Democrats plus six. That is across all the polls. That is exactly where it was in October of 2009. In October of 2009, right? So October of 2009, and then came November 10, and Republicans won 63 seats in the House.

So the notion that you can draw a straight line from even a bad political moment now, the question is whether or not, in my view, and this gets more complicated, whether or not what we've seen here is a kind of degrading of the Republican brand. Well, I don't know. But that we don't know. We don't know. I think you're right, though, about these polls. I mean, I remember, I mean, any kind of market research is incredibly, incredibly primitive

and doesn't tell you what people are going to think about in six months. I mean, anecdote, I remember standing on a stage next to the chairman of NBC and telling him that the show that we all like, the writers of Cheers, we all like this show called the Seinfeld Chronicles. And he'd been looking at me like I'm an idiot and saying, everybody hates that show. You should see the testing on that show. It's really bad.

Focus groups and testing and research show how terrible that show is. And, of course, it made them a billion dollars. Now, the only reason they left it on was because they were broke or they couldn't replace it. But had they had the money to replace it, they would have based on their idea of the science of market research, which is exactly what polling is.

And it's completely, it's intuitive and it's voodoo. And we've got to hope the voodoo's on our side. Okay, one more question. Hey, thanks guys. Great follower. Cornell Burnett. Born and raised in New York. Cornell Burnett. Oh yeah, in New York, Cornell Burnett. Oh, yeah.

Wow. All right. So here we go. So you guys brought up a lot of great points. It's because we're so smart. Yes, you are. Thank you. For sure. And so when we think about the path to victory, okay, you guys brought up a lot of great points.

You talked about children, education, and I think these are key. If you look at a place like New York City, just recently it was discovered in the new testing that about two-thirds of the kids can't read or do math on grade level. Here's my question. I mean, as you go forward, that doesn't, I think, bode well for the party in a sense that you're raising a generation of people who aren't going to be able to be productive, and so big government is going to be more appealing to them. I think what we need to do is change the messaging. Right now you've got a lot of people with income inequality and so forth. I think conservatism ultimately helps that problem, but we don't package it right. If you just say that, oh, we can't raise taxes because the rich guy's going to hire you, if I'm a poor person, that

doesn't help me. I think the best thing, what turned me to the conservative party was reading a guy like Milton Friedman, because everything he he did he brought it back to poor people this whole issue with vouchers and school choice this is like from the 50s and 60s if I could go to a poor parent and say I'm going to give you freedom by letting you choose what you know school your kid can go to that's magical but our candidates aren't doing that so I felt like we get caught up in this ideology thing and I'm such a conservative. I agree with you. We need to make the party bigger and we need to show people how conservatism can improve their lives.

I don't think we do a good job of that. Do you call yourself a conservative or a libertarian? I'm both. Bill Buckley said conservatism stood on those three stools, right? Being a libertarian was one of them. So I would say I'm a libertarian, but with a small L, I do believe that there's limits to what you can do. But I do believe in freedom overall.

It's not that complicated. Here is an answer, Cornell. You give an answer to Joshua Einstein's question about Christie and helping Republican politicians down ticket. because if Christie proves to be a good candidate nationally as he was statewide when he won in 09 and as apparently he's going to win in 13 and when he became governor in 10 one of the things that characterized him was precisely that he evaded and did not and crossed lines on the topics and sorts of things that he was willing to fight and scream about, among them education. People say there's no point to it. There's no point to it. It doesn't help.

There aren't that many parents who vote, and it doesn't matter, and there's nothing you can do. And if you remember, the things that made him famous were him screaming at reporters. More than that, screaming at teachers. Teachers? That was the one thing you weren't ever allowed to do was that you can't. We can't have a policy review on a teacher. You're not teaching these kids, so don't tell me. Right.

And screaming at reporters and talking about how there was a $25 billion tunnel project that he was going to cancel because it wasn't going to work. It was twice as expensive as they said it was going to cancel because it wasn't going to work. It was twice as expensive as they said it was going to be. And who knows how much it was going to cost. And the point is that candidates who are sometimes heterodox and ideologically unpredictable are unpredictable on issues the way Rudy Giuliani was. Rudy Giuliani ran in 89 as a liberal Republican, which he was, and in 93 pretty much as a liberal Republican. He was the most theoretically conservative politician we have seen in the last 30

years. Including, he liked fighting with liberals so much that he picks fights over depictions of Jesus Christ in urine at the Brooklyn Museum for no reason. It didn't help him. It was a giant fight he didn't need. But that's what they do. And that's the interesting thing about a guy like Christie. That a Romney could never do. Or that a Kerry could

never do. Or that a Clinton could never do. Because they draw between the lines. They're good. They're A students. And they do what you're supposed to do. And they get up in the morning and they make the phone calls. And they go on. And they put on the face. And other people break

molds. And you don't know if it's going to happen. But in the end, the only politicians who ever win are the politicians that break molds. Always, every presidential victory is a new kind of coalition is formed. But also every president who makes a real difference, it seems to me. I mean, that's one of the reasons I think that as you look back in history and you look at the past 20, 30 years, and you have sort of this unbroken chain of Ivy League presidents except for one, Ronald Reagan, Eureka College. And that's why I like Scott Walker so much

because he didn't even go to college. And I kind of feel like that's probably what this country needs right now is a president who's not a smarty pants. Right. And by the way, the other interesting aspect of this is... And I say that as a smarty pants. Right. Every single presidential... By the way, the other interesting aspect of this is every single winning presidential victory invents a new path to victory.

Obama created voters where there were voters that weren't voters before, both in 2008 and 2012. Bush ran a completely different election in 2004 from the one that he ran in 2000. Clinton broke the famous electoral lock that the Republicans had on the South. Bush won a third-term Republican victory when that was not supposed to happen. He was behind 17 points. Reagan won 49 states in 80. Won 50% with a third party in 80. He won 49 in 84.

Reagan won New York. Right. Carter invented a candidacy out of whole cloth. So if you think this is the one mark against the Hillary Clinton coronation, we still don't know that she's going to – people who win do it differently every time. Also, don't you find that, aren't you incredibly frustrated when you read these pundits talking about Hillary Clinton and her inevitability? They said that in 2008. She's already been inevitable

and she's already lost. By the way, she's worried, you know, today, yesterday she went on a campaign appearance and she's worried about Biden of all people. She spent 25 minutes answering some bizarre question about Syria and Afghanistan. Who here is excited about the Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden primary debate?

But she spent 25 minutes attacking Biden. She must see some numbers that say that Biden's more trouble for her than she realizes. Biden, that means that she's weak. Now, I don't know who's going to come up. Can I – we're going a little late, so we want to kind of wrap it up. But let me just ask by applause, presidential candidate who you think you might like in 2014? Sixteen. Sixteen.

That's the third maker's mark on the rocks, by the way. We're breaking the mold. We're breaking the mold. 2017. I'm going to win. By applause. And you can applaud for more than one. Chris Christie.

Ted Cruz. I've got to say, more enthusiasm for Christy than Cruz Scott Walker Bobby Jindal Bobby Jindal fantastic on education Susanna Martinez Susanna Martinez. Susanna Martinez. We have a Susanna Martinez.

So what we have is we have a lot of people enthusiastic about governors, which I think is probably a sign of the intelligence in this room. Louie Gohmert. Who? Sorry. He doesn't have any hair.

Sorry. Donald Trump. Yeah. I know. We thank you for coming. You can stick around and have a few more drinks. It's fine. We're going to wrap up the podcast now.

If you are listening to this podcast and you are a member of Ricochet.com, we thank you and we are proud and thrilled to have you as a member, a fellow member along with everybody here. Please say hello to fellow members. If you are not a member of Ricochet and you're listening to this, join now at Ricochet.com. You get all this. You could have been here

and you could be at future meetups, which will unfold in the future, of course, unknowable future. And we thank you for listening. We thank you for coming. And we thank John Podoritz, my co-host. And PJS Patty for the name tags. Dick from Brooklyn for just being all around sort of Paul's computer wonk and also finding the tags. Dick from Brooklyn for just being all around sort of Paul's computer wonk and also finding the spot.

Dick from Brooklyn, PJS. And Ricochet contributor Tommy DeSeno. Tommy DeSeno. And of course, the now, I'm sure, fast asleep Ann Coulter. Ann Coulter for joining us. Big fan of Ricochet. She reads it every day. Thank you very much

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