The Ricochet Podcast - The Greatest Week

Episode Date: February 7, 2020

A debacle in Iowa, a triumphant State of The Union speech, a rip-off, a socialist, a small town mayor with a big win — you name it, we discuss it on this week’s edition of The Big Show, aka The Ricochet Podcast. To help us sort through it all, we’ve got the great Deb Saunders, White House correspondent for the Las Vegas Review Journal, and Mr. New Hampshire himself, Michael Graham (listeners... Source

I'm more than happy to say I would rather be governed by the first 2,000 people in the Boston Telephone Directory than by the 2,000 people on the faculty of Harvard University. As government expands, liberty contracts. It's funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is because people are lining up for food. That's a good thing. First of all, I think he missed his time. Please clap. It's the Ricochet Podcast with Peter Robinson and Rob Long. I'm James Lalix, and today for guests, we have Deb Saunders on this week, and Bleepin' Politics and Michael Graham on what's coming up in New Hampshire.

So let's have ourselves a podcast. Welcome, everybody. This is the Ricochet Podcast, number 482. I'm James Lilex here in Minneapolis. We've got Peter Robinson, I assume, in California. Rob Long, last week in Miami. Prior to that, Venice. Who knows?

St. Petersburg. Where are you? I'm in New York City. Oh, good. You're in Gotham. So we've got the whole name. America's favorite in New York City. We straddle the nation as usual. Well, let's get right to it. We had a State of the Union. State of the Union is very great. It's very fantastic. It's very beautiful. It's very perfect. Let's ask our former presidential speechwriter,

Peter Robinson, what'd you think? It was a pretty remarkable, a remarkably effective performance, I thought. Let's get the ideology stuff out of the way. I'm a conservative. I'm a Reagan guy. There wasn't one word, one nod, one wink in the direction of limited government. Zero. But as a matter of patriotism, as a matter of emphasizing the policies of his that have worked, to my surprise, to the surprise of a lot of us, the judges, the economy's going well. He took out two, three terrorists. And then, of course, this tremendously moving, I got choked. I'm supposed to be a professional at this. I got choked up several times. The 100-year-old Tuskegee Airmen who stood up. All right. All of that was doing that as well. I will add that I thought the final bit, the peroration at the end, describing what America was like, was really pretty beautiful.

Donald Trump and beauty are not ideas that go together very easily, at least not in my mind. But at the end, it was pretty beautiful. I thought it was just a remarkable performance. And then I thought, well, within 24 hours, he'll step all over it somehow, probably on Twitter. I was wrong. It took 48 hours for him to give those remarks in the East Room yesterday. But the speech itself, I thought, was a pretty terrific piece of work. I have the feeling that if we go to Rob Long, he'll say, I thought it was a great piece of work, a very beautiful speech, but it was absolutely nothing about Reagan and limited government.

In other words, the complete flip of what Peter said. No, I look, I don't expect this. This is not a limited government president. The Republican Party is not a limited government party anymore. You know, we're big government Republicans now, those of us who are still Republicans. And this is a president who's not, you know, not cutting things in the budget. He's adding to the budget. On the other hand, it was, I mean, I actually disagree with Peter only in the second part. I thought it was a really great speech. It was, I mean, look, here's my, as a piece of politics, here's my bellwether,

my lodestar. I have a friend of mine who is not a fan of Trump at all, does not describe herself as a conservative or a Republican, shrugs and says moderate, all the things that conservative Democrats say. She's a conservative Democrat. And I had lunch with her the day after, and I said, what do you think of the speech? She said, oh, I think he crushed it. And I think that Americans looked at that. Americans in general are kind of socially conservative and economically liberal, despite, you know, the the the cliche of the reverse. It's really not. It's economically liberal, like a big government. And they like this performance. And what was remarkable about this performance is he said, I mean, unfortunately for him, it was what I think was the least watched State of the Union for a long time.

But oh, is that so? Yeah, but it was still a lot of people watching, right? He stood there and he recited a list of accomplishments, almost entirely a political stump speech in and across and those hearts, heart tugging moments, which are great. He's surrounded by Democrats who have nothing. They had no response. Their response is, yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're awful. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're rude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you're disgusting.

And there are a lot of American people. I would suggest that a winning tranche of the American voting public believes, as I do, that Donald Trump is a disgusting and loathsome pig. But but but unemployment's about three percent. We added two hundred thousand plus new jobs this morning. The economy seems to be doing well. We haven't been attacked by terrorists. You know, and that's and that's what he ran on. Meanwhile, they're sort of screaming, yelling.

And I actually find the fact that he waited 48 hours to be, to give Trump, Trump is Trump in the, in the, in the white house that, that sort of, you know, embarrassing ramble. Well, that's Trump too. And so if you, if you, if you love that, then you got a little of that. And if you're watching and you're thinking to yourself, you know, I don't like the guy at all. He gave you a great reason to vote for him. Donald Trump is running a presidential campaign to win in November. Yes, he gave you a great reason to vote for him. Donald Trump is running a presidential campaign to win in November. Yes, he is. Democrats don't seem to be doing anything of the kind. James, may I add one note because it flatters Rob? Why do I want to? Why one? Because it's been years and I finally got one. Rob has been saying over and over again, rightly so, throughout these last three years of this administration, that Donald Trump plays to his base and only plays to his base.

When is this guy going to start reaching out? When is he going to try to start adding to his coalition? And the answer is he did it during that State of the Union address. That State of the Union address was aimed in particular at African Americans. Oh, yeah. That and the moving stuff, the uplifting stuff, the stuff about school choice, that was aimed at ordinary working people who would not in any way fit the usual Republican stereotype. He has begun to reach out. If you sum up the

political importance of it, that's it. I think also I would add a coda to that. Not only has he reaching out on those terms, but he's also explicitly in some of his campaign ads saying, you don't have to like me. Yes. I know you are telegraphing to the voter. Listen, I know I'm a jerk. This is who I am. I know I'm terrible. I'm not asking you to to to suddenly be one of those Fox News primetime commentators who thinks Fox and friends who thinks that everything who is trying to convince people the day after the Super Bowl that Kansas City, Missouri was actually Kansas City, Kansas. I mean, you know, you don't have to be in the tank for the guy to vote for him. And that is a very subtle, very complicated, but very powerful, but very powerful message. And I think he sent it really good and hard on Tuesday.

And you can tell that because what it was a Democratic response. It was to rip the speech up it it was almost as if she wanted to give he here he is trying he's trying you may not like him but he's trying somehow to get things right to do good things for the country and and all they can do that means almost almost as if she wanted to call to mind this play on words all they can do – I mean it's almost as if she wanted to call to mind this play on words. All they can do is rip him down, tear him down. All they can do is destroy. It was just horrible.

It was appalling. But again, you don't – I mean I don't think he's motivated by altruistic reasons. I don't actually think he's motivated by patriotism really. I think he's a reptilian robot of self-interest and self-preservation. That's what a malignant narcissist is. But he is not – that doesn't mean he's not shrewd, and that doesn't mean that he isn't – he doesn't know exactly which judges to appoint and will fight for them. That doesn't mean he's not going to pass a very complicated, not terribly conservative, but pretty, pretty good tax bill. It doesn't I mean, none of those things matter to a vast majority of the American people. What they they hired him to perform and he's performing.

And on the State of the Union, all he did was talk about his performance. And that, you know, that's pretty powerful. I mean, he's it's pretty powerful stuff. James, we've we've run away. We've run. I'm sorry. We've run away. You've got, I know you've got places you want the show to go, go. No, no, no, no. I mean, great points all. It's just fun to hear Rob say he may be a malignant narcissist, but by gosh, he's a narcissist and he's better than the, and he's better than the statist and the socialist. And it's, you know, it's the continuing corruption of Rob Long until he finally becomes the Trump voter. We all know

who he's going to be. It's just fascinating. Well, I don't have to worry about that because I'm still registered in California. And if I change my registration, I'll be registered in New York. So, you know, I can sit home and eat pizza that night with impunity. Right. Oh, well, good. Well, it's been a long time since I've seen Mr. Impunity, given my best. So it's not just that. We had Mitt Romney this week. Mitt Romney, who was either acting out of profound religious conscience or because his top advisor also works for Burisma. Gosh, who knows?

Toss-up. Did what he did. And what I love about this is, of course, Mitt Romney's now entered the strange new respect period of his career, where the man who was excoriated by the press a while ago as being this weird religious weirdo guy who puts dogs on roofs and bullies kids and shaves their hair, kills people, fires them. All of those things swept away in a minute because he's now a man of conscience and a man of character. What motivated Mitt? Was it, as some of the Fox and Friends people would say, just absolute pique because he hates Donald Trump or because he had a genuine surge of admiration

for the principles at stake? I can't figure it out. And frankly, I'm not really interested in figuring it out. But I'll let you guys take a whack at it. I know. I don't know. This is where the, I don't, it struck me as pretty sanctimonious, but I've taken a, I'm sorry to say, when he was running for president, I took a pretty dim view of Mitt Romney even then. And I think probably unfairly, my general take of Mitt Romney is that his only fixed principle is that Mitt Romney is a little better than everybody else.

And that came through. What struck me, a couple things struck me. One was that he held this announcement until the day before the vote. And then he, his people put together a big press extravaganza. He released, he did a big interview that was released in the Atlantic that day. And then he did an exclusive with Chris Wall, exclusive, exclusive television with Chris Wallace and the New York times had it. And it was, it wasn't as if he really struggled with this, didn't want to make it a political point and was simply going to vote his conscience quietly. And

there was nothing like that. That's the first point. The press, there was just a little too much press for someone who was acting out of all due humility before his conscience. And the second thing that bothered me was I looked, I read most of the Atlantic interview and I looked at pieces of the interview with Chris Wallace. He kept saying, I've come to a conclusion. I've come to a conclusion and my conscience insists that I act on that conclusion. There wasn't much real reasoning. He did not display the reasoning by which he had reached that conclusion. And in particular, it occurred to me, Mike Lee, senator of Utah, also a Mormon, a very fine lawyer. Mike Lee, is Mitt implying that Mike Lee doesn't have his finer conscience? What Mike Lee has is a legal mind

that can reason through to the reasons for voting not guilty. And Mitt didn't display much of that reasoning. What he displayed was a pretty puffed up conscience, in my view. He's a fine man. He's lovely family, all of that. But I just wasn't impressed. Look, he voted this way because he knew he'd be the only one. And I think there are a lot of people who believe that Trump did the thing they said he did. This is not a court of law. This is something

else. This was a spanking and it should have been administered instead of absolutely expunged or not expunged, but sort of discharged. So I, I, I think that the argument should have been. Mitt Romney nowhere put his argument as concisely and persuasively as you just did. Right. I agree. And so he is sort of he can be he he is given to the pomposity of he is he put it this way. He's in exactly the right job for some of his part. It's not like he walked. It's not like he thought, you know, I'm I'm going to vote again. I'm going to walk into this empty room and just speak aloud my reasons. Oh, look, the press is here. Well, I guess I bested it. That's not the way it works.

The whole thing was remarkably calibrated to set him up as the voice of conscience. And now, of course, CNN has got a piece about Mitt Romney, the voice of the new old GOP. They love him. And they're pushing him out there, the same guy they would have excoriated as another xenophobic, racist, homophobic monster.

Did excoriate. He's now the man of the moment. I say it's finishing to hell with it. Hey, before we get to our guest and the rest of it, quickly about Iowa. Recanvassed do-over? Are they actually seriously thinking that people are going to – I mean, they had a drop-off of what? From 220,000 to 170,000, 180,000 people this year. How many people are going to show up again and say, let me, let me, I, or, or is it just, is it, do they finally, have they figured out a way to make Bernie lose this

and it requires a do-over or are they going to go with the numbers they have? What a debacle. What a debacle. Yeah. I actually think of all, I mean, first of all, I, I, I think you have to, what is it? The, that old Oscar wild line,? You have to have a heart of stone not to be laughing at this Iowa caucus. But I suspect that the really bad news for the Democrats and for their primary process isn't – it doesn't matter who won. It doesn't matter whether the app failed or didn't fail. None of that really is the bad news. The bad news is that not a lot of people voted. Now, this is after four years of telling us that we're on the precipice of

dictatorship and we're all going to die because of net neutrality or the Paris Accords or whatever, that people are their children are in cage. All the things that we've been told are a disaster in America. Right. And the Democrats in Iowa, remember, to be a Democrat in Iowa, I mean, you're pretty committed, right? You're a party faithful. There are no external or cultural currents in Iowa that would lead you naturally to become a Democrat. It's not South End in Boston. It's not, you know, Park Slope, Brooklyn. It's Iowa. And the idea that they couldn't they couldn't actually have a massive turnout suggests that there are a lot of Democrats who just aren't that either aren't,

as they say in the old in the political business, they're not eating the dog food. Or they just don't think that the world is going to come to an end if Donald Trump is reelected in November. If I'm in the Democratic Party, that's what's keeping me awake, not who won the caucus or who got 500 extra. That doesn't make any difference to me. The big headline is nobody voted. Well, the takeaway that I can't stop thinking about is the fact that the app and everything else that screwed it all up was run by a company called Shadow Inc., which was connected to another company called Acronym.

So I'm waiting for them to say in our next, we're going to do it again, but we're handing it over to Smirsh Inc., which is a division of Spectre. And we're going to do it again, but we're handing it over to Smirsch Inc., which is a division of Spectre. And we're going to see exactly how that works back then. You ever wonder how much those guys – you ever wonder – remember the old Bond movies when Spectre would have these enormous, elaborate headquarters? And they would have things like a chair that went down into a furnace under the boardroom, which is one of those devilish little sadistic touches that you have to think, was there anybody in Spectre involved in cost control who

was saying, look, we can't bring this project in under budget if you're going to have the incineration of the board members right directly under it. That's off the table. I can scrimp on some of the lighting. I can improve the filtration on the piranha pond with, you know, your little bridge that goes over it. But this, we got to talk about this. But Spectre apparently had unlimited money. You don't, on the other hand. You might be carrying all kinds of debt, revolving debt. And if, you know, if you're not paying off your card every month, you could be paying, well, you know, thousands of dollars in interest every year that you simply just don't have to.

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she spent 24 years running a conservative opinion page column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Deb, welcome back. They're probably going to bleep me out on this year and I hope they do, but what about that? God damn press conference? Was that brilliant or brilliant? For a prayer breakfast, you just a little salty, I thought. But anyway. Could you do me a favor and not call it a press conference because there were no questions and no answers.

And I'm, you know, we're all, we poor suckers in the press are all in the back, like elbow to elbow, and we get no questions in there. They keep teasing us with this, we're going to have, you know, it's going to be in the East Room. That's where, you know, like the best press conference ever that he had when he was first in office was there. And then there's, you know, he just talks and he swears them and he takes out his enemies. And that's it. Deb, Peter here. I don't even know how to put the question.

What did it feel like? I guess I do have a question. What did it feel like to be in that room? You're a professional observer, but the people, he called out a lot of people. He thanked a lot of people, for example. Now, Josh Hawley is a Stanford undergraduate, I believe Yale or Harvard law, a very polished, sophisticated, always buttoned up, always under control himself personally. And then this guy just kind of sort of emotes all over Josh Hawley thanking him. And what was the look on Josh Hawley's face?

Sheer delight or discomfort? Were people squirming? What was it like in that room? Well, I couldn't see. It's like, so this is what they do. And they're not really happy with the press. You may have noticed that. And so they've been doing you know, they're not really happy with the press. You may have noticed that. And so they, they've been doing this thing where they, they have these big events and we're all smashed in the back. And I was, I could see if I moved my head a certain way, I could see his face and I could see people who were sitting on my side of the room,

but I couldn't see a lot of the other people. I can tell you that the people I saw were very happy. They really enjoyed themselves. And of course, most of the people there worked in the Trump White House. I know that there were some other people, some opinion people, and obviously there were lawmakers and of course the legal team, but they've been working through this. They're all exhausted. So are we in the press, by the way. And they were just happy. They just loved it. I mean, there was some like weird stuff in there when he started talking about Jim Jordan's body, when he told Steve Scalise that he looked better after he got shot. You know, something I hadn't seen a president do before. But, but, you know, this is, this is, this is the kind of people who love it. And there are people who hate it. And for those

of us who are standing, writing about it. So, hey, Deb, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining us. So you're so far away at no point. I'm just trying to set the stage here a little bit. When do you know in these things that it's going in a weird direction? He comes out, and you expect a certain – this is obviously the beginning of it. When do you guys look at each other and think, oh, man, this is going to go? Like before we even got there. What were the signs? How do you know?

Okay, so we know that Trump had been pretty disciplined and not talking to the press a lot before the vote, number one. Number two, we saw him at the prayer breakfast that morning, and that's when he took off after Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi at a prayer breakfast, which, you know, usually presidents don't talk about their enemies at prayer breakfast, but he did that. So we knew before we were going to go in there that he was going to be loaded for bear. And the only question was, would they take questions or not? And I mean, I sort of feel like we in the press corps were sort of like Roman looking at the entrails to figure out what's going to happen.

We're all discussing where would he, we saw that there was going to be, they put out an announcement that he was going to have a statement on Thursday. And where would it be? Would it be in the diplomatic room, which would mean there would only be Sapul? Would it be in the East Room, which means we could all be there? Would he take questions? So that's sort of the speculation. But nobody put money on it. Yeah. Hey, so can I ask a question about the mood of that administration? I mean, I remember years ago during the 1992 campaign, a friend of mine was working very closely with the then president, George H.W. Bush, and they were talking about the election. And it was pretty early on. It was it wasn't it wasn't in the summer.

It was pre-summer and there was a lot of gloom and doom in the room. And Bush turned to his people and said, hey, am I the only one in this room who thinks I'm going to win this thing? And they all sort of there was a there was an uncomfortable pause. And then they sort of like, oh, no, no, no, Mr. President. No, of course not. But if the but the answer was in the pause that, yes, he kind of was the only one in that room at that point who thought he was going to win in 92. And I suspect that there have been a lot of people in the Trump administration when you look at a very weak political president with a very skinny, almost, I mean, I would say trivial to the point of a victory of 70,000 votes across three states. They had to feel, certainly for the past three years, especially with his poll numbers, like this is going to be a lot of uphill. Do they still feel that way or what's the mood?

If you feel that way, you don't work in this White House. OK. Kind of thinking is just not allowed. Right. These people, I mean, the people in the White House believe that Trump will win. They will be shocked if he does not win the election. They will be shocked if he does not win reelection. They will be shocked. Now, maybe there are some people who think that he's going to lose, but I don't think someone will get it. He had this week the highest poll number in Gallup he's ever had, 49%. He's up. Now, what happens after yesterday, I do not know. That could change, but they feel that they've worked really hard to get

through this. It was grueling for the White House. People are exhausted. I mean, imagine now, not everybody has been there since the start, as I have been there. But this is year four. Right. And it's trench warfare. So they're they're committed. if you work in this White House, you're committed and you think Trump is going to win. I would just say before I do, I think too, but I would say that I think just being a political observer, I've only recently tipped the 55% mark here

in my sense of that, mostly because just even this morning, we had these incredibly great job numbers. Is there even a kind of an excitement victory sense in that White House, or is it they're still, they're just too tired and exhausted and beat up from this process? Well, I mean, there should be a victory from all the good economic news. Larry Kudlow certainly speaks to that. And he's somebody who talks about how great the economy is. But, you know, the truth is Trump steps all over the economy.

When there's good economic news, the chances are he'll say something that changes the subject on cable news. Okay, so, Deb, Peter here, that's the question I have about the thinking, not in the White House, but among the press corps, your colleagues in the press corps. Here's what I saw in the last week. His Super Bowl ads were really pretty terrific. And by the way, Bloomberg's Super Bowl ad came and went and it barely made any impression on me. And I thought this is a problem for them. If Bloomberg's only weapon is money and it's going to buy mediocre stuff like this, this guy may never get it. I understand he's rising. I just thought to myself it was a good

set of ads for Trump. Bloomberg's was bad and Trump's were pretty terrific. State of the Union address, gee, what a performance. What a performance. It was moving. It listed accomplishments that are real accomplishments at this point. And I thought, terrific. He's actually, there's some discipline here. Let's brace ourselves. How long will it be before he steps on his own message by tweeting? Well, it wasn't 24 hours.

It was 48 hours. And it was much worse than a tweet. It was a long, disjointed, narcissistic, weird, vindictive, funny at places, but even the humor was dark and weird ramble. So does the press see this and say he will never learn? Are there people in the White House frustrated by this ability to to perform at a very high level, but the self-destructive impulse that just cannot be contained? I don't even know how to ask the question. Does it matter? Maybe does it matter? Does it matter?

What difference does it make? So thank you for reminding me about the day. I've almost forgotten about it because that was tuesday but it was a real tour de force and trump did a few i mean he it was uh it was an he was conservative like incredibly conservative and poking his finger in the eye of all the liberals there but he did it in such a deft manner that he didn't seem to be gloating, right? Yes. I mean, he gives Rush Limbaugh the Medal of Freedom in the room, and you know that they're

outraged, but hey, he's given some guy with cancer the Medal of Freedom. Like, who can complain, right? I mean, it was one of the most brilliant things I've ever seen him do, and I think all of his states at the union have it's just been superb. Right. And having, I mean, it sort of had this weird game show feel right. Like you just knew that he was going to say that the, the, the,

the man was serving in Afghanistan. We saw his wife and kids. You just knew he was going to say, come on down. Yes, exactly. And behind door number two, your husband.

Exactly. You just, and it really did have the sort of game showing feel to it. But the people were just tremendous. There were so many great stories. The young African-American student who got a scholarship and the Democrats just were sort of like scowling about stuff like that. You know, the widow and son. I mean, there are just so many great stories. And, you know, people are always the thing that melts the partisan divide because you're a Republican, there's a Democratic president, you're a Democrat, there's a Republican president. You see these stories of heroism and they melt you, right?

That didn't quite work here. So this was, and then of course, Nancy Pelosi shredding up the speech really is, it shows, you know, I think I've said this before and my husband Wesley has first said it. The problem with fighting Trump is to fight Trump, you have to become Trump. Yes, Yes. And to see, to see, right. To see Nancy Pelosi carrying out that speech, you know, after all the talk, the talk we've heard about how he breaks the quorum, she's doing it. And she's doing it, you know, for, for her base. Uh, but you know, the deal is the Trump base loves this stuff and the Trump also that, that, uh, rant and we'll call it a rant, in the East Room Thursday,

they love it. They say, this guy will fight for us. This guy will do, this guy's going to do anything for us. He's not going to be cowed. And, you know, Mitt Romney seemed like one of those guys who would sort of care too much about appearances and not really fight really hard. No one's ever going to mistake Donald Trump for Mitt Romney. Well, there's the reflexive cringe on the right in the governing class to accept the terms of the other side, which always advances the ideology towards their way. And Trump, in his language, doesn't do that. In the State of the Union, there were a couple of things that he said. One was government schools, which is, you know, it gets the,

the neck hair is all prickly on some people because yes, thank you. That's an important distinction. That's a great way of framing. And the other was the use of the term. And I don't know if I can say this, you're going to have to bleep this out as well. Illegal alien. He would use that term. And, and when I heard that in the State of the Union, I've sort of had this, whoa, this frisson of shock because I thought that that term had been completely expunged from public conversation. You couldn't say it anymore. But he rammed it down their throat constantly in the paration about ICE. And that's, I mean, that's sort of a toned down rhetorical version

of what he does in the, you know, in the prayer breakfast speech where he's not accepting their terms and punching back harder rhetorically than his predecessors had done before. And I think, Deb, you're absolutely right. People who've been used to the cringe, to the crouch, to saying undocumented aliens love that stuff. And what's more, it's not just the base. It's other people who, you know, feel I can't say illegal alien. That kind of is what I can't say that that makes me a bad person. I mean, it's it's it's an interesting approach. It's very, very Trump. Can I tell you the other the other really bland thing about that? So the last time I checked, the Associated Press rules are that you cannot use the term illegal alien unless it's in a quote.

Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, so they went to undocumented immigrants and then people who are in the country illegally. You know, they've gone to all these different nation nations. But I mean, I checked. I know that Obama, Barack Obama used the term illegal aliens at one point in time. But then the AP rules changed. And but if it's in a quote, you use it.

So anyway, he's found a way around the AP rule. Hey, Deb, Peter here one more time. Here's another thought that occurs to me. And again, I don't even know if there's a question. James will frame it up as a question. But I just want to see what you make of it. I was also thinking, not only The Democratic Party, China, and the New York Times. The Democratic Party has just produced an utter debacle. It looks as though going into New Hampshire, it's going to be Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg is surging. And then in South Carolina, it'll be Joe Biden.

And all of this is an opening for Michael Bloomberg. It could really be chaotic even after Super Tuesday, just a debacle. China is now totally self-absorbed with trying to keep their economy from imploding because of the coronavirus. And if I were the New York Times, I'd be nervous that something was about to happen to them. I mean, what do you make of this? This is he's not causing the coronavirus. Is he somehow causing the madness in the Democratic Party? I don't know if there's just this guy plays events and he gets breaks.

He got and it was so funny, by the way, when we went to the breakfast and also in the East Room, Trump took a copy of the Washington Post with the headline that he had been acquitted, acquitted the word. And he showed it to everyone. About a month ago, I think it was, he told everybody to cancel every White House subscription to the Washington Post. So we know that he's at war with people sort of kind of. And, you know, Iowa, I mean, to me, it's a big question before the State of the Union was, is he going to mention impeachment? Is he going to call out his Democratic rivals? Is he going to mention Iowa, which, OK, we know, and they were sort of telegraphing to us, no, we're going to be really disciplined. But I'm thinking, can he really not make fun of Iowa? Because as you know, he was tweeting, excuse me, the party that couldn't even pull off the Iowa caucus wants to do healthcare,

right? He was disciplined. He actually didn't do a thing. So, but here's what my question. So he's been really disciplined for two weeks, three weeks. We now know he can do it. We now know that he doesn't have to have to, you know, give in to all of his impulses all the time. So I wonder if that is going to change how people perceive him. Okay. What do you, can you answer that? Cause I can. No, I just like, I didn't know that they canceled all the subscriptions, but I have an image of him throwing up in the sash and the white house,

like Scrooge the day of the, you know, after the ghost had visited you to their boy, here's a groat, go and get the fattest Washington Post you can down at the corner. If there are any newspaper boxes left in D.C., that is. Hey, Deb, thanks a lot. You're in Mar-a-Lago right now? Is that so? I'm actually visiting my parents today. Oh, okay.

Well, you know, what the heck. And he's in North Carolina today. When you're there, slip a couple of matchbooks into the pocket for Peter. Mar-a-Lago. Say something. Come on. Peter collects them. He's got one from Air Force One.

I'm sure he'd like one from Mar-a-Lago, too. Deb Sonners, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks, Deb. And, of course, we'll have you back again. Thank you. Bye-bye. Thanks, Deb. Thanks for having me.

Indeed. Thank you. Did I say a groat? You said a groat. I was sort of wondering where that came from. Where did that come from? When you're reaching for English currency, you go for a shilling or pound or tuppence or thruppence or the rest of them. A groat. Not even an American coin. What do I know about money? Well, I know this. I know that if you have money that you owe

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And now back to the podcast, Michael Graham, politics editor, insidesources.com. He also does a CBS News contributor gig now and then writes a column for the Boston Herald. He is our official New Hampshire correspondent when it comes to these elections. Thanks, Michael. Hey, what are they going to be using to do their tabulation?

Are they going to be making marks on Birch with coal, paper ballots? Did they dump the app. What what's the news on the ground when it comes to tabulation for the you will be asked to bleed your own blood in order to cast a ballot. So we're thinking that's going to help Bernie's people. That's our theory at this point. So, you know, it's the secretary of state here, Bill Gardner, who's been a religious defender of the first in the nation primary. He was mocked a few years ago. He was on Trump's anti-voter fraud panel, and he held up a pencil and said, you can't hack a pencil.

He also said he gets 42 hogsheads to the rod. So I don't know how that works, but he's right. You can't hack a pencil. And so New Hampshire is ready for its moment in the sun, as I wrote it inside sources this week. Michael, am I not mistaken in that Hogshead is a unit of volume and Rod or Root is a unit of length? You are absolutely correct. Now we'll be moving on to the history portion of the conversation. All right. So we have so good. But the edge is surging apparently in New Hampshire. What are people around there thinking? Are they thinking that Pete is going to be the Obama to Trump or he's going to be the Romney to Obama? The best thing about being a guy from the right who's up here covering this race is I get to

cover it like the Super Bowl, which I could care less about the 49ers and the Chiefs. And so it was just great. And so I'm just looking at these Democrats going, are you out of your tiny little minds? You cannot possibly be thinking that Bernie Sanders, for example, who we just had a poll hit at our site this morning. I saw Bernie at an event. Two thirds of New Hampshire residents hate Medicare for all. They don't just dislike it. They hate it. It's like 60, 60, 20. They hate it. What is his only issue? Medicare for All. That's him. So then they sent out Pete Buttigieg, who I swear to God, every time I see him, I'm thinking to myself, there's a mom in a minivan with the door open going, Pete, Pete, we've got soccer practice, Pete. And so you can't be sending

this kid out against Donald Trump. And yet that's the way we're moving. Pete Buttigieg really is the kind of iconic kind of New Hampshire primary candidate, like Barack Obama, one of the highest levels of people with college and post-college degrees, as everybody from Julian Castro to Cory Booker keeps telling us it's painfully white up here. And so if you're a white suburbanite who thinks PBS is the cat's pajamas, you're probably liking Pete Buttigieg. Well, if Pete does make it, sorry, Robbie, if Pete does make it, is he going to strike the nation as sort of a version of Michael Dukakis, but without the sinew and the gritty toughness? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, he could wear the Hank Tank helmet worse. I'd be honest with you. Buttigieg is so unvetted. That is, to me, the most amazing part of this guy. He has a very thin resume. Of course, being a right winger like me, I'm impressed by the McKinsey gig. I mean, that's the one.

OK, you can do math. Good. Excellent. More unvetted than Bernie Sanders. I mean, the oppo on Bernie Sanders from sitting in the Soviet Union bare chested and singing your land is my land to talking about the greatness of bread lines to having rape fantasy stories printed in the college paper. There's so much there with Bernie. I can't imagine that Pete,

that Mayor Pete is less vetted than that. Wait, so you're saying some of those things are bad? I have to go back and look at that list. I don't know. But anyway, yeah, Mayor Pete has not been vetted in part because the kind of issues that would likely to come up are the kind Democrats don't want to talk about. And also because, to be honest, I don't think people really thought, I think a lot of people have looked at him like this is an audition for VP. This is an audition for a future run. He's not really in it. Well, suddenly, because of the collapse of Joe Biden in New Hampshire, people are thinking is he could theoretically be the non Bernie. But just be very clear here in New Hampshire, this race is all about one thing, Hillary Clinton.

The Democrats up here are so mad about Bernie and Hillary. They're so angry about the alleged sins of the Bernie bros. There are people on the side of the Democratic Party that I can't even mention the 2016 convention where Bernie voters turned their back on Hillary. They steam. They're like Trump yesterday. They're like, ah! They're so angry. And they're still having that fight.

And you just got to figure out where Buttigieg fits in that fight. Oh, hey, so Michael, it's Rob Long. Thanks for joining. So that's my real question. So do you see any Hillary lawn signs? I mean, that is sometimes, I mean, I used to go up there every cycle, I'd be in Manchester for a week, and it's just

fun to kind of drive around, and you drive around neighborhoods, and you see the signs, and you see a lot of signs, and you thought, I didn't even know that guy was still running. Is there any, I mean, I just, it's my own, you know, my own feeling is that when someone is having a dumpster fire, you want to find some lighter food and put it on it. So is there any is there a Clinton boomlet?

Because I think you're right. It does seem strange to me that that there's no there's no New Hampshire Democrat running, if you know what I mean. OK, there actually is one. Amy Klobuchar, I talked to the head of the New Hampshire Institute of Politics today. I actually asked that question, which setting everything else aside about how they're doing or money, whatever, who's the most New Hampshire-y of the candidates? Without a beat, he said, Amy Klobuchar. She's got the New Hampshire kind of message. She's very similar to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, who is the center-ish, you know, Deanette. Rob, is it Dean or Deanette

if it's a Lady Dean? It's Deanette. Okay, Deanette. Rob, is it Dean or Deanette if it's a lady Dean? I don't- It's Deanette. Okay. Deanette, yes, of New Hampshire politics. So she would fit in. But I want to go back to the Biden things. This is being wildly overlooked. You have a guy who is the two-term former vice president of the wildly popular Barack Obama. And his numbers have sunk down to Andrew Yang levels in New Hampshire. Nobody here wants to is enthusiastic about him. He owns the the endorsement class and he owns the flack of the pro worker classes. I used to want to back when I ran campaigns. And that is it. Nobody is excited about Joe Biden. Least of all Joe Biden. Joe Biden on Thursday with the election on Tuesday took the day off. Joe Biden on Friday took the day off.

So you talk to his supporters like, well, he's prepping for the debate. Well, first of all, all the other candidates have a debate, you know, the debate, too. How does that fit? But second of all, the average voter knows why Biden isn't on the campaign trail with the big debate. He needs a nap. He needs a nap. He wants to watch some Maury. He wants to, you know, yeah, that's not a bad thing, by the way. That's like let's let's be very careful. I would actually like a president who napped during the day and didn't do that. That to me was Calvin Coolidge, the sainted cow. So it does be very careful. Well, the napping right now is not helpful when you are plummeting

in the polls. You just got your head handed to you in Iowa. By the way, I was at an event yesterday, a Bernie event talking to the people, the hoi polloi, as I do. And I met people from all over. And I asked one guy what he thought of Bernie. And he answered me in French. And I thought, what's Rob Long doing in Derry, New Hampshire? I don't know. You guys talk more French on this podcast. And I want to say I do listen religiously on my knees, weeping and in prayer. And the amount of French and Peter is guilty of this as well. You guys got to lay off the frog lingo.

Michael, I also have one more thing that I want to get on the record here, Ricochet, and everyone can hear it. If you cannot pronounce Butt on Wall Street, you know, on Fox and blah, blah, blah. And boot, edge, edge. It's not that. Okay, for the first few weeks, I'll give it to you. Fine. It's a little hard to figure out. But good. Come on.

It's not that hard. Michel, ici Pierre. J'ai une question pour toi. Call it. I have one line. J'ai un grand stylo. It worked great for me in college. I have a big pen.

Oh, yes. All right. Listen, we're recording this on Friday. The primary is on Tuesday. Call it. Who comes in first, Sanders or Buttigieg? So I think Sanders still manages to come in first. He's got the best organization on the ground.

I don't think Pete's people were kind of ready for where they were going to be. So it's Buttigieg, then Sanders, then third place matters. Who comes third? It won't be Biden. That's the one thing I'll say. In fact- Biden comes fourth or fifth? One consultant I talked to said fifth. But if Bernie stumbles, I will tell you why. It's Medicare for all. It really is going to end up, I think, damaging to potential front runners Warren and Biden. I mean, and Bernie, excuse me, because Bernie, it's just not popular. And even the people who like it admit trying to get Americans to go for that is not going to work.

And in New Hampshire, Democrats have one sentence in mind. Who can beat Trump? Who can beat Trump. Nothing else matters. It's not that America can't beat Buttigieg or Sanders. So last question from me, who's paying attention to polling in South Carolina? Can Biden afford to finish fourth in Iowa, which he has done, and fourth or fifth in New Hampshire, which is what you were telling us? And will that begin to move the African-American vote in South Carolina away from him? That's what he's relying on as best I can understand his political theory here. So it's interesting. I grew up in South Carolina and ran campaigns and I now live in New Hampshire. And so I've got to see them both. And this notion that black voters in the South in general, in South Carolina in

particular, are just kind of loyally following along. They're not paying attention. They just love old Joe. No, I'm sorry. We've seen their pragmatic movements. You guys remember what happened to their support for Obama after he won Iowa. Before Iowa, Obama was struggling to win black voters in South Carolina because they wanted to win. They're Americans and they believe in the fundamental view of the Democratic Party, blah, blah, blah. And they want to win. So, yeah, they are paying attention. And it's absolutely possible for Biden to lose him. And people keep forgetting this about black voters in the South that, yeah, sure, you've got the black voters that I grew up with, rural, you know, a lot of them who finished high school but didn't go to college. But there are also this surging middle class of black voters, you know, who live in the suburbs. Their kids are in private school or quality public schools.

They're college educated. You've got college students who are activists on campuses like South Carolina State and Alabama, et cetera. proportional system Democrats have, Bernie Sanders on Super Tuesday is going to be able to not only rack up huge numbers in California and Massachusetts, where he will beat Elizabeth Warren in her home state. Please don't drop out, Liz. I want to watch that happen. I want to watch you lose your own state. But he'll also be able to sweep up these delegates 15 percent at a time in these college communities and affluent black communities across the South. Well, we'll see what happens. And if Bernie wins, you know, you have a septuagenarian whose ideology hit its high watermark in 1917 when some people gunned down the royal family in a

rural basement. And it's been fun ever since. But of course, they're progressive, which means that their ideas were baked 100 years ago. Their deficiencies are sort of manifest to the rest of us. Well, as we say around the Bernie Sanders campaign, das just wird revolution. Stick that in your French pipe and smoke it, Rob. Au revoir, Michel. Au revoir. Merci, Michael. Thank you. Bonne chance. Thank you, Michel. Au revoir. Merci, Michael. Thank you. Bonne chance.

Thank you, later. Have fun. New Hampshire. Do we, really? Is there a lot of French on our, I don't know. I wasn't aware that there was any French tall. Well, you didn't want to call him on it. You know, it may be possible that people are listening to this podcast with a French filter enabled, in which case.

And Rob Chomsky is the kind of guy who knows French a little too well. Well, you know, it may be possible that people are listening to this podcast with a French filter enabled, in which case. And Ross jumps across as the kind of guy who knows French a little too well. I think I may have said Boulevardier and Flanier a couple of times. And that maybe did it. That tipped us over the edge. You probably did that, right. Well, we have some things we always end up the podcast with. And one of them is, of course, the long pole. We'll get to it in a second.

It does not yet have a sounder. Musically, I'm working on that. But Yeti, I hate to say it because you may just drop it. So I'm just going to stand back and say, play it. The James Lylex Member Post of the Week. I hope that's licensed.

Oh, absolutely. Do you think we found that in public domain? Imagine the luck. Wow. I went on archive.org and found something. I mean, I did have a shout back in the day, but it was not that specific. And here we are. So the post of the week, the member post of the week comes from Nohaj.

I hope I'm pronouncing the name correctly. Thank you, Ricochetti, that would be us, for the sanity check and advice from mom. Quote, the silent majority is pretty quiet. There you go, figure. The mass is beating about the brow continuously that they're racist, misogynist, compassionate, bigots, XXXphobes. The silent majority is told they are simply wrong, actually simple, ignorant, and unenlightened. We are deplorable, Bible- gun toting rubes that's how the world perceives and loudly proclaims us of course we prefer to be silent of course my mom bless her she's 91 years old living in buffalo holy cow does it get a lot of snow she's one of

the silent ones for sure but it doesn't feel like the majority people she's not normally nor historically a fearful woman and i I chose this because, A, it's how a lot of people feel. You don't want to say necessarily what you feel because you presume, often entirely correctly, that there is a whole set of assumptions that come ladled by the others when you say, well, I'm sort of, I'm politically, economically conservative. People automatically assume the whole raft of things that they want to think you are. And also because it's a nice testament to her mother. So are you going to find that in any of these other political websites that you go to? No, you won't. You'll find them

at Ricochet because in the member feed, people post lovely stories about all sorts of things, from music to architecture, to their own lives, to politics, and oftentimes the intertwining of the two, politics and that other thing. So it was a nice little lovely post, and I thought I'd put it up there. And that brings us, of course, now to Rob Long's poll. No, I can't do it. No, I don't have one. Rob does need a shout-out.

I don't need a shout-out. Needs to be in French, of course. Yes, of course. I would say my poll question is really simple, and I think I have a hard time when I describe these. So what I want people to do is to put on their political prognosticator hat, not their I wish hat. So the poll question is really simple. A, the Democrats are A, doomed until 2024. B, doomed forever. C, not doomed at all. It's still early. D, not doomed at all. They

control, they'll control the House and the Senate soon. Or E, eh, we're all doomed. I think I know what I'd pick. But I'm interested to know what other, what are, what are my fellow members think? The final choice E to quote you E we're all doomed shows why the Gallup organization thought twice about hiring you Rob when you graduated from Yale. Yeah. Yeah. These are not scientific polls, Peter. I'm not saying that. I'm just suggesting that we ruminate on these ideas and think a little bit about it. And then, I mean, I think I do have, I don't't I do think that those five choices capture all the available choices. Speaking of speaking of Gallup this week, they released a poll that said that 90 percent, 90, 90 percent of Americans are satisfied with life, with things.

That's astonishing. That's really good, especially when you consider if you you pay attention to the young ones on the Internet, that this is a capitalist hellscape from which there is no remorse or from which there's no rescue. That we're doomed, that the planet is on fire and that misery attends every moment of our waking lives. But 90 percent of the people in America seem to be okay with the way things are going. That's pretty good. Yeah. Yeah. I mean,

I think it's actually that, that can't, I'd love to know more about those numbers that can't possibly be the case because if you watch television or are available to any kind of advertiser, it is every single thing. Every single ad seems to suggest that people are desperately too fat or depressed or have terrible digestive problems or the shoes don't work or everything is or their pillow is wrong or their life savings is endangered. I mean,

everything seems to be about being majorly dissatisfied and in peril, but okay, I'll take that. Bob Conquest, Robert Conquest, the late and great historian, had a rule. He had a better formulation, but the rule came down to this. People are always conservative about what they know best. So you talk to a physician, doesn't want his practice changed. Business guy doesn't want – or this is the reason we have so much trouble with school choice. People make their – my school is okay. People hate Congress but always approve of their own representative, those who can identify their own representative. So there's this weird thing where the conservative message is we have something to conserve. We have something to lose here. We've got a pretty good deal.

And the liberal message is think in terms of abstractions. Think in terms of things you don't really know that well, like the whole country, not just your life, which you're satisfied with, but the whole country, which is obviously going to hell. I don't know. Interesting to me. The closer you are, the smaller, the shorter the focus of the lens, the happier people are. We're going to ask one more question of Rob and Peter, but first I have to tell you a couple of things. First of all, podcast was brought to you by Lending Club and by Earnest. Support them and you support us and everybody benefits. And also, if you could please

take a minute to go to Apple Podcasts and give us a five-star review, your reviews will allow new listeners to discover us, which helps this show going. I'm trying to figure out a different way to do this every single week, and I thought a robotic voice this time might work. Did it work? Tell us. Leave that review because then more people go to Ricochet, more people sign up for Ricochet, and Ricochet prospers and all is great. Last question then. Rob, Peter, what are you watching? Oh, I'm looking for something to watch.

Yeah. We had the big thing yesterday, the – who cares? Google Fiber. Google – four or five years ago, Google dug up our whole neighborhood to put in a test Google Fiber. So they ran actual fiber all through the neighborhood and gave us this unbelievably fast internet service and television bundle for $90 a month. Well, it turns out Google has decided they're not going to rip up the whole country. This is not a business they want to pursue. And furthermore, they're going to end it in our neighborhood. So we had now all of a sudden we're trying to figure out what package do we want? And it's very confusing. And I don't have grandchildren to ask.

I have you guys, I suppose. Anyhow, we're looking around trying to figure out what package do you want? Oh, do you want Hulu? Do you want Disney Plus? Do you want the Apple TV? Do you want to have the ATT Now? Do you want the DirecTV? So we figured out we, we want, we want Fox news. We want British mysteries and we want sports. Now, I don't know what that package comes down to. Probably combine them all into one where somebody solves a mystery while playing cricket and then uses only their right hand to make a, to make a bowl. Uh, Rob, what are you watching? Uh, I'm not watching anything. I mean mean i'm not watching a series now i'm gonna get all these stacks of dvds uh for awards season you know for all the awards the every

studio they send you just every movie been released and so i have a bunch of movies i'm catching up on and caught up the other day on the movie the parasite which was really good um it's a south korean movie and it's spooky and weird and complicated and awfully good, really good. All right. I'm watching nothing because I finished everything. I finished the last season of BoJack Horseman, which is the most brilliant, I want to say, animated series ever that sort of sticks it in a category, which it obviously belongs, being animated. But it's a sitcom. It's very funny.

It's very dark, but it's not pointlessly needlessly grind your face and grittiness to it's it's it's for the six seasons. It's an, it was extraordinary piece of work, laugh out loud, funny, and gut punchingly sad. It was just great. And it's done. And it's good that it's done because they can't keep doing this over and over and over again. You're happy sometimes when everyone looks around and says it's time to stop, isn't it? It's time to stop. Yeah, right. And how's that for a segue? Perfect. It is time to stop.

And fun. Guys, we'll see you next week and we'll see everybody else at the comments at Ricochet 4.0. Next week. Next week, fellas. People try to put us down Talking about my generation Just because we get around Talking about my generation Things they do look awful cold Talking about my generation

I hope I die before I get old Talking about my generation I hope I die before I get old Talking about my generation My generation My generation, baby Why don't you all fade away? Talking about my generation Don't try to dig what we all used to say Talking about my generation

I'm not trying to cause a big. Talking about my generation. I'm not trying to cause a big sensation. Talking about my generation. I'm just talking about my generation. Talking about my generation. Our generation. Our generation. We win. Ricochet.

Join the conversation. Scott, go vape. Go vape. Go vape. You need to relax.