The Commentary Magazine Podcast

Oprah Gets Involved, Trump Gets Attacked

Aside from Oprah having a Kamala lovefest, the political story of the day involves attacks on Donald Trump's words about American Jews. These attacks seem peculiarly related to polling showing the Republican candidate making startling inroads into the Jewish vote, which could have a significant impact in the key state of Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, actual anti-Semitic garbage from the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina may imperil Trump's presidential bid even more. What's going on? Give a listen.

Broadcast on:: 20 Sep 2024
Audio Format:: other

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the commentary magazine daily podcast. Today is Friday, September 20th, 2024. I'm John Podwhore. It's the editor of commentary magazine with me, as always executive editor, a Greenwald Hi Abe. - Hi, John. - Senior editor Seth Mandel. Hi, Seth. - Hi, John. - And our Washington commentary columnist and the director of domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, Matthew Cottonetti. Hi, Matt. - Hi, John. - On the one hand, we have a lot to talk about today. On the other hand, nothing all that much new in the last 24 hours, but I do want to continue with our awesome sauce reporting on the amazing developments in and around the strike on Hezbollah by Israel. A document has been leaked out of Hezbollah intelligence. According to Dr. Eli David, one of the sources on Twitter that I trust. According to this leaked document, 879 died in pager explosions, out of which 291 senior commanders were of their number, 509 blinded, 1735 injured in their reproductive organs, out of which 906 were total damage and 613 permanent function damage. Seth Mandel, I'm not going to make a big point out of this, 613 is the number of the permanent function damage. And if you know what I'm referring to, you'll know why I am pointing out the number 613. I understand this is gruesome. I understand that we are celebrating death destruction and injury, but this is essentially, these are battlefield injuries, because Hezbollah is a terrorist organization on the battlefield against Israel. And as such, this was a victorious battle, a victorious battle on the level of action court, in which you do massive damage to the enemy and the almost no damage is done to you. This is what warfare and its most successful and most pointed is supposed to be. Asymmetrical results resulting in what would appear to be future implications for the readiness and ability of Hezbollah to fight Israel when the fight begins. Now, they fired a lot of rockets last night, which they didn't do in the shock of the first blush of the Pedro explosions. So there were big barrages last night. So they're not off the battlefield, they're not out of the game. But it's pretty striking. And then I need to add one more important point, which is that I've been warning people to hold onto their hat, not faint, like sit down when you hear this, but because it's so shocking. But the Wall Street Journal reported last night that American officials are now dealing with the understanding that there is unlikely to be a deal with Hamas before the end of the Biden administration. Now I know I've met your shocked, Seth, you're disappointed, Abe, you're outraged at this. On Twitter last night, I compared this to the scene in when Harry Metz Ali, where we first see Meg Ryan with her best friend, Carrie Fisher, who is having an affair with a married man who is constantly disappointing her. And Carrie Fisher says, "He's never going to leave her." And Meg Ryan for the 5,000th time says, "Of course he's not going to leave her." And Carrie Fisher says, "You're right, you're right. "I know you're right, I know you're right." So if they're actually now, this is the Carrie Fisher moment for Blinken and the Biden administration. Hamas is never going to make a deal. It's also, the Harris campaign is the hardest hit here because what does this do to her one line about the war? She'll revert through, "I grew up in a middle-class home." - Right. - Yeah, Sid Warke grew up in a middle-class home. - I don't know if you know. - But also there was one other development. - Mother ran a small business, yes. - There's one other development that happened in the United Nations and it did make me outraged, which was that as Israel was defeating its enemies in Hezbollah in the north and continuing to pressure Hamas in the south and having to fend off the Houthis in the Red Sea and dealing with the Islamization and incitement and plotting that's happening in the West Bank and then, of course, worrying about the internal threat and the threat from Iran. What does the nations decide to do? Well, it wanted to pass a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from all the occupied territories, which because the Palestinians wrote the resolution include territories that Israel hasn't occupied for over a decade, right? And it's frustrating and outrageous because it shows that the campaign to delegitimize Israel through law fair and through multilateral institutions like the United Nations is an ending and it's outrageous for another reason, which is that the United States, I'm happy to say, voted against this resolution, but the United Kingdom abstained, didn't vote either way and that is just a stain on the record of this new labor government in the United Kingdom. After it had gone through so much posturing and internal fighting over decarbonizing the anti-Semites within it. We published an important piece in the September issue of commentary. Right now, if you go to commentary.org, the issue that is on the homepage is the October issue, but Stephen Pollard of the Jewish Chronicle wrote, "A piece for us on the meaning of the care-stormer, "massive gigantic labor victory and what it might portend." And he made an important point here, which is that that victory, which was, I don't know, I don't know what the margin is, 230 seat, something like that, majority for labor. What's important about it is it is the high watermark for labor will never be where it was on election night. Again, things are going to go back to homeostasis, the parties will come into greater parity, the Tories will rebuild, labor will make mistakes, thing, it will become a competitive country again, electorally, and what this means as there is this withdrawal back to the center is that the Islamist elements within the labor party are going to become stronger and stronger and stronger and more and more important in future elections, by elections, local elections, and things like that. And so the pressure on the government, far from the decarbonization pressure, is to, will be to Corbinize. In, in, it seems almost counterintuitive, but the party making itself a plausible giant majority party will now be encouraged by its most cynical elements as well as its most ideological elements to start pandering to the anti-Semites and the Corbinites and the voters who supported them back in 2017 when Corbin took the party over in a sort of public plebiscite and we are only at the beginning of the move by Great Britain away from Israel and toward effectively, I think, either a position of neutrality between Israel and Hamas and its enemies or even a position of relative support for Israel's enemies. - And, and we shouldn't, you know, a few months ago something happened in this regard where the details are a bit in the weeds, but suffice it to say the, the sacred parliamentary rules and norms were very briefly suspended or broken in order to allow labor to avoid a vote on Gaza and weapons to Israel and things like that. And it, you know, it's in Britain, this was important because it was, you know, their parliamentary rules, as I said, are, you know, considered sacred, it's supposed to be nonpartisan, all that, but it was a, and it was a real scandal, but what they did was they had avoided showing everybody that the labor party would have essentially voted along with the leftist parties who wanted stronger action against Israel. They made a maneuver so that labor could stake out a middle ground between the Tories and the left. When what actually was happening was the, was labor was, they were about to vote for as far left a move on Israel as you could. And they had to literally suspend the parliamentary norms in order to get there. And then when they fought about it and they argued about it, people said, look, members of labor said, look, I have these guys outside my home. And then they reveal that there have been threats. Hamas had had really started to kick up a lot of dirt in British politics because people were getting threats and voting accordingly or remembering votes because of personal threats. - Now remember, so Britain has a much larger Muslim population than the United States. It has a much more radicalized Muslim population than the United States. It has a much more complicated Muslim population because they come from different places. A lot of them come from South Asia. A lot of them are not immigrants. They are native born to London, to England. But this game of directly threatening legislators is coming here as well. We have now seen, I'm sorry, I was gonna look it up. I didn't have time. The Congressman from suburban Chicago lives in Highland Park, Democratic Congressman, his house. There was a rally and riot, not a riot, but there was like a rally and screaming demonstration outside his house in Highland Park, just outside Chicago, on Lake Michigan, affluent neighborhood, very Jewish, where of course, there was a shooting spree, you will remember-- - Brad Schneider. - Brad Schneider. - Thank you, Brad Schneider. And so, you only need a couple of such incidents where individual politicians are themselves menists to introduce the notion of personal menists when dealing with controversial issues in the United States as well. This is when people say we may be becoming a Banana Republic or whatever, this is part of the overall game. And it may be the danger that we're looking at here is that Great Britain is the canary in the coal mine on this issue. - So I just think it's also important to note that we have another example of how the Biden's concept of escalation management has completely backfired. So you already pointed out this leak to the media that the administration is beginning to recognize that there will be no deal. What they don't say explicitly is there will be no deal because Hamas won't accept any deal. So they're beginning to understand that, but you also had a report yesterday that MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia said, "Well, I'm not gonna recognize Israel "until there's a Palestinian state." And this just shows that the administration's approach to the region, which was to kind of downplay the Abraham Accords from the very beginning to refocus his efforts on appeasing Iran and placating the Palestinians and the United Nations in pursuit of an eventual agreement and normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel is a dead end. It's a cul-de-sac. And the approach of the Abraham Accords working from the outside in, focusing more on creating an anti-Iran coalition that might eventually not only produce regularization between Saudi Arabia and Israel, but force the Palestinians to actually get serious and recognize that no, they're not gonna wipe Israel off the face of the map. That approach was the Trump administration approach. It was rejected by Biden. And instead we have the mess that the United States and Israel find themselves in, in the Middle East. - I also would like to point out that a story is being manufactured as we speak. It started last night about Donald Trump and the Jewish people that is an outrage and deserves to be pointed out and trashed. Now, Seth has written in the past. I've talked about it in the past. Trump's decision to speak to the American Jewish electorate the way that he does, like the way he talks to many people, maybe self-defeating and kind of ugly and personal and all of that. And that this is not a way to make friends and influence people. But he had, he attended two different sessions on combating anti-Semitism yesterday. Biden and Harris administration officials did not appear at either of these sessions, do not appear themselves to have any such sessions planned in the run up to the anniversary of October 7. So I'm sure Doug Emhoff will go somewhere and talk about Kamala's brisket and how wonderful it is, how she's made him a better Jew. She certainly made him a better Jew, probably 'cause he couldn't have been a worse Jew, but we will leave that to one side. - Good brisket, good brisket can do that. It's limitless, what good brisket can do that. - It's not the day that-- - It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, though my sister-in-law, I am told makes a magnificent brisket by everybody. I don't like brisket, so I totally discard this whole thing. I'm not forgetting of course here. Not at all, I am going, I refuse to allow brisket to take the place of the bagels and locks shorthand. It's like we've had 60 years of Jews eat bagels and locks. Now suddenly we all have to eat brisket. I've had enough, I don't eat brisket, I don't like brisket. Okay, now my son likes brisket, I don't like brisket. Okay, so Trump says for the umpteenth time, this is very unfair to me, I'm really good for the Jewish people. I'm the best president for Israel. I should be doing better with Jews. Jews who don't vote for me should have their head examined. Jews who vote for Kamala Harris should have their head examined. He said it 75 times. He's never not said it. Suddenly there are stories everywhere about the outrage of Trump saying this yesterday. Why are there stories about the outrage of Trump saying this yesterday? Because there is polling showing that Trump is making inroads in the Jewish community, that no Democrat has made in the Jewish community for 44 years. When Ronald Reagan got, by some accounts, 39% of the Jewish vote and by other accounts close to 50 because the polling was very inexact. But if you went precinct by precinct in Jewish precincts, like the precinct actually, the Chuck Schumer once represented in 1980, it really looked like it was closer to 50/50. Nonetheless, the number is 39. That's the best number that a Jew has registered since really since the 1920s really. If anybody really was polling then. And Trump's, the Seattle poll of New York had Trump up 10 over Kamala Harris, 54/44. Suddenly, Trump's an anti-Semite. I saw someone referring to, can't remember who, who was tweeting out stuff about Trump and the Jewish vote. As a copo for saying something nice about Trump and Israel. And like saying, Jews should vote for me. Now, I'm not gonna take sides on whether Jews should vote for Trump. I'm really not, first of all, commentary doesn't take sides. We're a 501(c)(3) nonprofit. If you email me and say, "Why aren't you talking about whether you're gonna vote for Trump or not?" I would literally, our magazine would lose our nonprofit status if we endorse the candidate. I have free speech rights, but I run this institution. It would be a problem. I would be in litigate, whatever. It's, so just so you understand why you don't hear that stuff from us. Simply on a technical level. But I also don't believe in it really. And I don't believe that I should, it's important to do that. However, I'm not gonna sit here and not make remarks about how Trump, who has been a great friend of Israel, unquestionably a great friend of Israel, was a great friend of Israel during his tenure as president, but not expectedly. No one really knew whether that was gonna happen. He was playing footsy with anti-Semites during 2015 and 2016. He, you know, said he wanted a great real estate deal between Israel and the Palestinians, which made my blood run coal and all of that. But that is not what happened. The proof of the pudding was in the eating, moved the embassy to Jerusalem. He allowed America to participate in the Abraham Accords, which is the most important diplomatic achievement for Israel since its founding. And is a great friend to Israel. And in that sense, certainly has earned the vote if people choose to hand him the vote of Jews for whom Israel is a central, if not the central issue. And for Scott Jennings, the former W. Bush Administration official, Republican tight consultants, went on a CNN this morning and said that the anti-Semitism problem in the United States over the last year emanates from the left, and he was trashed and attacked. And that is absolutely unambiguously true. And it is a chanda and a disgrace that people like Casey Hunt and Sarah Longwell and others should question that interpretation. He would like to know what Biden and Harris have to say about the anti-Semites under their eagists. And so would I, and so will America as two men, let's say 9/11, as October 7th starts to come down the pike. So that's the end of my-- - Yeah, and I would add to that two things. One, the devil's advocate argument about the polling increased with Jews is that a disproportionate amount of them live in New York, and a disproportionate amount of New York Jews are either Orthodox or Russian, who may tend to lean right politically or be more open to leaning right politically. But at the same time, what you would say back to that is that the trends are the trends. Russians and Orthodox are not the majority of Jews in New York. It's not like they swamp the polls when you poll this. And also it's actually been harder. It's not that easy to poll the Russians in New York. So that's a separate thing is that they are, they're more right word minded but less ready to pick up the phone for pollsters, less ready to be activists and stuff like that. So I think it probably evens out a bit, but it's also the trend. I mean, when you talk about the Jewish vote, what exactly are we talking about? Now, a lot of people say, well, you're just talking about Jews who vote. But if you're looking at Jews who are voting strongly based on Jewish related concerns, and I'm not saying that that disqualifies others from the Jewish vote, I'm just saying, if you want to understand the trends of what the Jewish community is concerned about, then Jews who are voting because Jewish concerns are at or near the top of their list, especially in America is an important way to measure that. And that by that measure, the list of Jews who are putting Jewish concerns at or near the top is very clearly growing. And that's something that both parties have to deal with and it's hurting in this cycle, it's hurting the Democrats. - I do want to say we should bring up an example of anti-Semitism from the right, though, that's in the news and that is Mark Robinson, the Republican gubernatorial candidate in North Carolina who was the subject of what I can only describe as a nuclear bomb of opposition research yesterday, one made huge story coming from Andrew Kaczynski at CNN, just kind of the guru of opposition reporting. And then a follow-on story by reporter Politico. The follow-on story had to deal with Mark Robinson's name being included in the Ashley Madison website for people who are looking for extramarital affairs. But the CNN story had posts that Robinson had contributed, let us say, to pornographic websites where he referred to himself as a black Nazi, had said a favorable thing about Hitler. We'd, you know, he'd had a record of these statements about Jews prior to his rise in North Carolina politics, but these are certainly incredibly outrageous. And now we find ourselves in a situation where the Trump campaign is distancing themselves from Robinson now after Trump endorsed him and has been supporting him for years and gave him a speaking slot at the RNC. - Yeah, and we could have reverse co-tales here where, you know, just Robinson's kryptonite-like effect on the electorate could harm North Carolina Republicans at the state level, at the congressional level, and perhaps even take a point or two off Trump's support there, which in a very close race could doom Trump. I mean, 'cause Trump needs to win North Carolina. And just finally, you know, it occurred to me when I was thinking through this story, which is just nuts, you know. It's also nuts that a guy like this could rise so high. But why is that? Well, I think it has to do with the fact that when your two main criteria for entry into politics is do you fight the left and does the left hate you? And are you loyal to Donald Trump? Well, you're going to get politicians like Mark Robinson 'cause he fits, he meets both of those criteria. - Now, I just want to say I wrote about him, if people want to go, I wrote about this in March when he was leading the fight for the nomination or maybe just had just won the GOP nomination. But North Carolina GOP nominees loony ideas about Jews as a post, you can go on our website. And it was, you know, it was a warning, it was meant to be a warning, you know, but this sort of stuff, but it's like the, you know, the saying about Jews being canary in the coal mines, like, well, you know, we tried to say something back in March here at commentary and like, this guy's trouble. But if you go to that, you can see some of the comments that he made, which I'm not even sure I would read on a, you know, on a podcast, but it's not, this is not a left wing drive by media hit job or whatever, if you want to see the statements that he's made in the past that we already knew even before this, they are really quite something. - Especially as you see pain with the FBI. - What if you could have a conversation with a serial killer? - It is Monday, April 2nd, times approximately 1105. - Sitting a room across the table. Hear them tell the story of who they are, what they did, why they did it. - Following would be a interview with Israel Keys. - What if you could separate their truths from their lies and maybe hear something new that they've never told anyone? - I'll give you two bodies. They're in big black trash bags. - From the team that brought you down the hill, the Delphi murders, this is Deviant. - A show that explores the people who blow through society's boundaries, the ones beyond the margins. - Our first story is real keys. - There is no one who knows me or who has ever known me, who knows anything about me really. The only person who knows about kind of things I'm telling you is me. - Follow Deviant, available June 25th, and listen on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music or any major streaming platform. - So look, I mean, not that I think that Trump is a figure out of Greek tragedy and that hubris will mark his downfall, but if there are these negative co-tales, right? If he is Kryptonite, if he drops Trump's poll numbers by two percent, if North Carolina remains razor thin, which is what all the polling is showing now, it's a one-point race in North Carolina. And if you can stitch together a 271-269 scenario or to what, a 271-268 scenario, whatever the number is, I'm sorry. 271-267 scenario where Trump can win Pennsylvania but lose the election by winning North Carolina, he will have lost the election for himself where Robinson would not be the gubernatorial nominee of North Carolina were it not for Trump. It was all there, just like Herschel Walker's psychosis was all in front of everybody in Georgia in 2022 and Trump wanted Herschel Walker and Herschel Walker then had split personalities and I don't know what else and did family crises. And by the way, so does Robinson like a month ago before any of this, Robinson, pro-life candidate, hates the left, higher heartbeat bill, blah, blah, blah, has to come out and say he and his wife had an abortion 30 years ago because it was coming out. So Oppo on him, very easy, it appears, not a hard sell and hilariously timed in my view as a brilliant nuclear strike, not that I want to discredit or say anything about Andrew Kaczynski of CNN who is a remarkable reporter has been, he was like 21 years old when Benson had hired him at BuzzFeed. He has been doing this for like 13, 14 years. He is an amazing political player as a journalist. So I don't know where he got it and I don't want to say that he's working in tandem or whatever but this did happen to drop six hours or seven hours before the last moment at which the Republicans could pull a switcheroo and get Robinson out of the race and off the ballot themselves without Robinson quitting. He is now on the ballot. The ballots are about to be printed. His name will be on them even if he were to be forced to drop out of the race. That is gold, that is gold for the Harris, obviously it's gold for the state party in North Carolina which is going to have a democratic governor again. But a related issue there is that he was lieutenant governor. - Right. - He didn't just come literally out of left field and then people started scrambling for office. He was sitting state office. - Yeah, yeah, the black Nazi is a new, you got to say though, that's a new one on me. - You know, I mean, it's like the movie black Klansman. Although he wasn't, it's not that the Klansman knew that the undercover FBI agent was black. - They're that fantastic Chappelle Skitt about the blind, black KKK grand dragon. It's just got to be one of the funniest things that I've ever seen. - Anyway, so yeah. - In a broader sense, we have stories like this every election cycle now because people who have no business being in electoral politics have rushed the gates. And so a few of them come out, a few of these stories leak every election cycle or not even an election or during the year, during day-to-day politics. These are all people who would have been weeded out before the process began. Ages ago, and I don't know if that makes them outliers. I mean, the problem is now, aside from it, representing someone's, from Robinson, representing someone's version of MAGA, it's also a representation of the state of our politics. There's just too much of this type of thing. - Well, can we talk about that? I think this isn't anything. - Only fans, candidates, and groping in public and there's all sorts of wackiness. - I think you can chart. I mean, as we're talking, Abe, I was thinking like putting on my history cap as a historian, Christine's a historian. She's not here today, but as my being the crappola political historian that I am on here and that I am sometimes in commentary, it does strike me that you combine two or three things over the last 18 years and you get this unholy stew of oppo brilliance mostly on the part of the Democrats. So the first real hit, I mean, there were two, the first real hit on the campaign trail was George Allen running for a senator in Virginia, saying something about an Indian American who was the guy following him from the Democratic Party, taping him on camera and George Allen being aware that this was happening and going, well, you know, there's that guy Makaka over there who's got it out, out, out, out, out, and that was the end of George Allen. So, because that footage could then be repurposed by Makaka or a new member's name and sort of put out there on YouTube which had pretty just started. YouTube started in 2005. So it had just started and there was footage of Allen looking obnoxious and annoying and maybe vaguely racist. And that was the end of George Allen in a complicated state where he should have been able to win the senatorial race. Then we go to 2010. - Kind of a rising stuff, you know. - Totally, he was like, oh, he'll win and then he'll be sent and then he'll be a credible candidate for president, right? That was, I mean, there was a step ladder effect for George Allen and one word in the wrong place with a, with essentially, but there wasn't, weren't iPhones yet, but effectively an iPhone. And he was done. Then we go to 2010 and we have the cases of Richard Murdoch and Todd Aiken and Sharon Angle, right, three senatorial candidates from Indiana, Kansas, and Nevada. All of whom had been captured, caught or what, again, on sort of in ways that could be exploited on the growing social media networks, saying very discomforting things about abortion and rape and things like that that could then be retailed against them and cost them. - Right, Angle, of course, wanted to barter chickens for a medical care. That was her. - Oh, that, right, that was her. - The legitimate rape was Aiken. - Aiken, yeah, and I think Murdoch said something similar. - Murdoch was, Murdoch was legitimate rape and somebody else was, you know, women in 2020, we also had Cristin O'Donnell. - We sent them themselves. - I'm not a witch of honor, right? She beat Mike Castle and a- - And that was, and that seat was, that was a foot, like Castle was going to win. - He was gonna win. - Well, certainly in 2010 in that environment, Castle was probably going to win. - Yeah, so she was the team. These were all Tea Party candidates. They were distinguished in 2010 by the fact that they were further to the right on social and cultural issues than the people that they were running against. And they were, it was a perfect storm that, you know, prevented the Republican overwhelming Republican victory in the house in 2010 from being duplicated in the Senate. And so this is now almost a two decade pattern that the Republican Party internally loves or is very much attracted to extremists who seem to be extremists for the causes that they love. But, you know, when someone is an extremist, it turns out they're an extremist in all kinds of ways that don't necessarily have entirely to do with the reason you want them to be elected to the Senate. And 2022, the Trump candidates in 2022, Walker and I remember who else. - But, you know, the- - Same effect. - There's a strain of Republicans who love that too. They love the potential for there being something unhinged about the person. That adds a free song to the candidate. - Well, that was Noah Rothman's point that he used to make on here is that there's some, they love losing. There's a part of the Republican Party that loves losing because it also then creates the conditions under which the culture war is being won by the left and that the right is permanently in a state of embadlement, must push itself back against the wall, you know, lesser force against greater force showing how this works and willing to lose for principle. But is Robinson, you're losing on principle. If you go with Mark Robinson, the black Nazi anti-Semite abortion, abortionist psychotic. I mean, that is not, you know, that's where we start, the rubber starts hitting the road, we're now in, you know, moving into the end of the first generation of this entire period of republic electoral extremism. But they also seem to, there's a wish that anyone who has the capacity to say something crazy may have a little Trump in them. And that's not the case. - I mean, they may have a little Trump in them, but that's- - Yeah. - It very much enables the Flight 93 mindset, right? 'Cause how often online have the four, you know, have any of the four of us been called a peace time consiglieri, you know, by the right. Like this was, this is the thing. It's like, well, it's war time. So you have to go to war with it. If it weren't war time, then fine, you can like people like Mitt Romney or, you know, Mitch Daniels or whatever, you know, people who don't, who aren't, you know, Nazis on porn sites or whatever. But like, this is war. So, you know, you run with the Nazi you have, it's the sort of attitude. And that's the excuse is that we can't afford to, you know, and so that furthers a Flight 93 stuff because every election has to be the Flight 93 election in order to justify telling people that Mark Robinson, you have to vote for Mark Robbins. - Well, Mark, Matt, put on your Sarah Palin hat for a minute 'cause Matt wrote a book about Sarah Palin. So you could call that a unity ticket in 2008, which is that there was John McCain, the ultimate peacetime, even though, of course, he was a war banger and everything, peacetime consuliary in your estimation. I needed a zet, needed to get, needed to bring new life to his ticket, pick Sarah Palin. But the thing about Sarah Palin was that she was a wildly successful young politician in a new mode, winning in this state, coming out of nowhere, working class girl, you know, moves to Alaska, husbands, you know, they ride around on snowmobiles. She has five kids, she has a kid with Down syndrome, all of that stuff going on, very exciting, all of this, but also seeming to be an able worthy politician who manages her state's complicated politics, quite brilliantly, and she had a choice to make after-- - Well, yeah. - Right, okay. - She had gone against the oil companies, she'd gone against the political establishment, and I think McCain was attracted to her record of independent political action, and that reminded him of himself in a lot of ways. And I wrote a piece for the Times, the day after the pick, talking about how there were two rogues, you know, that's what he liked about her. And she also had, of course, glamour, and she had a connection to social conservatives on the life issue, which John McCain lacked. So at the time, it seemed like a great choice. Her rollout was spectacular, that it ran into some trouble that first week, and we found out that one of her daughters was pregnant, but it wasn't until one month into her ascension as the vice presidential nominee that she got into trouble answering questions from Charlie Gibson and then from Katie Couric during the financial crisis. After the loss in '08, I guess, to your point, yeah, there came a time where could she have remained in office and basically set herself up to be among the front-runners for 2012? Absolutely. But her personality shows, I think people forget. So you need to say, basically, she quit the governorship of Alaska. I was just about to say that. Yes, sorry. In the spring of 2009, she quit the governorship of Alaska. She was, you know, there was some lawfare being practiced against her, but, you know, there was a certain kind of turbulence in her life always kind of has been, and I think that also manifested itself, and she was thrown in the spotlight, her family's thrown in the spotlight in a way that I don't think she was really prepared for. But she quit the governorship, and she became, for the next two years, kind of the leader of the Tea Party in a lot of ways, right? Because it was her comment in August of 2009 about Obama's death panels that I think really catalyzed a lot of the resistance to Obamacare. So she, you know, she was this figure, I think, who kind of was a bridge between the pre-financial crisis politics and Republican Party, and the post-financial crisis populism of the Republican Party. And so she does kind of herald some of the things we're seeing. I mean, she's nowhere as bad as Mark Robinson. I mean, it's-- - Well, of course not at quantum levels, different. But I think interestingly enough earlier today on our text chain, Abe pointed out that around the same time as Sarah Palin, being a figure of controversy and excitement, was the Anthony Wiener scandal in New York, right? - That was Seth. - That was Seth. - Oh, that was Seth, right? Okay, well, Seth, I give you credit, because I think that was true too. And if you remember, when Anthony Wiener called the press conference to dispute the allegations of him sexting underage girls, who ended up taking the lectern for the first 10 minutes of the press conference, Andrew Breitbart. So it was all there, it was all-- And of course, that was also, if you remember, and Seth, I'm sure you do, as you were thinking about this, that was also when Donald Trump released this video that went viral calling Anthony Wiener a pervert. And so something happened in those years, right after the financial crisis, where our politics took this turn toward just outrageous, populist, celebrity, scandal, entertainment, and we're still living in it. - And clearly, Wiener was, by the way, we should just say also, obviously, very connected. The reason that you can do six degrees of Anthony Wiener with anything that happens in politics today is because he was marrying into the Clinton world and whatever with whom I'll bet it, not that I don't wanna drag her name down or whatever, but he was obviously the reason that those messages found their way onto a computer that got Hillary Clinton in trouble, et cetera, et cetera, this right in the center of these guys, they sprung, from the right and the left, they crashed the gate and they really ran right to the center. - But let's take Palin. The reason I also brought up Palin is to say, there was Palin, so she was a populist, but she was also a governing populist who used the political power of her governorship. Again, in a highly complex state, she came in as a rogue, took over the reins of government in her state, kind of like Jesse Ventura in Minnesota, although not as a famous person, and did inventive things, right? It's a famous thing, I put the plane on eBay, their governor had a plane, I sold it on eBay. That kind of thing, imagine a history in which Sarah Palin did not drop out as governor. State as governor, had a good record as governor. I know it's a weird state to run as president from because it's so small and its politics are governed by this gigantic pool of oil money that no other state really has to play with, but she could have been this bridge figure beating Romney, who was running as I'm a good governor. I was really good, and you know what? I'll be as conservative, I'll be severely conservative if you want me to be. She was severely conservative. She was an inventive governor. She did, doesn't quit. She doesn't become an outside populist tea party leader. She doesn't get Fox News to build a studio in her house and get to pay the couple million dollars a year by Fox to be on Fox. She stays in politics as a conventional political figure who takes in the changes in the party and uses them technically to advance conservative ideas. I know it's a nice thing. Only it were so. I know, but I'm just saying that the fact that she went, she had a stand-in in the 2012 primary and that was my friend, Michelle Bachman. Fair enough. You know, Michelle did not get very far. Right. But I'm just saying, you can see where things went off in this other direction around the time. And yes, I think once again, we cannot, we have not gotten to the place where we understand the distorting effect, not only of Iraq, which I think everybody has taken in, but of the financial crisis and every alteration in recent American tools there. So including the conversations we're now having about the economy and where the economy is right now, we're still in the overhang from that moment in 2008 when every American household lost 35% of its wealth in six weeks. I mean, it's almost unthinkable that that happened. It took a decade for people to get back to par. So let's quickly talk about the Oprah Kamala interview because there was a very interesting moment in the interview. It wasn't an interview, it was a rally. It was really an infomercial. Literally, it looked like one of those share infomercials from the late '90s or the '90s when share would sit around with people and they would talk about the makeup you could buy from share, like those early infomercials. So it's a round, it's a forum in the round and there are all these screens around and Kamala is interacting with all kinds of ordinary, just regular Joe Americans, you know, like Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep and Chris Rock and Brian Cranston. And it was really one and Ben Stiller 'cause, you know, this is really the real America, that middle-class America that she comes from with her second mother who ran the childcare - Hanging out with Aaron Brockovich. - Hanging out with Aaron Brockovich. - And Aaron, exactly. But then finally, after the 15 minutes of the celebrity appearances, Kamala sits down with Oprah, they have a conversation and then they start taking phone calls from people on the, you know, who are there and there is this very attractive young couple and the couple says, woman says, we got married, we wanted to buy a house, we moved in with my parents so we could save money to build up a down payment to buy a house. And we did and we bought the house and now my brother and sister-in-law are living with us so they can build up money to buy a house. But our mortgage costs are way more than we expected and so we're struggling. What are you gonna do to lower the cost of living for people like me? Now, when you hear this and you look at this couple, you think, you know what, this is actually a pretty great American story. They look like they look like they were about 30, they bought a house, they'd saved money to buy, to get the down payment to buy a house. Now they are paying it forward by having a sibling living with them to do exactly the same thing. When do you think people buy houses? Did bought houses in America in the 1970s, 80s, 90s? Like, yeah, maybe they bought them in their early 20s when it really did cost $1,000 to put money down on a house, you know, before everything skyrocketed. But this is a success story, they are having a problem because mortgage rates are too high because interest rates went up too high because their mortgages haven't ratcheted down yet the way they should 'cause they had an adjustable rate mortgage. What is she gonna do to help them? Said they asked and she said, I'm gonna deal with price gouging. And you know what, I love our small businesses. She does. And you know, I wanna give a $50,000 tax deduction to people who start a small business 'cause right now that number is $5,000 and no one can start a small business with $5,000. And Oprah goes, yeah, that's a really small business. Says Oprah worth $4 billion. I would wager, I think I've said this before on the podcast, so if I'm repeating, I'm sorry. I would raise her that 95% of the small businesses in the United States start with people with $0. And they put it on their credit card. Or like they started Etsy, I mean, my niece started a an invitation design business on Etsy. How did she do that? She had a computer. Okay, so she would have had to pay for the computer. I think you're missing the big headline out of the Oprah interview, John. And that is not only does Kamala Harris have a gun, she is prepared to use it. She said, she said-- Ain't no one get into her house. She's gonna do it, it goes the way into her house. They're gonna get shot. And then kind of charmingly, she goes, I should have said that, should I? Yeah, my-- I think with Kamala Harris, it seems like beneath the banality, there's a pretty interesting person there. And yet, she is so nervous about saying the wrong thing that she buries herself under these clouds of verbiage and nonsense. And I think it's a real liability for her. I mean, Peggy Noonan has a column out this morning that says restates a lot of the stuff that we've been saying on the podcast and in writing it is she just dodges everything. You never get a straight answer from her. And people notice that, people do notice that. You're like, why can't you answer a simple question? It is a, it is a war shock test. In fact, as far as I'm concerned watching, when I watched Kamala this morning from last night. So I'm watching it and I'm like, this can't be, you know. How can this be? It's now been two months. She literally says the same, she gives nonsense answers to questions that are actually quite direct. Like, what are you gonna do to lower? I'm having, there is an answer, by the way, to the Borgage question, which is, what is happening now, right now, should make you feel confident about the future? We just heard that the Federal Reserve is cutting interest rates. That should come in to help you. We are going to do X, Y, and Z when we come into office. I don't know what, like not price gouging stuff, but there are things that we can do, we can dereg it. We have some deregulatory policies and all of that, that should make the circumstances that you're in, and a year from now, much better than they are now, you will be more comfortable. Your sister and brother-in-law will be able to buy their house at a better interest rate or be in a position like that. She can answer the question. She does not wanna answer the question. She wants to you go back to these talking points. And I hear that and I go, people are just gonna go, oh my God, the vipidity is just overpowering. And then I think, well, maybe they're not. Like maybe the bar is low because the bar is low. She's running against Trump. The bar is low. She just needs to be minimally credible as somebody who seems to be able to back and forth with Oprah to get the support that she needs to just make it over. - You know, there's a lot of vipidity in America too. - Yeah, I know, right, Oprah who is not vapid, but Oprah knows how to turn on the vipidity when she has to. - But you know what I was impressed by, impressed by meaning struck by and I only saw clips of this. I didn't see it in its entirety. Was there's a certain way to talk nonsense about wellness and be engaging because a lot of this came around to sort of feelings about it being Americans and why we came here and what it means to be in a manner. It was all mixed up and the syntax was swirling and everything from her. But I don't know that she did credibly have a back and forth with Oprah. That's what struck me. I think there's a different type of chops you need to be able to talk the sort of wellness speak and make it sound like something engaging. And she didn't even have that as far as I was concerned. Even when you put her in this sort of soft cushiony setting, she is so unsure of herself that she can't get from the beginning to the end of a statement without you scratching your head. - You could really be right. I find it impossible to gauge what you just said because that talk, I'm so allergic to it that I don't really know what's effective and what's ineffective or what fits the model or doesn't fit the model. She seemed more comfortable to me last night than she did with Dana Bash, for example, which I understand because it's like a play. She's just basically, she's acting, she's literally reciting the same line. So now, she's two months into the play, she's really relaxing into the dialogue 'cause she has it all, she's off book. She now, she can maybe stress different syllables, make it a little more interesting, I don't know. It's a very hard for me to tell, but it did strike me that when you look on the debates about this stuff on social media, you see right-wingers saying, I can't believe the word salad, I can't, I mean, this is cringe into it, this is the worst I've ever seen, I can't believe what I'm hearing. And then people, other people, and I don't think 'cause they're just trying to spin it saying she looked confident, she looked comfortable, she seemed like she was on top of her message. And I just, I don't know. I genuinely don't know, and the fact, but we gotta go back to maybe we can conclude here. This is anybody's, it remains anybody's race. And therefore, that's why the Mark Robinson thing is so bizarrely important, like tiny little changes in the atmosphere in various places, and the solving of certain states. But this gets back to the Jewish vote. Why do I think that everybody goes crazy when Trump talks about the Jewish vote this way, the day after, two days after, the numbers come out that suggest that he is making these M-roads. It's not because of New York state, he is not gonna win New York state. It is because of Pennsylvania, there are 400,000 Jews in Pennsylvania. If you do the math, if he gets 10% more of the Jewish vote in Pennsylvania than he got last time, or Jews stay home and don't vote for Kamala because of some of the stuff that he pushes about her and Hamas and all of that. That could be 20, 25,000 votes, and that could be the ball game nationally. It's not that much. It takes very little he won by 48,000 votes in 2016, by some measures, Biden won by 44,000 votes across five states in 2020. We are talking about microscopic changes in atmosphere that could make all the difference. And that's why we may see issues and things pop up that everyone's gonna go, what on earth? Why are we talking about this? Where, why is he bringing that up? Why is she bringing that up? And you're gonna have to like go tamutically into the cross tabs to figure out what the hell is going on because nobody is making the sale and closing the deal. - Yeah, and also we saw the organizing in the Jewish community that we haven't really seen in the past, not to slight Jewish, you know, I'll get out the vote efforts or whatever to this, but there were in the case of in New York when Jamal Bowman was ousted in the primary. There were some pretty startling statistics about how, you know, the Jews were like, what, two thirds of the early vote or something like that in that. You know, that was, and you know, less than 10% of the district. So, and then again, we saw it in St. Louis, in the St. Louis area, for Corey Bush to ask Corey. - So, there's a possibility that there's an organizing, you know, sort of movement growing and that it stays in place. And that also, if you only need, as you said, 15,000 for a certain area. - Yeah, now remember, those votes are within a democratic framework, right? That with Jamal Bowman was ousted by George Latterer in a democratic primary. So, there was no question that no one was voting for a Republican and no one was voting for Trump. So, the atmosphere is entirely different. However, we are, what is today is the 20th. So, we are 17 days away from October 7th. And how Biden and Harris and the Democratic Party handle October 7th could reassure American Jews, freaked out by anti-Semitism and worried about things and worried about campuses and all of that, or it could go the other way. And again, microscopic changes in that kind of atmosphere. I've just been talking within the Jewish community, forget the Jewish community, like there are a whole mess of Americans who don't like this either and don't like the disorder and the decay. And we talked the other day about how Hamas next seemed to be determined to seize October 7th as a day of resistance against Israel as opposed to it being a day of mourning for the Jewish people, the anniversary of the most horrible massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. And so far, as I know, there doesn't seem to be any organized effort among in the Jewish community, understandably, to mark October 7th because it is a memorialization day. So, you're not gonna get 300,000 people to rally on the, at the Capitol. It would be kind of inappropriate, I think. And it's maybe, I don't know. I mean, but clearly this is happening. It was gonna happen at the University of Maryland. It's gonna happen. - Also falls in the worst time of the year for- - Right, because it's the middle of the holidays. - The middle of the holidays. - Right, the high holidays. - Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah, it's what's called Holomoa. That's, those are the days between Russia, Shana, and Yom Kippur, Russia, Shana begins on the first or the second of October. And then Yom Kippur is 10 days later. So people are Jews who, this is, these are the few days that actually most American Jews mark. And so it is a particularly horrible- - And it's the 10 days of the whole, the whole area is known, the whole time is known as the 10 days of repentance. And so there's a special focus on, you know, not internal. - It's internal. - Yeah, on- - Also, on your own- - And there's extra prayers and- - All right, yeah. - A lot of times spent in those 10 days when looking inward. - Well, if you are, if you are a person of faith, but even so, the overall message of the time is you are supposed to reflect on your own sins and your own flaws and your own faults and what you need to do to make restitution or make repairs for your failings and not say, you know, not, so yeah, it's- - And also for the unobservant, those are overflow, synagogue days, those are days where- - Those are the days where they go. - Every synagogue has to put out extra chairs and stuff like that, everyone's there. - Yeah, so yeah, so it's a particularly bad time. But again, politically, it is a time of peril for, it is a much more significant time of peril for the Democrats and for Harrison and Biden than I think they realize or that they have taken note of because they are so concerned about not poking the Dearborn Bear as far as I can tell. Anybody got a recommends? - I don't think- - I can't, okay, go, please. - I've been reading quite a bit. So I'd like to take this opportunity to recommend Joseph Burgers. I don't know if it's a softer part. - Joseph Burgers, biography of Ellie Visele for the Jewish Live series, came out a few months back, have had it on my night's table, but finally got around to reading it. It's an excellent book. Tracing the life of Ellie Visele, drawing from his two memoirs, which I recommended earlier this year, but also interviews with his son Elisha, his Elisha. - Elisha, yeah, Elisha. - Elisha, parented my school, so that's- - Yes, and who's a very interesting person himself. - Yes. - His widow Marion and his close circle. Also, it's interesting as I finished the biography, I learned that one of Ellie Visele's close friends, the physician and artist Mark Podwall, had died. And so, it was sad to hear the two collaborated on a Hakada, which is I own, which is beautiful. And so, if you're interested in Ellie Visele, the history of the Holocaust, the survivors, and his remarkable influence on literature and public life, I recommend this biography. It's short, the Jewish Live series is great. They're pithy. - Yeah, pithy. 200 pages. - 200 pages. - 200 pages. - 200 pages. - Get through it in a day or two, and learn a lot. - And I think people will remember that I am an enormous admirer of Joseph Berger's work. His memoir, Displaced Persons, which I have recommended, I think at least twice on this podcast was a reporter for the New York Times for 40 or 50 years. Wrote extensively was one of the few extremely literate people able to write about Jewish matters and Jewish affairs in the pages of the New York Times without being offensive or snarky or whatever. And one of the best newspaper prose stylists of our time and his book is beautiful, and I look forward to reading the Ellie Visele biography as well. So we not only have Berger's Visele biography, I do once again recommend Displaced Persons by Joseph Berger. Have a wonderful weekend, everybody. We'll be back on Monday for Matt, Seth, and Abe. I'm John Pudberg. Let's keep the candle burning. 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