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Speaker 1: Hello there, Happy Wednesday. Welcome to another.
Speaker 2: Episode of the Chuck Podcast.
Speaker 1: Were give you a quick rundown of what we have today.
Speaker 1: I have a new candidate for you to take a
Speaker 1: listen to. It's a first time candidate for office named
Speaker 1: Joel Willett. He's running in Kentucky for the US Senate.
Speaker 1: He is a former essentially career national security person, worked
Speaker 1: in the intelligence community and sort of gotten decided to
Speaker 1: get involved in politics, and within a couple of days
Speaker 1: of that, lost his security clearance via the political purge
Speaker 1: that was orchestrated by the current head of the department,
Speaker 1: the Director of National Intelligence, Tulsea Gabbart, and the whole
Speaker 1: sort of the the political retribution aspect of the Trump
Speaker 1: administration sort of going after the intelligence community and anybody
Speaker 1: that he believes somehow that that was involved in surfacing
Speaker 1: the concerns of the intelligence community about how certain unfriendly
Speaker 1: nations to the United States seem to have access to
Speaker 1: Trump's inner circle. He obviously still is angry about that.
Speaker 1: But what's interesting about Joe Willett is that he's not,
Speaker 1: in some ways not a typical candidate for office, and
Speaker 1: I think and has an interesting background that will seem
Speaker 1: quite familiar to people who read the book. He'll billiology
Speaker 1: by jd Vance for what it's worth. But what was
Speaker 1: really helpful I had conversation after the deal was done
Speaker 1: in the shutdown was to hear how a Senate candidate
Speaker 1: was responding to the shutdown, and just about like every
Speaker 1: other Senate candidate, he was pretty negative on the deal,
Speaker 1: while he wasn't personally trashing Chuck Schumer the way other
Speaker 1: Senate candidates seem to be wanting to flex their anti
Speaker 1: Schumer muscles, as you've seen in so many Democratic primaries
Speaker 1: just in the last twenty four hours. I think he
Speaker 1: does give voice to at least I think he's a
Speaker 1: good example of explaining who the voters, the candidates think
Speaker 1: that are running for office in primaries think they're talking to.
Speaker 1: And that's I think probably the best way to understand
Speaker 1: the initial reaction by those that are running for office,
Speaker 1: those that are running in Democratic primaries, those that want
Speaker 1: to be leaders within the Democratic Party, versus they have
Speaker 1: reacted the way they've reacted.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: In some ways, you are what's your electorate, you know,
Speaker 1: you tell me you're electorate, and I'll tell you your
Speaker 1: position on the shutdown, right. And if you're electorate, if
Speaker 1: it's an electorate where you're more worried about the general
Speaker 1: the swing voter, you were probably on the side of
Speaker 1: figuring out how to do a pause in the shutdown.
Speaker 1: And if you were somebody who's got to worry more
Speaker 1: about a primary voter, then you were going to be
Speaker 1: emphatic against cutting this steel. And I think the reaction
Speaker 1: is a reminder that this was not about healthcare, right.
Speaker 2: This was about.
Speaker 1: Taking on finally confronting Trump on something right, and the party.
Speaker 1: Democratic Party hadn't done any decent confrontation.
Speaker 2: Really.
Speaker 1: A few governors had in trying to fight back on
Speaker 1: National Guard efforts and things like that, but there hadn't
Speaker 1: been a real showdown between the party and Trump, and
Speaker 1: the shutdown provided that and politically in the last forty days,
Speaker 1: it energized the base of the Democratic Party and they
Speaker 1: felt good about that energy and it because the elections
Speaker 1: went well last week. It can it seemed to provide
Speaker 1: the confirmation you know, a sort of form of confirmation bias. Hey,
Speaker 1: this shutdown seems to be working. Look at how well
Speaker 1: our candidates did. Why give up this this idea now
Speaker 1: when at the end of the day, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: things can turn quickly if you're not careful. And already
Speaker 1: some polling a surfaced about how as this shutdown was
Speaker 1: impacting more and more Americans, blame was starting to get
Speaker 1: shared more and more between both parties. Yes, Republicans were
Speaker 1: taking the run of the blame. Yes, Mike Johnson and
Speaker 1: Donald Trump were actually making it easier for Democrats to
Speaker 1: politically win the shutdown by their own maneuvers and their
Speaker 1: own decision making there. But ultimately, as I've stated in
Speaker 1: a few other places that I've spoken in the last
Speaker 1: forty eight hours, there is a large chunk of voters
Speaker 1: in the middle who don't pay attention to day to
Speaker 1: day massinations, but that will pay attention when the proverbial
Speaker 1: government toilet is clogged, you know, and not being able
Speaker 1: to travel around Thanksgiving at a time when we have
Speaker 1: almost no choice but to use their airplanes in order
Speaker 1: to get where we want to get in a short
Speaker 1: weekend was a way that you were suddenly going to
Speaker 1: start impacting people that don't normally pay attention to the
Speaker 1: day to day machinations, and that actually can become long
Speaker 1: term more politically damaging than anything you think is going
Speaker 1: for you in the short term. So that's my basic
Speaker 1: way to explain the situation we're in.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: What's funny here is leave it to the Democrats that
Speaker 1: come across. As you know, they're essentially divided over tactics.
Speaker 1: They're not divided over any issue. They all believe in
Speaker 1: this healthcare issue. They all believe Trump needs to be confronted.
Speaker 1: They all believe they've got to shift their messaging to
Speaker 1: cost of living issues. Right, So this is a party
Speaker 1: that is fighting over tactics. You know, do they have
Speaker 1: the right leaders? They probably don't. Just changing leaders change
Speaker 1: the debate on tactics. I don't know if it really does,
Speaker 1: but I will say this, once you have lost the
Speaker 1: trust of the people you're trying to lead, you probably
Speaker 1: ought to leave, right, you know. And and the best
Speaker 1: thing for the party would be if Chuck Schumer went
Speaker 1: out on his own, not forcing more groups to come
Speaker 1: out calling for his resignation and all this stuff. But ultimately,
Speaker 1: I don't know if it changes. You know, you're still
Speaker 1: going to have a leader that's got to be thinking about, Hey,
Speaker 1: there's the base wants one thing, but you still got
Speaker 1: to appeal to swing voters if you actually want to
Speaker 1: win enough seats to actually be in charge of governing something.
Speaker 1: So I think that tension would exist whether it was Schumer,
Speaker 1: whether Brian Schatz is there, whether it's Chris Murphy, whether
Speaker 1: it's Amy Klobashar, whether it's Patty Murray. Right, we could
Speaker 1: come up, you know, And I think if you know,
Speaker 1: this is one of those moments where if Schumer just
Speaker 1: decided in the next week to sort of you know what,
Speaker 1: all right, you know, I'm not wanted here, I'll take
Speaker 1: a step back. My gut is Patty Murray would replace him,
Speaker 1: because she'd be seen as a quote unquote caretaker majority leader.
Speaker 1: She's at this point the senior most member of the
Speaker 1: Democratic Senate, and nobody would cross her right, and she
Speaker 1: really has the respect of sort of all wings of
Speaker 1: the party. I think she'd be seeing the original mom
Speaker 1: and tennis shoes, you know, as she ran as a
Speaker 1: sort of a populist candidate of her day in nineteen
Speaker 1: ninety two when she first came on the national scene.
Speaker 1: I think she would be seen as somebody that would
Speaker 1: would be less of a public face for the party.
Speaker 1: And in some ways, I think many senators wouldn't mind
Speaker 1: that and would likely embrace that. But let's be realistic,
Speaker 1: you may not see any change in the short term.
Speaker 2: To me.
Speaker 1: The you know, while it's easy to cover this tactical
Speaker 1: split inside the Democratic Party because it's sort of easy
Speaker 1: to do. It's easy to create a cable news segment
Speaker 1: on it. It's easy to find people to criticize, you know,
Speaker 1: it's sort of an easy debate to have. It's not
Speaker 1: really that big of a divide because it's not over
Speaker 1: some sort of fundamental ideology ideological disagreement, you know, where
Speaker 1: for instance, like things with Mamdani, those are fundamental ideological
Speaker 1: disagreements about you know, how involved government should be in
Speaker 1: the economy. That's that's that's a larger divide that I
Speaker 1: think doesn't really get dealt with in the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: until the presidential primaries take shape. But I'd tell you,
Speaker 1: even as everybody's focused on the dem divide here, don't
Speaker 1: take your eye off the ball of a growing Republican divide.
Speaker 1: I think that is coming. I think that right now,
Speaker 1: if you're a Republican elected official in Congress, you should
Speaker 1: You're trying to figure out what do I do when
Speaker 1: the leader of the party is not accepting reality. And
Speaker 1: Donald Trump's inability to accept the reality that this economy
Speaker 1: sucks for a lot of his supporters is going to
Speaker 1: cause a much bigger problem for the Republican Party than
Speaker 1: anything the Democratic Party is going through at the moment,
Speaker 1: because ultimately, because they're in the minority and because they're
Speaker 1: in the opposition, you know, I mean, they're going to
Speaker 1: have a unity of message, They're going to have a
Speaker 1: unity of focus. They may disagree on how to deal
Speaker 1: with Trump in the moment, but they're not going to
Speaker 1: disagree on how to court the voters in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 1: That's a divide that I think that is not the
Speaker 1: case on the Republican side of the aisle. As this
Speaker 1: economy weakens for those without money and essentially with those
Speaker 1: about real savings. And that's what we're seeing here right.
Speaker 1: This is a This is the very definition of a
Speaker 1: trickle down economy where Donald Trump is hoping that the bang,
Speaker 1: the stock market success is going to somehow trickle down
Speaker 1: and help everybody else. There's not a lot of evidence
Speaker 1: that that ever works. You can just go back one
Speaker 1: hundred years and see how that worked out. The last
Speaker 1: time we sort of tried to put together an economy
Speaker 1: where government and big business fused itself together like it
Speaker 1: did in the early parts of the industrial and the
Speaker 1: Industrial Age.
Speaker 2: That didn't end well.
Speaker 1: We got a great depression, and then finally government decided,
Speaker 1: the people decided, hey, they wanted government. They wanted more
Speaker 1: guard rails on big business, more guardrails on the economy
Speaker 1: than what we had at the time. And I have
Speaker 1: a feeling we're going to end up in a similar
Speaker 1: situation where we're going to have a downturn caused by
Speaker 1: what we're seeing, this fusion of big tech and government,
Speaker 1: and that is going to awake awoke in a bunch
Speaker 1: of people who are going to want more guardrails put
Speaker 1: on our economy, necessarily leaving capitalism, but something more akin
Speaker 1: to what the two Roosevelts fought for, both Teddy and
Speaker 1: Franklin in their very different ways. But I did get
Speaker 1: a lot of questions on the shutdown, so I decided
Speaker 1: that before we get to the interview that I would
Speaker 1: answer all the shutdown related q and as in this
Speaker 1: part of the podcast, we'll have our individual will it
Speaker 1: then I'll do my top five list this week. It's
Speaker 1: where I the top five Senate seats most likely to flip.
Speaker 1: It's let's just say the top five has changed. Just
Speaker 1: like in college football, what the top five was at
Speaker 1: the beginning of October is a lot different than what
Speaker 1: the top five is at the beginning of November. So
Speaker 1: goes my list of top five most likely most vulnerable
Speaker 1: Senate seats in twenty twenty six. But before we get
Speaker 1: to all that, and I'll do some q and as
Speaker 1: on other topics that were not shut down related. So
Speaker 1: we'll begin with this. This comes from Tim, and he asks,
Speaker 1: I don't I understand why the Democrats are being blamed
Speaker 1: for the shutdown. If the Speaker will not convene the House,
Speaker 1: how can the Dems vote against it? Also, if the
Speaker 1: Republicans control the House, why can't they just.
Speaker 2: Vote to pass it.
Speaker 1: I think too many times that reporter. Too many times
Speaker 1: reporters assume that people know the cause of the most
Speaker 1: basic facts about an issue, or maybe this was reported
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the shutdown, so they don't need
Speaker 1: to reiterate those facts. I think it has helpful to
Speaker 1: remind people periodically of those basic facts. Thanks Tim, Tim,
Speaker 1: You're absolutely right. This is a pet peeve of mine.
Speaker 1: I talk about this to new journalists or those folks
Speaker 1: in journalism school where I remind people because I learned
Speaker 1: this from interacting with viewers during my time at Meet
Speaker 1: the Press. Is how often a viewer, particularly a first
Speaker 1: generation American, would come up to me and say that
Speaker 1: they watch Meet the Press to sort of understand how
Speaker 1: the American government works. And every time I would get
Speaker 1: a response like that, it would remind me that, hey,
Speaker 1: we're in the education business first. That's first and foremost
Speaker 1: what a journalist is. They're educating the public. We shouldn't
Speaker 1: forget that. And you know, I had a viewer one time,
Speaker 1: I think it was somebody on social media one time
Speaker 1: respond you know, somebody was lamenting the fact that people
Speaker 1: didn't know that there were nine members of the Supreme Court,
Speaker 1: or how all that worked? Somebody said how often do
Speaker 1: you put it in your stories? And I thought, you know,
Speaker 1: that person's right. We sometimes don't reiterate basic facts about
Speaker 1: government because we go through this well, people already know that,
Speaker 1: or the people that are paying attention to this story
Speaker 1: are already going to know those things. And you're like, well,
Speaker 1: what about the Joe Demaje. You know, there was a
Speaker 1: great saying by Joe Demaggio. He used to say he
Speaker 1: played hard every game because he thought that there might
Speaker 1: be somebody in the stands who was coming to see
Speaker 1: him for the very first time. And guess what, there's
Speaker 1: somebody reading your story. There's somebody listening to my podcast,
Speaker 1: there's somebody you know, reading your commentary.
Speaker 2: For the very first time.
Speaker 1: And if they don't understand it, they're not going to
Speaker 1: to read you again, right, or they may not be
Speaker 1: as they may not follow the topic you're trying to
Speaker 1: get them to follow because you didn't help them understand
Speaker 1: how it works. So I look, I believe in this,
Speaker 1: you know, I look at my college football writers. They
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time explaining how the college.
Speaker 2: Football playoff works.
Speaker 1: So college football fans all know how the college football
Speaker 1: playoff works. But it's not because they went out to
Speaker 1: look forward. It's because the new stories and the news
Speaker 1: commentators and ESPN in particular constantly wants to remind people
Speaker 1: how it works. Now they have an incentive, they're trying
Speaker 1: to make a bigger deal out of it. Well, we
Speaker 1: ought to take that same premise there. So you're asking
Speaker 1: why did the Democrats get Why should the Democrats get
Speaker 1: blames to their shutdown? Well, it was technically Democrats that
Speaker 1: withheld just enough votes where the Continuing Resolution to keep
Speaker 1: the government open couldn't pass the Senate. Now, in the House,
Speaker 1: Mike Johnson got a party line vote and he passed
Speaker 1: the continuing Resolution and in the House, so what they
Speaker 1: did is he passed that bill and then they want
Speaker 1: to This is a case where the House wanted to
Speaker 1: jam the Senate and they didn't want to. And his
Speaker 1: thesis was, I'm not even going to come. I'm not
Speaker 1: going to convene the House until the Senate deals with
Speaker 1: the bill that we gave them. And we gave them
Speaker 1: a bill to keep the government open. It's up to
Speaker 1: them to get that bill passed. So this is the
Speaker 1: whole the House passed its version. So no, you're right,
Speaker 1: the House didn't didn't convene while the government was shut down.
Speaker 1: But what Johnson's thesis was they didn't need to because
Speaker 1: there was no legislation. Now, why else did he keep
Speaker 1: him out, Well, because he didn't want his members, you know,
Speaker 1: board showing up on cable TV saying things that would
Speaker 1: cause them political pain.
Speaker 2: Et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: But it was also a tactic, and this is something
Speaker 1: that happens. You know, there's there's always a joke in
Speaker 1: Congress that you know that the real divide in Congress
Speaker 1: is not Democrats versus Republicans, it's the House versus the Senate.
Speaker 1: And so you know, the House was essentially jamming the
Speaker 1: Senate and jamming John Thune. So it was up to
Speaker 1: John Thune, who had fifty three Republican senators, actually fifty two,
Speaker 1: because Rand Paul indicated he was going to vote against
Speaker 1: this deal, he had to go find eight Democrats. So
Speaker 1: in that sense, this is why in theory, because it
Speaker 1: needed sixty votes when Democrats withheld their votes, unless the
Speaker 1: Republicans are willing to get rid of the filibuster, which
Speaker 1: was something Donald Trump talked about then the only way
Speaker 1: the government could get reopened is if eight Democrats joined
Speaker 1: fifty two Republicans to reopen the government. So I think
Speaker 1: what you're right about is every time that the story
Speaker 1: was reported that would not be explained at the top.
Speaker 1: And I think it's a bad habit professional journalists, particularly
Speaker 1: Washington journalists, have come. I always say that a lot
Speaker 1: of times Washington reports for Washington or producers produced segments
Speaker 1: for producers, they don't think about sort of are we
Speaker 1: educating somebody who's tuning in for the very first time?
Speaker 1: And you know, in that sense, I think that's something
Speaker 1: that we all need to do better on. In this way,
Speaker 1: I love the podcast format where I can feel like
Speaker 1: I'm not I don't have some sort of time constraint
Speaker 1: where I have to take a shortcut on something because
Speaker 1: the main thing I need to convey needs a certain
Speaker 1: amount of time to explain, and I don't want to
Speaker 1: take away from that by having to explain the basics
Speaker 1: and yet not explaining the basics all the time is
Speaker 1: what makes politics inaccessible to people. And I've always said
Speaker 1: my real goal, and I've had this goal ever since
Speaker 1: I entered journalism is, and political journalism is. I love politics,
Speaker 1: and my job is to explain it in such a
Speaker 1: way that it's more accessible to people. You know, there
Speaker 1: there was another person who used to go out of
Speaker 1: his way to talk about the Gang of five hundred
Speaker 1: and maybe politics inaccessible and would claim that politics was
Speaker 1: an exclusive club and only those in the know understood it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's people that want politics to be that way, so
Speaker 1: that way they are not subject to what the actual
Speaker 1: democracy wants, small d democracy wants, and so in that sense,
Speaker 1: I'm a populous when it comes to information, and I
Speaker 1: think we need to make politics more accessible, more understandable,
Speaker 1: so more people understand how much it's impacting their lives.
Speaker 1: I hope that helped you as to understand why in
Speaker 1: this case democrats had skin in the gament.
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Speaker 1: unless they win. All right, next question comes from Brian
Speaker 1: in New England. Right, So, I can't help but notice
Speaker 1: all of the liberal political commentators seem to think they
Speaker 1: have lost the shutdown fight. Likewise, all of the conservative
Speaker 1: political commentators believe they somehow won the shutdown fight, assuming
Speaker 1: no last minute silliness by Senator Ran Paul. Yet all
Speaker 1: of the more moderate political commentator seemed to paint a
Speaker 1: vast different picture as to who won and lost, and
Speaker 1: most seem to think Democrats got most out of the shutdown.
Speaker 1: So this brings up a good question, how do you
Speaker 1: win a shutdown fight? How do you know who won
Speaker 1: the shutdown fight? Can you even win a shutdown fight?
Speaker 1: Or is it really just a lose lose lose for
Speaker 1: everyone involved? Or at the end of the day, is
Speaker 1: who won or lost?
Speaker 2: A shutdown?
Speaker 1: All just vibes and fuzzy feelings anyway? To me, it
Speaker 1: kind of feels like the old whose line is at
Speaker 1: any way?
Speaker 2: TV? Show?
Speaker 1: Everything is made up and the points don't seem to matter. Well,
Speaker 1: look this is you know, if you really want to
Speaker 1: wind me up. The entire shutdown process is a manufactured
Speaker 1: political circus. The idea that the most important government on
Speaker 1: the face of the earth.
Speaker 2: Has a.
Speaker 1: Has a bug in it that allows for parts of
Speaker 1: the government to just simply shut down when there is
Speaker 1: a political dispute over funding levels is got to be
Speaker 1: one of the dumber things anybody does. The idea that
Speaker 1: you know, I just think that the legal interpretations and
Speaker 1: I went through this for those of you that wanted
Speaker 1: to go off, you know, I am, but let me
Speaker 1: just tell you, I am furious that there is not
Speaker 1: a single effing member of Congress in the center of
Speaker 1: the House that is rallying around the idea that we
Speaker 1: need to prevent shutdowns from ever happening again. It is
Speaker 1: absurd that we are hiring people to be air traffic
Speaker 1: controllers and part of the process is, hey, you know,
Speaker 1: every couple of years there's going to be a political
Speaker 1: fight and you're not going to get paid for about
Speaker 1: a month or two. Are you okay with that? What
Speaker 1: kind of circus are we running here? I mean, that's
Speaker 1: just you know, deciding to run to intentionally create a
Speaker 1: shit show government. It's stupid, it's unnecessary, and it shouldn't be.
Speaker 1: It's dumb, it's it's and it all. The only people
Speaker 1: that benefit from a shutdown are elected officials who are
Speaker 1: trying to make a name for themselves. You asked who
Speaker 1: wins in a shutdown? Individuals win, No party wins. Nobody
Speaker 1: likes the result of the shutdown at the end of
Speaker 1: the day, everybody collectively hates the process of it, right,
Speaker 1: But the winners are individuals. You know, Ted Cruz, you know,
Speaker 1: So take the twenty thirteen shutdown. Republicans quote unquote are
Speaker 1: seen as having lost that shutdown, right, because politically they did.
Speaker 1: If it wasn't for the shutdown, Republicans would have won
Speaker 1: a governor seat in Virginia that year, and instead Democrats
Speaker 1: won the governor seat. So you could look at just
Speaker 1: sort of the tactics and say up, Republicans lost and
Speaker 1: Ted Cruz was unpayable. Yet Ted Cruz built a political following.
Speaker 1: Ted Cruz was trying to run for president in twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen and build a national following. So it worked for
Speaker 1: Ted Cruz. And that's who the shutdowns are for. They're
Speaker 1: for partisan actors, pure and simple, to try to make
Speaker 1: a name for themselves. That's so the only people that
Speaker 1: have ever come outquote unquote ahead. Right, it becomes about
Speaker 1: who can raise the most money off of the silliness
Speaker 1: of the shutdown. And I'm sorry, I just think the
Speaker 1: idea that it's a practice that is somehow allowed and
Speaker 1: the only the only reason to have it is to
Speaker 1: figure out a way to bring more attention to a
Speaker 1: funding dispute. Guess what, perhaps we shouldn't put three hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty million people in the crosshairs of a of
Speaker 1: a political disagreement over funding levels. That seems like a
Speaker 1: waste of a superpower's time. It actually makes us more
Speaker 1: vulnerable as a nation on national security. It is certainly
Speaker 1: a huge sign of weakness. And again there's you know,
Speaker 1: so a responsible democracy and a responsible government wouldn't put
Speaker 1: put us in a situation where we can just easily
Speaker 1: have a couple of people decide that the government is
Speaker 1: just going to close its doors. And then, of course
Speaker 1: we've exempted so many aspects of the shutdown that if
Speaker 1: the initial idea of the shutdown was to you know,
Speaker 1: it was going to be so painful that everybody wouldn't
Speaker 1: want it to be be for more than a day
Speaker 1: or two. But when you take away you know, when
Speaker 1: you decide, well, social security isn't going to be a
Speaker 1: part of it, and we'll exempt military pay, and we'll
Speaker 1: exempt this, and we'll exempt that, then it becomes easier
Speaker 1: to do the political theater. So I have to say, I,
Speaker 1: as a as a voter who would like to have
Speaker 1: less dysfunction in our politics, am sorry that there's not
Speaker 1: a single elected member of Congress Democratic Republican currently advocating
Speaker 1: a no shutdowns bill. They've existed in the past. Where
Speaker 1: are they now where are they today? Instead, everybody wants
Speaker 1: to perform for the frickin' basis of each party because
Speaker 1: of how stupidly we've gerrymandered everything and our partisan primaries,
Speaker 1: all of those things, right, we have all of our
Speaker 1: incentive struck or for politicians to only pay attention to
Speaker 1: the base. And it's just so the people that hate
Speaker 1: this shutdown stuff the most are the ones that aren't
Speaker 1: partisan activists. And it doesn't seem like there's a single
Speaker 1: person in the in Congress that represents the constituency that
Speaker 1: just doesn't want the goddamn toilet clogged purposely, and instead
Speaker 1: this is what we have. So I don't know if
Speaker 1: I answer your question right, I don't think anybody won
Speaker 1: the shutdown fight. And if you're wondering to me, you know,
Speaker 1: it is one of those where the only time anybody
Speaker 1: gains from it is if they're trying to if it's
Speaker 1: somebody individually trying to build their own following for some
Speaker 1: sort of national political purpose, you know. And the best
Speaker 1: example of that Ted Cruise twenty thirteen. He shut down
Speaker 1: I was seen as a loser, but actually gave Ted
Speaker 1: Cruise a constituency, all right, next question comes from Kenny
Speaker 1: from Long Islanding Rights. My question for you about the
Speaker 1: deal that seems to have been struck. It seemed to
Speaker 1: me that the Democrats traded their leverage for a campaign
Speaker 1: at the Republicans will not have to take the tough vote,
Speaker 1: but will inevitably vote down the Obamacare subsidies. And that's
Speaker 1: about it. Snap resumes, payments resumed, no one gets fired.
Speaker 1: But all that is the standard course of events for
Speaker 1: the end of a shutdown. The only thing Senator Schumer
Speaker 1: seems to have extracted here is a tough vote. Am
Speaker 1: I reading this correctly? If so, why on earth would
Speaker 1: he have fought this hard and held out this long
Speaker 1: only to give up and walk away with nothing to
Speaker 1: show for it. Lastly, I agree and disagree with your
Speaker 1: assessment about President Trump entering this lame duck era. I
Speaker 1: agree that's the biggest takeaway for the shutdown resolution. To me, though,
Speaker 1: it's not because of the defiance. It's because they negotiated
Speaker 1: a solution without them in the Senate. At least, the
Speaker 1: President disengaged and made it easy for this to play out,
Speaker 1: but ultimately Senator thoonstruck the deal. I love the new
Speaker 1: format and I feel as though I'm learning so much
Speaker 1: more about the inside game when it comes to politics.
Speaker 1: Thank you for the scoop, all right, Kenny. I appreciate
Speaker 1: the construction constructive critique there on that front. It's interesting.
Speaker 1: I guess I could word it, you know, and again
Speaker 1: I would word it differently. I don't think there's a
Speaker 1: cave here. I think there is. I think Warnock said it.
Speaker 1: He said, if you're going to say that the Democratic
Speaker 1: Party seems to care about those on snap benefits more
Speaker 1: than the Republican Party cares about then I think he said,
Speaker 1: guilty is charged, right, that that's not a And I
Speaker 1: think if you're you know, again, a better leader and
Speaker 1: a better communicator would not have would not have signaled
Speaker 1: that this is over, would signal it.
Speaker 2: You know what.
Speaker 1: I think we've we've gotten more people aware of this
Speaker 1: healthcare issue. We're sorry that the president wants to irresponsibly
Speaker 1: punish people that have nothing and weaponize the FAA and
Speaker 1: all of this, and so we're not going to let
Speaker 1: him do that. So we're going to take a pause
Speaker 1: in this over the next two months. We're going to
Speaker 1: make sure people can travel for the holidays and come January,
Speaker 1: there's another vote to reopen the government and there's Obamacare subsidies. Okay,
Speaker 1: so I don't think they gave away any leverage. I
Speaker 1: think they still have leverage in January to essentially shut
Speaker 1: down government again if they want to, if these Obamacare
Speaker 1: subsidies don't get passed for a year. I think I
Speaker 1: think that there's going to be a majority of the
Speaker 1: US House that votes for these Obamacare subsidies. Not a
Speaker 1: majority of Republicans, but a majority of the House. I
Speaker 1: think you will see somewhere between thirty and forty Republicans
Speaker 1: who do this. I think you will see ten to
Speaker 1: fifteen Senate Republicans wanting to be for this. So I
Speaker 1: think it's going to happen. I think the results of
Speaker 1: the I mean, I think the biggest impact on the
Speaker 1: healthcare subsidies was the twenty five election results. The fact
Speaker 1: that it was a romp, the fact that cost the
Speaker 1: living issues and Democrats didn't even have the healthcare issue
Speaker 1: yet and it was working for them. We already know
Speaker 1: how well healthcare works as an opposition issue when you're
Speaker 1: messing with it. We just saw it in twenty eighteen.
Speaker 1: That benefited the Democrats and back in twenty ten when
Speaker 1: it benefited the Republicans. Anytime you mess with the status
Speaker 1: quo of healthcare, the party messing with the status quo
Speaker 1: gets punished, and in this case that's going to be
Speaker 1: now the Republicans. And so I guess I don't accept
Speaker 1: the premise that they got rid of.
Speaker 2: Any of their leverage.
Speaker 1: And I think this is why I could argue, this
Speaker 1: is why Schumer should go, because he's a terrible communicator
Speaker 1: and he couldn't communicate.
Speaker 2: That they won.
Speaker 1: They won if you want him, you know, and he's
Speaker 1: trying now. But he just doesn't have credibility with anybody anymore.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's like, like I said, I keep comparing Schumer to
Speaker 1: Pete Carroll and Bill Belichick. They used to have credibility
Speaker 1: with the players they coached. Now they don't anymore.
Speaker 2: That happens.
Speaker 1: It happens in every walk of life. It happens to
Speaker 1: political leaders all the time. Time there's a moment when they
Speaker 1: have uber leverage over the entire party, and there's moments
Speaker 1: where nobody will listen to them.
Speaker 2: George W.
Speaker 1: Bush had so much influence over his party for a
Speaker 1: period of time until he had no influence over his
Speaker 1: party for a period of time. Right, it is political
Speaker 1: capital is elusive. When you have it, you better spend
Speaker 1: it because if you try to save it, it'll disappear.
Speaker 1: So I guess I'm not I think they could have
Speaker 1: communicated this in such a way where they could have
Speaker 1: been seen as the adult in the room and not
Speaker 1: giving up their fight on healthcare, because technically they've given
Speaker 1: themselves opportunities before the State of the Union in February
Speaker 1: to make this a showdown vote one more time. All right,
Speaker 1: last question comes from David Crowder, and then we'll get
Speaker 1: to the interview with Joe Willett. I like your work
Speaker 1: in thoughtfulness. Thank you saw your podcast at sam First
Speaker 1: Info and Jay Jones came out in mid October. Virginia
Speaker 1: begins early voting mid September. You get my point. Second,
Speaker 1: the shutdown argument pre pandemic. Some twelve millions participated in
Speaker 1: the bill. Their subsidies remain with premium increases. It's not
Speaker 1: a big deal. The big deal is the twelve million
Speaker 1: who enrolled post pandemic who did not qualify financially for
Speaker 1: pre pandemic for subsidies they lose the subsidies. Is that
Speaker 1: disconnect worth shutting down the government.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Seems like some form of a subsidy could be agreed upon. Finally,
Speaker 1: the tax breaks that were scheduled to expire were extended.
Speaker 1: The differences the subsidies weren't scheduled to expire. It's all crap, David.
Speaker 1: You've summarized the poor legislative process quite well, right. You
Speaker 1: know the fact that we have such a dysfunctional way
Speaker 1: that we make laws now, and we have such distrust
Speaker 1: of the two parties that they there's always a weird
Speaker 1: poison pills in different ways.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The subsidies, they can't you know. Did Democrats want those
Speaker 1: subsidies in perpetuity?
Speaker 2: They did?
Speaker 1: Could they not get enough votes to get them without
Speaker 1: putting some sort of time stamp on it. They couldn't
Speaker 1: dinal with the tax cut, right, they couldn't. Trump couldn't
Speaker 1: get it permanent, so instead he had an expiration date
Speaker 1: on it, hoping that the expiration would serve as a
Speaker 1: fear of a tax hike and then that somehow would
Speaker 1: get people to renew them. The Bush tax cuts work
Speaker 1: this way, right, these ten year increments. We do this
Speaker 1: sort of funny business accounting when it comes to the
Speaker 1: impact on the deficit with these funny numbers with the
Speaker 1: Congressional Budget Office and these estimates that are all that
Speaker 1: are all just sort of make assumptions that nobody can
Speaker 1: assume when it comes to the actual state of the economy.
Speaker 1: But we make these deficit projections in such a way
Speaker 1: that it encourages these sort of false expiration dates. Right,
Speaker 1: some will have them, some will don't. They're usually time
Speaker 1: to make it politically difficult to somehow not extend the deadline,
Speaker 1: whether it's on a on a tax rate, or whether
Speaker 1: it's on a subsidy or whatever it is. So you know,
Speaker 1: this goes to the this is what you get when
Speaker 1: you when you don't have a functioning committee process in Congress.
Speaker 1: And not to get really dorky here, but essentially when
Speaker 1: we totally polarized the US Houses, which which really began
Speaker 1: sort of late eighties, early nineties, right, and you know,
Speaker 1: there's those on the right blame Jim Right and the Democrats,
Speaker 1: those on the left blame Newt Gingridge and the Republicans.
Speaker 1: I think I think sort of there was there was
Speaker 1: certainly power plays that Jim Right made that new Gingridge
Speaker 1: then emulated and took to took to an took even
Speaker 1: further that ultimately destroyed the committee process and the destruction
Speaker 1: of the congressional committee process both in the House and
Speaker 1: the Senate. Is why we get such poorly written legislation
Speaker 1: which used, so I think eloquently pointed out with the
Speaker 1: way you worded your question, the fact that the question
Speaker 1: was a bit confusing. I don't put on you, I
Speaker 1: put on Congress because this is how they legislate now,
Speaker 1: with these sort of weird expiration dates. It's all designed
Speaker 1: to create sort of political poison, almost almost like these
Speaker 1: sort of delayed bombs that suddenly explode and you have
Speaker 1: no choice but to continue a policy that maybe you
Speaker 1: were never in favor of. You know, Obama didn't want to.
Speaker 1: Obama ran on getting rid of the Bush tax cuts.
Speaker 1: Turns out he couldn't get rid of them because of
Speaker 1: what kind of impact it would have had on a
Speaker 1: number of people seeing their tax bills go up, and
Speaker 1: he didn't want to politically put himself in that situation.
Speaker 1: He had made a pledge not to raise taxes on
Speaker 1: anybody over I think it was four hundred thousand dollars.
Speaker 1: So the new line that they drew on that. So ultimately,
Speaker 1: you know, someday we're going to have a Speaker of
Speaker 1: the House and a Senate Majority leader that actually wants
Speaker 1: to make the legislative branch great again. But until that
Speaker 1: time comes, we're going to continue to have this poor,
Speaker 1: horribly dysfunctional legislative process that we've now seen that for
Speaker 1: many of you feels like the normal way Congress works,
Speaker 1: because trust me, this was not the intent. How Congress
Speaker 1: has worked the last thirty years is not the way
Speaker 1: that Congress was intended to work in the previous two
Speaker 1: hundred and twenty years. All right, So with that, there's
Speaker 1: all the shutdown, Q and a's that I got. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a pause when we come back, meet
Speaker 1: a candidate for Kentucky Senate, basically somebody who I think
Speaker 1: was a political independent who chose to pick a side.
Speaker 1: Here's motivation, how he did it. I'm always intrigued by
Speaker 1: first time candidates because I think they come they literally
Speaker 1: come at things with a fresh set of eyes, and
Speaker 1: I think it's always important to hear what a fresh
Speaker 1: set of eyes has to say about the current political system.
Speaker 2: So with that, we'll take a break.
Speaker 1: See on the other side. This episode of the Chuck
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Speaker 2: Well, joining me now is a.
Speaker 1: I guess you could argue a new politician to the scene.
Speaker 1: His name's Joel Willett. He's running for the US Senate
Speaker 1: in Kentucky.
Speaker 2: He got on my radar.
Speaker 1: He's kind of out of nowhere. Where Telsea Gabbert took
Speaker 1: away a whole bunch of people's national security clearances, even
Speaker 1: folks who were had served in the intelligence community were
Speaker 1: in the private sector but still had some, you know,
Speaker 1: some clearances because that is a normal thing we've done
Speaker 1: in our government for decades.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: And there appeared to be some sort of connection. The
Speaker 1: minute mister Willett agreed to think about running for office,
Speaker 1: Suddenly it seemed as if the government decided to give
Speaker 1: him another headline in some ways. I think they may
Speaker 1: have even given him an assistance with getting more attention
Speaker 1: in some ways for his candidacy. But he's all so,
Speaker 1: you know, we want to highlight interesting first time candidates
Speaker 1: who are not coming from sort of a typical place,
Speaker 1: hard left, hard right, things like that, and Joe Willett
Speaker 1: got on my radar and he agreed to sit down.
Speaker 1: Mister Willett, nice to meet you. Yeah, thank you, Chuck.
Speaker 1: So let's start with how you got into service. Look,
Speaker 1: we're taping just before Veterans Day. You're a veteran. I'm
Speaker 1: a huge advocate. That feels as if that the people
Speaker 1: best equipped to what I call to I'm looking for
Speaker 1: more pastors for patriotism in this country that I think
Speaker 1: the military community and the intelligence community, where you have
Speaker 1: to be Team America before your Team Red or Team
Speaker 1: Blue is probably as good of a place to find
Speaker 1: these pastors for patriotism as you can find. But tell
Speaker 1: me how you got what got you into service?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I love that term. Atn't heard it before, so
Speaker 2: I'm probably going to steal. Well, I'm using it over
Speaker 2: and over.
Speaker 1: I'm obviously a little proud of it, so I'm going
Speaker 1: to use it, probably too much.
Speaker 2: But you know, well, my grandmother took me to church
Speaker 2: every weekend growing up and was heavily involved with my
Speaker 2: church for a long time, so it resonates. So yeah,
Speaker 2: thank you for the opportunity to tell my story. I
Speaker 2: am Joel Willett running for the US and in Kentucky.
Speaker 2: Your listeners can catch all the parts of the story
Speaker 2: at joelfer Kentucky dot com if I missed something here.
Speaker 2: But I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and my path
Speaker 2: to service was perhaps common in some ways and uncommon
Speaker 2: in others. My dad was a Union iron worker. He
Speaker 2: was a Golden Gloves boxer. My mom worked in hospitals
Speaker 2: taking care of people. But we had some Kentucky struggles
Speaker 2: growing up. The lights didn't always come on when I
Speaker 2: got home from school. I learned, you know, early in
Speaker 2: my adolescence that both of my parents were struggling with
Speaker 2: addictions to opioids, and I would eventually lose my father
Speaker 2: to a fenteral overdose in twenty nineteen. It wasn't just
Speaker 2: my family, it was you know, tens of thousands of
Speaker 2: Kentucky families over the past couple of decades. But I
Speaker 2: was one of the lucky ones because I had incredible
Speaker 2: grandparents on both sides of my family. I had my
Speaker 2: grandmother's church, but I also had the institutions of this
Speaker 2: country public education, our military, our civil service, some of
Speaker 2: these things that I believed to be some of the
Speaker 2: greatest tools for achievement and economic mobility in the world.
Speaker 2: And when the attacks of nine to eleven happened, I
Speaker 2: was a senior in high school and a few months
Speaker 2: after that, after months of begging my mom to sign
Speaker 2: the paperwork, she relented and did and I joined the
Speaker 2: Army National Guard when I was seventeen years old, and
Speaker 2: I served in the Military Police Corps. I was able
Speaker 2: to graduate from the University of Louisville and from the
Speaker 2: University of Kentucky, and that launched a career. Once I
Speaker 2: left the Army in the intelligence community, I spent some
Speaker 2: time with the FBI working on canterterrorism and then was
Speaker 2: recruited into the Central Intelligence Agency into the Director to Operations,
Speaker 2: where I represented this country here at home and abroad
Speaker 2: in the Balkans, Baltic, Southeast Asia, Western European capitals. I
Speaker 2: speak Russian. Do without what you will, and you know,
Speaker 2: finished my last year in government in the White House
Speaker 2: Situation Room as a nonpartisan civil servant, there to provide
Speaker 2: intelligence and crisis management support to the president who was
Speaker 2: then President Obama and Vice President Biden. There to serve
Speaker 2: the presidency, not the president, and the true spirit of
Speaker 2: our civil service. I left government twenty fifteen in part
Speaker 2: to be able to take care of a lot of
Speaker 2: my family that remained in Kentucky. Went into the private
Speaker 2: sector have since been running businesses that have put hundreds
Speaker 2: of people to work every day. So, Chuck, I truly
Speaker 2: got to live my American dream and have been living
Speaker 2: that life as a private citizen for for some time now,
Speaker 2: and it's been increasingly hard to set on the sidelines
Speaker 2: and watch working families across this country, working families like
Speaker 2: the one that I grew up in, getting steamrolled by
Speaker 2: a political and economic system that I think continues to
Speaker 2: treat them as acceptable losses. So, as you said, I
Speaker 2: started exploring a run for the Senate. This administration found
Speaker 2: out about it, and as it is wont to do.
Speaker 2: Began trying to act revenge on people, no matter how
Speaker 2: long they'd or no matter what they had served, but
Speaker 2: because they had said mean things about Donald Trump, and
Speaker 2: we're thinking about standing up against some of what we're
Speaker 2: saying today, and they revoked a security clearance, and you know,
Speaker 2: came after me the way they've come after so many others.
Speaker 2: What made your democrat? Why'd you pick a party? Yeah?
Speaker 1: When did you pick a party? Do you remember when
Speaker 1: you've said, you know what I think? I am a
Speaker 1: Democrat and this is why I'm doing it. What give
Speaker 1: me your reasoning for?
Speaker 2: Yeah? It was a it was a long, maybe a
Speaker 2: short evolution out of being a conservative, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: I would freely admit to holding some conservative views as
Speaker 2: a as an interested teenager or even in high school.
Speaker 2: But my journey away from that came, perhaps shockingly to
Speaker 2: some people, through military service. The military exposed me to
Speaker 2: people from all walks of life, nationalities, sexual orientations, all
Speaker 2: of that, and I began seeing, you know, what I
Speaker 2: have since come to believe is, you know, this source
Speaker 2: of strength in our military and in our country, which
Speaker 2: is the diversity that we have. But it was also
Speaker 2: seeing the lies of the Iraq War. I, you know,
Speaker 2: I could see something very different than what the George W.
Speaker 2: Bush administration was saying publicly, you know, about this status
Speaker 2: or the state of our military, our readiness to fight
Speaker 2: such a war. And then you know, we we we
Speaker 2: later come to learn that much of the rationale for
Speaker 2: going to war in Iraq was a house of cards,
Speaker 2: and I continue to see that, you know, some twenty
Speaker 2: years later, as one of the most disastrous foreign policy
Speaker 2: decisions we've made, certainly in my lifetime. So that began,
Speaker 2: you know, a period of reassessment for me away from
Speaker 2: you know, what was the Republican Party or conservative viewpoints.
Speaker 2: And I would say that the journey into being you know,
Speaker 2: a Democrat is something that happened much later. I you know,
Speaker 2: I'm sure somebody will fact check me on this, but
Speaker 2: if my memory serves me, the first time I registered
Speaker 2: as a Democrat to vote was in twenty sixteen, and
Speaker 2: it was in response to what I saw as the
Speaker 2: clear and present danger of Donald Trump. And I have
Speaker 2: been proudly a Democrat since that time because that is
Speaker 2: the party that I see standing up for a strong America,
Speaker 2: for an America that works for everybody and not just
Speaker 2: the wealthiest.
Speaker 1: You know, hearing your story, talking about your personal story,
Speaker 1: your parents struggles with opoioid's, the tragedy of your father,
Speaker 1: the strength of your grandparents, I'm sure I'm not the
Speaker 1: only person who they start to think. I wonder what
Speaker 1: he thought of Hillbill the book Hillbilly Elegy by a
Speaker 1: gentleman by the name of jd Vance. Some people may
Speaker 1: recognize him as the current Vice President, and some people
Speaker 1: may wonder if the same person wrote that book. And
Speaker 1: I'll set that aside. I'm curious what you made of
Speaker 1: that book and how much of what jd Vance shared
Speaker 1: in that book resonated with you.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I first became aware of that book in twenty
Speaker 2: nineteen when I lost my father, and then, you know,
Speaker 2: an attempt to process my own emotions around that, because Chuck,
Speaker 2: it was, you know, one of the most debilitating things
Speaker 2: that had ever happened to me, because no matter how
Speaker 2: long I had expected that phone call, nothing really prepares
Speaker 2: you for it. And I would say, my life for
Speaker 2: six years has been a project and trying to understand
Speaker 2: how this country could you know, create my life, which
Speaker 2: I see as a truly uniquely American life, coming from
Speaker 2: Valley Station, Kentucky to the halls of the West Wing
Speaker 2: in twelve years to leadership and business. If my life
Speaker 2: is uniquely American, so too was my father's death. Because
Speaker 2: people do not die from fentonyl overdoses in a statistically
Speaker 2: significant way in other parts of the world, yet it's
Speaker 2: the leading cause of death, I believe, in the United
Speaker 2: States for people ages eighteen to forty four. So I
Speaker 2: became aware of hillbili elogy during that time. And I
Speaker 2: would say there are a lot of similarities between my
Speaker 2: story in JD. Vance's. My heart aches for you know,
Speaker 2: the life that he described, you know, living growing up,
Speaker 2: and so much of it resonates with me. And I
Speaker 2: understand that, you know, he similarly felt a need to
Speaker 2: serve his country. And you know, I will have to
Speaker 2: transition now to say that there are major differences between
Speaker 2: my story and JD. Vance's, and that being that I
Speaker 2: didn't turn into a giant asshole at the end of it.
Speaker 1: Boy, I didn't see that landing. I didn't see the
Speaker 1: plate landing that abruptly. That was quite we may have crashed.
Speaker 2: It a little bit.
Speaker 1: I was just going to say I had one of
Speaker 1: those landings yesterday actually, while flying back from Miami, where
Speaker 1: it was the first I think a runway that he
Speaker 1: wasn't used to using it.
Speaker 2: It was like boa, like we all hit the ground
Speaker 2: and road. Whoa. That was an early morning flight, so
Speaker 2: it woke me up. No.
Speaker 1: I mean, look, it is very hard to square jd Vance,
Speaker 1: the author jd Vance, the conservative pundit of twenty sixteen,
Speaker 1: right right with the person that ended up in the
Speaker 1: United States Senate, you know, sort of making a what
Speaker 1: appears to be a political deal, right, And look, that's yeah.
Speaker 1: I've always slightly hesitant on motive, in assuming motive, because
Speaker 1: none of us can crawl inside anybody's head right on motive.
Speaker 1: But he just looks from the outside. O. This stuff
Speaker 1: doesn't doesn't compute. But what does compute, frankly, is the
Speaker 1: fact that these so many of these stories exist and
Speaker 1: why politicians have had a hard time figuring out how
Speaker 1: to use government to fix this.
Speaker 2: So let's talk about that.
Speaker 1: Like I would assume for you, if you get elected
Speaker 1: that a priority is going to be Okay, how do
Speaker 1: we deal with it? I mean, take the issue of fentyl.
Speaker 1: You got a president who's manufacturing, is using the fentyl crisis,
Speaker 1: which is real, and ascribing it to the Venezuelans, which
Speaker 1: have nothing to do with this, right, and getting us
Speaker 1: potentially to screw up yet another Latin American country with
Speaker 1: interventions that will only cost us cause this country problems
Speaker 1: for decades to come, and our distrust in that region
Speaker 1: of the country. And it's like, how many times do
Speaker 1: we have to screw up our relationships with Latin America
Speaker 1: with this? But what is you know, you've it sounds like,
Speaker 1: for the last six years in particular, you've really wanted
Speaker 1: to understand both the struggles people have with ventanyl, how
Speaker 1: it gets into this country. What should we be doing
Speaker 1: differently to stop ventanyl from getting into this country? And
Speaker 1: is it possible? You know, are we trying to like
Speaker 1: stop the weather right?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Is this impossible? And instead we've got to go about
Speaker 1: this another way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we certainly have to go about it
Speaker 2: in a different way than we've attacked this problem or
Speaker 2: any other of the drug crises that we've had in
Speaker 2: this country over the years. But you know, let me
Speaker 2: start with kind of the supply side of this, where
Speaker 2: we you know, that's where Donald Trump's conversation around it
Speaker 2: seems to end. And unfortunately for many Americans, he's not
Speaker 2: the only president that has stopped the conversation. There. We
Speaker 2: talk about, you know, a drug war, and usually what
Speaker 2: we mean there is attacking the supply and where the
Speaker 2: stuff is coming from. Yes, we have to secure our borders.
Speaker 2: Yes we have to go after and chase to the
Speaker 2: ends of the earth the supply of this stuff, whether
Speaker 2: we find it in a factory in Beijing or whether
Speaker 2: we find it being pushed from boardrooms in some of
Speaker 2: the largest companies and richest families in this country. And
Speaker 2: you know, we've had many, many Kentuckians lose a father
Speaker 2: or a brother because of unregulated capitalism and doctors who
Speaker 2: had very perverse incentives to continue pushing highly addictive opioids
Speaker 2: and poison into our community. So I think we've we've
Speaker 2: got to pursue the supply of this in many different directions.
Speaker 2: We've made some progress on that, but it's the demand
Speaker 2: side of it. Why are people turning to these drugs?
Speaker 2: Why do people want to use them? And I think
Speaker 2: it is that that we need to that there is
Speaker 2: so much more that this country could do. When I
Speaker 2: talk to, you know, friends in Europe about, you know,
Speaker 2: what's going on with drugs and addiction here, and they're like,
Speaker 2: wait a minute. Drug addicts, you know, they often not
Speaker 2: because they're terrible people, but because they're literally out of
Speaker 2: their minds while using do some destructive things, whether they
Speaker 2: steal or are a public nuisance or wrecked cars and
Speaker 2: all these things. These are stories that are just so
Speaker 2: vividly remembered in my life and in my family's life,
Speaker 2: and European friends are like, wait, you send those people
Speaker 2: to jail. Why don't you send them to the hospital,
Speaker 2: because it sounds like that's probably what they need. In Kentucky,
Speaker 2: we've had three years of declining overdose deaths from syntheticopioids.
Speaker 2: We've got down to like fourteen hundred and ten this
Speaker 2: past year. A lot of that progress was made because
Speaker 2: we invested heavily in this state and medicaid expansion, and
Speaker 2: it was access to medicaid that paid for treatment, that
Speaker 2: helped people, paid for some NARCAN community awareness, and also
Speaker 2: paid for treatment for addicts. And I do think that
Speaker 2: is just something we have to invest more in because
Speaker 2: we want people to have good lives and good opportunity
Speaker 2: in this country. And you know, young men especially account
Speaker 2: for I think eighty percent of what we call deaths
Speaker 2: of despair, which are deaths from overdoses of some form
Speaker 2: or another or from suicide. And I think this can
Speaker 2: all be tied back to people who see their prospects demming,
Speaker 2: who see that no matter how hard they work, they're
Speaker 2: not going to be able to get ahead. And that's
Speaker 2: something that has to change. And I think that once
Speaker 2: we have a sane economic policy in this country for
Speaker 2: the working class upon whose backs all of this prospects
Speaker 2: already was built, only then we be able to truly
Speaker 2: address these problems with addiction.
Speaker 1: So when you think about the things that could have
Speaker 1: helped your father, you know, what's what's an intervention that
Speaker 1: we're doing now? I mean, you know, I lost my
Speaker 1: father at sixteen. I'm sorry alcoholism and hepatitis C in
Speaker 1: the late eighties when we didn't have a pill to
Speaker 1: take to sol hepatitis CE.
Speaker 2: You just died.
Speaker 1: So you know, I've got it's always one of for me,
Speaker 1: the what if is, oh, my goodness, if you just
Speaker 1: lived ten years longer than there'd have been a cure
Speaker 1: and he would have survived. When you think about the
Speaker 1: things that we're doing now, if they had been available
Speaker 1: even ten years ago, do you think your father.
Speaker 2: Would still be alive? Well, I know that as a
Speaker 2: civil servant, you know, living on an okay salary, but
Speaker 2: in a very expensive city in Washington, d C. It
Speaker 2: was very tough to get access to resources. And so
Speaker 2: I always say, you know, we confronted my father and
Speaker 2: checked him into you know, dollar Store Rehab and Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
Speaker 2: You know it was there were professionals there were doing
Speaker 2: the best they can, but it wasn't the most well
Speaker 2: resourced facility, and a lot of desperate people showed up there.
Speaker 2: But even that bought us some valuable years with my dad.
Speaker 2: He was able to see his granddaughter, you know, grow up.
Speaker 2: In his best moments, you know, in my in my
Speaker 2: recollection were always when he was a heavily involved father.
Speaker 2: And it was as my you know, my life and
Speaker 2: his started going in very different directions when I was
Speaker 2: a teenager. And this is because you know, there was
Speaker 2: a free fall that happens in this country. You know,
Speaker 2: you you grow up, you have some roof over your
Speaker 2: head or some access to basics, you get good public education.
Speaker 2: You've got some opportunities if you make just even marginally
Speaker 2: okay choices in this country. And my dad's path, you know,
Speaker 2: wound through a union and I got him jobs that
Speaker 2: were relatively you know, well paying when he could work.
Speaker 2: But you know, obviously there were mornings in the union
Speaker 2: hall where he didn't have work and the earlier mid nineties,
Speaker 2: but it was it was you know, surgeries and things
Speaker 2: like that that started to get these pain pills into
Speaker 2: his system. And then as his economic prospects dimmed, those
Speaker 2: that became a way to medicate away some of what
Speaker 2: I'm sure was existential pain for him. I was going
Speaker 2: to provide for his family. I was going to provide
Speaker 2: for his kids, for son and his daughter, my sister.
Speaker 2: So to answer your question specifically, yeah, we are doing
Speaker 2: a lot more today. There's a lot more awareness about
Speaker 2: it than there was before. This is an uncomfortable thing
Speaker 2: to talk about, is I'm sure it has been for you,
Speaker 2: you know, opening up and and it takes Look, you're
Speaker 2: never going to get over it.
Speaker 1: I you know, I want My wife and I both
Speaker 1: lost parents at different times of our life, and we
Speaker 1: always say, you know, the thing, the thing that you
Speaker 1: learn when you lose somebody like that. No matter when
Speaker 1: you lose it, it doesn't matter. It's always painful in it.
Speaker 1: You never get over it. You just sort of you
Speaker 1: live with it, right, Right, That's what we did. You
Speaker 1: just learn to live with it, and then you wonder,
Speaker 1: what can how do you learn from it?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: How do you how do you try to try to
Speaker 1: try to move on? You know, you brought up Medicaid.
Speaker 1: I mean you feel your I take it your concern
Speaker 1: that these Medicaid cuts are just going to make it
Speaker 1: that much harder. You know, do you feel like Kentucky
Speaker 1: needs more facilities that do rehab or they have enough facilities,
Speaker 1: they need more resources to staff those facilities.
Speaker 2: I think it's both, and I'll just zoom out to
Speaker 2: healthcare large. We need more doctors, we need more health
Speaker 2: care facilities. Uh. This administration passed an unconscionable four trillion
Speaker 2: dollar tax cut to put money back in the pockets
Speaker 2: of the already ultra wealthy, like the ten billionaires that
Speaker 2: serve in Donald Trump's cabinet. I'm fond of saying those
Speaker 2: billionaires are not like the average Kentucky voter. They do
Speaker 2: not like the average Kentucky voter. And they paid for
Speaker 2: all of this by taking money out of healthcare programs
Speaker 2: that as as our governor has been front and center
Speaker 2: in the press sounding the alarm about this. These cuts
Speaker 2: put thirty five rule hospitals pills in this state under
Speaker 2: threat of closure for people, you know, to lose access
Speaker 2: to that healthcare. Even people who maintain health insurance through
Speaker 2: their employers are going to have to drive farther, wait longer.
Speaker 2: These communities are going to lose you know, one of
Speaker 2: the largest employers in their communities. So yeah, we have
Speaker 2: a shortage of health care access in the state of
Speaker 2: Kentucky and in many parts around the country. And I
Speaker 2: think Republicans in this administration have shown just play in
Speaker 2: simply in recent months that they do not care. So
Speaker 2: I do think that we need to increase the supply
Speaker 2: of health care. We need to invest in more of
Speaker 2: what people actually need, and in Kentucky that does mean
Speaker 2: you know, more access to addiction treatment and overdose prevention.
Speaker 2: But again, I think the root causes of all this
Speaker 2: happened way earlier in life, and I would again tie
Speaker 2: it to increasing inequality and dimming prospects for working.
Speaker 1: Families having good life insurance is incredibly important. I know
Speaker 1: from personal experience. I was sixteen when my father passed away.
Speaker 1: We didn't have any money. He didn't leave us in
Speaker 1: the best shape. My mother single mother, now widow, myself
Speaker 1: sixteen trying to figure out how am I going to
Speaker 1: pay for college and lo and behold, my dad had
Speaker 1: one life insurance policy that we found wasn't a lot,
Speaker 1: but it was important at the time, and it's why
Speaker 1: I was able to go to college. Little did he
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Speaker 2: So let's talk.
Speaker 1: You know, it's interesting, I know that the next and
Speaker 1: perhaps you know, the fear of AI displacement for sort
Speaker 1: of middle class white collar workers is now you know,
Speaker 1: there's like a whole new group of folks that are
Speaker 1: learning what blue collar workers were worrying about during audit
Speaker 1: the rise of the initial rise of automation and robotics
Speaker 1: right plus the global the global trade system in the
Speaker 1: nineties and in the early odds, and that created this displacement.
Speaker 1: Now we've got AI displacement's going to hit another chunk
Speaker 1: of workers. This attempt to bring manufacturing back. Frankly, doesn't
Speaker 1: involve many individuals, right, It is more of a robotics
Speaker 1: and automated situation. So, you know, how do we You know,
Speaker 1: we can't go backwards. We're not going to force companies
Speaker 1: to use humans if it's cheaper to do an automated thing, Right,
Speaker 1: That's just not how capitalism works. But what's what should
Speaker 1: we you know, what what is what are the jobs
Speaker 1: in the next twenty years that we ought to be
Speaker 1: trying to get our communities prepared for, get our public
Speaker 1: education system geared towards you know, because I think about
Speaker 1: think about the last thirty years, and we thought all
Speaker 1: of our kids needed to learn to code, right, And
Speaker 1: it turns out whatever coding you've learned, it doesn't matter anymore.
Speaker 2: AI is going to do it.
Speaker 1: And so I can tell you this as a parent.
Speaker 1: You're petrified my kids. You know, my kid's going to
Speaker 1: have a future and what does that look like? It
Speaker 1: sounds like you have younger kids, both of mine are
Speaker 1: in college. What do you think about is the jobs
Speaker 1: of the future and how should government be thinking about it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, for the record, my son is sixteen and this
Speaker 2: is obviously a very uh.
Speaker 1: Yes, you're right. At the moment conversation. Yes, I have
Speaker 1: a freshman. I have a senior in college and a
Speaker 1: freshman in college.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, yeah, good stuff. So look, we've always had
Speaker 2: I mean, America is the innovation engine of the world.
Speaker 2: We have always innovated and with every wave of you know,
Speaker 2: innovation from you know, the industrial age too, you know,
Speaker 2: the assembly line, to even modern management theory and efficiency
Speaker 2: in factories and in business, there's there's always been displacement
Speaker 2: and we've always found, uh, you know, ways to innovate
Speaker 2: even around that, and people have always found, you know,
Speaker 2: new ways to to to to labor and to work.
Speaker 2: And I think there is some really, there are some
Speaker 2: reasons to believe. And I'm someone who has spent a
Speaker 2: lot of time, you know, running a technology company. Over
Speaker 2: the past couple of years, I've had the chance to uh,
Speaker 2: you know, I when I lost my security clearance, some
Speaker 2: of the you know, the most strident and well known
Speaker 2: right wing trolls on Twitter told me that I should
Speaker 2: learn to code. I'm like, yeah, thanks, I did that
Speaker 2: six years ago. You know already did that. So I
Speaker 2: say that only to say that I've you know, spent
Speaker 2: a lot of time uh playing around experimenting with and
Speaker 2: understanding AI tools and you know their implications in the workplace.
Speaker 2: I I am less bullish about the immediate, you know,
Speaker 2: wide scale impacts of this because there are a lot
Speaker 2: of implementation issues. There are a lot of data quality issues,
Speaker 2: hallucination issues, and all these sorts of things that I
Speaker 2: think even companies who have made a decision to lay
Speaker 2: off and displaced workers thinking they're going to be replaced
Speaker 2: with AI, are going to see and relatively short order
Speaker 2: that that it is not the panacea that they might
Speaker 2: think it is. Even still, I do accept the premise
Speaker 2: that we are going to have some massive changes in
Speaker 2: the economy, uh and in the jobs that are available
Speaker 2: to people. And I think that there are there are
Speaker 2: two things we need to wrestle with. Is one like, Okay,
Speaker 2: if a business finds a more efficient way to do something, well, great,
Speaker 2: they're going to have more profits. But now we're going
Speaker 2: to have more people on snap benefits. Now we're going
Speaker 2: to have more people, you know, needing Medicaid because they
Speaker 2: don't have healthcare. Because you know, all this activity in
Speaker 2: the economy has to come from somewhere. It has to come,
Speaker 2: you know, from from consumers. Buying things. And what I'm
Speaker 2: increasingly worried about is just that that the broad consumer
Speaker 2: base in this economy is just going to be completely
Speaker 2: left behind because the wealthy have enough at the top
Speaker 2: to continue pumping money into these businesses and these experiments
Speaker 2: and buying really expensive things.
Speaker 1: Now we're seeing it right now, where the high end
Speaker 1: consumer market is doing just fine. Yeah, but middle and
Speaker 1: long people are pulling back. People are saving money. And
Speaker 1: it's like this income and equality line is gap is
Speaker 1: just getting bigger and bigger.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And so tax policy is I think the number
Speaker 2: one thing that can address this. You don't have a
Speaker 2: situation where, you know, the America's first billionaire he died
Speaker 2: a billionaire, John Rockefeller, in nineteen thirty seven. Bill Gates
Speaker 2: fifty years later became the fifteenth billionaire, and thirty eight
Speaker 2: years since then, we now have seven hundred and fifty, right,
Speaker 2: and you know, all of the gains in the economy
Speaker 2: since the early nineties or like fifty two percent of
Speaker 2: them have been captured by the top one percent. So
Speaker 2: there has to be a reckoning with this growing inequality.
Speaker 2: It's in moral but to anywhere in the world in
Speaker 2: history where you see fascism grow. It does so in
Speaker 2: the fertile fields of wealth inequality, and people get desperate.
Speaker 2: They turn to strong men who say I alone can
Speaker 2: fix it.
Speaker 1: Right, No, I mean, I look at I talked about
Speaker 1: the fall of Turkey in Venezuela all the time to
Speaker 1: former democracies. I guess you could take Turkey is slightly
Speaker 1: higher on the democracy rating scale than Venezuela is, but
Speaker 1: a right Erwan and Hugo havez before Maduro, but Ugo
Speaker 1: shaves who sort of started this revolution. Both of them
Speaker 1: used frustration in poor communities to go after the so
Speaker 1: called elites, right in Istanbul or Caracas. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: I assume this is your experience overseas that this is
Speaker 1: there's a pattern here right where they when there's a
Speaker 1: belief when the gap between rich and poor gets so big,
Speaker 1: you can weaponize the poor against the elites and the
Speaker 1: pitchforks will come. But democracy leaves.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it's replaced with corruption and crony capitalism every
Speaker 2: timepocrisy of some sort. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So we do
Speaker 2: have to reckon with our tax policy that that I
Speaker 2: think has concentrated wealth at the top, that you know
Speaker 2: is certainly what does that look like.
Speaker 1: Because I've heard this before and the frankly, you know
Speaker 1: we you know, this is what we did one hundred
Speaker 1: years ago when we had all these robber barons. We
Speaker 1: passed the Amendment on the income tax. That was not
Speaker 1: about taxing Americans. That was about tax making sure the
Speaker 1: rich paid something back to this country that they were
Speaker 1: taking from it. And that's when property taxes became mainstream
Speaker 1: was back then? So what what is what is today's answer?
Speaker 1: Because I agree that tax policy is probably the that's
Speaker 1: what a small d democracy should do, and that sort
Speaker 1: of capitalism with guardrails.
Speaker 2: What what what large.
Speaker 1: Areas are you thinking when it comes to comes to
Speaker 1: tax policy and trying to close the income inequality gap
Speaker 1: without it coming across this redistribution.
Speaker 2: Right, there's that fine line there, right, sure. Well, one
Speaker 2: easy answer is something that that Ronald Reagan actually did
Speaker 2: and then in the late part of his second term,
Speaker 2: which is ensure that capital gains, you know, gains from
Speaker 2: investment were taxed at the same rate as your labor.
Speaker 2: I see no reason why people working forty sixty hours
Speaker 2: a week and are subject to payroll taxes, and you know,
Speaker 2: even if they don't make enough money to actually be
Speaker 2: subject to income taxes. They're paying a lot into to
Speaker 2: FIKA and into payroll taxes. And even in the you know,
Speaker 2: Reagan years, they found a way to say, hey, no,
Speaker 2: we're going to make sure that Okay, if you're if
Speaker 2: you're just putting money, you're making money off of money,
Speaker 2: well that's going to be taxed in the same way
Speaker 2: that making money off of you know, your labor or
Speaker 2: breaking your knees, you know, welding iron together and setting iron.
Speaker 2: Is that we're going to tax the same And that
Speaker 2: actually happened in this country for two years until George H. W.
Speaker 2: Bush undid that policy. And I don't remember if it
Speaker 2: was eighty eight or ninety, but one of those years
Speaker 2: check up on me. I think that that is a
Speaker 2: fairly easy place to start. And then the second thing,
Speaker 2: you know that we just have to deal with or
Speaker 2: you know, the strategies that the ultra wealthy use to
Speaker 2: live off of their unrealized gains. You know, people will say,
Speaker 2: if if I have stock and it appreciates in value,
Speaker 2: but I haven't sold the stock, I didn't actually make
Speaker 2: any money. That's true, except that you also collateralized that
Speaker 2: stock and borrowed a lot of money from banks to
Speaker 2: be able to live off of you know, you you
Speaker 2: accessed some value from that appreciation and that gain, and
Speaker 2: so I think even a simple policy like removing this
Speaker 2: by borrowde wealth preservations strategy that wealthy people use could
Speaker 2: also go some way in curing or making this a
Speaker 2: more equitable system. Basically, if you if you obtain cash
Speaker 2: flow from those unrealized gains in any way, at that point,
Speaker 2: it would be subject to tax. So these are kind
Speaker 2: of simple things. I think there's a lot of other
Speaker 2: complicated things that I'm sure academics and tax policy experts
Speaker 2: have a spectrum of disagreement about. But I think, you know,
Speaker 2: to your last point about redistribution, this is where Democrats
Speaker 2: often get in trouble because everybody sees that, oh, well,
Speaker 2: we're going to tax, we're going to tax everybody more,
Speaker 2: you know, hard working people, and then we're just going
Speaker 2: to do handouts to people who don't want to work.
Speaker 2: And this is just silliness, right. I believe that that's
Speaker 2: a myth for the most part, that most people receiving
Speaker 2: whether they're snap benefits or medicaid or whatever, actually do
Speaker 2: want to work. And I think forty million people on
Speaker 2: snap benefits, fifteen million of them do work full time.
Speaker 2: They don't make enough to actually be able to afford groceries.
Speaker 2: So I think we got to do away with some
Speaker 2: of those myths about the working poor in this country.
Speaker 2: But separately, rather than handing people you know, money to
Speaker 2: go buy things, we as a country need to invest
Speaker 2: some of those proceeds into building more. We don't have
Speaker 2: enough high quality education in this country. We have an
Speaker 2: energy grid that is increasingly falling behind for the demands
Speaker 2: that are going to be placed on it by an
Speaker 2: ai centric economy. We don't have enough hospitals and doctors,
Speaker 2: as I alluded to earlier. We need to invest in
Speaker 2: all of these things heavily and infrastructure in this country.
Speaker 1: No, and it it does seem though that there is
Speaker 1: a collective agreement on that. And yet you've seen this.
Speaker 1: This Congress doesn't function very well at the moment because
Speaker 1: we're in this you know, we're in this like forever
Speaker 1: Cold War between red and blue.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and it is very dysfunctional. And even when you
Speaker 2: can have consensus, or even when you have you know,
Speaker 2: broad agreement on issues, you know, progress remains elusive, and
Speaker 2: I believe that it is just that this system has
Speaker 2: been captured by the political and economic elites that are
Speaker 2: entrenched interests. We have campaigns, you know, bought and paid for,
Speaker 2: Elon Musk invests to forty something million dollars in getting
Speaker 2: President Trump reelected, and all of these parties you know,
Speaker 2: are looking out for their own interests and they are
Speaker 2: the ones you know, funding politics. And we have tried
Speaker 2: to have grassroots campaigns over the you know, the past decade,
Speaker 2: but these relentless text messages and emails and candidates like
Speaker 2: myself have to send two people who already probably don't
Speaker 2: make much and know, chip in five bucks to save democracy,
Speaker 2: and then a lot of that just goes back to,
Speaker 2: you know, paying for campaign consultants and all. It's absolutely
Speaker 2: fundraiser makes the money. Yeah, it's absolute nonsense. And I
Speaker 2: think that that, you know, we have to start electing
Speaker 2: people to the Senate who understand the struggles of the
Speaker 2: working poor in this country. We talk about how much
Speaker 2: representation matters, you know, especially as Democrats, and we mean
Speaker 2: that in a variety of different ways, but one way
Speaker 2: in which we don't explicitly talk about it is do
Speaker 2: poor people see themselves in any of the people that
Speaker 2: are elected to represent them, And I would say that
Speaker 2: they do not, because you know, many people who seek
Speaker 2: office year after year, cycle after cycle and win or lose.
Speaker 2: I just don't think they have much in common with
Speaker 2: the people who who they are trying to represent. And
Speaker 2: I think that that representation matters a lot.
Speaker 1: So And I'm not like asking you to throw shade
Speaker 1: at at potential primary opponents, but I may already have.
Speaker 1: It's sorry, why did why does Andy Basheer succeed? And
Speaker 1: why did an Amy McGrath fail in twenty twenty?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean there's there are a lot of you know,
Speaker 2: contributing factors, and you know why you should ask a
Speaker 2: me what her assessment of that race is. I'm sure
Speaker 2: that she should all the money in the world, all
Speaker 2: that money in the world.
Speaker 1: This was not a she didn't. This was not a
Speaker 1: financial issue. So this became a you know, the you know,
Speaker 1: an old marketing slogan was that the dog that doesn't
Speaker 1: matter how much money you throw behind the dog food.
Speaker 1: If the dog won't eat the dog food, you know
Speaker 1: it's not going to work. Why didn't it work?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Again, she would probably be much more you know,
Speaker 2: qualified to share an assessment with you on that. I
Speaker 2: will say Amy McGrath. McGrath has an incredible life story.
Speaker 2: She's a patriot that you know, has served her country
Speaker 2: and she she's been in this fight. I think my
Speaker 2: assessment is that in a place like Kentucky, it's a
Speaker 2: state that has been you know, that has put its
Speaker 2: faith in its trust in Donald Trump. You know, three
Speaker 2: three times three three elections in a row, and it
Speaker 2: you know, voters here believed the promises that he made
Speaker 2: and believed that he was going to be looking out
Speaker 2: for them. And when when Democrats don't actually offer an
Speaker 2: alternative vision, when they when they sometimes speak in ways
Speaker 2: that sound just kind of Republican but just a little
Speaker 2: less republican, I don't think voters can really tell the difference.
Speaker 2: And so if you got people on the fence, they're
Speaker 2: going to just vote for the Republican. Uh and Andy,
Speaker 2: butsheer didn't you know, do that. This is a governor
Speaker 2: who led with his values in both of his campaigns.
Speaker 2: He didn't shy away from talking about hard things, but
Speaker 2: he explained his choices, his decisions and reasons for different
Speaker 2: things and decisions he would make and policies he would
Speaker 2: advocate for. And even people who disagreed with Andy Bushier
Speaker 2: said that they trusted him and they thought that he
Speaker 2: would look out for them. And then he has shown up.
Speaker 2: We've had fourteen natural disasters or something declared in the
Speaker 2: state of Kentucky over the past couple of years or
Speaker 2: during his administration. This isn't a guy who hides in
Speaker 2: the governor's mansion. He's been out, He's been present with people,
Speaker 2: and I think that even when they disagree with them,
Speaker 2: are in, you know, marginal things, that he has their
Speaker 2: back on the major things. So I think that that's
Speaker 2: probably the big difference.
Speaker 1: What do you think is the best way to win
Speaker 1: win over somebody who voted for Donald Trump in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four to vote for Joel Willett in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would just ask those voters do they see
Speaker 2: more of themselves in Joel Willett or in Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: Donald Trump's net worth has increased three billion dollars according
Speaker 2: to the most recent estimates since January twentieth. How's your
Speaker 2: bottom line doing? Kentucky? Wages are stagnant, costs are up.
Speaker 2: You can't afford groceries. They're actively trying to take your
Speaker 2: health care. This man went to the Supreme Court this
Speaker 2: week to try to get permission to not give people
Speaker 2: money to buying groceries. And this administration made sure that
Speaker 2: Republicans in the Senate couldn't negotiate a deal with Democrats
Speaker 2: so that Americans wouldn't be faced with this unconscionable choice
Speaker 2: between being able to afford groceries or seeing a doctor
Speaker 2: when they get sick. And I would just ask voters
Speaker 2: to keep asking themselves why that is. Do you believe
Speaker 2: that this man has your back? And I think there
Speaker 2: is ample evidence at this point between his ballrooms, his
Speaker 2: own increase in his wealth, and these other policies he
Speaker 2: does not definitely.
Speaker 1: Has a gilded age feeling to it. Doesn't it like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let them cake whatever you want to, whatever cliche you
Speaker 1: want to pick it.
Speaker 2: It feels it like you're just like, yeah, the pictures
Speaker 2: are jarring.
Speaker 1: Well it leads me, and look, this is by the
Speaker 1: time this airs, the shutdown is over, it's behind us.
Speaker 1: So we're in the we're taping when they're in the
Speaker 1: middle of it ending. And I'm one of those who
Speaker 1: are empathetic to I get I understand the rationale on
Speaker 1: both sides of this argument inside the Democratic Party. One
Speaker 1: that says, hey, they're squirming, why give up now? The
Speaker 1: other that says, he's he's taking away snap benefits, he's
Speaker 1: putting the travel system under duress. Somebody's got to be
Speaker 1: the adult in the room here. And oh, by the way,
Speaker 1: if you're trying if the whole point of this was
Speaker 1: to bring more attention to healthcare, that's been a mission accomplished,
Speaker 1: and then now the burden is on them to either
Speaker 1: deal with this or watch out. In twenty twenty six,
Speaker 1: this becomes certainly a populist issue. So obviously you could
Speaker 1: see I can argue one side of this. I understand
Speaker 1: the other that, hey, the shutdown's gone politically really well
Speaker 1: for the Democrats, and Trump has made all sorts of
Speaker 1: mistakes like advocating to not pay snap benefits even when
Speaker 1: a judge says to do it, and the Speaker of
Speaker 1: the House is abdicated responsibility, right Like, I can I
Speaker 1: get the arguments and I couldn't I hear both of them.
Speaker 1: Where do you fall on this argument? And I'm mindful
Speaker 1: that you're in a Democratic primary in the moment.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I'm not someone who is going to ever
Speaker 2: play hide the ball with the people that I want
Speaker 2: to vote for me and the people that I want
Speaker 2: to represent. So in that spirit, I believe that the
Speaker 2: deal that was just struck is a betrayal of working
Speaker 2: families in this country. And I'm absolutely disgusted by this
Speaker 2: choice with the with the eight Democrats who who broke
Speaker 2: pretty angry about this, I am very fired up, Chuck.
Speaker 2: I went to bed mad and angry last night. I
Speaker 2: woke up this morning, uh, the same exact way. And
Speaker 2: while yes, there are you know arguments there, I you know,
Speaker 2: we're fond of, you know, saying in sports, and when
Speaker 2: we're trying to encourage people to to you know, get
Speaker 2: in there and and fight and play a game, we say, well, hey,
Speaker 2: you can't win if you don't play. But I want
Speaker 2: to quote my favorite, probably one of my favorite TV
Speaker 2: series of all times, The Wire, And I'm sure this
Speaker 2: was a David Simon line, but one of the characters
Speaker 2: told the police chief, you can't lose if you don't play,
Speaker 2: and that is I think some of the energy Democrats
Speaker 2: needed here. If the Republicans wanted the government open, they
Speaker 2: found ways to force through the you know, the big
Speaker 2: bullshit bill back in July. They did that right with
Speaker 2: with UH without getting the support that you know, they
Speaker 2: they wanted from Democrats. They could have funded and reopened
Speaker 2: the government the same way. Not sure there would have
Speaker 2: been some procedural issues and delays and things like that.
Speaker 2: They could have gotten it done if they wanted to.
Speaker 2: Democrats did not need to go support this. And yes,
Speaker 2: it is terrible to watch people potentially lose their SNAP
Speaker 2: or food stamp benefits. I was on food stamps as
Speaker 2: a kid. I know what that's like. You know, when
Speaker 2: my parents had to make decisions between being able to
Speaker 2: afford groceries or putting gas in the car to get
Speaker 2: to a job so they could make money to buy
Speaker 2: more food. I get that personally, But it is not
Speaker 2: Democrats that have made those choices. It was not Democrats
Speaker 2: going to the Supreme Court to try to get permission
Speaker 2: to not pay SNAP benefits. That was Donald Trump. That
Speaker 2: was Republican enablers in Congress. Democrats had a very radical
Speaker 2: idea throughout this shutdown. Maybe in the most prosperous country
Speaker 2: on earth, with thirty trillion dollars in GDP, we can
Speaker 2: have a country where people can afford groceries and be
Speaker 2: able to see a doctor if you get sick. That
Speaker 2: seemed like a pretty noble fight to me. And I
Speaker 2: don't understand, you know, when we've had millions of voters
Speaker 2: across this country in Virginia and New Jersey, in California
Speaker 2: and New York show up just this week, right, you know,
Speaker 2: over the past seven days, rather to support a party
Speaker 2: that it's a fighting for them, to just immediately turn
Speaker 2: it out.
Speaker 1: To say why, why do you assume the fight's over?
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a temporary opening, you know. I
Speaker 1: could if you made me have to message it on
Speaker 1: sort of on your I would say something like, look,
Speaker 1: we're not gonna we're not going to make people have
Speaker 1: to ration food because this administration is going to do it.
Speaker 1: But we're going to keep fighting for healthcare and come January,
Speaker 1: if they don't do this, we're shutting this place down again.
Speaker 1: And what's wrong? What is wrong with that strategy because
Speaker 1: you do sort of try to strike I could argue
Speaker 1: that it strikes the balance between you know, helping in
Speaker 1: the immediate term, and again I think, look, we're playing
Speaker 1: with fire with what's going on with their traffic control
Speaker 1: and not paying these folks and and all of this stuff.
Speaker 2: And I take it we had a we had a
Speaker 2: crash here, and we don't.
Speaker 1: Know that had what's that impacted by? Right, And we
Speaker 1: can't say for sure, but we know we've put these
Speaker 1: people under duress, meaning they've got to work with a
Speaker 1: promise to be paid right, which I've never met the
Speaker 1: landlord that said that, Hey, I'm going to post date
Speaker 1: this check just you know, I just don't know when
Speaker 1: I have to get to post date it. Do you
Speaker 1: not accept the premise that there's time to fight keep
Speaker 1: fighting for this in two months?
Speaker 2: I think when you look at the eight Democrats who
Speaker 2: voted for this, it sort of betrays the parties thinking
Speaker 2: that they don't really buy this premise either. None of
Speaker 2: those people are facing reelection next cycle. To my knowledge,
Speaker 2: find me one person who wants to run on this
Speaker 2: compromise right now next cycle. I don't think you find
Speaker 2: that Democrat anyway.
Speaker 1: What's the run on the compromise? The question is whether
Speaker 1: you're running. You know, you get to keep running on healthcare?
Speaker 1: I would argue you do, oh.
Speaker 2: Sure, because but the problem is you've got tens of
Speaker 2: millions of Americans who are absolutely now going to see
Speaker 2: premium increases or they're going to go without health care.
Speaker 2: That is now a fact that is going to happen.
Speaker 2: And you know a lot of people are like, oh,
Speaker 2: do you trust Republicans that they're actually going to give
Speaker 2: you a vote on this or whatever. It's like, Okay,
Speaker 2: I think you know. Fune has been very public that
Speaker 2: there is going to be a vote and it's going
Speaker 2: to happen on such and such date and all that.
Speaker 2: So take them out the where there's going to be
Speaker 2: a vote. What is that going to accomplish? Do you
Speaker 2: think magically Republicans are going to extend these enhanced subsidies.
Speaker 2: I think would be enough because I think they're petrified
Speaker 2: of this. I think they're absolutely petrified of the impact
Speaker 2: com mess. I think they look at for a way out. Yeah,
Speaker 2: well right, And so I don't have that level of
Speaker 2: faith right now because they are beholden to Donald Trump.
Speaker 2: And this is a man who found his affordability in
Speaker 2: the rative for a maximum of five hours one night
Speaker 2: before he the next day said don't talk to me
Speaker 2: about affordability. I mean they are going to do whatever
Speaker 2: he says, and until he's out there saying the personation
Speaker 2: is noted there, Joel, I see that. It's incredible. Check
Speaker 2: you know you got to keep that up. What more?
Speaker 1: Is it just?
Speaker 2: Or do you have others that you're pretty good at? Oh? Well,
Speaker 2: we'll save those for future episodes. My wife hates my impersonations,
Speaker 2: by the way. Oh she's got to be the biggest
Speaker 2: fat She can't do that to you. I just want
Speaker 2: to discourage it.
Speaker 3: And I've got a shared brown impersonation that I've always
Speaker 3: been really proud of ground to be a I just need,
Speaker 3: you know, with the men and the working men and wave.
Speaker 3: You know, you gotta you gotta have the dignity of work.
Speaker 2: There, Joel. That that is very good and quick aside.
Speaker 2: I was I was able to uh see Carl Rove
Speaker 2: and Paul Lagala do a fireside chat last last fall,
Speaker 2: and I mean, Carl Rove hasn't uh, you know, an
Speaker 2: incredible impersonation Donald Trump and an even better one of
Speaker 2: George W. Bush, the president that that he serves so firstly,
Speaker 2: and Paul Lagalla busted into a Bill Clinton, uh that
Speaker 2: would deceive anyone. And I just thought that was very
Speaker 2: impressive that the presidents that they had served, that they
Speaker 2: had just kind of embodied their voice so realistically.
Speaker 1: Well, it makes you wonder did they embody their voice
Speaker 1: or did the do the presidents embody the voices of
Speaker 1: their chief strategists? Yeah, you know who's pulling this strength now,
Speaker 1: I'm kidding. I'm kidding on that front. So I take
Speaker 1: it that if there's no deal on healthcare, you'd say,
Speaker 1: you think that this that these that shut down the
Speaker 1: government in January again, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't see what choice. I mean, look, I say
Speaker 2: this as a civil servant, and and and perhaps I
Speaker 2: should you know, lead with uh my, you know, I
Speaker 2: understand I've lived through shutdowns. I had I was always
Speaker 2: a you know, a an essential implay all you doing
Speaker 2: government shutdowns and had you know, pay at risk and
Speaker 2: got paid. Yeah, it always came back. But even if
Speaker 2: there was like a you know, a temporary you know,
Speaker 2: bulip in it, you you're you're not getting paid that
Speaker 2: much anyways, right, and you you continue to show up
Speaker 2: and it's it's work that you care about. But ultimately,
Speaker 2: you know, you've got to be able to afford things.
Speaker 2: And I don't want to use public servants as a
Speaker 2: as a political football in that way. But we cannot
Speaker 2: be the only party that cares about that one. One
Speaker 2: side of the spectrum right now is letting Donald Trump
Speaker 2: just run rough shot over the entire federal government, dismantling
Speaker 2: the civil servants, civil service that we fought so hard
Speaker 2: to build in an a political way in this country.
Speaker 2: And uh, you know, so I get Tim Kane when
Speaker 2: when he's trying to support federal workers, but you know
Speaker 2: the same is true from our corner. And so I
Speaker 2: do think this is uh, we we have to keep fighting.
Speaker 2: But like Democrats have to read the room the do
Speaker 2: you think Schumer should resign as party leader? H I
Speaker 2: I think that there are very valid and open questions
Speaker 2: about that. I want I don't know Chuck Schumer. I've
Speaker 2: not met with Chuck Schumer. You know, I get that
Speaker 2: you know there is a lot going on behind the scenes,
Speaker 2: and you know, for a party that is out of power,
Speaker 2: and so you know that's that's not something I'm prepared
Speaker 2: to say, as we said here, but it is an
Speaker 2: open question. In my mind.
Speaker 1: Doesn't sound like somebody, if you won, you would support
Speaker 1: keeping Chuck Schumer as a leader.
Speaker 2: If you had a vote, it would be a difficult
Speaker 2: vote for me to take today. I will say that
Speaker 2: before I let you go.
Speaker 1: I'm just curious, you know. I just interviewed Governor Basheer
Speaker 1: earlier this weekend. It's on a new sphere, which is
Speaker 1: another sort of independent media outlet, and he said something interesting.
Speaker 2: I said, you know. I said, he was talking about tariffs.
Speaker 1: And this is a case where Andy Basheer, Mitch McConnell,
Speaker 1: and Ran all are all on the same page.
Speaker 2: And he basically said.
Speaker 1: If all three of us are agreeing on something, maybe
Speaker 1: there's something there.
Speaker 2: What do you make of Rand Paul? And I say
Speaker 2: this because if you win, that's.
Speaker 1: A senator, you know, the States senators, you know, no
Speaker 1: matter even if you're from different parties, at times you
Speaker 1: need to work together.
Speaker 2: What do you make of him?
Speaker 1: And what do you make of his attempts at seeking
Speaker 1: a little bit of distance from from Trump World in
Speaker 1: a way that we haven't seen in the past.
Speaker 2: I Ran Paul is an idiosyncratic senator to say the least.
Speaker 2: You know, his views will sometimes overlap in very weird
Speaker 2: or align, you know, in very strange and unexpected ways.
Speaker 2: It's a weird ven diagram, isn't it it very much
Speaker 2: is I mean? But we have this in Kentucky with
Speaker 2: Thomas Massey as well. You've got liberals across the state
Speaker 2: celebrating Thomas Massey's willingness to stand up, you know, for
Speaker 2: the release of the Epstein files, which, by the way,
Speaker 2: this issue is not going to go away either. Those
Speaker 2: finals I believe will see the light of day. They
Speaker 2: have to. Voters are demanding it. But you make a
Speaker 2: broader point just about you know how we have to
Speaker 2: work together. No one senator can promise to get anything
Speaker 2: done on their own. You have to build relationships. You
Speaker 2: have to be able to work across the aisle. And
Speaker 2: I'm not somebody who presents just to be some above
Speaker 2: it all centrist. I am not, and I, like I said,
Speaker 2: We'll always tell voters you know where I stand on things,
Speaker 2: and my mind is made up on something. I'm not
Speaker 2: going to hide from you what I believe about it.
Speaker 2: But that doesn't absolve me, or any senator or any
Speaker 2: congressman of a responsibility to represent all the people in
Speaker 2: our states, because it is inevitable in a state like
Speaker 2: Kentucky if I win, you know, there are going to
Speaker 2: be lots of people here who did not vote for me,
Speaker 2: and they deserve a voice and they deserve representation as well.
Speaker 2: The problem that we have right now in this country
Speaker 2: is that, you know, you can have seventy five million
Speaker 2: people vote for Kamala Harris and marginally more millions vote
Speaker 2: for Trump, and they pretend that the score was one
Speaker 2: hundred to nothing, I know, and that all the other
Speaker 2: people didn't exist. You don't, you didn't win.
Speaker 1: Actually not what our founders intended. They assumed it was
Speaker 1: going to be a messy compromise constantly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so you know, we have to be able
Speaker 2: to do that. So, you know, I would I would
Speaker 2: work with you know which who would then be the
Speaker 2: senior Senator from the state of Kentucky to take care
Speaker 2: of working families in this state. They deserve a voice,
Speaker 2: they deserve representation, and we need solutions minded politicians. And
Speaker 2: that's exactly what I would be.
Speaker 1: Outside of Kentucky. Who's the US Senator that so far
Speaker 1: you've been the most impressed with.
Speaker 2: You know, It's funny, somebody asked me, asked me that
Speaker 2: question a few weeks so, not who I was most
Speaker 2: impressed with. I was able to say a few, But
Speaker 2: I'm gonna. I'm going to continue to give Chris Murphy props.
Speaker 2: I have appreciated, you know, he's been a very level
Speaker 2: headed senator. He speaks passionately about you know, a lot
Speaker 2: of issues, but you know, particularly he's someone you know,
Speaker 2: I talked about, you know, my dad dying a uniquely
Speaker 2: American death from finandol. Well, there's another uniquely American death,
Speaker 2: and that's to get killed atra elementary school. And you know,
Speaker 2: when you've got senators, you know, who are completely owned
Speaker 2: by the NRA that that aren't even looking out for
Speaker 2: response responsible gun owners anymore. You know, I've just been
Speaker 2: impressed with, you know, his leadership on that issue and
Speaker 2: other things, and somebody who I think is intelligent, whose
Speaker 2: heart's in the right place. And yeah, so I admire it,
Speaker 2: admire that guy.
Speaker 1: And I take it that Governor Bursheer is your pick
Speaker 1: for president in twenty twenty eight because you got you're
Speaker 1: going to be a home state guy.
Speaker 2: Is he is he running? Is he running? I don't know.
Speaker 2: I don't think he's.
Speaker 3: Uh.
Speaker 2: I don't think he said.
Speaker 1: Yeah, look at you doing doing a little bit of
Speaker 1: blocking and tackling that.
Speaker 2: I don't know, look at twenty twenty six. Right, yeah,
Speaker 2: of course, but and that does have to be our folks.
Speaker 2: I will tell you this. I do not believe, and
Speaker 2: I know Gavin Newsom has been very public in saying this.
Speaker 2: I've been saying it privately for months, that this administration
Speaker 2: intends to have free and fair elections in twenty twenty eight.
Speaker 2: And so if your listeners care at all about our
Speaker 2: two hundred and fifty year experiment with democracy here or
Speaker 2: liberal democracy in America, it is imperative that we turn
Speaker 2: out in massive numbers in twenty twenty six. I believe
Speaker 2: it's one of our last chances to provide accountability for
Speaker 2: this administration and to ensure that Americans have a free
Speaker 2: and fair choice, whether that be for Andy Basheer or
Speaker 2: anyone else in twenty twenty eight. So I don't think
Speaker 2: the stakes could be any higher. And I will say
Speaker 2: Andy Basheer has been an incredible governor of this state,
Speaker 2: and he's shown it path to victory here for Democrats
Speaker 2: who want to lead with their values to respect him
Speaker 2: for that.
Speaker 1: Let me get chatting here on this. Because you worked
Speaker 1: in the intelligence community, and I've been working with some
Speaker 1: people former members of the intelligence community on an exercise
Speaker 1: on trust and media. And it's not just about media
Speaker 1: and journalists. It's more about the information ecosystem and what
Speaker 1: happens if you have bad intelligence. Like I'm working with
Speaker 1: people who are nervous that the information you know, we
Speaker 1: already know there's a lot of misinformation and disinformation out there,
Speaker 1: and that if we don't figure out clean ways to
Speaker 1: get information, then we're going to make terrible national security decisions.
Speaker 1: Like how bad is the flow of intelligence these days?
Speaker 1: Do you is it in considering sort of how much
Speaker 1: we've alienated some of our key allies, you know, in
Speaker 1: the in the world of the Five Eyes, all the
Speaker 1: English language allies of ours that I get the impression
Speaker 1: that there's either concern that, you know, we've got too
Speaker 1: many leaks in our system or all of our stuff.
Speaker 1: There's one country in particular that gets access to intelligence
Speaker 1: without telling them what what is? What do you feel
Speaker 1: like is the state of America, the American the intelligence
Speaker 1: that are are the intelligence community is getting these days?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I appreciate that question more than you know, and
Speaker 2: you know, would would love to have an extended conversation
Speaker 2: about it, because I think that there are a lot
Speaker 2: of different forces that are polluting the information environment and
Speaker 2: leading to very poor information hygiene, not just in you know,
Speaker 2: our federal government with policymakers, but with our kids, and
Speaker 2: with with school age kids and people in university and
Speaker 2: and everything else. I would just turn to Russia as
Speaker 2: an example of this. During COVID, you may recall some
Speaker 2: of these images of Vladimir Putin setting at the end
Speaker 2: of a you know, a thirty foot table and an
Speaker 2: advisor you know, at the other end, and I, you know,
Speaker 2: equipped at the time that he had entered the late
Speaker 2: stage Howard Hughes phase of his government, his governing.
Speaker 1: Have you noticed his nails are suddenly super long?
Speaker 2: Oh no, no, right yet? Yeah, well, when he grows a beard,
Speaker 2: we'll know that the transformation leaden beard. Yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 2: it is it is an isolated autocrat who behaves the
Speaker 2: way that he did during COVID, who also then makes
Speaker 2: the decision to invade Ukraine. And when you listen to
Speaker 2: Vladimir Putins speak about, you know, his reasons for invading Ukraine. Yes,
Speaker 2: he has this sort of imperialistic worldview about Russia and
Speaker 2: you know, glory of Russia and all these sorts of things.
Speaker 2: But he also routinely just says things that are untrue,
Speaker 2: and you don't know if that's propaganda. I believe at
Speaker 2: this point that Vladimir Putin's information environment has become massively
Speaker 2: polluted because everybody in the Siliviki and the intelligence community
Speaker 2: in Russia has figured out that like, this is what
Speaker 2: this man believes, this is what this man wants to hear,
Speaker 2: and that's what they tell him, and he's manipulated in
Speaker 2: those ways. So there are very real examples of the
Speaker 2: consequences of that type of government that we see with
Speaker 2: Russia and the atrocities that are being committed in Ukraine.
Speaker 2: So let's go from Russia to the US intelligence community,
Speaker 2: and then I'll just finish my response with kids. My
Speaker 2: security clearance was revoked, as we talked about it at
Speaker 2: the top of the show, and it was revoked because
Speaker 2: I said something mean about Donald Trump six years ago,
Speaker 2: and because they found out I was going to exercise
Speaker 2: political speech by potentially, you know, by considering a run
Speaker 2: for the US Senate.
Speaker 1: Just astablishing something you said six years ago. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what they us. I mean, that is just like
Speaker 1: thought police stuff. That's write out all the while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it truly is.
Speaker 2: And uh, you know it was right wing Twitter that
Speaker 2: started that dug up some of this and started attacking me,
Speaker 2: And then I guess right wing Twitter runs our intelligence community.
Speaker 2: Now it's a very dangerous thing. Or a loomer the
Speaker 2: CIA chief apparently, Yeah, exactly, And so what do I
Speaker 2: think the follow on effects of something like what happened
Speaker 2: to me? But it is since I mean James Comy
Speaker 2: being indicted and other people who were actively serving in
Speaker 2: the CIA being walked out by security because they ended
Speaker 2: up on some list that nobody knows how well. So
Speaker 2: this is going to and perhaps already has a massive
Speaker 2: chilling effect throughout our federal government. And it's not just
Speaker 2: the intelligence community. I mean Donald Trump went to war
Speaker 2: with a weather forecast during his first administration. We might
Speaker 2: recall where he modified the course of a map rather
Speaker 2: than just saying, you know, I accidentally added an extra
Speaker 2: state in my comment. Right, So, up and down the
Speaker 2: civil service, you have people who know that if they
Speaker 2: speak truth to power like they're supposed to, they're just
Speaker 2: going to be out a job. And so that is
Speaker 2: dangerous for national security. It's dangerous for domestic security to
Speaker 2: not have expertise in the civil service, and.
Speaker 1: What would you do if you're in that situation? You
Speaker 1: know you have the So literally a week before the
Speaker 1: head of Southern Command decided to resign rather than carry
Speaker 1: out these orders on these on these Venezuela on these
Speaker 1: boats outside of the coast of Venezuela. I'd ask Jim Stavertez,
Speaker 1: former NATA supremat like commander, former head of Southern Command.
Speaker 1: I said, what happens if you get an order you're
Speaker 1: not on our pcent?
Speaker 2: Sure is legal? Right? We know we know that. You
Speaker 2: know if if you follow an illegal order, you're going
Speaker 2: to be held accountable to right. We have made that
Speaker 2: clear in our in our law.
Speaker 1: And he goes, well, you would, he goes, I'd probably
Speaker 1: resign and not go public about why I resign.
Speaker 2: I'd simply resign.
Speaker 1: Let others And you know, there's there's this sort of
Speaker 1: there's always that that sort of a would you if
Speaker 1: you were in a similar situation, would you simply resign?
Speaker 1: Would you resign with a bullhorn or do you try
Speaker 1: to keep working within the system Because it feels like
Speaker 1: there's no there's no perfect answer here.
Speaker 2: There is not, and I just want your listeners and
Speaker 2: American voters at large to understand that the admirals and
Speaker 2: the generals and the private first classes, they're the privates
Speaker 2: first class. They're not coming to save you. If you
Speaker 2: think there is some massive resistance that's going to build
Speaker 2: up in this way, you are mistaken. And it's because
Speaker 2: these are gut wrenching decisions that have extreme amounts of
Speaker 2: personal consequence to you.
Speaker 1: The culture it tells you, look, if you've got an issue,
Speaker 1: then you go ahead and resign, but you need to
Speaker 1: do it on your terms, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: And civil servants have an obligation I think, to resign
Speaker 2: rather than you know, carry out those things. Whether they
Speaker 2: speak about it at public or not would depend on like, well,
Speaker 2: this is a super classified thing. What can I say?
Speaker 2: You know, there's whistleblower things. We have ostensibly protections in
Speaker 2: this country.
Speaker 1: For that, but you're still all of those inspectors general,
Speaker 1: so it's not even clear who you would report violations.
Speaker 2: Of the constitution to. Yeah, exactly. In the military, you
Speaker 2: don't have the luxury of always just being able to resign,
Speaker 2: you know, admirals and generals and those sorts of things,
Speaker 2: or at various stages of their you know, contractual commitments
Speaker 2: to the country, but they can you know, resign and
Speaker 2: make a show of it.
Speaker 1: Look, the fact that the head of Southern camp and
Speaker 1: resign should have been a much bigger deal with the
Speaker 1: American public.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I don't think we.
Speaker 1: I don't think that whatever's left of legacy media made
Speaker 1: a big enough deal about it.
Speaker 2: No, And the Defense Intelligence Agency, who you know, the
Speaker 2: director there also gone because of you know, questioning the
Speaker 2: efficacy of the military strikes that we on Iran. So
Speaker 2: there are a lot of a lot of things there,
Speaker 2: and there are a lot of problems. But I do
Speaker 2: think that, you know, you do have obligations to not
Speaker 2: carry out lawful orders. And it's easy for me to
Speaker 2: say from the cheap seats over here at the stage
Speaker 2: of my life, I only, you know, hope that I
Speaker 2: would have had the courage of putting the same situation
Speaker 2: that i'm that I am asking other people to exhibit
Speaker 2: a day.
Speaker 1: Joe Willett, it's been a pleasure to get to know you.
Speaker 1: I sort of you come at this with a with
Speaker 1: a style that that is very appealing to me, I hope.
Speaker 1: But in that you seem like you think this stuff through.
Speaker 1: It seems like you think before you speak. There's not
Speaker 1: many politicians that do that these days.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I try. Chuck's been watching you for years. You know,
Speaker 2: I've only probably yelled at you through the television a
Speaker 2: few times, but you know, really appreciate you having me
Speaker 2: on and for having a thoughtful conversation. I am.
Speaker 1: I am a as I say. It's like, I'm as
Speaker 1: long as you're not yelling at me the whole time.
Speaker 2: I didn't. Yeah, and my campaign, and my campaign will
Speaker 2: fire me if I don't remind people to go to
Speaker 2: Joelferkentucky dot com if you're at all interested in supporting
Speaker 2: this camp.
Speaker 1: Are you concerned that the big money people in DC
Speaker 1: won't invest in Kentucky because of what happened in twenty
Speaker 1: twenty with all that money.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm very concerned about that. You know, we invested
Speaker 2: on you know, ninety four million dollars in the in
Speaker 2: the race here and got results worse than we'd ever
Speaker 2: gotten before, and I think that is on people's mind spot.
Speaker 2: There's an important difference here now. Andy Basheer has shown
Speaker 2: this path to victory, and we just have to have
Speaker 2: the right candidate walk down that.
Speaker 1: Path, Joe Willett, We'll be watching your primary, that's for sure.
Speaker 1: I know fairly early, right may right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, leave me soon that is that is six months
Speaker 2: are going to fly by, so be safe for the trail.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much, Chack, have you got it well?
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Joe Willett. I
Speaker 1: know I'll be following his candidacy to see see how
Speaker 1: that all works out. So, speaking of the Senate, it
Speaker 1: is that time I said every month I would update
Speaker 1: my top five, top five, top top top five, just
Speaker 1: a reminder in October and the way I do this
Speaker 1: and my ranks have been doing this since I wrote
Speaker 1: a column called on the Trail back during my National
Speaker 1: Journal dot com outline days, which was I like to
Speaker 1: order these races are most likely to flip parties, so
Speaker 1: not in the toss up Lean ar Lean d category,
Speaker 1: but most likely to flip to least likely to flip. Obviously,
Speaker 1: by keeping it to five, you know all of them
Speaker 1: are going to be somewhat competitive races that crack the
Speaker 1: top five.
Speaker 2: So to remind you, the last.
Speaker 1: Time my top five was North Carolina one, Georgia two,
Speaker 1: Michigan three, Main four, New Hampshire five.
Speaker 2: So the idea was I.
Speaker 1: Had the assumption was the open seat in North Carolina
Speaker 1: with the big recruit there. North Carolina, Georgia's the Democratic
Speaker 1: health seat of John Ossoff. Michigan, of course, the open
Speaker 1: seat Gary Peters Democrat is vacating. Maine is Susan Collins.
Speaker 1: New Hampshire is the Gene Shaheen seat that she is vacating,
Speaker 1: a Democratic seat there. So look my new top five.
Speaker 1: In some ways, number one hasn't changed. The most likely
Speaker 1: seat to flip is North Carolina. It is an open seat.
Speaker 1: It is the one open seat, you know, one of
Speaker 1: two open seats in the big seven battleground states. Right,
Speaker 1: The big seven battleground states are Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina,
Speaker 1: Nevada in sort of the sun Belt, and Wisconsin, Michigan,
Speaker 1: and Pennsylvania. And so when you look at the competitive
Speaker 1: Senate map these days, there's actually, you know, the last
Speaker 1: two cycles, they all seven of those states. We had,
Speaker 1: I think two cycles in a row. We either had
Speaker 1: seven for seven or six of the seven with Senate
Speaker 1: seats this time, right, we'd have nothing in Arizona, nothing
Speaker 1: in Nevada, there's one seat in Georgia, one seat in
Speaker 1: North Carolina, nothing in Pennsylvania, nothing in Wisconsin, and one
Speaker 1: seat in Michigan. So it is the presidential battlegrounds. This
Speaker 1: happens to be the one cycle where we have the
Speaker 1: fewest amount of Senate seats in the presidential battlegrounds. But
Speaker 1: I think you still have to put you know, I
Speaker 1: think what I learned from the twenty twenty five elections,
Speaker 1: and again history being a guide. Every time we've seen
Speaker 1: a route like this by one party, we have seen
Speaker 1: that continue in the following even numbered year. I am
Speaker 1: looking for the time. I mean, twenty thirteen is one
Speaker 1: of the few exceptions where Democrats did well in the
Speaker 1: off off year, but that did not translate to twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: which was not a good year for Democrats in there
Speaker 1: and again right there was there's a HEAs in twenty
Speaker 1: thirteen is the exception to every single one of these
Speaker 1: trend lines we've been talking about with New Jersey and Virginia,
Speaker 1: et cetera. And you know, certain things I think that
Speaker 1: I took away from the off off years. One, Democrats
Speaker 1: are ready to vote, and you know, the sheer raw
Speaker 1: number of votes that the Democratic candidate got in New
Speaker 1: Jersey versus the Republican candidate continues to blow me away.
Speaker 1: I think it's the single most important statistic that you
Speaker 1: need to understand coming out of these off off year elections.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Jack Chittarelli, the Republican nominee for governor, actually got one
Speaker 1: hundred thousand more votes than he received in twenty twenty one.
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty one, that vote total was good enough
Speaker 1: to only lose by three percentage points. In twenty twenty five,
Speaker 1: where he got more votes, he loses by thirteen percentage points.
Speaker 1: The Democratic candidate Mikey Cheryl got four hundred thousand more
Speaker 1: votes than Phil Murphy got in twenty twenty one. Okay,
Speaker 1: that tells you a whole bunch of Democrats who didn't
Speaker 1: bother to show up in twenty one decided to show
Speaker 1: up in twenty five. I don't think I had anything
Speaker 1: to do with Mikey Cheryl and Jeck Chodarelly, and everything
Speaker 1: to do with the larger national environment. By the way,
Speaker 1: we got that result on Tuesday. If you recall the
Speaker 1: NBC News poll that came out two days earlier that
Speaker 1: I am a big believer of because I trust those
Speaker 1: two pollsters. They had a generic ballot lead for the
Speaker 1: Democrats of eight points. It was the largest lead that
Speaker 1: Democrats had going back to twenty seventeen. Twenty eighteen cycle,
Speaker 1: another pretty good cycle for Democrats. So I throw all
Speaker 1: that in there in that my new top five list
Speaker 1: is skewed a bit towards the Democrats. So number one
Speaker 1: hasn't changed. That's North Carolina. It's not going to change.
Speaker 1: But my number two has. I had Georgia's the second
Speaker 1: most vulnerable seat. After seeing what we saw with those
Speaker 1: Public Service Commission races where there was no money spent
Speaker 1: and Democrats just generically won by a lot, you've got
Speaker 1: a growing divisive Republican primary. I highlighted an add a
Speaker 1: couple of podcasts ago where Derek Dooley, the son of
Speaker 1: Vince Dooley, the former football coach of the Bulldogs, that
Speaker 1: the super pack of Brian Kemp, the sitting governor, was
Speaker 1: running an ad that sort of lumped in the two
Speaker 1: Republican congressmen in the primary and osof as all responsible
Speaker 1: for the shutdown. So you now know what kind of
Speaker 1: campaign Dooley is going to run as the outsider, the
Speaker 1: anti Washington crowd. I think it's a smart place to
Speaker 1: position himself at this point. Though, if Dooley is the nominee,
Speaker 1: I think Osoff's in bigger trouble. But if Dooley is
Speaker 1: not the nominee, and so far he's still the third
Speaker 1: place candidate, I think Osoff is a bit safer than
Speaker 1: I preps. Look, he's still in the top five, but
Speaker 1: he is not number two most vulnerable. I think now
Speaker 1: you have to put in the second most vulnerable.
Speaker 2: Susan Collins.
Speaker 1: I do move Susan Collins up into the second slot there.
Speaker 1: I think when you see what the Democratic turnouts was
Speaker 1: in the Northeast in general, you see the fact that
Speaker 1: in some ways the strength of the oyster farmer Graham Platner,
Speaker 1: the fact that his support is holding and it's not
Speaker 1: hurting the Democrats. The fact that Jay Jones got through
Speaker 1: what he got through in Virginia, I think is only
Speaker 1: going to serve to reassure Platner on there. The anti
Speaker 1: Schumer vibe, the anti establishment vibe, seems to be much
Speaker 1: stronger than the anti character vibe inside the Democratic Party
Speaker 1: right now. And you know Collins is going to be
Speaker 1: defending a bunch of status quo stuff it is. You know,
Speaker 1: do I think if Janet Mills is the Democratic nominee,
Speaker 1: Collins has a better chance of winning. I do, believe
Speaker 1: it or not, but I still think it's going to
Speaker 1: be it's going to be a hard time being an
Speaker 1: incumbent Republican running in twenty twenty six with this likely
Speaker 1: economy that we're staring at and the way Donald Trump
Speaker 1: is positioning the party's brand right, And while Susan Collins
Speaker 1: is never going to be mistaken for a Trump Republican,
Speaker 1: she's still going to have to carry around some of
Speaker 1: that baggage, some of that baggage on tariffs, some of
Speaker 1: that baggage on health. I mean, she's probably going to
Speaker 1: be the loan Republican, you know, one of now she
Speaker 1: won't be the loan Republicans. She's going to be one
Speaker 1: of the lead Republicans trying to get these Obamacare subsidies extended,
Speaker 1: because if they do not get extended, she's done. She's
Speaker 1: completely done. Which is why I am bullish that you
Speaker 1: will see a one year extension at a minimum of
Speaker 1: these Obamacare subsidies, because I think there is no senator
Speaker 1: that would be more vulnerable to a decision not to
Speaker 1: do that than Susan Collins. So number one is North Carolina.
Speaker 1: Number two is main Number three I am going to
Speaker 1: put Georgia. I still think that there is certainly, you
Speaker 1: know it is it is a even state. We've still
Speaker 1: not seen, you know, a demo until these psc elections.
Speaker 1: We hadn't see a Democrat went a down ballot statewide
Speaker 1: contest in Georgia going back more than ten years. But
Speaker 1: the entire political environment in Georgia. I mean, if Georgia
Speaker 1: is indeed you know, I've been vacillating, was Georgia anti
Speaker 1: Trump state or is Georgia simply a swing state that
Speaker 1: demographics have been shifting over time? And I think there's
Speaker 1: now more and more evidence that this is a This
Speaker 1: is a realignment in Georgia. This is the growth of
Speaker 1: the Atlanta suburbs, This is all of those things that
Speaker 1: this is less about. And it may be what we're
Speaker 1: seeing in the Atlanta metro areas. What we saw in
Speaker 1: northern Virginia that went from being an important pocket of
Speaker 1: voters for Virginia Democrats to becoming the most dominant feature
Speaker 1: of the state and of the politics of the state.
Speaker 1: And I think we're starting to starting to see more
Speaker 1: and more of that in Georgia. But I'm still going
Speaker 1: to put it. I'm still going to put it right
Speaker 1: now in the third slot because because of the fact
Speaker 1: that this time Osof isn't going to have be running
Speaker 1: with Rafael Warnock or a presidential campaign, right, He's got
Speaker 1: to do this entire turnout operation on his own.
Speaker 2: There.
Speaker 1: So North Carolina one Main three, Georgia Main two, Georgia three,
Speaker 1: number four on the less, I'm gonna put Michigan, so
Speaker 1: it drops down a slot because I've jumped started Maine there.
Speaker 1: And look, I do think Mike Rodgers is he went
Speaker 1: down a weird road. He decided to claim that somehow
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four election was rigged, that it or
Speaker 1: he's implying he's opening the door to some conspiracy theories
Speaker 1: as to why he lost in twenty twenty four. Boy,
Speaker 1: that's a long way away from the Mike Rogers I
Speaker 1: first started covering when he was in It's going to
Speaker 1: come as a surprise, I given that he doesn't really
Speaker 1: have any serious primary opposition, the fact that he's going
Speaker 1: down this sort of Trump grievance road on his twenty
Speaker 1: four election is a bit of a head scratcher. Doesn't
Speaker 1: seem as if he needs to be catering to that
Speaker 1: primary voter that enthusiastically. So perhaps he really believes this,
Speaker 1: Perhaps he's going down this rabbit hole. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's good politics for him, but you know, he's still
Speaker 1: the reason I still give him and why I think
Speaker 1: Michigan could be very competitive is We're going to have
Speaker 1: a very messy Democratic primary. Who knows who gets elected?
Speaker 1: Is that the super progressive that gets elected is that
Speaker 1: the outsider and lsied is the progressive. McMorrow is the
Speaker 1: sort of outsider. Stevens is the establishment candidate. They've all
Speaker 1: scrambled to be anti Schumer now, even Stevens on that front.
Speaker 1: So that primary could get messy, and it's an August primary,
Speaker 1: and it means that rogers Is should be in a
Speaker 1: strong position. But I am I do think that's a
Speaker 1: loser to go down the conspiracy road in a swing
Speaker 1: state like Michigan. And then I'm putting a new seat
Speaker 1: at number five. I had New Hampshire in the top
Speaker 1: five before. No longer am I putting New Hampshire there
Speaker 1: because I think the political environment indicates that it's more
Speaker 1: likely another Republican health seat is going to fall before
Speaker 1: a Democratic health seat. And look, I think Johnson new
Speaker 1: is a much stronger candidate than Scott Brown potentially in
Speaker 1: an open seat. But if the wind is blowing left,
Speaker 1: New Hampshire goes with the wind right, you know you
Speaker 1: can still get elected as a Republican in New Hampshire,
Speaker 1: which it needs to be in a either even or
Speaker 1: good Republican year. I don't know if this is a
Speaker 1: winnable race for any Republican Chris or Johnson unhu. If
Speaker 1: the wind is blowing as strongly for the Democrats in
Speaker 1: twenty six as it was blowing for the Democrats in
Speaker 1: New Jersey and in Virginia in twenty five, I can
Speaker 1: just tell you that it knew it. The odds are
Speaker 1: it's going to look more more like a blue state
Speaker 1: in an environment like this than it will a swing state.
Speaker 1: So my new number five is Shared Brown and Ohio.
Speaker 1: John Houstad is the appointed elected senator there. He's been
Speaker 1: doing quite well in some of his union endorsements and
Speaker 1: getting a few union endorsements at Shared Brown, and when
Speaker 1: he was an incumbent senator would get but if you
Speaker 1: just shift, if you believe the electorate in general is
Speaker 1: just going to be five points better across the board
Speaker 1: for Democrats, like it was in Virginia, that basically makes
Speaker 1: Ohio a coin flip. And what we learned about Shared
Speaker 1: Brown in twenty four is he can run three to
Speaker 1: five points ahead of the Democratic of the generic Democratic number.
Speaker 1: He can't run it eight or nine points ahead of
Speaker 1: a Democratic presidential candidate. He's running in a midterm years.
Speaker 1: He has had more success running in midterm years than
Speaker 1: he has in presidential years. And he did win once
Speaker 1: in a presidential year in twenty twelve, but he had
Speaker 1: that Obama had a lot of wind at his back,
Speaker 1: and that was quite helpful to him. In twenty eighteen,
Speaker 1: he was able to win in a Trump year thanks to,
Speaker 1: you know, a combination of a week Republican opponent, but
Speaker 1: also just again it was a good Democratic year.
Speaker 2: So at this point I.
Speaker 1: Put Ohio there, And this means three of the five
Speaker 1: in my five most vulnerable are Republican held seats. So
Speaker 1: if Democrats sweep the five hold for Georgian Michigan and
Speaker 1: flip North Carolina, Maine, in New Hampshire, they are only
Speaker 1: one seat away from the majority. That's where this top
Speaker 1: five list sits right now. That's this is why if
Speaker 1: you want to mess around on the political betting markets,
Speaker 1: one of the best early bets to make right now,
Speaker 1: because it's a sheriff stock, and then you could sell
Speaker 1: that share before the results actually happen. Because if Democrats
Speaker 1: succeed in good candidate recruits in Alaska, a good candidate
Speaker 1: in Kansas, you may see them get six or seven
Speaker 1: Republican held seats in the competitive category.
Speaker 2: Will they win them all?
Speaker 1: No, But if they can put Texas, Iowa, Alaska, Kansas, Nebraska,
Speaker 1: they can put three of those five in play in
Speaker 1: addition to the three that I think they already now
Speaker 1: have a either even or slightly better chance at flipping.
Speaker 1: You you suddenly have.
Speaker 2: A path to the Senate majority. There you go.
Speaker 1: The top five list this week. North Carolina, Maine, Georgia, Michigan,
Speaker 1: Ohio the five Senate states most likely to flip this month.
Speaker 1: As far as the Chuck todcast is concerned, All right,
Speaker 1: let's take a couple more questions, ask Chuck. None of
Speaker 1: these will be shut down and related. This one comes
Speaker 1: from a third generation Navy vet John B from Saint Louis,
Speaker 1: and he writes, Hey, thanks for responding to my question
Speaker 1: about the atomic bowl. All right, so it's not a
Speaker 1: first time long time, but at least a second time
Speaker 1: long time. I'm a World War Two in Cold War
Speaker 1: history buff and I think it's crucial to keep conversations
Speaker 1: about those times alive in our modern discourse. We live
Speaker 1: in the shadow of those events. I'm wondering how America
Speaker 1: might have been different during the past fifty years if
Speaker 1: we had not ended the draft falling Vietnam. I think
Speaker 1: we could expand that to include national service in general. Thought, John,
Speaker 1: you are scratching an itch that I'm constantly dealing with.
Speaker 1: I think, you know, I think not having national service.
Speaker 1: I think national service could be a huge advancement of
Speaker 1: trying to depolarize America, right, getting people, getting American citizens
Speaker 1: to believe that they have to that part of your
Speaker 1: citizenship is to give a little bit to this country
Speaker 1: and service. And it doesn't have to be in the military.
Speaker 1: It can be a variety of ways you can give.
Speaker 1: It could be working, you know, in home health care
Speaker 1: for an elderly parent without a close knit family. It
Speaker 1: could be cleaning up rivers and streams. It could be
Speaker 1: teaching in underserved communities that need more school teachers. It
Speaker 1: could simply be tutoring, or it could be military service.
Speaker 1: I think anything.
Speaker 2: It's why I.
Speaker 1: Think that in general, you know, I'm speaking on Veterans
Speaker 1: Day here. In general, I'm a big advocate of bringing
Speaker 1: as many veterans as you can into the workforce, into
Speaker 1: any sort of culture because most military veterans, the experience
Speaker 1: of being in the military exposed them to people that
Speaker 1: grew up differently than them, people that worshiped different faiths
Speaker 1: than they did, but they all learn how to have
Speaker 1: a common mission and buy in some ways wearing the
Speaker 1: same uniform. They realize when you wear the same uniform
Speaker 1: you bleed the same red blood, that hey, they're really
Speaker 1: the differences really are are all surface. They're not They're
Speaker 1: not very deep at all. So not to sort of
Speaker 1: try to like, you know, but for the good old
Speaker 1: days kind of mindset, I'm a I'm a huge advocate
Speaker 1: of national service, and I think it could be a again,
Speaker 1: you know, you know, whether it's a way to pay
Speaker 1: for college. There's all sorts of ways that you create
Speaker 1: sort of for every year of national you know, maybe
Speaker 1: everybody has to do one, and every extra year you
Speaker 1: give you get that much more off of your tuition.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a lot of ways, you know,
Speaker 1: or to trade school, whatever you wanted to do it.
Speaker 1: Anything that we could do to sort of get Americans
Speaker 1: from different walks of life to have to have to
Speaker 1: give back for a period of time only strengthens the
Speaker 1: fabric of this country.
Speaker 2: So I'm a huge advocate, all right.
Speaker 1: Next question comes from Chase little Rock, Rockansas and response
Speaker 1: to your uestion about staying on the thirteenth floor in
Speaker 1: game day, if a black cat crossed my path while
Speaker 1: I walked under a ladder on the way out of
Speaker 1: my thirteenth floor hotel room in Fayetteville, I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: batted an eye. This razorback football season has already used
Speaker 1: up every ounce of luck in the entire state. Bobby
Speaker 1: Petrino's come back to or hit all the wrong notes,
Speaker 1: and honestly, Faydeville needs a total due over new coach,
Speaker 1: new schemes.
Speaker 2: I knew everything.
Speaker 1: So at the college football job market heating up, which
Speaker 1: openings do you think are the most tempting and who's
Speaker 1: got the chops or luck to fill them go hogs eventually. Well, look,
Speaker 1: you know, Florida is always the It's one of those
Speaker 1: that you think it should be a bigger power than
Speaker 1: it is. Irony is that the history of Florida football
Speaker 1: is actually quite mediocre.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: They've really only had two brief periods of success, one
Speaker 1: with Steve Spurrier, one with urban Meyer and Tim Tebow,
Speaker 1: which really probably have to talk more of Tim Tebow
Speaker 1: than urban Meyer. And they've been mediocre or port and
Speaker 1: every other you know, at any other period. In theory,
Speaker 1: it should be a great job to have. In theory,
Speaker 1: it should be a place that you could become a powerhouse.
Speaker 1: It seems to be a cesspool of micromanagers, right. It's
Speaker 1: kind of like you know what Auburn is. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it has all the ingredients, but it's impossible
Speaker 1: to succeed because the boosters are always going to get
Speaker 1: in your way. It just trusts me from experienced mind me.
Speaker 2: So on paper, it's Florida.
Speaker 1: But you know, I'm a huge I think Arkansas is
Speaker 1: a hidden I think Faetteville is a is a is
Speaker 1: a hidden gem in the South. I think it's one
Speaker 1: of the it's you know it's it's going to be
Speaker 1: the next Austin or Nashville. I think it's a great
Speaker 1: place to live. I think that somebody is going to
Speaker 1: crack that code. And when you have Tyson Chicken money
Speaker 1: and Walmart money, the the you know, if the if
Speaker 1: the university athletic program will invest in football, Arkansas could
Speaker 1: be a great job. It is not clear they want
Speaker 1: to invest in football as much as they do basketball
Speaker 1: and baseball. That seems to be the be the biggest
Speaker 1: problem there. I do think the Penn State job is
Speaker 1: actually quite appealing to because there's such a loyal fan base.
Speaker 1: You I actually think even though Franklin, you know, think
Speaker 1: about how long he survived without succeeding at the tippy
Speaker 1: tippy top, which means fan base has actually a lot
Speaker 1: more patience than it gets credit for. So that would
Speaker 1: be a good one that I think you could see
Speaker 1: quick success at and sustained success that and be in
Speaker 1: a community that would be pretty comforting. I mean you
Speaker 1: could turn you could definitely turn Happy Valley into Tuscaloosa
Speaker 1: and have a Nick Saban like run there. And that's
Speaker 1: probably the way I look at it. Where could you
Speaker 1: have a Nick Saban like run where you might go
Speaker 1: a decade and just be so dominant. I think Fills
Speaker 1: a place to do that. I think I think a
Speaker 1: Happy Valley is a place to that. I'm less convinced
Speaker 1: you can do that in Gainesville, and I don't you know.
Speaker 1: I think history shows you it's pretty difficult to do.
Speaker 1: And I don't know if Virginia Tech it can be
Speaker 1: on that highest level right now. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they have the financial backing to do that.
Speaker 2: On that front.
Speaker 1: All right, I'm gonna take one more question here. This
Speaker 1: comes from john S and Millie Waukee. Of course, everything
Speaker 1: I've learned about socialist mayors came from Wayne's World, the movie,
Speaker 1: and Alice Cooper.
Speaker 2: But I digress.
Speaker 1: Diehard listener here, just finish your podcast with rich Tawe.
Speaker 2: Fascinating.
Speaker 1: You answered my past question about voters in Ozaki and
Speaker 1: Sheboygan County's voting anti woman richest focus group confirmed my
Speaker 1: hunch some voters dislike Trump, but voter form anyway likely
Speaker 1: because of Harris. Have your thoughts on this changed at all,
Speaker 1: even if the polling doesn't pick it up. Look, I
Speaker 1: think it's pretty clear there was a group of voters
Speaker 1: that you know that Harris couldn't appeal to that. I
Speaker 1: guess what you're you know the better the question is
Speaker 1: that that Joe Biden did appeal to in twenty twenty. Yes,
Speaker 1: But I also think it's pretty clear, you know. I
Speaker 1: think it's a fair question about about whether it is hard.
Speaker 1: You know, I think I think race is less of
Speaker 1: an issue. I think gender was more of an issue.
Speaker 1: But it's hard to disaggregate it because you had a
Speaker 1: poor economic environment. She was defending the history of sitting
Speaker 1: vice presidents trying to succeed unpopular presidents is pretty stark, right,
Speaker 1: you know, Hubert Humphrey couldn't win with LBJ, but he
Speaker 1: came awfully close, and neither could she. So it is
Speaker 1: I think it's hard to find isolate the specific voter itself.
Speaker 1: You hear it in there, but you'd have a better
Speaker 1: argument if she lost with a better economic record. And
Speaker 1: I think that that's.
Speaker 2: You know, it is. I still think there's a.
Speaker 1: Little bit of choose your own adventure on this that
Speaker 1: you can. You certainly hear it in there, and you
Speaker 1: certainly hear it in those focus groups, and Rich sort
Speaker 1: of described it. It is a hurdle, but I don't
Speaker 1: think it's a brick wall, but it becomes a brick
Speaker 1: wall if you know, there's like this massive economic downturn, right,
Speaker 1: if a whole bunch of other stuff are going, it's
Speaker 1: sort of it is a factor.
Speaker 2: Not the factor.
Speaker 1: On this front. So I think that that. I mean,
Speaker 1: if we were seeing women struggle to win governorship in
Speaker 1: these swing states, I'd be I would be more persuaded.
Speaker 1: But you know, we look look at the state of Michigan.
Speaker 1: It's elected, you know to two term women governors in
Speaker 1: the last twenty years, uh in, Jennifer Grant Holme and
Speaker 1: Gretchen Wetber, but they didn't support Kamala Harris.
Speaker 2: Was that, you know?
Speaker 1: So I think that that it. I think you can't
Speaker 1: dismiss it as a factor, but I will. I am
Speaker 1: still going to dismiss it.
Speaker 2: As the factor, if that's fair, all right.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna leave that there because guess what. I'll
Speaker 1: be back in twenty four hours with another episode of
Speaker 1: the Check podcast until we upload again.