[00:00:14] Speaker A: Greetings, friends. Again, this is Dick flax with Diraka Laramahal on talking strategy, making history. And we have the privilege and pleasure today of having with us our friend and fellow conspirator in many ways, Harold Myerson, one of the really distinguished political journalists in America. He's right now, and for years, he's been editor at large, I guess you might say, at the american prospect. But he's longtime columnist for the Washington Post and has a lot of other credentials, including a lot of time in California, where he was born and grew up, and a lot of involvement with the labor movement and a lot of involvement with the democratic socialists of America in their founding period in particular. And those are all things we want to talk about. But really, Harold, the thing that got me triggered to invite you on was the fact that you were at the democratic convention in Chicago a few weeks ago. And I thought, well, wow, this is interesting. Harold is immersed in that scene in Chicago in the Democratic Convention, and I remember being with him in 1980 in New York at the democratic convention. This would all be worth getting into. And so I think, by the way, we're talking together the day before what may be a great debate in some sense between Harris and Trump. So we don't know what the world will look like when this finally reaches the world, but hopefully it'll still be here, the world that is. So, Harold, give us a sense. What was your big takeaway from Chicago in the democratic convention?
[00:02:02] Speaker B: As I noted in my writing, when I was 18 years old, I had been in Chicago for the 1968 convention as maybe the youngest staffer working on Eugene McCarthy's campaign. So to begin, it was a happier convention than 1968, though it would be hard to find a more unhappy convention than 1968. It was happy because the delegates came to it, and Democrats generally came to, came to it with a sense of having been saved from a fate worse than death, which was the continuation of Joe Biden's campaign, which was generally believed to be a surefire loser against Donald Trump. So this relief was the starting point, and it was added to by the fact that at that juncture, Kamala Harris had proved to be a very able campaigner. So there was this mixture of relief and happiness that generally suffused the convention and whatever internal divisions exist within the Democratic Party, as they exist within most any political party. The current Republican Party excepted, they seem to be relatively dismissed as insignificant compared to the general sense of satisfaction that the party had somehow managed to find a more electable candidate.
[00:03:35] Speaker A: One thing that I was curious about because of some things that were written in the prospect, american prospect itself, and maybe even things you said, is, on the one hand, the enormous feeling of actually a kind of movement atmosphere that one could feel at the convention through watching it on tv. But then there were many scenes in which extremely well to do people of means were gathered in rather exclusive circumstances. And I wonder if that contrast was real and how you felt it was.
[00:04:10] Speaker B: Real, but it's a permanent fixture of american politics as it currently exists. There was nothing in that sense. I've been to innumerable conventions going way back wherever this has been a factor. What differentiates this convention is that the center of the party, the Joe Biden Kamala Harris wing of the party, has now rejected most of the neoliberal tenets which reached an apogee, I think, in the Carter and Clinton administrations and were still around in Obamas. Joe Biden finally realized what those of us on the left have been saying for a long time, that the corporate globalization of the economy was hugely damaging to american workers, that government intervention was needed to prompt a more egalitarian and prosperous economy. I think those are the starting points. And that was what was different about the democratic convention. What was the same was that the rich we shall always have with us, to paraphrase the Bible, and yes, they were there at the Chicago convention as well.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: When we were there in 1980, I was very amazed and impressed by the fact that there were also these caucuses based in social movements, and I'm certain that continues to be the case. And maybe how would your experience, 40 years later or more, almost 45 years later, with respect to the movement and grassroots and feel of the party at a convention like this? Is it still, how has that changed and developed and evolved?
[00:06:06] Speaker B: I did attend one morning there was a labor caucus chaired by the head of the retail, wholesale and department store union, the RWDSU. And there were a thousand people in that room. They weren't all there because they were union members or union officials who were also delegates. It drew people like me, who was there in a journalistic capacity. But Bernie was there and spoke, and different labor leaders were there and spoke. And Chuck Schumer came by to affirm his pro labor credentials, which aren't totally, he is not Bernie, but it was significant, I think, that he was there. So this was certainly part of the convention that was alive and well. Now, let's face it, most of the young people and a significant number of their elders certainly did not avidly support the somewhat standoffish position that President Biden has taken vis a vis the Netanyahu government in Israel and its prosecution of the Gaza war. I have to say that I think the switching out of Biden for Harris had the effect of greatly diminishing the number of demonstrators outside the convention who were, I don't think there were ever more than about 1500 of them at any one place or time.
And this was certainly, I would say, a constant undercurrent.
[00:08:00] Speaker A: Did you go to the panel discussion that the uncommitted people put on?
[00:08:07] Speaker B: I couldn't make it, but one of our, one of our writing fellows did go to that. And, in effect, actually what they were asking for was really moderate stuff. And there were still most of them affirming that they would support Biden in the end. I think the. I'm sorry, support Harris in the end. I think what the Harris campaign was afraid of was the Trump people taking a snippet of a speech from the palestinian physician who many wanted to speak to the convention and use it against Harrison, a campaign ad. I think that was the main deterrent to keep that from happening, which actually.
[00:08:51] Speaker C: Which speaks to the transformation of the conventions over the time period that you've been going and being involved. Right. From 1968 and the time where the primary system was new and not fully formed. So we'd go into these conventions without a nominee, and there were actual fights over it through the eighties and its transformation into a very television driven thing, where and when something that is supposed to be a political event that involves all the aspects of a rambunctious and diverse party, but also cannot produce any. Yeah. Snippets, any sound bites that could possibly be used by the opposition, you start to get a very narrow, a big narrowing of what is, like, going to be allowed on the stage and so forth.
[00:09:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. And this has been the case for some time. Yeah. This isn't new. These are now conceived of as spectacles to get across a unified message, whether or not there's actually unity. At this particular convention, the unity was, we're willing to overlook what divisions we have because the alternative is so grotesque, the alternative being a Trump presidency. But, yeah, for a long time now, these things have largely been spectacles made for television, and these days made for television and social media.
[00:10:24] Speaker A: So were you just maybe wind up the convention itself? Were you happy that you had been there? How do you, how did you feel?
[00:10:32] Speaker B: Look, for someone like me, this is seeing a lot of old friends. This is. There was one lunch of what we might describe as alta Cocker, journalists, where I was able to see some folks I hadn't seen in a long time. Conventions are, on the one hand, exhausting. I told, one of the things I told our young writing fellows was whenever you get a chance to eat, no matter what, your schedule is so screwy, you may end up going without a meal for 20 hours.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: Absolutely.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:11:08] Speaker C: They're wild.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Yes.
Conventions are exhausting, but they can be exhilarating. And this one was largely pretty exhilarating.
[00:11:20] Speaker A: It felt that way on watching it. And I know from having been that one time at a convention that in the real world, what's on the floor is not necessarily what is experienced on television, which is much more of an actual spectacle. As you say, on the floor, it seems more chaotic and nobody's really listening and all the rest of it. But in this case, I just thought everything was just as a production. It worked extremely.
And in terms of the sentiments that were expressed, I was inspired by this fusion of patriotism and class struggle all in one package. It reminded me of the 1930s, the popular front, in a way, and so forth. And I mean that in a good way.
And I don't know if you have those kinds of.
[00:12:13] Speaker B: Yeah, look, Biden has claimed to be at least the most pro union president since Roosevelt, if not the most pro union president ever. And that reflects a shift to a mentality that sees record levels, the highest levels of union approval ratings since the 1960s and the Gallup poll that came out on Labor Day of 70%. And within the Democratic Party, it's probably about 90%. And this is a party that did major damage to unions, in particular during both the Carter and Clinton administrations. Yeah, that marks a real shift, and it should call to mind some of the politics of the Roosevelt era.
[00:13:00] Speaker C: Let's talk about 1980. When you, what were you and Mickey and Dick doing at the democratic convention in 1980?
[00:13:12] Speaker B: This gets back to what Desoc and then DSA was about in those years. And in 1980, there were still two distinct groups, DESOC and Nammdez. So there wasn't a DSA yet, though it was beginning to loom on the horizon.
One of the tenets of the organization was, you may as well be an open socialist within the Democratic Party for the reason that fish swim in the ocean and not on land, that the Democratic Party had to begin with a substantial base of members who were certainly predisposed at least to the basics of social democracy. Indeed, in 1967, Harrington wrote a book called toward a Democratic Left, which said that the party had in it, within it a hidden social democracy.
I think during times like the Clinton presidency, you would have to emphasize the word hidden more than the rest of it. But this certainly was a founding tenet of Desoc. And therefore Harrington sought to unite progressive forces around some economic issues, like full employment in particular, but other expanding social democratic aspects of the american economy. And so part of this expansion involved a project called Democratic Agenda, which was to unite progressive unions and people coming out of the sixties to get them together. After some of the Vietnam War, divisions had cooled down. Get them together with veteran progressive veterans of the thirties. That was a lot of, demographically, almost what I'd say early de sac was about. I had been in anti war movements and was able to meet surviving rutharites and some people to the left of the Rutherites, but who went back to the thirties as well. Anyway, the democratic agenda was an attempt to unify as a force the economic left of the Democratic Party. And in 1978, which was, I think, the precursor to the 80 convention, the Democrats, as one, a result of the McGovern reforms after the debacle of the 68 convention, had instituted something called a midterm convention. And Carter's economics had veered so far to the right that democratic agenda began to essentially assemble delegates. How midterm conventions were structured was almost create your own format as you go.
[00:16:18] Speaker C: I thought it was just the same delegates from the year before.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: No, but it was far fewer. And they showed up at the Minterm convention in December of 1978 in Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee. And there were some resolutions on economic issues that were clearly distinct and opposed to some of Carter's policies. The deregulation and his essentially, with the Paul Volcker appointment to the Federal Reserve, his willingness to go through high levels of unemployment, to engender high levels of unemployment, to beat inflation, from which I would argue, as Volcker continued to do this in the early years of the Reagan presidency, that's when the industrial belt began to turn into the rust Belt.
That was where unemployment soared. So there were 40% of the delegates at Memphis who were voting against Carter policy in a structure that, oddly enough, DESOC and Michael Harrington had put together. One of the consequences of this was that the Democratic National Committee quickly abolished the institution of midterm conventions. They didn't want this ever to happen again. But it also served as a launching pad for Ted Kennedy's challenge to Jimmy Carter two years later in the democratic primaries. Kennedy made the most memorable speech at that convention in a forum on health care that was convened actually by the then UAW president, Doug Fraser, who was one of the stalwart allies of the Harrington initiative. This was basically confined to unions that were, for one reason or another, opposed to the general AFL CIO leadership of. It was still George.
[00:18:17] Speaker C: So the UAW and the machinists and.
[00:18:21] Speaker B: Asked me, were the big financial parts of SEIU and the amalgamated clothing workers and so on. They were heavy presence in all of this.
And Fraser convened a session on healthcare where Kennedy delivered what is still in my mind one of the really great speeches I've ever heard. It's the only speech I've ever heard where the audience was standing and cheering through the last two minutes of Kennedy's delivery. It was just electric. And this really was the springboard for his challenge to Carter, which he largely muffed because he really didn't get back to his message in the early stages of those primaries, and he lost them all. He started winning at the end, but that was late. But there was explicit socialist caucus at these conventions, and there was the Kennedy slash democratic agenda slate of delegates, to which I suggested to my friends Dick and Mickey flacks that they might want to join. And that, in fact, is what Mickey did.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: Yeah, she ran as a Kennedy delegate here in Santa Barbara. She was strongly supported by the democratic local folks. And we went. And I. She was frustrated on the floor because. And I. But because, you know, we went to the socialist caucus and my. So there were probably 60 delegates out of how many? 23,000 in the socialist caucus. And there was a lot of media there, but I realized they were all european media. And I thought this was intriguing. And then we went to the democratic agenda rally. I guess it was in town hall, and there was quite an array of speakers on the platform of representing not only labor, but I think Gloria Steinem must have been on the platform. And I thought, this is my conclusion, Harold, at that time was, this is a great idea that Harrington has, but there's no real strategy for building the left within the Democratic Party other than these kind of symbolic moments. And I don't know if that was a fair assessment, but that's what I've always felt about that time.
[00:20:44] Speaker B: The director, the paid staff executive director in those years was the late, great Jim Chapin. And Chapin once noted that we managed to get union presidents and vice presidents as members or significant allies, but not so much the rank and file. And as he said, we're not even organized top down. We're organized top sideways. And I think that was a great description of what we were able and unable simultaneously to do.
[00:21:18] Speaker C: And that's what really seems to me about a kind of sad irony of the situation now is that if we go back to the late seventies, early eighties, when there was, is, I think, very brilliant analytical moment in America, in the american left, american socialism, of this move towards a realignment strategy, swimming in the ocean along with the other social movements and the Democratic Party, and some activity at the level, as you say, of, like, leadership and delegates to conventions that were abolished, right. Like a space that gets torn away precisely because there were socialists in it, but no electoral strategy, no organizing strategy, as Dick said, that would build upon it and give it some political power. And then you fast forward to today, and you have at least three open socialists spoke from the podium. You had at least three. I think there were more. Several DSA members, several people who are. Who might as well be your Elizabeth Warrens and so forth, like just good left Democrats. And when a lot of more growing electoral strength in places like Chicago, a DSA mayor, right, while it's happening, as opposed to Richard Daley back in the day. So all of these things, we have a left in Congress, a left in the Democratic Party, that is.
Yeah, there's unknowing, perhaps children of Michael Harrington, but DSA is like, not. There is struggling over whether to think of itself as part of the Democratic Party or not, or actually really struggling to think of how far away from the party to be, et cetera. But I know that there is a. There's a group of people in DSA, certainly a ton of paper members, but also activists, especially in places like New York, who really would love to see a combination of that strategic orientation, the elected officials we've already won. And then something that DSA never really did before of, until now, of like, real electoral power building real electoral power behind this.
[00:23:40] Speaker B: Of the long stretch of history of desocnam and DSA, is that DESOC was founded at a time when we weren't quite the plutocracy that we have become since and when economic inequality, which was always there and was, of course, you know, Michael Harrington became famous for writing the other America study of poverty in America. But economic inequality was not really at the top of very many agendas. And it really took several decades of neoliberal policy to create both those levels of economic inequality and the public awareness about it, which you began to see in Occupy Wall street back in 2011. And which Bernie then just the success of Bernie's initial presidential campaign in 2015 and 2016 was like this revelation, a surprising revelation, not just to the nation, but to those of us on the left and to Bernie himself. Who did not really anticipate the reception that he got. So I think that begins to explain the kind of movement at the base that you just talked about, Diraka and I, the absence thereof in the early years of DESOC and NAMM, and then the failure of the current DSA to be part of this really is almost the ironic footnote to all of this. And it's the sheer ridiculousness of this is made evident by the success of locals like in New York. And AOC, let us note, gave one of the signature speeches of the convention.
[00:25:34] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:25:37] Speaker B: That says something about both the base and the superstructure, as it were.
[00:25:41] Speaker A: So two of the most popular politicians in the United States are Bernie Sanders and AOC, and DSA wants to denounce them at this point, or a lot of the factors.
[00:25:52] Speaker C: Yeah, the factions in control.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: I think DSA's growth, which began with the elections of Bernie and then AOC, made every sectarian group in the nation aware that this was an organization they needed to involve themselves in. And we have seen the kind of self marginalization that has resulted from that.
[00:26:19] Speaker C: But I do, I think it's helpful to think about, because I think the realignment project is still live. It's still the thing we need to be doing. And I think talking about and thinking about the eighties and nineties, the left in the doldrums, the kind of bad habits of mind and so forth that developed during that time is really useful. And that very much overlaps with your journalistic career, your writing career.
[00:26:49] Speaker A: And.
[00:26:50] Speaker C: Yeah. So that's a question I have for you, is what are some of the developments or challenges or surprises that you've seen in covering politics, the left's impact in politics, say, in the last 30 years, like since Clinton, for me, in.
[00:27:12] Speaker B: Some ways, and I discussed this a lot with Steve Greenhouse, my friend who was a former labor beat reporter for the New York Times.
[00:27:20] Speaker C: Excellent writer.
[00:27:21] Speaker B: Yeah.
We had grown hardened and inured to the continuing decline of american labor, which let me know if you look at labor membership rather than labor approval rating is still continuing due to the many things, but above all, the complete dysfunction of labor law after it's been weakened by half a century of adverse court decisions and what have you.
But the biggest surprise is the support we see for labor and for unions. And certainly, as I just noted, the surprising revival of american socialism, which is, if we have to attribute this to one person, Bernie is clearly the responsible agent here. Both of those. The revival in that sense of an economic left is the most gratifying surprise that I've seen. Although given how the post 2008 crash recovery really bypassed most millennials for a decade, it shouldn't have been that surprising. We were creating a whole generation that began to realize that free market american capitalism was not working for them. And we still see this in particular on issues like housing and childcare and what have you, that they and the Gen Z generation really understand that the.
[00:29:05] Speaker C: Market ain't working very and every proposed solution gets called socialism by the right anyway. So. Yeah, right.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: Let's take a look, though, because you're such an experienced observer of the California political scene. So I would like to suggest that California is at a later stage in any development of a democratic, leftish, center left coalition dominating local government, the state government.
[00:29:36] Speaker C: It's very positivist of you, Dick, but.
[00:29:39] Speaker A: In terms of policy outcomes, there's some real frustrations that are not. Well, they haven't been publicized much. We've discussed a little on this podcast over the couple of years. One example is in housing, where everyone agrees we need a vast increase in affordable housing. But the social housing policy direction has been totally frustrated. At the state legislative level, I know that in LA, a major tax on high end real estate might generate a source of real funding for social housing, but on the state level, some pretty progressive bills, including one by our local senator, Monique Limon, just went nowhere in the legislature. And instead, a pro developer, pro real estate line continues to be the dominant one, even in the Democratic Party. And then the most recent example is this very interesting thing that happened with the proposal to tax, in a way, Google and the other, it's a big one. And in order to create a fund to support journalism, I thought this is a brilliant idea. And under Newsom's leadership, some people are saying the whole thing has been killed. So I wonder if you have any, if we can get past this goddamn election coming up and win, then we are in a stage of maybe what you might say, a new stage of struggle here in California in which we really have to take on the corporate control, including control within the Democratic Party and how to developing a strategy around that. So any thought on that?
[00:31:31] Speaker B: Yeah, let me step back for a minute and get to what I think is the nub of what we might call California exceptionalism. It's the fact in part that California has the lowest percentage of working class whites of any state except Hawaii, which has never had a white majority, that there, there was a lot of white working class involvement in the aerospace industry, which were, those were the largest private sector employers in California. The industry shrunk radically with the end of the Cold War and the recession that occurred late in Papa Bush's administration.
George HW Bush was statistically the highest levels of unemployment for a while there, and in an early bill Clinton administration, too, was in California, due to just the huge downsizing of Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, Boeing, etcetera. And a lot of those folks left the state, and that was a lot of the white working class.
California now, I think it's fair to say, has a predominantly latino working class.
In a sense, the demographic base of Trumpism is in many ways absent in California, which the California Republican Party has been too dumb to realize and have marginalized themselves as a consequence.
So that creates a democratic party that is going to be leading the nation on non economic, social issues, on cultural issues. And I think it's fair to say that in California, this is indeed the case, but campaigns something else because the Republicans have marginalized themselves. Business now mainly donates to more moderate, more centrist Democrats. Democrats, because Republicans don't even have enough strength to override.
They don't have enough strength to be the required one third in either house of the legislature. So there's absolutely no incentive for conservative or simply self interested business interests to donate to Republicans. Instead, they donate to more conservative Democrats.
[00:34:15] Speaker C: Especially with top two. That strategy works really well.
[00:34:18] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's. Yeah. This is the legacy. The one ongoing legacy of Schwarzenegger is to bolster more business oriented Democrats. And business isn't prodding the Democrats to move right on cultural issues, on LGBTQ issues, etcetera. That's not their concern. Their concern is the kind of thing, Dick, that you alluded to. Profits for the real estate industry, profits for developers.
There's a so called moderate caucus, the Democrats and the legislatures.
Two of their leaders left to go to work in one case for pharma and in the other case for Chevron.
That would be a republican move if pharma and Chevron thought there were significant numbers of Republicans to donate to them, but there aren't, so they donate to these guys instead.
[00:35:20] Speaker A: If the Democrats don't succeed, for example, in really creating an affordable housing outcomes for people, there will be a massive disillusionment with. With the democratic party or with the government as the instrument. And that's exactly what we don't want. There's a real opportunity in California to show what government support of the needs of people can help people solve their problems. But if these are stymied by sensible policies, we're not talking about anything radical when you're talking about the kinds of housing programs that exist in european countries that promote.
And it's even in the interest of corporations to have that kind of public housing support for their recruitment, for their own wage bill, so to speak. And yet I'm not optimistic at this point because we don't have a strategy yet in terms of the pro housing movement, how to counter the real estate lobbies, very sophisticated modes of operation.
But anyway, just pointing this out that once we win, in a sense, the sort of basic electoral framework for a left center coalition and democratic party, then we have to, then we have a new stage of struggle, which I'm looking forward to if we can get there.
[00:36:53] Speaker C: Yeah. Or maybe we have to learn to do them all at once, all the time.
[00:36:57] Speaker A: Well, yeah.
[00:36:58] Speaker B: I have a piece up on the prospect website on the day that we're recording on Monday, noting that Kamala Harris is running on continuing Joe Biden's industrial policy, on expanding that to really investing in what she terms the care economy, which means increasing the child tax credit and affordable childcare and paid medical and family leave.
And she has now initiated also a campaign directed at helping small businesses, giving them a major tax breaks. But what I argue is that she needs also to address directly working class issues. And if the care economy is stereotypically but also objectively tilted towards working class women, there's a need to do something a little more specifically towards working class men. And I was suggesting alongside the care economy and the small business economy, she needs to go further on a build economy, which would create a government agency not quite like the WPA, but that would at least funnel a lot more workers into the building trades, apprenticeship programs and to increase through various tax breaks and what have you. And appropriations the fund for Apprenticeship, the funding for apprenticeships and increasing the number of promised new houses from 3 million to something much greater than that through much more extensive tax credits to developers, whatever it takes. That would be both good policy and particularly between now and November, good politics and California. I think you're right. Dick can go further than that with a more explicit commitment to social housing. And I would hope that we will begin to see more explicit advocacy of that at the city level. In San Francisco, in Oakland, in Los Angeles. I say Oakland because my daughter, son in law and grandson lived in a large apartment in Oakland and they love to buy a house, but they can't afford it. So anyway, I think Oakland and Los.
[00:39:34] Speaker C: Angeles probably, but San Francisco is heading in the exact opposite direction right now.
[00:39:40] Speaker A: But I think, and right here in Santa Barbara, we have, I think the likelihood of beginning to create a housing, affordable housing trust fund that would support what we're calling social housing. And so I'm not pessimistic that those things can happen. And I agree on the more local level rather than state level. Maybe before that, that might be the progression around that. But yes.
So we're talking on a day that the New York Times has released one of their, I think, deplorable surveys that show that, if anything, Trump is slightly ahead of Harris. And one can argue, I would argue professionally, very vociferously, that there's something very wrong with their polls. But putting that aside, and she says, we're the underdogs, we Democrats, and that's supposed to be a spur to further engagement and work by people. But how are you feeling about all of this, about the prospects?
[00:40:52] Speaker B: I think I basically agree to this extent with that survey, which is that this is still a very tight jump ball election.
Ask me after Tuesday's debate, which is when this podcast will air.
There are just so many variables in play.
[00:41:15] Speaker C: What do you mean? Nothing can change from a single debate. Single debates don't do anything right.
[00:41:22] Speaker B: We should hope that Donald Trump does about as well as Joe Biden did in their last debate.
We shall see. But it's going to be close and even, look, even if Kamala was just clobbers Trump in the debate and wins a presidential election, I suspect the Democrats will retake the House, but I am very nervous about their ability to hold the Senate. John Tester in Montana has fallen behind his opponent. And assuming the Democrats win everything else on the Senate, that would still leave them with 49 senators.
There's a lot to be done between now and November, put it that way.
[00:42:07] Speaker C: So I have a. Oh, go ahead.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: Go ahead. I just want to say, what are you sensing about the ground campaign, the grassroots involvement in mobilizing and organizing?
[00:42:18] Speaker B: I think the Democrats have pretty much got their act together. And I suspect if you end up looking at swing states in, if you look at Arizona and Nevada, if you look at Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin, you're going to see really very good, large ground games. I'm, an interesting question is how much you're going to see it in contested house races, including in California.
The editor of my magazine, David, Dan, even though the magazine is headquartered in Washington, David lives, David has two homes. One is in Venice, California, and the other is in Palm Springs.
I was talking with him earlier today about whether anyone precincts walk in Palm Springs when it's 116 degrees. The answer is no. But it will. It will cool off somewhat between now and November, and we will have to see if there's sufficient ground game.
[00:43:19] Speaker C: Yeah, the turnout will be good, which is good for those races.
But so far, the last couple of cycles, the current state party leadership has not done it. Doesn't have a very good track record for Holden, these really important deep blue.
[00:43:36] Speaker B: State seats, but track record in New York, where the state party is essentially dysfunctional. And like, in California, there are probably four congressional districts that could swing if the Democrats get their act together.
[00:43:51] Speaker C: Yeah. Oh, yeah, New York.
There's that old joke that, like, everyone in the south is always says, thank God for Mississippi, right? So that they're always the second worst in the country. If you're Alabama, you're like, oh, man, grateful for Mississippi. And that's how I always feel about Democratic Party politics in California. I'm like, hey, man, at least we're not fucking New York.
But I have a presidential level politics question for you. As Harold. Like, you were one of the voice that was pretty early relative, relatively speaking. Like, directly calling for Biden to step aside. It just being like, you gotta go. And I was, like, involved in some online discussions with you and so forth in which people were reacting to that of, no, we can't abandon him, and so forth. But why is it that today, that in today's politics, you could have this open secret that Biden has deficiencies, that it's a problem, et cetera? Nobody challenges him. There was no serious challenger to get him to move off the ticket or reconsider or anything until it's like the very last minute and he has to walk away. But whereas the two conventions we talked about before 1980 and 1968 are periods where sitting, democratic presidents faced serious challenges from serious grown up politicians that pushed one of them to step aside and the other one, whatever, held his own and won the primary. But why is that over? And why did we have to sit and wait for Joe Biden to decide that he should step aside?
[00:45:38] Speaker B: There were fundamental political differences within the parties in 68 and 1980, which there really weren't this time around. Look, the challenges to Johnson were over the Vietnam War, which was the number one issue in the country, particularly since there was a draft at the time. I speak as someone whose draft number was 29 out of a possible 365. And in 1980, there were very serious issues over Carter's economic policies.
So those were fundamentally issue based challenges.
There was no real issue opposition to how Biden was governing and what his policies were, a b, a serious challenge would have had to have started well more than a year ago when Biden's condition was not really all that apparent to most democrats.
His decline, by all accounts, has been going on really precipitously for about a year.
It took some time. The lateness of Biden's withdrawal essentially made impossible any kind of subsequent party choice mechanisms, primaries or caucuses.
To a certain degree, it's dumb luck that Kamala Harris has proved to be a pretty damn good campaigner because it's not always been that.
[00:47:17] Speaker C: Yeah. Campaign effectiveness is not necessarily the criteria that you pick a veep for, but.
[00:47:23] Speaker B: That'S what we've seen.
[00:47:24] Speaker A: There's one other thing, which is the Trump thread itself makes sense, which made it less plausible that you would challenge and split the party in the face of the Trump threat. That's what I think was very, was quite important at this point.
[00:47:43] Speaker B: But, yeah, Trump is Biden.
[00:47:45] Speaker A: If Biden can't even speak in a debate with Trump, there's, that's, that's the end. You know, that.
[00:47:51] Speaker C: Those are all, those are good points.
[00:47:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And I, this is.
[00:47:58] Speaker A: This has been very good and makes us want to have you back as soon as we can figure out other hooks to put you on. And we look forward to reading your constant commentary and observations as we go.
[00:48:13] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:13] Speaker C: And people want to find you and follow your work. And what should they do?
[00:48:16] Speaker B: Www.prospect.org and I should add that we do not have a paywall.
Just go to prospect.org and whatever limitations we may have, imposing a price is not one of them.
[00:48:31] Speaker C: And you, I will say, as a subscriber, I also would encourage people to subscribe and invest. And it's a great publication, a really important asset for, for the left.
[00:48:42] Speaker B: So Bob Kuttner and Robert Reich, among the most distinguished social democrats of their generation, and continuing in that tradition, I.
[00:48:52] Speaker C: Guess we have to have Bob Reichon at some point and complete the trifecta Californian.
[00:48:59] Speaker B: So, yeah.
[00:49:00] Speaker A: All right. Hopefully we were, all three of us, looking forward to a new stage in life in a couple of months or else finding a hole to sink into. But anyway, thank you very much with.
[00:49:16] Speaker B: The two of you.
[00:49:18] Speaker C: Thank you.
[00:49:19] Speaker B: All right.
[00:49:19] Speaker C: Take care.
[00:49:23] Speaker D: He sent the world in mind he took the oceans and sky he set the border built the wall it won't stop till it holds it all and here we are standing on the brink of disaster enough is enough is enough is enough I know the answer.
Put a woman in charge put the women in charge put a woman in charge put the woman in charge.
The time has come.
We've got to turn this world around.
[00:50:21] Speaker A: That was episode number 39 of talking strategy making history.
You can find all our
[email protected] tsmh and when you get there, you can also subscribe to help us out. And with your subscription, you'll find and discover and make me enjoy a bunch of bonus things to listen to. Hope you will do that and that you will give us feedback and comment. You can use our Facebook page talking strategy making history for that kind of interaction, let us hear from you. Take care.
[00:51:10] Speaker D: Put the women in charge.
Put a woman in charge.
Put the women in charge.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: Heaven.
