Aloha and Namaste, everyone. And welcome to InPolitic with John Heilman, my podcast for Odecy and Puck, coming at you every Wednesday and Friday with fresh topical candid conversations with the people who roam the quarters of power and influence in America, from Washington to Wall Street, Hollywood, Silicon Valley, and beyond, shaping and shifting the warp and weft of our politics and culture. On deck today, we have someone who has transitioned swiftly, smoothly, suavely, and most of all, smartly over the past decade from the upper echelon of Beltway Mojo to the vanguard of new media, the one and only, Howard Daniel Pfeiffer Esquire. If you're into politics and you're into podcast, you undoubtedly know Dan Pfeiffer as one of the FAB 4 co-hosts of Pod Save America. And yes, I am invoking the FAB 4 very much intentionally because, love it or hate it, Pod Save America's place in the history of political podcasting is roughly akin to that of the Beatles in the history of rock and roll, a quartet of lovable mop tops who came along at just the right moment and through a combination of talent, charm, and moxie, changed everything. And in case you're wondering, and I bet you are, in this analogy, John Favre was Paul, Tommy Vieter is John, John Lovett is Ringo, and Dan is George, the low-key cerebral, sneakily but supremely talented backbone of the group who quietly but firmly holds the whole thing together.

Before Pod Save America thrust him into supernova, superstardum, Dan played the same role as part of a different FAB 4 alongside David Axelrod, David Pluff, and Robert Gibbs on Barack Obama's 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and in the Obama White House, where Dan actually served longer than any of those other three goofballs for six years and all. First as communications director and then as senior advisor for strategy and communications. Since departing the swamp, Dan has written a trio of New York Times bestselling books. 2018's, Yes, We Still Can, Politics in the Age of Obama, Twitter and Trump, 2020's, Untrumping America, A Plan to Make America a Democracy Again, and 2022's Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the MAGA Media are destroying America. If you are wondering where the hell his book for 2024 is, join the club. Although no one can fairly accuse Dan Pfeiffer of being a slacker. In addition to co-hosting Podsave America and Raising a couple of Supercute Kids on the Side, Dan writes a must-read substack called Message Box and hosts another podcast in the Crooked Media family that goes by the very punny and mildly funny name of Polar Coaster.

The official description of which, annotated by me, reads, Does every new poll make you want to crawl under your desk and get into the fetal position? Yeah. Do you hate the polls but can't quit them? Fuck, yes. Well, we have a podcast that's just for you. And I will say it's definitely for me, dork that I am. And I'd imagine it's also definitely for a ton of impolitic listeners, too. So all you people out there, go sign up for Polar Coaster right now. Dan and I have been having a running on and off conversation about politics for going on 20 years now. And as much as admitting the duration of that gab fest makes me feel like I should start shopping for a walker or boosting Mike Barnacle's Rascal, there are a few people inside or outside the political game with whom I dig talking politics more. And you'll understand why when you hear Dan chop up the post-Labor Day state of the presidential race and kick around the topics of Donald Trump's ridiculously desperate and desperately ridiculous efforts to get right with America's women folk on abortion and IVF, Kamala Harris and Tim Walls the eagerly waited sit down with CNN's Dana Basch, Barack Obama's pearls of Wisdom about what ails our body politic, Dan's torment over what befell Joe Biden, and why, in the end, it's more than okay not to be Leonard or McCartney when you are routinely spitting out the political analytical equivalence of Here comes the Sun, Something, and My Sweet Lord.

So everyone, buckle up, strap in, and hunker down for this all-new episode of InPolitic with John Heilman, featuring Dan Pfeiffer. Coming at you in three, two, One.

You know, I do the weave. You know what the weave is? I'll talk about nine different things, and they all come back brilliantly together. And it's like... And friends of mine that are English professors, they say, It's the most brilliant thing I've ever seen. But the fake news, you know what they say? He rambled. That's not rambling. When you have, what you do is you get off a subject to mention another little tidbit, then you get back onto the subject and you go through this and you do it for two hours and you don't even mispronounce one word.

Dan, is it wrong that I still find it funny? I mean, I get the stakes. You know me, I'm not, you to me. I'm not like, trivializing him or normalizing everything else. I still find it when I see it, I still can't suppress it. I think that might be a sign that I'm still human.

Yeah, I think you're still human. I think that's fair. I mean, You have to laugh. And that's both the curse and the blessing for Donald Trump is he is an object of ridicule, but at his events, he is entertaining for the people there, for his fans, all that stuff that People like me dunk on. It makes great fatter for our podcast. It was great for my tweets back in the day when I really cared about Twitter. But for the people in the audience, it's why they're there. They like the weirdness. They like the digressions. They like the windmills and the sharks and all of that other stuff. Those are the old hits they want them to play when they go to those rallies.

Yeah, it's still fat Elvis to me now. It's like he's past his prime. I do wonder, though, we'll get back to the weave in a minute because there's been a lot of weaving lately with Trump. I mean, real weaving with Trump, though, of consequence. And you've been writing about it, and I want to get into it. But my contention is that he has significantly, and this should be an obvious thing to say, but I can't get everyone else to say it, even in the mainstream media. His degree of cognitive decline, his lack of mental acuity, not just the usual psychically bent shit that he says, but the stuff where it's just like, he's not tracking. I think, as your client said to me on a podcast a few weeks ago that he thought that Harris becoming the nominee broke him in some fundamental way. And it has felt like that for the last six weeks. It's different than it was before. He's always been non-sequitors. He's always been long. He's always rambling. He's always done the weave. But I just think he can't stay on a thread anymore. And I think that's good news for Kamala Harris.

Yeah, he's definitely unraveled some since he became the nominated. He seems fixated on somehow the injustice of the whole thing that he's actually going to have to fight for this. If you just think back to that, it seems hard to imagine. When you think back to that convention, he's just sitting up in his box like a pig and shit, just so gloria, at least counting the days until he's the United States again. He's already won. He has the Mission Accomplished banner across the convention at the Pfizer Forum, and now that's not the case. So yes, he has unraveled. He has been less disciplined. He had one attack on Biden. It was very easy. He did it all the time. It fit with the narrative of Biden that the public and the press already believed. So it was simple. It was this batting practice every day. I think that his level of decline was always Was present before, too. Definitely, he is a little more broken, but it's just that the body politic was so focused on Biden because it seemed more serious for whatever reason. Biden gave off more fragile vibes, I guess. But Trump, he called Haley Nancy Pelosi on multiple occasions when Biden was still in the race.

And I do think it's somewhat of a scandal that for all of the attention that Biden's age and mental capacity got, that Trump now is the oldest candidate running for President, would be the oldest President by the end of his second term in history, is getting none of that attention right now.

I do, too. I wrote a column about it where I was like, he's not rattled. It's not like he's off his game. He's demented. He's in a state of... I would have said the same thing about Biden at that age, not that he doesn't have some... Again, the ageism people always get mad. I'm like, Old people have a lot of things to give to us. What they don't have is the capacity to do the hardest job in the world 24/7. They just don't. Anybody you've ever met in that age, in that age group, they just don't have it. So Trump doesn't either. Okay. The reason I think it's important is this. If you think about what is it that could stop Kamala Harris's progress, her momentum, right? Which has slowed a little bit in this period, but has still, by every demonstrable metric is, and we'll get to the state of the race in one second. But if you think about what could stop her, she fucks up some external event that changes the altars of dynamics of the race, that's an endogenous or an exogenous event. Or Trump defines discipline. I just think the third of those is now...

I don't think Trump is capable of doing what he did in those last couple of weeks in 2016, where he pulled it together and talked about trade in China and immigration exclusively for 12 days and helped him get over the hump in 2016. I don't think he could do that now if he had a gun to his head.

Yeah, clearly not, because he has actual real political operatives working with him who are telling him what to do. There was There were very few smart people around him in 2016 or 2020, which is why... But this time, he has people who know how to win races, and he is forcibly not listening to them. So no, I don't think that he's going to somehow turn into a different, better candidate over the last 60-some days of this race. That's not on the bingo card.

So in Message Box, you were talking about... I want to talk about the state of the race just to set the table here. But one of the things you talked about in one of your state of the race, now I forget which one of the message boxes. But you said for much of his presidency in the campaign, Trump's favorability rating hover in the high '30s, low '40s. However, the battleground states, Trump is now regularly seeing favorability ratings in the mid '40s, his highest ever. How do you explain that under the circumstances?

Polarization. It's similar to the difference between the 2016 and 2024 Republican conventions, where you still had a bunch of people who didn't love Trump, but were going to vote for him. And now this is Trump's party. And so it's It's primarily his numbers with Republicans that have gone up. I don't know how much it matters a ton because a voter from someone who doesn't approve of you and a vote from someone who doesn't approve of you count the same. And at the end of the day. But his control of the Republican Party has gone up, and he is doing better with independence in 2024 than he was doing in 2020.

Okay, so what explains that?

I think that that is a couple of things. One, the same things that were powering him when Biden was in the race: dissatisfaction with the economy, dissatisfaction with the state of the country. It makes sense if he's doing better with a bunch of people who voted for Biden in 2020, his numbers are going to be better. And so he has won over some group of mostly young men, mostly of those men, mostly young and some black and Latino, and that has helped him. And also the other thing that I think does matter is he is now, and you see this in the polls, he represents change more than Kamal Harris does. Obviously, Kamal Harris represents change much more than Biden does in voters' minds, exponentially more. But in a global anti-income incumbent environment when the right track, wrong track is 25, 75, and people are not happy with the economy, the candidate represents change is going to be more popular than they were certainly when he was an incumbent during the middle of a once-in-a-generation pandemic.

So we sit here Tuesday after Labor Day, traditional start of the fall campaign. People are looking at the polling averages. New York Times has Harris at 49 and Trump at 46 nationally. Nate Silver has Harris at 49 and Trump at 45.5. 538 has Harris at 47, Trump at 44. And the most recent high-quality national polls, the ABC Ipsos poll, out a couple of days ago, that has Harris at 50, notably. First time I've seen 50 for Kamala Harris. And Trump sitting at 46 among registered voters, Harris at 52, and Trump at 46 among likely voters. So, Dan, that's a pretty consistent picture nationally, and obviously much tighter in literally every battleground state. So give me your sense of just where things are today. And the stupid question people always ask, Well, if the election were held today, who do you think would win? Understanding the election is not held today. The election is held 60 some odd days from now. There's still more field to run in here, but getting a sense of where I need to summarize the state of the race as we sit here.

I think if you polled all the press corps, secret poll, right? Secret ballot here. All the press corps covering the race. Most Democrats who are not working on either the Harris Walls campaign or one of the Superpacks trying to help the Harris Walls campaign, you would get 85% of people who would say that Kamal Harris would win if the election were held today. If you ask the people who are actually deep in the numbers and paying really close attention on what's happening in the battleground states, it's closer to 50/50. Who said that she would win today. And I think it's very possible if the election were held today, Trump would win. I think that is a very possibility.

And do you think that disparity is because the people who are out covering... You're saying reporters covering the race, right? Is that what you're saying? Press.

Yes. Reporters covering the race and just Democrats broadly, unless the ones who are on the campaign.

And because they overstate the enthusiasm, the vibe, the mentum. They overwrite that.

They are overrating the national polling. Right. Overwaiting the national polling. Dramatically overwaiting the national polling.

So what's the... Go ahead.

I was going to say, when you dig into the battleground poll numbers, they're all top toss-ups, every single one of them. There is not a single battleground state poll where one of the candidates' polling average, where one of the candidates is up or down I made more than two points, and most of them are tied or one point. So everything's a coin flip. And when you start doing the math of what happens if one of the two candidates does not win Pennsylvania, it all gets very complicated very quickly. Right.

And Well, yes. And it's funny because people say, well, they're not outside. They're within the margin of error. I'm like, they're not just within the margin of error. They really are. They're statistical.

They're tied effectively. Every single state's a dead heat.

Every single state's a dead heat. It's not even just like, hey, you're pushing the margin of error because you got to double the number and all that stuff. What's the number that, in your judgment, would make you comfortable if we got towards now? Granted, there's early voting that starts in various states at various times, et cetera. But we got to election date, and you were looking at the state of the race then, at all the reliable public polling and internal polling that you get your hands on. What would Harris's lead need to be nationally and in battleground states for you to be like, I think we're going to get this. It's going to be close. No one doubts it's going to be close under any circumstance. But what's the number you look at as your bogey for I'll sleep okay tonight?

There is no number like that. We hit that number in 2020, and we sweated that thing out until Friday after the election. And so the polling industry has made... Campaign polling has made some adjustments to try to solve for the problem of underrepresenting Trump voters. But no one knows. This is an untested proposition. We haven't had an election since 2020 with Trump on the ballot to actually test out these new methodologies. So all those numbers, I remember we were doing a staff call at Crooked Media the night before the election, and I went through all the numbers, and I was like, These numbers, this is not the polling area you would need to lose if these numbers are right is massive and ahistorical, and we almost had it, especially in the battleground states. Now, the polling should be theoretically better. There is more good battleground state public polling this time than there has been at any point. There was very little in 2016, more in 2020. We don't have COVID this time, which I think did affect things on the margins in some way, should perform people think. But I'm always struck by the fact that the American Association of public opinion or pollsters or whatever else went and had a conference, where they all got together to try to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it, and they just took their hands and said, We can't figure it out because all the polls were all wrong for different reasons.

And so there is no number at which I think I will sleep well the night before the election. And I don't know that there's a number that we... We're not looking at a race where any of us are going to sleep well the night of the election because we will be up all night and maybe into the next day or two.

Yeah. I assume we're all still going to be awake come Thanksgiving. You know if we're lucky. There's my last state of the race quote, just before we dig into some of what's going on with these candidates and listen to some sound. In Milwaukee, Ax And Amy Walter held this little thing where Tony Fabrizio came at the Republican Convention. And they were in their peak hubris moment at that moment. And it was like, well, what's your best path to... The couple of times a report asked, what's your... Tell me about your past in 270. And Tony said, well, we stopped counting when we got to two dozen. We have so many past 200, 270. We can't even count them all. But here's the easiest path. And as soon as he said that, I was like, okay, so this is actually the path that if things get tight, which was win Georgia, win Pennsylvania, we're done. We don't have to win Arizona. We don't have to win Nevada. We don't have to win Michigan. We don't have to win Wisconsin. If we win Georgia and Pennsylvania, we can lose everything else from 2020 can stay the same.

And if you look at their spending, they're spending money right now in Georgia and Pennsylvania. They're spending money everywhere, but the disproportionate amount of money they're spending as Pennsylvania and Georgia. That looks like the... Now it's a tighter race. That looks like the same way that Biden used to look at just the blue wall states. It looks to me like Trump is... They're very heavy leveraging on those or betting on those two states. I understand why Georgia is hard for Democrats to win. It's a Republican state. A Democrat can win it, but it's fundamentally, it's a state that's basically still a Republican state, trending a little bit purple, but it's tough, right? I also understand why Pennsylvania is tough, but I When you hear more from the smartest people in your business, always that the place where they get, even with those who feel very strongly about how well Harris has performed, how much the momentum matters, how she has a better set of tools in her toolkit than Trump to play out these next 60 odd days, everybody still goes, Man, Pennsylvania is going to be hard. I know why. I have some ideas about that, but I'm curious A, if you agree, not just that it's the tipping point state, but it's going to be there's some peculiar challenges, particular challenges to Harris, and what those are.

How do you look at Pennsylvania and why it's so much harder than Wisconsin and Michigan, for instance?

It's just the fact that Pennsylvania is harder than Wisconsin. It just speaks to the change in politics since 2020. If I remember correctly, Harris won Michigan by almost three points. I'm sorry, Biden won Michigan by almost three points. Biden won Pennsylvania by one and a half. The one Michigan by or one Wisconsin by 0.6 %. And that's the way those states have gone, is Michigan is the most Democratic of the three, Pennsylvania the second, and Wisconsin is the one that people keep waiting to tip over into Ohio land, because it's so white compared to the other two. But because Trump has made gains with black voters, younger men, and continue to hold his margins with white non- College-educated voters, Pennsylvania becomes challenging. And it doesn't have a particularly elastic electorate where you can go get a bunch of new voters like Georgia does. Georgia has huge swaths of unregistered, very likely Democratic voters, Black voters, younger voters. There is in-migration from the rest of the South from younger voters who profile as Democrats coming in there. And so Georgia has this growth, it's growing in the right direction. Pennsylvania is static in a way. And when you talk to people on the campaigns, we all talk to the same people, is it's all of the above.

It is Is still struggling to reach Biden 2020 numbers with Black voters, both in terms of support and turnout in Philly, in particular. It is, is Harris going Can she bleed some of non- College-educated White voters? Can she make that up with non- College-educated White women because of abortion? There is still some stuff in the suburbs where people are a little more recalcitron to get there. This is the problem with these races. There's no one simple thing that you need a little bit from every single pot, and all the pots are in Pennsylvania, and just to get over the top. Wisconsin is also smaller and therefore, and Ben Wendler has organized it to the teeth. And Pennsylvania is a huge state. It's harder to... The bigger the state, the less impactful person-to-person field organizing is. And so it gets even more challenging. But I'm curious to hear why you think the particular reasons are.

I think those are... I go back just to the... All of that seems right to me. And whenever anybody says, well, with Harris at the top of the ticket, she's going to be able to drive turnout through the ceiling in Philly and in parts of Pittsburgh. I just look at what Biden did in 2020. Biden was not Hillary Clinton in 2020. I mean, Hillary Clinton, like, screwed that poodle, but Biden did not. And her numbers with black voters are still not as good as Biden's were, as we know. I mean, they're getting there, they're making... But as you said, that is not unlike the urban areas of North Carolina, where you have a growing number of black, and particularly black upscale voters, and in Atlanta. Philly and Pittsburgh are static. Those are not growth. And every black voter in Philly has had a touch in 2020. They're going to have to work really hard there, it seems to me. And then you've got that giant part of the state, that giant part state that is, as James Carville used to say, is like, Alabama. You know well from doing Obama there. It's a tricky map.

Even for a candidate who was as fantastic a performer and as much of a phenomenon in his moment as Barack Obama was, Pennsylvania was tricky because because of those weird dynamics of what goes on in the center of that state while also trying to motivate black voters in Philly and Pittsburgh. That's not like an easy balancing You got to be pretty good to do that. You guys are great at it, but it's hard.

And it gets harder with a candidate like Trump who is maxing out turnout in rural areas in ways that much Mitt Romney and John McCain certainly did not. Totally. So Trump is netting more voters from that part of the state than any other Republican going back to basically Reagan. That's a huge problem.

I want to talk about Trump and abortion and IVF because it's been the headline of... I'm going to plug message box again because as you know, I'm a fan. And and you've been on this hard the last couple of days. I want to play Trump, two quick bites of Trump. The Trump from last, I believe, Thursday, and then Trump from last Friday, where suddenly something happened between one day and the next. So let's start with Trump last Thursday being questioned by NBC News' Dasha Burns about abortion. You overfer and you want abortion to be a state's rights issue.

In Florida, the state that you are a resident of, there's an abortion-related amendment on the ballot to overturn the six-week ban in Florida. How are you going to vote on that?

Well, I think the six-week is too short. It has to be more time. I've told them that I want more weeks.

So you'll vote in favor of the amendment?

I'm voting that I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks. Look, just so you understand, everybody wanted Roe v Wade terminated for years, 52 years. I got it done. They wanted to go back to the States. Exceptions are very important for me, for Ronald Reagan, for others that have navigated this very interesting and difficult path.

Now, here's Trump just 24 hours later answering the same question from a reporter on Fox News.

Voting yes or no on Amendment 4 in Florida.

I think six weeks, you need more time than six weeks, I've disagreed with that right from the early primaries. When I heard about it, I disagreed with it. At the same time, the Democrats are radical because the nine months is just a ridiculous situation where you can do an abortion in the ninth month. Some of the states, like Minnesota and other states, have it where you could actually execute the baby after birth. All of that stuff is unacceptable. I'll be voting no for that reason.

I want you to just talk about what those two things are from the point of view of a voter who hears that, and then at the same time as a political professional with a special mentor in communications, what do you see happening there with that candidate?

So what is interesting about this, I'm going to default to the political professional because I haven't been a normal voter since I was 22 years old. So I don't even know how to- I was trying to flatter you. I appreciate it, but that is an unachievable territory for me. Basically, as a political professional, you look at that audio and you have two choices. There's a fork in the road. One is Trump's a flip-flapper, because basically this is 100 times worse on paper than John Kerry's I voted for before I voted against it. One thing is, path one, flip-flapper. Path One, flip flopper. Path Two is he is just an anti-abortion extremist who is the person on this planet, most responsible for overturning Roe v Wade. He just endorsed one of the nation's most extreme abortion vans. And the first Path One, the flip flopper one, is appealing to a lot of people because there is this very naive sense in politics that if we can just point out the hypocrisy, we will defeat our opponents. And that is a terrible error. And this is a very similar... And then there is the, get yourself on the right side of public opinion, or put him on the wrong side of public opinion on abortion.

And this is not dissimilar to the choice we faced with Mitt Romney in the 2012 campaign. Romney had all these modern positions when he was running for a governor, first for Senate and then governor of Massachusetts. Then now he's running in the Republican primary, 2008 changes all positions, goes further to the right in 2012 to actually win the primary. And we tested this. And you could do the flip-flopper thing. And people were showing up at our headquarters with Mitt Romney blend in flip-flops. They were going to do all that. This is what people wanted. But when you did focus groups on it. What people took from what we really saw how voters interpret that is, oh, he really is personally moderate, but is saying what he has to say to win as any politician would. And so we're going to think of him as the moderate. And with Trump, Trump has a similar patina of moderation on cultural issues that Romney had. And this is particularly true for Trump because he's this New York billionaire, millionaire, whatever, who cheats on his wives, has sex with porn stars. Sarah Longwell always tells us the story about when she was doing focus groups in Ohio around the abortion referendum there.

And she asked him if they thought he was... If Trump was pro-life or anti-abortion, and everyone laughed. They laughed in the room. And many of them volunteered that he probably paid for abortions. And so every opportunity where Trump takes an extreme stand, you have to take that one.

Ohio focus group participants are not stupid.

The numbers on abortion have changed with Kamal Harris in this race. She has a much larger advantage, basically double the advantage Biden had on the issue. But Trump is still outperforming other Republicans, and most voters don't believe that he would actually pass a national abortion bid. The gift here is not the flip The gift is the eventual position he took, and that he was felt forced to take that position, which I think is quite interesting, because Trump has been able to get away with whatever he wanted in the Republican Party. And we finally found a line he could not cross, which was to be on the other side of the evangelical base on abortion in this race.

He behaved like a dog. As you know, I love dogs and would never do this to a dog under any circumstance. But he looked like a dog had been wrapped across the nose with a newspaper. He met the He didn't basically just tell some part of his coalition to go fuck itself. He got a, No, no, no, no, sir.

Go fuck yourself. That has not happened to him very often in life or in politics.

Totally. And I would say it's also just there's a sign of it. Well, the thing that I thought was so interesting about one of the pieces you wrote in the last couple of days is that I get well-meaning Democrats all the time who are like, Dobbs solves everything. We've been on a roll since Dobbs, and abortion is going to be the killer issue. And now we've got Harris, who's at least unlike Biden, who couldn't even say the word abortion. We've got Harris now. All we got is this is going to be the biggest issue. And you have to point out to people, A, the gender gap is huge in this race, and this is a huge opportunity for Harris. But there are all these caveats, and you were smart to point them out, I thought, because the first one you just pointed out, which is a lot of people just don't believe that Trump is going to push for a national abortion ban because they think personally pro-choice. In their heart, they think that. But the second one is that a lot of these battleground state voters, five out of seven have Democratic governors. And the 50 % of under-45 Republican women who are now pro-choice, they look up at Governor Shapiro or look up at Governor Whitmer or look up at many of these Democratic governors and go, This is never going to come to my state.

Trump ultimately is just going to say, Leave it to the states. I've got a Democratic governor. I care about this issue, but it doesn't rise now above the economy for me in terms of And so there's a lot of work to do here. It's not like a gimmey that abortion is the silver bullet that's going to kill Donald Trump in this race, even with Harris at the top of the ticket, at least. That's my view.

Yeah, that's right. The stat that always sticks out to me is that according to the exit polls in 2022, 31% of voters said inflation was their top issue. Number two was abortion at 27%. So nearly as many people voted in that election. A third, a quarter. Yeah, more than a quarter thought that abortion was their top issue. In pretty much So across the polling now, that number is between 14 and 16, and it's behind immigration. It's usually, tell me where you ask a question. It's economy, inflation, stop, high 20s. Then it's immigration, 17, 19, and then abortion around 15, 16. And so Just that the voter pool is so different. It's 40 % larger in some cases in the presidential election. And so that's one. Now, it doesn't mean that you can't change these things. Yes, Trump is getting with it, but you're going to have to message, you're going to have to work hard at it. You're going to have to find opportunities like the one he gave us on Friday to define him in a way that gets it, because there is this real target audience that is very critical to... Ron Browns even wrote a great piece about this a few weeks ago.

There's some sense that Harris could lose a couple of points among white men, primarily working class white men. But a large portion of, particularly younger working class white women, are pro-choice, and they're very offended by Dobbs and these extreme abortion vans. So that's the target. There's a lot of work to do here. There's a lot of strong ground. Obviously, Kammerheros can prosecute this case against Trump in ways in which Biden was simply incapable, in part just because of his discomfort on the issue. He wouldn't say the word abortion in in those cases, even if he did a lot of really great things and promised to do great things, if he had gotten a Democratic Congress coming back. But she's more comfortable and certainly more aggressive on the issue and a more credible messenger. But There's work to do here.

Real quick, Dan, before we take a quick break, which is truly on the merits, even more ludicrous than the weave that Trump is trying to pull on abortion. I want to just quickly listen because it's so fucking crazy. Listen to what Trump said about this on the same day that he talked about abortion with Dasha Burns, because it's just, I mean, it's mind-blowing.

I'm announcing today in a major statement that under the Trump administration, your government will pay for or your insurance company will be mandated to pay for all costs associated with IVF treatment, fertilization for women, IVF treatment. Because We want more babies, to put it very nicely. For this same reason, we will also allow new parents to deduct major newborn expenses from their taxes so that parents that have a beautiful baby will be able. So we're pro-family. Nobody's ever said that before.

As you have said, Trump is an idiot, but he's not a political idiot. It looks to me like this is a guy who sees the freight trade of this gender gap bearing down on him with full force and doesn't really know what to do. He's been flailing in a lot of ways since Harris became the nominee. But on these issues, he looks particularly out of sorts. Like the notion that, Hey, here's the answer. I'm going to stand up and say, We're going to have the government is going to pay for IVF for every woman in America, or we're going to force the insurance companies to do it. Is there anybody? I mean, really, even people who are not politically attuned, does anybody believe Donald Trump is going to mandate? I mean, the size of that program would be one of the most expensive programs in health care.

Yeah, I mean, it is an absurd idea. He didn't even deliver it with the credibility of someone to actually believe what he was saying. But they were The margins we're dealing with are so small, and the way information travels now, people are going to see that clip out of context on TikTok for the next 60 days. And are some people going to believe that? Maybe. Just for some of the reasons we just said about how they view Trump on these sorts of issues. Now, are there a million IVF-focused voters who would believe Donald Trump? Maybe not. But are there 5,000 in one of these states? Maybe. I don't know. It is I mean, it's absurd on its face, but a lot of absurd on their face ideas have gotten a lot of credence in this media environment in this cycle.

We can come back to TikTok. Whoever I hear, it's going to be on TikTok for that. I'm like, Fuck. We can come back to TikTok later. I'm taking a quick break. We'll come back with Dan Piper right after this.

Dan, I think the most important and most significant aspect of my policy perspective collective and decisions is my values have not changed. You mentioned the Green New deal. I have always believed, and I have worked on it, that the climate crisis is real, that it is an urgent matter to which we should apply metrics that include holding ourselves to deadlines around time. We did that with the Inflation Reduction Act. We have set goals for the United States of America, and by extension, the globe, around when we should meet certain standards for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions as an example. That value has not changed. My value around what we need to do to secure our border, that value has not changed. I spent two terms as the attorney general of California, prosecuting transnational criminal organizations, violations of American laws regarding the illegal passage of guns, drugs, and human beings across our border. My values have not changed.

That was from the long-awaited, much-anticipated, widely I'm currently viewed, at least by the political class, interview with Dana Basch, with Conal Harris and Tim Walls. It's a little bit old news by now, but since everybody basically took off the week after the convention, I thought we'd come back to it because you, my friend, are a consummate communications professional. I ask you, putting aside, relevant questions like, what did you think of how Dana Basch conducted the interview? Or is there a double standard in terms of, et cetera? How do you think she did in terms of dealing with the issues she had to deal with, the business she had to get done in that interview?

She did good. This was a test that was set up by the press for the press, and she had to pass it, and she passed it. There's no great, amazing answer to the question of, why did you have all these positions in 2019? And you have different ones now. But she answered the question in the right way. She did herself no damage. She did herself some good, and she passed, and now she can get back to the actual business of winning votes, because this was not about that. The number of undecided voters were watching a Thursday before, or Wednesday, whatever. Thursday, yeah. Thursday before Labor Day weekend interview on CNN at nine o'clock at night is quite small. I mean, six million people watched it, but we know those six million people, right?

I think, now, just to go to the question, yes, it was set up by the press. Fair enough. I don't think we disagree that it is reasonable. Again, I'm trying to make this question as pure as I can make it. Certainly, when you were involved with both Obama campaigns and in the White House, I would not have gotten in a fight with you on or off the record about the question of, should a President of the United States subject himself to serious probing, responsible scrutiny and questions from the national press? You would not have thought with me about that. You would have said, of course.

And And I'm not disputing that she should do that either, and she did. I think she gets a pass for why it took so long because she became the nominee. She woke up, went to breakfast, as vice president, was the nominee by brunch time, and then had to pick a vice president, do a convention, all of that. What I think is really... I'm fascinated by the discourse here. It is good to do these things, but there was always this bargain in engaging in it, which was, I, the candidate, or I, the campaign, will take on your questions that I think are going to be tough and mostly fair, but generally disconnected from the things that I think voters care about. I'm going to take all your process questions, your flip-flops questions. And in exchange for that, I am going to be on your airwaves, and you're going to show me to the people who need to see me. And over the course of time, as media has changed, that power dynamic has shifted. In pre-Internet times, the candidates always needed the media, and the media had all the juice. Without the media, you couldn't succeed.

And it just has shifted to such a point where she absolutely should do it. It's the right thing to do, but it really is of less value to her than it has ever been before. Sure.

I guess I just like, I take, I bristle, even though I know that many people in my business are egotomaniical. Even though I know the press does all kinds of shit that I think is ridiculous and not in our interest, nor in the country's interest. Not good for our credibility, motivated by the wrong things. But the notion that voters should be able to get a look at candidates in unscripted settings and not just have to get the only information they get about them are from scripted speeches and from digital video shorts that are made for TikTok or made for whatever platform they're made for, but that are not wholly canned, that the voters have a right to expect some more than that and to see them challenged and see them have to think on their feet. I'm just not going to say that I think that's just some self-interested press thing. I'm not saying you are saying that. I don't think it is. I'm not saying you are saying that. But you know, many people do say that, which is like, She's just doing the press set this up, and now she's done it. Let's move on.

She's never doing another interview. I'm like, Really?

She should do interviews that are in her interest. And some of those interviews will be with traditional mainstream press organizations. I hope she is going to sit down and an hour of satellite TV interviews once a week for the rest of this campaign. Sure. That's absolutely the right thing to do. Also, it's just we have to broaden the definition of what people do. It shouldn't just be can, but I will say to Trump's, not to his credit, because I would never give him credit. But today, he did this interview with Lex Friedmann, this podcast interview. He did Theo Vaughn's podcast the other day. They have a strategy where he is not doing any... And he's not getting any real shit. He's not doing interviews with anyone who is not on Fox, Newsmax, the big sit on interviews, but he's doing a ton of things with very targeted media that's reaching his core target. She has not done those things either yet for the same reason she hasn't done the scene interview, but she's going to have to do those two to win. I think I really want to go back and look at how this goes because there was...

Yes, voters have a right to expect it. I'm not sure their expectation about who should be asking the questions is the same as it used to be.

Well, I don't disagree with I'm not fighting for some particular... But Trump did that interview with Dasha Burns. He made that news on abortion by doing an interview with someone at NBC. I know it wasn't like a sit-down interview, but again, I don't care about that. I think the idea that there's some degree of interaction, and I think the interviews with podcasters and interviews with people, as long as they're asking serious questions. I think the problem with Trump is that a lot of them are... He's doing interviews with the conspiracy theory, Nutball Caucus, not with just people that the gatekeepers have led through when we've democratized the medium, more like we've let in some genuinely fringe characters. I want to play this one other thing from the CNN interview that's gotten a lot of attention, where Dana asks Harris about Trump's overt race baiting around her identity. Let's play that.

He suggested that you happened to turn black recently for political purposes, questioning a core part of your identity.

Any same old tired playbook? Next question, please. That's it? That's it. Okay.

So no campaign in history has ever been more disciplined, focused, and rigorous about not getting sucked into the identity politics thing than Barack Obama's campaign in 2008. The perils were enormous for that. And you guys were like, if there was one thing, you guys were just every day woke up. We're like, We're not getting into that fucking. We're not going to get pulled into that briar patch. That's not going to happen. Tell me about how you think that works There's an obvious logic to her doing what she's doing, which is not letting Trump pull her down in the mud, right? Where both of you get dirty and the pig likes it, as the saying goes. But there is this other thing where, and I'm curious What do you think about the other piece of this, right? The gender gap is a huge factor. And there is a question. I don't really have a point of view about this, but she's going to have a bigger gender gap than any gender gap in the history of presidential politics. And a lot of what's going on with her is dream driven by women, and particularly younger women, who care about Dobbs, but also care about the idea of the first black woman president.

Is there anything she's leaving on the table by walking away from both aspects of the identity politics trap? She's basically like, I'm not going to talk about being a woman. I'm not going to talk about being a person of color. Has she got that exactly right in your view, or is there some way that that could be tweaked, where she could stay out of the trouble that it could bring, but also amplify the inspiring motivational aspects that are baked into, particularly with a lot of women who identify with her for precisely that reason?

Who is the voter who really wants to elect the first woman of color president but will not vote for that person because she did not talk about that historic achievement enough in route to achieving that historic moment. That person doesn't exist. The way we would think of this with Obama is all kinds of people wanted him to talk about the history making of it. And it's like every time he shows up on TV, the history making is obvious. And that is true with Kamala Harris, too. And I love that moment during the interview because there's such this internal resistance Twitter, online, outrage culture pressure on Democrats to respond to Trump. It's been going on for almost a fucking decade now. And the way she resisted that was just so important. One of my favorite Obama moments from the '08 campaign was right after, I think it was in North Carolina. It was right after this infamous ABC debate with George Fnapp and Charlie Gibson. Philadelphia. It was Philadelphia, all the exact... All identity politics, every question.

It was like the... It really wasn't Twitter then, but it was basically the Twitter debate.

Yes, exactly. It was the blog debate, I guess, is what it was, if you go back then. But Obama is up there, and people said he didn't do very well, and it was just a mess. And he stood up there, and this was the summer or the spring that Jay Zee's The Black Album came out. And he stood up there, and he brought up all the brouhaha about the debate. He just goes like this, dust off his shoulders. And that's the right way to approach this. There's no upside. There is not a voter who is going to be more convinced that Donald Trump is a racist pig because Kamala Harris says it. It becomes the eighth billionth Democrat to say it over the last 10 years. Don't get pulled into it. And it also drives him bananas. That's the other strategic advantage of it. He wants to pull her into the mud so bad, and she minimizes him and diminishes him by not responding, which also makes him look weak and desperate, which is what you want to do with a want to be strong man.

So speaking of things that make Trump crazy, let's play this. Here's a Donald Trump just talking about Kamala Harris.

Now they have Kamala, who they say has many deficiencies, but she's a nasty person. The way she treated Mike Pence was horrible. The way she treats people is horrible. But the way she treated Justice Kavanaugh during that hearing, in the history of Congress, nobody's been treated that way.

You got many things to say about that. She treated Mike Pence terribly, although she didn't tell anybody to hang him. I mean, she didn't do that, but she was really terrible to him in that debate when she said, I'm speaking, please. Is that projection? What is that?

That is Trump working through his anxiety about... He's probably watched, been forced to, in whatever fake debate preppy he has, watch some highlights from the Harris-Pence debate. I'm sure he has been shown the infamous Harris-Cavenagh exchange or Harris-Bill Barr exchanges from those hearings. And he's scared. He's working through some pre-debate anxiety in public, as he handles most of his anxiety, which is on his sleeve in public.

How important... This is like a softball in the tea, but I'm just interested to hear how you try to describe. Obviously, the debate is really important, right? But how important do you think the debate is? And what do you think if you were working for the Harris campaign, you would say, Our primary strategic objective in this debate is blank.

So to answer the first part for us, the debate is... I mean, it's so trite, but it'll probably be the most important moment of this campaign, full stop. We've seen in recent debates how important they can be. What was it? Like 30 million people watched your convention speech, which is a huge number. Huge. That's a very partisan number. I suspect this debate will be at least two times that. Gargantch. And you will get people who have... And this is what happened even with the Biden-Trump debate, was people who had not been paying to the campaign today, tuned in. People don't want to pay a ton of attention to politics, but here's a moment. We live in an event culture where the only times when people will tune into linear television is when there's a giant event, live sports, award show or debate. And so I expect to be a massive audience to see her. Still, Most people do not know a ton about her, so this is her chance to introduce herself. Again, for people to take a measure of her. I think her primary strategic objective is to seem calm, steady, and strong, and make Trump seem old and erratic.

Being a candidate of color in a debate is a huge challenge because she cannot yell at him and tell him to stop speaking the way Biden did in 2020. That is not available to her that will be treated by the press and the public in a way that's deeply unfair. And he will be able to get away with a thousand things she can't get away with. But the presentation that she has put forward in big moments, and if she can really not get drawn into him and have the discipline to not respond to him or to respond to him on her terms, it could be a huge game-changing moment for this campaign.

I got to say that, yes. And look, if it were a movie, and you know the only reason I'm saying this? Because the rest of the campaign has been like a movie. Every time I say, If it was like a movie, we'd have an assassination attempt now. If it was like a movie, Joe Biden would bow out. No one would put that in a script. If it was a movie, it would finally actually happen, and Trump would actually blurt out the N-word in the middle of the debate. That would be what would happen in the movie version. I want everyone who's listening to this to know that if it actually happens, this was the place you heard it first. I won't really say I'm predicting it.

Must cite John Howman's podcast.

I'm putting a stake in the ground on this right now. I think let's take one more quick break here, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about Trump's attacks on Harris, the ones that have maybe a little more substance to them. Also, we'll talk about one of your old bosses, Barack Obama, Dan, and another of your old bosses, in fact, Joe Biden. We'll do all that right after this.

We have been clear in multiple conversations and in every way. That any major military operation in Rafeh would be a huge mistake. Let me tell you something. I have studied the maps. There's nowhere for those folks to go. We're looking at about a million and a half people in Rafeh who are there because they were told to go there, most of them. We've been very clear that it would be a mistake to move into Rafeh with any type of military operation.

That was Kamala Harris in March. We're talking about the Israel Hamas war. Dan, you just said this thing about how the debate would be the most important event of the fall campaign, which seems self-eventually true. But I would just modify it slightly to the most important event that we know about. We know that it's coming is on the calendar, and it's the last big event that we know about on the calendar right now. This actually has a date, assuming everybody sticks to it. There was the thing I mentioned earlier about external events. The killing of the Israeli hostages is an external event that hints at other kinds of external events that are complicated for her because she's part of this administration. No one thinks that she owns the Biden administration's policy towards Israel or towards Afghanistan, another thing that's come up because of the Gold Star family stuff and the Arlington controversy. No one thinks she owns those things because we all recognize the President of the United States makes foreign policy. The vice President is pretty meaningless in all circumstances, but especially on these issues. The Israeli thing has all this emotional resonance to it.

And you have her on tape saying, Got to stay out of Rafa. Stay out of Rafa, stay out of Rafa. That would be a huge mistake. And then the hostages are found dead in Rafa. The other side is pounding away on her. And Joe Biden over this. You've got headlines on right-wing sites that say, Hostage has found murder in Rafa, where Kamala Harris told Israel not to go. You've got Eric Erickson tweeting, Hamas killed an American citizen with a bullet in the back of the kid's head, and Joe Biden has been sitting on the beach, and Kamala Harris is on the campaign trail talking about joy. And then, of course, you got Trump himself. He's on social media saying, Make no mistake, this happened because Kamrad Kamala Harris and Crooket Joe Biden are poor, L, leaders. Americans are getting slaughtered overseas, they have blood on their hands. So, Dan, when it comes not just to this particular episode, this particular example, but to these exogenous events more broadly, how much danger do you think they pose to her? Because it's very likely that there's going to be other stuff like this in the next 60 days on the foreign policy national security front.

I think it is In a close race, obviously, everything matters. We think back to 2004, where a lot of people think that one of the reasons that Bush won was simply because that Bin Laden tape was released the weekend before the election. So these things matter. I think they matter less than we think they do. I'm trying to think of what would be the event that would cause this race to change even a couple of points. Is it an attack on the US homeland? Maybe. I don't know what the foreign... Basically, we've had two wars happened in the last two years here, and that really didn't fundamentally change politics in any gigantic way. Or let me say that. It did not marginally affect Trump's numbers in a way. It didn't affect him. It did. Obviously, Gaza certainly has some real political implications here in the United States. Ukraine, probably less so. A bigger concern is probably less foreign policy and more economically economic. If you were to have some meltdown, if there was something were to happen with spike gas prices, that would be very concerning. That was always our biggest concern in 2012 was the 2012 summer gas price spike because that really Almost nothing correlates with political outcomes other than gas prices.

And if those were to spike again, that would probably move inflation back even higher up on the agenda. And that has been bad for the incumbent administration in every country in the world, and probably this one, Do you think that the Trump campaign, and the reason I mentioned the Gold Star family thing and the Israel thing, is just to ask this question.

As we sit here now, again, Tuesday after Labor Day. Does the Trump campaign, have they figured out what contrast campaign they're running against her? To me, it looked like for a while, they basically were running 14 different kinds of contracts, all inconsistent, mutually inconsistent contrast. They couldn't find what's the frame that we want to try to put her in. Do you think they found that now, or are they still just as searching, let's put it that way, are clueless about what they want to say about her.

I think Donald Trump is clueless about what he wants to say about her. I think their campaign is crystal clear about what they want to say about her, and their ads reflect that, which is they want to define her as a radical liberal who cannot protect you on crime and immigration and is associated with the unpopular economic policies of the current administration. That is their narrative. And she remains a largely undefined figure for most voters, and particularly, most independents. And And we're in a giant race to define Kamala Harris. And if she wins that race, she wins the election. Still.

Still. That is not like, Well, once we get through the convention, that race will have been... No.

Just reaching the people who do not yet have an opinion on her is so goddamn hard in this media environment. It is hard to reach them with paid ads. The idea is where you just put them after the local news or after 60 minutes or on linear television. Especially a lot of them are skew younger. And it is so hard to pay to reach a younger voter right now because you basically on linear TV, it's sports. You have to spend out the wazoo for NFL and college football games. Texas, Michigan, coming up. That's going to be a huge one. You're going to see a gazillion ads on that if you live in Michigan. And And yeah, so still she remains undefined by a lot of people, which is why her approval number is around what Trump's is, in a little bit higher, but her disapproval number is lower because there's a 5 to 7% of voters who don't yet have a strong enough Don't know enough about her to have an opinion on her. And those people probably decide the election.

It's the nature of the warpspeed times that we live in that the Democratic Convention already feels like it happened months ago, if not like 100 years ago. I'm like, I was in Chicago how long ago? I mean, I was just eating those three-inch Trump footlongs at Weeders Circle. When? Is that last month? Is that last year? I don't know. But even with my drug addled brain and Swiss cheese memory, I do recall pretty clearly, that your old boss, Barack Obama, gave really quite a fine speech in Chicago. I want to play a little bit of that. It is a little long. It's a couple of minutes, but he's not exactly a fast talker, Barack Obama. But it's worth it because I think this part of the speech strikes me as, in a lot of ways, the pure essence of who Obama was and still is and how he sees the world and the central political challenge of our time. So let's take a listen to that.

I I know these ideas can feel pretty naive right now. We live in a time of such confusion and rancor with a culture that puts a premium on things that don't last: money, Fame, status, likes. We chase the approval of strangers on our phones. We build all manner of walls and fences around ourselves, and then we wonder why we feel so alone. We don't trust each other as much because we don't take the time to know each other. In that space Between us, politicians and algorithms teach us to caricature each other and troll each other and fear each other. But here's the good news, Chicago. All across America, in big cities and small towns, away from all the noise, the ties that bind us together are still there. We still coach Little League and look out for our elderly neighbors. We still feed the hungry in churches and mosques and synagogues and temples. We share the same pride when our Olympic athletes compete for the gold. Because the vast majority of us do not want to live in a country that's bitter and divided. We want something better. We want to be better. And the joy and the excitement that we're seeing around this campaign tells us we're not alone.

The last time, Dan, that I sat down with Obama for a good long talk was a couple of springs ago, and he was really focused on the notion that what mattered more in our world was culture than politics and policy, that culture was really the thing that was dividing the country. And he was really focused on these issues social media and how we're dividing in these ways. I've heard a lot of that in that speech. I'm curious what... He and Bill Clinton, both in different ways, ended up saying this thing about people not to live in a state of bitterness and urging people, as he often does, not to not tell people they're wrong if they're wrong, but to try to meet them with an open hand and to meet them with respect, even if you disagree with them pretty fundamentally. Boy, Dan, Democrats do not want to hear that shit, man. You go out and say that thing right now, you will get, at least in social media, you'll get really dragged.

I have worked on, edited, read, sat in attendance thousands of Barack Obama's speeches over the last 15 years of my life. And that is a consistent theme in all of them. And the idea is that if you really want to win elections and build governing power in this country, you have to be willing to try to persuade people who don't agree with you on everything, to try to invite them into your coalition, that we have to be a big tent party. And that's particularly true given electoral politics in this country and the realities of the Electoral College. And Obama has been very clear about this, that the party has... Some elements of the party have moved away from that broadly appealing approach to politics in the Trump era. And it is core to who he is. It's core to his organizing identity. It's core to Bill Clinton and how you go about becoming the governor of Arkansas with his background. And they were both sending an important message to the party. It's one that Kamal Harris's speech had the same message, was very consistent in the idea that we're going to have to get a bunch of people who don't agree with us on everything to come be part of our movement, our coalition.

And you're right, you will get dragged on social media for saying it. People will clip a moment of a podcast of you saying it if you don't say it in the exact right way. And that's why it's absolutely essential that the most popular, most trusted Democrat in the country, and one of the most popular, trusted people in the world, uses his convention speech to send that message, because that's how we win. That's the only way we win.

Okay. I did this interview on this topic with nick Christoff, just for the podcast, just a week ago, two weeks ago. And I got an well-intentioned, well-meaning, actually polite, respectful email, but also very sharp email with people saying, your problem is you're a white dude. And if you're a black person in America, you are sick of being told that I have to try to meet, find common ground with a Trump voter. They have told us what they think of us. They want to kill me or they want to hate me. That's one version. Why Why do I have to extend an open hand to someone who wants to chop my arm off? Another is, we've tried to talk to them. This is the oldest song in the world. We've been hearing this since 2016. We need to understand them better. Fuck them. They need to be beaten. And I know there's a lot beaten as in defeated at the polls, not beaten physically. I know there's a lot of people in your audience that must... I mean, what do you say to those people when your boss goes out and makes the appeal he makes and they come back to you?

They must come back to you. You must hear it all the time, which is like, Dude, we're over that. There's nothing. These people, if you like Donald Trump, you are a racist, you are a fascist, you are any democratic, you are authoritarian. I got no time for you anymore. Next.

I probably hear it less than you think. I think when Obama says things, people do tend to listen in ways in which they don't, rightfully, when I say that. I think there is a difference between what Obama is saying and what some other people say. He would invite anyone into our coalition if we could bring them What he is not necessarily saying is, go out and find all the people with mega hats, sit down, try to understand exactly what they're saying to it. What he's saying is there's a whole bunch of people out there who agree with us on some stuff, disagree with us on other stuff. They're well-meaning people. Maybe they don't pay so much attention to politics. Maybe they are sick of politics. And we have to go reach those people. We are not going to win this election just with our own people, with our resist shirts on, our Kamala Harris pins. We have to go find other people. And that is ultimately how we do it. And that most people in this country are more optimistic, more willing to compromise, more willing to be unified than political partisans on both sides.

Our politics should aspire to that is his point. And I am not here to tell any person who has been the subject of racism or misogyny how they should think or approach. I am following what Barack Obama is saying, is if you want to defeat fascism in this country and extremism in this country, you have to build a coalition big enough to do it. And that's going to require being broadly appealing, going out and listening to people and compromising with people. And I think that was the right politics in 2004 when he gave that convention. It's the right politics in 2008. And it's still the right politics and probably with even more urgency in 2024. And it really is... Kamala Harris is her own person. She's running her own campaign. But she brings a similar perspective to how you think about politics in a whole host of ways that Barack Obama did.

So Dan, let me just ask you a last couple of questions here in the remaining time that we have, in the middle of the whole Biden thing, that horrible month. Horrible in the sense that it was agonizing for a lot of people. And people were, again, angry at you guys, specifically. And by you guys, I mean the four hosts of Pod Save America, you and Fabs, and John, and Tommy. And I mean people, and I don't just mean... I don't just talk about people in the Biden world. I mean, people in the Democratic family were mad at people who were saying things that struck me as totally obvious, which was, if you looked at public opinion polling, going back to October of 2021, that there were a lot of people in Democratic Party, and certainly a lot of people in the country who thought Joe Biden asked for four more years was not a good idea, and that someone shouldn't be President from '82 to '86. I just don't even see how that has to do with Joe Biden. I would say that about anybody. I don't want an '82 to '86-year-old President. I just think that's not right.

You're not at your peak of your game at that point. Anybody who says they are has never met someone who's aged '82 to '86. But you took a lot of shit, man. I remember seeing one piece of video where you were trying to explain how you had grown up with Joe Biden because you're from Delaware. And you weren't emotional, teary-eyed, but it was emotional for you in the sense that it felt to me like you were getting a lot of the incoming that people were receiving who had the position, which was that Biden should bow out at this point for a variety of reasons, not because they hated him, because they thought it was the right thing for the party in the country. And it was painful for you in a particular personal way because you had revered Joe Biden since your childhood. Just talk about how your head is and your heart is about that now that it's all settled out the way it has settled out. I mean, how you think about Biden, not just the outcome that Harris is, if the right thing happened, and she's now the nominee, she has a better chance to win.

But the Joe Biden of it sitting on that beach in Rehoboth over Labor Day weekend and looking like it's been fucking rough for that guy.

Yeah. That was a very tough period for everyone in the party, because I I think, look, there were people, particularly online folks, who were using this on both sides of the debate, I think, in ways that were disingenuous and a growth following and all of that. Bad faith. There was some bad faith, but there are a lot of people with really good faith points of views on both sides, because one is sticking with Biden, there are all these risks, but they're known. You're like, who knows what happens if you switch? And it was really an analysis of what you thought Biden's chances were about how big a risk you should take. It was personally complicated for a lot of us, me in particular, because I've known Joe Biden for a very long time. I worked with Joe Biden. I worked for Joe Biden. Like I said, I grew up in Delaware, ran into Joe Biden in the grocery store all the time. And also, I have a lot of friends who were on that campaign and saying the things that we were saying. And having the point of view we did, even in a good faith way, was making their lives a lot harder.

It was very uncomfortable. And even some of those friendships have probably remained a little strained because of that. But ultimately, I think it is like who cares what a bunch of podcasters say. What ultimately is that Biden made the right decision, and it's an incredibly hard decision, and he did it. I really think that his decision is the piece of evidence that he truly believed his own message about the stakes of this election. Because if you really believe that democracy is at stake, that Donald Trump is his existential threat, then you have to be willing to make a historic personal sacrifice in order to try to stop that threat from coming. And he did that. And I think, no matter what happened in this election, obviously, if Kamala Harris wins, he will go down in history as a hero. But I think he should go down in history as the greatest vice president in history and also the person who saved democracy by running in 2020, counting down retirement to run in 2020, and then going back in a retirement to try to save it again. That is just an incredibly unusual thing for a person to do.

And I am confident that he will be recognized for that going forward.

I have four questions. Each of us one sentence answers. Okay?

Okay.

What are you watching right What's the now that you really like?

I just finished Presumed Innocent, which I really enjoyed. I loved it. It was great.

What are you listening to that you really like right now?

I've been really listening to a lot of just old '90s hip hop. I haven't found anything new that I've really liked a lot. So I've just been using my Spotify playlist to just do basically everything from my high school and college era over and over again, which is they were classics, they're now.

I enjoyed seeing that guy who took the Mustang thing and turned it over and made his Mustang into a thing that said Wutang. It was right in the core demo for that. What are you reading right now that's really got you by the lapels?

I just finished the book James by Percival Everett, which is a retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim, which is fabulous. It's supposed to be great. It's truly unbelievable. I was skeptical because I'd read Huck Finn many times, but it had been obviously many, many years since I read Huck Finn, but it was... The book's unbelievable.

Okay, so my last question, and I want to say right now, I'm going to preemptively overrule and disallow you from giving one particular answer. You can't answer by saying the fact that Kamala Harris is now the nominee. Okay? So what's the thing right now when you look at the world that gives you a sense of optimism, where you look at it and go, Okay, Here's a cause for hope.

One of the great parts about Pod Save America and Crooket Media is our Votesave America program, which raises money for candidates, but also recruits people to do all sorts of volunteer activities for races up and down the ballot. And when we travel, we get to meet all of these people. And there's just this core group of young people who are engaged in politics in their communities in ways that are incredibly inspiring. And the fact that... And I get to meet those people all the time. And it does really make you feel hopeful for the future every time. People who have just done, taken on tremendous tasks that no one asked them to do. They just jumped up and did it and are changing their communities, their states, their countries, their world. And it's awesome.

How often do people who are big Pod Save fans Tell me, what does it tell you that you're their favorite of the Pod Save hosts?

It never happened once.

Okay, I'm going to do it now. Here we go. Watch this. I'm dating a woman right now who said that she loves Pod Save, loves all of you guys, thinks you're all fantastic. But she said to me, She said, If I had to date one of them, Dan for sure. And I tried to tell her how unusual that was. I said, No one would pick Dan over Tommy and Fabry. No one. Because, Fav's so handsome. Tommy, so smart. Love it, so funny. But here's the thing, Dan. Not one of those guys, with all their talents, not one could turn a podcast is nerdy as Polar Coaster into a runaway sensation. And hey, that is a superpower tailor-made for this moment.

I don't know how I feel about any of this, but thank you.

You're awesome for taking the time. Okay, awesome. And we'll see you out there, bro. Inpolitic with Jon Hyman is a Puck podcast in partnership with Odyssey. Thanks again to Dan Pfeiffer for coming on the pod. If you dug this episode, please follow InPolitic with John Hyalman and share us and rate us and review us on the free Odyssey app or wherever you happen to bask in the splendor of the podcast universe. I'm John Hyalman, your Cruise Director and the Chief Political Columnist for Puck, where you can read my writing every Sunday night, plus the work of all my terrific colleagues by going to puck. News/impolitik, that's puk. News/impolitis, and subscribing. Two of those colleagues from Puck, John Kelly and Ben Landee, are the executive producers of this podcast. Laurie Blackford is our senior executive booking producer. Ali Clancy is our executive assistant. Jd Crowley and Jenna Weis-Burman are our indispensable overseers and Guardian Angels at Odyssey. And the one and only, Bob Tabor, is the straw that stirs the drink. Flawlessly producing, editing, mixing, and mastering this show. We'll see you next time, everyone. And as always, Namaste.