Who Was That Masked Man?
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Welcome back to The Horse Race. All the talk about masks in the last week has me wondering if we're talking about politics in the presidential race or an old episode of The Lone Ranger. But fear not, that's what The Horse Race is here for. We're going to unmask what's going on in American politics with The Washington Post national political reporter, Robert Costa, and National Review's Jim Garrity. So saddle up and ride with us. Hi-yo silver, away!

Joining me this week is one of the political journalism world's rising stars, Robert Costa, who is the national political reporter for The Washington Post, moderator and managing editor of Washington Week on PBS, and whose work can be seen on or in many other media as he becomes the go-to guy for all things political. Bob, welcome to The Horse Race. Great to be with you.

Well, you are in a unique position to be able to assess what's going on in the world, in part because you covered President Trump in the 2016 campaign and got to see the what I've always heard was the delightful story.

Chaos, almost like a political peewee's playhouse running around you during the campaign. What's it like now compared to 2016 with respect to organization, discipline and the impact of the president's personality on his public face?

It's a good question. And it goes right to what I'm reporting these days, which is almost deja vu, the political circle around President Trump, then Mr. Trump in 2016. It was Corey Lewandowski, Hope Hicks, David Bossie, Johnny McEntee. You may know some of these names, you may not, but that was kind of his inner circle. And that was for a campaign that was extemporaneous, relentless, always combative, flying on

Trump Force One, they would call it, the 767 private plane he owns, going from rally to rally in battleground after battleground.

And throughout the last three and a half years of his presidency, that 2016 group has always been there. But more than ever, during this pandemic in April and May of 2020, President Trump is coming back to that 2016 group, talking again to Lewandowski, to Dave Bossie, playing golf with Bossie, who's an RNC member, having Hope Hicks return to the White House, Johnny McEntee, who was his so-called body man during 2016, now running personnel at the White House. So he's

You can see it and you feel it in the conversations you have with officials. This is a president returning to his comfort zone who believes that 2016 ethos is critical to getting him reelected again, to getting him reelected. So what does that mean for Brad Parscale, that here's the president's campaign manager who increasingly sees his client looking to his predecessors for advice and guidance?

Parscale has always been someone who's been pretty adept at navigating Trump's world. He has become close to the Trump family, Don Trump Jr., Eric Trump, and others, and he's utilized that relationship with the family to weather some political storms from time to time. Parscale is well regarded in the White House as someone who knows the digital operation, who can help build the footprint of the Trump campaign online.

And he has a way of bringing in people like Lewandowski, who's now part of the campaign operation. Some level helps out Vice President Pence. So Parscale knows if you're going to survive in Trump's orbit, you need to be able to not just be totally dominant. There are always people coming in and out of the 26th floor where Trump used to work at the Trump Tower. And there are always people now coming inside.

The plane, Air Force One, are inside the Oval Office, and Parscale always has to accept that as the reality. So there are three names you didn't mention that I think many listeners are kind of wondering why you didn't, and those are Ivanka, Jared, and Kellyanne. Can you go through each of them and explain how they fit into this operation?

Well, I didn't mean to leave off Kellyanne at all in the sense that Kellyanne Conway is a constant at President Trump's side. I mean, she is someone he turns to for political guidance. She is a political strategist inside the White House. She was campaign manager in 2016, still a counselor to the president. Someone who comes out of that New Jersey, New York political world, even though she was a Washington operative for years, she has the perspective of someone who

really knows how President Trump thinks.

And that's important because a lot of times President Trump during the Reince Priebus era, the John Kelly era, he was always surrounded by Republican National Committee types. And Kellyanne Conway, I'm told frequently, is someone who provides a gut check to President Trump. And she still provides that gut check on many political decisions. She's also someone, I'm told, by White House officials who's willing to at times speak her mind to the president, give a little back to him in a way that other people just aren't comfortable doing. And Jared Kushner is

in essence, the chief of staff. Mark Meadows is the new chief of staff, but Jared Kushner has always been the informal chief of staff of the Trump White House. His hands are in almost every project. And he works closely with Parscale. Parscale, when I say he's close to the family, he is close to Don Trump Jr. and Eric, but it's that relationship with Kushner. And it's Kushner and Parscale who are running the Trump campaign. And Parscale wouldn't be where he is, wouldn't continue to be where he is

unless Kushner had faith in him and they had a symbiotic relationship. And what about Ivanka? Does she play a role in all of this or is she more of a policy person who's kind of keeping her distance from her father because she now has her own brand? I don't think it's about distance. I spent some time with her on the road. You look at her role, it's really campaign surrogate and policy person.

And when the Republicans controlled the House, she played a much bigger role. She was working on different tax policies, family tax credit, child tax credit. And she was someone who could go talk to Republican House members, Senate Republicans, and tried to broker some policy deals. But with divided government, her role as a policy person has really shrunk. She did work on criminal justice reform with some Democrats in some of the more moderate areas of the White House policy-wise.

She has been a voice, but she has been traveling with Vice President Pence on the road and she provides that high profile, the youth of the Trump brand politically to audiences in suburban areas. And when you talk to the campaign about where is her role in 2020, it's going to be very much like it was in 2016.

You look at area like Pennsylvania, which is probably a must win state for President Trump or Vice President Biden. And she could go to someplace like Bucks County or Chester County in Pennsylvania in the collar counties around Philadelphia and draw an audience of women and really try to reassure them about President Trump. And those are the kind of places she will likely be sent, I'm told.

So how do you see this unfolding? We're about five months out from election day. The president's job approval rating and the RealClearPolitics average has been bouncing between 44 and 46 percent for the last couple of weeks. No one has won reelection with a rating that low before. And you'd have to say, based on conventional metrics, that he is a decided underdog.

I doubt the president sees it that way, or if he does, he resists that. How do you see him and his campaign unfolding under the circumstances? Well, they're on edge. I mean, they know the polling was always bad in 2016. So there's that caveat in Trump's circle that you can't trust the polling too much, but they know that the polling matters and they see Biden gaining everywhere. And it's got a lot of people alarmed in the GOP.

and they worry about some of these Senate races like in Arizona, in Colorado. If those contenders aren't running strong races as incumbents, it could have dragged down the president's chances in those states. And Republicans even in a place like Georgia, which had a narrow gubernatorial race in 2018, it's again narrow in the presidential race here in 2020, two years later,

So a lot of worries. It's not just about Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin anymore. It's about the deep south. It's about Texas looks safer than it maybe did a year ago, but Georgia looks like it could be a problem. Florida, North Carolina could be issues. Florida looks more in the Trump column than most. Ohio looks more Republican than not, but still an uphill climb in some ways in some of those suburban and urban areas of Ohio.

So the map for Biden looks favorable. In the economy, with nearly a fifth of the nation unemployed, you have just economic carnage and tragedy along with a health crisis. And so when you talk to Republican strategists and Trump strategists, they often say at this point, the president's opponent isn't Biden as much as it is the virus.

When I look at the president over the last couple of weeks, I see an emerging strategy of blame China, tie Biden to China and be the candidate of hope and rebirth and try and make Biden the candidate of the old ways that will keep you dependent.

Is there a sense within the campaign that they are moving towards a clear strategy or is it going to be much more like 2016, whereas really on the attack constantly without a whole lot of threads to tie it together other than that you don't want Hillary Clinton?

Well, your point about China is correct, but it has some nuance to it because you take the president's recent visit to Camp David. He was with House members, Republicans, and they're talking about China and withholding funding for the World Health Organization because of its relationship with China. And so you see across the board, the president's latest campaign ad is about him standing up to China, stopping flights from China. So China's a theme, but the president himself has been...

far less provocative in his rhetoric about China than some other Republicans who are close to him. You talk to some Republican senators, you look at Josh Hawley of Missouri or Tom Cotton of Arkansas, and they sound like Steve Bannon. It's the Chinese Communist Party framing China as the Chinese Communist Party, and that's the foil for 2020. But President Trump

He uses that rhetoric from time to time, but it's complicated for him because he believes a lot of his economic standing comes with this China trade deal. He doesn't want to disrupt it. He still wants to see agricultural and energy purchases from China on the trade deal front. And so he'll push around the WHO almost as a proxy for China. And so there's a bit of a disconnect in the way Republicans talk about China at this point and the way President Trump does.

I read, I follow a lot of House and Senate ads because I think that's kind of a good conduit into what the polling is telling the consulting class. And in the Republican campaign,

House and Senate candidates, the rhetoric against China is extremely harsh. And if anything, makes Tom Cotton look like Neville Chamberlain in the way that they treat the Chinese. But as you mentioned, it's going to be very difficult for that to stick if the president isn't going to engage in that sort of rhetoric himself.

So does that mean that China becomes a sidelight and we get into the sort of personal back and forth that President Trump seems to gravitate towards? At the moment, that seems to be the case. I mean, when you look at the president, yes, he's taking on China and some ads and he's talking about WHO funding, but it's not the priority in his messaging. What you see day to day as the death toll nears 100,000 Americans from coronavirus is

You see the president engaging constantly in feuds, conspiracy theory, a president who is raging about various grievances and perceived villains and enemies. And it's part of the culture and political war the president finds most comfortable. And that takes us back to our initial discussion on 2016. I mean, this is a revival of 2016. The close of 2016 was a rage against

the culture against people that an outcry on behalf of people who felt left behind. And it was feuds and conspiracies that,

the Trump campaign then and is fueling it again now at the president's direction. You don't hear it as a strategy per se from almost anyone around him. It's him, the gut driven candidate, the man who has battled in the tabloids for decades, who has lived a public life, making these decisions, believing that this is his way to connect his way to get ahead. I,

I watch WWE on a regular basis, and I have to say it's helped me understand Trump a little bit more because the characters on there, always finding a feud, always finding a narrative that's personal driven, very much the Trump political operation since he

came down the escalator in 2015. One can come up with a cute wrestling nickname for him, and it wouldn't be too in apropos. But in one sense, he ran against...

the ultimate wrestling heel in Hillary Clinton, somebody who had lots of baggage he didn't have to define, carried a lot of unpopularity and was not terribly adept at the political game herself. Joe Biden is not the strongest candidate I've seen in my lifetime, but he's not Hillary Clinton. Why does the president think he can make this happen again?

Well, it's going to be a different kind of race. I mean, it's not the same kind of opponent as Clinton, as you just laid out. And you're spot on with that in the sense that Biden is far more low profile. And so the president is actually not really battling Biden day to day. He's battling Joe Scarborough. He's battling the media.

And he's creating a whole parade of enemies and opponents rather than just zeroing in on Vice President Biden. The point about wrestling, it's perceptive. And I would often say, don't just watch wrestling, but watch The Apprentice, his old NBC show, to really understand how he thinks about power. But the thing is, when you watch wrestling,

or you watch The Apprentice and then you watch the Trump presidency, it's clear that this is not just a president who has frenetic rage and is zigzagging and pinballing from one thing to the next. There are choices being made. And as someone who's covered President Trump for over a decade, I always try to remind colleagues and others that as much as he is

Seems to be drawn toward distractions. This is a man who I've seen many times deliberately make decisions to engage in a disarming dizzying array of controversy and Feuds he wants this he once told me he likes to fight I always remembered him telling me that he likes to fight and he wants to fight that's his political his political way and

Well, I guess we're going to see whether or not he turns it into third time lucky or third time's a charm, depending on your proverb. First time being the nomination, second time being the general election. This is his third bite at the apple, and he's playing lucky.

A very similar strategy. Let's pivot for a minute to the Senate is that I know that Republican strategists are increasingly concerned. They're seeing bad numbers. The cusp state in most analyses is North Carolina, that because Alabama is such a Republican state, it's almost guaranteed to be a pickup for Republicans.

Colorado and Maine are Democratic states with Republicans trying to defend and McSally is defending nominally Republican Arizona, but she lost last time and she looks bad in the polls. The way for the Democrats to take control is take out Tom Tillis in North Carolina. Where do you see that going? The polls don't show Tillis doing terribly well, but they don't show him irretrievably behind either.

No, and Tillis is someone who, this is a wave election of the Democrats really come through and sweep not only the House majority again, but sweep the Senate. Because Tillis hasn't done anything really wrong. He reminds me a lot of David Perdue. He's not like the other North Carolina senator who engaged in scandal or possible scandal like Senator Burr. But the Democrats in North Carolina...

They've done something that has left them well positioned. In the age of Bernie Sanders and contested primaries, the opponent to Senator Tillis is a former member of the retired member. I actually believe he still is in the Army Reserve, Lieutenant Colonel named Cal Cunningham.

And Cunningham is exactly the kind of Democrat who Democratic leaders in Washington have tried to recruit for years. You know, he has experience in the state legislature. He was a state senator. He did run and lose for Senate in 2010, but he's come back now in 2020 as someone who's in his 40s, army lawyer, lawyer.

And if you're going to try to beat Tom Tillis, it's going to be with someone like Cal Cunningham. And Tillis, he's been aligned with Trump most of the time. And the Tillis election is really a referendum on Trump in North Carolina. And so if Trump carries North Carolina, Tillis carries North Carolina and vice versa. That's right. Well, as a last question, I'm

As you say, you've been following and covering President Trump for the better part of a decade. What do you think drives him at this point that here's a man who for all of his many controversies in his life really has achieved more than almost anyone would have expected? You know, becoming a success in business, becoming a media star, becoming president of the United States when every political observer thought that that was not going to happen.

Hasn't he had it all? Or is this kind of does he see this as his last fight? Or how does he at his stage in his life and his career look at this in the context of the rest of his life and his career? Well, Henry, I'm not a psychologist. And I've always whenever I'm asked questions about what Trump's President Trump's mind, it's hard to answer that. But I would say as someone who's observed him at length, he's probably the most relentless person I've ever met.

as a reporter, really almost in my life, in the sense of what drives him is this desire to be at the center of attention in American public life, not to be a dominant ideological figure, not to change the size or scope of the federal government, not to influence a party, not to change America's role in the world, though his America First policy has certainly done that. He is someone who

who comes out of a populist instinct, but he doesn't even consider himself a populist. In fact, in 2015, I always remember I interviewed him on his plane. And I said, well, what do you think about populism? And he said, I don't like that word. I don't see that word as what I am. I said, well, then what are you, Mr. Trump? And he said, I'm not populist. I'm common sense. I'm common sense. So he has this kind of

Belief in his own beliefs that goes back to his father Fred Trump who? Shared his own views on trade and was influenced by his father on trade and beyond trade. There is really no driving ideology This is someone who has flipped parties flip views on so many different issues So what drives him now then it's the desire to be whether it's on page six in the biggest building on the strip of the boardwalk at Atlantic City

He wants to be in the center of American life. I mean, he looks at his own father. You read every Trump biography, which I've read many of them. And he is the son that crossed the river from the boroughs to Manhattan. And there is this drive to stay in Manhattan, whatever Manhattan means.

And for him, does he want a second term? Of course he wants a second term. But you don't hear about him saying, well, in second term, we'll do deficit reduction. He wants a second term to be there. And even if he loses, I'm convinced as a reporter that he will continue to be in American public life wanting to be close to the flame. This is not someone who's going to go to Mar-a-Lago and say, I'll see you at the 19th hole.

Well, that should leave all of us wondering, will the Trump era ever end? Because it sounds like win or lose, we'll be in the Trump era for quite a while. Robert, thank you very much for joining me on The Horse Race. Thank you. Joining me this week for Round the Horn is Jim Garrity, the senior political correspondent for National Review Magazine and a perspicacious observer of all things political. Jim, welcome to The Horse Race. Henry, thanks for having me here.

Well, I've been reading you for years and in the current political situation, I've been eager to get your thoughts. When I look at the punditocracy, for lack of a better phrase, I hear varying senses of doom and gloom about conservatism, republicanism, and President Trump. And as the senior political correspondent for the leading conservative intellectual magazine in America, I'm wondering what your thinking is about those topics.

That is a really good question. And if you ask me on different days, I'll probably give you different answers. It is, you know...

It's interesting as the title of political correspondent, pretty much since the pandemic really exploded into our lives in mid-March, I've been writing about the coronavirus, the quarantines, the acts of China and all that kind of stuff. And the usual partisan politics and who's up and who's down and what's the outlook for the next election has kind of receded into the back burner. I think in the last week or two, things have kind of been able to re-engage. Life is getting clearly not anywhere completely back to normal, but somewhat back to normal.

And we do have an election that's coming this November. I am at this point pretty bearish about Trump's chances. I think there was a good opportunity. I think this is a crisis that is unparalleled and there's obviously a natural rally around the flag effect. I think Americans, even Americans who didn't like Trump,

wanted to see him succeed. And there's a lot of road between now and November. I think the indications that the economy has hit bottom and that it's likely we'll see some good news between now and then is probably going to help the president's chances. I think as the president goes, congressional Republicans are likely to follow. I don't think you'll see an enormous amount of tickets splitting in November.

I do think the pandemic is going to kind of force a giant rethinking, or at least it should force a giant rethinking on both sides of the political aisle. On paper, the argument is, ah, well, the era of small government is over. And because we have this giant problem that can only be handled by the federal government, you're going to see a lot more economic interventions in the economy. You're going to see a lot more spending on health care.

Bernie Sanders believes this affirms the argument for single payer and Medicare for all. Of course, Bernie Sanders sees everything as a further indicator that we need this. This is, you know, if there was no pandemic, Bernie Sanders would be saying exactly the same thing. And I think the argument, the problem with the, oh, this is going to empower government for, you know, a generation to come.

is that we've seen many cases of government work okay in this. I think generally you can characterize the response of the U.S. government as at least mildly disappointing, in some cases very disappointing.

the CDC tests and things like that. There is a outbreak, no pun intended, of Democratic governors breaking their own rules on quarantine restrictions, whether it's my own governor, Ralph Northam, going down to Virginia Beach and taking selfies with folks. Henry, do you live in Virginia? I do. Okay. So were you surprised that this is the one time Ralph Northam doesn't want to cover his face?

He's usually got a hood. He's got blackface. Oh, no, we can't get him to put a mask on this time. But yeah, so he goes down, goes to Virginia Beach, take and take selfies with people. And then, of course, the statement from his office was he was social distancing. He's got his arm around people. Right. I mean, you know, so you've got that one. You got Gretchen Whitmer's husband out in Michigan, out of Illinois. J.B. Pritzker's family is going across the state lines and down to Florida and stuff like that.

So I don't think this has been a shining moment for government at any level. Maybe you can make an argument that this is a little bit of a spotlight on federalism and the value of having 50 state governments setting policies for their people instead of one national size fits all argument.

Um, but I think, look, the argument for, if there's any weakness in the conservative movement's argument, it's been that it doesn't recognize or doesn't sufficiently recognize when government is necessary, uh, and what it requires, what's required to make a good functioning government. The problem for the folks on the left is there is really no desire or willingness to confront the fact that the number of times government fails, um,

We have a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that sent a whole bunch of machine guns to Mexican cartels. That's not what their job is. It's the opposite of their job, but they did that. The EPA accidentally polluted a bunch of rivers and turned them yellow in three states. I wrote a whole book on this about the federal bureaucracy called The Weed Agency. The federal government bureaucracy isn't good at doing what its mission is. When the

when the consequences are as high as they are, it forces us to, it should force us to contemplate, okay, what can government reasonably be expected to do? And what are some duties that are kind of extraneous and look kind of not so important in the light of a crisis? And that maybe we can, you know, either push down to state governments or local governments, or maybe have no government do it and have it taken over by the private sector. So I'd like to think that argument will

We'll be strengthened when we get to the other end of this. But I guess a lot of that remains to be seen. Well, yeah, that's an interesting question is that my view is that for decades, conservatives have been very good at saying what government shouldn't do and have been god awful about saying what it should do.

And by that, I mean that libertarians are pretty good at saying what government should do, which is say as little as possible, maybe police, but get to some people and they will say, well, roads should be operated privately. I can't tell you how many times I have the private road argument with the libertarian. And so in a sense, this pandemic will force conservatives to

if they want to defend the position that government ought to be limited, to say what government can do, what it should do. Do you see any interest among movement conservatives in addressing that question? Or do you see it more that

That just as Bernie Sanders sees every crisis as an opportunity for socialism, that this crisis will be seen by libertarian leaning conservatives as yet another example of nothing more than state failure. And we go back to the same argument we've been having for 70 years. I think since this pandemic sprung forth, we have seen some of the most, you know, reasoned, balanced, detailed assessments of,

from the likes of Yuval Levin, Ramesh Pinnuru, my colleague, Tevi Troy, kind of the usual suspects, you might say. Maybe the reformer cons. And the folks, there's a small subset of wonks who actually take governing seriously and who are probably leading the way on this. I'd like to see more of it, even...

In this vein, I'm among those who would say that, you know, dealing with a pandemic, either on this scale, or even let's say a more minor one, let's say a member Zika virus coming along, or our fears about Ebola. Look, that's something, you know, if government is there to protect our rights, our, you know, and our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, well, then, you know, protecting us from this scary virus that can kill, you know, that is invisible to the naked eye and can kill, you know, come and get into our lungs and kill us. That's exactly what we should have a federal government for.

One of the things I think has been clear, and you're going to hear me thinking out loud or at least writing out loud. And so if people are listening to this and say, Jim, that's a terrible idea. Well, then this is me writing in pencil, so to speak. I think everybody would agree that once there is a vaccine for SARS-CoV-2, that obviously you take care of your first responders first, but basically you want to get this in the hands of as many people as possible.

And I think it's already been decided this is not going to charge anyone. We don't want anyone having to pull it, you know, to pay for this, for a vaccine to protect you from this virus. In terms of government expenditures, the expenditure to develop a vaccine, get a vaccine, manufacture it, distribute it, get to as many people as possible. That's an area of government I am perfectly comfortable spending the money on. I do kind of wonder if you take that principle and

Would it make sense if we if the government's going to be in this business of taking, you know, making expenditures to maximize public health? You know, does it make sense to have the government pick up the tab for all kinds of vaccines because we want to maximize childhood vaccination? Does it make sense if we're worried about the flu vaccine?

for an influenza vaccine. At some point, I've become a little more open to the federal government paying for certain necessary costs of protecting the health of its citizens than I was four or five months ago. Now, obviously, this is the sort of thing where people are going to say, ah, well, based on this, you have to pay for acupuncture too, you know, or whatever expenditure pops into their mind or something like that. But I think...

When we see, look, one of the consequences of this is seeing the potentially serious consequences of people who are not in good health and who have not kept taking care of themselves and their greater vulnerability to something like this. So to the extent the government can step in and help people stick around longer and stay in the workforce longer, pay the pay to those systems, make sure our entitlement systems don't collapse forever.

I think I'd like to see that idea explored, but as you can tell, I'm putting a lot of caveats on this because I don't want this to be, you know, Jim likes single payer now, you know, or something. Yeah, but that's the thing is that there's a wide difference between single payer and subsidized health insurance that Ronald Reagan, as I showed in my book, was always for subsidizing health insurance for people who couldn't afford it so that no one who needed medical care would be turned away for lack of funds, but subsidizing private insurance is

And largely getting out of the way is a big difference between single payer or single payers, BMF cousin, which is government single payer and operated health care. Do you think then that this opens up the room for a conservative to say, I'm for universal coverage, not single payer, not government operation? I'm for universal coverage. And that's a conservative value.

I think it would be a very intriguing development. And I think you'd probably get a great deal of sympathy. I think a aspect of what led Donald Trump to winning the Republican primary in 2016 was the fact that he was not, he had no interest in cutting entitlements at all. Um, and he did not necessarily see people getting government, you know, getting, getting benefits from the government as a bad thing that needed to be reduced and shrunk at all costs. Um,

He wasn't interested in having that fight. And while for most of my public career, I've always thought of myself as somebody who supported entitlement reform, who thought this was a ticking time bomb and all that stuff. After you have enough election cycles, and I think probably 2012 Romney versus Obama was probably the most explicit example of this.

It is fair to ask how many times in a row Republican and fiscally conservative lawmakers are supposed to drag the American public kicking and screaming towards a policy outcome that they just do not want.

The numbers are on the side. We all know this is a ticking time bomb. We all know that expenditures are going up. And as the baby boomers retire, they're going to need more health care. My generation, Generation X, is going to get screwed over. The millennials are not going into the workforce and not earning enough to make up all that gap. The problem is clear.

The American people just don't want to believe it. They just, you know, they are convinced that at the last second, some sort of magical solution will present itself and that there's no reason to actually make anything like anything as scary as means testing or, you know, good heavens, we stopped, you know, covering social security for billionaires or something like that. Oh, good heavens. We could never contemplate that because then the system wouldn't be universal and, you know, the sky would fall if that happened. But you see, this gets to the question is that, you know, the left will always say that, but

I've thought for a long time that the rights argument is, again, to

Follow Ronald Reagan, which is that help should go to people who need it and should not go to people who don't. So if you've got two million dollars in the bank, why should you get Social Security, even if you've been paying the taxes for it? But that, in a sense, views your Social Security taxes as a life insurance premium. You know, thankfully, not everyone collects on their life insurance payments, but it was there in case you needed it. And I never hear conservatives make that argument, which say we're going to protect our

People write to Social Security if they're not reasonably able to provide for themselves. But if you are, you're going to pay for the ability to do so for others to have that right. And you're going to not collect.

Would this be the sort of middle ground on an entitlement reform that if it was actually articulated, which is not the Ryan entitlement reform, if it were actually articulated that way, might it not lead to more public support than the stark alternative of cut everybody to avoid tax increases or make it uniform for so that billionaires get Social Security and subsidize Medicare?

Yeah, I've always kind of wondered why you couldn't make the most, propose the most symbolic gesture, right? No social security for billionaires. Heck, no social security for Jeff Bezos. We think he's going to be okay. You know, this is just the most, you know, take the most extreme example and to say, all right, we know social security is supposed to be a universal program, but this guy, he's going to be fine in his old age without the government sending him a check every month.

And the argument from the left was always the reason they so staunchly opposed means testing in any way, shape or form was the fear was that once social security stopped being a universal program, it would not be nearly as popular. And I'm really not convinced that would necessarily be the case. I think there are a lot of people who like social security and think it should happen. And, you know, then we could argue about when exactly you'd hit some sort of either income or net worth, you know, value threshold, right?

Where the government would say, you know what, you're going to be fine. We're not going to send you a check. You're going to be hunky-dory. And that to me was striking as a very basic point in fine because I, you know, despite the accusations of liberals, I don't want to see social security destroyed.

The whole reason you worry about the long-term sustainability of Social Security is because you want it around. If you genuinely don't care, you're just going to let it crash. You're just going to say, all right, you know, you guys, you know, we've tried to save you guys. You're not going to willing to do it. Good luck. You know, at some point you're going to find out the interest payments on the debt getting larger and larger because we've borrowed so much and we can't afford these programs anymore. Then you're really going to be up a certain creek without a paddle. But by that point, I'll have my own fortune and I won't have to worry about you people.

or something. If you really don't care, that's your attitude. I think we want to reform this program because we want to save it.

But then that gets to those, to me, the central question of the American right, which is at what point do we say we're not just tolerating the modern state that was ushered in by FDR, we're actually for a lot of it. We're for environmental protection. We're for employment regulation. We're for a safety net for the, you know, for those who need it. What we're against is something different. Yeah. I mean, if you had to ask me, you know,

pre-pandemic, what is the largest and most kind of fundamental problem with American politics? I think one of my strong contenders would be that our discussion of government and what it ought to do is at best distant cousins or perhaps the furthest fringe on the family tree of the way government actually is and actually practiced. If you listen to anything Barack Obama had said about

The Affordable Care Act. It sounded terrific. Oh, my goodness. We're not going to have any worries about paying for health care anymore and all that kind of stuff. And then, of course, healthcare.gov happens, right? You know, there's this giant gap in that. And I think your average rank and file Democratic voter, not a wonk, not somebody who really studies these issues. Right.

First of all, I think they're an important point in our politics. I think most of the people are good people. The fact that you vote differently than me or disagree with me does not mean that not only are you my mortal enemy and I froth at the mouth and all that kind of stuff. I think a lot of Democrats mean very well.

was it, was it Reagan or somebody that says like their, their hearts are bigger than their heads or something like that. Um, they, you know, they, they want the world to be a better place and thus they believe, you know, government should take care of that. And they don't spend a lot of time reviewing government's record, taking care of things like that. Um, and you know, we, we can, you know, list off the, uh, uh,

The examples of the Obama era. When these things happen in Republican administrations, a common belief on the left is that, well, this is because Republicans are in charge, that they're just inherently, they don't want government to succeed, so they won't let it. And that they are incompetents and they're all a bunch of cronies and all that kind of stuff. This is deliberate incompetence. I got to tell you.

I don't think this is deliberate incompetence. I think if they were deliberate incompetence, they'd be better at it. That's how incompetent they are. They can't even be competent at incompetence. Yeah.

But there's just this general sense of a refusal to really confront the fact that the way federal bureaucracies operate, the difficulty of firing people, the flourishing of... A big point I'd put together in my novel, The Weed Agency, was that most people who go to work for the government want to do well. And they enter with energy and enthusiasm and oftentimes some idealism that they're going to make the world a better place in some way.

And they get in there and they realize their agency, where they work is kind of messed up, but well, they're low man on the totem pole. And eventually they'll have a chance to, to, you know, fix it. So they stick around and, you know, then they get to like the first promotion and they're not quite where they need to be. They still have a very slow moving and bureaucratic process, a lot of paperwork's using outdated technology and, and,

A lot of things are like, well, this is just always the way we've done things. But, you know, all right. And year by year, they, you know, to use a Star Trek metaphor, they assimilate into the collective. By the time you climb up the total pole to be in a position where you could actually change the policies, you have become part of the system and you have become used to the way things operate. And your urge to change things has been slowly sanded away year by year.

So, you know, and that's, you know, in the end, I don't know if there's a way to create a super duper efficient, top of the line government agency that will fix these sorts of problems. I think it's almost inherent in the human condition. And we need to, you know, formulate our government policies with that in mind.

It's basically the way you've described it. It sounds like a conservative entertainment entrepreneur ought to create a government version of the office where instead of Dunder Mifflin, it takes place in the Department of Social Blodity Blot.

Because it sounds like a very, you know, basically people are people and large operations tend to be sclerotic, faction ridden and inefficient, whether it's a small paper company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, or if it's the Department of Social Welfare in any medium sized city in the United States.

Yeah. A couple of people made that comparison or to Dilbert or any one of these other kind of workplace comedies where you've kind of said, you know, my God, how do we ever get anything done around here? We should point out that, you know, federal agencies don't always fail all the time. You know, the Department of Agriculture gets the checks out to the farmers and, you know, the Department of Education does take care of scholarships and things like that. But I think, you know, most people would point out that, first of all, they have plenty of failures and there's not a great system of accountability. Right.

One big portion of this is the fact that the boss, whether it's the agency head or the cabinet secretary,

you know, they're not maximum, they're lasting eight years. And that almost never happens. In most places, they're lasting four years. You know, a lot of administrations, they don't even make four years. And in this administration, you know, you can, you know, you know, don't buy any green bananas. Secretaries and cabinets are coming and going every day. So why would you enact some grand sweeping reform proposal when you know the boss is going to be out of here in 18 months anyway? Yeah.

Well, you have written to switch gears a little bit. You've written a very interesting article over at National Review about how different the fall campaign is going to be from anything we've ever experienced before. Why don't you tell the horse race listeners what you say in the article and what you think it might mean for the campaign's outcome?

Sure. You know, you write about politics for a living. You very often get questions of, so who's going to win? You know, what's going to happen in November? And I'm much more reticent about that. There are years I've gotten it spot on. I think I had actually the exact number of House seats Republicans are going to win in 2010.

Right on the money. And honestly, that's more luck than particular skill. I know. I missed by one and I like that. But yeah. You knew it was going to be a good Republican year, right? Yeah. I didn't think Trump was going to win. I thought there was a chance that he could win Florida. I thought there was a chance he could win North Carolina. I thought there was a chance that he could win that upper Midwest trio of Wisconsin or Michigan or Pennsylvania. Yeah.

I knew Ohio and Iowa looked pretty good, but I just figured there's no way he'd sweep all of them. Well, lo and behold, he did it. And so I try to be a little more reticent for that. So, you know, look, it's obvious every listener to this podcast knows Trump is completely different from any other president who's ever come along before him running for reelection. We're going to get a the only remotely comparable election is going to be 2016.

And now, right as we were about to start, it looked like Biden was clearly the nominee and the general election was ready to start in either a soft launch or a hard launch. The pandemic comes along. And I had this realization the other day that assuming both of our candidates are men in their mid to late 70s.

Trump clearly doesn't want to wear a mask and is not always going to be eager to listen to medical recommendations and to take the most precautions he possibly can. Biden seems a little more willing to listen to these sorts of things. But assuming that is the case and assuming we don't have some sort of miraculous development of a vaccine between now and November, you know, Henry, I thought about it. Joe Biden has probably shaken his last hand for the entire year.

which means he's never going to work a rope line for the rest of the campaign. He's probably not going to have an in-person rally for the rest of his campaign. I mean, he could. Maybe you keep him six feet away from everything, but you know, the great irony you're seeing since this pandemic has happened, virtual rallies, right, where everybody's connecting through Zoom and stuff.

If you're going to do that, you know, we all had a good laugh at, you know, Hillary Clinton forgot to visit Wisconsin for the last couple of months of the 2016 campaign. What's the point of going to Wisconsin if you can't see anyone, if you can't physically be in front of anyone? And so you just suddenly begin to realize all of the things that have happened in past campaigns that aren't going to happen this cycle because of the, you know, restrictions and desire to social distance and things like that.

The best, you know, most vivid example I can remember. Henry, I am sure. Do you remember that picture of Joe Biden hanging out at the biker bar back in 2012? I don't. OK, so it's I I link to it in the piece. You can click through and find it. So he's got this, you know, you know, let's let's just say hefty but attractive biker chick on his lap.

smiling, looking like he's having the time of his life. And on either side of him are two giant guys who would, you know, intimidate Lyle Alzado, right? Who looks like they belong in the stands of an Oakland Raiders game or something like that. And they're just kind of looking at each other like you get a load of this guy. Not quite eager to, you know, beat the tar out of him. I can only imagine what kind of thoughts were running through the Secret Service at this.

But you could picture any iconic handshaking in the diner. All the sorts of photo ops that we've seen that have been a big part of campaigns probably aren't going to happen this year. Certainly every cycle since at least 2000, maybe probably since 1992, we've seen celebrities doing campaign rallies and concerts for the Democratic nominee. Beyonce and Jay-Z, Katy Perry, Bruce Springsteen.

That's probably not going to happen this year. All the voter registration that traditionally goes on in college campuses in the fall, that's probably not going to happen. There's probably going to be a 9-11 ceremony, but I imagine it's going to be much smaller and it's probably going to be very different from last month. And if you don't think that could have a big impact on the race, think about how Hillary Clinton, the incident Hillary Clinton had at that experience. So there are just so many things that we've come to expect as part of the

The hoopla and the tradition and the things that make up a presidential campaign that aren't going to happen this year that I have no idea. That's just one giant X factor that I don't think anybody can really account for at this moment. And see, I read that piece and I thought this makes me more convinced than ever that simply to drive the contrast home between a risk averse Biden and himself, that Trump will travel anywhere that will let him meet people.

Even if it's I'm standing in a massive stadium in Texas and 30,000 people are filling a place that should seat 120,000. So it's socially distanced, but there's massive people or go into one of those bars in Austin, you know, where you where you go meet young people or something where he says, I'm the one who's not afraid.

And this is the way we need to go back and look at who's hiding out in his basement and wearing a designer mask from some famous person in New York.

Yeah, this actually kind of started by the controversy over the Republican convention in Charlotte, which as of this recording time is still scheduled to go ahead. But there it's now kind of, you know, in doubt because President Trump is quite irate with North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper because the governor is saying, look, I can't guarantee that this is, you know, it's going to be safe for you guys to hold this in the last week in August.

And so now there's apparently some talk that they could try to move it to some other state where they think the governor would be a little more amenable to holding the large event. The Democrats, it sounds like more and more they're talking about doing a quote unquote virtual convention in Milwaukee. Yeah.

So sorry, Wisconsin, you didn't get much attention from Democrats in the last couple of months of 2016. They were going to give you a makeup call by putting the convention in Milwaukee. And now it looks like it's not going to certainly not going to happen on anything resembling the traditional scale. And then you kind of just ask yourself, so if you have a quote unquote virtual convention, what does that look like? What does that sound like? And the comparison that just popped into my mind was like,

Henry, it's going to be like having the response to the State of the Union over and over again. There's not going to be any crowd to applaud. There's not going to be anybody laughing at any jokes. It's just going to be a politician looking to a camera and giving a speech and saying,

Let's face it, this is not all that exciting when it's done in front of a roaring audience at the convention, never mind when it's going to in this circumstance. So I'm sure they'll have video testimonials and they'll try to function as best they can. But do you do the balloon drop? Probably not. All these things make a political convention what it is.

the gathering of the party muckamucks and the delegates and the huge, the parties that get thrown and the protests in the streets. And the only thing that won't have to change is the protesters will still be wearing masks. That's a, they're pretty well established. I hope the paper mache works.

is of good filtering to keep out potential viruses. I'm just waiting for somebody on the Democratic side to get this great brainstorm idea of, hey, we know all these people in Hollywood. Let's go do it as a big production. We'll go to a green screen, get industrial light and magic to do it. We'll pipe in sound. They're already doing what the Bundesliga where there's nobody in the stadium, but Sky TV has crowd noises and a technician turning up cheers and booze.

Let's do it that way. And I bet it will go over just as well as the Francis Ford Coppola produced special in the 1980 Wisconsin primary on the steps of the Wisconsin State Capitol did for Jerry Brown. It was a massive flop that doomed his career. I was just about to say, I thought you were going to go with a they could get a bunch of celebrities to sing. This is my fight song.

Because if we learned anything from 2016, that's what's always that's the silver bullet to take down Trump. Yeah. You know, my guess is they will lean on Hollywood and I think it'll be more of the same. The only the two options that I thought might be more functional if either of the parties is determined to have something resembling a traditional party.

The first is, I think you're right, put it in a football stadium, put it in an open air arena. So first of all, there's larger capacity. You can spread people out. And, you know, it sounds like you're at lesser risk of contracting the virus if you're in an outdoor location. I mean, honestly, I don't know if I'd want to be have put a whole bunch of elderly people in an arena with central air ventilating, you know, their breath all onto each other. And then the second observation was the idea of like, if you can't bring people to the convention.

Can you bring the convention to everybody else? And just as everybody's coming out on their balconies and beating their pots and pans and cheering for the first responders, could you put out all of their supporters all across the country out onto their front lawns and onto their balconies? And you bring out your yard sign and you bring out your homemade signs. And everybody streams it live. Everybody listens to it live. And maybe you got your own balloons and your own celebration stuff.

And then you kind of have this camera going through America's communities and showing. And the idea is that the convention can't happen in Charlotte. So it's happening all across America and it becomes something that everybody feels like they're participating in and being connected through. That's one of the way I would think through if you had to scrap the traditional idea of doing a political convention. But I kind of wonder, like, again, this is.

I think most of the political world figures at some point we get to, quote unquote, back to normal and the campaign resumes. And I think based on what we're seeing so far, it's not like we're not very likely to happen. I don't think it's likely to happen, but I think Donald Trump is going to make it happen as much as he can. And I think Joe Biden is going to avoid it. And sometime in the middle of September, that's going to be a campaign issue as to what does this show for leadership?

But Jim, it's been wonderful chatting with you and I look forward to having you back on the horse race and tell our listeners how they can tell. Sure. Nationalreview.com. Every day I write a morning newsletter called the Morning Jolt. Most days I contribute to the corner over there, periodically pieces. I do a podcast with Greg Karambas called the Three Martini Lunch. That's available on Ricochet and at Radio America.com.

And I'm on Twitter, you know, wasting my time just like everybody else, at Jim Garrity. Well, thank you, and hope to have you back soon. Always appreciate it. Great to be with you, Henry. Thank you.

Usually in Ad of the Week, I'm talking about a campaign ad that is designed to help somebody either make a positive case for a candidate or make a negative case against that candidate's opponent. But there's another type of campaign ad, the type of campaign ad that isn't what it seems to be. That's what this week's Ad of the Week entry is. It's an effort in New Mexico's 2nd Congressional District Republican primary. Let's listen.

On June 2nd, Republicans have a choice. There's Santa Fe lobbyist Claire Chase, who opposed President Trump calling him an unworthy of the office. Or there's Yvette Harrell. She's 100% loyal to Trump, backed by 11 pro-gun sheriffs and cowboys for Trump. And she's even for Trump's border war.

So you may be wondering, if you were listening really closely, who is Patriot Majority PAC? Patriot Majority PAC is responsible for the content of this advertising, they say. And one wonders, who is this? It's a super PAC that is created by, wait for it, Democrats.

Yes, you might say, why are Democrats talking about a Republican primary? Well, let's go back to where this race is. This is the New Mexico 2nd Congressional District. It's a district that President Trump carried with over 50% of the vote. It's normally safe Republican territory in southern and southwest New Mexico in a part that used to be known as Little Texas.

However, a Democrat won in a big upset in the 2018 campaign by a narrow margin. So what the Democrats are doing here is they're trying to interfere in the Republican primary by pushing the candidate that they think is the weaker candidate. How are they doing this? Well, if you listen to the ad, there seems to be even handedness. There's a

Santa Fe lobbyists. And there is a former Trump supporting official, Yvette Harrell. But how they do this is trying to push Harrell, who lost two years ago and Democrats uniformly think is a weaker candidate, by making the contrast that Harrell is the Trump backer, Chase is the Trump opponent. That they talk about how the Santa Fe lobbyists and everyone's supposed to dislike lobbyists oppose President Trump, calling him an obscenity. And then there's Harrell, who's

loyal to Trump, backed by pro-gun people, backed by Trump, and even for Trump's wall. All the things they're saying about Harrell are meant to appeal to a conservative Republican electorate so that they say, yeah, I do have a choice. And I like that Harrell person.

Now, Yvette Harrell may not win the primary. There's a lot of money from Republicans on this race. It's not like the Democrats are the only people advertising in this. And she may win anyway, even if she is the nominee. But this is an example of

messing with your opponent that both sides do. And when you do it, you try and create a contrast that makes one candidate appear more favorable to the group, even though you think that that candidate is the person you want to face. This worked fantastically for the Democrats in the 2012 Missouri Senate race, where they were trying to push a congressman named Todd Akin in a three-way primary against Klaus

Claire McCaskill. And they ran ads citing him as the social conservative and a conservative. And Aiken won that three raceways and promptly blew up, lost in a disaster landslide to McCaskill and gave the Democrats that seat. This is a very clever campaign. And this is a very clever way to accomplish another end. And it just goes to show that when you're watching political advertising, if you're looking at it in a sophisticated way, you need to think who's the audience,

And what are they trying to do? Because it doesn't always seem that way. It's not always what it appears to be. And that's why this week's ad by the Patriot Majority Pack is a prime example of the mess with your opponent's primary approach. And that's why it's this week's Ad of the Week. That's it for this week's Horse Race. Join us again in two weeks for more inside expert analysis from the best political minds in America. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you again in the Winter Circle.