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Welcome to this week's horse race. As Democrats rally around Biden and Trump manages the pandemic, formal politics may seem to be frozen in amber. But that doesn't mean politics isn't happening. And we'll talk with National Journal's Josh Kroschauer about key congressional primary races that are coming up this spring that will help shape the party's directions in the years to come.
We'll also talk with Yuval Levin, a noted conservative thinker and a fellow at AEI and the editor of National Affairs, about the future of conservatism and the role that reform conservatism may play in that. And finally, we'll be speaking with Ramesh Panuru of National Review about how he's grading Trump's handling of the pandemic and the political aftermath of the crisis. The horses are at the starting gate. They're off.
This week on The Undercard, we'll be looking at intra-party battles, those primary battles or those battles in special elections that are between members of the same party and the winner of which casts a serious direction or indications about a serious direction of that party. Joining me to talk about this is Josh Kraushaar, the politics editor at National Journal and the anchor of a wonderful podcast on politics, Against the Grain. Josh, welcome to The Horse Race.
Hey, Henry. Thanks for having me on the show. Well, we've got a number of barn burners. Let's start with the president's party. We've got a battle in Georgia that has been talked about in part because of a recent scandal involving the appointed incumbent, Kelly Loeffler. Why don't you tell us how you see the race between Doug Collins and Kelly Loeffler for the Georgia Senate race?
Yeah, this election is something of a soap opera, politically speaking. And it's a weird election. It's not strictly a primary. It's an all-party special election where every candidate, whether you're a Republican or Democrat, runs on the same ballot in November. The seat was held by Johnny Isakson. He resigned because of health reasons at the end of last year. And the governor, the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, appointed Kelly Loeffler, who is a businesswoman, a
a venture capitalist. She owns a WNBA team in Atlanta, has lots of money, the wealthiest now senator in the entire body. So she's been
looked at as a strong candidate because she's a woman, she's from the suburbs of Atlanta, and she can spend unlimited amounts of money in the campaign. That's what made her politically attractive to Governor Kemp, and it's why Republicans endorsed her in Washington, including Mitch McConnell and the Senate leadership committees.
The problem is she doesn't have much of a political brand and she hasn't shown a lot of political smarts since she's arrived in Washington. And the big story politically in Georgia over the last month has been this revelation that she has traded stocks that...
That seemed to advantage her immediately after receiving a briefing in Washington about the risks of the coronavirus pandemic. So there were headlines that seemed to suggest that she was sort of doing insider trading. She was profiting from her public service. Now, she's defended her records. Her husband is an investor who owns Vodafone.
some of the stock exchanges. So he is very, very well versed in a lot of the Wall Street minutiae. But she has tried to explain that this was just coincidental, that she wasn't, you know, literally trading on insider knowledge, that she had a third party investment manager doing the work for her. But she's,
She's taken a political hit back home. And even as this was going on, even as she was taking a lot of criticism from within her party, she was also receiving a serious challenge from Congressman Doug Collins, who many of your listeners know was very prominent in the House impeachment trial defending President Trump. He's one of President Trump's favorite members of Congress. And he has a very accomplished record, a conservative record in the House.
So he wasn't scared of Senator Loeffler being appointed. He wasn't scared of the money that she has to run and spend in this race. Now he's benefiting from a lot of the scrutiny that she's been receiving on those ethical issues involving these document actions.
So this is a, you know, it's essentially, it's a de facto primary, even though they're all, all the candidates are competing in November on the same ballot. But there's been a lot of indications that Loeffler is in serious trouble that, that, you know, appointed senators generally have really poor track records winning elections. She's dealing with scandal. Uh,
As part of her tenure in Washington. And now she's facing a pretty seasoned conservative challenger who has been championed by President Trump at times. And there are some signs that she's in serious trouble hanging on to that Senate seat. Are there any polls that are worthwhile that should be talked about?
Yeah, there's – I think the AJC, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, before the scandal hit, did a poll that showed Collins ahead among Republicans that are voting in that race. So that's one warning sign that before all this happened –
Collins has a bigger profile. He has support with the conservative base, and that was present even before the controversy hit. Now, Collins's campaign put out an internal poll, and I think you should take that with a grain of salt, but it was sort of a stunning result, so it's worth mentioning. He showed...
in his internal poll that he was leading among Republicans by 70 points among Republicans in Georgia over Senator Loeffler. You know, I think, again, maybe that's a little bit exaggerated. Maybe the poll is designed to boost the image of Collins. But, you know, the pollster has a track record of doing good work in Republican circles. It's run by one of Collins' staffers, actually.
And, you know, usually you don't put numbers like that out unless you think you're pretty confident about your political standing. Well, there's another race that involves a controversial person. But this time the controversial person is the more conservative of the candidates. And I'm thinking of the Kansas Senate primary. Tell our listeners a little bit about Chris Kobach and why he sends shivers down the spine of establishment Republicans.
Yeah, Chris Kobach, who has run for many offices in Kansas, he's probably...
best known as one of Trump's biggest champions on immigration policy. He's been someone who's a hardliner on immigration, on restricting illegal immigration, even on regular immigration. He's a very big champion when it comes to being a restrictionist on the issue of immigration. So that's his profile in Washington. In Kansas, he ran for governor against Governor Jeff Collier, who was...
who was appointed to the seat. And he won the primary. He ousted the sitting governor in 2018 in the primary. But then in a red state like Kansas, he lost to Democratic Governor Laura Kelly. So, you know, there are not many Republicans that can't win in Kansas. In fact, Sam Brownback, who had a lot of detractors back home, was able to win two terms when he was governor. But
But Kobach couldn't win. He's a very polarizing figure. He's on issues relating to voting rights, immigration. He takes some of the most controversial issues and takes pretty right-wing positions on them. And he's shown that throughout his political career, he is not a very effective politician. He lost the governor's race. He ran for Congress many, many years ago and lost a very winnable seat for Republicans in the 30s.
the third district of Kansas. So this is someone who is just not a good politician, dramatically underachieves whenever he's on a ballot. He's running again for the Senate, but he opens seat of the Roberts is retiring. And Kobach is the best known Republican perhaps in the race, given his previous campaigns, but Republicans are panicked at the prospect that he could win the nomination and again, lose a general election to a Democrat, Barbara Ballier.
The other Republican that's running that has something of a profile is Congressman Roger Marshall.
from the first district, that's the Western Kansas district, that's biggest in the entire state. It's a very rural district. And Roger Marshall has something of a reputation of beating hardline conservatives. He won his house seat a few elections back, beating a Club for Growth Freedom Caucus Republican who was very right wing. He won the primary pretty convincingly and he's been in office ever since.
The problem is that when you have these ideological primaries, as you suggest, Henry, conservatives usually have the advantage because they're more mobilized, they're more energized. It's harder to run from the establishment middle and win in a race where you're going to have low turnout and the ideological folks are most activated. But Republicans in Washington, especially the National Republican Senate Parole Committee, the
the Senate Leadership Fund, all the establishment groups do not want Kobach to be the nominee. They're likely to pour their money and their endorsements against him, most likely all going toward Roger Marshall. And that's going to be a real test of electability. If Kobach wins that primary, that race is going to be very competitive in the general election. Democrats are going to spend some money in Kansas. They might be able to support up there.
Well, maybe it's fitting since people are talking about us being in a depression because of the pandemic that the Democrats have not won a Senate race in Kansas since the Great Depression. Maybe it's maybe it's just a depression thing that's going to go on. It's the longest streak of any state in the country that Kansas has never elected a Democrat for what, 88 years. That's a pretty long streak.
Well, there's a third Republican race that's attracted some national attention because of the person who is involved, and that's former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Alabama. Tell us where that race stands and how is it that Sessions is still standing despite some withering attention from President Trump? Yeah, well, this is a fun election. And
As we all know, Attorney General Sessions was hastily kind of drummed out of the White House and has been attacked mercilessly by the president since leaving. Trump doesn't like the role that he played in recusing himself from the Russia investigation. But he does have a lot of credibility in Alabama. He was a longtime senator. He had a huge, deep well of political support back home. We thought he could kind of make a comeback
and run in the Senate race and get his old seat back. But it looks like it's going to be a lot harder than he once envisioned. There was a primary that was held in March, and Sessions thought he was going to win the primary, even though his campaign knew it was going to be tougher to win a runoff in a one-on-one race against his top opponent.
But what happened in March is actually a little disappointing to Sessions. He lost. He didn't come in first place. He finished second to Tommy Tuberville. Remember Tommy Tuberville, the old Auburn football coach? Well, he's now going from football to politics. He's a little bit of an unknown. He doesn't have much of a political track record. But Tuberville is the one who led the Republican primary. Pete Sessions in the
primary and the conventional wisdom which I agree wholeheartedly with is that anyone who didn't support Sessions in that first round is much more likely to go to Tuberville in the runoff
So, you know, Trump, and also it's very important to note, even though the president stayed out of the primary, immediately after it was over and Sessions looked vulnerable, Trump endorsed Tommy Tuberville. So Trump has a very, very strong record in winning the primaries and picking a candidate he likes and getting them through a primary. He's done that a lot in 2018 with Brian Kemp, Ron DeSantis, and with a whole lot of other candidates. Yeah.
You know, Tuberville came in first place in the primary. I think he's a heavy, heavy favorite to beat Jeff Sessions and to Donald Trump very happy that Jeff Sessions is not going to be returning to the Senate. Before we turn to Democratic primaries and intraparty battles, are these ideological battles in any way or is it primarily personality battles between different types of conservatives? You know, it's a mix. And, you know, I don't think
A lot of the ideological divisions that we saw in Republican primaries for a decade are much more muted in the era of Donald Trump.
A lot of times you see primaries being litigated over which candidate is more supportive of Trump. Though I will say that in two of the races we've been talking about, there are pretty clear establishment versus grassroots divisions in the races. I mean, in Kansas, you couldn't get much more different conservative versus moderate than Kobach and Marshall. I mean,
I mean, Kobach is a hardliner and Marshall is someone who defeated a hardliner to get his political career started. So that is a pretty ideological primary over in Kansas. In Georgia, you know, Loeffler is trying to associate herself with Trump and distance herself from Mitt Romney and other establishment causes that she once supported. But it's clear that being a multimillion dollar Romney donor who is a business wing of the Chamber of Commerce, pro-business wing of the party, I mean, even though she's trying to distance herself from her record, I mean, she clearly is the candidate of the establishment.
Collins is the candidate of the more conservative grassroots. So there is a pretty firm ideological divide there, even if the campaign isn't being litigated on those grounds. Alabama is the one exception to the rule where, you know, I think Sessions is the candidate with the more conservative track record. But, you know, Trump doesn't necessarily support candidates based on ideology. So when Trump does weigh in, that does trump, if you will, the ideology that usually prevails in these primaries.
So let's turn over to Team Blue. What are some of the key primaries that you're looking at on their side of the aisle? Well, on the Senate side, they don't have as many huge contests. I mean, I think the big, big name one is in Massachusetts. Ed Markey, who is a first term senator, very liberal senator, is going up against Kennedy.
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Kennedy Skyhunts, another candidate who's trying to kind of use his name to reach higher office. And, you know, the race is going to be close. You know, Joe Kennedy, Joseph Kennedy III, is, you know, a popular member of Congress. He's someone who's very young, has a lot of future in Congress. But this is a test of, like, the workforce versus the show horse.
And it really isn't divided along pretty much ideological lines. In fact, the market is getting most of the establishment endorsement in this race. Not until September. I call this race the Seinfeld primary. It's kind of a primary about nothing. I haven't really detected any major issue divisions or any major issues between the two candidates. It's really hard to kind of figure out why Kennedy is running in the first place because it doesn't seem like he disagrees with
with Senator Markey on many issues. So you don't see the same kind of divide on issues or policy or even style. I mean, if anything, this is a generational contest. And Markey, you know, is pretty old. He's been around for a long time in Washington. Kennedy is in his 30s, part of a new generation. So, you know, there is a contest. Rather, if there is a divide, it's over generational issues.
As the person who co-authored the Green New Deal resolution with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, if she's not cutting a commercial for him in this, it's an indication of her leaning. But it's, I think, also gross political malpractice on Senator Markey's part. You're right. But she has endorsed Markey. And so so that a lot of these Green New Deal folks have actually gotten on Markey's bandwagon.
So what are some of the other races in the House of Representatives that you're looking at? On the Republican side, I think the best primary is going to be in Kentucky. We saw some, and there hasn't been a whole lot of political developments during the pandemic, but there was one big development that happened.
that happened as a result of the vote in Congress to authorize funding for the pandemic. And that was when, you know, the Senate passed the bipartisan bill. The House wanted to have a quick voice vote that wouldn't require many members of Congress to return to actually cast the vote on the funding. Thomas Massey, who is a libertarian congressman in Kentucky, did
essentially protected and enforced many, many members to have to come back to Washington during the crisis, during the pandemic, and actually have to cast votes in the lower chamber. A lot of Republicans were very angry at him. A lot of Democrats were angry at him. And he's always been a very quirky libertarian, you know, kind of Rand Paul style member of Congress. In fact, even more iconoclastic, I would argue, than even Rand Paul himself.
And he had an opponent already, a guy who was an attorney named Thomas McMurtry. The name may not ring a bell, but he was the attorney for the Covington Catholic kids. He was one of the lead attorneys winning the case for the Covington Catholic. And Covington is in this district, we should say. Covington is, again, it's a big district, but it includes all of the suburb, the Kentucky suburbs.
Cincinnati. So this is a district that is very conservative, but it also has a suburban affect to it. They're not looking for a member of Congress to vote against
pragmatic legislation all the time. And Massey's also taken some votes on Israel that have been very unpopular with the conservative evangelical community in addition to Jewish groups. At least a couple pro-Israel organizations have
joined the race, the Republican Jewish Committee endorsed McMurtry, which is an unusual step for them to do against an incumbent member of Congress. So that's a race that I think is going to be extremely close, extremely competitive. And it is an ideological battle between like the libertarian, the hardcore libertarian wing of the party and the more mainstream rank and file Republicans.
So that's on the Republican side. The big Democratic primary that I think should be getting a lot of attention, Rashida Tlaib, AOC plus three. Well, one of the three is in a really, really tough race that people aren't, I think a lot of people are sleeping on. They assume that with all the progressive energy in the Democratic Party, there's no way someone like Rashida Tlaib
Tlaib to lose her seat. But the reality is that Rashida Tlaib was sort of an accidental member of Congress. She ran in a very heavily African-American district in Detroit. The African-American candidates split the African-American vote, and Tlaib basically won because she had the white progressive vote in that district. But this time, she's likely to face a one-on-one contest against her strongest Democratic opponent, Brenda Jones, who's the
a city councilor from Detroit who has a solid political profile in the city, in that district. And there's been a poll, there's one poll out, a public poll that shows that race very close already. And we're, we're, we're the race, the primaries and until August, I think Rashida Tlaib is a very good chance. She loses her seat and we may see AOC plus two by the time 2021 rolls around, but that's going to be a race. That's going to get a whole lot of attention as we get closer into the summer.
What about the next AOC? Is there a race backed by Justice Democrats or by other progressives who are trying to take on a mainstream liberal to try and do what she was able to do, say that the party's energy, particularly in its safe urban bastions, is even farther to the left than the mainstream is willing to admit?
So the Justice Democrats, which is sort of the catch-all group that endorses candidates like AOC against incumbents,
They put a list out of candidates of members of Congress that they're trying to beat. I think the big race to watch is in Ohio. There are two races I would point your listeners to. Joyce Beattie, who is an African-American member of Congress in the Columbus area. She has a Justice Democratic opponent who's younger, who's more energetic, running far to the left of Joyce Beattie. The race was supposed to be in March. It got delayed because of the coronavirus.
uh it's a big big proxy test for that those aoc forces um who are trying to oust incumbents you
The other race I'd watch is a little later on in the year. It's in New York. Elliot Engel, the chair of the House Foreign Relations Committee. He's been around Congress for a long time. He's liberal, but he's not a woke liberal Democrat. And that's causing him issues among some of the voters in the district, including the Justice Democrats. He has an opponent, Bowman, as his last name.
who's raising a lot of money and getting a lot of organic support. So that's a race that's worth paying attention to in the fall. I will point out also that there were two races that Justice Democrats were involved in that already took place. There was a big race in Texas. They were trying to get Henry Cuellar, one of the most moderate Democrats in Congress, who were kind of
They came out and they had support from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and even a lot of more mainstream Democratic groups. And Justice Democrats failed pretty abysmally with all the money going in. They did not succeed against Henry Cuellar. They did succeed against Dan Lipinski in Illinois. That was...
a little bit of a unique race because Lipinski wasn't just a moderate, but he was something of a conservative Democrat, a throwback to the past. And he was opposed by a lot of establishment groups, including Emily's List, including a lot of abortion rights groups on the Democratic side. So even though Justice Democrats were engaged in that primary and they were candidate Marie Newman, it looked like she'll be headed to Congress. Lipinski had a whole lot more enemies than just the Democrats.
Well, you've certainly given my listeners and myself a lot to think about and to follow. Josh, thank you very much for joining me on the horse race. Thanks, Henry. For this week's end of the week, we're going to look south, south to South Carolina's first congressional district.
The 1st Congressional District is centered on Charleston and takes up a lot of the prosperous southern coast of South Carolina. It had been represented in Congress by Mark Sanford, who was a controversial figure when he was governor and a thorn in the side of President Trump after he returned to Congress.
He lost a primary bid for reelection in 2018, but the Republican who beat him lost in a shocking upset to a Democrat, the first time a Democrat has held this seat in decades. Republicans are looking to take it back because it's one of the most Republican seats in the country that is held by a Democrat. And the person they're coalescing around is State Representative Nancy Mace.
Her first ad went up on the Charleston Airwaves this week, and it's this week's ad of the week. Let's listen. Nancy Mace was the first woman to graduate from the Citadel. She helped elect President Trump. In the legislature, Nancy Mace fought for lower taxes, opposed wasteful spending, and protected our freedoms. In Congress, Nancy Mace will help President Trump take care of our veterans.
An American with an extraordinary lifetime of accomplishments, past, present, and future. Nancy Mace. Nancy. I'm Nancy Mace, and I approve this message.
This ad hits all of the boxes for a good introductory ad. It stresses a person's biography, the fact that Nancy Mace was the first woman to graduate from the formerly all-male military college, the Citadel, within the borders of the 1st Congressional District.
It talks about her role as a state representative and then has good pictures of her walking or talking in official capacity with her name on the screen with the things that are emphasized.
Lower taxes, eliminating wasteful spending, protecting freedoms. These are core conservative values, and they're meant to communicate to Republicans that Nancy Mace is a core conservative. Now, however, what it doesn't talk about, it doesn't talk about building the wall, which is something that's often talked about in Republican ads. It doesn't talk about social issues.
It doesn't talk about faith, other things that candidates introducing themselves in other districts would want to talk about. Why might that be? Well, first of all, she's running against a Democratic incumbent, even though she has to win the primary first. But she's also running in a seat that even though it's still voted for Donald Trump, moved towards Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. This is the wealthiest and most educated district in South Carolina. And it's one that as a result,
has people who habitually used to vote Republican who are now open to voting Democrat. The issues that I talked about that she doesn't mention are issues that tend to drive those voters away. The issues that she mentioned that she does talk about are issues that tend to attract
Again, you have somebody who is talking about a biography, a female trailblazer that is attractive to both conservatives and more moderates. And she talks about issues that unite the old Republican coalition rather than divide. She doesn't run away from President Trump. She talks about supporting Trump and she has a picture of her standing with President Trump when she's talking about Trump.
But again, unlike other Republican ads, she doesn't dwell on it. She doesn't talk about building Trump's wall or backing Trump. It's there, it's present, but it's not the focus of the ad. She then switches to something that is both another unifying issue and important for the district. Charleston is a habitual...
Navy base and a place that has a strong veterans community. So she has pictures with her, with veterans, with an aircraft carrier in the background. Again, the visuals and the words unify the potential Republican coalition rather than divide it.
And then in case that unification theme isn't clear, she chooses to end not with an endorsement from President Trump, but with five to 10 seconds of video and endorsement from Vice President Mike Pence. There is another person who is a unifying rather than a divisive figure.
within the coalition she's trying to build. She concludes by saying, habitually, that's required by law. Nancy Mace, I approve this message. But she does it in front of a good picture that's a positive picture of her with her name fully on the screen. It's difficult to think that her name ID is not going to rise significantly and that her favorables among Republican-leaning voters will rise significantly as well.
The fight for the South Carolina 1st Congressional District is going to be a hard-fought one. But with ads like this, you can expect that Nancy Mace is going to give Congressman Cunningham, the Democratic incumbent, a run for his money. And that's why it's this week's Ad of the Week.
This week on Round the Horn, I am joined by one of the most important thinkers and trenchant observers of all things American and American politics that there is on the right or in any spectrum. That is Yuval Levin, the Director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the must-read quarterly journal, National Affairs. Yuval, welcome to the Horse Race. Thanks very much for having me, Henry.
Well, it's, as they say, where the old Chinese curse used to be. May you live in interesting times. And thanks to the Chinese virus, we are. Yeah, really. This is the new Chinese curse, COVID-19. Yeah.
So what do you think? We're about a month into a crisis stage and formal politics have been placed on hold, but informal politics seem to be continuing apace. What's your sense of how the response is going and how the politics surrounding it are going?
Well, you know, in one sense, it's amazing how quickly we've mobilized and how thoroughly. I think if you told me six weeks ago what life would be like now, I would absolutely not have believed it and would not have thought that it could have gone the way it has. There's a lot to complain about, and we're good at that. And you can certainly point to the testing fiasco and various failures of mobilization. But, you know, on the whole, both at the federal level and in a lot of places at the state level,
we've seen extraordinary mobilization in what actually is a pretty short period of time. So
You know, I can certainly find fault with things the president has done and various governors have done and so on. But in the CDC and the FDA, and if you want to get me started on that, you can. But
But on the whole, the fact is our country has responded to this in an extraordinary way. And, you know, we are already beginning to see some light at the end of the tunnel and to think and talk about the next phase here. I would say what really stands out to me at this point is that I do think everyone in our politics is still understating the economic –
that we're confronting now because of our response. I think it's been a necessary response. And so in that sense, it's a necessary calamity. But the scale of it, the scope of it, because things are still closed down and it's still hard to tell exactly what is and isn't happening,
It seems to me that we're headed into an economic disaster that will rival the Great Depression and that we're doing it without a clear sense of exactly what this looks like, how to understand it in traditional economic terms. What is the GDP number even telling us now? What does inflation mean at this point? How do we get back from a place where so many people are underemployed and unemployed in just vast quantities that we can't quite fathom? I
I think we haven't begun to get our arms around that. Understandably, we're still trying to get our arms around the public health situation. But if the next phase is a gradual return, I think we're going to find that in economic terms, we're returning from a very, very grim place. Well, I guess that's one of the questions is our...
immediate in the sense of within three generations touchstone is the Great Depression, which was both sharp and long. But before that, and this is one of the reasons one can argue that people like Herbert Hoover didn't know how to respond, their touchstone was generally panics, sharp, immediate reversals that tended to last for a couple of years, but then with sharp recoveries, what we would now call a V-shaped recovery, and
Do you get a sense that this is, could it be a panic against something we haven't experienced in over 100 years? Or do you really think that this could be an elongated period of 15% or more unemployment, which typically characterizes depression?
Well, look, I think the only honest answer, obviously, is that we just don't know. And I certainly have no idea. And I do think it makes sense to think about this in terms of a relatively sharp kind of V-curve because there is an artificial holding down of demand here and it will be released at some point. But the idea that what happens then is that we return to the pre-
pandemic economy doesn't seem right at all to me. I think we're going to have had a real change in some of the basic dynamics of our economy, not only in that things have shut down and it's not so easy to open them back up, but that our basic attitude about supply chains, our attitude about the balance between efficiency and resiliency,
is going to change in a lasting way. And that attitude matters a lot. The emphasis on just-in-time supply chains and on intensely efficient global supply chains has been very important to the character of the American economy in the last generation. And if that's going to change, and we're now going to insist on much greater resiliency
We're going to have a different economy, and I don't think we're prepared to think about what that requires, what it means for industry, what it means for government, what it means for the service sector and for employment.
And so in that sense, I don't think we're just waiting for this to end and then we can all go back. I do think we're going to be in a new economic reality that will put some strains on the political system. And as I say, for the time being, I think everybody in our politics is still understating the economic cost involved here and the challenges that are going to be involved in coming back from this. To me, that's the issue we walk away with. We're going to beat the virus. The American pharmaceutical industry and academic research enterprise
is going to win the public health war. But the economic calamity we're left with when that happens is going to be something we haven't experienced before. Well, I think you touched on something that I haven't heard much discussed, and I want to focus in on that, which is that when I've been hearing people talk about
what's going to happen to the economy after pandemic. They focused on the service industries that are not in global competition. Will people go back to movies? Will people go back to restaurants? Will people get as many haircuts and so forth, which employ a lot of people?
But when you talk about supply chain and resiliency, you're talking about manufacturing, you're talking about goods, you're talking about globalization. And what you're telling me is that you think that what public opinion is going to demand is something that three years ago was considered heretical in both parties, which is paying a premium for manufacture in or around the American continent.
Is that what you're arguing? And if so, how do you see this playing out? Because multinationals and global financial investors are going to fight that tooth and nail because it means cost and reduced profit margin. Yeah, no, I think that's true. Look, I...
My sense is that we are headed in that direction. I certainly don't know. We're all looking through the fog here and it's very hard to say, but I think that both public opinion in a general sense, but also a lot of economic actors who now are having to think in very different ways about what business disruption looks like and what our reliance on China looks like and how sensitive to disruption so many of our economic systems are.
I think we're just going to think differently about the importance of resilience and the importance of sustainable supply chains. And we're just not going to take for granted, even as consumers, you know, I think we all went through this period early on in this response where
And we had a thought, well, I need this or that, so let me just go on Amazon. And then it says, well, you can get this on May 15th and it's March 20th. And you think, well, what is this about? And that on a much larger scale is a realization that I think a lot of the business world has been coming to in the course of this crisis. And the response to that is going to need to be something of a different attitude about how we think about where we get what we have.
And so, yeah, I think that there will be a change of view about globalization that isn't so much rooted in some of the arguments we've had that are based in the prioritization of American worker interests. I wish it were rooted in that. I think those are good arguments. But it's going to be rooted in the basic sense that things are not as secure as they seemed and that a globalized world involves risks that we need to think about.
And it's going to push in a direction that I do think is something we've been coming to in our politics for a while from a different direction and that we'll need to be thinking about.
Well, then let's think about it a little bit. Let's, as we were saying offline, speculate with data. How would that look? Is that we're talking about things like offering financial incentives for companies to come back? Are we talking about things like out and out industrial policy? Are we talking about...
the sort of long drawn out trade negotiations to produce a more balanced equilibrium with third world producers, which is primarily where the disruptions are coming from, places in China or in Asia. How does that change look to you as you try and dimly look through the glass into the next couple of years?
Yeah, I mean, I guess I would say my general sense is that part of it will be about prioritizing certain kinds of industries and goods. And you can call that industrial policy. I mean, in some ways, America has always had industrial policy. The question is, how is it directed? To what end and to what sort of benefit? You know, I think that we have come to see that medical equipment, for example, is a strategic necessity and has to be thought of in a different way than we've tended to think about it.
But, you know, there is an argument like that to be made around supply chains in a variety of industries. I don't think it's going to be a total transformation. We're not going to become closed off to the world and we're not going to give up on trade. But I suspect that when we think about trade agreements in the years to come, we're going to have this memory in the back of our heads. This is for this generation of decision makers and policymakers and for the rising generation of them.
this period is going to be a defining moment. You know, in the way that Munich was for a generation of Cold War leaders, they're going to approach various kinds of decisions
with the recognition, the recollection that great disruption that comes suddenly is a possibility and that it is part of their job to be prepared for it and to avert it. And I think that will change our attitude about what we take for granted when it comes to trade and economic policy generally. Again, as I say, not fundamentally, but in meaningful marginal ways.
But let me push a little bit on that. You and I have been intellectually or involved in the intellectual fights within the right over these questions of self-sufficiency versus economic efficiency, consumers versus producers that have been bubbling up over the last decade. The Trump presidency certainly saw somebody who
Surely doesn't read national affairs in his spare time or my articles, but seem to have an instinctual interest.
attraction to some of the broad themes. And what I hear you saying is that those fights are about ready to go, if not nuclear, then certainly into a much hotter level that the battle between what I like to characterize as the Wall Street Journal editorial page and the reform conservatism or populist movements is about ready to be sharp because
This isn't a thing that's going to suddenly be delayed for a couple of years. If we come out of it, I think we can expect people to be, whether it's challengers for the intellectual crown of Republican Party or whether it's Joe Biden or Donald Trump trying to continue what he's been starting in the last week, focusing on China and their role in spreading this. This will probably be part of the battle in the fall, right?
Where do you see the trends going within conservatism? Where are the battle lines and where can we expect sharp disagreement before some sort of consensus can be reached, if it can be reached? You know, I think it's an open question about whether what this means is that those fights become sharper or whether what it means is that the
the middle of the party moves in a direction that's a little more open to skepticism about China as the source of raw materials for our economy to the degree it has been. That is, I think the arguments may become less sharp if in the wake of this crisis, there's a broader sense that as a matter of degree or emphasis on
we need to shift in the direction of enabling our supply chains to be resilient in a crisis. And so it's imaginable. Certainly, it's easy to imagine that the fights become sharper. They've been sharp and they've been sharpening and they could easily continue in that direction. But what this moment might mean is that
There's a broader consensus around the view that at least with respect to some industries and some goods and some sectors, it's just essential that we have at least a greater variety of suppliers and in some cases that we have domestic capacity.
It seems to me that that's easily where we could find ourselves over the coming months, and certainly that would affect the direction of things on the right. A lot of the arguments that we've been part of for years are continuing. They haven't been resolved in the Trump era in any way, but they've been, as you say, sharpened, heightened. And I would certainly expect that whatever happens in November—
the party is still arguing in some basic ways about the direction it needs to take with respect to 21st century realities, and that includes the question of globalization. It also includes the question of
the of the capacity of Americans to form families and durable communities, of the ability of people to find worthwhile jobs where they are. Those questions that have been so central to some of the debates on the right are going to be, I think, in some important ways sharpened by the economic challenges that we're entering into here. Would it be an oversimplification to say that
On one side of this debate are people who tend to think that voluntary action without directed without some form of intentional direction from government is the best way to address that, and that the cure. If that's insufficient.
is worse than the disease, which is say that the intentional direction of government is something to fear more than weakening communities or weakening families or the lack of resiliency. While people on the other side, of which I will be very upfront with my listeners, I am one,
think that those problems are more important than the cure and that we can actually use government more effectively and in directional ways that are neither threatening to our liberty or imply some form of genuine socialism. In your view, is that an oversimplistic formula or is that roughly where we're going to see the philosophical tensions come within the party?
Well, I think that's probably a little unfair to our libertarian friends. I mean, I would say the caricatures painted of them as kind of simple-minded market absolutists don't seem right to me. I think there is a debate about emphasis and degree. There is a debate about the role of government
But that everybody agrees government-
And everybody agrees that there has to be some limit on that role, that it can go too far. The questions we're arguing about on the right, it seems to me, are probably best understood as questions about whether we should be emphasizing economic questions above social and cultural ones or vice versa. And in that sense, the argument we're going through in this period is
akin to a lot of debates that the right has had with itself since the middle of the 20th century. Struggles between various kinds of social traditionalists and various kinds of economic libertarians. And I understand those debates as arguments about the degree to which economic thinking should predominate in our political thinking and acting.
So I think they're not best understood as debates about the economic theory that should guide us, but about the extent to which the country's life is best understood in economic terms. Within the sphere of economics, I'm a market guy. I wouldn't say I'm a libertarian. I'm not. But I believe in markets, and I believe they're the best way to organize economic activity and to address problems of scarcity and
And prioritization. But I just think that that sphere of the economic is limited and that politics isn't just economics. It has to consider other things. It has to consider the dignity of the human person, dignity as a worker, as a as a parent, as a citizen.
It has to consider people's ability to form flourishing lives, to be parts of communities. It has to consider people's connections and affinities, their religious affiliations and beliefs, their belonging to various kinds of parochialisms in American life. These things are all legitimate and they matter. We have to take them seriously. And we also have to consider the importance of having a prosperous society and therefore a growing economy.
The work of politicians is to balance all these things. It's not easy work, you know, but no one forced them to run for office. And I think we have to expect of our politics that it take all of these different goods very seriously.
The mistake that I think libertarians do make is that they tend to subsume everything beneath economics and to think that as long as the economy is growing, people should be feeling good about their lives. I think it's hard to feel good about your life even if the economy is growing if you don't have a community to belong to, if your dignity is not respected by the people around you, if your family is broken. And so...
I think politics has to take a broader view of that. That, to me, is what reformed conservatism tries to encourage. I think that it seeks to do that by building a coalition with economic conservatives because, at least for me, my economic views are pro-market views, but they have to be put in their place. And, you know, I begin fundamentally as a social conservative, and my economic views come after that.
Well, I'm a market person as well. You know, I've been thinking recently about what are, to me, the essentials of a market economy. And I would say, you know, the essentials of a market economy are things like the ability of individuals to invest.
produce a good or a service without prior governmental approval, to charge a price for that service or good without political processes interfering, that capital investment is allocated according to return on investment or whatever criteria people who possess capital want to have. But that within that, there is also a question of
what happens when what is economically efficient in those principles create tensions in the areas that you are talking about. That if it is economically efficient to produce all of our drugs in China, and then in a disaster, we find we depend on somebody who's not our friend for those drugs, which set of values comes out on top? And necessarily, it strikes me that that means that
one has to make the argument for why a limitation from a directional way from government is required in those circumstances to produce that balance that you would like political politicians to have. And that necessarily means
a circumscription of economic free market ism in certain areas in order to achieve that balance. Is that again an oversimplification or is that simply something that you think that people of goodwill generally recognize and that it's false advertising to say that a number of people don't know about the economy?
That certainly speaks to me, and I think it's very much the way I think about these questions too. And there has been a tendency on the right to resist the constraints that sometimes do have to be put on markets for the sake of these other goods, and to resist them on the argument that, on the one hand, this is a violation of our principles, which is to say market principles,
which I think is, again, a mistake in prioritizing. It's true that this isn't pure market capitalism, but market capitalism is part of a larger system, a larger idea of social and political life, and can't win every single argument.
What worries me is that some of the people making the kind of argument that I find myself friendly to end up also arguing against market economics in its own terms and suggesting that ultimately, even as economic theory,
It doesn't it's not the best way to organize ourselves. And there I do disagree. I am a capitalist, but I'm an Adam Smith capitalist. I think capitalism has to be understood as the economic system of the liberal society and that larger society is not just an economy. And so.
It has to be seen in its proper context, and there are certainly times when the tensions that arise between what the market economy prioritizes and what other facets of our society would want to put first, those tensions cannot always be resolved in favor of the economic. I think that's a crucial point that conservatives have to press in any free society, and when we forget to do that, we're not doing our job.
So, and I would agree with that 100%. You are one of the leaders, if not the godfather of reform conservatism, which is something I've been favorable to for a number of years.
What do you think the future of reform conservatism is right now? Is it something that exists in a real way outside of a body of thought? And if so, where do you see it going?
Well, I think there are facets of it that certainly exist in a real way or elements of it. I would say this. I think reformed conservatism arose in the course of the late Bush years and the Obama years as a policy-minded version of the kind of argument we're making here. And I think ultimately...
Political ideas at this level have to be directed toward public policy. That is, they have to be aimed at telling the public how their lives could be made better by empowering the people who are articulating these ideas.
And that means that it can't just be pure theory and it can't be just a matter of ideology and philosophy. It has to also translate itself into the language of policy. In the last few years, we haven't really had much of a policy conversation on the right and in general. It's been a strange situation since the 2016 election in that
You know, in one sense, of course, conservatives or the right won the election, but it hasn't been the case that we've since been governing. You know, Congress hasn't really passed major legislation outside of crisis legislation since the tax reform era.
of 2017, three years ago. The administration hasn't done all that much. I mean, there's certainly been some valuable deregulation, but most of that has involved undoing very late Obama era rules. There haven't been fundamental changes to the character of the administrative state
And, you know, the president's running for reelection even before the pandemic. He wasn't really running on any particular agenda that I could see, and neither were congressional Republicans. And so we have this situation where the right is neither quite facing the responsibilities of governing, which require the building of coalitions,
Nor are we facing a progressive government with a left-wing president that we have to resist, which requires the building of coalitions.
Instead, we have this kind of we're in this sort of undisciplined state that doesn't require the building of coalitions and that lets us talk in the abstract for years on end and basically pick fights with one another over questions about which we do disagree and which are significant, but which in the bigger picture are going to be questions that are resolved within coalitions.
And we haven't had to do that work of building coalitions. Reform conservatism, from my point of view, was a coalition-building effort. It tried to draw in some people who were closer to the libertarian side of things. It tried to draw in people who are more like social conservatives.
and to help us all see how we can work together if we think about the agenda of the right in a particular way. That's just not the kind of debate we've had on the right in the last few years. And so I think it's been a little hard to place the reform conservatives in this period. There are some politicians who certainly come out of this camp. I think Josh Hawley, for example, would say that he does and Marco Rubio and others.
But not everybody who was involved with reformed conservatism agrees with what they're up to these days. And on the whole, I would say we just lack the disciplining pressures that force us to think about public policy in a way that might draw on the work we did then. So I think the next governing coalition of the right is going to have a lot to do with reformed conservatism. It's going to build on that effort quite a bit.
But I don't think we're building that coalition right now in this period. And so it's natural to wonder what's become of it. So I guess I'd like to just end with one final question then, which is, again, I'll oversimplify, which is to say that to govern means to act. And that doesn't mean to act necessarily in a way that always enhances government power. In fact, often you and I would say it would mean
to restrict or to channel government power, but it also doesn't mean inaction. And so is what we're seeing a, that movement between when the right has power, it doesn't have a governing coalition, which is I think characterized the Bush years as well, at least after the first couple of years. And when it's in opposition, it's, it finds its voice and to coalesce against government action.
Is not the question of a conservative governing coalition then an attempt to cut that Gordian knot in a way so that conservatives are comfortable with governing, which is to say acting through government on a consistent basis? Yeah, I think there's a lot of truth to that. And certainly in that respect, the project of the reformed conservatives has been
to offer up an agenda that would work as a governing agenda, that would be something conservatives wanted to do, given the power to do it.
There is certainly an inclination on the right to use power in order to not do, which is to say to not use power. I think it's a fantasy to believe that voters ever elect you to just do nothing. That's not how any politician actually runs for office, and it's not how voters think about what they want from government.
And to just do doesn't mean that a government should be taking over the roles of the market or civil society or anything else. But it does mean that we have to think about how to use public power in ways that enable the kind of flourishing that we think is right for American society. And in a moment like this, there's a lot that that requires, even if you think in very practical terms about the challenges that American families face.
There are many steps that government could take to lower costs and improve options for families in ways that I think should be very welcome by all kinds of conservatives, but that would certainly require public policy, government action, and getting people accustomed to that idea across our coalition.
It takes work. The right has always struggled with that. Well, not always. The right has struggled with that for a generation, and we struggle with it now. And certainly the work that we're trying to do, and I think the work that you're trying to do, is in part an effort to change that culture a little.
Well, to be continued, chatting with you is always the intellectual version of fine dining. I always enjoyed it and I always wish that I had the stomach and the appetite for more, but then that would be gluttony and that's one of the sins. Yuval, thank you for joining me on the horse race and to be continued. Thanks very much, Henry.
Joining me this week on Trump Talk is a good friend and a trenchant observer of the political scene, Ramesh Panuru, who is with National Review, Bloomberg Opinion, and the American Enterprise Institute. Ramesh, thanks for joining me on The Horse Race. Thanks for having me.
Well, you know, the president never lacks for newsworthy copy, whether it's delivered at the podium at a formal press briefing or whether it is delivered via Twitter. And there's certainly lots to chew on that he said and done in the last couple of weeks. What stands out most to you?
So I would say two things stand out. First, the decision to suspend funding for the World Health Organization over its record on fighting the pandemic and particularly its record of really assisting China in mishandling it and covering it up.
That is a decision that is obviously intensely controversial, which tends to split along partisan lines. And there's also a legal question as to whether it's within the president's powers, which brings me to the second thing which stands out, which is the debate that President Trump has waded headfirst into over the powers of the presidency, the
The president has talked about how the decision to reopen the economy is his. He has total authority over that. Not many people who are familiar with the Constitution or the law are with him on that question.
But it may be that he has sort of retreated to a more defensible position in just saying he's going to allow the governors to do what, in fact, they already have the power to do, which is to make these decisions for themselves.
So what do you think prompted him to say he has total authority over the economy? I mean, I have this small little problem, which is that I did attend law school. I do remember my Con Law case. And the thing that always comes to mind for me when I listen to President Trump talk is Youngstown Steel, Youngstown Steel.
President Truman tried to nationalize the steel mines during the Korean War in order to deal with a proposed strike, and the Supreme Court said, you don't have the power to do that. So if you can't shut down steel mills in the middle of the war, what makes you think you can shut down the economy in the middle of a pandemic? Well,
One can only speculate as to what was going through his mind. And I'm sure that a lot of lawyers in the administration have been hard at work trying to devise ex post facto rationalizations for what the president said. It may be as simple as that, he said.
That likes the idea of being powerful and being seen to be powerful to put a little bit more public spirited gloss on it. It may be that he thinks it's important for Americans to have confidence that somebody is in charge. But the American system is actually designed so that nobody really is in charge in a simple sense.
That's one of the things that I have heard from my friends overseas is that for them, they tend to live in centralized governments like the United Kingdom. And to see these governors acting independently of the central government, it's like, wait a minute, aren't you like us? Aren't you a nation? And no, actually, we're a federal republic even today. And that may be something that is at odds, though, with the idea that
the president is some sort of national leader, as opposed to what actual powers he has. Does that put him in a bit of a bind in that there's a press expectation or a public expectation that he ought to act, but then when he says he can act, you run into actual constitutional limitations on what a president or even a national government can do?
Absolutely. Within the last two weeks, when people were asking the president, you know, why is there no national lockdown? He would say things like, well, it's because we've got this thing called the Constitution. And that's right. I mean, you know, you could connect it to another conversation that we've been having recently, which is about COVID.
how big of a problem is it for Joe Biden that he's sort of on the sidelines during this crisis? Well, in a certain sense, even Trump is not quite as much in the foreground as he would like to be because there's a limit. There are constitutional limits. And of course, there are just limits based on the reality of the virus to how much he can do. And it's not surprising that he would be chafing a little bit under those limits. But
But, you know, people there is a certain damned if you do damned if you don't trap for the president in that people were criticizing him for not doing a national lockdown. And now people, you know, not always the same people are criticizing him for claiming that he does have authority over that.
And that's one of the things you hear in the pro-Trump community, which is that whatever the guy says, the anti-Trump community is going to say the opposite. Even if 48 hours before they were saying things that would be in accord with where the president is right now.
How much of that are you seeing? Obviously not with somebody like a Joe Biden, who is much more circumspect, but with respect to the media or prominent personalities, have you seen some of that flip-flopping, or do you think that's more of a myth in Maga land?
Oh, I think that that's true. I mean, partly it's just a reflection of having a large and cacophonous public square in which there are a lot of different voices and complicated coalitions. And on any side, there will be people saying things that are contradictory to what other people in their camp are saying. And you can sort of construct a story. In fact, you can experience it that way. You can experience it as you're hearing one thing and then you're hearing another.
But I also think that it's just true that there are people on the left side of the spectrum, the anti-Trump side, who went from saying, oh, there's nothing to worry about with the pandemic. And we have more to worry about anti-Chinese animus arising from the pandemic than we do from the virus itself. And now they're, you know, they flipped over to, you know,
to saying Trump never took this seriously enough and we lost precious time, et cetera, et cetera. Doesn't mean that one of those critiques isn't right, but I do think you have to choose one. And of course, on the pro-Trump side,
You also see people who will sort of defend him using whatever means are at hand, regardless of whether they're consistent with what they were saying the day before yesterday. The president sort of aids that since he himself is so frequently going back and forth on things.
Yeah, one could say that the president sometimes is a verbal Gumby twisting himself in different shapes that they, although I might have just dated myself by referring to Gumby, an old 1960s cartoon, which the president himself does often, although usually with references from the 1950s. You mentioned the defunding of the World Health Organization. So I'd like to ask you two questions, although they are related. One is,
separated from his legal authority to do so. Do you think this is a good policy idea? Now, he may have a good policy idea, but not have the legal authority to do it. So one, do you think it's a good policy idea? And then two, do you think it's entirely a coincidence that this came the day after the kerfuffle and the controversy about his claim for total authority? So both good questions.
tend to think that this is the right decision. I'm not saying that the U.S. should be out of the WHO forever, but I do think that we need to exert some kind of pressure for reform there, that the record really is pretty bad, at least the record during this pandemic. And
It's not going to reform itself, certainly not, you know, just by having itself be slathered in praise, which is what the critics of the decision are currently doing for it. So I do think it's the right decision. As to the timing, you know, what people, the thing that people have mostly latched on to on the other side of the decision is that
the WHO is being made a scapegoat for Trump's own mistakes and his own failings. And I think we just have to
Maintain our own intellectual integrity and separate these two issues. It is perfectly possible to say that Trump has made mistakes and that the WHO has made mistakes. Whatever Trump's motives are, it does not mean that he is wrong in fingering the WHO. And if the WHO is wrong,
has made mistakes that deserve public approbrium or at least public scrutiny, it doesn't mean that Trump should be considered to be in the clear. But unfortunately, our politics has often taken that form. Do you think that it's possible to have a fruitful public discussion about the pandemic and how government should react to it while Trump is in office because he is such a polarizing figure? Yeah.
It would be difficult to have a kind of calm discussion of the issues, given that we're talking about life and death and livelihoods, things that strike directly at people's hopes and fears. So it's going to be an emotional argument. It's going to be one that arouses conflicts in people. The polarization of our politics, of which Trump is...
at least as much a symptom as a cause, makes it harder to do that. But we are in this odd position where the normal political lines are a little bit scrambled. Since there is a kind of pro-Trump
impulse to want to reopen the economy quickly. But of course, that isn't the Trump administration's public position. The Trump administration's position has been to favor these lockdowns, at least for the time being. And I think that that's one thing that has maybe caused this argument, as harsh as it may look, to actually be a little bit more contained than it otherwise would be.
What's your view? He has said a couple of times that as early as this week, he's going to begin to announce a plan to reopen the economy. Do you think it is safe?
to reopen segments of the economy or portions of the country within the next couple of weeks as he is intimated? Or do you think this is another example of the president's mouth getting ahead of where the facts will ultimately lead him?
Well, I think that there are some respects in which the lockdowns have gone too far and should be relaxed. I don't see, for example, why drive-in church services ought to be prohibited. I think that heavy-handed enforcement tactics are mistaken. They're overkill and they're maybe self-defeating overkill and that they make it harder to sustain lockdowns.
These lockdowns, I'm not sure it was right to close down as many parks as we have closed down. But on the question of whether we should sort of move back towards life as normal, I do think right now that that is premature. I think we need to have.
not only declining cases, but we need to have more testing and tracing capability than we currently have before we can do that. But, you know, the thing is that it is a judgment call. And at some point there will be a moment where it makes sense. And at that moment, there will still be voices saying it's too early. Now I happen to be on the side right now saying it is too early, but that calculation could change.
Do you think that the American people, you've mentioned tracing capability, and this is something certainly that South Korea has used to great effect, but tracing capability means tapping into your cell phone and knowing literally who you have come into contact with, and then sending government agents from health departments to go talk to those people and make sure that they're okay and haven't spread things. Do you think Americans...
when it comes down to it, would be willing to accept that degree of even beneficent public intervention in literally who they see, where they see them, and when they see them? That is a huge question to which we don't know the answer. I think that one...
Question that will help determine the answer to that larger question is, do people decide that is intrusive or inconvenient or potentially threatening as that is? It is not as intrusive, inconvenient or threatening as the lockdowns. And it may be the only way forward to get out of them.
And in that case, maybe people will get a little bit more tolerant of it. But I do think that the tech companies and legislators should be mindful of the fact that people are not going to support this and are not going to comply with it unless they believe that there are privacy protections in place. So if you look at the Apple, Google,
cooperative effort to create smartphone apps that would assist in tracing. The idea is that you'd be voluntarily using this app
It's sort of hard to see, at least to start with, doing it on any non-voluntary basis. And people are just not going to download this app and use it to report on themselves in anything close to the necessary numbers if they think that it's opening a door to the loss of all their privacy.
And that then gets back to the question of trust in government and mandatory measures that South Koreans, regardless of their very sharp political differences, which are on display today with their election, do seem to trust a mandatory government ability to seize your cell phone records and identify who you're with and so forth in a way that Americans don't.
If Americans aren't willing to do that, or if Congress isn't willing to authorize it, then a real tracing capability seems to be gone. And then doesn't that add more risk to the decision of when to reopen? Because if we're going to wait for the perfect, then we make it the animated good, and then we'll be in lockdowns through the summertime.
Right. Now, I mean, you could, in theory, also get testing so widespread and frequent that you use that instead. But of course, whether we'll be able to do that, whether people would accept that is also a question. So, yeah, we've got really imperfect alternatives that we have to choose among. And it's particularly hard in a country which has historically been pretty individualistic and
and which has recently seen a lot of decline in trust and authority and has been given reason to have less trust and authority. So just to close this out, put yourself in Trump's shoes for a minute and think about over the next week, what do you think the most important decisions are
that he has to make in the next week are, and what do you think he should do for the good of the country, not for the short-term political perceived benefit? I think the main thing that would be helpful in his position is
is to reach a deal with Democrats on the Hill about economic aid to small businesses. We have run out of funding for the small business aid program.
And there is a logjam right now with Democrats insisting that they get some of their priorities in order for this to move forward. Very hard position for a lot of small business owners to be in. There's a lot of things that we need to do. I assume that a lot of those things are things that can be done by the bureaucracy. But this is a political logjam that needs to be broken.
Well, one hopes that he can break that logjam because I can only imagine what the political pressures are like in 10 days if it's not broken. Ramesh, thank you very much for joining me in the horse race, and I hope to have your back. Thanks. Take care. That's all for this week's horse race. Next week, we'll look at the Keystone State, Pennsylvania, and take a deep dive into the Democratic race in New Mexico's 3rd Congressional District to see the different ways that rookie candidates
introduce themselves to the voters they seek to represent. I'm Henry Olson, and I'll see you next week in the Winters.