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Feb. 20, 2024 - The Muckrake Political Podcast
55:19
Should Biden Be Replaced? With Special Guest Max Burns

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman are joined by Max Burns, who is a democratic strategist, political columnist, and a founder of Third Degree Strategies, to discuss what the Democrats are doing and not doing in order to win the upcoming elections in November. Sign up for our Patreon to get access to our LIVE Show coming up on Saturday, February 24th at 8:30 PM EST plus a host of other benefits at: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Time Text
Hey everybody, Jerry J. Sexton here.
I was so excited to get to our guest today, and I'm excited for you to get to our guest today, that I forgot to mention that we're going to have live, exclusive, post-South Carolina GOP primary coverage this Saturday, February 24th.
We'll be going live right around 8.30 p.m.
Eastern.
That's this Saturday, February 24th.
Chances are that this is going to be the death knell of the Republican primary.
Uh, in South Carolina, and we should talk about it.
So, if you haven't already, go to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast, become a patron, you can come to the live, uh, broadcast, you can talk to us, ask us questions, and it's just one of those perks that I think everybody enjoys.
All right, everybody, let's get to that show, and let's get to the, uh, previously mentioned guest.
Hey, everybody!
Welcome to the Muckrake Podcast.
I'm Jerry D. Sexton.
I'm here with my good buddy, Nick Hausman.
Nick, how are you?
How was your weekend?
It was pretty good.
It was pretty good.
We're just, you know, battening down the hatches with all this rain and weather that's not nice.
Am I wrong, or was there a storm in California that dropped trillions of gallons of water?
Is that correct?
That was like a week and a half ago, and yes, and we're in for a little bit more today and tomorrow for a while.
We're not used to this.
We don't normally get, you know, rain for so long and strong stretches, but But here we are, and I don't want to, you know, rub it in on people who are probably dealing with much worse issues across the land.
I think it's okay if you complain about trillions of gallons of water being dropped on you.
It's almost, Nick, like something's happening with our environment, but that's neither here nor there.
Before we give this episode a reminder to everyone, go over to patreon.com slash mccraigpodcast, become a patron, subscribe to the show, keep us ad-free, editorially independent.
Also, you get all of our exclusive stuff.
Nick, we've got the South Carolina primary coming up.
We are going to offer exclusive post-primary coverage.
That, of course, is going to be Nikki Haley being destroyed in her own backyard.
Man, it's really, really something what this is becoming.
This primary season, this election, is absolutely absurd in so many ways that we are going to go over today.
And, Nick, I thought that we needed a little bit of help to get into the entire situation.
That is why I asked my friend and friend of the pod, Max Burns, who is a Democratic strategist, political columnist, and a frequent guest host on SiriusXM Progress.
He's the founder of Third Degree Strategies, a progressive communications firm headquartered in New York.
Max, my good friend, how are you?
Hey man, thanks so much for having me.
It's good that I'm in this seat now and I get to see how an actual show is put on because I'm just winging it over there.
But I always appreciate having you.
Thanks so much.
You're the absolute best and I was really excited to get you on to talk about this entire We've graduated from silly season to sillier season with, like, more important situations.
Before we get started on the main topics of the day, how are you feeling so far about the race just in general, like, from a vibes perspective?
How does it hit you?
I think anxiety dreams is a great way to put it.
A lot of sweating.
I feel, and this is some unpopular position that has upset some that I've written about, that if Democrats pull this off in November, it's going to be because of structural weaknesses in the Republican Party and the candidate.
And that to me, when democracy is on the line, hoping that your opponent makes the mistakes that lead you to victory really just sets my stomach churning, man.
I mean, it's a high anxiety moment.
You know, it's not even that, will he make the mistakes?
Like, he will.
We know he's going to make every mistake a candidate could possibly make, and Trump will, right?
And yet, we also, I think what makes us wring our hands is that it doesn't matter.
We know that the people who are going to vote for him are not going to care that he makes all his mistakes.
Is that safe to say?
Oh no, that's absolutely right.
I mean, Trump's base is set, and we've known that for years.
The question is with these independent voters who are saying, who rank, you know, top among their priorities, a candidate who shares my values.
Love it.
Which side are they going to go on?
Because their values, in polling at least, appear to be very split.
They're very strong with Republicans on immigration, very strong with Joe Biden on everything else except age and that age issue that keeps coming up and we've seen now we're on what week two or three now of this Biden age panic part four with no end in sight and that is certainly eroding faith at least among some Democrats privately and that keeps me up at night.
Yeah, we're going to get into that entire situation that's been developing there.
There's a lot to get into.
We're also going to get into the electorate, but we have to start, Max, in news coming out of New York State, where a judge has found against Donald Trump and the Trump Organization in the fraud case.
Right now, we're looking at over $350 million in damages.
With all the interest, we're talking over $450 million.
The possibility of Trump being completely and utterly bankrupted through this, not being allowed to run a business in New York City or New York State, but also possibly being able to be president, but we'll deal with that later.
What we've seen Already in the wake of this is we're already seeing crowdsourcing, fundraising, trying to, you know, basically squeeze blood from every rock in the Republican base.
On top of that, the Trump group, MAGA, has pushed out Ronald McDaniel, the head of the RNC, And has pushed now to get Laura Trump, his daughter-in-law, installed in front of the Republican Party.
And Laura has made it very, very clear to anyone willing to listen exactly what she intends to do if she's given that position.
If I am elected to this position, I can assure you there will not be any more $70,000 or whatever exorbitant amount of money it was spent on flowers.
Every single penny will go to the number one and the only job of the RNC.
That is electing Donald J. Trump as president of the United States.
I'm reassured.
I feel great.
So Max, you know, this is a lot of troubling stuff.
The idea that the Republican Party has not only been taken over by Trump, but taken over completely and sort of retro-engineered into a grift machine, which, you know, we've only seen that operating at like a certain percentage before now.
I gotta tell you, thinking about an election up against these absolute cretins and thinking that they could pull this thing off, not only makes me nervous, but also makes me want to know from somebody who's in these rooms, why do you think that this ramshackle bullshit campaign and organization, why do you think that it's even in contention at this point?
I mean, what's amazing here is you have to remember Donald Trump isn't even the nominee yet, and the Republican Party's already said, listen, we all know where this is going.
We're going to stand behind Donald Trump.
The votes don't matter, and that shouldn't surprise anybody.
But what I've noticed, one of the really interesting things to me about Trumpism is how indebted it is to Marx without even knowing it, with, in fact, being quite hostile to it.
I mean, both revolutionary class ideologies that tell people not to seek change within the system, but to tear it out.
And Marx had his economic base that he said built the superstructure in its shape.
Trump has just swapped out the economic base for a personality base.
And the superstructure that's built from that is quite distressing indeed.
I mean, you've got Lara Trump now likely to be RNC chairwoman.
Trump has hinted Eric Trump might have a government role.
The RNC is going to pay Trump's legal bills.
And it's all wrapped up really neatly in this class warfare that says pretty bluntly, democracy doesn't work.
Washington is lying to you.
It's keeping you down to enrich itself, and it's time to burn it down.
And that appeals to a lot of people.
That kind of burn-it-down revolutionary thought.
Certainly to a lot of Republicans.
The fact that this has taken over the party, I think, was a conscious choice.
I mean, anyone who opposed it is gone by now.
So the only people left have self-selected to be part of this next cancerous evolution.
Yeah, so Nick and I have been covering this for a while, and Nick, I want to hear what you have to say about this, too.
We've been talking about the fact that this entire situation, like, it's hypocritical on all fronts, right?
Like, this idea of Marxism is evil, communism is evil, and yet at the same time, what are they interested in?
They're interested in co-opting a government, making it robust, going into absolutely everyone's lives, and also using it as a crutch in order to maintain their businesses.
They want their financial mistakes covered over.
They want to be bailed out, right?
And I think one of the amazing things in this Is that what we're being shown is Trumpism, which is a completely faux populist movement.
You know, it's being used by the same people who have hollowed out America in order to redirect the anger from them onto their political enemies, which is what the right always does.
It turns out Marxist ideas are pretty damn popular!
It turns out that people get pretty excited about this stuff when all of a sudden they realize that things have been corrupted.
And Nick, you know, we've talked about this before.
The hypocrisy is the point.
It's not what keeps them from being popular.
It's actually what makes them popular.
It's the ability to think two things at once or even three or four things at once.
It's like this sort of like weird postmodern sort of mindset that they've been able to put together.
Yeah, I mean, I keep having to say that authoritarianism is always takes control democratically.
You know, people want this.
They want to vote it in.
I kind of think it's the death of journalism here with the way they've contracted, you know, newsrooms and stuff.
You know, if you think about something like Nixon, whether or not Congress would have exposed what he was doing anyway and got him out of there.
Probably happens either way, but without Woodward and Bernstein and everybody else reporting on this, we don't have anybody reporting on what's going to happen with all the money that he's probably been siphoning off from the campaigns illegally into his pocket.
And what you mentioned earlier, what he's trying to do to pay off all these debts he has now.
I don't think he's going to release his taxes this time, is he?
Well, I don't even know if you'd be able to follow these taxes at this point.
I mean, this has turned into like, you know, an Escher painting.
I don't even think you'd be able to follow these judgments.
Max, I have a question on that front for you.
In all of this, like, none of this is being reported in the right wing.
This is all being turned into, obviously, a quote-unquote witch hunt.
He's a political enemy.
On top of that, we've watched the Republican Party be completely taken over.
You know, for a while, we tried to tell people that there was a little bit of a demolition derby, civil war in the Republican Party between establishment Republicans and MAGA Republicans.
That's over, is it not?
I mean, aren't we at a place now where, like, this is, you know, it's a continuation and evolution of the past Republican Party, but that boat has sailed, is it not?
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right.
I mean, the actual conflict for who was in functional control ended when Donald Trump became the nominee in 2016.
I mean, that decided that.
What we've seen since over the last four years is really the mopping up.
It's the Trump movement Going from informal control to actual structural control.
Putting in a Speaker of the House that is pro-Trump.
Putting in Lara Trump at the RNC.
It takes time to formalize a takeover of any occupied land.
And fortunately, you know, a lot of Republicans have made this very easy by either leaving voluntarily or being booted out in primaries.
And that just leaves people who are already open to these changes, or are opportunistic enough to think that they're going to thrive under this new regime.
Which is where you get people like Ted Cruz, who not only did a 180 on Donald Trump, did a 180 on supporting Ukraine when it became clear that Trump was going to win this.
I mean, those are the people Trump wants to work with, not for the good of the country or for any people, but to speed up this sort of final state capture of the GOP.
How do you feel, Max, about the notion that, you know, when we had a record turnout in 2020, Trump gets destroyed, basically, at least in the general and then, you know, good enough in the Electoral College.
I mean, that advantage still has to exist in America today, doesn't it?
Oh yeah.
I mean, the MAGA movement is not one that works if democracy functions as it's intended to.
I mean, it's meant to drive down turnout through either disaffection or intimidation and to limit physical access to voting.
I mean, it's no surprise that we've seen over 300 voter suppression laws either introduced or passed in states since 2020.
Pennsylvania just last week had an election which by a fairly large margin turned out for Democrats in a way that will now prevent Pennsylvania's Republicans from altering their election laws in a way that would let them call an election for Trump even if he lost.
They're not banking on democracy.
They're banking on all of the institutional blockades they can put in front of it, which is why that turnout is so important and why democratic over-performance over the last year and a half has been so notable.
That's over-performance even in the face of more obstacles, which tells you a lot about how motivated those people are to cast their vote.
Max, we're going to get into sort of the atmosphere in terms of like what people are expecting in terms of turnout.
I wanted to ask you a question, though, going back to these structures that we're discussing.
I was in a meeting last week with a few strategists on the Democratic side.
And one of the things that I it took me a while to wrap my head around this, but like it finally got in, you know, it's You can leave Greene County, Indiana, but information doesn't get in any easier.
And what I've noticed is in the past, it felt like the Democratic Party, particularly the strategist consultant class, did not understand this.
I think in 2016, there was a fundamental misunderstanding of Donald Trump and MAGA.
It was the idea that it was just sort of, I don't know, a red state backwoods uprising that was going to get defeated and go away.
I think people are starting to actually wrap their heads around the political realities now and understanding not just the material conditions that created this, but sort of the warped ideology and authoritarian energies inhabited.
Is that what you've noticed?
Is that how you felt about being in these rooms?
Yeah, and it comes from the fact that it is now functionally impossible to run a consulting firm outside of Washington, D.C., New York, L.A.
I mean, these places where the money is focused.
So these are people who are in this same environment day in and day out.
Every day.
And they're going to frame this through their last reference, which is the Tea Party, an extreme right-wing movement that arguably failed at achieving its goals and washed out of Congress pretty uneventfully.
So they thought, you know, seeing this sort of redux of the Tea Party movement under Trump, that it would follow the same path.
I think up until the moment those people broke into the Capitol, there were still consultants talking about how the wave had peaked and it was already ending.
I mean, as people were marching to attack the government, there were people on cable news saying this is probably the high-water mark of Trumpism.
And it just shows you that they are not actually talking to these people.
To some extent, they disdain these Trump voters.
They don't want to talk to them.
They don't want to go to a Trump rally.
They don't feel safe there.
But that's where you have to go if you want to understand this.
And I followed Trump around to several rallies in 2016 and knew early on, I mean, that this was a problem and wrote about that.
I wish more reporters had taken up my invitation to join me.
Yeah, I agree.
Go ahead, Nick.
Well, you know, Max, just to give you some reference to where I'm coming from, I got so despondent last week I started musing about whether we truly won World War II based on what's going on with Russia.
But that's asking the right questions, Nick.
That's a great question.
Right.
So, I just want to go back a second.
Did you say that the Tea Party ended up being a failure or ineffective or didn't last?
I'm kind of curious.
Is that what you said?
I said arguably, in the sense that a lot of their leadership ended up falling out after one cycle.
The ideology stayed and gestated.
And it showed that if you push hard enough, you can make the party ungovernable.
John Boehner barely survived some of those threats.
And the lesson that they took away from that was to reorganize and come back stronger.
But that initial push, it did.
I think a lot of those people, and Joe Walsh, who was one of the leaders of that as well, would argue that they certainly don't feel they achieved what they wanted to with it.
Yeah, it's sort of like looking at proto-mammals that died out before, you know, eventually we got on two legs and figured things out.
Like, I think it's totally the evolutionary thread.
Speaking of, and this is maybe a weird way to get into it, but I promise you in my brain it works out.
There is, you know, we're always looking at signals and conversations and media, and it was only a matter of time until this article came out.
This was from the New York Times, Katie Kluke.
It's an article titled, Anti-Trump Burnout.
The Resistance Says It's Exhausted.
And what gets put out here in this article is a portrait of a sort of liberal tiredness in terms of like looking at the 2024 election, Biden versus Trump, part two.
I wanted to break down a little bit of this.
I've got a couple of quotes I wanted to look at.
The first one is, quote, some folks are burned out on outrage, said Rebecca Lee Funk, the Washington-based founder of The Outrage, a progressive activism group and purveyor of resistance-era apparel.
We've also got this other quote, quote, we're kind of like crises doubt, said Shannon Cassabur, a security guard in Pittsburgh who called the prospect of a Trump-Biden rematch a dumpster fire.
It's crisis fatigue for sure.
And then finally, here's another article that was put, or a quote from here.
It basically was put out by a person who says that this fear is not a motivator.
The idea that we've had all these national crises and cultural crises and all these.
And I noticed something in this.
One, how many of the people who are being interviewed in this article, Max, are people who have created businesses?
That are about selling apparel and things that like somehow or another promote a resistant identity.
And actually what we're talking about is not really politics.
We're not really talking about how we move things forward or how we take power or how we make the world better.
What we're actually talking about is sort of the cultural environment around it.
And I feel like it would be an interesting conversation about how those things are now sort of intertwined in a weird way.
This is why I love this podcast, and I love you, because you're the only one asking this question, and it was the first thing I thought of when you mentioned it.
We've known for years that the resistance movement has largely been a commercial enterprise.
It's a merchandise operation.
And it's many of those people who have now sort of run through their interest within the movement have started pitching right-wing stuff as well, and they're sort of pitching alt-right things.
But we saw this not just within these people who are merchandising, but also this whole constellation of Political action groups and super PACs that popped up under Trump.
There were so many and there was just too many to all survive.
There's not enough money to go around.
So we're starting to see a lot of those early resistance era groups close.
That's a lot of unemployed resistance people whose main CV for the past four years has been being very active on Twitter and posting memes.
I mean, you look at places at not to cast criticisms, but you look at a place like Midas Touch, the Young Turks, a place where I was a contributor for many years.
And it has become a very sort of sensationalist Fox News style approach to constant fear, constant outrage.
Here's why you should be mad.
And here's where you can give money to help.
And it's almost always back to the media company.
It's never to anything that's doing grassroots work.
And the problem is you can only run that grip for so long before people realize nothing's actually getting done.
I don't think it's that far of a stretch.
We've seen how the Republicans have used fear this whole time to motivate for voting and for money.
It would make sense that yes, Democrats would say, hey, we should probably do the same thing.
And now we're all wringing our hands, which makes me wonder in that article about there's a poll asking about how, how motivated you are to vote.
And I wonder if that's even a worthwhile question because they make it seem scary because there's so many more extremely motivated Republicans who want to vote.
Whereas I would imagine on the other side, We all are kind of dreading the decision, right?
Jared, I believe you're going to take a long shower.
I'm going to take a long, scalding shower after this election.
Absolutely.
So, but there's a moral imperative to some degree that we all have to do this, and not just for like Biden or for democracy, it's for things like abortion.
I mean, did you see that in Alabama, they're now declaring that embryos are children?
Yeah.
And that's going to cause a whole lot of problems with health care.
So it almost feels like that's not even a worthwhile question to ask at this point.
And it only adds to some weird, you know, nebulous, non-realistic fear on the Democratic side that people aren't going to come out to actually vote.
Yeah, I mean this to me is such a great example of how capitalist system will commercialize any moderately successful social movement and hollow it out until you're just selling mugs and shirts.
I mean what's needed here isn't some branded hashtag resistance movement.
It's just for Democrats to talk about the issues that motivate us as a party that we already know win.
Abortion.
Immigration now.
Inexplicably, Democrats are now on the offensive on immigration for the first time in my lifetime.
And we've seen in New York's third district race with Tom Suozzi that that move votes.
We saw that things like the culture war, that these candidates that are coming out saying they'll burn books if they're elected, unsurprisingly pretty unpopular with voters.
But also at the same time, you know, resistance movements can't make money off that.
So they have an incentive to now stoke fear about how without them being there, Democrats are going to be in trouble.
Because if they aren't essential, no one has any reason to keep giving these guys money.
Yeah, there's, like, all this stuff that is, like, built up around it.
And I remember, you know, Max, I was out there covering these Trump rallies, too, and in 2016, there were all these people who would end up outside of these rallies.
They, you know, it's not like they supported Donald Trump.
Maybe some of them did, but they would pop up their tents, they would sell Trump hats, they would sell bootleg Trump shirts, all this stuff.
Which, by the way, was really incredible because the Trump campaign didn't have any of that.
They weren't interested in running a traditional campaign.
They didn't even have yard signs.
People had to create the yard signs for themselves.
And so what happened was this entire ecosystem built up around Trump.
And I think that light went on because what happened during the 2016 election and after the 2016 election was suddenly everybody realized, oh, this thing is so awful.
And so anxiety-making and also so passion-making for certain people, there's so much profit to be had.
We're talking podcasts, we're talking shirts, we're talking RBG mugs and RBG toys.
We're talking all of these things that give the illusion of actual politics, that give the illusion of democratic participation, when in fact all it is is an expression of a consumer identity.
It's picking between Coke and Pepsi and whether or not you're a Nike or Adidas person.
And on top of that, that goes ahead and it takes your money, and that's the way you express it, as opposed to your hard-earned time going out in public where these states have, you know, passed these laws that allow people to run you over.
If you were literally protesting at the wrong place, your loans could be taken away, your job could be taken away, your entire livelihood could.
And instead, what's been created is a facsimile of political participation, and that's not at all what's going to get us out of any of this.
No, not in the least.
But it is, for a while, wildly profitable.
That outrage makes you a lot of money.
But it's also skeptical to me, these organizations, where there is absolutely no discussion of grassroots activism, of actually getting into communities.
They say things like, we'll be putting our faith in Robert Mueller, if you remember that far back.
Or put your faith in Merrick Garland to handle the prosecutions.
And if you talk to the activists who are out there winning these special elections, they'll say no.
Put your faith in yourself.
Come out and vote.
Use the right while you have it.
There's no amount of money you can give, no t-shirt you can wear, that's going to strengthen democracy.
It's a participatory exercise.
And as you said, you know, essentially paying to opt out of it and saying, well, I have the anti-Trump shirt, I've done my part, is a really profitable way to cash in on laziness and to give people an off-ramp away from actual activism.
Well, before I ask this question, I want to preface it by saying that I believe that capitalism turns everything to shit.
So let's make sure that that's clear.
But it will fill that shit.
Shit happens.
Now, here's the question, though.
Wouldn't the sales of these kind of merchandising things be the same thing as a poll, in a way, and measuring all the things that are how excited people are for this candidate?
Well, I think the problem is it skews it because it's on Twitter.
I mean, these people are not, as someone who has worked with some of these organizations as clients, not targeting a general electorate audience.
You're targeting mainly people who are online a lot, who are older, largely older people.
They're retired, they have disposable income, and they speak English.
And already there, you've excluded a lot of the core demographics Democrats are trying to go after.
Because you're trying to maximize profit.
You're not necessarily putting forward a public service message.
If it gets on TV and gets you some attention for whatever issue of the week you're talking about, that's a side benefit.
But your primary goal is you've got to make payroll this week and you've got to ship this inventory out.
So you'll put forward whatever message will sell shirts.
And right now that's, don't forget us.
You could be risking the election if you don't give us money this time.
And we'll see the same thing until this moves on to the next issue they want to sell to.
I also want to say that there's something really weird happening with this, too, which is there's still the divide.
And this goes back to the first segment that we were talking about.
The Republicans and Trump's base, it literally is a cult.
And so when Trump tells them, I built a wall, the wall doesn't need to exist.
You know, it's there.
It's a matter of faith.
And actually, what we're talking about right now in terms of like, quote unquote, resistance or, you know, sort of liberal things, People are being sold on the liberal side with the idea that if they buy these things, if they donate to these things, if they do this, there will be results.
And that's still, you know, something of an empirical base sort of society.
And I think a lot of people who have been kind of taken in by this resistance consumerism, Max, I think a lot of people are looking around, they're saying, you know what, I bought all this RBG merchandise and Roe v. Wade's gone.
Right?
Like, we literally have seen this stuff taken away, and so what we're missing, and this is the problem, is I actually think that there are energies out there, and there is momentum in terms of democratic energies, progressive energies, that are building up.
It just so happens that they are not profitable.
You can't put that on a t-shirt, you know?
Organizing the local Amazon warehouse doesn't, like, fit on the back of a t-shirt.
It just so happens that it's what gets things actually done.
Yeah, and it brings voters out.
I mean, we saw that with abortion in Ohio.
We saw that with all the labor organizing in Bessemer.
We saw that with a huge amount of—we're in a renaissance right now of labor organizing, and nobody's printing off shirts for that.
And the reality is, you know, these are the issues that bring Democrats to the polls.
This is what the National Party is supposed to be for, is sending national money to state parties to tell this story.
And instead, all that money goes directly up to the presidential races now.
We have completely abandoned the Democratic Party's role in funding state parties.
And if we're not going to subsidize that message, it shouldn't be surprising that a bunch of for-profit grifters have stepped in to tell people who have no other mechanism for learning it what their version of the message is.
The only other problem I have with that is that on a local level, up until the state races, it kind of becomes dangerous to run for those positions.
You know what I'm saying?
Because the other side has made it such a treacherous road where they're going to threaten you and dox you and all sorts of things.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly the right doing that.
And to the point where, like, who would want to run anyway?
Well, and the apparatus isn't there either.
I mean, you know, what has happened, and Max brought this up, I think it's one of the most consequential things that's happened in the past few years.
The Democratic Party gave up on the 50-state strategy.
Howard Dean is one of the most influential people in modern American politics.
And the fact that that stake got pulled up and instead they've been relying on basically Stacey Abrams in every quote unquote red state there is.
They've just given up on it and hope that if Stacey Abrams would show up and bring in all this money.
And so what actually happens, Nick, is like, let's say you're in a deep red state and you want to run for Congress.
Right.
And you want to run as a Democrat.
You're putting your life on the line and you don't even have a party that's the parties.
I'm going to help you put out signs, much less make sure that you're protected and make sure that the environment is actually fair.
I mean, Max, does that check out for you?
Yeah, I mean, that's the frustration I hear from activists every day.
And you see, Stacey Abrams isn't even exempt.
I mean, she delivered two monumental turnout performances in Georgia that many Washington-based consultants said was statistically impossible to do.
And she did it twice.
She did it on a shoestring budget.
And her reward for that wasn't to be made DNC chair and taking the strategy national.
It was for the DNC to say, this year, Georgia doesn't look as competitive.
We're pulling funding out.
And now her organization is closing down.
I mean, it is, if anything, one of the most self-inflicted wound moments I've seen from the DNC in years.
Because now Stacey Abrams has essentially no infrastructure in Georgia.
God, the most self-inflicted wound from the DNC.
That is, that's not, that's a Mount Rushmore right there.
It's a big ol' list.
Well, Max, what do you think, why?
Why did they abandon the 50 states, you know, outreach like they had under, you know, Dean's vision?
Because Obama won.
I mean, it's simple.
It's as simple as that.
Obama came in and his great contribution at the time was leveraging digital.
I mean, no one had done it 2008.
And there was no politics really on Twitter at all until Barack Obama spearheaded that.
And he won big and then.
That sort of became orthodoxy.
I mean, he appointed his people, and the thought became, as long as we protect the White House and Congress, we're great.
And as long as we have that, it's everything.
It doesn't matter about governorships.
It doesn't matter about state houses.
And that worked really well at electing the president.
Not so much for anything else.
Well, and I just want to throw in there, Max, and this was one of the things because we can get deep in the weeds for a quick second.
One of the prevailing dogmas of that period was this idea of demographics or destiny, that America was changing.
And as a result, we weren't going to have to worry about this anymore.
Basically, the Republican Party was going to moderate itself at some point.
Right, the Marco Rubios, the Nikki Haley's, that that was the whole idea is eventually they were going to have to fix themselves.
And it was both, I think, naive, but also dangerously ignorant in its own right to believe that somehow or another demographics were going to completely change the entire thing, or that there wasn't going to be a backlash in some way, shape or form.
And eventually, like you look up, and you have states now, Where there is no significant democratic presence.
You don't have a neighbor.
You don't have a co-worker.
You don't have anybody in town basically in any office.
Anybody around who isn't in a quote-unquote satanic cabal.
And so as a result you have states that it's it's been turned into trench warfare at this point.
Yeah, I mean there are parts of this country, especially in the West, where the Democrats are a third party in a lot of states behind the Libertarians.
And Democrats nationally haven't funded those state parties in years.
And it just goes back to this idea that this fixation we had after Bush v. Gore of winning the White House at all costs And just having that and everything would be okay.
And it was incredibly short-sighted to the point now where we're unable largely to fight back against these anti-abortion laws going on in the States.
And it really is an uphill fight.
I mean, the infrastructure will take a generation to build back.
Well, for what it's worth, in Wisconsin, I think they're finally getting control of the congressional maps so that they can't, you know, all that work they had done behind the scenes for all those years on the Republican side was really nefarious.
But I also think that, you know, we're looking at, you know, to do a hashtag Thanks, Obama.
The short-sightedness continues even to this day.
With perhaps even the the the picking of Joe Biden in 2020 when you know for all intents and purposes Obama decided who was going to be the nominee and without any kind of you know thought for the future like what we're going to happen in 2024 and that's that that's kind of a big problem I feel like as we're heading up to the election.
Well and what we got to talk about Max and and I thought this was You know, we're all politicos here.
We're political sickos.
And this is the kind of thing, you know, it's like some people get excited when Taylor Swift drops a new album.
Some of us get excited when Ezra Klein has a podcast come out and announces that he thinks that Joe Biden should step aside and not run for re-election.
We need to dive into this a little bit because one of the things that happens in the New York Times with people like Ezra Klein is there's a lot of signals, a lot of cross-conversations, a lot of discourse that's happening here.
And Nick, can you go ahead and play this first clip from this podcast?
I want to say this clearly.
I like Biden.
I think he's been a good president.
I think he is a good president.
I don't like having this conversation.
And I know a lot of liberals, a lot of Democrats are going to be furious at me for the show.
But to say this is a media invention, that people are worried about Biden's age because the media keeps telling them to be worried about Biden's age.
If you've really convinced yourself of that in your heart of hearts, I almost don't know what to tell you.
In poll after poll, 70-80% of voters are worried about his age.
This is not a thing people need the media to see.
It is right in front of them.
And it is also shaping how Biden and his campaign are acting.
Democrats keep telling themselves when they look at the polls that voters will come back to Biden when the campaign starts in earnest and they begin seeing more and more and more of Donald Trump.
When they have to take what he is and what it would mean for him to return seriously.
But that is going to go both ways.
When the campaign begins in earnest, they will also see much more of Joe Biden.
People who barely pay attention to him, now they will be watching his speeches, they will see him on the news constantly.
Will they actually like what they see?
Will it comfort them?
Max, so in this podcast, Ezra Klein, who is one of the most influential liberal commentators and personalities in the United States, which is actually incredible now, I'm just going to be an old person and say it's incredible that a blogger has gotten to this position, more or less in the New York Times,
Is giving a signal, which is in liberal circles, it's not only okay to talk about Joe Biden's age and talk about his memory, and of course what we heard in this special investigator's report, but that the Democrats should consider it.
And maybe the right position to have in all of this is that Joe Biden should step down.
What do you make of this?
And there's a lot to talk about here, but what are your initial reactions to this?
Well, I'm part of this whole mess because I wrote a column last week about Joe Biden's age.
I don't think he should step down, but I do think that Ezra Klein's right in the sense that this is not manufactured.
Democrats refusing to talk about this will not make it go away.
If anything, it will make it worse.
And Joe Biden would be, should be, the first of anyone to acknowledge, given his career, that you've got to fight on the political reality you have.
You have to level with the American people.
And Joe Biden did that in 2020 because his candor up on the debate stage stood in such stark contrast to Trump's brashness and lies and just self-involvement.
I think he can have that conversation again.
I mean, this country is not getting any younger.
It's older than it has ever been, statistically.
It's not as if people are not familiar with the realities of aging and sympathetic to it.
But ignoring it just makes it seem even worse.
I mean, I think it's just that it's tough to spin.
You can't spin him as being young.
You can't do it.
And Nick, you're an online creature.
You've been watching the discourse on this.
And I assume you've seen what I've seen.
Which is a lot of people saying that, like, we shouldn't talk about it or comparing it to Donald Trump and saying, you know, that they're both old and moving from there.
This is the kind of thing that comes out to the commentariat, to a large swath of liberal commentators, pundits, and also liberal voters, people who are reading this stuff and taking it in.
How do you feel about how the discourse has been and do you think that this will change?
I mean, I get upset when you want to say, but Trump, blah, blah, blah, because it doesn't, Exonerate Biden's issues.
We've all seen endless amounts of sound bites of him and the way he talks, the way he'll trail off.
And I know he already has, you know, a stutter that he's overcome, but like clearly.
And then on the other side, by the way, you do see Trump and he also has problems, but he speaks more forcefully.
And whether you want to, you know, put any weight into that or not, the problem here is that there's no question that Biden is older and isn't necessarily in control of All the details and all the facts all the time.
And it's really, really frustrating.
You know, I did want to bring this up really quickly.
March 31st.
Are we aware of the significance of that?
How about this?
March 31st, 1968.
Do we know what that date was?
That is when LBJ says he's not going to run again.
But what was more interesting to me, as I did my research earlier today, was when Robert Kennedy announced Do you know if it was before or after LBJ announced he was stepping down?
It was before, correct?
Yes.
Yeah.
And I had thought it was the opposite.
So here's an interesting, you know, not that we can maybe necessarily use this as a template, but here was a young upstart, very popular, you know, uh, guy who's going to jump into the race, uh, put that puts pressure on LBJ and then realizes I could step down.
I thought it was the other way.
So suddenly you start to realize maybe there is some weird path and it's not maybe too late because that was in March and this is only February.
Well, the fantasy, and we'll get into this brokered convention narrative that's been thrown around lately, which is a large part of this.
But Max, I have a question for you on the point that Nick just made.
This feels a little bit, it's like if it was an Olympic, you know, 100-yard dash, right?
Or 100-meter dash.
I'm getting this all confused.
I'm not an Olympic guy.
But like if there's going to be a race, right?
You first have to tell people there's going to be a race, and you have to get people in the arena.
Doesn't this feel not that a race is getting ready to take off, but like people are starting to wrap their heads around the possibility of a race?
Yeah, I mean, it certainly does.
And there's sort of two conflated problems in the media that the press just doesn't care to untangle.
And one is, is it okay to talk about this?
Right.
I mean, of course it should be.
To say you can't talk about Joe Biden's mental health or physical decline is Trumpian.
I mean, to say you can't criticize him, and then should he step down?
And I think the people who say that There are people who are largely not familiar with how the actual process works.
I mean, Kamala Harris will certainly have some thoughts on that, as would Gavin Newsom.
They all have in their minds a person they think will step in and replace Joe Biden, and that this will just be a consensus choice.
It will not.
It would be a bloodbath, because the party would sense the weakness inside it.
And everyone, Pete Buttigieg would be in there.
Gavin Newsom would be up there.
Kamala Harris would be up there.
It would be a huge and costly fight with no guarantee that anything actually changes.
By the way, Nick, I'm going to have you play the second thing here in just a second, but I want to point out the casualness with which Kamala Harris is absolutely brushed aside in every one of these conversations.
Like, it basically always comes down to this.
We all know Joe Biden's older, he's lost his step, but the other problem is that he can't just hand it over to his VP.
It is a very strange way to handle this, and Ezra Klein does it as well.
But Nick, if you could play this clip, I think there's something else that's happening here as well.
So yes, I think Biden, as painful as this is, should find his way to stepping down as a hero.
That the party should help him find his way to that.
To being the thing that he said he would be in 2020.
The bridge to the next generation of Democrats.
And then I think Democrats should meet in August at the convention to do what political parties have done at conventions so many times before.
Okay, so very quickly, rhetorically, and Max, I know that, like, you do the same thing as well.
Helping Joe Biden find his way is a really interesting piece of rhetoric.
You know, helping somebody find their car, helping somebody home, helping somebody with their groceries.
This is very weird, weird choice of language.
But on top of that, I think what's being expressed here, and people need to understand, Ezra Klein is not in a bubble.
Ezra Klein is really tight with Barack Obama.
Really, really close with Barack Obama and the entirety of the Obama world.
The Obama world does not want Joe Biden to run for re-election.
They are very interested in sort of re-establishing the Obama-DNC Democratic Party.
And it's been that way for a while.
We've heard leaks that Obama keeps trying to tell Biden to change the campaign, to do this, to take this sort of a strategy.
And that's the thing is there's a signal that's happening here.
And this is what happens when parties sort of kind of lose control over the process.
No one can keep Joe Biden from running for re-election.
It is his choice.
But the entire point is somebody, everybody is saying somebody needs to do something.
And this idea of the Brokered Convention, which we'll break down in a second, they are saying somebody needs to step in here.
Are you saying that Ezra Klein is in lockstep with Obama on that podcast?
Like, he wouldn't have been able to record it like that if Obama said no?
Oh, no, no, no, no.
I don't think Obama gave him some sort of a signal.
I'm saying that they traffic in the same waters.
Like, this is a very specific type of liberalism.
A very sort of like, you know, today Bruce Springsteen's gonna come over and we're gonna talk about songs and politics, you know?
That's sort of that, like, oasis, I guess you would call it.
That sort of pool.
But it definitely feels, doesn't it, Max, as the idea that somebody needs to do something here.
Somebody needs to break the glass in case of emergency.
Yeah, and Ezra's doing his best in his calm voice to try and give you a sense of continuity, that this wouldn't be what it actually is, which would be a radical change from the norm and very destabilizing, not just for politics, but for the markets, for world affairs.
It would create a moment of crisis, even if you don't intend to.
But he's saying, no, this is actually just what parties have done for centuries.
They've had conventions and they've nominated candidates.
Well, we don't have the party system of a hundred years ago when we went and had contested conventions.
The DNC made the choice, like we talked about earlier, to defund all those parties.
So they don't have the structures.
What you're really saying is we want to take this to a convention and have a group that has already made this decision, put it forward at the convention.
And that is radically different from anything that's been proposed before.
And I want to put this out there, and I've said it many times on the podcast, I do not think Joe Biden is the person for this moment.
I don't.
I wish he wasn't running for re-election.
I wish there was some sort of a bridge for the future.
But I also want to point out, I am small-d democratic, and I really have a hard time with all these people being like, we just need to get to a convention, and the calmer heads will prevail, and we'll figure it out.
And that's what happens in all of this, Max, is the punditry is always talking about like, oh, if we just didn't have pesky primaries, if we didn't have the electorate and the base figuring this out.
We saw this after 2016 when they said, oh, the parties would have never allowed Donald Trump.
But this whole idea is just very, very elitist.
And I don't think people understand how big of a shitstorm it would be If we had a brokered convention with the Democratic Party, I really don't think people understand, like, what an absolute disaster that would be.
No, and it's that kind of thing that sort of bugs me about that kind of opinion reporting, is that it doesn't inform the way it needs to.
Like, for example, in order to do any of this, you would need to significantly change the party rules.
But the rules committee of the DNC is firmly Biden people.
They're all very strong Biden allies.
So what you're really saying is you need to bring in people to challenge all of those people, which would become a very public, very nasty fight that would be on the national news for days as it rolled out.
The convention grinding to a halt, which makes Joe Biden and the party look even more inept and inadequate.
I mean, I really genuinely think this is a fantasy created by people who learned politics from the West Wing.
By the way, Nick, I want to point out, and I want you to imagine something, because when we get into these scenarios, it's always good to imagine.
Imagine the field day that Republicans would have.
Look at the Democrats behind the scenes, pulling puppet strings, doing all this.
And for the record, just because I want to give everyone a reality check, Barack Obama does not want to be seen like that.
No politician has been more concerned with their public perception than Barack Obama, besides maybe Bill Clinton.
And, like, he does not want to be seen as the person who's pushing out Uncle Joe in order to bring people.
But, Nick, can you imagine the disaster this would be?
Oh, well, a couple things, because I don't see the disaster that you guys see it in.
I see another issue, but the thing about that I'm getting frustrated with Biden is that he now becomes accused of being the most corrupt president ever.
He also is accused of lying, being the most dishonest, all these things, and being a grifter.
And it's basically the knee-jerk reaction to because Trump was accused of these things and is accused in the court of law of these things, then you have to then say, well, the other person is just as bad.
And that means going forward, no matter who you are and how stellar your reputation is, you are simply going to be accused of all these things without any evidence and people are going to believe it.
So that's really, really a frustrating thing.
And then as far as the shitstorm about a broker convention, I just think it's a time thing.
If you're going to wait until when?
Is it August?
Is that what it is?
July, August?
You can't run a national campaign in like two months.
There's no way to ever be able to do that, no matter who it is.
Even if the ghost of, let's say, Abraham Lincoln comes back Suddenly switches parties and he runs like he wouldn't win if you gave him like a month to run a national campaign like that would be ridiculous.
He needs the train.
He needs to go across the country.
You need to build all that stuff up.
I don't think you could do it.
I know and I certainly not with whoever we have in the in the wings.
So that is really the worst part of it for me is that it would just be we'd lose the Democrats would lose this election.
Yeah, and we would deserve to at that point.
I think that level of allowing that level of irresponsibility should be a turnoff for voters.
I mean, that is what many Democrats are banking on being the case for Trump and the RNC.
I don't see why we would ever want to voluntarily do that to ourselves.
So what if they did it now?
What if they did it in March?
Is that enough time?
Does that change anything or no?
I think it makes the party look unstructured.
I mean, it makes it look like we are not in control, and that would be the case.
If he left, we would not be in control of that narrative.
It would be clear that it was because of age, and it would be an admission, not just that that was right, but that he had been in that situation for a while beforehand and refused to leave.
We would never dig out from under it.
If Biden was not going to run for president or re-election, it needed to happen last year.
That's when it needed to be announced.
At least that way there was the ability for a primary to be held.
But yeah, for this special investigator's report to come out, and then suddenly everyone to say, we need to push Grandpa Joe out.
You know, and find something flashier and snazzier.
I mean, that is not just desperate, but it also, it just reeks of a party that doesn't have its shit together.
And which, quite frankly, like, I mean, the Democratic Party, you can accuse them of a lot of things and not having their shit together is one of them.
But, like, the idea that this thing could, like, be put forth and be good and energizing, it's insanity to me.
I mean, this argument wouldn't work, but you could obviously say that Ronald Reagan had two years of complete dementia in the White House, perhaps?
He could argue even more than that.
I mean, listen, it would be the old Joe Biden wants to spend more time with his friends and family, right?
Like, you could do that, but nothing about this would work.
It would be an unmitigated disaster, and you would never hear anything about it.
And for the record, and Max, I would love to hear your thoughts on this, you know how twisted and screwed up this environment is?
The Republicans would turn Joe Biden into a martyr.
They would basically say, look what they did to him.
They even turned on him.
Like, it would be the weirdest political campaign thing you'd ever seen.
Trump would go everywhere and say, hey look, the deep state even took Biden out.
Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely right.
You look at the way the media would process this, the first question anyone would ask immediately after he steps down is, how long did the president know that he was mentally unfit before he decided to step down?
And that will be the Hillary Clinton's emails question that will never be answerable, because there will never be an answer that satisfies.
I just want to go on the record as we know that question to ask because of the West Wing.
No, you're right.
That is an excellent point.
And I just want to put this out there, and Max, you're in communications, and I want to go ahead, I love giving out free advice on this podcast, okay?
This is straight-up honest, and this is the first thing that you tell anybody when you're doing like, quote-unquote, crisis management.
The best thing in the world to do is just tell the truth.
Don't try and cover it up, don't try and move around, don't try and do this, don't try to obfuscate.
If Biden does have, and I've said this on the podcast, I don't want a president who has these issues.
I think it's a very, very important time.
I don't think we should be messing around with it.
If this is what's actually occurring, you need to just put the cards on the table and say, you know what?
This is a bad, deteriorating situation.
We need to take care of it.
What Klein and a lot of these other pundits are putting forward, they're trying to slick it up.
They're trying to make it like a show.
They're trying to make it, you know, with panaz.
Oh, think about the ratings.
Think about how much attention people would pay.
And that makes everything worse, as it does with every crisis.
Yeah, we're talking about Ezra Klein's narrative.
Think about the hero arc in Ezra Klein's thing, giving Joe Biden the opportunity to be the hero.
One of the most infantilizing things you can say to an adult is showing them, here's how you can be noble and leave quietly.
But it will be anything but quiet.
I mean, people will think that he leaves, he's replaced, and then we move on.
But he'll give interviews after that where he'll have to explain his situation.
There'll be people from the White House who will leak stories of him being forgetful.
This will be the only thing we talk about if we do it, and that will be a godsend to Donald Trump.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
All right, Max, thank you so much.
Max Burns, it was an absolute delight having you on the show.
Can you tell the good people where to find you?
You can find me, for some reason, still on Twitter at TheMaxBurns, and I'm also on Substack, though I'm barely writing anymore.
It's maxburns.substack.com.
We miss you on Substack.
You wrote so beautifully.
It's a labor.
I don't know.
I appreciate that you do it, so I don't have to, but it is certainly a labor.
Well, you are going to have to come back on the show as the campaign season goes forward.
We are so, so grateful to have you.
Everybody, we will come back with The Weekender on Friday, and as always, go over to patreon.com slash muckrakepodcast.
In order to access that, we know you listen to the previews.
Come on over to the other side, Sports Show, keep us ad-free, editorially independent, all that good stuff, and all of our exclusive coverage from the campaign trail.
If you need us before, then you can find Nick at CanYouHearMeInSpanish, you can find me at JY Saxton.
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