Oct. 28, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We're in the home stretch people. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, only 12 more days left in this shopping season to pick the leader of the free world. | ||
| If the polls are right, Hillary is well on her way to winning this thing, though my guess is that the polls are going to tighten significantly as we get closer to Election Day, as they almost always do. | ||
| Also, polls are just polls at the end of the day, and nobody knows what will happen until Election Day itself. | ||
| I've been saying this for a while now, but I'm guessing that many people aren't publicly saying that they're supporting Trump, Out of fear or shame or public humiliation, so the polls might not be as accurate as pretty much everyone is saying they are. | ||
| Whether the polls are right or wrong, anything can happen in the next 12 days, and knowing this election, anything that can happen will happen. | ||
| Just wait for the Trump-once-groped-a-donkey Hillary's-being-funded-by-Mr. Burns headlines the day before the election. | ||
| A few really interesting storylines have taken root over the past couple weeks. | ||
| On the Clinton front, it's pretty clear that there was some sort of coordination with PAX who conspired to create violence at Trump rallies. | ||
| Regardless of who you're supporting in this election, I'd recommend taking a look at the Project Veritas videos here on YouTube. | ||
| While you should view them with a skeptical eye, because Andrew O'Keefe of Veritas obviously is no Hillary fan, the videos do appear to provide proof of her campaign doing some seriously shady stuff to paint Trump supporters in a negative light and expose as much of this manufactured violence as possible to our lapdog media. | ||
| When you consider the Project Veritas videos and add in the continuing information WikiLeaks is dropping about the Hillary campaign colluding with friendly sources in the media, as well as the DNC's rigging of the primaries against Bernie, it's pretty clear that even the most ardent Hillary supporter must acknowledge that there has been major ethical, if not legal, violations by her campaign. | ||
| On the Trump front, there are a whole slew of other issues. | ||
| First, the continuing allegations of sexual assault surrounding Trump, though none of them have been proven true yet. | ||
| While his words to Billy Bush about grabbing women were crass, words do not equal action and until any of these allegations are proven to be true, they remain just allegations. | ||
| Regardless of whether they are true or not, apparently we live in a quasi-post-truth society where people get to decide what's true depending on whether or not they like the person. | ||
| This is a huge problem because any of us could be accused of anything. | ||
| I wish my friends on the left were a little more understanding of this, even when it's politically expedient for them right now to use innuendo to destroy Trump. | ||
| The bigger concern here about Trump right now is his rhetoric around the elections being fixed. | ||
| You all know I'm no fan of the mainstream media and I've consistently called out the bad actions of the Hillary campaign as I did just a second ago. | ||
| However, Trump saying that our elections are rigged, before they've even happened, and with no evidence, is an actual assault on our democratic system. | ||
| For all of America's faults, we've always, without exception, had an easy transfer of power from one administration to another. | ||
| This transfer of power from party to party has been a key to our success as a nation for over 200 years. | ||
| We accept the results of an election and we put down the fight until the next one. | ||
| While our elections themselves have had issues, just ask Al Gore in 2000, there has been a respect for the process by everyone who has run for the office. | ||
| Trump is preemptively shredding this contract we've always abided by, potentially laying the groundwork for civil unrest and violence. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| When the Trump supporters are out there on the streets protesting, rightly or wrongly, watch how quickly the left will be into the same state power they usually decry True democracy must survive any candidate, whether you think that the candidate is a crook or a narcissist. | ||
| By the way, I'm not making a false equivalence here. | ||
| I think there are wildly different reasons we should be suspect of both Clinton and Trump. | ||
| Unfortunately, these are the two we're left with and hopefully whichever of them wins will prove me wrong either by making us stronger together or by making America great again. | ||
| My guest this week is Hilary Rosen. | ||
| Hilary is a democratic strategist often seen on CNN as well as a partner at SKD Knickerbocker, a strategy and media relations firm. | ||
| Hillary knows the media landscape and the democratic machine well and we're going to cover all of the issues I've mentioned here and many more. | ||
| I know that by just saying democratic some of you will automatically dislike her and some of you will automatically like her. | ||
| For those of you in between, which is undoubtedly the fastest growing group in American politics, it's important to hear from all sides and decide what you believe in. | ||
| As I mentioned last week, I see a new political alignment happening right before our eyes. | ||
| Many classical liberals, conservatives, and libertarians are suddenly realizing we aren't all each other's enemies. | ||
| So regardless of whether it's President Trump or President Clinton, | ||
| we should be finding allies in our fight to make America sane again. | ||
| Joining me this week is a CNN contributor, the managing director of SKD-Knickerbocker | ||
| media relations firm, and an optimist, according to her Twitter bio. | ||
| Hillary Rosen, welcome to the Rubin Report. | ||
| Hey Dave, how are you? | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| So you're an optimist. | ||
| I know if it's said on Twitter, then it has to be true. | ||
| It's tough being an optimist these days, isn't it? | ||
| You know, I've lived in Washington so much longer than I can really even admit, but it's like over 35 years. | ||
| And this town will suck the life out of you, like literally, like bodily suck it out of you. | ||
| And so, you know, I've lived through the Reagan years here. | ||
| I lived through the Bush years, then the, you know, the second Bush years. | ||
| And yet there's something about it that keeps me believing that the next person You're an optimist. | ||
| to make it better. | ||
| And honestly, living through Barack Obama has had its moments | ||
| so I'm an optimist. | ||
| You're an optimist. | ||
| Is this a prescription drug related thing possibly? | ||
| Drug free, drug free. | ||
| Drug free, all right, very good. | ||
| Well, mostly drug-free. | ||
| Fair enough, and whatever it is, I'm okay with it. | ||
| No tests, give me no tests. | ||
| All right, so you are a Hillary supporter. | ||
| Your name is Hillary. | ||
| You've got one L, she's got two. | ||
| You are a Hillary Clinton supporter. | ||
| I was required to be one, yeah. | ||
| My audience is all over the place, which I'm very proud of, so I know you're gonna get a certain amount of hate, so I'm just giving you, that's a trigger warning for you, or a- Bring it on, people. | ||
| Or something like that. | ||
| So before we get into Hillary, though, because that'll be the easy part for you, why do you not like Donald J. Trump. | ||
| You know, it's funny because I had this moment today. | ||
| So, have you paid attention to the, you know, the Facebook Live thing that they're doing? | ||
| Well, I saw a little bit of it last night. | ||
| You're Mr. Tech, correct? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I literally went to post that I thought that the Trump campaign's Facebook Live daily show was a brilliant idea. | ||
| And I kind of went back and forth. | ||
| Should I not compliment him? | ||
| Is that a bad thing to do? | ||
| Will people think then that I think that Hillary should do a Facebook Live thing? | ||
| And I just thought, oh my God, you're so fucking overthinking this. | ||
| I like Kellyanne Conway as a person. | ||
| I'm sure I'm gonna get hate mail from our Democratic friends on that. | ||
| So I thought it was a good idea. | ||
| As a person, I find him an unbearable narcissist. | ||
| I always have found him to be boorish. | ||
| You know, it's not a coincidence that the only congressional district in New York State that Donald Trump lost in the primary is the one that he lives in. | ||
| Not a coincidence. | ||
| Like the people who know him best like him the least. | ||
| So I'd like to- That is a fact. | ||
| You're not making it up. | ||
| I will grant you that fact. | ||
| It's a fact, right? | ||
| He lost that congressional district. | ||
| He lost his neighborhood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, his neighbors didn't vote for him. | ||
| You know, I could come up with one or two nice things about him. | ||
| I do think that how much his kids love him is a good thing. | ||
| Um, uh, you know, so I, I agree with Hillary on that. | ||
| I do think that anyone who can make a business out of, uh, just using his name, which is really what his business has been the last several years, just using his name, um, has to have some sachel, as my grandmother would say. | ||
| Um, But I don't think it's particularly helpful for anyone else because, you know, the average steel worker laid off in Ohio is not going to be able to create a business out of his name. | ||
| So I'm puzzled by the affection for Trump's business skills. | ||
| I just find him to be kind of a terrible person. | ||
| Yeah, so let's back up and start with what you first said, which is interesting about the Facebook Live post. | ||
| And you were gonna post, because I suspect what you were saying is that you were gonna post something, not necessarily praising Trump, but saying that this idea is interesting. | ||
| Kind of praising Trump, right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like, we're not allowed to do that anymore in this sort of hyper-partisan world. | ||
| So, you know, I did it anyway because I don't really live by hyper-partisan rules. | ||
| But I did go through this kind of process over whether it's okay or not to have that kind of civil analytical conversation. | ||
| So as someone on the left, as a liberal or a progressive, do you consider yourself a progressive or a liberal? | ||
| Does it even matter to you? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of those, both of those? | ||
| I consider myself a, I'm a capitalist tool with a progressive activist heart. | ||
| Yeah, that's nice. | ||
| So as that, does that dishearten you that you know when you post something on your own Facebook page, that obviously these are your fans or your friends, these are people who know Hilary Rosen, they know your politics, that even by posting, ah, you know, Trump, this TV idea is kind of interesting, or gee, he's using Facebook in an inappropriate way, that even that's going to bring hate from the left, which is supposed to be the tolerant side. | ||
| That must drive you crazy. | ||
| Like, there's so many things about this election that drive me crazy. | ||
| You know, civility has become a partisan issue on kind of both sides, right? | ||
| To say something Like, all of a sudden, if you say, I like Kellyanne Conway. | ||
| She's a good person. | ||
| All of a sudden, it's like, what are you talking about? | ||
| She's an evil person. | ||
| Or if you say, actually, you shouldn't want to ban all Muslims. | ||
| That's not a good thing to say. | ||
| You're so partisan. | ||
| You're so against Donald Trump. | ||
| Like, these kind of basic niceties that you were kind of brought up to imagine would be the right way to live every day, all of a sudden it's caught up in this sort of partisan world where it's a little frustrating. | ||
| I'm very proud that I'm called a libtard and a member of the alt-right every day. | ||
| Like, I think that says something, you know? | ||
| Libtard. | ||
| Where did that word even come from? | ||
| Like, that's the best they could come up with, libtard. | ||
| Now I get libtard, I'm a cuckservative, I'm a member of the alt-right, I'm a white nationalist. | ||
| You know, it's a lot. | ||
| Well, you are all of those things, and I'm ashamed of you for it. | ||
| I should have told you before you agreed to do this show. | ||
| Let's talk about Hillary, though, because I've found that for me, at least in the online space that I live in, it's been easier for me to find people. | ||
| It's the online space that you're in right now. | ||
| I know you do the mainstream thing, but you're in the online world right now. | ||
| Just imagining you living in your little box. | ||
| Just a teeny, tiny dial-up thing. | ||
| Ox in the Hollywood Hills. | ||
| Not in the hills, I assure you. | ||
| But I'm able to find more passionate Trump supporters that I've had better exchanges with than Hillary people. | ||
| The Hillary people have either been connected to the campaign somehow, or I sense that a lot of Hillary people are voting for her begrudgingly. | ||
| So as someone that's not voting for her begrudgingly, can you sell me on Hillary Clinton? | ||
| Yeah, I hear a lot. | ||
| I hear people say that Hillary voters are unenthusiastic, but I meet a lot of enthusiastic Hillary voters. | ||
| So I'm not sure where the disconnect is coming from. | ||
| I think you can look at people and sort of categorize them by ages. | ||
| And I just had a couple of women in my office earlier today One of them was a millennial, and they, you know, so they don't, she didn't know the Clintons of the, you know, 70s and 80s, the sort of, you know, progressive middle class Clintons, right, you know, before they became a member of the elite class like the rest of us have now. | ||
| But what she really keyed in on, she's like, oh my God, Hillary Clinton talking about sexual harassment and making this be an important issue in this campaign has totally excited my friends and I, because this has been a real issue for us. | ||
| It was an issue for us a few years ago in college. | ||
| It's still an issue for us. | ||
| Nobody else has ever talked about it in public life. | ||
| Like, that's a really big thing. | ||
| And so, she's enthusiastic. | ||
| And for a whole other set of reasons that, you know, Hillary's giving voice to for young women. | ||
| And yet, for someone like me, who, you know, has worked with her and known her for a long time, I remember when she You know, made sure that after that, um, disheartening defeat on healthcare, she came back and didn't give up and passed the children's health insurance law that is, you know, helped a lot of kids, uh, um, to this day. | ||
| So like, I know that kind of pragmatic, thoughtful, engaging, really wonky side of her that is rooted in policy. | ||
| I love that side of her. | ||
| Um, I also happen to know kind of the girl's girl side of her that The one who at lunch remembers, you know, who you're dating and your family. | ||
| And, um, the last time she talked to you and, um, you know, I just saw her recently actually at an event. | ||
| And the first thing she said to me was, Oh my, you know, I've been thinking about you because, you know, our friend's husband has cancer. | ||
| And are you, you know, I wish I could do more. | ||
| Are you taking care of her? | ||
| That's Hillary. | ||
| That's who she is. | ||
| Do you think it's partly that because of the over-the-top caricature that Trump basically is, that people are just sort of, whether you hate it or you love it, there's a certain attraction to that. | ||
| It's clickable, it's easy to understand what it is, where the word you use, pragmatic with Hillary, It just sort of seems boring or whatever, maybe perfectly great and maybe what you want out of a leader, but that it maybe just isn't flying for the 2016 Twitter age. | ||
| Well, I think the short answer is yes, but I think one thing we have to be proud of with Hillary in this campaign is I think she has Gone at Trump with a little more intensity and maybe a little more relish than people thought she would, personally. | ||
| That was a conscious decision on her part because she has felt like when other people have gone after him earlier in the campaign season, they didn't get as much attention for it. | ||
| And basically she had the bully pulpit and she needed to use it. | ||
| Having said that, the thing that she has stayed pretty consistent on, I think, is that she started out this campaign with a lot of wonky policy papers, with a lot of positions, with deep, you know, not two or three point plans, but ten point plans on virtually every subject. | ||
| And has stayed there. | ||
| Has stayed there doing roundtable events on all sorts of subjects. | ||
| You know, consistently, we just saw it in the last debate when someone was talking about Obamacare. | ||
| It didn't get much attention, but Hillary actually recited the top five, you know, benefits of Obamacare and why it mattered and what we would lose if we actually repealed it. | ||
| Whereas Trump was just like, I gotta get rid of it. | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| It's a disaster. | ||
| You know, he, he didn't even really know the actual policies that it Mattered in the legislation. | ||
| So I think she has consistently been that person. | ||
| This is a really long run on answer. | ||
| But to wrap that up, it's just she started this campaign with goals of what she wanted to do as president. | ||
| I think she's ending up this campaign. | ||
| Yeah, so the Obamacare one is an interesting play because I have no doubt that she knows her stuff inside and out. | ||
| I've said it on the show many times, but as an example with Obamacare, we just heard in the last couple of days that there are these double-digit rate hikes and things like that. | ||
| So it's weird because on one hand she has to defend The parts of Obamacare that are obviously are working. | ||
| And then at the same time, people see the headline, you know, they look back and, you know, they hear Obama saying, if you like your pan, you can keep it. | ||
| We know that wasn't exactly true. | ||
| They said that certain hikes weren't going to be true. | ||
| Then people see the headline, which I'm sure, I haven't seen Drudge today, but I'm sure it's the lead thing, you know, double digit increases. | ||
| So she's sort of caught by being part of the system where she has to defend something and attack it at the same time, where Trump doesn't have to, he's outside, so he can kind of say whatever he wants, right? | ||
| Well, you say she's caught, but I'm not sure that's the construct. | ||
| I think she is articulating for people to benefit, no question. | ||
| And if you're one of those 20 million people who now have health insurance, you really don't want your presidential candidate out there saying, we gotta get rid of this thing. | ||
| So I don't think she feels caught. | ||
| Well, what about for the people that are upset about the increases? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| I think you have to be honest and recognize that there are multiple audiences here that feel differently about this law. | ||
| You know, I'm a small business owner. | ||
| Our health care costs have gone up a lot in the last couple of years. | ||
| But before Obamacare passed, our health care costs were skyrocketing. | ||
| So this law didn't solve all the problems in health care. | ||
| And because there was a very strategic decision, To keep our health care system in the private sector to keep it relatively competitive among companies, you know, that that you're not going to you're not going to be able to dictate what all of the price increases are, what all the plans are and and how the outcomes are. | ||
| All right, let's move off Hillary, that Hillary, and Donald, because there's a lot of other things that we can talk about about media and the type of work that you actually do now, and I want to talk about a little cable news stuff. | ||
| As someone in media relations at the moment, do you sense like a real sort of earthquake happening just related to how we connect with our politicians? | ||
| How we demand they connect with us. | ||
| How social media has replaced cable news in a lot of ways. | ||
| Just that everything really, this really does feel like to me, four years from now the election is going to be extremely different than this. | ||
| Which will probably be good for a lot of reasons. | ||
| But this really does seem to be an election taking place in two worlds. | ||
| The traditional mainstream route and the online world. | ||
| And they're just like clashing and that's what's creating such craziness. | ||
| Yeah, and I actually think there are really three elections right now. | ||
| There are those two. | ||
| There's sort of cable world TV, you know, drama of the day, repeated all day long, all day long on cable TV. | ||
| Then there's kind of the online conversation that real people are having with each other or ranting about with each other. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then there's actually the campaign that's out there in the States on the ground organizing Where there is real organizing, particularly on the Democratic side and the coffee shops and in the town halls and community centers and things like that, where there really is kind of old fashioned shoe leather vote targeting going on. | ||
| And it's rare that those three campaigns have come together in moments this cycle. | ||
| I think that the I think this notion of the citizen voice is stronger than it's ever been, and the pushback on conventional wisdom. | ||
| I find that reporters are most outraged and freaked out of all the things that happen in this campaign. | ||
| The thing that reporters hate the most Is this Donald Trump like, don't believe the media, the polls are rigged, this is all crazy, the media is biased, like, it's sort of the attack on the media, the undermining of the media is the credible source of information about the campaign that has people the most crazy. | ||
| And in some respects, their reaction to it only reinforces it because they spend a lot of time then killing the message, which Ends up appearing like they're killing the messenger. | ||
| Um, so a good example of that was the, what I thought was like a ridiculous overwrought reaction to Donald Trump saying he wasn't going to accept the outcome of the election. | ||
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Um, because I just thought this is stupid. | |
| You know, of course he's going to accept the outcome of the election. | ||
| He's just, he's, he's foaming at the mouth. | ||
| He's doing what he does. | ||
| And. | ||
| But yet for three days it was the headline. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| If we say that it's over, it's over. | ||
| How can somebody say it's not over when we say it's over? | ||
| You know, it's interesting, it's interesting because that line I actually thought was, and I led into the top of the show with this, I actually thought there was some legitimacy, legitimate scary stuff with that because it's a dog whistle to his people if he loses to say that it wasn't us, it wasn't us, but the system, it's one thing to say the media's messed up, but it's another thing to say that the actual voting is rigged. | ||
| So I actually did think that it was, it had some, I'm not giving it legitimacy, I'm just saying it had some like worth to push back on. | ||
| Yeah, I understand, but I think of all things, I think they're gonna conflate whether or not the system is rigged against them versus whether people really believe that voting machines have been hacked. | ||
| Right, those are two separate things. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't think that people will get to voting machines have been hacked. | ||
| Call me skeptical on that point. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, the system is rigged. | ||
| The media is biased. | ||
| Regular people don't get a fair shake. | ||
| Your voice isn't represented. | ||
| That's Bernie Sanders too, right? | ||
| That's not just Donald Trump. | ||
| Well, that's the funny thing. | ||
| They both were the outsiders. | ||
| But okay, so as someone that does this, that is a Democrat in media relations and cable news and the whole thing, is it fair to say that there are more Democrats generally in media than there are Republicans or conservatives? | ||
| Most of the people are liberal. | ||
| That's fair to say, right? | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Give me a media relations answer, come on. | ||
| Um, well, I'm gonna, I'm gonna split this up. | ||
| I think what we have seen traditionally in the Republican Party as their national candidates, and ever since kind of the right wing took over Republicans, um, what you end up having is sort of a, a, a real split on social issues. | ||
| And I think that, um, there's no question that my experience in the, in the media world, that there are more sort of Socially liberal people, you know, media folks and there are socially conservative media folks. | ||
| And so the whenever candidates put emphasis there, I think that that has that has created bias. | ||
| I think the Trump issue, though, isn't really about You know, Democrats versus conservatives. | ||
| I think it's just that people are offended at how much he lies. | ||
| I think people in the media are just appalled at just the kind of, you know, bad fact machine robot like person that he is and and tries to encourage other people to be. | ||
| And I think people are just incensed by it in the media. | ||
| And so they're constantly pushing back on him, particularly in the last six or eight weeks | ||
| when it got more serious. | ||
| And so, but I don't think that they'd be treating Mitt Romney this way, | ||
| or I don't think they'd be treating Marco Rubio this way. | ||
| I think this is unique to Donald Trump. | ||
| Yeah, but really, I mean, with Romney, you know, there was the binders of women and the 47%. | ||
| Like, you don't think at this point, they pretty much were saying Romney was anti-woman at this point. | ||
| So isn't it just that's sort of what the Republican is gonna get? | ||
| Like, I think a lot of people are looking back and going, man, maybe we should have been a little nicer to Mitt, because look at this. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not sure the binders of women was as much a media thing as an effective echo that the Obama campaign made happen. | ||
| But I, you know, so most of my reporter friends honestly don't vote. | ||
| And- Is that out of principle or laziness? | ||
| Out of principle. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You know, that they find that important. | ||
| So I actually don't, But do I experience them as generally socially more progressive? | ||
| And yes, but also, you know, I do think there's this path of socially progressive Fiscally conservative, if there were a candidate down that middle path, you'd find a lot of media more apt to be there. | ||
| Yeah, well, I think that that's where most of the country is. | ||
| I think they're fiscally conservative if they really understood economics, and I think they're, for the most part, but obviously not the fringes, are socially liberal. | ||
| But I'm curious, as someone that's been in this for a long time, and you're in the DC crowd and the media crowd and all that stuff. | ||
| I'm in the crowd. | ||
| You're in the crowd. | ||
| You're very popular amongst the popular people that are in DC. | ||
| What do you think about the sort of level of friendliness in general between the media and the politicians? | ||
| I mean, you know, we could look at any cable network and the amount of people that are considered analysts That either work on campaigns or have worked on campaigns or who are actively working on super PACs. | ||
| I don't even need to name the people, so I won't put you on the spot, but there's plenty of people that then leave there to go work for the DNC or work, like it's just this big orgy. | ||
| And people I think are really legitimately sick of that. | ||
| So as someone that has a little insight into that, how do we, how should the average person view that? | ||
| I think, you know, I've been at MSNBC and CNBC and CNN, so that's my experience, but I think that the network in some respects looks at people like us as cheap talent, and then there's a lot of free talent because there are a lot of people who | ||
| Thank God you said that, because every time I've gone on HLN, they never pay me, and I thought maybe it was just me. | ||
| I do think that producers and bookers try and look for people to come on these shows that bring something to the table. | ||
| I don't think that it's a disqualifier that one of the things that they also bring to the table is having been in the room and that sometimes they're still in the room, you know, the room where it happens. | ||
| And so I think that that's something that viewers have historically been interested in from an analyst point of view. | ||
| But I do I think that it has the potential to turn into kind of a feeling of coziness, that there is a there's a room where things happen for people who are invited into the room. | ||
| And if you're not invited into the room, you get screwed. | ||
| And I think that that's why, you know, like I think at CNN, we have Anchors like, you know, | ||
| Frankly Anderson Cooper, Jake Tapper, people who don't see themselves as particularly political | ||
| and will ask people questions like regular people talk. | ||
| And so I think that's really important. | ||
| I think that we can be on TV interpreting what's happening in the election | ||
| for people who don't live it day in and day out, What does that mean if a poll says this in one state and a poll in another state? | ||
| How do you reconcile that? | ||
| And how might a campaign make a decision about where to disperse resources? | ||
| So people like me can bring that kind of expertise to the table, and then people like me can argue on behalf of a candidate and trash another one, right? | ||
| So we're going to bring those two things. | ||
| But I'm not going to pretend to know details about the job search of a laid off factory worker in Ohio. | ||
| I have empathy for it. | ||
| I want to see good public policy about it, but I'm going to depend on CNN to go to Ohio and find ways for those people to talk for themselves and to find Like real representatives for it. | ||
| Yeah, do you think part of the problem is just a human reaction? | ||
| Like once you're invited to those parties, I always think the White House correspondents did it. | ||
| I used to be friends with someone in a public person, I don't have to mention him, who would rail against it. | ||
| He thought it was the worst thing ever. | ||
| You see the media's in bed with the administration and they hate it and hated it. | ||
| And then last year got invited to it, now he's all about it. | ||
| So like, so that there's some element of, it's almost like the powers that be can kind of invite you in and everybody wants to go to the cool part. | ||
| You know, they call it the nerd prom, which sounds so douchey to me, but like, they, you know, they want, they know, ah, you got into the party once, you're around these people, you enjoyed the good food and the cocktails, like, you're gonna ease up a little bit. | ||
| It's just natural human reaction. | ||
| Do you think that's a fair estimation? | ||
| I know not for everybody, but I think for a certain amount of the reporters that are around it, it's like you wanna be in the club. | ||
| Look, I'll just take Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton as an example. | ||
| I don't think either one of these have had reporters this year ease up on either one of them. | ||
| I think part of it is timing. | ||
| Hillary had a really rough year and a half this last six or eight weeks. | ||
| People have said, all right, we've had a really, we've really dissected her and gone off on the emails and gone off on the Benghazi and done like everything. | ||
| And now they're still going after her on WikiLeaks and other things. | ||
| But Donald Trump had a, you know, by a lot of media accounts, a good skate there for a while. | ||
| And so now he's getting, you know, his rectal exam. | ||
| And I think in some respects, It's a timing issue that people are paying attention now in a way that they didn't pay attention before. | ||
| But I do not think either one of these candidates feel like the press has been cozy with them. | ||
| And I think if you look at House and Senate candidates or local candidates that are Subjected to maybe a doubt. | ||
| There's been less emphasis in the media on some of those other races because the presidential election is such a, you know, car accident that you can't, you know, take your eyes off of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But so I think maybe on some of those races, there's less focus than there needs to be. | ||
| But I don't see this as kind of A clear sale for either of these folks. | ||
| All right, so you briefly mentioned WikiLeaks over there. | ||
| I didn't know, as a Democrat, if you were gonna bring it up. | ||
| I had it in my notes here, but you did bring it up. | ||
| So tell, I mean, are you guys concerned? | ||
| Do you think this is all legit? | ||
| It is shameful that the Russians are trying to take over our election. | ||
| That's my line, and I'm sticking to it. | ||
| No, I mean, really, all right. | ||
| As a media relation, well, first off, just tell me what your general thoughts are on the content. | ||
| Do you believe the content? | ||
| To be real. | ||
| That's a great question, actually, because, you know, we do a lot of work with the DNC here, and we just had a situation last week where there were emails to the DNC, supposedly from John Podesta, and they were fake. | ||
| And so, all of a sudden, we, you know, kind of believed what people had been saying all along. | ||
| Wow, there really can be planted emails in this huge dump. | ||
| So as a practical matter, no, I don't feel like I could say that they're authentic. | ||
| Okay, so separating from that, which it seems to be, the jury seems to be out on that. | ||
| I had David Sirota on this week who was saying that if the DNC or Hillary campaign could have for sure said, we even found one fake one, that certainly they would have let us know. | ||
| But I think you can just chalk it up to we're not totally sure at the moment. | ||
| Read the Michael Isikoff story on Yahoo the other day, because they gave him the fake emails to look at. | ||
| Okay, all right. | ||
| And he's a great investigative reporter. | ||
| All right, I'll definitely take a look at that. | ||
| All right, so removing that portion from it, as someone that, again, has worked with campaigns and things like that, do you think there's anything in there, you know, I know there's stuff that sounds like they're giving stories to friendlies at the New York Times, Or some stuff that kinda sounds like pay-to-play. | ||
| I mean, stepping away from the campaign a little bit, do you think there's anything in there that really strikes you as untoward or really bad? | ||
| I feel like it's the kind of day-to-day, back-and-forth that happens on any campaign. | ||
| The should we do this, or this is the downside of doing that. | ||
| So I haven't really seen anything where I thought, oh shit, that's really, really bad. | ||
| What about giving stories to friendlies, as they've called? | ||
| We know that that obviously exists, and that goes to what I'm talking about before, about just the relationship between the press and politicians. | ||
| But do you think there's something that, at least even if it's just optics, do you think there's a problem there? | ||
| Well, not for the campaign. | ||
| Um, it, you know, it's not, it's not great for the media outlet. | ||
| Um, but I don't think it's bad for the campaign because the campaign's doing its job. | ||
| Um, I think for the, for the media outlet, you know, again, you have to look at the whole of the, of the coverage. | ||
| I don't think that people would say that the New York Times has been easy on Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Now the last couple of weeks, they've been really tough on Donald Trump. | ||
| But as I said, I don't, You know, I don't think you could you could argue that they gave her a free ride. | ||
| So I don't think that those were any sort of, you know, major problems. | ||
| And, you know, there are a couple of other things in there that I think were embarrassing, you know, conversations that they probably would really not want to have public if they were accurate. | ||
| But I didn't see anything that really troubled me that much. | ||
| I sort of felt the same way around the excerpts of the Goldman Sachs speeches, which is there didn't seem to be anything in there that was so troubling. | ||
| What about the line about, you know, you guys are the experts, so you should kind of police yourself? | ||
| Well, she didn't say you should police yourself. | ||
| She said you should participate. | ||
| And there's a big difference there. | ||
| Um, and I mean, that's just factually true. | ||
| You are experts. | ||
| It doesn't mean there aren't, there aren't other experts too, who need a seat at the table. | ||
| Um, but I, I don't see anything wrong with inviting industry to the table. | ||
| I don't think they should own the table or run the table, but I think that how can you make smart laws if you don't, you know, have people there who are going to tell you it's impact. | ||
| You don't always have to believe them, but you want to hear it. | ||
| Yeah, let's flip back to Trump for a second because this reminds me sort of, if you were handling him, if he was coming to you for sage wisdom, you'd probably have to pay a lot for that, right? | ||
| That would not come cheap to Trump. | ||
| That would not be cheap. | ||
| That would not be cheap. | ||
| I don't know if there's enough money in Trump Tower to pay me to handle Donald Trump. | ||
| So, but if he came to you and what you said before about the lying, that we know, I mean we see every day the amount of lies that he lays out per day. | ||
| Sometimes I think they're somewhat overblown, but we know it's just like a factual mess, the things that he's saying every day. | ||
| It's like Tourette's or something with him. | ||
| So as a media relations person, it seems pretty obvious to me that despite the lies, he just has forged through them, and that he's said, you know, what was the line about, I could shoot someone in the middle of the street and nobody would care? | ||
| It's like he's realized that the more he doubles down on this, the more that it works. | ||
| In your history of media relations, have you ever seen an example of something like this before? | ||
| Never. | ||
| Never. | ||
| Can I say that more emphatically? | ||
| Never. | ||
| I've never seen this. | ||
| And in fact, you know, if I had a client that I was media training, you know, it would be that kind of, um, uh, cluelessness about the, about the impact you were having that I would try and beat out of them. | ||
| Um, you know, I'd, you know, make them practice and rehearse over and over again to, to try and look like they actually cared about someone other than themselves. | ||
| But what does that then say? | ||
| What does that say for your line of work then? | ||
| Even if he loses the election, that he has sustained this for so long, treating the media this way. | ||
| What does that say? | ||
| Well, we'll look at the numbers, right? | ||
| Because you can get some people to believe anything, but it's what you get a majority of people to believe. | ||
| He's got the biggest audience he's ever had in his life and, you know, in his career. | ||
| Maybe for his future, 36% is great. | ||
| You know, what were the Trump hotels market share before then? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I, but I, but it's not persuasive, um, to, to a majority of people and it's not, um, effective. | ||
| It's, it's working with some people, but I, It's not working with most people. | ||
| Yeah, all right. | ||
| Let's step away from all the day-to-day election stuff and the media stuff at the same time and just talk about politics in a kind of broader sense. | ||
| Even though you're a Democrat, would you like to see more parties? | ||
| I mean, it's really hit me more than ever. | ||
| I consider myself independent, but we desperately, we desperately need more parties. | ||
| I would love if there was an actual Libertarian or classical liberal party. | ||
| I think if we had a functional, not Jill Stein-led Green Party, I think that would be fine. | ||
| Do you think, even though you obviously like the Democrats, do you think that for the health of democracy that we need more parties? | ||
| Wow, that's a big, good question. | ||
| I know your paycheck is slightly related to the answer, so you know. | ||
| No, it's not really. | ||
| I think that it would be freeing in a way if people could narrow their interests more. | ||
| You know, I'm a little more of a centrist Democrat on some things and a little more left on other things. | ||
| But and I think that we're going to see a really significant struggle in the Republican Party over the next six or eight months, but to reconcile their factions. | ||
| But I'm not sweeping under the rug the factions in the Democratic Party. | ||
| So it's appealing to think about it and imagine that then we could have real coalition government as opposed to partisan government. | ||
| Um, you know, we, we've seen it, um, work in Europe and then we've seen it sort of blow apart in Europe. | ||
| So, um, I guess I'm open to it, but I think it's a function of, um, I guess it feels hard to get to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What would you tell Hillary if she wins? | ||
| We somehow got right back to it, but what would you tell Hillary if she wins about reaching across the aisle? | ||
| And look, no matter what she does, assuming she wins, a certain percentage of the Trump people, an extremely high percentage, are gonna hate her no matter what. | ||
| What would you tell her as far as if you wanna get even 10% of them that might be malleable and flexible in thinking to come on board? | ||
| How would you instruct her to do that? | ||
| I think she actually, Understands this question very well. | ||
| And you know, as a you know, President, you're not a dictator, but in this instance, if we have multiple factions, you are a little more like a prime minister than a president in a way, because you have to find ways to bring Republicans together, liberal Democrats together with centrist Democrats. | ||
| You have to get some moderate Republicans in. | ||
| I think the Republican majority in the House is going to shrink some and the next speaker will have to decide if they're willing to Pass things with some Democratic votes because there's going to be a faction of right wing votes they're never going to get if they try and come to the table. | ||
| So I do think that Hillary actually is a really good leader for those times because she's not so politically bound. | ||
| You know, people see her as such a partisan, but in fact, she's really not. | ||
| She's more She's more issue focused than she is politically focused. | ||
| Do you think you'll miss the old school Republicans? | ||
| I mean, this split that's breaking. | ||
| Like, did you ever think there would be a day where you'd suddenly be like, you know, Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham and a couple of those old guys. | ||
| Paul Ryan's not old, but like just those- I think it's funny that, you know, Paul Ryan and Lindsey Graham used to be considered fairly right wing. | ||
| I think it's funny that they're now the moderates, you know? | ||
| I'm old, so to me sort of the moderates were like Arlen Spector and Lincoln Chafee and People like that. | ||
| So, you know, they don't even exist in the Republican Party anymore. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So to that point, do you think you'll miss some of just whatever the old Republicans are, be it from the Arlen Specters of back in the day to Paul Ryan now, that like that thing, that Republican conservative thing, short of them having some crazy resurgence, assuming Trump loses and they go back to their roots. | ||
| I mean, it really seems over. | ||
| Do you think you'll be nostalgic for it ever? | ||
| Oh, I already am. | ||
| Because I know that it's, you know, people like that who have, first of all, helped social progress, like I'm a LGBT activist in my spare time. | ||
| And if you look at the, you know, the few times we actually won votes on Capitol Hill, we won votes with Republicans. | ||
| You know, it wasn't just, yeah, we got the majority of Democrats, but We stopped the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage with eight Republican votes in the Senate and the majority Democrats. | ||
| That couldn't happen today. | ||
| We couldn't find eight Republicans to vote with us on an issue because there's such bad consequences for them to cross over party lines on issues. | ||
| I think that we're more poorly served as a country without our moderates. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious. | ||
| My audience knows I criticize the left more because I consider myself part of the left as a liberal. | ||
| Is there anything going on on the left right now that you're not thrilled about? | ||
| Like when it comes to some of the political correctness stuff or the free speech stuff or any of that, do you see cause for concern or am I blowing it out of proportion on Twitter? | ||
| No, I think there's a couple of things where you see just sort of demonizing anyone who works on Wall Street. | ||
| Like, I don't get paid by anyone on Wall Street. | ||
| I have no clients on Wall Street. | ||
| I have no dog in this fight. | ||
| But that doesn't mean that I don't think there isn't like some expertise around financing that is still kind of useful to have somewhere around the government. | ||
| I'm, I'm a clean air and clean water advocate. | ||
| I'm, I'm, uh, happy that we are moving towards wind and, and, and solar and alternative energy, but I don't, I don't see how we, you know, we're not there overnight, right? | ||
| We need some interim steps. | ||
| I, you know, people are not giving up their cars. | ||
| They don't, we still want our houses cleaned. | ||
| We need a backup generator as it were. | ||
| So the sort of the purity caucus, I think, Um, is where I end up kind of parting ways. | ||
| And, um, I'm, I'm much more, um, conservative, for instance, on taxes. | ||
| I, if a company, uh, makes money and wants to hire more people with that money, it's like, fine. | ||
| I'd rather them hire more people than pay higher corporate taxes. | ||
| Which is, I know, an anathema to my liberal friends, right? | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| If they take that money and pay it out to their executives, we ought to tax their income really well. | ||
| Like, tax them high. | ||
| You know, like, I don't like the disparity between CEO pay and regular worker pay. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| Obscene. | ||
| And so if they end up using their corporate profits to pay their senior executives a lot of money, then those people should be taxed a lot on that income. | ||
| But if they wanna use their profits to create jobs and more growth and more opportunity, I'd rather see the money go there. | ||
| Yeah, so when you see, or what happened with Trump's taxes and the 980 million, whatever, knowing that assuming what he did is legal, because no one's saying it's illegal, You don't have a moral problem with it. | ||
| That's more of a systemic problem. | ||
| I do, because that's personal income tax, right? | ||
| That you get a ridiculous amount of benefits from real estate in particular. | ||
| The esoteric nature of taxing real estate professionals, that's obscene too. | ||
| Your asset's appreciating, but yet you're depreciating the buildings that you That makes no sense to me. | ||
| Right, but you make the distinction between him just using the law, which he did, versus doing something illegal, right? | ||
| You just don't like what he did, basically. | ||
| But a lot of people do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| No, I don't like what he did, and I don't actually think that that's a good, you know, it's not a good use of corporate dollars. | ||
| So I'm all for him paying significant taxes there. | ||
| I'm making a different distinction. | ||
| A company or a small business is earning money. | ||
| And with their profit, they are growing their business, hiring more jobs. | ||
| I'm not talking about taking a loss. | ||
| I'm just saying my interest is not in raising their taxes. | ||
| My interest would be in raising the taxes if they pay their bosses too much money. | ||
| Yeah, all right, I have two more questions for you, and then you're free to go to the fancy D.C. | ||
| parties or whatever. | ||
| I know I'm gonna get all these crazy notes on this stupid tax view of mine, but whatever. | ||
| The Twitter people are gonna be out. | ||
| The Trump people on Twitter, they just are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
If I bring on Trump- Please don't write to me about my tax views. | |
| I'm not an expert. | ||
| He just asked me if I had a thought about where we get a little too crazy on the left. | ||
| Trust me, even by me asking certain questions, they yell at me. | ||
| It's okay, that's what free speech is all about. | ||
| So two questions before we end here. | ||
| After this election, Do you think there's gonna be just like a little brief healing period? | ||
| Because I actually do. | ||
| Like just where people, just November night's gonna come, one of them's gonna be the winner. | ||
| I actually do think there's gonna be a couple weeks of like, we're in this thing, it just feels so intense for everybody. | ||
| Even my friends, my best childhood friend who is not political at all, if you asked him who the vice president is right now, I don't think he would know, but he's been all about this election. | ||
| Do you think there's just gonna be some natural cathartic thing that happens in the country after this? | ||
| I think there will be a big exhale, like, oh my God, thank God it is over. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Um, I, I do worry about Hillary Clinton. | ||
| I think it's going to be hard to be Hillary Clinton, you know, to, to get up and, and, um, find the words that make the entire country believe that you can move past what has been such a, you know, um, ugly, unhealthy, uh, conversation. | ||
| Um, it's hard. | ||
| Uh, and well, maybe scratch that. | ||
| Some of the conversation actually is healthy, right? | ||
| Some of the stuff that, you know, when Donald Trump is gross about women, like I said, people, there's been a really great conversation about sexual harassment that we wouldn't have had otherwise. | ||
| But, but it's not, this election has not brought out the best in America. | ||
| Um, and I do think that people want the best in America. | ||
| So I'm hopeful that she's going to give it a, Give it a good show at the end. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| All right, final question. | ||
| On the record, what are the percentages? | ||
| What are we looking at here on election day? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| I'm asking, that's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I have been thinking that the winner would not break 50% because of the third party candidates and the like. | ||
| But I actually think now that she could get 51% of the popular vote, and he'll be in the high 30s, and we're gonna see a stronger third-party vote than we anticipated. | ||
| That's my prediction. | ||
| All right, listen, I tried to do my best to help Gary Johnson. | ||
| I did a whole video about how we gotta get the guy to 15%, and let's do it. | ||
| Unfortunately, I don't think he did much homework preparing for this opening. | ||
| He didn't live up to your own faith in him. | ||
| No, he didn't. | ||
| I feel like he owes me a steak dinner. | ||
| That's what I've been tweeting. | ||
| Hilary, it's really been a pleasure. | ||
| You did my old SiriusXM show. | ||
| You were one of the first real people we got on when we were a struggling little thing, and I really appreciate that, and I appreciate you joining me today. | ||
| You're great, David. | ||
| I love your sensibility. | ||
| Keep at it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks so much, and you guys can follow Hilary on the Twitter. | ||
| It's at Hilary R. That's just with one L. Don't get her confused with the other Hilary, although people have gotten you too confused, right? | ||
| No, no one's ever gotten me confused. | ||
| Oh yeah, there was a story, actually. | ||
| Yeah, there was a story. | ||
| I want to look like Hillary Clinton, so I could be a lookalike after she's president. | ||
| There could be work in that. |
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