Bill Kristol: A Blue Wave vs. the Toxic Red Tide

andy and anna here from your new favorite podcast no such thing as a fish yes we are two of the four hosts of the podcast that stuffs fascinating amazing weird mad facts into your ears on a weekly basis you got any good facts andy yes how about this one anteaters have evolved on 12 separate occasions wow mysterious wonderful the world really wants them to exist what about this one when ronald reagan left office he left a note on the white house lawn for the squirrels warning them to beware of george bush's dogs so there you go if you like fascinating facts and much more besides we are no such thing as a fish hey everybody just a real quick note um i pre-taped this upcoming pod with bill and so you know assuming it was a blowout lsu victory on saturday night uh that's why i didn't mention that because i don't know what has happened yet i don't know what's happened in the world so you know if we got it right we're good to go we got the cheeseburger from heaven or whatever i don't know about it so uh it is a great show we're talking a little bit about the midterms and it's a retrospective on 94 and 2006 i think that you're going to really enjoy it also reminder we got these events coming up tickets are starting to go so if you want to come join us atlanta columbia charlotte the borg.com slash events and one last thing i'm after the pod's over let me know what you think about kind of the retrospective part of this i have another little brainchild for something that i think you guys that is in a similar vein and so i'm interested in your thoughts so you can if you didn't like it or it was boring or whatever you can you can let me know so appreciate you guys very much have a great labor day stick around for bill crystal hello and welcome to the borg daily i'm your host tim miller it is monday it's labor day and i have for you of course i'm going to be talking about the borg daily and i'm going to be of course editor at large bill crystal we have a very special episode by popular demand it's the labor day kickoff getting ready for the midterms and uh bill and i on several episodes have been discussing the 2006 wave year that led to the democrats taking the house in the senate as well as some other midterms and and i've suggested kind of cheekily like maybe we should dedicate a full episode to that and people are like yes please do we want that and so we're going to do it right now for labor day it'll free a little holiday bonus so that sound good bill sounds good so we'll do 2006 where you'll which is the least modern history then we'll go back to 1994 the ancient times before you were born and i could discuss what happened then and then you also told me you wanted to do just a little bit on your first campaign 1948 thank you i set you up i set you up so well for that i mentioned 1948 and morning shots this week and that's why tim is having a good time having a good time with that i was not quite around yet we also for the youtube viewers and the borg plus subscribers we might have a picture of me from 2006 and video of bill from 94 so you can go see what we looked like we're both we're both handsomer than ever now before we do that i thought it would be good just kind of set the table with a little bit of you know just pure politic in some prognosticating looking ahead to this year's midterm and then kind of we can talk about how like our various experiences in past midterms sort of inform these projections so i don't know we need to like go state by state but kind of wondering what bill like your your big picture thoughts are as we sit here on labor day for how the november election will go and maybe specific states that they're catching your eye i've thought it would be a big democratic year for quite a while uh based on nothing other than just the obvious facts the main fact being that donald trump's approval rating has gone down steadily since he was inaugurated and the approval rating of an incumbent president is a good predictor of what happens in a midterm election especially when his party controls what has the congress so it is a referendum on do you approve of what they've been doing for two years and or more importantly probably do you want the republican especially when the republican party in congress is so attached to trump do you want them to continue rubber stamping what he's been doing for the next two years or do you want a party to check him that was very much my experience in 2018 the last trump midterm and so i i've always assumed democrats had a pretty good shot at a pretty good victory and then as trump got into the iran war and decided to monkey around with tariffs some more and inflation didn't go down and he made a generally seemed disconnected from people's lives and so forth and gas prices went up by quite a lot i thought a good year could become a very good year and that's kind of for the democrats and that's kind of where i am yeah so let's just do the house first um i'm i agree with you on all that on the big picture i'm a little bit of two minds at the house in the senate and it's a little bit because of the playing field like i do think that the democrats are going to see big gains among latino voters so you know in in the parts of the country where there are a lot of latinos like texas we have that that is maybe for the senate but i think that they're going to overperform there there'll be a lot of trump backsliding and and i think the prognostications are wrong a lot about what's happening in south texas maybe even south florida some places like that and so i expect the democrats to even overperform in in the house for that reason and uh if you look at a lot of the projections right now nate silver uh the democrats need to win four seats to get to 18 a lot of these projections have them only netting like eight seats or something and ending like 222 and the reason for that is to one the cheating that republicans did the gerrymandering did work a little bit that's going to offset some of the gains that's one and and another reason for that is just this kind of uh and you discuss this with oh shoot was it doug shown it was on your crystal conversation and just like the nature of this is very different than 06 and 94 and just how polarized we are there aren't as many districts in play and there's been gerrymandering even before the cheating gerrymandering there's there's regular old gerrymandering and there's gerrymandering and so i see that and i recognize it but man i just look at the map and some of these places that cook for example has is leaning towards republicans you know in in south texas as i mentioned in eastern north carolina in colorado a couple districts in colorado florida i think there's gonna be a bunch of surprises we'll get into why so i think that the democrats could net as many as like 16 seats and end up at two seats and i think that's going to be a lot of surprises and i think that's going to be a lot of surprises so i think that's going to be a lot of surprises 30 which would be less than still those other wave years we're going to talk about but more than what is being projected so that's kind of where i'm at the house i'm less bullish on the senate we'll get to that in a second but what's what's your review on that yeah same on the house i just think people are underestimating they look at a district that's gone republican in the last few years it's a republican now called republican plus six maybe republican plus eight because trump might have been strong in 2024 and they underestimate that if the whole country moves trump won by a point and a half right yeah let's say the generic ends up plus eight that is the democrats win the national house vote by eight which seems reasonable that's a nine and a half point move that means that a lot of districts that are trump you know plus six seven eight are in play right and in fact not only in play but might you might even maybe should be almost favored to go democratic so i i tend to think also that people are being a little too uh what's the word i'm looking for deterministic from the past in this respect and not understanding that when you get to a wave you know districts topple that we're a little beyond the you know of course they can win this one because it's only plus two republican and or or or republicans holding a seat that harris actually won there are some of those so yeah i'm sort of in the two i've been saying just to be a little optimistic just to make the numbers round 235 to 200 in the house oh wow look 235 making me seem cautious with my job my job is to make you my job is to make you look sane prudent you know reasonable i just like some of these districts i mean i don't know anna paulina luna's in a close race in florida that's in the likely our category on cook um the fifth jeff crank has been in this colorado springs seat forever there's a lot of like sprawl into colorado springs and from the rest of colorado you know it's like places like this start to fall the mill seat i've talked about a lot daytona beach i think that's potentially winnable democrats was strong candidate there bail dalton so i i just think that there are a lot of potentially gettable dem seats in this kind of likely dem category that there is there's the toss-up category the lean category than the likely i think there's a lot of potential dem seats to pick up there so we're we're in the same page even if not the same number on the house here's my nervousness about the senate we talk about this in a lot so people who listen to the show should be pretty familiar with the playing field but i'll just i'll just lay it out democrats need to pick up four to get to 51 and really they need to pick up five because john federman's been acting pretty squirrely and i don't know if you it's kind of one of those damned if you do damned if you don't if you're chuck schumer if you have 51 it's like either you got to get past everything by john federman or john federman switches parties and and puts it back at 50 50. so you really want to try to get to 52 which means you got to win five yeah net five yeah okay so that means you have to protect uh georgia that seems safe at this point and you have to protect michigan which seems other people think is less safe than me i think i think that's pretty safe at this point okay then you go into the pickups you've got north carolina is the one that it seems like you're gonna get that's one you've got maine susan is tough i i think that that maine is going to be a flip this year but that's not a guarantee then you got to get two more to get to four three more of ohio iowa texas alaska three of those four the best four then after that you get into like kansas which you and i have talked about nebraska it's an independent running montana it's an independent running florida maybe you know the map is is tight and a lot of those places you mentioned eight nine earlier most of those places are eleven twelve trump states see one by eleven or twelve i'm a little nervous that they end up running up into running a bunch of really cool close races and a bunch of losing by three points a lot of 51 48 losses in those center races if i sat here today and you forced me to choose to prognosticate i do think that they get ohio with sherrod brown and i kind of look at texas and alaska i think i don't think they're going to get iowa that would be if you're just asking me today you look at texas and alaska i think those are pure coin flips and you know just to be cheery i'd say they go with the democrats but i think that they're i think both of them right now are like really neck and neck so that's kind of the state of play you'd win both of them if you if you did win hold the same seats when north carolina maine ohio alaska and texas that does get you to 52 and a real majority that you can work with where i don't know who is the next biggest troublemaking senator after fetterman there's really there really aren't any i guess that would be paltola probably you have a pretty cohesiveness to it i don't know who's the next biggest troublemaking senator after fetterman where you're just kind of dealing with you know working with paltola and who knows in that case maybe murkowski dips honestly so i think that would be kind of the state of play what about you on the senate i mean i basically agree and you know obviously predicting races that are basically 50 50 is a fool's errand so i mean there's some historical precedent i guess you say for when you get a wave things tend to tip over to 51 49 your direction you don't i mean that seems like that's can't mathematically or scientifically be determined that way it just happens feels that way though the car you know whatever the the the weird you know dynamics of these races they do tend to tip one way or the other for some reason and and and so i kind of think that you could split those the big four two to two which is sort of what you were suggesting might be the single most likely outcome but they could also go four zero either way honestly but if the wave continues this is where it's so important what happens late and you know what september october aren't that important in the sense that i feel like we know 90 95 of what's going to happen in 2026 but that last delta that last bit is awfully important if you're looking at four but i would even say five maybe six very close i mean kansas was closer than iowa i think in 2024 in the presidential they have a democratic governor it's not like no one in kansas is ever like well voting for a democrat that would be crazy so um i kind of think that i'd put that almost the same category as those other four make it five something and also there'll be some surprise like the democrats will lose a state they were supposed to win maybe michigan in this case but maybe maine and then still get to win michigan in this case but maybe maine and then still get to majority because kansas and somewhere else will come through you know what i mean that's sort of what happens in these in these years if if it's a dynamic wave like year if it reverts a little bit i think you said this on the last podcast on monday does the wave continue a little bit in those last two months or does it revert to them so what's the expression we're looking for revert to the mean you know revert to in the last two months and that that makes all the difference does it go plus eight to kind of drift down to plus six or does it go up to plus nine you know that just makes a big big difference in these close state senate races and that's a good transition into 2006 because i do think that the scale of that wave for the democrats changed based on what happened in october and it went from what was going to be a really really good year for the democrats no doubt kind of like this year to to a bunch of seats falling and uh producer ansley just kind of pulled this for me if you kind of look at going back to that cook political report which i referenced and we love amy walter and everything that they're doing there's really great even though in 06 it was charlie cook you know at the end they looked at their own projections and saw like how many they got right and they kind of looked at the wrong and in 06 there were a bunch in that kind of likely um republican category that were surprising dropped at the end that gets attributed to this october you know kind of momentum for the democrats so we'll get to what happened in october in a second i just want to start on both years of the basic facts so the democrats in 06 gained 30 seats in the house which is more than we're both projecting for this time but for the reasons we laid out a lot a lot because of gerrymandering they gained six seats in the senate right now there is no gerrymandering the senate so that's more of an apples to apples situation right like if you match the 06 number you should get about six which is kind of what we're talking about that would get you to 53 if you then that's really what you're saying is the sweep maybe of of iowa ohio alaska and texas or maybe you win three of those and kansas and you get to six so that was the 2006 year compared to this year in both cases the president's approval rating is above this current president's w on election day of 06 is at 38 in gallup which is above where trump is right now is 38 56 so that's the state of play i'll give you guys some names and then we'll do big picture to get your mind in the right time space uh in the senate claire mccaskill my ms now buddy beat jim talent john tester wins that year shared as shared brown defeats mike dewine so time's a flat circle in ohio um likewise the current governor shared's back running sarah's friend rick santoni goes down to bob casey this was a devastating one for me personally sheldon whitehouse defeated lincoln chafee the running joke and on that campaign that year because i was always like the house moderate and it was like we need to moderate more we need to moderate more more and they called me a lincoln chafee republican in the campaign that year and then jim webb defeated george mccaca allen in 2006 and i was set that year i was working in iowa we will put this picture up for jeff lamberti who's running in iowa three which is a des moines district challenging a vulnerable incumbent leonard boswell so there it is uh whoa look how much handsome i'm looking man thanks to our friends at one skin my plan there i there was a political consultant that i knew and it was just like you should go to iowa you should meet the reporters this is the first campaign where i got to do pr i was before that i was just kind of a little low level assistant funky field person and um i want to be a comms person so i go to iowa meet the reporters and he's like then whatever presidential campaign i end up running he was in line to be a presidential campaign man and i'm like i'm gonna go to iowa and i'm gonna go to iowa and i'm gonna i'll hire you to be the iowa person i was like great it's a great deal and so uh he was looked like that was gonna be george allen and then george allen did a racial slur on the campaign trail kind of a weird one mccaca it's not like a common racial slur and that was enough to crush him different simpler times in 2006 to think that that would be uh like nowadays george allen would go up with republican voters after doing that but um he goes down and then uh that consultant ends up working for mccain and dress history i end up working for mccain so there is 06 have you ever thought i should be doing something to protect myself from stalkers scammers and hackers i got stalkers baby let me tell you about the stalkers that are out there some nice stalkers and that's nice i never had a stalker before it's cool but you gotta you gotta be careful you know you gotta be careful and the scammers the fucking scam techs these 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you guys know i only do things that are really easy to use because i get distracted i start tweeting you know i'll sign up for something i'll be halfway signed up and then i'll you know then i'll just die in my tabs thousand tabs i have so you can't do that it's got to be easy get delete me it's easy then once you do it they're checking they're keeping it updated they're making sure you're good so sign up with me take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for delete me now at a special discount for our listeners get 20 off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me.com slash bulwark and use promo code bulwark at checkout the only way to get 20 off is to go to www.joindelete.me.com slash bulwark and enter code bulwark at checkout that's www.joindelete.me.com slash bulwark code bulwark before i go through the full timeline what is your what are your big picture memories of o6 well just on out so i lived then as i do now in virginia i knew george allen some and thought well of him and he was a pretty good he was a good governor and uh his father had been a great redskins coach obviously and a nice a very affable guy and a very good politician actually jim webb i respect it i knew him slightly too he had been reagan secretary of the navy i think and then he quit and protested over something it was sort of an irascible kind of old-fashioned democratic hawk sort of and kind of a populist and he wrote like did you write like uh erotica was he the erotica guy i can't remember which was that i don't know like that he wrote some history of like the ira the scots irish in america fighting something i don't know he was he was like an amateur historian he's a smart very smart is a smart guy i think he's still there yes jim webb did write erotica okay well i don't know if that helped anyway so george allen was i'm gonna say i don't know what mid 50 i mean the height of his career had been and senator as you say a lot of the smart money was on him for president possibly in oh and he was vp but wasn't going to run to succeed bush obviously so wide open race on the republican side a senator for a swingish state more republican than the democratic unlike now virginia but you know sort of a representative state and everyone liked allen and then and webb ran a pretty good campaign but i remember thinking in the summer i wonder if this could be close i mean uh everyone assumed allen went easily so webb was kind of an odd candidate right it wasn't like the attractive 38 year old tallarico against the corrupt packs and this was everyone liked george allen and he hadn't defended anyone much. And then the wave happened. That was part of it. I think, I think Virginia is a state because it's got a lot of, especially Northern Virginia, very susceptible to waves as it was later on in 2018 and so forth. You know, it's got a lot of upper middle-class tuned into politics voters who were like more, had maybe voted for Bush in 04, had voted Republican at the Senate level and thought, oof, man, this has gone really badly. So that, that helped. But then he did have this slur, which was crazy. So do you remember the story? Of course. Yeah. This young guy was a tracker. He went to, he was from Northern Virginia. He went to the same high school our son went to, TJ. He's a little older. He had graduated and was 22 years old, I think. And Alan, he seemed to get along fine, actually. But then he was bothering Alan. Trackers, you know, the guys who go around everywhere and try to record everything and find you and catch you in some slip up. Yeah. And this is pre-iPhone, but they got the little camera and all this. And Alan sort of, I can't remember what he did. He said something like, oh, come on, macaque again. We got macaque over here. We got little macaque over here. I don't think he, I mean, I think it's plausible. He didn't even know kind of what it meant. Like someone said his mother had used this term about Indian, Indian Americans or Indian, Indian, you know, people from the South Asia. I don't know. Anyway, it became a big thing and it kind of then he handled it very badly. That's my main memory. He didn't explain it. This is always the case, often the case with these things. Right. And, and then the waves just kind of carried Webb onto a, onto a victory. But I remember early, like around now saying to someone, I guess Webb will be fine. Right. And this person who was older and had been around for 94 and for, and for a couple of others, a couple of other biggish elections, Reagan 80, I suppose, uh, said to me, I don't know, Bill, you know, in a wave, the stuff that looks shaky on Labor Day goes down, you know, that's sort of what it means to have a wave. And so that's my memory of the Virginia situation. I don't get the time, but just the house people anyway, just because it's kind of fun to go back and, oh, sex. So here are some of the democratic winners that beat Republican incumbents. Gabby Giffords beat Jim Colby, a Republican that year. Another race that I had a friend working on in Colorado, seven, Ed Perlmutter beat Bob Beaupre. It's the start of Denver suburbs going blue. I've talked a lot about this race, Iowa two. I was working in Iowa three, which was the big way. So I already spent money. Nobody spent money on Iowa two. Dave Lobsack was a professor in Iowa. It's literally was not on, I should have went to look to see where it wasn't cook. It had to have been like not lean or likely, but solid Republican. Like it was a solid Republican. Jim Leach had been there a hundred years, moderate Republican popular. He loses to Dave Lobsack, Minnesota one, you know, who won that one in 2006, Tim Waltz, Tim Walz, uh, gets in and beats Gil Guttnacht. Uh, Christian Gillibrand is that year, uh, fun for football fans. Heath Shuler wins in that rural North Carolina 11 district, which is the same one. I think the Democrats could surprise them again this time. Okay. Here's the timeline of a six and oh five. And I think this is part of what prompted this was we a little bit like just kind of, our memories were different on like, like why did Bush get so unpopular in this period of what happened? So I'm going to run through the timeline and we can kind of go through our memories of it. He's reelected. He gets in in January and things are looking kind of good in Iraq. Actually, they hold their first parliamentary elections. I think that's the blue thumb election. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So that's January, a purple thumb, sorry. Uh, it's January of oh five. Uh, but then like pretty much immediately after the counter, the insurgency intensifies some IEDs, suicide bombings. Then you get to August of oh five. And, um, this is the last month where a majority of Americans approve of Bush in the polls. Just like mostly Iraq stuff. Um, Sydney Sheehan, like her big protest starts then August of oh five. Uh, and then August 29th hurricane Katrina, which is like now basically a year ago, the same time, obviously everybody knows how it was there. My sleeper event of this time is October three, the Harriet Myers nomination. Everyone looks to Katrina because it was like, where he got such bad PR like in the media. And I do think that like, you know, whatever, there's some swing voter types that I don't think there are a lot of Republican voters. So we're like, I'm bailing on Bush over his handling of Katrina. That doesn't feel right to me. There's some, you know, some of this kind of proto populist, right. The isolationist, right. We're unhappy with the war and the Myers thing. He gets just filleted and including you and conservative media over this, uh, you know, and I think this is where you start to get, uh, maybe the Myers parallels, like the Epstein files in a way. I, and just in a weird way, it's like it upsets the base, right. And this for the base now is starting to get frustrated, followed the first year. Okay. John Murtha then first calls for withdrawal in November, a Scooter Libby indictment. So now you get into, uh, some, some controversies there that is that's October. And, uh, then the Abramoff lobbying scandal is December. So Oh five was a rough year. Lots happening there for Bush. Not a ton then in Oh six happening. I mean, Iraq keeps getting worse. His approval ratings keep going down a little bit. Gas prices are rising a little bit to me. There's the gas price issue. It's a parallel to this issue. And then really, you know, kind of nothing of note as far as like scandals or whatever until October until a month out and Bush's numbers are low, but they really, the bottom falls out October, late September, October 1st, where the Mark Foley page scandal happens. Mark Foley was sending inappropriate texts, young male pages. He resigns house Republican leadership had covered it up. One of the house Republican leaders had covered it up pedophile, Denny Hastert. Didn't know that at the time. Republicans circled the wagons around them. I remember this ruined the last month of the campaign for my candidate, Jeff Lamberti. It's like every interview, you know, what do you think about this? Like we do go to a local news interview. We'd want to talk about whatever, you know, uh, national security and the clip that they'd show in the local news is whatever his response to was to Mark Foley, you know, sending messages to teenagers. So, um, deaths in Iraq go up that month. And then maybe a final two days of Saddam Hussein. So, uh, Saddam is convicted and sentenced to death two days before the midterms. I'd forgotten this, a final breath of optimism maybe, but no, November 7th was the blot. And then, oh, and then November 8th, Rumsfeld resigns. So note what is not there is much economy talk. Gas prices were up a little bit and you point that to the war. So it's a little bit of a parallel to now, but inflation was 2.5% in 06. Like nothing. I mean, standard what you're looking for. Unemployment rate was low. Economy's pretty good in, in 2006. So this is a lot of foreign policy scandal, disappointing the base, um, you know, wanting to have a check, looking like things are out of control. That's, that's kind of my overview. But what, what, what jumped out to you in that timeline? No, that sounds absolutely right. I've forgotten some of those things. I think as you spoke, I was thinking to myself, the economy wasn't that bad in 05, 06. And so all the talk about it's all kitchen table, you know, it's all this. I don't know. Yeah, sort of somewhat. It wasn't great as I recall, but we didn't know 07 and 08 was coming. Right. I mean, I don't think, I don't think people felt that way. It didn't feel ominous or anything. It's just the only two tiny points I'd make is Harriet Meyer. I think it has slight, this is not crazy. It's a little bit like Trump with the ballroom or something like that in the sense that it was Bush indulging his personal, like she was his counsel from back in Texas. And then he made her white house counsel and she didn't have the normal qualifications for Supreme court justice. I mean, and, and so, um, it's a little bit like Trump just, you know, feeling less, I'm not going to just go with the kind of normal practices of the president. I'm going to put my personal friend in there. I, I may be exaggerating that. I don't know how much hurt anyway, but it feels a little bit. It's important in both, but turn out like really matters. Like turnout is a little bit more important. And so depressing your base matters. And I do think it did. It happens that you're coming off of the first summer. It's the fall of the first year. Like there are other things to be worried about. And then it's like, what we wanted you to follow. Like one of the things we cared about being the Republican base, MAGA base this time is like to deal with this Epstein issue. Like you said you were going to do, we wanted you to do it. And I think that the Republican base at that time in 06 was like, we want good Supreme court justices. Like this is our stand in for some reason. For social issues like this, we care about the court. You ran on the court, ran on anti-gay marriage stuff, whatever. And it's like, okay, we wanted you to do, we don't want another suitor. Like this was a big thing then. And it's like, okay. And now you're just like, oh, you're going to give it to your friend. You know, and Epstein thing is horrifying. What did it to these young women? But like, in just the way of kind of letting down of something that they expected. No, I think that's, well, that's a good point. I think it's, I mean, he began, people forget this the second term by saying, let's privatize social security. No, it was an idea that was perfectly reasonable, respectable. I don't know if it was reasonable or not. No. And the think tanks loved it. They could sort of things. He had not mentioned it to my knowledge during the entire campaign. And it had this weird, and I remember saying, I will say. That's kind of like the Iran war. One of the few things, it is one of the few things I got right early on in Fox. I was on the Fox Sunday round table pretty much every week then. And I said, February, this is going to fail. I mean, he has not, the country is not ready for this. He hasn't prepared it for it. It's such an easy issue for the Dems to scream and yell about social security. It's like their, their go-to issue was back then even more than it is now. You know, protect the social security. They'll gamble it away in the stock market. He's just rewarding his rich stock market friends. The idea was not a crazy idea and you can make it. It was actually a really good idea and would have been wonderful. It would have been a much better place if they would have signed it right now, but okay, whatever. Right. I mean, we're all, our savings that are in our IRAs and 401ks probably ended up growing faster than social security, whatever. But anyway, but I think it is like this little like 20, 25, 60. And it was also only, I think like 10% of your, or 20% of going from memory. I don't even remember. It was a good idea. The Democrats did an excellent job of attacking it. The Republicans weren't ready to defend it because no one had even talked about it. It sort of got popped out of the treasury department and I don't know, sometime February or something. And so I remember early on. saying this is a political, it's going to damage them. And it had that same character, though, of, hey, we reelected you. We sort of thought you were better than the other. We kind of liked the direction you were going, more or less. They weren't thrilled with everything. And we wanted you to kind of do more stuff along those lines, maybe. And it was just the surprise, the kind of willfulness of, I think, willfulness of it hurt. And as you said, that's a little more like Iran. It wasn't exactly that he had promised not to do it. So in that respect, it's not quite like no more forever wars. But it's a little like just where the hell, where'd that come from? So I think it did some damage. Maybe it's more like a Canada trade war. Right. It didn't, yeah, no, that's good. It didn't hurt Bush in the sense that people left him. But I think it prevented him from having any momentum at the beginning of the second term. And the other part, just like what you make about this, is a smaller part, what is about two-thirds usually, is that the turnout in a midterm election is about two-thirds that of a presidential, sometimes even less, which does mean almost by definition that what the basis of each party think matter more, because that missing third is going to be less involved voters. Because if you can turn out 90% of Republicans or whatever, or Democrats, you're going to win. You're going to have a good year. Right, because you don't get all those other voters in the middle who are kind of diluting, as it were, the true believers. And so the best thing you can have going for you is you persuade some people, that's good. Then you turn out your base big time, and then you depress the other, something the other party does that usually isn't something you do in the opposition, depresses its base. So in 26, just to bring it back to the president for one second, that would be as if people are infuriated by things, or infuriated by a million things Trump has done correctly, and they'll turn out. There's some swingish voters who don't like particular policies, and, oh, he's gone a little crazy. I can't, maybe you should check him, not support him. Gas prices, economy. Yeah, that's good. And then some Republican voters who still will probably vote Republican in 2028, still think of themselves as Republican, but just, you know, I don't know, just stay home. So you get the Democratic turnout up and the Republican turnout down. If you can get both of those happening at the same time in an electorate that's two-thirds the size of a presidential electorate, that's where, again, the 2024 number, plus 11, is a little misleading. But some of that plus 11 for Trump in Iowa, in Kansas, in Ohio, are voters who will not vote this time. Correct. Yeah, I think it was, I apologize to whoever it is, one of the data people I saw on social media was putting this out, and they're like, well, what if the electorate in Iowa is actually only a plus five electorate? That's the right way to put it, yeah. You know what I mean? Right. It's like it's a plus 11 Trump state, but because of the depressed turnout, and the increased turnout on the Democratic side, then all of a sudden, you know, can you get enough independent voters to get there across the line? And I think that, you know, the Harriet Meyers thing, which is why I wanted to talk about it, was part of that depressing. The Republican way of saying that, all of it, I think Iraq was part of that as well. Like, we are seeing that this time on both sides. And to me, this is why I'm kind of even, and 18, again, because of the nature of the map and gerrymandering, and how we're, you know, like a big part of the 18 gains for the Democrats, when 18 gains were about, this kind of realignment to the suburbs for the Democrats, and places that, you know, Republicans used to do well, because of Trump. And so, they did better there. But like, the Trump base was still pretty excited in 18. So, I do think that was a little different. So, that's part of the reason why I'm more bullish, and think that Democrats are going to overperform their polls. So, anything else there? I mean, Katrina is something that everybody talks about, when they kind of reflect back in that time, obviously, of course, like here in New Orleans, of course, and you know, such a traumatic and visual event. And you know, then there's the W, the flyover, and you know, Kanye saying W doesn't care about black people. And so, like, there's all this, I don't, I don't know. I'm, maybe I'm, this is counter-conventional wisdom, but I think that that ended up actually mattering less than the economic stuff, the Abramoff and Page scandals, and then Myers. But where are you on that? People have the sense that the Iraq war wasn't being fought well, whatever the justification, the moral case for it almost, might have been. I think Katrina made it more plausible to say they're kind of, you know, they, the Bush sold himself, it's competence, toughness, but also competent, but not just toughness, kind of competence. Condoleezza Rice, serious people, Colin Powell, it was, you know, grownups administration. And suddenly, like, geez, the Iraq war, then Powell leaves, of course, after the first term. And suddenly, the grownups, little less grownups in charge. And then Katrina, total, just screw up, just in terms of, Yeah. Execution, obviously, as well as the way they talked about it and handled it. Without Iraq, Katrina makes, wouldn't have made as much difference. And without Katrina, Iraq would have maybe, but they, they felt they came together in a pretty bad way. And then the scandals, you don't really want incompetence and some bad policies and scandals all happening at the same time. Yeah. And you're right on social security. I, I, I overlooked that. I think that was another key inflection point. November 8th, Romsfeld resigns. Do we, is that, is that kind of a relic of an older time? Where somebody has to fall on the sword or is that, or do we possibly get a Hegsath resignation this November? I remember that at the time I was very anti-Romsfeld. I called on him to be fired after the victory in November '04. So I thought he had mismanaged Iraq and he could get a fresh start and things were getting worse. They kept Romsfeld and Casey, things got worse over the next two years. I think Bush planned to fire him for months, but just felt you somehow couldn't do it till after the election. I don't, to this day, understand why he thought, wouldn't it be better to do it in September? I mean, I don't know what, but somehow it was like so weird. I don't know, you can't do it. Or honestly, after the Mark Foley scandal, in retrospect, gosh, we need to get Rove on here or something. Was there ever a meeting, you know, to do this, was there a meeting about that? It's like, wouldn't, wouldn't firing Rumsfeld be a better news story than talking about, you know, Congressman Diddle in teens? Seems like it. I'll say in slight defense of Bush, which I've done quite a while, but I have the sense, and I, I mean, I saw Bush a few times in those, in that second term of those, he, first time I never saw him because I was a McCain guy, but second term, he, I was a supporter of the war, so I got, I got indicated. And occasionally for these smallish meetings with, you know, people like me, magazine editor types, think tank types. And he, he really did care about the troops. He just cared about their morale. And I think one, I remember at one point having a weird argument with him where I think, I'm not sure it was Rumsfeld exactly, but it was something about acknowledging they'd made mistakes in the first three years of the war in terms of the strategy. And he said, I can't do that. It'll make people feel like their, their loved ones died in vain somehow. And I just need to suck it up and I'll take the hit. I understand people. I think I was wrong, but I just, I can't say to people, it was a kind of weird, I don't think he's right psychologically exactly, but on the other hand, I, I sort of respected, he, he thought a lot about that. And so I think maybe he thought just dumping Rumsfeld where it would have looked like he was doing it to help in the midterms was not appropriate. It looked weak and political. Yeah. Yeah. He should have done it. Yeah, he should have done it. He was kind of like an honor and principle guy, whatever you think about him. And his own mistakes, like he did, like that stuff did matter to him. Interesting. Interesting. Okay. Well, there's 2006. God willing. I mean, a 30 seat house gain, that would be the dream, but that's even better than you or I. It's a little better than my projection. We have to have a 240, 242, something like that. That'd be exciting. Yeah. Okay. Let's move to 1994. This is the classic year people talk about when they talk about waves. I was in short pants back then. I was, I was just after my last democratic vote that I had done before Trump came around, which was actually this time. True. My last democratic votes were 92 in the school election. I voted for bill Clinton and bet my grandmother $1 on it and was very proud when she sent me the dollar, you know, then I started to get red pills there later in the middle school. And then I did vote against our own Lieutenant governor candidate in the 2004 race that I was interning on. Cause he was such a dick, but that's, that's neither here nor there. Those are my two other democratic votes. 94. I really found out that I don't remember. I didn't remember anything, but I was totally wrong about a lot of stuff. So, uh, we'll see if. I, I knew the gist about the fact that it was a big way of 54 house scenes get seats gained new house. Majority was two 30 to two Oh four then. So that Republicans were coming out of a big hole. I should've mentioned this in Oh six, because this is what happens in wave years and neither year did an incumbent of the, uh, party that was doing the waving loose, you know? So no Republicans lost in the house or Senate 94 or in 2006 because of the redistricting mid cycle this time. Like there will be some. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or not, but I think it's a good thing. I think it's a good thing. what our term limits, stuff that wasn't going to happen, you know, and a couple of semi-serious things, including, I think, reducing the, you know, rate of growth of Medicare or something, which got them in such trouble a year later when they actually got in the fight with Clinton. So that was sort of not as important. It was helpful at the end, allowed all these candidates. Wow, there's a lot of stupid stuff in here. You're right. Yeah, no, totally. Cut the number of House committees. Right. It was really, I remember looking at it at the time, I had nothing to do with it, but I knew Newt. I was pretty involved in some of the fighting in 94. I'd been fighting against Clinton. But yeah, I remember thinking, oh, come on. But it did help a little rhetorically. I'm sorry, I have to read all of them. It helped by like half a point. It was not important. It would have been a wave anyway in 94, but go ahead and read it. Please, because again, I don't, in my memory, this was totally wrong. Okay. Eight major reforms. It's like, it's literally nothing. Require all laws that apply to the rest of the country, also apply to Congress. I don't even know what that's, what does that even mean? I think it's like banking privileges and some, I don't know. Better healthcare plans, that kind of thing, you know? Okay. Select a major independent auditing firm to conduct a comprehensive audit of Congress for waste, fraud, and abuse. Great. Limit the terms of all committee chairs. Ban the casting of proxy voting in committee. Require committee meetings to be open to the public. Require a three-fifths majority to pass a tax increase. Guarantee an honest accounting of the federal budget by implementing zero baseline budgeting. There's the fiscal responsibility, the Act. This is balanced budget, truth and sentencing. So there are, there are additional other, a $500 per child tax credit. So there are, you know, some job and wages stuff, but no, that was just the congressional accountability point of it. And then a citizen legislature act, which is the term limits you referenced. I mean, they were trying to capitalize and they did on the anti-incumbent, anti, there was some congressional scandals, some of them real, some of them slightly fake. I mean, they, I don't know, they had some like bank they could use. It was just a banking thing. They weren't like ripping off the taxpayer. But they got a little bit, I don't know, it was nice. They got cheated. If you went to the little congressional bank, you got, I don't know what, you could float your check for a week or something. And it wasn't like dealing with your local branch bank where they were not so nice to you. Anyway, there were these minor scandals, the pretty minor retrospect that happened. Jim Wright had been forced out as earlier as speaker. I mean, there was, the Democrats were vaguely tainted with congressional scandals, having been there forever. Ross Sienkowski, right? Committee chairs who'd been in, there were no term limits signed for committee chairs. They'd been there for 10, 20 years. They'd been in Congress. 30, 40 years. So I think that was the part of it you read, the congressional accountability is really pretty small ball, but it captured a little bit. They ran, I'd say this is one analogy. So they did run against the status quo in a pretty big way. Now, how could they do that? So let me just go back to 94 for one second, if you want. I mean, it's just, it was different from 2006 or for that matter, 2010 or 2018, which were sort of waves in many ways, if you want, within the context of the Senate. So they controlled the House for 40 years. They controlled the Senate for 34 of the preceding 40 years, except for that six year stretch in the first six years of Reagan. Congress was Democratic. I came to Washington in 85. That was how it was. Republicans had won the presidency. Eisenhower, eight years, then the Kennedy Johnson, Nixon, eight years, then Carter for, then Bush, Reagan, Bush for 12 years. How did Reagan not take a House? He took the Senate. He took the Senate in 80. Yeah. The House was so, because those Southern seats were still Democratic. That's one thing that happened in 94. 30, 34, I believe, Democratic incumbents lost. That's pretty amazing in 94. And about half of them were in Southern seats where they'd been there forever. And then finally, people just decided, well, that was very nice. You've done a great job bringing Fork to this district for 25 years. But you know what, with like someone who's actually a conservative like us and not part of this Hillary Clinton, healthcare, Bill Clinton, pro God knows what, you know what I mean? There was a kind of a certain cultural caricature of the Dems with Clinton, especially, and that really tried to capitalize on that. So it was a big change in that respect. I mean, Congress, when I was studying politics and I first got into it, the presidency was often Republican. The Congress was Democratic and the House was really, it was this, it was the bulwark of, of, you know, old Democratic power, powerful committee chairs, Rostenkowski and all these characters. And then obviously in speakers and so forth. And when Newt started to say two years out, you know, we can win the House, people just thought, well, no, that's not going to happen. And one reason they thought that incidentally is there was no real precursor to this. It had been a mediocre year for Democrats, Republicans, that off year election. They didn't lose much. They didn't pick up much. 92, two years before Bush had gotten 38% of the vote. Bush had gotten 54% in 88. The Republican party was in utter disarray. You know, the incumbent Republican president had gone from 54 to 38%. That's partly a Perot thing, but still. Does that really just mean that the House Republicans end up being Bush plus Perot vote like? Pretty close. Yeah, yeah. Pretty close. And yeah, then with a differential turnout, sort of. Thing there too. Yeah. So they expected it by September 94, but no one expected it in early 93. When Newt started to say this, people thought, you're crazy. The House has been 40 years. That's two generations of political operatives cycling through. There were people in Washington who had come as very young people to work in the Hill or in the executive branch and literally had never, of course, seen a Republican majority. It just seemed incomprehensible. And even the Senate had only been there one six year period. So I think this degree of surprise was out of just novelty of what was happening. I mean, it was like these districts had Democratic incumbents who had been there a long time. Tom Foley, the Speaker of the House who lost, I think maybe the only time or one of the very few times a speaker has lost his own seat, you know, had a district in eastern Washington, I believe, which was becoming quite conservative. It's not Seattle, you know, it's like, and he'd been there forever and they loved him and he'd, you know, God knows a speaker or before that his majority leader brought a ton of pork there and all. And it didn't matter. They wanted it. It was sort of a Republican, you know, this was the end of old interest group pork barrel politics, I think, in some ways, and the beginning of modern ideological parties, ideological waves. And in that respect, it really was a precursor of what we were going to see for better or worse, maybe mostly worse over the next three decades. So that's my memory is just what a surprise it was, not at the very end, though. I think I was on some show, I think it was Meet the Press, maybe, or with Stephanopoulos, who was then the White House spokesman, and I was running this little project for the public in the future. But I'd become sort of prominent as a critic of Clinton and a Republican strategist. You know, it's great how you could become a Republican. I had won like one failed Senate campaign and been Quayle's chief of staff at a presidential campaign we got clobbered in. But I nonetheless got to call myself a Republican strategist and have that guy run on TV. And as a Republican strategist, I said, Republicans are going to win both houses. And everyone just like Stephanopoulos, of course, even said that wouldn't happen because he was working for Clinton. But actually, the people there, I guess it was Russ, probably were like, oh, come on, Bill. I mean, really? I mean, maybe. Take up seats, sure. But win both houses? That's something it's hard to recapture the degree of surprise and kind of novelty about what was happening. Interesting there, again, not an economically challenging time. Good economy in 1994. You mentioned a couple of the scandals. I mean, some of these Clinton, you know, the Whitewater, you mentioned the cattle futures, like that stuff was being investigated in the news. But like, you know, I mean. I mean, nothing at all like this. I mean, the thing that people point to is the failed health care plan. So I think you're kind of looking at two things, really. One, in that sense, it's like, Bill, it's a feeling that the administration was not competent. Maybe that's the Katrina parallel. But it's just more like they're not going about their business well. And then I do think that there's this kind of demographic, like, you know, these sort of populist right people are aligning with Republicans. And then some of the racist Southern, you know, white people are aligning with the Republicans. But talk about, you were involved in the health care stuff. Like, what was, was this just kind of like a big government, little government? Was this, is this a feeling that Bill betrayed his voters because they thought he was going to focus on other stuff? He ends up focusing on this. Like, how do you, how do you judge that? I mean, I think a little of both. I think it was a big government thing. It was, I mean, Hillary's plan, I was a pretty big critic of it, but it was a pretty big overhaul of the system. It wasn't really like Obamacare, which, you know, at the end of the day was insurance for $30 million. People who couldn't otherwise buy it on individual markets. It was a complicated plan. It was a big deal, Obamacare. But Hillary's thing really was embracing, pushing people into HMOs. Again, I can't remember, honestly, the details, but it was, it was a bigger overhaul. It was huge hoopla. Hillary, big speech around Labor Day a year before in 93. Hillary Clinton testifying to Congress as the first lady. He'd put his wife in charge of the task force to devise this. It all had a slight, you know. She's more polarizing than him. She's much more polarizing than him. You know, some of this is misogyny, but also just like culturally, he is governor of Arkansas. You know, she comes off as very liberal and like putting that up first as a policy thing is like more of a signal that like, no, this is not a DLC governor of Arkansas. Right. She was more liberal and it was the inside baseball, his wife in charge. And for moderates who had voted for Clinton, which there were, you know, some obviously some, some Bush voters made the aid to a deserted Bush. Not all, some went to pro, but some went to Clinton. They thought welfare reform. That was the kind of. of signature DLC models. moderate Democratic. We're willing to take on the welfare state and we're going to reform welfare and, you know, it'd be a little tougher on welfare. Such a big issue. Reagan used to hammer Democrats over it. And putting healthcare ahead of welfare became symbolically very important as he's gone to the left. He's betrayed his moderate supporters. And there was some truth to that, incidentally. And in that case, kind of in a weird way, that is depressing the Democratic vote, but not in the way we were talking about in 06 and this year, because it's not depressing the base vote, right? Because they were presumably mostly for that, but it's depressing this kind of other part of the coalition, the Southern Democrats, the rural, the more populist Democrats, you know, that were thinking it was going to be something different. Yes, I think that's right. And then the healthcare proposal was sort of funny because, I don't know, they thought they could get Bob Dolan, moderate establishment Republicans on board. Those people had often been in favor of reforming healthcare in that direction. As Romney was later on, right? And with Obama, you know, sort of precursor of Obamacare. Right, sure. And there was a lot of talk about compromise. And I was running this little project for the future. And I advised them not to compromise. The healthcare system was not that broken. There was no healthcare crisis. That was a memo that I wrote. And we sort of argued to Republicans, they should just hang tough. And that was a contrarian view, I will say. And most people, you get killed if you just don't do nothing. You can't do nothing. There's a healthcare problem. Republicans have lost the 1991 special Senate election in Pennsylvania over healthcare. That was Carville's first great upset victory against Thornburg. And so Clinton had talked a lot about it in 92. This wasn't a case, it wasn't a case where he was doing something he hadn't, he said he wouldn't do, but the big government character of it and the Hillary character of it, I think. And so whatever the Democrats ended up going in the do nothing, just say no position on healthcare. The one insight I had was, if you ask people in polls, this is the thing about polling and it shows why people shouldn't take posters, shouldn't take one polling result too seriously or too literally. Two-thirds, three-quarters of Americans wanted healthcare overhaul. Three-quarters of Americans were unhappy with the healthcare system. Three-quarters of Americans had gripes with the insurance companies or you name it, whatever the cost, obviously, stuff. Two-thirds or three-quarters of Americans like their own health insurance. That's because they mostly work for businesses and corporations that provided decent health insurance. And so they didn't see there's any great need if you were working for General Electric or Coca-Cola. Your health insurance is adequate, big university, big state government. And I sort of had the insight that the Republicans should run on that second poll result. He's endangering your health insurance that you're satisfied with. And there is a way, as we've seen this in a lot of public policy areas, both from the right and the left, right? The status quo is easier to defend than to say, let's risk everything by overturning the whole thing. And maybe you won't get insurance from your employer, but we got a better idea in mind. It's done up by this fancy think tank. Hillary Clinton's got it all worked out for you. And we were able to caricature it, honestly, in that way, pretty successfully, I think. Well, we talked about the October surprise in 06. In 1994, Clinton tried to drop an October surprise to protect himself, but I don't know that it landed. Let's watch. When we started the health care debate, they said it was secretive. That's not true. We met with them in advance. We even offered to work with them on drafting a bill. We were told, no, you go ahead and put your bill in, then we'll put our bill in, and then we'll work. They announced an approach where more than half the Republican senators supported universal coverage. The bill never came. By the time it came to talk about the bill, there were zero senators from the Republican Party on that. And by the way, then they released the memo of their strategist, Bill Kristol, who wasn't even ashamed to release the memo and say, you must not cooperate on health care, because if the middle class ever gets security about health care, they'll probably support the Democrats again. Whereas if we keep them all torn up and upset and angry, we can either keep them home or get them to vote for us. So I want, let me just say this, I want more than anything to have a bipartisan effort. He blamed you. He also, there's a different clip I saw just the text of where he tried to go after you in the final days because you came out against farm subsidies, which is, you know, anti-farmer welfare bill. That's unacceptable. That was on the tarmac in Iowa five days out. I remember like, why? It was, kind of a, and this is pre-cable, really. I mean, he, this was Larry King. CNN was the one cable network. That was like the one political show, basically, that anyone watched. Yeah. And then that was two days before election day, I think, where he says, kind of amazing. Yeah. I'm their top political strategist. I was running this little 12, 14 person, you know, little sort of quasi think tank there, Project for the Republican Future. I was not really the top Republican strategist, but it was nice that President Clinton thought I was. But you knew we're talking. Newt called you. Yeah, that's true. No, I was involved. But anyway, that was a funny, a funny moment. But so the dynamics were pretty different, honestly. I think in that respect, in all these different respects, the historical character at 40 years in the House, the novelty, the fact that a lot of it was history catching up to the Southern Democrats. The fact that Clinton hadn't done, it was more that he, they had tried to do something that scared people and that we were honestly helped scare people about. That's all what did him in. So, and I do think in this respect, to double back, I think 2006 is more, is more of a similar situation. 94 was kind of a, 94 was the end of an era. It was an important election, just a little different from the kind of a, you know, the, you know, normal reaction against the incumbent president. And incidentally, as 94 also shows something that 06 doesn't, which is it doesn't, it's not always a precursor of what happens next. If you're a Democrat and you look at 06 and you think that this is going to be like 06, you know, what's the good news? The next, they win the presidential election by seven or eight points two years later. So, hey, it's great to double header to 06 and 08 to pick up a lot more seats. 94 was great. And then Clinton probably won re-election by seven or eight points or something in 96. So, kind of a midterm. Yeah, it is. And also, 06 is also more comparable, even though this is non-subsequent terms, you know, the second midterm in 06 versus the first one in 94. There's a very, there's difference in the dynamics between the second midterm and the first. I don't know, to me, the 94 lesson is, and some of this is just things outside of strategist hands, right? Like it's just the kind of changing tectonic plates of politics and trends and media and it's global. It's a lot of different things that are happening in other countries. But like, if you look at that number that, you know, the Democrats had before in 92 that included these other parts of the country, like if they want to get to a vote, you know, a place where like they're, they're really advancing like permanent policy changes and big policy changes. It's like people that want progressives that want big policy changes should want this the most, right? It's like, it's like, there has to be a way to reconnect with these, you know, parts of the country that they've lost. Like they had managed this coalition from like FDR through LBJ, like all the way through Tip O'Neill, like all the way to Bill Clinton's first term. And it finally collapsed, like, but it's fucking a half century, right? Where it's very different ideological and demographics of people in the coalition. And at the sorting of the parties that started in 94 has been very bad for the Democrats. And it might be feel unfair and asymmetric. And I hear JBL whining about it already. But like, if the Democrats want a governing majority, like they do need like a more diverse coalition like they had before 94. And, you know, then they lost the House in 94, they lost it, it stayed lost for 12 years, people, you know, and then they got it back by doing exactly what you just said, right? Rahm Emanuel recruited a lot of candidates for the House, and then some Senate candidates appeared on their own, who desorted from the sociological, Tester, McCaskill, think of these people running in 06, and winning, and the Democrats, and then they held those seats and increased them in 08 with Obama, which is a little more complicated, but there they had the advantage of a massive financial crisis, obviously. Even Tim Walz, right? Like think of the different kind of race that Tim Walz runs in 06 from how he runs his commonwealth VP, and he runs as a very moderate kind of rural farmer teacher guy. That's Minnesota that year, I already mentioned Heath Shuler, redneck kind of football player winning in North Carolina, two Texas seats, they'd be Oh, well, you'd mentioned how Foley lost delay lost in in that 06 year in Texas to a guy named Nick Lampson. That's a good Jeopardy trivia question. I would have never been able to pull that. But you know, three Indiana seats. So like, that's, that's the way back. Okay, what did we forget? 1948? I mean, 1948. I just mentioned that in Morning Shots, because I was trying to make the point that Mike Johnson is such a wet noodle, as we said in the headline of the piece, and it said a couple of idiotic things about how we don't really have a view on anything. You know, if Pete Hicks, I trust Pete Hicks, I trust the Secretary of War, I trust Trump, I'm not gonna I don't know anything about the Iran war. I'm just a speaker of the house. And I do think they should pummel the Republicans. I was trying to think what's the Truman pummeled the Republican Congress, the 80th Congress, as the do nothing Congress, he was incumbent president running for election, the do nothing Congress had failed to do anything. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. He failed to pass any legislation that he wanted, including on health care, incidentally, and other things. And he famously hit them as the do nothing Congress and won a famous comeback victory, obviously, against Tom Dewey in 1948. And the Democrats, this was a different era, right with with more party switching and less, you know, less Democrats picked up 75 seats in 1948, in the House, and and took the Senate. And so that was a wave with Truman beating Dewey, an incumbent president, so it doesn't really, it's presidential year, so it doesn't quite compare with what we've been talking about. So what's the equivalent of the do nothing Congress? I mean, the Republican Congress now is kind of more like a rubber stamp Congress, I guess, and maybe that's a better term. if someone could think of it. It's a rubber stamp and do nothing. It took another two weeks. It's another two weeks on vacation. Very good point. Who gets this much of vacation? Speaking about health care, you want to make health care an issue, all these guys get free health care without working. I mean, Mitch McConnell, what kind of health care system is he on back at home? We don't even know what's happening with them. They're not even working. It's crazy how little that they've worked. I do think calling it a rubber stamp and do nothing Congress, that's now been set up in a way for the Democratic challengers. They should run it. They've got to run against Trump, but they also have to run against the Republican Congress as enabling Trump and as doing nothing to check Trump and we'll check Trump and also making it worse in some ways, depending on which members of Congress. I wanted to find a quote of Truman using do nothing Congress. I came across just this stump speech. He used it all the time, of course. So you just get a stump speech he gave somewhere. And in the stump speech, the two issues on which he most complains that the Republican Congress did nothing are health care and housing, housing prices. Isn't that amazing? And he also throws in inflation, actually. And so I really feel like the Democrats, they're looking around for the message. They always have that inter-analyst internal, you know, hand-wringing about the message. They should go read Harry Truman's speeches from 1948. They're excellent. They're economically populist. He's big on the people versus the corporations and versus the elites and versus the big shots. But Truman also, of course, was a cold warrior and a middle American guy. And he wasn't some lefty kind of cult, you know, on cultural stuff. So I feel like they should run as Harry Truman for the next two months. That's a great place to leave it. Bill Kristol. Appreciate you. I hope everybody enjoyed a little holiday pod content. And we'll be back tomorrow. We got a double header. We got another guy tomorrow that is very keen on this, on this kind of, he's tired of this talk about the Democrats like getting to 52 Senate seats. He's like, why not 60? Why not 58? So we'll talk to him about how the Democrats get that done tomorrow. And we got one of my buddies coming on the show. It's going to be a good one. Bill Kristol. Thanks so much, brother. We'll see you next week. Great. Thanks. 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