The Long Game

Michael Steele is the former lieutenant governor of Maryland who went on to become chairman of the Republican National Committee from 2009 to 2011. He's a regular mainstay on MSNBC these days, and is a possible candidate for governor in the future in Maryland.  I met Mike in 2006 when I covered the Maryland legislature, and we've stayed in touch since. We were ostensibly going to talk about the Re...

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, a Republican, said that in his state mail-in ballots will be among the first ballots counted on the night of the election. This is because Ohio law allows election clerks to process mail-in ballots as they arrive in the weeks and days before the election, so they're ready to be counted and tabulated the moment polls close.    "We can start processing those rig...

Michael G. Adams is Kentucky's Secretary of State, the top elections official in that state. He is a Harvard Law graduate who was a senior lawyer at the Justice Department in the George W. Bush administration. He built a private practice over the last 15 years advising major Republican clients on how to navigate the thicket of election laws, and working to help Republicans win elections across the...

As Democrats get set to start the first virtual party convention in history, former Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean talks about what he thinks the party needs to accomplish this week. Dean was governor of Vermont from 1991 to 2003, and nearly won the Democratic nomination for president in 2004. He was DNC Chair from 2005 to 2009. Outro song: "Heaven Help Us All" - written by Ron...

Bill Buford is an author, chef, and adventurer. I've read his two latest books in the last year. Dirt , released in 2006, was the first half of an epic narrative that's taken up the last two decades or so of Bill's life. It starts with him asking to be let into the kitchen of a high-end restaurant in New York, Mario Batali's Babbo, on the bottom rung, to learn the ropes. He goes to Italy to learn...

One of the foundational books of my adult life is "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman. It helped me see the ways in which the modern world was driven by entertainment more than information, as we transitioned from an word-based society to an image-based society with the advent of television. The modern equivalent to Postman's book, in my opinion, is Nicholas Carr's " The Shallows ." Writt...

Next Monday, the CEO's of four of the most dominant and important technology companies in the world will testify to Congress:  Amazon's Jeff Bezos, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Pichai, and Apple's Tim Cook will all appear before the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on anti-trust, commercial and administrative law.  My guest today is the congressman who is going to chair and...

Rick Hasen is professor of law and political science at UC-Irvine and author of "Election Meltdown." Rick is two things that make him worth your time. First, he knows more about elections than almost anyone I know of. He updates his " Election Law blog " daily with the latest developments, and he has written two books on elections and election law. The most recent one, "Election Meltdown" came out...

Tom Ridge is the former governor of Pennsylvania, from 1995 to 2001, and went on to become the first ever head of the Department of Homeland Security, which was created by President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks.  In March, Ridge and a former Democratic Governor, Jennifer Granholm of Michigan, formed a group called Vote Safe , which is pushing to expand access to voting by mail. Every stat...

Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, is the only black Republican in the U.S. Senate. When he was elected in 2012, he was only the 7th African-American senator in the nation's history. Scott has been quite vocal on many sides of the George Floyd killing. He's called on Minneapolis to charge all four officers, he's called the killing of Floyd a murder, and he's spoken out publicly about systemic racism in the pas...

Francis Collins is the director of the National Institutes of Health, which is the primary U.S. government agency responsible for biomedical and public health research. It's a giant agency, with 20,000 employees, including 6,000 research scientists, and a $39 billion budget. And this job makes him a crucial figure at this particular moment. He is leading the hunt in America for a vaccine solution...

Terry Mattingly, founder of GetReligion.org and a nationally syndicated religious columnist, talks about the ways in which conspiracy theories like Qanon are merging with conservative white evangelical subculture. The Atlantic piece on Qanon is here , and Terry's responses are here , here and here . Outro music: "Working On a Dream" by Bruce Springsteen Support this show http://supporter.acast.com...

Tim Miller worked in Republican politics for many years but over the last few years he's become more of a writer. One of his latest pieces at The Bulwark is titled, " Taking #Obamagate Seriously: President Trump's Bonkers Theory Explaine d." Tim is a veteran political communicator with a good feel for how information flow moves in the modern media environment, and he believes that you can't let ha...

Marc Elias is leading 32 current lawsuits in 16 states to try to push for more expansive voting rights, and since the coronavirus, his workload has gone way up. We go deep on the debate over vote-by-mail, and ballot collection, aka ballot harvesting. Elias is chair of the Political Law practice at Perkins Coie. He was the top lawyer on Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign and has years of...

"When I was young, it was so simple. I thought God was good. I thought God rewarded those who obey the rules. I thought my good news was accessible to everyone if only they had the ears to listen. I thought my country was a place where hard work was rewarded on a level playing field, no matter where you came from …" D.L. Mayfield's penetrating book, " The Myth of the American Dream ," examines the...

Jonathan Karl is chief Washington and White House correspondent for ABC News. His new book is " Front Row at the Trump Show ."  Jonathan writes in his book that Trump's attack on "fake news" are "fake" is that Trump actually loves the press, because it is both a vehicle and a villain for him. It gives him a stage on which to act, to play out the Trump show. And as he plays out this soap opera, Jon...

Adam White is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a law professor at George Mason University. He wrote about how we are focusing too much on the president's role in responding to the coronavirus pandemic and that led into a discussion of how the only thing the president -- and the national press -- should really be talking about is doing the things that will help the countr...

Republicans are hammering Democrats for not automatically approving another $250 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, a fund set up to help small businesses avoid going out of business. The fund received $350 billion a few weeks ago, but has already run out of money. Sen. Ben Cardin, D-MD, helped craft the program with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla. Cardin explains why he and other Democrats are...

Congress authorized $350 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program in its coronavirus rescue package that was passed two weeks ago. Any company with 500 employees or fewer can get a loan of up to $10 million and that loan will be forgiven as long as 75% of the money goes toward keeping employees on payroll. The loans are financed by the U.S. government, but are conducted through private sector b...

The question of who's to blame for the mess we're in with coronavirus is not a fun one. It's clear that the U.S. response has been pretty terrible on a number of fronts: the testing component has been a disaster, as has the lack of preparation regarding medical equipment, from personal protecting gear to ventilators. And then there's the president, who's public statements have mostly been erratic....

I talked with Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who has been leading the push with Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota to send at least $2 billion to states to help them get ready for a fall election conducted during a second wave of infections. He called the $400 million in last week's rescue package a good start but said he's going to be pushing for much more in the next bill that Congress passes t...

I talk with Yuval Levin about his article in the Atlantic about how to come back from the pandemic shutdown we are currently in. He writes: "Along with making the hard pause bearable, we also need to enable a soft return toward normalcy, starting soon. That return will be slow and gradual; it will look different in different places, and it will mean living with the virus, not putting it behind us....

Lee Saunders is the head of one of the country's largest unions, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. He talks about why union membership has steadily gone down for decades, how an adverse ruling at the Supreme Court rejuvenated his union, and what it takes to lead a large organization effectively. He also talks about the Democratic National Committee process to change...

Addisu Demissie ran Cory Booker's presidential campaign and has an expert resume in Democratic campaigns. Right now he's an undecided voter in California. We talked about what's going to happen in the California primary on March 3, how the South Carolina result will impact Super Tuesday, and what happens to Bernie going forward. We also talked about Addisu's thoughts about why Booker's campaign co...

Joe Biden's last stand will be in South Carolina, where he is still expected to retain support from a large number of African-American voters despite his poor showings so far in Iowa and New Hampshire. Black voters make up about 60% of the Democratic primary vote in South Carolina. If Biden can perform well in Nevada, and then win South Carolina — both of those things being tall orders — that may...