The Long Game

Joe Trippi is one of the most experienced consultants in Democratic politics. He's worked on campaigns in six of the last 10 presidential elections. He helped guide Howard Dean's historic 2004 candidacy. He's been a longtime adviser to Jerry Brown, one of the most consequential Democrats of the last half-century. And he helped Democrats win a Senate seat in Alabama in 2017 for the first time in tw...

The Kennedy family is one of the most legendary in American political history. It has long been involved in efforts to combat mental illness through public policy since President John F. Kennedy, spurred by the botched lobotomy on his older sister Rosemary, made it a focus of his presidency.   Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-MA, became a vocal proponent on the issue after disclosing his own battles with b...

When President Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides” after white supremacists and neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Sen. Tim Scott spoke up. He called the president’s comments “indefensible” and said Trump had “compromised” his moral authority. That prompted a call from the White House, asking Scott -- a black Republican who in 2012 became only the seventh African-American to...

Jennifer Palmieri has been one of the party’s most influential operatives for the last decade. Most recently, she was communications director and a senior adviser to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, and came to that job after serving as White House communications director under President Obama for two years. As Jennifer told me during our conversation, Clinton’s loss to Trump...

Trent Lott was elected to the House of Representatives in 1972, and to the Senate in 1989, and operated inside the House and Senate at a time when bipartisan cooperation was more common. By the time he became Senate Majority Leader in 1996, however, Republicans were becoming more confrontational. I talked with Lott about growing up in the Deep South during Jim Crow, and about the controversy surro...

"When I got elected, I was the classic young man in a hurry. Classic," said Rep. Patrick McHenry, a Virginia Republican and one of the Republican Party's top leaders in Congress. "I can see it vividly. My first three years I did everything wrong you can do wrong as a member of Congress that is neither unethical nor illegal ... I was going to be a warrior, without regard for fighting what. Basicall...

An update on where I've been for three weeks, and on the release of my new book today. And then I share a few clips from my 2015 interview with Joe Biden for the book. When I went back through the interview recently, I realized he was just as nervous about Elizabeth Warren then as he might be now if he runs for president. I wrote about the Biden & Warren tensions here . BOOK STUFFf: here's the...

Albert Mohler is president of Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, the flagship training ground for the Southern Baptist Convention, which is one of the largest evangelical denominations in America, with roughly 42,000 congregations across the country and 15 million members, though Sunday attendance is estimated to be far less than that number.   Mohler and Southern released a 67-page repo...

Ron Shaich, the founder of Panera Bread, the ultra-successful fast-casual chain, resigned from his CEO job in 2017 and is now talking more about what he sees as one of the unique plagues in American business, as well as politics: short-term thinking.  We talk in this conversation about how Shaich, a college student with no interest in business, got interested in his line of work, and how his lesso...

Michael Bennet is a 54-year old Democrat from Colorado who was elected to his second full term in the U.S. Senate in 2016. He's deeply disturbed by the demise of the Senate, but he told me he doesn't think the Senate can be fixed from the inside. He said running for president may be one way to try to reverse the decline of American political institutions. "There is not a substitute toward trying t...

Andrew Sullivan was editor of The New Republic from 1991 to 1996, and has been a pioneer in more than one sense. He was one of the first writers to start blogging, launching The Daily Dish in 2000 and becoming one of the most widely read and influential bloggers in the country. And of course, Sullivan wrote the first major article in an American magazine — in 1989 in the New Republic — advocating...

Last Tuesday, a group started by Stacey Abrams filed a 66-page lawsuit in federal court that listed all the ways in which the Democratic candidate for governor and her allies say Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is now governor-elect, intentionally created “an obstacle course” for voters of color.  For this episode, I spoke with Lauren Groh-Wargo, who was Abrams’ campaign manager duri...

There’s plenty more to do about political parties, and I’ll dip into that topic from time to time. But it’s a good time to move into other topics as well. I’ve done a little of that already. Going forward, however, the podcast will shift a bit from a primary focus on political parties to a focus on short-termism vs long-term thinking. And I’ll be looking at a number of different institutions: Cong...

On Tuesday voters will go to the polls to choose candidates for Congress, for statewide office, and in local elections. Here's a look back at the biggest moments that shaped the last 22 months since Donald Trump was elected President. January 21, 2017 - The Women's March February 17, 2017 - "The Enemy of the People" March 4, 2017 - Trump accuses Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower April 7, 2017 - Gor...

We often refer to American politics now as a circus. But it's a carnival ride that best illustrates the gravitational forces that created the mess we've made of our politics. Everything now is centrifugal — pushing us away from one another and away from the center — with almost zero countervailing force. In this episode I talk about: Our loss of imagination for how to overcome challenges through w...

If you want to read a book about Trump and discuss it with someone who sees the president differently than you, this is the book to buy. “ Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride: The Thrills, Chills, Screams, and Occasional Blackouts of An Extraordinary Presidency ,” by CBS News’ Major Garrett. He’s the chief White House correspondent and host of “The Takeout” podcast.  "I don’t try to tell people to .. set aside...

The race for governor in Georgia is intense. You could script a full Netlix mini-series around the two main characters and the history between them. But when Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate, denounced critics this week who say he's suppressing the black vote, he resurrected an old term that carries a lot of baggage from the deep South's dark segregationist and Jim Crow era....

"You can risk going too far. You can risk saying everyone has a right and should see every single piece of everything, no matter how incredulous, how ridiculous, how over the top, how upsetting … So we’re going to take you into 4Chan and show you all the most racist terrible memes and all that stuff. There’s an idea now … that there are ways we can responsibly do a little more of that gatekeeping....

10 years ago, the American economy was on the edge of Freefall. A divided government overcame partisan differences to work together, in an election year. We talked to former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and many others, to get their take on whether our political system now is ready for the next crisis. Click here to read the piece by Andrew Romano and I on why...

Sen. John McCain passed away one month ago at the age of 81. He was an American hero. In 2013, I interviewed him in his Senate office to talk about his place in history. I wrote a profile for The Huffington Post, which you can read here . But now I'm releasing the audio of the interview for the first time. Here is a link to McCain's speech on July 25, 2017, in which he told his fellow senators thi...

"In the pitiful early hours of Election Night [it] was the only credible resource Trump advisors had." That's CBS News' Major Garrett's description of the Republican National Committee's data and analytics apparatus, which was loaned out to the Trump campaign in the latter half of 2016. Newt Gingrich says Trump, who had no serious campaign of his own, would not have won without it. The work of bui...

It’s intriguing to wonder what might have happened to the Republican Party if Mitch Daniels had run for president in 2012. He was finishing up his second term as governor of Indiana, and was widely respected for the job he’d done. He was articulate, thoughtful, and had a wide breadth of political experience, having served as White House budget director under George W. Bush, and as a high-level pol...

“A key part of our task,” Yuval writes, “is simply to see what we lack.” "And when you step back and listen, an awful lot of what’s distinct about this moment in America seems like a response to a certain kind of suffering: a response to being left behind, disrespected, robbed of place and dignity and hope ... The absence we feel looks like isolation and mistrust and alienation, and so it looks li...

I talk with Adam Wren about what it's like to be a journalist entrepreneur, covering national politics from the Midwest while also starting a state news-focused newsletter. And Adam shares his observations of Vice President Mike Pence, and how the Indiana Republican establishment is now shaping the future of America. And we talk about our mutual experiences writing profiles of Indiana Senator Joe...

Republican political operative Terry Sullivan discusses the move away from issue-based campaigns, toward contests based around personality and image, whether Sen. Jesse Helms was a racist, and how bad advice to Marco Rubio led to the moment that became the downfall of his presidential candidacy. For examples of people losing touch with their senses, read the mentions below these tweets: My tweet o...