And now from the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio, the Axe Files with your host, David Axelrod.
I sat down with an old friend and colleague this week amid the roiling controversy surrounding the status of the Biden candidacy. I worked and collaborated for years with Jon Favreau when he was the chief speechwriter for senator and then President Barack Obama. I've watched and listened as John and his Pod Save America crew, white House alums, all built something smart and entertaining and impactful these past eight years. They are an admirable, inspiring group of pragmatic idealists who see politics as more than a game, and their podcast and Crooked media site are a vehicle to provoke thought and action and change. Here's my conversation with Jon Favreau. Jon Favreau. It's it's good to see you.
Thanks for having me on again.
Welcome to the island of pricky podcasters. It's been quite a time. And, just but just. I wanted to talk to you, partly for therapeutic reasons on this particular. This will be a different kind of Axe Files. But also because it seems like a really meaningful time in like a hinge, one of those hinge moments in history. What happens in the next few weeks and obviously what happens in the next few months. And you've been talking a lot about it. I've been talking a lot about it. But tell me where you think we are.
I don't think we're in a great place. Look, I'm really. I have a lot of. I've had a lot of feelings over these last couple of weeks. Feeling pretty angry that we somehow ended up here, feeling, pretty, pretty worried about the election and the future of the country. And also just, like, bewildered at why there hasn't been sort of more movement from people in the party who, like, we all saw what we saw on stage when 50 other million, 50 million other American saw it as well. And then we all saw that George Stephanopoulos interview. 8 million Americans saw that. And I think we all, anyone I've talked to. People in politics, people outside of politics, are like, yeah, that was that was bad. It wasn't just one bad interview, one bad debate. There's like, this is really concerning. And we're going up against Donald Trump and democracy is at stake here. And yet there seems to be a collective action problem and a very stubborn president and his inner circle that refused to budge. And I don't know. It feels, it's it's it's very frustrating. It's very frustrating.
What are you hearing? You've got quite a listenership and readership at that Pod Save America empire that you've built. You and the boys. What what are you hearing from people?
I mean, it's interesting because we have, you know, we have a set of subscribers who are great, the friends of the pod community. And we had this Discord, which is like a sort of private Twitter that's much nicer. But all of our people, all of our listeners.
That's a low bar, my friend.
It's I know it is a low bar. All of our listeners are like, they they see what most Americans saw, and they're all ready to work their ass, work their asses off to get Democrats elected and to beat Donald Trump, but they are feeling like a little gaslit by the Biden White House and the campaign and other senior people in the party who were saying, like, everything's fine and don't worry about it. And, you know, they just want they want some direction. And, you know, today some were wondering, well, like what? What are we supposed to do? How are we supposed to think about the fall? And, you know, I told everyone, we've obviously been having these conversations hoping that the president would sort of see the light here and, and make some hard but right decisions. But whatever he decides, we're still going to have to work our asses off to defeat Donald Trump and elect Democrats up and down the ballot and do whatever we can to save democracy. And that's a fight that doesn't even end in November. And that's true no matter who wins, you know, and so that we have to be in this for the long haul.
Yeah, I know you guys have done a lot to mobilize young voters over the course of your existence and in a really very focused and successful way. I mean, I forget what the numbers are, but it's something quite impressive.
Yeah. We had about 3 or 400,000 volunteers in 2020 who were, were doing work to elect Democrats from Joe Biden on down. We've raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars since Vote Safe America began. And, you know, we're already, we're already putting that money to work this time with grassroots organizations, local campaigns, state campaigns, voter registration drives. So wherever we can help and we try to tell people that, you know, we want to make sure that your money and your time are spent most efficiently. So we want to tell you, you know, where your money is going to have the biggest impact. And we work really hard to make sure that people aren't just wasting their money on races that, they don't have as, or where people don't have as good a chance at winning.
And you said you had 3 or 400,000 volunteers out there in 2020. Are you getting the same volume of volunteers, or are you getting pushback about whether they can, they can motivate themselves but motivate voters around the president?
'You know, we for. If you compare this time in the cycle to four years ago, we're actually getting more than we were at this time last time. But there have been concerns from the get go about Joe Biden and exciting people to elect Joe Biden. And we've felt that on our. We've listened to that from our staff here at Crooked Media. And I think that a lot of people, a lot of volunteers out there, you know, they sort of understood that this election isn't really about rewarding or punishing Joe Biden or Donald Trump. It's about something bigger than that. It's about choosing between two different futures for yourself, for your family, for the people in your community, for the country. And so before the debate, we were, you know, a lot of our volunteers and a lot of people who listen to the pod, I think they really internalize that message that, you know, this isn't this isn't just about the two people duking it out to be president. This is about something bigger. This is about who's going to make decisions that affect our lives and the life of this country. I, I'm not going to lie, it's been much, much tougher post-debate, because I think people are scared and they're confused and they don't know what's going to happen.
You know, we both worked with Joe Biden in the White House. I actually really enjoyed working with him. I thought he brought a good sort of grounded point of view. He brought experience about the Hill. Some of the things that he brought were, have been evident in the last four years. I mean, I think he's done some miraculous things in the last four years. He obviously agrees with that. But, you know, the thing that I keep wrestling with is, you know, every time he gets asked about why he should be elected for the next four years, he talks about the last four years, and it's sort of it's sort of willfully bypassing the fundamental question that seems to be very much top of mind for most voters, which is, you know, whatever it did for you in the last four years, and I don't think he gets the credit he deserves, and his approval rating isn't as high as it should be. History will be better to him. That's irrelevant to whether they think he can do it for the next four years. And it feels like Democrats are, you know, those who support him, are like hoping to get him through the next four months rather than the next four years. You know.
'I mean, what has really bothered me over the last couple of years is the seeming resistance by- sometimes the Biden administration does this, sometimes a lot of people, a lot of very online, very engaged Democrats, not so much activists and organizers, but people who sort of follow politics for a living--this resistance to listening to the concerns of voters. And of course, that's like the right thing to do in a democracy. But it's also like the only smart political thing to do. And I just like. We wrestled with this in the Obama White House, right. Like, we, I don't know how many speeches where you and I would go back and forth and say, okay, how much should we talk about what Barack Obama has accomplished and how much should we acknowledge that, you know, a lot of people still don't have jobs, and a lot of people still are struggling. And yes, we don't get to toot our own horn as much if we do that, but we have to meet people where they are first and foremost. And like, I don't I. There are times when Biden has done that, but like not enough. And I think since. He was actually getting closer to doing that at some of these events before the debate, I think the reaction to the debate has made it so much worse, the backward looking stuff. And I was just saying this on the pod on Pod Save America yesterday. Like if you read that transcript of the Stephanopoulos interview. So forget about how he looked, how he sounded. If you clean up all the syntax in the transcript and it's and you do him all these favors, his message is still, I did a lot of great stuff. Most of it's foreign. I held NATO together or something about the Pacific Basin and China and AUKUS, like, foreign foreign policy accomplishments. It's just like, there's no message there that resonates with what voters continue to say they're looking for, which is, what are you going to do for the next four years? And I already know why Trump is bad, but what's his plan for the next four years? And it's the most basic thing, is to make an election a choice, especially if you're the incumbent. And he just, his campaign knows that. And they drive the choice in their ads and in their communication. But he doesn't he can't seem to drive that choice. And I don't understand why.
Yeah. He was he did get a little bit more working class rhetoric into his appearance on Morning Joe. He called in, I suspect he had cards in front of him, to remind him of that. But then when he went off a little bit about the elites and so on in that session, he said, you know, he was back to NATO again, you know, which is, you know, part of the issue. I've, I've said from the beginning, you know, Joe Biden's strength and the reason he won in 2000, which, 2020, which we should remind ourselves, was really by the margin of 45,000 votes in three states. It wasn't a, this was no landslide. I mean, he won a popular vote majority. He wouldn't today, but he did then by 7 million votes. But 45,000 votes in three states. But he, remember, middle of the summer, he started embracing, and the convention really amplified this, the whole sort of. Joe from Scranton, Main Street versus Wall Street and so on. And that was what propelled him, I think much more than, you know, there's a mythology about the soul of America message. That really got jettisoned to a large degree, and it was really working class issues that drove him. You know, he had a week in there where he went back to Scranton a few months ago, and I thought, well, now we're going to. But they that was a week. It was like, you know, it was like Donald Trump's infrastructure week. It came and it went and and.
It look, we we know that that message is a message about, you know, helping middle class families, giving people a chance, you know, fighting against sort of corporate special interests. That that's a resonant message. It has been for some time. It's also like it's perfect for Joe Biden, because it's who he is and what he believes. So it's not even like it's a poor fit for him. Right? Like we've we've both seen him in in public and in private become animated by those issues. So this is not something that's beyond Joe Biden's capacity to do. I think that a a lot of this foreign policy. I mean, the foreign policy stuff. I have to say, it really reminded me of, I started off on the Kerry campaign. And John Kerry, and I think, you know, he was fantastic secretary of state, for, for for us in the Obama administration later. But like, he, you know, sort of fancied himself a foreign policy expert, loved his time on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and would always on his own drift back to talking about foreign policy issues and talking about them in a way that only someone in Washington would really understand. And that's that that, Biden reminds me of that a lot when he's in these recent interviews.
Yeah. I'll say two things about that. One is that Biden's, you know, his his roots and his ethos, I think, are very, were very much formed in his working class upbringing in Claymont and and in Scranton. But he spent 50 years in Washington. I mean, he's, that's where he's worked, and a lot of it in the foreign policy, national security realm. And I think that's where he's most comfortable. And when he feels like he's drifting or when he's looking for ballast, his first instinct is to reach for the things that he feels he knows best. And that's all this national security stuff. And obviously it's super important. NATO is here this week. And, you know, I think he's done an admirable job. But when he says, you know, I'm the guy who, in the George interview, I'm the guy who added countries to NATO. And I'm like, I'm wondering how the guy in Scranton hears that as part of his life. You know, it's important, it's admirable. It's it's it's significant for the security of our country and the security of the world. But it's not a front line issue for voters, which is your point. I thought, George, by the way, I thought it was a very good interview. I thought he did a very good job. I thought he was respectful. He really gave the president a chance to confront what he needed to confront. He just didn't want to confront it.
Multiple times. Multiple times. And it was it was so frustrating, because he had a week, right? He has this debate performance that his own people agree was very bad. Had a week to prepare for this interview. They gave George 15 minutes. And I get that it's tough when all of the questions are about your, you know, cognitive abilities and decline and age, how it's tough to like pivot back to a message. But one would think, knowing his advisors as we do, that they would have prepped him for that pivot, to pivot back to message. And I'm sure that they did. And it's just it's it's very worrying that he wasn't able to do that.
Yeah. And I wonder. I mean I don't know what's transpiring between him and the people around him, whether they are whether they are, you know, just drawn into his own emotions. He's clearly pissed, you know, about the way people are reacting. I mean, you know, that that came through loud and clear in that Morning Joe interview. And I don't know, is anybody telling him, you know, he was yesterday, I'm told he was shopping these Bloomberg state polls that I think were very much inconsistent with a lot of other data that I've seen and inconsistent with two sets of polls that have come out since. But they were a little more rosy. They weren't great.
I mean, he was he was still losing the election in those polls. I think he was down seven in Pennsylvania, and 55% of voters in those polls said that he should step aside. And those are the polls that they were touting as like, oh, the narrative is wrong, and all the Twitter pundits are wrong. It's like, I get it. We've all been in a campaign. Like sometimes you just got to work with what you have and spinning stuff. But I mean, it does worry me, because I think that there's business like poll denialism and poll truther ism that has sort of infected some of the party and some of the pundits in the party, and now the Biden campaign, or at least the outward facing part of the Biden campaign and the president himself. Which is like, polls aren't perfect. They are very imperfect tools to measure public opinion. You know that. They can be wrong. But like, they're all we have to to to measure where the public is and to measure where the race is. And campaigns spend a lot of money using them for themselves, including the Biden campaign. And if.
That's the thing, you know.
If we're going to dismiss all the polls, then all we have is all of our own subjective judgment. And everyone can just be like yelling about stuff and having our own judgment and like, that's just no way to make a decision.
'No. Sort of the order of the day. I mean, we do a lot of that on a lot of things. But, you know, it seems to me that he he believes in polling when the polls are favorable to him and he thinks polls are, are inaccurate when they're not favorable to him, because he says I go out there. He was just on the road and he had some rallies and he said, oh, you know, you should have come with me, you know. They tell me I've lost Black support. Well, you know, I go out there and I see how people are reacting, those polls don't reflect. He's going to rallies for him. It's kind of a self-selecting audience, you know. So if you if you don't get a good response at a Biden rally, that would be really concerning, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the whole country. So what do you think happens now? You know, we had these caucuses today. House and Senate. And I got the same read from both of them. The leaders did not make, the leaders, you know, did not push them one way or another. And in both of those, half the room or more were he's got to go, we can't win with him. The other half was supportive of him. And the same was true in the House and Senate. And so, you know, it seems to me the only people, George asked this and Biden said it would never happen, the only people who can impact on him are the leaders of Congress, because, you know, that's his world. And if and if the Senate majority leader comes to him and says, Joe, we're going to lose a lot of seats here, and we got to really turn this thing around and we can't do it with this hanging over us. But it doesn't really feel like either leader is going to do that.
And I don't under I don't quite understand why. I have not heard from a single person. I'm sure you've talked to a lot of people too. When I've talked to members and I've talked to strategists, and I've fielded panicked calls from senior members of the party, and it doesn't seem like anyone thinks that he can win right now. And so even the people who aren't saying something publicly that he should think about stepping aside privately think that he can't win and are worried. And then the reason that they're not speaking publicly is that they are afraid of the unknown. And whether that unknown is the candidacy of Kamala Harris or an open convention, they, they just they're sticking with what they know, which is Joe Biden, and hoping that, I guess, he's got a floor. Trump has a low ceiling. People will forget about this. He won't make any other mistakes. You know, negative polarization and a closely divided electorate will rule the day like they have, you know, for the last several elections in the Trump era. We get the race within 3 or 4 points. And then, I don't know, a miracle happens? Like, I don't know, maybe the polls were a little off. I mean, even if you give the Biden campaign the benefit of the doubt, you know, their internal polling, they said, you know, he was down a little bit after the debate, but it's still tied. So it's tied in the low 40s. You know, that they had one chance to have a big audience in an election where the biggest challenge was getting people's attention in a very fractured media environment. So they get 50 million people to watch. They now, they've now blown that chance job. Well, the candidate has blown that chance. And they might not get another chance like that, because I don't know why Trump would agree to another debate now. To the second debate.
Right. Well, he already said I wouldn't put Joe through that again.
Which is the smart thing. I would do that if I was him. We have two conventions coming up, which are mostly watched by partisans who have already made up their mind. So then the question is like, what? What does the, what is the plan from the Biden campaign and from Joe Biden to not just hold on to Democrats and hold on to like, elected Democrats, which is what they've been doing for the last week, but to actually win over the 15, 20% of voters who keep telling pollsters, including the the Biden campaign's internal polling, that they're not sure whether they're going to pick between Trump or Biden. Like, what's the plan to win over those voters after what some of them saw or heard about that debate?
We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now back to the show. What was interesting to me to listen today to the press conference that Pete Aguilar had, the number three guy in the House. I don't know if you heard that, but, you know, he came out and did the press conference with Ted Lieu after the conference met. The leader wasn't there, Hakeem Jeffries wasn't there. And he gave opening remarks. And through the opening remarks and almost every answer, he really didn't mention the president. It was all about Trump and it and extremism. And we're not going to let that happen. And our goal is to stop Donald Trump from becoming president of the United, from getting in the Oval Office again and to, elect Hakeem Jeffries, speaker of the House. And I found that really interesting. That and what it suggests to me is, this, this is how they're going to run the.
Yeah. I mean, how how does a Democrat at this convention, if Joe Biden remains the nominee, is it seems like he's going to be, make an honest case with a credible case to voters about Joe Biden's abilities? You can absolutely talk about his incredible record of accomplishment. I'm right there that he has been a great and consequential president, for sure. You can absolutely talk about the threat that Donald Trump poses, which I very much believe in and I'm very much afraid of. And you could talk about all the things that Donald Trump's going to do. But like when you get to the part about Biden and the next four years, like, what do you say?
Yeah. Well. Maybe there'll be a chant of four more months. That that would differentiate it from. But look, I you're the most gifted speech writer that I know. There are other candidates who are all your colleagues and partners and proteges. You know, it struck me there was a great speech to be written if Biden had decided on to to leave the race on July 4th. To talk about Donald Trump, may not understand that no one is bigger than this republic of ours and this democracy, but I do. And, you know, and I've decided that I'm going to step away. But now, if you were writing his speech, what would you say?
I mean, I think what I would say if he really. And of course, we can't get inside his mind. But if he really, truly believes that he is up for this and he's okay, and he was just having a bad night, or, and he's just a little older and not as precise, I would say, look, I, I, I know people have concerns. I understand. If I saw, you know, what what everyone else saw, I'd have concerns, too. I also know how much I love this country. I know how much I believe in my ability to be part of bringing this country forward. I believe that Donald Trump is a threat to everything we hold dear. And I am going to show you every single day over these next couple months. I'm going to fight as hard as I know how. I'm going to go out there, and I'm going to work even even harder than than I ever thought possible to prove to you that I am fighting on behalf of you. And it's. And that's why I'm in this race. I don't, you know, I don't care about the, the pundits or anybody. You know, he can do that kind of stuff. But he's, he's got to make the turn to people. Right. And, and the reason that I got into this race, like I'm old. Right. And and Donald Trump's old. We're both old. But I have kids and grandkids and I love this country. And what I'm in it for is their future and your future. And if Donald Trump gets elected, that's going to be a future that does just in no way reflects the values that we love about this country.
This isn't about my future or Donald Trump's. It's about yours and your kids and your and.
And you know what? And I'm not perfect. And I'm maybe not a perfect, perfect messenger for this. And I am older than I was, and I am slower than I was. But I will tell you, I mean, he he did get close in that, I liked that North Carolina rally when he said, I know how to do. It was a little too much "I," because I think the some of the defensiveness was there. But whatever. It's it's something to work with after the debate. That I think he has to acknowledge. And this is something that they've had a lot of trouble with. He has to acknowledge people's concerns. And because right now it doesn't seem like they are operating in the same reality that most other people are. And I think that's the most, that's the biggest danger is that not only Joe Biden, but like other Democratic officials talking about Joe Biden sound like they are either lying to people or just not meeting people where they are right now.
In addition to just the presentational issues that were so shocking in that debate, as you point out, was a missed opportunity. And I thought going into the debate, they were set up to do the right thing because, Jen O'Malley Dillon, who we both know and worked with, did a great interview on Puck and her messaging was really, really good. And it was exactly what you're talking about. It was, you know, actually, I'm fighting for people. Biden is fighting for people every single day, and Donald Trump fights for Donald Trump. I mean, one of the things that imperils that message is right now it feels very much like he's fighting for him. And I have no doubt that he believes that he, that Donald Trump needs to be defeated and that he believes that he's the best guy to do it. But it has become a lot more about him and a lot less about people, and a lot less about Trump, frankly.
Who else is going to hold NATO together? Who else? I mean, that's it's just that's the kind of like acting like he's the only person who can beat Trump. He's the only person who can do all these foreign policy things. It's just not it. You're right. It is antithetical to the message that is supposed to be central to the campaign, which I do believe is the right message. I mean, this is what's so frustrating, too, is I think his team knows it. His the ads are right on. The messaging from the team is right on. They all they know what they're doing in terms of figuring out what to communicate to the American people and what to communicate to the undecided voters. But it's it's a it's a candidate issue. And I don't know how I don't know how they fix it. And like, I, you know, it it sucks being in this position because like, I do love and respect Joe Biden and I, like you, I enjoyed working with him. And it's not personal about Joe Biden. Like if. You know, we went through a really bad first debate with Barack Obama. But if something happened as bad as it did with Joe Biden on that debate stage with Barack Obama, like we'd be pretty upset with him. Yeah, and we'd be and we'd be. And you would be like having some pretty serious talks with him. And you have. Right? It's not it's not about Joe Biden. It's just like he's the guy who's supposed to be on the top of the ticket, who's tasked with and told us that he could help save democracy and beat Trump a second time.
Yeah, no, he's right about the magnitude of the stakes. But that should lead him to focus like a laser on whether what gives us the best chance to, to turn back the threat. Yeah, you mentioned that debate, and that came up a lot after the debate, because that was part of the the sort of instant spin. Well, Obama had a bad first debate, too. And, and honestly, most first presidents do. But, you know, that was an order of magnitude different than what we saw. But the bigger thing was, whatever doubts there were about Barack Obama, they weren't about his mental acuity. They weren't about his stamina. They weren't about any of those things. I mean, this was his, there were there were concerns about that. And this was his oral exam in front of 50 million people. And it went badly. And that's why this was such a big deal. Ronald Reagan had a bad first debate in in 1984, but he also was like ahead by double digits when that happened. The country was in a very positive mood about things, and there was a lot of room for him to recover. This. This was not the case here. Let me ask you something. One of the reasons that I so loved working with you and all of the speechwriters was it was a room full of pragmatic, yes, but idealistic young people. Very creative, obviously, but all who all believed that politics was more than just a sport. But it was a vehicle to achieve things that will change people's lives for the better, that will make the country more just, that will make the world more peaceful. And that was what jazzed people up, was to feel like, hey, we're about something big here. We can do things that could really help. And are you worried about that being, I mean, about cynicism, just dousing that sense of possibility?
Very much so. And I, I mean, I've been worried about it long before the debate. I've been worried about it for a couple of years now. And part of it is, you know, I think the way we consume information, the way younger people consume information. Right. The incentives on all of these social media platforms are to, you know, enrage us and make us afraid and, and show us everything that's wrong with the world and not a lot of what's right. And so I do worry about all that. When, when people ask me about it, I mean, you know, one of the reasons I've been trying to say that this election is not just about Joe Biden and Donald Trump is because I think that politics and the way politics is covered, and this has been true for a long time, focus is so much on personalities in politics and not enough on sort of policies and vision and like what we can do together. And, you know, we dealt with this to some extent after Obama won, which was, you know, a lot of people got excited about Barack Obama. But I thought, okay, you know, I did my job. I think they saw politics as transactional. I gave him my vote, and now I can go back and chill out and do do something else for four years, and Barack Obama is going to go into Washington. He's going to fix everything. And I don't care how young you are, how talented you are, how good of a communicator you are. Like, that's not the way this democracy was ever supposed to work, right? And now that we are facing a threat from rising authoritarianism here and all over the world, I think it is a good moment to not just go around saying we need to save democracy and defend democracy, but we need to sell democracy to people as the best way of organizing ourselves. And that might feel like, why do we have to do that? That's kind of basic, isn't it? Well, you know what? It's been it's been a long time since World War Two and we were out there defending democracy around the world. And a new generation hasn't necessarily felt the benefits of living in a democracy that hasn't necessarily delivered for them, whether it's financial security, personal freedom, safety, whatever it may be. And, you know, there's been this debate within the party about do we, you know, do we make it about democracy because, you know, Donald Trump's an existential threat to democracy. And you know what? If you had someone and they were about to go into the voting booth and they were undecided and you had 30 seconds, you would probably talk about the threat that Donald Trump posed to democracy. That's what you probably say. At the same time, you talk to voters and people who, you know, aren't highly educated, don't have a lot of money, don't have time to read another Atlantic piece about the future of democracy. And they, their concerns are much closer to home, and their concerns are kitchen table. And I think it's I think the only way to square this circle is for someone and for hopefully for a lot of Democrats to make an argument about why democracy matters to you, about why this system is the best way to give you a better life to to help you be financially secure. And, like I just I don't think you can separate those two things forever or just pick one or the other. I think you have to figure out a way to tell the whole story.
Yeah. You know, I think I agree with everything you said. One of the things that's concerned me about all of the rhetoric around this is, yes, yes, democracy is under threat, but a we don't really think about enough about why. We don't think enough about why and whether or not democracy has delivered in a way that it should. And I wonder whether or not we should be talking not just about saving democracy, but strengthening it, fixing making it work and making it more accountable to people. And, you know, the younger folks, let's think about the last couple of decades in the United States. I mean, when I met you, was in 2004. You were 22 years old. I want to ask you about that in a second, about life as a 42 year old. But, you were 22 years old, and, we had just gone through 911. We had a financial collapse four years later that that took years to recover from. And then, we had the turmoil of the Trump years and we had, a, pandemic. And a lot of these things had it had very different impacts on different people. We, you and I and a lot of people like us, the president would call us elites. He, he he was one of them, too. We were able to endure that pandemic just fine. We could stay at home and work on our computers and go out for walks. And there are a whole bunch of people who didn't have that luxury, and they happened to be the people who keep the country moving and working. In so many ways we live in. It's a it's a cliche, you know, that it's been a cliche in politics, but there really are two Americas, and democracy can't function well if half the country feels like the system is rigged against them. And then you have on top of that social media amplifying everybody's resentment and outrage. So the project is bigger than just saving democracy, because you can maybe save it. Labor party just won a big victory in, in Britain, but they have to look over their shoulder because the right did pretty well in that election. And this was a reaction to the failure of the conservatives. It wasn't necessarily an affirmation of Labor. You see, you know, what's going on in France. They dodged a bullet, but not necessarily for long. This project of democracy needs refreshing.
The the the lure of authoritarianism, the promise of the demagogue is fairly simple and and easy to understand. It is there's all these problems. I'm going to tell you, they are caused by other people who don't look like you, who don't come from where you come from, and all you have to do is put me in power, and I alone can fix it, right? I'm going to do it all. And that is a story as old as time. And what happens is, every time one of those demagogues or authoritarians get into power, then when you give someone absolute power, it corrupts them absolutely. And they end up looking out for themselves and their loyalists, and they don't care about anyone else. And it is a false promise, but it is constantly attractive to people who feel like things are out of control, that they can't get ahead, that there's chaos in the world, that the world's changing too fast around. And the other way to organize ourselves is say, okay, instead of giving all this power to one person who might turn out to just look out for themselves, let's all have a voice and let's all have a say, and let's give each other a chance. And let's be inclusive of everyone, no matter what you look like or where you come from. And that sounds nice. It's also really tough to do, because that's a lot of opinions and that's a lot of people and that's a lot of different, you know, backgrounds and religious beliefs. And the only way that's going to work is if we actually practice the values of democracy, which I don't think we talk about enough. And those values are like we have to be empathetic to each other. And that empathy is not just people from a different class or from a different place, but people from different political beliefs as well. And that's not us being like soft, mushy, moderate centrists or, you know, everyone now it's like, oh, Michelle Obama when she said, they go low, we go high, that was a huge mistake. It's not about just like being nice. It's like we are not going to survive in a country with more than 300 million people who are incredibly different in a, we're not going to live peacefully and coexist peacefully with one another unless we can step into one another's shoes and talk to each other and figure out how to disagree with each other, sometimes vehemently, while still not devolving into political violence. Or, you know what, what we have seen, you know, or lawlessness, right. Like, that is the project. And it's a much harder project than what the demagogue offers. But like, we've got to sell that project if we want people to participate.
We're going to take a short break and we'll be right back with more of the Axe Files. And now, back to the show. How? The demagogue. I mean, obviously Trump fits that category that you're you're describing, and there is this sense that has helped propel him through all of his indictments and convictions and all of the baggage he's carrying, that somehow he is strong and he can make this work, and that the Biden is weak and he and he he's not in control. And that is the siren song of Trump right now that Democrats have to find a way to contest, because there is a sense that things are out of control. And you listen to the Republican message, it's about the border. It's about urban crime, it's about inflation. It's dissent, and that that's their fundamental message. Things are out of control. But in terms of our democracy itself, one of the things that we're fighting, social media is the is the absolute antithesis of what you're describing. Social, the whole profit incentive for social media is to divide us, to, make us feel aggrieved and to feel like everyone outside our silo is menacing. And you, you live much more in this world than I do. How do we defeat that?
Yeah. That's really that's extremely difficult because I don't think. I don't. You know, I, I host this podcast, Offline, and I have come to think that we can't really regulate ourselves out of this, even if we did have a functional government that could pass social media regulations right. Like because, you know, people have focused on privacy concerns and you can, you know, take care of that and you can sort of. Even these social media companies, you tweak an algorithm one way and then a whole nother set of problems happen.
Right, right. You have to create another algorithm to police the first algorithm.
And I think nobody quite even understands how they all work.
No one understands how they all work. And it also I think the other thing it does, it doesn't just enrage us, it isolates us and it gives us the illusion of connection. But it's not real connection because real connection is face to face interaction with other human beings. And when you can't see someone's face, their expressions, when you can't have a complex, nuanced argument with that person, it's just not going to work. And, you know, we were when we interviewed, Obama at the 50th anniversary in Chicago in November. You know, I remember Tommy asked him a question about Gaza, and Obama started the answer, talking about, you know, everyone talked about technology, sort of the Obama campaign pioneering the use of technology. And he's like, but we organized people online to meet up offline, right? So we use it as a tool to get people together in real life. If you're just going to organize people online, it's just that's never going to work with this kind of social media environment. And I do think it's going to take people like voluntarily sort of walking away from this and unplugging. And I think it has to start with with kids. I think it has to start with the younger generation, like I now, you know, I have a four year old and an a six month old and I, you know, I worry about when they get their phones, how much time they're going to be on their screens. A lot of schools are starting to ban phones in the classroom now. I think that's a really good idea. I can't imagine why you kids need to have their cell phones. They're in class the whole day. I think they should be not just learning, but like interacting with their friends in person because like, we just can't have younger generations of kids growing up where they're only by themselves with a screen scrolling through all the horrors of the world, like, that's just not that's that is antithetical to the Democratic project.
Yeah, it is, it is. And there are all kinds of other attendant problems, as we've seen with the elevated suicide rate, particularly among adolescent girls. I've got a nine year old granddaughter who, much to my chagrin, just got a cell phone. And I worry about her. You know, she's entering that very vulnerable age. But back to the Democratic project. The other thing that I've said here before, I think I probably said everything here before because this is my almost 600th podcast . But, in terms of the Democratic Party's role, I still think the Democratic Party is the party that has empathy and solidarity with working people and vulnerable people and so on, but it's also become a cosmopolitan, college educated party. And, we, you know, Democrats tend to approach these communities, rural communities, small towns, working class people, sort of, as Margaret Mead would approach the natives, you know, it's like, I'm here, we're here to help.
Or we're here to help you become more like us. Right? And it carries with it this sort of, sort of unspoken disdain, like, you know, you're a little bit less than we are, but you could be like us. And the people we're talking to are people who work their asses off doing things that we need, that the world needs done. There's dignity in what they do. And, you know, actually, the guy who I think, you know, feels that is Joe Biden, he just hasn't been able to express it very much lately.
But this I think one of the reasons he won is because there was enough of that, that he made people feel comfortable that, yeah, maybe he gets what's going on in my life. But, this is a project for the Democratic Party. So this is what I wanted to ask you about now that you're, I don't know, should we say middle aged? I guess These days, 40 is the new 20, I guess, these days, but.
I feel great. I just turned 43. I don't love that number, but, yeah, I'm feeling okay.
But you started off, as I say, you were 22, you were 26 when you became the head speechwriter for the president of the United States. Pod Save America. How long has that been around now?
So you're kind of young. And when all these projects happened. Do you find it harder to relate to your younger audience? I don't even know what the demo of your audience is. But I'm assuming it's young.
It is, but it's funny. Our audience is similar. Like their I would say like late 20s through early 40s or late 30s. So we're still like, you know, we're millennial age and then we're sort of elder millennials, but we still have a lot, but, you know, there's a lot of younger folks too. And we have a lot of younger staff. And, they let us know when we seem too old or we don't get it. Yeah, it is a it's a constant process of learning and like trying to understand the change that's happening in younger generations without being like, you know, the old man on the lawn yelling at kids kind of thing. I'm always sort of wary of that. I'm sure our staff is probably like, yeah, well, you don't always, you know, you're not that aware. But, you know, it's it's it's tricky. It's tricky. But I think, again, this is back to, like, what we were talking about. You just you have to be open to hearing from younger people, listening to them, like. And, you know, I was just doing, I did an episode of the The Wilderness, which is, podcast where you look at focus groups, and we just did, an episode on young voters. And, I talked to John Della Volpe.
Harvard pollster, polls young people from the Institute of Politics there.
He sent me like a dozen focus groups and town halls that he did in swing states with young voters. And it was it was tough listening, because these kids are they're really worried about the future and their. The financial insecurity just came through as the number one.
And particularly around housing, whether it's, you know, worrying that you're never be able to own a home, whether it's worrying that your rent is too high. And for a lot of these kids, they're saying, you know, I did what I was supposed to do. I went to college, I took out all this debt. I got a job after college, and the job is still not allowing me to live comfortably or, in some cases, live anywhere at all. And some of those groups, there were there were kids who have a college, well, some kids had college degrees and were working and said that they experienced homelessness. Had experienced homelessness, you know. And then when you asked them like, well, then what do you think about politics? They're like, well, politics doesn't seem like it matters to me, right? Because who's, there's all this yelling about this and that, but like, who's actually going to be out there fighting for what I need?
'This is so worrisome to me. This is, you know, I work with young people at the Institute of Politics at Arizona State to some degree, you know, University Chicago, Arizona State. And I think the most critical thing that we can do is keep these young people in the game, keep them, you know, because they the thing about democracy, they have to believe that they can change things. That they actually can change things. And you look at communities across the country and there's change all the time. There's been some significant change in Washington as well. But the fundamental, pervasive feeling is that this is politics as, and I think you wrote some lines like this for Obama's announcement speech in 2007, that politics is an inside game for the benefit of those who play it, and not a vehicle for change. And that to me--if there's more than anything else, we talk about what Trump might do to the democracy--the promotion of that kind of cynicism is the most insidious thing you can do to democracy and young people. If there's not a renewal of faith in that, then we have real problems. I had such a great conversation with someone I know you like or love as much as I do. Doris Kearns Goodwin.
Last week. I don't know if you've read her new book.
I haven't. I've been meaning to.
Yeah, you'll love it. Because, you know, her husband, Dick Goodwin, was a speechwriter and worked on some of the great speeches in the 1960s. But the thing aboutt Doris, who's in her 80s herself now, is she still retains through the work, her work of about the ages this sense of enthusiasm, inspiration about what democracy can do. And, in the course of getting ready for that podcast, I went back and reread Bobby Kennedy's Ripples of Hope speech in South Africa in 1966, and that speech in which he talked about the actions of individuals, of daring and courage creating ripples and that a million ripples come together, you know, in a way that can knock down the walls of oppression and so on. And it still gives me chills to read that, you know?
And look, it's it's. The challenge today is it's it's difficult to. There's so much cynicism. There's so much more cynicism now. Some of it warranted. I. Especially from younger generations who just haven't, like we said, felt the benefits of of living in this democracy, benefits of living in this country, that it's it's harder to have that message land without it feeling either cheesy or false. And part of this is like, I think that we have to be careful about sort of overpromising and, and also like you've got to tell people, you got to level with people, right. Like the thing that I think Obama did well and we always tried with him was to like, balance out idealism and inspiration with just honesty and not telling people what they want to hear, but telling them, like, what they need to hear and and just leveling with people about how long and difficult the challenge may be. But then to say, yes, it's going to be hard. Yes, it's going to be difficult, yes, it's going to take a long time. But if you keep at it, like even with the setbacks, even with the disappointments, we're going to make progress. Things are going to get better. And you know what the choice is between giving up, in which we know if we go in that direction, we're not going to make any progress at all. And then a whole bunch of other people, strangers that we don't know, are going to make huge decisions that affect our lives, and we're not going to be part of those decisions. Or, you know, we can, as as Obama said, we can grab an oar, and we can get involved. And that's not always going to be satisfying. And the work's going to be difficult. And we're not always going to win, but it's going to give us the chance to make progress. And if you look at the long arc of history, it's the only thing that has ever made progress. It's the only way we've ever done it.
So I'm going to stop right there, because I can't think of a better way to end this conversation. And, it's a message that I think we have to continue to repeat and carry and make real for, for people here. It's easy to get swept up in the dispiriting situation that we find ourselves in. But this project of democracy requires that we stay in the game. And I applaud you and the other guys for being true to it and calling people to that mission and lifting up people who are doing it well. It's really, really important. So, you know, maybe you'll age out of it someday. I hope not soon.
Well, you haven't. And we and we learned it and we're inspired by that mission because of you, to a large extent. So yeah, I always appreciate that.
Well, as you know, I'm proud of you guys every day. So let us proceed and we'll see what happens. I'll see you down the line, my friend.
Thank you for listening to the Axe Files, brought to you by the Institute of Politics at the University of Chicago and CNN Audio. The executive producer of the show is Miriam Finder Annenberg. The show is also produced by Saralena Barry, Jeff Fox, and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special thanks to our partners at CNN, including Steve Licktieg and Haley Thomas. For more programing from the IOP, visit politics dot uChicago dot edu.
