The Kamala Pivot

Prefer to read? Check out the Audio Transcript

Evan Osnos: Joe Biden was just disconnected from this growing piece of the American public to such an extent that it made people feel hermetically removed from politics to the point that they just turned off and tuned out. Why the Kamala Harris phenomenon is happening is that it was this slingshot effect of people who had felt so cut off.

And all of a sudden now feel brought in.

Zachary Karabell: What could go right? I’m Zachary Karabell, the founder of The Progress Network, joined as always by my co host, the executive director of The Progress Network, Emma Varvaloucas, drum roll, please. And What Could Go Right is our weekly podcast where we look at issues of the world with a lens of, yes, what could go right?

And not just the continual question that people seem to ask of, you know, What’s going wrong and what could go wrong. And in that light, we talked to a lot of different people with a lot of different sensibilities, because we do think there are a lot of different sensibilities that should be addressed, as long as it’s with the generalized sensibility that I just talked about at the beginning.

One of the ways, one of the places where that sensibility is least apparent and often least present is in political campaigns. And. Particularly in the United States during presidential election cycles, where the nastiest, most partisan divisions through the pettiest aspects of our collective and individual personas are given full flight and full expression in the bloom of social media that gives us all a megaphone, often for our worst instincts rather than for our better.

So today we’re gonna talk to someone who Who has been reporting about politics, who has been at the center of the media universe and is one of the most enlightened, interesting, eclectic, and diverse voices out there. So Emma, who are we going to talk to today?

Emma Varvaloucas: All right. So today we’re talking to Evan Osnos.

He’s a staff writer at the New Yorker. He’s also a contributor on CNN and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He’s written three books, one of them being a book about Joe Biden called Joe Biden, The Life, The Run, and What Matters Now. And he’s also the author of Wildland, The Making of America’s Fury.

So he’s been in the news business a long time and I’m looking forward to what he has to tell us about Trump, Kamala, Walz, all the major players.

Zachary Karabell: All right, let’s, let’s talk to Evan. Evan Osno, it’s a pleasure having you today. And while you are someone who has written widely, if not deeply, on a whole variety of topics, today, I think we’re going to focus a bit on the election and all that’s going on in that, because that happens to be one of your Foci right now.

I think any interview that has the word foci at least once in it is probably already a success. So we’ve gotten that out of the way. I’m going to ask a question that I’m not even sure I’m that interested in, but I think it’s, it’s worth asking because it seems to be unasked, which is for all the enthusiasm that is now directed, you know, interestingly, compellingly in the direction of Kamala Harris, Joe Biden is still president of the United States, which seems to have become.

At, at the very least an afterthought. And, I guess I’m just wondering, like, what does Biden do as president for the next X months? I mean, second term presidents always have this kind of lame duck quality come about now in the, at the end of a second term. So in that sense, he’s almost, I guess, like that, but it seems even like lamer than the normal lame duck.

So I’m just wondering, given that you’ve been following Biden for a long time and have some thoughts about this, what is, what is his presidency actually for the next, You know, between now and January, whatever the date is.

Evan Osnos: Yeah. I mean, he’s in a really unusual position for all obvious reasons. I mean, we just haven’t had something like this and he’s been acutely conscious of this, risk, not, not necessarily specifically the idea of dropping out of a presidential race with a hundred days to go to election and so on.

But I do remember, when I was interviewing him once during the vice presidency back in 2014. And I, at that point, it was already a relevant question to ask, you know, he was 71. And I said, you know, when do you think you will retire? And his answer was interesting. He answered it by saying, you know, I encouraged my father to retire.

And I think it was a mistake, he said, because I think he could have continued working. And it was a kind of, it was in its own way, looking back now, kind of a little window into his sense that there is a, that there’s something perilous about, announcing an end date on your centrality. I mean, he’s always believed this idea that, as he sometimes says, you’re either on the way up or you’re on the way down.

And now of course he’s in this strange purgatory in between and that is an uncomfortable place I think I can confidently describe. So I, you know, I talked to somebody, just a couple of days ago, I was very close to him and he says, I guess I would put his frame of mind right now as disappointed, but not depressed.

There’s a lot. There’s a lot there.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, I wonder if we could, rewind a little bit and maybe you can talk a bit about how you view his frame of mind when he did decide to make the decision. Right. Like, did he see it as a, a legacy saver? Was he really convinced that he couldn’t win? I mean, what’s your take on it?

Evan Osnos: I get the sense, that in the end it was primarily a political judgment. And I think that is a reflection of some of his blind spots, to be honest, about himself. Meaning that there came a point when the data was incontrovertible and there, there was, there’s an argument to be made that there was data all along that should have been five alarm fire material inside their political operation.

And for various reasons, they, it wasn’t five alarm fires. I interviewed some of his advisors about how they thought about these negative polls, and they had made this very impassioned case that they didn’t believe the conventional polling that was out there, which is wild considering that they were, of course, doing their own polling internally.

So it was never clear to me why it was that they would believe some of their own indicators, but not Public indicators. And I think it’s, it gets to some of the strange psychology of conviction that’s required in order to be a candidate. But to, to your question, Emma, I think in the end it was the recognition that he was going to lose.

And, lose with great influence, meaning it would drag down Democrats across the Congress, which is a place that he cares about more than most presidents. And then wrapped up in that is, of course, your place in history. And he is acutely, probably in the end, to a fault, concerned about how he’s perceived and how he’s regarded and the need for approbation.

So all of those things came together. I mean, it’s worth just pausing to recognize how strange it is, and in its way, what a mercy and what a glory it was that he said, I’m out, as painful as that probably was for him personally.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. I mean, I was struck by like how sudden and slow it all seemed in that until the day that he announced or released that letter, I guess on that Sunday, even as that Friday, I guess his campaign had done another statement saying, you know, we’re all in and we’re going ahead.

A minute. It. It wasn’t like a, it was more like a damn breaking. at the end, or at least it felt that way. And then I’m still surprised. I read this interview, I think over the weekend with Anita Dunn, who had been one of his, you know, for those who don’t know, one of his kind of inner circle counselors. And she, I think recently just stepped down and gave a very sort of tone deaf, truculent interview about how she felt this was all kind of unfair.

And he, he was dealt a raw hand and we should have been able to go on and he was fine. It was all fine. It was fine. He had a bad, you know, bad debate, big deal. And I wonder what you feel about that, having been around a lot of politicos and that mindset in that, you know, this was one of these cases where even before the debate, it just felt kind of palpably like a vast number of people had come to the conclusion that he was simply too old.

Not that 81 or 82 is too old, just that Joe Biden was, right? It’s like, I don’t even think there was a lot of ageism in that perception, or at least that, I’m sure there were some, but it seemed much more like it didn’t feel like this particular person could win this particular campaign, or even should.

And yeah, you had an inner circle that clearly had a completely different funhouse mirror thing. And like, how is that possible?

Evan Osnos: I think that part of this has to do with somewhat the difference between governing and campaigning in the sense that, you except on the edges right now, I would say, and you may disagree, but I think people sort of broadly feel like, okay, this guy’s capable of governing for the next five months and, but not in the end, capable of campaigning and winning.

And those are slightly, and that’s because they are separate functions. And you know, so, Even people who are in disagreement with him about policy decisions, yeah, they will ultimately say, no, the guy is the one making the decisions and he’s making, he’s making good faith, competent decisions. He may just disagree with them.

But that’s, so, so in a way, the people who are most immediately around him in the White House, that was part of it. They were seeing not just him out on the stump looking extremely Frail. And they were also seeing him, you know, in a room, small group details, that kind of thing. Now I look, I, I don’t mean to ignore what is the elephant in the room, which is that there were people close to him who clearly decided at a certain point that they were just gonna try to.

Kind of muscle it out that they thought that he could rise to the occasion when they needed him to. And, and that’s a big piece of it too, is that, when he performed well at the State of the Union, that was in a sense, an indication that he had this range. That there were days when he would be bad, and then there were days when he could rise to the occasion.

And the fact that they pushed for there, for there to be a debate, and this is Nancy Pelosi’s view too, the fact that they pushed for a debate. is a sign that it’s, they were not, you know, that was not a suicide mission. They were not doing that because they thought he would get up there and take down their campaign.

They were doing it because they thought that he could demonstrate, that he could put these questions about competence and age to the side. And of course, that’s not what happened. That was the unraveling, but it, it is a sign that they, it’s not as if they were, this is where I think the idea that there was some vast, you know, Government conspiracy at the top of the White House, you know, Watergate of cognition, that was, you know, hiding.

His, his infirmity is more of a fever dream on the right than it is an actual description of how it was experienced, I think, to the people who were involved with it.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s also wild too, now that everything doesn’t hang on Biden, how the narrative has. Like, instead of like, he’s a decrepit old zombie, all of a sudden now he’s really fresh and peppy and he’s got spice and he’s answering, you know, reporters with these little zingers and things like that.

Evan Osnos: I’ll tell you what, just an interesting little Insight is So there was a viral tweet a couple days ago in which they had, the campaign had responded to that bizarre Donald Trump, Elon Musk interview, in which, they had technical problems. And anyway, the Harris campaign had put out a snarky, good rebuttal and it went all over the place because people said, ah, see, look at that.

They’ve got their, you They’ve got their groove back. And oddly enough, you know, I know the person in the campaign who wrote the tweet and I said, ah, that’s, that was a good tweet. And he said, yeah, the funny thing is I was writing tweets like that six months ago about Biden. It’s just that nobody noticed or cared or thought they were funny.

And it, and the reason why I think that’s important is, is that it gets to this interesting thing that is a fact about politics, that the frame, the, the, the aspiration that we have, the perception we have really for a candidate, is so important and that the same language coming from two different people can be interpreted in such widely different ways.

That’s not a criticism, that’s a statement of reality about politics and you ignore it at, at, at your peril. So what

Zachary Karabell: do you make, let’s, you know, shifting to the, the current. dynamics. I’ve been surprised, maybe even occasionally really surprised at this Kamala surge. And I say this not with any particular, you know, I thought Kamala vastly underwhelmed as vice president in 2021.

I don’t know if that was bad press, but at some point bad press is a reflection of some reality. I don’t think press kind of is. is a completely false overlayer lens. She was not overly impressive as a candidate. I met her in 2020. She was, you know, interesting, fine, engaging, but the. It’s really been a big surge over the past three weeks.

I mean, it may be a lot of projection of a lot of people onto what amounts to something of a blank canvas. And that it’s not like she has clear ideological policy positions. She may be more Clintonian in her ability to morph her positions to suit the political moment. But again, how do you account for this?

Because it is, it is. Rather extraordinary. And it also may be a lot of deflected energy of people who don’t like Trump, but had nowhere to put it. Right. So there’s a, there’s a whole series of things, but I’m just curious as to your take.

Evan Osnos: Yeah, I, I mean, I think, there are elements of, of everything there.

One is this, there was an almost undescribed vast pool of, of energy, of enthusiasm waiting to be. Discover it. I mean, you’ve written about this recently, Zachary, and I do think it’s a huge point that in a way there was this sense of ennui, of malaise, I mean, curiously, I was working on a long piece for the New Yorker, for much of the summer about precisely this problem of disengagement and how it seemed like it was so profound and it, you know, I was looking at all of the literature, the psychology of apathy and, and, and of, Meaning and why people had lost a sense of agency and of belonging, and of autonomy and of effect, and all of these things.

And it was really kind of, it was this very gratifying model that was coming together, okay, this is why we’ve got this problem. And then it turns out that actually. When you replace the person at the top, and this is the irony of it, is it’s not as if the person at the top of the ticket was was replaced in some great demonstration of democratic agency.

In fact, it was done more or less in the kind of, you know, smoke filled room way. That’s not a criticism of it. It had to be done. That’s why parties exist. But yet, it still, it still ignited the feeling among the public, among this large portion of the public, of the public that there was a responsiveness, to the public will that had been absent.

And, and that is some of what’s happening here. And the reason why I think that’s so interesting is that in a way, it wasn’t as if people needed to be able to go into the booth, pull the lever and, and change the top of the democratic ticket. They just needed some demonstration that this, that the candidate could be a closer reflection of them, their age, their, ethnic diversity, their style, their humor.

In so many ways, you know, Joe Biden was just disconnected from this growing piece of the American public to such an extent that it made people feel hermetically, removed from politics to, to the point that they just turned off and tuned out. That’s what I think is, is part of what’s going on.

Zachary Karabell: You, yeah, this is your first moment where you could, you could say, wow, like Joe got, Joe Biden killed my piece.

Evan Osnos: Yes, well, in a way, you know, there’s a, there’s, that’s, that’s, that’s the natural order of the universe that, but in some ways, I find myself now reading some of that stuff and thinking, actually, that’s the substructure of a really interesting piece about why the Kamala Harris phenomenon is happening, is that it was this slingshot effect of people who had felt so cut off And all of a sudden now, feel brought in.

And I, I think it complicates in a really thrilling way how we sometimes imagine you have to find roots for public engagement. It turns out that there are other ways to do it.

Emma Varvaloucas: So do you think that the, all the kind of like internet energy that exists right now is really going to convert into real energy?

Because I mean, I was gobsmacked. The difference in social media after Kamala Harris essentially like got the nod. It was like on TikTok, just thing after thing after thing, you know, about Kamala. Her career is obviously being run by Gen Z people on social media because they’re totally in this like, guys, they, I, I was like, oh yeah, like I’m, I’m really feeling this in a way that I was totally not expecting.

But then I was reading all of these kind of like doom and gloom takes about like, don’t expect that to like really translate. That’s a urban, coastal, whatever, whatever, whatever thing. And that’s not going to speak to, white working class voters. That’s not going to speak to, you know, X, Y, and Z. What do you, what do you think about that?

Is it real? Is it not real?

Evan Osnos: I, I am just back from a week in the Midwest and I was going to events in Michigan, that, that she was doing. And there are white working class. people who are also white working class Gen Z. And that’s worth remembering that there is, particularly in an election where we’re talking about these very small margins, the difference between people engaging, not just enough to go vote, but then also going and getting their neighbor or driving somebody down the block is a huge deal.

Look, I think at this point, it’s a mug’s game to start making predictions about what piece of the energy is going to exist until November, simply because. This election has been effective in showing the limits of predictions. even, you know, on the very day that Biden dropped out, the number of donors who I was talking to who were saying, ah, it can’t be Kamala, it can’t be Kamala.

And within 24 hours it was. But I, I think it’s worth pointing out that in addition to the meme energy, which has been really visible and, and, and, and amazing, There’s a much more conventional and behind the scenes dynamic that has gone on, which is that she was on the telephone and more importantly, some of the people who are around her and advising her and working for her had been laying the foundation really since Dobbs, to go and suddenly activate this network of People, and supporters.

People like, you know, state party chairs, delegates to the DNC. These, these are not high profile public figures, but they are. the middle management of big D Democratic party and small D Democracy. And they were vital in the process of her, ending up with this. I mean, as somebody who said, somebody said to me the other day who is not on her.

team, but as just an observer, they said, you know, she, she wasn’t, she wasn’t given this job. She took it. meeting the nomination is an important point.

News Anchor 1: Harris took the memes. She ran with them from the jump. What have you made of their social media strategy so far?

News Guest 1: It’s masterful, Alicia. I mean, the way that she is able to harness That earned media really connecting with digital natives, that younger generation, but also not ignoring the old school age side of things.

You know, we have seen that in the last week, the Harris campaign. close to 30 million and they’re gonna be spending another 50 million coming up on the DNC. So they are really going hard on the social media campaign which I think is fantastic, especially because she has time to make up for. That being said, I worry.

There’s that little Debbie Downer in me. That sees the need for coupling that with old school politics. So just making sure that you’re not relying on social media alone, because it is a fantastic buzz to convert votes, to convert, especially young folks who are low propensity voters to A, register to vote, and then B, turn out and vote.

So I mean, as long as they have that direct mobilization conversion piece, The social media is going to do what it needs to do.

Zachary Karabell: You know, there’s an irony to, apropos Emma’s point of on the heels of Congress passing a bill and then Biden signing it that paves the way to ban TikTok because of pernicious Chinese influence.

Everybody is running in the Democratic Party right now saying absolutely nothing about TikTok as a negative thing because all they want to do is use TikTok as a way of getting elected, which I have to say is one of the funnier. I don’t know, like, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of absurd on the face of it, right?

Like, we don’t want the Chinese government spying on our lives, but Let’s just hold off on that and use this tool that the Chinese government made controlled to get ourselves elected. Yeah.

Evan Osnos: I mean, they were, they were always in that contradiction too, when it was Biden at the top of the ticket. I mean, they were using TikTok, not particularly successfully, but, So, you know, that’s sort of been a dynamic for a

Zachary Karabell: while. As a media person. Right. I mean, as someone who understands that, you know, in it, you’re going to have this kind of continued wave of focus on Kamla through the democratic convention, which basically means through Labor Day. Right. And then Labor Day is going to be some weird reset point.

And there is an adage in news and certainly in a social media fueled news world where an old stories and old stories, you know, like you need a new story. So the question is like. I’m not asking for a prediction on how the election goes. I’m asking for your sensibility about nobody sticks on the same story.

So do you like, do you turn around and is there going to be a natural inertia come Labor Day of like, ah, you know, we thought Kamala was amazing, but now maybe we don’t think she’s so amazing or, or what? I guess I don’t quite know where this goes. And the one thing that’s particularly striking and particularly negative for Donald Trump’s campaign is the one thing that he has thrived on.

is the negative attention of the kind of, you know, the media elite that, that does indeed skew towards the Democrats. And he’s lost that attention, which is fascinating. But I guess, where does it go in your, in your, in your view, not the election, but the media narrative or the media,

Evan Osnos: energy? Well, there, there is, and you already kind of see it in some of the coverage, this.

feeling, that, okay, when’s the next beat of the story? And I find that kind of. A little gross, the idea that people are waiting, inevitably for, okay, when does the Kamala balloon come crashing down? I, I’m saying that in quotation marks, because it’s just this assumption and this, you know, you’ve, you’ve thought a lot about this, the, you know, there’s a negativity bias in news that in a sense, you know, the very definition of news is the plane that crashes.

And the, that in its way, this gets to a kind of, I think, a more interesting underlying how our information is absorbed and, and distributed is, you know, that, that was sort of, it made sense when news was a smaller portion of our daily lives. But when news, both for commercial reasons and for information distribution reasons, is now a constant infusion, a sort of trickle drip into our brains, if, if individual practitioners need to go out and find examples of a, of a crashing plane all the time, that means that as the news user, That’s what you’re getting.

Now, that’s a roundabout way of saying that, you know, there is this inevitable instinct to say, okay, what would be the news story now? It would be that maybe the Kamala phenomenon is unsustainable. I don’t know if it is sustainable. I have no idea. But I think going out and kind of assuming that it’s doomed is part of this fascinating problem of news methodology.

that I can, I can describe and also, you know, I’m in this industry. I know it. I know, I know the reality of it. I, I guess, but the other thing that’s happening, this is, you know, there’s been a really interesting critique. I think a very credible critique in the last couple of days from James Fallows, who after all is a, a long time reporter, distinguished American journalist, has the credibility to, to point out problems in the industry.

And, you know, he made the observation that after that. That’s a really, disabled performance by Donald Trump in his conversation with Elon Musk. That’s just the only way to put it. I mean, he was voicing the most bizarre Unhinged Perceptions of Reality. That, that there’s been no front page coverage of that in that context.

In the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Wall Street Journal, the three major national newspapers. You know, the of the kind You know, what he is saying is, why are we not seeing stories about Donald Trump, a geriatric candidate and his declining cognitive capability. Why are we not seeing comparable stories of the kind we saw about Biden?

About, you know, insiders at the top of the Republican Party whispering about it. Why is it not a subject of constant dinner conversation? Why is it that we don’t have Biden’s stories? you know, psychologists and, and medical practitioners being quoted on the front page of those papers saying, you know, I can’t diagnose him because I haven’t examined him, but it appears to me that he shows the indications and symptoms of X, Y, and Z.

It just hasn’t existed. And so Fallows, to his great credit, I think, has been running this kind of daily, day six, day seven, where are those front page stories, kind of count. And I find that really, worth paying attention to.

Emma Varvaloucas: Well, the thing with Trump is that it’s hard to separate cognitive decline from his general unhingedness, that has been around since he kind of came onto the political scene.

So I guess that’s one defense of the media here.

Evan Osnos: I guess, no, but I agree with you, Emma. I mean, I think that is, that’s certainly the explanation that we’ve all just kind of been like, oh, well, that’s just, that’s the base. case. But like, if that’s the base case, then it has to be described and announced every day that the Republican nominee is operating from a continuous condition of cognitive dysfunction.

Why is that not still front page news? This gets to this. This is why I brought up this point about essentially the sort of definitional problem of news. It’s the new thing. And, but you could even confine it and say, all right, he’s, he’s demonstrating new evidence. of his declining capability. so anyway, that’s my pitch for the fallow’s view.

I, I, I, I find it very compelling.

Emma Varvaloucas: A lot of us are so used to the worst occurring that like the idea that maybe the worst is not going to occur now feels really foreign and a little bit psychologically dangerous to latch onto.

Evan Osnos: Yeah, that’s a super interesting phenomenon. I totally agree with you. I mean, I think my wife and I were talking about the other day about why, how this feels different or similar to the Obama phenomenon in 2008 and, and one of the things that seems really apparent is we’re hardened as a people.

You know, we’re sort of tempered. a bit, by the reality of history that zigs and zags and can sometimes punch you in the face. And it’s like, we’re just not as open to the possibility of, of, of good news, perhaps, in the way that we were 16 years ago. I mean, 16 years is a very long time in, in, in this day and age.

I think this gets to an interesting question, which is, has it, Has it changed us for good or for worse in terms of our capacity to imagine good outcomes? I mean, obviously it’s at the core of what you guys think about, but I think about this a lot, this puzzle of how, how is it possible to be optimistic?

and not naive? How is it possible to be ambitious and not cynical? How is it to be cool without being dopey? These are all questions that are, like at the center of the daily news proposition, because the, the cool, the cool points accrue to the person who’s willing to say, ah, it’s all doom and gloom coming.

And I don’t think that’s a healthy way to So, yeah, I

Zachary Karabell: think there’s a lot of things that we can learn from this. likely Democratic has has failed to separate in the Donald Trump era the candidate from the party and the party from its voters and has sort of mishmashed everything into one global emanation of Donald Trump ism, which is tempting, right?

Because there’s certainly evidence of that, if that’s what you want to find, if that’s the prism that you want to see reality through. But it’s unequivocally true that, you know, vast numbers of people will vote for Donald Trump in November. Feeling much the way about Donald Trump that most people appear to feel about Donald Trump, that he’s like a narcissistic, not nice guy who you wouldn’t want either marrying your daughter, being your friend, leading your business, teaching your children, leading the country, having the button, anything.

of, of all of that, but he’s the choice you’ve got compared to the other choice you’ve got. And the other choice you got is laden with a huge amount of baggage. If you are, you know, if you talk to someone like Elise Slotkin, who’s a congressional representative of Michigan running for Michigan Senate, you know, she kind of gets this and has gotten this all along.

Like, there’s a lot of people who feel, you know, That the Democratic Party and the Republican establishment have let them down in a whole myriad of ways, many of which, honestly, if you were them, is quite accurate, right? It’s not a, it’s not a line they’ve been told, it’s not a what’s the matter with Kansas.

Narrative. It’s like, you know, they’ve gotten screwed in a whole series of ways that weren’t, it could have gone elsewhere. I mean I hope that changes But you see any evidence of, like, in the media world of like Trying to look at these realities, because no matter what, this is likely to be a close election.

I mean, I guess Comlink could develop Intense momentum and whatever the Trump balloon is could deflate and it could not be, but from the moment it would appear, it is likely to be close.

Evan Osnos: Yeah, no, I think it’s gonna be, I think it’s gonna be brutally close. I looked at one sustained example of this question of why people.

Have turned away from the Democratic party and sort of what are the real reasons and what are the fake reasons? yeah, I was looking at, at, West Virginia because that’s where my first job was outta college, and I’ve kind of been in and outta there over the years and I, I do find that there’s a couple of interesting examples that one is sort of the credible reason.

Thanks for listening! Bye! You’re welcome! for listening! Bye! Homes and find portraits of FDR on the wall, and that was because West Virginia benefited greatly from the New Deal and from what Roosevelt did for labor protections and things like that. Then amazingly, it has flipped to some of the most reliable Republican territory, and part of the reason was because.

It just fell off the radar screen of the Democratic Party. That is one of the explanations. I mean, the most sort of evocative example of this, which I do think of often, is that in the town where I work, Clarksburg, West Virginia. During the 1960 presidential democratic primary, which is this very memorable occasion because that’s the primary that proved that John F.

Kennedy could conceivably be the democratic nominee because he could be nominated by, Protestants. But in that year, so many major democratic heavyweights came to little Clarksburg, West Virginia, you know, town of 14, 15, 000 people. I mean, JFK came multiple times. Bobby Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, you know, you go down the list.

Lyndon Johnson. I mean, just one after another. I mean, Kennedy went on TV in this town and gave a 30 minute, sort of call in Q& A with people. So there was a level of engagement. To go back to this thing we were talking about earlier, people felt some agency, some proximity, some, some attachment to what the party was doing.

It didn’t feel remote. It didn’t feel elite. It didn’t feel far away. And then I was talking to people at the Historical Society in Clarksburg. I said, so give me the list of the other democratic presidential nominees who have visited since 1960. And they went back into the archives and came back and they were like, well, none.

they said Jesse Jackson came once in 1988. That’s as close as we’ve come. And so that’s the real kind of, they fell off the radar screen of what the Democratic Party represented as it shifted to focusing more on urban areas. But then there’s a completely hallucinating, hallucinatory version of why. the Democratic Party should, should be rejected by voters in places like West Virginia.

And that’s this idea that was propagated very effectively by right wing propagandists starting back in about 1999 and 2000. Really it was sort of, you know, Karl Rove found something very effective, which is he said Democrats hate coal, West Virginia loves coal, therefore West Virginia must hate Democrats.

And he just sort of started turning that idea very effectively. Found local. People who would become the spokespeople for that idea. and by the time you get to sort of, you know, and I’ll wrap up this little soy in a second by saying that by the time you get to like 2000, and, and by the way, 2000 was a pivotal year because had Al Gore won West Virginia, he would’ve won the presidency even without Florida.

Just to worth remembering, you know, by the time you get to like 2013, 14. There is this universal perception, more or less universal perception, that in, in West Virginia, that, the Democrats are seeking to, quote unquote, destroy my way of life. Meaning the coal industry, which that is the life spring for local commerce, for culture, for status.

That’s what allows a person to be a big wheel in the community is having reliable job and union benefits and so on. But so eventually that just becomes so much of a feeling of an existential threat. Then there’s all the social permission that goes along with the idea of voting, of not voting for Democrats and you’re off to the races.

So, That’s a really, I’m sorry, long way of answering the question, but I do think that’s, there’s an element of there’s a real thing and there’s a fake thing and you have to sort of identify both. And J. D. Vance

Zachary Karabell: kind of embodies both. Yeah. Same, same area, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio.

Evan Osnos: Yeah. But I will also say Tim Walz does too.

And that’s the cool thing. I find that a really fascinating comparison. I mean, Tim Walz, is a little bit, Tim Walz is basically what JD Vance pretends to be. I’ll stand by that. That’s, that’s like, I think a really, that’s an essential truth. And I’m, I, for one, am really looking forward to the vice presidential debate because, Tim Walz has a pretty crystalline understanding of what people care about right now in rural communities, in the upper Midwest.

And if you want to ask people in Appalachia about what they think of hillbilly You actually don’t need to go door to door. You can read a book that was the rebuttal to it called Appalachian Reckoning, written by a bunch of writers, basically saying this is not us.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I mean the, the fast and deep unpopularity of JD Vance is also fascinating, right?

like, just people from the vast spectrum of American society that I know, like, all dislike him. Which is really, it’s a, it’s a feat, right? to be disliked that, that badly, that fast. forgive me for asking this question, but do you think that Trump really does have cognitive decline? Because I know that there’s been a lot of, like, okay, Trump picked Vance because he was reacting to the Biden campaign, he felt really sure that he was going to win.

And now he’s not, he was caught flat footed and now he can’t react that fast to the Harris campaign. But like, this is Trump. I mean, like, it surprises me that he’s kind of making these really poor marketing moves because at the core, like, he’s great at selling stuff, right?

Evan Osnos: I mean, this is a question.

Like, this gets to this, you know, do you think that he actually believes that that Kamala Harris AI’d her crowd in Detroit. and of course the savvy answer is to say, well, no, no, he’s just doing that because he’s trying to fool his public and sort of lead them down this, this path. And then he also talks about it on his Elon Musk interview.

And like on some level you, you begin to lose that, what used to be this very canny distinction that he was able to play between which part of. Which part of his public dialogue was the fake wrestling and which part was the real wrestling? And, and like that was always at the core. I think you’re onto something very important, Emma, which is that like, we do tend to assume that when he does something that is by any reasonable definition, the utterance of a crazy person, that we just chalk it up to some marketing triple play.

And, I don’t know. At a certain point, kings do go mad. And, I am not answering the question deliberately because I’m not, I don’t know. And I, this is what, I’ve always thought, you know, it’s always funny when reporters say, well, you know, according to the studies of his vocabulary, you see more limited use of words.

Like, yeah, I can cite those same sorts of indicators. But in the end, you know, we start to kind of go with our gut. On some level, Americans looked at Joe Biden and decided on some almost just sort of biological interpretive level, this person is diminished. And there was something to that. And I, I think it’s hard not to look at, at Donald Trump and, and not decide some similar things, but that’s not my job, and I’m not trained to do it.

Now I’m doing of course a, a Trumpy thing, which is I’m saying I’m not saying something by saying it, but I’ll leave it there. You know, some people say that Trump, that

Zachary Karabell: Trump has undergone cognitive decline. I mean, I’m not saying, I’m just saying some people say that. Fair enough. So what are you, what, what are you gonna focus on, for the next, is this gonna be your, your bailiwick for the next three months?

I mean, you, you’ve had a, you kind of toggle between over the past years, the, the political focus and you did the extraordinary Biden biography at, at an extraordinary time. But you’ve also focused a lot on China. You focused a lot on American culture. You focused a lot on kind of the quirky oddity of the lifestyles of the rich and famous and how they are.

Deeply, it’s like another culture sociologically. so what’s your focus for the next few months?

Evan Osnos: Well, I, I am keeping my eye pretty closely on the presidential race. And, and partly that’s because there are ways of writing about a lot of those elements, through the lens of presidential politics. And I’m going to do that.

I’m, you know, I’m not planning to go to China between now and the election. But yeah, I was there last fall, for instance, sort of knowing that we were about to get into the presidential cycle. And part of the reason to guide did a long piece in the New Yorker about the mood in China called the age of malaise.

And that’s partly because I was trying to understand in a sense, how does it feel there compared to how we were feeling here? And this circles back to something we talked about earlier, which is this, all of a sudden we went from feeling this that was totally. Epithetic to being this country that feels hyper engaged.

And I think that’s pretty interesting. I mean, I’m describing mostly a phenomenon on the democratic side of the ledger, but that’s kind of interesting, and as a comparison to China, they don’t have those moments of swings from apathy to engagement or of feeling of powerlessness to powerful. partly because the political system doesn’t allow it.

Political system is so top down and sclerotic right now that that, you don’t get that. So anyway, I’m, I’m kind of, for the moment I’m oscillating and staying in that one place of, of looking at the U S for the next few months.

Zachary Karabell: Although on the China point, you could argue that there was an intense amount of popular passion and this is our moment and this is the ascendancy of a new China in the 21st century.

That was palpable and, and real in 2010. that Xi Jinping has managed for his own particular worldview to totally damp down. Agree. Yeah. You know, it doesn’t manifest itself politically, but it certainly manifested itself

Evan Osnos: culturally. Totally agree. I mean, I think it really was this extraordinary moment of, of awakened individual aspiration and then collective aspiration.

That was the dominant sensibility the years that, that I was living there. 2005 to 2013. And that’s what’s so striking now is that, and there’s a way to think of it, which is that Xi Jinping basically demoralized the society in three different stages. The first one was the political stage when he began to purge the party of his rivals and so on.

And then the second stage was when he demoralized the business community, the sort of entrepreneurial class by locking up somebody like, you know, you, you go down the list. There’s a whole range of them, but Jack Ma would be the most prominent example of somebody whose wings were clipped and that sent out the message to everybody.

And then the third stage was the public during the zero COVID period, particularly in a place like Shanghai, where all of a sudden you had, you know, you had people who were very, these were fully realized autonomous individuals. That’s how they saw it, thought of themselves. And then. They discovered that no matter how successful I had been in my personal and my business life, that the government could come and say, I’m literally going to lock you in your house for two months.

I mean, that is a real fact. That was for people, this is not melodramatic. It was traumatizing and it ultimately led them to sort of think about plan B and that’s why people were moving money abroad or moving themselves abroad. And so that’s a level of disengagement. That is really a profound difference from where it was 10 years ago.

Zachary Karabell: Evan, it’s been such a pleasure talking to you today. It’s the kind of thing I’m, you know, we could go on for hours, which I would love if I were Joe Rogan, but otherwise we’re going to keep this at a, at a more reasonable length. maybe we’ll, we’ll revisit all this on the other side of November and see what, see what the world looks like.

I think this is all reminder, particularly the past weeks and the writing that you’ve done of, and interesting that we ended with the China point of. we all get very caught in our present moment and have a tendency, I think, to extrapolate that our present is just reality, and it is our present reality.

But as you’ve just talked about, whether it’s China, whether it’s the United States before July, you know, things can just change on a dime in ways that are palpable and intense. And no, we don’t always expect them because if we expected them, it wouldn’t be a surprise. But we shouldn’t be surprised by how quickly things can go from one extreme to another culturally, even as it feels in the moment.

And, you know, you’ve, you’ve certainly been highlighting a lot of the warp and woof of so many things and have been an incredible voice that I really appreciate. Always read and always look forward to, and I certainly encourage everyone else too. So, go about your day, go, go report on the campaign or whichever campaign, and, we will talk to you again.

Great to be with you guys. Talk to you on the other side. I don’t have much more to say other than what I said at the end, which is that’s the kind of conversation, I mean, look, I, I feel we say this over and over and over again, and the enthusiasm for the particular conversation, but I do feel it. This time as well, just, you know, he’s such a interesting person, modest in affect and, and brilliant behind it.

And I kind of wish there were more Evan Osnos in the, at the heart of the media world. And he’s so uninterested in the kind of gotcha journalism. He’s so uninterested in undermining for the sake of a good story, but also tough. You know, it’s like, it’s a great combination in my view.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, absolutely. And it’s really interesting to meet those people that have been in the news industry for a really long time and come out of it with the takeaways, you know, the James Fallow esque.

takeaways that are, you know, he had absolutely no hesitation being like, I just think it’s kind of gross for the media to be like, what’s the next thing? Whereas, you know, when you are tracking news on the day to day, like you do feel this little, like, like, let me get it, you know, and it’s, it’s, definitely a credit to him that he resists that, notices it, resists it.

Zachary Karabell: Yeah. And also James Fowles, who’s one of the original members of the Progress Network also, you know, has embodied that, embodied some of the work he did with his wife, Our Towns, looking partly at West Virginia and how they have, people at the grassroots have kind of tried to remake themselves, not in angry JD Vance fashion, but in much more uplifting, I guess, Tim Walz fashion.

so people should check that out as well. But it’s going to be, you know, I still think What’s interesting is for the first time, this possibility in the campaign that some of the Trump bubble actually does deflate and this doesn’t end up a close election, which I think is unlikely. But of course, if you’d asked me or anyone a few months ago, I would have thought that was impossible, right?

Like now I think it’s unlikely, but I think there is actually a possibility that this ends up much less close than we expect. And that would have been unthinkable even a year ago. So that’s intriguing as well. And something we should. I think contemplate as possible, because momentum can in fact build on itself as opposed to be reversed.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I mean, one thing that has been surprising so far, in addition to the very surprising thing of Biden actually stepping down, is that everyone kind of assumed that if Harris stepped in, everyone would hate her. I think that is, that’s also one of the reasons why we’re having this feeling of like, yeah.

Is it gonna last? Are, is she gonna, you know, continue to build momentum? Are, are people going to revert to their original Harris stances, right? I think we’re going to have a big clue. This is going to be after this podcast comes out, but she’s going to be announcing some of her policy positions, or she just, she already did, so we can’t talk about them now.

But, I think that’ll also be a good indicator about, you know, how people react to those.

Zachary Karabell: Absolutely. So thank you all for listening. Thank you, Emma, once again. For co-hosting and we will see you all on the other side.

Emma Varvaloucas: Thanks, Zachary, and thanks everyone.

Zachary Karabell: What Could Go Right is produced by the Podglomerate, executive produced by Jeff Umbro, marketing by the Podglomerate.

To find out more about What Could Go Right, The Progress network, or to subscribe to the What Could Go Right newsletter, visit theprogressnetwork.org. Thanks for listening.