Hi, I'm Molly john Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds and Mega Mike Johnson brought all of the Congressional press Corps to the border.
We're back from vacation with an amazing show for you.
Today, Josh Green talks to us about his latest book, The Rebels Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, AOC, and the struggle for a new American politic. Then we'll talk to author Brad Meltzer about his latest in a series of children's books about ordinary people changing the world. His newest book is called I Am Ruth Badergensburg.
But first we.
Have the host of the Enemies List, the Lincoln Project's own Rick Wilson.
Welcome back to Fast Politics.
Rick Wilson, Hey, Molly, how are you. How was your new year?
Oh?
It was amazing. I just my life is just one high too of the next. But anyway, enough of a sad.
No.
First, I think we should talk about the American Media Industrial CONFLICTX, of which you and I are members. We are fucking up this election.
Go look, I'm going to say there are three main groups fucking up this election, and those of us in the media enterprise broadly speaking, some of us are fucking up this election.
Let us start with the Associated Press.
Well, I was just getting to that.
As my friend Stewart Stephen said, it's like saying Julia Child and Jeffrey Dahmer are both famous chefs with a different approach to ingredients. The competition for the dumbest fucking headline of the universe this week, it was really up there. That one really to me, especially when I read it. This frame of dislike of Joe Biden in the media is very clear. Now, yeah, I get it, he's not exciting.
But when you see an article like that AP article that is like, oh, well, one guy is against terrorist attacks on the Capitol, that when overthrowing himocracy, but Republicans differ. I'm sorry, that's not how this works. And the thing that makes me so angry about it is there's a frame and I've seen it now, I've started to notice
it over and over and over again. It's former President Donald Trump did something outrageous, evil, cruel, and stupid today, but Republicans defended him and then and the flip.
Of the frame is, but Joe Biden old.
Hated ancient dodding fool.
President Joe Biden, who is.
Hated by all Americans with their hatred of him, today announced record job reports. Republican economists speculate it won't be enough.
Come on, just for people to know that we're not exaggerating. I'm going to actually read the AP headline that came into my email box yesterday morning and enraged me. One attack, two interpretations. Biden and Trump both make January sixth riot a political rally and cry, and then it goes on with President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump now heading towards a pop potential twenty twenty rematch. Both are taking the same event in a very different way. The
dueling narratives. I swear to god, I'm not even making this up.
They are going to fucking both sides us into the grave.
It gets even worse, though, reflect how the capital attack is increasingly viewed differently along partisan lines, and how Trump has bet the riot won't hurt his candidacy, Like there you go. Biden has repeatedly characterized Trump as a threat to democracy.
I'm just going to say this as bluntly as I can to the AP. There's a yoga move you might want to consider. It's called pulling your head out of your ass. And I'm sorry. You know, there are great reporters of the AP and I like a lot of them. And I know reporters don't write the headlines. I get it, I get it, I get it, I get it.
They do write the first paragraphs.
But the framing of all of these goddamn stories keeps coming back to the essential message of yes, Trump is evil, horrible, terrible. But that's not anything more than a simple political divide.
It's the usual left versus right. No, it's not.
It's an autocrat saying I'm going to burn the fucking country down versus a solidly center left.
President in the great tradition of America.
Now, I will tell you the other people who are fucking over this campaign on the Democratic side. They're Joe Biden's own staff.
I know where you're going with this, because you know what a lot. But I'm not going to let you get there yet because I want to talk. I have another thing I want to talk.
You, psycho.
I have another thing I want to talk about, which is I listen to The Daily It's a podcast. Perhaps you've heard of it not as far as this podcast obviously now only listen to by millions and millions of people.
The New York Times, which.
We pick on because it's so famous and so many people read it. That's why we pick on you, not because we don't love you, but because you shape the news narrative in a way that a lot of places wish they could but don't. So New York Times, the Daily run by Michael Babaro, a person I like very much, had deals with him. Delightful. God, I'm actually not going
to criticize an episode he was on. It was an episode with Sabrina Tabernisi Biden's twenty twenty playbook, So read Epstein and Sina Tabernici and in this episode read Epstein is like, Biden is not powerful, Biden is a terrible campaigner.
To say, it is the most negative.
Thing I've ever They were like, he's not popular, people don't like him, he can't galvanize, he has no message. Yes, he says the economy is good, but people feel the economy's bad, so it doesn't matter. I mean, it was the most negative and I was like, you know, I didn't even pick Biden. Right in twenty fifteen, I wrote a piece in the Washington Post that.
Said he should drop out.
I am hardly like miss Biden Stan, but the reality is, like, if we look at just the last years of Biden, he has way overperformed, Like we don't even need to like, suppose we can just look at twenty twenty two, twenty twenty three, twenty twenty.
The primis when we founded the Lincoln Project in twenty nineteen. In December, Elizabeth Warren was leading Joe Biden by twenty six points and Bernie Sanders was ahead of Elizabeth Warren. And at the time we were thinking, oh my god, what the fuck are we gonna do? And it turned out that Joe Biden was exactly the guy with the right message. He was exactly the guy who could beat Trump.
And it turned out that he is the only candidate who has ever beaten Donald Trump, folks, the only one the idea that the critiques of the president are at this point going to change what's going on. There was somebody yesterday saying, well, you know, maybe he should drop out of the convention and then we could.
Scramble the board.
I'm like, scramble the board.
Why don't you just roll out the fucking red.
Carpet for Donald Trump.
If you scramble the board, none of that makes any sense.
Did what happened in twenty twenty two not happened because that was like eighteen months ago.
Yeah, and again you and I've talked about this. I will never forget it. In January of twenty twenty two, read Galen and I are on this call with all these big democratic activists and donors and operatives.
It was not invited to this call, by the way, yet another call or event or party or talk.
That I was not invited to. But it's all good, it's all good.
Well, a very prominent Democrat said, well, we're going to make this election about prescription drug coverage and gas prices. And you know, of course, because Reid and I are always like the skunks at the garden party, were like, the fuck are you you?
We're invited to the guddap garden party? Continue?
Sorry, go on, It's like, what the fuck are you talking about? That's crazy town, that's that's insane. What are you doing? It's about democracy?
A year ago, today, the cap and this is again in early twenty two, a year ago, the Capitol is on fire. What is wrong with you? And Biden has an instinct right now that is the correct instinct. If you make the choice between going back to the past of Donald Trump, which involves all the insanity that people would like to forget about, all the madness that people would like to say, Ah, that day, I guess we're done. Now you will get it tenfold.
People.
If you think COVID was handled badly, imagine scaling that to the entire government for the next four years if you elect Donald Trump.
And by the way, there's no guarantee that's four years. Like I always say, this is.
The do you want to have elections election?
This is the last election. Either it's the last election for Donald Trump or it's the last election for America. And I say that without trying to be dramatic or over the top. This is a consequential and existential election for this country. It is in part we are amusing ourselves to death. In the media side of this, it's like, oh, it's so funny, Trump's so wild, ha ha, and it's it's just its madness.
It does seem to me like the pundit industrial complex has gotten very far removed from the voters industrial complex for example, twenty twenty two midterms, our last big election. God forbid, we talk about it, but it feels like we spend so much time prognosticating in so little time, like looking back at things that just happened. So I want to go back there for a minute. Biden said, you'll remember, right before the election, you say is going
to give these speeches. Pundits laughed at him, made fun of him. They said the speeches weren't good. They said the speeches weren't working. They said, people don't vote on democracy, they vote on the economy, which was teetering and.
Inflation, which is a real problem.
Even though again, and I want to say this because I feel like it doesn't get any credits, the rest of the world is struggling with inflation at much much more catastrophic levels, including the UK right, which did when we fucked up with Donald Trump. They fucked up with Brexit, which happened to actually be harder to reverse. But you know, I do think there's a certain extent in which this really did happen. You know, the pundits were like, Biden is wrong, and then Biden ultimately was right.
Biden has something that a lot of people have missed out on. And this is a guy who's been around the block. Yes he is older.
Like Moses.
He knows how Washington works. He knows how the comings and goings of DC in governance and leadership work. And people who underestimate that and who you know. It's like Tom Nichols always says, people hate experts now in this country, and the cult of hating experts is very powerful thing.
But actually Joe Biden's an expert at government. I say that in terms of the management of these things, of dealing with things as they happen, whether it's a pandemic or a foreign policy crisis, and that experience is something that we have undervalued and undercounted in this country. And the desire for novelty, the desire to watch the car crash. This is like those YouTube videos of people wrecking their motorcycles into a wall or screwing up on a gymnastics
move and breaking their neck. People watch that shit all day long. It doesn't make it good. And what we're seeing right now is I think an addiction to the novelty of Trump. And Trump knows it. He is the master of the political spectacle. And the press cannot resist dragging themselves over and over again, like they're poking with a stick, like do something crazy, do something crazy, something crazy, and they're always going to get something crazy. He's always
going to do something crazy. I think there's a certain degree of selfishness and immaturity about how we're talking about this politically, because, as I like, I'm going to say it again, this is a use it or lose it moment for American democracy if we do not stop him. All the people bitching right now about oh I didn't get everything I wanted in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Yeah, you notice, I'm not letting you go down this road of you know what I'm laying to you. I no, No, I'm not gonna let you. So what's happening here?
Is it?
Rick and I know each other well enough that I know he's going to go on this carvel style rant about how progressives need.
To get on board. And I'm going to tell you.
I'm not talking about progressives, Molly, I'm talking about the entire democratic apparatus, from top to bottom. Progressives, moderate centrist traditionalists, Clintonites, Obama types, everybody needs to get on board with this guy. There is not going to be another fucking nominee for the Democratic president.
There's not It's Joe Biden.
And the fact that people still are stabbing this guy in the back who work in the White House and the campaign, it is unbelievable.
And in part of like, y'all deserve Trump.
If you keep this shit up, now, nobody deserves Trump.
We're not going to say that, And like that is the thing. You know, now that we are here, people are allowed to be mad.
You know, that's okay.
I also think a really important thing is happening, which is that one of the things that Biden administration has been really good about is listening to people, really good about listening to people. So when they've said, when they've said we want student debt, he's gone and tried different creative ways to cancel student debt, despite the fact that we have a Supreme Court the very right wing, far
to the right of the normal American human in the world. Sure, So, I mean, I think you know, they want to ban abortion, they want to ban abortion pills, they want to ban anything they don't like. They want to use the Comstock Act. I mean, they're basically the Heritage Foundation. If the Heritage Foundation were severely and terminally Christian in a way that is profoundly religious and cultish. Okay, is that fair when they're not having orgies, when we're not.
Having orgies in Florida, I am not an orgy goer or a tender or viewer.
Share share often.
There was a bill apparently that even the Republican leadership in Florida in the House said no. Apparently one of these guys in the House said, we want to acquire data from apps about women's periods so we can monitor them m hm, And the House leadership is like.
No, you're not bringing that bill forward.
Yeah, but the fact that that shit is out there, it's the Overton window, Molly. They're going to shove it and shove it, and they're going to keep doing it because at this point there is no like sanctity of life argument to be had here on their part. I'm trying to give them even the most generous interpretation because now it's down to little lady, I'm.
Going to tell you how to use that vagina of yours.
It is really getting to be very obvious and very ugly just how bad their attacks on women will be if they have full power.
Yeah, and we're seeing it happen firsthand, and it really is just profoundly disturbing. I'm going to ask you, now, this is going to be annoying to you, but it's something I've been wanting to ask you. The polls I touch to a lot of pollsters. They defend it. They say they are high quality poles, low quality poles, res mutant as I call.
Them resputant poles.
Those guys suck and their poles are low quality, but they're also created to help Donald Trump. But there are also high quality poles, which people point them out to me to show me that poles are not always wrong, and that this and that. But ultimately, all these poles are like a thousand people on the phone, right, Look, I mean it's all we have, so people are very attached to them. The methodology hasn't changed, right, it has changed.
Actually, it's tough rabicuely. Now.
Look, the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of polling in this country is hot garbage on top of a burning dumpster fire mountain filled with radioactive tires.
It is terrible.
It's terrible because back in the post Obama two thousand and eight era, we started thinking about how do you assess poles in aggregate, and we started assessing poles in aggregate. So you would have a low quality rest Museen pole and a high quality Mason Dixon poll or whatever. Okay, you'd add them all up and you do some mathematical jiggering on it, and you would end up with a polling average. Real Clear Politics does one. New York Times does one five point thirty a all. There are a
lot of polling averages out there. The Republicans discovered. Okay, I can go and form the x y Z Patriot polling company. I can do a poll, an online poll, or I can do a robodial poll for pennies on the dollar. They do this to flood the zone and make the aggregate number of polls in the mix, draw the numbers back to the framing they want, e g.
Pro Trump.
So polling averages have been corrupted somewhat. There is an awful, awful amount of people who want to have the interpretation of you know, this six hundred person poll gives you an accurate national picture down into the weeds of every single demographic.
It does not.
It simply does not. You've got to do things. It's the Depeche mode rule. Everything counts in large amounts. So you've got to do really big surveys. You've got to dig dig deep into using surveys that are verified from the voter file. You have to weigh them appropriately. There are so many steps in getting it right that the people very few people actually take the time or spend
the money to do it right and look. And also, most reporters are not mathematicians or statisticians or really first well, obviously, I mean your work that got you the field metal back in the days. But long story short, you know we're in a yeah, we're we're in a moment where polling is dubious and questionable. You have to do it in huge samples to get it right. You have to do it from the voter file.
And with so a lot of these poles are wrong, and a lot of the averages are skewed.
Yes, a lot of these poles are hot garbage. Yes, here's the other thing. If you have one rule, folks, if you have follow one single rule about polling, there are three tiers of indicative nature of polling. The best tier are likely voters, and the file is drawn from the voter file. Okay, not self identified likely voters, but actual likely voters. We know people, we can see your voter record, if you voted or not. We can't see the.
How you voted, but we can see if you voted.
How you voted.
We can see if you voted or not. Right, So likely voter polls from the voter file. Second tier is registered voters. Okay, then you're much mushier, and the third tier is called all adults. Don't even look at all adults poll. Just stop, don't and don't infer too much of any demographic group from any single poll unless it's an incredibly large sample inside the poll of that group.
So we see a lot of these polls. By the way, So you have a thousand person poll, okay, nationally, and you go out and they'll say, well, you know, voters eighteen to thirty they hate this or that. You're probably talking about sixty or seventy voters in that thousand person It's really hard for people to get the scale problem right when it comes down to that. So long story short, there are hot mess. They're all they're hot mess. We're in hell and we're all going to die.
Rick Wilson don't do drugs. I do not ever stay in school. Stay in school kids.
If the lady is from what's it called to ask you to join their orgy, you say no.
Never go to the Moms for Liberty orgy.
That's right. Never go to the Moms for Liberty Orgy. That should be the name of this episode.
Josh Green is a correspondent for Bloomberg BusinessWeek and the author of The Rebels Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, AOC and the Struggle for a New American Politics.
Josh Green, Welcome to Fast Politics.
Thank you for having me.
Thank you for coming. How do you go from the Devil's Bargain to this question?
So I spent twenty fifteen twenty sixteen embedded with Trump and Steve Bannon for the last book, which is all
about the rise of right wing populism. But I actually kind of come out of the lefty policy world and had always been interested in kind of left wing populism, and so, you know, it occurred to me as I was looking for the next book and never wanting to go back into the kind of sewers of maga world that I've been reporting in that you know, the financial crisis which I think kind of produced the backlash that led to Trump, also produced this big backlash on the
left that led to Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren AOC and yet because it hadn't put anybody in the White House yet, it had really been written about and explored, And so that's what I wanted to do in this book.
Yeah, I mean they're the same, but not at all the same.
Though the financial populism stuff is really interesting.
Who did you think was sort of the leader in that?
I think that the real leader, and that the real
kind of historical figure. When people look back on the last ten to fifteen years of politics on the Democratic side, they're going to look at with Warren because when the financial crisis hit, she at the time was a fairly unknown Harvard professor who got appointed to oversee the bank bailouts after two thousand and eight and turned this backwater oversight gig that had no real power or responsibility into a public platform to kind of push this brand of
left wing populism, economic populism that really hadn't existed in American politics in like twenty or thirty years. And I think she really sort of captured the dissatisfaction, the backlash that all sorts of people were feeling in the wake of a crisis where bankers got bailed out and folks on the middle class didn't. And you know, it seems like a million years ago now, but it turned her into this almost instant celebrity. I mean, she was a pioneer in how she used YouTube at Twitter, which were
new tools back then. You know, it led to a grassroots movement to kind of pull her into the twenty sixteen presidential election. And only when she opted not to do that and kind of made way for Burnandie Sanders, did her star and her significance begin to dim a little bit. But I don't think that democratic politics would
look anything like the way it does today. I don't think Joe Biden would be governing the way he's governing today if it hadn't been for Warren Bernie and then later on AOC Hmmm, that's so interesting you buy that.
I don't know. I mean, it sounds good, it's true.
I'm not arguing, but I just wonder, like I think of Bernie as sort of the person who was there first and who had been.
Preaching it the longest.
I mean, I feel like Warren sort of made that kind of populism acceptable.
I think that's exactly right.
I mean, I've been in Washington long enough that I remember Bernie Sanders back before he was Bertie Sanders. I used to work for the American Prospect in the Washington Monthly, which you know are kind of small Washington lefty policy magazines, and so I was super tuned in to Bernie and what he was saying back then. But the fact is, like almost nobody else was back then. They thought he was kind of a gadfly, like a wee, or he just wasn't like the mean Bernie that he became once
he started running for president. And I think that it took the financial crisis and the after effects the austerity and the job loss and the stress and the anxiety for people to kind of wake up and be open to a message, like an anti Wall Street message and even an anti establishment democratic message, because there really hadn't been one before. But then what he started started making sense. But I think Warren was really kind of the first celebrity. You know, she was the one that kind of broke
through the popular culture. As I write in the book, you know, she became a regular on John Stewart on the Daily Show. Was an important mechanism of communication and then which she decided not to run. In twenty sixteen, Bernie jumped in with, as you say, the same message she's been talking about for thirty years, only the difference was this time Democrats were primed to hear it. And you can see that in the way that his campaign just took off like a rocket ship.
No, I agree, And it's so funny to me as someone whose grandfather was basically Bernie Sanders, right. I mean, he was older, but he was a Communist, he believed in you know, he went to jail for the House of Non American Activities. I mean, he had all those sames. So when I would watch Bernie, I would think, like, American people are going to elect a Jewish guy who basically has the exact same political I mean, and that's
not a criticism. I meant I think my grandfather was in many ways ahead of his time, except when it came to Stalin.
He had a real soft spot in his art for Stalin.
But I mean, I'm very stuck on the two thousand and eight financial crisis because I watched it happen. I just couldn't believe that they were bailing out the banks and not the people, Like I just was shocked.
Well, to me, what you're getting at goes to sort of the context in which you're viewing Bernie. I mean I viewed Bernie before two thousand and eight the way a lot of people did, as just not an important figure, but that context and in the context for a lot of Americans I think changed radically, not just in two thousand and eight, but in two thousand and nine and ten and eleven, as these years of austerity kept.
Kind of dragging out. And you know, it's not just for.
Like college graduates who are graduating and do a shitty economy and thought, you know what, Bernie speaking truth, I'm going to get with that guy. It was a lot of blue collar workers too. I was in al Equippa, Pennsylvania last week reporting out a story basically like the iconic Pennsylvania steel town where the mill.
Shut down in the eighties and now they're building a new one. It's thanks partly to the infrastructure law.
But I was talking to these old steel workers there who are like, yeah, we were all for Bernie in twenty sixteen, because we're union guys, like he was the one speaking truth to power, like he was calling out the bullshit on Wall Street. And so I think that that had a kind of appeal post two thousand and eight that it might not have had two thousand and eight.
I think, I think the kind of the weirdness and like the grandpa look and all that actually added to his credibility because people are like, all right, this is not some slick politician putting on airs. This is like a crazy guy with white hair flying around, and like, you know, he's not going to get bought off the way that the other people will.
I really do, play deeply feel terrible about ask his But would Bernie have won?
I don't know that he would have, and I tend to think, given how close the election wound up being,
that he would not have won. But I think in a weird way, and I get at this at the end of the book that he has nevertheless sort of succeeded in in printing this like populous left agenda onto Joe Biden, who was a guy who could win, a safe guy, an old guy, a moderate, not somebody who's going to like scare the but Jesus out of Washington and not only got elected but was able to implement a lot of this stuff, some of it in a
biportisan way. I talked to a top White House official ex top White House official for the book who said to me, I will never say this on the record, but Joe Biden won the nomination, but Bernie and Warren really won the presidency. Like if you look at what Biden has done, especially in the wake of COVID when it came to like the stimulus package, which differed like one hundred and eighty degrees from the stimulus package after the Great Financial Crisis, right, Biden put up a big stimulus,
beefed up unemployment, aviction, free small business loans. You know, students didn't relieve all that kind of stuff. That didn't happen in two thousand and eight. It did happen when Biden got elected. And it only happened because this left populist movement had pushed over the intervening twelve years for it to happen, and people, even Joe Biden, who when I came to Washington in two thousand was still known
as the Senator from corporate America. Because you represented Delaware, Like the Center for Corporate America is taking the Sandors and Warrant agenda uneconomic populism implementing the White House.
You know.
I think that's a great victory for the left and even for Bernie Sanders, and I think that's one reason why you don't see Sanders anymore or warranting more out criticizing what Biden is doing, or running against him in twenty twenty four.
They're behind it, right, No, No, it's a really good point. I mean I have been on a panel where.
We've talked about how progressives are really supported because they're getting their legislative wins.
I mean that's yeah, with the net net there they are.
But the the thing that blows my mind is you look at Biden's support in like this latest mom Mouth poll and it's like creatoring and not just with Republicans independence, but Democrats like I think that they don't realize what a success Biden has been in terms of implementing the policy not just that he ran on, but that the progressive wing has been pushing all along.
Yeah, yeah, it's true, they are.
It is a real economic populist agenda, and I do think the reason Trump won was because he kept you know, he would just offer people whatever they wanted, right, I mean totally.
And back then he was an economic populist. I mean it was rhetorical and it turned out to be bullshit. But if you go back to the twenty sixteen campaign, he talked as much about Wall Street and globalists and all that kind of stuff as he did about immigrants, right, exactly, like that stuff has power. Economic populism is the unifying thread.
And you know, I argue that in the rebels is a unifying thread in democratic politics because it brings together not just moderates and liberals, but independence and even some of the Republicans, like the steelworker guys I was talking to, you know that are also Trump guys.
And so that's why I don't know.
I think if Biden is going to win, and if he's going to overcome these boll members and turn around, he's got to go full populist.
Right, the fucking polls are bullshit, And you know, a thousand people who pick up their phone, I don't want to talk to those people because I'm not picking up the phone if I don't recognize the number. Let's talk about AOC AOC was like capture the zeitgeist in twenty eighteen. I feel like she had that kind of news cycle where everyone got very excited about her and then they sort of got mad at her for not being this celebrity they fantasized she was. And now she's been a
bit quiet. Talk to me about the AOC trajectory.
See, I think in a lot of ways she's she's kind of one of the most interesting characters in the book, partly generationally because like if you look at her life story, which is in the book, she really is a product in a sense of the Great Financial Crash, Like she was the college graduate that graduated into like a shitty economy and was working a bunch of service jobs. It
was burned by student debt. What was interesting about her and like her effect as a politician is yeah, like she came in with a head of esteem and occupied Nancy Pelosi's office. Like, to me, that was the first thing it really gripped kind of the Washington press corps. It was like, holy shit, Like not only did she knock off Joe Crowley who we all thought was going to be the next speaker, but like she's serious about
she's occupying Pelosi's office. But I think what you saw happening over the next six months with AOC was, you know, she was in a new environment. She began to understand how Congress works, and being an effective congress person is
completely different than being an effective activist. My first book, which nobody read, was a book I co wrote without Henry Waxman, the famous Democratic congressman who passed so much of the landmark legislation shapes our world in the country today, and so many of those stories were about him quietly working behind the scene to like diffuse this critic or
that critic. And I think to AOC's great credit, even if it pisss off people on Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever who don't think she's being pure enough, she adjusted to being a congress woman in a way that has been like ridiculously effective. If you look at again, going back to Biden's record, AOC was all about a Green New Deal and climate legislation and lo and bold Joe Biden winds up passing like the biggest climate bill
in American history, three hundred plus billion dollars. It just wasn't like packaged that way, and it wasn't delivered in a way that dunked on Republicans. And so I think for a lot of people who follow lefty politics on a kind of a surface level, it just didn't feel like a big win, and so they're not as excited about it as they should be.
Yeah, I agree.
I mean I also think that like, we don't really know how excited anyone is. And the thing that I keep coming back to and the why, you know, when I do I do this podcast, I interview with gazillion people a week, thank god, but you know the truth is that there aren't that many people that I interview
who are actually like out there people. So I mean I had somebody on and she's talking to me about what it's like for poor women on the ground in Alabama, And there's a lot of America that we are just not, at least I am not engaging with on a regular basis. And so you know, all we see are these like thousand phone calls, which maybe that is dispositive. It doesn't feel like it is. So who else in this book should we know about? Who's interesting? And who's the book is?
It's really about these three characters, you know, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and AOC. But like what I've done, or what i've what I've tried to do is kind of smuggle in a history of the modern Democratic Party, like when it was that Wall Street first got its claws into Democrats, because you know, in the sixties and seventies, Democrats.
Were the party of workers, were the party of unions.
And then in beginning in nineteen seventy eight, which is sort of where the book starts, Jimmy Carter was having a terrible time with the economy. Kind of Wall Street slid in a side door and reshaped the party, giving rise to people like Bob Rubin, and all of a sudden you had Golden Sachs executives who not only ran the Republican Party but now had important positions in the Democratic Party too, And I think that helps explain why the party's values shifted in a way that ultimately wound
up with a two thousand and eight financial crisis. And that backstory helps to explain why people like Warren and Sanders are so important because in the eighties and nineties, like there really just wasn't a left populist wing of the Democratic Party. Democratic liberalism cared a lot about this stuff in the forties and the fifties, but beginning in the sixties, Democrats were more focused on women's rights, civil rights, environmentalism.
It took the crash in two thousand and eight to kind of open up this new wing of the party that I actually think has been a great thing because I think, like I said, economic populism is the unifying thread in democratic politics, and it really has to be going forward because if we wind up with Donald Trump is for Republican nominee in twenty twenty four, Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, then what we're really having is a ref random on whose version of populism does America want?
The right or the left, Trump's or Biden's. That's what I think is so important. And I try and spend a lot of time out talking to normal Americans to get out of Washington whenever I can. But I would say this, like, definitely what Biden has done is not connecting in a way that you would want it to if you're in the White House. But the other experience I have that might make me a little different than some of your guests. I work at Bloomberg, which is
a financial news company. So I am like inundated with this stuff all day long. Talk to a lot of economists, talk to a lot of Wall Street people, and to me, there's this like crazy dissonance between what those people are saying and what the poll numbers are saying. Like, the fact is Biden's response to the COVID crash worked brilliantly, especially if you compare it to the Great Financial Career, right,
and like that's not just partisan spent. If you look at the actual economics numbers today, we have record low unemployment, We've got record high stock market, We've got falling inflation, falling gas prices, consumer sentiment is turning around. Like everything in the economic numbers says it's about to be mourning in America again. The only thing it doesn't show is Joe Biden's poll numbers. And like, obviously Biden's not getting credit. Will he get credit? I think he actually might. I mean,
there's a delay effect with these things. We've got almost a year, but I mean, looking at these numbers, I know there's TikTok, I know there's a lot of numerism, but it really does feel like a vibe shift is coming that is gonna benefit Biden, because all of the numbers that I see, like at Bloomberg all day longer pointing in that direction, even the crappy ones like mortgage rates and all the stuff that are like burdening. You know, younger people people want to buy house. Those are getting
better too. Will they be better enough to get Biden reelected? You know, we'll see, but I kind of think they might.
Vibe shift Biden. Joshua agree, And I hope you come back anytime.
I would love to. Thanks so much for having me.
Brad Meltzer is the author of many many books, including the Latest Ordinary Peo Well Change the World.
I am Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Welcome back to Fast Politics. Brad.
I'm so happy to be here.
Your new friend.
But I really like you, and you know, I hate Boston, So for me to make a friend in Boston, that's like a huge, huge deal.
I started writing in Boston, but I don't live there anymore, so don't worry. You can hate Boston all you want.
I thought you guys lived there still.
We moved from there years and years ago, so we are now like every other Jew and here in Florida.
Wow, Oh yikes.
Trust me, Oh you know, by the way, the best thing about living in Florida is that when you travel the country like on book tour, is everyone gives you that look of like there was just a death in the family and says, how is it there? It's just fascinating.
So let's talk a little bit about this book.
Yeah, So, as you know, I usually write mysteries and thrillers, and I do nonfiction like the Nazi conspiracy and write about World War two and things like that. And there's no better segue than Nazis and murder to saying I've been writing children books for the past decade. And the truth was, Molly is I head kids, and my kids were looking at reality TV show stars and people who are famous for being famous and thinking that that's a hero. And I was like, I got to do better than that.
So we started writing a lot of kids books with that. I am Amelia Earhart, I am Abraham Lincoln, I am Rosa Parks. We've done over thirty books now, we've been doing it for ten years. We've done everyone from Jane Goodall to Billy jing King to you name it in between, Jim Henson, mister Rogers, and now it's the ten year anniversary, and we're out with our thirty second book in the series, and it's I am Ruth Bada Ginsburg and it's just a hell of a fistfight of a book. Tell me why,
because you know what our kids books do? You know their books for little kids you're like five years old to twelve years old, they are little cartoon versions of them. But what I do is I look for what my own kids need. And I have a daughter. The book asked the question how do you create change? Because one of the hardest things to change is what the world
thinks of you. And when Ruth Bade Ginsburg has grown up up in Brooklyn, New York, which is where I actually grew up, she loved the things that all these kids like, roller skating, riding bikes, playing games like stup ball, and she loved to read. But when she would read books, all the boys in the books she would read would be climbing trees and riding bikes and having adventures, and all the girls would sit around in pink dresses. And she's like, this makes no sense, Like I'd rather be
climbing trees than wearing a dress. It's her mother who saves her takes her to the library every Friday afternoon. They pick out five books and she loves you know, everything from like little women and obvious things to like Greek mythology. But she loves reading the kind of books that I now write, writing female heroes. She loves reading about Amelia Aarharp, Harriet Tubman, and she loves reading about Jewish heroes to kuno lam, you know, repairing the world.
And her mother gives her this lesson is every year on her birthday. Ruth Bita Ginsburg is a little girl all true used to go. Mother used to take her to the local Jewish orphanage and they give away ice cream to everyone, so she doesn't have her own party as a kid, which, by the way, my kids would absolutely revolt. But her mother teaches her, listen, it's better to help other people and better to you know, to deal with being a nice person. Then that's how you
really change the world. And Ruth Beta Ginsberg, when she's seventeen years old, her mother dies, but her mother gives her one of life's great lessons and there's nothing a woman can accomplish. And that's where we go in the book. You know the reason our books are become a fistfight for kids is I could tell my daughter, you know, you could be a Supreme Court justice one day, But that's a ridiculous, you know, it's like, how many kids
are going to really think? You know, it's like being president or he who would even want the job these days. But knowing that you can make the world a better place by being kind to other people, knowing that, you know, having someone say to you there's nothing that a girl can do is valuable stuff. And the book ends with to me one of my favorite lines we've ever worked on, and it says, you know, today they call me a trailblazer. This all written first person. It says, but the best
part of blaze in the trail is leaving tracks. And that means you're not just doing things for yourself. You're leaving a path for others to follow. So start with one voice and let it grow into a course. And it says, I'm Ruth Badeginsburg, Create a quality, create justice. And I love the fact that, you know, I want my daughter to get that lesson. I want my sons to get that lesson. And we know have seven million
people out there who have bought these books. Who have built libraries of real heroes for their kids, for their grandkids, their nieces, their nephews. And I love the fact we get to do that.
What do you sort of think of for young girls? I mean, do you think the sense with Ruth Bader Ginsburg is that she was sort of a created in existence that we didn't even know could exist.
I listen, I always test the books on my own kids. I didn't have kids to have a free focus group, but they will never stop giving me their opinions and what they can understand. And what every one of us, boy and girl understands is someone telling you you can't do that and just going, man, I want to do that, you know, And I know that sounds silly, but not everyone has, you know, the family, the parents, the friends or whatever to let that happen. I think that's what
books do you know. I was someone who grew up we didn't have many books in my house. My mom's only thing she read was the Star in the Inquirer because she thought that's where all the real news was. But you know, to me, there's a moment when you see Ruth bade Ginsburg in the book where she goes to Harvard into Columbia Law School, which is where I went to law school. And she said there were nine women five hundred men. There wasn't even a women's bathroom
in the main building. And that's what kids understand, right, They understand that, like basic stuff. There's a point where she goes to get a job and everyone says, you see this, you know guy saying we don't hire women. Another guy says, we don't hire Jews. Not that says we don't hire mothers with kids, because she had a kid at the time. Telling these stories. When you say things like oh she did this and then she was nominated here and this, kids don't care. They zone out.
But seeing when she was a little kid that she used to want to take woodworking in wood shopping when she was in school. But girls coudn't take woods shop. Girls had to take home ack. They had to do you know, the cooking class, and they had to do the sewing class. And she's like, what are you talking about? I hate this. I want to do the woodworking class. Kids understand that, you know, I mean, I remember my
daughter I had. My daughter was one of two girls on the little league team that I coached all boys, and I brought my daughter and I was like, look out, we're coming to play. And my daughter looked around and was like Dad. First she was the only girl, and then there was one of the girl who joined, and I said, get your bet, get your glove, let's go. And you know, it was important to me to just say that for some people, in some situations, you don't have that advantage. And what to me is this book
is just to remind people of their power. The crazy part is, Molly is I researched these books and start writing them, you know, a year and a half ago.
I don't know where the world's going to be. We just thought, you know, Ruth Beginsburg was the number one hero that kids were writing to me and begging for a book about number one bar nobody, and we've done obviously some of the big names, but she was number one, and so of course I included things about anti Semitism, how she faced anti Semitism when she was a little girl. She used to say that hatred is similar to injustice, that both are destructive fractures in our society we have
to repair. And that's what our mother taught her, you know, repair those fractures, don't just complain about them. They'll just bitch and moan about heir of the world. And I don't know where we're going to be with anti Semitism a year and a half ago. And I think that's I'll include this part because I think it's important for my kid. But man, we're still fighting this worse than
ever right now. You know, she's she's a hero always, but boy, right now, it seems like, you know, when we look at what's happening with abortion rights, when we look at what's happening with anti Semitism, when we look at what's happening with the way the country is divided. You know, she's someone who was confirmed with nearly one hundred percent vote in the Senate, and she's to me just a hero for perfectly where we are right now.
I mean, she's also how we got where we are right now.
But yes, I'm still mad at her for that. Listen, we've done. I am Billy jing King. Billy jing Ing spent two hours on the phone with me correct in her book. When we did. I am jing Goodall, Jing Goodall read the book, gave us all the things temper random book got on the phone with me, spend time correct and everything. Ruth Beginsburg is one of the few who I knew. I knew her a long time. Her daughter was one of my mentors in law school. I was a witness with with Justice s Ginsberg at a
friend's wedding. We signed their coutuba together. And I'm still like, why didn't you just leave a little earlier? I love Rador, but of course that's where we are.
So tell me the story of how you know my mom.
This is a crazy story. So it must have been like nineteen ninety seven. But that first year I become a writer, my first book is published. It's a thriller called The Tenth Justice. I'm out of Barnes and Noble. And this guy waits to the end of the line and he approaches me and hands me a little card preprinted, but it's really nice and it has a nice font on it, and it says be a part of cinematic history.
And it says the new Woody Allen movie is looking for special extras and you've been selected and we want you to be in this new Woody Allen movie. And my first thought is this is complete bullshit. This can't be real. Because when I used to work in the Senate Judiciary Committee, I was an intern. I used to take the Judiciary Committee station area. I used to use the pen sign and machine from the center. I write
to my friends. I would tell him they were being deported, and you know, I thought, this is just someone you know, payback on me. And I'm like, it's got to be faked. So I call a buddy of mine who I know is doing legal works for Woody Allen's film crew, and he says, no, this is real. Woody Allen personally picks out. He told me is extras to all of his films. The new movie is called Celebrity. They want real celebrities
in the movie quote unquote celebrities in the movie. And they picked you because they're doing a book party scene and they want real authors in the background. So here I am. I'm twenty seven years old, and I'm like, Woody Allen has just picked me. And again this is pre Woody Allen where he is today, of course, and so I'm just like, I gotta go down there. So
I was living in DC at the time. I fly to New York and the other person that they pick is Lorenzo Carcaterra, and they picked your mother and your mom and Lorenzo and I spend two days as extras in the Woody Allen movie Celebrity. We're hanging out with NOA Riot is there and Kenneth Brown is there, and they're now treating us like extras. They'reletting you know, they
keep us inside. They take us. All the extras are outside and we're kind of inside, and you know, we're talking to all the stars and we're talking all the people, and we're watching I've never been to a film in my life, and I'm like, this is the greatest. We are clearly the most important writers on the planet Earth right now. We've been selected person by Woody Allen. So
I'm sitting with your mom. We have these great two days together, and at the end of the two days we finally say something along the lines of like, so, how did you get the call to get here? You know, because we just started comparing notes and the one thing we realize is that I signed on that Barn's Noble where I got approached on like Tuesday. Lorenzo was there
on Wednesday, your mother was there on Thursday. It had nothing to do with anything at all about if we were the three schmucks in the right place at the right time. Whoever was in that Barn's Noble that week got invited and we were just like, oh my gosh, we were so self important, but your mom was super fun to hang out with. And that was literally the start of my career.
That is a great story and also such a great explainer of what it's like to be a writer, right, you think you're so special and in fact, and also what it's like to.
Be a human.
I mean, it was it was the best lesson, right. It was like it was like it took all my ego and lifted it all up here. I am, I've been I'm the chosen one. It's been revealed. And then it was like listen, schmuck, here's how here go back down the planet Earth. Then it was fantastic. But anyway, I know you and I have gone back and forth on Twitter and threads and everywhere else, but I was like, I always promised I would tell you what when we finally got on there on podcasts together.
It's a great story. Who's next? I am, Who's next?
Yeah, So we just did mister Rogers, which is like mister Rodgers is the one you can't complain about. You know, we'll definitely take some complaints for every once in a while we'll get books. You know, we've had our Rosa Parks book and our Doctor King book were banned.
That's insane from.
What in Pennsylvania. They had nothing to do with the content. There were about one hundred, two hundred books that were selected as being good for talking to your kids about race. This is about a year and a half ago, and it was like the I Am books. It was Sonya Sodo, My Yours book, it was Malala's book. They were, you know, just kind of bread and butter. These were good books
to teach your kids. And what the school board did is said, we want to read these books before we give them the kids and okay them, which to me is actually a fine thing. Go read the books, check them out and make sure they're you know, whatever they are. But what the fast one at the school or pulled is that they took a year and the books still weren't read. You can read I Am Rosa Parks in ten minutes. It's not like reading Warm Peace. And basically
what happened was is they did it on purpose. They were What started as a little freeze to hold the books became a band because librarians couldn't get them. No one knew whether they could order them. And that's how they shut the books out without ever having to take a vote. It was such cheap politics. So I got a call from CNN, from MSNBC, even from Fox News called me and said this is nonsense. Can you come
and talk about it? And when when CNN and Fox and MSNBC all agree, you know, someone screwed up right, Like it's one of the few times where you're like, this is you know, even even those three will agree. They asked me to speak at the special school board, meaning I, you know, it's part of the pandemics, like
zoom in. I give my speech where I've convinced again I've saved democracy as we know it, and then all the students start speaking, and these students who start saying things like you know, how dare you ban these books? Holding up our books and saying, you know, these are books that we care about. How dare you ban these books of people that look like me? Because every book on the list was either by someone who had a brown or black face or was you know, written about
someone who was and these kids were so impassioned. By the time they were done, they completely re voted. The school board had to take a vote right there. They shamed him into putting the books back on the shelves, and they saved the day. I had nothing to do with it, but we fought. You know, our Billy jing King book just got selected in Florida, of course in Florida, and we fought against it, and it's now back on the shelves. It got unanimously voted back on the show.
So that's what we're fighting now. So we still keep that fight going. We am one of the people who's responsible. We're bringing pen America to open a Florida office to fight these book bands because I use the money that we make on these books, and I basically donated to these places that will fight book bands like this. So the next one that we're doing is in time for the Olympics. We wanted to do Jesse Owens and I
decided this again a year and a half ago. Did not think we were still going to be fighting Nazis in twenty twenty four, but here we are still fighting Nazis. So Jesse Owens comes next. You know, we've done everyone from Free to Collo to Albert Einstein to you know, anyone you can name in between, and it's been one of those things for me. That's my way of fighting back. I think, as you know, it's sometimes so hard to
change adults' opinions. But give me some kids. And we now have seven million kids who have read our books. And I love the fact that we're creating this little army of people who have values of perseverance and kindness and some compassion because God knows we need it right now.
Thank you so much, Brad.
No, thank you for finally doing this, and you got to send my love to your family.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely will.
No.
No moment infect Hi.
It's our moment of fuckery and it's just me all alone because I forgot to ask Rick to do it, but also more importantly, because I wanted to take a minute too. Thank you guys for listening. We had this break. It was probably the last break we're going to have before this election. I talked to a lot of people, I took a little trip, and a lot of you listen to this podcast, and I'm really, really, really grateful.
I think that we're doing really cool stuff, doing these local elections, trying to talk to people, trying to really get a sense of what's going on.
And since we're back from.
Vacation and I'm very introspective, I would like, instead of having a moment of buck gerty today, to just thank you guys for listening. We work really hard on this podcast, Jesse and I, and we do a gazillion interviews every week and it's really cool to know that you guys are listening.
So thank you.
That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday to hear the best minds in politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again, thanks for listening.