well we had uh put this podcast to bed on friday a few hours before the uh news of justice ginsberg's passing and i wanted just to add something before you hear the show that we had put together with james carville and philippe rinus i like almost anyone who pays attention to her justice system was a huge admirer of justice ruth bader ginsburg i was a member of the judiciary committee during my years in the senate and though i wasn't a lawyer i did play one in a sketch and i had a very deep appreciation for who ruth bader ginsburg was and uh for the soaring contributions that she made not just in expanding the rights of women but for her being just a warrior for economic and environmental justice for voting rights her fierce opposition to citizens united and just her amazing energy and tenacity and brilliance she was a powerful writer you may remember her famous descent of the just horrible 5-4 shelby county decision that unraveled the 1965 civil rights act because it got rid of pre-clearance the pre-clearance remedy was basically that any changes in election laws made by states and other jurisdictions say counties which had been shown to be discriminatory in the past any any changes in election laws that those jurisdictions were proposing had to be reviewed and approved or pre-cleared by the justice department before they could take effect because these were places that had had a history of making it harder for oh say people of color to vote any changes they made in their election laws had to pass scrutiny now uh chief justice roberts uh wrote the opinion for the majority which got rid of pre-clearance he said that the wrote that the pre-clearance remedy had worked so well that they were no longer just there's no longer any need for it that has shown to be complete [ __ ] and since and in her dissent at the time justice ginsburg wrote that quote throwing out pre-clearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you're not getting wet and she's been proven to be exactly right and those jurisdictions have gone back to systemically making it harder for people of color to vote the conservatives on the court have shown absolutely no interest in revisiting the decision and and republicans in congress have absolutely no interest in rewriting the law in the way it would need to be rewritten in order to re-establish pre-clearance uh it's just one of the millions of reasons that we have to win this election and both the presidency and take back the senate and speaking said i cannot tell you how maddening all of this is and just how disgusting i find mitch mcconnell who blocked merrick garland in the way he did with the entirely bogus rationale he gave the so-called biden doctrine which was just a lie and what he's doing now gives complete proof to that why and of course he he doesn't care believe me if you think mitch mcconnell is a sick cynical ugly monster well he's just much much worse than that and to get some perspective on that you might want to go back to my podcast with howard feynman who's been covering mcconnell since howard worked for the louisville courier general in the mid 70s it it it was a really good podcast you know for for a change so let's go uh to my interviews with james carville and philippe reinus who was hillary clinton's sparring partner in preparation for the 2016 debates and i i just want to add one last thing which i've got to include in my intro to philippe during the interview i did get a little emotional when i was talking about how so many kids can't go to school because of covet and my anger is a trump for the completely irrational response he's had to the pandemic and one of one of the reasons i get emotional in that part is that i have grandchildren who are paying the price as are just millions of children right now for his incompetence dishonesty his negligence so here is what you would have heard if we hadn't gotten that terrible news on friday night [Music] hey everybody i got a great one today you know for a change but this one really does represent a change because i'm doing two separate interviews both looking forward to the big debate coming up you know when uh david axelrod uh did the podcast about a month ago he said that the first debate will be the single most critical event of this campaign so i have two guests who know a little bit about preparing a presidential nominee for debates james carville part of the consulting team that got bill clinton elected to the white house twice and philippe reinis who played donald trump in hillary clinton's debate prep in 2016. he's going to tell us how you prepare to be a candidate's debate sparring partner when her opponent in the ring will be donald trump and what he learned from that intense experience and he gives a really a unique perspective on how joe biden himself should prepare for the most important two hours of his and maybe our lifetimes first i want to touch on last week's podcast with lori garrett and andy slavic which was about the vaccine which became about uh how we no longer have any baseline of truth uh in this country anymore we we have a president who disgorges a constant torrent of lies whether they're about science or russia or as taxes or law order or biden or you know what he said five minutes ago you know in 1995 i wrote a number one new york times bestseller titled rush limbaugh is a big fat idiot and other observations and it was really about right-wing lying there's a reason donald trump bestowed the presidential medal of freedom on rush limbaugh the same medal with which martin luther king cesar chavez and the astronauts of apollo 13 were honored without rush there would be no president donald trump a a few years ago i wrote another new york times bestseller lies and the lying liars who tell them a fair imbalance looked the right and that was about fox news and bill o'reilly and sean hannity and ann coulter and dick cheney and people at the time they said to me you can't call people liars and i said well they're they're lying mark twain uh has often been credited with the famous truism a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on uh with the internet that became literally true and we have the right-wing alternative media just gushing obscene bile and malicious effluent into our digital information system you know on the second day of the trump administration when kellyanne conway announced that the administration would be putting out alternative facts we thought that was laughable but she was telling us how it was going to be you you can't run a functioning society if you don't agree on facts this this of course has been going on forever there weren't too many kings or emperors or autocrats who bothered to be scrupulously honest things were especially bad for example before the enlightenment but i grew up in a time where at least society agreed on certain facts science is based on evidence we agreed that the earth was round and what the force of gravity is and so we are able to send a man to the moon we we have the west coast burning scientists are telling us that because of global warming the east antarctic ice sheet is now vulnerable to collapse and would raise sea level by 10 feet around the world if it if it melted entirely but the president said in california this week that things are going to get colder because winter is coming and that the fires in the west coast could have been prevented if folks in california and in oregon had just raked the forest there is so much at stake in this coming debate but that's why i do this podcast i believe that if vice president biden listened to my two guests today that it will help his debate performance and that could very well determine the outcome of this election the second most important election of our lifetime the first being the last election which we blew and we cannot let that happen again so let's first go to james carville now you'll hear we had some technical difficulties and a couple of interruptions during this but i think you'll find those actually entertaining also we begin our conversation talking about james daughter maddie with whom i had delightful texts back and forth on her dad's phone and we learned that mandy is engaged to get married and that she and her fiance had to delay their wedding because of of covid but james very proudly mentions that maddie worked for new orleans mayor mitch landrieu and that she worked on the first draft of a speech that he gave a couple years ago when he took down a few of the confederate statues there in the city of new orleans and this was one of the most powerful and moving speeches i've ever heard and her fiance did the final draft of the speech with the mayor so before i get to james i i know he would want me to play just a few short minutes of this beautiful important speech this is mitch landrieu from may 2017. there is a difference you see between remembrance of history and the reverence of it for america new orleans it has been a long and winding road marked by tragedy and triumph but we cannot be afraid of the truth as president george w bush said at this at the dedication ceremony for the national museum of african-american history and culture and i quote a great nation does not hide its history it faces its flaws and it corrects them so today i want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the lost cause of the confederacy but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding each other so let's start with the facts the historic record is clear robert e lee jeff davis pgt beauregard statutes were not erected to just honor these men but as part of a movement which became known as the cult of the lost cause this cult had one goal and one goal only through monuments and through other means to rewrite history to hide the truth which is that the confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity first erected 166 years after the founding of our cities 19 years after the civil war these monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of the confederacy it is self-evident that these men did not fight for the united states of america they fought against it they may have been warriors but in this cause they were not patriots these statutes are not just stone and metal they're not just innocent remembrances of a benign history these monuments celebrate a fictional sanitized confederacy ignoring the death ignoring the enslavement ignoring the terror that it actually stood for and after the civil war these monuments were part of that terrorism as much as burning across on someone's lawn they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in the shadows about who was still in charge in this city that just gives me chills do yourself a favor and google that speech and and give it a listen but first enjoy the rest of this podcast with my two guests a little later philippe reinis who studied donald trump far too long intensely than is healthy for a human being but first the raging cajun james carville so i uh texted you to set this up right right and then i i get this text uh senator franken james eldest daughter here texting on his behalf while he eats his dinner if he doesn't do your podcast we'll send him back to the swamp he hatched from now uh how old is your eldest daughter she is 25 and she is wants to be getting married next month but obviously we're not having a wedding in a particular note she went to work for the mitch landrieu the mayor new orleans and a part of application was to write a draft of the speech to remove the confederate monuments wow she did and the guy that she's marrying is a it was worked for [ __ ] for 11 years is actually from chicago and he was the chief speech writer and he wrote the last draft that was a brilliant brilliant brilliant speech that was a beautiful speech and i'll always be proud of my family's part in that speech because uh most people don't realize this but my great grandfather was actually a soldier in the union army and was a republican member of the louisiana legislature so wait a minute when did he go to move to louisiana after the war oh after the war so there's a union soldier okay that makes sense it's kind of doubtful that he saw any action okay well if you ever run for office don't say that the story were told he had to ask him when he came to louisiana i could never figure well why would you come to louisiana if you had afro i just let me just go to arizona or something you know yeah the truth is he was actually a carpetbag and of course his winner is complicated as things are hold on just a second let me tell them to pull off the vacuum cleaner here thank you hello okay james now is uh clarifying something with uh folks around him or maybe looking for a family member we we don't know but uh i'm all right i'm back it's it's the sounds of a fluence somebody is vacuum cleaning ramona okay we're good so far this is just gone flawlessly yeah it couldn't be any better so um so your daughter sounds like the spawn of james carville and mary madeline turned out pretty good i i'm quite proud of her my youngest year she is and uh she's a very uh the arguments we get in are i am pretty left and she's pretty left of me well i know that and you grew up in louisiana obviously and so uh kind of a racist state would you say yes yeah yeah there's a there are only three things i teach my students race water and oil it is it is the history of the state and there's still the history to stay and race and water are linked they're joined at the hip every time something happens when i mean water i mean coastal erosion i mean hurricanes i mean flooding i mean all of the things that come with being part of a culture in a low-lying state that is affected by climate but probably twice the rate of any state not named florida in the united states i also think that oil and water are related because the incidence of cancer in places where there are toxic chemicals in the water is much higher they're also related in another way louisiana has lost an enormous amount of land and a significant contributor to the enormous amount of land has been all companies coming in digging canals in louisiana marsh and then abandoning the canals which cause if you just stop and think about basic physics they collapse and they have more and more salt water intrusion the greatest ongoing environmental disaster bar none by factor of 10 is the loss of land on the louisiana coastline and you cannot imagine the long-term effects for the rest of the nation particularly from let's just say minnesota minnesota's goods basically get to the world market through the port of new orleans so are you going to get them out that's it and that is true for two-thirds of the country you have to have a southern terminus on the mississippi river how are you go how are you going to get minnesota soybeans or minnesota manufactured products or anything else to anywhere in the world if you don't send them down the river you can't so are you saying that this erosion has jeopardized the port of new orleans of course it has it's jeopardized it's going to jeopardize the entire floor of commerce in the middle part of the united states it absolutely will okay that's something frightening to add to my list of hormones frightening the real it is a real scary scary thing that is going on and it's been going on for a long time and it of course the people that are going to suffer the most from this is always are african-american people i guarantee you two-thirds to three-quarters of all african-americans live close to the mississippi river and there if the the water was against the levy in baton rouge for 217 days they just that's just the kind of a fact that people you know really need to appreciate there used to be a sign on a urinal in minneapolis that said please piss and urine on louisiana needs drinking water right there's actually some truth to that and it was obviously processed before you drank it out but now minnesota's access to world market basically passes through louisiana my house for a long time thank god for the louisiana purchase right good move uh thomas jefferson violating i believe the constitution [Laughter] but he had a big opportunity to increase the size of the united states just put me on hold just one minute okay okay uh james is now uh taking a phone call and uh clearly has hello not done the normal um clearing of his time most of my guess let's see if we can listen in what are you saying okay let me do that hold on now hold on i'm doing it hey mary jordan oh me i believe that my i think i heard mary that might be mary madeline he's calling to or there may be another marriage common name uh common name both in louisiana and actually all over the united states many countries maria is uh used uh i'm sorry this is just let's keep going no no that was uh we overheard some of it right we don't need that for calling okay let's go okay okay how important is this first debate you've obviously coached bill clinton for debates and uh so i i talked to axelrod about this about strategy do you have any thoughts on that yeah i have many but my principal thought is this first of all he's going to start with his normal [ __ ] he's going to say all kinds of things right and all that vice president donald needs to do is look at right nine said you have been documented you've lied 22 418 times i am not going to spend my time pointing out you just adding five more to that i'm gonna look at more people and say simply we are four percent of the world's population we have 22 of the deaths that is a number that is not good now let me tell you what i'm gonna do stay out of his [ __ ] and just every time you know if i'm a boxing fan just admit it as soon as he dropped his right hand step in through a ferocious combo and get out and that's all you have to do just just keep get five statistics that you go in with that are devastating say them and then turn around and tell people how you're going to change america he thinks that you know having four percent of the popular you know that population to death ratio is over five to one he thinks that's good i don't i'm not going to argue with him i'm going to tell you how we can reduce it and not only that and this should be emphasized other countries have opened up and this has devastated our economy because of your right in action go in put a couple of things knock the crap out of it move out the problem that i i think divide again people come up to me and say james biden hadn't done anything dumb he has not he's run i think a good campaign he didn't have much of a campaign in the primary but they have not done anything done what he needs pushing forward is a memorable line in a memorable moment that people can stick to and he doesn't have to force it it's not but you know he there's got to be an opportunity where he says something that thick in the back of people's mind how about something like uh you know one of the problems with you is that you're a pathological liar not no no i i mean just point out i tried that one foul the the point with him is you think america's doing the best it can or you think america's doing great i think we're not doing well at all it's an 80 wrong track country right and if you lose sight of that you accept the way the country is today i do not i think we're a lot better than this i love the line he says um he keeps telling us that if he was president you'd feel safe well he is president whether he knows it or not that's fine i mean he has to own all this and that's obviously what he will make him do in the debate he's the president and i'm not he thinks we're doing great i do not you only have 80 of the people that agree with you basically what you're saying is uh him wants him you know just on okay you've lied this many times uh that was a lie there was another one there have been several so far uh axelrod suggested a website that he could send people to that we'll be fact checking but then move on to this what i want to do and this is what you've done this is there will be so many fact checkers there will be fact check in real time there will be fact check in ways that you you cannot even imagine will be so much fact checking going out there'll be fact checkers on the screen there'll be fact checkers online they'll be thinking you can't even imagine there's going to be a fact checkers wet dream let them do their job again it is by my account he's got five more five more facts he got wrong but i'll let them flush that out you know just just say i've counted five but i'll let the fact you know to people that are interested in facts you can you can do it i'm interested in the future very nice very nice i like that my thanks to james carville up next my conversation with philippe reinus the man who played donald trump to prep hillary clinton for her 2016 debates okay so felipe what do you call the person who plays the opposite who is there for the debate prep and plays the opposite person so you know every four years assuming both candidates agree which even donald trump did in 2016 and did and is doing in 2020 there are three general election debates and you know it sounds crazy but for as much as we see both candidates at that time trump and hillary and this time biden and trump they're actually never together at the time we couldn't even remember the last time hillary and trump had been together she thought it might have been his wedding 10 years earlier it's possible biden and trump haven't been the same place at the same time since trump was inaugurated so you know there are 100 million people seeing the two of them for the first time and you know it's a big moment and you want to get it right and if you're a sane rational thoughtful human being you actually practice for it and the point of debate prep it isn't to memorize answers that that's not how any public servant really operates and i'm sure you can relate to that if you have one goal it is when your candidate walks into the ring that they're not hearing anything of that 90 minutes for the first time that they've had a chance to think through every possibility every answer it's it's like batting practice you know you're getting out the kinks you're not killing yourself to put it over the wall but you're you're warming up and a lot of that is sitting with your team and talking through things very just broadly about points you want to make and points that might be made against you but then there is a part of it where you are actually standing at podiums pretending to debate your opponent and since donald trump was not available and you want to be around donald trump as little as possible i played donald trump so about eight times over the period of six weeks before the first debate so we're talking september of 2016. hillary and i would stand behind podiums that were precisely measured apart the same way that the rules called for and it was pretty cool because the backdrop we used was the set that barack obama's team had built in 2012 for him to practice against mitt romney they took it out of storage and gave it to us and we were at a hotel in westchester and we would always start these debates at 9 00 p.m because that's when the debates actually started it was a full-on simulation and we wouldn't break character for the 90 minutes you know the team would watch and then when it was over you would discuss it i have to say i have a new appreciation for how tough it is just standing there especially when you're a smart person like hillary like you where it's the toughest thing thank you thank you thank you thank you very much like like hillary like obama it's interesting you mentioned obama because obama by all accounts had a catastrophic terrorist debate against mitt romney terrible we know and in fact axelrod and i discussed that as well and what we discussed was how incumbent presidents almost always have a terrible first debate because they haven't debated that year obviously and also because they're just uh they're cocky i've been president well it's an unpleasant experience you're sitting in a room with 10 to 15 snot-nosed staffers like me who are taking advantage of the situation to take out all their pent-up you know resentment at you for working for them for 15 years you didn't pronounce that name correctly uh you skipped over this part you forgot to say that oh that answer was pretty good philippe why am i thinking that trump's team isn't quite as snot-nosed and to him as you were to hillary so it's interesting to say that because his prep as i understand it both from what was reported but also knowing someone who was part of it is that he wouldn't prep so what they would do is they would sit around his bed minister club in new jersey and in between him eating fast food and ranting about whatever chris christie would throw in a sentence here there that was meant to elicit a response and fast forward four years i think he just this week said on fox and friends that his debate prep essentially consists of what he does every day with the press the sparring he does and that is a bad idea for a lot of reasons but here's the thing and and this is what i want to ask you about i want to ask you a number of questions how did you prepare um i want to ask you about what surprised you about him coming out because he is not like any other debater for example if you debate an issue if you debate an issue with him like healthcare or something he knows nothing about it so his answer is just going to be like his answers at press conferences he'll just go off wherever he wants to go exactly when i saw the first debate with hillary i went oh it's over it's over she just clobbered him that's i've never seen anyone give such a bad debate performance and evidently i was wrong so what i want to know is what surprised you about that and then what surprised you about the reaction to it in the aftermath you know my expertise was basically what we all have experienced over the last four years i just had a year head start um and in some ways i had a couple of decade head start growing up in new york like i had a very specific view of him that is an accurate view but what i what i did to start was well first off i did the you know talking about drama i did the costume stuff i told my tailor i needed a blue suit i need to look like donald trump but not for halloween like i needed legitimate he knew exactly what i meant he made me a two baggy suit with the cut cuffs too long and uh the two long red tie i went on ebay i found trump watch you know i'm not six nine or whatever he pretends to be so i got lifts and it was more for me to get in character than full hillary but most substantively i watched all the republican primary debates or 11 of the 12 because he didn't participate in one and i watched each one three times one uh just the whole way through a couple i had seen just as a you know regular you know pedestrian watching tv once just listening to him and whoever he was having exchange with and once uh standing in front of the tv behind a podium and trying to mimic his hand motions with the uh with the volume off and what i noticed more than anything was how different his speaking style was so distinctly different so first off it really reinforced the idea of him being different the typical debate it would be hi i am the moderator i'm here at university of wisconsin and i want to welcome our candidates first question is to mr trump uh mr trump you said this crazy thing yesterday what do you say in response oh hi i'm donald trump and here's an even crazier answer to your question thank you mr trump let's move on to marco rubio senator rubio what is your immigration plan well thank you for asking me that question i'm so glad to be here in wisconsin go badgers i love cheese let me say that when i first joined the senate i was one of the 19 co-sponsors of s927 i later became a primary sponsor of 9207 blah blah blah blah typical senator public servant answer and moderator would say mr trump what do you say in response and he's like i don't know what he just said i'm gonna build a wall i'm gonna build a big wall tall wall it's gonna be beautiful it's gonna be so beautiful and people can't get in i mean the right people will get in they'll have a door and it has a weird effect of actually sounding honest right now i'm talking to you and i'm talking to you differently than i talk to my close friends to my family to my cats we don't walk around saying everything on our mind i don't go into an interview and saying look i don't feel like doing this just give me the damn job and there's there's a cost to that there's a pause there's you know rational human beings think about what they say when you remove that which is very hard to do and the hardest thing that i had to learn if you remove that because there are no consequences to what you say almost like a george costanza you know do everything backwards situation life becomes very easy and you come across as very genuine you know if you ask donald trump about social security he doesn't want to talk about social security there was one debate in the primaries that i watched where he got a question about social security and within 17 seconds he had segue from social security through some digression to north korea i mean that is remarkable donald trump is a bad debater that does not mean it is easy to debate him or to beat him actually i'm gonna give you what if uh let's say biden comes out questions about health care okay now i mean this should be a slam dunk for biden the aca guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing conditions at no extra cost and it did just a whole variety of great things covered 20 some million new people trump said he was going to replace it with something terrific he didn't when the bills failed in in congress he said who knew health care was complicated well puts pretty much everyone knew that health care was complicated so this is going to come up in the debate i'll tell you why he will be difficult so he will say exactly what you said and you're going to say putts everyone knew it was tough he will point to a few things one that he would have gotten the repeal had loser john mccain not turned his thumb down and ruined the vote and what he will pound on is that you being joe biden you lied when you said you can keep your doctor now he's not going to answer the question i mean there is no he did not repeal obamacare but he's not going to go down that road he's going to latch on to why did you lie and it's very possible that the moderator in this case the first moderators kirsh wallace of fox which i don't think is great for trump but chris wallace might say mr vice president what about that you did lie i didn't obama did yeah it might look like oh my god joe biden is telling the truth i mean that's the thing he's going to hem and ha and then you have this gap now we're four years later and when donald trump stepped on stage with hillary clinton at hofstra university then he had never debated one-on-one before and watching the primary debates it was clear you know these debates are two and a half hours but you don't talk the whole time there are ten of you on stage you're the center of attention but i had clocked it he had never talked for more than 22 minutes in one debate you know he would take a little mental siesta in between things and here you were fast forwarding to a debate where just in simplest terms you have 45 minutes she has 45 minutes i knew he'd be a fish out of water for a large chunk of it i also knew that he was not good with staying on the clock which in the republican primaries in any primary there's you know ostensibly a clock but it's not really enforced the first thing i said when i got the gig i said to the broader team and to hillary i said look a hundred percent of what i say is going to sound bonkers but ninety percent of it he has said five percent he has said but hasn't really repeated he might have said it on howard stern or some straight interview the remaining five percent i'm guessing and i think everyone's like yeah okay whatever they were really concerned about about me and in the first debate it's about 10 minutes in and we were in this auntie room at hofstra and um everyone turned around at one point and looked at me and finally understood what i meant because i had said something about healthcare and i'd use the name i'd use the name you know jonathan gruber as someone who had told the truth accidentally told the truth about uh obamacare and they thought i was making up the name they thought i was making up all of it and it just realized now most importantly hillary is on stage thinking oh my god i've heard this i've heard this routine about jonathan gruber and i know how to answer and you know it's at that point you're like this is what prep is for that she has had this conversation before you know hillary when she came off stage someone said every time you look at him do you see philippe and she said no but every word he says i hear fully and the first time we we debated the first time we had a mock debate when it was over she just wanted to hit me over the head now i one of the reasons i was so good at this is because i had worked for her at that point but for 15 years and just my mere presence antagonizes her like like the idea that she was on stage with me as an equal is just enough to make her head boil but when it was done she said god he's annoying you are so annoying trump is just so she had like blurred all the pronouns and me and him and i thought that's exactly what i need to do so okay so there he came back with something you had told her was one of the many things that he had said over and over again uh what surprised you in in that that debate in the first debate the only thing that surprised me was just exactly how bad he was you know i i there wasn't anything he did to surprise me but that in itself was surprising let's talk about the health care question if he comes back with it would have passed if uh mccain had voted for it he could say well you know why he voted against it because it didn't protect people with pre-existing conditions because people who had health insurance under the aca would have lost their health insurance and yeah because it would have gotten rid of medicaid expansion that's why john mccain voted against it and i believe two other republicans that's why it went down and that's why in 2018 we flipped 41 seats on health care because what you guys came up with was so horrible something like that well yes except if you just write down what you just said it's a lot of dense policy you know medicaid blah blah blah pre-existing conditions pre-existing conditions is something that everyone understands i i think what joe biden has to do is not let donald trump get away with the amount of nonsense that he probably will get away with 90 of trump will sit there and say look you're upset because i'm winning this debate look uh you know what i would ask trump tell me if you think this would be effective do you remember your one your one policy proposal on health care from a 2016. do you remember what it was i bet you don't i've gotten more done in four years then you got done in eight and that you would get done as president everyone knows it everyone knows yeah yeah about 12 million people have lost their health care their health insurance that's what you got done you know what you're one because you don't remember your one proposal here's what it was to allow insurance companies to sell insurance across state lines and guess what you don't remember it because it was such a stupid idea not one republican bill included that why because it's legal to do it already in six states and guess how many insurance companies have taken those six states on have done it none zero zero i bet you don't even know why they don't they don't do it and then you can explain why that is the right answer the question is could hillary clinton at the time or now more specifically with your example could joe biden deliver that answer effectively and not go so out of body that it becomes so problem so look if you go into a debate thinking i need a new strategy tonight i got to be different then you have larger problems ideally a debate is you're being the guy that got you the nomination that has you in the lead that people seem to like i've seen buyers i've seen him angry i think he can do that i've seen hillary anger oh i believe me i've seen it too i've been on the receiving end of it if biden goes in and he's a different person like a lot of people you could you could dumb this down to people biden's doing well because they don't like trump but they also might like biden because he's so different than trump like you couldn't have an equally boastful blowhard and think that people are going to choose that one they might say hey if we have to get stuck with this kind of person i'll go with donald trump because you can't out trump trump biden's a dignified guy i mean he's got ramrod straight posture he looks the part he's got great ties if he is out of sorts it's possible that people say oh joe biden's worried about something saying to him look you lied to the american people about covid we have nearly 200 000 people dead we have five percent of the world's population and over 20 percent of the world's fatalities that's on you and you knew what was happening and you denied that it was happening ladies and gentlemen there's a thing called the truth and one of the fatalities of this president is the truth this guy can't tell the truth he doesn't know what the truth is he's on tape you will hear that but you're not going to hear that after every lie there's a limit to how many times you can do that now hopefully you hear it up front and hopefully you hear it in a way that adds on to it where everything you're about to hear you need to know is probably a lie because that's what he does the best that sounds obvious but that is a an aggressive thing that joe biden has to do you know again it's different when you can he do it as much in sadnesses and anger because he'll have his own time he'll have a minute or minute and a half or two minutes and can he say there's no baseline for truth in this country anymore you are having a constructive debate while someone is having an unconstructive argument that's more akin to a rant or nervous breakdown the question is not going to be what what donald trump shows up the question is going to be what joe biden shows up because you know to the extent that donald trump says i'm using my daily sparring as debate prep that guy on stage is not gonna do well i mean the guy is a mess and it's very hard to follow him his language you know he digresses four years ago he felt no need to defend himself all he does now is feel a need to defend himself i don't think he expected to win he was building his brand and so being blustery and doing what he did was it was no lose for him so he wasn't under the kind of pressure that biden's under the pressure right now of saving the world as far as i can tell but i have to differ with you it's it's insane not to go into this debate angry at him oh i i i totally agree you got to call [ __ ] i mean there's no question about that and you got to call [ __ ] in a direct way not in a these are untruths i mean this can't be watching cnn a year ago or the or new york times where using the word lies is somehow like the l word how can you not be furious now you can be furious also in in sadness because this has been tragic but look at i have grandchildren my grandchildren can't go to school they can't be with their friends they can in other countries who handled this right this is going to affect these kids forever this is a tragedy we've lost 200 000 people we are five percent of the world's population you bungled this so badly you're 100 right now joe biden actually does have that in him he does and he can do it in a slightly different way but the anger has to be there because yes the american people should be everyone should be furious at this man listen and if you're not furious about that how about calling everyone whoever was in our military suckered a loser about that if i were joe biden i'd go in there and i would say chris i yield all my time to donald trump and let him talk for 90 minutes because that donald trump that we've seen for four years but particularly the last year and even the last month has been different and he's not that donald trump is not winning this race so to some extent you you want to find a weird balance between exactly what you're saying calling things out and not taking any crap but also prevent defense and that's a weird combination i like that strategy though of saying you know what go ahead keep talking keep talking yeah joe bite you're not fighting joe biden on this joe biden when he announced her president it was via video and he went right at trump now that sounds so obvious before then the debate in 2019 was whether or not these candidates should be talking about donald trump or only about a positive future it was ridiculous it was absolutely ridiculous and joe biden saw that it was ridiculous joe biden when he was asked about his son he said look you want to go after me come after me but if you go after your fam my family i'm going to come back hard when donald trump said joe biden has lost his step he's got something missing upstairs you know what if donald trump wants to have the argument about cognition and who's still with it bring it i'm happy to have that with my opponent joe biden is very capable of doing exactly what you're saying the question in a lot of ways is can he do it naturally which i think the answer is yes can he do it uh at the right moments which to me i think it's early on like what you said about framing that this guy lies you gotta do that up front because he's gonna do it he's gonna lie about lying it's very hard when you're someone like joe biden to boast you know that's supposed to be a nice attribute but you've got to be a little bit more direct people are running around saying do i like this guy or do i like that guy and they seem to be saying bye now i say they i mean the sliver of the world that somehow doesn't isn't sure about which one of them they like better this is the biggest moment he has to reinforce that it's just a bigger audience you know kovid is the biggest event to happen to the world in a long long time since and be since world war ii um and you handle it or you don't you're the president of the united states and he didn't i think he should do a joe biden version of what i did i think he i that's what i think he should do i think he should go into this debate with all the anger and outrage that every american rightfully has i really do and he can do that he and by the way that's how donald trump won to the extent that he won on um substance was that he channeled the anger that people had hopefully the angers now with him i mean what the biggest liability for donald trump is that the biggest difference between now in 2016 is that now he has a record and that record which you've been dismantling is there's no word for how horrific it is i mean it is actually in fact costing lives let me ask you another thing in the i think it was the first bush court uh debate gore kind of invades bush's space it's a little behind him and bush kind of turns around and looks at him and kind of nods like very dismissively going like really okay hi and then turns around brilliant brilliant okay so in i can't remember which debate it was it was either the second one okay where they can wander around yeah so he wanders around and he's coming behind her he's coming behind her in a really creepy way and she wrote about it in her book and she wrote about i didn't know what to do to me that was a very very famous moment in a debate where bush turned around looked at him and said yeah buddy and then turn around she didn't remember that she did not have to remember 15 years back because when you ask who would have thought of it i'm going to pat myself in the back i thought of it and i simulated that and the reason i did it was because back to the point about he had never debated he had never done a town hall debate and i knew he was going to be confused whether to sit or stand and i knew he would look at her when she was standing and say i'm not sitting while she was standing and i knew he'd be awkward moving around on stage and i thought he would actually get caught leering at her but when we practiced before the second debate i didn't tell her hey i'm going to get your space but i got real close i got in her not just in her baffles but in her peripheral vision she does write in the book and what she writes in the book is she still doesn't know what would have happened you know you and i might have a view about go girl you turn around and tell him to [ __ ] off and back off what bush did was so minimal it was just acknowledging your being a creep with a nod i could be wrong about this i believe rob portman played al gore in george bush's prep bush was sitting governor and they would prep in hotel rooms in these smaller hotel rooms and portman would wander around and get into bush's space and bush would say rob what are you doing and portland said look i watched the tapes and he did this with bill bradley the guy just thought he just gets too close to you and bush said you know what if you guys are gonna screw around and and start doing things that aren't gonna happen then this is pointless and bush is later said that the smirk on his face was the first thing he thought of was that portman did it and he told portman to stop screwing around and george bush is just a cool character i mean he's just a he's very comfortable in his skin i know that story and that's that's the point stuart stevens has said that that was prepared and what i'm kind of asking is why not the exact same move why not the exact same move because bush it was muscle memory he had experienced it he had done it he did it again and it was perfect with hillary you've got a couple of things going on in a righteous world she could have done a lot of things she could have turned around and said what are you doing you can't grab everyone you can't like back off or she could have stalked him whatever it is but you know to my point about people can't just do and say everything they want the extent that she is thinking it through especially you're experiencing weirdness i mean it is in fact creepy and you're thinking can i get away with saying back off and then if i say back off are we gonna have an exchange about treating women and if we have exchange about treating women is he going to start going after bill and if he goes after bill is he going to point out paul jones and juanita broderick sitting 10 feet there like it and and then you end up in knots okay i'm i guess maybe i'm not making myself clear i'm not saying she should have said a thing to him she should have done exactly what bush did and all bush did was turn around and nod and and what his nod said was what you're doing is odd i'm going to go back to my answer and she didn't have to say a word to do it again i i think she would i would agree with you okay but it happened it had happened in the past we knew the story and i just wanted to know the story behind that look you debate in in real time i've done it you kick yourself for for things you did and things mainly that you didn't do but it's it's in real time and if you had asked me after each of those debates i would have said hillary won hands down so uh thank you for for preparing her and thank you for being with us take care man thank you al bye thank you well i i hope you enjoyed uh listening that beautiful music is by leo cocky the great leo cocky i want to thank peter ogburn for producing this podcast we'll talk again next week you