Political analyst Cliston Brown joins me for a post-election debrief. Download podcast above and/or watch YouTube version below.
Transcribed excerpts from our discussion:
CLISTON: The Democrats cling to what used to always work, but doesn’t work anymore. So we talk about new media and traditional media. The Republicans are kicking our ass on new media. Every day, traditional media loses more and more viewers. It’s a dying medium. And yet we keep relying on the media to present a balanced case to the public, when the public is tuning the media out in drones and going with all these new media actors who may not be, you know, a good thing but it is what it is. You want to go fishing, you’ve got to fish where the fish are, and increasingly, that is not traditional media. So we, again, are failing to learn our lesson on that.
So many far left people in particular, although some liberals too, don't understand that fundamentally politics is a math problem. And the objective is to get 50.1 percent or more. Otherwise you lose and you don't get to govern and you don't get to pass all these things that are important to you.
SER: I know a lot of Kamala Harris supporters initially didn’t want her to run [instead of Joe Biden.] They felt like she’d be falling on the sword. But her doing so really did help the party down ballot. She did no harm. Everyone from [Tammy Baldwin, Elissa Slotkin, Ruben Gallego, Jacky Rosen], they could appear in public with her and say, “Yes, I believe this person should be president for the next four years. You can trust my judgment, which was not something that they could easily do after [Biden’s] debate performance. I mean, he had the garbage comment gaffe when he wasn’t running. Defending Biden would’ve been the only think Democrats could talk about and that would’ve been a disaster, so I appreciate Harris stepping up. She saved the party, and it had to be her, given the timeline.
I do think that in a best-case scenario, you have a nominee who can fully break from Biden, but on the other hand, [Gretchen] Whitmer and [Josh] Shapiro looked at the conditions on the ground and basically said, “You want me to run a presidential campaign in 100 days? And with an incumbent president whose approval is about like syphilis? No, I’m gonna get crushed. No, thank you. I don’t think that Whitmer, Shapiro, [Gavin] Newsom, [J.B.] Pritzer stepped back for Harris because they’re so nice. Generally speaking, if there’s a chance to be president, a politician will take that chance. I think they all realized there was a greater chance of falling on their face.
CLISTON: Yeah, they saw what was coming and they decided they didn't want to take that L. Live to fight another day.
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