Paving the Way to Progressive America
S1: The show may contain my tips for making money on Bitcoin. It won’t. It also may contain explicit language and it really might.
S2: It’s Monday, November 25th, 2019 from Slate, it’s the gist. I’m Mike PESCA.
S1: David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network got a sit down with Nikki Haley, widely regarded as a non shameful former member of the Trump administration. Birdy asked the big question on everyone’s mind.
S3: What is your views kind of spiritually on the sovereignty of God and what he’s doing exactly by putting Donald Trump is present, the United States lots of ways to go with this bit of theology.
S1: I would say the question, though, is a strong candidate for I reject the premise. Let’s people rejecting the premise left and right. If there ever was a time to reject the premise, it be this one. I mean, I can see, of course, God’s involved in ensuring that Ohio State beats Penn State and that Wisconsin beats Purdue. I mean, God’s really into the Big Ten schedule plus all the acting and singing awards that God has to play a part in. But still, I, if asked, would not full throatedly embrace the idea that God is so good at this political thing that he knows how to give Donald Trump the presidency by winning the Electoral College, but not the popular vote. I mean, if it were the work of God to only affect the hearts of 80000 voters in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, that is impressive. But I think it’s a little dicey. I don’t know. Maybe God only affected the hearts in Pennsylvania and Michigan. And then he closed down some polling places in Milwaukee to suppress the black vote. Maybe that’s what God did. Maybe that’s how God works. I don’t claim to get it. But if God can do that. If God can win an election by winning the Electoral College, but not the popular vote, I don’t know. Maybe God can have a team cover the point spread but not win outright. Asking for a friend who had Ohio State and a three team teaser the holy trinity of Teasers. Okay. Okay. So that was the question that David Brody put to Nikki Haley last year.
S3: She answered by putting Donald Trump as president, United States.
S4: Well, you know, I think it goes to show that things everything happens for a reason.
S5: Yes, that is it. That’s diplomacy. Nikki nailed it.
S4: The way I see it is look at the results of Donald Trump as president.
S1: Just look at the results. Wow. Oh, she’s going there. See, I did not expect her to be so blunt about Trump’s failures. Go on.
S4: Look at the results of Donald Trump as president. Look at we have more friends and family with jobs than we’ve ever had before. We have the economy moving in a direction it’s, you know, hasn’t been in a long time. That is doing great. We are acknowledging real trends with a president that had the currents to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. And there’s been a lot of courage that has come from this president to change. What was the status quo?
S1: Courage to change the status quo, really? Or is it more like never reading the briefing papers? Is the courage or more that no one told him we shouldn’t let Navy SEALs kill just anyone they want? I’ve got to say, of all the crazy crap that Americans go in for the large portion of Americans who not only have these beliefs, sure, fine. Have them, but are eager to sit for an interview where the question is why does God like Donald Trump more than I’m not even going to say Hillary Clinton more than active religious person Marco Rubio or more than actual religious person who probably believes these very ideas? Ben Carson. The number of people who would sit for that is astounding. I am not mocking anyone’s religion. I am, though, mocking anyone who has a desire, really a need to use a televised interview to profess outlandish, truly crazy claims as a means of establishing your relevance to the Republican Party. That does go in for some criticism of the questioner of the question answer.
S5: I guess by implication of the Republican Party. Are you mad that I’m saying this?
S6: Well, if so, just remember God works in mysterious ways. Now, what I have to do is not get hit by a lightning bolt for the next few weeks. On the show today while I visit Nikki Haley’s old stomping grounds, South Carolina. Its importance in presidential politics exaggerated. I’m taking South Carolina to task. I’m going to Carolina in my spiel. But first, Sherrod Brown is the senior senator from Ohio. And as befits a person in that position, he was assigned to desk on his first day of work. Now, this desk, desk 88, had some other notable occupants Bobby Kennedy, William Proxmire, Hugo Black, Al Gore, senior George McGovern and Senator Brown became intrigued, started researching these former senators and turned the project into a book. So we talk about how to get things done in the Senate and where Senator Brown stands on the issues, but mostly where he sits. Desk 88, eight progressive senators who changed America. Author Senator Sherrod Brown. Up next.
S7: Sherrod Brown is a U.S. senator from Ohio. He’s written a book called Desk 88 8 Progressive Senators Who Changed America, and the conceit of the book is that it’s his desk on his desk in the U.S. Senate. There are names and etched upon the desk is history, some known, some less known. And he found eight heroes of progressive America. Now, I have to say, when a senator writes a book, I graded on a curve, vive. I often want to speak about a senator despite the book. If this book were written by a historian, not a senator, I’d still want to talk to the author. And yet this gives me a chance to talk to a senator and an author. Thank you for coming on, Senator Brown. Thank you for saying it that way. All right. Let’s talk a little bit about the tradition of desk picking and the actual physical desks. What did you know about I’m sure you first gained election to the Senate. You remember the House Representatives, maybe you know these traditions, maybe you don’t. But how are you oriented as two? All right. Here’s where you’re gonna be working for the next six to however many years.
S8: Yeah, I don’t know the tradition. In fact, I talked about this book with a group of senators at a lunch last week. Democratic senators and a number of senators have never even really looked at the desk drawers. I mean, it’s just not something people think about. But I love history. So I did. Basically, it works this way. When you come to the Senate, you choose your office, you choose your committee assignments, you choose your desk place on the Senate floor, mostly by seniority. So there were 10 unoccupied desks in the freshman class as we scurried around the floor our first month to decide where to sit. And there, you know, you’re there. No, you’re not sitting behind a pole at old Shea Stadium. You have a good view of everything. So I tried heard this tradition a week earlier that senators carved some senators carved their names in the desk drawer. So I started pulling out draft desk drawers. And the fourth one I spotted McGovern, South Dakota, Hugo Black Ribicoff of Connecticut. And then I saw the one word, Kennedy. So Senator Kennedy, Ted Kennedy sat a few desk, so and said Ted committers second watch. And he walks over. And I said, Which brother’s desk is this? It just says, Kennedy and no state. And he said, well, it’s got to be Bobby’s. I have Jack’s desk. So I took that desk in large part because of that. But some other names and my wife, who is a journalist, had knows I love history. And she sent she got a bunch of books off eBay that were out of print about senators costing about three dollars and 50 cents each, I think, because nobody was reading. Okay.
S9: That’s how much we value historians, how much we value industry in a story.
S8: And so I started reading a bunch of this and I just thought, you know, a number of these senators I knew a lot of them had been good progressive’s some of them there’s one in particular I’d never heard of Glen Taylor, but he had a really interesting life and and contribution to our country in the last hundred years and in over 11 years. I wrote this. I stopped, I started, I did a lot of research. I read about 160 books and interviewed about 100 people and took eleven years to do it. I mean, mostly senators are pretty lost to history, including a number of the eight I chose to talk about.
S10: Yeah. Tell me about Glen Taylor. I hadn’t heard of him yet.
S8: Glen Glen Taylor was a I’m from Idaho. He ran for Congress once in the Senate six times and he won. Once he was elected, he he was most known in Idaho for the Glendora band. And Gordon Doreau band was Glen Taylor, Glen, Dora Taylor, his wife and their son. And you, as a baseball fan, appreciates this. Dora’s son during Glennon son is Dora spelled backwards, A-Rod and A-Rod. Taylor would sing with his parents. He was 10, 12 years old and would go around and he would sing it. And they passed the hat and that’s how they made a living. I reached A-Rod. The most fun interview I did was A-Rod in 2009. I reached him, a retired dentist in California, and he told me this story about his father as father. Here he was, the running mate, vice presidential running mate for the Progressive Party.
S11: Henry Wallace in 1948. And Glenn Taylor being the progressive, outspoken take no prisoners kind of guy, spoke in front of an integrated audience and walked in the door. That next to the door said Coloureds only. And he was picked up by the police. He spent the evening, spent the night, and in Bull Connor’s jail in 1948. Hawk Bull Connor’s known 15 years later for the firehoses and the dogs that he turned on. Black demonstrators, including Dr. King.
S10: Wow. And Glenn Taylor ran and lost several times. He would not be dissuaded.
S12: Yeah, every every year. Every even no year from 1938 to 1956, I think, except twice he was on the ballot and he was red baited.
S7: And a few of these figures, a few of these senators were. And some fought it off more successfully than the others.
S13: Yeah. Some had a easier ability to do it because, you know, somebody in Rhode Island or New York had a better a better constituency, if you will. The. To fight back on those issues, and a number of Democrats were defeated in 1950 or 52 or 54 because of McCarthy Herbert Lehman, who was a New York senator, he was one who tangled with McCarthy. Yeah. MCR Herbert Lehman was the son and the son and the nephew of the two founders of the venerable that met its demise, Lehman Brothers firm one. So he was one of the most distinguished families in New York. And they start off as cotton traders in Alabama and ended up starting a bank, Lehman Brothers Bank in New York. And he was the governor of New York right after Roosevelt. He was lieutenant governor when Roosevelt became governor. And he started what was called the little new deal while Roosevelt was doing it. You in Washington. Lehman did it in New York and did a lot of the same things, but did it more easily because there was not the conservative resistance over some in New York, but not like nationally.
S10: Now, as far as getting along with your fellow senators, this becomes sort of a proxy fight in the Democratic primary where Joe Biden talks about the power of doing this. And to some extent, soda’s Pete, butI jej and you could analyze. Is it that they really think because they know how to shake hands, they’ll get things done? And some of their critics, I think rightly and but some also wrongly say that that is just not realistic, given how much the Republican Party wants to be the party of opposition. How far can having personal relationships and wanting to do some reaching across the aisle, how far can that go if we’re talking about progressivism and deep structural change, deep structural change and it getting along with colleagues important.
S13: And I’ve always thought about politics. It’s it’s whom you fight for and what you fight against. I I never try to make it personal. I think there’s just no reason to do that. But when I think about whom I fight for, I really do think about people and in groups and low income people and people of color and voting rights. And and I think about kids getting sick from environmental issues when you want to do that. But I don’t want to make it personal towards Mitch McConnell or towards Ted Cruz or anybody else. I don’t think that serves you. But a real quick story. I was some a senator from Missouri, Roy Blunt, very conservative. It’s conservatives. I am progressive, was the secretary of state in Missouri when I was secretary of state of Ohio. And he told somebody a year or two ago, he said, I’ve known Sherrod Brown 30 years and we’ve agreed exactly on five issues. And he laughs. And he said, but all five of those are federal law, meaning I find I’m working. I’m working now on expanding the earned income tax credit and working on a pension bill that will really matter for a bunch of people that could lose their pensions. And I picked out three or four Republican senators that I’ve been talking to that that might might work with me on it. Maybe they will. Maybe they won’t. I know that Ted Cruz won’t. Mitch McConnell won’t. I can list a named bunch of names of people that won’t, but you’ll find people that will. I but I also think that when I hear presidential candidates talking about that, just don’t dwell too much on the past, especially on something that we’ve seen. We’ve seen Mitch McConnell not want to work with Democrats on anything. Yeah. And Obama always thought. McConnell I mean, for some time, Obama thought McConnell would play it straight and McConnell never did.
S10: Well, when you pick or select the five that you’re going to target, how much his personal agreeableness a factor and how much is it that they see that it’s in their interests and will appeal to their constituency and be good policy?
S13: It’s all that. It’s that’s a good question. I have not tried to rank it. It’s it’s the personal relationship as one. But I have something of a relationship with everybody a little bit some more than others. You know, maybe it’s like one one guy work on veterans issues with a lot. I see him in the gym almost every morning and we talk about all kinds of stuff. I’m part of it is what is their history? Some Republicans actually want to do things occasionally. A few Republicans want to do things for low income people and want to do things for for the environment, not for a many, unfortunately. And this total. Donald Trump, Republican Party. So you find out what history they have. You think about your personal relationship and you think about their state. I think that Cory Gardner of Colorado is going to be working with Democrats a little more than he used to. Is my guess because he’s in real political trouble for re-election. So you calculate all those things.
S10: As I read through your biographies and your reflections on them, I said to myself, I wonder how many of these people who are now hailing as at least, if not greater than very goods of the Senate, how many of them would have biographies that they’d have to answer for? You know, Al Gore, senior, just for working with just like Joe Biden has the answer for working with people who were segregationists or you talked about Lehman and how his name was literally synonymous because it was his family’s name of some large financial corporation. I guess the question is, if these guys have these good track records of progressivism, are progressives applying such a. Purity test as to select against these sorts of figures in the future.
S13: That’s a very good question. First of all, all of them were uneven. Even most of us are including bleeding. Progressive’s and the Senate today are uneven to have not always been in the right. What I would consider the progressive side of an issue at some point during their lives, their careers, whatever. Hugo Black’s the best example. Hugo Black, Supreme Court Justice, Senator from Alabama first and Supreme Court. He started off easy, was a member of the KKK, and he said later he renounced it quickly after he was elected. But his membership. But he said later I would have joined any group that got me votes. He 30 years later, not forgiving what he did and justifying it at all. But 30 years later, he was burned in effigy at his law school in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, because he was a major push before the Supreme Court decision. Brown vs. Board of Education. First big leap for the Supreme Court into into the issue of civil rights against segregation. So and he was known as those civil libertarians. So you you and you embrace change. You want them to change. You’ve got to accept when they change. But you also don’t you can’t forget somebody that did something like that well beyond Hugo Black’s association with the Klan and so forth.
S10: When I think of his jurisprudence as a member of the Supreme Court, I don’t associate it so much with progressive causes. I mean, he wrote the opinion in Akamatsu and he was against a generally right. I’m right. He was against the right to privacy. So, OK. I have two questions. Do you think he was more progressive in the Senate? And the second question is, do you think his Senate experience informed his time on the court?
S12: I mean, I I’ll start with one other thing. I don’t know that all eight of these people would have called themselves progressives or liberals either. Yeah, I looked at this. Taylor would have. He ran for president or vice president. Taylor. Taylor, for sure, Wolf. And Kennedy would have. McGovern did. Yes. But I’m not so sure about black. I’m not so sure about Lehman. Would have not so sure about Gore. I’m not sure that it would have worked in their states to label him that. I don’t think labels matter a lot. But politicians often do. But I think black. I mean black. I wrote about black because of what black did.
S13: He became Roosevelt’s favorite southern senator because he worked so much on the 40 hour work week and in collective bargaining and minimum wage and in in the National Labor Relations Board, he worked with Senator Wagner of New York. So I appreciate that part of his career than much of his Supreme Court in the last 10 or 15 years in the Corps, 20 years, maybe he was considered a civil of, you know, great civil libertarian. But again, I don’t excuse certain behavior. And I I don’t claim any of any of us are anything but an uneven in our work.
S7: OK. Now, this interview so far has been, I think, mostly complimentary for me to you, but I do have to blow the whistle on myself. And that when you were considering running and doing a big press rollout, you talked a lot about the dignity of work. And I did criticize you on my show because I thought that that phrase had connotations of, I don’t know, perhaps looking down on people who might not work or talking to someone who might be questioning, oh, do these people not want to work? I got a letter, an email from a listener that said you completely misunderstood Sherrod Brown’s message about the dignity of work. To paint him as a cheap ploy to appeal to the macho, macho undertones of the white working class men indicates you spent no time listening to what he says about the dignity of work. He credits the term to MLK, his writings and the speeches of Bad Wife send you that enduring Senate.
S9: Your daughter sent me all my daughters. Honest to God, yes. All right. Yeah, there was. It starts off. I admit, this is a weird e-mail. I’m a frequent listener of the. I happen to be Sherrod Brown’s daughter. Was it Elizabeth or Emily? No. Is Elizabeth who is Elizabeth? She’s she’s an elected official in Columbia. Alumnus? Yes. Yes. So here I would love you to send that to me now. And now I know you tell me she did. Yeah. Now you know my e-mail address. Yes. Right. So this was in December when I was talking about it.
S10: But I do have to say, even if your intention is pure about the dignity of work, why do you have to emphasize or sell it, emphasizing the dignity? Shouldn’t it just be if we were exalted enough members of this species, shouldn’t we immediately recognize that there is dignity, work, and even better, there’s just money that comes from work and we all need money to live well.
S14: We should recognize it. But the term first came from Pope Leo the 13th, who is known as the Labor Pope at the turn of the 20th century. And he was. In response, the industrial revolution. All the immigrants that were so including in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York that were killed on the job. Dr. King talked about it a lot. All work has dignity. He said no job is menial if it pays inadequate wage. And to me, Larrys, I talked about dignity of work as so many people in this country, people that clean offices, people that work construction. People that push the wheelchairs at the airports. Nobody asks in their name, nobody sees them. Nobody pays attention to them. They’re paid low wages. They so often have no benefits. All work to me has dignity in all work should be celebrated in the criticism of the dignity work less what you said was more. While Brown’s just talking about white male Trump voters that belong to unions. And I clearly wasn’t. I was talking to workers who took to all people. And in in work is a pretty expansive term. It’s not just low wage workers, it’s people staying home and taking care of kids. It’s people taking care of aging parents. All of that has a dignity, too, to it that this society doesn’t ascribe to work. And I want us to look differently at what work means. It’s not just it’s not just pay. It’s contributing to society. We all work because we need to make money, understand. And work should be. We all should have. We all should believe in the dignity of work for each other.
S7: Sherrod Brown is senator from Ohio. His new book is out. It’s called Desk 88. It’s about the desk he sits at the desk that Robert Kennedy and Herbert Lehman and you go black and many others sat at desk 88. Progressive senators who changed America. Good talking with you. Great discussion. Thanks. Thank you, sir.
S1: And now the schpiel, South Carolina, the Palmetto State, the eighth state to ratify the Constitution. The first state to break from that via secession. It is ranked 40 second in the U.S. News and World Report’s ranking of the states. You know how U.S. News World reports go. The state’s tourism board tries to get people to apply to visit, only to reject them so as to appear more selective. U.S. News But South Carolina plays an important role in the process of nominating the next Democratic candidate for president. You have no doubt heard about that of the early voting states. It is the only one where the majority of Democratic voters are black. Chris Wallace mentioned all this on Fox News this Sunday.
S15: No Democrat has ever won Iowa and New Hampshire and then not got on to win the nomination. So where does that put Bill to judge if obviously all this can change? But if he were to go ahead and win Iowa and either finish first or second in New Hampshire in super strong shape, and even if he goes in to South Carolina and is in 0 4.
S1: So that is where he would kind of hit a wall that was looking at South Carolina as perhaps helping Joe Biden because of South Carolina’s overwhelmingly almost two thirds African-American composition of the Democratic electorate. The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart was on left, right and center, and he also talked up South Carolina. He emphasized, again, the overwhelmingly African-American Democratic electorate, but this time to make a case for Kamala Harris.
S16: What about South Carolina? And South Carolina is extremely important. But also, keep this number in mind, 62 percent, 62 percent of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina is African-American. And so while Mayor Pete is ahead in Iowa, surging in New Hampshire, if he can’t win South Carolina, then that does not bode well for him getting the nomination.
S1: So in both cases, the idea is, Pete, Bridget lacks for black support. Therefore, Pete Bhuta JEJ and anyone else really will not be able to get the South Carolina vote. And without the South Carolina vote, the nomination itself could be shaky. I think so much of this, so many of these planks are wildly overstated. First, pundits are using phrases like winning South Carolina or winning Iowa or coming out of New Hampshire the victor. There’s no such thing. There’s no winning Iowa. It’s its collection of delegates. The winner of each caucus or primary is the candidate who gets the most delegates. Sure, we could call him or her the winner. But it’s proportional. So if the 41 delegates in Iowa could work like this, but it gets 12, Warren gets 11, Sanders 10, Biden 8. So we say Boobage wins Iowa. But that’s a headline. It’s a data point. A little bit. What he really did was win a few more delegates on the way to four thousand five hundred ninety four total on to New Hampshire with its 24 delegates out of four thousand five hundred ninety four. Nevada with its thirty sixth noticed, by the way, the Nevada a ratio in all this. Also, the fact that no one talks about Nevada and none of the clips I played, the clips you probably heard where they talk about Iowa, New Hampshire and then not South Carolina. Once you skip past Nevada, it does put a crimp in the idea that it’s all about a more proportionate representation in terms of ethnicity. Since Nevada is very largely Latino. Just throwing that out there. So proportionality means that if you put it aside, the idea of winning a state, which is a fiction, you will have the different candidates coming into the South Carolina primary, each having won a few delegates. Will the fact that I don’t know, let’s say Elizabeth Warren won the most mean that Kamala Harris can’t win the most in South Carolina. It will not mean that. But what it will mean is that winning, quote unquote, winning South Carolina or winning the black voters in South Carolina, very hard for that to make up the ground lost in the first three contests. There is no winning a state. There is only collecting delegates. There is no logical scenario where a candidate who’s done really poorly in Iowa. Forty one delegates. New Hampshire, 24 delegates. Nevada. Thirty six delegates will be saved by doing pretty well in South Carolina, 54 delegates. The New Yorker writes in a headline a few months ago, quote, The high stakes for Kamala Harris and the South Carolina primary. But if she does really poorly before South Carolina, then South Carolina will have much lower stakes. You’re not going to be able to make up that ground. And she’s doing rather poorly in South Carolina. Yes, she should have some natural appeal with the black community. And it is true that Pete Boobage is at zero with the black community in South Carolina. But Kamala Harris is at a whopping 6 percent with the black community in South Carolina. That’s high stakes, Harris, over there in a. Distant fourth place with the black community overall in South Carolina. She’s at 3 percent of the total vote and they do count the votes of white voters in the South Carolina Democratic primary. They do actually do that, which means that P Buddah JEJ, though, at zero with black voters right now, would be getting more delegates out of South Carolina than Kamala Harris. It’s a long way of saying this, the notion of a stand that depends on Biden losing almost all his support, black voters being up for grabs. Kamala Harris getting a mass of black supporters booted JEJ, making zero inroads with the black community. All of that is a quadruple bank shot that I find pretty far fetched. But even so in this, my main point, even if all that does happen, it won’t change the overall dynamic. My problem is not with an analysis of the black vote or the white vote or any of the candidates. I think Harrison Boudia Jej both have virtues to recommend them. They both have flaws. But we should as a country, as a media, we should not be hyping up South Carolina. I get why we have to hype Iowa. It is the first to vote. That is on February 3rd and 8 days later is New Hampshire. That is the first actual primary. It’s hard not to pay attention to actual votes after all this time to draw some inferences from those actual votes. But then I think they’ll be diminishing information as well as diminishing delegate allotment with each contest. So Nevada takes place February 22nd and South Carolina take place a week after that. But here now is the giant squid of the deep stocking, these guppies. Three days after the South Carolina primary is Super Tuesday, which this year is not a misnomer. Super Tuesday is Alabama. Arkansas. California. Colorado. The Democrats abroad. Maine. Massachusetts. Minnesota. North Carolina. Oklahoma. Tennessee. Texas. Utah. Vermont. Virginia. Together, those 15 nominating contests will select 1345 delegates, which is over a third of all the Democratic convention delegates. That’s three days after South Carolina. Let’s say in South Carolina. No, Harris, let’s make her do well. She gets 22 delegates and one gets twelve and Sanders gets eight and booted.
S5: JEJ gets for a nice win for Harris. Right.
S1: But three days later, Texas has 228 delegates to a lot. Virginia ninety nine. North Carolina, a hundred ten. Minnesota, seventy five and California, 416. There is no logical reason to focus on these silly, small early contests. There is a psychological one on the first and probably the second. We can’t help it, but the contest three days before Super Tuesday and to focus on that, because the demographics there are favorable to a certain candidate and not another, or because we presume the demographics to be favorable just doesn’t make much sense. I have an analogy for you. Let’s say we’re covering and analyzing a contest between bears who want honey. No, I’m not gonna make it bears and honey. And he’s something countable rabbits who want carrots. Now, that’s lame. Right. There’s a contest and it’s about aardvarks who’d love cherry tomatoes. Oh, you know, aardvarks and their legendary affection for cherry tomatoes. Whichever aardvark gets to 2500 cherry tomatoes wins out of almost 5000 cherry tomatoes. So the first cherry tomato picking contest probably in the Midwest.
S6: Let’s say the Ibe, Iowa, Elizabeth Aardvark gets 20 peaty. The Aardvark gets 12. Joe Baquet’s six, Berney the aardvark who hates millipedes and centipedes, gets to whatever. Then there’s the cherry tomato contest. The second one, they split a little fior cherry tomatoes and the first one we wait a week. Cherry tomato picking contest 3. They a lot somewhere between the number of cherry tomatoes of the first and second contest. Okay, great. So now there’s another small cherry tomato contest in seven days. You got 54 delicious cherry tomatoes to be picked by aardvarks, but in 10 days. So if you look just a couple of days past that contest where they’re picking 54 delicious cherry tomatoes in 10 days, we’re picking 1345 cherry tomatoes. Don’t you think that’s the one you’d be focusing on? You would and you wouldn’t be wrong. In fact, I think if you were telling friends who are interested in but not obsessed with the aardvarks and their quest to get the most cherry tomatoes, that would be the one you’d be pointing to. Oh, no, look at that one. Yeah, yeah. I know there are 54 at stake in a week, but look, 10 days out, one thousand three hundred forty five cherry tomatoes. If I were a responsible editor of, say, the Aardvark Cherry Tomato Gazette or if I were cherry to mate. Silver, proprietor of the Empirical Aardvarks site 530 cherry to make dot com. I would be focused on Super Cherry Tomato Tuesday.
S1: Now, listen, the stakes are clearly not as important as aardvarks and their imaginary love of the cherry. Tomato, Autobots, democracy and a worthwhile opponent for Donald Trump. But I do think it’s weird and I do think it’s off that we’re giving certain states this outsized importance that I do not think in real life they will actually wind up having anyway. That is my case. I could be wrong. You probably remember the spiel from a few months ago where I asserted that badgers don’t like Scrabble. Of course, badgers love Scrabble. At this point, it’s now almost a cliche.
S2: And that’s it for today’s show. Daniel Schrader produces the gist. He frequently fields calls from the aggrieved progeny of Albon Barkley because I frequently quote him as saying the vice presidency isn’t worth a warm bucket of piss.
S17: He said that a lot of people say spit buckets, hippies Cristina de jozo also produces the just solo today.
S2: In fact, part of her job is getting an early and fast forwarding through all the answering machine voice mails of members of the Freeling hisand political dynasty. After I’d dub them the Freeling Houses, the geste and the waiting, an angry e-mail from Dick Cheney rejecting my description of Liz Cheney as a bit too loose with the truth and quick with the deployments that will match the one I got from Liz about Dick Cheney and her desperate to Peru. And thanks for listening.
