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Speaker 1: This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Chapter. Now, almost everything you hear about Medicare is somebody quietly trying to steer you somewhere. And you're skeptical of that, as you should be. I get it. I mean, there's a federal lawsuit going on right now over exactly this. Companies that branded themselves as unbiased while allegedly pointing people toward whatever would pay them the most as some sort of broker. So if your default is to distrust everyone in this space, honestly.
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Speaker 2: I get it.
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Speaker 1: I'm a bit distrustful these days myself. That's the whole reason I want to tell you about Chapter. They're independent Medicare advisors whose entire model is that their advisors are not paid to push any one plan. They're just trying to help. Yes, there's compensation that goes with it. but it's across the board is what they're trying to do. At the end of the day, they're advocating for you. They're not the insurance companies themselves. They're an actual person who actually goes through your doctors, your prescriptions, your needs, and then compares them to every single plan available to find the best one that will work for you and hopefully save you a couple dollars too. And here's the part that sets chapter apart. They don't disappear once you've been in They will keep advocating for you. They're kind of like almost like a concierge service. You're just there. I need help. You're like customer service. You know, the plan, you know, help me navigate this again. So you ever get hit with a wrongful medical bill, they'll help you fight it. They want to stay an advocate for you even after you've done this. So look, I get it. I think there's all sorts of space. You see a lot of people are throwing themselves in this healthcare space. What I like about these chapter folks, I've spent time with them. This is a very transparent organization. It is Medicare and all of its affiliated stuff can be very confusing. The whole point of this is to make this easier and less confusing. OK, so look, take the skepticism you already have in all of this, point it at your own plan for 20 minutes. It's free. There's no pressure. And then call chapter today at 980-734-4200. Hello there and welcome back to the Wednesday edition of the Chuck Toddcast. Yes, now that the fall season is upon us, I am bringing back my Wednesday pod. So we will have Chuck Toddcast episodes dropping on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You will have Super Tuesday with my partner, Chris Silliza, on, shockingly enough, Tuesday. And of course, you can catch New Sphere every Sunday night on the New Sphere app. And also, I know I've been teasing this and teasing this, but it is now live on YouTube right now. And you can see it in this feed as well. It is for my Dynastic Sports History podcast with J.A. Adande. He and I have a tremendous conversation about Alabama football with the man himself, the The only person other than Nick Saban you could call Mr. Alabama football that's living today, and it is Paul Feinbaum. It was a tremendous conversation. You definitely will, if you're a college football fan or a fan or a history of college sports or you just love Alabama football, you're going to love this conversation. Yes, even me, even me, this anti-SEC Miami Hurricane fan, did my best to compartmentalize my own personal venom with how the SEC sometimes wants to velvet rope off college football for themselves. I think we do a good job giving Alabama its due there. But I'm coming in tonight. We're actually taping. It's right after our live stream that we had on the New Hampshire primary. So I want to start with there. And look, most of my Wednesday episodes, at least between now and November, are going to be very campaign heavy. What's happening on the trail? You know, and that is... what I'll be bringing you tonight. I've got a fun sort of, on one hand, kind of an out-of-the-box kind of guest. On the other hand, when you hear the topic that we have, actually, it will make a lot of sense that this interview is in the Chuck Toddcast. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Plus, I have my top five list. The Blue Wave Blue Tsunami Test is what the top five list is about. You'll have to check it out. To get more details there. And of course, I take your question. But let me begin with what, if anything, we learned out of New Hampshire. And I think the big thing is, is that the establishment got its way. And they did so, frankly, rather comfortably. Chris Pappas, who's basically been the Democratic nominee in waiting ever since he announced and the field was relatively cleared. He helped clear it. Other people cleared it for him as well. There was no doubt that Democrats wanted to try to minimize the risk of losing this seat. Republicans, meanwhile, found themselves the best possible candidate they could get in this environment. They got somebody with the last name of Sununu. No, not the governor. But the former senator, John Sununu, and my friend Jeffrey Skelly noted that if John Sununu does win this Senate seat, it will be an 18-year gap, the largest gap really in the modern era between service time in the United States Senate. John E. Sununu served one term in the Senate, 2002, where he was recruited to primary, an incredibly vulnerable incumbent at the time, Bob Smith. The primary worked. Sununu won the primary, and then he goes on to defeat Gene Shaheen, who was the sitting governor at the time, for that Senate seat in 2002. Six years later, there's a The challenger won the rematch. That doesn't always happen. A lot of times in the Senate rematches, the losing candidate not only comes up short, but usually comes up, usually loses by a larger margin than they lost the first time. Paul Wellstone, Rudy Boschwitz is my favorite example of that. If you want to go down into the history of those election results. But Shaheen won the seat back from Johnny Sununu in 2008, and she's served in it ever since. Interestingly, her first reelection was against Scott Brown, who was by then the former senator from Massachusetts. He got the nomination in 2014. It was a fairly competitive race, but Sheen survived in a Republican-leaning year. And then Scott Brown wanted to run again when this seat opened up, and Republicans decided that they did not want to get behind his candidacy. So they went and found themselves a Sununu. And so here we are. And John Sununu won by a bigger margin than Chris Pappas did in his primary. Pappas had a progressive primary challenger who did not have much money. Had no national support. And that's what's that's the most interesting aspect of it's sort of like the dog that didn't bark in New Hampshire and the progressive dog didn't bark. And I think it had a lot to do with presidential candidates not wanting to alienate the Shaheen machine. right? And so the Shaheen machine was basically behind Pappas. The Shaheen machine has a candidate in the first congressional district, the district that Pappas is vacating. And Jean Shaheen's daughter ran in that race. And certainly there was a lot of effort to eke her out into that primary. And so it is interesting that so many outside groups didn't play in this race. And as James Pindell Boston Globe reporter, a longtime New Hampshire reporter. In fact, back when I got to know him, he worked for something called Politics NH, really is sort of the New Hampshire expert. And, you know, he looked at it as if he were assessing the progressive movement, that they really dropped the ball on this one. They had an opportunity. But, you know, this has been it's been interesting. You know, the the progressive progressives have had a, you know, Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary twice, but the progressive movement has not been able to either use that momentum to build off of it in any way. I mean, the most progressive member of the delegation they've had in sort of this century was Carol Shea Porter, who represented one of the two congressional districts. But the left has been sort of muted, and it's always been kind of muted. And it goes back to the fact that Democrats couldn't win in New Hampshire for an ice age. And then 1996, Gene Shaheen goes from party operative. She cut her teeth helping Gary Hart pull an upset 1984 as one of his, the Shaheen machine was born at the 84 New Hampshire primary when she essentially resurrected the Gary Hart campaign from the dead. And the legend was born then. And by 96, she had enough chits to actually win office herself. And she broke a near 100 year streak to become a Democratic elected governor there in New Hampshire. So She is the party. She created the modern Democratic Party. And there's always been an allergy inside that party. Don't go too far to the left. That's how, you know, New Hampshire Republicans have successfully elected very conservative statewide office holders in the past. I think they have less luck with that now. The state really is a sort of a center left leaning state. You know, if Democrats go too liberal, that's when a Republican can win. And these days, Republicans can't get too far to the right, or they struggle to carry that state, right? Donald Trump's never carried New Hampshire, yet we still consider New Hampshire as part of the larger, most competitive part of the battleground. So I think the story of New Hampshire really is how the establishment really did work its magic in both sides of the aisle and kept the outsiders out, if you will. Certainly kept them at bay, kept the outsider money from being too involved here the way we've seen outsider money everywhere else. Now, the question is, how competitive is this race? I had a lot of fun with Jessica Taylor during our live stream. She is the guru behind the Senate ratings for the Cook Political Report with my friend Amy Walter. And we were doing, OK, what's closer to toss up? Nobody is saying New Hampshire Senate is a toss up between Pappas and Sununu, but it's going to be a very competitive race. It's going to be a single digit race. Probably decided, I think, in the somewhere in the four to six point range. If it's closer, that means it's probably been a better Republican night nationally. And if it's a little bigger, then we'll know it was a better night nationally for the Democrats. But I think we're looking at a four to six point range. So we did this. OK, what's closer to toss up? New Hampshire Senate? or Kansas Senate. Oh, and then we did New Hampshire Senate or Nebraska Senate. And then we did New Hampshire Senate or Iowa Senate. And so when she did those orders, she had New Hampshire Senate, essentially much closer to, not much closer, closer to toss up than Kansas, closer to toss up than Nebraska, but Iowa is in her toss up category narrowly. But New Hampshire, not there. So that's where she classifies New Hampshire. I'm probably a little more bearish on it, though. I don't want to discount the Sununu name. And I've shared with you, I've known John E. Sununu a long time. He is just a dude. I've gotten to know him. He's a big baseball card collector. And he's way into, for those of you who don't know, he collects all the pre-war, all the pre-1952 stuff. He's a pre-war collector. He loves those. If the set has a T in front of it, he's collecting those. Um, he one time gifted me two tops Venezuelan cards, which are these very thin was printed on extraordinarily thin paper, but, uh, in Spanish and stuff. And just, just a fantastic little collector's item. If you care about these things, um, in many ways, I always thought, you know, Johnson and his politics were probably a little too conservative New Hampshire, but culturally he was sort of the right kind of quirky. And I say that as a compliment. Um, But it's hard to see. Kelly Ayotte is a Republican that has figured out how to win that governor's race. But as we've discussed, it is easier to win a governor's race if you're not from where the state leans than it is a federal race where the jersey color matters a lot. And the thing with Chris Pappas, his sin in the primary was he was not considered a progressive. He very much is, you know, he was getting hit for votes that many Republicans supported in the House of Representatives. So he is ideologically well suited. The question is, is he charismatic enough to hold it or does it matter? Right. Is it going to break through? Is this a race that is going to grab the attention of New Hampshire voters and importantly, the New Hampshire independent voters? I'm a bit skeptical, which is why I think you're going to see. Everybody will acknowledge this is going to be close. It's kind of like, frankly, how I feel about the South Carolina Senate race. I think it's going to be really close. I think you're making a mistake if you totally ignore it. I feel the same way about New Hampshire. You're making a mistake if you totally ignore it. But eight times out of 10, I think I know who's going to win both races. But if you're talking, it is not a crazy result. It is not some total, it's a surprise, but not a shock if Sununu pulled it off. And I'd feel the same way in South Carolina if Annie Andrews upset Darlene Graham. I'd be surprised, but it wouldn't be shocked, right? The ingredients, there's a lot of the ingredients you need to pull an upset is sitting there in South Carolina. So that's kind of, I put New Hampshire more in that category, that sort of, these are competitive races. The party that should win, is favored to win, should win But these are some pretty good challenger candidates, so they shouldn't be ignored. But again, I go back. It is really interesting to me how, and this is what Pindell kept pointing out, which I think was a smart point, which is how people like in that second tier of presidential candidate on the Democratic side, think Ro Khanna, think Chris Van Hollen, think Chris Murphy, didn't essentially go against the grain and go against the establishment. Because here's a dirty little secret. The Shaheen machine's never getting behind a Ro Khanna. The Shaheen machine's never getting behind a Chris Van Hollen candidacy or a Chris Murphy candidacy. So I kind of think it would have been a free opportunity and it would have allowed you to stand out in a way that others didn't stand out. But again, I get it. No Democrat wanted to be on the wrong side of the Shaheen family, which may explain why progressives in general didn't get the support in New Hampshire that I think perhaps that voters might have been intrigued and open for. So there's my quick little thing in New Hampshire. It does not change my overall belief about where the national landscape is. It doesn't change anything I said. I still think the most likely scenario is some sort of fairly significant blue wave. The question is just how big can it get? Can it look closer to being big rather than closer to him being a mirage? Well, that's what we're going to find out in the next eight weeks. And speaking of that, let me unload on a few more items in my notebook, my sort of Wednesday, call it the Wednesday campaign notebook. And I want to start in the state of Missouri because I think we have a real sort of disenfranchising of voter problem now going on in Missouri. Because if you want an example of of how our political system can make something that ought to be fairly simple, like voting, almost incomprehensibly complicated. Do I have one for you? And the story has changed a lot just in the last 24 hours. So right before the polls closed in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, the Supreme Court seemed to put it to rest and we thought we had it to rest. And then another federal court jumped in and put a temporary restraining order what the state Supreme Court said, kind of ignoring what the U.S. Supreme Court said. So let me lay this out there for those of you that haven't been paying attention to what Missouri's been up to. And this, of course, is all about that larger battle that we spent the spring litigating and relitigating all over the country, the sort of mid-decade redistricting. So Missouri Republicans drew, you know, followed the advice of President Trump and drew a new congressional map last year. They wanted to go instead of 6-2, they wanted to at least see if they could get to 7-1 or even 8-0. It was part of that mid-decade redistricting arms race. And the principal target was the fifth congressional district in Kansas City. It is the district that is currently represented by Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. opponents of that map. And what they did is they basically, they got rid of the fifth, right? They created a hub and spoke and they made a, and essentially they created a situation that there would be just one African-American seat in St. Louis, essentially. And that's it. 7-1 everywhere. They took a 6-2, a map that, you know, in a really good democratic year could get to 5-3. if the Ann Wagner suburban seat ever fell to the Democrats. But realistically, it had been a 6-2 map. They decided they could make a 7-1 map. They couldn't get rid of the St. Louis district, but they thought they could get rid of the Kansas City one. So they come up with this 7-1 map. Opponents of that map went out and collected more than 300,000 signatures to put the legislation basically on a yay or nay, up or down vote on a statewide referendum. Because under Missouri's constitution, A valid referendum petition can suspend a law until the voters decide whether to approve it. The voters can kind of overrule a legislature if enough signatures are gathered to do just that. It's an interesting... Missouri's not the only state that does this, but it's one of the few states that do it. So opponents got the signatures and they had it for a long time. And it looked like we were going to get this referendum... pretty quickly and it would have happened perhaps in the spring or whatever, except the Missouri Secretary of State, Danny Hoskins, decided the referendum provision didn't apply to congressional redistricting. By the way, he had no basis in fact to prove this, he just decided this. So he just kept delaying. Those petitions were submitted in December OK, December of 2025. We are sitting in September of 2026. And when did he did not reject the petition signatures officially until 4 p.m. on August 4th. August 4th happened to be the day of the Missouri primary. In other words, and you see what he was doing here, he was sort of trying to they were trying to jam the courts. They were trying to sort of force a situation where, yeah, you know, but you can't disenfranchise the voters. We've gone too far. It's like Trump. It's the equivalent of knocking down a building before anybody gave you permission to knock down a building. What are you going to do about it now?
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 1: That's essentially what this Missouri secretary of state tried to do. He tried to screw the voters, screw the state constitution and jam this thing through. So Missouri went ahead on August 4th, held congressional primaries using the new district lines. Even though he knew the legal status as Secretary of State, this person ought to be recalled and kicked out of office. It's the most undemocratic actions that you could make here. I mean, and it's incompetency. Like any first-year lawyer just out of law school would have told him, hey, this is going to get challenged. Anyway, so he goes ahead and allows the election to be held under the new lines, even though he knew the legal status was in question. And so what happened? Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court, the state Supreme Court, unanimously said the Secretary of State's decision to not accept these referendum, accept those signatures and accept the premise of the referendum, that his interpretation that somehow this provision in the Constitution didn't apply to redistricting was BS, man. This was unanimous. Unanimous, they said this. They said the referendum was legal, it was sufficient, and it was timely. And because it was filed on time, the court said the new congressional map never took effect. So as far as the state Supreme Court is concerned, there is no 7-1 map that the Republicans created late in 2025. There was only the 2022 map, which was that 6-2 map. So- The Missouri Supreme Court is saying the map didn't become illegal last week. The map never existed. It never took effect. But voters voted, right? Hey, you know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat? Boy, is that me. 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So the old 2022 districts remain, as far as the state Supreme Court is concerned, the only legal congressional districts that Missouri has had the entire time. So the court specifically blamed the practical mess we're now in on the Secretary of State's delay and incorrect interpretation of law. This is why this person, he literally... has disenfranchised over a million voters with his partisan decision just because he was afraid of following his own state's constitution. I believe he took an oath, but apparently he already violated his oath. So look, they didn't like what the state Supreme Court did. So Missouri appealed to the United States Supreme Court to intervene. And again, just before polls closed in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declined to intervene. He didn't give an explanation. But I can tell you why he didn't intervene. This is a state issue. The U.S. Supreme Court rarely is just not going to get involved in the interpretation of a state constitution by a state Supreme Court. That's why he didn't intervene. And if you go look at the history of U.S. Supreme Courts, when you see states, I mean, we saw a similar thing happen with Virginia. Virginia Democrats wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and they wouldn't do it. They're not going to get involved when the state Supreme Court is interpreting the state constitution. So one would have assumed that would have settled it. Old map is going to be in November. Now, there was a lot of problems with that, except minutes after the Kavanaugh decision where he said the U.S. Supreme Court was not going to intervene in this, a federal district judge in Missouri said, a gentleman named Stephen Clark issued a temporary restraining order saying Missouri cannot use the old map, even though the state Supreme Court said there is only one map. There is no new map because it was never legal. So here we are. The Missouri Supreme Court says there is no new map. You cannot use it. It's not a legal map. And a federal judge says, yeah, but you can't use the old map now. It's too late. Election day is eight weeks away. So here we are, Missouri. So what's going to happen? So here's what Judge Clark's order says. does. It only lasts 14 days, this temporary restraining order. And the opponents of the new map have already appealed this decision. But it is important to hear Clark's reasoning here because this was the point I had actually prepared to talk about until we had even more changes here. He has now put his finger on the same problem I was trying to understand since the Missouri Supreme Court ruling came down. He says switching maps between the primary and the general election would, quote, wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness of Missouri's congressional elections. And he's right about the underlying practical problem, because Missouri already held this primary. About 1.2 million Missourians participated in said primary. Candidates won nominations. Those results were certified, all under a map that does not exist, according to the state Supreme Court, by the way. But because those primaries were conducted using the new districts. So now what do you do, right? The Missouri Supreme Court says those districts never should have been used because they had not been enacted into law yet. So imagine you're a voter in Missouri. You showed up in August. The state told you, here's your new congressional district. Here are the candidates seeking to represent you. You get to pick one. And so you did. Your vote was counted. And now the state may have to come back and say, well, We now, you're now in a different district. So the person you voted in the primary is not the nominee you get to decide between. That's in, you're now in a different district. Well, what the hell, right? Right, so somebody else won a primary to represent your actual district, except you never got to vote in that primary. So we're, this is not a hypothetical. This is what is being contemplated right now by the state of Missouri. Now, if you want to get into the details here, six of Missouri's eight congressional districts were changed by the new map. And the fifth district was the one changed the most. So basically, you've got three quarters of voters were impacted by this in Missouri. So I don't know how you can even if you're I don't know how Congress can seat the winners of this if they hold if they somehow change maps here anyway. So. So now are they going to revert to the old map? And then if you're the Republican nominee, a guy named Rick Bratton thought he was going to be essentially the shoo-in to win the congressional seat of the new fifth district. Now he's going to be the Republican nominee against Emanuel Cleaver in Emanuel Cleaver's old district, and he's going to get trounced. And the Republican voters who nominated the Republican who were voting in a fundamentally different district. So what do you do? Well, what Judge Clark's answer is, essentially, is that changing now creates such enormous disruption that the fairer course is to finish the election under the map used for the primary. But there's one enormous problem with the solution. The Missouri Supreme Court has unanimously said that the map never took effect under Missouri law. So now you've got two courts protecting two different principles. The state court is saying you cannot simply ignore the Missouri Constitution because following it has become inconvenient. which is what the secretary of state essentially did. And he intentionally delayed his decision to try to jam, to try to create this fiasco situation we're in. Again, I just, you know, I hate dumbasses. This guy, I don't know, just get out of politics. Don't ever get near public services. again. You weren't interested in working on public service. You were just interested in implementing some partisan hackery. You ran for secretary of state. That's it. That in theory is supposed to be a job. That's a bit more operational, a lot less partisan. And, and it's just, it stinks to high heaven. Um, So we're in this situation because of a bad acting by a bad actor. But now we've got the two courts, and I get it. This is not a very easy thing to reconcile. So now we're in this situation where you have a map that the state Supreme Court says did not follow the state's constitution. You've held a primary election, an illegal primary election, as it turns out. But you don't want to disenfranchise all of these voters, right? That's what the federal judge is saying. So what do you do? Well, why does the solution have to be pretending that one of these problems doesn't exist? Because there is a precedent for another way to get out of this box, and it's Texas 1996. This is where the Missouri story, I think, is likely headed. Texas had a similar situation. They had already held their congressional primaries in 1996. Then after those primaries, a federal court had to redraw a bunch of congressional districts because the Supreme Court had upheld a ruling finding that several of the districts, not all of them, but several of them were unconstitutional. So while it was a different underlying legal issue, we had the same practical election problem. You've already held the primaries. Now you've got different districts. So what did the federal court do? It voided the primary results in the 13 affected congressional districts. and then did something remarkably simple. On the regular November election day in 96, everybody ran on one ballot, Democrats, Republicans, and anybody else who qualified, all on the same ballot. If somebody got a majority, congratulations, you're going to Congress on the traditional election day. If nobody got 50%, the top two came back for a runoff on December 10th. Four districts ended up requiring those runoffs. This is not some theoretical law school remedy. This is what was actually done not that long ago. And the reason I bring this up isn't because I'm telling Missouri what a court should do. I'm just telling you what's, I think, going to be the likely, the simplest solution to not an easy, to certainly not an easy problem. There are important legal differences between Texas in 96 and Missouri in 26, right? Missouri law itself does not ordinarily provide for this kind of congressional election. A court would have to find the legal authority to impose this extraordinary remedy. And I think that's something a federal court could do. The clock, by the way, is ticking here. Federal law generally requires military and overseas ballots to go out 45 days before a federal election. For November 3rd, That would put the deadline at September 19th, 11 days, right? We're less than two weeks away. But if the courts ultimately conclude that Missouri has to use the old districts, somebody's going to have to answer this fundamental question. Who nominated the candidates? Because District 5 is not just a number on a piece of paper. A congressional district is filled with people. Change the people and you've changed the electorate. And if you've changed the electorate, how do you simply declare the nominee chosen by one group of voters is also the nominee chosen by another group of voters who never got to participate, right? So that's why I keep coming back to the Texas solution. It's the most obvious answer here. And it's the simplest way to not create more problems because more problems could create it if you don't do this. You know, November doesn't have to be the general election. November becomes the primary and the general. It's what Louisiana used to do for years for what it's worth, right? You know, you get, frankly, it's the type of primary election I would prefer as a voter, you know, not having to pick a party, but you just, everybody's on the same ballot. I don't know that this is what the courts will do, but precedent always matters here. And this is a fairly, it's the fairest way to resolve this problem, right? Of all the available choices, at least this one is the virtue of letting people who actually live in the district choose who represents them. And this ought to be the priority, right? That's the constituency whose interests seem to have gotten lost in this entire fight, the actual fricking voters. Republicans wanted another congressional seat. Opponents wanted a referendum. The Secretary of State decided the referendum wasn't valid because it went against his own politics. The Missouri Supreme Court decided that it was. The The state was hoping the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene. They wouldn't. Now we're in this intervention, temporary restraining order, which sort of screws everything up. The Eighth Circuit is going to get involved. And that's where I think they're going to come up with this remedy. There is just there is no other way. Again, unless everybody has their head up their partisan ass, right, the only remedy here is to provide the voters an opportunity to pick their own representatives and in the districts that actually exist. If they don't do this, there's all sorts of issues here. I could see a Congress not seating anybody from these eight. We could see an entirely new special election have to take place. By the way, this referendum is now gonna be on the November ballot to decide whether or not, yay or nay on this. And who knows, we've seen voters Voters don't like a political party, whether it was voters in a blue state like Virginia, didn't like the idea of trying to jerry-rig that referendum. And I think you're going to see, you know, voters didn't love it. It passed, but they didn't love it in Virginia. And then the courts intervened. So we'll see. Missouri is certainly a red state. But again, no matter how partisan you are, you don't like to feel like you don't get a say in these things. And we've seen Missouri referendum ideologically will go in a variety of different places. It may be a red state, but it's not always ideologically as red of a state as its reputation. But either way, it's kind of, and if the margin is really close in the house, I'm not going to go down these rabbit holes. I have a conversation that I'm going to get to in about a week that you'll enjoy on that. But Imagine if we have an entire congressional delegation where we can't seat them on January 3rd for the new Congress. And imagine if somehow those eight congressional districts, what happens in them would decide control if the margin is that tight between the two parties, which of course, in my blue mirage scenario, is quite possible. All right, let me whip up a few other things from the campaign trail. We are less than eight weeks away. And like I said, especially on Wednesdays, I'm going to do my best to highlight just some interesting developments on the trail. Not every poll. I'm not going to do every ad or manufactured outrage. But there are some things that pop that I think are worth a quick hot take about or two. And here are three that caught my eye over the last few days. And strangely enough, all three are kind of the same version of the same question, which is what candidates say versus what candidates do. And I'm going to start in Nebraska. Because the independent Senate candidate there, Dan Osborne, has given us one of the more revealing explanations of campaigning that I've heard in a while. Osborne, if you recall, came surprisingly close in 2024 of pulling an upset against Deb Fischer. Well, he's obviously he's running again, and this time he's running against Pete Ricketts. And he's trying to perform an incredibly difficult political balancing act, right? He's trying to stick to being an independent, promising he's not going to caucus with either party if he wins a Senate seat. And yet he can't win if Democrats don't rally around him. And he can't win if he doesn't win a majority of independents. And he's going to need some Trump voters. This is Nebraska, right? In 2024, Osborne ran an ad that began this way. Social Security deal with illegals? Who would be for that? And then he went on to say he was with Trump on issues like corruption, China, and the border. And then he adds, if Trump needs help building a wall, well, I'm pretty handy, right? You know, he's the working class guy. He's the mechanic. And he was trying to show that off, right? It's a nice line, except Osborne had also talked publicly about undocumented immigrants who had been in this country for decades, being able to get legal status and participate in Social Security. And then this summer at a private meeting with Black and Latino Democrats, he was challenged about that wall rhetoric and that wall ad from 2024. And here's what Osborne said. He explained that campaigning and governing were essentially two separate pots of things, if you will. He said, there's the campaigning side when you're trying to get elected. And then there's what you do once you're in office. This is true, right? Every politician runs into this. Every politician tailors a message. Every politician emphasizes one issue in one room and another issue in another room. That's called politics. But there's something else. There's something different about actually articulating the theory You've got to walk a fine line here, especially with a guy like Osborne. His best asset is he's not a traditional politician, except now he's behaving like a traditional politician. politician. Campaigning over here, governing over there. What makes it particularly interesting coming from Osborne is because of his independent political identity. His pitch is that he isn't one of these people. He's not a normal politician. He's not beholden to the parties. except apparently the distinction between the campaign version and the governing version applies to independence too, huh? And it's, look, he, I give him points for being honest that, hey, he's going to say certain things on the trail and he's going to govern a different way. You know, what is it? There was a famous Mario quote, you know, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But I think it really– certain campaigns can get hit harder when you're caught sort of behaving like somebody you've been running against. And that's why I think this is potentially one that could sting for Osborne a little bit. But it takes me to a campaign in Ohio because this is a House race. But there's sort of a similar issue here. So I want to share the story with you. The Democrat is a guy named Don Leonard. He supplied us with another version of the same sort of Osborne story here. Leonard is running against a Republican congressman named Mike Kerry. And earlier this year, Leonard was talking about accusations that he's a Democratic socialist. And Leonard is on tape saying the following. I'm not a Democratic socialist, OK? But then he added this. Even if I were, I'd lie to people. I'd lie to the people of my district in order to get their votes. And then he laughed. Well, guess what? Mike Kerry, the congressman, has turned that little excerpt into an ad. Because why wouldn't you? There is nothing in this day and age of everything being AI'd up, the only thing that might be credible with voters, and I say might, I don't know if any ads are going to matter anymore if everybody thinks they're all just made up AI slop fest. And Trump is with the AI slop fest that he does all the time. It's really doing this. But anyway, if you can get candidates in there, if you can get your opponent in their own words, it always has the ability to land harder than if you're just repeating the words or showing them on screen. So look, if your opponent hands you audio saying, I'd lie to voters to get their votes, you don't need to be a political genius to say, hey, I think I'm going to use that in a political ad. Now, Leonard has an actual recording record of being sort of left-wing political views that gives Kerry plenty of material with which to surround the quote. But let's forget the ideological argument here for a moment. I'm fascinated by the assumption contained in the joke. Osborne gets asked about saying different things to different audiences and explains, well, hey, there's sort of two different lanes you got to do here. You got to say certain things as a candidate, then you'll do certain things when you're governing. The candidate in the Ohio House race jokes that if he held an unpopular belief, obviously he'd lie about it. And you're like, great. Thanks for, you know, puncturing whatever hope voters might have had that somebody with integrity might actually run for office here. Different candidates, different states, there's different politics, but it's the same underlying assumption, right? The campaign is the thing you do to get elected, and then there's what you actually believe. And I just say, when you're running an outsider campaign and you're an outsider, the second your opponent gets to prove that you're no different than they are, doesn't hurt the opponent as much as it's going to hurt, you know, the outsider candidate, right? Nothing in a weird way. It hits harder, you know, even if the sin is, is relatively small, right? It's who you're trying to portray yourself as versus who you might actually be. And I think, look, this is, you know, for all of these independent candidates, Osborne, Brian bangs, uh, Todd Achilles, um, Seth Bodnar, right? The Republican campaign against them is, oh, they're Democrats in independent clothing. And Osborne just saying what he did makes that easier to execute that, essentially to prosecute that case. Perhaps the jury of voters might say, yeah, we hear you, but man, we're done with these incumbents and we're going with the outsider anyway. And that might very well be the case in Nebraska. But I think this is– I think this is suddenly– it's a story that says, oh, he's just another politician. And if you're trying to break this– if you're trying to break into this system, you don't ever want somebody to conclude you're just another politician. All right. I want to stop in Kansas here and the Roger Marshall story. I mean, there's a few things going on in Kansas. One is Donald Trump is doing everything he can. to screw up the Kansas economy, right? He's done it with beef, and now he's doing it with these Canadian tariffs. In particular, Bombardier, a Canadian-owned airplane manufacturer that has factories in Kansas. It's been a staple in Kansas for decades. And let's just say every Republican elected official, except really for Roger Marshall, he hasn't really come out, has come out in support of Bombardier, though it's funny how they keep talking. Some people, they put out statements. Nobody wants to name check Trump and say, you know, he's wrong about this. They just simply want to show that they're supportive of Bombardier. But it is yet more proof that Trump might be just a secret plan at of the Democrats to just see if he can totally implode the Republican Party before the midterms. But that's not the story I wanted to touch on in Kansas. I wanted to touch on the story in the New York Times that's making the rounds. And it's one of these stories that there's nothing illegal that was found, but it's a character story. So let me tell you about it. Roger Marshall, of course, Republican Senator up for reelection. Democratic opponent is the Methodist pastor, Adam Hamilton. Now, Marshall, before he ran for his political career, was a doctor. In fact, he built a substantial part of his political identity around being Doc Marshall, an OBGYN, rural doctor, a guy who delivered thousands of babies. Well, the New York Times has gone through court records from his years of practicing medicine, and what they found was somewhat remarkable. More than 700 patients of Marshall, have been sued for unpaid medical bills. 81 arrests following missed court appearances. He is asked for wage garnishments, bank accounts, interest. He's charged interest on this debt. And some of the debt has been astonishingly small. One was $ 101. One was $ 129. Now, I want to be careful here. Roger Marshall did not personally order police officers to arrest patients who missed court dates. Judges issue warrants when people fail to appear in court, not the person who is suing. His attorney says Marshall was not personally making those decisions and that his medical practice was using the same collection procedures available to other creditors. Okay, totally true. But there's also this. If you're suing somebody over a $ 129 medical bill, this is no longer an abstract argument about the financial survival of rural medicine, right? There's one more wrinkle. In 2025, Senator Marshall introduced legislation restricting hospitals' ability to sue certain patients when hospitals had failed to comply with federal price transparency requirements. Now, that's very interesting to me now, after reading this story about Marshall. Does Marshall, did he change his mind about medical debt collection? Does he think what his own practice did was wrong? Or does he believe there's an important distinction between what a hospital does to collect medical debt and what a doctor's office does? Point is, I think we'd all want to hear the answer from him. But there's also a campaign media story here too. Marshall's allies want to know why this story appears now, right? Why didn't the New York Times do this story a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, six years ago, et cetera? Why did they choose to run this story less than two months before an election? A fair question, right? There's no doubt. It's possible that somebody to show a reporter, hey, did you see what we found? There might be more to this. You might want to look into it. Guess what? Welcome to campaign vetting, right? Welcome to campaign reporting. Now, I've covered enough campaigns to know that damaging information doesn't usually materialize spontaneously on a reporter's desk. But here's a distinction that I think matters. The motive of the source doesn't determine whether the information is true. If a campaign hands a report or a court record, the journalist's job isn't to say, oh, this came from the opposition, therefore it doesn't count. The job is to go get your own version of the court record, verify it, do the reporting, find out what's going on behind it, give the candidate in question an opportunity to respond, then perhaps let voters decide whether this is a story or not. There's also campaigning, right? What candidates say, what candidates do, and what the other side can prove they did. So it's one of those things that I understand the crankiness of the Marshall campaign. But I do think this becomes a character question, right? Which is, You know, the story also noted Marshall decided what the interest rate should be on uncollected debt, and he chose 18%, right? Like credit card debt, 18%, not 3%, not 4%, not 5%. And there were the inevitable stories from people on explaining why the ones who'd gotten arrested for missing a court appearance, some said they didn't know there was a court appearance and they didn't know that missing it meant they could get arrested. And look, I think I think we all know you have to have some rules. And if you have no rules, then nothing gets enforced. But what this really gets at, right, is the empathy question. You're a doctor. How empathetic are you?
00:50:22
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:23
Speaker 1: The Democratic nominee is a pretty famous pastor.
00:50:27
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:27
Speaker 1: Pastors are, you know, and empathy go hand in hand. It is it. And, you know, Marshall already kind of has this. Marshall is not a real. I'll put it in medical terms. He doesn't have the greatest bedside manner. In fact, in some ways, I'm surprised. You know, I look at a guy like the other doctor and one of the other doctors in the Senate, Bill Cassidy. That dude's got a good bedside manner, whatever you think of Bill Cassidy. Some of you may love him. Some of you may hate him, be angry with him over the Kennedy thing. And, you know, I think there are good friends of his that are angry with him over the but I get it. Like as a doctor, you're like, yeah, he would make me feel better. He would, you know, the information I got out of him, he, he there, he's got, he's got, he's got the ability to tell it like it is and not feel like you're getting something jammed up here.
00:51:23
Speaker 2: You know what.
00:51:25
Speaker 1: Marshall is. I don't know if he's just a little still Washington shy. I don't know how else to put it, but there's just a little, and this story sort of paints a very just cold picture. Look, There's nothing untoward that he did. And, you know, he's running a business and they've got to collect the debt. But it certainly appears there wasn't a lot of empathy behind the decision making. And ultimately, right, politics is very personal for people, especially, again, the contrast with Pastor Hamilton is quite striking here. Never mind that it brings up the larger question of, you know, You know, how much of health care should be a for profit enterprise and how much of it should be a right? And, you know, what what what should you know, there was this just gut wrenching story with one of the people who got arrested, who she was. She started to fill out the paperwork. She thought she might qualify for Medicaid. And then she went into labor before she finished the paperwork and then got the big bill and et cetera. And it went on.
00:52:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:52:33
Speaker 1: Let's not pretend we make this easy for people that are at or near the poverty line when it comes to getting Medicaid coverage, qualifying for Medicaid coverage, going through the hoops, different states have different rules, all of those things. And it is, again, I get why the Marshall people are upset with the timing, but this is no ordinary place for an oppo hit like this to land. It lands in the New York Times. That's, you know, That's going to be a boon for Hamilton as far as attention. It's going to be a boon for Hamilton when it comes to some fundraising. The question is, is it, you know, and you can see how this gets turned into what the Obama people turned Romney into, the cold, hard-ass corporate executive who just was trying to lay people off as fast as they can. You could picture that that's the picture that they want to paint with Marshall. And that's the question that I have about Marshall is how How well established is his identity? He's an incumbent, but this is his first reelection as senator. How well established is he with Kansas voters? How embedded is he? Jerry Moran's been around a long time. I think he's embedded himself. One story wouldn't puncture the reputation of Moran. I'm not as convinced on Marshall. So it's quite the look. This was quite the hit on Marshall. And look, here's the thing. If we don't vet these candidates during campaign season, when is there ever going to be vetting of these candidates? So I'd rather have the information.
00:54:18
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:54:18
Speaker 1: Is it all motivated by the election? Of course it is. But ultimately, when are voters paying attention to decide on the character and the qualifications of whether these people deserve to be in public service? It's in campaign season. So I'd rather see all of these stories about everybody in the vetting. And we're going to get, I promise there's going to be a deep dive into how Hamilton has managed his congregation and how he's managed. And there already have been stories like that. There'll be plenty of that. But I think this one, you know, I've had Kansas on my radar a little bit longer than most people. And I think you now see that Kansas is just inching ever so closer to the battleground. Not quite one of our top six races yet, but it may be getting closer than either Nebraska or my friends in New Hampshire. All right. So with that, I'm going to sneak in a break, but coming up, my conversation with Anthony Tomasini. And this is one where some of you know I'm a sports nut. Some of you know I'm a political nut. And some of you know that I was a a music major for a brief period of time while in college. I played the French horn. Well, Anthony Tomasini is somebody I've been reading for a long time. He's the longtime chief classical music critic for the New York Times. But he's got a new book out about the extraordinary life of Marian Anderson. Marian Anderson may not be a name you know, but you are probably familiar with one of the iconic photos and stories from her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial after she was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because she was Black. And Tomasini has written a biography of her, but he argues that remembering Anderson simply as a civil rights icon actually obscures something important about her. She's one of the great American artists of the 20th century. So we talk about her music, her life, and why we've never quite known how to remember her. Anyway, she's both a civil rights icon and one of the greatest voices of the 20th century. Anyway, it's a little bit, you know, for some of you, this might be a little bit of a not a left turn or a right turn, but maybe a U-turn of sorts. But I think it's a good story. And I think you'll enjoy the conversation. And Anthony is just terrific. By the way, Skip Gates is directing this series of sort of forgotten stories. icons of the civil rights era in the 20th century. And he sort of inspired and reached out to Anthony to do this. He tells the story a little bit. So let's sneak in the break. And then when we come back, my conversation with Anthony. Hey, this episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Ethos. Look, let me tell you about life insurance. As you know, Ethos is an incredible portal for helping you find the right life insurance policy. I'm a huge believer in life insurance. I wouldn't have gotten to college in Washington, D.C. without life insurance. 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Get your free quote at ethos.com slash chuck. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary. The rates may vary. That Trustpilot rating was as of August of 2026. Well, I'm going to do a bit of a turn with my guest today. We have a canon of barrier breaking in this country. Jackie Robinson taking the field in Brooklyn, Rosa Parks staying in her seat, the nine kids walking into Central High School. And we teach those stories and we know the dates. Marian Anderson belongs on that list. And I bet most Americans couldn't tell you much more about her than one photograph. Easter Sunday, 1939, the Lincoln Memorial, 75,000 people right here in Washington, D.C. outside after the Daughters of American Revolution refused to let her sing in Constitution Hall. And that's the whole life for most of us. One afternoon, one photograph. What I didn't know and what I found a little embarrassing for me not to know is that the concert was the least of it. She was already by then one of the great singers of the world. She'd been famous in Europe for years before America caught up, and she spent the next two decades performing in cities that applauded her at night and wouldn't rent a room afterwards. In 1955, at 57, she became the first black singer to appear at the Met in New York City. There's a second reason, though, I wanted to do this. Some of you know I spent a good chunk of my life with a French horn in my hands. And I often lament that I don't have it in my hands as often. And Anthony Tomasini was the chief classical musical critic at the New York Times for the last 20 plus years. So this is a book. about the civil rights story most of us half know, written by a critic who can tell you what was actually happening inside that voice. His new book is called Voice of a Century, The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson. It's actually part of an interesting series being edited by our friend Skip Gates, which I think Tony will tell us a little bit about. So, Tony, welcome to the podcast.
01:00:43
Speaker 2: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for your interest.
01:00:46
Speaker 1: Well, let's start with how you came about to do this biography. Was this something you've been working on? Was it something people reached out to you, Skip Gates, things like that? I know that this is part of a series that he's involved with. So tell me some of the origin story.
01:01:02
Speaker 2: This seldom happens to an author. I was asked to write the book. I had gone to know Skip, and in fall of 2021— Sony Classical issued this big deluxe set of all of Anderson's RCA recordings. And I wrote a Sunday Times piece about it. And for people who didn't know about her, I talked about the Lincoln Memorial and her childhood in Philadelphia and stuff. But I focused a lot on the recordings. And I said, some of these recordings are just forgotten. you know, kindertotenlieder Mahler with the San Francisco Symphony of Piedmont, Scandinavian songs in the original languages. And so Skip really liked it. And he emailed and told me so. Two months later, he asked me to write this book. Would I write a book for him? And why me? I mean, I did think about that. I mean, all the subjects are major black figures. And one thing he said in interviews about this series is that There is an underappreciation, it's a remnant of prejudice, of black intellectualism, and I think he's right. And in a way, in this article, I was saying Anderson for all her fame and her, you know, position that you were talking about as the civil rights pioneer or however reluctant, you know, she was for, uh, how people she's in a way intellectual, the equivalent to music of intellectually underrated. She, she was a probing interpretive artist. She was a major musician. And that's sometimes that happens in a lot of fields to pioneers. They wind up being remembered mostly for breaking the path. And well, how did they... You mentioned Jackie Robinson. Well, of course, the biggest... pathbreaker in baseball history. What was he, if you were writing a book about him, was he also one of the great, great players? Yes, actually he was, but we forget that, all we remember. And in a way that's happened to her. So I think he knew I would tell the story well and be sensitive to it. But in a way he wanted the Times critic to say, well, Make a case for her, you know, artistically. I mean, so that's why the book, the subtitle, The Life and Artistry, I spent a lot of time writing about her recordings, her voice, her approach, how she, when she was rejected from music school, she learned this stuff on her own. But she was a major, major artist.
01:03:40
Speaker 1: So what, it is interesting, you know, her life story growing up. in Philadelphia and not having these opportunities. And it's such a reminder. I mean, I'll be honest. I've always said one of the reasons why I'm not a professional French horn player is I remember the first time I heard somebody not as good as I was technically make a better sound. And there is something called a gift. We all know it. And you have it or you don't. And the way you describe her voice is terrific because I think a lot of people can sing. but can you amplify on your own? And she was doing it without all the modern help that everybody has today to boost sound or to boost different decibels within your sound. So describe her sound a little bit, because I think that must be what really jumped out at you when you heard those recordings.
01:04:38
Speaker 2: And I think also what jumps out at all people who hear those recordings and heard her in her church, One thing I learned, which is that from Mahalia Jackson to Marian Anderson to, you know, Beyonce today to Dionne Warwick to Leon Price, growing up in the black church was everything, everything, everything in their lives. And for her, that was true, too. She was conscripted into the junior choir at six years old, you know, and before long, everybody was bragging about the baby contralto. So already this child had a kind of low set voice. But Anderson, both as a young woman and throughout her career, also had this wonderful middle and upper range too. She could get, but it was a haunting, beautiful thing about her voice that once she got into soprano terrain, it was beautiful and radiant, but it sounded like it was emanating from that awesome low voice.
01:05:43
Speaker 1: Well, you can go high. and low, and you're using your low, you're using your diaphragm to support it. I mean, you can hear thin versus full.
01:05:53
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
01:05:54
Speaker 1: You would never describe her high range as thin.
01:05:57
Speaker 2: No, no, no. It just emanated from, everything was supported.
01:06:02
Speaker 1: And so that's the gift, isn't it? This isn't some like training mechanism. I mean, you know, I went through diaphragm breathing exercises back in the day and all of those things. And, you know, I'm sure she did learn those things over time, but This was just a gift that she had, wasn't it?
01:06:17
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that's a gift. Also, her younger sisters both have very good voices. They actually thought about maybe could they have a career.
01:06:28
Speaker 1: Well, mom and dad must have had some good voices as well.
01:06:30
Speaker 2: Well, her mother, not her father so much, but her mother did. But yeah, I mean, so yes, the voice, that's a gift. Musicality. Just having instincts for music, that's a gift. You either have it or you don't. The intellectual, analytic part of music, that you can learn. That you learn by going to school, by studying harmony, by working with composers, by working with coaches. And that's what she had to find her way around. I mean, I tell the story in the book that she was taking private lessons and finally at around 17, she says, okay, I have to get serious. And she takes herself off to the Philadelphia Musical Academy, which no longer exists. And she tries to get an application. And this kind of snippy, young, pretty blonde receptionist says, oh, we don't take colored. And Anderson Wright talked with her journalist friend, Emily Kimbrough, 50 years later about it. It's still hurt. She said, I finally came face to face with what it means to be a Negro in this country. And the shock. you know, was like something physical. You would think she knew that already, but somehow having that happened to her. So even then she wasn't going to go to music school. She had to keep learning from expert coaches and teachers, which is why she eventually made herself just found a way to get to Europe.
01:07:58
Speaker 1: Well, I was just going to say, I mean, this is, there's a lot of our 20th century, um, Black music history had to be popularized in Europe and respected in Europe. The musicians got more respect in Europe before they ever got back here. This has been true of multiple genres of music. So how did she get there?
01:08:16
Speaker 2: Well, it was 1927. She had just turned 30. She had saved money. The church raised money for her, and she finally took herself off to London, and she stayed there for a year. And by the end, she sang at a London proms concert, believe it or not. I mean, that was a big deal. So it was kind of a big success. Then she came back home. And then the second time she went to Europe, that was in 1930. And she applied for a Rosenwald Fund scholarship. And she wrote the most poignant letter where she said she wants to be a fine artist who will be accredited to her people. And she got a fellowship to go study in Germany. This was 1930 in Germany, 1931 in Germany. Can we say that again? Early 1930s Germany. Here's this black woman.
01:09:08
Speaker 1: Black woman. And it's really interesting. There's a scholar and.
01:09:19
Speaker 2: Historian Kira Thurman has written a lot about this, about trying to parse the reception she got. And like German leader were so central to the identity of German culture and German people and stuff that it confounded them that how could this black American woman sing our music so beautifully, you know? And she got reviews, rave reviews, but sometimes along the lines of, It's horrible to say it, but they essentially were saying, she sings Schubert so well, you wouldn't know she was black. So they had to kind of bleach out her color and just sort of... But then she wound up going... to Scandinavia, and she had a promoter there, and she found an accompanist there, a Finnish man, Kosti Vahanen. And before long, Marian Fever gripped Scandinavia. It was a big success.
01:10:18
Speaker 1: How many different languages did she speak? Was she able to sing it?
01:10:22
Speaker 2: This is someone who barely finished high school, and she became fluent in German. It's hard to know. She was pretty comfortable in French. And the Scandinavian language is a little bit because she had a Finnish accompanist and she immersed herself in the songs and the stuff. But at least three, I'd say, you know, English and German and French.
01:10:46
Speaker 1: And those are the three that she's recorded in. There's recordings.
01:10:50
Speaker 2: She also recorded Italian arias, but the opera sort of brings up a whole nother topic.
01:10:59
Speaker 1: That's more of a phonetic. or what?
01:11:01
Speaker 2: No, no. It's, it's more that she, no, it's a beautiful language for singing. It's that she, from the start, didn't see the point of studying too much Italian opera because she wasn't going to get into opera companies in the United States.
01:11:19
Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.
01:11:20
Speaker 2: So she just, yeah.
01:11:21
Speaker 1: So a whole genre that she might've been, We may have missed out on a whole subsection of canon had she felt like she could have broken into.
01:11:35
Speaker 2: An opera company. In 1925, she won a competition for the New York Philharmonic to make her debut at Lewiston Stadium. And she won against several hundred other applicants. And the big aria that she sang was a Donizetti aria, O Mio Fernando. It knocked everybody out. At the London Proms concert, she also sang that aria. So it was exactly what you said. It was a hint of what she could have done. I mean, you mentioned her debut at the Met in 1955. First of all, that is not that long ago that the Metropolitan did not have black singers on its stage. But she had already sung in Carnegie Hall, in major halls in the 30s and 40s, Why not? What was wrong? The difference was on the Carnegie Hall stage, a black woman was sort of just a voice. On stage at the Met, you are a character. You could be somebody's lover or somebody's mother or somebody's brother or, I mean, sister. And the other singer would inevitably be white. And we couldn't have that. You know, you couldn't mix races on stage. There was still this issue of um uh you know casting again uh a casting that's still in a way troubles all the arts but but um i we've made huge progress over that i think you make.
01:13:05
Speaker 1: Pretty clear yeah go ahead finish.
01:13:07
Speaker 2: That no that that was the inhibition that huh and but anyway she she did it and she had had no experience in opera whatsoever and it was a but she only sang in that one production of very Zimbalo and Mascara, a supporting but important role of El Rica. And it was a big triumph. And sitting in the audience that night, that was 1955, was a young soprano named Leontine Price. Oh, wow. Who said, she later told me, she anointed me that night. And she said, maybe someday I can sing on that stage. And she went, how did she... get to that stage, exactly what you said. She went off to Europe and she performed, Price performed in European companies. Then eventually in 1961, she had a triumphant Met debut.
01:14:02
Speaker 1: What, what, if she had been born 30 years later, What genre of music do you think she would be singing?
01:14:14
Speaker 2: She would have, she, she loved songs. She especially loved German leader. And we can talk more about what drew her to that if you want, but she would have sung opera. And in 1960, she did a long interview for ladies home journal, but the very good journalist, Emily Kimbrough, who was a friend of hers and tried to get her to really talk openly about as the article was called, um, you know, being black in a white America. And Emily said to her, well, you know, I know it was so tough, but you look at everything you've done, there's nothing you haven't accomplished. And Marion turned on her and said, Nothing. What about opera? I wanted opera. But they didn't. I wish I could have offered. I could offer, you know, now what I could have offered then. But they didn't want it. They didn't want me. But she said, but at least I've broken this barrier for singers who will follow me, which she absolutely did. So I think she would have had an opera career.
01:15:18
Speaker 1: It's interesting that she said it then, because the portrait you paint of her early is not someone.
01:15:24
Speaker 2: Who was.
01:15:27
Speaker 1: she was not focused on being a trailblazer. She was focused on being a music singer. And at times, look, I don't wanna say you wrote critically about that, but it was almost like you wrote with a bit of disappointment that she didn't fight harder.
01:15:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, except I think that's interesting that that came through that way too. I do present that side of her, but on balance, I'm on her side.
01:16:03
Speaker 1: I don't want to make it seem like you weren't, but it was sort of like– and this is always to me the difficulty of writing about anything in history. Is that how much of today's morals and today's ethics do you– and it is impossible if we're writing about something we did not experience. If we're writing about a time we did not live in. You know, what was the norm is the best we can come up with is what other people tell us what the norm was, right? So I get this challenge, but I could feel a little bit of that tension that you had of like, wow, in hindsight, it's easy. You could have fought, you could have done this, or you could have stood this, but you didn't. But in some ways, she was playing a long game. It's the other side of that.
01:16:52
Speaker 2: And also, if I can tell you one story I tell in the book, She's singing in church. She's the star singer of the choir. She's having voice lessons. She's about 14 years old. And the great tenor, black tenor, Roland Hayes, who was about 10 years her senior, comes to her church and sings. And among the things he sings are German songs, Schubert in German. And the congregation thought his voice was beautiful. Nobody knew what he was singing about. Marian didn't know what he was singing about. She didn't care. She was haunted, she was hooked. She made up what the songs were in her mind. But what Roland Hayes, she had this epiphany. This is something hard to define. This was an artist. This went beyond the components of his voice, his technique. There was something about getting to the essence of music that just got to her. And from that moment forward, she wanted to be a fine artist. That was her driving thing. That even applied to the Lincoln Memorial Concert that you described well. The night before that concert, she was on the phone to her manager trying to get out of it. Because she thought the whole thing had morphed into some kind of civil rights demonstration. And if she sang, she didn't need to sing at Constitution Hall. You know, like she didn't need to. She had sung everywhere. But if she was going to sing there, she was going to do it because she was a great artist. And that's what they want. You know, that's what they wanted. And she was afraid. And Sol Yurok, her manager, had to say, no, Marion, that's not what it's going to be like. People are people. They're not going to be banners. People are going to come. and express their support for you by savoring every moment of your artistry. And that's what happened. And that's why she was deeply moved by it. But it was, it was being an artist that drove her. You know, why didn't she speak out more? In 1937, she has her first concert at Princeton. She hasn't sung there before. She thinks she has a room at the Nassau Inn. Until she finds out, uh-uh, she can't stay there. She's there. What is she supposed to do? Word gets to a famous faculty member, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who had heard her at Carnegie Hall and come backstage meekly to meet her. Big fan, Albert Einstein. Wow. And he says, you must, you will come. His wife had just died. He said, you will come and stay with my stepdaughter and me and my personal secretary at my house on Mercer Street. So she did. And they took wonderful care of her, and he went to the concert, and they stayed up late. And he was ashamed of his adopted hometown that this magnificent woman honors your hotel by staying in it. And are you kidding? And they became fast friends, and there was one point of disagreement. He thought, why don't you speak out more? You have this platform. You're marrying, you know, and she was said, I can't know how she put it to him, but she probably said, well, basically, it's easy for you. You're Einstein. You know, you can go out and say whatever you want.
01:20:17
Speaker 1: Well, that's kind of what he was saying. It should be easy for you.
01:20:20
Speaker 2: But it wasn't. She was still trying to get through the door of an opera house in this company, in this country, you know. She was trying. There were still things, so many things closed to her. And she had to do it through the merits of her singing. through her artistry. So, yeah, I just think it was partly her nature. Maybe she wasn't bold enough. Paul Robeson spoke out all the time, but career-wise, as a singer, he paid a price for it. He lost a lot of opportunities. So, yeah, she could have been more outspoken, but she prevailed through her artistry, through her Great, you know, great voice.
01:21:05
Speaker 1: So let's, you know, did she, you know, sometimes you have some artists, they go to Europe and they never want to come back.
01:21:13
Speaker 2: Right.
01:21:13
Speaker 1: Because they're so, they were so frustrated with how poorly they were treated here, they stay there. I mean, and there's plenty of generations of artists have done that.
01:21:24
Speaker 2: Especially early in the 20th century, jazz musicians.
01:21:28
Speaker 1: A lot of black artists just basically left America because they felt like they were, frankly, safer.
01:21:33
Speaker 2: Right.
01:21:33
Speaker 1: In Europe. Why did she come back?
01:21:37
Speaker 2: She was an American and she was proud to be an American. And she was comfortable in this country. And also, if she was not outspoken in a way that we would maybe admire even more today, she spoke all the time of my people. I want to be a credit to my people. She thought she.
01:22:03
Speaker 2: But she thought the way to do that was to be an example of excellence and possibility. Give us a chance. Look what we can do. And she wanted to prove herself that way in America. I think that's why she came back. But she kept going back to Europe. She would turn around and go have tours there and come back. She traveled a lot. But sure, she based herself here and... And eventually all the doors did open for her, but she pried them open.
01:22:42
Speaker 1: You say that if the genre that obviously she missed the most with opera, what did she make of the rise? Because, you know, as she's becoming more well-known, that's also the rise of jazz. It's the early days of the crooners. Then we move from that to, you know, popular music and it goes from there what did she make of that genre and it at all interest her.
01:23:07
Speaker 2: Yes she was friends with duke ellington and she respected all that music tremendously i don't think she had great feeling for it or deep interest in it but she was very curious and respectful um i kind of rescue her in a chapter um where from interviews she gave where she would talk about uh high, upper, higher music. It used to be that people favored popular things more than the songs she sang, the art songs she sang. But during the war, singing for the troops and going to hospitals, it's amazing how often people asked for Schubert and Brahms. And she acted like the higher forms of music She used that word, unfortunately, you know, like.
01:23:58
Speaker 1: Well, it's funny. I mean, it's, look, let's be honest, especially if you, you know, I was a music major for a while, right? And so there's this mindset that real music, the real difficult music is classical music, right? And opera is a derivative of that. And popular music are for singers who couldn't do opera, right? And I'm sitting here being very, obviously, ham-handed here, but that was sort of, this mindset. And yet I look at somebody like Whitney Houston, it's like, well, if she'd chosen to do opera, she might've been a great opera singer.
01:24:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:24:31
Speaker 1: Yes.
01:24:32
Speaker 2: I think there's this chapter I'm proud of that was called Why Schubert, where I try to explain what drew her to this art form. And I compare it to myself growing up in a Long Island suburb, but there was more music in her household than there was in mine. This Grabbed me. I don't know how. I just I was listening to Salzburg Festival radio concert on the radio by myself when I was a kid. It just hooked me.
01:25:04
Speaker 1: And you don't have that parent or grandparent that said, hey, take a listen to this. I mean, no, I didn't have that. I had a I had a father who had eclectic and stuff. So I. I was hearing it in my house a little bit.
01:25:16
Speaker 2: No, I screamed. I wanted a piano. I wanted lessons. It was through me. Finally, at eight years old, I got one. But it wasn't through my parents. Everyone in her family sang. Music and music at their church was crucial to her. But what I say is that when she heard these songs, like Roland Hayes singing Schubert, It wasn't, she may have used the word higher, but she didn't mean, she ended every recital she ever gave with spirituals, singing Negro spirituals.
01:25:49
Speaker 1: Was that always connected to her first recording contract?
01:25:53
Speaker 2: That was. The first recording she was asked to do were spirituals. But soon after, you know, other things. But it was her way of saying, these works are every bit as profound and great as any song by any European composer ever. That I've sung already. But what I think did grab her about classical music was, yes, it was the subtext of things. It was the multi-layered quality of it. Why is it that a Schubert song, singing on the surface, seems so cheerful, but yet there's this undertone? There's this sadness. There's this longing. What's going on there? It's the subtleties and inner workings of it. I think that's what hooked her, that she had to figure out what is that. She used the word higher, but it wasn't higher.
01:26:48
Speaker 1: Was she also a piano player?
01:26:52
Speaker 2: Yes. She took piano lessons. There wasn't a lot of money for them, but she learned a lot. on her own.
01:26:59
Speaker 1: And was she a music reader or did she learn it by ear?
01:27:01
Speaker 2: No, no, no. She, yeah, she did learn to read. Yeah. And, and, and, and all the, and all that stuff, but not being able to get into the music academy, what she never did was like take a course in harmony or something like that, or, you know, or counterpoint or these things that all music students do. Right.
01:27:18
Speaker 1: She was not doing like rudimentary composition.
01:27:21
Speaker 2: No, she wasn't, she wasn't doing that. And, So, but again, she, she worked with really, really.
01:27:27
Speaker 1: I have scars, by the way, I still have scars from my music composition professor who went to Yale, who absolutely eviscerated one of my first attempts at a Bach chorale. And I'm like still scarred from this. Oh, that's terrible. I'm so glad she, I'm so glad she didn't have to fear that.
01:27:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. But normal in classical music training that usually by studying counterpoint and writing pieces in the style of Bach chorales and, And harmony. It's not that you become a master of this, but it changes the way you hear. You really do. You hear, ah, you're alert to what you're listening to, I think. So she did miss that.
01:28:11
Speaker 1: She is somebody, I get the impression that when you did your review and Skip Gates reached out to you, that in some ways what Skip Gates is concerned about is some of these folks getting lost. Because I do think, and it goes back to this pioneer and this breaking barrier mindset that we have, the pioneers will always have their pages in the history books. There's a whole group of people who,– she was a pioneer. She didn't choose to advertise being a pioneer as we keep– as basically we've spent 20 minutes talking about. That doesn't make her any less relevant to the music– to the history of music in the 20th century. And ultimately, I feel like with this book is you can't tell the history of American singing– of the 20th century without her.
01:29:01
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. And she, even in the moment of being a pioneer, she was going to make the larger points about artistry. And for example, the Lincoln Memorial Concert. Okay, she agrees to do it. There she is. She opens up singing America. She's so flustered to look at 75,000 people, black and white.
01:29:25
Speaker 1: Was that the largest audience she'd ever had?
01:29:27
Speaker 2: That was the largest audience that ever been at the Lincoln Memorial. And, you know, 24 years later for the I Have a Dream speech, it absolutely hearkened back to the Anderson concert. You know, like in a way it was a reference to that. It was really one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement, that concert in 1939. So she sings America, she flubs the words a little because she's so flustered. It's only a half-hour concert. It's going to include a Schubert Ave Maria and three spirituals. The second piece she sang was the longest, that Donizetti aria I mentioned before. O Mio Fernando, seven minutes before an audience. It was then an obscure aria. How many people among those 75,000, even radio listeners, would have known anything about it? She said, I'm going to show them. This is real. Even if this is a civil rights, you know, milestone, I'm going to also show them. And newspaper reporters surveying the crowd said people were awestruck. They didn't know what she was singing about, but just that a voice could do this, really. That's what gets forgotten about that concert when it's written about. How well did she sing? Well, that day she sure did, you know.
01:30:58
Speaker 1: Is there a really good recording.
01:31:00
Speaker 2: Of that concert? Yes, the radio broadcast. There's a radio broadcast of it on NBC and it was broadcast. But the other thing that people forget about that concert, okay, there's a platform of sponsors, Supreme Court justices and senators and Catherine Hepburn and people like that and 75,000 people. She's greeted. It's a big, of course, her mother and her two younger sisters come from Philadelphia for this big day. And she's, you know, news around the world. Of course, none of the Anderson women in 1939 could stay at any hotel in Washington, D.C. So from all this, she has to rely on it had been arranged. Gifford Pinchot was the former progressive Republican governor, two-term governor of Pennsylvania, her home state. His wife was a big supporter of women's rights. They had the Anderson women stay with them at their home in Washington. I mean, that's the part of our history that we keep. It's not only that she, as an artist, I think is underrated, but even what she did as a civil rights pioneer is forgotten. That she had to face the humiliation of not being able to stay anyplace in Washington.
01:32:22
Speaker 1: Your source material, you had quite a bit. Obviously, you had to go into multiple languages to see how she was received in Germany. But I'm curious about her. You note in her memoir that she left certain details, including about her father and his business, out. Oh, yes.
01:32:38
Speaker 2: He had a side business in selling alcohol.
01:32:42
Speaker 1: Which I guess she didn't– you get a sense of why she left that out. And what else did she leave out of that memoir?
01:32:50
Speaker 2: And she left out any mention of, well, and throughout her whole life, the only romantic relationship she ever owned up to was with Orpheus Fisher, the man she eventually married, not until 1943. And she, you know, she went to, in 1935, she was on a tour. of Europe, and she made it to the Soviet Union, if you can imagine, in 1935. Two tours. And the Soviet government puts her up at a spa for two weeks as a gift from the government. And there she has a fling with a younger Russian Jewish man who was an actor and reader, and who was apparently very passionate. And there are, we have his letters, but not hers. And she, of course, never, ever, ever mentioned this, you know, So there are things like that. And also the other thing I do talk about in the book, this is how much– so she worked with a ghostwriter, Howard Taubman, who was very, very faithful to the recorded tapes, which you can hear at the University of Pennsylvania at the library.
01:34:00
Speaker 1: Is that where all of her stuff is?
01:34:01
Speaker 2: That's where all of her stuff is. Yeah. And he, by the way, talking about conflict of interest in journalism, he had my job. He was the chief classical music critic of the New York Times at the time. He wrote, he was her ghostwriter. They kept it quiet. His name was not given and even mentioned.
01:34:24
Speaker 1: Not even in the acknowledgments or anything like that?
01:34:26
Speaker 2: No, in the acknowledgments, yes, for editorial help, but not that he actually wrote, you know. And he was left out of all the reviewings. He was sharing money that he made from it. It would be like if I had, as a critic, was the ghostwriter for Renee Fleming's memoir, and we kept it quiet, and we were both making money, and I kept reviewing her positively. I mean, that was just total different era of journalism. Well, yeah.
01:34:54
Speaker 1: I mean, I always say, be careful when you ask about the good old days of journalism. You don't want to know what some of the rules used to be.
01:34:59
Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly. But when she finally got the draft of the book from Howard Taubman, her first thing was she wanted everything about the Lincoln Memorial Concert taken out.
01:35:19
Speaker 1: That's why are we doing the book, right?
01:35:23
Speaker 2: And her lawyer, whom she trusted, and her husband... And Taubman had to convince her, no, no, that is quite wrong. But she didn't, she wasn't.
01:35:34
Speaker 1: But you don't open with it. You know what I almost feel like now listening to that story, that your decision not to open with the Washington concert, I feel like was an homage to her.
01:35:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also what I, I wanted to make clear how, how for Black, for all of us, but especially black people, even today, but especially back then, you can overstate how important it is to have a model, to see somebody, ah, doing that. So I begin with Leontine Price, who's still with us at 99. So Anderson comes back from Europe and she starts singing here again. And she has a concert in Jackson, Mississippi. And one day Leontine Price's Mother says to her, well, Marian Anderson is not going to be coming to Laurel, Mississippi, but she is singing in Jackson and we're going to take the bus and we're going to go there and hear her. So they did. They went to see her. Now, of course, in this big auditorium, they're sitting in the colored section, you know, and this woman walks out and elegant, beautiful and starts singing. And Price has this epiphany and she looks at her and says to herself, I'm going to be her. That's my future. At the time, Price was the star of her church choir. She was taking piano lessons. She thought, maybe I could be a music teacher. Maybe I could be a voice singer and do some concerts. Then she thought, ah, that. I'm going to do that. And what does she do? She goes out and does it. She becomes the most famous opera singer in the world.
01:37:20
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful way to open because the whole point is that she did break barriers.
01:37:24
Speaker 2: She did, yeah.
01:37:24
Speaker 1: For the next generation.
01:37:26
Speaker 2: And then, so Price is in the audience when Anderson makes her debut. When Price makes her debut in 1961, who's in the audience? Marian Anderson. I mean, wow, that's really moving.
01:37:43
Speaker 1: What, somebody listening right now, one recording, where would you tell people to start?
01:37:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm such an advocate of wanting her. Can I pick two? I'd say one is Schubert's Ave Maria because it's so famous. And I think even to people new to this music, the eloquence, the personalness, the authenticity, the sensitivity she brings to it is overwhelming. But the other one is this spiritual crucifixion. Wow. She recorded it in 1941. It wasn't released for years and years. I don't know why, because maybe she thought it was too personal. The spiritual is amazing. It's profound. The words are, they begin, they crucified my Lord. And he never said a mumbling word, not a word, not a word, not a word. So the spiritual is about jesus's reaction that he never even with this punishment nothing never said a word in his defense the spiritual it's a profound piece it's meant to be sung very slowly anderson sings it at this glacial tempo so slow you think the she's taking a risk that the music is going to lose any kind of rhythmic thread it's just going to go limp but it's so intense so um The sound is so tremulous and grabs you and so heart-wrenching, you hang on every word. It's four and a half minutes, and it's one of the most profound vocal music recordings of the whole 20th century. And I'll tell you, she sang it in 1935 in Salzburg. Of course, she couldn't sing at the Salzburg Festival, a black woman. Nazis were overrunning Austria. But the lobby of a hotel was rented for her. And it was kind of an informal concert for a few hundred people. Two people show up, famous conductors, Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini. And on the program, she sings some spirituals. And one of them is crucifixion. And the reporter... reporting on the concert said at the end of crucifixion, no one applauded, not a sound, you know, and they were overcome.
01:40:23
Speaker 1: It just sounds haunting the way you, and it, look, it's the subject matter itself. If this is your faith, this is the moment. And it sounds like she interpreted it that deeply.
01:40:34
Speaker 2: Absolutely. This gets to the title of my book, which we don't have to go into, but Toscanini goes up to her afterwards and congratulates her. Then he says, And this is the best quote we have is from her accompanist who was standing right next to him. He says, what I just heard, one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years. So naturally, her big shot manager, Sol Yura, grabs that comment and tweaks it into something much catchier and promotional. So all of a sudden her posters are plastered with Marian Anderson, quote, the voice of the century, Arturo Toscanini. And he never said that. He never said that.
01:41:19
Speaker 1: The social media of that day, huh? That would have been immediately tweeted out and Instagrammed and all of that, right?
01:41:25
Speaker 2: But the president of Penguin encouraged me to tweak that phrase into voice of a century. I didn't want to go anywhere because... Because it's ambiguous. I love that. That it's not the voice.
01:41:44
Speaker 1: It's voice.
01:41:45
Speaker 2: It's like it almost means she exemplified the century. She embodied this. She sang for it. She spoke for it. Both the possibilities and the horrible shortcomings of it. It's all there. And also, by the way, it implies a little. She happened to also have one of the great voices of the century. But Toscanini also said what I loved about his quote. He didn't say the voice I have just heard. He said what I have just heard, meaning everything, your artistry, your interpretation, your sensibility, and of course the voice.
01:42:25
Speaker 1: Well, look, it's a tremendous story. Congratulations that you got to do this because you get to put your imprint on this. Before I let you go, I'm curious of your thoughts on the state of classical music. And I say this as I watch, you know, my last music professor was second chair at the National Symphony, still is, still is at the National Symphony. They don't have a home.
01:42:57
Speaker 2: They don't have a home.
01:42:59
Speaker 1: You know, it is, look, one of the things that I've always said I talked myself out of trying to go into music as a career was, you know, the opportunities are fewer and fewer all the time, unless you're the best of the best. It is really, you want to talk about, it's not 1%, it's the one, you know, one-tenth of 1% are able to truly make a living in classical music. What's your sense of it as a public genre and what's your sense of it you know, how do we create a new youth movement?
01:43:38
Speaker 2: That's a huge topic. And we got two minutes.
01:43:42
Speaker 1: No, I'm kidding.
01:43:42
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, the Kennedy Center story, the tragedy there is that maintaining a symphony orchestra, maintaining an opera company is already so challenging. Even if you have the most supportive board and staff, of trustees and people and patrons, it's still so hard. And so to have politics just take over and run the place into the ground is just incredibly tragic.
01:44:16
Speaker 1: No, it's a gut punch.
01:44:18
Speaker 2: But, you know, the thing, the great hope I have, in a way, AI could maybe Even though we're all afraid of it, help this. I know you've said things like this on your podcast that it might drive people back to the original.
01:44:40
Speaker 1: Oh, I am a believer in this, that the unintended consequence of the artificialness of everything is going to make us appreciate the original everything.
01:44:54
Speaker 2: And when you were talking to Bob Spitz about the book on the Rolling Stones, you were both talking about the kind of mystique of live instruments. We've been losing that, and even in that field, we have to get it back. But my mantra in writing about this field and loving this field and promoting it and encouraging people is this is one field, art form, you have to hear live. You think you don't chamber music? A string quartet?
01:45:26
Speaker 1: What? No, and unfortunately, I think the digitalization of it has turned it all into elevator music, and it's not fair.
01:45:33
Speaker 2: If you hear a string quartet playing in a hall that seats 300 or 400 people, no amplification, I'm sorry. When I was a kid, I knew nothing about opera. I got seats at the Met, the old Met, when I was really young. I had no idea what these operas were about. But the sound of these voices coming up and encircling me, no amplification, was enthralling. Every time I've brought some neophyte to the Met Opera in New York who doesn't, they'll ask 10 times, there's no amplification? I said, no, no. You know, a symphony or to hear a great orchestra at Carnegie Hall, that sound is... You cannot record that. You know, like we all love our recordings. Obviously, they're wonderful. It's like Toscanini once said, it's like getting a kiss. No, Stravinsky, I'm sorry, once said, it's like getting a kiss over the telephone. But yeah, but I think if young people could just hear this stuff and hear it in the places where it's meant to be performed, I mean, it's just enthralling. It captivates you. And if the demand, the demand has to be there, but it's a very expensive art form. You know, putting on opera is very, very labor intensive. But I believe in the genre. I believe in the art form. I believe in its sustaining power. And it's never going to have the big audiences that, of course, pop music has. But we can sustain it. We have sustained it.
01:47:11
Speaker 1: Well, I always love to tell some of my friends who, who are not really maybe fluent in classical music or just sort of, you know, appreciate it when it's in a cool movie score, you know, which can, which can is, is sort of, and then they go to a rock concert that brings on, you know, a brass, at least a brass accompaniment, right. Or might have 20 instrumentalists behind them, you know, a couple of trumpets, a couple of French horns, a couple of violins, And it just fills the stadium in a way that no synthesizer could. And no matter how many of those speakers you stack up, right, for the people that sit on the floor seats.
01:47:57
Speaker 2: Also, in the kind of concert you're describing, but also think of the symphony orchestra on a big concert stage. There's a spatial element to listening that, you know, bases are here and the brasses are here and it's coming from different parts, you know, and you have a solo oboe sort of standing up against the whole orchestra. And there's that kinetic kind of spatial thing is also you have to be there to hear it.
01:48:23
Speaker 1: There's really no recording yet. I feel like that has truly been able to capture that sort of fullness, no matter what kind of, you know, you could have the best. And I'm, you know, I was an audiophile until until I got kids, right? And then it's just sort of like, there's only so much hobbies you could keep up with, but you can have the best sort of setup to, you know, whether you're playing vinyl or you're playing something that, you know, through the best version, digital version you could get, and it's never going to fill the room the way live fills it up.
01:48:56
Speaker 2: No, you're singing my gospel. No, I agree. Again, as someone who loves recordings, and especially historic recordings, all of Anderson's recordings. I mean, I never heard her live, and so it's all I have. And I cherish them. But no, I agree. I would rather hear.
01:49:21
Speaker 2: Than the most highly touted, best engineered, amazingly performed recording of, let's say, Beethoven's uh, Eroica symphony, I'd rather hear this Juilliard orchestra play it live, you know, or the Manhattan school or music orchestra play it live. Uh, because those kids have never played it before. Usually they're thrilled. And they're also, by the way, very good. They're very talented. They're technically incredible.
01:49:47
Speaker 1: Someone who couldn't get into Juilliard. I will tell you that.
01:49:52
Speaker 2: Maybe it all worked out for the best.
01:49:54
Speaker 1: You know, it all, it all, it all works out. Let me, uh, If you could pick one, if you cannot see classical music live, what is your preferred recording? Is it vinyl? Is it a high, high-end digital sort of recording? Is it a 78 rather than a 33 on the vinyl? Do you have a preference?
01:50:20
Speaker 2: In a way, you're asking the wrong person, Beth. I... I have found that many musicians, and first and foremost, I was a pianist and played a lot of concerts, and are not audiophiles. because you can listen through anything. I can listen through any old scratchy recording. And so when digital came along, for me, just pragmatically, it's clean, it's not gonna deteriorate, it's reliable, it's maybe a little colder than vinyl sound, you know, an analog sound, but.
01:50:57
Speaker 1: There's a warmth to vinyl that's hard to recreate anywhere else.
01:51:00
Speaker 2: There is, but you have to have really good equipment and it's just, you know, it's- And any old CD player can really, you know, so it's, it's a convenience in a way that, but Anderson made some recordings from the early eras, you know, a recording that are full of crackles and stuff, but doesn't bother me. I can listen right through, you know, to hear what I want to hear. Let me get you out of here. Yeah, go ahead.
01:51:28
Speaker 1: Finish.
01:51:29
Speaker 2: I'd say go hear something live. Yes.
01:51:32
Speaker 1: That's, I think we can't emphasize that. I mean, You know, even if it's something, one of my favorite summer programs that we have here in D.C. is the National Symphony would do movie night at Wolf Trap.
01:51:44
Speaker 2: Right. Wonderful. Right.
01:51:45
Speaker 1: And you do a movie and then they do the score live. And it's just, it's actually a great way to get, to bring your kids into something.
01:51:53
Speaker 2: Right, right.
01:51:53
Speaker 1: Right. It's sort of, you know.
01:51:56
Speaker 2: What music do your kids listen to?
01:51:59
Speaker 1: Oh, my daughters. There's Taylor Swift and everybody else, my friend.
01:52:06
Speaker 2: She's awfully good.
01:52:07
Speaker 1: No, and it got my daughter to pick up a guitar. I mean, look, I insisted on piano lessons. Let's just say it was a chore for them when they were younger. But, you know, I believe music is a language that you learn. And so even a rudimentary understanding of music is only going to help you in life down the road. Let me get you out of here on this, because this used to be a fun little conversation I would have over the years when I was more active. in the, in the music world, classical music world, who would you say is the, what's, what's the premier symphony to get into now? You know, you'd have these little debates. There was the Cleveland orchestra, there's New York and there's Philadelphia and there's, you know, they all had their strengths, Chicago, you know, some would argue Boston, of course, you know, with, with, with, with, they had the problem, arguably the most famous conductors for a while, you know, who's got the belt right now? Who's the number one symphony in the country? Where do the musicians going, no matter where they are, they go, I want.
01:53:14
Speaker 2: To go there. I guess I have, again, a sort of different take on that because it's, it's not just like you can calculate the excellence or.
01:53:26
Speaker 1: Well, I feel like it's hard to tell the difference, but it, my guess is it's in some ways it might be even director specific.
01:53:33
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. I was just going to say, it's, you know, for example, the Los Angeles Philharmonic just became, first under the composer, conductor, Esa-Pek Salonen, and then Gustavo Dudamel, who's now coming this fall to the New York Philharmonic. They were so, such adventurous, such an adventurous whole institution, you know, There was a real connection between the conductors, those two conductors, especially Gustavo and the audience and those players and the programs. They really had, they just made every concert seem important, you know, and it's, was it, Were they playing greater than the Chicago Symphony? It's not that. It's just something that was really happening there. You know, like you could compare to, we now look back. You can read reviews criticizing Bernstein when he was at the New York Forum. Oh, sure.
01:54:38
Speaker 1: Arthur Fiedler at the Boston Pops would get criticized, but it was fun.
01:54:41
Speaker 2: We look back at Bernstein now in those years. Are you kidding? That was like the golden age ever.
01:54:46
Speaker 1: Everybody wanted to be with him and in New York.
01:54:49
Speaker 2: That was just, those concerts were incredible. So it's really the mix that makes an orchestra really great.
01:54:59
Speaker 1: I mean, basically, there's eight to ten great symphonies to belong to, and it's really director-specific, really, that sort of drives the moment.
01:55:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, but, you know, the Alabama Symphony came to Carnegie Hall once, to play a concert. And I, and they did, it was a really good concert and they played really well. And it was a new piece. And so I said, you know, I'm sorry, this sitting there that last night, this was as good as any concert I can remember, you know? So it doesn't quite work that way, but yeah, when you have, let's see what Gustavo does in New York, you know, he's got some big plans and it could, he could be bringing all, all his, you know, charisma and energy and ideas.
01:55:46
Speaker 1: We'll see, you know, well, I, I, um, that's something to look forward to. Uh, I'm glad to hear that. Uh, Tony, this was great. Um, thanks for, uh, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing this book. Yeah. And I know it comes out in about a week or so.
01:56:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. A little bit, a little longer, September 8th. And, uh, it's, um, a couple of few weeks and Yes, thank you. I'm honored. I'm very glad that you invited me. Thank you so much.
01:56:27
Speaker 1: All right, let's do a little top five list and some questions to wrap up this episode. So here's my top five list this week, and it's a It's the statewide sweeps. To me, blue wave, blue tsunami, right? I've gone through my various stages here for you. You know, blue mirage, blue wave, blue tsunami. I'm going to leave the blue mirage category aside for this list. Well, actually, you could look at it this way, but I think there's a pretty good measurement. particularly on the Democratic side, measuring this through the prism of the Democrats here, of five states where a Democrat hasn't carried that state at least since 2012 for president, where both a governor and a Senate race is on the ballot. And as you know, I went through this about the importance of the top of the ticket. It's governor's races in many of these states and how important these gubernatorial nominees might be to bringing over either you know, flawed candidates or lesser known candidates, or maybe the state's a little too red or you got to try to drag it over. But I thought a pretty good measurement. I wanted to give you the five states where I think Democrats at least have a 10 percent chance of of the dual sweep of winning the governor's race and the competitive Senate race in that state. And I think this is the way I would have you examine this top five. If somehow all Democrats swept all five of these states, I'm about to highlight here. that are both featuring both competitive Senate and marginally competitive governor's races. I say marginally, because that's eye of the beaker, but they're not they're not blowouts. They made the list because, you know, it is somewhat competitive. And in one case, it's actually a governor's race is more competitive than the Senate race. And I'll get to that. But I think a good way to see which categories, if somehow Republicans swept all five. of these states and the dual statewide, well, then that would be blue mirage territory. And then the degrees of wave depend on how many of these states Democrats sweep, right? If they can get all of them, then this is a blue tsunami. I'd argue three of the five. If they swept, you would call this either a very big wave bordering on blue tsunami, and obviously four or five is there. So I know I threw a bunch of caveats in there and you're like, what the hell are you talking about? Here's the bottom line. Here's the five red states, right, where a Democratic presidential candidate has not carried that state since at least 2012. So it's been more than a decade since that state went blue in a presidential race. Here are my top five states where Democrats have a realistic chance of the sweep, both Senate and Gov. And again, It's like I'm not Michigan doesn't make this list because, hey, Joe Biden carried Michigan in 2020. And, you know, there's you know, it's it's I think Democrats are favored to sweep both races. But the Senate race is definitely a coin flip. Ditto with a Minnesota or ditto with a that could see, you know, Democrats win both the governor's race or that, you know, it doesn't qualify. This is already sort of a blue or purple state or a blue leaning state. These are these red states basically that in the Trump era have been out of reach for for Democrats, particularly in the presidential level and either out of reach, either in a Senate race or a Gov race or both. So coming in at number five is the state of Florida, okay? Florida, this is the most unrealistic. This is probably the hardest of the states that were once competitive and haven't been in the Trump era, put Florida there. This is probably the tallest mountain for Democrats to climb. It's more, you know, they could in a blue wave scenario, even, you know, they could lose both the governor's race and the Senate race and still have a good year politically, you would say this. But I'm putting it on the list because I do think the governor's race is going to be close. And I think if somehow David Jolly pulls it off, we will say this was closer to being a big blue wave to slash tsunami. And I think Angie Nixon may be more competitive than folks realize. She doesn't have the resources and the national party is not going to put it there. but you may see more party realignment here than you realize there. So look, it's sort of, it's at the tail end. It is not a, but it's sort of, you know, because I say you have to have a top five list, Florida's fifth, but there's a big gap between four and five on my list. Number four on my list is Kansas. So Kansas is interesting because now they've never, they haven't elected a Democratic senator since the 1930s. And obviously, the current governor is term-limited from seeking a third term, Laura Kelly, and it's a Democrat. So this is a case where if Democrats are able to do something they haven't been able to do when they've won these governor's races, which is have a new Democrat replace the term-limited Democrat, right? It didn't happen with Sebelius. And Kelly is trying to see, has she permanently shifted the governing culture of the state? Now, we'll see. Her preferred candidate lost in the primaries. The Democratic nominee is won in part due to the Kansas City Chiefs deal, but she's also been pretty front and center on, again, status center expansion and things like that. And then, of course, Republicans in Kansas are still having to carry the baggage of Sam Brownback and those unpopular budget cuts, and that's always something that they got to hang on there. But the real sort of blue tsunami test here is, Can Democrats actually win a Senate seat here? They've got a good candidate in Adam Hamilton. They've been competitive before 2014. They had an independent Greg Orman who came within single digits of Pat Roberts back in the day, or right around single digits. It was right in the 9-10 cut line on that. But I promise you, if Democrats were able to flip this Senate seat, and I think Roger Marshall's uniquely vulnerable here. He's not the most....
02:02:48
Speaker 2: Right.
02:02:48
Speaker 1: Jerry Moran has been more front and center pushing back on Trump. Marshall will never push back on Trump. And I wonder if that's a problem for him, if he's going to underperform in some of the suburban areas of Kansas City, Kansas and things like that. So I think the possibilities are there. But boy, you would be in blue tsunami territory if Democrats could win both in the same cycle, a Senate race and a government race. So number four. So I put Florida is is Competitive, but very unlikely. Kansas, competitive, mostly unlikely. My next three here are the more realistic sort of blue wave seats. And I think if two of these three sweeps came in for the Democrats in my top three here, you would call it a significant blue wave. And if all three came in, I think you would need to classify this as blue tsunami. And I'm going to start with the state of Iowa. I'm putting Iowa number three instead of Texas. I debated back and forth. Number one, the minute I say it is going to be, you'll see why that was sort of the easier call here. But number three on my list is Iowa. So what I'm saying is, is I think this Senate seats a very, very tough hill for Democrats to climb. I told you, I gave you all the data behind it last week and a couple of monologues there. So I won't go into the dirty details there. But All you have to do is listen to Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee, and how he campaigns and how he speaks about party politics. He talked about that if for some reason he was asked the question if Senator Grassley couldn't finish his seat, who would he appoint? What party would he appoint a Democrat to replace Grassley? He said, no, he'd appoint an independent. it was important for him to get that out there, right? He's trying to send a message to those that are not happy with the Democratic brand in Iowa, that he's a different type of Democrat, that he's more of an independent-minded Democrat. But that's also a reminder of why in Iowa, I think it's going to be very much harder for a Democrat to win a Senate seat than a Gov seat. Governors, individual person, a Senate seat is sort of a party caucus vote, right? And it's in some ways voters usually you know, are more likely to pick to to prioritize Jersey color over an individual than they do in a governor's race. Look, Republicans also have a very weak governor gubernatorial nominee. I mean, this Zach Lane guy is having to make the case that he's an actual Iowan when you're less than 60 days from election and you've still got to answer serious questions about how much of an Iowan you are in a place that is very proud of being of living in that state. I just think it's a it's I don't want to say it's unwinnable because it's a red leaning state. But Zach Lane's as close to being an unelectable nominee as you can come up with in in in this current in this current situation. So a Democratic sweep here of both the gubernatorial and the Senate race definitely is indicated indicative of a blue wave, in my opinion. And I have a feeling if both of those come in, then there's going to be sweeps with the next– potentially sweeps with the next two states we're talking about here. And I'm going to get to the part where the state that I think some people are going to feel as if is an impossibility, and that's Texas. We already know the Senate race is close with Tallarico having a slight advantage. The more remarkable race that has fallen under the radar because of Ken Paxton and Tallarico is the governor's race. Greg Abbott's trying to do something nobody's ever done in Texas, win a fourth term for governor, a fourth four-year term for governor. That is, you know, you could just look at recent history. Fourth terms are very difficult to get, particularly for consecutive terms. Sometimes it's a lot easier to do it the way Jerry Brown did it or to do it the way Terry Branstad did it. You win a couple of times, you leave, you come back and win two more times. But four straight, right? Mario Cuomo was trying for a fourth until it sort of blew up in his face. So I just think there's a natural fatigue, right? Throw in the fatigue with the national party, throw in the disappointment with, you know, you have a divided Republican party in the state, right? You have both a rising Democratic electorate in the state and a divided Republican party, particularly on issues like the way this voucher situation Uh, has gone education cuts, very similar to what we see, what we saw developing in Kansas, where really a divided Republican party gave Democrats an opening. And essentially Democrats moved to become the, the, the Republican light party, uh, as far as state government is concerned. And it was a lot of former Republicans who became Democrats who, uh, who have helped fuel this movement as well. I'm not saying you're there where you have Republicans switching parties in Texas, but you do have this divide that exists. And I think that is, I mean, you saw it here. So look, I think the data center flip flop by Abbott was an acknowledgement that this race is way too close for comfort. Would I bet on Abbott losing? No, I would not.
02:08:04
Speaker 2: All right.
02:08:04
Speaker 1: I think that I think there's a pretty hard ceiling on this, but it's but I say pretty hard, right? I don't think the concrete is completely dry. So maybe, maybe you can break through. But certainly, if Democrats swept both of these, you would say blue tsunami. And I just think the likelihood is greater than we fully appreciate. And I, you know, look, do I think either Iowa or Texas are likely for Democrats to sweep those two top statewide races? I don't. But you're in like the 15 to 20% chance range, right? That ain't nothing. And when you're in one in six, one in seven possibilities here, that can happen. That's realistic. That's where Trump was sitting. He had about a one in four, one in five chance of becoming president. He became president. So I would not dismiss that. But the number one state, and to me, frankly, it'll be a test about, you might argue, blue mirage or blue wave, will be if somehow Democrats get shut out of Ohio or Democrats win one and lose one, or Democrats sweep the governor's race and the Senate race. If atmospherics are as strong as I think they're developing, then I expect the Democrats to sweep in Ohio. I think that the unique nature that, you know, big tech is very unpopular with the middle of the electorate. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican leading the ticket, is kind of you know, made his, you know, that's what he's known for is being a tech entrepreneur, very close with that industry. What was a net positive for him in a Republican primary when he was running for president might be seen as a net negative now with swing voters and independents or even some members of MAGA who have grown a little bit leery of big tech here. And so I think I think Ohio's the best chance Democrats have of pulling a sweep in a state that they have not carried in a presidential election since 2012. And we're just, you know, and it would, I think a sweep would indicate you would put this state, by the way, in all five of these cases, if Democrats sweep the governor and Senate race, I think it puts that state in play in the presidential. Because to do both means you fundamentally have adjusted something. You've shifted an independent electorate, or at least it's fluid enough that it is worth contesting in a presidential year. So in another way, the top five red states, the Democrats are gonna, another way to look at this, top five red states that Democrats are going to learn about whether they should target them in 28, I'd put them in the same order. They sweep Ohio, Ohio goes into the battleground. You sweep Texas, Texas goes into the presidential battleground. You sweep Iowa, Iowa's back in the presidential battleground. I believe the same thing with Kansas and Florida. So that might be, as I'm talking out loud here, the even better way. The five red states that, depending on how successful Democrats are, could end up in the presidential battleground come 2028. And number one on this list for me is Ohio. Number two is Texas. And I think if you look at it, absolutely, you could see the scenario where that possibility becomes more real than we think. After all, At this point in time, in 2006, Virginia was still seen as a reach by Democrats, not just in a Senate race, but even being targeted in a presidential race. The Democrats win the Senate race in 06. Suddenly, Democrats decide, hey, maybe it's time to put Virginia and Colorado into the battleground. Lo and behold, Virginia and Colorado are now semi-reliably blue states. So there you go. There's the top five list this week. The Toddcast Top 5 list is brought to you by FanDuel. Baseball fans, do you think you know who's hitting a homer today? 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It's 18 plus in D.C., Kentucky, Wyoming. If you have a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET or call 1-888-789-7777. You can also visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut. You can visit the mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland for help. You can visit gamblinghelplinema.org. You can call 800-327-5050 in Massachusetts. You can call 1-877-8-HOPE-NY, or you can simply text HOPENYNEWYORK. in order to get some help with any gambling concerns. Finally, you can also call 1-877-770-7867 if you're in Louisiana. All right, let's do a little Ask Chuck. Greetings from Hermosa Beach, California. In the wake of 9-11, some argued the attacks should have been treated as criminal acts rather than acts of war. In the spirit of your Ford Nixon retrospective, How might history have unfolded differently if we had taken that approach? Would we still have invaded Afghanistan? And could it have blunted the case for the subsequent invasion of Iraq? I know the national desire for vengeance probably made that impossible, but it feels worth examining. Keep up your edifying and affordable work. Well, I appreciate that, Todd. Hey, great name, obviously.
02:14:41
Speaker 2: So.
02:14:42
Speaker 1: This is actually the subject of the column I'm working on this week, sort of a little bit of fallout from 9-11. And I'm focusing on sort of our loss of privacy and how that sort of happened. The timing, the growth of the tech industry and our comfort with giving up some privacy in exchange for security ended up putting us in a bad relationship with big tech is essentially the short form version of the column I'm going to write. But it's interesting what you, the idea that if we had, treated this as a criminal act rather than as an act of war. So one of the what-ifs I have done is what if Gore had won the 2000 presidential and 9-11 still happens? There were a lot of Democrats that were arguing for, hey, let's do this in a court of law. Let's do this like we did Oklahoma City. Let's do this. So I do think that there's a chance that that Gore might've gone down that road as president more so than, than Bush wanted to. But, you know, I think no matter what we'd have ended up in Afghanistan, I mean, for one is you're not wrong about, there's the need of, well, who do we, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta get somebody for this, right? We gotta blow something.
02:16:06
Speaker 2: Up.
02:16:07
Speaker 1: So we were going to do something. You're not wrong about that. And, An investigation was going to take us all the way to Afghanistan. So the question is, would we have treated Afghanistan as sort of all special forces, right? Not tried to put the Taliban essentially as an enemy of our state in order to deal with this. You know, and, you know, certainly now that we're have, I guess, sort of, you know, this now diplomatic relations with the Taliban. You know, it does seem odd now in retrospect, right? Look, the bigger point of your question is, had we looked at it as just focusing on the act itself, And who is behind the act itself? I'm not sure we would have kept this as a criminal investigation, but if we had just stayed focused on disrupting al-Qaeda wherever we were finding them, right? Kind of like the Israelis, you know, with Munich and how they dealt with that. I don't think it takes us to Iraq, right? Like that seemed to be, right, Iraq feel... And it looks worse and worse, right? History, you know, makes the decision look worse and worse all the time. And there just wasn't a connection, right? And the attempts to create a connection of Iraq to al-Qaeda might have still been there, right? There still might have been forces within the government who wanted to make that case, who believed these terrorist organizations were working together more than they weren't. But had we just made this about Al-Qaeda, you know, is the situation in the Middle East more stable today? Yeah. You know, it's funny, if we don't invade Iraq, I don't think Saddam is still in power or that the Ba'athists are still in power. I think the Arab swing would have overthrown Iraq. Now, you might say it would probably be a government that would be very close to Iran. Oh, wait, that's what we have, a government that's very close to Iran. So my point being is that I think Iraq was probably not. As easy as it was to topple Hussein, I think it tells you that he wouldn't have survived the Arab swing. um in that brief period had had we not touched had we ended up deciding not to invade iraq um and that ultimately is still the is still the the original sin of this one right like of all the mistakes we made after 9-11 and many of them to me are very you can you see how it happened and it might have happened no matter what right we were in a certain period we were country was nervous we were willing to give up privacy in exchange for security um so many of the things that happen i think stay happening um it is interesting that if you've noticed we're you know we're back to treating the 9-11 hijackers as criminals again with a judge and we're still trying to we're now now all of the information that's been gotten about uh Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has suddenly been thrown out by a court, if you've been following that at all. So it is, that was the other problem, is I don't know with the decision, and I think it would have, this would have happened under, no matter the administration, we were gonna strengthen the intel community's ability to get information. Whether or not it was going to be information you could introduce in a court of law, was not the priority at the time. So the likelihood that we would have gotten coerced information or information you never would have been able to use in a trial might have also made treating it as a criminal act very difficult as well. So anyway, I think it's a fair question. This is a good time to have this conversation. It's a good time to be thinking about alternative. But ultimately, the biggest what if is What if we had just stayed focused on dealing with the hijackers and the organization that was behind the plot, Al-Qaeda, and just stayed laser focused on that? Might Afghanistan be a better country today because of it? Might the Middle East be more stable today?
02:20:49
Speaker 2: Maybe.
02:20:53
Speaker 1: But I think in hindsight, creating a global war on terror didn't work. And we're certainly now weaker today because of it. It's certainly a contributor to the weakness today. Donald Trump doesn't become president without his inability to essentially cast an entire faction of the Republican Party into the dustbin of history, which is what he did. So all of it had to happen for us to get to the moment we're in at the time. And if you think we're in a bad moment, then we made some pretty bad decisions in the first few years after 9-11.
02:21:32
Speaker 2: All right.
02:21:33
Speaker 1: Next question comes from Letitia W. And she writes, hey, Chuck, longtime listener, first time caller from Pennsylvania's 10th district. Recent coverage of John Fetterman got me wondering, do voters have any recourse if they believe an elected official is simply refusing to do the job or represent their constituents? Should there be some mechanism such as a recall or a special election rather than voters having to wait out an entire term, especially a six year Senate term? Thanks for everything you do. Keep calling them as you see them, regardless of the letter after their name. Thanks, Letitia. Well, Letitia, the bottom line is there is recall elections for federal office holders are just not constitutional. There are a handful of states that have tried it. There was a group that wanted to recall Bob Menendez during the height of his picadillos in New Jersey, and a court threw it out. It's the same. It's just like the term limits laws that a bunch of states tried to pass in the 90s were all deemed unconstitutional for Congress, because if you don't put it in the Constitution, it's unconstitutional.
02:22:41
Speaker 2: Right.
02:22:41
Speaker 1: There are no term limits in the Constitution and U.S. Senate terms are set for six years. Now, what's interesting is in my little research on your question here is that. In our previous constitution, the Articles of Confederation, there was a recall provision for federal office holders. It got deliberately left out when they did the new constitution, the 1789 constitution. So it was considered and they decided not to. So you don't– on a US senator, there is no recall provision, right? Many states have You can do recalls for state or even city elected officials, and we see this all the time. But you need a constitutional amendment, period. There's nothing else. There is no other workaround. There's one other workaround to get rid of a U.S.
02:23:34
Speaker 2: Senator.
02:23:35
Speaker 1: Two-thirds of the Senate can expel a U.S. senator, right? And that was something Bob Packard was going to do, was going to happen to him. He likely would have been expelled, but I believe he resigned before there would be an expulsion vote. So you know, most senators, well, so far, you know, most of the time, the threat of expulsion and the vote counting on expulsion convinces a senator to just go ahead and resign on that front. So, no, you're stuck with Fetterman through the end of, now his term's up in 28, and we shall see what happens, right? But he is, it is a sick, and it was designed this way, right? The whole point is, is that you didn't want the Senate to be at the whim of sort of instant gratification, where mob rule can sort of grab hold of things over a six-month period. The point of having these longer terms was so they literally had the political space to be what the founders intended, which was the cooling saucer, which is why you can see a senator Get elected under one scenario and one type of atmosphere. Six years later, the atmosphere could completely change and they may not fit that atmosphere at all. Right. You know, Fetterman was was not an ordinary politician. And that was a was something that mattered a lot to Democrats in. In 2022 and in 2021, especially in the wake of Trump getting elected now. He might not– he's obviously not going to fit the mood of where the Democratic electorate is going to be, but who knows? Maybe he fits the mood of where Republicans want to go, which is they want to have iconoclastic candidates or who knows. So I'm not going to declare the end of Fetterman's political career here, but I do get the sense he doesn't like being a senator. I think he enjoyed being the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania a hell of a lot more than he's enjoyed either being lieutenant governor or a U.S. senator. But sadly, no recall election. But you could start the constitutional amendment for it, Letitia. All right. Happy week one. Next question comes from a familiar emailer, Bill S. in Newburgh, Oregon. The fighting sixth, as he calls it. Who doesn't want their congressional district known as the fighting whatever, right? Isn't that what Colbert gave us? Everything was the fighting sixth. I'm in the fighting eighth of Virginia. Happy week one. My favorite games were UMass over Rutgers and Western Michigan almost over Michigan. Certainly better than watching my Mariners lose to the A's. You often encourage politicians to speak American, so I'm curious. Why do you sometimes seem reluctant to plainly use the word racism, whether discussing Vivek Ramaswamy with John Kasich or Byron Donalds under performance in North Florida? Thanks. And go you, Bill S. It's a fair thing to point out. I try to be careful about motive statements. right? You know, it looks like racism, looks like lying. If I do it, I, I try to put it that way because I do think, um, there's certain words that when you accuse somebody of it, there's no, you don't unring the bell. And, you know, it's, uh, I don't, I'm, I'm not trying to get people canceled. Um, And I don't want to presume, you know, look, I see the pattern. A person of color has a harder time winning over a conservative constituency in the South. It looks like a candidate of color has a problem winning over a conservative constituency in the Midwest, right? In Michigan and possibly in Ohio. But if you're talking 5%, of an entire faction of an electorate, I don't want to look like I'm painting an entire electorate as racist or an entire party as racist. So You're fair to pick that up. And you're right. I am cautious on certain words, racism, you know, in accusing somebody of racism. I think it's easier to say something is racist. You're behaving in the way a racist would be. I've always thought one of the few positive legacies of Andrew Gillum in his gubernatorial campaign in 18 is in this great retort. when Ron DeSantis took issue with being called a racist, he said, I'm not saying you're a racist. I'm saying racists think you're a racist. I think that's the line I try to walk. And I'm sure I have failed. And I understand some people like, well, you should soften. You got to tell it like it is. Well, I think you tell it like it is, but I don't like my motives questioned. You know, some people will assume, That I have a certain take on him and they'll say, well, it's because your wife's this or it's because your parents are that or because your kids are this. And it's like, I don't want motive to get in the way of the analysis. And, you know, again, when you ring certain bells, you imply motive. It's why, you know, I famously didn't say liar to Kellyanne Conway. I said falsehoods. Because again, it's motive. Maybe they're that delusional and they actually believe they didn't commit the murders. Maybe they actually believe that they only dreamed of murdering their ex-wife. So it is, there's always a 1% chance that there's self-delusion in there and it's not motive or whatever. So anyway, you can say I'm creating semantics or I'm not. But the minute you're that declarative, then there's a whole group of people I'm trying to talk to and listen to reason that may tune me out. So, look, man, as I always say, I'm trying to widen my aperture and I'm trying to widen the space here for us to have the conversations we need to have to make a better democracy and a better America.
02:30:22
Speaker 2: All right.
02:30:24
Speaker 1: Uh, by the way, I have to, uh, add you, you, you talked about UMass over Rutgers, which was fantastic in the, in the Western Michigan, Michigan game was just not a well-played game. I think there's no doubt what the game of the weekend was. And it's the Ole Miss Louisville game. That was something else. That was, that was two good offenses. I think two questionable defenses, I think. Um, SMU-FSU was certainly close, but did not have what Louisville and Ole Miss had in that. And in many ways, SMU-FSU felt like a game where there was a good team making a lot of mistakes, SMU, and a mediocre team not knowing how to take advantage of opportunities in FSU. But I have to say, I think my favorite game of the weekend, and in fairness, you may have written this before, Louisville Ole Miss game. But I think that was, if you're just pure entertainment value, game of the week was, I think, Louisville Ole Miss. All right. Greetings from Texas 4. If the midterms produce a 50-50 Senate and a Republican senator later resigns, becomes incapacitated or otherwise unable to serve, what happens to control of the chamber? Would Republicans retain control despite having one fewer senator or could control shift to Democrats? Love the show and the college football talk. Canes looked fantastic. Can only imagine your thoughts on what happened in Ann Arbor Saturday night, John. Well, hopefully you like what I said on my Monday pod about, I do think we've got to, there is something, there is a fix we can make to increase, you know, to basically increase the credibility of officiating in college football is we got to take the conferences out of the, out of being in charge of officials and the replay and all of that stuff. Just get, conferences out of it. Just one less conspiracy rabbit hole for people to go to. Well, look, we have provisions and you wait, the governor would replace of the state. You got to appoint somebody. Now, let's talk about the two places with two fairly old senators, one of whom is currently not been able to make it to the floor of the Senate in a couple of months where there's a Democratic governor. And in Iowa, where there is likely to be a Democratic governor. And of course, if you just heard my top five list with Iowa in there, you heard about the question Rob Sand was asked about replacing Chuck Grassley. What would he do? And he said, well, I'd appoint an independent, which would only like that would be fascinating. Well, look, I mean, it's, you know, majority is decided by the party that has the most senators with them. So if you're in a 50-50 Senate and the scenario you describe happens, the two likeliest candidates, right, that would really make this complicated. But Kentucky's the most complicated because Kentucky legislature passed a law saying that the governor has to replace with the party of the deceased senator. But that is– that has never been tested in state courts. And I think– and if the state constitution simply gives the governor the power of appointment. So I'm not so sure. I think that if McConnell somehow– and look, McConnell is getting replaced. So it's less of an issue going into the next Congress since he's not going to be there. But with Grassley. you know, if we're going to use that example, uh, he's up in 28, but something happens from in 27, we're sitting in the 50, 50 Senate. What does Rob Sand do? Right. And what does that independent do? Um, you know, I, you, you know what the zeitgeist would be on the left. And you know what the zeitgeist would be on the right. It would, uh, it would put, it would be interesting to see the, how sand would handle the pressure of that moment. Um, But ultimately, there would be no vacancy. The governor of the deceased senator immediately needs to appoint somebody. You saw Darlene Graham got appointed within– she was a senator I think within 36 hours. They had her already sworn in. It was something that quick. So this is– that's how absolute the governor's power is to appoint a temporary replacement. Now, legislatures could decide, you know, some states you have to have a special election within 90 days. I think that's what Massachusetts did. Others, it's the next federal election. But there would be no vacancy. It would be an immediate filling.
02:35:13
Speaker 2: But. Right.
02:35:15
Speaker 1: Party of the governor, party of the person that, you know, if that differs, that's when you start to see some quite a bit of horse trading.
02:35:24
Speaker 2: All right.
02:35:24
Speaker 1: Last question for the. for this episode. It's Anthony in California's 30th congressional district. He says, I'm hoping to become a member of the two-timers club here. I really got into college football last year in part because of your podcast. Right on. Welcome. I want more Californians into college football, and I'm glad to see Cal, UCLA, USC, Stanford, all starting to invest real dollars into football.
02:35:47
Speaker 2: So kudos.
02:35:51
Speaker 1: And he said, in part because of your podcast, and it became something I love talking about with my brother, who sadly passed away earlier this summer. I am so sorry to hear that. So thank you for continuing to be a source for me to learn from and enjoy the sport. As a Steelers fan, which quarterback should I be keeping an eye on this season if Pittsburgh ends up looking for a first-round QB next year? Thanks, Anthony. Well, first of all, Anthony, I think you ought to.
02:36:17
Speaker 2: I think.
02:36:18
Speaker 1: I'm weirdly bullish on Drew Aller, who is the backup to Rodgers, who I think is going to start three games this year, five games this year. What if Drew Aller is just the type of sort of Pittsburgh quarterback you've gotten used to that knows how to read a defense, play action pass, sort of, he's got a little Roethlisberger in him. He's just sort of, you know, it's certainly more of a 20th century type quarterback, not necessarily a 21st century, but I say that, you know, what's the Pittsburgh way? You want to have a, When Pittsburgh's good, they have a great offensive line, a great running game, and a good quarterback. So I would like to see Aller. I'd like to see what he can do. But I do think he has to have a good offensive line. But look, the quarterbacks, you know, here's what's happening. I think you now, you know, the quarterback position has always been incredibly important. And it's even more so over the last 20 years. You are now getting a concentration of great athletes who are choosing to be, you know, used to be, you didn't always put your best athlete in quarterback. You might put in football, you might put your best athlete at running back. You might put them at wide receiver. And if you put it at quarterback, it's because you ran a certain type of offense. Well, now we've mainstreamed the idea of dual threat quarterbacks, quarterbacks who could run pass on the run and all those things. And so I just think college feels like it's never been deeper in the quarterback ranks and in quarterback development. And I think the idea now that college quarterbacks are going to stay in college because they can make good money, frankly, better money in college if you're a top quarterback than the first couple of years as an NFL pro because of the way they've structured their systems. You're going to get guys like Bo Nix, who had 60 starts in college and certainly knew what the hell he was– the learning curve was just– was much shorter for him. And within two years, he's guiding them as a contender and a playoff guy. So look, I think– obviously, I think Miami's quarterback looks like he's got all the tools, just incredible touch, super accurate. and this is now his third stop where he's impressed. I look at it, it's the same reason why I'm so bullish on Cam Ward and Beck and now Mensah is that he did this at Tulane under one coaching staff. He did it at Duke under another coaching staff. He's already doing it at Miami in our third. So what does that tell you? He processes information quickly, right? Just like Cam Ward, he went through three different systems and seemed to succeed and get better each year. Carson Beck is now showing that ability to do that. I think that in a weird way, these quarterbacks that could go from different systems, that's who I want in my NFL team, right? That means they're coachable. You know the way, how transient NFL coaching is, both at the top, but particularly at the coordinator level, you're going to go through different systems, right? And if you're not easily adaptable to new systems, you're not going to be a successful NFL quarterback. So I look at those guys and, you know, so Mensah looks like he's got an NFL arm at Miami. Dante Moore looks like he's got it at Oregon. But I'm not as sold on Moore yet as others are. I think he's got all the tools, but you can have a lot of tools, but it may not all come together. Go watch a South Carolina game. And this kid, Lenora Sellers, he's another one that's got all this talent. You're just, you know, what happens if you had a little bit more talent around him? but wow, does he got a lot. I'm not sure Levitt is going to translate as well to the pros, which is the kid who did great at LSU. And I worry about Trinidad Chambliss' size a little bit, but boy, his ability to throw on the run is really impressive as well. So, you know, if you're, I look at it as who would fit the Steelers mindset, right? There's also, like, I always think there's just certain fits, right? Certain cultural fits, right? I'll tell you, There's something about Arch Manning of the Steelers that would feel correct. I don't know why I think that, right? He's a big kid, right? In that sense, he's got a little Roethlisberger in him because he's also mobile the way both Roethlisberger and Bradshaw were. So, you know, maybe it's Arch that you should be focused on. But I'm going to end with where I began. Don't give up on Drew Aller. You never know when your future is sitting on your own bench.
02:41:09
Speaker 2: Right.
02:41:10
Speaker 1: How many, you know, just ask the Seattle Seahawks. I guess that's like ask the San Francisco 49ers and the random seventh round quarterback that turned out to be a franchise quarterback of Brock Purdy. So it's and there's something about Aller, Penn State guy, Steelers.
02:41:29
Speaker 2: I don't know.
02:41:30
Speaker 1: It just maybe I want it to work because it just feels like such the right fit for the Pittsburgh fan base.
02:41:37
Speaker 2: Right.
02:41:37
Speaker 1: And he's got that. the grittiness that you want for a Steelers quarterback. So let's not give up on Drew Aller just yet. All right, with that, welcome back to the Wednesday podcast. So I'm giving you, we're giving you updates every single day of the week. Mondays, Tuesdays, it's Super Tuesday with Chris Silliza. Wednesday, another standalone podcast. Thursday, another standalone podcast. And of course, on the weekend, you've got New Sphere. So plenty of places to get what I hope is a little better informed about American politics, however it looks on any given day. With that, I appreciate you coming here. This podcast is politics for the rest of us. I'll see you in 24 hours.
Speaker 1: This episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Chapter. Now, almost everything you hear about Medicare is somebody quietly trying to steer you somewhere. And you're skeptical of that, as you should be. I get it. I mean, there's a federal lawsuit going on right now over exactly this. Companies that branded themselves as unbiased while allegedly pointing people toward whatever would pay them the most as some sort of broker. So if your default is to distrust everyone in this space, honestly.
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So you ever get hit with a wrongful medical bill, they'll help you fight it. They want to stay an advocate for you even after you've done this. So look, I get it. I think there's all sorts of space. You see a lot of people are throwing themselves in this healthcare space. What I like about these chapter folks, I've spent time with them. This is a very transparent organization. It is Medicare and all of its affiliated stuff can be very confusing. The whole point of this is to make this easier and less confusing. OK, so look, take the skepticism you already have in all of this, point it at your own plan for 20 minutes. It's free. There's no pressure. And then call chapter today at 980-734-4200. Hello there and welcome back to the Wednesday edition of the Chuck Toddcast. Yes, now that the fall season is upon us, I am bringing back my Wednesday pod. So we will have Chuck Toddcast episodes dropping on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. You will have Super Tuesday with my partner, Chris Silliza, on, shockingly enough, Tuesday. And of course, you can catch New Sphere every Sunday night on the New Sphere app. And also, I know I've been teasing this and teasing this, but it is now live on YouTube right now. And you can see it in this feed as well. It is for my Dynastic Sports History podcast with J.A. Adande. He and I have a tremendous conversation about Alabama football with the man himself, the The only person other than Nick Saban you could call Mr. Alabama football that's living today, and it is Paul Feinbaum. It was a tremendous conversation. You definitely will, if you're a college football fan or a fan or a history of college sports or you just love Alabama football, you're going to love this conversation. Yes, even me, even me, this anti-SEC Miami Hurricane fan, did my best to compartmentalize my own personal venom with how the SEC sometimes wants to velvet rope off college football for themselves. I think we do a good job giving Alabama its due there. But I'm coming in tonight. We're actually taping. It's right after our live stream that we had on the New Hampshire primary. So I want to start with there. And look, most of my Wednesday episodes, at least between now and November, are going to be very campaign heavy. What's happening on the trail? You know, and that is... what I'll be bringing you tonight. I've got a fun sort of, on one hand, kind of an out-of-the-box kind of guest. On the other hand, when you hear the topic that we have, actually, it will make a lot of sense that this interview is in the Chuck Toddcast. We'll talk about that in a little bit. Plus, I have my top five list. The Blue Wave Blue Tsunami Test is what the top five list is about. You'll have to check it out. To get more details there. And of course, I take your question. But let me begin with what, if anything, we learned out of New Hampshire. And I think the big thing is, is that the establishment got its way. And they did so, frankly, rather comfortably. Chris Pappas, who's basically been the Democratic nominee in waiting ever since he announced and the field was relatively cleared. He helped clear it. Other people cleared it for him as well. There was no doubt that Democrats wanted to try to minimize the risk of losing this seat. Republicans, meanwhile, found themselves the best possible candidate they could get in this environment. They got somebody with the last name of Sununu. No, not the governor. But the former senator, John Sununu, and my friend Jeffrey Skelly noted that if John Sununu does win this Senate seat, it will be an 18-year gap, the largest gap really in the modern era between service time in the United States Senate. John E. Sununu served one term in the Senate, 2002, where he was recruited to primary, an incredibly vulnerable incumbent at the time, Bob Smith. The primary worked. Sununu won the primary, and then he goes on to defeat Gene Shaheen, who was the sitting governor at the time, for that Senate seat in 2002. Six years later, there's a The challenger won the rematch. That doesn't always happen. A lot of times in the Senate rematches, the losing candidate not only comes up short, but usually comes up, usually loses by a larger margin than they lost the first time. Paul Wellstone, Rudy Boschwitz is my favorite example of that. If you want to go down into the history of those election results. But Shaheen won the seat back from Johnny Sununu in 2008, and she's served in it ever since. Interestingly, her first reelection was against Scott Brown, who was by then the former senator from Massachusetts. He got the nomination in 2014. It was a fairly competitive race, but Sheen survived in a Republican-leaning year. And then Scott Brown wanted to run again when this seat opened up, and Republicans decided that they did not want to get behind his candidacy. So they went and found themselves a Sununu. And so here we are. And John Sununu won by a bigger margin than Chris Pappas did in his primary. Pappas had a progressive primary challenger who did not have much money. Had no national support. And that's what's that's the most interesting aspect of it's sort of like the dog that didn't bark in New Hampshire and the progressive dog didn't bark. And I think it had a lot to do with presidential candidates not wanting to alienate the Shaheen machine. right? And so the Shaheen machine was basically behind Pappas. The Shaheen machine has a candidate in the first congressional district, the district that Pappas is vacating. And Jean Shaheen's daughter ran in that race. And certainly there was a lot of effort to eke her out into that primary. And so it is interesting that so many outside groups didn't play in this race. And as James Pindell Boston Globe reporter, a longtime New Hampshire reporter. In fact, back when I got to know him, he worked for something called Politics NH, really is sort of the New Hampshire expert. And, you know, he looked at it as if he were assessing the progressive movement, that they really dropped the ball on this one. They had an opportunity. But, you know, this has been it's been interesting. You know, the the progressive progressives have had a, you know, Bernie Sanders has won the New Hampshire primary twice, but the progressive movement has not been able to either use that momentum to build off of it in any way. I mean, the most progressive member of the delegation they've had in sort of this century was Carol Shea Porter, who represented one of the two congressional districts. But the left has been sort of muted, and it's always been kind of muted. And it goes back to the fact that Democrats couldn't win in New Hampshire for an ice age. And then 1996, Gene Shaheen goes from party operative. She cut her teeth helping Gary Hart pull an upset 1984 as one of his, the Shaheen machine was born at the 84 New Hampshire primary when she essentially resurrected the Gary Hart campaign from the dead. And the legend was born then. And by 96, she had enough chits to actually win office herself. And she broke a near 100 year streak to become a Democratic elected governor there in New Hampshire. So She is the party. She created the modern Democratic Party. And there's always been an allergy inside that party. Don't go too far to the left. That's how, you know, New Hampshire Republicans have successfully elected very conservative statewide office holders in the past. I think they have less luck with that now. The state really is a sort of a center left leaning state. You know, if Democrats go too liberal, that's when a Republican can win. And these days, Republicans can't get too far to the right, or they struggle to carry that state, right? Donald Trump's never carried New Hampshire, yet we still consider New Hampshire as part of the larger, most competitive part of the battleground. So I think the story of New Hampshire really is how the establishment really did work its magic in both sides of the aisle and kept the outsiders out, if you will. Certainly kept them at bay, kept the outsider money from being too involved here the way we've seen outsider money everywhere else. Now, the question is, how competitive is this race? I had a lot of fun with Jessica Taylor during our live stream. She is the guru behind the Senate ratings for the Cook Political Report with my friend Amy Walter. And we were doing, OK, what's closer to toss up? Nobody is saying New Hampshire Senate is a toss up between Pappas and Sununu, but it's going to be a very competitive race. It's going to be a single digit race. Probably decided, I think, in the somewhere in the four to six point range. If it's closer, that means it's probably been a better Republican night nationally. And if it's a little bigger, then we'll know it was a better night nationally for the Democrats. But I think we're looking at a four to six point range. So we did this. OK, what's closer to toss up? New Hampshire Senate? or Kansas Senate. Oh, and then we did New Hampshire Senate or Nebraska Senate. And then we did New Hampshire Senate or Iowa Senate. And so when she did those orders, she had New Hampshire Senate, essentially much closer to, not much closer, closer to toss up than Kansas, closer to toss up than Nebraska, but Iowa is in her toss up category narrowly. But New Hampshire, not there. So that's where she classifies New Hampshire. I'm probably a little more bearish on it, though. I don't want to discount the Sununu name. And I've shared with you, I've known John E. Sununu a long time. He is just a dude. I've gotten to know him. He's a big baseball card collector. And he's way into, for those of you who don't know, he collects all the pre-war, all the pre-1952 stuff. He's a pre-war collector. He loves those. If the set has a T in front of it, he's collecting those. Um, he one time gifted me two tops Venezuelan cards, which are these very thin was printed on extraordinarily thin paper, but, uh, in Spanish and stuff. And just, just a fantastic little collector's item. If you care about these things, um, in many ways, I always thought, you know, Johnson and his politics were probably a little too conservative New Hampshire, but culturally he was sort of the right kind of quirky. And I say that as a compliment. Um, But it's hard to see. Kelly Ayotte is a Republican that has figured out how to win that governor's race. But as we've discussed, it is easier to win a governor's race if you're not from where the state leans than it is a federal race where the jersey color matters a lot. And the thing with Chris Pappas, his sin in the primary was he was not considered a progressive. He very much is, you know, he was getting hit for votes that many Republicans supported in the House of Representatives. So he is ideologically well suited. The question is, is he charismatic enough to hold it or does it matter? Right. Is it going to break through? Is this a race that is going to grab the attention of New Hampshire voters and importantly, the New Hampshire independent voters? I'm a bit skeptical, which is why I think you're going to see. Everybody will acknowledge this is going to be close. It's kind of like, frankly, how I feel about the South Carolina Senate race. I think it's going to be really close. I think you're making a mistake if you totally ignore it. I feel the same way about New Hampshire. You're making a mistake if you totally ignore it. But eight times out of 10, I think I know who's going to win both races. But if you're talking, it is not a crazy result. It is not some total, it's a surprise, but not a shock if Sununu pulled it off. And I'd feel the same way in South Carolina if Annie Andrews upset Darlene Graham. I'd be surprised, but it wouldn't be shocked, right? The ingredients, there's a lot of the ingredients you need to pull an upset is sitting there in South Carolina. So that's kind of, I put New Hampshire more in that category, that sort of, these are competitive races. The party that should win, is favored to win, should win But these are some pretty good challenger candidates, so they shouldn't be ignored. But again, I go back. It is really interesting to me how, and this is what Pindell kept pointing out, which I think was a smart point, which is how people like in that second tier of presidential candidate on the Democratic side, think Ro Khanna, think Chris Van Hollen, think Chris Murphy, didn't essentially go against the grain and go against the establishment. Because here's a dirty little secret. The Shaheen machine's never getting behind a Ro Khanna. The Shaheen machine's never getting behind a Chris Van Hollen candidacy or a Chris Murphy candidacy. So I kind of think it would have been a free opportunity and it would have allowed you to stand out in a way that others didn't stand out. But again, I get it. No Democrat wanted to be on the wrong side of the Shaheen family, which may explain why progressives in general didn't get the support in New Hampshire that I think perhaps that voters might have been intrigued and open for. So there's my quick little thing in New Hampshire. It does not change my overall belief about where the national landscape is. It doesn't change anything I said. I still think the most likely scenario is some sort of fairly significant blue wave. The question is just how big can it get? Can it look closer to being big rather than closer to him being a mirage? Well, that's what we're going to find out in the next eight weeks. And speaking of that, let me unload on a few more items in my notebook, my sort of Wednesday, call it the Wednesday campaign notebook. And I want to start in the state of Missouri because I think we have a real sort of disenfranchising of voter problem now going on in Missouri. Because if you want an example of of how our political system can make something that ought to be fairly simple, like voting, almost incomprehensibly complicated. Do I have one for you? And the story has changed a lot just in the last 24 hours. So right before the polls closed in New Hampshire on Tuesday night, the Supreme Court seemed to put it to rest and we thought we had it to rest. And then another federal court jumped in and put a temporary restraining order what the state Supreme Court said, kind of ignoring what the U.S. Supreme Court said. So let me lay this out there for those of you that haven't been paying attention to what Missouri's been up to. And this, of course, is all about that larger battle that we spent the spring litigating and relitigating all over the country, the sort of mid-decade redistricting. So Missouri Republicans drew, you know, followed the advice of President Trump and drew a new congressional map last year. They wanted to go instead of 6-2, they wanted to at least see if they could get to 7-1 or even 8-0. It was part of that mid-decade redistricting arms race. And the principal target was the fifth congressional district in Kansas City. It is the district that is currently represented by Democratic Congressman Emanuel Cleaver. opponents of that map. And what they did is they basically, they got rid of the fifth, right? They created a hub and spoke and they made a, and essentially they created a situation that there would be just one African-American seat in St. Louis, essentially. And that's it. 7-1 everywhere. They took a 6-2, a map that, you know, in a really good democratic year could get to 5-3. if the Ann Wagner suburban seat ever fell to the Democrats. But realistically, it had been a 6-2 map. They decided they could make a 7-1 map. They couldn't get rid of the St. Louis district, but they thought they could get rid of the Kansas City one. So they come up with this 7-1 map. Opponents of that map went out and collected more than 300,000 signatures to put the legislation basically on a yay or nay, up or down vote on a statewide referendum. Because under Missouri's constitution, A valid referendum petition can suspend a law until the voters decide whether to approve it. The voters can kind of overrule a legislature if enough signatures are gathered to do just that. It's an interesting... Missouri's not the only state that does this, but it's one of the few states that do it. So opponents got the signatures and they had it for a long time. And it looked like we were going to get this referendum... pretty quickly and it would have happened perhaps in the spring or whatever, except the Missouri Secretary of State, Danny Hoskins, decided the referendum provision didn't apply to congressional redistricting. By the way, he had no basis in fact to prove this, he just decided this. So he just kept delaying. Those petitions were submitted in December OK, December of 2025. We are sitting in September of 2026. And when did he did not reject the petition signatures officially until 4 p.m. on August 4th. August 4th happened to be the day of the Missouri primary. In other words, and you see what he was doing here, he was sort of trying to they were trying to jam the courts. They were trying to sort of force a situation where, yeah, you know, but you can't disenfranchise the voters. We've gone too far. It's like Trump. It's the equivalent of knocking down a building before anybody gave you permission to knock down a building. What are you going to do about it now?
00:19:49
Speaker 2: Right.
00:19:49
Speaker 1: That's essentially what this Missouri secretary of state tried to do. He tried to screw the voters, screw the state constitution and jam this thing through. So Missouri went ahead on August 4th, held congressional primaries using the new district lines. Even though he knew the legal status as Secretary of State, this person ought to be recalled and kicked out of office. It's the most undemocratic actions that you could make here. I mean, and it's incompetency. Like any first-year lawyer just out of law school would have told him, hey, this is going to get challenged. Anyway, so he goes ahead and allows the election to be held under the new lines, even though he knew the legal status was in question. And so what happened? Last week, the Missouri Supreme Court, the state Supreme Court, unanimously said the Secretary of State's decision to not accept these referendum, accept those signatures and accept the premise of the referendum, that his interpretation that somehow this provision in the Constitution didn't apply to redistricting was BS, man. This was unanimous. Unanimous, they said this. They said the referendum was legal, it was sufficient, and it was timely. And because it was filed on time, the court said the new congressional map never took effect. So as far as the state Supreme Court is concerned, there is no 7-1 map that the Republicans created late in 2025. There was only the 2022 map, which was that 6-2 map. So- The Missouri Supreme Court is saying the map didn't become illegal last week. The map never existed. It never took effect. But voters voted, right? Hey, you know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself wearing on repeat? Boy, is that me. 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So the old 2022 districts remain, as far as the state Supreme Court is concerned, the only legal congressional districts that Missouri has had the entire time. So the court specifically blamed the practical mess we're now in on the Secretary of State's delay and incorrect interpretation of law. This is why this person, he literally... has disenfranchised over a million voters with his partisan decision just because he was afraid of following his own state's constitution. I believe he took an oath, but apparently he already violated his oath. So look, they didn't like what the state Supreme Court did. So Missouri appealed to the United States Supreme Court to intervene. And again, just before polls closed in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday, Justice Brett Kavanaugh declined to intervene. He didn't give an explanation. But I can tell you why he didn't intervene. This is a state issue. The U.S. Supreme Court rarely is just not going to get involved in the interpretation of a state constitution by a state Supreme Court. That's why he didn't intervene. And if you go look at the history of U.S. Supreme Courts, when you see states, I mean, we saw a similar thing happen with Virginia. Virginia Democrats wanted the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene and they wouldn't do it. They're not going to get involved when the state Supreme Court is interpreting the state constitution. So one would have assumed that would have settled it. Old map is going to be in November. Now, there was a lot of problems with that, except minutes after the Kavanaugh decision where he said the U.S. Supreme Court was not going to intervene in this, a federal district judge in Missouri said, a gentleman named Stephen Clark issued a temporary restraining order saying Missouri cannot use the old map, even though the state Supreme Court said there is only one map. There is no new map because it was never legal. So here we are. The Missouri Supreme Court says there is no new map. You cannot use it. It's not a legal map. And a federal judge says, yeah, but you can't use the old map now. It's too late. Election day is eight weeks away. So here we are, Missouri. So what's going to happen? So here's what Judge Clark's order says. does. It only lasts 14 days, this temporary restraining order. And the opponents of the new map have already appealed this decision. But it is important to hear Clark's reasoning here because this was the point I had actually prepared to talk about until we had even more changes here. He has now put his finger on the same problem I was trying to understand since the Missouri Supreme Court ruling came down. He says switching maps between the primary and the general election would, quote, wreak havoc on the fairness and orderliness of Missouri's congressional elections. And he's right about the underlying practical problem, because Missouri already held this primary. About 1.2 million Missourians participated in said primary. Candidates won nominations. Those results were certified, all under a map that does not exist, according to the state Supreme Court, by the way. But because those primaries were conducted using the new districts. So now what do you do, right? The Missouri Supreme Court says those districts never should have been used because they had not been enacted into law yet. So imagine you're a voter in Missouri. You showed up in August. The state told you, here's your new congressional district. Here are the candidates seeking to represent you. You get to pick one. And so you did. Your vote was counted. And now the state may have to come back and say, well, We now, you're now in a different district. So the person you voted in the primary is not the nominee you get to decide between. That's in, you're now in a different district. Well, what the hell, right? Right, so somebody else won a primary to represent your actual district, except you never got to vote in that primary. So we're, this is not a hypothetical. This is what is being contemplated right now by the state of Missouri. Now, if you want to get into the details here, six of Missouri's eight congressional districts were changed by the new map. And the fifth district was the one changed the most. So basically, you've got three quarters of voters were impacted by this in Missouri. So I don't know how you can even if you're I don't know how Congress can seat the winners of this if they hold if they somehow change maps here anyway. So. So now are they going to revert to the old map? And then if you're the Republican nominee, a guy named Rick Bratton thought he was going to be essentially the shoo-in to win the congressional seat of the new fifth district. Now he's going to be the Republican nominee against Emanuel Cleaver in Emanuel Cleaver's old district, and he's going to get trounced. And the Republican voters who nominated the Republican who were voting in a fundamentally different district. So what do you do? Well, what Judge Clark's answer is, essentially, is that changing now creates such enormous disruption that the fairer course is to finish the election under the map used for the primary. But there's one enormous problem with the solution. The Missouri Supreme Court has unanimously said that the map never took effect under Missouri law. So now you've got two courts protecting two different principles. The state court is saying you cannot simply ignore the Missouri Constitution because following it has become inconvenient. which is what the secretary of state essentially did. And he intentionally delayed his decision to try to jam, to try to create this fiasco situation we're in. Again, I just, you know, I hate dumbasses. This guy, I don't know, just get out of politics. Don't ever get near public services. again. You weren't interested in working on public service. You were just interested in implementing some partisan hackery. You ran for secretary of state. That's it. That in theory is supposed to be a job. That's a bit more operational, a lot less partisan. And, and it's just, it stinks to high heaven. Um, So we're in this situation because of a bad acting by a bad actor. But now we've got the two courts, and I get it. This is not a very easy thing to reconcile. So now we're in this situation where you have a map that the state Supreme Court says did not follow the state's constitution. You've held a primary election, an illegal primary election, as it turns out. But you don't want to disenfranchise all of these voters, right? That's what the federal judge is saying. So what do you do? Well, why does the solution have to be pretending that one of these problems doesn't exist? Because there is a precedent for another way to get out of this box, and it's Texas 1996. This is where the Missouri story, I think, is likely headed. Texas had a similar situation. They had already held their congressional primaries in 1996. Then after those primaries, a federal court had to redraw a bunch of congressional districts because the Supreme Court had upheld a ruling finding that several of the districts, not all of them, but several of them were unconstitutional. So while it was a different underlying legal issue, we had the same practical election problem. You've already held the primaries. Now you've got different districts. So what did the federal court do? It voided the primary results in the 13 affected congressional districts. and then did something remarkably simple. On the regular November election day in 96, everybody ran on one ballot, Democrats, Republicans, and anybody else who qualified, all on the same ballot. If somebody got a majority, congratulations, you're going to Congress on the traditional election day. If nobody got 50%, the top two came back for a runoff on December 10th. Four districts ended up requiring those runoffs. This is not some theoretical law school remedy. This is what was actually done not that long ago. And the reason I bring this up isn't because I'm telling Missouri what a court should do. I'm just telling you what's, I think, going to be the likely, the simplest solution to not an easy, to certainly not an easy problem. There are important legal differences between Texas in 96 and Missouri in 26, right? Missouri law itself does not ordinarily provide for this kind of congressional election. A court would have to find the legal authority to impose this extraordinary remedy. And I think that's something a federal court could do. The clock, by the way, is ticking here. Federal law generally requires military and overseas ballots to go out 45 days before a federal election. For November 3rd, That would put the deadline at September 19th, 11 days, right? We're less than two weeks away. But if the courts ultimately conclude that Missouri has to use the old districts, somebody's going to have to answer this fundamental question. Who nominated the candidates? Because District 5 is not just a number on a piece of paper. A congressional district is filled with people. Change the people and you've changed the electorate. And if you've changed the electorate, how do you simply declare the nominee chosen by one group of voters is also the nominee chosen by another group of voters who never got to participate, right? So that's why I keep coming back to the Texas solution. It's the most obvious answer here. And it's the simplest way to not create more problems because more problems could create it if you don't do this. You know, November doesn't have to be the general election. November becomes the primary and the general. It's what Louisiana used to do for years for what it's worth, right? You know, you get, frankly, it's the type of primary election I would prefer as a voter, you know, not having to pick a party, but you just, everybody's on the same ballot. I don't know that this is what the courts will do, but precedent always matters here. And this is a fairly, it's the fairest way to resolve this problem, right? Of all the available choices, at least this one is the virtue of letting people who actually live in the district choose who represents them. And this ought to be the priority, right? That's the constituency whose interests seem to have gotten lost in this entire fight, the actual fricking voters. Republicans wanted another congressional seat. Opponents wanted a referendum. The Secretary of State decided the referendum wasn't valid because it went against his own politics. The Missouri Supreme Court decided that it was. The The state was hoping the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene. They wouldn't. Now we're in this intervention, temporary restraining order, which sort of screws everything up. The Eighth Circuit is going to get involved. And that's where I think they're going to come up with this remedy. There is just there is no other way. Again, unless everybody has their head up their partisan ass, right, the only remedy here is to provide the voters an opportunity to pick their own representatives and in the districts that actually exist. If they don't do this, there's all sorts of issues here. I could see a Congress not seating anybody from these eight. We could see an entirely new special election have to take place. By the way, this referendum is now gonna be on the November ballot to decide whether or not, yay or nay on this. And who knows, we've seen voters Voters don't like a political party, whether it was voters in a blue state like Virginia, didn't like the idea of trying to jerry-rig that referendum. And I think you're going to see, you know, voters didn't love it. It passed, but they didn't love it in Virginia. And then the courts intervened. So we'll see. Missouri is certainly a red state. But again, no matter how partisan you are, you don't like to feel like you don't get a say in these things. And we've seen Missouri referendum ideologically will go in a variety of different places. It may be a red state, but it's not always ideologically as red of a state as its reputation. But either way, it's kind of, and if the margin is really close in the house, I'm not going to go down these rabbit holes. I have a conversation that I'm going to get to in about a week that you'll enjoy on that. But Imagine if we have an entire congressional delegation where we can't seat them on January 3rd for the new Congress. And imagine if somehow those eight congressional districts, what happens in them would decide control if the margin is that tight between the two parties, which of course, in my blue mirage scenario, is quite possible. All right, let me whip up a few other things from the campaign trail. We are less than eight weeks away. And like I said, especially on Wednesdays, I'm going to do my best to highlight just some interesting developments on the trail. Not every poll. I'm not going to do every ad or manufactured outrage. But there are some things that pop that I think are worth a quick hot take about or two. And here are three that caught my eye over the last few days. And strangely enough, all three are kind of the same version of the same question, which is what candidates say versus what candidates do. And I'm going to start in Nebraska. Because the independent Senate candidate there, Dan Osborne, has given us one of the more revealing explanations of campaigning that I've heard in a while. Osborne, if you recall, came surprisingly close in 2024 of pulling an upset against Deb Fischer. Well, he's obviously he's running again, and this time he's running against Pete Ricketts. And he's trying to perform an incredibly difficult political balancing act, right? He's trying to stick to being an independent, promising he's not going to caucus with either party if he wins a Senate seat. And yet he can't win if Democrats don't rally around him. And he can't win if he doesn't win a majority of independents. And he's going to need some Trump voters. This is Nebraska, right? In 2024, Osborne ran an ad that began this way. Social Security deal with illegals? Who would be for that? And then he went on to say he was with Trump on issues like corruption, China, and the border. And then he adds, if Trump needs help building a wall, well, I'm pretty handy, right? You know, he's the working class guy. He's the mechanic. And he was trying to show that off, right? It's a nice line, except Osborne had also talked publicly about undocumented immigrants who had been in this country for decades, being able to get legal status and participate in Social Security. And then this summer at a private meeting with Black and Latino Democrats, he was challenged about that wall rhetoric and that wall ad from 2024. And here's what Osborne said. He explained that campaigning and governing were essentially two separate pots of things, if you will. He said, there's the campaigning side when you're trying to get elected. And then there's what you do once you're in office. This is true, right? Every politician runs into this. Every politician tailors a message. Every politician emphasizes one issue in one room and another issue in another room. That's called politics. But there's something else. There's something different about actually articulating the theory You've got to walk a fine line here, especially with a guy like Osborne. His best asset is he's not a traditional politician, except now he's behaving like a traditional politician. politician. Campaigning over here, governing over there. What makes it particularly interesting coming from Osborne is because of his independent political identity. His pitch is that he isn't one of these people. He's not a normal politician. He's not beholden to the parties. except apparently the distinction between the campaign version and the governing version applies to independence too, huh? And it's, look, he, I give him points for being honest that, hey, he's going to say certain things on the trail and he's going to govern a different way. You know, what is it? There was a famous Mario quote, you know, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. But I think it really– certain campaigns can get hit harder when you're caught sort of behaving like somebody you've been running against. And that's why I think this is potentially one that could sting for Osborne a little bit. But it takes me to a campaign in Ohio because this is a House race. But there's sort of a similar issue here. So I want to share the story with you. The Democrat is a guy named Don Leonard. He supplied us with another version of the same sort of Osborne story here. Leonard is running against a Republican congressman named Mike Kerry. And earlier this year, Leonard was talking about accusations that he's a Democratic socialist. And Leonard is on tape saying the following. I'm not a Democratic socialist, OK? But then he added this. Even if I were, I'd lie to people. I'd lie to the people of my district in order to get their votes. And then he laughed. Well, guess what? Mike Kerry, the congressman, has turned that little excerpt into an ad. Because why wouldn't you? There is nothing in this day and age of everything being AI'd up, the only thing that might be credible with voters, and I say might, I don't know if any ads are going to matter anymore if everybody thinks they're all just made up AI slop fest. And Trump is with the AI slop fest that he does all the time. It's really doing this. But anyway, if you can get candidates in there, if you can get your opponent in their own words, it always has the ability to land harder than if you're just repeating the words or showing them on screen. So look, if your opponent hands you audio saying, I'd lie to voters to get their votes, you don't need to be a political genius to say, hey, I think I'm going to use that in a political ad. Now, Leonard has an actual recording record of being sort of left-wing political views that gives Kerry plenty of material with which to surround the quote. But let's forget the ideological argument here for a moment. I'm fascinated by the assumption contained in the joke. Osborne gets asked about saying different things to different audiences and explains, well, hey, there's sort of two different lanes you got to do here. You got to say certain things as a candidate, then you'll do certain things when you're governing. The candidate in the Ohio House race jokes that if he held an unpopular belief, obviously he'd lie about it. And you're like, great. Thanks for, you know, puncturing whatever hope voters might have had that somebody with integrity might actually run for office here. Different candidates, different states, there's different politics, but it's the same underlying assumption, right? The campaign is the thing you do to get elected, and then there's what you actually believe. And I just say, when you're running an outsider campaign and you're an outsider, the second your opponent gets to prove that you're no different than they are, doesn't hurt the opponent as much as it's going to hurt, you know, the outsider candidate, right? Nothing in a weird way. It hits harder, you know, even if the sin is, is relatively small, right? It's who you're trying to portray yourself as versus who you might actually be. And I think, look, this is, you know, for all of these independent candidates, Osborne, Brian bangs, uh, Todd Achilles, um, Seth Bodnar, right? The Republican campaign against them is, oh, they're Democrats in independent clothing. And Osborne just saying what he did makes that easier to execute that, essentially to prosecute that case. Perhaps the jury of voters might say, yeah, we hear you, but man, we're done with these incumbents and we're going with the outsider anyway. And that might very well be the case in Nebraska. But I think this is– I think this is suddenly– it's a story that says, oh, he's just another politician. And if you're trying to break this– if you're trying to break into this system, you don't ever want somebody to conclude you're just another politician. All right. I want to stop in Kansas here and the Roger Marshall story. I mean, there's a few things going on in Kansas. One is Donald Trump is doing everything he can. to screw up the Kansas economy, right? He's done it with beef, and now he's doing it with these Canadian tariffs. In particular, Bombardier, a Canadian-owned airplane manufacturer that has factories in Kansas. It's been a staple in Kansas for decades. And let's just say every Republican elected official, except really for Roger Marshall, he hasn't really come out, has come out in support of Bombardier, though it's funny how they keep talking. Some people, they put out statements. Nobody wants to name check Trump and say, you know, he's wrong about this. They just simply want to show that they're supportive of Bombardier. But it is yet more proof that Trump might be just a secret plan at of the Democrats to just see if he can totally implode the Republican Party before the midterms. But that's not the story I wanted to touch on in Kansas. I wanted to touch on the story in the New York Times that's making the rounds. And it's one of these stories that there's nothing illegal that was found, but it's a character story. So let me tell you about it. Roger Marshall, of course, Republican Senator up for reelection. Democratic opponent is the Methodist pastor, Adam Hamilton. Now, Marshall, before he ran for his political career, was a doctor. In fact, he built a substantial part of his political identity around being Doc Marshall, an OBGYN, rural doctor, a guy who delivered thousands of babies. Well, the New York Times has gone through court records from his years of practicing medicine, and what they found was somewhat remarkable. More than 700 patients of Marshall, have been sued for unpaid medical bills. 81 arrests following missed court appearances. He is asked for wage garnishments, bank accounts, interest. He's charged interest on this debt. And some of the debt has been astonishingly small. One was $ 101. One was $ 129. Now, I want to be careful here. Roger Marshall did not personally order police officers to arrest patients who missed court dates. Judges issue warrants when people fail to appear in court, not the person who is suing. His attorney says Marshall was not personally making those decisions and that his medical practice was using the same collection procedures available to other creditors. Okay, totally true. But there's also this. If you're suing somebody over a $ 129 medical bill, this is no longer an abstract argument about the financial survival of rural medicine, right? There's one more wrinkle. In 2025, Senator Marshall introduced legislation restricting hospitals' ability to sue certain patients when hospitals had failed to comply with federal price transparency requirements. Now, that's very interesting to me now, after reading this story about Marshall. Does Marshall, did he change his mind about medical debt collection? Does he think what his own practice did was wrong? Or does he believe there's an important distinction between what a hospital does to collect medical debt and what a doctor's office does? Point is, I think we'd all want to hear the answer from him. But there's also a campaign media story here too. Marshall's allies want to know why this story appears now, right? Why didn't the New York Times do this story a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, six years ago, et cetera? Why did they choose to run this story less than two months before an election? A fair question, right? There's no doubt. It's possible that somebody to show a reporter, hey, did you see what we found? There might be more to this. You might want to look into it. Guess what? Welcome to campaign vetting, right? Welcome to campaign reporting. Now, I've covered enough campaigns to know that damaging information doesn't usually materialize spontaneously on a reporter's desk. But here's a distinction that I think matters. The motive of the source doesn't determine whether the information is true. If a campaign hands a report or a court record, the journalist's job isn't to say, oh, this came from the opposition, therefore it doesn't count. The job is to go get your own version of the court record, verify it, do the reporting, find out what's going on behind it, give the candidate in question an opportunity to respond, then perhaps let voters decide whether this is a story or not. There's also campaigning, right? What candidates say, what candidates do, and what the other side can prove they did. So it's one of those things that I understand the crankiness of the Marshall campaign. But I do think this becomes a character question, right? Which is, You know, the story also noted Marshall decided what the interest rate should be on uncollected debt, and he chose 18%, right? Like credit card debt, 18%, not 3%, not 4%, not 5%. And there were the inevitable stories from people on explaining why the ones who'd gotten arrested for missing a court appearance, some said they didn't know there was a court appearance and they didn't know that missing it meant they could get arrested. And look, I think I think we all know you have to have some rules. And if you have no rules, then nothing gets enforced. But what this really gets at, right, is the empathy question. You're a doctor. How empathetic are you?
00:50:22
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:23
Speaker 1: The Democratic nominee is a pretty famous pastor.
00:50:27
Speaker 2: Right.
00:50:27
Speaker 1: Pastors are, you know, and empathy go hand in hand. It is it. And, you know, Marshall already kind of has this. Marshall is not a real. I'll put it in medical terms. He doesn't have the greatest bedside manner. In fact, in some ways, I'm surprised. You know, I look at a guy like the other doctor and one of the other doctors in the Senate, Bill Cassidy. That dude's got a good bedside manner, whatever you think of Bill Cassidy. Some of you may love him. Some of you may hate him, be angry with him over the Kennedy thing. And, you know, I think there are good friends of his that are angry with him over the but I get it. Like as a doctor, you're like, yeah, he would make me feel better. He would, you know, the information I got out of him, he, he there, he's got, he's got, he's got the ability to tell it like it is and not feel like you're getting something jammed up here.
00:51:23
Speaker 2: You know what.
00:51:25
Speaker 1: Marshall is. I don't know if he's just a little still Washington shy. I don't know how else to put it, but there's just a little, and this story sort of paints a very just cold picture. Look, There's nothing untoward that he did. And, you know, he's running a business and they've got to collect the debt. But it certainly appears there wasn't a lot of empathy behind the decision making. And ultimately, right, politics is very personal for people, especially, again, the contrast with Pastor Hamilton is quite striking here. Never mind that it brings up the larger question of, you know, You know, how much of health care should be a for profit enterprise and how much of it should be a right? And, you know, what what what should you know, there was this just gut wrenching story with one of the people who got arrested, who she was. She started to fill out the paperwork. She thought she might qualify for Medicaid. And then she went into labor before she finished the paperwork and then got the big bill and et cetera. And it went on.
00:52:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:52:33
Speaker 1: Let's not pretend we make this easy for people that are at or near the poverty line when it comes to getting Medicaid coverage, qualifying for Medicaid coverage, going through the hoops, different states have different rules, all of those things. And it is, again, I get why the Marshall people are upset with the timing, but this is no ordinary place for an oppo hit like this to land. It lands in the New York Times. That's, you know, That's going to be a boon for Hamilton as far as attention. It's going to be a boon for Hamilton when it comes to some fundraising. The question is, is it, you know, and you can see how this gets turned into what the Obama people turned Romney into, the cold, hard-ass corporate executive who just was trying to lay people off as fast as they can. You could picture that that's the picture that they want to paint with Marshall. And that's the question that I have about Marshall is how How well established is his identity? He's an incumbent, but this is his first reelection as senator. How well established is he with Kansas voters? How embedded is he? Jerry Moran's been around a long time. I think he's embedded himself. One story wouldn't puncture the reputation of Moran. I'm not as convinced on Marshall. So it's quite the look. This was quite the hit on Marshall. And look, here's the thing. If we don't vet these candidates during campaign season, when is there ever going to be vetting of these candidates? So I'd rather have the information.
00:54:18
Speaker 2: Yes.
00:54:18
Speaker 1: Is it all motivated by the election? Of course it is. But ultimately, when are voters paying attention to decide on the character and the qualifications of whether these people deserve to be in public service? It's in campaign season. So I'd rather see all of these stories about everybody in the vetting. And we're going to get, I promise there's going to be a deep dive into how Hamilton has managed his congregation and how he's managed. And there already have been stories like that. There'll be plenty of that. But I think this one, you know, I've had Kansas on my radar a little bit longer than most people. And I think you now see that Kansas is just inching ever so closer to the battleground. Not quite one of our top six races yet, but it may be getting closer than either Nebraska or my friends in New Hampshire. All right. So with that, I'm going to sneak in a break, but coming up, my conversation with Anthony Tomasini. And this is one where some of you know I'm a sports nut. Some of you know I'm a political nut. And some of you know that I was a a music major for a brief period of time while in college. I played the French horn. Well, Anthony Tomasini is somebody I've been reading for a long time. He's the longtime chief classical music critic for the New York Times. But he's got a new book out about the extraordinary life of Marian Anderson. Marian Anderson may not be a name you know, but you are probably familiar with one of the iconic photos and stories from her 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial after she was barred from performing at Constitution Hall because she was Black. And Tomasini has written a biography of her, but he argues that remembering Anderson simply as a civil rights icon actually obscures something important about her. She's one of the great American artists of the 20th century. So we talk about her music, her life, and why we've never quite known how to remember her. Anyway, she's both a civil rights icon and one of the greatest voices of the 20th century. Anyway, it's a little bit, you know, for some of you, this might be a little bit of a not a left turn or a right turn, but maybe a U-turn of sorts. But I think it's a good story. And I think you'll enjoy the conversation. And Anthony is just terrific. By the way, Skip Gates is directing this series of sort of forgotten stories. icons of the civil rights era in the 20th century. And he sort of inspired and reached out to Anthony to do this. He tells the story a little bit. So let's sneak in the break. And then when we come back, my conversation with Anthony. Hey, this episode of the Chuck Todd cast is brought to you by Ethos. Look, let me tell you about life insurance. As you know, Ethos is an incredible portal for helping you find the right life insurance policy. I'm a huge believer in life insurance. I wouldn't have gotten to college in Washington, D.C. without life insurance. 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Get your free quote at ethos.com slash chuck. That is E-T-H-O-S dot com slash chuck. Application times may vary. The rates may vary. That Trustpilot rating was as of August of 2026. Well, I'm going to do a bit of a turn with my guest today. We have a canon of barrier breaking in this country. Jackie Robinson taking the field in Brooklyn, Rosa Parks staying in her seat, the nine kids walking into Central High School. And we teach those stories and we know the dates. Marian Anderson belongs on that list. And I bet most Americans couldn't tell you much more about her than one photograph. Easter Sunday, 1939, the Lincoln Memorial, 75,000 people right here in Washington, D.C. outside after the Daughters of American Revolution refused to let her sing in Constitution Hall. And that's the whole life for most of us. One afternoon, one photograph. What I didn't know and what I found a little embarrassing for me not to know is that the concert was the least of it. She was already by then one of the great singers of the world. She'd been famous in Europe for years before America caught up, and she spent the next two decades performing in cities that applauded her at night and wouldn't rent a room afterwards. In 1955, at 57, she became the first black singer to appear at the Met in New York City. There's a second reason, though, I wanted to do this. Some of you know I spent a good chunk of my life with a French horn in my hands. And I often lament that I don't have it in my hands as often. And Anthony Tomasini was the chief classical musical critic at the New York Times for the last 20 plus years. So this is a book. about the civil rights story most of us half know, written by a critic who can tell you what was actually happening inside that voice. His new book is called Voice of a Century, The Life and Artistry of Marian Anderson. It's actually part of an interesting series being edited by our friend Skip Gates, which I think Tony will tell us a little bit about. So, Tony, welcome to the podcast.
01:00:43
Speaker 2: I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for your interest.
01:00:46
Speaker 1: Well, let's start with how you came about to do this biography. Was this something you've been working on? Was it something people reached out to you, Skip Gates, things like that? I know that this is part of a series that he's involved with. So tell me some of the origin story.
01:01:02
Speaker 2: This seldom happens to an author. I was asked to write the book. I had gone to know Skip, and in fall of 2021— Sony Classical issued this big deluxe set of all of Anderson's RCA recordings. And I wrote a Sunday Times piece about it. And for people who didn't know about her, I talked about the Lincoln Memorial and her childhood in Philadelphia and stuff. But I focused a lot on the recordings. And I said, some of these recordings are just forgotten. you know, kindertotenlieder Mahler with the San Francisco Symphony of Piedmont, Scandinavian songs in the original languages. And so Skip really liked it. And he emailed and told me so. Two months later, he asked me to write this book. Would I write a book for him? And why me? I mean, I did think about that. I mean, all the subjects are major black figures. And one thing he said in interviews about this series is that There is an underappreciation, it's a remnant of prejudice, of black intellectualism, and I think he's right. And in a way, in this article, I was saying Anderson for all her fame and her, you know, position that you were talking about as the civil rights pioneer or however reluctant, you know, she was for, uh, how people she's in a way intellectual, the equivalent to music of intellectually underrated. She, she was a probing interpretive artist. She was a major musician. And that's sometimes that happens in a lot of fields to pioneers. They wind up being remembered mostly for breaking the path. And well, how did they... You mentioned Jackie Robinson. Well, of course, the biggest... pathbreaker in baseball history. What was he, if you were writing a book about him, was he also one of the great, great players? Yes, actually he was, but we forget that, all we remember. And in a way that's happened to her. So I think he knew I would tell the story well and be sensitive to it. But in a way he wanted the Times critic to say, well, Make a case for her, you know, artistically. I mean, so that's why the book, the subtitle, The Life and Artistry, I spent a lot of time writing about her recordings, her voice, her approach, how she, when she was rejected from music school, she learned this stuff on her own. But she was a major, major artist.
01:03:40
Speaker 1: So what, it is interesting, you know, her life story growing up. in Philadelphia and not having these opportunities. And it's such a reminder. I mean, I'll be honest. I've always said one of the reasons why I'm not a professional French horn player is I remember the first time I heard somebody not as good as I was technically make a better sound. And there is something called a gift. We all know it. And you have it or you don't. And the way you describe her voice is terrific because I think a lot of people can sing. but can you amplify on your own? And she was doing it without all the modern help that everybody has today to boost sound or to boost different decibels within your sound. So describe her sound a little bit, because I think that must be what really jumped out at you when you heard those recordings.
01:04:38
Speaker 2: And I think also what jumps out at all people who hear those recordings and heard her in her church, One thing I learned, which is that from Mahalia Jackson to Marian Anderson to, you know, Beyonce today to Dionne Warwick to Leon Price, growing up in the black church was everything, everything, everything in their lives. And for her, that was true, too. She was conscripted into the junior choir at six years old, you know, and before long, everybody was bragging about the baby contralto. So already this child had a kind of low set voice. But Anderson, both as a young woman and throughout her career, also had this wonderful middle and upper range too. She could get, but it was a haunting, beautiful thing about her voice that once she got into soprano terrain, it was beautiful and radiant, but it sounded like it was emanating from that awesome low voice.
01:05:43
Speaker 1: Well, you can go high. and low, and you're using your low, you're using your diaphragm to support it. I mean, you can hear thin versus full.
01:05:53
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
01:05:54
Speaker 1: You would never describe her high range as thin.
01:05:57
Speaker 2: No, no, no. It just emanated from, everything was supported.
01:06:02
Speaker 1: And so that's the gift, isn't it? This isn't some like training mechanism. I mean, you know, I went through diaphragm breathing exercises back in the day and all of those things. And, you know, I'm sure she did learn those things over time, but This was just a gift that she had, wasn't it?
01:06:17
Speaker 2: Yes, I think that's a gift. Also, her younger sisters both have very good voices. They actually thought about maybe could they have a career.
01:06:28
Speaker 1: Well, mom and dad must have had some good voices as well.
01:06:30
Speaker 2: Well, her mother, not her father so much, but her mother did. But yeah, I mean, so yes, the voice, that's a gift. Musicality. Just having instincts for music, that's a gift. You either have it or you don't. The intellectual, analytic part of music, that you can learn. That you learn by going to school, by studying harmony, by working with composers, by working with coaches. And that's what she had to find her way around. I mean, I tell the story in the book that she was taking private lessons and finally at around 17, she says, okay, I have to get serious. And she takes herself off to the Philadelphia Musical Academy, which no longer exists. And she tries to get an application. And this kind of snippy, young, pretty blonde receptionist says, oh, we don't take colored. And Anderson Wright talked with her journalist friend, Emily Kimbrough, 50 years later about it. It's still hurt. She said, I finally came face to face with what it means to be a Negro in this country. And the shock. you know, was like something physical. You would think she knew that already, but somehow having that happened to her. So even then she wasn't going to go to music school. She had to keep learning from expert coaches and teachers, which is why she eventually made herself just found a way to get to Europe.
01:07:58
Speaker 1: Well, I was just going to say, I mean, this is, there's a lot of our 20th century, um, Black music history had to be popularized in Europe and respected in Europe. The musicians got more respect in Europe before they ever got back here. This has been true of multiple genres of music. So how did she get there?
01:08:16
Speaker 2: Well, it was 1927. She had just turned 30. She had saved money. The church raised money for her, and she finally took herself off to London, and she stayed there for a year. And by the end, she sang at a London proms concert, believe it or not. I mean, that was a big deal. So it was kind of a big success. Then she came back home. And then the second time she went to Europe, that was in 1930. And she applied for a Rosenwald Fund scholarship. And she wrote the most poignant letter where she said she wants to be a fine artist who will be accredited to her people. And she got a fellowship to go study in Germany. This was 1930 in Germany, 1931 in Germany. Can we say that again? Early 1930s Germany. Here's this black woman.
01:09:08
Speaker 1: Black woman. And it's really interesting. There's a scholar and.
01:09:19
Speaker 2: Historian Kira Thurman has written a lot about this, about trying to parse the reception she got. And like German leader were so central to the identity of German culture and German people and stuff that it confounded them that how could this black American woman sing our music so beautifully, you know? And she got reviews, rave reviews, but sometimes along the lines of, It's horrible to say it, but they essentially were saying, she sings Schubert so well, you wouldn't know she was black. So they had to kind of bleach out her color and just sort of... But then she wound up going... to Scandinavia, and she had a promoter there, and she found an accompanist there, a Finnish man, Kosti Vahanen. And before long, Marian Fever gripped Scandinavia. It was a big success.
01:10:18
Speaker 1: How many different languages did she speak? Was she able to sing it?
01:10:22
Speaker 2: This is someone who barely finished high school, and she became fluent in German. It's hard to know. She was pretty comfortable in French. And the Scandinavian language is a little bit because she had a Finnish accompanist and she immersed herself in the songs and the stuff. But at least three, I'd say, you know, English and German and French.
01:10:46
Speaker 1: And those are the three that she's recorded in. There's recordings.
01:10:50
Speaker 2: She also recorded Italian arias, but the opera sort of brings up a whole nother topic.
01:10:59
Speaker 1: That's more of a phonetic. or what?
01:11:01
Speaker 2: No, no. It's, it's more that she, no, it's a beautiful language for singing. It's that she, from the start, didn't see the point of studying too much Italian opera because she wasn't going to get into opera companies in the United States.
01:11:19
Speaker 1: Oh, interesting.
01:11:20
Speaker 2: So she just, yeah.
01:11:21
Speaker 1: So a whole genre that she might've been, We may have missed out on a whole subsection of canon had she felt like she could have broken into.
01:11:35
Speaker 2: An opera company. In 1925, she won a competition for the New York Philharmonic to make her debut at Lewiston Stadium. And she won against several hundred other applicants. And the big aria that she sang was a Donizetti aria, O Mio Fernando. It knocked everybody out. At the London Proms concert, she also sang that aria. So it was exactly what you said. It was a hint of what she could have done. I mean, you mentioned her debut at the Met in 1955. First of all, that is not that long ago that the Metropolitan did not have black singers on its stage. But she had already sung in Carnegie Hall, in major halls in the 30s and 40s, Why not? What was wrong? The difference was on the Carnegie Hall stage, a black woman was sort of just a voice. On stage at the Met, you are a character. You could be somebody's lover or somebody's mother or somebody's brother or, I mean, sister. And the other singer would inevitably be white. And we couldn't have that. You know, you couldn't mix races on stage. There was still this issue of um uh you know casting again uh a casting that's still in a way troubles all the arts but but um i we've made huge progress over that i think you make.
01:13:05
Speaker 1: Pretty clear yeah go ahead finish.
01:13:07
Speaker 2: That no that that was the inhibition that huh and but anyway she she did it and she had had no experience in opera whatsoever and it was a but she only sang in that one production of very Zimbalo and Mascara, a supporting but important role of El Rica. And it was a big triumph. And sitting in the audience that night, that was 1955, was a young soprano named Leontine Price. Oh, wow. Who said, she later told me, she anointed me that night. And she said, maybe someday I can sing on that stage. And she went, how did she... get to that stage, exactly what you said. She went off to Europe and she performed, Price performed in European companies. Then eventually in 1961, she had a triumphant Met debut.
01:14:02
Speaker 1: What, what, if she had been born 30 years later, What genre of music do you think she would be singing?
01:14:14
Speaker 2: She would have, she, she loved songs. She especially loved German leader. And we can talk more about what drew her to that if you want, but she would have sung opera. And in 1960, she did a long interview for ladies home journal, but the very good journalist, Emily Kimbrough, who was a friend of hers and tried to get her to really talk openly about as the article was called, um, you know, being black in a white America. And Emily said to her, well, you know, I know it was so tough, but you look at everything you've done, there's nothing you haven't accomplished. And Marion turned on her and said, Nothing. What about opera? I wanted opera. But they didn't. I wish I could have offered. I could offer, you know, now what I could have offered then. But they didn't want it. They didn't want me. But she said, but at least I've broken this barrier for singers who will follow me, which she absolutely did. So I think she would have had an opera career.
01:15:18
Speaker 1: It's interesting that she said it then, because the portrait you paint of her early is not someone.
01:15:24
Speaker 2: Who was.
01:15:27
Speaker 1: she was not focused on being a trailblazer. She was focused on being a music singer. And at times, look, I don't wanna say you wrote critically about that, but it was almost like you wrote with a bit of disappointment that she didn't fight harder.
01:15:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, except I think that's interesting that that came through that way too. I do present that side of her, but on balance, I'm on her side.
01:16:03
Speaker 1: I don't want to make it seem like you weren't, but it was sort of like– and this is always to me the difficulty of writing about anything in history. Is that how much of today's morals and today's ethics do you– and it is impossible if we're writing about something we did not experience. If we're writing about a time we did not live in. You know, what was the norm is the best we can come up with is what other people tell us what the norm was, right? So I get this challenge, but I could feel a little bit of that tension that you had of like, wow, in hindsight, it's easy. You could have fought, you could have done this, or you could have stood this, but you didn't. But in some ways, she was playing a long game. It's the other side of that.
01:16:52
Speaker 2: And also, if I can tell you one story I tell in the book, She's singing in church. She's the star singer of the choir. She's having voice lessons. She's about 14 years old. And the great tenor, black tenor, Roland Hayes, who was about 10 years her senior, comes to her church and sings. And among the things he sings are German songs, Schubert in German. And the congregation thought his voice was beautiful. Nobody knew what he was singing about. Marian didn't know what he was singing about. She didn't care. She was haunted, she was hooked. She made up what the songs were in her mind. But what Roland Hayes, she had this epiphany. This is something hard to define. This was an artist. This went beyond the components of his voice, his technique. There was something about getting to the essence of music that just got to her. And from that moment forward, she wanted to be a fine artist. That was her driving thing. That even applied to the Lincoln Memorial Concert that you described well. The night before that concert, she was on the phone to her manager trying to get out of it. Because she thought the whole thing had morphed into some kind of civil rights demonstration. And if she sang, she didn't need to sing at Constitution Hall. You know, like she didn't need to. She had sung everywhere. But if she was going to sing there, she was going to do it because she was a great artist. And that's what they want. You know, that's what they wanted. And she was afraid. And Sol Yurok, her manager, had to say, no, Marion, that's not what it's going to be like. People are people. They're not going to be banners. People are going to come. and express their support for you by savoring every moment of your artistry. And that's what happened. And that's why she was deeply moved by it. But it was, it was being an artist that drove her. You know, why didn't she speak out more? In 1937, she has her first concert at Princeton. She hasn't sung there before. She thinks she has a room at the Nassau Inn. Until she finds out, uh-uh, she can't stay there. She's there. What is she supposed to do? Word gets to a famous faculty member, a refugee from Nazi Germany, who had heard her at Carnegie Hall and come backstage meekly to meet her. Big fan, Albert Einstein. Wow. And he says, you must, you will come. His wife had just died. He said, you will come and stay with my stepdaughter and me and my personal secretary at my house on Mercer Street. So she did. And they took wonderful care of her, and he went to the concert, and they stayed up late. And he was ashamed of his adopted hometown that this magnificent woman honors your hotel by staying in it. And are you kidding? And they became fast friends, and there was one point of disagreement. He thought, why don't you speak out more? You have this platform. You're marrying, you know, and she was said, I can't know how she put it to him, but she probably said, well, basically, it's easy for you. You're Einstein. You know, you can go out and say whatever you want.
01:20:17
Speaker 1: Well, that's kind of what he was saying. It should be easy for you.
01:20:20
Speaker 2: But it wasn't. She was still trying to get through the door of an opera house in this company, in this country, you know. She was trying. There were still things, so many things closed to her. And she had to do it through the merits of her singing. through her artistry. So, yeah, I just think it was partly her nature. Maybe she wasn't bold enough. Paul Robeson spoke out all the time, but career-wise, as a singer, he paid a price for it. He lost a lot of opportunities. So, yeah, she could have been more outspoken, but she prevailed through her artistry, through her Great, you know, great voice.
01:21:05
Speaker 1: So let's, you know, did she, you know, sometimes you have some artists, they go to Europe and they never want to come back.
01:21:13
Speaker 2: Right.
01:21:13
Speaker 1: Because they're so, they were so frustrated with how poorly they were treated here, they stay there. I mean, and there's plenty of generations of artists have done that.
01:21:24
Speaker 2: Especially early in the 20th century, jazz musicians.
01:21:28
Speaker 1: A lot of black artists just basically left America because they felt like they were, frankly, safer.
01:21:33
Speaker 2: Right.
01:21:33
Speaker 1: In Europe. Why did she come back?
01:21:37
Speaker 2: She was an American and she was proud to be an American. And she was comfortable in this country. And also, if she was not outspoken in a way that we would maybe admire even more today, she spoke all the time of my people. I want to be a credit to my people. She thought she.
01:22:03
Speaker 2: But she thought the way to do that was to be an example of excellence and possibility. Give us a chance. Look what we can do. And she wanted to prove herself that way in America. I think that's why she came back. But she kept going back to Europe. She would turn around and go have tours there and come back. She traveled a lot. But sure, she based herself here and... And eventually all the doors did open for her, but she pried them open.
01:22:42
Speaker 1: You say that if the genre that obviously she missed the most with opera, what did she make of the rise? Because, you know, as she's becoming more well-known, that's also the rise of jazz. It's the early days of the crooners. Then we move from that to, you know, popular music and it goes from there what did she make of that genre and it at all interest her.
01:23:07
Speaker 2: Yes she was friends with duke ellington and she respected all that music tremendously i don't think she had great feeling for it or deep interest in it but she was very curious and respectful um i kind of rescue her in a chapter um where from interviews she gave where she would talk about uh high, upper, higher music. It used to be that people favored popular things more than the songs she sang, the art songs she sang. But during the war, singing for the troops and going to hospitals, it's amazing how often people asked for Schubert and Brahms. And she acted like the higher forms of music She used that word, unfortunately, you know, like.
01:23:58
Speaker 1: Well, it's funny. I mean, it's, look, let's be honest, especially if you, you know, I was a music major for a while, right? And so there's this mindset that real music, the real difficult music is classical music, right? And opera is a derivative of that. And popular music are for singers who couldn't do opera, right? And I'm sitting here being very, obviously, ham-handed here, but that was sort of, this mindset. And yet I look at somebody like Whitney Houston, it's like, well, if she'd chosen to do opera, she might've been a great opera singer.
01:24:29
Speaker 2: Yeah.
01:24:31
Speaker 1: Yes.
01:24:32
Speaker 2: I think there's this chapter I'm proud of that was called Why Schubert, where I try to explain what drew her to this art form. And I compare it to myself growing up in a Long Island suburb, but there was more music in her household than there was in mine. This Grabbed me. I don't know how. I just I was listening to Salzburg Festival radio concert on the radio by myself when I was a kid. It just hooked me.
01:25:04
Speaker 1: And you don't have that parent or grandparent that said, hey, take a listen to this. I mean, no, I didn't have that. I had a I had a father who had eclectic and stuff. So I. I was hearing it in my house a little bit.
01:25:16
Speaker 2: No, I screamed. I wanted a piano. I wanted lessons. It was through me. Finally, at eight years old, I got one. But it wasn't through my parents. Everyone in her family sang. Music and music at their church was crucial to her. But what I say is that when she heard these songs, like Roland Hayes singing Schubert, It wasn't, she may have used the word higher, but she didn't mean, she ended every recital she ever gave with spirituals, singing Negro spirituals.
01:25:49
Speaker 1: Was that always connected to her first recording contract?
01:25:53
Speaker 2: That was. The first recording she was asked to do were spirituals. But soon after, you know, other things. But it was her way of saying, these works are every bit as profound and great as any song by any European composer ever. That I've sung already. But what I think did grab her about classical music was, yes, it was the subtext of things. It was the multi-layered quality of it. Why is it that a Schubert song, singing on the surface, seems so cheerful, but yet there's this undertone? There's this sadness. There's this longing. What's going on there? It's the subtleties and inner workings of it. I think that's what hooked her, that she had to figure out what is that. She used the word higher, but it wasn't higher.
01:26:48
Speaker 1: Was she also a piano player?
01:26:52
Speaker 2: Yes. She took piano lessons. There wasn't a lot of money for them, but she learned a lot. on her own.
01:26:59
Speaker 1: And was she a music reader or did she learn it by ear?
01:27:01
Speaker 2: No, no, no. She, yeah, she did learn to read. Yeah. And, and, and, and all the, and all that stuff, but not being able to get into the music academy, what she never did was like take a course in harmony or something like that, or, you know, or counterpoint or these things that all music students do. Right.
01:27:18
Speaker 1: She was not doing like rudimentary composition.
01:27:21
Speaker 2: No, she wasn't, she wasn't doing that. And, So, but again, she, she worked with really, really.
01:27:27
Speaker 1: I have scars, by the way, I still have scars from my music composition professor who went to Yale, who absolutely eviscerated one of my first attempts at a Bach chorale. And I'm like still scarred from this. Oh, that's terrible. I'm so glad she, I'm so glad she didn't have to fear that.
01:27:43
Speaker 2: Yeah. But normal in classical music training that usually by studying counterpoint and writing pieces in the style of Bach chorales and, And harmony. It's not that you become a master of this, but it changes the way you hear. You really do. You hear, ah, you're alert to what you're listening to, I think. So she did miss that.
01:28:11
Speaker 1: She is somebody, I get the impression that when you did your review and Skip Gates reached out to you, that in some ways what Skip Gates is concerned about is some of these folks getting lost. Because I do think, and it goes back to this pioneer and this breaking barrier mindset that we have, the pioneers will always have their pages in the history books. There's a whole group of people who,– she was a pioneer. She didn't choose to advertise being a pioneer as we keep– as basically we've spent 20 minutes talking about. That doesn't make her any less relevant to the music– to the history of music in the 20th century. And ultimately, I feel like with this book is you can't tell the history of American singing– of the 20th century without her.
01:29:01
Speaker 2: Absolutely not. And she, even in the moment of being a pioneer, she was going to make the larger points about artistry. And for example, the Lincoln Memorial Concert. Okay, she agrees to do it. There she is. She opens up singing America. She's so flustered to look at 75,000 people, black and white.
01:29:25
Speaker 1: Was that the largest audience she'd ever had?
01:29:27
Speaker 2: That was the largest audience that ever been at the Lincoln Memorial. And, you know, 24 years later for the I Have a Dream speech, it absolutely hearkened back to the Anderson concert. You know, like in a way it was a reference to that. It was really one of the seminal events of the civil rights movement, that concert in 1939. So she sings America, she flubs the words a little because she's so flustered. It's only a half-hour concert. It's going to include a Schubert Ave Maria and three spirituals. The second piece she sang was the longest, that Donizetti aria I mentioned before. O Mio Fernando, seven minutes before an audience. It was then an obscure aria. How many people among those 75,000, even radio listeners, would have known anything about it? She said, I'm going to show them. This is real. Even if this is a civil rights, you know, milestone, I'm going to also show them. And newspaper reporters surveying the crowd said people were awestruck. They didn't know what she was singing about, but just that a voice could do this, really. That's what gets forgotten about that concert when it's written about. How well did she sing? Well, that day she sure did, you know.
01:30:58
Speaker 1: Is there a really good recording.
01:31:00
Speaker 2: Of that concert? Yes, the radio broadcast. There's a radio broadcast of it on NBC and it was broadcast. But the other thing that people forget about that concert, okay, there's a platform of sponsors, Supreme Court justices and senators and Catherine Hepburn and people like that and 75,000 people. She's greeted. It's a big, of course, her mother and her two younger sisters come from Philadelphia for this big day. And she's, you know, news around the world. Of course, none of the Anderson women in 1939 could stay at any hotel in Washington, D.C. So from all this, she has to rely on it had been arranged. Gifford Pinchot was the former progressive Republican governor, two-term governor of Pennsylvania, her home state. His wife was a big supporter of women's rights. They had the Anderson women stay with them at their home in Washington. I mean, that's the part of our history that we keep. It's not only that she, as an artist, I think is underrated, but even what she did as a civil rights pioneer is forgotten. That she had to face the humiliation of not being able to stay anyplace in Washington.
01:32:22
Speaker 1: Your source material, you had quite a bit. Obviously, you had to go into multiple languages to see how she was received in Germany. But I'm curious about her. You note in her memoir that she left certain details, including about her father and his business, out. Oh, yes.
01:32:38
Speaker 2: He had a side business in selling alcohol.
01:32:42
Speaker 1: Which I guess she didn't– you get a sense of why she left that out. And what else did she leave out of that memoir?
01:32:50
Speaker 2: And she left out any mention of, well, and throughout her whole life, the only romantic relationship she ever owned up to was with Orpheus Fisher, the man she eventually married, not until 1943. And she, you know, she went to, in 1935, she was on a tour. of Europe, and she made it to the Soviet Union, if you can imagine, in 1935. Two tours. And the Soviet government puts her up at a spa for two weeks as a gift from the government. And there she has a fling with a younger Russian Jewish man who was an actor and reader, and who was apparently very passionate. And there are, we have his letters, but not hers. And she, of course, never, ever, ever mentioned this, you know, So there are things like that. And also the other thing I do talk about in the book, this is how much– so she worked with a ghostwriter, Howard Taubman, who was very, very faithful to the recorded tapes, which you can hear at the University of Pennsylvania at the library.
01:34:00
Speaker 1: Is that where all of her stuff is?
01:34:01
Speaker 2: That's where all of her stuff is. Yeah. And he, by the way, talking about conflict of interest in journalism, he had my job. He was the chief classical music critic of the New York Times at the time. He wrote, he was her ghostwriter. They kept it quiet. His name was not given and even mentioned.
01:34:24
Speaker 1: Not even in the acknowledgments or anything like that?
01:34:26
Speaker 2: No, in the acknowledgments, yes, for editorial help, but not that he actually wrote, you know. And he was left out of all the reviewings. He was sharing money that he made from it. It would be like if I had, as a critic, was the ghostwriter for Renee Fleming's memoir, and we kept it quiet, and we were both making money, and I kept reviewing her positively. I mean, that was just total different era of journalism. Well, yeah.
01:34:54
Speaker 1: I mean, I always say, be careful when you ask about the good old days of journalism. You don't want to know what some of the rules used to be.
01:34:59
Speaker 2: Exactly, exactly. But when she finally got the draft of the book from Howard Taubman, her first thing was she wanted everything about the Lincoln Memorial Concert taken out.
01:35:19
Speaker 1: That's why are we doing the book, right?
01:35:23
Speaker 2: And her lawyer, whom she trusted, and her husband... And Taubman had to convince her, no, no, that is quite wrong. But she didn't, she wasn't.
01:35:34
Speaker 1: But you don't open with it. You know what I almost feel like now listening to that story, that your decision not to open with the Washington concert, I feel like was an homage to her.
01:35:44
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also what I, I wanted to make clear how, how for Black, for all of us, but especially black people, even today, but especially back then, you can overstate how important it is to have a model, to see somebody, ah, doing that. So I begin with Leontine Price, who's still with us at 99. So Anderson comes back from Europe and she starts singing here again. And she has a concert in Jackson, Mississippi. And one day Leontine Price's Mother says to her, well, Marian Anderson is not going to be coming to Laurel, Mississippi, but she is singing in Jackson and we're going to take the bus and we're going to go there and hear her. So they did. They went to see her. Now, of course, in this big auditorium, they're sitting in the colored section, you know, and this woman walks out and elegant, beautiful and starts singing. And Price has this epiphany and she looks at her and says to herself, I'm going to be her. That's my future. At the time, Price was the star of her church choir. She was taking piano lessons. She thought, maybe I could be a music teacher. Maybe I could be a voice singer and do some concerts. Then she thought, ah, that. I'm going to do that. And what does she do? She goes out and does it. She becomes the most famous opera singer in the world.
01:37:20
Speaker 1: It's a wonderful way to open because the whole point is that she did break barriers.
01:37:24
Speaker 2: She did, yeah.
01:37:24
Speaker 1: For the next generation.
01:37:26
Speaker 2: And then, so Price is in the audience when Anderson makes her debut. When Price makes her debut in 1961, who's in the audience? Marian Anderson. I mean, wow, that's really moving.
01:37:43
Speaker 1: What, somebody listening right now, one recording, where would you tell people to start?
01:37:49
Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm such an advocate of wanting her. Can I pick two? I'd say one is Schubert's Ave Maria because it's so famous. And I think even to people new to this music, the eloquence, the personalness, the authenticity, the sensitivity she brings to it is overwhelming. But the other one is this spiritual crucifixion. Wow. She recorded it in 1941. It wasn't released for years and years. I don't know why, because maybe she thought it was too personal. The spiritual is amazing. It's profound. The words are, they begin, they crucified my Lord. And he never said a mumbling word, not a word, not a word, not a word. So the spiritual is about jesus's reaction that he never even with this punishment nothing never said a word in his defense the spiritual it's a profound piece it's meant to be sung very slowly anderson sings it at this glacial tempo so slow you think the she's taking a risk that the music is going to lose any kind of rhythmic thread it's just going to go limp but it's so intense so um The sound is so tremulous and grabs you and so heart-wrenching, you hang on every word. It's four and a half minutes, and it's one of the most profound vocal music recordings of the whole 20th century. And I'll tell you, she sang it in 1935 in Salzburg. Of course, she couldn't sing at the Salzburg Festival, a black woman. Nazis were overrunning Austria. But the lobby of a hotel was rented for her. And it was kind of an informal concert for a few hundred people. Two people show up, famous conductors, Bruno Walter and Arturo Toscanini. And on the program, she sings some spirituals. And one of them is crucifixion. And the reporter... reporting on the concert said at the end of crucifixion, no one applauded, not a sound, you know, and they were overcome.
01:40:23
Speaker 1: It just sounds haunting the way you, and it, look, it's the subject matter itself. If this is your faith, this is the moment. And it sounds like she interpreted it that deeply.
01:40:34
Speaker 2: Absolutely. This gets to the title of my book, which we don't have to go into, but Toscanini goes up to her afterwards and congratulates her. Then he says, And this is the best quote we have is from her accompanist who was standing right next to him. He says, what I just heard, one is privileged to hear only once in a hundred years. So naturally, her big shot manager, Sol Yura, grabs that comment and tweaks it into something much catchier and promotional. So all of a sudden her posters are plastered with Marian Anderson, quote, the voice of the century, Arturo Toscanini. And he never said that. He never said that.
01:41:19
Speaker 1: The social media of that day, huh? That would have been immediately tweeted out and Instagrammed and all of that, right?
01:41:25
Speaker 2: But the president of Penguin encouraged me to tweak that phrase into voice of a century. I didn't want to go anywhere because... Because it's ambiguous. I love that. That it's not the voice.
01:41:44
Speaker 1: It's voice.
01:41:45
Speaker 2: It's like it almost means she exemplified the century. She embodied this. She sang for it. She spoke for it. Both the possibilities and the horrible shortcomings of it. It's all there. And also, by the way, it implies a little. She happened to also have one of the great voices of the century. But Toscanini also said what I loved about his quote. He didn't say the voice I have just heard. He said what I have just heard, meaning everything, your artistry, your interpretation, your sensibility, and of course the voice.
01:42:25
Speaker 1: Well, look, it's a tremendous story. Congratulations that you got to do this because you get to put your imprint on this. Before I let you go, I'm curious of your thoughts on the state of classical music. And I say this as I watch, you know, my last music professor was second chair at the National Symphony, still is, still is at the National Symphony. They don't have a home.
01:42:57
Speaker 2: They don't have a home.
01:42:59
Speaker 1: You know, it is, look, one of the things that I've always said I talked myself out of trying to go into music as a career was, you know, the opportunities are fewer and fewer all the time, unless you're the best of the best. It is really, you want to talk about, it's not 1%, it's the one, you know, one-tenth of 1% are able to truly make a living in classical music. What's your sense of it as a public genre and what's your sense of it you know, how do we create a new youth movement?
01:43:38
Speaker 2: That's a huge topic. And we got two minutes.
01:43:42
Speaker 1: No, I'm kidding.
01:43:42
Speaker 2: Okay. Well, the Kennedy Center story, the tragedy there is that maintaining a symphony orchestra, maintaining an opera company is already so challenging. Even if you have the most supportive board and staff, of trustees and people and patrons, it's still so hard. And so to have politics just take over and run the place into the ground is just incredibly tragic.
01:44:16
Speaker 1: No, it's a gut punch.
01:44:18
Speaker 2: But, you know, the thing, the great hope I have, in a way, AI could maybe Even though we're all afraid of it, help this. I know you've said things like this on your podcast that it might drive people back to the original.
01:44:40
Speaker 1: Oh, I am a believer in this, that the unintended consequence of the artificialness of everything is going to make us appreciate the original everything.
01:44:54
Speaker 2: And when you were talking to Bob Spitz about the book on the Rolling Stones, you were both talking about the kind of mystique of live instruments. We've been losing that, and even in that field, we have to get it back. But my mantra in writing about this field and loving this field and promoting it and encouraging people is this is one field, art form, you have to hear live. You think you don't chamber music? A string quartet?
01:45:26
Speaker 1: What? No, and unfortunately, I think the digitalization of it has turned it all into elevator music, and it's not fair.
01:45:33
Speaker 2: If you hear a string quartet playing in a hall that seats 300 or 400 people, no amplification, I'm sorry. When I was a kid, I knew nothing about opera. I got seats at the Met, the old Met, when I was really young. I had no idea what these operas were about. But the sound of these voices coming up and encircling me, no amplification, was enthralling. Every time I've brought some neophyte to the Met Opera in New York who doesn't, they'll ask 10 times, there's no amplification? I said, no, no. You know, a symphony or to hear a great orchestra at Carnegie Hall, that sound is... You cannot record that. You know, like we all love our recordings. Obviously, they're wonderful. It's like Toscanini once said, it's like getting a kiss. No, Stravinsky, I'm sorry, once said, it's like getting a kiss over the telephone. But yeah, but I think if young people could just hear this stuff and hear it in the places where it's meant to be performed, I mean, it's just enthralling. It captivates you. And if the demand, the demand has to be there, but it's a very expensive art form. You know, putting on opera is very, very labor intensive. But I believe in the genre. I believe in the art form. I believe in its sustaining power. And it's never going to have the big audiences that, of course, pop music has. But we can sustain it. We have sustained it.
01:47:11
Speaker 1: Well, I always love to tell some of my friends who, who are not really maybe fluent in classical music or just sort of, you know, appreciate it when it's in a cool movie score, you know, which can, which can is, is sort of, and then they go to a rock concert that brings on, you know, a brass, at least a brass accompaniment, right. Or might have 20 instrumentalists behind them, you know, a couple of trumpets, a couple of French horns, a couple of violins, And it just fills the stadium in a way that no synthesizer could. And no matter how many of those speakers you stack up, right, for the people that sit on the floor seats.
01:47:57
Speaker 2: Also, in the kind of concert you're describing, but also think of the symphony orchestra on a big concert stage. There's a spatial element to listening that, you know, bases are here and the brasses are here and it's coming from different parts, you know, and you have a solo oboe sort of standing up against the whole orchestra. And there's that kinetic kind of spatial thing is also you have to be there to hear it.
01:48:23
Speaker 1: There's really no recording yet. I feel like that has truly been able to capture that sort of fullness, no matter what kind of, you know, you could have the best. And I'm, you know, I was an audiophile until until I got kids, right? And then it's just sort of like, there's only so much hobbies you could keep up with, but you can have the best sort of setup to, you know, whether you're playing vinyl or you're playing something that, you know, through the best version, digital version you could get, and it's never going to fill the room the way live fills it up.
01:48:56
Speaker 2: No, you're singing my gospel. No, I agree. Again, as someone who loves recordings, and especially historic recordings, all of Anderson's recordings. I mean, I never heard her live, and so it's all I have. And I cherish them. But no, I agree. I would rather hear.
01:49:21
Speaker 2: Than the most highly touted, best engineered, amazingly performed recording of, let's say, Beethoven's uh, Eroica symphony, I'd rather hear this Juilliard orchestra play it live, you know, or the Manhattan school or music orchestra play it live. Uh, because those kids have never played it before. Usually they're thrilled. And they're also, by the way, very good. They're very talented. They're technically incredible.
01:49:47
Speaker 1: Someone who couldn't get into Juilliard. I will tell you that.
01:49:52
Speaker 2: Maybe it all worked out for the best.
01:49:54
Speaker 1: You know, it all, it all, it all works out. Let me, uh, If you could pick one, if you cannot see classical music live, what is your preferred recording? Is it vinyl? Is it a high, high-end digital sort of recording? Is it a 78 rather than a 33 on the vinyl? Do you have a preference?
01:50:20
Speaker 2: In a way, you're asking the wrong person, Beth. I... I have found that many musicians, and first and foremost, I was a pianist and played a lot of concerts, and are not audiophiles. because you can listen through anything. I can listen through any old scratchy recording. And so when digital came along, for me, just pragmatically, it's clean, it's not gonna deteriorate, it's reliable, it's maybe a little colder than vinyl sound, you know, an analog sound, but.
01:50:57
Speaker 1: There's a warmth to vinyl that's hard to recreate anywhere else.
01:51:00
Speaker 2: There is, but you have to have really good equipment and it's just, you know, it's- And any old CD player can really, you know, so it's, it's a convenience in a way that, but Anderson made some recordings from the early eras, you know, a recording that are full of crackles and stuff, but doesn't bother me. I can listen right through, you know, to hear what I want to hear. Let me get you out of here. Yeah, go ahead.
01:51:28
Speaker 1: Finish.
01:51:29
Speaker 2: I'd say go hear something live. Yes.
01:51:32
Speaker 1: That's, I think we can't emphasize that. I mean, You know, even if it's something, one of my favorite summer programs that we have here in D.C. is the National Symphony would do movie night at Wolf Trap.
01:51:44
Speaker 2: Right. Wonderful. Right.
01:51:45
Speaker 1: And you do a movie and then they do the score live. And it's just, it's actually a great way to get, to bring your kids into something.
01:51:53
Speaker 2: Right, right.
01:51:53
Speaker 1: Right. It's sort of, you know.
01:51:56
Speaker 2: What music do your kids listen to?
01:51:59
Speaker 1: Oh, my daughters. There's Taylor Swift and everybody else, my friend.
01:52:06
Speaker 2: She's awfully good.
01:52:07
Speaker 1: No, and it got my daughter to pick up a guitar. I mean, look, I insisted on piano lessons. Let's just say it was a chore for them when they were younger. But, you know, I believe music is a language that you learn. And so even a rudimentary understanding of music is only going to help you in life down the road. Let me get you out of here on this, because this used to be a fun little conversation I would have over the years when I was more active. in the, in the music world, classical music world, who would you say is the, what's, what's the premier symphony to get into now? You know, you'd have these little debates. There was the Cleveland orchestra, there's New York and there's Philadelphia and there's, you know, they all had their strengths, Chicago, you know, some would argue Boston, of course, you know, with, with, with, with, they had the problem, arguably the most famous conductors for a while, you know, who's got the belt right now? Who's the number one symphony in the country? Where do the musicians going, no matter where they are, they go, I want.
01:53:14
Speaker 2: To go there. I guess I have, again, a sort of different take on that because it's, it's not just like you can calculate the excellence or.
01:53:26
Speaker 1: Well, I feel like it's hard to tell the difference, but it, my guess is it's in some ways it might be even director specific.
01:53:33
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely. I was just going to say, it's, you know, for example, the Los Angeles Philharmonic just became, first under the composer, conductor, Esa-Pek Salonen, and then Gustavo Dudamel, who's now coming this fall to the New York Philharmonic. They were so, such adventurous, such an adventurous whole institution, you know, There was a real connection between the conductors, those two conductors, especially Gustavo and the audience and those players and the programs. They really had, they just made every concert seem important, you know, and it's, was it, Were they playing greater than the Chicago Symphony? It's not that. It's just something that was really happening there. You know, like you could compare to, we now look back. You can read reviews criticizing Bernstein when he was at the New York Forum. Oh, sure.
01:54:38
Speaker 1: Arthur Fiedler at the Boston Pops would get criticized, but it was fun.
01:54:41
Speaker 2: We look back at Bernstein now in those years. Are you kidding? That was like the golden age ever.
01:54:46
Speaker 1: Everybody wanted to be with him and in New York.
01:54:49
Speaker 2: That was just, those concerts were incredible. So it's really the mix that makes an orchestra really great.
01:54:59
Speaker 1: I mean, basically, there's eight to ten great symphonies to belong to, and it's really director-specific, really, that sort of drives the moment.
01:55:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, but, you know, the Alabama Symphony came to Carnegie Hall once, to play a concert. And I, and they did, it was a really good concert and they played really well. And it was a new piece. And so I said, you know, I'm sorry, this sitting there that last night, this was as good as any concert I can remember, you know? So it doesn't quite work that way, but yeah, when you have, let's see what Gustavo does in New York, you know, he's got some big plans and it could, he could be bringing all, all his, you know, charisma and energy and ideas.
01:55:46
Speaker 1: We'll see, you know, well, I, I, um, that's something to look forward to. Uh, I'm glad to hear that. Uh, Tony, this was great. Um, thanks for, uh, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing this book. Yeah. And I know it comes out in about a week or so.
01:56:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. A little bit, a little longer, September 8th. And, uh, it's, um, a couple of few weeks and Yes, thank you. I'm honored. I'm very glad that you invited me. Thank you so much.
01:56:27
Speaker 1: All right, let's do a little top five list and some questions to wrap up this episode. So here's my top five list this week, and it's a It's the statewide sweeps. To me, blue wave, blue tsunami, right? I've gone through my various stages here for you. You know, blue mirage, blue wave, blue tsunami. I'm going to leave the blue mirage category aside for this list. Well, actually, you could look at it this way, but I think there's a pretty good measurement. particularly on the Democratic side, measuring this through the prism of the Democrats here, of five states where a Democrat hasn't carried that state at least since 2012 for president, where both a governor and a Senate race is on the ballot. And as you know, I went through this about the importance of the top of the ticket. It's governor's races in many of these states and how important these gubernatorial nominees might be to bringing over either you know, flawed candidates or lesser known candidates, or maybe the state's a little too red or you got to try to drag it over. But I thought a pretty good measurement. I wanted to give you the five states where I think Democrats at least have a 10 percent chance of of the dual sweep of winning the governor's race and the competitive Senate race in that state. And I think this is the way I would have you examine this top five. If somehow all Democrats swept all five of these states, I'm about to highlight here. that are both featuring both competitive Senate and marginally competitive governor's races. I say marginally, because that's eye of the beaker, but they're not they're not blowouts. They made the list because, you know, it is somewhat competitive. And in one case, it's actually a governor's race is more competitive than the Senate race. And I'll get to that. But I think a good way to see which categories, if somehow Republicans swept all five. of these states and the dual statewide, well, then that would be blue mirage territory. And then the degrees of wave depend on how many of these states Democrats sweep, right? If they can get all of them, then this is a blue tsunami. I'd argue three of the five. If they swept, you would call this either a very big wave bordering on blue tsunami, and obviously four or five is there. So I know I threw a bunch of caveats in there and you're like, what the hell are you talking about? Here's the bottom line. Here's the five red states, right, where a Democratic presidential candidate has not carried that state since at least 2012. So it's been more than a decade since that state went blue in a presidential race. Here are my top five states where Democrats have a realistic chance of the sweep, both Senate and Gov. And again, It's like I'm not Michigan doesn't make this list because, hey, Joe Biden carried Michigan in 2020. And, you know, there's you know, it's it's I think Democrats are favored to sweep both races. But the Senate race is definitely a coin flip. Ditto with a Minnesota or ditto with a that could see, you know, Democrats win both the governor's race or that, you know, it doesn't qualify. This is already sort of a blue or purple state or a blue leaning state. These are these red states basically that in the Trump era have been out of reach for for Democrats, particularly in the presidential level and either out of reach, either in a Senate race or a Gov race or both. So coming in at number five is the state of Florida, okay? Florida, this is the most unrealistic. This is probably the hardest of the states that were once competitive and haven't been in the Trump era, put Florida there. This is probably the tallest mountain for Democrats to climb. It's more, you know, they could in a blue wave scenario, even, you know, they could lose both the governor's race and the Senate race and still have a good year politically, you would say this. But I'm putting it on the list because I do think the governor's race is going to be close. And I think if somehow David Jolly pulls it off, we will say this was closer to being a big blue wave to slash tsunami. And I think Angie Nixon may be more competitive than folks realize. She doesn't have the resources and the national party is not going to put it there. but you may see more party realignment here than you realize there. So look, it's sort of, it's at the tail end. It is not a, but it's sort of, you know, because I say you have to have a top five list, Florida's fifth, but there's a big gap between four and five on my list. Number four on my list is Kansas. So Kansas is interesting because now they've never, they haven't elected a Democratic senator since the 1930s. And obviously, the current governor is term-limited from seeking a third term, Laura Kelly, and it's a Democrat. So this is a case where if Democrats are able to do something they haven't been able to do when they've won these governor's races, which is have a new Democrat replace the term-limited Democrat, right? It didn't happen with Sebelius. And Kelly is trying to see, has she permanently shifted the governing culture of the state? Now, we'll see. Her preferred candidate lost in the primaries. The Democratic nominee is won in part due to the Kansas City Chiefs deal, but she's also been pretty front and center on, again, status center expansion and things like that. And then, of course, Republicans in Kansas are still having to carry the baggage of Sam Brownback and those unpopular budget cuts, and that's always something that they got to hang on there. But the real sort of blue tsunami test here is, Can Democrats actually win a Senate seat here? They've got a good candidate in Adam Hamilton. They've been competitive before 2014. They had an independent Greg Orman who came within single digits of Pat Roberts back in the day, or right around single digits. It was right in the 9-10 cut line on that. But I promise you, if Democrats were able to flip this Senate seat, and I think Roger Marshall's uniquely vulnerable here. He's not the most....
02:02:48
Speaker 2: Right.
02:02:48
Speaker 1: Jerry Moran has been more front and center pushing back on Trump. Marshall will never push back on Trump. And I wonder if that's a problem for him, if he's going to underperform in some of the suburban areas of Kansas City, Kansas and things like that. So I think the possibilities are there. But boy, you would be in blue tsunami territory if Democrats could win both in the same cycle, a Senate race and a government race. So number four. So I put Florida is is Competitive, but very unlikely. Kansas, competitive, mostly unlikely. My next three here are the more realistic sort of blue wave seats. And I think if two of these three sweeps came in for the Democrats in my top three here, you would call it a significant blue wave. And if all three came in, I think you would need to classify this as blue tsunami. And I'm going to start with the state of Iowa. I'm putting Iowa number three instead of Texas. I debated back and forth. Number one, the minute I say it is going to be, you'll see why that was sort of the easier call here. But number three on my list is Iowa. So what I'm saying is, is I think this Senate seats a very, very tough hill for Democrats to climb. I told you, I gave you all the data behind it last week and a couple of monologues there. So I won't go into the dirty details there. But All you have to do is listen to Rob Sand, the Democratic nominee, and how he campaigns and how he speaks about party politics. He talked about that if for some reason he was asked the question if Senator Grassley couldn't finish his seat, who would he appoint? What party would he appoint a Democrat to replace Grassley? He said, no, he'd appoint an independent. it was important for him to get that out there, right? He's trying to send a message to those that are not happy with the Democratic brand in Iowa, that he's a different type of Democrat, that he's more of an independent-minded Democrat. But that's also a reminder of why in Iowa, I think it's going to be very much harder for a Democrat to win a Senate seat than a Gov seat. Governors, individual person, a Senate seat is sort of a party caucus vote, right? And it's in some ways voters usually you know, are more likely to pick to to prioritize Jersey color over an individual than they do in a governor's race. Look, Republicans also have a very weak governor gubernatorial nominee. I mean, this Zach Lane guy is having to make the case that he's an actual Iowan when you're less than 60 days from election and you've still got to answer serious questions about how much of an Iowan you are in a place that is very proud of being of living in that state. I just think it's a it's I don't want to say it's unwinnable because it's a red leaning state. But Zach Lane's as close to being an unelectable nominee as you can come up with in in in this current in this current situation. So a Democratic sweep here of both the gubernatorial and the Senate race definitely is indicated indicative of a blue wave, in my opinion. And I have a feeling if both of those come in, then there's going to be sweeps with the next– potentially sweeps with the next two states we're talking about here. And I'm going to get to the part where the state that I think some people are going to feel as if is an impossibility, and that's Texas. We already know the Senate race is close with Tallarico having a slight advantage. The more remarkable race that has fallen under the radar because of Ken Paxton and Tallarico is the governor's race. Greg Abbott's trying to do something nobody's ever done in Texas, win a fourth term for governor, a fourth four-year term for governor. That is, you know, you could just look at recent history. Fourth terms are very difficult to get, particularly for consecutive terms. Sometimes it's a lot easier to do it the way Jerry Brown did it or to do it the way Terry Branstad did it. You win a couple of times, you leave, you come back and win two more times. But four straight, right? Mario Cuomo was trying for a fourth until it sort of blew up in his face. So I just think there's a natural fatigue, right? Throw in the fatigue with the national party, throw in the disappointment with, you know, you have a divided Republican party in the state, right? You have both a rising Democratic electorate in the state and a divided Republican party, particularly on issues like the way this voucher situation Uh, has gone education cuts, very similar to what we see, what we saw developing in Kansas, where really a divided Republican party gave Democrats an opening. And essentially Democrats moved to become the, the, the Republican light party, uh, as far as state government is concerned. And it was a lot of former Republicans who became Democrats who, uh, who have helped fuel this movement as well. I'm not saying you're there where you have Republicans switching parties in Texas, but you do have this divide that exists. And I think that is, I mean, you saw it here. So look, I think the data center flip flop by Abbott was an acknowledgement that this race is way too close for comfort. Would I bet on Abbott losing? No, I would not.
02:08:04
Speaker 2: All right.
02:08:04
Speaker 1: I think that I think there's a pretty hard ceiling on this, but it's but I say pretty hard, right? I don't think the concrete is completely dry. So maybe, maybe you can break through. But certainly, if Democrats swept both of these, you would say blue tsunami. And I just think the likelihood is greater than we fully appreciate. And I, you know, look, do I think either Iowa or Texas are likely for Democrats to sweep those two top statewide races? I don't. But you're in like the 15 to 20% chance range, right? That ain't nothing. And when you're in one in six, one in seven possibilities here, that can happen. That's realistic. That's where Trump was sitting. He had about a one in four, one in five chance of becoming president. He became president. So I would not dismiss that. But the number one state, and to me, frankly, it'll be a test about, you might argue, blue mirage or blue wave, will be if somehow Democrats get shut out of Ohio or Democrats win one and lose one, or Democrats sweep the governor's race and the Senate race. If atmospherics are as strong as I think they're developing, then I expect the Democrats to sweep in Ohio. I think that the unique nature that, you know, big tech is very unpopular with the middle of the electorate. Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican leading the ticket, is kind of you know, made his, you know, that's what he's known for is being a tech entrepreneur, very close with that industry. What was a net positive for him in a Republican primary when he was running for president might be seen as a net negative now with swing voters and independents or even some members of MAGA who have grown a little bit leery of big tech here. And so I think I think Ohio's the best chance Democrats have of pulling a sweep in a state that they have not carried in a presidential election since 2012. And we're just, you know, and it would, I think a sweep would indicate you would put this state, by the way, in all five of these cases, if Democrats sweep the governor and Senate race, I think it puts that state in play in the presidential. Because to do both means you fundamentally have adjusted something. You've shifted an independent electorate, or at least it's fluid enough that it is worth contesting in a presidential year. So in another way, the top five red states, the Democrats are gonna, another way to look at this, top five red states that Democrats are going to learn about whether they should target them in 28, I'd put them in the same order. They sweep Ohio, Ohio goes into the battleground. You sweep Texas, Texas goes into the presidential battleground. You sweep Iowa, Iowa's back in the presidential battleground. I believe the same thing with Kansas and Florida. So that might be, as I'm talking out loud here, the even better way. The five red states that, depending on how successful Democrats are, could end up in the presidential battleground come 2028. And number one on this list for me is Ohio. Number two is Texas. And I think if you look at it, absolutely, you could see the scenario where that possibility becomes more real than we think. After all, At this point in time, in 2006, Virginia was still seen as a reach by Democrats, not just in a Senate race, but even being targeted in a presidential race. The Democrats win the Senate race in 06. Suddenly, Democrats decide, hey, maybe it's time to put Virginia and Colorado into the battleground. Lo and behold, Virginia and Colorado are now semi-reliably blue states. So there you go. There's the top five list this week. The Toddcast Top 5 list is brought to you by FanDuel. Baseball fans, do you think you know who's hitting a homer today? 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It's 18 plus in D.C., Kentucky, Wyoming. If you have a gambling problem, call 1-800-GAMBLER or 1-800-MY-RESET or call 1-888-789-7777. You can also visit ccpg.org slash chat in Connecticut. You can visit the mdgamblinghelp.org in Maryland for help. You can visit gamblinghelplinema.org. You can call 800-327-5050 in Massachusetts. You can call 1-877-8-HOPE-NY, or you can simply text HOPENYNEWYORK. in order to get some help with any gambling concerns. Finally, you can also call 1-877-770-7867 if you're in Louisiana. All right, let's do a little Ask Chuck. Greetings from Hermosa Beach, California. In the wake of 9-11, some argued the attacks should have been treated as criminal acts rather than acts of war. In the spirit of your Ford Nixon retrospective, How might history have unfolded differently if we had taken that approach? Would we still have invaded Afghanistan? And could it have blunted the case for the subsequent invasion of Iraq? I know the national desire for vengeance probably made that impossible, but it feels worth examining. Keep up your edifying and affordable work. Well, I appreciate that, Todd. Hey, great name, obviously.
02:14:41
Speaker 2: So.
02:14:42
Speaker 1: This is actually the subject of the column I'm working on this week, sort of a little bit of fallout from 9-11. And I'm focusing on sort of our loss of privacy and how that sort of happened. The timing, the growth of the tech industry and our comfort with giving up some privacy in exchange for security ended up putting us in a bad relationship with big tech is essentially the short form version of the column I'm going to write. But it's interesting what you, the idea that if we had, treated this as a criminal act rather than as an act of war. So one of the what-ifs I have done is what if Gore had won the 2000 presidential and 9-11 still happens? There were a lot of Democrats that were arguing for, hey, let's do this in a court of law. Let's do this like we did Oklahoma City. Let's do this. So I do think that there's a chance that that Gore might've gone down that road as president more so than, than Bush wanted to. But, you know, I think no matter what we'd have ended up in Afghanistan, I mean, for one is you're not wrong about, there's the need of, well, who do we, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta get somebody for this, right? We gotta blow something.
02:16:06
Speaker 2: Up.
02:16:07
Speaker 1: So we were going to do something. You're not wrong about that. And, An investigation was going to take us all the way to Afghanistan. So the question is, would we have treated Afghanistan as sort of all special forces, right? Not tried to put the Taliban essentially as an enemy of our state in order to deal with this. You know, and, you know, certainly now that we're have, I guess, sort of, you know, this now diplomatic relations with the Taliban. You know, it does seem odd now in retrospect, right? Look, the bigger point of your question is, had we looked at it as just focusing on the act itself, And who is behind the act itself? I'm not sure we would have kept this as a criminal investigation, but if we had just stayed focused on disrupting al-Qaeda wherever we were finding them, right? Kind of like the Israelis, you know, with Munich and how they dealt with that. I don't think it takes us to Iraq, right? Like that seemed to be, right, Iraq feel... And it looks worse and worse, right? History, you know, makes the decision look worse and worse all the time. And there just wasn't a connection, right? And the attempts to create a connection of Iraq to al-Qaeda might have still been there, right? There still might have been forces within the government who wanted to make that case, who believed these terrorist organizations were working together more than they weren't. But had we just made this about Al-Qaeda, you know, is the situation in the Middle East more stable today? Yeah. You know, it's funny, if we don't invade Iraq, I don't think Saddam is still in power or that the Ba'athists are still in power. I think the Arab swing would have overthrown Iraq. Now, you might say it would probably be a government that would be very close to Iran. Oh, wait, that's what we have, a government that's very close to Iran. So my point being is that I think Iraq was probably not. As easy as it was to topple Hussein, I think it tells you that he wouldn't have survived the Arab swing. um in that brief period had had we not touched had we ended up deciding not to invade iraq um and that ultimately is still the is still the the original sin of this one right like of all the mistakes we made after 9-11 and many of them to me are very you can you see how it happened and it might have happened no matter what right we were in a certain period we were country was nervous we were willing to give up privacy in exchange for security um so many of the things that happen i think stay happening um it is interesting that if you've noticed we're you know we're back to treating the 9-11 hijackers as criminals again with a judge and we're still trying to we're now now all of the information that's been gotten about uh Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has suddenly been thrown out by a court, if you've been following that at all. So it is, that was the other problem, is I don't know with the decision, and I think it would have, this would have happened under, no matter the administration, we were gonna strengthen the intel community's ability to get information. Whether or not it was going to be information you could introduce in a court of law, was not the priority at the time. So the likelihood that we would have gotten coerced information or information you never would have been able to use in a trial might have also made treating it as a criminal act very difficult as well. So anyway, I think it's a fair question. This is a good time to have this conversation. It's a good time to be thinking about alternative. But ultimately, the biggest what if is What if we had just stayed focused on dealing with the hijackers and the organization that was behind the plot, Al-Qaeda, and just stayed laser focused on that? Might Afghanistan be a better country today because of it? Might the Middle East be more stable today?
02:20:49
Speaker 2: Maybe.
02:20:53
Speaker 1: But I think in hindsight, creating a global war on terror didn't work. And we're certainly now weaker today because of it. It's certainly a contributor to the weakness today. Donald Trump doesn't become president without his inability to essentially cast an entire faction of the Republican Party into the dustbin of history, which is what he did. So all of it had to happen for us to get to the moment we're in at the time. And if you think we're in a bad moment, then we made some pretty bad decisions in the first few years after 9-11.
02:21:32
Speaker 2: All right.
02:21:33
Speaker 1: Next question comes from Letitia W. And she writes, hey, Chuck, longtime listener, first time caller from Pennsylvania's 10th district. Recent coverage of John Fetterman got me wondering, do voters have any recourse if they believe an elected official is simply refusing to do the job or represent their constituents? Should there be some mechanism such as a recall or a special election rather than voters having to wait out an entire term, especially a six year Senate term? Thanks for everything you do. Keep calling them as you see them, regardless of the letter after their name. Thanks, Letitia. Well, Letitia, the bottom line is there is recall elections for federal office holders are just not constitutional. There are a handful of states that have tried it. There was a group that wanted to recall Bob Menendez during the height of his picadillos in New Jersey, and a court threw it out. It's the same. It's just like the term limits laws that a bunch of states tried to pass in the 90s were all deemed unconstitutional for Congress, because if you don't put it in the Constitution, it's unconstitutional.
02:22:41
Speaker 2: Right.
02:22:41
Speaker 1: There are no term limits in the Constitution and U.S. Senate terms are set for six years. Now, what's interesting is in my little research on your question here is that. In our previous constitution, the Articles of Confederation, there was a recall provision for federal office holders. It got deliberately left out when they did the new constitution, the 1789 constitution. So it was considered and they decided not to. So you don't– on a US senator, there is no recall provision, right? Many states have You can do recalls for state or even city elected officials, and we see this all the time. But you need a constitutional amendment, period. There's nothing else. There is no other workaround. There's one other workaround to get rid of a U.S.
02:23:34
Speaker 2: Senator.
02:23:35
Speaker 1: Two-thirds of the Senate can expel a U.S. senator, right? And that was something Bob Packard was going to do, was going to happen to him. He likely would have been expelled, but I believe he resigned before there would be an expulsion vote. So you know, most senators, well, so far, you know, most of the time, the threat of expulsion and the vote counting on expulsion convinces a senator to just go ahead and resign on that front. So, no, you're stuck with Fetterman through the end of, now his term's up in 28, and we shall see what happens, right? But he is, it is a sick, and it was designed this way, right? The whole point is, is that you didn't want the Senate to be at the whim of sort of instant gratification, where mob rule can sort of grab hold of things over a six-month period. The point of having these longer terms was so they literally had the political space to be what the founders intended, which was the cooling saucer, which is why you can see a senator Get elected under one scenario and one type of atmosphere. Six years later, the atmosphere could completely change and they may not fit that atmosphere at all. Right. You know, Fetterman was was not an ordinary politician. And that was a was something that mattered a lot to Democrats in. In 2022 and in 2021, especially in the wake of Trump getting elected now. He might not– he's obviously not going to fit the mood of where the Democratic electorate is going to be, but who knows? Maybe he fits the mood of where Republicans want to go, which is they want to have iconoclastic candidates or who knows. So I'm not going to declare the end of Fetterman's political career here, but I do get the sense he doesn't like being a senator. I think he enjoyed being the mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania a hell of a lot more than he's enjoyed either being lieutenant governor or a U.S. senator. But sadly, no recall election. But you could start the constitutional amendment for it, Letitia. All right. Happy week one. Next question comes from a familiar emailer, Bill S. in Newburgh, Oregon. The fighting sixth, as he calls it. Who doesn't want their congressional district known as the fighting whatever, right? Isn't that what Colbert gave us? Everything was the fighting sixth. I'm in the fighting eighth of Virginia. Happy week one. My favorite games were UMass over Rutgers and Western Michigan almost over Michigan. Certainly better than watching my Mariners lose to the A's. You often encourage politicians to speak American, so I'm curious. Why do you sometimes seem reluctant to plainly use the word racism, whether discussing Vivek Ramaswamy with John Kasich or Byron Donalds under performance in North Florida? Thanks. And go you, Bill S. It's a fair thing to point out. I try to be careful about motive statements. right? You know, it looks like racism, looks like lying. If I do it, I, I try to put it that way because I do think, um, there's certain words that when you accuse somebody of it, there's no, you don't unring the bell. And, you know, it's, uh, I don't, I'm, I'm not trying to get people canceled. Um, And I don't want to presume, you know, look, I see the pattern. A person of color has a harder time winning over a conservative constituency in the South. It looks like a candidate of color has a problem winning over a conservative constituency in the Midwest, right? In Michigan and possibly in Ohio. But if you're talking 5%, of an entire faction of an electorate, I don't want to look like I'm painting an entire electorate as racist or an entire party as racist. So You're fair to pick that up. And you're right. I am cautious on certain words, racism, you know, in accusing somebody of racism. I think it's easier to say something is racist. You're behaving in the way a racist would be. I've always thought one of the few positive legacies of Andrew Gillum in his gubernatorial campaign in 18 is in this great retort. when Ron DeSantis took issue with being called a racist, he said, I'm not saying you're a racist. I'm saying racists think you're a racist. I think that's the line I try to walk. And I'm sure I have failed. And I understand some people like, well, you should soften. You got to tell it like it is. Well, I think you tell it like it is, but I don't like my motives questioned. You know, some people will assume, That I have a certain take on him and they'll say, well, it's because your wife's this or it's because your parents are that or because your kids are this. And it's like, I don't want motive to get in the way of the analysis. And, you know, again, when you ring certain bells, you imply motive. It's why, you know, I famously didn't say liar to Kellyanne Conway. I said falsehoods. Because again, it's motive. Maybe they're that delusional and they actually believe they didn't commit the murders. Maybe they actually believe that they only dreamed of murdering their ex-wife. So it is, there's always a 1% chance that there's self-delusion in there and it's not motive or whatever. So anyway, you can say I'm creating semantics or I'm not. But the minute you're that declarative, then there's a whole group of people I'm trying to talk to and listen to reason that may tune me out. So, look, man, as I always say, I'm trying to widen my aperture and I'm trying to widen the space here for us to have the conversations we need to have to make a better democracy and a better America.
02:30:22
Speaker 2: All right.
02:30:24
Speaker 1: Uh, by the way, I have to, uh, add you, you, you talked about UMass over Rutgers, which was fantastic in the, in the Western Michigan, Michigan game was just not a well-played game. I think there's no doubt what the game of the weekend was. And it's the Ole Miss Louisville game. That was something else. That was, that was two good offenses. I think two questionable defenses, I think. Um, SMU-FSU was certainly close, but did not have what Louisville and Ole Miss had in that. And in many ways, SMU-FSU felt like a game where there was a good team making a lot of mistakes, SMU, and a mediocre team not knowing how to take advantage of opportunities in FSU. But I have to say, I think my favorite game of the weekend, and in fairness, you may have written this before, Louisville Ole Miss game. But I think that was, if you're just pure entertainment value, game of the week was, I think, Louisville Ole Miss. All right. Greetings from Texas 4. If the midterms produce a 50-50 Senate and a Republican senator later resigns, becomes incapacitated or otherwise unable to serve, what happens to control of the chamber? Would Republicans retain control despite having one fewer senator or could control shift to Democrats? Love the show and the college football talk. Canes looked fantastic. Can only imagine your thoughts on what happened in Ann Arbor Saturday night, John. Well, hopefully you like what I said on my Monday pod about, I do think we've got to, there is something, there is a fix we can make to increase, you know, to basically increase the credibility of officiating in college football is we got to take the conferences out of the, out of being in charge of officials and the replay and all of that stuff. Just get, conferences out of it. Just one less conspiracy rabbit hole for people to go to. Well, look, we have provisions and you wait, the governor would replace of the state. You got to appoint somebody. Now, let's talk about the two places with two fairly old senators, one of whom is currently not been able to make it to the floor of the Senate in a couple of months where there's a Democratic governor. And in Iowa, where there is likely to be a Democratic governor. And of course, if you just heard my top five list with Iowa in there, you heard about the question Rob Sand was asked about replacing Chuck Grassley. What would he do? And he said, well, I'd appoint an independent, which would only like that would be fascinating. Well, look, I mean, it's, you know, majority is decided by the party that has the most senators with them. So if you're in a 50-50 Senate and the scenario you describe happens, the two likeliest candidates, right, that would really make this complicated. But Kentucky's the most complicated because Kentucky legislature passed a law saying that the governor has to replace with the party of the deceased senator. But that is– that has never been tested in state courts. And I think– and if the state constitution simply gives the governor the power of appointment. So I'm not so sure. I think that if McConnell somehow– and look, McConnell is getting replaced. So it's less of an issue going into the next Congress since he's not going to be there. But with Grassley. you know, if we're going to use that example, uh, he's up in 28, but something happens from in 27, we're sitting in the 50, 50 Senate. What does Rob Sand do? Right. And what does that independent do? Um, you know, I, you, you know what the zeitgeist would be on the left. And you know what the zeitgeist would be on the right. It would, uh, it would put, it would be interesting to see the, how sand would handle the pressure of that moment. Um, But ultimately, there would be no vacancy. The governor of the deceased senator immediately needs to appoint somebody. You saw Darlene Graham got appointed within– she was a senator I think within 36 hours. They had her already sworn in. It was something that quick. So this is– that's how absolute the governor's power is to appoint a temporary replacement. Now, legislatures could decide, you know, some states you have to have a special election within 90 days. I think that's what Massachusetts did. Others, it's the next federal election. But there would be no vacancy. It would be an immediate filling.
02:35:13
Speaker 2: But. Right.
02:35:15
Speaker 1: Party of the governor, party of the person that, you know, if that differs, that's when you start to see some quite a bit of horse trading.
02:35:24
Speaker 2: All right.
02:35:24
Speaker 1: Last question for the. for this episode. It's Anthony in California's 30th congressional district. He says, I'm hoping to become a member of the two-timers club here. I really got into college football last year in part because of your podcast. Right on. Welcome. I want more Californians into college football, and I'm glad to see Cal, UCLA, USC, Stanford, all starting to invest real dollars into football.
02:35:47
Speaker 2: So kudos.
02:35:51
Speaker 1: And he said, in part because of your podcast, and it became something I love talking about with my brother, who sadly passed away earlier this summer. I am so sorry to hear that. So thank you for continuing to be a source for me to learn from and enjoy the sport. As a Steelers fan, which quarterback should I be keeping an eye on this season if Pittsburgh ends up looking for a first-round QB next year? Thanks, Anthony. Well, first of all, Anthony, I think you ought to.
02:36:17
Speaker 2: I think.
02:36:18
Speaker 1: I'm weirdly bullish on Drew Aller, who is the backup to Rodgers, who I think is going to start three games this year, five games this year. What if Drew Aller is just the type of sort of Pittsburgh quarterback you've gotten used to that knows how to read a defense, play action pass, sort of, he's got a little Roethlisberger in him. He's just sort of, you know, it's certainly more of a 20th century type quarterback, not necessarily a 21st century, but I say that, you know, what's the Pittsburgh way? You want to have a, When Pittsburgh's good, they have a great offensive line, a great running game, and a good quarterback. So I would like to see Aller. I'd like to see what he can do. But I do think he has to have a good offensive line. But look, the quarterbacks, you know, here's what's happening. I think you now, you know, the quarterback position has always been incredibly important. And it's even more so over the last 20 years. You are now getting a concentration of great athletes who are choosing to be, you know, used to be, you didn't always put your best athlete in quarterback. You might put in football, you might put your best athlete at running back. You might put them at wide receiver. And if you put it at quarterback, it's because you ran a certain type of offense. Well, now we've mainstreamed the idea of dual threat quarterbacks, quarterbacks who could run pass on the run and all those things. And so I just think college feels like it's never been deeper in the quarterback ranks and in quarterback development. And I think the idea now that college quarterbacks are going to stay in college because they can make good money, frankly, better money in college if you're a top quarterback than the first couple of years as an NFL pro because of the way they've structured their systems. You're going to get guys like Bo Nix, who had 60 starts in college and certainly knew what the hell he was– the learning curve was just– was much shorter for him. And within two years, he's guiding them as a contender and a playoff guy. So look, I think– obviously, I think Miami's quarterback looks like he's got all the tools, just incredible touch, super accurate. and this is now his third stop where he's impressed. I look at it, it's the same reason why I'm so bullish on Cam Ward and Beck and now Mensah is that he did this at Tulane under one coaching staff. He did it at Duke under another coaching staff. He's already doing it at Miami in our third. So what does that tell you? He processes information quickly, right? Just like Cam Ward, he went through three different systems and seemed to succeed and get better each year. Carson Beck is now showing that ability to do that. I think that in a weird way, these quarterbacks that could go from different systems, that's who I want in my NFL team, right? That means they're coachable. You know the way, how transient NFL coaching is, both at the top, but particularly at the coordinator level, you're going to go through different systems, right? And if you're not easily adaptable to new systems, you're not going to be a successful NFL quarterback. So I look at those guys and, you know, so Mensah looks like he's got an NFL arm at Miami. Dante Moore looks like he's got it at Oregon. But I'm not as sold on Moore yet as others are. I think he's got all the tools, but you can have a lot of tools, but it may not all come together. Go watch a South Carolina game. And this kid, Lenora Sellers, he's another one that's got all this talent. You're just, you know, what happens if you had a little bit more talent around him? but wow, does he got a lot. I'm not sure Levitt is going to translate as well to the pros, which is the kid who did great at LSU. And I worry about Trinidad Chambliss' size a little bit, but boy, his ability to throw on the run is really impressive as well. So, you know, if you're, I look at it as who would fit the Steelers mindset, right? There's also, like, I always think there's just certain fits, right? Certain cultural fits, right? I'll tell you, There's something about Arch Manning of the Steelers that would feel correct. I don't know why I think that, right? He's a big kid, right? In that sense, he's got a little Roethlisberger in him because he's also mobile the way both Roethlisberger and Bradshaw were. So, you know, maybe it's Arch that you should be focused on. But I'm going to end with where I began. Don't give up on Drew Aller. You never know when your future is sitting on your own bench.
02:41:09
Speaker 2: Right.
02:41:10
Speaker 1: How many, you know, just ask the Seattle Seahawks. I guess that's like ask the San Francisco 49ers and the random seventh round quarterback that turned out to be a franchise quarterback of Brock Purdy. So it's and there's something about Aller, Penn State guy, Steelers.
02:41:29
Speaker 2: I don't know.
02:41:30
Speaker 1: It just maybe I want it to work because it just feels like such the right fit for the Pittsburgh fan base.
02:41:37
Speaker 2: Right.
02:41:37
Speaker 1: And he's got that. the grittiness that you want for a Steelers quarterback. So let's not give up on Drew Aller just yet. All right, with that, welcome back to the Wednesday podcast. So I'm giving you, we're giving you updates every single day of the week. Mondays, Tuesdays, it's Super Tuesday with Chris Silliza. Wednesday, another standalone podcast. Thursday, another standalone podcast. And of course, on the weekend, you've got New Sphere. So plenty of places to get what I hope is a little better informed about American politics, however it looks on any given day. With that, I appreciate you coming here. This podcast is politics for the rest of us. I'll see you in 24 hours.
