Campbell Conversations

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is the pollster, John Zogby. Mr. Zogby is the founder of the Zogby International Poll and with his sons, Jeremy and Benjamin, he serves as senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. He's also the author of a recent book, it's titled, “Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should”. Mr. Zogby, welcome to the program.

John Zogby: Hey, Grant. Good to talk to you again.

GR: Good to talk to you, always good to see you. So, my questions are going to be driven by your book and also your background. They'll also be driven by my own background, as you know, I’m a political scientist. So, I'm going to draw on some of the discussions I hear from my colleagues when we're talking about polls and surveys, get your take on those. And then I also wanted to ask you some questions about some recent survey and poll data that's been out there and has been in the news. So let me just start with a basic question here, one question that always comes up a lot regarding polling in recent decades is how all the big changes in communication technology have complicated it. I mean, let me just throw out a couple things. You know, landlines are basically gone, people don't answer the phones if they don't know who's calling them when they see the number coming in or the person. It may be harder to find certain demographic groups to tap for their opinions and so on. So, I just wanted to get your sense as a pollster, what in your view are the biggest challenges for polling that have arisen since those golden days when we all used to have landlines and answered the phone when it rang?

JZ: Well, of course it's technology and non-response, or low response rates. When I started in business in 1984, response rates averaged 65%. Two out of three that you reach, actually reached by phone we're willing to conduct a survey. However, change has been part of this business from the beginning and the pace of change has increased greatly. So, you know, imagine in the 30s, 40s and 50s, folks like Gallup and Roper and Harris would develop sampling points throughout the United States, identify people in each of those sampling points to travel to those sampling points, mail envelopes to them with survey questionnaires, instructions on First and Elm Street, fifth door on the left-hand side, and conduct the survey over 3 to 6 weeks, mail the surveys back. And that's, you know, providing everything that went out came back, then you'd get results. Well, our world got faster, things move more quickly. We moved to the telephone. As you pointed out, that was a perfect world. 95% of people had a landline telephone and socially, they welcomed a long-distance call, making them feel important. And then that all dissipated. The answering machine, *69 when they would call you right back and find out who you were, call waiting, that sort of thing, and we had to adjust. You know, by the mid to late 90s, response rates had plummeted to 15%, in major metropolitan areas, 7%, 6%. So, we have always had to adjust. The internet was not welcomed just as, incidentally, the telephone wasn't welcomed in the beginning. How are you going to know who you're talking to? Same thing with the internet. And now, of course, you know, technology has changed rapidly and people who conduct polls can't wait 3 to 6 weeks. Frankly, Grant, they can't wait 3 to 6 days. They want their data and analysis right away. We've had to make those adjustments. So, for every advance, and it has been an advance, there have been detractors.

GR: So let me ask you a question about the phones specifically and how things work today. Has there been discussion, among you and your polling colleagues about simply just moving away from phones entirely to, say, the internet? I'll just tell you, political science research in recent years has essentially done that. That all political science survey is done by the internet, but that has introduced a whole new set of problems. But how are you folks dealing with it? What do you do with that?

JZ: We have well, we had a very large 124 phones call center in Utica. We don't have that anymore, we farm it out, you know, to call centers. I mean, that's obviously one change, but we encourage as much to be done by internet, by email as possible. We also use text to web, so we'll send out emails, we'll also send out texts, but ultimately inviting people to a secure web site to conduct the poll. To answer your question directly, there are still some applications where you really can only do it by phone. If it has to be spontaneous, if it has to be ultra confidential, not to say that the internet can't be confidential, but there are applications, very small areas or very targeted audiences, you know, may require the phone. But I would say, you know, of our survey work, 85%, 90% is online.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the pollster, John Zogby. He's the author of a recent book titled, “Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should”. So, polling regarding the elections always involves this subset of people that are called likely voters, whether that's likely voters in a primary or likely voters in a general election. How do pollsters identify those people, and does that introduce some kind of inevitable error or challenges? I'm remembering, I think I'm remembering this right, but you correct me, I believe that was one of the problems in the early polling that thought Dewey was going to beat Truman, right? Was the guess about who was going to be voting in that election. So how do you folks deal with that?

JZ: Well, first of all, that's 1948, a long time ago. And, the last polling was done two weeks to ten days before the election. And so, those who have read about it or may even remember it, that's when Harry Truman was on his famous whistle stop, and he had built momentum at the top, you know, two weeks before the election. He felt he was going to lose the election. That's why he manically, you know, traveled throughout the country. ‘Give ‘em Hell, Harry!’. And so, there was the issue of timing as well. And to a great degree, there still is the issue of timing. So, first of all, likely voters we ask, we have 3 - 4 question screen that we use to determine if they’re likely voters. Now, of course they could be lying, but it has served us well. You know, what does anybody get out of lying to a pollster? And then how do they create a conspiracy of a thousand people who are also lying? That's, it doesn't happen. You know, I think folks like to beat up the polls and say, oh, you were five points wrong. But when you're talking to 1500 people, five points wrong ain’t so bad. You know, when you think about it, you at least get a direction. So yeah, we poll likely voters when it comes to politics and policy because they're the ones that matter.

GR: And you mentioned some of the pollsters getting beaten up recently. And I wanted to ask you kind of a more specific version of that. There has been a lot made of the supposed inaccuracies of polling in very recent years, and particularly regarding Donald Trump and elections that either he's in or he's been heavily involved in. And there's been a lot of different kind of effects that have been hypothesized to be going on that might be driving some of that, maybe people, you know, a bias and who's responding and not responding. And like you said before, maybe not necessarily a conspiracy, but a general sense of, you know, I'm going to tell the pollster some garbage because they don't like Donald Trump or whatever. What do you think's going on there? Is there anything real in that? Is there a Donald Trump effect of some sort?

JZ: No, I don't think so. I think if we close our eyes and picture, you know, the red, ‘Make America Great’ cap again, Donald Trump has a lot of people who are ready to jump and scream and write and attend rallies and be proud that they're for Donald Trump. That secret Trump effect, maybe you could have said at one point on college campuses. A professor may not have seen it in his or her best interests to be wearing a MAGA cap, or to sit at lunch, in a...

GR: (laughter) That's putting it lightly. I can tell you from my experience at the university. Not that I would put on a MAGA cap, but I could just tell you if someone did, their life might be in danger. But anyway, go ahead.

JZ: But, you know, there hasn't really been anything measurable. Donald Trump finishes strong. And the thing is, many of the pollsters conduct their last poll Friday or Saturday before the election. I try to keep the lights on longer, so I'll go till Monday night. Sometimes I've even gone into Tuesday morning, meaning, of course, Election Day to capture that last minute spark or whatever happens, or the last-minute lack of spark where you begin to see. Let me give you a prime example, you know, in January 2008, the focus in New Hampshire was Obama having won the Iowa caucuses against Hillary. And usually a candidate gets a big, huge bounce after Iowa, and then there's two weeks into New Hampshire. This one year, Iowa was on Thursday and New Hampshire was on Tuesday. And so, there was momentum up to Obama, you know, by Sunday night leading by 12 points. And then, Monday night, Obama is still leading by 12 points, we get to 5:00 and our last 125 calls had Hillary leading by six. So now what do I do? You know, do I report that, or do I do what the responsible thing is? It's a running average. I've got to average the previous 24, 36 hours in with that and I still came out with an Obama double digit lead. Hillary won by six. And so, we all got it wrong, we all got it wrong. And part of the problem is, there are some folks who love to bash the pollsters, you're only as good as that last number you put out. No nuances. Those are seen as excuses.

GR: Well, so quick follow up on that and then we'll have our break in the middle. But, so just to clarify, you do not think though, as I have often heard and read in the media, that there is a systematic underreporting of Donald Trump's support in polls, not approval rating, but you know, trying to predict what the voting outcome is going to be.

JZ: I do not. But there is a noticeable difference between our polling and a few others, and other polling, mainly like the networks and so on, over-representing Democrats under-representing Republicans.

GR: Interesting, okay. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with John Zogby. The pollster is the founder of the Zogby International poll, and with his sons, Jeremy and Benjamin, he serves as a senior partner at John Zogby Strategies. He's also the author of a recent book, it's titled, “Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should”. I want to, John, to pick up on the point that you made, which was that the mistake that pollsters tend to make these days is not the one that I had identified in terms of some specific Trump effect, but rather they oversampled Democrats as opposed to Republicans. Why is that happening? What's going on there?

JZ: Initially, it was a demographic thing. Back in the 80s, you are more typically a Democrat as a blue collar person and as somebody who, not afraid to share opinions and wanted to feel important that somebody was asking you. Republicans more than likely to be, you know, suburban, professional, and not wanting to be bothered on the telephone. The interesting thing is, though, that I determined that an adjustment needed to be made for a political party. That we were getting, maybe 1 or 2 points more Democrats, maybe 2 or 3 points fewer Republicans, that's a 5 or 6 point swing. And given the fact that 90% of self-identified Dems are going to vote Democrat, then same thing with Republican, that could impact the election result. What I was finding in my colleagues and I mean, the top of the line colleagues, was that they were coming in with 15, 16, 17 point swings, like 42, 44% Democrat when it should have been like 36, and 28% Republican, 24% Republican. And you know, that bothered me, because that was really skewing the results. There was a seeming real Democratic bias in it. And there were two implications. One was folks at the New York Times told me they used out of work actors and artists on the telephone to make their calls, and immediately, boy, you know, some middle class, some blue collar woman would say, “ Good afternoon, I'm doing...”

GR: Right, right.

JZ: The other thing is that, personally, I'm a progressive Democrat. My firm has always, I hope, been independent. And I became, like, the darling of Republicans.

GR: For pointing this out.

JZ: For pointing that out. And Rush Limbaugh and the New York Post and all of that, you know, adopted me. It was said at one point that Republicans are going to be naming their firstborn, Zogby at some point. And it stuck in my craw a little bit, but that was the honest thing, that it was more of a demographic and partisan thing, and not based on whether the candidate was black or, like the Bradley effect that we talked about or Obama effect or the Trump effect that they talk about now.

GR: That's fascinating. And, well, you also have to remember, John, the enemy of my enemy is my friend, and so that's why that happened. But it's fascinating that political polarization amplifies this problem. I hadn't really, I hadn't made that connection before. Political polarization is just involved in so many different things, it's fascinating. Let me move to a different kind of polling, which is approval ratings and President Trump's recent approval ratings, in particular. They've been very low, dipping below 40% in some recent surveys. Is there a particular number regarding those that suggest either a tipping point or an inflection point? Is there like a panic level for Republicans in terms of Trump's approval rating and have they hit that?

JZ: Well, generally, if you hit, you know, in the high and mid-30s, that's the real trouble. That's on the surface. When you look at those numbers, though, and you see that Trump was elected with over 50% of the vote, that's the second real trouble. That means he's dropped 17 points. When you realize that 42% is the MAGA base, and there are polls that have him well under that MAGA base and getting trounced among independents. You have to ask, where is he going? Where's he going with numbers like this? So, it's more a dynamism than it is a hard and fast rule.

GR: Right, placing it in context like that, yeah, that's a very good point. You know, I'm sure you saw this, Gallup recently announced that it's no longer going to do its regular approval ratings of the president. It’s been used for so many years, 88 years, I think, and they're going to stop that for other officials as well. What's going on there? What do you think is happening?

JZ: Well, you know, several years ago, after the aggregators, you know, the Nate Silver’s, the Real Clear Politics of the world where they aggregated averages of polling and waited for certain track records and so on. The focus became too much on, did you get the election right to the percentile or did you get it right within a point and a half? A whole point and a half. And Gallup said that they weren't going to do the presidential horse race anymore because they were tired of being embarrassed.

GR: Okay.

JZ: Pew followed with the same thing. Now you won't see any daily tracking from any of them. Now, you're not going to see anything from Gallup, I think Pew will follow shortly. I stopped, doing, you know, the daily tracking or the frequent polls. Number one, we didn't need it anymore and number two, like Gallup, I didn't need anybody telling me, oh, you got the last election within 1.8, that placed you 23rd among pollsters for having a 1.8 differential between your polling and the final result. So, the focus became too much on, I think the Icarus syndrome. The aggregators had a few elections where they flew too close to the sun and, you know, this kind of science I don't think was ever designed to tell you exactly how much the election, down to the 10th of a percent. I was fortunate to get a lot of those right, but I don't consider myself wrong if I'm off two points.

GR: Gotcha, yeah. Well, yeah, the point prediction problem. I assume, though, that there will be organizations that will tell us how many people, or what percentage of people are approving of Donald Trump, right? That information will not be lost to us completely, correct?

JZ: No, it won't, but there is a further problem, and I promise I'll take 30 seconds on it, and that is the standard deviation. So, we're getting at a 42% average when you'll have five polls that have 47%, that neighborhood, and five polls that have 36-37%. That's not the way you should be getting a mean, you know, of 42 or 43%. You should have them mainly clustered around that average number, then here and there, an outlier. So, I believe what's happening is you've got polls with a distinct Democratic bias, polls with a distinct Republican bias, and what they're doing is they're coming up with, I think, what is an artificial average.

GR: Very interesting. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is the pollster John Zogby. Let me ask you one more question in this vein, then we'll turn to something else. But the generic ballots, these are, you know, if the election were today and all you knew was one candidate was a Democrat and the other one was a Republican, who would you vote for? And they're heavily used in the midterms, and they've, been a lot of discussion about these in recent weeks that the Democrats have opened up, you know, a pretty good lead, historically, over the Republicans. I think it's ranging from, you can correct me if I'm wrong, like 3 to 6 points right now, depending on who's doing it. Does that spell real trouble for the Republicans in the 2026 midterms?

JZ: Yes, today it does. So, let's look at that generic ballot. It's not the greatest measurement, but it is very useful. And overall, because of gerrymandering and because of Republican domination of state legislatures who do the reapportionment every ten years, the Democrats need to lead by four and a half to 5% to be nationally, to be in the territory where they're gaining seats. So right now the average is at about 5% lead, which means they're not in comfortable territory, but they're in, you know, they're heading in that direction. When you add to that, though, the special elections that they have won, or at the very least overperformed, say in very red districts, Trump may have won the district by 20 points, Democrat lost in a special election for whatever it is, state legislature by four points. Then you're seeing that, and I think that's mainly on the basis of independent voters swinging way over to the Democrats now. But there's a long way to go, a long way to go.

GR: Interesting, yeah. I'm thinking of the special election in Tennessee where Matt Van Epps won, but it was much closer than expected. So, we've got about, oh, really just a couple of minutes left, unfortunately. I could talk to you all day about this stuff, but, in a couple of minutes left, I want to turn to a couple of things that come more specifically out of your book, and I'll start with the title. If you could briefly just tell us, other than the fascinating conversation we've had so far, why should citizens pay attention to all these polls?

JZ: Well, I think we want to feel connected. We want to feel that, hey, this is my opinion, but is the majority with me? Is the minority with me? Am I part of a very vocal, intense minority? But I want to feel connected. I want to know where my opinions stand as far as the Main Street is concerned. And, you know, secondly, I do want to have some kind of an idea of who's ahead. I don't need to know who's winning, or going to win, not this early, but, you know, have some sort of an idea where voters nationwide stand. That is supposed to prevent the notion, oh, he'll never win, nobody at the barbershop supports him.

GR: I see.

JZ: Which usually is translated into, nobody in America supports him. Why? Because I was at the barbershop.

GR: Right. Or my grandmother or whatever.

JZ: My grandmother, who was usually, you know.

GR: Right. So, we've only really got a minute left. I mean, these are going to have to be sort of our lightning round. What was your worst mistake as a pollster? I know there's a longer story there, but what was your worst mistake? You're very open about your mistakes.

JZ: My 2004 election had the numbers absolutely correct, Bush over Kerry. I thought Kerry was going to win and said so.

GR: Interesting, okay. Finally, things pollsters hate, you've already indicated why, but I do want you to make some just one word point predictions for 2026 midterms. In the House, who comes away with the majority? How many seats?

JZ: As of today, Democrats 20-plus seats.

GR: Wow. That's a big shift. And then what are the chances, percentage-wise, in your view, that Democrats could retake the Senate?

JZ: Less so than the House, but I think it's, I think they're both in play. In fact, there’s some, you know, some new races that weren't expected.

GR: Interesting, interesting. Okay, I’ll have to leave it there. That was John Zogby, and again, his recent book, it's titled, “Beyond the Horse Race: How to Read Polls and Why We Should”. John, thanks again for talking with me, this is fascinating. I had fun and I also got better informed, thank you.

JZ: Thank you. Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I’m Grant Reeher. My guest today is Nathan Sanders. He's a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. And he's also published a new book with Bruce Schneier titled, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship", and he's here with me today to talk about that book. Mr. Sanders, welcome to the program.

Nathan Sanders: So glad to join you, thank you.

GR: We appreciate you making the time. So, we'll get into the specific topics that are covered in your book, but first I wanted to ask you just a couple of basic, big picture items to set the context here, and the first one is the most basic of all. All of us have heard by now of artificial intelligence. Most of us have probably intentionally used AI to answer some question or another, but to just start us off, could you give us a very, very concise definition of what artificial intelligence is and what distinguishes it from high powered computing more generally?

NS: Oh, it’s such a great and foundational question, and I acknowledge that almost everybody, especially those who are experts in the fields, defines AI little bit differently. In our book, we try not to get bogged down in the technical distinctions and all the variations of how AI models are built, and instead we adopt a very broad definition. That, for our purposes, AI is any technology that replaces a cognitive function that used to be the exclusive domain of humans. So that does include technologies like large language models, which are used to do things like generate text that you might use in writing an email, or also to control external systems like software systems that maybe used to have required a human in control, but it does include other forms of AI as well. Think of, for example, Google Maps or navigation software that's helping you plan a route from point A to point B, something that is a very hard, challenging computing and used to be something only humans can do you, you think of that AI as well, as well as computer vision models, other forms of natural language processing and predictive machine learning as well.

GR: All right. Well, I'm glad I asked, and it is already complicated. Now, your book is about the application of AI in the politics and the public policy arena. Let me just start with kind of the end if I can, and that is, could you give me, say, your two biggest hopes for how AI could improve what we do in the politics and public policy arena and on the other hand, your two biggest concerns or worries about it?

NS: Sure. In terms of hopes, one thing I am optimistic about is the ability of citizens, of people to leverage any new technology and including AI, to enhance our power as citizens of democracies. We have some great case studies and examples of what that looks like around the world in our book. We talk about citizens groups using AI to watchdog the government to incorporate instances of public corruption. We write about a great example of a group in Brazil that's been using AI for that purpose for about a decade, long preceding the current modern developments and large language model technologies. We talk about groups of citizens in the US and elsewhere around the world who are using AI to improve how citizens can have their voices heard in policymaking processes, helping people to articulate their views about the laws that should govern all of us and communicate that in an impactful way to the legislature. So there's obviously a huge risk, and we see this as the central risk that AI poses to democracy, of the technology being used to concentrate power and make the already powerful more powerful. But I am optimistic about citizens groups leveraging the technology to switch those dynamics. In terms of fears, I already mentioned the biggest one, that it will be used to concentrate power. And of course, we do see examples of that around the world. We see AI as a fundamentally power magnifying technology, and that means that pro-democracy advocates that want to reform good governance using the technology, they can use it for that purpose and it can be effective. But just as well, elected officials and others with authoritarian tendencies that want to use AI to control citizens and to enforce unjust policies, AI will magnify their power as well, and we can see examples of that around the world today also.

GR: We'll get into some of those a little bit later. I wanted to ask you a more of a historical question as a follow on to that. And I was thinking about this and I was wondering how would AI compare with technological innovations of the past that have also had great impacts on politics? I thought of three right away. One very simple one is simply the ability to amplify a voice, you know, voice amplification. And then of course, you have radio, then you have opinion surveying and polling. And then an obvious one would be television. Those are all the ones that came to mind to me. Do you think that AI is going to have a more dramatic effect than those kinds of technological innovations, or will it be comparable or less? I don’t know.

NS: Well, I think you're right to locate AI along a historical spectrum of new technologies that, when they're introduced, affect not just politics, not just government and administration, but really everything. I'm not a historian, but I know historians and economists have a classification of what are called general purpose technologies, technologies that really do change and transform everything. Maybe some people differ about what belongs in that category, but it includes things like telecommunications and includes things like railroads and includes things like universities as knowledge generation technologies. And I do think we can locate AI along that spectrum. In terms of political applications, you know, we see AI transforming the way that people interact with candidates and elected officials in a way that extends the progression of the introduction of whistlestop tours on the back of railroad cars, moving into broadcast communications like radio, moving into visual communications with television, moving into the internet and social media, and now it's getting the ability to not just broadcast opinions, but to individually respond to questions, tailor conversations to an individual person, and even exchange information in a two way communication with many, many individuals at mass scale in a way that previous technologies just wouldn't have made possible. And once again, that capability can be applied to good purposes that most of us and most of your listeners would probably think are beneficial. And it can definitely be applied in negative ways as well.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is the data scientist Nathan Sanders. And we're discussing his new book. It's titled, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship". So, let's get into some of these things more specifically and you have given us clues about the arguments that you, the two of you make in your book. But how would AI affect democracy specifically? You talked about the concerns about concentrating power in the way that citizens might do things, but how will it affect democracy as a system of government? And I'm going to define democracy here very broadly in the way that you defined AI as being a system in which the people, usually through elected representatives and their leaders, give laws to themselves. And I think that's sort of the fundamental essence of it. How do you think AI is going to affect us?

NS: It's a great question and of course, it's a broad one. In our book, we do go through in-depth applications across all the major branches and systems of governance, politics, citizenship, the judiciary, the administrative branch.

GR: And I want to get into some of those, each with you, as we go on. But go ahead.

NS: And maybe what I can do to start that conversation is just to share an example that we think is really interesting, that we've just written an update to the story we shared in the book of the most recent happenings that, specifically talks about how citizens and candidates, voters and candidates engage with each other. We just wrote a story about what's happening in Japan right now with a brand new political party called Team Mirai that is really reimagining how politics works and using AI as a tool in that reimagination. This is a party that was founded by a 30-something software engineer named Takahiro Anno. And at the time we wrote the book, he had just run for office for the first time. He had run for governor of Tokyo, and he is, as an individual software developer, had made some tools to help him get the word out about his platform and views, and to get feedback from people that were novel and helped him reach hundreds of thousands of people in the Tokyo electorate in a way that a individual candidate traditionally couldn't do. Now, since we published the book, he's now been elected to the upper chamber of the Japanese national legislature, the Diet. So, he's effectively a senator now in Japan, and he has founded a political party, and he's now receiving public funding that is distributed to Japanese parties, and he's using it to advance that vision. He's hiring engineers and using it to build new political technologies, not just for his party, but open source tools that the entire Japanese electorate can use. Let me just give you one example of what that looks like, to make clear how this is so different from how politics is practiced today elsewhere. He's developed an AI interviewer tool that allows many, many individual voters to have a conversation with a representative that can explain a policy position from this party's platform and, crucially, get feedback on it. All of these dialogs are available for anyone to see online, and my coauthor Bruce Schneier and I have reviewed some of those. We've seen really interesting examples of voters learning about proposals to reform the structure of the Diet, to change the structure of the legislature, being informed about those and reacting to them saying, well, I like this aspect and I think it could lead to this, but I don't like that. And then the outcome of this interview process is a recommended change to the policy proposal to the candidate's own political platform, his written political platform. That changes something the candidate reviews and either says yes or no to. And then the voter gets a response, they get to see was the suggestion that I made in this interview accepted? Is that now part of this party's platform or not? This is being done on a scale right now of thousands of voter conversations and thousands of responses. But the technology is so scalable, we can see it being applied at a scale of millions. And I think that kind of individual voter interaction and the responsiveness to voter inputs and preferences could really change how politics is done.

GR: Interesting, interesting. Two things come to my mind listening to that story of yours. I want to put these things to you as follow up questions. One is, transparency seems to be absolutely the key, though, in having that process be trusted and not feel like it might be being manipulated. Would you agree with that?

NS: I do for sure.

GR: Yeah. And other thing that popped up in my mind is, it has to do with age and politics. We see in the United States right now, I think there's a collective frustration among many younger voters, and I'm going to define younger sort of in political terms, being like under 55, with the age of the leadership. It's certainly been a big conversation in the Democratic Party. And I wonder, and also the fact that, older citizens vote in higher proportions than other citizens and so therefore they get more attention paid to them. I mean, it's no accident that, you know, Medicare and Social Security are often called the third rails of American politics. You don't touch them without risking your own political death. Do you think this might, the effect of this technology might get at that? That somehow this is going to provide more openings for younger people to have more power?

NS: A great question. First of all, I agree with your premise. I think that age is emerging as an increasingly important dynamic that's controlling political outcomes, not just in the US, but around the world, especially in places with an even more skewed age distribution in their electorate like Italy and Japan.

GR: Right.

NS: The political scientist David Runciman has written really powerfully about some of those dynamics, and I think they do intersect with AI. Bruce and I have been watching the polling on voter understanding and preferences about how AI is used in government, and it's changing over time. But one of the things that is maintained, steady trend, is that younger voters tend to be more informed about AI and not necessarily more favorable or open to its applications, but at least more informed about its potentials and risks. I think that as that changes over time, it will manifest in our politics. One thing that we're already seeing in the US is a huge local response to the citing of data centers, the compute infrastructure, the physical infrastructure that's used for AI models. Many communities across the country have really risen up to reject the idea that the negative externalities, the environmental effects, the impacts on energy prices of that infrastructure would hit them locally in their communities. I think that's really just the starting point of a larger grappling with how AI is changing society. That will happen, at a national level. You know, to me, the biggest political implication of the growth of AI is the concentration of wealth and power. The fact that we have a very small number of companies, mostly located in the US, mostly in one city in the Bay area, that are concentrating wealth at just an enormous, unprecedented scale. Multitrillion dollar valuations built on the future potential of AI. The political implications of that concentration of power I think are really severe, and I haven't yet seen either of our major political parties or most of our major political leaders in the US really identify solutions to that growing concentration of power or organize a political response to it. I'm confident that will happen, and I hope that parties will adopt a position that it is bad to have that concentration of power. It seems clearly an existential democratic risk to me.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Nathan Sanders. The data scientist is a research affiliate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. And he's the coauthor with Bruce Schneier of, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship", and we've been discussing his book. So, Nathan, right before the break, you really set out a pretty serious, specific concern about concentrating power, and the way it might play out in the United States. And one of the things that popped into my mind as a political scientist when you said neither party has really started a real conversation that's critically examining this, is because then no one wants to go after the goose that's laying the golden eggs when it comes to campaign financing. I mean, these folks give a lot of money. And so that's one thing that I think is going on. But how did the two of you see this problem being tamed, what could we do?

NS: Well, if you don't mind, I'd love to just pause for a moment on that question of campaign financing.

GR: Sure.

NS: And then I'd love to go on to talk about solutions to the broader problem. I think you're absolutely right. We're seeing really a capture of government and elected officials by the wealthiest industries in our country. And increasingly, that lobbying spending is being funneled through AI technology companies and it's having a real effect. When we talk about solutions to mitigate the risks that AI is proposing to democracy in our book, we note that a lot of the solutions are not really specific to AI or specifically about AI. And we do think renovation of our campaign finance system is critical to control and mitigate risks of the development of the technology. That is a solution, campaign finance reform, that is responsive to the risks of how AI is manifesting in our politics today, even though that's not a solution, that itself is inherently about technology, so I'm really glad you raised that.

GR: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. You know, now that you say that, the Supreme Court has been pretty firm on its view about how money is equivalent to speech and how corporations are equivalent to individuals, and thinking about that connection between money and speech. AI may change that, I mean, AI may be the thing that, kind of the straw that breaks the camel's back on that. I hadn't thought of that before, very interesting.

NS: I hope we do grapple with that and it does lead to some change, I agree with you.

GR: So, you've got a part of your book, and this gets a little bit more into the weeds, but, about how AI could affect and improve how government itself works, the actual administration of government. Tell us a little bit about that.

NS: Yes, that's right. We see examples in the US and around the world of government agencies leveraging AI to change how they operate, in some cases to improve efficiency, in some cases to augment their capabilities, to help them do things they couldn't do before. In fact, in the later days of the Biden administration, about a year ago, they published an inventory of AI use cases across the federal government. And it may surprise people that even at that time, we're talking about really reporting from 2024, how many active applications of AI already existed in US agencies. It was more than 2000, it's really happening at a very large scale. And it ranges from everything from agency officials trying to write emails faster by using AI assistance like Grammarly, you know, really kind of small scale granular use cases, to agencies that administer billions and billions of dollars in government benefits trying to automate that process using AI. And we see, especially as we've transitioned from the Biden to Trump administration, a pretty clear change in the policy and guardrails around how it's being implemented, how the technology is being implemented in agencies that we're concerned about. If you don't mind, I can share a specific example of what that looks like.

GR: Absolutely.

NS: So in the US, one of our largest agencies is the center for Medicare and Medicaid Services that administers health care benefits for millions of Americans and represents a massive amount of money. Those benefits are often lifesaving, critical to people's lives. And, you know, for CMS and for other health care administrators, they face a life or death question, often thousands of times a day, which is, will you authorize a health care provider to perform a medical service, or will you say, no, I'm not going to pay for it. So under the Biden administration, there was an initial policy laid out that allowed for CMS and the insurers that work with it to start using AI in that administration process. And they laid out some pretty clear guardrails for when human review is required, when it's appropriate to use automated decision making, when you disclose that, etc., etc.. The Trump administration has come in and now issued new guidance with a pretty different posture. They've done two things that concern us and that we've written about. One is really to peel back those guardrails and to leave more of those decisions in the hands of corporate insurers and the technology providers that those insurers use. And the second, they've put in place some financial incentives that some people have criticized as effectively a bounty on denying care, saying that you will get a financial incentive if you build an AI system that says no. That's where the incentive is being placed. To us, this is a form of what we would think of as tech washing. The idea that if a computer says it, it's true, or it's objective or it's okay. We urge people not to think of that kind of use case as an objective use of technology, but rather asking technology to encode a policy decision, to encode a set of values. The technology can be used to encode the value that our goal is to save money by saying no to people's healthcare needs. It can also equally be used to encode to say, we need to say yes as quickly as possible to people who need care, so they don't have to wait for a decision. Those are two totally different uses of the same technology.

GR: That's really interesting in that distinction. You've given me a phrase now I'm going to commit to memory, ‘tech washing’, I love that. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Harvard University data scientist Nathan Sanders. So, you've also got a very intriguing chapter about how it could affect the court system. And, you know, there's so much that is subjective in the criminal justice system. So, I’m really curious for you to share with our listeners a bit, how you see that playing out.

NS: Well, you know, we see transformative effects of AI being used in judicial processes around the world. And one of them has grown since we wrote about it in the book. We wrote about the use of AI in the Brazilian judicial system. Brazil is a society that's maybe even more litigious than the US, which is shocking. They have millions and millions of court cases processed per year, and many of them are cases brought by citizens against the government, they're effectively accountability cases. The Brazilian court system spends about 1% of GDP every year just administering cases, and it spends another roughly 1% of GDP paying out penalties assessed to the government when they're found responsible in those cases. So, it's a really significant large scale issue in Brazil. Part of the problem that they've been facing is an ever growing backlog. There are so many of these cases, they just can't process them all. And the problem gets worse and worse every year. And so starting several years ago, again, before the advent of technologies like ChatGPT, the Brazilian judiciary had started adopting AI technologies to improve the efficiency of that process, to automate decisions such as how should we distribute our litigators who represent the government across cases, to put the best people in the cases where they can have the biggest impact? Using it really for administrative procedures as opposed to making decisions on behalf of judges. And they found that and reported that to be effective, they've actually turned around that backlog. So now it's shrinking instead of growing, which is a big deal for that judicial system. But the response that has been reported is also interesting. Litigants are also using AI to automate filing cases and to write court documents. So now they have an even faster growth of new cases. And it's created this arms race, both sides using AI for opposing purposes. And the question is, is that good or bad and how should we change that? You know, I think it's clear to see what the risks is. If ultimately the legal system is just machines talking to machines, that sounds disastrous. On the other hand, we hope that there's a potential upside to this, which is that there's a real accountability function for the judicial system to play. And if more people are able to represent their concerns to the government by bringing litigation, and if the judicial system is more efficient and processing those concerns, that's a good thing for democracy. We need to see how this plays out, but those dynamics, I think, will be important in other countries too.

GR: That's very fascinating. We've got about three minutes left and I want to try to squeeze in a couple questions if I can in that time. I want to go back to the citizens here because you talked about that a lot at the at the beginning of our conversation. For the average citizen is not going to wrap their minds in their hands around all this. So for the average citizen out there, what should they be paying most attention to when it comes to AI and politics? What is the thing that they got to keep their eye on, do you think?

NS: I urge people to think about that problem of concentration of power and to demand that their political parties and representatives present real solutions. And we present alternative vision in the book for how AI can be developed. There's nothing inherent about AI as a technology that says that it has to be developed by a few companies with trillion dollar valuations. There's nothing about the technology that says that it has to be trained at such a large scale, and so repeatedly, that it uses enormous energy and environmental resources. There's nothing about the technology itself that says that only the richest individuals and companies can profit from it and capture value from it. And there's nothing that says that only that small group of people can decide how models are trained and what biases they may be subjected to. Instead, we present an alternative vision of AI developed not by big corporations, but by people and the systems that we put in place to represent us in government, a public AI model. You know, when we started writing about this several years ago, the idea of a public alternative to corporate AI didn't exist in the real world yet, but today it does. We have examples like the Apertus model in Switzerland. This is a effective large language model, a modern AI model that was trained by government institutions in Switzerland and offered as a public good for everybody to use. This is an alternative vision of how AI can be developed that can be more sustainable. By the way, the Swiss model was trained on national compute infrastructure, that is hydro-powered, powered by renewable energy and doesn't require value to be captured by corporations, but instead captured by people, and the technology can be built for public benefit.

GR: So, my last question, we got about a minute left, kind of a bottom line question for you to return to where I started. I want to have you put yourself on a scale here. And then maybe just say a couple quick words about it, in terms of how optimistic or pessimistic you are about the future here in this regard. If 1 is the end of civilization as we know it, and 10 is Doctor Pangloss, this is going to create the best of all possible worlds, where are you? What's your number?

NS: Great question. I think I'm right in the middle. I think I'm a 5. You know, I'm an American, I see a lot of things to be pessimistic about in our government today, a lot of things. But I'm very optimistic ultimately about us as citizens steering our government and exercising our democratic control. And I'm optimistic about us leveraging new technologies to increase our power as the public.

GR: That's great. It's a great place to end. That was Nathan Sanders. And again, his new book is titled, "Rewiring Democracy: How AI Will Transform Our Politics, Government, and Citizenship". It's incredibly illuminating. And it's also, as Nathan just suggested, a call to action to all of us. Nathan, thanks again for talking with me, I really learned a lot in this conversation.

NS: My great pleasure. Thank you for having me.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Politics has become more partisan and aggressive in recent years, but has that had an effect on how political scandals play out? This week, Grant Reeher talks with Brandon Rottinghaus, who says that it has. Rottinghaus is a political science professor at the University of Houston, the host of "Party Politics" on Houston Public Media, and the author of "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era."

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Brandon Rottinghaus. He's a political science professor at the University of Houston and the co-host of "Party Politics" on Houston Public Media. He's with me today because he has a new and timely book out. It's titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." Professor Rottinghaus, welcome to the program.

Brandon Rottinghaus: Hey, thank you for having me.

GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time, so let me just start with a question that gets at your title there. Basic question about the book. Obviously, political scandals have been around as long as politics has been around. But has there been some kind of historic, recent historical inflection point in scandals, in how they play out? Where things began to turn that caught your eye?

BR: Scandals are definitely an indicator of our politics, in some ways a lagging indicator. The kind of things that are affecting American politics also affect scandals. So to answer your question very bluntly, polarization is really the biggest driving factor in terms of changing the way that we see scandals and the less impact that they have over time. So the premise of the book is, in part, that scandals appear less damaging in a polarized era. Politicians ranging from Trump to Santos, who survive these kinds of behaviors that would have basically ended careers years ago, the partisan identity that people have basically shields politicians, even amid very serious criminal indictments or wrongdoing that's been discussed. So really it's about polarization. But it of course, is got tendrils around all kinds of other related incidents and things that are affecting our politics, like our siloed media environment or, just a kind of new age of politician who doesn't have the same degree of shame because they've seen lots of scandals come and go and understand that surviving them is a mix of, guile and media strategies, and a lot of other things. So in a nutshell, basically, the thing that's affecting politics more broadly is also affecting the lessened impact of scandals.

GR: Remember, in the McCarthy era, there was, I forget which senator or other political figure, put this question to McCarthy. “Have you no shame, sir?” I guess I guess the answer now is no, I don't. Well, you've brought into the conversation here a bunch of things that I wanted to follow up with you on. So you've kind of set the terms for how we're going to talk here. But we have talked about political polarization on this program many different times with different authors. It always helps, I think, though, just give a super quick thumbnail description of what we mean when we say political polarization.

BR: Yeah. There are really two things I think at work. And these are kind of political sciencey explanations, but they've got roots in the way that people think about each other and how they interact with the bigger political system. One is motivated reasoning, where people effectively believe what they want to believe, and even if they are convinced of something by someone else, or they have alternative information, they still believe what they believe. So that's where partisanship thrives. It's like a germ that, if you cover it and keep it warm, it will continue to grow. And so people, once they believe something, it's hard to get them to unbelieve it, or they're willing to find things in the world in news, in the conversations with people that basically already support what they believe. So that's one.

GR: Confirmation bias.

BR: Yeah, precisely. And the other is just a kind of sense of tribalism in politics. And people call it in the field affective polarization, that I don't like you because you're of a different political party from me. There are actually lots of real-world examples of this that aren't about politics. It works for sports. It works for race and ethnicity kind of bias. So there are a lot of ways that this kind of motivated reasoning, and and this of affective polarization will work together to reinforce partisanship, but effectively, people are retreating to their own camps, and that hyper partisanship is creating a moment where politicians can retreat to their base and basically survive a scandal they didn't years ago or wouldn't have years ago.

GR: I was thinking of this topic in part, more as it's sort of a general cultural thing, and we'll come back to the polarization lens and the other specific political factors for this. But I was thinking, as I was reading through your book, is there a particular moment in time where, at least in my lifetime, it felt like something changed, and I wanted to run this by you. The one that I came up with was Bill Clinton's scandal during the primaries in 1992 with the Gennifer Flowers affair. And I remember at the time, the expectation among my colleagues was that Clinton would back out of the race. He’d drop out. He didn't. He ultimately survived at a very famous, thing he said to the New Hampshire primary voters. He'd be “with them till the last dog died.” Would you pick that, or is there other, is there one moment that kind of stands out to you where it begins to feel like something shifts?

BR: That's a really great point. And I think that's a moment that you're certainly seeing a lot of that change in the book and in other scholarship. I use the 90s as a kind of cut point for a politician, so it makes sense to basically have it as the pre- and post-moment. I do think that the moment that preceded it is as important as the moment you describe. The moment that preceded it was Gary Hart being essentially be in the middle of a scandal where he was reported to have an affair, and as a married man, and it was a media feeding frenzy. It ultimately didn't show anything definitive, but it definitely suggested that the scandals that are affecting people are now really killing careers. But a short four years later, you have Bill Clinton surviving what was more or less the same kind of scandal. Part of it was about his own initiative. Part of it was the politics of that moment allowed it to happen. But I think you're exactly right to pinpoint that as one of those pivot points. And, to be able to see what that transition looked like from a prior scandal, to me, also was telling, because these scandals aren't isolated, they don't exist in a vacuum. They're all building on each other. And so politicians recognize that other people have been in similar situations, and they've used a certain kind of playbook to get out of it. And that really is, I think, the tale of the tape you're seeing scandals really unfold in ways that we hadn't before. And even though the kinds of things politicians do to embarrass themselves, their families tend to be kind of similar. It's still the case that now that they're able to wiggle out of them in ways that they weren't before.

GR: You know, they've you mentioned Gary Hart. This was a situation where the truth is stranger than fiction. On the boat was "Monkey Business" where this supposed to have taken place. And then, as I recall, the woman involved, Donna Rice, went on to make quite a bit of money selling jeans on television. I'm Grant Reeher.

BR: Yes, all about recovery.

GR: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, somebody was the better for it, I suppose. I'm Grant Reeher, and you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, and my guest is political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus. He's published a new book titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." So, just to think about the current era we're in and, basic question on this. If you're a politician, you get caught in one of these. What kinds of responses are currently the most effective? Is it just digging in? Is it ignoring it? Is it attacking your attacker or what? What what do you what do you see people doing?

BR: That's a it's a really good question, and definitely one that gets to the heart of how politicians' strategies have changed. Part of the reason they're able to solve these things and to, to be able to survive these things is that they are effectively using this new playbook. A lot of people look at Donald Trump as being the architect of this playbook, but he is not the only one. There are a lot of authors on this kind of playbook, but in a nutshell, a lot of what happens is that you do see the kind of retreating to the base where politicians will say things like, this other great political force, the opposite of us, the others are trying to get you, but I'm in the way. So a lot of politicians like Matt Gaetz, for instance, use almost literally this exact language to say that there's this unseen liberal democratic force that's out to get your, the kind of voters that he cares about, the constituencies he cares about. And he's the only one in the way. So he gets snared in these types of scandals. It's obviously wrong and misleading to imply these are happening, but it is a useful tool for politicians because they are harnessing this affective polarization, this hyper partisanship. So that's one thing that they do. We also look at other projects. In other projects, we look at stonewalling, where politicians simply say nothing or claim this is a political witch hunt that also can be effective in certain kinds of situations. It depends a bit on the specifics. So we find is that when politicians stonewall, they're more likely to do so if they think the truth won't be revealed. That is, if it's something that's kind of private, or maybe it's a complicated legal issue that won't ultimately be resolved before they leave office, they can essentially stonewall and push the boundaries. So there are some very common techniques we're seeing. And it is, I think, wearing on the American people a little bit to see the lying or even outright falsehoods, even when presented with evidence that a person has done something wrong.

GR: Yeah. The stonewalling certainly. I can think of a whole bunch of examples that come to my mind with that. Let me ask you this hypothetical question again. I want to go back in time. I ask you to go back in time. What do you think is the most important example of a past scandal that did end someone's political career? That if it were to happen today, you think the person at the center would probably have survived it?

BR: Yeah, it's a good question. We see a lot of times where scandal still do hurt politicians. One recent example is Governor Walz in Minnesota. Although the scandal itself wasn't connected to him, it definitely affected his administration in the perception that he could do a good job. So there is definitely still times where this happens. I think the kind of scandals that now exist that would have in the past hurt a candidate typically involve morality, something that a person has done that creates, a negative experience for themselves, their family, maybe something that is hypocritical, they contradict themselves either as a moral question or maybe as a political question. These are the kind of things that, in the past, a politician might get tripped up on. But in the kind of current moment you're likely to see them survive, those, because either the voters don't really care and or you've got the politicians with tools that let them sidestep this. And, we can't ignore the voters in this because voters are willing to forgive in ways that they weren't before. It's not necessarily that they're doing this out of the goodness of their heart, or they see a kind of, moral clarity from this kind of apology or absolution. But they rather see this as a partisan fight, and they're willing to back the partisans that they like, even in the conditions where there's something bad going on with that person.

GR: You know, I wanted to ask you about this, this potential example, because it gets at your argument about partisanship, I think, and that was Richard Nixon. I have heard, usually they're Democratic commentators, but I've heard commentators say, if Richard Nixon were to have Watergate today, he would have hung in there. The reason why ultimately he decided to resign was because they didn't have the votes among the Republicans. There's a there's a famous moment where he's confronted with this fact. He says, how many do we have? It's like, “no, almost none, sir.” So today, though, with the partisanship, you could easily imagine, like all the Republicans just sticking with him, and you're not going to get two-thirds of the Senate to convict. I wonder, do you think, do you think Richard Nixon survives Watergate in 2026?

BR: I think the short answer is yes, in part because, as you're describing, you definitely see a kind of unity. Now, you didn't see before this actually happened for Bill Clinton when the scandal, accusations came out, all of the delegation, including all of his cabinet, stepped up and said, we support the president. We're backing him. So obviously, it's something that is a useful tool. And although there's no academic work exactly on this, I've long thought about the way that unity matters to politicians and how that gives them this bigger shield. So that I think that's definitely kind of one major element here. I think Nixon would have survived. I mean, to some degree, he did survive. The way I kind of track this in the book is that we can look at these survival models that basically track how long a person survives in office after a scandal, and it's getting longer and longer as time goes on. So in a polarized era, you see politicians hanging on for longer. And that definitely is something that would have been a plus for Nixon because you can just kind of drag things out and, he resigns early, but it wasn't, it wasn't immediately, he definitely hung in there for several years before the kind of facts caught up to him. The last reason, I think, that it's the case that the Watergate would have been, more of a nothing burger back then, is that the media now don't have the same kind of reach. This fact that we're seeing two things happening. Number one, the media itself is kind of winnowing and in narrowing, that's something that scholars have shown that does have an effect on reducing the likelihood of the scandals are revealed. And the other is that people just don't believe the media. So you have reports that come out that say, Richard Nixon involved in these things. You've got Woodward, Bernstein kind of digging, getting each of the individual, members of the staff and sort of picking out these sort of moments of wrongdoing. And people just wouldn't believe it.

GR: So they would just say, I'll just say, oh, that's "The Washington Post," right? If you're a Republican, that's "The Washington Post."

BR: Yeah, precisely. And they definitely did that too. But the process is so much more aggressive now. And I think that divide is so much more clear now that it's really a challenge to get people to believe it when they're confronted with actual wrongdoing from politicians.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Brandon Rottinghaus. He's a political science professor at the University of Houston, and we've been discussing his new book. It's titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." The one thing that I was thinking about a lot because I observe a lot of local and regional politics here in this area, are the dynamics of this different at different levels of office? For example, we still have a lot of officeholders here in upstate New York who resigned amid these scandals fairly early on. They don't, they're not able to hunker down. Do you see any dynamic in that regard at different levels of office?

BR: That's such a great question. We don't have great data on the level of scandal below, say, Congress. The book in this case uses presidents, governors, and members of Congress, House, and Senate. So we don't have a lot of details about what happens at the lower level. So I'll just start there. I'd love to do more of that, because I do think you're right that if we're seeing this pattern, we ought to see it all the way down the way. I do think that you see moments where politicians are willing to stand up and kind of fight back against these kinds of scandals, for instance, I just saw a headline and read a story last week about a local mayor in a North Texas town, and the kind of accusation against him were that there were some fraud issues at work. And the city council used its power to sanction that mayor, and the mayor said, basically, quote, "I wear it as a badge of honor." So there is, again, a kind of tribalism at work. Politicians might use these scandals as a way to be able to aggravate the base. One of the reasons that scandals are less impactful and that scandals really, in some ways, can be a positive for a politician, is that they use it to raise money, they can use it to aggravate their base. And those kind of partisan appeals do have serious impacts in terms of how politicians are able to survive. So in a way, having a scandal is like, positive, as a, as a political, kind of tool. So, I do think you're seeing it at other levels. Again, there's no universal like sort of playbook for scandal. We don't see it happening in every case. Right. Because people are different. The scandals are all different. The level of government and your support is all different. But what we do know is that institutionally, the stronger a person is, the more likely they are to survive. So the kind of inputs in politics we think of as powerful, like having more members who support you, more money, a longer term in office. These are all things that basically are, the elements that help a politician survive a scandal.

GR: You've given me an idea for a new political novel, and that's a president that intentionally creates their own scandals…

BR: I love it.

GR: In order to raise money.

BR: I love it.

GR: Well. And perhaps in that vein, my next question for you is one that you probably anticipated from the very beginning. The elephant, both literally and figuratively, hovering over this book and hover, hovering over this conversation is, of course, Donald Trump. Has he simply taken this to another level, or has he changed, you've said he didn't invent this? In an earlier point, our conversation. But has this been a qualitative shift with Donald Trump, or it's simply just taking this out on the axis further?

BR: I think that Donald Trump is a continuation of the kind of trends we've seen in how politicians are able to survive scandals. One of the things the book does is look closely at the resign rates for members of Congress and for governors and for presidents and their staff over time. And you see a bit of a safety uptick for the moment where Donald Trump comes into office, that is, they're able to survive scandals a little bit longer. But really, the 90s were the time where politicians were surviving scandals pretty significantly, and in the 70s, they would survive them a lot less frequently. So you're seeing a kind of gradual movement. It's not a linear movement because things kind of go up and down, and depending on how you cluster the cases and the data, it can change. But definitely, you see a change with Donald Trump. The fact that he is the most scandal-ridden president in history definitely gets him a spot on the Mount Rushmore of scandalized.

GR: Oh, he's got ideas about that, I understand.

BR: Yes, and it is definitely something that we've seen before. But what's interesting is that part of the book looks at the kind of legacies of presidents and what happens when they're caught in scandals. Does it change perceptions of their legacy? And so, in a different kind of world, I do this survey of presidential greatness with a colleague of mine at Coastal Carolina. And so we looked at to see whether or not scandals were impactful in terms of legacy of presidents. And we found that it was modestly true. Most of the scandals didn't have that much of an effect. The only times it did, or for Donald Trump in his the Ukraine scandal in his first term, and for the Teapot Dome scandal, those are the two scandals that actually had an impact on the perception of presidential greatness. So it definitely is wearing on him a little bit. There's no question that it's creating political controversy, and that is getting him off message, which to me is probably the most damaging thing. I don't think it's going to be a criminal matter. It's not going to be a moral issue. I think people are past that in terms of thinking about where Donald Trump is. So to answer the question briefly, basically, Donald Trump didn't start this, but he certainly has found a really, I think, intense and really clear rhythm for how to survive a scandal.

GR: If you're just joining us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is the University of Houston political science professor Brandon Rottinghaus. There's been a lot of discussion recently about lawfare, and that is using the criminal justice system to both pursue and hopefully eliminate political opponents for those who are using it. Again, Donald Trump has used this very aggressively. He was also arguably, subject, of it. Letitia James announced that she would prosecute Donald Trump before she was even elected to the New York State Attorney General's office. So has lawfare changed this, or do you see this as just another tool in the toolkit about this different way of doing scandals?

BR: This is highly problematic in a system like this where you've got very thin guardrails in some instances between the executive branch and DOJ in terms of those prosecutorial conduct. So I definitely think this has to be resolved. And in the book, I do offer kind of some solutions for how to fix some of these issues or address some of these issues. So I think you're exactly right to pinpoint this. Certainly, that's part of what's going on there. Scholarship in the late 1980s that did imply that the future of politics, especially as tribalism increased, was going to be about using scandals against each other. And you definitely see that as part of the way that these kind of events unfold. The thing is, like we said, that people and voters especially tend to look past these things because it feels like it's everywhere, right? It feels like these are just kind of riddling the entire system. So any person who runs for office of any type is going to get some kind of criticism when people perceive this as being either really important and the worst thing politicians ever done or not an issue at all. So that divide still exists in a way that's problematic. But definitely, the use of these kinds of tools to attack opponents is highly problematic. And part of this story. It's not exactly the full story because you do still see politicians, opponents bringing out these things. And that can be damaging. You still see, the ways the media are investigating that also have impacts in terms of releasing and revealing these scandals. So there are a lot of other ways that scandals get unfolded. And to the extent to which people are willing to use these against each other, you're certainly, I think, seeing lawfare as part of that story.

GR: Yeah, I'm very concerned about it, too, and I just don't see the mechanism that's going to end it. Bottom line assessment, thinking about how scandal has changed, and you associate very convincingly partisanship with this. You've done that in our conversation too, but it's there in your book, has either party on the whole, you think benefited from this change in the way that scandals now are going down and being responded to, someone come out on the better end of this?

BR: That's a great question. The short answer is no. That scandals tend to affect all politicians of both parties, and you don't see the kind of impact of surviving a scandal greater for one party or the other. But I use that as a control variable, and it never shows up a significant to the kind of more technical language. So the I think implication from that is that really it affects everybody almost equally. We see politicians of both parties struggling through these scandals and finding ways to be able to navigate them without having any kind of real serious kind of implications.

GR: And we've got about a couple of minutes left, and I've got really one major question that I wanted to make sure that I gave you a little bit of time to speculate about. I want to look to the future now. Been asking you a lot of questions about the past. You've spoken to this a little bit, but where do you see all this going in your scandal crystal ball? Are we headed for, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, the end of scandal as we know it?

BR: Yeah, that's a great question. I do think we're seeing some changes in terms of how people perceive scandals. So, for instance, one of the things I do in the book is ask people survey questions about scandals to come. So, like you said, we're looking at scandals in the past that involve fraud or things like that. But tomorrow scandals are going to be when a person is found to have, nude pictures on the internet, or they've smoked marijuana or done drugs in a time where it was not legal to do that. So I probe people in surveys about these kinds of things and find what really is, I think, true from what was the moment when scandals mattered, where there's a certain morality that people still retain, there's still, kind of resistance to, and really forgiving people for some things that there are problematic from a moral or legal perspective. So there is still a bright line for a lot of people. And I think that's a good thing because we should have these. The book ends in a way to suggest that we need these scandals that essentially they are like a canary in the coal mine, that we're in a world where if we don't have these revelations of wrongdoing, then we might simply miss it, or politicians might get away with it. Those things are difficult from a legal perspective, but I think from a systemic perspective in American politics, we need to have these scandals show us why things are bad and then how we can fix them. There are different ways we can do this. We can increase civic education. We can revitalize the media, especially local media. We can depolarize information systems. These are all things that give us a chance to be able to make sure people understand the impacts of scandal and put it in its right place. I have a series of questions people should ask themselves in the book. That basically is a guidepost for figuring out when something goes wrong, how bad is it? And if it affects a politician you don't like, does it change your opinions of things? And I think it gives people some self-introspection when it comes to thinking about these different issues and the way that we can solve them and have them really impactful going forward.

GR: Okay, we'll have to leave it there. That was Brandon Rottinghaus. And again, his new book is titled "Scandal: Why Politicians Survive Controversy in a Partisan Era." And as Professor Rottinghaus just alluded there, if you read the book, you'll leave with some questions and guideposts to help you sort things out as a citizen. And so that's the best mark of a political science book. Professor Rottinghaus, thanks again for talking with me. I really learned a lot from this conversation. Appreciate it.

BR: Thanks, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media Conversations in the Public Interest.

We take for granted that Christianity is well established. Indeed, it's the most popular religion in the world. But a close look at what we know about the historical Jesus and the aftermath of his death reveals that outcome was far from obvious. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with renowned biblical scholar Elaine Pagels, whose most recent book is "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus."

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is the renowned biblical scholar and writer Elaine Pagels. She's a religion professor at Princeton University, and among her many recognitions and awards are a MacArthur fellowship, a National Humanities Medal, and the National Book Award. She's here with me today to discuss her newest book. It's titled "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." Professor Pagels, welcome to the program. It’s a thrill to have you on.

Elaine Pagels: Thank you. I'm very glad to be here.

GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So let me just start with this question. It's a little bit quirky, but I wanted to start with it. What's the most important thing about the written material that forms the Gospels? Either the four gospels that make up the first four books of the New Testament, or any of the others that you write about in this book, and others that most people today don't know or most people today don't sufficiently appreciate.

EP: That's a hard question. What is the most important thing? Somehow, the power of the person who was Jesus of Nazareth comes through this material, even though it's got all kinds of miracle stories, it's got all kinds of things that sound very unlikely. It's remarkable that that sense of somebody who lived 2,000 years ago is vivid to people all over the world and often in many different ways. I think that's astonishing, actually.

GR: Yeah, yeah. No, it really is when you sit back and think about it. And one of the things I loved about this book as I was reading it is you do that all the way through. You sort of take a step back and remind the reader of the big picture. One of the things that I wanted to ask related to that is, and you write about this in the book, the historical context in which all of these gospels were being written. You talk about that being important to understanding parts of their content. Just tell us briefly about what was going on when the Gospels were being written.

EP: Well, when I was growing up and was taken sometimes to a sort of nice Methodist church, I saw pictures of Jesus with children on his lap and flowers around. And it was all very pastoral and all very nice. It looked very much like California, right? What we don't remember is that Judea, land of Israel, is between—always has been between—enormous empires. And at that time, it was also under siege by Rome. The Romans had been allies of the Jews, and then they were so powerful that they just dominated the whole country. And whenever anyone tried to start a revolution against the oppression of Roman power in Judea, they were brutally murdered. There were forests of people who were crucified as Jesus was on the charge of insurrection, as he was. And so it's about war. And the death of Jesus certainly reflects the context of war, because he was accused of starting a revolution against Rome. That was the charge. And the birth of Jesus probably shows that too. But it's not that pastoral, lovely scene so much. It's a very ancient part of the world that has been lived in for so many years. And there's enormous amount of warfare that's going on.

GR: Yeah. And I was struck by something that you pointed out, that the writers of the Gospels were writing at a time when they were worried about their own lives. And so that is a lens through which we can interpret some of the decisions they made about the kinds of stories they told or didn't tell. And I think that's an important point of understanding it. I wanted to shift a bit and sort of ask you a question you probably get asked more frequently, which is, you've spent so much time with us thinking about this. You must by this time have a picture in your head of what Jesus was like as a person, his personality, what he was like to be around. You said that it comes through in the Gospels. I'd be very curious to hear your own impression of that.

EP: Well, that's a good question. As I mentioned in the book, there's not one word about what he looked like. So you've got all kinds of portraits. That's why I put paintings and photographs in the book of totally different views of what he looked like. I have the sense of a powerful, charismatic, remarkable person with quick changes of moods. And what else? Then it becomes a kind of mosaic of different views of somebody who can be compassionate and welcoming to people who are in need, somebody can be harsh to people in authority. Contemplative, maybe foolhardy in some ways. But there are so many different interpretations that when I think of a mosaic, for 2,000 years people have been making pictures either visually or psychologically or religiously of who Jesus was. So I'm sure I'm affected by all of those different portraits.

GR: You mentioned that he could be harsh and again, a personality that varied. One of the things that I was struck by being a neophyte in all this, when I first began reading about this topic of the historical Jesus several years ago, was the fact that he wasn't always nice to his own family. And I'd be curious to hear you talk about that and if you think it means anything for the message of the Gospels.

EP: Well, the first thing we know is that the family wasn't very nice to him. That is, the earliest gospel written is the "Gospel of Mark," is just 17 pages and the others are both "Mark" expanded, "Matthew" and "Luke." And what "Mark" says is that when he went to his hometown, people didn't believe that he was a prophet or a preacher, or had any right to talk like he was, or to try to heal people by divine power. They just thought, who is this guy? We know his mother. We know his brothers. There are four of them, and we know his sisters. Who does he think he is? And he said nobody believed in him. His family went out to stop him when he was speaking in public. And it says because they thought he was out of his mind, which is something you don't expect to see. Translators kind of avoid that. That's the Greek, but they make it a little better in English. And they also are very—several of the gospels say his brothers didn't believe in him. So the picture there is of a disrupted family, a mother. And the strangest part of it for me is that they called him—who is this guy? He's the son of Mary. Now, you don't call a Jewish boy son of Mary if he has a recognized father, because it's always a patronymic. But they called him Son of Mary, and they speak of his maybe seven siblings. And so, when the others come up with stories about virgin birth, you begin to wonder what's going on.

GR: Yeah. Yeah. Right. No, you speculate about that in the book. Yeah.

EP: And critics always said that he was the son of a woman who was rather disreputable and probably illegitimate. And that's the reason that Matthew and Luke make up biblical stories for a birth story that probably wasn't historically true.

GR: Interesting. I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations, and my guest is the biblical scholar and writer Elaine Pagels. She's published a new book. It's titled "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." So, I'm a political scientist, so of course I'm going to ask you this question about his leadership style. Can you say a bit more about how you'd characterize him as a leader of other people?

EP: Well, I'd be interested if you would comment on that, because I didn't really focus on it much. He was obviously somebody who drew people to him in a very powerful way. And it seemed they would do anything for this man. They would go to the death for him. And that's quite remarkable. How he did that? He didn't have any natural authority as far as we know. He was brought up in a family that was not remarkable. He perhaps wasn't educated in the way we think of it, although he would have learned the scriptures by heart the way Jewish boys did, the way Muslim boys learned the Koran and boys in India learned the Indian scriptures. But somehow, he had great power to compel people to believe that the end of time was coming, that all the hopes of Israel were coming to a great climax, and the world was about to be transformed.

GR: Yeah. I was thinking as I was reading, I thought, which president has the leadership style that I feel like I'm getting here, and I couldn't come up with any. And the irony was the most religious president, genuinely, knowledgeably religious president we've probably had, arguably Jimmy Carter, at least in the modern age. Certainly, other presidents knew their scripture, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Garfield. But obviously, there's very little similarity in those leadership styles. So it is perplexing. One of the things that you marvel at and you've already spoken to it earlier in our conversation is, but I want to draw you out a little bit more is how and why this movement of early Christianity, with all the challenges that it faced, including the sudden death of its leader, was able to succeed and ultimately has changed the world the way it has. Is there one thing more than anything else, you think that's made that possible in your view?

EP: That's such a hard question. His message was that God was going to come and bring the world to its conclusion and everyone was about to be judged. And you have to get ready. And strikingly, many people today believe that in the same way, Jesus may come tomorrow. Amazing, isn't it? That he preached a message which didn't happen. And then he was brutally killed. And nevertheless, the movement started. And the only thing I can think of, it probably would have gone away. People would have left. They would have thought he wasn't the person we thought he was. We thought he was a prophet. We thought he was going to maybe rule the world. But he's dead. And he was helpless. It's only when people said he's alive. And they came to the conclusion that he was, even though he had died, many people said they saw him. And then they give you so many different kinds of stories that these stories came from many kinds of sources. Without that, I can't imagine that it would. Except I did mention, as you may remember, being a professor of political theory and science, that there was a movement in the 20th century in New York about a Hasidic rabbi in New York Menachem Schneerson, whose followers said he was the Messiah and the Holocaust in Europe was the signs of the times—the worst things had happened in the world. The end was about to come. And this rabbi, a famous and charismatic rabbi, was going to rule the world. And he died. But the movement didn't die. It's grown all over the world. Now it has many thousand followers. The followers of Menachem Schneerson. So if you thought it couldn't happen, it does happen. Even though Schneerson has—actually, people say they've seen him since he died. There are many stories like that.

GR: Yeah, and I was thinking of this in a secular way that it's sometimes said that the moment makes the leader. And in a sense, if that leader hadn't appeared the moment would have made another one. And I was thinking about that in this case with Jesus. And it's hard for me to imagine that that would be the case. Although your story suggests that I probably need to rethink that. I want to come back and ask you a different version of that question after the break. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Elaine Pagels. The biblical scholar and writer is a professor of religion at Princeton University. And we've been discussing her newest book, "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." You mentioned about the importance you think in making this movement grow and last over the hundreds of years that it has this notion of Jesus coming back to life or having some sort of everlasting life, and then that gets translated and you talk about this in your book to a more general proposition for everyone. And that promise of everlasting life, however it is we understand it—if it's explicitly corporeal or if it's a different sort of more abstract—that's been an enormous draw, obviously, for many people. Other than Jesus, of course, is there any one person in this story who gets the most credit for crafting and putting forward that message in Christianity?

EP: Well, the obvious person is Paul, the apostle who never met Jesus and never knew him, and actually turns it into a very different story about a being who comes down from heaven and goes back and saves us from sin. That is quite different. But even before that, I think there's something else about the message of Jesus, Grant. And that is that the gods of Greece and Rome were patrons of the rulers. Right? And if you want a favor from a god, you go to a temple and you pay money, so that the god will give you what you need. You make a sacrifice. It could be Zeus. It could be the goddess Roma. It could be anybody, any god. But you have to pay. This teacher, from a humble background, said that God could be with anybody. It was astonishingly democratic in our sense of the word. That people could say that a man who had no social status to speak of was speaking for God, and that you could join the movement, and God loves you. No matter who you are, you could be a slave, and you could join the movement. You don't have to pay. You can go and worship. And in fact, if you or I were a destitute woman without a husband's support or a child with no parents, you could go there, and they would give you food. They would take care of you. So this is a movement that welcomes people at the bottom, and that's really outraged the aristocrats. It was enormously inclusive because if you could take God with this Jewish peasant from the provinces, he could be with anybody. And anybody could be welcomed.

GR: Do you think, given how it has lasted and grown, as you point out, a third of the planet itself is Christian, do you think that Christianity will still be as prominent in the next millennium as it is today? It's going to look really far ahead there.

EP: That's a very interesting question, but I don't think I'm equipped, and I wish I were a prophet. I don't know because when I think about politics and questions like that, there's so much uncertainty. In many ways, we see many people moving out of, particularly Christian, structures of value systems. Many people have dropped that. And I think many more will. At the same time, there are others who are joining. This is still the fastest-growing movement in the world, particularly in Africa and Latin America. And I think the appeal for that is exactly the reason that I was looking at those anthropologists—that people say, well, if you join this movement, you're a human being. You're valuable. God loves you. No matter who you are. You can be a person that is not even human in some societies, as the Dalai people were regarded recently called untouchables, but they joined Christianity with great joy because it tells them how valuable they are. So that there's movement in both ways.

GR: Yeah. And that speaks to the democratic appeal that you were talking about before as well, when you talk about these recent movements. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Elaine Pagels, and we've been discussing her new book, "Miracles and Wonder." You talk a lot about where there are no clear consensus among scholars regarding important facts and questions, and then you sometimes offer your own speculations based on the available evidence and your interpretation of the texts. That's where the mysteries are, beyond the biggest one, of course, and that's where the mysteries remain. I was wondering, is there one of those mysteries, more than all the others, that you'd like to be able to solve to your satisfaction before you depart planet Earth, and at least in the form that you have?

EP: Well, the most convenient one before I depart planet Earth would be the one about resurrection. I guess growing up among scientists and having married a theoretical physicist, I always thought, well, these are just fantasies. I was certainly brought up—my father would just say, no use for religion anymore. We've got science, and this is all nonsense. So the idea that life after death is a possibility is just not open. But since that time, I've had different kinds of experiences, some of which made me think—what do we know? So I would really like to know about that. And I don't expect to get any information until we all get there.

GR: I couldn't help wonder, as you've set forward some of your hunches and speculations about where there are different accounts and where scholars have different ideas about it, whether as an intellectual and scholarly matter, we have now reached the point of diminishing marginal returns, absent discovering new material to examine. Is that something that you and your colleagues discuss? Like, where are we in our collective journey? Have we kind of reached the end in one way?

EP: Well, that's an interesting question. I remember when my husband was taught that physics was over a long time ago, and now it's starting all over. But actually, we only have a handful of information, of actual sources. Now, of course, you can find a cave somewhere with a lot of more ancient texts in it. And the secret gospels that were found in Egypt are an example of that. They really challenged the way we thought about Christianity before. But this idea I started out as a historian to what do we know historically? And the answer is not much. So I began to get very interested in why this person, who is so elusive to track historically, is so powerful. And it's really about the visions. And it's about 2,000 years of reinventing and re-exploring those stories. And projecting into them different content. That's why I wanted to look at see how movie makers use the story of Jesus, and one can use it as a South African director can to speak about apartheid and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and how Jesus is depicted as a kind of Steve Biko figure, a revolutionary against apartheid, who dies in the cause. We could think of Jesus as some kind of teacher. That is, the messages that people associate with Jesus are compassion for all people. Openness, not responding with anger toward others who are violent. It's a kind of teaching that is fundamental to human beings. It's something like the Buddha teaches, although not identical, but certainly comes from the Hebrew Bible. Very ancient. So that's something we can use without becoming Christians necessarily. Also, many people think that he's the savior of our souls. And that's another way to have a personal relationship with Jesus. I was reading the work of many anthropologists who study the way people speak to Jesus or to other divine beings, and engage in strong relationships with them. And a psychiatrist might say, this is delusional. I met 12 at Stanford at one lunch, and I asked them if they thought anyone who had a religious experience was delusional. They all looked at me somberly and they said, well, yes, but other people will say, well, that's not delusional. That's a helpful way of encountering the many possibilities that human beings have that we may not be aware we could develop.

GR: Plenty of issues to sort through. We've got about a minute and a half left, and I want to try to squeeze in two questions on this. And this first one's more personal. I have to ask it. It's how do you come down on all of this? And I'm only going to give you a few seconds. I'm sorry, but how have your views changed as you've aged on that question?

EP: Well, that's a big question. I wrote about it in this little memoir called "Why Religion: A Personal Story." I started out as an evangelical once for a year as an adolescent, and I'm not that now, but I understand that these traditions are not foolish. They have many deep insights about human behavior that actually transform people's lives. So people sometimes say to me, are you a Christian? I want to say, well, that's the tradition I was brought up in, and it's familiar to me the way English is familiar, but I don't feel that I'm defined by it. I do love this tradition. I love English language, too. But that doesn't mean there aren't others. Nevertheless, it is a valuable tradition. Otherwise, I wouldn't have spent my life devoted to trying to understand it.

GR: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, only a few seconds left. I have to say, I don't want to spoil this, but I love the way you ended your book. And I was wondering, as I was reading it, how is she going to wrap all this up?

EP: So was I.

GR: So the only thing I want to say about it is, and you can kind of almost do yes or no, but was it in any way influenced or intended to speak to our current political climate?

EP: Well, it couldn't help be, since we're all immersed in that. And what I realized that I love about these stories in the Bible, whether you quote unquote, believe them or not, is that they suggest that no matter how terrible a situation can be and seemingly impossible to resolve, there's always hope. And that's spoken not just to our political climate, but to people for millions of years. So yes, I think that's the way I saw these sources and what they can do for us.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Elaine Pagels. Again, her book—really, it's a book I devoured and I will reread—is called "Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus." Professor Pagels, thanks for writing this great book. And again, it's been a real thrill to have you on the program.

EP: Well, thank you. I very much enjoyed our conversation.

GR: Me too. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. Conversations and the Public Interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. My guest today is Chris Libonati. He's the managing editor of Central Current an online media outlet in Central New York. He also has experience as a crime and politics reporter at the Syracuse Post-Standard. Chris, welcome to the program, it's good to have you on.

Chris Libonati: Well, thanks for having me. It's good to talk to you, Grant.

GR: You bet. So let me just start with some real basic stuff. We'll get into Central Current in a second, but let's just start with the context and the landscape that things like Central Current are entering into. Remind our listeners what's happened to local news coverage of public issues in recent years in Syracuse, but all over I think the same phenomenon has happened, just bring us up to date on that.

CL: Yeah. All over the country, I mean, you know, for decades now, local newspapers have closed, or shrunk. You know, it can be the Syracuse Post-Standard, but it's also Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Buffalo News and, you know, it's not just in New York, it's everywhere. And there are communities all over the country, often smaller communities who are losing, you know, just simple local papers, that, you know, even had only 3 or 4 reporters before, and now you have none. Central Current, you know, kind of grew out of a national effort. Well, it grew from locally, but out of a national effort to expand reporting in communities that need more of it. And then, frankly, all communities need more reporting. This is not just a Syracuse issue, this is a nationwide issue, local newspapers are closing nationally.

GR: Yeah. I have a couple colleagues that study the media and they've really driven this point home when I have heard them speak. So, in fact, you know, you hear this phrase, 'food desert' a lot, but then you have these small towns that you were talking about that are being called 'news deserts', and I think what you spoke to illustrates that. So I'm going to go now to Syracuse, and I'm going to make a, I guess I'm going to make a confession here publicly, but one of my slight irritations over the years, is the Post-Standard's apparent reluctance to acknowledge that they've cut back on their local and regional news coverage in recent decades. Instead, they often point to, hey, we've got added content on our website and, you know, this is really it's better somehow. It seems a bit misleading to me. But anyway, you had some experience at the Post-Standard before you took on this position. I would be very interested to hear your views more specifically on how, because they're the, you know, they're the big players in our market, obviously, how their local news, especially public and political affairs news coverage has changed in recent years.

CL: You know, honestly, so I started there in late December of 2017.

GR: So a lot of this stuff had already happened.

CL: Yes, yes, absolutely. So, I came in kind of, I think I was at Syracuse University, and Newhouse while it was changing and honestly, you know, I think I kind of, I missed out on it in the way that, like, the local reader got to see it, right? Because, you know, during layoffs and cutbacks, I just wasn't as avid of a reader of the Post-Standard, and I was probably more reading the Democrat and Chronicle in Rochester, because that's, I'm from Rochester. And I used to take the newspaper to school every morning with me while I was in elementary school. So.

GR: Oh, wow.

CL: Yeah. So, and I think though, like, what has happened at the Post-Standard, you know, the Post-Standard cut early, right? They cut or they saw the tide coming and not the Post-Standard really advanced media and the Newhouse family. In some ways they were ahead of the curve in cutting, right? Because now newspapers are, you know, you see it at the Buffalo News, right? They're doing they're cutting now and I think in some ways it's like, it was take your medicine then or take your medicine now. And that's not to say that, yeah, it's just unfortunate that that's happened. And I think that the truth is, you know, in some ways what you, you don't necessarily, very obviously lose like common council coverage or legislature coverage, you lose issues coverage in some ways, right? Like, you think about, you know I was talking to someone, like, the Post-Standard years and years ago had a labor reporter, you know, well before, probably before I was born, honestly. And someone was complaining to me about that at one point. You know, obviously we have Sean Kirst and, you know, that wasn't a cut, you know, but Sean did leave and it was a loss to the community. I think that it's not necessarily the people that work there and the reporters that work there, but just in aggregate resources. And I think that, yeah, I can tell more of a broad story than a specific one, but I think, though I will say, and one of the benefits of the Post-Standard, I do think things have been very consistent since 2017, and that is the benefit of having taken kind of the medicine, so to speak, in the early 2010's, I'd say, is that it has steadied. And, you know, there is, I guess there's something to be said for that, right?

GR: Yeah, no, it makes sense, I hadn't really thought about it that way, but you're right. I didn't know that the Post-Standard had done this earlier than everybody else but, and you know, and then they cut back to the three days of sort of a genuinely new paper paper, and, yeah, but it's been steady since then. Well, so, let's then transition from that into Central Current. So give us a brief history of Central Current, you were present at the founding. What do you see as Central Current's place in the local media landscape, and what was the history of its story and its founding?

CL: Yeah. So the organization started with the board. So, you know, a couple of our founders, Tony Malavenda, Larry Bousquet got together, and I guess, Tony was like, you know, Tony Malavenda was somewhat unaware of the movement in nonprofit news, and he had kind of gone to a group of people that he knew, and he was like, you know, maybe this could be a nonprofit. And lo and behold, there's nonprofits all over the country, all over the place. And it gave them a bit of a blueprint, right? It made it a little more simple to kind of get that started. They hired Julie McMahon, former editor, you know, also a colleague, former colleague at the Post-Standard to kind of get it rolling.

GR: And I spoke to her when it was just starting up. So you're kind of like the second chapter now, but go ahead.

CL: And so we, I came over because, you know, what I told one of my editors when I was leaving, one of my editors at the Post-Standard was, you know, I was just kind of like, I want a bit of a feel like a college newsroom and not in all the college age, you know, activities or whatever, but trying things out. You know, that was what, when I was at the Daily Orange, you know, it was like, can we just do a story this way, because we we say so, you know? And I think in legacy media, you get locked into, well, we are the paper of record and we need to look and act like the paper of record. And that is not to say that we don't hold ourselves to a very high standard, but that is to say that that very high standard does not have to be a barrier to creativity. And to exist and to succeed, we have to be creative. And I think it was both freeing and backing myself into a corner where, no, I have to be creative. It is innovate or kind of die out, right? That is the mentality. And I wanted that, you know? That was a challenge to me. There is something to being the first reporter somewhere and that's what I was. I was going to set the tone for who we wanted to be even without editing power, right? Or editing responsibility. And that was, that's how I got here. And I think probably telling people that I wanted a feel of a college newsroom, and maybe it was not the way I should have said it, because, like, back then, because it's just a hard feeling to capture if you haven't been there recently. And, you know, when I left, I guess I'd been out of the D.O. for five-ish years and I thought that there were things that we did there that could apply to a professional, I mean, they are a professional newsroom, but, you know, something like a nonprofit.

GR: Yeah, no, it's interesting. And you're still here, and you don't look too hung over to me,

CL: (laughter)

GR: So I don't think you that you've gone in the bad direction there. I'm Grant Reeher, and you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. My guest is Chris Libonati, he's the managing editor of the media outlet, Central Current. So, you mentioned Malavenda and Bousquet. Where does your funding come from now?

CL: Yes, we have a bunch of different places, but so it's about, we think about, on the business side, Maximilian Elye, our executive director thinks about it in about four pillars. So it's a grant funding, a sponsorships, major donors, and then grassroots donors, which is like membership, or we don't have subscriptions, necessarily, but that would be the small dollar donors, however you want to frame it.

GR: And what would be the relative size of these pillars? And, you know, and where does some of that grant funding come from?

CL: Yeah. So, major donors and grant funding tend to be, for us, tend to be the bigger fund, you know, I can't give you a percent off the top of my head, but those tend to be where much of our funding comes from. But, you know, we have support from the Gifford Foundation, Central New York Community foundation, the Allen Foundation. For a long time we've gotten support from the Inasmuch Foundation, which is, they had a national investigative reporting grant and they're based out of Oklahoma. And then we've received some national dollars, I think we're, report for America, the Miami Foundation, which is a big journalism funder. So our foundation contributions come from all over the country, mostly in Central New York though.

GR: Yeah, interesting. And so let's think about the last year and the outlet, Central Current. What do you think you would view as some of your greatest hits in the last year, or maybe specific areas? You mentioned topics before where you've concentrated a lot of coverage that is relatively missing elsewhere.

CL: I think that the place I want to start here, with Patrick McCarthy's reporting on whether it's transparency or the budget or surveillance at the Common Council. You know, I definitely think that Common Council and city issues are the Post-Standard's bread and butter in some ways, like they do genuinely great work on city issues. But I think that where we contributed was like, you know, whether it's lead in the water or what have you, like, those issues are critical, but also process matters, like how do we arrive at the decisions by which we fund the efforts to fix these issues? And Pat did some really great work around the budget and transparency. You know, the council meeting with all nine members in a caucus meeting, which, you know, there are some case law out there that says that that is improper. And, you know, not making a budget report that you commissioned public before you vote on the budget. You know, that's a, those are very basic, good government type issues that I think we dominated. But then, you know, Pat has also lead on surveillance coverage, broadly. Whether that's the police department's use of drones, license plate readers. And it's not that, you know, one answer to those questions is right or wrong, but process matters. You know, you create these processes to evaluate these technologies. And did we go through them? Who is advocating for and against them? It sounds very basic, it's very basic. And it could, the way I'm describing it can make your eyes glaze over, but it's like some of the most critical, it's demonstrative of how business happens, you know? And so, our city business happens and, yeah, I think his coverage on those issues has been really critical, has been really important. But from very specific kind of like stories, I think our most read story and my personal favorite story that I got to write last year was called, or we titled it, “Before the Deportation” which caught Jeremy Dottin-Reina, kind of as he was preparing to self-deport after ICE had followed him from his home to work. And it was the first reporting on that issue. Rick Reina, his husband, owned Syracuse Soap Works. And what, you know, our place in that story was to capture a deportation as it's in progress, essentially, which I have not really seen anywhere else. I mean, it's a hard thing to capture, right? Like someone has to tip you off that it's happening.

GR: Right.

CL: It all has to open up, you have to be there for it. And it was the first reporting on that incident. And I thought it was like, you know, I'm speaking about my own work, so I'm trying to have some humility here, but I thought it was powerful in what it showed. And everyone followed that story, right? The Post-Standard followed that story, CNY Central, (W)SYR. But, you know, and it wasn't just because it was about a business owner, it was because of the the time and place and how it happened. I think... try to make sure I catch everyone's work here, you know, Laura Robertson, on naturalization ceremonies being canceled, I think we're the first around here to report that.

GR: Yeah, I saw that one.

CL: It was a super important story. It's not just about, you know, whether or not the net thing happens, right? Where people become citizens. It's about the chaos that kind of gets caused around that process. And then, throw one more in there, our reporting on the payroll modernization snafu with the city, which, you know, resulted in some questions around about how $10 million got spent by the city. Again, process, right? Process was a big part of that, and result too. And we'll be covering the results, you know, as more payroll software gets instituted. But that drove some conversation around the mayoral election.

GR: Yeah, I remember that conversation for sure. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Chris Libonati. The former Syracuse Post-Standard reporter, is the managing editor of Central Current, a Central New York media outlet. And we've been discussing that organization. So we, before the break, you were talking about some of the greatest hits, the stories that you guys brought to the foreground in the last year that were important. And I remember when I was talking to your, maybe your predecessor or I don't know what exactly her role was, but the the original founder, Julie, you mentioned her. One of the things that she said years ago was that the intention was, among other things, to make arts an area of particular concern for the organization. Just wondering if that is something that has continued, and if you're still think about that today?

CL: I think it's a long term goal. And I think that one of the things we realized over time, we do reader surveys, and people wanted more politics coverage, news coverage, hard hitting coverage. And, you know, I think that we've definitely turned more toward that for sure. We've tried to balance it a little bit with Sean Kirst, and obviously that's not the arts, I think that's more culture. And you know, the way I look at culture, right, is fabric of the community, like, are we getting to stories about that? And I point to a lot of the work Sean's done, but also Pat McCarthy on the Onondaga Nation's reintroduction of the buffalo and stuff like that. It's not true arts coverage, but it is culture coverage. And I think that, it's something that we would, I think we would like to sustain in time. But I think we realize that to make ourselves truly indispensable, we have to be able to do the hard hitting coverage well.

GR: Okay. And I'm very curious to know, what in your experience with this organization has been the biggest challenges you face? Because it's not easy, what you guys have done.

CL: No.

GR: So what have been the biggest challenges in both growing the effort and sustaining it, and how did you go about addressing them?

CL: I think first and foremost, explain to people why it's important to pay money to get this. And I know that, you know, you probably read quite frequently, but there are people who read less frequently and who see this as important, but then also are, you know, why should I give my $5, $10, $100 toward this effort? And I think explaining that importance is one of the hardest things, because there are a lot of great social service organizations around Syracuse that do important work to keep kids clothed, fed, what have you. And, you know, it's much easier to part with $5 or $10 to do something like that than to, I think, read about all the city and county problems, you know? And I think learning how to show people that, in fact, this work buttresses the work that other people do. It's not, as much of a challenge in terms of like, how do we do it? It's just that knowing that people need that explanation is the first step. The only way you can fix a problem is to know you have it, right? And to not have enough reporting kind of like feeds these other problems. So explaining that to folks, kind of getting them on that same playing field, that's probably like that first step. I know it sounds like a very broad, unspecific problem, but it is so critical to explaining what we do. And then, you know, simply like, making sure that philanthropy and, whether that's foundations or, you know, can sustain the, you know, we, Max and I talk all the time like, what is sustainable here? What is the level we can get to, what is a this year going five years down the line goal? You know, I think we've gotten into a place where we feel really comfortable, right? Not, you know, too comfortable or anything.

GR: Right, complacent, yeah.

CL: Yeah, not complacent. But at the same time, we're like, okay, today and tomorrow you know, the today's and tomorrow problems are kind of like slowly fading. It's more like, you know, how do we make it grow? Early on it was like, who are we going to be? I think that that was the real problem when I started, you know, and in some ways, we've figured out who we are. And that is only through consistently writing. We can only do that by telling stories in the similar way time and time again, you kind of, I think people generally know what they're going to get from us now. Which is not true, that was not true when I in June of 2022 when I started publishing my first stories. And in some ways we are a very different organization today than we were then. We had to let ourselves grow a little bit and figure out who we were to be able to tell people who we are. You know, you can't really tell a story about yourself unless unless you have, like, a coherent version of that. I think that was one of the other challenges that we've since tackled, but it's it's always a consistent thing because you still have to tell the stories the same way going forward.

GR: Sure. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Chris Libonati, the managing editor of Central Current. So, this one may be a little bit of a, I don't know, nasty question, but I feel like I have to ask it.

CL: Yeah.

GR: Along the way, did you get support or resistance or neither, from the Post-Standard and syracuse.com?

CL: I think we just coexist, is my answer. You know, we have, I think if you read all of our stories, we love to give everyone credit when they report something before we do. I think that's really important. That's ethical, that's the right thing to do. You will find their links throughout our work, and we will always do that because it's important for the reader. They should know source material, right? You know, we don't operate in a vacuum and neither do they. And I think that that's a critical thing to understand if you're an editor of a publication, if you're a reporter at a publication. And so we make every effort to make clear that, you know, there's another news organization in town and they're doing critical work, too. We would never short someone on their work.

GR: You are a very diplomatic editor. I can tell that because, I will maybe say this for you, I don't know, but I will say it's been my experience, one of the things I would knock them on a little bit is acknowledging other outlets. It's almost like if it didn't happen there, it didn't exist. But you're articulating a different way to see things.

CL: (laughter)

GR: You're not making that criticism, I said it, not you. But anyway, yeah, very diplomatic. So, let me ask you this. Do you have an idea what stories you're going to be, Central Current is going to be focusing on next year? You know, I do get the Post-Standard every Sunday and they did, you know, they put out, like, here are the ten things we think people need to be following. Do you have an idea of what you guys are going to do?

CL: Yeah. So I have, so I think, I was just talking, we were talking to our reporters about this with Max about this, you know, what are we really, who are we going to be in 2026? And I think housing has always been important to us, the policy side of housing, I think that will be important again.

GR: It's going to be critical.

CL: Yes. It's always critical. And I think that it's been, housing has been an issue here since I was in college. You know, I remember when Matthew Desmond, the author of a book, “Evicted”, came to speak at SU. And that was when, you know, I was a student and we still see a lot of housing being such a critical issue. So that will be in the mix is one of our kind of, like, big issues. But I think beyond that, elections will be big. And everything, you know, that we talk about including housing and some of these other issues will affect elections, but NY22 is on the table, county leg(islators), again, is on the table, statewide offices. So, you know, I think that that's going to be a big focus for us. And beyond that, we're trying to figure out how to move our resources around to make sure that immigration is a consistent issue that we cover.

GR: Good, yeah.

CL: It's the issue kind of our time in some ways, right? The last couple of years, at least, the last year. And their, the Post-Standard has done some great reporting on immigration. And there can only be more great reporting on immigration. I think that, whether it's policy or the human side of stories, I think that's really critical. And, so, yeah, there's I'd say three of the biggest issues that we're going to hit this year.

GR: Good. Those are good choices, it strikes me. Well, we've got about two minutes left and I want to try to squeeze in two questions, if I could. They may be a little bit different from the other ones, but, and this first one may be hard for you, but I wanted to get your take on this. If you had to pick one journalist in Syracuse, now I recognize that you, as you said, you arrived here at the university, doing my math, around 2013. But if you, based on your knowledge and your historical knowledge you've developed since then, if you had to pick one journalist in Syracuse who's been most integral to the life, the understanding and even the success of the area, working in any of the mediums, who would it be?

CL: Well, that's tough, I am, so, I can I give you like a 1a, 1b? Is that okay?

GR: Yeah sure, absolutely, just do it quickly.

CL: Yeah. Sean Kirst without a doubt, but I'm going to give you my favorite, and that's John O'Brien. When I was in college, I read John O'Brien and I respect the work he's done. And he was so critical to what the Post-Standard did, and I just loved his work.

GR: Remind us what his beat was.

CL: Yeah. So, John was an investigative reporter. He did investigations on the Onondaga County District Attorney's office.

GR: I remember that one.

CL: Some of the, oh, man, the murder case up in Oswego. He did some incredible work around that, but mostly around, you know, coverage of policing and stuff like that. And he was incredible.

GR: Okay, and then the last one, I'm only literally giving you 2 or 3 sentences, but, big picture looking forward, future media landscape in Syracuse. Are we going to see more Central Currents? It's hard for me to imagine giving all the funding challenges. What do you think is going to happen in the next ten years or so?

CL: That's a great question. Honestly, my biggest hope is that what's here grows, that's all of us. I think that keeping it at the level it's at right now is probably most likely. But hopefully we grow and do more great work.

GR: Certainly we want to avoid becoming a news desert, that's for sure.

CL: Yes.

GR: That was Chris Libonati. Chris, I want to thank you again for making the time to speak with me. And I also want to wish you good luck in continuing to develop this media outlet. I think it is important. And again, it's called Central Current. I think the area needs all the help I can get, so thanks so much.

CL: Awesome. Thank you, Grant.

GR: You bet. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Well, the cliché is that all good things must come to an end, and that's the occasion for my conversation today with two term city of Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh. By the time you hear this, he will be former mayor. But today is his second to last day in office. It's fitting, perhaps, that there's a blizzard blowing outside our windows. It's Syracuse, after all. Mayor Walsh, welcome to the program, it's good to see you again and I'm glad we were able to get to speak one more time.

Ben Walsh: So am I, Grant. Thanks for having me.

GR: Well, I really appreciate it. So let me just start, I want to start by giving you a brief victory lap. Just briefly list some of the things that you're the most proud of accomplishing while you've been in office these eight years.

BW: Well, there's a lot, Grant. We've worked really hard over the past eight years. And what I think one thing that I'd like to point out is that, you know, oftentimes you look at administrations and, you know, they might focus on just the small day to day, city service issues. And then others that are focused, you know, primarily on big picture issues, I think we really did both. We spent a lot of time addressing core city services, which is our what taxpayers pay for. But we took some really big swings, too. So, on the city services side, I think about, you mentioned the snow, you know, our fleet, our snowplow fleet is in the best shape it's been in decades. And, you know, we've invested a lot into the fleet, into technology to improve our snow operations. We are paving more roads than we've paved in decades. In 2017, the year before we started, the city paved about four miles of roads. And when it's all said and done, we will have paved over 100 miles of roads over the past eight years. Our municipal sidewalk program, repairing, we've repaired or reconstructed over 40 miles of sidewalks. We plow a lot of sidewalks now in the winter, our new street light network. So a lot of things that people notice, you know, not to mention our new trash and recycling service. While at the same time, you know, advocated for the community grid for the 81 project which is well underway, built thousands of new units of housing. So, again, really, really proud that we were able to do all that.

GR: Yeah, that's a good starting list. And obviously, as you've just pointed out, you've accomplished a number of things that you can point to as, you know, real tangible achievements for the city. I was wondering, though, if you had to pick one thing either concrete or more abstract, that you would hang your hat on, let's say, you know, let's go fast forward and we're looking back now in the historical assessment of you as mayor. What would you want it to be and why?

BW: I think a couple of things come to mind. Where I always start is with with our team here in city government. We've assembled just an incredible group of dedicated public servants that are incredibly passionate about the city, are highly competent and capable, could be doing many other things, and are choosing to serve the public because they believe in what we're doing here. And so between the team, and then I think, you know, in terms of, it's hard to pick any one of those things that I mentioned, but I think what we've done with housing in the neighborhoods I think will stand the test of time. We built more homes, actual homes, single family homes, as well as apartments, than the city has in decades. And you drive down certain streets and certain neighborhoods. I think about, you know, you drive down to the south side and look, you know, at Baker and Woodland Ave, South State Street, parts of Colvin, we've transformed those neighborhoods that hadn't seen investment, again, in decades. While at the same time, certainly you look downtown and along the Near East Side, heading up to University Hill, all of the new apartment buildings. Again, we've physically transformed these neighborhoods, but I think, you know, in doing so, really built back some of the fabric of the community that, again, will last for decades.

GR: And this next question isn't so much about policy accomplishments, necessarily, but I did want to ask you, was there a time in your eight years where this job just felt the best to you?

BW: I thought you were going in a different direction than that.

GR: (laughter) We'll get there, we'll get there.

BW: Okay, so I think, you know, I will say that the recent weeks after a really challenging final year, have been really gratifying to be able to have some time to reflect on our accomplishments and to hear from a lot of constituents that are really grateful for the service. It's it's been nice to finish out that way. At the same time, again, getting back to housing, I think some of the best moments for me were the times when we were cutting a ribbon on a new home and more importantly, handing over the keys to a new homeowner. In many cases, these are, you know, first time homeowners, the first of their family to own a home. And, you know, I remember one in particular woman who had lived in public housing her whole life, who was able to buy one of the new homes that we built with Home Headquarters. Those are those moments where you just, you realize that you're having a tangible impact on someone's life that, again, will have a generational impact for their family.

GR: You know, one of the things that struck me when I was thinking about these last couple questions I've asked you, what I would think about them, and this is pretty abstract, but I just wanted to get your thoughts about it. One of the things I would put in the plus column for you is that you've had to deal with two really, really difficult, important people. You had to deal with Andrew Cuomo and you had to deal with Donald Trump, at least the administrations.

BW: Right.

GR: And that's not easy. But you seem to handle that with some grace and patience, but also not just folding over.

BW: Right.

GR: Could you talk a little bit about navigating that tightrope?

BW: Yeah. So, you know, I'll start with Governor Cuomo. Well, I'll start with the fact that, you know, when I ran in 2017, one of my major platforms was collaboration and partnership. And I would specify that when I talk about those things, it doesn't mean that you have to get along with everybody all the time. But I think you try to treat, I've tried to treat everyone with with dignity and respect. And what I've always said is, if you sit down at the table, you can disagree, and you can get up and walk away, but you always have to come back to the table, and I think we've done that. With Governor Cuomo, obviously his relationship with the previous city administration was strained. And so I went out of my way to develop a strong working relationship with him. I think that that really helped us, certainly on 81. I remember you know, going to him, and making the pitch that the time for studies and analysis were over, that we were never going to achieve full consensus, but all the signs, the data pointed to the community grid being the right option. And he challenged me to show him that in the form of support from various stakeholders, and we were able to do that. And I think that helped him get over the hump with the community grid. Also, I think about the STEAM school, you know, I spent, there was a particular event at the airport where I was with, at the time, County Executive Mahoney, who obviously had a great relationship with the governor. And she kind of set me up, teed it up for me and said, hey, governor, you know, mayor's got this really exciting idea for this STEAM school and I pitched it to him and he was excited about it. And ultimately that led to an $85 million investment from the state. So, again, I invested in that relationship. I think it paid dividends. And as it relates to President Trump, never had the chance to meet him. You know, I've not been shy about articulating some of the challenges that the city has faced as a result of policies that have come out of his administration. But I've also gone, you know, tried not to, you know, to put a stick in his eye. You know, in some cases, just, you know, staying off the radar is all you can do, and I've tried to do that.

GR: Yeah. No, I think you've got that exactly right. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with two term Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh and he is in his final week as mayor. So here's a couple of questions that I think you did anticipate. First one, what's the biggest thing you feel like you've left on the table, that with the benefit of a do over, you might have gotten over the finish line that you didn't get over the finish line?

BW: Well, I think I appreciate the way you asked it, because I really do feel that everything that I set out to accomplish, we at least if we didn't finish, we got started and will be completed. I really can't think of any one thing where we just completely whiffed. But, you know, I think, I talk a lot about housing in this interview, it's been a priority. The challenge with housing is the city doesn't build housing. We need partners. And we can, you know, identify resources and we've done that. But we're we're relying on our partners for that. And those partners are reliant, oftentimes on complicated financing that is really hard to pull together. So a number of our big housing projects have just been slower than I would have liked. Starting with the East Adams project, in partnership with the Housing Authority. You know, I've made my frustrations with the Housing Authority known. We've been able to make some changes at the board, and I hope they continue to make internal changes to prepare themselves for what they've undertaken. But, you know, we got phases one and two closed and underway before we were done, and I'm happy about that. You know, the Maria Regina project up on the north side, again, just has not moved as quickly as I would like. I think it is going to happen. They'll probably close down their financing in the first quarter of 2026. So, you know, those things, just that the urgency in the timing of some of those projects I would have liked to see move faster. But, you know, to your point about some difficult things we faced, you know, sandwiched in those eight years is two years of a global pandemic and that undoubtedly slowed some things down. But again, I think everything we set out to get going, we at least got off the ground.

GR: Well, in a related vein, and this question isn't really about policy miscues necessarily, but was there a time when the job did not feel good, when the job felt the hardest?

BW: Couple of things come to mind. First, any time there was a tragedy in the community, violence, in particular, loss of life, those were brutal situations, every one of them. And, you know, I've said that those are the moments where I feel the most powerless as mayor because there isn't a whole lot that I can do that to take the pain away from the family members and friends of those that we've lost. But, you know, for me, that's why I tried at a minimum to be present whenever I could, whether it was at a crime scene or at the hospital, because sometimes just my presence was the only thing that I could offer, but it was, I think, better than the nothing. You know, the other specific time that I remember, I mentioned the pandemic, when we, before the ARPA legislation was passed, and we were, we had lost our, a significant portion of our largest source of revenue, sales tax, which is what happens when you shut the economy down. And we had to put together a contingency budget. And I just, I knew how painful that was going to be and how all the things that, you know, ultimately, we were able to accomplish in terms of city services and staffing, for a while, it didn't look like we were going to be able to do that, and that was that was pretty bleak. But the ARPA funding was a was a lifeline and I think we took full advantage of it.

GR: How easy or hard was it for you to decide to run for a second term?

BW: It was easy. The first decision was the was a hard one, because as we've talked about before, I really, even coming from the family that I did, I didn't envision myself being in elected office. I did envision myself being in public service. And so, that was a, I had to push myself way out of my comfort zone for that one and had to make sure that my family was along for the ride, starting with my wife, Lindsay. And so that was a leap of faith and I still look back on it and shake my head and think, what the heck were you thinking? But, I'm glad I did. And once I did, I knew that I was in the right place at the right time and so I never hesitated from running for reelection. But, you know, people ask me about a third term and, you know, I got into this knowing that the best I was going to be able to do was eight years, and so I haven't really thought about, you know, what-ifs as it relates to term limits or a third term. I'm really happy with what I've done, and I'm ready for a change.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Syracuse Mayor Ben Walsh, and this is his exit interview with me as he finishes up his second term. So I've cleaned out offices a few times, always seems like there's a moment when you pick something up that sparks a memory or a thought that speaks to something broader. A quick example for my own experience is to give you time to think about this. But when I was moving out of my office as Campbell director at the Maxwell School a couple of years ago, I found in my drawer a five year service pen that a friend gave me, and when he did not get tenure and he left it sitting on my desk when he left the university. And that reminded me of the need to appreciate contingency. You know, that nothing's for certain. And I'm just wondering if you had any of those moments recently when you're cleaning out your office.

BW: Yeah. Well, I'll note that I'm not in my office right now. I'm in a small little office in the mayor's suite because I wanted to make sure the office was cleaned out and maintenance is in there now, painting and getting it ready for for mayor elect Owens.

GR: That's conscientious of you.

BW: I try.

GR: (laughter)

BW: So I went through that process, it was brutal. I spent a couple of weekends in there. But I think kind of similar to your story. So, the center drawer in my desk, it was kind of like the, you know, a little bit of the junk drawer that everybody has in their kitchen. But it's where I put all my notes that I thought were worth keeping. And, you know, I was feeling a lot of urgency to get things cleaned out quickly. But once I had that drawer and I saved it to the end because I knew it was going to happen, I just spent a lot of time going back through the notes, and, you know, they were snapshots in time, some really difficult times, some really great times. And just reading, reading those notes from some very close friends and family, but also some, you know, prominent public figures like Governor Cuomo and like Governor Hochul, was really special and bittersweet.

GR: Did your predecessor leave you, like, a note in your drawer the way presidents sometimes do?

BW: She, Mayor Miner did. And I'm glad you reminded me, because I have to do that before tomorrow.

GR: Yeah!

BW: And I do plan on doing that for mayor elect Owens. Yeah, Mayor Miner wrote me a nice note and, you know, included, combined a little bit of humor with with some heartfelt thoughts and that's, I plan to do the same for Sharon.

GR: Well, I'll leave the contents of those things personal, because that's the way they're intended to be. What is the best piece of advice that your father, who was both a city councilor and a long time congressman for this area, I think he served 20 years, as I recall, what was the best piece of advice he gave you about being an elected office or about maybe campaigning for elected office?

BW: Well, my coworkers will tell you, I quote my dad a lot. And so, he's pretty prolific with his quotables. Some that immediately come to mind, I'm not sure what the best was, they, kind of depends on the circumstance, but, you know, he's a big, he would always say, go with your gut, he's a big gut guy. And so, I think about that a lot. The advice that I give to young people, something that he gave to me, you don't have to know what you want to do for the rest of your life, you just have to know what you want to do next. And for me, that was really helpful to kind of compartmentalize, you know, what is otherwise, overwhelming life of decisions to have to make. Trying to think of some others, one thing I'll say, and he took this from his his grandfather, he only offers advice when I ask, as it relates to politics. And he said, you know, he would do that, his dad did that, too. And so he kept doing it the same way. And I really appreciated that because a lot of people give you unsolicited advice, but I did seek his advice often, and it was always good.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and my guest is the soon to be former Syracuse mayor, Ben Walsh. Speaking of your father, I took the liberty of reaching out to him yesterday, and I asked him to give me a question to ask you, and I think he hit it out of the park, and you anticipated it in a way. Before I ask this, I'm going to remind our listeners that your grandfather, whom you mentioned before the break, was also a mayor of Syracuse. And here's your dad's question. Of all the projects that you either worked on or completed during your eight years as mayor, which one do you think your grandfather would have been the most excited about?

BW: Oh, man. He's going to catch some grief next time I see him because I did not see that coming.

GR: Well, you have to give the grief to your mother, too, Dede, she was part of coming up with this question.

BW: Well, my mother is the Walsh family's secret weapon, so, I'll give her some grace, but my dad, I'm going to give grief to. So, the project that my grandfather would be most proud of, boy.

GR: Well, excited about is what he said.

BW: Yeah. You know, I think it would be the the community grant and 81. You know, we did have a chance to talk before he passed, about, you know, urban renewal and some of the decisions that were made and the impacts and, you know, 81 was well under way by the time he took office. But, you know, what he said was that, you know, at the time, obviously, there's a lot of federal funds coming into cities to do that type of work. And, you know, they were basing their projects off of best practices and, you know, what was eligible for funding. But he acknowledged that, you know, they didn't get it all right. And that, you know, you have to try to make the best decisions based on the best information you have. But I think he, knowing what I know, I think he would look at the way in which I viewed Interstate 81 and some of the negative impacts of urban renewal and being willing to kind of own it and try to, you know, make right some of those wrongs. I think he would have thought that was pretty cool.

GR: Good, interesting. Well, let's look ahead. You recently came out that you've been named to this new position, I believe it starts about a month from now. Just tell us about it. I mean, first of all, what is the New York State Canal Corporation, for starters, most people probably would not know what that is?

BW: Yeah, so it's a really neat position and I'm excited about it. I have a ton to learn, but, you know, of course, growing up in Syracuse, you're familiar with the history of, most people are familiar with the history of the Erie Canal. The New York Canal Corporation oversees the New York State Canal system, which of course, includes the Erie Canal, but also includes the Cayuga-Seneca Canal, the Oswego Canal, the Champlain Canal, I'm not sure if I'm missing one, but it's over 500 miles of canal ways and nearly 500 employees that maintain the system. It's a 200 year old system that has a lot of old infrastructure, locks and bridges and other things that are in need of constant repair and like a lot of infrastructure have not seen the level of funding that they require. And so, but it's also just this amazing recreational asset that I think communities are still learning how to embrace. I've already heard from a lot of mayors and town supervisors along the canal that are passionate about it and are anxious to build a working relationship. And so, you know, I think it's a combination of being, you know, an ambassador and a cheerleader for the canal, but also, you know, being a manager and managing the, you know, this massive system of infrastructure, that, again, needs a lot of work.

GR: We've got about, maybe, I don't know, four minutes left or so, five minutes. I wanted to try to turn the questions a little bit differently and a little more personal, if we could. One of them, and I'll try to say this as succinctly as I can, but in my experiences of you in the last eight years and even before when you were working in the Miner administration, you have a particular quality that I find rare in politicians, particularly these days, where it just seems like there is so much anger in this system. And I know you get frustrated with things, I know I've asked you questions that have frustrated you and I can tell, but still, it seems like there is an even-keeledness, sort of at the core that keeps you from getting sucked into kinds of exchanges that we associate with politics today. And I just wanted to know, what is the secret sauce for you? What is the, where does this come from?

BW: Well, I often joke about one of my favorite Seinfeld episodes where they keep saying 'serenity now' and then eventually they say serenity now, insanity later.

GR: (laughter)

BW: So I'm hoping that that doesn't come to fruition. But, you know, I think part of it is just going back to my role models, my father and my grandfather, they were very much the same way. You know, I think also I've learned from the way in which I've reacted to things. I can, when I look back on the past eight years, there are certainly times when I've lost my temper and I've said things that I regretted. And, you know, and sometimes it feels good in the moment, but in almost every case, I did regret it and it didn't ultimately help me achieve my outcome. You know, when I certainly lost my cool with, you know, with the Common Council on a number of occasions, both individually and collectively. And that never served us well, it just, you know, further entrenched them, I think about the most recent budget process is an example of that. And, it just, you know, I'm ultimately all about what works. And in my experience, what works is maintaining, you know, staying calm, cool and collected, maintaining relationships and partnerships and a spirit of collaboration. You know, look, if I thought losing my marbles every day was going to get the job done, then I'd probably do that, but in my experience it doesn't.

GR: Very calculated. Well, so, this last question, and I hope you'll take some time with it, although you may want to dismiss it quickly. Just for old times sake, I want to play the game that you and I have played in the past. And so if you're ready, I will try to ask the question this way.

BW: Sure.

GR: Ben Walsh is still young, 46, I think I saw in the paper. So.

BW: Yep.

GR: So, that's young in political years. If he does run for another elected office and the path as an independent was not viable to you, what parties' banner would you run under? You're on your way out now.

BW: Yeah. So look, I think that, I've said to you before, I had to convince everyone I wasn't a Republican when I first ran, and then I was convincing everyone I wasn't a Democrat when I ran again. I think, you know, when you plot me on the political spectrum, which, you know, evolves and changes, I think it's worth noting that. You know, I think people would probably, most people would put me left of center. But, you know, I do reject the, you know, the party labels because in my experience, I just, I don't think we all fit neatly into those boxes. And frankly, I don't think the party establishments themselves, necessarily are always consistent with the policies and ideologies that they claim to espouse. So, but I mean, again, in 2025 looking at the political spectrum and where the parties are, you know, again, I think most people would agree I'm, you know, to the left, but not extreme by any stretch.

GR: Yeah, that sounds fair to me, too. Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Mayor Ben Walsh. Mayor Walsh, I want to take a little bit of time here at the end, and just I want to say, first of all, I think you more than met the Athenian and standard of leaving the city better off than you found it, which is the standard, I think, inspired in part by the Maxwell School that you've articulated all along. So I want to just take a second and thank you for your service.

BW: Thank you, Grant.

GR: I want to thank you for making yourself available, not only to me, which you've done on many occasions, but also to the Maxwell School students, which you've done as much as I think as anyone could expect. And I want to put some thanks to your family as well. All of you have been integral to this city and to this region, so we appreciate it.

BW: And I wouldn't be where I am today without the Maxwell School. So, much love to you and your colleagues and your students. It's a special place and we're lucky to have it here in Syracuse.

GR: Well, we are proud to have you as one of our graduates. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. The last time I spoke with John Mannion, it was about six months into his first term in Congress. He's now finished close to a year, so it's a good time to check back in and get his reflections. As always, it seems a lot has been happening in Washington in the last six months. John Mannion represents New York's 22nd congressional district, which contains all of Onondaga and Madison counties and portions of Oneida, Cortland and Cayuga counties, including the cities of Syracuse, Utica, and Auburn. Congressman Mannion, welcome back to the program and it's good to see you again.

John Mannion: Great to see you. Thank you for having me on again, Grant.

GR: Well, I have to say our listeners can only hear this and I can see you, I'm going to jump right to a question I was going to ask you later, but, you look pretty relaxed. You don't look like a beaten down member of Congress. (laughter)

JM: Well, it's still early in the day. (laughter) Listen, there will be times where, you know, I'll be in a grocery store back home or somewhere, and people go, you know, hey, I support you, you know, thank you for everything you're doing, I hope you're doing okay. Every now and then, I'll get a, you look tired, you know, you look tired.

GR: (laughter)

JM: But I understand the gravity of the position that I hold. And, of course, I love the place where I'm from. I consider it an honor to be able to represent it and we're going to do everything to make sure we do a good job. And we uphold, you know, the history of this country and the norms of this country, the values of it. And, you know, some days are longer than others, but, I appreciate the compliment, and I'll take it wherever it comes.

GR: Okay, great. Well, a little more serious version of that, though, if I could. You know, when I think about, and we'll come back to getting your sense of, you know, the things that you've accomplished and all that, but when I think about the weekly life of a member of Congress, knowing a bit about it, it really does seem to me to be kind of a grind in a lot of ways. I mean, you're going back and forth to D.C. constantly. You're always having to raise money. So, I imagine it has been an adjustment from the state Senate, even though that was a challenging position as well. I mean, how, do you have strategies for coping with it?

JM: So, I do think my four years in Albany was a great preparation for this. And it was in many ways, no offense to the state Senate and state Assembly, because there's important, very important, if not just as important legislation there, but just the calendar itself. It was a six month in-session session, so January to June, and then you had six months to get back in the district and really get a chance to talk to folks. The D.C. schedule is three out of every four weeks a month on average. August is not a month we’re working and we won't get into the government shutdown or even the cancellation of votes around that time. But it's about four days a week, typically. And when you're here, you're going, you know, from first thing in the morning, all the way through the evening, you get up and you do it again. And there's a lot of committee work, as I think we talked about a few months ago. The committee work here is really intensive, and there's amendments to legislation and multiple hearings, so you can count on those every week. But the travel is something for sure. We're fortunate that, you know, I mean, I have driven, but as far as flights go from Syracuse to D.C., there's a lot of them and they're direct flights, so we could do a lot worse than that. And I feel fortunate that I live where I do. And both airports are great and easy to get in and out of. So, you know, that's the least of it. It's really the importance of the work. And then what's tough is, because it's usually the full week or close to a full week, I miss a lot of stuff at home that I really want to be at, and certainly want to get to new areas of the district that may not know me as well, and let them know that I want to hear from them and that I'm fighting for them.

GR: I just can't imagine, for example, how a member of Congress representing a rural district in California manages that with the flights and the travel involved. But, well, let's get to the meat of some of this. You've been in a year, it’s a two-year term. So, what do you regard as your most important accomplishment so far in this first year?

JM: You know, some of those things, Grant, have really come up recently legislatively, and I'll get to that. But when I was elected, you know, this past fall and so was the president, I said, I wish for the country's success and therefore I wish for his success. But what we've seen immediately with the executive orders that came out on Inauguration Day was that the backstops of many things to keep executive powers reined in were removed. And that includes the removal of the inspector generals and, you know, clearing out of the DOJ and the FBI. So, you know, a lot of my time has been devoted to, and I say this, I'm just telling the truth, I'm letting people know that regardless of where you land on the political spectrum, that we should always maintain the co-equal branches of government and a system of checks and balances. And when we hear either secretaries or the president himself talk about defying court orders, that's, of course, incredibly concerning. And congressional oversight is not happening to the extent that it has in the past, historically, regardless of which party is in power. So that's a lot of what we work on. But, when we've gone through, I will call it the Big Beautiful Bill, the reconciliation process, there was a lot of work there, a lot of amendments were attempted that were voted down basically by party lines, and some of them were very logical moves, including extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies, also returning what legally has been found to be illegal firings of the federal workforce and returning veterans to that workforce. But most recently, what you've seen are a couple pieces of legislation is that despite, you know, the president really having a tight grasp over the speaker is that we have found, and I do think this is inspiring, bipartisanship within the discharge petition process. So, you know that I come from a union family and I was a union president while I was still teaching in my last eight years. So, there was a discharge petition, passed the House, bipartisan support to restore the collective bargaining rights of some of these, you know, government entities. And I was grateful to see that happen. You know, additionally, a lot of media attention, and justifiably, is around the release of the Epstein files that, two, we should have accountability and justice for victims. And that was something that has happened recently as well. So, you can imagine my frustration in having really logical amendments stall, even though sometimes I'm advocating even more for, proportionally other congressional districts that might benefit from an extension of the Affordable Care Act's tax credits. But, you know, that's what's frustrating, but we have seen some movement. I've got my own legislation that we're going to continue to build support around and consensus around and gain co-sponsorship and try to move that legislation forward while finding our spots to insert our voice and insert our amendments and trying to make some of the legislation that's moving by the majority better.

GR: I want to come back to a couple of things you mentioned. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with Congressman John Mannion. The freshman representative is in New York's 22nd congressional district. So, one of the things, you mentioned this, was, you referenced our earlier conversation where you observed that one of the biggest differences and surprises in some ways for you was the intensity and the importance of the committee work relative to what you had experienced in New York State. Are there any other big surprises now that you've had a year that you just didn't see coming as far as the nature of the job down there?

JM: Sure. I, you know, I'm going to shift again to executive powers here, I think I have to. So, you know, I have to remind people that in a previous Congress, appropriated dollars were obligated to different organizations, you know, including like, NEH and NIH grants, Department of Ed grants, Department of Defense and Energy grants. And that was a Republican majority in Congress that passed that, even though it may have been signed by a Democratic president. But the appropriations process is one of those, what I like to call forced bipartisanship. So, we all want bipartisanship, but the Appropriations Committee and other aligned committees make sure that we're not playing hunger games, we're not playing winners and losers. And I hate the term blue districts and red districts because my district is a purple district. They happen to have a blue representative right now, but I consider myself here for everybody and every district across this country has Republicans and Democrats. So, I wish we weren't playing this game and I know the people I represent, by and large, feel the same way. So, the fact that those appropriated dollars were frozen and sometimes grants ended when universities or not for profits or municipalities had to plan a budget, that, again, was, I think, surprising to everyone. We know that there can be rescissions, but there's a process. But these were done, the damage was done. You go to the court to try to restore, but honestly, a lot of that had already occurred. And then the other one, and we did see this in the first Trump administration, would be the tariffs. You know, we're watching again, with precision, tariffs make sense. With it being so dynamic and so unpredictable, the people that I talked to, this is not good. Particularly being on the AG committee with our farmers. I've heard statements from some of my colleagues about we have a bumper crop across this country and soybeans and corn, but demand is down. Well, demand is down because we have ceded our tariff power, execises and imposts in the Congress to the president and we should rein that in. And there are, you know, discharge petitions and legislation to do so, although it's already written into law. So it’s that overextension of the powers that is surprising. And I'll say one more, you know, the president promised that he would go after the worst of the worst when it comes to immigration and that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing racial profiling, we're seeing cruelty. We're seeing people who are trying to abide by the law and follow the process and going to their immigration hearings. And they're being, you know, taken away, separated from their families. I know from speaking to people that's incredibly unpopular here. Yes, we need to enforce our immigration laws, there's a way to do it. And we also should not ignore how we got here, which is exactly that, that we have ignored many of our immigration laws over a long period of time. And we have members of our community that are doing what a lot of ancestors did, which is trying to put in a hard day's work and provide for their family. Let's work with the people who have been here a while, have comprehensive immigration reform and be true to our values as the country that we are.

GR: Let me ask you a question about your party here for a minute, actually, a couple of them. The first one is, how would you assess Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ leadership of your caucus?

JM: Well, Hakeem Jeffries I am supporter of. We actually went to college at SUNY Binghamton, we called it back then, Binghamton University, at the same time. And we did not know each other there, or if we did, we’d forgotten, I guess.

GR: (laughter)

JM: But he's proud to be a graduate of that university as am I, and also Eugene Vindman. Hakeem Jeffries is a principled man. I know that there's times where people want him to, you know, metaphorically, you know, throw bombs, right? But he, I do believe that his steady hand in getting through this chaotic time is important to maintain, you know, our character and our principles. We only have so many tools to use in the minority. And we certainly can use our voice, we can assist in amicus briefs in the litigation space, we can amend legislation. But what you saw in fighting for the ACA subsidy extensions was great leadership, very unlike what our party can be criticized for, disciplined message. We prioritized what we were going to do to try to lower health care costs for everybody in this country, not just people on an Affordable Care Act plan. And Hakeem Jeffries was the leader of that message, and I think did a fantastic job as it relates to it. In this moment in time, I know myself, I will question, should I have spoke up louder on this issue? Should I have not elevated that issue? Is that just a distraction? And we're always going to question that. But I know his heart's in the right place, mine is too and, you know, we were definitely laser focused on that issue in unison. And then also, we made it the priority that I think it needed to be.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Congressman John Mannion, who represents New York's 22nd Congressional district. So, you mentioned the effort to extend the subsidies for the premiums in the Affordable Care Act and I did have a couple of questions I wanted to ask about that. One was related to the shutdown, you've already brought the shutdown up. And that's, do you think in retrospect, the Democratic Party's approach toward funding the government, which was, as you point out, you know, took a pretty hard line for holding out for an extension of those premium subsidies, was that a wise move relative to the shutdown negotiations?

JM: Just stepping back quickly, is that, I mentioned forced bipartisanship, the appropriations process. One of those other forced bipartisanships is the 60 votes in the Senate, right? So that means we've got to negotiate. And that could be leadership. Hakeem Jeffries, Mike Johnson, Senator Thune, Senator Schumer, that didn't happen, you know? There was not consensus, not negotiation, none of that. And as a result, if you need the votes, I mean, I hate to be a partisan or political hack here, but if you need the votes, you have to negotiate. And it's just not our rule, that's always the rule. So that was worth standing up for. Again, we weren't going to get everything. But I do think that extending those tax credits should have been a priority because of the cost that it's going to, that people are seeing already in their premiums increase.

GR: Yeah, I wanted to follow up with that with a question. It's going to take me just a couple minutes to develop, so if you’ll bear with me. But I really do want to get your reaction to this. I've been thinking a lot about these subsidies and reading about them. And the holdout did, you know, it accomplished a serious and separate look at that question. The Senate, though, has recently rejected both Republican and a Democratic version of health bills that would have addressed those things in different ways. As you mentioned, the subsidies expire on January 1st. There's about 24 million people that get health insurance through these market exchanges with these premiums and that's about 7% of the American population. People earning less than four times the federal poverty level qualify for subsidies, but the additional subsidies that are going to expire on January 1st, they applied to people regardless of income. They were instituted during the height of COVID, I think the thinking at the time was it would be a temporary source of help. The Kaiser Family Foundation, which is a nonprofit and nonpartisan research group, reported recently that the people that are going to be hardest hit by the expiration of these subsidies are basically two groups, high earners who are going to pay a lot more and then lower earners that will pay a little more, but it will feel like a lot to them, I'm sure. So, I wanted to put an argument to you though and get your reaction to it. Explain to me and to our listeners why all of us, as taxpayers, should support people who are this less than 10% of the population, and the rest of us, who are either outside these exchanges or in government funded programs like Medicare or Medicaid, why should the rest of us subsidize less than 10% of the population who are getting their insurance through these exchanges, particularly if they're high earners and they're getting these very, very large subsidies, which were never intended to be permanent?That answer doesn't seem obvious to me. So, explain this to me.

JM: It's a great question. It's a complicated question, and it requires a complicated answer and I will do my best. But I think we can all agree that we do need comprehensive health care reform. If we go back to the Affordable Care Act being passed, the attempt was made there to make sure that people in this country all had coverage and it was all affordable. What we've seen since then is sometimes a partisan attack to try to dismantle it, and some of that has contributed to it not being, you know, perfect, let's say. When it was passed, not all about polling, but it was underwater, negative 10. Now the Affordable Care Act is plus 30 because of a lot of the positives there, like your kids being able to stay on your insurance up to age 26. There's things that are really beneficial out there. In a state like New York, we do have a lot of people with really good private insurance through their employer and also the state has tried to create their own programs to make it affordable care and affordable coverage. So, your question is, you're a taxpayer, I'm a taxpayer, why do I have to help someone else other than that? And this is where when we don't have a national health care system like we do in other countries, I think we're trying to make sure that there is accessibility and affordability for everyone, and that is where that comes from. Now, do we need to continue to work on it? We absolutely do. When you talk to the hospitals and the doctors, they will tell you that the fewer people that they have covered with health insurance, their revenue goes down. So, we want to make sure that people are covered, and that is quality coverage and affordable coverage. I'm all for committing to a bipartisan work group on comprehensive health care reform. You know, Medicare is a program that is widely popular, and yes, there's advantage programs beyond that. But, myself as Disabilities Chair of the New York State Senate, there's a lot of people that rely on Medicaid. And we have, these are big programs, but by and large, they're successful programs. And when you talk to people, if it weren't for Medicare and Medicaid, honestly, people would have worse coverage and may not be able to get the health care they need and therefore not be with us. So, you know, the mission of this country, like in public education, is to make sure that we are taking care of each other. We have to make sure that there's accountability, accountability for private insurance, accountability for waste, fraud and abuse, which is a term that's widely used by the other side. But there are auditors and investigators to make sure that we catch that, and we need greater accountability around that. Could we wipe out every public health care plan in this country, social safety net plans? I think by and large, people would say, no, let's not do that. But we do need reform and we can't get reform if we're not talking. And as you've seen, we don't have anything on the floor because we're not talking enough.

GR: When I was mulling through this, and maybe this is just a two sentence way of saying what you said with a lot more detail, but, my answer to my own question was, yes, we have a patchwork system, which you just described, this is one piece of that patchwork, and we all have a collective interest in making sure that it doesn't unravel. And so that's, you know, another possible system where we would all be in the same boat, is not what we have. And so, until we do something like that, we have to prop these things up.

JM: And I think more people are paying attention to where their tax dollars are going as it relates to health care. And honestly, you know, when they hear about Medicare or Medicaid, I think there's more robust conversations around that. I was on a different radio program where I talked about how hospitals, because the Medicaid, Medicare cuts and people falling off their insurance, was going to cause hospitals to lose revenue and make difficult decisions about what services they provide. And the person who's probably an avowed anti-Medicare for all person said, well, they're the hospital, like, they've got to provide that service and that's not how it works.

GR: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Congressman John Mannion. Well, we could keep talking about health care, but we got about four minutes left. I want to try to get some other topics in. So, there's one, and I'm just dying to ask you this, it may push out the other ones, but I'm going to do it anyway. It's another thing I've been thinking a lot about. I'm wondering, in your caucus, there's got to be some conversation about looking toward the future and saying, at some point we're going to have to shift from the critical argument, the negative argument about Trump and the administration to putting forward a positive vision. And that's certainly going to have to happen in 2028. And I'm just wondering, I guess if you could be brief on this. Are you folks talking about that, are you wrestling with that? Is that something that, you know, behind closed doors you're hashing out?

JM: We absolutely are. And we want to bring forward a positive message. And I do think we have it, and it's about affordability. You know, we've got these tariffs. The tariffs have only made inflation worse. They are a tax on the people, we have to rein in those. I think part of the health care conversation is also an important one in an opportunity economy. So, we as freshman members actually in our caucus said we need to work together to develop an agenda. We have, you know, for what it's worth, listening sessions. But for me, it really is living in this area of the country my whole life. It's about affordability and opportunity and making sure that people have the opportunities here and they can afford to live here as it relates to homeownership, you know, groceries, insurance, etc..

GR: Two quick questions at the end. First one, you have been and have been in this conversation, a very strong critic of President Trump. Anything that the administration has done so far that you like, that you approve of?

JM: Well, listen, absolutely. You have to give credit where credit is due. Our air traffic control system with the FAA is long overdue and there's a commitment and investment to supporting that, I support that. You know, advancing legislation which is referred to as, you know, take it down legislation to make sure that people's privacy is protected. So, there are positives in there. And just like we talked about, with the discharge petitions, a restoration of collective bargaining rights, that is not, you know, signed into law by the president, but it is a show of bipartisanship and where we're working together. But I will always reject, including, you know, whenever this is broadcast, today there was the death of Rob Reiner, right? A tragedy, an American icon. And to take that opportunity and further divide us is not going to get us in a better place. And I'm always going to reject that as should all Americans.

GR: Yes. Well, last question, and just a few seconds here. Have you been trying to work across the aisle? You've talked a little bit about it, but can you just give me maybe two really quick examples of where you've worked across the aisle, who you've worked with?

JM: Absolutely. So, you know, I have legislation around supporting local journalism where we have co-sponsors that are out there. These are ways to make sure that we maintain and restore local journalism tax credits for the entities themselves who hire local reporters, tax credits for advertisers, tax credits for subscribers to get around the paywall and EMS Counts Act. Which means that we count our first responders appropriately so that they receive the appropriate amount of funding. We continue to build bipartisan support around those pieces of legislation and others. And this week, going to the floor of the House, whole milk back in schools.

GR: All right, we'll have to leave it there. You've been very busy, that's obvious. That was Congressman John Mannion. Congressman Mannion, thanks again for making the time to talk, really appreciate it.

JM: Thank you so much, Grant. Always a pleasure to be on.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. Last Sunday was December 7th. I wonder how many of you gave that day serious thought. My guest today will help us do that. Craig Shirley is a political consultant and a noted biographer of Ronald Reagan, and he’s also the author of, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." Mr. Shirley, welcome to the program.

Craig Shirley: Thank you, Grant, thank you very much.

GR: We appreciate you making the time to be with us. So let me just start with a kind of a basic question about this historical event. What do you think is the most important thing about either the Pearl Harbor attack or its immediate aftermath that most Americans don’t know today?

CS: Well, I think the most obvious is that it completely changed America's outlook from being an isolationist country to becoming an internationalist country, that changed overnight. Isolationism had been prevalent in the United States from the end of World War One right up until December 7th, 1941. You know, there was a saying going around America after World War One that all we got was death, debt and George M. Cohan, and we became an increasingly internationalist country as we limited immigration from Japan as we passed various neutrality acts in the 1930s, passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president. And by 1941, everybody was isolationist. FDR, the White House, everybody knew war was coming, but everybody also had their head in the sand and wanted to avoid war at all costs with either Germany, Italy or Japan.

GR: Yeah. You know, your answer is interesting because it, that's exactly the question I was going to ask you a little bit later, but I'll follow up on it now. I was going to point to that isolation, but you already described it very well. And the fact that this was a very quick pivot point, I mean, it just, like you say, this changed overnight. And I was trying to think of, have there been any other similar moments in our history like that? The only thing that I could come up with was maybe the firing on Fort Sumter, but even then there was a lot of lead up to that and so I couldn't, you know, yeah.

CS: Yes. There was, I'm trying to think also, I suppose after, during the War of 1812, we barred immigration, obviously, from Great Britain and also, not from France, but from Great Britain and we became, we were somewhat of an isolationist country more because of the distance than anything else until Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay. And then we, obviously the Spanish-American War was an internationalist war. But we've gone through periods, you know, where we've been isolationist and internationalist and isolationist and internationalists again, but we've been pretty much internationalists since 1941, sometimes more expansively, other times less expansively. But even Trump, you know, people say he's an isolationist, but he did, he solved eight wars around the world. He’s solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and he's trying to stop the war in Ukraine. So even, you know, so he's accused of that, but it's really not true. It's just that I don't think he's as activist as other presidents have been in the past.

GR: Certainly seems more reluctant than previous presidents to commit ground troops and that seems to be a line that he has drawn on that. Well let me, let me go back to the, yeah go ahead.

CS: Let me just say one thing, Grant, is just that anti-communism animated a lot of that response on our part from 1946 up until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1991.

GR: Right, right, yes, that was a that was a major part of our internationalism. Well, let me go back to this attack of the Japanese. And I think looking back on it now, it's hard, I think, to believe that an attack of that magnitude could have surprised the Americans so much. So how did the Japanese pull that off?

CS: You know, military planners still study it today because of the precision it was carried off with, because of the professionalism, obviously, the stealth that it was carried off with. Because don't forget, is that on December 7th and 8th, the Japanese just didn't hit Honolulu, they just didn't hit Pearl Harbor, they hit Wake Island, they hit the Philippines, they hit Indochina. They hit, you know, a half dozen different locations simultaneously orchestrated and organized, all at the same time, which was really, you know, just from the standpoint of accomplishment, it was a masterstroke in a way, because, you know, I mean, you just didn't think that they could get away with that. Of course they'd already been in China and they'd already gotten into bad relations with the United States because of their rape of Nan King and they probably murdered 250,000 civilians when they invaded China in 1939. So there was already bad blood there between the United States. I always believed China was an ally of the United States in 1939. But, I’m losing train of my thought, I guess, but is that we did everything we could to avoid war with Japan. The secretary of state, you know, set out a four point plan. He offered the Japanese something like $25 million, we would lift the oil embargo, we would lift the junk metal embargo and Japan, in turn, had to sign a proclamation of peace and that they would invade no more countries and they rejected this. So we really tried to avoid war with Japan before December 7th.

GR: Was it maybe the surprise then came from a little bit of wishful thinking that we would avoid that war?

CS: It was absolutely it was wishful thinking. But you know, it was also, you know, they moved a carrier fleet, four of their first line carriers and escort ships 4000 miles across the Pacific without being detected, then launched this completely surprise attack using 300 planes on Pearl Harbor. And when they did so, it reminded me what Frank Borman said. Frank Borman was an astronaut who was charged with the investigation of the fire of Apollo 1, and when he was testifying before Congress a senator asked him, he says, how did this happen? And he says, Senator, it was a failure of imagination. And that's what happened here, we just didn't believe, we didn't imagine that the Japanese would be so audacious or they would be so intent on war, Tojo was intent on a war. That they could transport these four carriers plus escort ships, refueling ships, and I think they made two stops in the Atlantic or the Pacific to refuel, then carried on, and then withdrew their forces without ever getting harmed whatsoever, not even a shot fired at them. And it was just, we never imagined that they would take that monumental step and initiate World War Two.

GR: I’m Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations, and my guest is Craig Shirley. He’s the author of, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World." So, we got a bit lucky, though, as bad as the attack was that day, regarding our navy. Briefly remind us of how that happened.

CS: Well, you're absolutely right, we were lucky in a number of ways. The Japanese main target was the, was our four aircraft carriers that were there, stationed at Pearl Harbor. But they had only recently left, two went back to San Diego to be repaired. One was down in the Coral Sea, that was Bill Halsey's carrier. He was out at sea, and so none of the carriers were actually there in Pearl Harbor, so they escaped the carnage. We were also lucky in another regard. And people have thought about this, is that everybody in America was mad that we didn't go out and attack the Japanese after they attacked us. But if we sent our ships out, they would have been slaughtered, we would've been wiped out. The Japanese ships had much better firepower, much thicker plating, and could survive an attack, whereas their shells would have gone right through the hulls of most of our ships. The ships were built much more for speed than for protection. And they would have been, the whole, you know, instead of losing 3,000 men as we did on December 7th, we would have lost maybe 30,000 men if we got into an open fight with the Japanese.

GR: And had much less of a navy.

CS: Yes.

GR: So, you obviously get into a lot of the stories about heroism and sacrifice on that day. Is there one story that sticks with you the most, after you wrote the book?

CS: Well, I got to think about that one, Grant, because there's so many stories.

GR: Yeah, it’s a tough question.

CS: There's so many stories. There's, is that the heroism of the nurses treating the injured, the badly injured sailors at the hospital, that in itself is worth a book right there. The nurses who have been killed, nurses who have been injured, who still managed to get back to the hospital and managed to treat many of the wounded, you know, in surgeries and drawing blood and, you know, applying anesthesia and doing whatever they could, so that in itself is one. I think also, you know, you have to say, Dory Miller's actions when she received the Navy Cross for need to be cited. Dory Miller was an African-American, was a ship's steward, was not trained for combat. And it's interesting, too, he was named Dory because his real name was Doris. And the story is, his father, his mother and father had five sons, and the father wanted a daughter, and he ended up with, Dory was the sixth and the father named Doris, even though he was a boy, because he wanted a daughter so badly. So he named him Doris, so he got the nickname Dory. But Dory went to the stern of a ship, manned a machine gun and managed to blast away at several Japanese zeros. And I think, in fact, he shot down several, but he was brave in the face of terrible tragedy and carnage all around him. And he later received the Navy Cross and, of course, the sad part of the end of the story of Dory Miller is that, he was we went back into combat, okay, I got one other good story too, I'll tell you, is that he went right back into combat and was lost in a battle, was killed in a battle (in) 1943 and was lost at sea, remains were never found. There's something like 80,000 Americans who were lost at sea in World War Two, lost in the Pacific, whose remains were never found. One other story I can tell you is that, you know, whenever I go out and give talks about my books, I always ask people, I said, you know, your history, your memories are so important to historians, and there are lots of repositories now on the internet. You know, there's the World War Two museum down in New Orleans and other places. Please record your stories, your big stories, your little stories, your stories about sacrifice or victory gardens or whatever else, is that because to the historians, they’re invaluable. And this one woman raised her hand and said, Mr. Shirley, I have a story.I said, what's that? She said, my father was on the USS Oklahoma on December 7th, 1941, which as you know, the only two battleships who were sunk and destroyed, were sunk, was USS Arizona, which was of course obliterated, and the USS Oklahoma, which took four Japanese torpedoes, capsized and sunk. It was later refloated, but it had to be fixed, be repaired substantially. But her father was a mechanic below decks and he was there when the ship capsized. And for a week he was in, he was hanging by a pipe in greasy, dirty, cold water. The sounds of men screaming all around him, screaming and dying. And he was there for a week until he finally heard the sound, you know, of course, sailors were tapping on the hulls. A week later, he heard the sound of acetylene torches, and the whole time he didn't know whether it was the Americans coming to save him or Japanese coming to kill him.

GR: Wow.

CS: But what is interesting, he wasn’t sent stateside, you know, said, well, you've got traumatic stress disorder, you have to go to recover at home. He was sent right back into the fleet and served all four years of the war.

GR: Wow. You're listening to the Campbell conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Craig Shirley. He's a noted biographer of Ronald Reagan and he's also the author of, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World" and we've been discussing that historical event. So, you mentioned a little bit earlier in our conversation that the focus of the United States post-World War Two being that of fighting communism, you know, opposing the Soviet Union. And I wanted to ask you a question that might be related to that in a way, and that has to do with the American views toward Japan and the Japanese. Obviously, they became very negative during the war. Today, they are our very good friends, and we see them as some kind of partial counterbalance in a way to China in that area of the world. When did our views toward them start to soften post-World War Two? Was there a particular event or development that was instrumental in that, or was it the Cold War that really shifted our thinking?

CS: I think it was a number of things, Grant. I think that Douglas MacArthur was, of course, the Supreme commander of the Pacific Forces and then became the steward of Japan after World War Two. And what he did to rebuild the Japanese society and economy and culture is absolutely amazing. He really should have gotten the Nobel Peace Prize for what he did to rebuild Japan and bring Western values that, you know, women would get the vote and they would no longer be, you know, is that it was not state policy to discriminate against them anymore or, you know, or promote some kind of macho, which is what it was before the Shogun culture before and during World War Two, it no longer prevailed after World War Two. What he did with their industrial plant, with so many things, is that so they became, I think they really appreciated, the Japanese people really appreciate what Douglas MacArthur did for them. And that helped warm relations greatly between Japan, the United States, and, of course, the Communist philosophy was not something it was interesting to the Japanese people. They didn't they didn't want collectivism, they'd been introduced to the profit motive and they'd been introduced to consumerism. And that's what they wanted, a Western style economy and Western style government and a Western style society. And so that also repelled them from the Soviets and moved them toward the United States during the Cold War.

GR: And I wanted to ask this other question too. You have obviously spoken to a lot of people about this event. You've done a lot of talks about the book, and I was thinking about this, that among the Americans who weren't alive in 1941, which is the vast majority of us at this point.

CS: Yes.

GR: I imagine there is some kind of, still, some kind of generational divide in the immediacy of this event for people in their memories. I'll give you an example, take myself. My father fought in World War Two, Pearl Harbor is part of my working memory. Is there a generation where, in your experience, where this becomes ancient history for people like, that happened just a really long time ago, and it's not foremost in their mind?

CS: I think that's true, but what made World War Two different from, say, the Vietnam War or even World War One is that FDR, you'll never find me criticizing FDR. I think he was, together he and Churchill saved the world from fascism and from Nazism. You know, I mean, the New Deal didn't work, but FDR was trying to get the economy going. You'll never find me criticizing either Eleanor Roosevelt or Franklin Roosevelt, despite, you know, their being Democrats and my background is Republican, is that he got all the American people, all the American people had a stake in the war, it wasn't just the young men who were enlisting and who were then later drafted. My father was, as an example, my father was a Boy Scout during World War two. And his job, this is the government using the Boy Scouts, to hang up promotional posters at supermarkets and bars and restaurants and churches like, ‘Loose Lips Sink ships’, and, ‘Johnny Got His Zero’ he got another zero, you know, and stuff like that. And then my mother had her own victory garden, and I thought victory gardens before I started this book, I thought it was kind of a PR stunt by the FDR administration. My mother got indignant when I asked her about it because she's still alive, she's 94, she's still alive. And she got indignant, she said, I had a victory garden and everybody knew had a victory garden. And I did a little research, and I found by 1943, something like 40% of all vegetables eaten, consumed in the States were grown in victory gardens because we were sending everything overseas to not just the American fighting men, to the Russian fighting men, to the to the British fighting man, to the Australian fighting man, to the Chinese, to the free Chinese, to the French underground. You know, that's why I say FDR was literally president of the world during World War Two because he was arming and supplying all these other countries and not just the United States. So, I don't know where I'm ending up with this, but what he did, it really unified Americans to fight against the war. So as a result, everybody had a stake in the war. Everybody, you know, engaged in scrap drives and rubber drives and paper drives and everybody, you know, it's interesting, Grant, because in, I wrote about that four years, five years after December 7th, never once did I find a letter to an editor or editorial board, anybody complaining about the sacrifice or the rationing or anything. Nobody ever, nobody complained about going without gasoline or going with little gasoline. The national speed limit was set in during World War Two, the national speed limit was 35 miles an hour. Can you imagine driving from New York to California at 35 miles an hour?

GR: (laughter)

CS: You know, it would take you months. But nobody complained, nobody complained. Everybody was part of the effort.

GR: It was a different, yeah. I see what you're saying about the uniqueness of this particular time. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Craig Shirley. He's the author of, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World". I want to get you to engage, we've got about, oh, I don't know, 4 or 5 minutes left. I want to try to squeeze in maybe three questions if I can. First one is I want to get you to engage in a little alternative history if you don't mind. What do you think would have been America's path had the Japanese not attacked us that December?

CS: We would have continued to be an isolationist country. The United Nations would have never been created, we may not have gone into Korea, we may not have gone to Vietnam. We would continue being an isolationist country, you know, one of Newton’s three laws was that, you know, an object in motion has a tendency to stay in motion. Well, we were in motion toward isolationism. You know, very well that Charles Lindbergh might have been elected President of the United States in 1944 / 1948. It was interesting too is that everybody was isolationist. Republicans and Democrats were equally, they were all, Democrats and Republicans were all part of the America First movement. They were going to run candidates in every congressional district in 1942. We would have continued that way because the bad taste of World War One would have continued unabated throughout the next few succeeding generations. I mean, we may have become a little bit more internationalist in the face of communism, but I think we still would have remained more of an isolationist country than international country had Japan not attacked.

GR: And I guess I have to wonder what would have happened in Europe had that not happened. Let me ask you a related question to that, it's more depressing, actually. Let's imagine something like this were to happen today, god forbid, in our current political climate, do you think that this country would be able to unite the way it did in World War Two?

CS: No.

GR: Or do you think we would just immediately descend into mutual recriminations? It was your fault, no, it was your fault. Would the country be even further divided?

CS: You know, many republics fail in their third century. You know, Greece, Rome, France is on the fifth republic. Is that, I'm not sure that America is special enough to survive its third century. Because, now, let me just say, is that we've always been this nonsense about unity, we've only been united twice in our lives. That was for several years after December 7th, 1941, and for several months after September 11th. But even September 11th fell into sharp partisan disagreement over everything, our union deals and over the war and over men and material, over the economy, everything. And I think that it would just be the same way, only worse, is that we've been, historians will tell you that maybe 30% of the American people were against the war with, the Revolutionary War, the war with King George III in England. And as a matter of fact, is that after the Revolutionary War, 100,000 Americans got on sailing ships and left the United States because they did not want to live under Republican rule, small, our Republican rule, they did not want to live, they wanted to live under the British crown. And so they left and they went to Jamaica, they went back to Europe, they went a lot of places. And it's been that way every time, whether, the Civil War was about our very divisions and World War One, it took three weeks to agree on a war declaration, and three dozen congressmen voted against it. So those are the only two times, December 7th and September 11th.

GR: Okay, I’m going to put you on the spot this last question, you literally have five – ten seconds to answer it, but it's about movies about Pearl Harbor. They've made a bunch of them. My favorite still is, “From Here to Eternity”, but that's more of an interpersonal drama. Which one do you think does the best job of capturing what it was like?

CS: “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

GR: Okay, great. We'll have to leave it there, it was a fascinating conversation. That was Craig Shirley. And again, his book is titled, "December 1941: 31 Days that Changed America and Saved the World". It's a great read and you'll learn a lot about America when you check it out. Thanks so much for making the time to talk with me.

CS: Thank you very much. Merry Christmas.

GR: You too. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations, I'm Grant Reeher. You've probably heard something about the danger of plastics, but has it changed any of your behavior? Today, we take a deep dive into the problem with plastics with my guest, Judith Enck. Professor Enck teaches at Bennington College and is the founder and president of Beyond Plastics. She served in the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration and also served in New York State government as a deputy secretary for the environment. Professor Enck is with me today because she's written a new book with Adam Mahoney titled, appropriately, “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late.” Professor Enck, welcome to the program.

Judith Enck: Thanks, Grant. It's a real pleasure to be with you, thanks for having me.

GR: Well, we really appreciate you making the time. So, before we get into some of the arguments that you make in your book, I wanted to start with just a very basic question for our listeners and just to remind us all, what is plastic made from and how is it made?

JE: Well, plastic is a very durable material that never biodegrades. It's made from fossil fuels and 16,000 different chemicals. And it really was brought into commerce right after World War two. It was created by a guy from upstate New York named Leo Bakelite (Baekeland), and it has dramatically increased in the last decade or two. And that's because plastics used to be made from chemicals and crude oil. Now it's made from chemicals and ethane, which is a byproduct of fracking. Because there's a glut of fracked gas on the market is why we are seeing the proliferation of plastics.

GR: Okay. So what are the qualities about plastic that have made it so ubiquitous over time? It's obviously light and somewhat strong, what else do we need to know about it?

JE: Well, it's durable, it's heat-resistant. You can make many, many different colors. I mean, the way I want to answer this is explaining why it's mostly not recyclable. So, take an aluminum can. You can recycle that aluminum can into a new aluminum can. Take a newspaper, you can recycle that into new paper products, cardboard paper. Plastics are made from many different types of plastic polymers. There are 16,000 chemicals used to make plastic in many, many different colors. So that's what makes up plastic. So that also makes it really hard to recycle. Think of your own home or apartment, you might have a bright orange hard plastic detergent bottle near your washing machine.

GR: I do, I do.

JE: In your refrigerator, you may have a black plastic takeout container. Those two things cannot get recycled together because they're different types of plastics, they're different colors. So the people who knew for decades that plastics are really hard to recycle and why we have in this country an abysmal plastic recycling rate of only 5 to 6%. The people who know this are the companies that make plastics. And yet they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising telling us, don't worry about all your single use plastic, just toss it in your recycling bin, knowing full well that most plastic never gets recycled. And the deception is so serious that California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued ExxonMobil in September of 2024 for deception around plastics recycling. So, keep recycling your paper, cardboard, metal, glass. Please, please, please compost your yard waste and your food waste. But recognize that plastic recycling has been an abysmal failure.

GR: Interesting. I knew that a lot of plastic wasn't recycled, but I didn't know exactly why. So that's very, yeah, I appreciate that. Well, briefly as an overview, and then we'll get into some of the specifics as we go, but briefly as an overview, what's the problem with plastic overall? You mentioned that it doesn't biodegrade, what are the other problems?

JE: Well, it's entering our ocean in a rapid fashion. 71% of the Earth's surface is ocean and every single minute two giant garbage trucks, the equivalent of two giant garbage trucks, dump plastic into the ocean. So we are turning our ocean into a watery landfill. Second big problem is climate change. I mentioned that today, plastics are made from a byproduct of fracking. That is making the climate crisis worse. Third, we have the really significant concern of environmental justice. Most plastic is manufactured in Texas, Louisiana and Appalachia, doing enormous health damage to people living near these plastic production facilities. There's a stretch of the Mississippi River, which we talk about in the book, between New Orleans and Baton Rouge called ‘Cancer Alley,’ and that's because of the concentration of petrochemical facilities making people sick. Johns Hopkins recently did a study where they documented the cancer rates in Cancer Alley are seven times higher than the national average. So, I have visited communities in Port Arthur, Texas, the Houston Ship Channel, up and down Cancer Alley. These have become sacrifice zones, government regulations have failed these people living in these communities. And because most plastics never get recycled, if you go to the other end of the spectrum, what happens to them after they're manufactured and used? They mostly get released into the environment inadvertently and into water bodies, or they go to landfills or garbage incinerators. Those disposal facilities are typically sited in low-income communities and / or communities of color. So environmental justice is a big part of this book and part of the dedication in the book. The fourth major issue is just taxpayer savings. You and I, as taxpayers spend a lot of money getting rid of non-recyclable plastics when we think we could do a lot better on reducing the amount of plastics and also shifting to reusable, refillable products. And then finally, we have the health issue with plastics. So it's people being poisoned near plastic manufacturing facilities. But you and I have little shards of plastic known as microplastics in our bodies. We breathe them in through our nose or we swallow them. So just in the last few years, there have been peer-reviewed scientific studies documenting the presence of microplastics in our blood, our kidneys, our lungs, in the human placenta, both the fetal side and the maternal side, in testicles, in breast milk, also in our heart arteries, the microplastics attached to plaque. And a study found increased risk of stroke, heart attack and premature death if you've got microplastics on plaque. And then finally, there's a study documenting that microplastics pass through the blood-brain barrier. And that has been linked to Alzheimer's disease and other neurological disorders. Now, I want to emphasize that we need more of these studies. You don't make a solid conclusion based on one study. But we now have multiple studies looking at different parts of the human body and I'm willing to go out on a limb and say, no amount of microplastics in our brains or our heart arteries are acceptable.

GR: Kind of like smoking. Well, you've anticipated so many of my questions. We're going to dive into some of these things as we go forward. I'm Grant Reeher, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media and my guest is Judith Enck. She's a professor at Bennington College and the author of “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late.” I did have one question before I pursue some of the things that you've just brought up there in your answer. And that is, are certain kinds of plastics or plastics in certain forms more dangerous than other kinds of plastics?

JE: Yes. So we're very focused on PVC plastic, polyvinyl chloride. 99% of the highly toxic chemical vinyl chloride is used to make PVC plastic. Vinyl chloride is a carcinogen. We've urged the federal Environmental Protection Agency to ban vinyl chloride. Some of your listeners might know the community East Palestine, Ohio, where just over two years ago, a train derailed.

GR: Yes.

JE: And very unwisely, the governor and the rail company decided, rather than carefully removing the vinyl chloride from the train cars and what was released into the environment, they decided to do an open burn and just set it on fire so that the rail corridor can open more quickly. I think East Palestine is just an incredible visual of the problem of moving vinyl chloride all over the country, and it's mostly used to make polyvinyl chloride plastic. So we've got a real focus on vinyl chloride. I'm also concerned with plastics that are used in food and beverage packaging. When that plastic gets warm or hot, you may have leaching into your food or your beverage. People who, for instance, put frozen food in a plastic container into the microwave, they may notice it tastes a little plasticky when it's fully cooked.

GR: Because it is. (laughter)

JE: Yes, it leaches into the food. And so if people have learned nothing else from this radio show, please do not put plastic into the microwave because you're going to get some chemical leaching. And unfortunately, the FDA is very quick to approve the use of plastic in packaging, including recycled plastic, which is incredibly problematic.

GR: Well, you mentioned the microplastics that we breathe in and, you know, are in our organs. I'm wondering, is that what when I hear conversations about forever chemicals forever plastics, that's what you're getting at?

JE: Not exactly.

GR: Not exactly, okay. So what's the difference?

JE: So, the microplastics are like physically little shards of plastic five millimeters or less. The chemicals hitchhike on the little pieces of plastic. So forever chemicals, which is PFOA and PFAS, they are used in plastics. So, it's a double threat. It's the physicality of the little pieces of plastic and then the chemicals hitchhiking on the little pieces of plastic that we're concerned about.

GR: And those little pieces of plastic, that's when I read about the ocean teeming with these things. That's what they're talking about, that's what you’re talking about.

JE: Yeah, the plastics. Well, there are these big islands on the surface of the ocean, they're called gyres. And they're a little bit of a misleading image because when plastic makes it into the ocean, and the way it gets there is, let's say you're walking down the street in Syracuse, and somehow a plastic wrapper gets away from you, something light, you didn't litter it on purpose, but it happens. And it rains, it gets into the storm drain and then goes into a stream, a river, and then eventually the ocean. It gets out into the ocean, it's exposed to sunlight, it gets brittle. And then the wave action acts almost like a paper cutter. So one hamburger wrapper becomes hundreds of little pieces of plastic. Most of the plastic in the ocean falls to the sea floor, it's not on the surface of the water, and it is eaten by fish and sea turtles and seabirds. There are these terrible, iconic photos of seabirds, albatross in particular. They consume plastic, they feel like they're full, so they stop eating calories and they die. And then scientists do autopsies, and there are these photos of their guts filled with plastic. If it's a red bottle cap, for instance, they think it's shrimp and they eat it. So, plastics are devastating the ocean. And remember, the ocean covers nearly 71% of the Earth's surface, it's a major source of protein for many people around the world. And we know that the microplastics are building up in the marine food chain.

GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Judith Enck. She's a professor at Bennington College, has served in the Obama administration and in New York State government, and is the author of a new book titled “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late.” So, I wanted to come back to something you mentioned in the first part of our conversation about the fact that the dangers in making plastic and in dealing with it are not equally distributed across different groups of society in this country, and I imagine also probably in terms of countries in the world, I imagine the southern hemisphere probably gets more of the byproduct of all this than we have to deal with. So, curious to hear a little bit more about that, the injustices that you see.

JE: Yeah. Thank you for raising this. So, you're right, the plastics are being manufactured in low-income communities and communities of color in the Gulf South and Appalachia. And then there's a huge amount of waste plastic exported to the global South and other countries. So just really harrowing depictions of waste plastic going to Indonesia, to the Philippines, to Vietnam. And I highly recommend that people watch the movie called, “The Story of Plastic,” which is available on the website of the NGO called, “The Story of Stuff.” I teach a class on plastic pollution through Bennington College, and it's available on Zoom and people can audit it. Most of the students are actually auditors, and every semester we show that movie, “The Story of Plastic,” and talk about it and it really puts the spotlight on the export of plastic to other nations that are not equipped to handle it, just like we are not here. In terms of the United States, I think I can best summarize the situation by reading the dedication to the book, which I'll do quickly.

GR: Okay.

JE: “By design, low-income people and communities of color bear the burden of plastics. The destructive web of plastics gathers in their neighborhoods, rivers, air, and bodies. We dedicate this book to those living in the shadow of plastics facilities in Louisiana, Texas, Appalachia, and elsewhere, in the sincere belief that they should live in a world beyond plastics, and that such a world is within our reach.”

GR: Well, that's a perfect segue to what I wanted to ask you about now, which is what is within our reach? And so how should we be thinking about what we need to be doing differently? You do write in your book about what you call false solutions. What are these and why are these dangerous?

JE: Well, there's a bunch of false solutions that are promoted by the plastics industry because they don't want to reduce the production of plastics. There's something called chemical recycling, which is heating plastic to a very high temperature and then turning it into low grade fossil fuel, the last thing we need. There are some companies that want to turn waste plastic into plastic bricks. Well, what happens if those bricks catch fire? And also, what happens with plastic bricks and plastic lumber is there's abrasion. And then when it's exposed to sunlight and then you've got little bits of microplastics falling into the soil and into the air. So what we see is whenever we advocate for policies that reduce plastic, whether it's a plastic bag ban to promote reusable bags or utensils only upon request when you get takeout food, like, we all have these kitchen drawers that are just overflowing with plastic utensils and straws and condiments that we're never going to use. There's a bill pending in the legislature that said, you only get that stuff if you ask for it, and it'll save restaurants money, by the way. Whenever ideas like that surface, the army of lobbyists show up in the city council, the state legislature, and say, no, no, no, we don't need to reduce plastics, we can use chemical recycling, or we can turn it into to decking in your back deck. And none of them are sustainable or healthy options.

GR: If you’ve just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher and my guest is Judith Enck. She's the author of “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late.” So, you also put forward what you argue are better solutions. I think we've got an inkling of some of them, you've mentioned them along the way, ways to use less plastic. But tell us what those solutions are and why they're better.

JE: Well, we cannot shop our way out of the problem. No matter how careful you are, you cannot avoid plastic in your typical supermarket. So, we really need to see policy reform or systemic change. For instance, there's a bill pending in the New York State Legislature called the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act. It requires a 30% reduction in single-use packaging stretched out over 12 years. Not 30% in two years, it's 10%, then 20% then 30% over 12 years. The bill also bans 17 of the most toxic chemicals used to make packaging. Chemicals like the PFAS forever chemicals, lead, mercury, cadmium. We really prefer that not be in packaging. And again, it's reasonable. There are 17,000, I'm sorry, there are 16,000 chemicals used to make plastic, we're looking at prohibiting just over a dozen. Third, it prohibits what we just talked about, chemical recycling is counting as real recycling. And then finally, it authorizes modest fees on packaging with this new money going to local governments and the private sector to support better recycling and waste reduction. So better recycling doesn't help us on plastic, but it does help us on paper, cardboard, metal, glass. But also having money for waste reduction, reuse, refill is so important. What does that mean? It means your local school could install dishwashing equipment so children are served food on real dishes rather than single-use plastic. Some of us go to the airport and we refill our water bottle with, hopefully not a plastic water bottle at a water refill station. Why don't we have water refill stations where lower-income folks travel like bus stations and train stations and every public park? There was a time when you had water fountains in public parks and Main Street. So that re-use, refill infrastructure takes money. Why don't we have refillable wine bottles in the Finger Lakes? Wineries are very interested in that because they're spending a lot of money buying new bottles every time. But we need a commercial bottle washing operation in the Finger Lakes so those bottles can be returned and sanitized. So, we're going to solve the problem in 120 different ways. But we need a new law like the Packaging Reduction and Recycling Infrastructure Act to be adopted to incentivize all of this. So this bill has passed in the New York State Senate, two years in a row, thank you Senator Rachel May of Syracuse for voting yes.

GR: She's a frequent guest on the program, I should say. Go ahead.

JE: Love, love, love Senator May. And we now have to get it through the Assembly, where we're asking Speaker Carl Heastie to bring the bill up for a vote. It's on the floor now, it doesn't even have to go through committee. So, 2026 is an election year, there's an army of lobbyists opposing the bill. But local governments, taxpayers, medical experts, environmentalists, civic leaders need to come together. And in fact, there will be a big lobby day in Albany to bring average citizens to the state capitol, to advocate in support of the bill and that will be on Monday, February 2nd. And listeners can go to beyondplastics.org to get information on how to register for the lobby day or just information on this bill if they want to drop a note or make a phone call to their state Assemblymember and state senator.

GR: Okay, who's leading the way right now on these kinds of things? And I mean that in terms of countries and states within the United States and then any localities that you think? You know, you teach in Vermont, I often associate Vermont with great environmental efforts, but who are the folks that are out in front on this?

JE: Trance, to a degree, they're promoting reusables, but unfortunately, a lot of it is plastic. But they're doing some other good work. There are countries in Africa that have adopted single use plastic bans. In the United States, it's spotty, but the leadership's actually coming from local governments. Vermont passed something called the Plastics Trifecta all in one bill. It banned polystyrene foam food packaging, banned plastic bags, and also takeout plastic, you know, the utensils if you ask for it. Vermont's pretty good. New York City adopted some pretty good laws that the state then followed. California is screwing things up across the board on waste issues, which was a little surprising to me. For instance, they passed a plastic bag ban ten years ago, but they allowed for thicker, single-use plastic bags, and it took them ten years to fix that. The leadership is coming from local governments and then occasional states, but we've got a long way to go. This is the long game and unfortunately, Washington, DC is not doing anything helpful. In fact, they are hurting on the plastics and toxics issue, whether it's Congress or the EPA.

GR: I'm going to be very unfair to you here at the end, we only have just a few seconds. But the one last thing I wanted to ask you is, in a lot of ways, this is all been very depressing, enlightening, but depressing. Can you just leave us in 10, 15 seconds with a thought that's going to lift us back up again?

JE: Yeah. You know, the book includes profiles of amazing people who are working in difficult communities. People like Sharon Levine in Cancer Alley, Diane Wilson in San Antonio Bay, Texas, who are really taking on special interests and winning. So, plastic can be a little discouraging, but we're also seeing progress, and ordinary people can make a difference when they come together.

GR: Perfect, thank you. We'll have to leave it there. That was Judith Enck, and again, her new book, written with Adam Mahoney, is titled “The Problem with Plastic: How We Can Save Ourselves and Our Planet Before It's Too Late.” It's an important book, and it's an important call to action. Professor, thanks so much for making time to talk with me, I really appreciated it.

JE: My pleasure. Thanks, Grant.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.

An event you've probably never heard of, the 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion, puts a lot of our current political discussions and conflicts in context. This week, Grant Reeher speaks with Erik Chaput, a teacher at Groton School in Massachusetts. He's written a book on the event titled "The People's Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion."