Playbook Deep Dive

By POLITICO

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Welcome to Playbook Deep Dive, the stories behind the power. From Congress and the White House to bar stools and back rooms, POLITICO's top reporters and Playbook authors bring you the most compelling and confounding stories that explain what’s really going on in Washington.

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What Iran and China stand t...

03.17.2023

On Thursday, the Senate began to re-evaluate one of the most controversial episodes in American history: the Iraq war. After a generation of use and abuse, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling a vote to repeal the Iraq AUMF, ...

Playbook Deep Dive episodes:

03.17.2023 What Iran and China stand to gain from an Iraq AUMF repeal On Thursday, the Senate began to re-evaluate one of the most controversial episodes in American history: the Iraq war. After a generation of use and abuse, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is calling a vote to repeal the Iraq AUMF, ...
03.10.2023 AI is advancing faster than Congress. Here’s why that’s a bug Last November, when the artificial intelligence platform ChatGPT launched, an old science fiction question suddenly became very real: How long until the machines are smarter than the humans? It marked the beginning of a new era in technology – one ...
03.03.2023 Finnish Ambassador: Here’s the right way to poke the Russian bear The war in Ukraine is just over one year old. There is widespread talk of a major spring offensive from both sides. War in Europe, once unthinkable, is now the new normal. But for one nation on Russia’s northern border, ...
02.24.2023 How to investigate the president, his predecessor & keep your job Until last month, Anthony Coley was Director of Public Affairs at the Justice Department and a Senior Adviser to Attorney General Merrick Garland. Coley was in the middle of some of the most extraordinary episodes at DOJ over the last ...
02.17.2023 What experts get wrong about Nikki Haley’s run Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, and President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, is running for president. But not everyone on the right is impressed. In a brutal Valentine’s Day editorial, The Wall Street Journal said ...
02.10.2023 Have China hawks flown the coop? In Washington, there is now a bipartisan consensus around being tough on China. This was happening even before the Chinese sent a spy balloon drifting across the United States. Last month, by a vote of 365-65, the House created a ...
02.03.2023 Why Kevin McCarthy thinks he’s already won A small group of longtime Kevin McCarthy aides who decamped downtown to lobby are suddenly some of the most influential and sought-after people in Washington. They remain intensely loyal to the new speaker and serve as crucial sources of insight ...
01.27.2023 Behind the RNC's anti-Trump revolt After losing both chambers of Congress during Trump’s presidency and after waging a disappointing campaign to recapture them in 2022, the Republican Party is having a lot of intra-party feuds. This week, the post-election search for new leadership moved to ...
01.20.2023 The people of New Hampshire vs. Joe Biden What do you do when you are one of the guardians of your state’s most precious political and cultural institution — the very thing that defines New Hampshire — and the president you love and the party you’ve served your ...
01.13.2023 The strategist who didn't believe in the red wave In off-the-record conversations and private emails, AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer argued that the pundits focusing exclusively on the fundamentals of the race — Biden’s approval rating and the dismal economic indicators — were missing the bigger picture. Yes, presidents ...
01.06.2023 The unauthorized history of the House Freedom Caucus In late 2014, Rep. John Fleming (R-La.) was traveling back to Louisiana with his wife when he had an idea: a plan to empower arch-conservatives to push back against their Leadership, led by then-Speaker of the House John Boehner. Soon ...
12.23.2022 The anti-McCarthy faction teases a shadow speaker Rep. Bob Good (R-Va.) and his allies are trying to end Kevin McCarthy’s reign as leader of the House Republicans. Good is one of five Republicans in the far-right Freedom Caucus vowing to block McCarthy’s path to the 218 votes ...
12.16.2022 Will the fusion breakthrough ignite a Congressional chain reaction? Department of Energy announced a breakthrough in the decades-long quest to recreate on Earth the process that powers the Sun: nuclear fusion. To simplify slightly, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California recently fired a bunch of lasers ...
12.09.2022 Gov. Chris Sununu surveys the field Gov. Chris Sununu was recently re-elected to his fourth term in office. The Republican governor has been positioning himself for the 2024 presidential primaries for a while now. Before Election Day, there were a lot of reasons to be skeptical ...
12.02.2022 True or false: Colorado is a swing state Michael Bennet is the senior Democratic senator from Colorado, a famously purple state. In the weeks leading up to the 2022 midterms, Colorado seemed to be a place where Republicans might actually flip a few seats. But as it turned ...
11.18.2022 Sen. Markey vs. Musk’s Twitter: The freed bird might get its wings clipped There are some members of Congress who have famously struggled to understand the online world. Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) prides himself on not only understanding the internet, but also for passing some of the key legislation that he likes to ...
11.11.2022 How to flip a GOP stronghold: be a normal politician Why were Democrats seemingly able to by and large defy history and avoid a catastrophic result in the midterms? Across the country, Democrats successfully defended seats that Republicans had confidently expected to pick up, while also adding wins in gubernatorial ...
11.04.2022 Democrats' 'optimistic apostle' offers hope for the midterms Simon Rosenberg is the head of the progressive think tank NDN, and he has a message for jittery Democrats on the eve of the midterms: cheer up! This week on the Playbook Deep Dive podcast we sit down with the ...
10.28.2022 The quarter-billion dollar PAC driving a red wave Dan Conston is the president of the Congressional Leadership Fund, the super PAC aligned with Rep. Kevin McCarthy with the singular mission of making the California Republican Speaker of the House. Most forecasts suggest that Conston and CLF are on ...
10.21.2022 Weaponized (un)truths: Has the GOP ‘lost its mind’? Robert Draper's "Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind" focuses exclusively on the GOP during the crucial 18-month period after January 6 and vastly adds to our understanding of the Trump era. Far-right representatives Paul Gosar, ...
10.14.2022 How we predict elections Scott Bland is POLITICO’s national politics editor and leading all of POLITICO’s 2022 midterm coverage. To do it, he has a team of about 15 reporters around the country following campaigns. Despite the cooling temperatures, this is when people like ...
10.07.2022 Dream job disappointment: Testifying against Trump Sarah Matthews has a political resume similar to a lot of conservatives her age. At Kent State, she joined the College Republicans and made her first pilgrimage to the annual CPAC conference in Washington. Matthews interned on Capitol Hill for ...
09.30.2022 Giorgia Meloni's Hard Right Playbook Last Sunday, Italians voted for the most right-wing government since Benito Mussolini. The controversial politician leading the winning coalition, Giorgia Meloni, will become Italy's first female prime minister. Meloni has become a darling of sorts for many Republicans in America, ...
09.23.2022 The untold story of Trump's botched impeachments It’s hard to imagine a political event that was covered more intensively in real time than Trump’s two impeachments. But only now, 18 months after the Senate acquitted Trump a second time, we are learning crucial new details about what ...
09.16.2022 The Bitter End to democracy? Hindsight is 20/20. UCLA political scientists Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch and Vanderbilt’s John Sides argue that political party identity has become increasingly “calcified” in surprising new ways. Their latest book,“The Bitter End,” describes both the long-term trends and short-term shocks that shaped ...
09.09.2022 Kara Swisher knows when to fold ‘em Kara Swisher has hosted the annual Code Conference for the last twenty years. Recently she announced that this was her final year organizing and running the event, which concluded on Thursday in Los Angeles. At the final big panel on ...
08.26.2022 When Senator Leahy laughed with Raul Castro On Tuesday, Leahy, who is retiring this year after representing Vermont in the Senate since 1975, released “The Road Taken,” an engrossing memoir that covers his long career, from his politically fraught vote against the Vietnam War to his account ...
08.19.2022 Ron Klain says ‘season of substance’ could save Dems The White House suddenly has a lot to brag about. And the president’s aides, led by chief of staff Ron Klain, are reaching deep into the 20th century to make the case that Joe Biden is a transformational president with ...
08.12.2022 Byrd nerds: Why the byzantine process of budget reconciliation exists and how it actually works This week the Senate passed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 using the process known as budget reconciliation. The upside? No filibuster is allowed. You only need a majority to approve a reconciliation bill. And the downside? There are strict ...
08.05.2022 Biden’s big bill: Two GOP strategists on how to kill it The biggest remaining obstacle for the Democrats is now Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough, who will continue to host Democratic and Republican aides behind closed doors today (no press allowed) to scrub the reconciliation bill for potential violations of the Byrd ...
07.29.2022 Legalizing the trip: One ‘shroom advocate’s playbook Here’s something about Washington, D.C. that even a lot of people who live here don’t know: Psychedelic mushrooms are basically legal. In 2020 voters approved a ballot initiative that made growing, purchasing, and distributing mushrooms the lowest law enforcement priority ...
07.22.2022 He was right about inflation. Biden wasn’t. Larry Summers on what’s coming next Ryan caught up with the former treasury secretary — and thorn in the side of Biden White House economists — Larry Summers on the sidelines of the Aspen Security Forum for a wide-ranging interview about last 18 months of economic ...
07.15.2022 LA wants to recall its most progressive prosecutor. Inside the DA’s hostile office THE PLAYBOOK INTERVIEW: GEORGE GASCÓN — Gascón was elected district attorney of Los Angeles County in November 2020 with 54% of the vote. “I won handsomely,” he reminisced Wednesday during a 90-minute conversation at the Hall of Justice in downtown ...
07.01.2022 Why haven’t there been more Cassidy Hutchinsons? The question of why so few Republicans have stepped forward to testify about what they heard and saw in the Trump White House, is very much at the heart of much of the House Jan. 6 committee’s work — and ...
06.24.2022 New Jan. 6 witness: Trump had mystery call with Putin If documentary filmmaker Alex Holder’s memory is accurate, Donald Trump was on the phone with Vladimir Putin just minutes after the news broke that the Russian president had dismissed Trump’s Hunter Biden allegations. Holder began filming former President Donald Trump ...
06.17.2022 Director’s cut: What else did Judge Luttig have to say about Jan. 6 in his interview J. Michael Luttig is the former federal appeals court judge who advised Vice President Mike Pence that the VP had no authority to reject electors on Jan. 6. Back in February, Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza spent four hours interviewing Luttig ...
06.10.2022 He defied Trump and still survived a GOP primary This week in the GOP primary for South Dakota’s at-large district, Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.) defeated a challenger from his right who claimed he wasn’t aligned closely enough with former President Donald Trump, even though Johnson agrees with Trump on ...
06.03.2022 Will the GOP control Congress for the next decade? There’s at least a few people in the Democratic establishment who have hope for the midterms. They’re the redistricting experts, people like Kelly Burton. She’s a long-time political operative and the president of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, an organization ...
05.27.2022 Will ‘extremism’ fracture the GOP? Cheney vs. Trump in Wyoming Trump-backed candidates have lost recently in Georgia, Nebraska, North Carolina and Idaho. The biggest caveat about how the lessons of other states might apply in Wyoming is that in states where the Trump candidate lost, the non-Trump candidate was not ...
05.20.2022 The GOP rancher trying to save Idaho from the far right For this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive, we sat down with Jennifer Ellis at her cattle ranch in eastern Idaho to understand how the state’s GOP establishment delivered a stinging rebuke to Trumpism.
05.13.2022 'He absolutely betrayed me': Steve Schmidt tells all about John McCain This week on “Playbook Deep Dive,” we sat down over Zoom with Steve Schmidt, the architect of the late Sen. John McCain’s 2008 presidential run, to hear what amounts to an untold chapter of that exhaustively chronicled campaign. It’s a ...
05.06.2022 Lifting the curtain on SCOTUS with a POLITICO reporter who broke the Roe story This week on Playbook Deep Dive, POLITICO’s Peter Canellos talks with our own Josh Gerstein, who broke this week’s massive news that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has drafted an opinion to overturn Roe v. Wade. Peter and Josh nerd ...
04.29.2022 Haddad dishes on more than brunch The White House Correspondents’ Dinner is back for the first time since 2019. Journalists, A-list celebrities and Washington’s power players will pack the cavernous ballroom at the Washington Hilton. That means brunch is back too. On this week’s episode, Playbook ...
04.22.2022 ‘You only win if you fight:' Will Gallego unseat Sinema? This week Playbook co-author Ryan Lizza is in Arizona to dig into a few big plotlines ahead of this year’s elections. Trump narrowly lost the state in 2020, Senator Mark Kelly – the Democratic incumbent – is one of the ...
04.15.2022 Biden’s pollster on how to ‘not get our a---- kicked’ in midterms In the coming weeks and months, the Playbook team will be out covering the key districts and states that will decide the outcome of the midterm elections. This week, co-author Ryan Lizza was in Las Vegas to interview John Anzalone, ...
04.08.2022 Ro Khanna had some BBB advice for the president. Biden called it ‘homicide.’ Congressman Ro Khanna is one of the most influential progressives inside the house democratic caucus. He represents California’s 17th district – a large chunk of Silicon Valley. It’s wealthy, influential and home to companies like Apple, Intel, and Cisco Systems. ...
04.01.2022 Think you understand suburban voters? Doug Sosnik has a 14-page memo betting otherwise. Doug Sosnik is a man whose deep dive political memos are considered essential reading in Washington. He's best known as a former senior adviser to then-President Bill Clinton. His latest memo dissects the new center of political power in America ...
03.25.2022 'It's war and the enemy gets a vote’: The man advising Blinken When you look at the major diplomatic events of the last thirty years, Derek Chollet has experienced them all. He’s worked with legends like James Baker, Strobe Talbott and Richard Holbrooke and served in some of the highest echelons of ...
03.18.2022 Why a centrist Democrat is ditching Congress Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) pioneered the playbook that helped Democrats flip the House in 2018. Less than four years later, she announced her retirement. Her experience has raised alarms about the Democratic Party going forward. Today, Playbook co-author Rachael Bade ...
03.11.2022 The man fighting for Ukraine in DC Even as President Joe Biden has emphasized that the U.S. and NATO do not want to engage with Russia militarily, Congress has pushed the administration to take a hard stance against Russia through unprecedented financial and economic sanctions. In recent ...

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