Slow Boring

It was a lot of fun to chat with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett, mostly about American students’ falling test scores and the ways that post-Obama Democrats have gotten away from talking about the core function of the K-12 school system. We were going to shift gears into a more expansive conversation but tech woes stymied us.

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Noah Smith is probably the number one source of articles that hit my feed where I think “damn, I wish I’d written that.”

So it was great to grab a chance to sit down and chat with him for almost 90 minutes today. We started out talking about the rising importance of batteries and electric motors, the Biden administration’s efforts to keep America in the game with China on this, and how Trump is squandering it. I think we see largely eye to eye here that Trump is being badly shortsighted and also that Democrats erred by getting this too mixed up with climate politics in a way that was ultimately politically counterproductive.

Then we get into a lot of politics stuff, our trajectories growing up with Bush-era politics, the consequences of the unexpectedly rapid success of the gay marriage cause, the perils of progressive racial politics and more.

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Thanks to everyone who tuned in for my live video with Katelyn Jetelina! She writes the Your Local Epidemiologist newsletter which is a great source of information and advice related to all things infectious disease.

We covered a lot of good stuff including some of the scientific and public policy aspects of the ongoing H5N1 bird flu epidemic, and especially RFK Jr.’s confirmation hearings. I thought it was a great intersection of our interests and I learned a lot.

Transcript is available below for paid members.

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Thanks for everyone who joined yesterday’s live interview with Rep. Ritchie Torres, I thought it was a fascinating discussion.

Torres is young, he’s dynamic, and he has a pretty safe blue seat. He could take the path of least resistance and go along to get along. But he’s also ambitious enough to be thinking about the future and the larger picture and to see that the course Democrats have been on isn’t good enough to reliably contest tough races or to bring growth and opportunity to places like New York. He’s got thoughts on crime, immigration enforcement, Israel, housing, abundance, mass transit and much more.

I sat down at around 11pm Eastern time yesterday with my friend Brian Beutler of Off Message to record a special live episode of our podcast Politix and thought I would make it our official content for this morning.

We were of course dealing with some uncertainty about the election outcome but as you’ll see the assumption pretty swiftly turns to a Kamala Harris loss and a potentially large GOP gain in the senate. We didn’t talk much about the House where I think the outcome remains pretty significantly up in the air. I apologize that I messed up my microphone for the beginning of this and the audio doesn’t sound very good, but I promise that midway through I figured out how to do it correctly.

The main topic of discussion here is less “what went wrong” with the campaign qua campaign than what went wrong with Democrats in terms of big picture marketing across large swathes of the country. Brian is focused more on questions of media infrastructure, while I think the product itself needs to be rethought in a meaningful way.

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We talked for 75 minutes but the upshot is just that the election is close.

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.slowboring.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.slowboring.com/subscribe