It s Mental Health Awareness Month, and on this episode of The Psychology of Your 20s, we re taking a vulnerable look at why mental health is so hard to talk about. This week s guest is Michelle Obama, a former first lady and current first lady of the United States.
00:31:39.040And people that don't care about politics or think they, you know, might or might not be interested, this paints an unbelievably accurate picture of this race, this 107-day race in particular.
00:31:51.360Of course, you go a little bit earlier to the debate on June 27th.
00:31:55.660But as it relates to the issue of some of the animus that you express, as it relates to what is perceived and or is accurate about undermining Kamala Harris, who was a very loyal vice president.
00:32:07.720And you say that in the book, that she really went to great lengths to be a loyal representative of this administration.
00:32:16.200And that Biden primarily turned the page on any animus from the early election primary, but Jill Biden may not have, you suggest.
00:32:36.800And, you know, a lot of people, close aides said that they didn't have a very warm relationship throughout her time at the White House.
00:32:44.680That sort of bled, you know, into this process and what was happening.
00:32:50.680But yeah, a really kind of contentious relationship.
00:32:53.460He's still trying, Joe Biden is still trying to do cleanup from perhaps the, before the Trump-Biden debate, the biggest knockout punch I'd ever seen in a debate, which was Kamala Harris hitting him on busing, which is why Jill Biden hates her.
00:33:07.860One of the reasons that Jill Biden hates her.
00:33:09.540Last week, Biden did his first interview, or did his first speech since he left the presidency, gets an award.
00:33:18.140And he talks about moving to Wilmington when he's a little kid.
00:33:21.820And he sees a bus full of black children go by, and he uses the term, quote-unquote, colored kids.
00:33:28.900He says what we used to call colored kids.
00:33:31.080And, like, I mean, we're all roughly the same generation.
00:33:33.720Nobody has said that in our lifetimes.
00:33:37.740But when you listen to the rest of the story that he's telling, he's saying, I asked my mom, why aren't these kids going to school with me?
00:33:43.800And she says, because black children are not allowed to go to school with white children in Delaware.
00:33:50.280But decades later, Joe Biden was trying legislatively to make sure that black kids couldn't go to school with white kids.
00:33:58.680So, I mean, it's like he's still trying to do cleanup duty from what happened on a debate stage with her in 2019.
00:34:04.480And, of course, stumbles all over himself in doing it.
00:34:07.540All right, so we move forward as we stumble forward in figurative sense, and we fast-forward the decision to step down.
00:34:15.240And you paint this picture minute by minute, quite literally, minute by minute, the inside of the conversations, which is remarkable.
00:34:23.960I still, back to everyone being wired, the conversations between the president and the vice president.
00:34:28.840The vice president saying, are you sure, Mr. President, sort of maintaining that loyalty and firm footing.
00:34:34.600And then immediately organizing, independent, it seems, of her in another room, her sort of-
00:35:28.480And let me just interrupt you there for one second, which is, we asked one of our sources, we said, what are the odds that all of these people are meeting in the pool house, next to the pool, at the vice president's residence?
00:35:49.920Like, we're, like, what are the chances that they're there and she doesn't know what, and the person who talked to us said, you think there's anybody in the vice president's pool house?
00:35:59.720The vice president doesn't know exactly what they're doing.
00:57:02.760But Susie is somebody who has been involved in politics for her entire career, and she is in her, like, mid-60s now.
00:57:10.820And she, like, got her first job in the White House, in the Reagan White House, like, you know, kind of early in life, worked at the Labor Department for him, and then went to Florida and worked for mayors in, you know, Jacksonville, right?
00:57:23.280And, like, really sort of got to understand politics from the ground up, too.
00:57:45.940And so Lewandowski comes in, and he ran the 16 campaign for Trump until he got booted from that, you know, sort of toward the end of the primary.
00:57:54.420And he comes in, and he does what everyone does in Trump world, which is when they sense a little blood in the water, and Harris is rising in the polls, and Trump's falling back a little bit.
00:58:04.320And it's—at this moment in, like, September, even into early October, it's basically a dead heat.
00:58:50.140And now, all of a sudden, he brings in the old pro to sort of stress test his old buddy Lewandowski that's going to come in and he's going to look under the tires.
00:58:59.760Because one of the vulnerabilities and one of the things Trump doesn't like you describe in your book is wasteful spending, profligacy.
00:59:06.780And it appeared, at least, to Lewandowski and some of the critics out there, that Lasavidas had banked a little too much.
00:59:26.320But this is the stuff Corey Lewandowski is, you know, using against Lasavidas and against Susie, to some extent.
00:59:33.600Like, the argument that Lewandowski is making to Trump is the reason that you are having trouble right now politically, the reason that Kamala Harris is rising, you're falling, is that these guys are mismanaging your campaign.
00:59:43.520And this—and Trump wants—that's the kind of thing that usually gets Trump to act.
00:59:47.820And Susie and Chris go to Trump in Mar-a-Lago, unbeknownst to Corey, and they sit down with him, and they lay out what all the campaign spending is.
00:59:55.560And I think they lay out a little bit of who Corey is.
00:59:57.980And they all get on Trump Force One, and Trump calls Corey over, and just—I mean, like a schoolboy, he's, like, at one point, like, kind of kneeling at the table.
01:00:08.060I mean, you literally describe him kneeling at the table.
01:00:10.980And Trump, you know, looks at Lewandowski, and he points to Susie and Chris, and he goes, they're in charge.
01:00:51.040And he shows, as you suggest in the book, a maturity in terms of the discipline of the campaign that may not have been as present in his first campaign.
01:01:23.780He's doing that with these campaign folks.
01:01:25.980And you even see it in the policies that he chooses, where his aides are giving him strong advice on, say, a national abortion ban, where they say, they have to do a slideshow for him.
01:01:37.640And they're like, here's what the abortion laws are in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and these swing states.
01:01:43.240And if you do a national abortion ban, you're taking abortion rights away from women in those states.
01:01:48.240But if you don't support it, their rights stay the same.
01:01:52.040And therefore, you're taking it off the table as an issue in those states, or at least for a lot of the voters, right?
01:01:56.960So you see him kind of learning from the last time.
01:02:00.120He supports early voting in this election, which he doesn't believe in, which he's going to try to take away now that he's president.
01:02:07.080But he is told you get to bank the vote.
01:02:10.700So again, this money thing, it's like once you have a vote in early, you don't have to spend money to convince that voter anymore.
01:02:17.220So you describe, and as we move further into the book, we have this dialectic between the Harris campaign and the Biden campaign.
01:02:25.260And this notion around change, obviously, every election is about change or allegedly every election is about change.
01:02:42.640You describe Trump showing a little bit, I'm not going as far as sister shoulder moment, but shows some dexterity, a willingness to sort of shift in terms of policy principles on the national abortion brand, kind of break with some of the mainstream of his party, more of the conservative elements of his party.
01:02:59.060But Harris had a more difficult time in that space.
01:03:02.720You describe a moment in time that was indelible for many people.
01:03:07.100And that was her appearance on The View.
01:03:35.560She was supposed to say that, but, and I know you know this more than anyone, she was supposed to pivot forward and say, but, you know, the future is going to look a lot different.
01:03:45.400And so when she says it, her aides are all like, what?
01:03:53.640But in that moment, the Trump campaign was looking for something, in her words, to kind of make that point, to say, in a change election, she is exactly what we just had.
01:04:15.140But they put out an ad essentially saying, no, it's going to be exactly a rubber stamp of more of the same.
01:04:21.920And this is at a time when the right track, wrong track of the country was way off and all the inflation scars and including, well, I mean, across the spectrum, people really were looking for fundamental change.
01:04:34.440And what a weird spot for her to be in because, you know, she was always trying to prove that she was a loyalist.
01:04:48.700And I think the outcome of the election may suggest that she did that in her own peril, own electoral peril.
01:04:54.920And with Joe Biden, pardon me, Governor, with President Biden breathing down her neck over and over and over again, saying, no daylight, kid.
01:05:22.820I don't even play a good one as a governor trying to be objective.
01:05:25.940But what the hell are you supposed to do?
01:05:27.640The minute she deviates from him, they'll pounce and they'll show all the videos of her shaking her head, standing behind them at the podium when President Biden makes an announcement.
01:05:37.900And presumably they thought, and I say they, because David Plouffe now appears in the picture, an old hand, obviously one of Obama's principal consultants and campaign strategists.
01:05:50.400They merged with Jen O'Malley Dillon, who was running the Biden campaign.
01:06:08.440She seems to be the personification of change.
01:06:10.900They can make that case maybe without even making the case that it's imbued.
01:06:14.780But that's what they did with Obama in 2008, right?
01:06:17.860In 2008, which was also a change election, and George W. Bush was deeply unpopular, and there was a financial crisis in the middle of that campaign.
01:06:27.260And they couldn't have known that when they started with Obama as change.
01:06:31.080But they knew Barack Obama represents physical change.
01:06:36.500They don't ever have to talk about his skin color, right?
01:06:38.880They don't have to talk about his name.
01:06:40.700They know he, that was their 2008 campaign.
01:06:43.680This is 2024, and you have the same people running a campaign with the same concept here that people are going to look at her and say, well, that's the change I'm looking for.
01:06:54.980Like, it's just, it's as if they didn't watch the last 16 years of politics or so, and they're running cookie-cutter campaigns that rely on, like, sort of this crazy, like, sort of data analysis as your strategy.
01:07:10.300And the thing that I always come back to as emblematic, not necessarily causal, is the trans ad that was run against Harris.
01:07:17.600So let's talk about that, because you just brought up the issue of data, and it plays a big role in your book.
01:07:31.320I mean, you sort of lay out how analytical this campaign was and the utilization of this billion and a half dollars, the $2 billion that was the overall spend in this campaign, and how those resources were put to work.
01:07:44.760And it was a data, to your point, data-driven campaign, and decisions were made or not made on that basis.
01:07:53.200And interesting, I had an interesting Oval Office conversation, at least with the chief of staff, while I was waiting to see President Trump in the Oval Office with Las Avidas, and we talked about this ad.
01:08:04.600I think you should tell that story now.
01:08:05.920And they lay out what they perceived as a weakness, and they asked me, as someone from California, intimately familiar with some of the ongoing of the campaign, why didn't she respond more forcefully?
01:08:25.900And in your book, you answer that question.
01:08:29.860You pose it and answer it by saying, well, the data bared out.
01:09:44.700But the data, the data, the data says, says the trans ad is not effective against Harris.
01:09:51.480And even more than that, they're, they test their responses with focus groups and decide that none of the responses are effective.
01:09:59.460And like, I don't think you have to be a political genius to, I mean, I'm sure you watched that ad the first time watching the World Series or a football game or whatever.
01:10:08.060And your jaw dropped and you were like, wow.
01:10:32.600He's attacking the vice president for a position that he was allowed to advance as president.
01:10:38.000So you had an opportunity to push back there, but also we started doing our own research because this was at CDCR in the state of California.
01:10:44.900What's the origin story of this policy?
01:13:55.520It's the people that, like, come out of that learning, like, oh, it must have been this.
01:13:59.160I don't think if you talked to David Plouffe, he would tell you Barack Obama was president of the United States because David Plouffe's a genius.
01:14:04.800And I'm not saying David Plouffe is a genius.
01:14:07.860So, like, I mean, but I do think that you come down a generation or two and the people that worked on that campaign or around it kind of draw some of the wrong lessons.
01:14:16.820I mean, I would revere, though, that insight they would have.
01:14:19.880And as a candidate, I would look to the, I would, and you would be remarkably deferential.
01:14:24.180I mean, and look, she had 107 days, this thing.
01:14:27.080And by the way, I thought, and I humbly submit, I thought she won or ran under the circumstances, a pretty remarkable campaign.
01:14:35.120But you paint a few circumstances that test that theory.
01:14:38.720And one of them, as we move towards 270 and getting near page 268, the conclusion of your book, 270 electoral votes I'm referring to, is Texas.
01:15:54.720We find out in this book, we do reporting, they move the, they create this entire rally to be in Texas on Friday night because they want to be within striking distance of Joe Rogan's podcast.
01:16:18.080And so they are in this back and forth with his people.
01:16:21.580When do we go when a huge back and forth, they finally say they're, they're trying to, to arrange one date.
01:16:32.420And finally, this is at the end of like a huge back and forth.
01:16:37.020And they finally come to the conclusion that, you know, he is taking a personal day.
01:16:44.180So Rogan tells the Harris campaign, or his folks, according to your sources, in your book, he's not available that Friday because he has a personal day.
01:18:30.160But once they committed to it, they committed to it.
01:18:32.080So much so that they literally put her in Texas in October in the stretch run of the campaign for a rally, you know, and said that it had to do something with abortion rights.
01:18:41.460You know, like, oh, well, we can do an abortion rights rally anywhere.
01:19:03.920But the fact that they made this entire rally, you know, to try to get this done when it wasn't already, like, signed, sealed, and delivered is, it's kind of jaw-dropping.
01:19:18.020And, you know, the idea and the people can go to what happened, why did she lose?
01:19:22.020Was it the view, the unwillingness to separate from someone that was difficult to separate from because he didn't want her to separate and she wanted to express loyalty?
01:20:05.980And so you describe those two scenes of Tim Walz getting alerted that they've lost, but also Kamala Harris being told that she's not going to win.
01:20:18.640They had prepared in every way, shape, or form, confident.
01:20:46.600There was, there was something different happening.
01:20:49.060That said, I mean, in hindsight, we can look back and we can make a different argument because we're all experts and geniuses in hindsight.
01:20:55.600But going into election night, that was 60-40.
01:21:31.100His, his team had told him, if you hit a certain threshold nationally, right, you get whatever the number was, 65 million votes nationally, you're president.
01:22:48.100Even though their final tally, their final projection of the race had her losing.
01:22:52.840And so that leads to our conclusion, the epilogue.
01:23:02.840And what's remarkable, the epilogue is how contemporary it is to this moment we're actually sitting in, which suggests this thing either keeps writing itself or you just quite literally finished this book.
01:23:14.260Um, the lessons learned, the word gaslighting came up in this book over and over and over again, um, and how the American people may have felt.
01:23:22.500And I know there's other books being written in this space and, uh, how people feel like, you know, I'm, I'm among, I imagine I'm among them.
01:23:29.980That people were not expressive enough about where, uh, Joe Biden was in terms of what was perceived or real as it relates to his physical health or cognitive decline.
01:23:40.420And I, of course, never experienced any of that quite literally.
01:23:43.480So I would have been lying if I played to that, except one event, which you reference in the book.
01:23:48.100And that's the fundraiser, uh, the infamous George Clooney fundraiser, where it was clear, uh, and that for me, jet lag was as easy a way to describe that as anything else.
01:23:57.580But it was clear that something was a little bit off or different, but this notion of gaslighting the campaign from an analytics perspective and, and, and, and the sense that, and having conversations, particularly, you know, we had the vice president, uh, or vice president nominee, governor Walsh on this podcast.
01:25:14.620Uh, but, but what are the lessons learned?
01:25:17.700I mean, honestly, when you look at this, do you, I mean, the Democratic Party, um, right now I've had strong opinions about where I think our party is right now in terms of just truth and trust.
01:25:27.120This sense that we weren't being truthful, that that's a perception that we were, that we were gaslighting the American people.
01:25:32.280They don't trust us on issues and policies and the ability to deliver.
01:25:35.940Um, and if you're not winning on truth and trust, that's a brand that, as I've said, and I've gotten a lot of blowback for it, is a bit toxic at the moment, at the moment.
01:25:43.760Uh, but what do you think this moment represents and, and do you think it's important for folks like me that are current public servants that represent, uh, portions of the Democratic Party to really take this book and read it and reread it and take what lessons from it?
01:26:00.780Yeah, I mean, we write these books for people to gain knowledge about what happened.
01:26:05.180But it's also a playbook about going forward and what Democrats and Republicans can learn.
01:26:10.380And one of the things I think they think is that, I mean, first of all, there needs to be some accountability, right?
01:26:17.060Like someone, either President Biden or someone close to him has to come out and say, look, this is what happened.
01:26:23.500Because the Democratic Party can't move forward until people address what has actually happened.
01:26:30.240And voters, to your point, don't trust the Democratic Party right now.
01:26:34.160I mean, I think a lot of people think that the Republican Party obviously is, is gaslighting the American people right now, too.
01:26:40.740But let's have a discussion about what happened in this past election.
01:26:44.740And then there needs to be some accountability on where the party goes from here and speaking to voters and actually connecting to voters.
01:26:53.140So many of these people who've supported Trump used to be traditional Democrats.
01:27:01.220Look, I think it's fundamentally one of the reasons I'm doing this podcast is that I'm concerned that we're taking the wrong lessons or not even absorbing any lesson from these elections.
01:27:11.020Including, by the way, just the anomaly that was a COVID election.
01:27:15.400It's one thing to take away the wrong lessons in a midterm.
01:27:17.640It's another to look at these general elections and not necessarily absorb a deeper understanding of what played an outsized role and what didn't structurally and organizationally.
01:27:28.020So that's episode two of this podcast.
01:27:30.200We'll talk about our 2020 book, Lucky, that was largely ignored.
01:27:35.080It did not sell as well as this one has.
01:27:37.340Which is the point you were making that it was a lucky outcome.
01:27:39.640There was a pandemic in the middle of that election and the president of the United States went out, President Trump, to a podium and said things that were untrue, that were wild, that underestimated the physical, you know, the psychological and physical toll of the disease and undermined himself a lot.
01:27:57.700While Joe Biden was, the way Republicans would say, is hiding in his basement, but largely was off the campaign trail, right?
01:28:04.440And then he wins that election by a very narrow margin.
01:28:08.440And I think the Democratic response to it was, we crushed Trump, he's gone.
01:28:12.440And the Trump response was, they barely beat me and I'm coming back.
01:28:16.840And so, you know, I think that when you say that Democrats have lost trust, it's not just that they've lost the trust of Republicans and independents.
01:28:24.740If you look at the polling, they've lost the trust of a lot of Democrats, too.
01:28:28.500And the first thing for any party is to kind of rebuild its trust among its own and then sort of branch out.
01:28:35.140And I mean, I'm curious to see what the 2028 candidates do.
01:28:38.640And maybe you will shed some light on this or know some people who might.
01:28:42.160What they're going to do to modernize the Democratic argument for what the country should look like five years from now, 10 years from now.
01:28:48.300What are you doing with entitlement programs?
01:28:55.340No, we haven't. And I think what Ezra Klein did, you know, his book Abundance, interesting, sort of, you know, it's very self-critical, but it is a very critical look at sort of progressive governance and accountability that also needs to be, you know, laid at the hands of all of us in these, quote unquote, blue states and the ability to deliver big things in a way that's timely and efficient.
01:29:22.180Look, this book is timely, a remarkably efficient use of 263 plus pages.
01:29:31.520And I encourage anyone, whether you like politics, don't like politics, but you're just interested or want to know what world we're living in in the context of the political life and leanings, this is a must-read fight.
01:29:44.120Amy, Jonathan, thank you for being here.
01:31:05.100I was so pleased to have Tim here, and he was the only exception, unsurprisingly, because he could regale us to a little bit of the insight of being out on the campaign trail and what it was like and how exhilarating it was for him, which I also love, too, that he loved being out there.
01:31:20.340That was absorbing, I think, to all of us.
01:31:22.820There's a joy, and he felt that joy and that energy, and I think that was the disconnect.
01:31:26.600And so understanding that and minding that gap between performance and perception, where we are and where we're going, where the American people are, and where we are as a party, what is our party, who are our leaders?