#20 Presidential Debate Extravaganza!
The Road to Now
Benjamin Sawyer
4.8 • 629 Ratings
🗓️ 19 September 2016
⏱️ 66 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The first Presidential debate of 2016 is fast approaching, and Bob & Ben have put together a Debate Extravaganza to help you get ready for this highly anticipated showdown!
Never before has The Road to Now offered so many brilliant minds in a single episode! Bob and Ben begin by going through some of the most important moments in the history of Presidential debates since 1960, when John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon became the first candidates to debate live on television. Bob and Ben then hand the microphone to RTN favorites Matt Negrin and Alexander Trowbridge of Bloomberg Politics for an outstanding piece on the origins of the "spin room" and the role it plays in modern debates, featuring interviews with Utah Congressman Jason Chaffetz and With All Due Respect's Mark Halperin. Our extravaganza concludes with a tremendous conversation with The Washington Post's Chris Cilliza about the 2016 debates and what strategies may be best for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
You're probably thinking "Matt Negrin and Alex Trowbridge…. haven't I heard of those guys before? Well of course you have! They're the hosts of Path to the Present, a podcast within a podcast, brought to you by the podcast Double Down and Out, brought to you by Double Down (still available on Amazon and still kind of relevant), featuring The Road Less Traveled, a micropodcast featuring deleted scenes from The Road to Now. They've also joined our team as official contributors to The Road to Now, and we couldn't be more excited! (Trust us, this will all make sense once you listen to the episode!)
For more on The Road to Now: www.theroadtonow.com
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm Ben Sawyer. |
| 0:04.4 | I'm Bob Crawford and welcome to the Road to Now's Debate Extravaganza 2016. |
| 0:10.0 | That's right. We are here and as you all know the moment we've all been waiting for is coming |
| 0:15.6 | up next week on Monday, May 26th, Clinton and Trump are going to go at it for the first time. |
| 0:21.5 | We're going to see what's coming. |
| 0:22.7 | And I think everyone's excited about this in a weird way. |
| 0:27.9 | Yeah, I think it's been a wacky enough election cycle that we feel like anything could happen. |
| 0:34.1 | You know, I mean, there are professional wrestling analogies at play here. And I, you know, |
| 0:41.1 | I could see Hillary pulling out some salt and throwing it in Donald Trump's eye. Perhaps Katrina |
| 0:47.5 | Pearson will appear from the crowd and like, you know, bash Hillary over the head with a chair. |
| 0:53.1 | Anything could happen in this debate. |
| 0:55.6 | But more likely it's going to be, well, hopefully it'll be a battle of ideas. |
| 1:00.3 | Hopefully so. |
| 1:01.1 | That's what we want from every debate. |
| 1:02.3 | Or is it, you know? |
| 1:03.2 | It's the weird point where we want to hear about ideas. |
| 1:07.9 | But I think that the reason I'm getting, I'm getting already getting |
| 1:11.6 | Facebook invites for events to watch the debates with my friends might not be because we're |
| 1:17.4 | expecting for their ideas to be at the center of the discussion. And the wrestling analogy that |
| 1:23.2 | Bob brought up brings me to a point where we should introduce the whole episode. |
| 1:27.8 | This is not going to be a traditional interview. |
| 1:30.1 | We have multiple segments. |
... |
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