Welcome to Words Matter. I'm Elise Jordan along with Steve Schmidt. Our goal is to promote

objective reality. As a wise man once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinion,

not their own facts. Words have power, and words have consequences.

As the end of the year approaches, we thought it would be a good idea to go back and look

at some of the books we selected for the Words Matter Audible Library. Just so you could get a

sense of our thinking in brief of why we felt that each specific title was important in 2018.

And hopefully, if you didn't check it out the first time, you can go back and catch up and

follow along with the Words Matter Audible Library. Joining me today is our executive producer

and my sometime co-host Adam Levine. Adam also served in the White House for President George W. Bush.

He was also a senior producer at NBC News and began his career with the late great Daniel Patrick

Moynihan. Great to be here Elise. We've had a great 2018 launching Words Matter and we've had so

much fun launching the Words Matter Audible Library. And in our first season, we've tried to answer

the question, how did we get here? And we chose a selection of books that we felt held illuminate

the path to this perilous political moment. And so let's just talk about some of the titles that

we focused on this year at Words Matter and why we found the book to be important.

To start with, there's The Red and the Blue, The 90s and the Birth of Political Tribalism by Steve

Cornackie. I really love this book. It reminded me of my childhood and the formative political

narratives that I heard growing up as a child, the 92 election Bill Clinton and Steve Cornackie

just really brilliantly goes through and tells the compelling history of it, but in just a highly

fun and enjoyable read. Fun in the sense of, I'm kind of like, whoa, why didn't we see this coming

because it was all there, but that's why the book is worth a read because Steve does such a good

job of kind of explaining how the 90s contributed to the political tribalism of today.

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