Welcome to Talking Feds.

Around table that brings together prominent former federal officials and special guests

for a dynamic discussion of the most important political and legal topics of the day, I'm

Harry Littman.

How long has it been since this country was sane since our politics were anywhere in

the realm of normal since it didn't seem as if the democracy and government institutions

were under existential threat?

We come exhausted and nervous to some sort of finish line, anxiously awaiting our fate.

Are we too awakened from the fever dream of the last four years or are we to try to come

to grips with the re-election of the most corrupt and least public-spirited man ever

to occupy the White House?

When Trump and former vice president Joe Biden made their closing arguments to the country

this week, Trump told his followers that the country was rounding the corner on the virus

and that the election was a choice between a Trump boom and a Biden lockdown.

Biden kept to a more limited schedule.

He promised to heal divisions, he evoked the memory of FDR and he called the election

a battle for the soul of the nation.

New hefty numbers bracket the election home stretch.

First, more than 80 million people already have voted.

That compared with the 47 million votes that came before Election Day in 2016.

And second, last week the country had a record high of over 500,000 new virus cases that

says many in a week as the country logged in the first three months of the virus.

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