Hello, I'm Adam Wren.

And I'm Dasha Burns. It is Thursday, August 14th.

And this is the Playbook podcast. Good morning, Dasha.

Good morning. How you doing?

I'm doing well. Let's get right to what's driving the day.

Let's do it.

First up, we have an exclusive interview

in this morning's playbook that you're going to want to read for both its 2028 implications and for a

better sense of how opinions within the Democratic Party are shifting on Israel and Gaza.

Recently, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made an appearance on the influential

Pod Save America podcast after which she caught incoming fire over his response to a question

about Gaza, an answer which critics thought was especially Mealy Mouth.

Yeah, it's so interesting, Adam, because Buttigieg is known for being such an excellent

communicator and really being able to distill

and help digest some of these really complicated topics. So I was surprised by the story,

but it looks like he's trying to do a little bit of cleanup and clarifying, and he is doing that

with you, my friend. You talk to him, so I'm so curious to hear what his message was on take two on this question.

Yeah. He sort of acknowledged that he wasn't as clear as he could have been. He said,

quote, I get it, end quote. He said, quote, it's important to be clear about something this

enormous and this painful. It's just that it's so enormous and it's so painful that sometimes

words can fail. Essentially, I asked him the same questions that the Pod Save hosts asked him

whether or not if he was a member of the Senate that he would have voted against sending additional

...