Hey folks, what's up? It's the man of steel. I'm Michael Steele. Welcome to the podcast. So glad you could be with us. Of course you can find us on Apple Podcasts.

Did you're all the good places where you get your podcasts thing going on? I'm excited about today because I've known this guy for a long time as they like to say when he was a pup reporter.

Back in the day, I was a county chairman. He was a young reporter doing his thing on the beat and we got to know each other and work together a little bit over the years.

And it's a real pleasure to have him on John Ward. He's a journalist who has written about politics, religion and culture for over 20 years.

He is the senior political correspondent at Yahoo News and lives in Washington DC. He's got this great new book out folks who want to get into a little bit called Camelots and Kennedy versus Carter and the fight that broke the Democratic Party.

John Ward, welcome to the podcast. Talking with the man of steel. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me on, man. You're selling yourself a little short now. I was a...

You were Lieutenant Governor when I first, I think, met you.

Wasn't Lieutenant Governor... Oh, I thought we got back a little bit further than that. Okay, well, I'll take that. That's good too. That's good. All right.

Yeah. So it's a pleasure having you on and let's just dump right into the book. I love where you go with this book because it really does not just in terms of what happened inside the Democratic Party.

But you can see, you can see sort of manifestations in today's politics inside the GOP. But let's just focus first on where you go.

You talk about, you know, the Carter presidency being on life support. The Democrats are nervous. They're concerned about whether or not the president really has the chops to pull this one out.

And they turn to Ted Kennedy. Pick it up from there. What's the narrative that you dig into in this very fraught relationship between Kennedy and Carter?

Yeah, I mean, the thing that is important to set the scene with is that the 70s were not a great time. Right. I mean, I was born in 1977.

So this is not something I lived through something that had to be conveyed to me by talking to people. And I'll never forget sitting down with Anita Dunn who was the top adviser to President Obama.

And has a long history and Democratic politics. She talked about how dark the 70s were. And I was talking to her back a couple of years ago, you know, 2013 probably.

Right. It's just like six years ago. And in 2013, the national mood of the country was was okay. I mean, it was, it was nothing like what it is now and has been the last few years.

And so at that time, I was talking to Anita. She was conveying to me anxieties about the nation's place in the world. Right.

You know, joblessness was going up. Inflation was out of control. That meant that middle class families had a hard time making big purchases on houses and cars and other, you know, big picket items.

And, you know, you had major crime problems. The murder rate was at its highest point. Really, a nation's history at that time. Right.

Big cities were just total mess. And there was a number of other items. You also had sort of the ongoing back backlash or sort of PTSD from Vietnam War, Watergate, all of this.

So it's just not a great time in the country's history. And then you have an energy crisis in 79. That's really what sort of causes the Democrats in the country to turn on Jimmy Carter.

And he gives what's what's known as the Malay speech. We can get into that if we want, but he gives that speech in the summer of 79 and Kennedy kind of decides at that point, he's going to challenge Carter.

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