It's Glenn Thrush with Politico's podcast again.

A couple of weeks ago before the first Republican presidential debate, we had a chance to sit down with former

New York Governor George Pataki. To ask him what it's like to get the view of Donald Trump

from the back of the school bus, what's it like to be up on stage with these guys? What is his

view of the rest of the candidates and the field, how to try to punch through

to get past 1%, which is where Pataki sits right now.

I think a lot of people forget that this guy was a star about 10 or 15 years ago in New York.

He was elected twice, was a very popular governor, particularly in the wake of the September 11th

attacks. And then he kind of took a very long sabbatical and decided for reasons that he gets

into in this interview to jump back in. But what I thought was interesting with two things.

First of all, he was very gingerly, as everybody is about Donald Trump. He was less constrained in his discussion,

and I'm an old New Yorker, so this was of interest to me. He really doesn't like Bill de Blasio,

the current mayor of New York, and thinks he's really the lead of a trend that's going to doom

the Democratic Party nationally.

I said some interesting things about that.

But he also, at the very tail end of the interview, when I was trying to get him to talk about

Governor Bush, he was extremely reluctant.

It took me a couple of minutes to get him to say anything.

But then he sort of talked about this issue of dynastic politics and the fact that we're a country of over 300 million people

and why do we have to get down to these two families. And I thought he's the first candidate

to articulate that that I've heard in this cycle. And I think he reflects the opinion of an awful

lot of Americans. So with that, here's George Pataki, former governor of New York.

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