Music Good afternoon, Michael Malice here. Let that be your welcome for the next hour. Guys, you are in for a real treat. Here's a guest I've been meaning to talk to for over a year now. Mark Halperin is one of the few journalists who I think is worthy of that title. He is co-author among other things of Game Change, which is the definitive book of the 2008 election. He currently co-hosts on the Megan Kelly network, and I want to make sure they get the title exactly right. Next up with Mark Halperin. Mark, you were the one who, I don't know if you broke this, but you're the first person I saw who announced that Biden was going to resign as the candidate. the're the one who, I heard from, that this was not through his choice. One of the things I want to talk to you about, vis-a-vis 2024 is, I think people have this idea that the Democratic Party is this big monolith and everyone's part of the team, which to me is completely insane and detached from not only human nature, but politicians with their egos and their own agendas. Can you talk a bit about the public perception of how politics works versus how it really works? Sure. Michael, very honored to be here. I'd like the record to show. Is there a record here? I'd like the record to show that unlike Jimmy Carr, I showed up properly on time. Not late. That was my fault. I was like 30 seconds early. What, you gave me the wrong address? I'm not in person. I wish I were. Wish I were in Austin, Texas eating food with you tonight. Where are you right now? New York City. We have we have less good food here. The gap between what people think about politicians and how they actually are, is that the question? Well, you may disagree with my reply, but I find them to be more idealistic than the popular perception, not all of it. But I find like 90% of them really want to do the right thing. And in the last couple decades, they've been caught in a system where all the incentives are to do the wrong thing in order to keep their jobs and not to lose a primary to get book deals and cable deals and social media following. So I think that they want to do the right thing. They're most of them, not all, but most of them in their public life because they want to make the world a better place for their constituents, their kids, their grandkids, but they're not passive actors.

They could do more. And occasionally you see someone like a person, cinema, who's, who's willing to step out of the roles and say and do things that are independent. But most of them feel constrained by the current polarization to not do the right things. And unfortunately, I'll say they're not very sophisticated about grappling with the complexities of the modern world. And that's unfortunate because they're given so much power, whether they're in the executive branch or in the Congress they're talking here about people in federal office, regulating social media. I'm a big first amendment person. I know you are too. And I'm not saying we need tons of regulation. But there's clearly these giant companies that are the most powerful forces on the history of the earth, in terms of private companies. And there's got to be some grappling with how they interact with our citizenry. And they're just completely, I'm not equipped to do it. So they're well-meaning, but they're not currently up to the task. I think of some of the most complicated things that our societies are dealing with. I've reminded the person who, I'm black in the center's name, he was the center from Alaska, who I died, I think, in a plane crash not that long ago. And he was in charge of regulating the internet or the committee that had that, you know, and he was in his 80s

And he was explaining this became a meme, you know, the internet is a series of tubes and sometimes these tubes get backed up And it's like This is not someone no matter what your political persuasion who you should have the power to you know It's like you and I trying to be heart surgeons, you know We might really want to save that person and we care about them, but he's going down. It's not this is not happening

Yeah, I'm just talking more specifically though, I think people have this idea, I'll give you like a counter example you're talking about. There was this idea floating around in, in conservative circles, which I found crazy. I still find crazy that Biden was going to drop out and Michelle Obama was going to be the replacement, right?

And whenever I hear something like this, I always ask myself, what would need to be true

for this to happen, right?

I'm not going to say, preemptively, out ridiculous.

But what would need to be true for that to happen is Gavin Newsom and Amy Klobuchar and

Pritzker and all these other people, they're just going to sit by and let Michelle Obama

be the nominee.

That's not going to sit by and let Michelle Obama be the nominee, that's not going to happen. Like they all have their own agendas.

And they can say with a straight face, I got elected, she's never elected anything, but

that would need to happen for that to be the result.

Right.

I'm thinking specifically about when Biden got sat down and what that was like.

First of all, Michelle Obama is never going to run for anything.

So any complicated narrative or conspiracy theory that involves Michelle Obama running,

not going to happen. Second, again, I respectfully dispute your premise. I was dealing several months ago with one of the smartest people, literally anyone we know knows, very smart, very, very smart person involved in government, but not super familiar with politics. And he said pretty much the same thing. If you're going to try to anticipate what a politician would do, assume that the most most craving, ambitious, self-interested motivation will guide their activities. I just don't believe that to be true. I'm not saying it's never true. But in the hypothetical you gave, the premise that, well, you know, she'd never run it was, they were more deserving, they were going to fight her for it. I actually don't think that would have happened. Michelle Obama said she wanted it. I think actually she might have gotten it, although I'm not sure, uh, Kamala Harris would have stepped aside. Um, in, in the case of politicians, uh, sometimes they care about the country, sometimes they care about their families. Sometimes they define ambition in a different way. So for example, when Kamala Harris, when Biden stepped down, and yes, I was the first report that he planned to accept Nancy Pelosi's pressure and accept the fact that she would ratchet up that pressure to a degree that would have been so uncomfortable. He wouldn't have wanted it and agreed to step aside. Kamala Harris, part of what I reported, was she knew this was happening, much of which she writes about her book is true, but not her account of when she learned this was going to happen or might happen. So she was underway and all the staff could transfer to her, the office space that they had for the campaign, all the money. And so these other people who looked at it, like the governor of Pennsylvania, for instance, or others, they didn't think they could beat her and under those circumstances. So if they, but there was not a zero chance, they could be there. So why didn't they try?

Why didn't they say?

Because I interviewed the person, Jamie Harrison,

who was chairman of the Democratic Party at the time, and he said he talked to all of them. He says one of them actually thought very seriously about running. He wouldn't tell me who it was. He plans to write about it. So I look forward to see who that was because I don't know the answer to that.

But my point is, if they were just for personal ambition,

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