Hey everybody. This is Glenn Thrush with Politico's off message podcast. We have a kind of a quick bonus podcast this week. We haven't tried this before. So I really want you to let me know if you think these are useful. This isn't a full-scale interview.

You know, these are busy, busy weeks, these convention weeks, and I think we're going to

have a couple of them around debates.

And the idea that we were having was to have interesting guests on for shorter hits.

I generally think we're not going to make a big practice of this, but I wanted to give it a shot.

And my guinea pig is somebody I've known for a while, Mike Duhame, who is Chris Christie's

top political advisor, somebody I've known from the New York covering New York and New Jersey politics.

And he's the perfect guy for this kind of format he expresses himself really succinctly he tells it like it is

I think he's an absolutely great guest and kudos to him for you know giving us 20 or 25 minutes

to really express some stuff a little bit more about Cleveland we just got out of Cleveland

going to Philly tomorrow.

I have to say, for all the predictions of gloom and doom in Cleveland, it was probably like the nicest vibe at a convention I have been at in a really, really long time.

Maybe it had to do with the fact that so many people weren't into it. It kind of took the pressure off of it. And I think a big part of this too is Cleveland itself, which is a Midwest city

and just has a sense of decorum that my lovely hometown of New York very sorely lacks. I mean,

people were really, really nice.

I'll give you an example. My second day in Cleveland, I made the mistake of parking, one parking

spot at my hotel, one parking spot over from the one that I had been given. And I came home

that night and my car was gone and it had gotten towed. So I had to find out where this place was and it turned out it was in an area called, I think it's called the Flats, which turned out fascinating.

It turned out to be the waterfront of the Cuyahoga River that it actually burned down in the 60s.

It's the famous river on fire area. And it's now actually cleaned up

and becoming kind of gentrified.

Like if I were living in Cleveland,

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