The Alabama Fallout, and Louise Erdrich on the Future

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2017

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Roy Moore was a classic Trumpian candidate: a political outsider of extreme positions, rejected by the establishment and plagued by accusations of scandal. He eventually garnered the full support of Donald Trump, but Moore was finally too much for voters. A significant number of Republicans wrote other names on their ballots, and Democratic-leaning black voters turned out in force—a combination that gave Alabama its first Democrat to go to Washington in twenty years. David Remnick and the staff writer Amy Davidson Sorkin discuss what the outcome says about the President’s power and about voters’ feelings on sexual misconduct. With the recent calls for Al Franken’s resignation, congressional Democrats are trying to lay claim to the moral high ground, but Sorkin notes that the Party has yet to put the sins of Bill Clinton entirely behind it. Plus, an interview with Louise Erdrich, who says that she was inspired by Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” and by P. D. James’s “Children of Men”—works that put literature in the service of imagining the worst.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a real trait to the one world
0:06.0	observatory.
0:07.0	The Strait of the block for West Boulevard and make that right.
0:10.0	They didn't break that, but they have pretty good access to those people.
0:15.0	They're going to subconsciously mocked that lineage.
0:19.0	So that's happening.
0:21.6	It seems like an incredible story here on the new front.
0:25.3	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production
0:30.2	of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:33.1	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour.
0:34.7	I'm David Remnick.
0:36.0	We've got a lot coming up on the show today, and we're going to start with Amy Davidson Sorkin, who's a political columnist for the New Yorker.
0:43.4	I wanted to talk with Amy about Alabama's election of Doug Jones and what it means in Washington for the Democrats, the Republican Party, and President Trump.
0:53.7	Do you think the election, no matter how close, was the turning point in some way for the President of the United States?
1:01.5	Taken into context with the results in New Jersey and Virginia and elsewhere.
1:06.8	You mean that he can't win all of the time?
1:09.4	Yeah.
1:09.9	It depends on how he plays it.
1:11.8	I don't know if you saw his morning after the election tweet where he basically said...
1:17.3	I predicted it.
1:18.2	There's a message of this was that Trump was right all along.
1:22.5	And that if only he'd been allowed to play it the way he wanted to. There'd be a Republican in the Senate right now.
	...

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