The Lawyer as Political Warrior (Talking Books with Bob Bauer)

Talking Feds

Harry Litman

News, Politics, Government

4.8 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 October 2024

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Harry talks with Bob Bauer, the most prominent Democratic political lawyer of the last generation, about his new book, “The Unraveling.” The book, analyzes the contributions of lawyers to the politics-as-blood-sport that is our inheritance from the last 40 years of national campaigns. Looking back on a lifetime of representation of candidates, officials, and political institutions like the White House, Bauer analyzes the warrior’s role, including pushing on the truth and demonizing the enemy. Many of these excesses helped pave the for the far greater and more vicious dishonesty of the Trump era. Bauer ends with an extended prescription for restoring ethics and a sense of institutional values to political lawyering. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:29.2	without the ads. talking feds that brings you in-depth discussions with authors of the most important and
0:45.3	interesting contemporary works of fiction and non-fiction. It's axiomatic in the United States
0:51.9	as de Tocquil observed 200 years ago, nearly every political or social
0:58.4	dispute becomes a legal dispute.
1:01.3	And a corollary is that lawyers have been at the center of the degeneration of
1:06.8	our politics in the last 30 or so years, including the hyper-polarization and sheer nastiness of the Trump era.
1:16.2	Today's author is to my mind not only the most visible and important of the political
1:22.0	lawyers of his generation, but also the most thoughtful.
1:26.0	Bob Bauer has been a lawyer at the highest levels to government officials,
1:31.0	including White House Council to President Obama from 2009 to 2011,
1:37.0	but also to campaigns, political parties, and political figures in their private capacities.
1:43.2	The potential overlap in those roles is part of what is new book,
1:47.6	the unraveling, reflections on politics without ethics and democracy in crisis is about.
1:54.9	The unravelling is an account of political lawyering that's part memoir,
1:58.9	part analysis of the problems, and part prescription for trying to get us out of the deep muck.
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