Welcome to Beg to

Beg to Differ. The Bullworks weekly roundtable discussion featuring civil

conversation across the political spectrum. We range from center left to

center right. I'm Mona Charrens indicated columnist and policy editor at the Bulwark.

I'm joined by our regulars Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution in the Wall Street Journal.

Linda Chavez of the Niskanin Center and Damon Linker who writes the

sub-stack newsletter, notes from the middle ground. Our special guest this week is

Joe Klein, longtime political reporter, columnist, foreign policy guru, and most famously the author of the

originally anonymous but later it was revealed.

Author of Primary Colors, which for our younger listeners,

was a huge blockbuster book that got made into a movie

about the Clinton campaign of 1992.

Those days seem unbelievably innocent from our perspective now.

But let's move straight to the news of the week because we had two things that I want to start off with.

The linkage between these two items, Nicky Haley and Sam Alito is simply that they cause heartache and dismay for those of us who

used to be affiliated with the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Let us start with Nicky Haley,

who continues to receive votes in Republican primaries,

about 20% of the vote, despite the fact that she dropped out two months ago.

She had become sort of the repository of the hopes, or at least the protests of a section of the Republican Party that is not okay with Trump.

And as our colleague at the Bulwergh Abbey started pointed pointed out it would have been really important and

inspirational for her to at least do a Mike Pence to at least fail to endorse Trump.

But yesterday she went ahead and said that she was voting for him.

...