1078: Debating the Trump Era with Abby Phillip

26:59But it's in general. Are you willing to concede something, anything, anything? Some people are not. And so people aren't because I think there's this pressure that if you concede something on live on national television, then suddenly your side is going to be like, why did you just do that? And what's wrong with you? And you gave in and it's a real. Yeah. It's a psychological thing. It's about social media clout. It's about your standing in the group because your standing in the group becomes the most important thing to you because your people might not like you as much anymore. And that's – we have to come to terms with that in politics.

27:42That is such a big thing in terms of how people are willing to show up politically is that they're so afraid of being ostracized by people in their group that they're not willing to admit when they're wrong or when something needs to change or when, you know, the other person might be right. Yeah. Well, and especially I think on the left now, there's another reason not to do it, which is, well, if they're going to do this, then we can't be the ones that are always saying we're wrong or we change our mind because we're in a fight against these people who are in a different kind of reality, you know?

28:18And it's sort of like I think if you have values and beliefs and principles, they've got to be universal, like no matter what the other side does. But do you – I mean, but I thought – you know, I've been talking about this a lot lately because I feel like this has really come up. And, I mean, I wonder as you are a card-carrying Democrat, do you see that happening and do you think that's a problem? Because I think some people think that Democrats unilaterally disarm too often and leave Republicans to just do whatever they want. And then like in redistricting, for example, is an example of this.

28:55Yeah. Do you do I think that it's a problem? Do you think that that's bad? The Democrats are doing? Yeah. No, on that on that kind of thing, I'm like, that's an easy one for me just because it's like we proposed national nonpartisan gerrymandering and we couldn't get a Republican vote for it. And if Republicans want to join us, then I'm like, let's let's stop the race to the bottom and do no more gerrymandering and let's reverse it. But otherwise, we're not going to unilaterally disarm. I have a sort of a different take on the broader Republicans are always fighting and Dems don't fight. And the whole like, you know, everyone likes to bring up the Michelle Obama quote, like, you know, when they go low, we go high.

29:31And everyone's like, we can't do that ever again. And I'm like, it's not. I just think that our our political goals are different in a way, which makes it asymmetrical. like I think that Donald Trump and a lot of the MAGA movement would be quite happy if people were more cynical about politics and not paying as much attention and they would get to do what they want to do and I think that Democrats at their best believe that government should be a tool for people to come together across like different ideologies races identities and try to figure out something together and if you're going to believe that it's much tougher to then go and just destroy the other side all day because we believe in a bigger community than that.

30:14Yeah. I mean, I feel like the government shutdown debate is a little bit of that, where it's like, I mean, I was there all the years that Republicans shut the government down, even when Trump was president. And in a way, Democrats are just doing what they did and justified for all those years. However, the government is still shut down. Right. And people are still not getting paychecks and so on and so forth. I think I don't have any answers to that, but I feel like that is the dilemma the Democrats are facing, which is, do we really take on their tactics even if people get hurt or do we have a higher bar for ourselves?

30:53And what is what is heightened that challenge for Democrats is, of course, Donald Trump and particularly how he's acting in the second term. Right. Because I I'm very much like I don't want I'm in politics where the people are helped and I don't want them to get hurt. But like, I also think that there's masked agents on the street, like arresting people who are American citizens and nothing stopping them. and I don't like my view on the government shutdown was I would not have gone I would not have made it about health care because health care to me is a policy issue that under a different Republican president or a different president whatever you would say okay we had a an election they won this is the government they get to do what they want right and so it's normal shutting down the government over a typical policy fight to me is not as important I think Or I wouldn't have done it unless it was shutting down the government over like, you know, I think Chris Murphy has been saying this, like, why am I going to fund a government that's like destroying democracy right now?

31:54Yeah. You know, you guys can find the votes yourself. I think that, you know, my humble opinion as an observer of politics is I actually don't think that a government shutdown over capital D democracy would have worked. I don't think I don't know that it would have. Yeah, I think I think it would have gone way over people's heads. And this is not an endorsement of a government shutdown over anything. Right, right, right. But it's just to say that the uniqueness of this one is that the underlying issue is one that is a political vulnerability for the other side, whereas the other stuff is much less so.

32:33It's true. It's also – then if you get to the nerdy legislative part of it, though, you say, okay, why would we make a spending deal when they're going to go back after the spending deal and just be like, well, we're going to spend whatever we want. And we're going to not spend whatever we want. And we're going to shut down whatever we want, fire whoever we want. And it doesn't really matter. And look, I hear that. But at the same time, I mean, some deal has to be made. I know. I know. So, you know. It's a tough situation. I don't know. Do you feel like you better understand what drives MAGA politics because of this show?

33:08Yeah. You feel like you got enough of the people's true feelings? I talk to tried and true, dyed-in-the-wool MAGA people every single day. And so, yeah, I understand where they come from. I understand the information silos that they're in that make it hard to see outside of it. And it's not that complicated. I mean, I think that they like winning. And Trump is winning in their minds. So in a way, to me, it boils down to mostly that. Because we have all shades of this sort of Trump supporter. We have people who are not really that into him who are now people who are not even all that into him right now, but would prefer to defend him to the alternative.

34:03You know, I see it all. And at the end of the day, the biggest thing that works for Trump is that they've figured out how to use raw political power to dominate their opposition. And turns out that's very appealing to a lot of people on the right. And they're willing to gloss over a lot of conduct in order to be on the team that is winning. So I think that's a lot of what's going on right now. Do you feel like you understand Scott Jennings' politics better? Yeah. I mean, I think what I just described accurately describes him. Because he's taken a journey. He's taken a journey, as we've talked about.

34:46I think he, as he said, he would prefer Trump over the alternative. But I also think that he has seen Trump win on the culture issues, on the economic issues, on all of that. And he's willing to give him a pass on things that maybe he's slightly queasy about privately because I think he believes that going against Trump is a bad idea because Trump keeps winning.

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37:06Okay, seamless pivot from Scott Jennings. to Jesse Jackson about whom you wrote this fantastic book. So what was your sense of Jesse Jackson and his legacy before you started writing the book? And what questions did you want to answer? My sense of him was what I think a lot of people's sense of him is, which is that he's an activist. He's a leader of the civil rights generation and is ubiquitous, right? That he's in everything and that mostly it's just showing up. I think that was the sense that a lot of people had of him, have of him. And one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I found that this particular chapter, when he ran for president two times, is arguably one of the most significant parts of his legacy that rarely gets talked about.

38:00Yeah. And it is the part of his legacy that actually, I think, kind of undermines the view of him as somebody who's just sort of surface deep and only just shows up and so on and so forth. Because I do think that that running, you know, this running for president is a is a real difficult task. And a little insane. Yeah. And it's a little crazy. And it attracts a certain type of person. And Jesse Jackson certainly is in that same category of people. But for a black man in the 1980s who grew up in the segregated South, who did not have much, for him to end up on the same debate stage with all of these figures, not just Michael Dukakis, but Al Gore and Joe Biden and all these other people who later on went on to do other things.

38:54But he was on the debate stage with all of those people and holding his own on foreign policy, on economic policy, on a whole host of things. And then he comes in second place in 1988. And then it's kind of promptly forgotten about, partly because Bill Clinton, but also partly because Barack Obama. And I think that there's a lot there that is worth exploring, including explaining how we even got to Barack Obama. I think he's a huge part of that story. Can you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. I mean, look, Jesse Jackson and Obama actually politically, to be honest, don't have a huge amount in common.

39:34So it's not about it's not so much about that, because I think Obama is way more centrist than Jesse Jackson was. However, I also think Jesse Jackson's sort of left-wing politics of the 80s actually became kind of centrist in the 2010s or whatever. And – but more to the point, I mean, just from a nuts and bolts perspective, had Jesse Jackson not changed the rules of the Democratic Party to make it easier for outsider candidates to come in and run against the establishment and still rack up delegates and still get to the convention, Obama wouldn't have beaten Hillary. This is how we beat Hillary Clinton.

40:17Period. Yeah. It just wouldn't have happened. Yeah. If it was winner take all like the Republicans have in the primaries, we wouldn't have done it. And I mean, in a way, it's like, think about the foresight of that, because there were so many people in the 80s who were like, why run a black candidate for the presidency? You know you're not going to win. This country isn't going to do that in this moment. And they were right about that. But I also think Jesse Jackson had this sort of tactical intelligence about the value of leverage. Some of that was built up for years and years of using leverage to get concessions from private companies on diversity and all kinds of other stuff.

40:58But he understood leverage really well. And he really pushed in both of those campaigns toward getting to the convention, getting changes to the platform, getting changes to the nominating process for the Democratic Party, the nuts and bolts of how you even get a candidate, let alone what that candidate stands for. And it turns out that foresight was exactly correct because 20 years later, and this is why the book is called A Dream Deferred, is because it took 20 years for this to actually be seen. But that became the thing that allowed Barack Obama to bypass what would have been a blowout from a much more establishment candidate.

41:42It's also the thing that allowed Bernie Sanders to have as much leverage and influence as he did in 2016 and in 2020. And so there's so much about how he conducted politics and we didn't even talk about the issues. But all of those things make him a very consequential figure who doesn't get a lot of credit for that chapter in his life. Why do you think that is on the credit? Yeah. He doesn't – like he's not – he hasn't gotten his due, I think, either as a civil rights leader like a John Lewis or a political leader, not only from, I think, the public, but even from like his contemporaries. Totally.

42:26There's a lot of drama. I mean that's the truth is that his relationships personally I think are very fraught. And I get into this in the book that, you know, when he ran for president, he did not have many endorsements, even from black elected officials. In fact, he had none in 1984. And in 1988, he had a few more. But overwhelmingly, a lot of his friends and colleagues, they endorsed the establishment Democratic candidate. And I think some of that has to do with not just the political part of it, but also just his relationships with people. And I think also Jesse Jackson is a character. He has like real main character energy in the sense that he has a lot of personality traits that are double-edged swords.

43:25This incredible skill of connecting and oratory and also an incredible amount of, I don't know, a desire to be in the public eye. Some people would say arrogance. Ego. Not unfamiliar if you know people who run for president. Psychological turmoil around his father and how he grew up. So there's all of that mixed together in this person. And so he was really polarizing. And I was talking to someone else just recently also about just the fact that he has lived as long as he has. And that contributes to it too. He is 84 years old. And so for the last 60-something years of American history, people have known who Jesse Jackson is.

44:17Very, very few people have that many years on the books in public life. And inevitably, that means that you are going to have people who have all kinds of different views about you. All kinds of chapters of your life are going to get forgotten. And I think that just the longevity of his life has been a part of the picture. It's just very easy to lionize people when they leave us in an untimely fashion. Yeah, that's true. Because it's easier. You don't have to deal with the full scope of their life. And I think in some ways he was blessed to live a long life, but I think the length of his life and the range of things that he did sometimes works against him.

44:58Your book made me think, I was talking to some of my old Obama colleagues today, and I'm like, what? I don't have a real sharp memory of Obama saying a ton about Jesse Jackson. There's a reason for that. Well, that's because what I remember is, I remember that his daughter was Michelle's maid of honor at their wedding. Yeah, Santita. So I was always like— And Jesse Jr., they were very close. And Jesse Jr. was close. In 2008, but before that. And then I remember towards the end of the campaign, there was a whole thing with Obama and - The hot mic moment. Yeah, the hot mic moment where he was upset about how Obama was going to black churches and he thought he was talking down to, I think he said, like, I want to cut his nuts out or something like that.

45:46I remember that being a thing on the campaign. Which, by the way, that's a whole thing in terms of like taking something that somebody says in a break and then publishing it. But it happened. And then I remember Bill Clinton inserting him into the Democratic primary after Obama won South Carolina. And Bill Clinton was like, well, Jesse Jackson won some states, too. God. I was like, oh, that is. But I've never seen like – I don't think I remember hearing Obama talk about him. Yeah. Well, there's a very important reason for that. And it's because their relationship was not great. And despite the Chicago ties and the family ties and all of that stuff, I mean, I explore this in the book and it's complicated because I think that a lot of people involved in that have a lot of regret, are kind of confused about why it turned out that way.

46:44I think people acknowledge that Jesse Jackson and some degree of resentment played a role. Right? That Obama was, I don't know. I mean, I think the truth is Obama allowed people, not him personally, but the fact of Obama was sort of a permission structure for people to sort of put Jesse Jackson to the side, or at least that's how he felt about it. And I do think that some of that psychologically played a role here. I mean, I talked to people on the Obama side and people on the Jesse Jackson side, people caught in the middle of the two. And I think that ego, right? Jesse Jackson wants to be remembered.

47:39He wants to be honored. He wants to be given his due. He didn't always feel like he got it from both Obama and his team. He lashed out in certain moments as a result of that. In other moments, like in the hot mic moment, he was actually saying something that other people were saying, but it was unwise for him to say it where he said it and the fact that it became public was a huge problem. And afterwards, you know, he gave interviews where he's Jesse did where he said, I regret that so deeply because the truth is when Obama won, Jesse Jackson was related. I know. I remember the picture of him in Grant Park with tears in his face.

48:24I mean, all of that said, when Barack Obama won, Jesse Jackson reacted the way a man who was standing feet from Dr. King when he was killed would react to a black man being elected president. Disbelief, hope, fear, love, you know, and a little bit of regret that he wasn't able to do it. but joy that Obama was. And so those emotions were very real. And I think he had a lot of regret. He said so about how that relationship transpired. And I mean, your lack of, the fact that you don't have a memory of Jesse Jackson being part of the Obama world is because he really wasn't there. He hardly ever went to the White House.

49:15After the fact, they're both in Chicago. They've met. And I wrote about a relatively recent meeting that they had. And that meeting meant a lot to him. It meant a huge amount to him because I think that he does live with some regret over that lost opportunity to have a relationship with the first black president. Somebody who probably wouldn't be in the White House had it not been for what he first did. I also think even if they're even if they had a close relationship, there was an effort on the campaign to not to make it a, you know, that he wasn't just the first he wouldn't just be the first black president.

50:02Yeah. Right. Like the history making nature of the campaign was always intended to be a light touch. Yeah. Yeah. And unspoken. And I mean, like, I remember we he gave the convention speech. She accepted the nomination in 2008 on the day of the, I believe it was the 40th anniversary of the March on Washington. And there were a few consultants who were like, in the first draft, we had King at the end. A light touch King, not like a heavy touch. And it was like, I don't know if we want to mention Martin Luther King. It's like a little too black. And I'm like, he is about to be the first black nominee of the party.

50:40And look, I think that that's a common theme. You know, when Jesse Jackson ran in the 80s, the fact that he came out of the civil rights movement was a problem because it coded radical to a lot of white Americans. And I think, you know, the Obama campaign, and I don't want to speak too much, you're part of that world, but understood that, that for some people, you know, I think for most of us, we think, wow, these people are heroes. This was such an amazing time where we pushed the country into a period of reaching its true potential. But there are a lot of people who think civil rights movement and they think radical black power activists.

51:25And it is politically very dangerous to be in that space. And Jackson couldn't avoid it because that is the history that he came out of. And but even at that time in 1983, when Harold Washington was running for mayor of Chicago and Jesse Jackson was a really big part of helping make that happen, even Harold Washington had to keep him at arm's length. because again, like for the white Chicagoans who he needed for the general election, Jesse Jackson coded radical and civil rights and black power. And so even in the 80s, and he and Harold Washington were friends. He was kept at arm's length. So that was nothing new.

52:11And the fact that that did not really change after all that time, I think it just says a lot about the country and just how you have to navigate race and how you have to navigate the people who do have ties to those movements who were seen to have been asking for too much from particularly the white power structures that, you know, especially in the 70s and the 80s, controlled most of our politics.

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54:07The other reaction I had coming through the book was just this feeling of frustration and anger that there aren't many potential Democratic candidates today who have the ability, I think like Jackson did, to speak from a place of passion and moral conviction about social and economic injustice. while also very explicitly trying to build a multiracial working class coalition, going everywhere, talking to everyone, campaigning in pretty creative ways. Yeah. Did any of that jump out at you when you were? That's the thing. I mean, that's the thing that you come away from this. When you really dig into how that campaign unfolded, his unpredictability, his ability to kind of capture the moment, to be creative, but also to speak to people in a certain way.

55:11I just think that the last few campaigns that I've covered, especially candidates who have run for president in the Democratic Party, they substitute reaching people on a soul level for a laundry list of policies. And I cannot for the life of me understand why anybody would think that that's a good substitute. It's not a good substitute. I think it because it codes, if you don't, if you talk about morals and you're passionate, it codes like too progressive. And then if you give your laundry list, then it's like your laundry list of policies that pull well. And so then you can code more moderate.

55:57But like, I think it's a false choice. Yeah, it is a false choice. I mean, but also like, I don't know, politics is the art of persuasion. Yeah. And you have to move people. You have to reach them. And we're moved by stories and emotion. Yeah, exactly. You got to tell a story. And I do think that that is a lost art or it's increasingly so a lost art. I don't know what kind of, you know, candidate school some people need to be put through. But I just think there's definitely a rise of the sort of dominant Democratic candidate that doesn't know how to reach people on an emotional level. And but also, but to be fair, to be fair, Jesse Jackson was running in the 80s.

56:44He was running against those types of like almost technocratic candidates, right? And that's one of the reasons that they lost spectacularly against Ronald Reagan, who was very much not that, who actually was the sort of like, how do you move people kind of figure on the right? And so it is such an – to me, it's such an important takeaway from Jesse Jackson is that some of it's a skill. You can't really teach it. But selecting for that in candidates I think can be really important because, you know, if you have a candidate who can speak to people, who can understand how to craft an argument that addresses the practical day-to-day needs, economic needs, safety, you know, education, people's futures, who can actually speak to them on that level.

57:36That probably should be the price to entry, and it's not really anymore. No. And, you know, I mean, in this moment, you have to ask the question, OK, there are probably some Democrats who do this, but the Democratic Party doesn't know what to do with them. Maybe it's, you know, and that's that's they have to figure that out. But but but one of the one thing I will say is that Jesse Jackson had this base that was so energized. It was a lot of young people. It was a lot of disaffected voters. It was a lot of new voters. And he brought them into the political process. And then the party was kind of like, we don't really need them.

58:23It just wasn't a priority to sort of bring those people fully into the process, even while he lost the primary into the general election. And I think that is a sort of lesson, right, that it can be a mistake even if you don't endorse the sort of left-wing politics of a certain candidate. What do you do with their people? Right. What do you do with their people? And the failure to do anything with Jesse Jackson's people I think really hurt Democrats. We've had that problem over time. Yeah. But it's also like it's the reason that he has those people is not just because of his issue positions, though that's a big part of it, but it's also because of something unique that he had.

59:05And I think that that's part of what we are missing. I mean, just like you write about this, that, you know, he he campaigned with poor white people and farmers and went places where you would not think that Jesse Jackson would go. and his rhetoric. I mean, I went back and read his 1984 speech at the convention because that was always one of my favorite speeches. It's funny, it made me go back to when I was first in politics and I first loved speeches, I would go to this website, AmericanRhetoric.com, and they ranked the 100th. That's a great resource. And so I went back there last night because I was looking at Jesse's 1984 speech again, and it's like his speech, Mario Cuomo's speech at the convention, Lyndon Johnson's We Shall Overcome, King, obviously.

59:52Like when you look at those top 10 speeches, they are all speeches that are like powerful, telling a story, like really just like searing in a way, but also like well-construed, like Jesse Jackson for all the, well, he's on the left and the politics and maybe he's radical. Like he was constructing a pretty persuasive argument and trying to reach people who were not with him. Absolutely. And that's part of the misconception about his candidacy was that he spent a lot of time in places that Democrats don't go anymore. He was at Farm Aid with Willie Nelson talking to a sea of white people about progressive politics.

1:00:34And this is like RFK's campaign too. We used to have candidates like that. He was with farmers between the two campaigns, between 84 and 88, with farmers whose farms are being foreclosed, rallying with them. He was going down to the deep south, back to Selma, and talking to the guy who, you know, 15, 20 years earlier had been on the bridge beating the civil rights protesters. So he went places that I think even today you don't see a lot of Democratic candidates willing to go to. trying to persuade people who normally wouldn't be inclined to talk to him and actually succeeding in large part. And then those speeches, both the 84 convention speech and the 88 convention speech are very good speeches.

1:01:23They are arguably some of the best ever to be delivered at a political convention. And they also, when you read them, you're like, oh, yeah, he's talking about hollowed out factory towns and steelworkers who need to get back to work and how we need to stop being engaged in foreign wars and spend the money on bridges and roads at home. And it's like, wait, who does that sound like? I know. I know. And that's, I mean, that's not, that's not to say that Jesse Jackson and Donald Trump have anything policy-wise in common, except that they understand that you have to talk to people about their actual lives in really concrete ways and paint a picture for them of their existing life and then the version of it that you're arguing you can change.

1:02:15And I think he really understood that well, and I think Trump understands that really well. That's why it's been really hard, I think, for Democrats to respond to Trump because I think he's kind of stolen some of their messaging on some key issues. And figuring out how to get that back is going to be part of the task ahead. It's become such a cliche in politics to meet people where they are. But I kind of want some Democratic candidate to take that literally and like launch their presidential campaign by like going to West Virginia, going to Mississippi, going to these places that are going to have like no electoral value to a Democratic to the Democratic nominee.

1:02:55Jackson was in West Virginia. He was in all those places. You know, and like don't don't set up an event where it seems like it's all artificial and you have your advance. You just like go talk. You know, we're in a national environment. Someone's going to film it anyway. It's going to end up on social media. I mean, Trump did a little of this in 24 where we were like, why is he going to Madison Square Garden? Why is he going here? And part of it was just the message that the place sends. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I mean, Jesse Jackson launched his campaign in 88 in this small Iowa town called Greenville.

1:03:32He had gone there like the year before and was invited by locals and went to this church. And it was like, I think it was like Super Bowl Sunday or something. And a thousand people showed up. And then so he really had a connection to this place. It was literally a small town, a tiny, tiny town. And there was nothing there. It was so, it's close to Missouri. So then when he announces his campaign, all these farmers from across the border come just to hear him. And it's this kind of like they're in this old, this barn area and they've got people on tractors. And it's that kind of vibe. And here he was, this candidate that everybody was like, well, that's the black candidate.

1:04:10And he doesn't launch in Des Moines. He doesn't launch in one of the bigger Iowa cities. He goes to the country where there are really only white people. And there are a lot of farmers and there are a lot of people who otherwise have no reason to be interested in his message and drew a big crowd and launched his campaign there. And that was symbolic, not just for the press, but for himself, because I think he it was important to him that people saw that he envisioned his campaign as encompassing more than just people who looked like him. He really did believe that the message that he had had resonance with those people too.

1:04:54And they did more so than I think people recognize because it just doesn't get remembered. I mean, in the book, there's this great photo that I am obsessed with because it's like Jesse Jackson and he's standing. I think he's on a tractor. And there's like a young boy, like a young white boy in the photo standing next to him. But then all these men, farmers, with sacks of brown paper bags on their heads, with their eyes cut out. And they had the sacks on their heads because their farms were being foreclosed on. They were protesting against that. And they were hiding from the people foreclosing their farms.

1:05:29But they wanted to show up at this Jesse Jackson rally. And I tell the story in the book about how he did this rally with them. And then they went to a church down the street. And the farmers sat with the sacks on their heads in the front row in the pews of the church listening to Jesse Jackson give this like stem winder of a speech in a church. And it's the story of this candidate who was so different from everything else that was going on. But I think part of it was the media environment. There was no internet. So a lot of that never really broke through. I mean, some of those stories. He probably would have done much better in an attention.

1:06:09environment like we have today. Yeah. I mean, some of those stories were not even reported on. I talked to some people who were there, which is how I was able to write about it. But in the newspapers, people weren't writing articles about Jesse Jackson talking to farmers all that often. And you imagine what would have happened if they did. What a quintessential American scene, though. Just the church. I mean, just it's, well, a good version of an American in my view. Yeah, I mean, the brown paper sacks could be a lot of different things. It could be very nefarious. But in that case, it was not.

1:06:47But it just tells the story of also those people, they're just, they were the type of people who their family and friends would have not wanted to see them at a Jesse Jackson rally. Yeah. But they showed up anyway because he was the only candidate talking to them. The only one. Yeah. Last question, I'll let you go. how did you find the time to write this book? You, you, I think you were, you were like a new mom when you, when you were starting to write it and you still had your day job. I was, I was, I was pregnant with my, my one and only daughter when I, when you started it, when I started it.

1:07:23Yeah. And I, and I just started anchoring my first show inside politics when I started this. So, I mean, bad timing. I will concede. Yeah. I mean, it took a while. It took a while, but I also think, You know, part of it was in writing this book, I kept struggling with how does the story end? Like, what's the conclusion about today's politics? And because every four years, right, something massive happens in our politics. You know, in 2020, when I first started writing the book, Biden had won. Then in 2024, Biden loses. So, like, where are we going? And I think that's still kind of unclear. But I think one thing that is not unclear is that this fight for the working class American is well underway.

1:08:18And that is the pitched battle that both parties are in right now. And I think that's what this book is about. How do you reach those people? And if you are a Democrat, how do you reach those people while also not abandoning the coalition of voters that makes up the Democratic Party? And I think that is where there are so many lessons from Jesse Jackson. But I also just, I mean, it's as a writer, sometimes you want to be able to say, well, this is what you do with this information. And I think the answer is actually that it's TBD because we're still in the middle of this very important consequential conversation about the future of economic populism and political populism in this country.

1:09:01Yes, and we have been for several decades. But this is an important part of it, of that discussion. Abby, thank you so much for joining. Thanks for having me. The book is A Dream Deferred, Jesse Jackson and the Fight for Black Political Power. It's fantastic. Everyone go pick it up. Thanks. Thank you. Before we go, some quick housekeeping. We got a special deal right now. If you sign up to become a friend of the pod, we're offering an exclusive 20 % off when you subscribe for a full year only through today, Sunday, November 2nd. Monthly subscribers can upgrade and annual subscribers can renew at the discounted rate.

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